Seeking Spaces of Belonging: Free Black Women, Infrastructure, and Indigenous Neighborhoods in 17th-Century Puebla, Mexico

The peripheral neighborhoods of Analco and Santa Ana of Puebla de los Ángeles were designated to be Indigenous spaces in the city’s design, and were maintained as such by local elites. However, increasingly throughout the seventeenth century, free women of African descent began to move into these barrios, deeply enmeshing themselves into the preexisting social and economic communities of the neighborhood. Operating in contrast to the Spanish spatial order–which was created to ensure social order–these Black women built close economic and social relationships with the largely Indigenous community around them. Many of these Black women were quickly targeted by varying arms of colonial authority, including the local courts and the Inquisition. However, there were a few short decades in the early seventeenth century during which free Black women began to build lives in these neighborhoods away from the surveillance of colonial officials and elites. Using baptismal, marriage, notarial, land rights, judicial, and Inquisition records, this paper will trace the bonds of kinship, animosity, and close friendship free Black women forged with the Indigneous–largely nahua–community in the 1630s and 1640s. This paper will follow the initial establishment of free Black women in these areas–coinciding with the dissolution of major obrajes (workhouses)–through their early economic efforts selling to Indigenous buyers, and finally as property owners, highlighting a moment of frequent Afro-Indigenous solidarity and intermingling before these peoples were separated once again by the will of the colonial governance.