Creole Civic Pride and Positioning “Exceptional” Black Women

Abstract

Here we examine texts written by and about women of African descent in the Americas during the seventeenth century. That we know about their lives indicates that they were exceptional; that they were black, enslaved for the first parts of their lives, and located in the Americas makes them, by some standards, marginal as well. Over one hundred years before Phillis Wheatley gained recognition as “Phillis, a Negro girl, in Boston,” the lives of the women we examine—an African Carmelite in Mexico, a black Franciscan lay sister in Peru, and a Mexican-Jewish mulatta born in Spain—exhibited similar tensions between how their status as exceptions was constructed and deployed by Euro-Americans as a reflection of the virtues of a specific city or region and how they negotiated these characterizations by also navigating a range of transatlantic discourses. For Euro-American creole elites, discourses surrounding “exceptional” black women could help resituate their endeavors with respect to cosmopolitan centers—black women were useful significo in ongoing debates about what counted as the periphery within empire.¹ The women whom we study were intensely aware of the marginality that comes with low social status, but they were also aware of the marginalization that worried Euro-American creoles. We examine their positions between local and global spaces and examine how they described the world, criollismo, domestic space, and local politics. The bodies of black women, especially those who were enslaved, were often overdetermined as cultural and economic objects, a dynamic evidenced by the ways they were exceptionalizcd by creole elites (and modern scholars). At times the women we study explicitly resisted objectification of their bodies. We are more interested, however, in how they challenged and participated in imperial discourses while looking beyond figurations of their bodies.