Dealing with Drama Queens: Candanga and Deviance in Colonial New Granada

Popular ‘excesses’- whether in fandango and bunde performances, or in the foreign mental geographies of marginalized groups like enslaved Africans; these were some of the sinew and flesh (the soft tissue) giving shape to the sturdy institutional structures of historical inquiry. Suspicious or alien practices and political actions that in historical documents were presented as rebellion, or simply deemed unacceptable by local officials, dotted the cultural landscapes of colonial Nueva Granada. In homage to Eric Van Young’s mentorship and guidance by example, along with his willingness to emancipate students to pursue their own historical trajectories, this work will explore some ethnographies of difference presented by documentation from the 18^th and 19^th centuries in places like Medellín, Chaparral, and Cartagena. There among the Africans, indigenous, and mixed populations, rituals that gave meaning to daily lives and lent themselves to interpretations of crisis moments at times remained unreadable maps for those religious and civil officials who sought to chart desired mentalities in colonial settings. In 1798 the ‘misguided’ impressions of the enslaved blacks in Medellín led them to baptize their hopes through violent rebellion; this was Candanga. As an example of the cryptic mentalities of the marginalized this case and other instances of distances between cultural representation and meaning will be explored to test the possibilities of uncovering and ‘re’-covering the local institutional bodies that provided the contested substructures for the actions, thoughts and beliefs of the colonized. These historical moments permit us to perceive the restrictive, as well as expansive frames of reference accepted by officials when they were tested by alien additions through the complexities of colonial demographics.