‘So color de una cofradía’: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru

Abstract

Enslaved and free Africans in Lima, Peru, joined Catholic cofradías (religious sodalities) in order to form community. As they did this, they also discovered and created fissures within their number. Early cofradía records demonstrate how Afro-descent communities drew upon their contemporary experiences, including adapting the European rhetoric of ‘difference’ deployed against them to identify and police their own divisions during the first century of the institutionalisation of African slavery in Spanish America. These documents also provide us with a history of how African ‘ethnicities’ came to be central to diasporic identities.