Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the law of the Spanish empire was more supportive of manumission than was the case with other New World slave regimes. Adriana Chira's Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations gives us a nuanced look at the role of law in regulating the lives and possibilities of freedom for quasi-free and enslaved persons in one Spanish venue, Santiago de Cuba in the nineteenth century. Chira's choice of Santiago, on the eastern part of the island, provides us with a particularly appropriate jurisdiction in which to look at the processes and strategies that people used to gain freedom or at least a freer status. Located far enough away from the large sugar plantations that would transform the worlds of race and slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century, Santiago was a venue whose economic conditions supported a large free population of color engaged in small-scale farming. These conditions facilitated the growth of quasi-free people who were able to lawfully purchase shares of their own lives and to hope for eventual purchase of total freedom.In the first chapter Chira traces slavery and freedom in Santiago from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. With conditions more suited to tobacco farming than sugar cultivation, the region became home to numerous small farms and a population of African descent that was able to purchase free or partially free status. The Spanish crown, wary of possible slave rebellion, had policies that were designed to limit the number of African captives brought to the island. The crown also had policies designed to encourage or at least facilitate manumission. All of this contributed to the growth of a free population of color, many of whom might have logically seen themselves as stakeholders in the Spanish imperial system, as witnessed by their participation in the militia, utilization of the courts, and manipulation of political patronage.Because Santiago escaped the sugar boom that transformed Cuba in the nineteenth century, the region also escaped some of the harshness that came with the expansion of the plantation economy and the increase in the African slave trade. The east remained somewhat underdeveloped, which led to somewhat greater autonomy for Santiago's population of African descent. The revolution in Saint-Domingue would heighten the concerns of Spanish authorities over possible rebelliousness, as would the arrival of French-speaking refugees from Hispaniola. This new fear would lead to increased governmental and legal support for manumission.Chira takes us through Cuba's nineteenth century, including the earliest rebellions that would ultimately culminate in Cuba's independence. But it is in her discussion of how the slave and partially free population used the law to gain partial or full freedom that Chira makes her strongest contribution. Chira's portrait of nineteenth-century Santiago society is nuanced and textured, reflecting a society where race and color as well as slavery and freedom came in complex and overlapping layers. Phenotype might set a presumption as to an individual's color or racial status, but it was a presumption that might be overcome by social, economic, political, and military accomplishments. There were individuals who were free and others who were enslaved, but there was also the possibility of purchasing a part of one's freedom, a topic previously explored in Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (2016). This possibility in turn made the law a vehicle for settling not only disputes between those who claimed ownership of an individual and those who claimed their manumitted status but also legal quarrels over fractions of ownership of human beings.Patchwork Freedoms is at its best in taking us through the legal processes that determined what quantum of freedom an individual was entitled to claim. The enslaved and quasi-enslaved people of Santiago became skillful navigators of the legal system, with an ability to use formal and customary law in the quest for greater freedom. They were also adept at using patronage networks, especially connections with free and quasi-free people of color that enabled slaves and partially free individuals to earn the money for self-purchase.With Patchwork Freedoms, Adriana Chira has helped to expand our understanding of race and slavery in the Spanish empire. Her localized study guides the reader through the varied considerations—economic circumstances, imperial rivalries, shifting racial ideologies, and political and legal change—that determined the fate of many peoples of African descent in nineteenth-century Cuba. The book is a critical addition to the burgeoning field of Afro-Latin history.