Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Abstract

Hiding in Plain Sight is a new contribution to the study of African descendants in the Río de la Plata and one of the few works in English to examine continuities and transformations in race relations from the late colonial to the early national period. The title refers to the relative success that some African-descended women and their families from the province of Córdoba achieved in “whitening” their social status and erasing their African and mixed-race past. In Erika Edwards's analysis, a number of mulata and parda concubines, wives, and mothers “negotiated their own invisibility” as a result of a conscious generational strategy to ascend to whiteness and claim the social privileges restricted to those publicly recognized to possess a white identity (p. 2). Like Ann Twinam in her study on whiteness in Spanish America secured through the colonial gracias al sacar petitions, Edwards finds that “whitened” women in Córdoba most often achieved social mobility through relations with white men. Case studies drawn from an examination of ecclesiastical and civil court cases as well as Bourbon and early nineteenth-century censuses provide examples of slave concubines and wives of white men whose children were manumitted or registered in the book of “white” baptisms, and several women were recognized with the honorifics of señora or doña. According to Hiding in Plain Sight, institutional policies to whiten society eclipsed African-descended women's individual strategies in the late colonial and early republican periods. This project by provincial authorities sought to enlighten and discipline the large nonwhite population. By the 1832 census for the province's capital city, the myriad racial distinctions for those of African descent had collapsed into one category, “pardo”—a result, Edwards argues, of a shift “from an identity based on reputation and social and moral attributes to an identity based on inherited traits” (p. 44).Hiding in Plain Sight depicts Córdoba as a conservative society, jealous to maintain white privilege. The first two chapters detail the rise of a significant free casta population in the city of Córdoba by the 1770s in the context of constantly policed social boundaries. Slave families often created social networks that allowed them to purchase the freedom of children and wives. Edwards also uncovers examples of slaves who petitioned the state to emancipate them by arguing that they were Indians and thus illegally in bondage. Bourbon efforts to reestablish social hierarchy increased surveillance of the poor and nonwhite population suspected of idleness and immorality but also established new schools to uplift them from their “barbaric and ignorant state” (p. 33). Edwards studies how these attitudes were preserved after independence by governing elites who closely held political power, even as they recruited slaves for independence armies, freed slaves born after 1813 at adulthood, and further expanded access to public schools in order to impart new behaviors and mores to mixed-race girls and future mothers. According to Edwards, “manumitted African descendants enrolled in these schools to whiten themselves” (p. 104).The following chapters are organized thematically, examining the paths to freedom and respectability that African-descended women chose. Despite legal and customary restrictions, some women of African descent found in concubinage, marriage, and manumission means for social mobility. In one case study, the light-skinned slave mistress of a priest was able to “escape . . . blackness” by violating late colonial sumptuary laws, acting as the señora of the household and dressing with luxurious clothes appropriate for that role (p. 49). In other cases, women of alleged African descent contested the 1776 Royal Pragmatic, which prohibited “unequal marriages,” by seeking to prove their Spanish or Indian genealogy; in eight documented cases, slave women married Spanish men and achieved freedom for themselves and their children. Manumission was most often granted by slave owners in recognition of valued service. Edwards also points to the role of slave mothers as court supplicants seeking to free their children by claiming an Indian identity, appealing for enforcement of the 1813 Free Womb law for their children, or asserting that slave owners had forfeited their rights by acting dishonorably. Edwards underscores the agency of women of African descent in pursuing the privileges of whiteness. She does acknowledge that this path was not possible for those women without white allies or light skin (p. 3). Yet we know much less about the African-descended community who might have pursued horizontal solidarities and made it more difficult to render Blacks invisible in Argentina. Similarly, though much of the analysis examines legal cases, we know relatively little of the role of learned intermediaries, such as colonial notaries and court-appointed defensores de pobres, in shaping the identities that women asserted in these public forums.