This chapter analyzes the language black interpreters helped produce about the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of blackness in the distinct missionary scenarios they led. In identifying and parsing this language in the context of its delivery and comparing it with other writings and images about black Christian conversion from the early modern Iberian world, the chapter argues that black interpreters circulated discourse about black beauty and black virtue that is seldom seen in other Spanish or Spanish American texts.

The collection of Jesuit texts describing black interpreters’ lives and labor in seventeenth-century Cartagena demonstrates that the black men and women employed as evangelical linguistic intermediaries before and after the publication of Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise were far from the invisible and easily replaceable assistants Sandoval suggests. In fact, the texts analyzed in this chapter provide rich details regarding the biographies and roles assigned to and adapted by the black interpreters in Cartagena. The interpreters’ stories, told in part through highly mediated accounts given by some of the black interpreters themselves, present them as linguistic and spiritual intermediaries who are leaders of black communities in the city and influential participants in the Jesuit mission. The sources demonstrate that the interpreters took advantage of the space of negotiation provided by the mission to acquire privileges unique to enslaved laborers during this period and became avenues for newly arrived black men and women to make some successful demands through their participation in the Jesuit mission.