With the CLACLS Summer Travel Fellowship, I spent two weeks in Mexico City conducting preliminary research for my dissertation. This summer’s research provided me with the opportunity to explore the Inquisition collection held at Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación. In the expansive archives, I discovered cases that detailed the charges brought against Afro-Mexicans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ranging from accusations of false mysticism to the act of denunciation, these cases now serve as the foundation of my dissertation, which examines how Africans and their descendants re-appropriated Catholic rituals and practices to make claims to colonial society. I will further incorporate one voluminous case into a paper, entitled “‘Su fingida santidad’: Narratives of Saintliness and Blackness in Late Colonial Mexico,” that I will present at the 2015 Latin American Studies Association conference in Puerto Rico.