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At the Heart of the Borderlands is the first book-length study of
Africans and Afro-descendants in the frontiers of Spanish America.
While people of African descent have formed part of most
borderlands' histories, this study recognizes and explains their
critical contribution to the formation of frontier spaces. Lack of
imperial control coupled with Spain's desperation for settlers and
soldiers in frontier areas facilitated the social mobility of
Afro-descendants. This need allowed African descendants to become
not just members of borderland societies but leaders of it as well.
They were essential actors in helping to shape the limits of the
Spanish empire. Africans and Afro-descendants built, opposed, and
shaped Spanish hegemony in the borderlands, taking on roles that
would have been impossible or difficult in colonial centers due to
the socio-racial hierarchy of imperial policies and practices.
By the early 1700s, the vast scale of the Spanish Empire led crown
authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their
political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan
mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book
follows the Ocopa missions through the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the
indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima
earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and
the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the
missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle
over the nature of colonial governance. Cameron D. Jones reveals
the changes that Spain's far-flung empire experienced from
borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon
monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that
broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were
shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa
friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and
bureaucrats in Lima and Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents,
Jones argues that these conflicts were representative of the
political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout
Spanish America on the eve of independence.
At the Heart of the Borderlands is the first book-length study of
Africans and Afro-descendants in the frontiers of Spanish America.
While people of African descent have formed part of most
borderlands' histories, this study recognizes and explains their
critical contribution to the formation of frontier spaces. Lack of
imperial control coupled with Spain's desperation for settlers and
soldiers in frontier areas facilitated the social mobility of
Afro-descendants. This need allowed African descendants to become
not just members of borderland societies but leaders of it as well.
They were essential actors in helping to shape the limits of the
Spanish empire. Africans and Afro-descendants built, opposed, and
shaped Spanish hegemony in the borderlands, taking on roles that
would have been impossible or difficult in colonial centers due to
the socio-racial hierarchy of imperial policies and practices.
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