The Interspecies Logic of Race in Colonial Peru

As I write this article in the city of Guayaquil, where Martín de Porres (1579–1639)—a well-known saint throughout much of the Spanish-speaking world—spent the early part of his youth, I am accompanied by a credit card–size laminated image (estampa) and a tiny plastic statuette, both of which bear his likeness. ¹ The 75-cent estampa is one that I have glanced at so often walking the streets of Guayaquil, with its scores of Catholic churches and curbside stands full of mass-produced reliquaries, I am, like most city residents, fairly inured to its details. The devotional card shows a subject of African descent wearing the seventeenth-century Dominican habit, with a broom and a crucifix in his hands; “fray escoba”—the friar of the broom—is one of San Martín’s many monikers, as he was designated patron saint of custodians and menial labor in the wake of his Roman canonization in 1962. In the background, one clearly makes out two hospital beds by their spare simplicity and the presence of a crucifix atop each head-board. In the foreground, San Martín himself is curiously surrounded by animals: what appears to be a dove flies downward as three quadrupeds—a dog, a cat, and a mouse—together ring a half-eaten plate of food.