Inspired in part by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm, the past several years have witnessed a reinvigoration of Black Studies, with careful attention being paid to the approaches and methods of writing black history. The terms “African Diaspora” and “Black Diaspora” have become almost commonplace in scholarly discourse, emerging out of relative obscurity from their roots in the politically inspired Pan-Africanist and Civil Rights discourses of the 1950s and ’60s. Critiques of the Black Atlantic model and its overly narrow concentration on the English-speaking world have fueled new and important discussions that have touched fields and subfields well beyond the traditional boundaries of Black Studies.

In 1641, the rural guard of colonial Trujillio on the northern Peruvian coast, accompanied by “many Indians,” attacked a cimarrón (fugitive slave) encampment led by two congos, Gabriel and Domingo. Indigenous men wished to end the fugitives’ raids on their fields and families. Towards this end, they guided the Spanish lieutenant magistrate and his company to the cimarrón settlement hidden in the hills above the Santa Catalina valley. Indigenous leaders and commoners of the Mansiche reducción—or colonial indigenous village—who maintained lands in the Santa Catalina valley, testified that “negros cimarrones” (fugitive “blacks”) had been assaulting local inhabitants and stealing from valley since 1633. Yet, Mansiche reducción had not registered a previous complaint indicating that fugitive slaves and indigenous people in Santa Catalina had not to this point been antagonistic.

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression. In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces. These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

Inscribed on the outside walls of Quito’s Cathedral is a list of the men who invaded, occupied, and ultimately renamed the Inka city of Quito for Saint Francis on August 28, 1534. Listed among these individuals are two blacks—Juan (de color negro), and Anton (negro). Juan and Anton represented the hundreds (and perhaps thousands by this date) of blacks, explorers, conquistadors, slaves, and squires who had come to the Americas during the age of conquest (1492-1550). Although the biographical records for Juan and Anton are sketchy, sources indicate that they were freemen.

In 1586, the royal audiencia of Quito received a letter from a fugitive African slave written with the aid of an itinerant Spanish missionary. The judges were dismayed by what they read. The African, Alonso de Illescas, head of one of the maroon communities that had been flourishing on the coast of Esmeraldas since 1553, petitioned the court with a proposition and a veiled threat. The proposal implored the judges to honor an earlier promise giving Illescas political authority over Esmeraldas, the coastal province comprising the maroons’ homeland, and to desist in their plans to establish Spanish settlers in the region.