El villancico de negrilla: Europa y África en el México del siglo XVII

• Antonio Llaca University of Ottawa

Keywords: Villancico, Negrilla, African Diaspora, Slavery, Colonialism

Abstract

Villancicos became an important musical genre in the Spanish world and migrated with the conquest from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World. Within the context of highly racially mixed societies in the Americas, the genre gained linguistic, thematic, and musical diversity. This paper examines issues of social agency in the musical depiction of African slaves through two compositions by Gaspar Fernandes and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. The author provides an analysis of texts through the lens of social agency to show the European view of the African subject in seventeenth-century Mexico. The study shows the varying portrayals of the African subject in the villancico genre by novo-Spanish composers of the time.

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