African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
282 p., Prior tO 1640, When the Regular Slave Trade to New Spain ended, colonial Mexico was the second largest importer of slaves in the Americas. Even so, slavery never supplanted indigenous labor in the colony, and by the second half of the 17th century there were more free Afromexicans than slaves in Mexico.
Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
