Lays out the theoretical interventions of the book as detailed in the book abstract.

This chapter studies the performances Afro-Mexians staged for Mexico City's celebration of the beatification of Ignatius of Loyola. The chapter illustrates how Afro-Mexicans engaged with the material culture of baroque festive culture. The chapter also investigates the kind of dance and music that may have accompanied Afro-Mexican festive Black king and queen and other performances. The chapter thus higlights how Afro-Mexicans continually managed to perform "with their king and queen" despite ever-present suspicions about their motives. It contends that they did this through the kind of negotiations they constantly carried out with colonial officials and religious orders. The chapter thus illustrates how Afro-Mexican used festive culture to negotiate their standing in colonial society.

I conclude the book by musing why Festín is the last source about Afro-Mexicans’ festive practices, when most of the sources from other latitudes are posterior. Through the analysis of a 1699-1702 Inquisition case that shows Mexicans of all “especie” (kind) acting in concert, I propose that the case may demonstrate the natural result of creolization: the incorporation of different cultures into a new one. Thus Afro-Mexicans, who had gone from Africans to Afro-Mexicans, become simply Mexicans. This scenario underscores the kind of cultural intimacies Afro-Mexicans developed with other groups and further complicates Mexican narratives of mestizaje.

This chapter studies the performance "more than fifty" blacks staged "with their king and queen" in Mexico City in February 1539. To contextualize the performance, I draw a wide diasporic net that illuminates the origins of this festive tradition in the Atlantic. As the earliest known example of this performance in the Americas, the text that describes it centers Mexico as a key player in the cultural transformations that gave birth to the modern Black Atlantic.

This chapter analyzes the performance ten "creole Black women" staged for the arrival of viceroy Diego López Pacheco in 1640. The performance is described in the only colonial text dedicated in its entirety to Black festive performance. The chapter thus studies the only surviving text for the kinds of performances Afro-Mexican staged for the arrival of new viceroys. In their performance the women reenacted the biblical story of the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon. By embodying the biblical Black queen, the women inscribed this performance within the Afro-Mexican tradition of festive Black kings and queens. This chapter is the first analysis to study this text from a Black perspective.

This chapter analyzes two instances where Afro-Mexicans' confraternal and festive customs were used against them. The chapter seeks to illustrate how the Iberian world's growing anti-Blackness affected Afro-Mexicans' confraternal and festive practices. Compared to these instances of persecution, the significance of the other performances studied in the book comes to the fore.