Negros esclavos y libres en las ciudades hispanoamericanas

Abstract

Our image of African slavery in the Americas, Carmen Bernand argues, has been unduly shaped by studies of the plantation economy. Historians, she says, have neglected the African experience in the Spanish American city, a key locus of Spanish American social and cultural development since the early colonial period. That neglect has hardly been complete; the author depends heavily on existing scholarship to make her case. Her book, nonetheless, offers a useful and often rich, if too brief, survey of the African experience in urban Spanish America from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, along with some thoughtful analysis concerning the distinctive nature of that experience.For Bernand, Spanish American uniqueness resulted, in part, from the fact that slavery and liberty were never entirely antithetical in societies rife with alternative legal conditions like yanaconaje. As mestizaje and manumission were added to the mix, descendants of enslaved African immigrants came rapidly to inhabit numerous “hybrid” statuses that diluted collective identity and promoted assimilation into a broad plebeian sector. Cities, where many Spanish American slaves were concentrated, provided spaces in which routine and relatively anonymous social interaction further destabilized boundaries to which color was already an unreliable guide. Impertinent slaves were but one of the more notorious dangers to colonial order to emerge from these milieux, as Bernand reveals by attending to the “voices” of people of African origins in judicial records. Thus an enslaved mulatto coachman, Ignacio Arriola, was arrested for drunkenly insulting and persistently threatening a Spaniard in Buenos Aires in 1790 because a member of the latter’s household had failed to produce a promised supply of cigars (p. 124).Lamentably, the author can provide this level of archival detail only for late colonial Buenos Aires. Otherwise, she relies in particular on Richard Konetzke’s classic collection of royal legislation to achieve documentary “coverage,” teasing out, for example, the regular infractions by free blacks and castas of laws intended to block their mobility. This method is quite effective, but the frequent use of lengthy quotations from published sources seems unnecessary, and evidence drawn from royal legislation is sometimes misleading. Bernand rightly argues, for instance, that tribute status was a social as well as an economic issue for free blacks and mulattos, but wrongly supposes on the basis of a late-eighteenth-century cédula that militiamen of color in Guatemala, and they alone, had never managed to obtain tribute relief (p. 165). In fact, they were winning it already in the 1690s.Surprising bibliographical gaps may account for this sort of weakness. Bernand makes extensive use of essential work done on Lima, for example, but ignores key studies of Mexico City and Santiago de Guatemala that focus precisely on themes she emphasizes. It is reasonable to deny, as she does, having either the intention or the capacity to focus with equal intensity on the African experience in every historically important urban center. One wonders, though, whether the basic principles of that experience, which she expresses the desire to enunciate, might appear more heterogeneous if, say, the coastal cities receiving most of her attention were to be systematically compared with highland ones surrounded by dense indigenous populations.Such comparison will have to be sought elsewhere, however. This book’s focus narrows dramatically—more or less to Buenos Aires—once the nineteenth century is reached. The conclusion then unexpectedly reprises old notions that black populations suddenly disappeared following abolition, and discovers the nefarious influence of present-day multiculturalism in the work of George Reid Andrews (p. 193). It seems an odd way to end a book that in general treats questions of identity and the African experience in Spanish America with a subtle touch.