Teresa Mina’s journeys: “Slave-moving,” mobility, and gender in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study tells the story of a West African woman, Teresa Mina, as a window onto a relatively unexplored aspect of nineteenth-century slavery in Cuba: the journeys around the island of Africans and their descendants, long after surviving the Atlantic slave trade. Coerced displacement, herein termed “slave-moving,” was fundamental to the experience of slavery and to the contested process of “place-making” occurring on the island. Slave-moving served the practical needs of the expanding plantation economy, occurring via the same transport systems that enabled faster transfer of commodities, and became a key function of the colonial bureaucracy. It also served disciplinary purposes, deepening slaveholders’ power and unfree people’s subjection. Its effects were strongly gendered, exposing women to heightened, specific forms of subjugation. Throughout, the essay also explores how unfree people managed to travel of their own will, in ways that were nonetheless closely connected to the processes of slave-moving and place-making.