Potions, Power, and Persecution: African Women and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City

This presentation examines Spanish Inquisition records centered on African and Mulata (Afro-Mexican) women in seventeenth century Mexico City to identify important traces of entwined Bantu-derived and New World emergent epistemologies in the African Diaspora.  African women interrogated for heresy, witchcraft, love magic, and other forms of ‘supernatural’ power suggest that even in the milieu of New World repressive slave societies some women found ways to give expression to beliefs anchored in transported and transmitted knowledge.  Their testimonies reveal evidence of Bantu-derived religious understandings that had deep, sinuous roots in Bantu-descended populations of people whose ancestors had for millennia prior to the eventual Trans-Atlantic slave trade lived in the regions of West and West Central Africa.  Among the most salient and relevant worldview perspectives those populations assumed was an understanding that societal and individual well-being and strength depended on ongoing relationships among ethereal forces and corporal beings.  Colonial and church officials viewed African and Mulata as potential threats not only because their beliefs did not align with Christian doctrine and government agendas but also because they had witnessed their creation of social positions as entrepreneurial religio-medical healers, which accorded them some level of power and prestige in colonial Mexico.