UCI Department of History: FACULTY

My current work centers the early Atlantic world in the southern Iberian empires where free and enslaved ‘Africans’ and ‘Indian’ laborers created new, colonial identities from elite, labor categories. During the ‘long’ 17th century, on the northern Peruvian coast, Spanish authorities and local landholders labeled a diverse African population as ‘black’ to signify an enslaved status and created ‘Indians’ from diverse indigenous communities in order to extract tribute and labor.

I argue that indigenous people claimed their rights as Crown subjects against highland migrants, fugitive slaves, and the encroachment of sugar plantations during the later half of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, enslaved Africans remained legally ambiguous but infused transatlantic categories to signify Diaspora communities such as lucumí (originating from the hinterland of the Bight of Benin). By the eve of the ‘enlightened’ Bourbon reforms, Spanish colonization occurred at an intimate level, that of naming oneself within corporate possibilities as casta categories were legal (secular and ecclesiastical) labels that could be claimed or discarded, depending on necessity and circumstance. Thus, "race" in colonial Peru was not a hierarchy of whiteness imposed from above as boundaries of colonial difference in the early Atlantic emerged from multiple subaltern actions, intentions, and material circumstances.

As a colonial historian, I started working on this project because I wanted to understand how Spanish colonialism shaped cultural and institutional racism in the Andes today. I find that in Spanish America, categories called casta were fundamental to a hegemonic and long-lasting colonial rule. Yet, my interrogation of categories of difference challenges us to recognize racial categories as constructed and modified. Landholding elites and Spanish officials employed colonial categories to maintain order, but colonized people infused casta to create identities that were meaningful to themselves and their communities. Thus, if elements of racialized discrimination began in the colonial past, then so did the struggle to appropriate, to challenge, and to re-make these categories of colonization and slavery into personal, communal, and (eventually) political identities of social change.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses at UCI about the experiences of indigenous people within Spanish colonial rule, how enslaved and free people of African descent negotiated early modern Atlantic world slavery and the intersections between colonial indigenous and African Diaspora histories.