Introduction

In June 1791, the pseudonymous author Hesperióphylo offered the reading public of the Mercurio Peruano, an important journal of Peru's creole enlightenment, two short essays titled “Idea de las congregaciones públicas de los Negros Bozales,” or a description of the public meetings of African-born Black slaves. Premised on the inhumanity of slavery and the consolation enslaved Africans found in the Catholic Church, the essays contemplated the ways in which these “unhappy men and women” organized themselves into cofradías which both deepened their relationship with the Church and provided more secular entertainment and community. Indeed, cofradías serving members of African origin or heritage were formed within a decade of the conquest of Peru in 1531-1532, and – like the city's other cofradías – flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite repeated attempts by the Church and the Crown to rein in their enthusiastic increase. Hesperióphylo noted that “the first thing [slaves arriving from Africa] do is join a cofradía; these maintain the social networks of their respective communities.”

Those “respective communities” were the African ethnicities to which the author claimed the enslaved belonged, the ten major castas or naciones, which he enumerated as: Terranovos, Lúcumes, Mandingas, Cambundas, Carabalíes, Cangoes, Chalas, Huarochiríes, Congos, and Misangas.