Creating Vecindad: Confraternities, Burials, and the Future in Colonial Peru

This article employs fragmented archival evidence from notarial and judicial records from Trujillo on the northern Peruvian coast, to painstakingly reconstruct how Juan Dávila, a freed man of color, served as a leader and member of seventeenth-century confraternities and thus secured his status as a vecino, or municipal subject. To secure an honorable reputation, Dávila served as a long-standing mayordomo and proved his financial literacy, a critical component to claiming public legitimacy, by managing the wealth of his brotherhood, Nuestra Señora del Rosario. Confraternity leaders like Dávila, likewise, scheduled funeral processions according to their own timetables, thus providing a means for free people to present, display, and secure their municipal subjecthood, or vecindad. Within and through confraternities, freed people engaged in Afrofuturistic plans. By constructing a confraternity altarpiece and family tomb, the storekeeper produced the alternative history of the past in which the Dávilas became enshrined in one of the foundational churches like any city founder.