Book Talk | Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640
Miguel A. Valerio
Monday, October 12, 2026 | 03:00 pm
Latin American and Iberian Institute (801 Yale Blvd NE)
801 Yale Blvd NE (campus building #165)
About:
Miguel A. Valerio explores a striking feature of Black life in colonial Mexico: Africans and their descendants who elected kings and queens and brought them into public view through elaborate festivals, processions, dances, music, and performance. Drawing on his award-winning book Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640, Valerio examines how these practices helped Afro-Mexicans build community, express collective identities, and claim forms of autonomy within a society structured by slavery and racial inequality. He traces these traditions across the early Black Atlantic, from Central Africa and Iberia to Mexico, while showing how Afro-Mexicans transformed them in a new setting. The talk invites us to see joy and celebration not simply as diversion, but as forms of cultural creativity, community-making, and what Valerio calls “communal sovereignty.”
Miguel A. Valerio is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world, specializing in Black Catholic confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America. He is the author of the award-winning Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640 (Cambridge, 2022) and co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America (2022) and Mapping Diversity in Latin America (2025). His scholarship appears in leading journals in Latin American and African diaspora studies. His current book project, Irmandade: Black Placemaking in Colonial Brazil, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and examines Black community formation in Brazil.
Notes:
This event is free and open to the public.
