Mexico’s forgotten Black voices

A study of Afro-descendant music in New Spain hits the right note. Review: Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico, Sarah Finley, by Kevin Anzzolin

Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond, Sarah Finley, 2024, Vanderbilt University Press

Perhaps at a time in the not-too-distant future, the turn of the twentieth century will be understood as a veritable watershed moment for Mexico; in terms of politics, economics, and culture, the past 30 or so years have been immensely dynamic.

1994 saw the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trilateral trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada that changed the face of commerce, immigration and foodways. 2000 saw the defeat of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), political clique that had been in power over 70 years. More recently, Mexico has become a crossroads for Central Americans hoping to cross into the US. Finally, this past October, the country elected its first female president.

Culturally, Mexico has begun the difficult work of exploring racism, as José Vasconcelos’s proposition that Mexico is inherently a mestizo nation—a privileged site for a cosmic race—has been undermined by calls to listen to diverse voices and appreciate other identities. Thus, while social media platforms are replete with the neologism “Whitexican”—a critical, sarcastic term used to refer to Mexicans born with certain phenotypes, wealth and privilege—2020 saw the long-awaited for inclusion of the self-identifying term “Afro-Mexican” on the country’s census. During the past 20 years, scholars from diverse disciplines—different historians, various literary scholars and linguists—have engaged with these novel discourses surrounding race in Mexico.

Within this milieu, Sarah Finley has published Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond, a groundbreaking study that explores Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain and colonial Latin America. Combining detailed archival research, a judicious theoretical toolkit and fascinatingly exact translations, Amplifications examines how Black and African individuals from Colonial Mexico participated in musical performances—both religious and secular—which provided them with visibility, chances for advancement and a sense of cultural belonging.

In Finley’s text, Black singers are agentive, they staked claims, they were heard. Although the book may be best categorised as an example of Sound Studies, Amplifications will be of interest to musicologists, Africana Studies scholars, and academics across disciplines who focus on Spanish colonial culture or Mexico. The book is a fine example of why the humanities—especially when executed alongside a firm commitment to interdisciplinarity—remain politically relevant even in the Age of AI. Finley’s book tasks us to listen more keenly to the world around us and rescues marginalised, even hitherto silenced voices.

Finley’s opening is majestic, successfully laying the groundwork for the guiding query that runs throughout the text: What are the possibilities for the common hero, the suppressed subject, within and against colonial society? How to hear the voices of Otherness amid the din of the ordered city?

In the first pages, Finley ingeniously interprets Juan Gómez de Trasmonte’s map of Mexico City, dating to 1682. Finley describes Gómez de Trasmonte’s drawing as “an orderly collection of churches, streets, plazas, and dwellings peacefully rest in the middle of Lake Texcoco”. Yet, she wonders: what can we hear? “For all of its detail, the representation of Mexico City does not include a single inhabitant. It is curiously silent, but not soundless, for the urban layout itself resonates with harmony”.

Amplifications explores this rather de Certeauian line of questioning over the course of six chapters, interrogating the extent to which Black, underrepresented individuals can resist the impositions of colonial order—in terms of place, space and sound. Utilising cathedral records, Inquisition cases, travel narratives, the scores and lyrics of Black villancicos and visual art, Finley uncovers Afro-descendant sounds in seventeenth-century New Spain with particular focus on Mexico City.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the histories of Afro-descendant singers in New Spanish cathedrals during the early seventeenth century, some of whom may have been eunuchs or capones. Juan de Vera and Luis Barreto, two black sopranos, take centre stage. While Finley rightfully acknowledges that these individuals, as slaves, were tragically denied absolute freedom—their voices were unquestionably commodified by wealthy church patrons—Finley also shows that these disenfranchised talents ameliorated their condition in ingenious ways.

Luis Barreto in particular was able to exert a significant amount of what Stephen Greenblatt referred to as self-fashioning, gaining access to education, clothing and even a “voice-healthy” diet. On the one hand, Barreto’s voice was thereby “instrumentalised” for religious purposes, brought into accordance with exemplary Christian practices; on the other hand, Finley argues, Barreto’s special dietary niceties denote elevated social status. Here we witness the real strength of Finley’s analysis: her ability to situate colonial subjectivity at the intersection of social, economic, and religious pressures.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Finley shows that ideological fetters have led us to imagine Black sounds as either consonant or dissonant with dominant socio-political and spiritual ideals. We see how Afro-descendants in New Spain participated in public ceremonies to align with the dominant socio-political order in urban spaces, and they also engaged in spiritual demonstrations.

Sound was a crucial element in these activities. Travel writings and Inquisition records serve as sources for understanding New Spanish sound culture. We even listen to a few oracles along the way. Black and African people marched in processions for feast days, organised private performances, and sold their talents as fortune tellers. For the most part, these practices harmonised with Christian doctrine even while creating a space to preserve syncretic traditions tied to their countries of origin.

In Chapter 5, villancicos—a paraliturgical genre that aimed to narrate religious stories for social others (often Black and Indigenous communities)—are foregrounded. Finley’s adept translations shine here, as the onomatopoeic bubbling of habla de negros is rendered concisely, respectfully, and culturally attuned. Even though the African characters within these performances are depicted as evincing a simplistic, even erroneous understandings of Catholic doctrine, the devotion of Afro-descendants, as Finley shows, is unquestionable. The author explains that “representation of Afro-descendent performance in villancicos record a listening positionality that responds to the pieces’ evangelical bent”.

During the course of villancicos, the appearance of Afro-descendant performers almost always erupts in euphoric pandemonium: “While wild, dancing bodies might seem like a puzzling paradox against this social backdrop, I maintain that their disorderly motion is, in fact, a key element to the villancicos’ performance of social order. Set against the consonant grid of the urban space, the bombastic movements of black dancers create dissonance with social order and reinforce the non-European performers' outsider status”.

With Finley’s astute analysis, we never lose sight of the complex social, religious and racial positionality of individuals. More succinctly stated: Black performers did indeed have a voice, but their songs were sung under specific, controlled circumstances—conditions that they had not chosen. As Finley argues, their “gyrating bodies thus become an outward symbol of spiritual transformation, and their dance performs evangelisation”. Ultimately, Black music is characterised as “crude in comparison with the European tradition” even as the villancicos “do not necessarily marginalise or even devalue it”.

In today’s Mexico, traditions of Black music continue to be sought out, revived and celebrated. Performers like Grupo Cultural Kelele look to African roots rhythms while in Afro-descendant communities along Mexico’s Costa Chica once again perform the “Danza de Diablos”. Finley’s Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond tasks us to listen to these forgotten voices anew. Perhaps, in a real sense, they never stopped singing.

Kevin M. Anzzolin, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures at Christopher Newport University