Chapter 1 takes the long view of regional development in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands, from prehistory through Veracruz’s foundation in 1519 and its refounding as Nueva Veracruz in 1599. It examines geography, environment, and how human societies mediated coastal spaces before the seventeenth century. It culminates with Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, which followed an extended battle between powerful merchants in Mexico City, Seville, and Puebla and Veracruz’s own cabildo. While metropolitan merchants and administrators wanted to locate the city closer to port facilities at San Juan de Ulúa, local officials resisted the move, arguing the coastal climate was “unfit for the sustenance of life” and proposing to relocate it further into the mainland interior. By the end of the sixteenth century, metropolitan forces had won out, moving Veracruz closer to the port and securing the primacy of coastal climates and maritime commerce and migration in its social and cultural development in the seventeenth century.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

Chapter 4 examines Veracruz’s role as a hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival manuscripts held in Mexico and not previously used in studies of the slave trade, it offers a detailed examination of the slave trade to Mexico in three chronological stages: an early period (before 1595); the asiento period (1595–1640); and a decline period (1640–1713). In its examination of both the early and later stages of the slave trade, the chapter departs from earlier studies that focus mainly on the Portuguese asiento period, showing that more captives arrived in Veracruz in the early and decline periods than has been acknowledged and those who did hailed disproportionately from West Africa, rather than West Central Africa. Across all periods, the chapter demonstrates the complexity of the early modern slave trade to the Spanish Caribbean, focusing especially on the intercolonial slave trade and on nonlinear slave ship voyages that delivered captives in multiple colonies. In this, it argues that we should not think of captives who arrived in Mexico as a distinct “cohort,” but as part of a regionwide diaspora to multiple Caribbean territories.

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

Chapter 2 examines the environmental consequences of Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, drawing on hospital records, cabildo reports, and published traveler accounts. When Veracruz resettled at Ulúa, it was subject to many of the dangers the cabildo warned about in the sixteenth century: more mosquitoes, less arable land, and no stable supply of drinking water. These factors contributed to Veracruz’s reputation as an impoverished, insalubrious, and unwelcoming place. Such descriptions have inevitably contributed to the historical labeling of Veracruz as a “backwater,” but they also represent the deliberate efforts of early modern writers to spatially classify Veracruz as a part of the Caribbean world. In particular, white male European writers explicitly linked Veracruz’s ostensibly “poor” environment to its large African population, suggesting the city’s climate was suited for Africans, but not Europeans or indigenous people. By linking Veracruz’s climate with the skin color of its residents—even by means of a negative trope—European writers defined the city into a discrete environmental and phenotypical space distinct from both Europe and other parts of the Americas.