Author: Dr. Danielle Terrazas Williams

In The Capital of Free Women, Dr. Danielle Terrazas Williams illuminates how free Black women navigated secular and religious expectations in colonial Mexico.  

Dr. Williams meticulously interrogates archives, as well as royal edicts and ecclesiastical sources to survey cases of Black women in colonial Mexico across the economic spectrum. Free Black women in central Veracruz, sometimes just one generation removed from slavery, purchased land, ran businesses, served as influential matriarchs, managed intergenerational wealth and even owned slaves of African descent. By examining a transitional space of freedom and enslavement, The Capital of Free Women contributes to important conversations about women’s agency and the struggle for dignity. 

Dr. Danielle Terrazas Williams is an award-winning historian from the Bay Area. She earned her BA from Cornell University and her MA and PhD from Duke University. She is now an Associate Professor in the School of History at the University of Leeds in England. Terrazas Williams’ work examines how Spanish American institutions imagined marginalized people and how race and gender influenced the ways in which people navigated imperial demands and religious expectations. Her book, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico from Yale University Press challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on free Black women. Her research on women’s history, history of the Catholic Church and legal culture has appeared in the scholarly journals of The Americas, Ulúa, the Journal of Women’s History, the History of Religions and the American Historical Review.