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The Black Sacrament: How Baptism Created Race in Spanish New Orleans and the Atlantic World, constructs a new framework for understanding the origins of race in the Spanish Empire. In it, I examine the interdisciplinary intersection of racial formation, baptism, and gender in the Spanish empire between 1500 and 1800, and argue that the ritual of baptism and its associated record-keeping became the foundation for the development of race. My historical research is grounded in New Orleans, a city that provides a unique perspective on the development of racial ideology due to its French, Spanish, American, and African influences. In Spanish New Orleans, race was assigned, tracked, and validated through the baptismal records that were kept in St. Louis Cathedral. Since all citizens of the Spanish empire were required to be baptized, the baptismal record created a globe-spanning archive that contained information on every person’s birth and baptism dates, gender, race, and free/enslaved status, as well as information about their parents, grandparents, and godparents. I contend that in a society without birth certificates, yet in which racial designations were carefully calculated based on the fraction of an individual’s African ancestry, the baptismal records kept in each parish of the Spanish empire served as the official record of a person’s race throughout the Atlantic world. One of the biggest issues for the Spanish colonial empire was navigating the construction of identity between Spaniards and the peoples they saw as “other” than Spaniards. In order to do that, categories of difference including race were codified through the baptismal archive. Consequently, I argue that race could not have existed without the backbone of the baptismal archive, because it was the development of this archive that allowed race to be recorded, tracked, and verified.
