"Sovereign Joy"
Thursday, April 24th, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.
Biography
Miguel A. Valerio is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prof. Valerio is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world. His research has focused on Black lay Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil. He is the author of the multi-award winning and widely reviewed Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press 2022; Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History, Latin American Studies Association 2024; Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies 2023; honorable mention, International Latino Book Prize 2024) and a co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices (Amsterdam University Press 2022) and Mapping Diversity in Latin America: Race and Ethnicity from Colonial Times to the Present (Vanderbilt University Press 2025). He is currently working on his second book project, Irmandade: Black Placemaking in Colonial Brazil (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
