Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the black geographies of New Granada in the eighteenth century, with the structure following the routes of African captives from the Caribbean region across to the mines of the Pacific. It explores how Caribbean New Granada was connected to Antioquia and the Pacific region by the mobilities of people of African descent and thereby offers an alternative geography of colonial Colombia that nuances traditional understandings of region in Colombian history. The chapter outlines the demographics of New Granada’s provinces, demonstrating the central importance of the jurisdiction’s black population to colonial history, and how New Granada was a society governed through slavery. Rivers and slave caravan routes that connected the Caribbean to the interior and the Pacific. Following an analysis of provenance zones of captives arriving in Cartagena de Indias, the chapter sketches the black geographies of the provinces of the Caribbean coastal cities of Cartagena de Indias and Santa Marta and their forested interior before casting its gaze across to the gold mines of southwestern Colombia. Elites ruled the region from temperate cities upon the backs of black and indigenous labourers.

The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

Chapter 4 charts the provision and/or absence of instruction in Catholicism in the cultural worlds of the Pacific, which the bishops of Popayán framed as “spiritual pasture.” It begins with an analysis of the patterns of baptism and godparentage in the small city of Cartago, far from the gold mines where enslaved labourers shored up the white elite. The chapter examines two controversies that divided the mine and slave-owning elite and the upper echelons of the Church for decades; first, a debate over the stipend system in which slaveholders had to pay itinerant clergy to travel to the mines to administer the sacraments, and second, over mineros allowing enslaved people to work on holy days, despite myriad laws and papal bulls outlawing it. Ultimately, the remoteness of the mines from towns, and the disinterest of whites in settling there, meant that enslavers continued the long-held custom of enslaved people labouring on holy days and saving up gold dust to pacify them. Condemned by the bishops as “spiritual abandonment,” the custom helped to create conditions for the growth of the large free black population and perhaps the practice of their own religions that largely remain outside of view.

Chapter 3 explores the production of knowledge about Catholicism by people of African descent and their engagement with Iberian and their religious vernaculars. It is based on a small body of Inquisition records, largely relaciones de causas de fe, and one full proceso de fe, the sacrilege case of Felix Fernando Martínez in 1776. The only chapter that focuses on the Caribbean region, it demonstrates the importance of Catholicism in black material and oral culture, whether that be through embrace, questioning, or overt criticism of the Church, Catholic cosmology, and the saints. The religious knowledge production of defendants from the Caribbean, most of whom were free and described as mulato, does not suggest African intellectual genealogies alone. Rather, people of African descent were part of and constructed a vibrant and heterogeneous religious Caribbean and exchanged knowledge about the supernatural, especially Catholicism, with people of all ethnicities. Such speech, and on occasion acts, nevertheless was potentially dangerous to them in the transcultural Caribbean, evidenced by the violent sentences handed down, ranging from spiritual exercises, to forced labour and execution.

Chapter 2 examines the circulation and application of medical and ritual knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, including Venezuela and Panama, and is based upon Inquisition trial records and secular court cases. The chapter approaches healing and ritual as intimately connected and often inseparable activities for African-descended practitioners who were solicited by clients of all ethnicities. Where clients were also people of colour, they were often hired to perform work of community healing. The chapter outlines the gendered and racialised patterns of prosecution and punishment of defendants of African descent tried by the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias. This is followed by an analysis of the mobility and exchange of healing knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, an examination of the marketplace of ideas, and an exploration of the social worlds in which black specialists practiced. Case studies include that of three Kongolese bondsmen, who had hired Joseph and Thomas to poison his owner in 1740s Cartagena, and that of enslaved man Aja, who was accused by fellow bondspersons, other members of the cuadrilla on the gold mines of San Antonio in the Cauca valley mines (owned by the Convent of the Encarnación in the city of Popayán) in the 1770s.

Centring the lived experiences of enslaved and free people of colour, Black Catholic Worlds illustrates how geographies and mobilities – between continents, oceans, and region – were at the heart of the formation and circulation of religious cultures by people of African descent in the face of racialisation and slavery. This book examines black Catholicism in different sites – towns, mines, haciendas, rochelas, and maroon communities – across New Granada and frames African-descended religions in the region as “interstitial religions.” People of African descent engaged in religious practice and knowledge production in the interstices, in liminal places and spaces that were physical sites but also figurative openings, in a society shaped by slavery. Bringing together fleeting moments from colonial archives, Fisk traces black religious knowledge production and sacramental practice just as gold, mined by enslaved people, again began to flow from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic world.