Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status Through Religious Practices

Javiera Jaque is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures in Virginia Tech. Her topic of research is the literature and culture of Colonial Latin America with a focus on Jesuit missions in Chile. More recently her research is focus on indigenous migration to urban spaces. She has published her research in A Contracorriente, Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Rocky Mountain Review, Revista Chilena de Literatura, and Revista Provinciana. Revista de literatura y pensamiento . She is currently working in her first monograph entitled Misiones Jesuitas en la Frontera de Arauco: Resistencia Mapuche, Negociación y Movilidad Cultural en la Periferia Colonial (1593-1641), in which she analyses the frontier dynamics among Mapuche people and Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the African diaspora in the literatures and cultures of the early modern Iberian world, particularly Afro-confraternities’ festive practices. His work has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, Slavery and Abolotion, Colonial Latin American Review and the Journal of Festive Studies. He is currently completing his first book, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Performance, 1539-1640, which examines the festive customs of Afro-Mexican confraternities.