The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

In 2004, my mother and I were having an argument and she called me a “Black bastard.” And I’m like, even if you want to hurt my feelings, who says that? Call me stupid. call me whatever, but “Black bastard?” Where did that come from? So after a pregnant silence, she told me the story of how she met somebody just before she met the man I thought was my dad. She doesn’t really remember a whole lot about him; it was a short-lived relationship. But he was Black. African American. Of course, I was shocked. But I also had a sense of relief and affirmation. And while I was having a lot of questions—I wanted to know who this man was, I wanted some evidence—all these pieces just fell into place: why my lips were bigger, why my skin was darker, why I didn’t look like the rest of my family, and perhaps even why I gravitated to the people and things that I did. It just explained a lot of things that I had a hard time explaining to myself. And it made me feel like perhaps all the choices I had made were not necessarily mine to have made. Maybe in a strange way my biological father had been guiding me towards myself all along. —Zun Lee

Yaba Blay, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, (Philadelphia: BLACKprint Press, 2013). 92-93.

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

Yale University Press
2022-04-12
296 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
9 b/w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780300258066

Danielle Terrazas Williams, Lecturer in the School of History
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

A restoration of the agency and influence of free African-descended women in colonial Mexico through their traces in archives

The Capital of Free Women examines how African-descended women strove for dignity in seventeenth-century Mexico. Free women in central Veracruz, sometimes just one generation removed from slavery, purchased land, ran businesses, managed intergenerational wealth, and owned slaves of African descent. Drawing from archives in Mexico, Spain, and Italy, Danielle Terrazas Williams explores the lives of African-descended women across the economic spectrum, evaluates their elite sensibilities, and challenges notions of race and class in the colonial period.

Tags: Afro-Mexicans, Danielle Terrazas Williams, New Spain, Veracruz, Yale University Press

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2022 at 17:01Z and is filed under Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

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