Overview

In May 1962, as the struggle for civil rights heated up in the United States and leaders of the Catholic Church prepared to meet for Vatican Council II, Pope John XXIII named the first black saint of the Americas, the Peruvian Martín de Porres (1579–1639), and designated him the patron of racial justice. The son of a Spanish father and a former slavewoman from Panamá, Martín served a lifetime as the barber and nurse at the great Dominican monastery in Lima. This book draws on visual representations of Martín and the testimony of his contemporaries to produce the first biography of this pious and industrious black man from the cosmopolitan capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The book vividly chronicles the evolving interpretations of his legend and his miracles, and traces the centuries-long campaign to formally proclaim Martín de Porres a hero of universal Catholicism.

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9781107034372

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Advance praise: 'In a time of change and promise for the Catholic Church under its first Latin American Pope, Celia Cussen offers readers a fascinating account of the first black saint of the Americas, Peru's Fray Martin de Porres. From his emergence as the son of a Spanish American father and formerly enslaved woman, to the movement to canonize him long after his death, Black Saint of the Americas has much to teach us about the history of Catholicism in the New World. And, like the saint she reveals in this impeccably researched and highly readable life and afterlife of de Porres, Cussen's book is 'good to think with'.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University Advance praise: '... a deft new portrait of Lima's kiln of spiritual longing and fluorescence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Celia Cussen's angle - a Mulato barber-surgeon whose vectors of interaction lead within and without the cloisters of powerful Santo Domingo - interrupts as it enhances our understanding of an age still most often defined through its contemporaneous saintly, variously white contemporaries. Thanks to sustained engagement with the hard limits and overspilling promise of hagiography, visual imagery, and layers upon layers of sacred history, purported margins are shown to have been central. Cussen's Martin de Porres raises questions that are sure to excite further research into multiethnic sanctities in the early modern Spanish world and well beyond.' Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto

'In a time of change and promise for the Catholic Church under its first Latin American Pope, Celia Cussen offers readers a fascinating account of the first black saint of the Americas, Peru's Fray Martin de Porres. From his emergence as the son of a Spanish American father and formerly enslaved woman, to the movement to canonize him long after his death, Black Saint of the Americas has much to teach us about the history of Catholicism in the New World. And, like the saint she reveals in this impeccably researched and highly readable life and afterlife of de Porres, Cussen's book is 'good to think with'.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University '... a deft new portrait of Lima's kiln of spiritual longing and fluorescence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Celia Cussen's angle - a Mulato barber-surgeon whose vectors of interaction lead within and without the cloisters of powerful Santo Domingo - interrupts as it enhances our understanding of an age still most often defined through its contemporaneous saintly, variously white contemporaries. Thanks to sustained engagement with the hard limits and overspilling promise of hagiography, visual imagery, and layers upon layers of sacred history, purported margins are shown to have been central. Cussen's Martin de Porres raises questions that are sure to excite further research into multiethnic sanctities in the early modern Spanish world and well beyond.' Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto

Author Information

Celia Cussen is an Associate Professor of History at Universidad de Chile, where she has worked since 2004, and focuses on colonial Latin American history. She holds a BA from Stanford University, California and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Cussen is the editor of Huellas de Africa en América, Perspectivas para Chile (2009) and the author of articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Colonial Latin American Historical Review. Her work has appeared in volumes edited in Peru, Chile, Italy and Argentina. She has been awarded fellowships and grants by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Chilean government's Fondo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Fondecyt).

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