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Kristen Block. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. 328 pp. $24.95.
Kristen Block successfully navigates the central thesis of her book, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: to sympathetically portray the stories of silenced and exploited voices during the early period of transatlantic confluences in the Spanish Caribbean. Block effectively uses historical evidence to convey the ambiguities of religion as a tool of oppression and liberty. Spanning the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in her analysis, Block examines the duplicities of economic privilege and inherent slave and other marginalized statuses through the lens of Protestant and Catholic conflict and "culturally aware" religious acts. In the first section of the book, we find Gregorio Álvarez de Zepeda, an alcalde charged with the task of adjudicating escaped maroons, interviewing recaptured runaways Juan, Susana, Mariana Mandinga, and Isabel Criolla. Criolla and the others recount their attempted escape into mountains near Cartagena de Indias. The author highlights archival descriptions of Doña Eufrasia Camargo's severe and disgusting maltreatment of the escapees. Block vividly recreates the physical and emotional tortures slaves faced as evidenced by "thick white welts" on their "shameful parts." Criolla tells Zepeda of the cruelties inflicted by mistress Camargo but begs the magistrate "for the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ" to sell her to another lest she "lose her soul." This "culturally aware performance" points to Spanish American duplicities of enslavement, gender, and religion, according to the author. Block details how in this moment the sexual dalliances of male slave masters like Camargo angered noble wives and underwrote female slave abuse. It also prompted subaltern resistance by female slaves, challenging parameters of elite European womanhood and universalisms of Christianity.
In the next section of the text, Block explores marginalized Protestant Northern Europeans in Atlantic metropoles under Spanish Catholic moral authority. Nicolas Burundel, for example, employed conversion and religious performance. Arrested by Inquisitors for a "fake" conversion in Cartagena, Burundel resorted to yelling from his cell and engaging in other mad...