Advertisement
Miguel A. Valerio explores a striking feature of Black life in colonial Mexico: Africans and their descendants who elected kings and queens and brought them into public view through elaborate festivals, processions, dances, music, and performance. Drawing on his award-winning book Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640, Valerio examines how these practices helped Afro-Mexicans build community, express collective identities, and claim forms of autonomy within a society structured by slavery and racial inequality. He traces these traditions across the early Black Atlantic, from Central Africa and Iberia to Mexico, while showing how Afro-Mexicans transformed them in a new setting. The talk invites us to see joy and celebration not simply as diversion, but as forms of cultural creativity, community-making, and what Valerio calls “communal sovereignty.”
Advertisement
Event venue
UNM Latin American & Iberian Institute, 801 Yale Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106, United States
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.
Discover more events by tag
Books in AlbuquerqueHistory in AlbuquerquePerformances in AlbuquerqueEducation in AlbuquerqueLiterary-art in Albuquerque