Until 1640 more Africans went to New Spain than to any other part of Spanish America (p. 1). Moreover, Mexico’s multi-faceted economic, cultural, and environmental conditions offer a view of the African in a variety of local settings. For these two reasons the topic of this book is important.
Palmer divides Mexican slavery into three chronological periods: 1519-1580, 1580-1650, and 1650-1827 (p. 2), stating incorrectly that emancipation came in 1827 (p. 3) when actually it did not come until two years later. His study deals with the second period when slavery in New Spain reached its zenith. The first chapter treats the Afro-Mexican slave trade. Drawing primarily on records in Spain and Mexico City, the author manages to explain effectively the conditions which gave rise to the trade, its approximate volume, and the African origins of the slaves involved.
The remaining six chapters attempt “to reconstruct the life of the slave in Mexico . . .” (p. 4), but they are unable to accomplish this. In order to place the African within the context of the broader Mexican society, Palmer interweaves some new information he has uncovered with more extensive findings of other scholars. The results are of mixed quality. Palmer is able to add little to what we already know about such things as daily slave life on large commercial agricultural units and in mining areas, but his findings on blacks in Mexican textile obrajes is illuminating.
Because of his heavy reliance on the evidence and conclusions of other authors, he often contradicts his own data. For example, Palmer tries very hard to support Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran’s thesis that Afro-Mexicans tenaciously clung to their West African cultural traditions despite efforts by Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities to eradicate them (chapters 5-6). Yet, Palmer admits that today colonial Afro-Mexicans are an all but forgotten group (p. 4). It is doubtful that even in the early colonial period Africans had much cultural impact on Mexican society for two very good reasons. First, blacks never comprised more than two percent of the overall population (p. 39). Secondly, in Mexico, African culture had to compete for survival against two other strong cultures instead of just one as it did in most other New World areas; that of the politically, socially, and economically dominant whites, and that of the numerically dominant Indians. Palmer accepts the common assumption that bozales, or African-born slaves, were more rebellious than Creoles, or American-born slaves, despite the fact that he documents many more instances of Creole rather than bozal conspirators, assailants, and rebels. Palmer, like Aguirre Beltran, also sees Mexican slavery as an extremely brutalizing experience for blacks without fully comparing their experience in this setting in terms of living and working conditions to those of slaves elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere or those of other groups within colonial Mexico itself.
Palmer has great difficulty in treating blacks’ relations with other segments of the society. He naively assumes that the growth of the free segment within Afro-Mexican society was due to manumission (pp. 178-179). In reality, the numerical rise of the free black came about primarily as a result of miscegenation between black male slaves and free women of all racial backgrounds. The fact that the vast majority of free blacks throughout the colonial period were not African-born blacks, but rather Mexican-born Afro-mestizos, bears out this conclusion.
Finally, Palmer treats the black experience within Mexico from 1570-1650, as if there was no change, despite changes in demographic, economic, health, administrative-legal conditions within the general society which he notes were developing around Afro-Mexicans during this period.
In sum, this book, although offering some new data and insights on a complex and little-studied aspect of the overall black history of the Americas, still falls far short of its most significant goal—integrating the Afro-Mexican into the evolving racially and culturally heterogeneous society of colonial Mexico during the period from 1570 to 1650. Instead, Slaves of the White God describes the black experience in this setting as if it took place in a vacuum and at a suspended point in time.
