Almost eleven of the twelve million Africans who survived the trauma of enslavement in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, remade their lives in territories claimed by Spain or Portugal. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused sources, the authors show that although plantation slavery was a horrible reality for many Africans and their descendants in Latin America, blacks experienced many other realities in Iberian colonies.

Paul Lovejoy analyzes a treatise by a seventeenth-century Muslim scholar in Morocco and argues it shaped the slave trade to Latin America. John Thornton examines the early and significant adaptations Central Africans made to European material culture and Catholicism, noting how closely Angola resembled Latin America by the mid-seventeenth century.

Lynne Guitar studies the grueling nature of African slavery in the sugar plantations of Hispaniola and the rebellions they triggered--the first in the New World. Jane Landers discusses slave rebellions in seventeenth-century New Spain and the development of maroon communities strong enough to negotiate their freedom. Matthew Restall tracks the life of one eighteenth-century Afro-Yucatecan to demonstrate how enslaved persons experienced competing English and Spanish systems in the circum-Caribbean.

Rene Soulodre-La France considers how the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Latin America in 1767 transformed slaves' lives and identities in New Granada. Matt Childs investigates the tensions between African-born and creole members of Havana's black brotherhoods in the eighteenth century. Stuart Schwartz probes a Muslim uprising of Hausa dockworkers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Seth Meiselshows how enslaved blacks parlayed their military service against British forces in 1806 into freedom and citizenship in the new republic of Argentina. The appendix includes translated primary documents from each of these essays.

Explores social and cultural transformations among the indigenous communities of western Mexico, especially the indios fronterizos (Frontier Indians), preceding and during the struggle for independence In The Mark of Rebels Barry Robinson offers a new look at Mexican Independence from the perspective of an indigenous population caught in the heart of the struggle. During the conquest and settlement of Mexico's Western Sierra Madre, Spain's indigenous allies constructed an indio fronterizo identity for their ethnically diverse descendants. These communities used their special status to maintain a measure of autonomy during the colonial era, but the cultural shifts of the late colonial period radically transformed the relationship between these indios fronterizos and their neighbors. Marshalling an extensive array of archival material from Mexico, the United States, and Spain, Robinson shows that indio fronterizo participation in the Mexican wars of independence grafted into the larger Hidalgo Revolt through alignment with creole commanders. Still, a considerable gulf existed between the aims of indigenous rebels and the creole leadership. Consequently, the privileges that the indios fronterizos sought to preserve continued to diminish, unable to survive either the late colonial reforms of the Spanish regime or creole conceptions of race and property in the formation of the new nation-state. This story suggests that Mexico's transition from colony to nation can only be understood by revisiting the origins of the colonial system and by recognizing the role of Spain's indigenous allies in both its construction and demolition. The study relates events in the region to broader patterns of identity, loyalty, and subversion throughout the Americas, providing insight into the process of mestizaje that is commonly understood to have shaped Latin America. It also foreshadows the popular conservatism of the nineteenth century and identifies the roots of post-colonial social unrest. This book provides new context for scholars, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and anyone interested in the history of Mexico, colonization, Native Americans, and the Age of Revolutions.