Creolization's genesis in sixteenth-century urban New Spain resides in an immersion in the cultural practices of power. Becoming a creole literally involved navigating the judicial maze with the intent of exploiting the possibilities offered by legal obligations and rights. This definition reminds us that persons of African descent, the first people identified as creoles (*criollos*) before 1560, did not configure their culture through the physical environment, diet, language, beliefs, kinship practices, and community structures alone. Creole culture included the customs, laws, and institutions that upheld the larger social structure and came to include an ability to navigate the various institutions of absolutism. [Para.] Cognizant that their competing juridical identities created an exploitable tool, Africans and their descendants seized the opportunity. Though patricians posed a serious physical threat, individuals drew on their creole consciousness for specific tactics. In this process, their command of Spanish—which shaped the ability of Africans and their descendants to represent themselves before scribes, royal officials, and ecclesiastics as royal subjects and devout Christians—played an important role. Even recent arrivals from Africa, *bozales*, immersed themselves in a new linguistic environment soon after landing in New Spain, acquiring fluency in the Castilian lexicon and morphology of power. Eventually, *bozales* learned to enlist the protection of crown and clergy, who, as representatives of the Spanish sovereign, often stood at odds with individual patricians. [Para.] This strategic awareness—the defining feature of creole consciousness—enabled the plebeian population, which included persons of African descent, to employ the law in their defense. As litigants, persons of African descent modified their life circumstances, yet they rarely, if ever, threatened to undermine Spanish rule. But in enabling a semblance of cultural autonomy, the litigious nature of Africans and their descendants also insinuated both slave and free even further into [the] workings of Spanish absolutism.
Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Indiana, 2003), 2-3.
