HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH EVENT SERIES

Daniel Nemser is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities Book Award in 2018. His talk today will focus on the archives of marronage in colonial Mexico By the turn of the seventeenth century, the camino real (royal road) between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz had become a key logistical corridor for the circulation of commodities like silver across the global Spanish empire and the emerging racial capitalist world-system. The recent completion of a new leg of the road was intended to make this circulation faster, cheaper, and more secure, but it also created conditions for new threats to circulation to emerge. According to colonial officials, the most significant of these threats were maroons.

Administrative documents affirm that negros cimarrones (maroon Blacks) frequently attacked merchants transporting commodities along the road. Yet there are few documented cases of specific attacks. The disjuncture between the frequency of general statements about regular maroon attacks and the elusiveness of documented attacks raises significant questions for scholars. To what extent do these statements reflect a real phenomenon, and to what extent are they the product of the racist paranoia of the colonial authorities? What, if anything, might these archival silences tell us about maroon strategy and fugitive practice? This talk takes up these difficult if not impossible questions.