Early modern Spanish and Spanish American cities were diverse spaces where “all types” of men and women – Spaniards, mestizos, Indians, Asians, Africans, mulatos, and Blacks – lived near each other. At all social levels, these men and women built close networks of relations, support, and cultural affinity. This panel explores how multiethnic groups related to each other and coordinated different cultural and political efforts in the Spanish Empire. The panelists examine popular devotion, petitioning, and travel that bound peoples from different ethnic groups to one purpose. This panel thus enhances our understanding of multiethnic relations in the Spanish Empire.

In 1699, the Afro-Mexican street vendor Isidro Peralta was accused before the Mexican Inquisition for saying mass without holy orders, a capital crime. The investigation that followed revealed that Isidro was not saying mass, but rather leading a diverse group of people of “all types” – Spaniards, mestizos, Indians, mulatos, and Blacks – in popular devotion. Isidro’s case reveals how men and women of “all types” built communities in colonial Latin America. In his paper, Miguel Valerio studies Isidro’s case as an example of how diverse urban communities were in Spanish America and how these communities built networks of mutual support and cultural affinity.

Felipe Ruan’s paper investigates the legal-petitionary consciousness materialized in paperwork Black, Mulato, and Indigenous vassals generated in the Indies or in Madrid to have their claims and appeals heard and reviewed at the Council of the Indies. Several Indian and African-descended subjects personally travelled with their paperwork to the Habsburg capital, becoming provisional residents in Madrid. Their presence and ‘lobbying’ in the city call attention to Madrid as an important node in the Hispanic monarchy’s transatlantic governance, legal, and communication networks. Traditionally viewed as a Spanish city, the focus on Indigenous and African descended petitioners helps us rethink Madrid as a multiethnic urban space, intimately connected to the larger Iberian Atlantic.

Building on scholarship of the transatlantic movements and mobilities of Indies’ vassals in the early modern Spanish Atlantic, Sara Guengerich focuses on the itineraries of Indigenous women and women of mixed ancestry, often labeled as mestizas, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries. The numerous cases of these willing and unwilling travelers showcase their experiences living in the Iberian Peninsula and their motivations for leaving it behind. Their stories are marked by asymmetries, but they also reveal a great degree of fluidity regarding to social, cultural and physical mobility. A recurrent theme that emerges from these women’s documentation suggests their profound ability to understand their place within imperial welfare policies. From their embracement of their juridical status of indias miserables, to their occasional display of calidad, these women of color were an integral part of the imperial and colonial dynamics.