“Of Greater Dignity than the Negros”

Abstract

Enslaved and free men and women of African origins or descent in Lima, Peru joined Catholic cofradías in order to form community. The earliest records of Lima’s African-descent cofradías reveal some of the ways that members found community, as well as dealt with growing schisms and fissures due to the Atlantic slave trade and local racialized hierarchies. Peruvians of African descent drew upon their contemporary experiences, adapting the European rhetoric of “difference” deployed against them, to identify and police their own divisions during the first century of the institutionalization of African slavery in Spanish America. These documents also provide us with an early history of how African naciones, often misdiagnosed as ethnicities, came to be central to diasporic identities.