Race and the Built Environment in the Iberian World, ca. 1400–1800

In his meditations about Peruvian architecture a century after that country’s independence, the twentieth-century architect, urbanist, critic, and historian Emilio Harth-Terré intertwined notions of identity, modernism, and—unlike most of his contemporaries—race.¹ Harth-Terré penned his words before postcolonial theory emerged. Since then, there have been efforts to decenter the field, although amid abiding epistemological challenges. Most of the architectural histories of the American, Asian, African, and European territories of the Iberian world in the period around 1400 to 1800 have centered on canonical architecture and buildings designed by perceived “white” European architects. The implementation of official languages, urban design regulations, and cartography—or the way the world was represented and understood—consistently tried to efface both racial and religious minorities.² Blood purity statutes established segregation between Old Christians and New Christians, the latter being former Jewish or Muslim people forcibly converted to Catholicism. These statutes had a tremendous impact on regulations across the Iberian world.³ Contributors to this roundtable demonstrate that a nuanced analysis of race and architecture in this period in the Iberian world must also encompass identity, religion, and culture, as distinctions were not always grounded in skin color.⁴

The Iberian world was composed of vast, contrasting geographies and regions, and steeply hierarchical societies; the building trades were indeed hierarchical social structures as well. Legislation that required the segregation of European populations from “other” residents in cities and that prohibited racial and religious minorities from partaking in the building trades across many locales in the Iberian world had important reverberations for these groups, but also projected imperial ambitions. Recent scholarship on Mexico City and Quito, for example, has demonstrated that Amerindians and their descendants actively participated in and sometimes dominated the building trades.⁵ Similarly, contributors to this roundtable also show that prevailing views on the lack of primary sources about the role played by racial and religious minorities in the building trade have been overestimated. Nevertheless, the task ahead is not without difficulties, as the names of Indigenous, Black, and Brown architects, master masons, carpenters, and stonemasons were purposely silenced in the records.⁶

The greater challenge, however, is epistemological, as the social histories of architecture have privileged a biographical model and the artist–patron relationship, and above all have insisted on placing Europe as the umbilicus mundi of architectural production. With the global turn, the study of the circulations of architectural knowledge, or how designs traveled, has become a popular analytical lens. At the same time, this model risks perpetuating the notion of “expansion” by focusing on how so-called European images and designs reached “peripheral regions” of the world. Plenty of evidence challenges this model of studying architecture in a connected world. The architecture of many cities across the former Spanish and Portuguese Empires, from the seventeenth century, sometimes earlier, developed in parallel ways.⁷ Thus, we need to rethink how we engage with the many regions with rich architectural cultures that preceded the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish in colonial settings, which also means reconsidering existing traditions in the Iberian Peninsula. Complex architectural traditions preceded European contact, and sophisticated architectural cultures thrived beyond the feeble boundaries of the Iberian world. Furthermore, we need to dispel the notion that only some places, some people (those of particular descent, lineage, identity, or religious background), certain forms of built architecture, and certain kinds of generated knowledge are worth studying.

This roundtable presents eleven essays, organized in roughly chronological order, that engage with existing debates and challenge long-held myths. Barbara E. Mundy demonstrates that imperial ideals of urban spatial segregation did not correspond to the lived realities of colonial Mexico City, Lima, and Manila. Other contributors address the memorialization of architectural spolia in Oaxacan churches and period writings of Islamic and Visayan architecture in postconquest Spain and the Philippines (Pilar Regueiro Suárez and Juan Luis Burke, Antonio Urquízar-Herrera, Amy Y.T. Chang). Scholars in this roundtable also study how architects, engineers, and patrons of African and Indigenous descent emerged in Goa, Brazil, and Havana (Sidh Losa Mendiratta, Miguel A. Valerio, Rosalía Oliva Suárez and Karen Mahé Lugo Romera, Alice Santiago Faria). Essays about the significant contributions of African and Indigenous builders, carpenters, and smelters and their descendants in Angola, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Lisbon showcase research methods for a social history of architecture that bring us closer to the realities of the built environment of the time (Sandra M. G. Pinto, Francisco Mamani-Fuentes, Crislayne Alfagali). Authors of this roundtable demonstrate that research on the intersections of race and architecture is not only pressing but can also fundamentally shift our understanding of how architecture emerged and functioned at the time.

The Spanish Habsburgs centered political control in a vast network of cities and towns. In these places, they attempted to segregate residents of Spanish descent from others, be they Indigenous, Black, or Asian. Some scholars have focused on these policies as the primary mechanism through which racialized categories were created and enforced.¹ But was the racially segregated city a lived reality? And do such representations of cities as racially segregated simply reinforce a hegemonic discourse necessary to the empire? Mexico City, Lima, and Manila offer evidence that lived experience contradicted the Habsburg ideal.

Mexico City was the largest and most important American city for the Habsburgs; its sixteenth-century urban core was memorialized in the twentieth century. A schematic representation created in the 1930s retrospectively expresses the policy of separation between pueblos de españoles and pueblos de indios (Figure 1). The latter were to be populated exclusively by Indigenous peoples and represented politically by “Indian” town councils. People of European (particularly Spanish) descent were to reside in the pueblos de españoles, the town councils (cabildos) of which were staffed by “Spanish” men. When many of the pueblos de indios were called upon to represent themselves for the crown in the 1580s, they mapped their towns on idealized gridiron plans, depicting ordered urban spaces that conformed to Habsburg juridical discourse and ecclesiastical expectations.²

But a strict spatial segregation between indios and españoles was impossible in Mexico City, a place founded upon Aztec (or Mexica) Tenochtitlan. Throughout the sixteenth century, its Indigenous residents outnumbered Spaniards and others. By about 1540, the city had three cabildos, two of them representing Indigenous residents. San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco married the names of the city’s two pre-Hispanic polities with those of Christian saints, and their cabildos made decisions in the interests of Indigenous men and women in the postconquest city. Men and women of all classes and ethnicities moved freely through the urban sphere.

While Lima had been founded upon the lands of the Indigenous lord Taulichusco, its smaller population made it easier for the authorities to attempt racialized urban segregation. By 1571, Indigenous residents were corralled into a new urban neighborhood, Santiago del Cercado. With thirty-five blocks arranged around a large central plaza where a church stood, it housed approximately one thousand people. Some of the neighborhood’s residents had long-term ties to the area, but others were brought to the city by Viceroy Toledo’s reducciones, which forced Indigenous tributaries into new towns under religious supervision.³

In 1571, Manila was established on land opened by conquest and Indigenous removal.⁴ Among the residents of the walled city were the sangley, people of Chinese descent, but Spanish fears that they would ally with hostile Chinese led to their expulsion by 1595. Period maps render the intramuros as center and the sangley extramuros as periphery, and in doing so, they claim that the city’s essence is its Spanish core, existing in opposition to the mixed ethnicities around it.⁵

Historians have described the central traza of Mexico City as a place “reserved for Spanish occupation.”⁶ The same has been noted of Manila, where bells would ring at the end of the day as a signal for non-Spaniards to leave the walled enclave. But the need for labor within those Spanish enclaves meant that multiethnic peoples were ever present. In the case of Lima, the high proportion of Black residents (42 percent at the time of the 1613 census), almost all of whom lived under the roofs of their masters, short-circuited any possibility of a segregated urban space.⁷ In Mexico City, the dense preexisting urban population and limited space made entirely separate Indigenous neighborhoods impossible. And while walled Manila may have been filled with Spanish institutions and residents, thousands of ethnic Chinese entered the city each day, their numbers equaling, if not exceeding, those of the Spanish who lived there.⁸

Was the ideal of a neatly ordered city with a segregated Spanish core perhaps a useful fiction, a feint of a never-certain dominance? In the seventeenth century alone, segregated Manila was convulsed by four uprisings by residents of Chinese descent, each followed by a brutal crackdown. In Lima, the Spanish constructed a wall around the city in 1684–87, putatively for defense against piracy, but its real function may have been to aid in “local control” of Black and Indian populations.⁹ When a revolt caused by food shortages erupted in Mexico City in 1692, the proposed solution was to evict Indigenous residents from a defined space in the center of the city.¹⁰ This reactionary traza, with its ideal racialized segregation, is illustrated in the 1938 schematic representation mentioned above (see Figure 1).

Accepting the Spanish aspirational ideal (read: myth) of the segregated city with Spaniards at its urban core comes at a cost. For instance, Spanish rhetorical constructions of Manila, in text and map, obfuscate the fact that it was the extramuros Chinese-run marketplace that was the economic nerve center of the city. Remaining in the thrall of a Spanish-centric, segregated city binds us to a top-down notion of race and minimizes the roles of other bottom-up phenomena—such as religious sodalities, celebrations, markets, and multilingualism—that were equally instrumental in the negotiation of racialized formations in these locales. To accept the myth of a segregated city is to reenact some of the violence of the colonial order, imagining subaltern peoples as if they were pawns on an urban grid, itself the chessboard writ large, manipulated by wills and desires other than their own. Moreover, it is to obscure the dynamism that arises from that fluid congregation of peoples that cities have enabled in the past, and thus undervalue its relevance in urban plans of the future.

The Livro dos reprovados (Book of the disapproved, or rejected) is a small manuscript found among the records of the Brotherhood of Saint Joseph of the Carpenters, the builders’ brotherhood of Lisbon. This book records the names of the masons and carpenters who failed the application to become brotherhood members. The reason given for the refusal of Monteiro’s admission in 1673 relates to the notion of “blood purity,” which in Portugal and across regions of the Iberian world prevented New Christians and racialized minorities from joining brotherhoods and holding public positions.² However, Monteiro’s examination records show that he had successfully passed the exam to become a master mason on 20 December 1657, an accomplishment that enabled him to freely practice the trade and instruct apprentices.³

Although most of the entries in the Livro dos reprovados do not record the reasons for the candidates’ rejections, the candidates’ applications to the brotherhood reveal that many master carpenters and master masons were refused admission. The same records show that the masons, although not admitted to the brotherhood, passed the examination to practice. Master carpenter Luís de Oliveira’s application was rejected because his grandmother was a “New Christian.” And master mason Domingos Gonçalves was not admitted into the brotherhood because his mother inherited from a man “of the infected nation.” Master mason Francisco da Silva’s paternal side was from Almaçar, in Lamego, and according to a priest, “In that parish, apart from two or three Old Christian households, all others are New Christians.”⁴ Five master masons—António da Costa, Bernardo Ferreira da Costa, Guilherme da Cruz, João Rodrigues, and Valentim Falcão—were refused admission because of their wives; in addition to being subjected to the same “purity” requirement as the applicants, the men’s wives could not be street vendors or laundresses.⁵ Thus, the refusals were not based on the applicants’ skills but on their familial relationships and ancestry (such as belonging to “a mulatto caste,” “a Moorish race,” or “a Jewish nation”), their having been involved in misconduct, or their having suffered vile punishment.

Admission to the brotherhood did not guarantee that one’s “unblemished” lineage would be unchallenged. Master carpenter António da Costa and master mason Valério Martins de Oliveira held significant positions in the Brotherhood of Saint Joseph, and the latter authored the only known construction book of the period in Portugal, three editions of which were printed during his lifetime.⁶ However, while the brotherhood collected information by questioning local elderly witnesses, the Inquisition conducted its inquiries beyond the limits of Lisbon. Witnesses from the hometown of Costa’s paternal grandparents attested that his grandfather had Jewish ancestry. For Martins de Oliveira, a false rumor circulated about his father being “mulatto,” noting his “swarthy face and curly hair,” and it was said that a great-aunt inherited from a close relative who had been burned at the stake or penanced by the Inquisition.⁷

Racial, religious, and social hierarchies operated within the community of masons and carpenters in early modern Lisbon. Old Christians with impeccable (or untraceable) lineage were allowed to work and also join the brotherhood. Brotherhood members were eligible for public offices and received support in times of poverty, illness, and death. New Christians and racialized minorities could work, rise to the top of their trades as masters, sign building contracts, and undertake significant architectural projects alone or in partnership with brotherhood members.⁸ Indeed, the regulations of the Lisbon builders’ guild remained silent on whether religious and racialized minorities could participate in the trade.⁹ In contrast, a 1780 regulation in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, explicitly prohibited “black, indigenous, and captive mulattoes” from becoming apprentices and undergoing examinations.¹⁰

Scholars have largely believed that the most arduous and laborious tasks in Lisbon’s building trades fell upon enslaved individuals, who rarely appear in the records. However, analysis of a few records related to the social history of these trades reveals undeniable evidence of racial and religious discrimination but also shows that racialized minorities and New Christian builders rose to the top of their trades. In this respect, the mining of notarial records and archival collections such as that of the Brotherhood of Saint Joseph can shine light on the social composition of teams of builders in Lisbon, a port city and imperial capital that since the mid-fifteenth century was known for having “many and varied people” with “diverse mixtures.”¹¹

The colonization of New Spain unleashed profound social and environmental changes in Mesoamerica. The policy of congregaciones forcibly relocated Indigenous populations to dense new European-like urban settlements, where they were unable to maintain their ancestral forms of living.¹ When pre-Hispanic communities were decimated by diseases against which the Indigenous peoples lacked immunity, the colonizers populated those new settlements with inhabitants of various ethnic backgrounds, creating complex social issues in the process. Furthermore, environmental changes triggered by the introduction of European livestock and crops dramatically altered the natural landscapes of colonial Mexico.²

In the face of such disorienting cultural and social orders, Indigenous residents of the settlements adopted diverse forms of resistance in order to preserve religious-mythological narratives that were intertwined with the built and natural landscapes. One subtle tactic involved the reuse of construction materials from pre-Hispanic structures, particularly temples, in the construction of Christian churches under the direction of European missionaries. Traditionally, scholars have regarded the employment of Indigenous spolia as a pragmatic use of construction materials and a sign of Christianity replacing paganism.³ However, recent research suggests that this was an Indigenous strategy to preserve ancestral cosmologies. Two cases from the present-day Mexican state of Oaxaca shed light on this architectural practice, which promoted the memory of ancestral Indigenous knowledge and negotiation with the Spanish colonizers.

The church of Santiago Tilantongo, built in 1532 in the Mixteca Alta region, has two embedded stones. One represents a mountain with a human figure inside it, while the other displays a lizard or crocodile. The latter stone faces in the direction of Monte Negro Hill, and Eleanor Wake has suggested that its placement was an Indigenous strategy to allude to the founder of the Tilantongo’s dynastic lineage, Lord 4 Crocodile (Figure 2).⁴

According to the Nuttall Codex, the Tilantongo dynasty was established through the marriage of Lord 4 Crocodile and Lady 1 Death. The foundation is believed to have occurred at Monte Negro Hill, which is where the original settlement is located.⁵ The links connecting the sacred landscape, Tilantongo’s lineage, and the sixteenth-century church suggest that this colonial building preserved Tilantongo’s cultural memory and provided the community with an identity. This type of memory employs mnemonic devices—in this case, elements of the landscape, such as Monte Negro Hill—to perpetuate narratives of a mytho-religious and historical nature.⁶

The Teotitlán del Valle church building offers another example of how spolia can be used to give new meaning to architectural structures, enabling them to serve as symbols of communal memory (Figure 3). The church was built between 1582 and 1590 in the Tlacolula Valley, Oaxaca, and was completed a century later by Dominican friars who led the evangelization of the Zapotec region. During the church’s construction on top of a pre-Hispanic temple, Indigenous builders removed from the temple ancient stone elements with mosaic fretwork and floral iconography, which they then embedded in the façade of the new structure. To this day, the spolia are a source of cultural pride, providing visual-iconographic inspiration for geometrical patterns used in the designs of textiles produced at Teotitlán.

The largest piece stands out among the many spolia at Teotitlán del Valle—it represents a man wearing a large headdress (Figure 4). But the question perhaps should be: Why did the friars allow the Indigenous workers to display these spolia so prominently? One theory is that while the friars’ objective was to eradicate Indigenous rituals and images of ancient deities, they allowed the installation of spolia on the church façade as a strategy to bring the Zapotec closer to the new faith. The friars understood these elements as symbols of great esteem, identity, and social cohesion.⁷ In this light, the spolia stones can be interpreted as Indigenous memory devices within the process of colonial domination and negotiation.

These and other examples suggest that spolia in certain colonial Mexican churches may have transformed each structure into a new axis mundi for its community, so that it became a sacred seat for both old and new holy entities. This practice could foster a sense of community, reinforce social bonds, and strengthen the connections between Indigenous identity and significant historical events, some of which were linked to ancestral lineages. The employment and key placement of pre-Hispanic spolia in sixteenth-century churches provided continuity for Indigenous cultural memory. Thus, spolia were not merely reused construction materials; they were part of a long-term negotiation process, illustrating the role fulfilled by Indigenous builders as keepers of ancient cosmologies, interpreters, and intermediaries of new socioreligious realities in the face of a colonial order.

Towering over the palm groves, the majestic church of St. Anne (1682–95) dwarfs the surrounding houses of the village of Talaulim in Tiswadi Island, Goa (Figure 5). In the chancel are three tombstones bearing coats of arms with skeletal motifs crowned by three-sided birettas resting on crossed keys. They belong to Goan Catholic priests, and the respective inscriptions include the sobriquet “Bragmane” (Brahman) after their names. Santana, as the church is known locally, has recently been described as the “first Goan church,” but mid-twentieth-century Portuguese scholars called its architecture “Indo-Portuguese.”¹ The nuance is significant, as that label fit into a broader narrative propagated by the Portuguese Estado Novo regime, portraying the colonial territory of Goa as a model of interreligious and interracial harmony hinging on the peaceful coexistence of Eastern and Western civilizations.² But why was such a monumental church built in the small village of Talaulim? The patronage of Francisco do Rego (1638–89), the priest who commissioned Santana, is key to understanding the context in which this building was erected.

During the mid-sixteenth century, as Jesuit missionaries worked to convert most of Tiswadi’s population, they encountered “the greatest difficulty” in Talaulim, where the villagers “greeted and bade farewell” to the missionaries “by throwing stones.”³ Resistance to conversion was linked to the village’s Brahman community, but despite this initial opposition, Christianity took root, and the parish church of Santana was rebuilt in 1577 on the site of a primitive church constructed a decade earlier.⁴

In the early seventeenth century, most rural parishes in Tiswadi Island, including Santana, were transferred to the care of Goan priests. This was the first step in a long path toward the empowerment of the Goan Indigenous clergy, who were trained in the colleges of Old Goa but were kept in subaltern positions by the Portuguese clergy.⁵ One of the first Goan priests to challenge this racial prejudice was Matheus de Castro (1594–1679), who traveled to Rome and obtained commissions from the Vatican. Inspired by Castro’s “Catholic Brahmanism” and anti-Jesuitism, other Goan priests began questioning their loyalties and asserting their caste.⁶ Basing his main argument on the notion of a noble lineage through “purity of blood,” Castro lashed out at both the mixed Portuguese born in India and the other Goan castes, particularly the Chardós.⁷

During the seventeenth century, many Goans abandoned Old Goa, migrating to the surrounding villages. Talaulim grew, becoming a hotbed of Catholic Brahmanism. Two of the first Goans to be knighted by the Portuguese crown, Pascoal de Frias (ca. 1630–ca. 1690) and Nicolau da Silva (fl. 1640–70), hailed from Talaulim, as did António João de Frias (1664–1721), a priest and author of a book that celebrated Catholic Brahmans.⁸ Frias went on to build the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, 1699–ca. 1710, on the Island of Divar, apparently in emulation of Santana.

Do Rego, from the nearby village of Neura, was ordained a priest and continued his education in Lisbon, returning to Goa with the status of protonotary apostolic. He also defended his Brahman lineage in an unpublished, presumably lost work titled Tratado apologetico.⁹ When do Rego became parish priest of Talaulim in 1682, he relied on the rural power base of Brahman parishioners to finance his ambitious architectural project.¹⁰ Santana was built both in emulation of and in competition with the churches in Old Goa. Do Rego wanted to outdo the Jesuit churches in particular, as they were the major antagonists to the empowerment of the Catholic Brahman priests. The church’s main façade boasts two lofty symmetrical towers, a prestigious parti reserved for the seats of dioceses of the Portuguese State of India until it was adopted by the Augustinian order in its mother church of Our Lady of Grace, 1598–ca. 1615. The nave is covered by a barrel vault with lunettes, a vault type first employed in India by the Discalced Carmelites in their mother church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 1630–39. The internal elevations in the nave include Jesuit-influenced semicircular niches at the lower level and a “never-seen-before concept of moulding and ornament.”¹¹

In Santana, architecture condensed and projected Catholic Brahman aspirations, laying the foundations for the construction of a Goan Christian identity. During the eighteenth century, as the parishes of the Salsete and Bardês provinces fell into the hands of Goan priests, their churches were rebuilt or revamped, and the Goan landscape was thus transformed.

In his will signed in Lima in 1652, Diego de Medina, a master carpenter from Seville, declared that he owned Manuel, an enslaved carpenter aged fifty.¹ Medina’s will prompts us to consider the shared learning experiences he may have had with Manuel, as Manuel possibly contributed to Medina’s construction of the wooden ceiling of the church of the Monastery of Santa Clara in 1648.

Indigenous and African carpenters and their descendants appear in workshop records throughout the former Viceroyalty of Peru.² Analyzing the apprenticeship system is crucial to learning more about the role of these individuals in the trade. Apprenticeship contracts (asientos) between masters and underage apprentices were often signed by the “protector of the Indians” (protector de Indios) for the Indigenous people, by slave owners, by family members, or occasionally by adult apprentices. A contract usually included the location of the workshop and the names of the parties, along with some details about their origins and their race or ethnicity. Signing an asiento carried obligations: the master had to train the apprentice in the trade and provide food, health care in case of illness, lodging, clothing, and footwear. The apprentice had to obey the master’s instructions and refrain from running away or changing masters during the two to four years of the apprenticeship. At the end of the contract, the apprentice would be equipped with the skills necessary to pass an examination by the guild to become a journeyman.³ Training was not always recorded on notarial documents; many Black and Indigenous carpenters learned the trade informally or were part of an ayllu of carpenters.⁴ This population—whether enslaved or free—practiced carpentry in Peru from early on.

Complaints by European carpenters who sought to monopolize the trade in Lima led to the issuance of the Ordinances of 1575, which regulated carpentry and protected the Europeans’ privileges.⁵ Yet Indigenous and African carpenters and apprentices and their descendants still entered the trade in Peru. For example, in 1622, Alonso Bañol, a Black enslaved man, arranged for his son, Pablo Criollo, to enter the workshop of the Spanish master Pedro Vasquez in Lima.⁶ In 1629, in Santa Fe (Bogotá), Isabel Quintana, an Indigenous woman, placed her eleven-year-old son, Francisco, under the tutelage of Juan Bautista, a journeyman carpenter.⁷ In 1591, Domingo Quirari, an Indigenous journeyman carpenter from Tarabuco, apprenticed with Bernardo Sánchez, a Spanish carpenter in Potosí.⁸ There were also interethnic/interracial apprenticeships, such as that of Alonso Soyco, whose father, Martín Mala from Huanta, arranged for him to be apprenticed to Pedro Guaman, an Indigenous carpenter, in La Plata in 1590.⁹ In 1635, Felipe Tito Quispe from Cusco began an apprenticeship with Pascual de Cifuentes, a carpenter described as “mulatto.”¹⁰ There even exists an apprenticeship contract between a Catalan apprentice, Juan Calvo, and a Black carpenter, Mateo Roque; the three-year contract was signed in Lima in 1598.¹¹

The fact that carpentry apprenticeships were part of interethnic/interracial practices sheds light on a phenomenon within the history of architecture in colonial spaces that challenges the ethnocentric notion of a one-sided transfer of knowledge from European carpenters to non-European carpenters. We have evidence of the persistence of certain aspects of Andean carpentry for Indigenous people.¹² However, the study of African carpenters’ contribution to construction technologies has only just begun.¹³ Apprenticeship contracts have emerged as fundamental historical sources for the study of the social history of carpentry. By examining them, we can unravel racial and ethnic relations, explore technical developments, and ultimately arrive at new and insightful perspectives on the architectural history of the nations that formed the Viceroyalty of Peru, including Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

In colonial Brazil (1500–1822), Black and mixed-race Afro-Brazilian lay Catholic brotherhoods built almost fifty churches and stand-alone chapels from the late sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.¹ They did so with their members acting as both architects and patrons. Many colonial Afro-Brazilians were artists, artisans, architects, and builders, and many were also brotherhood members.² However, we know only a few early modern Afro-Brazilian architects by name, all of them mixed-raced pardos, or lighter-skinned mulattoes, such as Manuel Ferreira Jácome (ca. 1677–1736; active in Recife, 1700s–1736) and Valentim de Fonseca e Silva (ca. 1745–1813; active in Rio de Janeiro, 1760s–1813).³ When Rio de Janeiro’s refuge for wayward women burned in the 1780s, the viceroy commissioned Mestre Valentim, as his favorite all-around artist was known, to rebuild it.⁴ This event left us with the only known contemporary image of a group of Afro-Brazilian artists, one that includes among the people depicted Mestre Valentim and Leandro Joaquim, the viceroy’s painter.⁵

As patrons, Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods also commissioned their hometowns’ most celebrated artists and architects to build and beautify their churches and chapels. In Vila Rica (Ouro Petro), for example, one of the town’s Black Rosary brotherhoods hired the Luso-Brazilian (read: white) José Pereira dos Santos, an architect from nearby Mariana, to design their sanctuary’s elliptical plan shortly before he died in 1764 (Figure 6).⁶ These churches thus invite us to reconsider the roles that people of African descent played in colonial architecture. While Afrodescendants historically have been seen as bricklayers and other minor workers employed to build colonial spaces, they have not been thought of as patrons and professional architects themselves. But these sanctuaries show that Afro-Brazilians did contribute to the colonial built environment as both patrons and architects. Additionally, these churches demonstrate how Afro-Brazilians competed for sacro-social prestige in a world where sociosymbolic status was overdetermined by the sacred. In other words, through these churches, Afro-Brazilians made potent public statements about their humanity and laid claim to the sacro-social pedigree that was the currency of the realm.⁷

These churches were built in the late baroque or rococo style.⁸ Brazilian rococo, while generally less ornate than its European counterparts, took cues from Portuguese rococo, which was in turn heavily influenced by German trends. Nevertheless, these churches retained distinctive elements and local variants.⁹ As elsewhere, the ornate, heavy exterior decoration of Brazilian rococo churches belies their modest interiors of white walls, which guide the viewer’s eyes to the gilded chancel chapel (capela-mor). Many churches, like the Afro-Brazilian brotherhood church in Pelourinho, Salvador, feature majestic Italianate illusionistic ceiling paintings (Figure 7). The abundance of rococo temples in Brazil has contributed to the neglect of Afro-Brazilians’ brotherhood churches in the scholarship. It seems that many scholars have assumed that the Black examples do not offer any insight into Brazilian rococo art and architecture, or have considered them to be marginal works.¹⁰ This oversight has meant that the scholarship has failed to fully engage with the nature of artistic production in Brazil, which was largely in the hands of Black artists.

Though less ornate than the temples usually featured in the literature on the Brazilian late baroque, the extant eighteenth-century Afro-Brazilian brotherhood churches are true jewels of this artistic period. Their exteriors differ little from the façades of brotherhood churches built by their white counterparts; it is the iconographic programs of their interiors that set them apart. Although the literature includes works by several of colonial Brazil’s leading artists and architects, such as the period’s best-known artist, the pardo Antonio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijadinho (ca. 1730–1814; active Minas Gerais, 1750s–1800s), and José Joaquim da Rocha (ca. 1735–1807; active Salvador, 1750s–1800s), these commissions, and the patronage strategies of colonial Afrodescendants more broadly, remain unexplored in the field. Likewise, the absence of these churches from the scholarship on Black brotherhoods is limiting, as these religious monuments truly underscore the socioeconomic and cultural agency that Afro-Brazilians garnered through their brotherhood activities and further illustrate how the irmãos (brotherhood members) practiced their faith. In Latin America, the vast majority of colonial-era African- and Afrodescendant-authored objects, traditions, and techniques have disappeared. Thus, these churches are particularly significant, given the paucity of other enduring forms of visual evidence about Afrodescendants’ colonial lives.

In the summer of 1568, a team of eighteen Moriscos carried a bronze statue representing Faith to the top of the Giralda of the Cathedral of Seville. The tower, a former minaret, had undergone significant changes that embodied its new service to Catholic humanism. The Moriscos were descendants of Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity in 1502, and their act marked the symbolic, religious, and architectural conversion of the former mosque into a Christian church.

Spanish sources of the time used the term arquitectura morisca, but the connection between Islamic architecture and Morisco identity—and the question of whether the words carried racial implications—remains complex.¹ It is worth asking if the emphasis on the “Moorish” character of the architecture of the period had associations beyond the religious divide and what this might mean concerning race in Spain at the time. The emerging concept of race then was generally related to lineage rather than to categorization based on ethnic and religious background. On the other hand, it seems clear that race mattered in Iberia, albeit in a broader sense, considering intersections of biology, religion, and culture.² In the Moriscos’ case, for instance, descriptions of skin tones varied, with many frequently described as either “white” or “quince” (the latter in relation to the color of the fruit), and sometimes “black.”³ While the Moriscos were very diverse, coeval anti-Morisco narratives in the written culture of the period tended to portray the community as unified.

The term “Morisco architecture” referred to surviving Islamic medieval structures, and it also described architectural traditions influenced by Islam that were created under Christian rule, sometimes as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (what historiography has termed “Mudéjar art”). After the Christian conquest of Al-Andalus, Islamic architecture served Christianity, and many Muslims and Morisco converts partook in the building trades. But the roles of Moriscos in the building and artistic trades were subject to a variety of regulations in different cities. For instance, in Seville, Moriscos were not allowed to evaluate the master mason candidates on behalf of the city council. In the aftermath of the Christian conquest, many medieval mosques had been demolished, and those surviving had been converted into Christian churches. The Great Mosque of Córdoba famously became a cathedral, and Seville’s minaret became the Giralda. Alongside architectural transformations came the rewriting of the histories of these buildings. Old Christians commonly acknowledged that the Mosque of Córdoba and the Alhambra of Granada were built by Muslims. However, new narratives sought to write a Spanish and Christian lineage for these buildings that rooted their original construction in presumed pre-Islamic foundations. In Granada, the “lead books” forgery (1588–99) saw a group of Moriscos intending to prove that the Arab culture did not conflict with Christianity and the Spanish nation. This project connected the ancient Muslim architecture to the converted Moriscos and the origins of Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula. By that time, tensions had risen after the Rebellion of the Alpujarras (1568–71), and Morisco builders encountered some professional limits all around Spain. In Zaragoza, after the revolt more than half of the master masons of Morisco lineage were tried by the Inquisition. From 1614 through 1617, Moriscos were expelled from Spain because of suspicions about their religious conversion and loyalty to the crown.

The racial implications of the Morisco expulsion and, in general terms, Spain’s obsession with “blood purity” remain a debated topic. Historiography has generally seen these events as driven by cultural and religious factors rather than race. Writings of the time did not mention race in relation to architecture; instead they emphasized the term “nation,” the connotations of which differed from the modern understanding of race. “Moors” as referred to in the period sources (read: the Muslims who had lived in Spain) were seen as a nation, along with the French, German, Castilian, and Catalan nations. In 1627 Pedro Díaz de Ribas defined the “way of building that each nation had” in Spain and specifically in Córdoba from antiquity to his time. He paid special attention to the architecture of the “Arab nation,” but he did not necessarily imply a racial difference with the other nations he mentioned: Romans and Goths. The situation becomes more complicated when other sources reveal a biological classification of builders. Records in Valencia distinguished people based on skin color, including the “quince” color sometimes attributed to Moriscos. These contradictions highlight the complex interplay of identity, religion, culture, lineage, and race, revealing that much remains to be done in this respect. Regarding architecture, for instance, the extensive Spanish historiography on Mudéjar art has largely ignored race, while recent debates have tended to question the validity of the term “Mudéjar” as an art historical concept.

In this context, it would be worthwhile to explore the doubts that writers in early modern Spain expressed about the Moriscos and their architecture belonging to the Spanish nation. Furthermore, given that before the expulsion a great number of the builders were Moriscos, a fresh look into the continuity of Islamic architectural designs and construction technologies in the Iberian Peninsula is warranted. In the same vein, expanding this research into the potential relationship between Morisco builders and so-called Mudéjar art in America could provide valuable insights.⁴

In his 1668 ethnohistoric work Historia de las islas e indios Bisayas, Jesuit missionary Francisco Ignacio Alcina used the phrases “la casa mestiza” and “de obra que acá llaman mestiza” (of work that is here called mestiza) to describe a new type of building that he had witnessed arising in the Spanish settlements of the Philippines over the more than thirty-four years he spent living and preaching there, explaining that this meant “half stone and half wood” architecture.¹ In relating this, Alcina indicated that he considered this architecture to be locally specific, materially rooted, and worthy of explanation, since the islands were noted for their Indigenous wooden stilt-house architecture, and there had not been any known stone architecture before colonization. Today, stone and mestiza architecture form the overwhelming majority of surviving buildings, drawings, and textual evidence from the Spanish colonial period, leaving an important but incomplete legacy from which to imagine the early modern Philippine landscape.²

For scholars of the Americas, use of the term mestiza in relation to colonial architecture surely recalls twentieth and twenty-first-century debates.³ However, for those who focus on the Philippines, it primarily calls to mind Alcina’s text and Luis Merino’s 1987 monograph Arquitectura y urbanismo en el siglo XIX.⁴ There, Merino coined the term arquitectura mestiza, after Alcina’s text, to describe architecture that had been widely adopted in response to the 1645 earthquake, which combined a shock-absorbent Indigenous wooden stilt-house structure with a curtain wall of stone encasing the supporting house posts to create an enclosed lower level.⁵ Merino saw this as a symbiotic indigenization, which, by the nineteenth century, formed the basis of most Spanish colonial buildings, including state projects by engineers in the Junta Consultiva de Obras Públicas, who would refer to it not as mestiza but as “the system adopted in the country.”⁶ Merino’s work created a divergence in the historiography of arquitectura mestiza for Philippine architecture, which stayed close to Alcina’s original emphasis on materials and construction.

For in Alcina’s text, wood and stone building materials emerged as metonymic of Bisayan and Spanish culture. He wrote of stone cities the Spanish built that were repeatedly dashed to rubble by earthquakes and typhoons, and of settlers turning to building with wood and learning from the construction of native houses, as if they had been forced to by the environment.⁷ Yet the settlers’ quest to erect stone buildings, or even to develop la casa mestiza, must have been a minor part of the architectural landscape for much of the colonial period. For when the Jesuits were assigned to the eastern Visayas in the 1590s, there were only a handful of priests, while the island of Leyte was reported to be home to seventy thousand natives, with a small population of Spaniards represented by eighteen encomenderos who agreed to support the missionaries with their tributes. When Alcina arrived in 1634, a similar system was in place, with four or five Jesuits assigned to oversee 100 leagues of coastline—a feeble demographic ratio if they were seeking to convert the built environment from a strong preexisting tradition.⁸ How then might we approach imagining the experience of the greater portion of buildings in the native tradition that continued to dominate the colonial Philippine landscape?

Although well studied, Alcina’s text still yields fresh opportunities for more intricate readings of a wider system of interpreting wooden materials and architectural interactions from which we can infer ways that social and spiritual relationships were reflected in spatial, formal, and material choices as well as stages of stylistic change. In the natural history portions of his text, Alcina wrote extensively about the species of trees that were to be found in the Visayas, listing where they grew and the occasions on which they might be cut. He also detailed their buoyancy, potential to fuse with other materials, petrification, resistance to degradation, colors, uses in the building of houses and ships, and supernatural significance. Alcina further explained that building in Bisayan society was done nearly entirely in wood, with houses being constructed without any nails, bound together only by joinery, carpentry, and lashing. He noted that ancient houses from the time of Magellan or earlier still stood, and some had been given to missionaries to live in. Alcina described the Bisayans as natural-born builders, saying there was scarcely a man who could not build an entire house and all but the largest types of ships single-handedly. He depicted a society in which self-sufficient fluencies in building, carpentry, and seafaring were ubiquitous forms of knowledge requisite for adult male social citizenship.⁹ In short, his text allows us to glimpse how social and spiritual relationships were reflected in spatial, formal, and material architectural choices.¹⁰ Perhaps, then, for further context and direction on imagining a vanished wooden architectural landscape coeval with, and exceeding, surviving stone, we can turn back to descriptions of tangible and intangible materials from the moments before they were incorporated into new colonial architectures.

Pedro Manoel was an eighteenth-century Mbundu smelter from Angola. His trade was complex and strenuous; he employed assistants and trainees who mined the hills of Ilamba in search of iron ore and broke the metal into smaller pieces. Smelting required cutting firewood, preparing coal, building a furnace, gathering sheaves of papyrus, and controlling the bellows, among other tasks. Pedro manufactured iron of excellent quality. He combined practical methods in iron smelting with ancestry-rooted beliefs that enshrined secret wisdom from the invisible world that had been passed down over generations.¹

Many foreign travelers in Angola were intrigued by African ironmaking, and Governor Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho (1764–72) was determined to reveal the key to the Angolan smelters’ success. Many other smelters and blacksmiths were active throughout Ilamba, a region near Luanda that was rich in iron ore. Aware of the high cost of European iron, Sousa Coutinho envisioned a project to build the Nova Oeiras iron foundry to supply iron to all regions of the empire and conquer new markets. Thus, the factory would provide iron and bronze to produce artillery for the whole empire.

In 1769, the governor reported that the town of Nova Oeiras had been established, as well as the “church, administration buildings, smithies, treasuries, prisons, and houses for the masters of all trades and engineers.” In the shade of the large factory, a “smaller factory was built for the Negroes to work in”; this was where all the Nova Oeiras iron was produced.²

This “other” factory occupied a small part of the enormous limestone architectural ensemble and, unlike the larger complex, took little time to build. It was not built with well-finished stones like those used on the façades of the town’s other structures. However, the “smaller” factory was the only successful enterprise of this grandiose undertaking, because African iron smelting techniques were employed there (Figures 8 and 9). African expertise in ironmaking has been overlooked by the historiography so far.³

In the small foundry, Mbundu blacksmiths and smelters employed furnaces dug into the earth, bellows covered with goat hair, and stones to export approximately 60 tons of iron and steel across the Portuguese empire from 1765 to 1800. This foundry also supplied between 30 and 40 quintais (1.8 to 2.4 tons) of metal per month to the Kingdom of Angola.⁴ But Central African labor also built the town and factory of Nova Oeiras, including the beautiful arches of its aqueduct. The literature on the design of the factory has focused on the contributions of Governor Sousa Coutinho, the engineers, the intendants, and the inspectors, but who rebuilt the structure after it was ravaged by floods and, at least once, caught fire?

The factory workers were free African people who were forced to labor under the tutelage of the local rulers (sobas). The soba Mbangu kya Tambwa had many artisans and builders under his control—masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths.⁵ The governor viewed them as free because they were presumably remunerated and well treated. These assumptions in no way correspond to the conditions to which the sobas’ builders were subjected. Records show that, from the workers’ standpoint, the meager factory wages were of little value given the mistreatment they experienced and the strenuousness of the work. Records also document a number of enslaved carpenters and masons who received wages from 1768 to 1772, among them four officers and one apprentice.⁶ The governor of Angola distilled the prevailing racial prejudices concerning the workers’ disposition with regard to arduous work. He saw the perceived slow pace of the Mbundu blacksmiths’ work as a hindrance to “industry” and evidence of “laziness.” He viewed their use of local tools and techniques as “crude” and “barbaric.”⁷ Yet evidence has shown that the only productive iron foundry of the period was the one controlled by Africans.

These passages offer insights into the language employed by the Portuguese governor and officials to diminish the contributions of Africans to the building of Nova Oeiras. The perspective of the Portuguese authorities who authored most of the surviving documents was such that they did not describe the participation of the African other as a historical subject with the same complexity as they described the contributions of Europeans. Nonetheless, theirs was by no means the only view that existed of the Mbundu. On the contrary, Africans resisted the single Eurocentric narrative, constructing alternative readings—an alternative history—that showcase how they resisted the unbearable work pace by running away. Many refused to work with European iron technology. African blacksmiths and smelters demonstrated their industriousness and courage by rejecting the attempts of the Portuguese governor in Luanda to control them and their ancestral ironmaking techniques. The governor, fed up with the resistance, told the regent of Ambaca, “Your Grace shall leave the black blacksmiths and smelters free to do as they please, since there is no other way to lead such people.”⁸ “Such people” were not as easily co-opted or “led” as the governor had expected—neither with persuasion nor with modest wages.

Havana was one of the main Atlantic port cities and a key center for transcontinental commercial trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.¹ The city was known for the diversity of its population, and given the prominent role that its port played in the dehumanizing trafficking of enslaved people in the period, the body of publications about that subject is vast.² Scholarship on the architecture and urbanism of Havana, including its unique fortification system and grand residential buildings, is similarly rich.³ The construction of the city was possible because of the forced labor of enslaved people. The city council archives contain many records of teams of “Blacks,” whose names were anonymized, sent to build the city’s infrastructures.⁴ Colonial legislation instigated racial and social segregation across locales in the Spanish Americas. However, a closer study of Havana, particularly of the numerous notarial deeds from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shows that Africans, Amerindians, and their descendants resided across the city, thus debunking a long-standing historiographical myth.⁵

In 1947, Francisco Prat Puig published his study of a large residential building near the foundational square of the city, the Plaza de Armas, which he considered a fine example of eighteenth-century domestic architecture.⁶ This essay focuses on that building’s architecture, and particularly on Juana Carvajal, a freed Afro-Cuban (parda) woman who inherited the building in the early eighteenth century and acted as an architectural patron to her properties. In Havana, free, freed, and enslaved Afro-Cuban women played subaltern roles within the city’s patriarchal and racial social hierarchies. However, Carvajal and her nieces came into considerable wealth, and notarial records show that Carvajal became the patron of architectural works for the residential buildings she inherited in the city.

Juana Carvajal was born into slavery sometime at the end of the seventeenth century into the household of the Carvajal-Rivadeneira family. In 1698, the head of the family, Lorenza Carvajal, widowed and without descendants, granted Juana her freedom and named her as the heir to all her properties and assets, including the one-story residence and a cellar in which they both lived.⁷ Juana also inherited more houses in the city, as well as other properties and enslaved people. Traditionally, the social mobility of Black women in Havana has been studied through the lens of concubinage. However, Lorenza Carvajal’s testament reveals that Juana inherited from her because of the emotional ties the two women had: “to Juana Carvaxal parda that I have in my house . . . that I freed . . . and I have affection and friendship for her before being free and after that [her freedom] she has assisted me and assists me.”⁸ The deed also states that the house was well built and covered with tiles, sited on a large plot located in front of the grounds of the Castle of the Royal Force and a few steps away from the Plaza de Armas (Figures 10 and 11).⁹

In the three decades that Juana Carvajal owned the plot, she directed major reforms there, including commissioning a new large residential building of two stories, according to notarial records of 1724 and 1725.¹⁰ The large building, as the records show, was divided into two separate houses, one on the ground floor and the other on the second story. The structure was well built, with a tile roof and the traditional sturdy rammed-earth walls found in many buildings in Havana.¹¹ Despite the changes the property has seen over time, the boundaries of the building’s two houses can still be discerned (see Figure 11).

Furthermore, the notarial records show that Juana not only signed documents but also commissioned master masons and carpenters for architectural projects. A decade later, in 1735, sick and old, Juana Carvajal wrote her will, in which, among other dispositions, she left her nieces the two houses. Juana Carvajal and her nieces actively disputed with the cabildo (city council) of Havana regarding the upkeep of the urban spaces adjacent to their properties. In 1748, Margarita and Mónica de Rivera Carvajal sold both houses to Pedro José Calvo de la Puerta, Count of Buena Vista. It was this Creole aristocrat who unified the two residences, turning them into a single property, which for its structural elements and mural decorations is considered one of the representative buildings of Havana’s eighteenth-century domestic architecture, as Prat Puig argued in his pioneering book of 1947.¹²

This interdisciplinary investigation into the history of Juana Carvajal has shown that a freedwoman who lived in the early eighteenth century gained decision-making power and contributed to the development of domestic spaces in colonial Havana. In doing so, Carvajal, along with her nieces, helped to establish the architectural and aesthetic urban patterns that still survive in and define Old Havana, now listed as a World Heritage Site.

Attempts to foster the teaching of military architecture and engineering in colonial settings across the Portuguese Empire, from Brazil to India, Angola, and Cabo Verde, occurred from the early 1760s onward.¹ The role of the crown and the importance of educating the “children of the land” have been emphasized in the historiography along with successful examples of architectural and engineering pedagogy in Brazil. However, examining the case of Goa, which had no immediate success, provides insight into the interconnected dynamics of knowledge, race, and architecture that would shape the built environment of the former Portuguese imperial territories. The first engineer to be appointed, in February 1675, to Estado da Índia (Portuguese India) with teaching responsibilities was Manuel Barreto da Ponte.² The engineer’s teaching assignment faced opposition from Goa’s government, which feared that the graduates might work for competing empires in the region. Despite Lisbon’s insistence on admitting “the naturals of the land” as students, the viceroy of India resisted; the teaching would be limited to casados (married Portuguese) resident in Goa.³ In January 1677, the Overseas Council accepted this proposal but pointed out its disadvantages. Yet the persistent resistance from Goa and the lack of records about teaching lead us to believe that Barreto da Ponte never taught military architecture in Goa.

The casados are at the genesis of the “children of the land,” an expression that was used in several territories of the Portuguese Empire to identify those who were born and raised in particular places, mestiços in culture and ways of living.⁴ The children of the land could be people of Portuguese or mixed Portuguese and Indigenous descent. Thus, these colonial subjects represented a unique link between colonial power and local reality across the former Portuguese Empire. Goan elites were normally divided into three main groups: “naturals of the land,” descendants, and reinóis, who were the Portuguese from Europe. The “naturals of the land” mentioned by Lisbon in archival records were specifically the Goan Hindu elites who had converted to Christianity.⁵

Despite numerous earlier attempts, the regular teaching of military architecture and engineering in Goa did not begin until 1807. A formal teaching structure was established in 1817 with the creation of the Military Academy. Numerous descendants of Portuguese people in India studied and taught at the academy and in subsequent teaching establishments. Through the army and military schools, the descendants wielded influence over public works; they became teachers, directors of public works, and designers, thus establishing their presence across the Portuguese Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ Power clashes among several elites of Goan society, but also among the descendants themselves, related to “purity of blood” issues resulted in the dissolution of the Portuguese Indian army in 1870 and the closing of the military schools.

At the turn of the 1700s to the 1800s, a significant political, administrative, and territorial reconfiguration occurred in Estado da Índia and across the empire. This facilitated the organization of military education and enabled a network of experts—descendants, born and trained in Goa—to play a significant role in transforming the built environment across various regions of the former Portuguese Empire in the nineteenth century. They restructured the urban landscapes of Goan villages and were responsible for the design of the majority of churches and civic buildings throughout the territory, such as the courthouse in Margão, the administrative buildings in Quepém and Pondá, and the archbishop’s palace in Pangim.

When working in different parts of the empire, experts from Goan schools normally served for long periods. Engineers who circulated across the empire and had important hierarchical roles in imperial public works also attended the military school in Lisbon. This illustrates a disparity in diploma recognition between Goan military schools and the teaching establishments in Lisbon, as well as the hierarchical social organization of the empire. Constantino José de Brito (b. 1836, Goa; d. 1914, Lisbon) and Alcino António Sauvage (1844–1914, Goa) represent two distinct groups within the descendant community. Brito also studied in Lisbon and reached higher echelons in his career. He was director of public works of Macau and Timor from 1881 to 1884, and he designed and built the Taipa Church in Macau and the Barracks in Timor, among others. Sauvage only attended Goan schools and served in Macau from 1874 to 1893 as subdirector and substitute director for several periods. An exceptional example is Claudino de Sousa e Faro (b. 1840, Goa; d. 1919, France) who served in Angola (1873–76), Cabo Verde (1876–81), São Tomé (1881–84), and India (1893–95). As far as it is known, he studied only in Goa, but he had long-standing family connections across the Portuguese Empire, especially between Africa and India. He designed and built the Maria Pia Hospital in Luanda, Angola, and the Governor’s Palace at Cidade da Praia, Cabo Verde; he also coordinated several cartographical projects in all the territories where he served. Thus, the study of the careers of these Goan-born engineers and architects can provide insights into the circulation of knowledge and social and racial hierarchies in the Portuguese Empire in the nineteenth century.