Negros Blasphemos: Inquisitorial Archiving and Race Making

The trial records of the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal are one of the richest archival repositories with information about the lives and experiences of colonial subjects living in New Spain. Scrutinizing the production of these records allows us to gain insights into the role that unique patterns of documentation played in the formation of identities and race-making in the colonial period.

To that end, this paper explores the trial records produced by Mexican Inquisitors who prosecuted enslaved Afrodescendants accused of blasphemy between 1595-1625, a period that overlapped with the peak of the African slave trade to New Spain. I compare the inquisitors’ generally faithful implementation of the Suprema’s regulations governing trial procedures and their collection of biographical information regarding individual suspects of European descent to their contemporaneous development of an alternative judicial practice for prosecuting Afrodescended individuals whom they eventually came to label as “negros blasphemos.” This locally developed inquisitorial jurisprudence, I demonstrate, actively excluded the collection of many individualizing biographical details that could distinguish members of this latter group from one another. In exploring the construction of these archival silences, I argue that the formation of the inquisitorial archive itself created a material register through which European colonists were individualized and ascribed a wide range of biographical specificity while Afrodescendants’ subjectivities were flattened and enslaved negros and mulatos were collectively stereotyped as possessing shared deleterious proclivities. Over several decades, and as a revolving cast of inquisitors re-enacted and fine-tuned these discursive and legal practices, these officials collectively infused monikers such as “negro” with racializing characteristics that were rooted not so much in Afrodescendants’ phenotypical profiles but rather in regularized presumptions about their interiorities and their inhibited capacity to develop into unique individuals.