Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through theexperiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radicalreconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorialrecords, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives andliberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, whobecame majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting historyof 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, bodypolitics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on thesephenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history ofMexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blacknesspresents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.