{"id":702162,"date":"2026-05-24T14:02:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T18:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=702162"},"modified":"2026-05-24T14:02:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T18:02:39","slug":"review-spring-2026-office-hours-pablo-sierra-silva-702162","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/review-spring-2026-office-hours-pablo-sierra-silva-702162\/","title":{"rendered":"Office hours with Pablo Sierra Silva"},"content":{"rendered":"

The historian and creator of the Black Mexico seminar and World History Through Soccer on hidden connections, the power of primary sources, and sport as a window onto society.<\/h2>\n

As an undergraduate, <\/strong>I loved studying African history\u2014Ethiopia, Senegal, Angola\u2014and literature, film, and history from Latin America. Those two interests felt like separate tracks.<\/p>\n

The turning point came <\/strong>in a lecture on Black conquistadores of Mexico. I remember sitting there thinking, \u201cThis has to be wrong,\u201d because I had never heard this history before\u2014and I spent most of my childhood in Mexico. It completely floored me.<\/p>\n

Suddenly it clicked: <\/strong>I could bring my two interests together, asking what it means to study Blackness in Mexico, a place so closely associated\u2014visually and narratively\u2014with Indigenous civilizations like the Maya and\u00a0Mexica.<\/p>\n

On an exploratory trip to Mexico, <\/strong>\u00a0I reviewed a box of documents from the 1600s. Right away, I found dozens of references to enslaved Angolans and Congolese. I thought: If this random request yields so much history, what would a true, in-depth study produce?<\/p>\n

\"Pablo
SHELF LIFE:<\/strong> Sierra Silva\u2019s office is filled with books, some of which he has written himself. (Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ photo \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That led to my first book, <\/strong>Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los \u00c1ngeles, 1531\u20131706<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2018). So much of my archival material never made it into the book, so when Covid hit and the archives closed, I wrote Mexico, Slavery, Freedom: A Bilingual Documentary History, 1520\u20131829<\/em> <\/a>(Hackett Publishing, 2024).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a will from Zacatecas, <\/strong>in northern Mexico, written by a man in the 1700s who owned something like a convenience store. He lists his stock\u201420 yards of ribbon and lace, four pounds of candles\u2014and then itemizes what people pawned to buy things: a coral bracelet, a silver pendant. A student might read that and think, \u201cMy sister has a pendant like that.\u201d Suddenly, 1712 doesn\u2019t feel so distant.<\/p>\n

Another document that has stayed with me <\/strong>is an investigation into a gay community in Mexico City. I was never taught that queer communities existed in the colonial period. The document is violent\u2014these people are being persecuted by crown officials\u2014but within it you find lists of homes where they dined, and their nicknames for each other: La Rosada, \u201cthe pink one,\u201d and La Coqueta, \u201cthe flirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mapping those communities <\/strong>onto the past and then asking what we do with that knowledge has been powerful. A student raised in the 2000s or 2010s will see things in that document that I never would. That\u2019s what keeps me committed to primary sources: Each generation reads them anew.<\/p>\n

My current research<\/strong> follows 1,463 people kidnapped in a pirate attack in Veracruz and dispersed to places like colonial Charleston, South Carolina, and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). What did it mean for those people, and for those left behind? What did it mean to land in a foreign port, not speaking the language, and, in some parts of Saint-Domingue, in a setting with very few women?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been drawn <\/strong>to the footnote on the page that says, \u201cWe don\u2019t know what happened to this person.\u201d I\u2019m obsessed with those gaps. Why don\u2019t we know? What connections are we missing?<\/p>\n

\"Pablo
SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT:<\/strong> For one class during every World History Through Soccer course, Sierra Silva invites students to come dressed in their favorite team\u2019s jersey. (Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ photo \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For me, sport offers another way <\/strong>into these questions. I try to teach<\/a> HIST 154: World History Through Soccer every World Cup cycle. It always strikes me how central sports are to everyday life in Latin America, the United States, and Europe\u2014and yet when we open many standard histories, they\u2019re barely mentioned. How can that be, when on a given Sunday in some cities a huge share of the population is either at the stadium or listening on the radio?<\/p>\n

In Buenos Aires alone <\/strong>there are 79 stadiums; that\u2019s a profound transformation of urban space that we rarely treat as historically significant.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m especially interested <\/strong>in the history of women\u2019s soccer. Archival photos of women playing in uniforms in Chile in the early 1900s raise questions about why those stories disappeared in the 1960s. If I ever move fully into researching the 20th or 21st century, it will likely be through this lens. We don\u2019t take sports seriously enough in academia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ professor, who teaches World History Through Soccer, on the power of primary sources and sport as a window onto society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1402,"featured_media":702192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41112,456],"tags":[21422,37112,34152,16072],"class_list":["post-702162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-magazine","category-society-culture","tag-department-of-history","tag-faculty","tag-pablo-miguel-sierra-silva","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOffice hours with Pablo Sierra Silva<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ professor, who teaches World History Through Soccer, on the power of primary sources and sport as a window onto society.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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