ABSTRACT
The resistance of market workers and residents in multi-ethnic neighborhoods, including Indians, castas, and blacks, market workers in colonial Lima, Peru, helps historians see the role of the African Diaspora in establishing a permanent African presence in Andean cities, towns, and mining centers in the 1500s and 1600s. These ongoing and complex struggles over residence and markets resulted in the production not so much of Andean spaces for black nucleation or isolation, as opportunities for Africans and Afro-descendants to interact and negotiate with other sociocultural and political actors in the racial and spatial order. Peru's Afro-Latinos exercised historical agency and were deeply involved in the processes of conquest and colonization, and the production of black spaces in the colonial Andes. Contemporary and modern national narratives about the conquest and colonization render virtually invisible this significant contribution. Reclaiming this history and restoring Afro-Latinos as historical agents involves documenting their voices and actions, challenging official national discourses that invisibilize Afro-descendants and whiten history.
