Afro-Indigenous History in the Andes: Sources and Methods to Explain Mulata Cacicas, Quechua-Speaking Afro-Andean Parishioners, African–Indigenous Marriages, and Africans in Indigenous Villages in the Andean Highlands

AHA Session 142
Conference on Latin American History 25
Friday, January 5, 2024: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Continental Ballroom 7 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Tamara J. Walker, Barnard College, Columbia University
Papers:
A Mulata Cacica in the Central Andes? Disputing Maria Hernandez’s Genealogies and Blurring Gender and Racial Boundaries in the Construction of Lineage and Authority in the Early 1600s
Damian A. Gonzales Escudero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Reconstructing Afro-Andean Histories from Parish Records in Cuzco and Surrounding Towns, 1580s–1640s
Leo J. Garofalo, Connecticut College
Interethnic Relations and Gender in Marriages among Afro-Andean and Indigenous Spouses in Cusco, 1650–1720
Flor Isabel Palomino Arana, independent scholar
Africans in Pueblos de Indios: Methodological Approaches to Socio-Laboral Dynamics and Human Ties through Data from Colonial Charcas, 1500s–1700s
Paola Revilla Orías, Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo
Comment:
Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon

Session Abstract

This panel brings together the methods and practitioners of art history, legal history, social and cultural history, and labor history to discuss how they work with a range of sources to create a new corpus of studies for colonial Afro-Andean history in the highlands of the Central and Southern Andes. Most published scholarship on people of the African Diaspora in the Andes concentrates on the Pacific coast and the northern Andes, and it is often ensconced within modern national histories. Drawing together researchers from Bolivia, Peru, the U.S., and based in Europe, this panel highlights how junior and mid-career historians and an independent scholar are pushing the study of the African Diaspora into the heavily indigenous highlands by creatively employing their subfield’s methodologies and weaving together widely dispersed sources. The histories they are beginning to tell are both Afro-Andean and Afro-Indigenous, and, taken together, they set aside earlier scholarly assumptions that Africans in the Andes always adhered to Hispanic society and reinforced Spanish power and cultural hegemony. This new interdisciplinary research shows complex dynamics of interethnic accommodation and cultural creativity in the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. The panel includes the assessment and comment on these approaches and conclusions by two senior historians of coastal Afro-Peruvian history, serving as the chair and the commentator.
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