Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Miguel Valerio editor Javiera Jaque Hidalgo editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:1st Dec '25

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Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America cover

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

[The editors] provide readers with a panoramic view of current trends in research spanning from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. [... The volume] brings together thirteen scholars looking at Black and/or Indigenous confraternities within four regions of colonial Latin America: New Spain, Peru, the Southern Cone, and Brazil. The latter’s inclusion attempts to bridge a gap in existing scholarship, which has historically read confraternal life for those under Portuguese rule in isolation from the rest of Latin America. While the individual chapters address various aspects that are related to confraternal life among Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, what ties these studies together is the role of these sodalities in helping negotiate, consolidate, and assert social status. The volume’s structural division allows readers to streamline their focus to a particular geographic region. Yet, when read as a whole, the rich array of themes explored within this collection reveals a plethora of geographic and temporal intersections. Confraternities are presented as spaces in which Indigenous and Spanish Catholic beliefs and practices could merge. -- Elizabeth Liliann Blakemore, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, The Catholic Historical Review 2025.

ISBN: 9781041181378

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 620g

414 pages