Danielle Terrazas Williams is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College and specializes in the history of free African-descended women in colonial Mexico. Her broader research interests include legal history, slavery, and fluctuating notions of status. She has held fellowships at Princeton and the Huntington Library and her work has appeared in The Americas and Ulúa. Currently, she is finishing a book project, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Economic Development in Colonial Veracruz, that challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on elite African-descended women and their experiences in Mexico’s understudied period from 1580 to 1730. From royal edicts to local notarial and ecclesiastical sources, her project bridges the workings of the Spanish empire with the quotidian experiences of people and towns on the periphery.