Free Elections from the Margins: Self-Governance of Black Confraternities in Colonial Lima

In the early modern Iberian Atlantic world, popular elections were a common method of self-governance. City councils, friars and nuns elected their leadership. These election results were not considered sacrosanct: viceroys, governors, and judges occasionally meddled to ensure that an election yielded their preferred outcome. Yet within the Black confraternities of Habsburg-era Lima, men and women elected their leaders with a minimum of interference from ecclesiastical, municipal, or viceregal authority. Challenges to their election results frequently came from dissatisfied confraternity members, not from external authorities. Even when priests or friars in the institutions that housed these corporations tried to meddle, ecclesiastical judges acted to ensure their capacity to choose their own leaders by ordering that the elections be held again. But it was not because these confraternities commanded an unusual level of respect that they were left to their own devices: judges often characterized these confraternities, and the disputes that they had between themselves, as unimportant. I propose that it was precisely because these confraternities were perceived to be poor and undistinguished that colonial elites were not very interested in curating the electoral outcomes. It was elite neglect of these institutions that, paradoxically, permitted them to operate as they preferred and choose their own leadership. As a result, elections within Black confraternities were often as free as the brothers and sisters chose to make them.