Miguel A. Valerio

Miguel A. Valerio earned his doctorate from The Ohio State University with a dissertation on the festive practices of black confraternities in the early modern Iberian Atlantic. He is currently assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His research has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, Slavery & Abolition, and the edited volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), edited by Cécile Fromont, and is forthcoming in Colonial Latin American Review and the Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association. He is currently completing his first book, “With Their King and Queen”: Afro-Mexican Festive Practices, 1539-1640, which studies the performance of festive black kings and queens in Mexico City’s first century of Spanish colonization.
 
 
 

Alter­native cre­ative methodologies

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Published on October 22, 2023
In 2013, reading from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s His­toria ver­dadera de la Con­quista de la Nueva España, for a graduate seminar about colonial cities and fes­tivals led by my soon-to-be adviser, Lisa Voigt, I came across a line – just one line – that men­tions a pro­cession of “more than fifty” Black men, women, and children led by “their king and queen.” Intrigued by this passage, I began the research that ulti­mately led to my first book, Sov­ereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640.

Radical Blackness

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Published on October 15, 2020
One of the doc­u­ments I have been pouring over the past seven years tells of a plot in 1612 by Mexico’s black pop­u­lation to kill all male Spaniards, rape the young, beau­tiful women, and enslave the native population.