This collection of essays is born out of the concern of its editors that despite the great number of works published in recent years about people of African descent in colonial Latin America, these stories do not seem to permeate the general narratives of the period. When they do, it is in the form of aggregate numbers or discussions of economic production rather than as part of an attempt to reconstruct individuals’ day-to-day lives. This volume focuses on the lives of Afro-descendants in both internal and external borderlands—that is, cultural spaces in which Spanish institutional presence was weaker and the possibilities for upward mobility among Afro-descendants were the greatest.

The book gathers ten contributions from all over the Americas. In the first chapter, Cameron D. Jones describes the roles that Afro-descendants played in California missions from the late eighteenth century to 1821, challenging white Eurocentric narratives about westward expansion in...

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