Africans and their descendants in colonial Mexico are one of the most thoroughly documented diasporic populations in the early Americas, with archival evidence attesting to everything from long-term demographic trends to the daily experiences of individual Afro-Mexicans. As a delicately balanced work of social and cultural history, Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva's Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico puts this evidence to excellent use, modeling aspects of both large-scale analysis and detailed microhistorical storytelling. Focusing on colonial Mexico's second city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Sierra Silva draws on an impressive array of municipal, notarial, and judicial records to reconstruct a complex landscape of urban slavery, showing how the enslaved navigated Puebla's particular urban spaces and labor regimes to sustain families, build social networks, and improve their legal and financial circumstances.
Though not strictly chronological, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico begins with Puebla's founding in 1531, in a previously uninhabited plain not...