Gagged: Vocal Suppression and Inquisitorial Power in 17th-Century Mexico City

Seventeenth-century Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New
Spain, hosted the most cosmopolitan and racially-diverse urban population in the Americas. Voices in this dense setting of over 100,000 people represented a constant threat to authorities because they had the potential to disrupt behavioral norms known as policía. Combining insights from the vibrant fields of early modern race and sound studies, this paper analyzes reports of four autos de fe, public sentencing rituals, from 1646, 1647, 1648, and 1659, to shed light on the symbolic and material ways authorities identified, suppressed, and punished unwanted vocal sounds. Auditory cues such as bells that regulated ritual and time, town criers who trumpeted new laws and regulations, or missionaries who preached about religious doctrine, served to standardize and announce social prescriptions. Mixed-race groups known as castas and free and enslaved Blacks drew from African, Indigenous, and European ritual practices to negotiate privileges and social relationships through different forms of vocal modulations, including spell casting, incantations, and blaspheming. The resulting investigations and sentencing trials reveal how different languages, religious doctrines, and cultural frameworks disrupted the Inquisition’s strategies to impose silence by using mordazas, or gags, elaborate staging known as tablados, symbolic costumes, and interrogation tactics, including torture and solitary confinement.