Introduction: visualizing Blackness in colonial Latin America

Abstract

As she lay dying in Lima's convent of La Trinidad in 1696, Tomasa Fernández Montejo, a black-veiled nun, made arrangements for the fates of the two enslaved women in her possession. 1 María Gregoria, a mulata aged four years, was granted liberty; Ysabel María, de casta conga, on the other hand, would be given to the two-year-old child Fernández Montejo was raising in her cell, for the remainder of the child's life. But before Ysabel could be 'free of all subjection and bondage,' she would have one final mistress: an image of the Virgin of Carmen housed in the convent's choir. Ysabel would be required to leave the convent for the streets of Lima to earn jornal until she amassed 300 pesos. These earnings were to be rendered to the nun in charge of the image, and used for the celebration of feast days. Most stunningly, any children that Ysabel might have during her years of servitude would be enslaved to the image as well.More than a century later, in March of 1812, José Antonio Aponte y Ulabarra, a free Black man working as a cabinet-maker and sculptor in Havana, was brought to trial to answer charges that he had incited a series of slave rebellions that had erupted at nearby sugar plantations. Central to the accusation levied against Aponte was a remarkable 'Book of Paintings' that he had created, a hybrid of painting and collage depicting imagined and historical landscapes populated with figures of mythology and biblical history, classical gods, and most significantly, swashbuckling figures of Black history along with Black saints, cardinals, priests, pilgrims, nuns, and battling Black armies. Aponte also included depictions of himself and his forebears and used the book as a didactic tool to instruct members of his community about a telling of history that centered and celebrated Africans and their descendants as protagonists. Though Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' has been lost, the trial record of his three-day interrogation has left us Aponte's ekphrasis of the images he created. After his testimony, Aponte was condemned to death and his body was made a grisly public display.The fates of Ysabel María and José Antonio Aponte demonstrate the often-fraught relationship between Afrodescendants and visually potent objects which could variously and simultaneously be tools of oppression and vehicles for the articulation of subjectivity. Ysabel María's story illustrates the brutal fact that religious statues were conferred with greater agency than human beings. As scholars we long to know how Ysabel María regarded the Virgin to whom she was in bondage, a position that may have come with a certain amount of prestige and latitude. Aponte's 'Book of Paintings' not only visualized Black sovereignty and presented it as a historical fact to Black habaneros, it also