Typological portrayals of black Christians or black proto-Christians in missionary texts from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish America acknowledge black men’s and women’s interiority and intellectual capacities, whatever their level of civility, as a means of justifying their ability to become Christians. The juxtaposition of three generic types of black subjects in this chapter demonstrates that even as racial hierarchies in the Iberian world were cohering and increasingly associating blackness with bodies direly in need of civilizing tutelage, theological discourse left open a loophole for conceiving of black intellectual capacities and spiritual virtue.

This chapter analyzes the language black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of blackness in the distinct missionary scenarios they led. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, the chapter argues that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish or Spanish American texts.

This chapter argues that the policy developed for evangelizing black populations in Spanish America, compared with that of indigenous populations in the same regions, required uniquely validating black interpreters’ roles as evangelical intermediaries. This validation in turn opened a space for important forms of subjectification and authority for black interpreters.

The collection of Jesuit texts describing black interpreters’ lives and labor in seventeenth-century Cartagena demonstrates that the black men and women employed as evangelical linguistic intermediaries before and after the publication of Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise were far from the invisible and easily replaceable assistants Sandoval suggests. In fact, the texts analyzed in this chapter provide rich details regarding the biographies and roles assigned to and adapted by the black interpreters in Cartagena. The interpreters’ stories, told in part through highly mediated accounts given by some of the black interpreters themselves, present them as linguistic and spiritual intermediaries who are leaders of black communities in the city and influential participants in the Jesuit mission. The sources demonstrate that the interpreters took advantage of the space of negotiation provided by the mission to acquire privileges unique to enslaved laborers during this period and became avenues for newly arrived black men and women to make some successful demands through their participation in the Jesuit mission.

Outlines the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade and the Church’s efforts at evangelizing black slaves, which including confraternities for enslaved people and sacred art of black saints