Proclaiming an African King in Colonial Mexico: Crax Bomba and the 1669 Rebellion
by Professor Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, University of Rochester
Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 4pm-5:30PM
Location: book HG 1010
In the fall of 1669, hundreds of Africans proclaimed a king of their own in a rural outpost known as La Rinconada (in the modern-day state of Veracruz, Mexico). This was not one of the festive coronations organized by Black Catholic brotherhoods, cofradías, throughout Spanish America. Instead, the story of Crax Bomba's ascension to an impromptu kingship is one of strategic violence and ritualized respect. The rebellion culminated with the murder of the incoming factor for the slave trade to Mexico, the destruction of the inn at La Rinconada, and the brief reign of Bomba. Through deep sensory description, this paper reconstructs the sounds, sights, and scents that informed the emergence and immediate repression of a maroon community that was not to be. Through King Bomba, we learn of the physical and symbolic struggle against the transatlantic slave trade by survivors of Atlantic and Caribbean voyages in the late seventeenth century.
Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva is Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Rochester. His first book, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (2018), reassesses the dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade to the city of Puebla and establishes that at least 20,000 people were sold in its slave market during the seventeenth century. His second book project, “In the Wake of the Raid: Blackness, Piracy and the 1683 Sack of Veracruz,” examines the violent dispersal of over 1,000 people of African descent across various Caribbean and Atlantic settlements following Laurent de Graaf’s devastating attack on the port of Veracruz.