Yesenia Barragan. Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific.

Abstract

Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars from North American institutions have sought to expand historical understanding of the process of abolition in Spanish America. Yesenia Barragan’s book analyzing the case of the Colombian Black Pacific is a major contribution to this scholarship. It draws on the rich tradition of Colombian history and the Colombian Pacific, offering a comprehensive analysis that emphasizes the gradualness of Black emancipation and the significance of the regulation of the status of the “Free Womb Children”—free sons and daughters born to enslaved mothers after the passage fo the Free Womb Law— as a form of “racial governance” (p. 6) of the new generations of Black inhabitants of the Valle del Cauca. The book is made up of six chapters divided in three interlinked parts, covering the “social universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” (p. 37), the laws and technologies of gradual emancipation, and the final abolition and its afterlives. The first chapter is centered on the description of the material and social world of the lowlands: its geography, rivers, mining economy, and legends. Using secondary sources, travel accounts and records from the national and local archives, chapter two describes the lives of slaves and emancipated blacks the cities of Quibdó and Nóvita. The third chapter describes the antecedents to the Free Womb Law of 1821, especially the Antioquian law of 1814. In dialog with Edgardo Pérez Morales’s thesis (now book, Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia [2022]), it analyzes political antislavery arguments, their impact in Nóvita, and the opposition they roused there. In chapter four, Barragan explores the popular circulation of the law, marks the importance of baptismal records as proofs of freedom, and unveils conflicts around the control of Free Wombs’ children’s lives. In chapter five, Barragan reconstructs three routes to freedom: self-purchase, testamentary manumissions, and public manumissions. The author analyzes the political use of the latter in conversation with Jason McGraw’s “Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia” (Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 2 [2011], 269–88) and details how those manumissions had different impulse in different contexts. Chapter six reconstructs the final abolition process, attempts to delay it, and the politics of compensation. The epilogue connects this process to the present day and emphasizes how the vernacular freedom woven daily by the lowland inhabitants challenged Colombian white supremacy.