Jueves, 27 de junio, 2:30-3:45pm | Universidad de Cartagena
Angélica María Sánchez, “Blackness and Conversion in Jaime Martínez Compañón’s Codex Trujillo”
Resumen: The Codex Trujillo is the name given to the nine-volume manuscript sent to king Charles IV by Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón. The manuscripts were presented almost entirely as a compilation of watercolors and the clear emphasis on the convenience and urgency of building new pueblos de indios is evident in portraying indigenous population in two instances: first, out of the pueblos and wearing traje ordinario, and a second time when they were within the pueblos and wearing traje de iglesia (dressed for the service). However, when it comes to representing the black population in this codex, a second instance is non-existent. They are represented wearing what one might consider “ordinary” clothing, with an open unaltered natural landscape as a background. There is not a traje de iglesia version as it is the case for the indigenous population. Additionally, in comparison to a total of 143 representation of indigenous population in the Codex, just seven watercolors represented black people. Why is there such a drastic difference between representations indigenous and Black people? What does it mean that black people in the codex do not have a second transformative moment deserving to have a “better” appearance? Why are there so few representations of black people in this codex? This paper synthetize a work in progress where I try to analyze the asymmetries in representing human differences in the Codex Trujillo, focusing my observations on the Black people. It is my interpretation that it was not conversion or relocation that could turn black people into “better” Christians, but rather miscegenation. As the Codex was following a scientific aim according to the mindset of the Enlightenment times in which it was conceived, it is my belief that images presented by Martinez Compañón ultimately shaped an ideal black human “type” useful to the economic and social purposes of a colonial project.
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Ximena Gómez, “From Ira to Imagen: Possible ‘Space Correlation’ in Colonial Lima’s Virgen de la Antigua”
Resumen: In this chapter I elucidate the complex and interconnected ways the Virgin of the Antigua’s black cofrades utilized visual and material culture in their confraternal activities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima. Though the cult of the Virgin of the Antigua originated in Seville, and the Antigua Virgin that hangs in Lima’s Cathedral was imported from Seville, this chapter considers the Lima devotion first and foremost as inextricably tied to the black cofradía. Based on the cofrades’ self-identification as caboverdes in the 1630s, I look to the material culture and rituals of the Greater Senegambia region from which members came, in order to speculate about the cultural recollections the caboverde devotees might have experienced during confraternal interactions. The cofrades of the Virgin of the Antigua did not leave us with a corpus of religious devotional objects and sodality possessions. In compiling the cofradía’s bienes through inventories and other records of objects I created a corpus of objects to which a Greater Senegambian lens can be applied. I propose that the Antigua sodality’s members created “spaces of correlation” in which this material and visual culture can be more fully imagined and interpreted through subjunctive recall, with reference to the cultural heritage and memory of West Africa.
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