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Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means
in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century
by
Danielle Terrazas Williams
Department of History
Duke University
Date:_______________________
Approved:
___________________________
Pete Sigal, Supervisor
___________________________
Kathryn Burns
___________________________
John D. French
___________________________
David Barry Gaspar
___________________________
Ben Vinson, III
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
History in the Graduate School
of Duke University
2013
ABSTRACT
Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means
in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century
by
Department of History
Duke University
Date:_______________________
Approved:
___________________________
Pete Sigal, Supervisor
___________________________
Kathryn Burns
___________________________
John D. French
___________________________
David Barry Gaspar
___________________________
Ben Vinson, III
An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
History in the Graduate School of
Duke University
2013
Copyright by
2013
Abstract
“Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa,
Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century” explores the socioeconomic worlds of
free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations,
managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites,
and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination
of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group
played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free
women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to
their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that
allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This
dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of
race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin
America.
iv
Dedication
To my family in the United States and in Mexico.
v
Table of Contents
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv
List of Charts..................................................................................................................... vii
List of Maps ........................................................................................................................ x
List of Images .................................................................................................................... xi
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... xii
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One ...................................................................................................................... 58
Chapter Two.................................................................................................................... 147
Chapter Three.................................................................................................................. 211
Chapter Four ................................................................................................................... 273
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 354
Biography ........................................................................................................................ 369
vi
List of Charts
1. 1 Overview of Marriage: 1724-1736 ............................................................................ 74
1. 2 Overview of Exogamy: 1724-1736 ............................................................................ 76
1. 3 Overview of Marriages: 1641-1702 ........................................................................... 85
1. 4 Both Spouses of Legitimate Birth: 1724-1736 ........................................................ 105
1. 5 Exogamy, AD non-HL Spouse with HL Spouse: 1724-1736 .................................. 107
1. 6 African-descended Legitimate Spouse with non-HL Spouse: 1724-1736 ............... 108
1. 7 Neither Spouse Designated as HL: 1724-1736 ........................................................ 109
1. 8 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1642 ...................................................................... 113
1. 9 Baptisms and Legitimacy: 1641-1655 ..................................................................... 117
1. 10 Baptisms and Legitimacy: 1656-1669 ................................................................... 119
1. 12 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1712 .................................................................... 121
1. 13 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1726 .................................................................... 123
1. 14 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1728 (partial) ...................................................... 124
1. 15 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1736 (partial) ...................................................... 125
1. 16 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1726, 1728 (partial), 1736 (partial) Combined
Totals....................................................................................................................... 126
1. 18 Baptisms by Designation of Godparent and Gender of Child: 1641-1655 ............ 132
1. 20 Children with Godparents of African Descent: 1666-1689 ................................... 134
vii
1. 21 Children with Spanish Godparents: 1666-1689 ..................................................... 135
1. 22 Children with Godparents of Unknown Caste: 1666-1689.................................... 136
1. 23 Children with Two Godparents of Different Designations: 1666-1689
............ 137
1. 24 Children with Two Godparents of Different Designations: 1724-1732 ................ 138
2. 1 Demographic Profile: 1600-1625 ............................................................................ 149
2. 8 Vecina Status: 1600-1650 ........................................................................................ 159
2. 9 Vecina Status: 1651-1699 ........................................................................................ 160
2. 10 Vecina Status: 1700-1725 ...................................................................................... 160
2. 11 Marital Status: 1600-1650...................................................................................... 161
2. 12 Marital Status 1651-1699 ....................................................................................... 162
2. 13 Marital Status: 1700-1725...................................................................................... 163
2. 14 Primary Types of Business: 1600-1650 ................................................................. 165
2. 15 Primary Business Type: 1651-1699 ....................................................................... 166
2. 16 Primary Business Type: 1700-1725 ....................................................................... 167
2. 17 Marital Status and Primary Business Type: 1600-1650 ........................................ 168
viii
2. 18 Marital Status and Primary Business Type: 1651-1699 ........................................ 169
2. 19 Marital Status and Primary Business Type: 1700-1725
ix
.................................... 170
List of Maps
Map 1: “Mexico and the central Veracruz triangle,”. ........................................................ 3 Map 2: “New Spain and Environs,”. ................................................................................ 45 Map 3: “Spanish lands in the province of Jalapa, ca. 1600,”........................................... 47 Map 4: “Spatial zones of Jalapa, ca. 1700,” .................................................................... 49 x
List of Images
Image 1: Statue of Gaspar Yanga located in Yanga, Veracruz....................................... 341 Image 2: Official Folk Dress of Yanga, Veracruz .......................................................... 343 xi
Acknowledgements
I would like to express the immense gratitude I have for the family members,
friends, colleagues, and mentors who supported me during my graduate work, but
especially my parents, godparents, brothers, and grandparents. A wide net of people
from all stages in my life offered constructive criticism, encouraging words, and joy to
my life as I took classes, gained mentors in two countries, and traveled the world for
research and conferences.
I would like to thank my advisor Pete Sigal for his unwavering confidence in me.
They say that the right advisor can make or break your experience as a doctoral student. I
knew from the beginning that he and I would work well together. I will always have
profound respect and appreciation for Pete and his thoughtful guidance and resolute
support of my choices. It made all the difference.
I cannot thank my entire dissertation committee enough for working with me on
this endeavor. John D. French helped to develop my understanding of Brazilian history
and broaden my conception of racial politics. Kathryn Burns tirelessly supported me
from the other side of tobacco road at UNC-Chapel Hill and instilled in me an endless
appreciation for notarial sources and the production of colonial knowledge. David Barry
Gaspar, whose undeniable contributions to the field of colonial history, inspired me to
complicate narratives of understudied subjects. Ben Vinson encouraged me to pursue
new possibilities and forge new paths in the field. I thank him for seeing my potential
xii
and for supporting the earliest years of my career. As I move on to the book project, I
look forward to working with them all once again.
Adriana Naveda, my informal research advisor while I lived in Mexico, served as
my skeleton key to archives, special collections, and research centers.
She was
instrumental in securing my affiliation with the Universidad Veracruzana and helping me
integrate into Mexico’s scholarly circles. Adriana remains a cherished mentor and friend
who helped me grow as a researcher but also as a person. Te agradezco mucho.
There are not enough ways to thank Reena Goldthree for the time and energy she
has expended being my mentor, my friend, and a consummate soror. At every major
stage in this process, Reena volunteered her skills to help me navigate the hectic seas of
Ph.D. life. She was, and continues to be, my sounding board and my beacon of light.
Thank you for being the generous scholar that you are.
In 2006, at LASA in Puerto Rico, Rachel Sarah O’Toole took me under her wing
and I know that I am better for it. Countless times I asked for her advice, a favor, or a
pep-talk and she was always there to oblige me and help steer the ship, introduce me to
other amazing scholars, and review my work over the years. Thank you for helping me
figure this thing out, Rachel.
For nearly a decade, Alfonsa Sequera served as my life raft. As one of the
archivists at La Unidad de Servicios Bibliotecarios y de Información (USBI) in Xalapa,
she and her team educated me on paleography, archival protocols, and how to survive the
monotony of searching for a needle in the haystack. For every poorly-scribbled, inksmudged, termite-eaten page of the notarial archive that I fought with and that she
xiii
generously took time out of her day to walk me through decoding a collection she knew
expertly, I thank her.
Duke University was a wonderful place to call home for my graduate education.
In addition to the professors, the staff members at Graduate Student Affairs, namely Dean
Jacqueline Looney, Tomalei Vess, and Lana Bendavid, provided me with encouragement
and productive distractions while I was on campus. Thank you for creating a calming
space to relax and fellowship with other graduate students. All of your hard work was
greatly appreciated.
I would like to thank Dartmouth College for the dissertation writing fellowship
year to complete this project. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the Chair of the
Department of African and African-American Studies, Antonio Tillis. He ensured that I
stayed focused on my purpose, allowed me much needed flexibility, and offered
invaluable professional guidance.
Additionally, I am grateful to the department’s
program coordinator, Adrienne Clay, for facilitating so many aspects of my transition to
Hanover and Dartmouth and for being gracious as I interrupted her workdays just to chat.
I will always be grateful to the staff of every institution, archive, and research
center that welcomed me and helped me to accomplish this project. In particular, I am
thankful for Robin Ennis, Cynthia Hoglen, Connie Blackmore and Natalie Hartman, but
also dozens of people who worked in various positions at the USBI-Xalapa, the Instituto
de Investigaciones Histórico-Sociales, CIESAS-Golfo, the Archivo General de las Indias,
the Archivo de la Nación, the municipal library of Yanga, Veracruz, and the Metropolitan
Cathedral of Xalapa. Thank you to Holly Ackerman, librarian for Latin American,
xiv
Iberian and Latino Studies at Duke University, who was a joy to have as an instructor and
as a wellspring of knowledge for all of my rare book inquires.
To Angela Layne who reviewed and provided important feedback on dozens of
grant applications, chapter drafts, and anything else I needed her to review and she did on
short notice, thank you for the fresh and insightful eyes that you lent to me. To Alex
Martin, who contributed as my technical advisor, thank you for teaching me patience.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of María Cristina García,
Wahneema Lubiano, Kia Lilly Caldwell, María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez, Kathleen
Cheatham, Becky Johnson, Wacey Turner, Algernon Cargill, Jr., Helen Bailitz, Mario
Zúñiga Gutiérrez, Irasema Rosas Peralta, Malena Martínez Godínez, Kim Bowler, Zeb
Tortorici, Treva Lindsey, Shelby Grantham, Ariana Ochoa Camacho, my dissertationwriting partner Larissa Hopkins, and especially all of the families who welcomed me into
their lives in Xalapa, Córdoba, Los Mangos, Mataclara, Cuitlahuac, Orizaba, and
Veracruz Port. They all made this journey possible and I remain grateful to have such a
wonderful group of people in my life and my heart.
Finally, this project was generously funded by a number of departments and
programs at Duke University, including: the History Department (Anne Firor Scott
Award), the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (Mellon Dissertation
Research Grant), the African and African American Studies Department (Travel Grant),
the Women’s Studies Program (Race and Gender Award), and the International PreDissertation Summer Research Travel Award and the Stern Dissertation Writing
Fellowship from the Graduate School. The support of a number of external fellowships
xv
also assisted in the completion of this dissertation, including: the Foreign Language Area
Studies Fellowship (FLAS), the Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original
Sources from the Council on Library and Information Resources of the Library of
Congress, the Marcus Garvey Foundation Research Fellowship, the Fulbright IIE
Fellowship, and Dartmouth College’s Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship.
xvi
Introduction
“Behold rich lands!” – Alonzo Hernandez Puertocarrero on the beaches of Veracruz
(1519)1
On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into
record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa.2 The
will included information about Polonia’s family, possessions, debts to collect, and how
she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the
appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially
acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her
legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.
However, on March 14, 1679, just six days later, as she lay sick in bed, Polonia de Ribas
notarized one final act by commissioning an official carta de libertad (freedom card) for
one of her slaves.3 Polonia de Ribas was a slaveowner, and her final entry freed a fiftyyear-old man designated as a negro criollo4 named Gerónimo de Yrala. At first, this
might appear to be ordinary. Many slaveowners, regardless of gender, freed some or all
of their slaves believing it to be their final act of generosity. This manumission case is
remarkable for two reasons: 1) Polonia de Ribas was a wealthy free mulata and 2)
Gerónimo de Yrala was her brother.
1
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (New York: Grove Press,
1956), 83.
2
Archivo Notarial de Xalapa, La Unidad de Servicios Bibliotecarios y de Información,
Colecciones Especiales, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz (ANX), March 8, 1679, f 486vta 489fte.
3
ANX, March 14, 1679, f 489fte - 490vta
4
During the early and mid-colonial period, the term “criollo” designated people of African
descent in the colonies, as opposed to someone born in African or Europe.
1
Polonia de Ribas, a woman of African descent, occupied an exceptional position
of influence and economic opportunity in late seventeenth-century Mexico, and she was
not alone. It was in the 1600s, when many African-descended people in Mexico labored
as slaves in fields and urban centers, that a new demographic of coloniality emerged: free
African-descended women of means. Although free African-descended people were
found throughout the Spanish colonies as early as the Conquest era, the seventeenth
century witnessed tremendous growth in their numbers. 5
As colonial Mexico’s
institutions took shape and local economies diversified, free women and men accessed
developing labor markets, demonstrated geographic mobility, and keyed into interracial
networks in order to secure their livelihoods. Free women employed strategies similar to
those of other people of means, but they also applied gendered strategies and found
themselves in circumstances specific to their race, such as having enslaved family
members. By virtue of their social markers, I argue that though free women encountered
challenges because of race, they also carefully negotiated legal avenues to their benefit
through their use of capital—economic, social, and cultural. In this study, I define
economic capital as financial clout, inclusive of both reputational wealth and actual
assets. Social capital describes the networks of people while cultural capital denotes
knowledge and awareness of customs and conventions.
Free women of African descent in Xalapa during the long seventeenth century
demonstrated their skill in managing all three forms of capital.
5
Through their
Herman Bennett asserts that in New Spain there were significantly more free people of African
descent by the mid-seventeenth century. He notes, “By 1646, the creole population, largely free and
comprised of mulattos, numbered 116,529, whereas the predominantly African slave population totaled
35,089.” Herman Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009), 27.
2
participation in the notarial and ecclesiastical worlds of record making, they staked
claims in both low and high interest endeavors. Xalapa’s notarial archives witnessed as
free women engaged in straightforward business, such as the registration of a legal
representative. However, free women also demanded greater recognition in realms that
were not seen as their spaces to occupy, such as when African-descended women and
their families demonstrated an interest in the public recognition of their claims of social
respectability and legitimacy.
Map 1: “Mexico and the central Veracruz triangle,” Patrick J. Carroll,
Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1991), xiv.
3
This work explores the socioeconomic worlds of free African-descended women
of means in one of colonial Mexico’s most important economic regions.
Central
Veracruz, anchored by Veracruz Port,6 Córdoba, Orizaba, and Xalapa, served as the
primary entry point when the importation of Africans to Mexico increased markedly
between 1570 and 1610.7 Patrick J. Carroll describes this area of the colony as the
“heartland of New Spain’s sugar industry until nearly the end of the seventeenth
century.”8 The region relied on both free and enslaved African labor to invigorate the
colonial economy through agricultural development and international commerce that
battled bouts of retraction and experienced occasional expansion during the early- and
mid-colonial periods.
Xalapa, the present-day capital of the state of Veracruz,
represented a major hub of regional influence, which included a diversity of enterprises,
although sugar cultivation dominated much of the region’s agricultural development.
Herbert Klein situates the primacy that enslaved Africans had in this industry when he
argue that “no American society seemed capable of exporting sugar except with use of
African slave workers.”9 More than a sugar-producing, resting stop for travelers on the
Camino Real, the elites and merchants of Xalapa often had connections with the center of
colonial authority, Mexico City. Córdoba and Orizaba were two of the largest sugar 6
Veracruz State has had two “Ports of Veracruz.” The original Port of Veracruz, known as La
Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz (also known as “La Antigua”) in colonial documents (now called Antigua),
was moved in 1595 to what is now the current Port of Veracruz, known in colonial documents as La Nueva
Ciudad de Veracruz (or simply, “La Nueva”). The new port's deeper waters allowed for greater traffic by
larger vessels.
7
Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 80.
8
Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 20.
9
Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford
4
growing regions of Veracruz and helped fuel the economy of Mexico. Veracruz as the
major port of entry for transatlantic travel and trade in goods, including African slaves,
played an essential role in the development of the entire colony. In addition to being the
site of high economic traffic, Veracruz Port served as a strategic point of military
defense, often carried out by soldiers of African descent.
From these urban and rural spaces, free women of means emerged as important
social actors through their participation in the multiple economies in the region. While
Xalapa had the most well-established and well-documented African and Africandescended population in the region, the histories of Veracruz Port, Córdoba, and Orizaba
all played critical roles in contextualizing the cases that will be presented, cases about
women who had connections with family, friends, and business associates in these areas.
In this respect, Xalapa’s history was exceptional in comparision to that of the more rural
areas of Córdoba and Orizaba and the striking mix of coloniality in the Port.
My research on central Veracruz from 1580 to 1730 establishes that some free
women of African descent had profitable opportunities and significant wealth during this
period. Free women of African descent owned slaves, engaged in interracial affiliations,
managed their real estate, maintained profitable social networks with regional elites, and
worked skillfully to secure the economic futures of their children. My dissertation
highlights the significant role that women of African descent played as business owners,
slaveowners, and legal intermediaries for their family members and members of the
regional elite. Their involvement in these activities helped support the diversifying
economy of Xalapa that was fueled by increased transatlantic trade routes and
5
economically-established zones of agri-business.
My work demonstrates that free
women engaged in specific types of economic endeavors, such as slave-owning,
patronage networking, and managing intergenerational resources that spoke to their
investment in particular kinds of social and cultural capital that allowed them increased
social mobility and social legitimacy.
Project Overview and Research Questions
My dissertation offers new approaches to interpreting sources on free women of
African descent who lived in Mexico during the colonial period. While I focus on
regional history, the sources allow me to address broader questions of slavery, racial
hierarchies, gender roles, familial configurations, patronage systems, the etiquette of
interracial interactions, and the economic influence and social mobility of free women.
The near absence of free women of African descent in the historiography, particularly in
narratives of the elite and other people of means, positions my research within the
growing body of literature that unequivocally demonstrates a much greater role for
people of African descent in the progression of Mexican history. By examining free
women’s economic influences, I also address how these women positioned multiple
identities, garnered social credibility, and claimed respectability. This work serves to
enhance the burgeoning conversation on African and African-descended people in
Mexico beyond the traditional narrative of slavery and domination. I demonstrate that
race did not always predetermine social status in seventeenth-century Mexico, although it
did influence the ways in which colonial subjects engaged one another and how they
interacted with colonial institutions.
6
The aforementioned Polonia de Ribas and all of the other women in this study
lived during the long seventeenth century and experienced life in Veracruz, a region of
the colony not unfamiliar with the African diaspora. What would become Veracruz State
witnessed the introduction of the majority of African-descended people into the colony
because of the importance of the Port of Veracruz as a gateway to the Atlantic World.
The central Veracruz region received a disproportionate number of enslaved Africans. In
the town of Xalapa, African-descended people existed in a society that depended on their
labor to invigorate the colonial economy. Although the population density of Africans
and African-descended people varied throughout Mexico, Veracruz was rare in that “by
1600 [African slaves] outnumbered Europeans in the region.” 10 Even with greater
demographic representation, it was still exceptional that free women of African descent
emerged from the obscurity that cloaks the lives of so many colonial subjects and arrived
on the historical stage via notarial and ecclesiastical sources.11 The story of Polonia de
Ribas, merely excerpted here, was far more detailed and complex in the primary sources,
which provide much needed insight into the social and economic resources and
experiences of free African-descended women in seventeenth-century central Veracruz.
Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the following research
questions guide this project in assessing larger implications in the field: How were
African-descended women marked socially?
What categories did they mobilize in
notarial documents? What kinds of social networks were available to them, and which
10
For all of the collections examined in this study, both ecclesiastical and notarial, I went through
each document and identified free people of African page by page.
11
7
avenues did free women pursue to secure their livelihoods? I also address how racialized
strategies and gendered narratives may have influenced the ways in which women of
means navigated colonial Veracruz.
How did these women mobilize their multiple
identities to their benefit? By examining notarial and ecclesiastical archives, I focus on
how free women positioned themselves in society by the acquisition and manipulation of
social, cultural, and economic capital. I further explore how social markers, such as
legitimate birth, intergenerational wealth, and ownership of slaves and real estate,
influenced their ability to act as historical agents in seventeenth-century Xalapa.
Historiography
Over the last twenty years, the field of Afro-Mexican Studies has thrived. A wide
array of topics, subjects, and analytical frameworks has arisen to bring rich narratives of
Africans and their descendants to the fore of colonial Mexican history. The foundational
early contributions to the field, most notably Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s La Población
Negra, provided an overview of the history of Africans and their descendants in
Mexico. 12 These works covered broad topics such as Spain’s involvement in the
transatlantic slave trade, demography, and the importance of the agricultural sector, but
they also touched on subjects that would later receive greater attention from scholars,
12
Joaquín Roncal, “The Negro Race in Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 24,
no. 3 (August 1944): 530-540; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones
Fuentes Cultural, 1946); Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Pierre L. Van Den Berghe, “The African Diaspora in
Mexico, Brazil, and the United States,” Social Forces 54, no. 3 (March 1976): 530-545; Luis Querol y
Roso, Luis. “Negros y mulatos de Nueva España: Historia de su alazamiento en 1612,” Anales de la
Universidad de Valencia año 12, cuaderno 90 (1931-1932): 121-165; Ignacio Márquez Rodiles, Origen del
comercio de esclavos negros en América y su presencia en México. Problemas Educativos de México.
Suplemento 4 (Mexico: Casa Ramírez Editores, 1963).
8
subjects such as agency, cultural capital, marriage partner choice, and the consequences
of the Inquisition on the African-descended population.
Not surprisingly, slavery dominates the historiography of the African diaspora in
Mexico.13 While some works advanced the tradition of overarching discussions on
slavery,14 others examined specific labor sectors of slavery, including the involvement of
African slaves outside of agricultural labor, an area especially in need of further
development.15 The emphasis on slavery and the plantation economy, nonetheless, has
served as an important catalyst to discussions of agency and resistance among Africandescended populations in Mexico.
The history of uprisings, resistance movements, and counter cultures has
contributed greatly to our understanding of what constituted agency for colonial
subjects.16 Racialized anxiety about African-led plots of social disturbance (both real and
13
Bennett notes that the field has held slavery as the “defining” experience for Africans in the
Americas. He argues for more encompassing narratives. Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 5, 104.
14
For works that focus specifically on slavery, see: Robert L. Brady, “The Domestic Slave Trade
in Sixteenth Century Mexico,” The Americas 24, no. 3 (January 1968): 281-289; Peter Boyd-Bowman,
“Negro Slaves in Early Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 26, no. 2 (October 1969): 134-151; Gerald
Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations of Veracruz and Pernambuco, 1550-1680 (Washington,
DC: University Press of America, 1983); Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclovos negros en las haciendas
azucareas de Córdoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830 (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, Centro de Investigaciones
Históricas, 1987); Dennis Nodin Valdés, “The Decline of Slavery in Mexico,” The Americas 44, no. 2
(October 1987): 167-194; Marie Luisa Herrera Casasús, Piezas de Indias: La Esclavitud Negro en Mexico
(Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1991).
15
Patricia Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 62, no. 4 (1982): 569-606 (includes a section on Black domestic servants); Gerald Cardoso, Negro
Slavery in the Sugar Plantations; Frank T. Proctor, III, “Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de
Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Americas 60, no. 1 (July 2003): 33-58.
16
David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 46, no. 3 (August 1966): 235-253; Edgar Love, “Negro Resistance to
Spanish Rule in Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Negro History 52, no. 2 (1967): 89-103; John Herbert Roper
and Lolita G. Brockington, “Slave Revolt, Slave Debate: A Comparison,” Phylon 45, no. 2 (1984): 98-110;
Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 90-101; Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico,
1570-1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 119-144; Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclovos
negros en las haciendas azucareas de Córdoba, Veracruz,1690–1830 (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana,
Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, 1987), 113-140; Jane Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African
9
imagined) figures prominently in this branch of literature.
Laura Lewis’ work on
witchcraft, Joan Cameron Bristol’s on “ritual practice,” and Bennett’s research on the
history of the Inquisition are notable contributions in the establishment of a more
developed historiography of resistance and individual agency.17 From riots in Mexico
City to smaller acts of defiance through involvement in the unsanctioned world of
witchcraft, these important works helped move the historiography into more nuanced
understandings of interracial interactions, colonial fears, and African agency.
While Slavery Studies has grown to include detailed personal profiles, fewer
scholars have turned their attention to Africans and their descendants who were not
enslaved and were not of the servant-sector classes in colonial Mexico. Contributions by
Ben Vinson and Matthew Restall to the history of African-descended militiamen and the
rights they and their communities demanded figure prominently in the historiography.18
Herman Bennett’s Colonial Blackness is one of the most recent contributions to
broadening the scope of diaspora studies for the Mexican context. Even more rare are
works that focus on free women as economic actors. The notable exception is the
Spanish-language monograph by María Elisa Velázquez about free and enslaved women
Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of the Spanish Circum-Caribbean,” in Slaves, Subjects, and
Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson, eds.
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006): 111-146.
17
Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003); Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican
Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007);
Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole
Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
18
Ben Vinson, III, “Race and Badge: Free-Colored Soldiers in the Colonial Mexican Militia,” The
Americas 56, no. 4 (April 2000): 471-496; Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in
Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 171-205; Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for
His Majesty (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004); Ben Vinson, III, “Articulating Space: The FreeColored Military Establishment in Colonial Mexico From The Conquest to Independence,” Callaloo 27,
no. 1 (2004): 150-171.
10
in Mexico City.19 Much of the literature that includes narratives of free women is limited
to the domestic/familial realm.20
While the field continues to develop a more encompassing historiographical
tradition on the history of free African-descended women,21 examining the literature of
other areas of the African diaspora in the Americas has proven instructive in creating
realms of possibility. For the early colonial period, the Caribbean provides some of the
most groundbreaking work in the field, including macro and micro-historical approaches
as well as focused biographical narratives.22 For the nineteenth century, Brazil and the
United States have produced strong traditions of women’s narratives and gender-focused
analyses. 23 Notable examples in this vein are works on Brazil’s most well-known
colonial female subject of African descent, Chica da Silva (or Xica da Silva), whose story
and visage have been mobilized in historical works, novels, movies, theatrical
19
María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispana, siglos
XVII y XVIII (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, UNAM, 2006).
20
Edgar F. Love, “Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City
Parish,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (February 1971): 79-91; Patricia Seed,
To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988); Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered
Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
21
Other notable contributions that discuss on women of African descent in include: Frank ‘Trey’
Proctor III, “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review
86, no. 2 (2006): 309-336; Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican
Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
22
David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery
in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark
Hine, eds., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2004).
23
A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Women and Society in Colonial Brazil,” Journal of Latin American
Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (May 1977): 1-34; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Storites
from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gywn Campell, et al., eds.
Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic, Volume 2 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
11
performances, and television productions.24 Historian Júnia Ferreira Furtado cites a letter
in which an unnamed member of a religious order stated that Chica da Silva had “lived in
the greatest ostentation, the lady of a large house,” and that she luxuriated “in the light of
nobility and great wealth.”25 As the consort of a chief judge with diamond contracts in
Brazil, the same member of the religious order stated that Chica was visited “by people of
the highest order, from the government and the judiciary.”26 Chica’s eighteenth-century
narrative testifies to the exceptional wealth that she managed, the illustrious reputation
she enjoyed, the respect she garnered, and the patrimony and social position that she
secured for her illegitimate children. Chica da Silva’s story has received unprecedented
attention, but this would not be the case for the vast majority of free women during
slavery in the Americas. For women who lived one hundred years earlier, no comparable
projects on the historical narratives of free women of means in Mexico existed until now.
The burgeoning importance of local regional history has challenged the field to
question the privileging of place. Mexico City, as the center of viceregal authority and
home to the most numerous population of African-descended people in Mexico,27 has
figured prominently in the historiography. While the archives of the capital provide a
wealth of documents and a diversity of experiences, Mexico City did not encapsulate the
24
Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Chica Da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xix. Furtado notes that a 1975 film by Cacá Diegues
entitled “Xica da Silva” that “reinforced, propagated, and amplified the myth” of Chica and “embodied the
stereotype of licentiousness and sensuality always attributed to the black or mulatta female in the Brazilian
popular imagination,” 12.
25
Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva, 130.
26
Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva, 130.
27
Bennett asserts, “By 1570, Mexico City was home to the largest African population in the
Americas.” He cites 9,000 persons of African descent compared to the 8,000 Spanish residents in the
capital. Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 4-5.
12
“prototypical” experience of African-descended people in Spain’s most important colony.
Works focusing on regional history, such as those by Patrick Carroll, Adriana Naveda
Chávez-Hita, Jane Landers, and Kimberly Hanger,28 demonstrate that few places in the
Spanish empire replicated the environment of Mexico City and the experiences of its
residents. Regional Studies has offered the particularity of place that has been necessary
for discussion of a multiplicity of narratives. By decentering the narrative prominence of
Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire and consequently de-centering the importance of
Mexico City, the emerging research into the experiences of Africans and their
descendants involved in the work of colony-building in seventeenth-century Mexico
fosters the depiction of a range of strategies utilized to carve out space for economic
mobility, cultural expression, and social legitimacy.
Not only were questions of agency being taken on by scholars, but works began to
address how social and cultural capital were accumulated and what types were being
acquired.29 Vinson focuses on military privileges and how access to the military elite
influenced the way African-descended men understood their rights as defenders of
colonial space. Bennett’s work pays particular attention to the courts’ involvement in the
private lives of colonial subjects, especially in cases of bigamy, blasphemy, and
28
Patrick Carroll, “Estudio socio-demográfico de personas de sangre negra en Jalapa, 1791,”
Historia Mexicana 23, no. 1 (July-September 1973): 111-125; Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz;
Kimberly S. Hanger, “Avenues to Freedom Open to New Orleans' Black Population, 1769-1779,”
Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 1990):
237-264; Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New
Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish
Florida (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, ed., Pardos,
Mulatos y Libertos: Sexto Encuentro de Afromexicanistas (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 2001);
Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations (1983); Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclavos negros en las
haciendas azucareras de Córdoba (1987).
29
I define social capital as networks of people, while cultural capital is inclusive of types of
knowledge used to access greater mobility, whether economic, social, or religious.
13
witchcraft.30 This colonial preoccupation with controlling a growing group of “cultural
interlopers” demonstrates the Church’s and the Crown’s anxiety about the racialized
other, an anxiety María Elena Martinez scrutinizes thoroughly in her work.31 Also
notable in this branch of research is the examination of the significant awareness of the
legal procedures and rhetoric that Africans and their descendants acquired. Bennett
writes, “Africans and their descendants demonstrated the acumen that enabled them to
navigate New Spain’s sixteenth-century cultural landscape.”32 Nicole Von Germeten’s
work on confraternities is another important contribution to the “agency through religious
structures” literature. Both projects engage with how cultural capital was transmitted and
which productions of knowledge African-descended people used to accomplish their own
goals.
Defining difference is one of the central interventions of my work and one with
which the historiography has had limited engagement.
Most difference in the
historiography has focused on racial or caste distinctions, which has, of course,
contributed greatly to our understanding of how African-descended people interacted
with the Spanish population and has tilled particularly fertile ground for the seeding of
more focused work on Afro-indigenous relations.33 Matthew Restall’s edited collection
30
Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole
Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 54.
31
Maria Elena Martinez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence,
and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 3. (July
2004): 479-520; María Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender
in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
32
Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 161.
33
Edgar F. Love, “Legal Restrictions on Afro-Indian Relations in Colonial Mexico,” The Journal
of Negro History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (April 1970): 131-139; John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial
Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978); Matthew Restall, Beyond Black and Red
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans,
14
is one such welcome project, which features scholarship from the top of the field,
including Restall’s own work along with important contributions by Ben Vinson, Jane
Landers, and Kris Lane. An equally important contribution is Laura Lewis’s Hall of
Mirror, which takes on agency bestowed by the “unsanctioned realm” of witchcraft.34
Her work connects a vast array of colonial subjects through the management of
clandestine social and cultural capital.
Although Lewis pays particular attention to
indigenous women and their role as diviners and healers, she incorporates the history of
African-descended women and their search for “other worldly assistance.” Lewis also
asserts that enslaved people would use witchcraft to empower themselves, attain freedom,
or to have power over their owners.
African-descended women’s connections to
practitioners and knowledge of such practices allowed them agency that frustrated
colonial authorities and demonstrated the extent to which African-descended women
went to be self-determining.
One of the largest debates waged in the field has been about how to assess which
of two prominent lines of historiographical differences, caste (race) or class, more
prominently determined the lives of colonial subjects. Some scholars have argued that
the caste system, although fluid and variable at different times and places, remained an
organizing tool of colonial Mexico. 35
Others have addressed questions of racial
Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009).
34
Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003).
35
Laura Lewis explains, “… [Caste] in the colonial context made Spaniards attribute reason to
themselves, weakness to Indians, and aggressiveness to blacks. These qualities became central to the
politics of caste, and they were generated by, even as they maintained, processes of colonization.” Lewis,
Hall of Mirrors, 24. Both Magali Carrera and Ilona Katzew argue that Mexico was still a highly raceconscious society as late as the end of the eighteenth century. Both employ a compelling use of art history
15
discrimination and social stratification to highlight the importance of race/caste as a
determining factor in one’s life conditions.36
The class-based argument contends that status positions, such as elite and
plebeian held greater social salience in colonial Mexico than did racial distinctions.
Susan Kellogg describes this shift as “an emerging trend [that] treats ‘subaltern’ people
as a relatively undifferentiated group.”37 In The Limits of Racial Domination, Cope
argues that the poverty of plebeians facilitated greater interaction among colonial subjects
of different racial backgrounds.
He writes, “The existence of such impoverished
Spaniards diminished the social distances between whites and castas.”38 Cope concedes
that the caste system played a role in social hierarchies but insists that class dominated as
the social divider in very tangible ways, such as residential segregation.39 He takes an
even stronger stance by arguing that Mexico City’s socioeconomic structure in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries “militated against the development of a fully
techniques to make their argument. Magali M. Carrera, “Locating Race in Late Colonial Mexico,” Art
Journal 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 36-45; Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage,
and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Ilona
Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004). Ben Vinson argues most directly that free Blacks understood themselves as a community and
often asserted and organized around a racialized corporate identity to secure material gain and navigate
colonial law, specifically tribute exemption. Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 4-5, 132-198; Also,
Ben Vinson, “Free Colored Voices: Issues of Representation and Racial Identity in the Colonial Mexican
Militia,” Journal of Negro History 79, no. 4 (1994): 170-182.
36
Jim F. Heathand Frederick M. Nunn, “Negroes and Discrimination in Colonial New Mexico:
Don Pedro Bautista Pino’s Startling Statements of 1812 in Perspective,” Phylon 31, no. 4 (1970): 372-378;
Martinez, “Black Blood of New Spain”; Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race”; Rodney Anderson, “Race and
Social Stratification: A Comparison of Working-Class Spaniards, Indians, and Castas in Guadalajara,
Mexico in 1821,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 2 (May 1988): 209-243.
37
Susan Kellogg and Norma Angélica Castillo Palma, “Conflict and Cohabitation between AfroMexicans and Nahuas in Central Mexico,” in Beyond Black and Red, 71.
38
Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 21.
39
16
effective racial hierarchy.”40 He does not delineate, however, what a fully functional
racial hierarchy might look like by providing his reader with a counter example from the
Mexican context.
Patricia Seed urges scholars to push through the underlying false dichotomy in
order to address more fully the important categories of race and class. She writes,
So, the debate over caste and class resolves itself into the question: how
closed must a system be before it is a caste system, how open before it is a
class system? These arguments trivialize the discussion of race and class
by reducing it to an argument over degrees.41
Seed’s argument leads me and other scholars to place other social markers beneath the
historical microscope.42 My work challenges how we take on the history of free Africandescended women of means and complicates our notions of subjects with particular
markers of difference who, at times, behaved in discernible patterns and other times when
they appeared to be “undifferentiated masses.”
The seventeenth century is often referred to as the “lost century” because of the
dearth of publications in the historiography. While many works on colonial Mexico
focus on the Conquest era as a time of rapid change and violence and on the eighteenth
century as the precursor to Mexican Independence, Bennett follows a burgeoning wave
40
Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race,” 602-603.
42
The scholarship of other areas of the African diaspora has been particularly instructive in
expanding the idea of differentiating African-descended populations. In colonial Saint-Domingue, for
example, Susan M. Socolow argues that legal status, at times, trumped race as the most salient social
signifier. She writes, “Legal condition was far more important than ethnicity in establishing social
loyalties, and the gap between a free person of color and a slave was large.” Susan M. Socolow, “Economic
Roles of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More than Chattel, 286.
41
17
that focuses on the importance of the seventeenth.43 He writes, “Temporality shaped
slavery…The ascendancy of freedom in the seventeenth century requires us to reexamine
New Spain’s neglected century.”44 In his 1975 field review, Charles Gibson writes,
At the most, seventeenth-century history seemed to express the realization
or implementation of principles originating in the sixteenth. Hence, very
little was done with the seventeenth century, beyond calling attention to
our ignorance of it.45
We are now approaching the forty-year mark since Gibson made this assessment, and still
the seventeenth century has not yet escaped its peripheral place in the historiography,
especially with regard to the histories of African-descended people.
My work
reconsiders the social dynamics of the seventeenth century and aims to bring the
seventeenth century into the historiographic fold as a période fondamentale in
understanding the colonial era.
My specific periodization of 1580 to 1730 frames the significance of the longseventeenth century. With the unifications of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in
1580, Mexico became the largest importer of African slaves to the Americas, second only
to Brazil. Mexico maintained this advantageous economic position until the dissolution
of the unified crowns in 1640. The ascendancy of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne
after the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713) had wide-ranging effects on the
remaining Spanish territories, including Mexico. For the central Veracruz region, the
43
More recent contributions emphasizing the richness of the seventeenth century include: Proctor,
‘Damned Notions of Liberty’: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640-1769. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches:
Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (2007).
44
Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 11.
45
Charles Gibson, “Writings on Colonial Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 55,
no. 2 (May 1975): 303.
18
introduction of designated trade sites (known as ferias) by the first Bourbon King of
Spain Philip V changed the scale of the economies, especially for Xalapa which hosted
its first in 1722.46 Ferias were not the only changes introduced by Bourbon rule, and the
consequences of the redirection of resources, the transatlantic politics, and colonyfocused policies distinguish most of the eighteen century from the previous 150 years of
the colony’s history. In the case of Xalapa, I specifically have chosen to end at 1730
because of greater changes brought by the Bourbon administration and the drastic decline
in cases noting African-descended women after this time period.
Terminology
In Poblaciones y Culturas de Origen Africano en México, Catharine Good
Eshelman writes, “The objective is to develop a vocabulary and a useful conceptual tool
to elucidate the social complexity.” 47 The question of terminology has remained
unresolved in the field of the African diaspora in Latin America with good cause. Over
the last three decades, the field has come to encompass a panorama of disciplines,
including history, anthropology, sociology, musicology, art, literature and even the
biomedical sciences. The diversity of academic areas yields an equally diverse field of
identifications for Africans and their descendants whose tenure in New Spain and
present-day Mexico spans nearly 500 hundred years.
Early scholars followed the
terminological lead that Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán expounds in his foundational 1946 text,
La Población Negra. Although Aguirre Beltrán includes references to “cantidades de
46
My translation, Catherine Good Eshelman, “Poblaciones y Culturas de Origen Africano en
Mexico,” in Poblaciones y culturas de origen africano en México, María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez and
Ethel Correa Duró, eds. (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2005), 146.
47
19
ébano” (quantities of ebony) and “la presencia del hombre de ébano” (the presence of the
man of ebony), Aguirre Beltrán consistently uses the Spanish term negro with regard to
the African diaspora in Mexico.
In his chapter entitled “Caracteríticas Somáticas,”
Aguirre Beltrán provides the earliest scholarly articulation of the caste system in Mexico.
In his introductory chapters, he also offers a long discussion about the different African
nations identified throughout Mexico’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
However, Aguirre Beltrán’s use of negro prevails throughout, and as the presumptive
“founder” of Afro-Mexican Studies, many scholars followed suit. Until, that is, there
appeared in the 1990s what seemed to be a break in the practice. As the field expanded
and more scholars entered it, largely from the United States and Mexico, new terms arose
in the literature.
In my survey of Afro-Mexican historiography, which is largely
historical with some inclusions of anthropological studies, I found core trends and
“terminological epochs,” which at times overlap. They fall generally into four categories:
generational, disciplinal, epochal (modern vs. colonial) and linguistic (focusing on
differences in Spanish- and English-language literature).
Brief History of the Caste System
The growth in terminological variance in the field follows a similar trajectory of
terminological variance during the colonial era. It began with a few categories and
relative continuity, progressed to a rapid expansion of terminological options, and then
settled into a relatively stable set of categories but not necessarily stable with respect to
the meanings of these terms. To understand the Spanish colonial permutations of caste
identifications, one must first return to Iberia. The caste system of New Spain had its
20
roots in pre-conquest notions of “otherness” tainting the limpieza de sangre (purity of
blood) of “Old World” Spanish Christians. That limpieza de sangre did not emerge as a
colony-specific “project” forms a critical element in any examination of the social
anxieties manifested in colonial Mexico.
Historian Maria Elena Martinez argues that colonial discourses on race in New
Spain were cast from the same iron as those of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century concerns
about controlling and patrolling religious purity.48 She writes,
New Spain’s race, or caste, system was partly inspired by the Spanish
concept of limpieza de sangre, which originally referred to the status or
condition of having unsullied ‘Old Christian’ ancestry, free of Jewish,
Muslim, and other heretical antecedents.49
As the colony ushered in the seventeenth century, limpieza de sangre shed most of its
religious associations and focused on racial connotations, for reasons to be discussed
below. Initially, Africans and indigenous groups had been considered a threat to blood
purity because of their status as “new” Christians. Then, as Martinez asserts, “[Limpieza
de sangre experienced] a discursive shift…[that] increasingly marked both native and
African ancestries as impure and generally saw mixture with either group in negative
terms.”50 However, she adds, “[I]t was black blood that was more frequently and
systematically construed as a stain on a lineage.”51
As two racialized “others,” how did it come to be that indigenous groups and
Africans and their descendants experienced limpieza de sangre so differently in New
48
Martinez, “Black Blood of New Spain,” 479-520.
Martinez, “Black Blood of New Spain,” 483.
50
51
49
21
Spain?
It was believed that, through a few generations of interracial mixing with
Spaniards, often as few as three, indios could be “purified” and also become Spanish.
This process of whitening was visually represented in the casta paintings of the
eighteenth century. In a four-scene painting representing four generations in a family, the
indio heritage of a family was often lost by the final panel. In Casta Paintings, Ilona
Katzew writes, “The idea of purifying one’s blood back to white, with all its paradoxes
and intricate blood measuring methods, must have been common [by the seventeenth
century].”52 The belief that indigenous people could access “purity” stems partly from
their status previous to the Spanish conquest. Magali Carrera writes,
[Spaniards] acknowledged the existence of social and political hierarchy
among the indigenous people and recognized…Indian nobles…In fact,
following the logic of raza, Spaniards believed that Indian blood was
unblemished by infidel blood and, this, was essentially a pure blood.53
However, theoretical purity was not extended to people of African descent. Unlike
indigenous people, Africans were deemed an “unfixable” population. In the early 1600’s,
Fray Prudencio de Sandoval asserted that people of African descent could not rid
themselves of their “negritude” even with “thousands” of white ancestors.54 Martinez
writes, “The growing association between black blood, slavery, and impurity can in part
52
Katzew, Casta Paintings, 49.
Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain, 12.
54
Martinez, “Black Blood of New Spain,” 485. And this is not to say that a few did not try by
attempting to buy their way out of their African heritage through “gracias al sacar” petitions. See, Ann
Twinam, “Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations on the Essence of Pardo-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End
of Empire,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, Andrew B. Fisher and
Matthew O’Hara, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 140-165.
53
22
be attributed to the Iberians’ long history of linking blackness to both servitude and Islam
(because of the presence of black slaves in Muslim parts of the Iberian peninsula).”55
Colonial authorities found it challenging to categorize people of African descent,
because, as “tainted” people who could not completely “blanquearse,”56 they did not
easily fit into a three-race schema. In La Población Negra, Aguirre Beltrán writes,
During the first century of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the distinction
between the different populations that were integrating was simple and its
stratification logical: 1) Spanish conquerors and settlers, 2) vanquished
indigenous groups, 3) imported enslaved Africans. Verifying the mixing
among the three populations presented a problem with placing the
offspring in any one of the three boxes…57
As many colonial documents attested, designating people by mixed-caste categories was
notoriously inconsistent. The caste system of the eighteenth century involved a wide
array of identifications for people of African heritage.
Most commonly employed
throughout colonial Mexico were negro, mulato, and pardo, but a plethora of other
categories arose as the century progressed: morisco, coyote, lobo, trigueño, prieto,
cambujo, barcino, and canelo.58 In seventeenth-century Xalapa, however, this level of
terminological diversity did not exist.59
Spanish institutions, specifically ecclesiastical and notarial in this study, identified
55
To whiten oneself or one’s progeny through marriage and procreation with people of white
physical characteristics.
57
My translation, Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra, 153.
58
Álvaro Ochoa Serrano, Afrodescendientes: Sobre Piel Canela (Zamora: El Colegio de
Michoacán, 1997), 77.
59
Carroll notes, “As early as the first quarter of the seventeenth century Jalapans commonly
used the six racial terms defined in chapter 5, namely: white, Indian, negro, mestizo, mulatto, and
pardo.” Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 113. My research in the notarial and parish archives of
Xalapa corresponds with Carroll's findings. However, I have chosen not to translate these designations
to English.
56
23
people of known or “visible” African descent by the following: negro, mulato, pardo and,
to a lesser extent, moreno.
Although terminological definitions varied in colonial
Mexico, the most common interpretations of the most common categories are these:
negro or moreno denoted someone of African heritage who was not (or did not appear to
be) racially mixed; a mulato was someone of both Spanish and African heritage; and a
pardo was someone of African and indigenous heritage. However, someone of African
and indigenous descent could also be identified as mulato depending on whether that
person had a lighter skin tone.60 On a few occasions, the notary added origin information
regarding African kingdoms or regions. For instance, a mother of a free mulata was
categorized as from “Guinea.” Whether "Guinea" served as a signifier for all of Africa or
whether the woman was actually from this region of western Africa is unknown.
Additionally, some notaries made clarifications, stating, for instance, “This woman is
mulata but may appear to be negra.” Or, that a woman was a mulata blanca, perhaps a
descriptor that referred to someone almost indiscernibly of African descent but enough to
declare it, or to have it declared by a notary, or to have it be common public knowledge.
Most importantly, the archives of Veracruz revealed that notaries and religious officials
regularly identified claimants within the confines of the sistema de castas. Most of the
cases for this study involved women identified as mulatas. However, as the seventeenth
century came to a close, more and more women of African descent were being identified
as pardas.
Although mulatas, and later pardas, represented the majority of cases
examined here, I also included the few cases involving free negras and morenas.
60
Gilberto Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, Siglo XVII (Xalapa, Veracruz, México:
Universidad Veracruzana, 1995), 113.
24
Sign of the Times: Early Scholars and Terminology
The literature on the African diaspora in Mexico yields an array of terminological
possibilities. However, this variance developed quite late in the historiography. In La
Población Negra, Aguirre Beltrán heavily employs negro as his encompassing term for
Africans and their descendants in New Spain. When discussing specific groups of castas,
he uses the designations found in archival materials, such as mulato, negro, and pardo.61
In El Negro Esclavo en Nueva España, Aguirre Beltrán reiterates his preference for negro
and la población negra as inclusive terms for his work. Aguirre Beltrán’s use of the
word negro must be placed in the context of other early twentieth-century studies on
Africans and people of African descent in Latin America. Early influential scholars, such
as Frank Tannenbaum (Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, 1947), Gilberto
Freyre (Casa-Grande & Senzala, 1933), and Fernando Ortiz (Los Negros Esclavos,
1916), to name but a few, all relied on the vernacular of their time and place. For a
majority of the Spanish- and English-speaking scholars of the first half of the twentieth
century, this term was “negro” in Spanish or “Negro” or “negro” in English. Such
studies were groundbreaking in their own right, but none explicitly examined the racial
terminology they employed.
A twenty-year stretched between Aguirre Beltrán's work and the next widely
published and circulated pieces on the African diaspora in Mexico.62 From the 1960s to
61
It is of some importance that Aguirre Beltrán makes a distinction between the indios, mulatos,
and negros. He writes, “The free negros and mulatos did not constitute a true “caste” like the indios.
Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra, 291. However, Aguirre Beltrán does not go on to define what a
“true caste” was in the colonial Mexican context.
62
Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 235-253.
25
the late 1980s, a majority of the published material employed the term “Negro” or the
relatively new term, “black.” And, perhaps foreshadowing the popularity of the term
amongst later generations of scholars, Edgar F. Love experimented with the functionality
of “persons of African descent.”63 Although Love also uses “Negro,” the classification
“of African descent” makes a strong early appearance in this 1971 article. Of a sample of
three monographs since Aguirre Beltrán's seminal work, Colin Palmer decided on
“Black” (1976), whereas Gerald Cardoso (1983) went with “Negro” and Adriana Naveda
Chávez (1987) vacillated between “negros” and “esclavos africanos.” What is clear is
that very little terminological variation appeared in the literature in the fifty years
following the publication of La Población Negra.
By the 1990s, more foundational scholars had emerged, and the field began to
blossom, as did the terminology these scholars experimented with during this third wave.
Within a decade, the literature had gained more than a dozen important works, and it was
evident that the field was taking off in a new terminological direction. One of the most
recognizable additions to the literature during this time period was the term “AfroMexican,” employed by Carroll (1991) and then in an article by Palmer (1994).
However, it was not the only addition. Scholars worked through a myriad of options
during the 1990s. In Blacks in Colonial Veracruz (1991), Carroll uses a half dozen
different terms: Afro-Mexicans, blacks, Afro-Veracruzanos, Africans, Afro-Jalapan,
Afro-casta, and even “black racial hybrids.” Ben Vinson's 1994 article introduced “free
63
Edgar F. Love, “Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City
Parish,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 1 (February 1971): 79-91.
26
colored,” a term he stood by in works published as late as 2004.64 Kimberly S. Hanger
largely uses “free black,” “free person of color,” and also the Spanish term “libre” (free
person) as inclusive designations for people of African descent in Spanish New Orleans
and occasionally uses untranslated casta labels from the colonial documents with which
she works.65 The use of translated and untranslated Spanish caste designations also
became more prevalent as seen in Hanger’s work on Spanish New Orleans.66 Although
the literature in Spanish seemed to prefer “negro” or “esclavo”67 (slave) as collective
terms, Fernando Winfield Capitaine brought some change with “la población africana y
sus descendientes” (the African population and their descendants) in 1992 and Luz María
Martinez Montiel also utilized the term “la presencia africana” (the African presence) in
1994 to bring greater terminological variety to Spanish-language literature.
The new millennium introduced more scholars, innovative research, and diverse
terminologies, but the field had not arrived at an agreement as to which terms were most
appropriate. In the last thirteen years, dozens of monographs, anthologies, articles, and
documentaries dedicated to some aspect of Afro-Mexican history and life have been
produced. Although there is no current consensus, there are clear terminological frontrunners. “Black” has gained in popularity since its early introduction.68 In Hall of
Mirrors, Laura Lewis also uses “black” as her dominant inclusive term, but she also uses
64
Vinson, “Articulating Space”; Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty.
Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places (1997).
66
Kimberly Hanger uses the term black, but also transitions to colonial designations of morena but
also uses the English word mulatto. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places (1997).
67
Herrera Casasús, Piezas de Indias (1991).
68
Favored by such scholars as Herman Bennett (2003 & 2009); Matthew Restall (2000, 2005,
2009), María Elena Martinez (2004); Theodore Vincent (1994, 2001); Martha Menchaca (2001); and
Nicole Von Germeten (2006).
65
27
“mulatto” to refer to African-descended people collectively. 69
Lewis discusses
“blackness” and “mulattoesness” but does not specify who would belong to either of
these categories or what these categories signify.
Ben Vinson's 2004 contribution continued with his previous preferred
identifications, but for the first time, he included an explanation for his terminological
choices. He writes,
On a final note, this book uses the words “free-colored” and “black”
interchangeably. These refer to the same racial groups, namely pardos,
morenos, and mulatos. While many scholars have utilized various forms
of nomenclature to refer to these groups in the past, free-colored is the
preferred terminology here, and is the most used. It more faithfully
captures the spirit of colonial referencing – pardos libres, morenos libres,
and mulato libres...70
Vinson does not elaborate as to how “free-colored” more faithfully captures colonial
categories, but is one of few who broaches the question of the researcher's preference.
Nicole Von Germeten's 2007 monograph makes clear in the introduction that she is aware
of the terminological debate. She states, “This book uses racial labels throughout; such
usage must be consistent and have a theoretical and historical justification.”71 Von
Germeten offers some background for her choices. She writes,
I chose to use the more general term “Afromexican,” which does not
appear in colonial documents, to refer to the group of people, both slave
and free, of African or mixed racial heritage, who lived in New Spain
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. My purpose in using this
term is to suggest that a diverse range of individuals of African descent
contributed individually and collectively to many aspects of life in New
69
Frank T. Proctor also uses the translated terms of “black” and “mulatto” to refer broadly to
people of African descent. Proctor (2010).
70
Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 6.
71
Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 4.
28
Spain through their own version of religious piety, especially in the
seventeenth century…The term “Afromexican” connotes a fluid group and
is meant to highlight the long-term presence of people of African ancestry
and suggest that they influenced the development of Mexican religion and
society…“Afromexican” captures these subtleties of meaning.72
Von Germeten further argues that racial labels should “be consistent and have theoretical
and historical justification.”73 I do not think that “consistency” necessarily has to be a
goal for the field, but her call for greater conversation regarding such choices should be
central as we situate our research.
Among Spanish-language scholars, the terms afrodescendientes, afromestizos,
and afromexicanos have also found traction.74 However, colonial terms, such as “negro”
and “mulato” are still prevalent among some Spanish-language writers. 75 A few
scholars, however, continue to experiment terminologically. In Castas, Feligresía, y
Ciudadanía en Yucatán, Melchor Campos García uses castas, vecinos de color,
afromestizo, moreno, africanos, negros, la población negra, la población de color, and
72
74
Adriana Naveda, “Presentación,” in Pardos, Mulatos y Libertos: Sexto Encuentro de
Afromexicanistas, Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, ed. (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 2001), 9-14;
Norma Angélica Castillo, “La pérdida de la población de origen africano en la región de Puebla: El cruce
de la barrera del color por las inconsistencias de la categorías raciales: Análisis de la genealogías y
conflictos interétnicos,” in Poblaciones y culturas de origen africano en México, 299-325; Luz Alejandra
Cárdenas S., “Historia y Alteridad: Mujeres de origen africano en el Acapulco colonial,” in Poblaciones y
culturas de origen africano en México, 327-334.
75
Juan M. de la Serna H. “Bregar y Liberar: Los esclavos de Querétaro en el siglo XVIII” in
Pardos, Mulatos y Libertos: Sexto Encuentro de Afromexicanistas, 99-116; Ursula Camba Ludlow
Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias: conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos
novohispanos, siglos XVI-XVII (Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos,
2008); Nicolás Ngou-Mvé, “Historia de la Población Negra en México: Necesidad de un enfoque
triangular” in Poblaciones y culturas de origen africano en México, 39-63; Blanca Lara Tenorio, “La
integración de los negros en la naciente sociedad poblana 1570-1600,” in Poblaciones y culturas de
origen africano en México, 285-297.
73
29
originarios de África.76 There also appears to be a preference among anthropologists for
“afro-mestizo,” although very little has been said as to why.
Anthologies have served to demonstrate the variety of terms among a crosssection of disciplines and the various trends among established and newer scholars. In
Adriana Naveda's 2001 anthology Pardos, Mulatos y Libertos, she along with her
contributors employ a wide range of terms. However, a few scholars have obvious
terminological preferences. Naveda uses afromexicano, la cultura africana, la presencia
africana, afromestizos, africanos, and esclavos africanos.
María Elisa Velásquez
Gutiérrez uses la población del origen africano, la población africana y su descendencia,
grupos de origen africano, and mujeres africanos with a strong preference for “de origen
africano.” Ben Vinson predominantly employs the term la población negra. Luz María
Martínez Montiel, an early scholar of Afro-Mexican studies, limits her terminological
usage to negro and la presencia africana in her piece, “Esclavitud y Capitalismo en
Ámerica,” perhaps because of the breadth of the project. Juan González Esponda uses la
población africana, la presencia africana, los negros esclavos, africanos, and la
población negra y afromestiza. While Juan M. De la Serna H. uses negro, la población
de color, and la población mulata, he notably uses the term esclavo as his inclusive term.
De la Serna H. explains his preference: “We know from experience that ethnic categories
like mulato, negro, pardo or morisco, were used as synonyms for ‘slave’.”77 De la Serna
H.'s suppositions have not held true for the archival materials that I have examined, but
76
Melchor Campos Garcia, Castas, Feligresía, y Ciudadanía en Yucatán: Los afromestizos bajo
el regimen constitucional espanol, 1750-1822 (Merida, Yucatan, Mexico: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y
Tecnologia, Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, 2005).
77
My translation, Juan Manuel de la Serna Herrera, “Bregar and Liberar,” 107.
30
this is not to say that his depiction is not an accurate characterization of archives in
Querétaro.
The greatest terminological diversity among recent anthologies comes from María
Elisa Velázquez and Ethel Correa's Poblaciones y Culturas de Origen Africano de
México (2005). Although Colin Palmer's contribution was originally written in English
and later translated, it includes nearly a dozen different terms: la población africana de
México, esclavos africanos, la población negra, las culturas negras de México, el estudio
del pasado africano en este país, las culturas afromexicanas, los africanos, los negros,
poblaciones de origen africano, personas de origen africano. In her two contributions in
the collection, María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez has a clear preference for using terms
that describe origin, but she also includes an array of synonyms: la población africana, la
presencia y participación de los africanos en México, las africanas y sus descendientes,
los estudios sobre negras y mulatas, la presencia feminina de origen africano, las
mujeres de origen africano y sus descendientes, and la población de origen africano.
However, most scholars vacillated between using caste-specific categories and utilizing a
host of encompassing terms without describing why such terms worked for their
particular projects, whether theoretically or methodologically. The field had begun to
shift, and historians now increasingly challenge their own use of categories – perhaps a
late side effect of earlier scholarship that had questioned the idea of the rigidity of the
caste system.
Questioning the Caste System
No historian before R. Douglas Cope took to task the strict and stagnant
31
interpretation of the caste system in Mexico as fully as in his 1994 work, The Limits of
Racial Domination. The earliest division of the “two republics,” one of indios and the
other of españoles (and other castas), may have served juridical purposes, but the two
groups were never actually so divided. The same was true of the caste system.
Cope
explores this fluidity through his research on plebeian spaces to counter the notion that
the caste system exclusively divided the races of colonial society. Cope argues, “In a
multiracial society such as colonial Mexico, ethnic identity itself became a prime point of
contention and confusion. Elite attempts at racial or ethnic categorizations met with
resistance as non-Spaniards pursued their own, often contradictory, ends: social mobility,
group solidarity, self definition.”78 If the caste system was an ill-defined and flexible
entity, then so too were the caste identifications that it produced. Cope writes,
[E]thnic status is not fixed permanently at birth, by official fiat, but
constitutes a social identity that may be reaffirmed, modified,
manipulated, or perhaps even rejected – all in a wide variety of contexts.
In short, “the use of ethnic identity is free...flexible,” and strategic.79
The agency demonstrated and the strategies employed by castas complicated notions of
the institutional influence in the quotidian experience for colonial subjects in Mexico.
In theory, the caste system not only divided the races but ordered them
hierarchically.
However, implementation of this invested societal ideal varied greatly
across the colony. Cope asserts,
Most significant, the racial and economic aspects of the Spanish-casta
division were inconsistent. In reality, not all castas were relegated to the
low-status occupations, nor did Spaniards hold solely prestigious
78
79
32
positions.80
Later scholars continued to challenge the efficacy of the caste system and the vast
disparity in how authorities employed it in different parts of the colony, as well as how its
meanings might have changed over time.
Bennett argues, “Racial labels took on
meanings that were not necessarily shared throughout New Spain. The depositions from
people who had been familiar with each other for many years, if not a lifetime, suggest
that there was much ambiguity in the meaning of racial and ethnic labels.”81 Bennett
adds,
As has been evident throughout, social labels had an ambiguous quality.
Though the sources often underscore a range of possibilities, these
meanings never remained fixed nor were they employed beyond a given
regulatory context.82
The lack of juridical uniformity across the vast expanse of New Spain created an array of
caste systems and an even greater variety of caste identifications that allowed for spaces
of negotiation and even arbitration when disputes arose.
Importantly, regional
particularity has proven to be extremely relevant when discussing the caste system and
caste identifications.
One of the permutations of the caste system that Campos García finds in his work
of the Yucatan peninsula also holds true for Veracruz. He writes, “The designation of
moreno was in use from 1567 to 1700, but then disappeared as a status category of
entrants. However, the categories of mulato, pardo, and negro prevailed throughout the
80
82
81
33
colonial period.”83 During this early colonial period, there were some consistencies
throughout the colony. In Africans in Colonial Mexico, Herman Bennett writes, “Often
manifest in regulatory moments, the terms became symbolic markers that flourished
despite the ways in which they obscured the nuances of experience and diverse
meanings.”84 The seventeenth century was certainly a period of increased consolidation
of colonial administration and, by extension, the development of the caste system as an
administrative tool underlies this phenomenon.
In Afroméxico, Ben Vinson draws our attention to the silences caused by the
inconsistencies of or caste terminology in any archive. He asserts,
When the category was finally assigned, such as pardo or mulato, the
bureaucrats never clarified these terms. In other words, the exact details
of race and of the gendered mixture of race did not concern them so much,
especially in the eighteenth century when lineage was very difficult to
trace.85
During the seventeenth it was not unheard-of that newly arrived slaves and first- or
second-generation free people had some idea about their ancestry, although having such
information recorded in written documents was rare. That certain caste identifications
gained prevalence should not obscure the possibility of their functioning as placeholders,
ready to be inscribed with any number of meanings.
Herman Bennett posits an even wider colonial use of the term mulato. He argues,
“For many individuals, especially secular and ecclesiastical authorities, mulatto simply
83
My translation, Campos Garcia, Castas, Feligresía, y Ciudadanía en Yucatán, 21.
85
Vinson and Vaughn, Afroméxico, 31-32.
84
34
constituted a descriptive and juridical referent to transgression and impurity.”86 In the
late sixteenth century the usage of racialized placeholders is evident in the use of the term
“vagabundo,” or vagabond, as an inclusive term for free people of African descent who
were not tied to Spanish masters or employers.
The questions regarding the
inconsistencies of the larger caste system have sparked greater debate about the function
of the terms scholars were and are still using. Fortunately, this has encouraged some
scholars to address explicitly the dilemma of terminological appropriateness, and it has
influenced others to call for action in the field of Afro-Diasporic Studies.
Taking Terms to Task
If the 1990s marked the advent of questioning the stability of the caste system and
by extension the categories that it produced, then the last thirteen years, 2000 to 2013,
witnessed direct interrogation of the terminology used by scholars.
In Christian,
Blasphemers, and Witches (2007), Joan Cameron Bristol squarely addresses the issue of
terminology. She writes,
[T]o study them we must begin with the most basic set of questions. Who
were Afro-Mexicans?…As we shall see, the category “Afro-Mexican”
itself encompasses a great variety of individuals and experiences. Some
Afro-Mexicans were Africans brought from West and West Central Africa
to serve as slaves in Mexico, and some were born in Spain. Others were
creoles, born and raised in New Spain and other parts of Spanish America.
Some were labeled negros (blacks) and others mulatos (mulattoes),
indicating mixed parentage. Many Afro-Mexicans were enslaved, yet
large numbers were free by the end of the seventeenth century, and many
individuals passed from slavery to freedom over the course of their
lifetimes.87
86
87
Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 1-2.
35
Bristol was not the first to address the vast diversity of experiences that the term “AfroMexican” encapsulates, but her work is indicative of a trend of publications in the field
that recognize the importance of what terminology does for our projects. In Afroméxico
(2004), Bobby Vaughn offers a cohesive discussion on terminological particularity in
what he see as the divide between the academic campus and the campo. He writes,
First, it is necessary to explain the racial, ethnic, and color terminology
that I use in this paper to distinguish what is used by academics in Mexico
and by the inhabitants of the Costa Chica. Contrary to the Mexican
academy and popular convention, I prefer to use the terms indigenous and
indigenous towns, instead of the word indio. In the Costa Chica, most
Mexicans of African descent use the distasteful word indio. To refer to
Mexicans of African descent, I use the terms “afromexicanos” and
“negros” interchangeably, and, unless otherwise noted, my use of the term
negro is a shorthand to refer to "afro-mexicanos" and does not suggest a
particular skin color. Afro-Mexican, then, is roughly the equivalent to the
local term “moreno” that is sometimes used by locals to refer to people of
the entire ethnic community, regardless of color…By using the terms
afromexicanos and negro, I diverge significantly from the conventions
employed by the Mexican academy that prefers the term afromestizo.88
Vaughn highlights one of the core negotiations that take place for anthrolopologists:
How to address sensitively the local terms that people use to self-identify and also attend
to terminological trends in the academy.
Although the residents of the Costa Chica widely use the term moreno,
Vaughn decides to use afromexicano and negro as inclusive and interchangeable terms.
Scholars are now adding footnotes like Vaughn’s to discuss their choices, which I see as
a productive progression in the field.
Catharine Good Eshelman urges others to
problematize the language we use to label groups. She writes, “The categorical diversity
88
Vinson and Vaughn, Afroméxico, 75.
36
that researchers use in different cases leads to other theoretical and methodological
problems. Using these concepts to study the African, we also deal with the lack of
consensus on their definitions.”89 And perhaps in a direct commentary towards the
previous years of generalizations of caste history, Good Eshelman argues,
The nomenclature that we use to analyze and describe social relations
must be adapted to particular historical or current situations. For example,
one can not assume that there are clear boundaries that separate a black, an
Indian, a peasant or a worker. Nor can we assume that the social meaning
of this designation is obvious…In particular, we must work with more
flexible categories and formulate more open concepts…If the current
categories and terminologies of our disciplines are to correlate with actual
facts, we must create new terms of reference or redefine the existing
ones.90
Terminological variation seems to have stabilized, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Where the field appears to be heading is greater awareness as to what kind of theoretical
or methodological work particular terminologies do for each scholar.
Terminology in this Study: What I Use and Why
I have deliberately chosen not to translate into English any of the caste
distinctions relating to African descent. I have also decided not to translate the modifiers
criollo and criolla, because changing these terms to “creole” may be misleading for some
audiences. Many people in the United States understand “creole” to denote someone of
89
My translation, Catharine Good Eshelman, “El Estudio Antropológico-histórico de la
Población de Origen Africano en México: Problemas Teóricos y Metodológicos,” in Poblaciones y
culturas de origen africano en México, eds. María Velázquez Gutiérrez and Ethel Correa Duró (Mexico,
DF: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), 144.
90
My translation, Good Eshelman, “El Estudio Antropológico-histórico de la Población de Origen
Africano,” 146.
37
French and African ancestry, usually from Louisiana.91
“Creole” was also used to
designate someone of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America. In
Mexico, the term criollo had both geographically and culturally specific meanings. In the
early colonial period it referred to people of African descent born outside of Africa.92 It
later became a marker of Mexican authenticity, indiscriminate of race, as the conflict
between colony and metropole heightened in the early nineteenth century. As a point of
clarification, the caste of negro refers to people who were perceived to be of non-mixed
African ancestry or who had more prominent African physical characteristics.
Its
translation into “black” is largely understood to be a more inclusive term for anyone of
African ancestry, including people of mixed heritage. However, to avoid confusion with
the limited use of the Spanish caste designation of negro in colonial Xalapa and the
inclusive English translation of “black,” all caste distinctions remain in their Spanish
form and are italicized, with the exception of direct quotations from secondary sources.
In addition, I employ the Spanish term casta descriptively. As “caste” is widely
accepted in the field as an acceptable translation that is distinct from other connotations,
such as the context of India, I have chosen to use the English form as a subject form.
Finally, I also use the term “Afro-casta” as an encompassing term to refer to people of
91
An extensive literature exists on the history of creole culture and history in Louisiana.
Important contributions include: Sybil Kein, Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of
Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Virginia R. Domínguez, White by Definition:
Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986);
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the
Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
92
Lockhart asserts that before 1560, criollo referred to Africans almost exclusively and meant
someone born outside of Africa. Which meant that Africans born in Spain, Portugal, and the colonies were
all criollos. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History, 2nd edition (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 198.
38
African descent.93 In Xalapa, I found no substantive difference in the “notarial or
ecclesiastical lives” among castes of African descent and to collapse the terms negro,
moreno, pardo, and mulato, I use Afro-casta as a functional placeholder.
For this project, I primarily transition between the descriptions of descent (such as
African-descended, Africans and their descendants, and “of African descent”) and “Afrocasta.”
My usage does not presume that all African-descended people in colonial
Veracruz understood themselves as a cohesive group. I argue that my terminological
choices shed light on how incohesive and amorphous the caste system was. For instance,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish royal edicts that dictated restrictions against
Afro-castas were often written as “XYZ law prohibiting mulatos, pardos, negros,
morenos, and zambaigos from doing XYZ thing.”94 This amalgamation of all castes of
African descent was not uncommon in the colonial documents, and I use these variations
of descent to reference this history and those practices. When making specific references
to women, such as Polonia, I use their casta identification at least once and then often
transition to references to them as African-descended women.
I use the term “women of means” to designate women of African descent who
were in a position to register their business activities (whatever they may have been) with
the local notary or to be named as a principal actor or recipient in the notarized business
of another registrant. The cases I examine found such “women of means” to include
slave owners, landholders, business owners, and close friends and associates of
93
Patrick Carroll utilizes this the term “Afro-casta” in Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, among a
plethora of other terms to refer to people of African descent. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz (1991).
94
See various examples in Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (Madrid, Spain:
Boix, 1841), Tomo Segundo, Título Quinto, Leyes I through XXIX, 320-325.
39
prominent families in Xalapa. However, I also include in this category “of means”
women who may have lacked economic capital but who had cultural or social capital.
The documents that I utilized in this study also attest to a few cases of
intergenerational wealth among free women of African descent. The methodological
decision to begin in the notarial archives allowed me to demarcate these women from
others who did not have the means to be principal actors in notarial transactions or who
did not have the legal acumen to navigate Spanish institutions. In this way, “women of
means” serves as a status placeholder materially, culturally, and socially. The wielding
of cultural capital implicit in these transactions also provided insight into the early
adaptability of free African-descended people in Xalapa. This study includes women
who were indisputably wealthy, but also women who were firmly of the middling
economic sector, and those whose lives barely made the historical radar because of a
scarcity of capital. The inclusive term “women of means,” as opposed to women with
wealth, provides the necessary breadth to survey this demographic as a whole and allows
a degree of depth with specific cases of free women of African descent.
My choices of Afro-casta and “of descent” beyond their function as inclusive
terms, also shed light on how inconsistent and incoherent the usage of caste terminology
was. Those identified as mulata were not necessarily women who had fair complexions
or whose parents were identified as an español and a negra (or a negro and an española).
Nor has there been significant evidence that mulatos, negros, pardos, and morenos (just
to name a few) were phenotypically distinct as “members” of that designation or that they
had significantly different life chances because they were labeled mulato instead of pardo
40
or any other caste designation for people of African descent. R. Douglas Cope asserts
that people of mixed heritage “and plebeians in general – knew little of their ancestry and
were uninterested in the complexities of the sistema de castas.” 95 In his work on
seventeenth-century Mexico, Frank Proctor argues that such differences were contextual
“but did not necessarily demarcate mutually exclusive racial identities.”96 Where such
differences between people of African descent may have been perceptible were in niche,
numerically-limiting establishments, such as the militia.97 I believe that “of African
descent” allows for a more general discussion of race, especially during the colonial era
when the boundaries of “Mexico” did not yet exist as we know them today and not all
people in this study were born within the boundaries of colonial Mexico.
Both inclusive and purposefully nebulous, “of African descent” allows for more
flexibility to speak about the myriad of racial profiles that were encompassed by unstable
categories such as negro, mulato, pardo, and moreno. For people not born in the
colonies, I have noted their ethnic group or, in the rare cases where it is noted in the
sources, kingdom affiliations.
A final note:
My preference for terminologies “of
descent” also speaks to my support for and appreciation of the works and histories of the
African Diaspora in Latin America. People of African descent in Spanish-speaking
countries are demanding visibility and scholars the world over are flocking to African
Diaspora Studies. By adopting “of African descent” as a unifying language, I believe the
95
Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty, 61.
97
Ben Vinson notes a few cases where free mulatos were integrated into regular Spanish militias,
while pardos and morenos were kept apart in their own militias. However, Vinson also notes that
aggression towards militiamen of African descent affected mulatos as it did pardos and morenos. Vinson,
Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 207.
96
41
field adopts the both/and orientation, as opposed to either/or, that we need to appreciate
the national particularity of these histories along with the wider implications of historical
and contemporary movements (cultural, social, political, linguistic, and geographic) of
people of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean.
The field continues to suffer from the same linguistic schizophrenia that prospered
throughout the colonial era. We are the inheritors of a language system that our forebears
propagated and struggled with in the documents they produced and reproduced
throughout the colony. Perhaps scholars will never agree on a term or set of terms to
describe Africans and their descendants in New Spain as subjects and later as Mexican
citizens. However, I look forward to greater debate and open discussion about why such
words for particular scholars are useful and how they see such terms advancing the
understanding of the complexity of life for people of African descent in Mexico, in
particular, and Latin America, more broadly.
Background: The African Diaspora in Mexico and the Development of Xalapa,
Veracruz
On April 22, 1519, Hernando Cortés walked on the balmy, tropical beaches of an
unfamiliar coast. A man named Alonzo Hernández Puertocarrero turned to Cortés and
exclaimed, “Behold rich lands! May you know how to govern them well.”98 On that
day, the voyagers began the work to found a Spanish town on that land with a name
inspired by its wealth of beauty, Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz or “Rich Town of the True
Cross.” Onto these same rich lands would disembark free and enslaved Africans and
98
Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 83.
42
African-descended people to serve in auxiliary roles during the Spanish Conquest of the
Americas.99 More than one hundred thousand would make it to the shores of Veracruz
and the colonial era bore witness to the contestation of power and competition of
resources among new actors. Africans, Spaniards, diverse indigenous groups, criollos,
peninsulares, crown officials, and slave-holders all found themselves negotiating the
terms of their interactions in a constantly shifting environment influenced by local,
regional, colony-wide, and transatlantic events.
While more than a few African-descended men would join the conquest efforts
alongside Spanish conquistadors, and others would serve as “involuntary colonists,”100
labor motivated the Spanish Crown to encourage large-scale importation of African men,
women, and children.
In 1522, the Spanish Monarch Charles V granted the first
monopolistic trading licenses to transport 4,000 Africans to the Americas over four
years. 101 The first Crown-sponsored importation was only partially successful as
approximately 2,500 Africans were introduced to Spanish-owned territories, with an
unknown number arriving in colonial Mexico, specifically.102 King Charles V later
granted more licenses as Spanish colonies required more robust labor pools. However,
Mexico’s reliance on indigenous labor predominated in many areas of the colony for
most of the sixteenth century, even after dramatic population decreases.
In 1519, it is estimated that the indigenous population in New Spain numbered
99
Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean,1-20; Landers, Black Society in
Spanish Florida, 7-9; Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 188.
100
Matthew Restall’s description. Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 172.
101
María Guadalupe Chavez Carbajal, “La gran negritud en Michoacán, época colonial,” in
Presencia Africana en México, Luz María Martinez Montiel, ed. (Mexico, D.F.: Dirección General de
Publicaciones del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 84.
102
Chavez Carbajal, “La gran negritud en Michoacán,” 84-85.
43
between fifteen and twenty-five million.103 By 1548, these numbers had fallen to a
dismal 6.3 million.104 Less than fifty years later, New Spain counted barely 1.3 million
indigenous people.105 In Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, Patrick Carroll writes, “When
Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico in 1519, he brought with him an unwanted ally.”106
This “ally” was smallpox and it swept through the indigenous population with such
ferocity that soon thousands of indigenous people had succumbed to the disease.107 With
no previous exposure to European diseases, indigenous people all over the colony fell
victim to less severe maladies such as influenza, measles, mumps, and chickenpox.108
More virulent diseases and conditions such as typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery
devastated indigenous groups and Spaniards alike.109
In 1542, the Crown abolished indigenous slavery 110 but still instituted their
coerced labor through the allocation of encomiendas, and later repartimientos as “tribute”
to their Spanish colonizers. The abolishment of indigenous slavery helped slow the
drastic population decline of indigenous, but it also precipitated greater interest in
enslaved African labor. While Spain had a long history of interactions with Africans,111
and King Charles V had begun to issue slave licenses to large-scale traders, it was not
until the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns in 1580 that Spain’s
103
Russell Menard and Stuart Schwartz, “Why African Slavery? Labor Force Transitions in
Brazil, Mexico, and the Carolina Lowcountry,” in Slavery in the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Binder
(Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993), 98.
104
Menard and Schwartz, “Why African Slavery,” 98.
105
Menard and Schwartz, “Why African Slavery,” 98.
106
107
108
109
110
111
Ruth Pike, “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,” Hispanic
American Historical Review, Vol. 47, No. 3 (1967): 344-59.
44
involvement in the transatlantic slave trade solidified and thousands of Africans were
transported to the Spanish empire by mostly Portuguese traders. Most would be relocated
to predominantly agricultural areas or high-population cities, such as Mexico City,
Puebla, the mines of Zacatecas, the coastal areas of Oaxaca, and the semi-rural zones of
Veracruz.
Map 2: “New Spain and Environs,” Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power,
Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
xvi.
45
The actual number of enslaved Africans brought to the colony is still greatly
debated. Aguirre Beltrán posits that by 1646, there were 151,618 people of African
descent in New Spain.112 For a shorter time frame (1595 to 1622), Colin Palmer
estimates that 110,525 people of African descent were shipped to Mexico.113 Bennett
asserts that between 1595 and 1640, approximately 75,000 “West-Central Africans,”
specifically, arrived in Mexico.114 An exact number may never be possible to discern
because many of the figures come from records taken at slave ports in West Africa
instead of when vessels docked on the coasts of New Spain. Obvious statistical problems
arise because as many as twelve to fifteen percent of slaves died during the traumatic
Middle Passage.115 In addition, these numbers do not take into account the number of
slaves shipped illegally via the clandestine markets.116 However, census records from the
seventeenth century indicate that “African immigration was quantitatively greater than
whites prior to 1700.”117
Most of those who would enter Mexico would first experience the sights, sounds,
and heat of the ports of Veracruz, first through Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, then La
Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz, and finally and primarily though the port established in La
Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz.118 Starting from La Nueva, the Camino Real would lead
112
Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra, 219.
Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 28.
114
115
Douglas Richmond, “The Legacy of African Slavery in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1810,” Journal
of Popular Culture, 35, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 4.
116
117
Richmond, “The Legacy of African Slavery in Colonial Mexico,” 3.
118
The short hand for these cities were often designated in colonial documents as “Villa Rica,”
“La Antigua” or “La Antigua Veracruz,” “La Nueva” or “La Nueva Ciudad.”
113
46
merchants, slaves, free people, and Atlantic goods to the seat of viceregal power in
Mexico City.
Map 3: “Spanish lands in the province of Jalapa, ca. 1600,” Patrick J. Carroll,
Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1991), 13.
47
Along the Camino Real lay Xalapa. Unlike some of the Spanish settlements in
the central Veracruz region, Xalapa had been a populated area for centuries when Cortés
first traversed it in 1519. Indigenous communities that resided in the three “barrios” of
Xallapan, Techacapan and Xallitic constituted the area what would be known as
Xalapa.119 The famed conquistador quickly recognized Xalapa’s potential as an attractive
resting stop and “refueling” post for New Spain's travelers and traders. Through the early
colonial period, indigenous people continued to reside in these three neighborhoods, but
the newly arrived conquerors selected the barrio of Xallapan as the Spanish center.120
With the forced and voluntary assistance of the indigenous population, Xallapan soon
became home to the principal public plaza and the majority of the living quarters for
Spanish residents. It was also the area through which the Camino Real flowed in and out
of the town.121 Its more fixed population consisted of its initial founding indigenous
groups, migratory indios, Spaniards born in the colony, peninsulares, mestizos, and
people of African descent, both free and enslaved, along with the sporadic appearance of
subjects from the Philippines.
119
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 15.
121
120
48
Map 4: “Spatial zones of Jalapa, ca. 1700,” Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial
Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1991), 104.
The jurisdiction of Xalapa was unique during the colonial era in that it mirrored
the larger trajectory of the colony and was affected by transatlantic politics and policies
49
in ways that would be unexpected for a population the size of Xalapa’s. The drastic
decline in Xalapa’s indigenous population is one such example. While indigenous people
helped build many of the principal buildings of Xalapa, including the Monastery of San
Francisco and the Royal House of Spanish Justice (la Casa Real de la Justicia Española)
in the sixteenth century,122 they would be devastated in numbers comparable to those
witnessed in Mexico City.
In 1519, under the Triple Alliance control headed by
Moctezuma, Xalapa had 51,609 indigenous residents. By 1569, that number had fallen to
6,268.123 Nearly 88% of indigenous people in the jurisdiction of Xalapa had perished in
half a century. Just eleven years later, nearly a thousand more indigenous people lost
their lives, leaving the population at 5,431 residents in 1580.124 In 1580, which marked
the start of the mass importation of African slaves to Mexico, the indigenous population
in Xalapa was only 10% of its 1519 pre-Spanish size.
Xalapa, like other towns
devastated by population decline, needed labor for its diversified industries, and Africans
would fill this need starting in the long seventeenth century.
Xalapa’s non-indigenous population size is less certain.
Based on parish
sources,125 Gilberto Bermúdez Gorrochotegui has compiled estimates for Xalapa’s five
primary populations (indigenous, españoles, mulatos, mestizos, and negros) over the
course of the seventeenth century.126 For the purpose of this study, I have collapsed his
mulato and negro population data to better depict the African-descended population
122
124
125
Xalapa’s parish was not established until 1641. Thus, all extant church records date from this
time period forward.
126
123
50
compared with the sizes of others. Bermúdez Gorrochotegui estimates that between 1641
and 1650, there were 936 indigenous in Xalapa, 250 españoles, 139 people of African
descent (50 mulatos and 89 negros), and 66 mestizos. Between 1671 and 1680, he
estimates an indigenous population of 1,837, 455 españoles, 375 residents of African
descent (264 mulatos and 111 negros), and 166 mestizos. By the last decade of the
seventeenth century (1691 - 1700), Bermúdez Gorrochotegui posits 2,487 indigenous
living in the jurisdiction of Xalapa, 659 españoles, 542 people of African descent (417
mulatos and 125 negros), and just 247 mestizos. While the indigenous population slowly
recuperated, the Spanish and African-descended populations experienced dynamic
growth, as did Xalapa’s economy.
Xalapa’s main source of agricultural production was sugar, as it was for much of
the central Veracruz region. Xalapa and its sister town of Córdoba in central Veracruz
comprised two out of three of colonial Mexico’s largest sugar-producing regions.127 Due
in part to Crown gifts of land, indigenous tribute labor, and the influx of the African labor
pool, the first haciendas in the jurisdiction of Xalapa were built between 1580 and
1620.128 Some of Xalapa’s earliest agricultural sites were San Miguel de Almolonga,
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (La Concha), Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Tenampa,
San Sebastian Maxtlatlan, La Limpia Concepción de Nuestra Señora (El Chico), Lencero,
Nuestra Señora del Socorro (Las Animas), Lucas Martín, San José Zoncuantla, Nuestra
Señora de los Remedios (Pacho), San Pedro Buenavista (La Orduña), and la Santísima
127
Proctor notes the third primary sugar-producing as “central New Spain (largely Morelos).”
128
51
Trinidad (El Grande).129 Most of these largely focused on sugar cultivation and cattle
ranching, with a lesser investment in the cultivation of corn.130 Those involved in the
sugar trade would benefit handsomely during these early years of cultivation as the
demand for sugar in the world increased and the price rose steeply between 1540 and
1600.131 Hundreds of people, both free and enslaved, lived on or worked at these
ingenios and a few of these sugar-producing plantations and extraction mills would
reappear in the narratives of free African-descended women.
However, as a way station between two important economic centers (Veracruz
Port and Mexico City), Xalapa’s residents also took part in commerce-centered
businesses, such as venta (inn) and recuas (pack train business) ownership. Free women
were among those who found these businesses to be profitable. The Venta del Rio was
owned by a free African-descended woman while the Venta de la Riconada was managed
by another. Between 1560 and 1600, Spanish settlers received land grants from New
Spain’s viceroy to develop pastures for maintenance of both large and small ranch
animals, most importantly oxen and mules.132 One scholar argues that these land grants,
which placed large swaths of agrarian land under Spanish ownership, “created the base
for the future latifundia.”133 Mules, oxen, horses, and cattle were in high demand by all
levels of sugar cultivation and production, farming, and most importantly by a growing
129
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 148-149.
Ranching and sugar production occupied the interest of early Spanish residents of Xalapa.
Gorrochetgui asserts, “In the early years of the colonial period, few Spaniards were interested in the
agricultural business because they preferred to labor in commercial activities and attend to the travelers in
the inns built near the Camino Real.” Historia de Jalapa, 239.
131
Fernando Winfield Capitaine, Esclavos y Libertos en Veracruz (Xalapa, Veracruz: Editora de
Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 2009), 59.
132
133
My translation, Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 243.
130
52
transportation business.134 The recuas employed arrieros (muleteers) who moved cargo
and people with trains of mules along the Camino Real to Mexico City, Puebla, Orizaba,
and back to the Port of Veracruz.135 Both venta and recua owners served as instrumental
members of Xalapa’s development as both an agricultural region and a commercefriendly hub equipped to welcome and accommodate the business of travelers who would
bring greater economic opportunities to the relatively small colonial town.
The region was not always home to an easy flow of transatlantic import and
export, nor were Africans and their descendants compliant as they witnessed the
atrocities of slavery. Xalapa’s location in this narrative positions people of African
descent in an unusual environment in Mexico and in the central Veracruz region. Xalapa
had free and even wealthy people of African descent as early as the late sixteenth century.
Córdoba, on the other hand, was founded in 1617 in response to continued attacks on
travelers by maroons who had escaped from nearby plantations. The Spanish settlement
was meant to offer travelers greater security from maroon activity and a sojourn between
the port and the next Spanish town. Patrick Carroll notes that African-descended people
in Córdoba comprised nearly a fifth of the district’s population as a result of late reliance
on enslaved labor, beginning around 1700.136 My examination of Córdoba’s notarial
records indicates that the vast majority of these women and men of African descent were
not free. And while there were likely smaller groups of people who were living as
maroons in the shadows, the most well-documented maroon settlement was led by
134
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 249
136
135
53
Gaspar Yanga who founded the community sometime in 1580.137 Yanga and his fellow
escaped slaves fought off numerous attempts by the Royal Spanish War Party to
dismantle and re-enslave the community.
Viceroy Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marquez of Cerralvo, finally relented and
settled for a truce and signed a treaty with Yanga’s group. By October 3, 1631, Yanga’s
stronghold resulted in the establishment of the first free town of the Americas and was
christened San Lorenzo de Cerralvo, later San Lorenzo de los Negros, and now simply
Yanga. While Spanish troops were ultimately unsuccessful in defeating Yanga, colonial
authorities had experience in dealing with uprisings led by African-descended people. In
the sixteenth century, Mexico witnessed major revolts by people of African in 1537,
1546, and 1570 along with any number of smaller uprisings.138 Maroon resistance
provides the most vivid testament to the unrest brewing among the colony’s population of
African descent,139 and Xalapa was not immune to slave revolt. On June 10, 1725, the
notarial offices documented a revolt that had occurred in the jurisdiction at the ingenio
San Miguel Almolonga.140 According to a legal motion recorded a month later on July 3,
there had been an insurrection and two Spanish vecinos of nearby Naolinco had been
“gravely injured.” The perpetrators of the rebellion were identified as “negros” and
“other aggressors.” The criminal case’s resolution was not documented in the notarial
137
Love, “Legal Restrictions on Afro-Indian Relations in Colonial Mexico,” 131; see also, Roper
and Brockington, “Slave Revolt, Slave Debate,” 99.
139
Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 119-44; Love, “Negro Resistance to Spanish Rule in Colonial
Mexico”; Davidson, “Negro Slave Control”; Patrick J. Carroll, “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican
Runaway Slave Community, 1735-1827,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 19, No. 4
(October 1977): 488-505; Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd
edition (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979).
140
ANX, July 3, 1725, f 691fte - 692fte.
138
54
records, but with the high number of enslaved people in Xalapa since the early sixteenth
century, it was likely not the only incidence of slave uprising. Even with slave repression
in the region and in the air in nearby sugar mills, free women of African descent arose in
Xalapa beginning at the dawn of the long seventeenth century.
Chapter Outline
Chapter One analyzes patterns of marriage choice, familial configurations, and
godparentage. This chapter also analyzes the signficance of exogamy, the social currency
of religious legitimacy, stability of family structures, and interracial interaction. An
examination of local parish records uncovers diverse configurations of family life among
free African-descended women. The choices of free African-descended families for
godparents would also vary, but important trends arose according to particular family
configurations.
Chapter Two delves into notarial sources by first providing a demographic profile
of the free women who engaged in a wide range of matters, and it introduces us to some
of the more intimate, familial concerns of African-descended women. Demographic
information on people of African descent in the historiography has often focused on men,
especially when addressing mainstream economic involvement. Like many colonial
women of any racial background, they would outlive some of their children. Others
would live to fulfill their parental duty and offer respectable dowries for their daughters.
This chapter will also reveals how free women of African descent with wealth shared
familial preoccupations very similar to those of both Spanish and other mixed-race
women.
Beyond the immediate family, women of African descent established
55
connections to the local and regional Spanish elite, enabling them to enjoy greater social
mobility as well as access to patronage systems not available to many of their enslaved or
less economically stable brethren.
Chapter Three focuses on cases more centered on economic activities and
examines how these women engaged with certain types of economies that spoke to their
investment in particular types of social and cultural capital. It also delves into economic
contributions and analyzes consumption.
I examine economic prospects, debt,
intergenerational wealth, and business ownership.
I take on the task of discussing
consumption through an examination of wills, poderes, and bills of sale registered in the
notarial archive.
Finally, Chapter Four explores the lives of free women who owned slaves. For
African-descended women who gained their freedom, at least some of them saw slavery
as a means to establish a new subjectivity, that of slaveowner. Free women found slavery
to be a worthwhile economic venture, especially in Veracruz, where the use of enslaved
African labor was intrinsically tied to the development of the local economy. While they
engaged in slave-owning as a viable economic actvity, they may have also engaged in
performative acts of slave-owning that would lend them a social legitimacy that was not
otherwise accessible to them as women of African descent. This chapter also takes on
questions of identity and the intersection of gender politics as it relates to female
slaveownership.
The diversity of experiences had by free people of African descent is vivid,
compelling, and, sometimes, perplexing. While I build from important contributions to
56
the historiography, no other single monograph focuses exclusively on free women of
African descent in colonial Mexico. The narratives that unfold challenge traditional
interpretations of familial configurations, expand our understanding of legal acumen, and
problematize economic investment as a way to understand different forms of capital and
social legitimacy. This project on gendered and racially-negotiated strategies of free
women aims to contribute to the growing debates of understudied historical actors and
serve as a contribution towards developing a historiographical engagement with the
nearly 500-year history of Africans and their descendants in colonial and contemporary
Mexico. We begin with the cornerstone of colonial life—the family.
57
Chapter One
African-descended Families and Interracial Kinship
Historians have long debated the politics of marriage choice.1 Whether such
bonds were forged by perceived religious or familial obligations, sexual desire, or
genuine affinity, the institution of marriage remains fertile ground for socio-cultural
inquiry.2 In colonial Mexico, where Crown and Church vied for governance over their
diverse subjects, marriage and its administration was intrinsically part of the public
domain. Richard Boyer writes, “However self-contained married life, it nevertheless
connected to society at every turn.”3 As a Christian sacrament, it also marked for adults
an important step into social and religious integration – an expression and progression of
one's public identity.
For colonial subjects of African descent, marriage may have
represented an entrée into legitimate social spaces. As a core organizing institution,
marriage could define life chances, shape social networks, and influence one’s economic
prospects along with those of future children. Securing an advantageous extended family
of in-laws, patrons, and business associates through sanctioned affective ties was a
1
There is an incredible wealth of literature on marriage that cannot possibly be addressed here.
For important contributions to historiography on marriage in the Spanish Empire, see: Seed, To Love,
Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away:
Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1948 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991);
Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); María Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and
Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2007); Asunción Lavrin, ed, Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1989); Silvia M. Arrom, “Marriage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811,” Journal of Family
History, Vol. 3 (Winter 1978): 378-391; Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
2
For a discussion of how the Church tried to regulate sexuality through ecclesiastical courts, see
Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists; Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 23-57.
3
Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists, 142.
58
preoccupation for much of the population, not just for Spanish elites.4 With high rates of
illegitimacy throughout the colony among all subjects of the Spanish Crown,5 marriage
and the public acknowledgment that it involved offered people of African descent social
legitimacy.6
In this chapter, I examine the politics of marriage and discuss how marriage
partner choice shaped social interactions and the familial configurations of Africans and
their descendants in colonial Veracruz. For this study, I reviewed nearly one hundred
years of documentation dating from 1641 to 1736 housed in the Metropolitan Cathedral
of Xalapa. I focused on the parish archive records documenting three religious rites of
passage: baptism, confirmation, and marriage.7 The data in this chapter suggest that the
conventional wisdom about marriage choice is incomplete and that people of African
descent, especially free people, demonstrated considerations of status, legitimacy, and the
notion of the respectable family not previously documented in colonial Mexico.
4
George Reid Andrew argues, “In both Spanish America and Brazil, white and free black society
alike was structured around the fundamental building block of the extended family. No members of
colonial society could hope to make their way upward without support and assistance from family
networks, and family ties and connections were even more necessary for members of a small,
disadvantaged group battling for a place in society. Even more important than cementing one’s individual
social and economic position was strengthening the position of the family, which was achieved by securing
the education, advantageous marriage and inheritance of one's children.” George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin
America, 1800-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46.
5
Ann Twinam asserts that illegitimacy was often tied to being of mixed ancestry. However, she
clarifies,“[I]llegitimacy was not solely confined to the racially mixed, for the white population also
produced its own significant portion of offspring stigmatized by their birth.” Twinam, Public Lives, Private
Secrets, 10.
6
James Lockhart notes that in Peru, “Successful freedmen were particularly anxious to enjoy the
respectability conferred by marriage; most prominent free black men were married, usually to free black
women, or less often, to black slave women or Indian women.” Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 217.
7
Unfortunately, few of the collections that I reviewed were complete. A fire in the church
consumed a number of important sacrament books. The collection’s subsequent relocation and then return
to the Metropolitan Cathedral resulted in the loss or misplacement of several tomes. The passage of close
to 400 years and the lack of funds to properly preserve the collections have also devastated these rich
sources.
59
Much of the historiography posits that race primarily determined marriage choice
among African-descended people and that exogamy reflected attempts to move away
from an African racial designation towards a Spanish (white) one.8 However, I argue that
people of African descent did not always concern themselves with the pursuit of
blanqueamiento (whitening oneself or one’s progeny).
My research has found that
African-descended people understood and were invested in Spanish ideals of
respectability and mobilized towards the concept through their efforts to establish claims
to social legitimacy.
Through the sanctioned religious activities of baptisms,
confirmations, and marriages, African-descended people demonstrated their interest in
fulfilling the role of a Catholic parishioner. In addition, marriage records demonstrate
that women and men of African descent emphasized their interest in developing lineages
of status by marrying other people of legitimate birth.
Few studies have included people of African descent in the dialogue of marriage
choice in colonial Mexico, but these few have made significant strides towards exploring
this neglected subject. Ben Vinson examines exogamy in Puebla among free men of
African descent in the militia. He notes that the data initially appear to confirm an
interest in “racial ascension.”9 However, Vinson argues for a broader examination of
records, both public and private, to assess how militiamen referred to themselves and
8
Important discussions about whitening or “passing” in colonial Spanish America include: Ann
Twinam, “Purchasing Whiteness: Conversation on the Essence of Pardo-ness and Mulatto-ness at the
End of Empire,” in Imperial Subjects, 141-166; Twinam, “The Etiology of Racial Passing:
Constructions of Informal and Official ‘Whiteness’ in Colonial Spanish America,” New World Orders,
Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Early Modern Americas,” John Smolenski and Thomas J.
Humphrey eds. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005): 249-272; Ilona Katzew,
Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 44-46. Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 75-78.
9
60
how others discussed them in order to consider possible investments in the whitening
process.10 He notes that a man marked publicly as a member of an African-majority
organization likely widened his pool of potential partners, but also narrowed his options
if the goal was to “whiten” oneself through marriage to a Spanish woman, as “militia
status limited the ascent of his racial climb.”11 For Vinson’s work, militia status served
as a determining social marker in marriage choice for both men who sought Spanish
wives and those interested in other options.
Frank Proctor reassesses Patrick Carroll’s marriage choice data for Xalapa
through the conditional kappa, or the measurement of endogamy in the entire racial
group.12 Proctor’s analysis finds that greater endogamy existed in Xalapa when Africandescended caste designations are collapsed into one racial category. Later in this chapter,
I also employ this methodology but analyze only the marriages of free people of African
descent, excluding all slaves except those married to free people of African descent.
Neither Carroll’s work nor Proctor’s reassessment specifically differentiates the slave or
free status of the African-descended couples in the data they analyze, a social marker that
serves as a distinct category among marriage patterns in my work.
The examination of how marriage socially marked colonial subjects figures
prominently in the historiography. Patricia Seed scrutinizes the Church's involvement in
marriage choice and the changing notion of respectability due to capitalism, but she also
addresses how involvement in the institution of marriage demonstrated a level of cultural
10
Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty 129.
12
Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty, 65-67.
11
61
capital that had been acquired by those involved in the conflict cases she examines. Seed
asserts,
Since marriage was a ceremony intimately integrated into Catholic
doctrine and Hispanic culture, the aspirants to church marriage who
appear in the prenuptial conflicts therefore represent the most thoroughly
Hispanicized and catechized of the blacks and castas, rather than those
castas tied closely to the Indian communities or recent arrivals from Africa
who retained their own ideas about marriage.13
Still, as Herman Bennett has demonstrated, many newcomers to Spanish institutions
(both indigenous and people of African descent) quickly realized that certain institutions
and statuses, including marriage, allowed for greater personal benefit and freedom.
Bennett writes, “As Christians, [people of African descent] acquired an understanding of
the obligations and rights they invoked to effect changes in their lives.”14 They also
appeared to understand the value of legitimacy claims, according to Bennett. He argues,
“Individuals used legitimate son and daughter (hijo/a legítimo/a) as a juxtaposition that
signified moral status.”15 While those less acculturated to Spanish norms were less likely
to involve themselves with Spanish institutions, including marriage through the Church,
many subjects took note of social expectations, even if they did not adhere to them fully.
Bennett finds evidence of such investments in legitimate labels in eighteenth-century
Michoacán and, in this chapter, I explore the importance of legitimacy for Africandescended families during the long seventeenth century in Xalapa.
Seed and Bennett scrutinize how the notion of “free will,” a core value in the
Catholic tradition of marriage administration, shaped marriage partner choice. Bennett
13
Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico, 26.
15
14
62
notes that while it was not universally welcomed, interracial unions were not explicitly
prohibited,
Though alarmed by interracial sex and especially by racial exogamy,
neither the Crown nor the Church banned such behavior. In keeping with
Christian law, the Crown did not decree endogamy. Such a practice would
have violated free will, both a Christian belief and a widely held Iberian
norm.16
However, Seed calls into question the Church’s stance that it “does not marry statuses but
unites wills.”17 Seed found that when exogamy involved a Spanish man and a nonSpanish woman, the Church “formally retained its commitment to unite wills rather than
marry ranks.”18 However, when the exogamous union involved a Spanish woman and a
non-Spanish groom, “church officials carefully questioned them about their intentions.”19
Endogamy was never officially decreed, but through the racialized language of “status,”
the Church could continue to influence the politics of marriage and family when
confronted with cases of objectionable exogamy.
Ramón Gutiérrez asserts that the Church, far from a neutral institution,
understood marriage as a civil matter with potentially adverse material repercussions if
the “wrong” families were united. He writes,
The Church abused the principle of marital freedom when children were
joined in matrimony against parental wishes. The clergy had the right to
define the rites that constituted matrimony, but had to recognize that
marriage was also a civil contract that legitimized progeny, created
inheritances and property rights, and was the basis for the accession of
honors.20
16
18
19
20
Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 316.
17
63
Both Seed and Gutiérrez see the Royal Pragmatic on Marriage, issued by King Charles
III in 1776 and instituted in 1778, as an important political moment as the Crown
“expanded the role of the civil judiciary in private life.”21 According to the Royal
Pragmatic, the Crown deemed it unlawful to unite unequals legitimately. It also ordered
that petitioners of marriage under the age of twenty-five required parental consent,
granting parents a stronger legal foothold in dictating marriage partner choice and
consequently in managing the family’s resources.
Gutiérrez notes that the decree
reinforced the notion that “wide status disparities between marital candidates were
detrimental to the economic prosperity of honorable families and to their social
exclusivity.”22
The extent to which the Marriage Pragmatic and the Church influenced marriage
patterns is still up for debate. Seed cites the second half of the seventeenth century as the
advent of greater “competition” between Crown and Church.23 She also notes that by
1740 the Catholic Church had backed away from interfering in the decisions of heads of
families regarding their children’s choice of marriage partners and from arbitrating prenuptial conflicts.24 Without the clergy’s intervention into disputes and its protection of
the free will of applicants, Seed argues, marriage choice in the eighteenth century became
increasingly determined within a capitalistic framework of familial honor, often
dependent on the family's financial state or its public reputation.
Gutiérrez, however, argues that the arrival of the Royal Pragmatic to Spanish
21
23
24
22
64
legal culture did not drastically diminish free will and independence in the eighteenth
century. He writes, “As early as 1776, when King Charles III issued the Royal Pragmatic
on Marriage, he had complained about those ‘blind passions of youth,’ the egalitarian and
individualistic ideology of romantic love.”25 Gutiérrez finds that in late-eighteenthcentury New Mexico, “[Y]oung men and women were being swept away by love and
began choosing marital partners on the basis of affect and desire, at times forsaking
family name, honor, and patrimony.”26 Herman Bennett also establishes that the clergy
continued to support the principle of free will in marriages, even among diverse
populations that sought to contract exogamous unions.27 He proposes that location may
have influenced how the Church involved itself in parental disapproval of intended
marriage partners. Bennett writes,
In urban areas, as the colonial state withdrew from its alliance with the
Catholic Church, the clergy may have been interested in cultivating
support among elite patricians. In rural areas – especially zones with large
black, Indian, mulatto, and mestizo populations – the clergy may have felt
that preserving a social order premised on Christian matrimony was a
more pressing problem.28
My work ends before King Charles III granted parents greater sovereignty over their
progeny’s spousal options, but these debates of patriarchal influence and familial control
of private life inform my analysis of marriage choice among women and men of African
descent in Xalapa, especially in cases that suggest a strong investment by legitimate
families to unite with other legitimate families.
25
27
28
26
65
Bennett problematizes “free will” for the African-descended population by
arguing that marriage served as a colonizing tool of the Spanish Crown. He contends,
But instead of subjecting persons of African descent to greater military
vigilance, [King] Charles attempted to rectify the situation through
marriage. In the Spanish monarch's eyes, ‘the grand remedy’ would be to
command ‘the negros that come here from now on and those that are here
now’ to contract marriage. Matrimony, according to the king, represented
an effective way to curb seditious behavior threatening the common
wealth. As a Christian sacrament, matrimony was the instrument through
which Castilian officials tried to impose orthodoxy on its new subject
population.29
This desire to police and “domesticate” Africans and their descendants in New Spain
involved continuous negotiation. In the late 1500s, the Spanish Crown grew increasingly
uneasy about the growing number of free and “untethered” Africans in New Spain. As a
result, the Spanish king and the viceroy of New Spain ordered Spanish authorities to
maintain a vigilant eye on the activities of legally free people.
Viceroy Martín Enriquez was the fourth viceroy of New Spain (1568-1580) and
the sixth of the viceroyalty of Peru (1581-1583). In “Portrait of an American Viceroy:
Martín Enriquez, 1568-1583,” Phillip Wayne Power argues that Viceroy Enriquez “must
be ranked among the most effective, intelligent, and conscientious governors sent to this
hemisphere by Spanish monarchs.”30 Viceroy Enriquez’ letter to the king of Spain
articulates anxiety about, rather than assurance of, his ability to handle a rising colonial
“problem.” The viceroy wrote,
29
Philip Wayne Powell, “Portrait of an American Viceroy: Martín Enriquez, 1568-1583,” The
Americas 14, no. 1 (July 1957): 1.
30
66
This [increase in mulatos] is becoming a worst state and if God and our
Majesty do not remedy it, I fear that this land will go to hell [and] as free
people, they do what they want. Very few of them apply themselves to
jobs and almost none of them cultivate the land. Instead they guard their
earnings and wander freely wherever they may be.31
To curtail greater vagabondage, curfew ordinances were issued that attempted to restrict
the geographic mobility of free people of African descent.32 Spanish authorities had
become so concerned that a 1612 decree prohibited African-descended people from
attending funerals in groups larger than eight, limiting attendance to just four women and
four men.33 Bennett's assertion that the institution of marriage served as another device
intended to control the colonial body, and by extension colonial sexuality, fits well into
the greater narrative of the anxieties expressed by Spanish authorities. Julia Tuñón
Pablo, however, argues that the Crown's preoccupation with marriage reflected its interest
in the repopulation of the colonies after the great decline in the sixteenth century, which
resulted in vast labor shortages.34 While a diminished labor pool certainly concerned the
Crown, so did the possibility of a labor pool that could not be organized or coerced to
fulfill the goals of the king.
Most scholars have discussed marriage choice of African-descended people in
Mexico through quantitative data analysis.
In Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, Patrick
Carroll briefly examines the marriage patterns of Africans and their descendants. He
writes, “Marriage offers one of the best means of correlating race and social rank.
31
My translation, excerpt of Viceroy Martín Enriquez’ letter. Aguirre Beltrán, La población
negra, 183.
32
Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 22.
33
34
Julia Tuñón Pablos, Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1999), 23.
67
Spouses entered into extended personal contacts that impacted not only on their own
immediate status within the community but also upon their future children's standing as
well.”35 One's marriage choice, and conversely one's lack of marital ties, affected one's
social capital by developing or closing off patronage ties through the extended family,
which could affect the social and economic mobility of one's children.
Countless factors dictated marriage choice, but statistical studies on marriage
demonstrate the importance of particularity. While I do not share the conclusions of
Edgar Love's 1971 article on marriage choice, his research based on records of the Santa
Veracruz parish in Mexico City allows for some comparative work with Seed's.
According to Love's data, from records dating between 1646 and 1746, there were 2,378
marriages involving people of African descent in the Santa Veracruz parish. Of these
marriages, 74.60% involved at least one free person of African descent and 1,120 cases
(47.10%) document that both husband and wife were free.36 Love notes that of the free
couples of African descent, most were identified as mulatos (54.50%) and that men from
this group most often married mulatas, followed by mestizas and indias.37 Love notes
that free mulato men married thirty-nine Spanish women but does not specify the number
of mestiza and india spouses. 38 Love also finds significant caste-specific exogamy
among mulatas. His data cites that a majority of free mulata women (291 of 516)39
married mulato men (59.02%), but adds that mulata women also married 122 mestizos
35
Love, “Marriage Patterns,” 87.
37
38
39
While Love cites 516 partners, only 493 spouses are accounted for in his discussion of the data.
My percentages of his data are based on a total of 493 partners.
36
68
(24.75%), 45 castizos (9.13%), 22 moriscos (4.46%), and 13 negros (2.64%).40 By
collapsing the mulato and negro caste categories, endogamy is as high as 61.66%.
Notably, free mulata women married exogamously 38.34% of the time between 1646 and
1746 in the Santa Veracruz parish.
Seed, whose primary body of research is based on records from Mexico City,
asserts, “[M]arriage between racial groups remained rare during the first two centuries of
Spanish rule in Mexico.” 41
Love’s research demonstrates that exogamy figured
prominently among free mulatos who contracted marriage at Mexico City’s Santa
Veracruz parish, nearly 40% among free mulata women alone. The viceregal capital of
New Spain, Mexico City, accounted for incredible diversity: economic, racial,
geographic, cultural, and linguistic.
It did not, however, account for all of the
experiences of the colony, and Love’s data sample highlights the importance of regional
and also parish, caste, and free status specificity.
The historiography continues to develop in the field of colonial African diaspora
studies in Mexico, but scholars have taken on marriage choice with the broader Mexican
population. Subversion has arisen in many works, including that of Richard Boyer and
Steve J. Stern, who work with records of violence, while Seed examines prenuptial
disputes, and Gutiérrez scrutinizes cultural conflict between Pueblo Indians and Spanish
colonials. The diversity of interpretative lenses and methodological approaches pose new
questions about free will, familial influences, and the politics of choice. Seed writes,
“Passions, or the emotions prompting human actions, are tricky issues for the
40
41
69
historian.”42 For African-descended people in Xalapa, marriage choice was influenced
by more than economic considerations or generalities about racial antipathy. While
desire is nearly impossible to interpret from an official document, I demonstrate that
conclusions based on notions of “marrying up or down” the caste system must be
reconsidered.
Marriage Choice
In a survey of marital records from early eighteenth-century parish collections,43
ninety-four cases involved at least one person of African descent. One of the most
distinguishing characteristics about the documents is that two caste designations
dominated the records, pardo and mulato. No other Afro-casta designation was cited in
the 1724-1736 parish marriage logs. While my research of seventeenth-century notarial
records yields greater usage of the term mulato (including a number of people cited as
moreno and negro), the parish records of the early eighteenth century see a stark reversal.
Of the 134 individuals of African descent involved in ninety-four marriages, only ten
people (7.46%) were assigned the caste of mulato while 124 people (92.54%) were
designated as pardos. This shift in percentages, however, does not necessarily represent
a change in the racial make-up of Xalapa's African-descended population.
It is difficult to surmise how much of this greater usage of the term pardo
reflected a population shift, a socio-cultural preference for the term, or the whimsy of a
particular parish recorder. It has been well established that caste identifications were
42
Archivo Eclesiastico de la Parroquia del Sagrario, Iglesia del Sagrada Corazón, Xalapa,
Veracruz (AEP), Matrimonios Caja 2, Libro 4 (1724 – 1736).
43
70
notoriously unstable, which is why it is impossible to use the data to make a claim that
pardos were more likely to marry than mulatos. Or, that more people of African descent
were having children with more indigenous people and therefore creating a greater pardo
population in Xalapa. A more likely explanation for this data, as I discuss below, is that
parish priests and notaries took some license when assigning casta labels.
According to popular understandings of the caste system as found in trends across
the archival landscape but also in the graphic representation of racial exogamy in the
eighteenth-century casta paintings, there was a sense of “science” to caste designations, a
colonial logic that assigned categories based primarily on phenotype and purported
lineage. A negra was generally found to describe a woman not of mixed-race heritage.
Colonial record keepers also utilized the term morena as a synonymous descriptor of
negra but not always. A mulata was a woman likely of Spanish and African descent. A
parda was believed to be a woman of indigenous and African descent. However, mulata
and parda terms were often conflated, as was the parallel usage of the term morena for
parda. Researchers have found that terms fell in and out of preference in the same cities,
in the same parishes, and sometimes in the same logbooks, rendering Afro-casta
designations as functional placeholders for discussing people of African descent.
A cursory examination of other parish documents in Xalapa, specifically the
confirmation and baptismal records, reveals these inconsistencies of casta designation.
For instance, in 1642, two mulata sisters named Polonia and María were confirmed in the
presence of their father, an enslaved negro, and their mother, an india.44 According to
44
AEP, Libro de Confirmaciones, 1642.
71
the caste system of designations, both girls should have been categorized as pardas,
women of African and indigenous descent. Likewise, on December 21, 1674, Josepha
and Joseph Ramires baptized their son Francisco in Xalapa.45 While both Josepha and
Joseph are designated as free pardos in the baptism record, their son is cited as a mulato
(someone of Spanish and African descent). These “miscalculations” signal to many
historians the lack of diligence employed in cataloguing the heritage of people of
differing backgrounds. Additionally, few scholars have yet to identify significant trends
that differentiate the life chances of mulatos and pardos,46 a situation that supports my
decision to collapse the data for people of African descent and compartmentalize by caste
only when the body of data allows for the establishment of significant patterns.
Of note is that the surviving documents intrinsically undercount the number of
marriage cases because of other inconsistencies of the parish record keepers, principally
the decision (or carelessness) not to include caste designations for some people of
African descent. Such was the case of Sebastiana de Rivas y de Irala, a woman of
African descent, whose mother Polonia de Rivas was cited as a mulata and her
grandmother as a negra from “Guinea.” Sebastiana’s mother’s designation as a mulata
was documented in a number of notarial entries in Xalapa during the mid- and late 45
AEP, Bautizos Caja 1, Libro 1 (1666-1689), December 21, 1674.
Vinson cites evidence of intra-racial disunity that signals an acute awareness of casta difference
between mulatos and pardos militiamen as they competed for militia-conferred privileges. Vinson,
Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 202. In his work on colonial Igualapa, Vinson examines how non-African
descended groups articulated their understanding of the various casta categories. He notes that estate
owners often referenced pardos, morenos, and mulatos with terms that indicated an undifferentiated
population, such as “esa gente,” “nación,” “clase,” and “aquella gente.” He writes, “Underlying [the estate
owners’] actions was a specific conceptualization of the free-colored population as a homogenous cultural
group.” Ben Vinson, III, “The Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province in the ‘Costa Chica’: Igualapa in
1791,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 276.
46
72
seventeenth century. On July 28, 1671, Sebastiana and her Spanish husband Phelipe de
Santiago Falcón baptized their son Juan. A Spanish woman named Francisca de Orduña
Castillo served as Juan’s godmother. Nowhere in the entry was Sebastiana’s heritage as
the daughter of a mulata noted. I corroborated her African heritage only through a record
in the notarial archive. If I had not already done research on her family lineage, I would
not have known from the church records that she was of African descent since she was
not identified with a casta designation in these records. This was also the case for
Sebastiana’s brother Juan de Ribas when he served as the godfather for a mulata girl
named Josefa on April 16, 1670. In his work on racial identities and caste designation in
Pátzcuaro, Mexico, Aaron Althouse finds that there was a significant number of people
not labeled, and he notes that some priests “simply did not bother to record [racial
identifications].”47 Althouse adds,
Interestingly, such record-keeping methods were not exclusive to a
particular priest, as the same priest might at one point record the marriage
partners and their race, the godparents and their race, all three witnesses to
the marriage, and even the names and racial status of the marrying
couple’s parents, and at another juncture omit all but the names of the
bride and groom.48
This may have also been the case in Xalapa as documented not only in marriage records,
but in all of the ecclesiastical records I reviewed.
For extant parish archives that document hundreds, not thousands, of baptisms,
confirmations, marriages, and deaths of Xalapa’s population of African descent, the
possibility that dozens of records were not designated as those of mulatos, pardos,
47
Aaron P. Althouse, “Contested Mestizos, Alleged Mulattos: Racial Identity and Caste Hierarchy
in Eighteenth Century Patzcuaro, Mexico,” The Americas 62, no. 2 (October 2005), 163.
48
Althouse, “Contested Mestizos, Alleged Mulattos,”163.
73
negros, or morenos, would significantly modify the demographic landscape that the
archives offer and alter the perception of the level of inter/intra casta and racial
interaction experienced by African-descended people. Not only is it is likely that this
demographic is undercounted, but also, Xalapa’s relatively smaller collection of archives
would not have offered the enticing plethora of records available to scholars of Mexico
City, such as Love and Seed. Xalapa, nonetheless, represented an important hub in the
history of the development of the region and the colony as a whole, and its smaller
population in comparison to that of the viceregal capital does not reduce the importance
of examining that population closely.
Exogamy
Exogamy was a significant feature of colonial life for African-descended people
in Xalapa for the length of the long seventeenth century.49
1. 1 Overview of Marriage: 1724-1736
49
The term “African-descended” is abbreviated to “AD” in all charts. When gender designations
go un-specified as to race/caste in the legend, they are to be understood to refer to African-descended
women and men.
74
Of ninety-four marriages recorded from January 30, 1724 until February 2, 1736, fortyseven were exogamous, accounting for 50% of those married in the twelve year period
catalogued.50 Nearly as many African-descended women (24) as men (23) decided to
marry outside of the Afro-casta population. An additional seven cases involved four men
and three women of African descent marrying individuals of unknown caste.51 Although
exogamy was certainly prevalent during the years studied, the records document forty
endogamous unions (42.55%) between people of African descent. Most of these cases
involved pardo-parda unions (35 or 87.50%) with only two unions (5%) documented
between a mulato groom and a mulata bride. Again, that the records demonstrate such a
high incidence of “intra-caste” marriages among pardo/parda couples may have more to
do with a shift towards greater usage of the term “pardo/parda” to describe people of
African descent by the parish recorder instead of evidence that mulatos (people of
purported African and Spanish descent) experienced a negative population growth or that
mulato and mulata people were least likely to be married in Xalapa. This is even clearer
when marriage choice is examined with regard to the scarcity of cases involving interAfro-casta unions.
Of the ninety-four marriages during twelve years, only three mulata women
married pardo men, accounting for 7.50% of Afro-casta endogamous unions. This low
percentage may have signaled that mulata women demonstrated a discriminating aversion
towards men of a “lower caste” because they were either culturally, ethnically, or racially
50
AEP, Matrimonios Caja 2, Libro 4, January 30, 1724 - February 2, 1736.
Only eight cases involved people without caste designation. While this appears to be uncommon
in the Xalapa parish marital records, it is incredibly common of the confirmation and baptismal records.
51
75
more closely tied to indigenous or Afro-casta social life. As mulatas who were partially
of Spanish descent, this may have demonstrated their preference to remain single instead
of marrying a pardo man. However, not a single parda woman married a man designated
as a mulato; someone with a supposedly “higher” casta designation. In addition to the
three mulata women who married the three pardo men, only one other mulata woman
appears in the marriage records, and she married an español. The four mulato men who
married non-Afro casta women included unions with two mestiza brides, one española,
and one india.
With only eight mulato men and five mulata women involved in
endogamous and exogamous unions between 1724 and 1736, I have included them as
part of the undifferentiated categories of people of African descent in the below analysis.
1. 2 Overview of Exogamy: 1724-1736
With an incidence rate of 50%, exogamy proved to be a strong characteristic of
76
marriage among people of African descent. How we come to explain what exogamy
means as a social phenomenon, however, may lead us to a number of interpretations. The
first equates high exogamy rates with greater social interaction among colonial subjects.
More than just a casual arrangement or clandestine encounter, the process of petitioning
even an uncontested marriage was not a simple act. The betrothed couples had to first
prove that not a single canonical impediment, varying from lack of consent to bigamy,
existed to contract the marriage. After such matters were verified and any ecclesiastical
dispensation was properly granted, the marriage banns were proclaimed in three
consecutive Sundays in order to publicize the impending marriage with the implicit
purpose of allowing enough time to pass in the event a witness existed to dispute the
validity of such a union. Only after the three-week period could a couple be then
married.52 For those women and men of African descent who married Spanish, mestizo
and indigenous partners, the process allowed for public acknowledgment of racial
boundaries being crossed through a legitimizing colonial institution.
Among Xalapa’s twenty-four women of African descent who married
exogamously, only one woman was cited as a mulata and the other twenty-three women
were designated as pardas. The twenty-three spouses of parda women included two
indios, eight españoles, and thirteen mestizos. With the inclusion of the sole mulata
woman who married an español, the totals change only minimally for women of African
descent who married non-African descended men: two indios, nine españoles, and
thirteen mestizos. Of the twenty-three men of African descent involved in exogamous
52
Marysa Navarro and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, Women in Latin American and the Caribbean
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 44.
77
relationships, four were cited as mulatos and nineteen as pardos. The nineteen pardo
men, much like the parda women, married more mestizas (13) than any other group, with
only four men marrying españolas and two men marrying indias. As aforementioned,
pardo men married three mulata women, unlike the parda women who married no
mulato men during this time period. By collapsing pardo/mulato categories, Africandescended men married fifteen mestizas, five españolas, and three indias. In addition to
these women, men of African descent married four women who had no identifiable casta
or ethnic label in the marriage records.
Rarely did people of African descent marry men and women labeled as indios.
The first marriage between an African-descended man and an india was contracted in
1726 with the other two couples following in 1729 and then in 1730. The two marriages
of African-descended women and indio men took place in 1726 and the second one
occurred three years later in 1729. According to demographic profiles assembled by
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, the indigenous population living in Xalapa had decreased from
2,377 to 1,376 inhabitants during 1580 and 1609. This drastic decline within a thirtyyear period demonstrates that the indigenous population had experienced a negative
growth rate of 42%, which it very slowly recovered from over the course of the next two
centuries.53 Even by 1791, the population of Xalapa counted only 2,378 españoles, 1,181
pardos, 925 mestizos, 500 castizos, and 2,310 indios.54 With an indio population still
likely larger than that of African-descent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, we would expect greater social interaction between the two groups that resulted
53
54
78
in more marital ties.
Edgar Love asserts that Afro-indigenous unions were common in Mexico City
and argues that “strategic production” played a role in such exogamous unions. A
viceregal edict articulates the fear of such mixed-race progeny. It reads, “Prohibit negros
and mulatos from marrying Indians…there are so many mulatos because the negros
marry the Indian women knowing that their children will be free.”55 New Spain practiced
the principle of vientre libre (literally “free womb”) manumission in which the child
followed the status of the mother.56 While this may have accounted for some percentage
of mixed race people, “such children,” Frank Proctor argues, “were also born free without
the formality of marriage.”57 Love’s assessment of vientre libre likely did not play a role
in formal exogamous couplings of these two groups as there were few actual marriages
documented between Afro-castas and indigenous people, especially given Xalapa’s large
free population of African descent.
The sample of Afro-indigenous marriages may
suggest other more status-inclined interests, at least for African-descended women.
Of note is the “type” of indio men whom African-descended women married.
The first woman in the 1724-1736 collection was a free parda named Magdalena Lucero
who married on June 18, 1726. She was the legitimate daughter of Francisca de Vargas
and the late Antonio Lucero. Magdalena’s indio spouse was named Theodoro Joseph and
he was the legitimate son of Don Melchor Gaspar and the late Francisca Hernándes.
Both Magdalena and Theodoro were cited as having been born and raised in Xalapa. The
55
My translation, Archivo General de las Indias, Seville, Spain (AGI), Mexico, 19, n. 125 (1574).
57
56
79
second parda-indio marriage took place on October 6, 1729, between María Salomé, the
legitimate daughter of María de la Asunción and Pedro Días, both pardos, and Miguel de
los Santos, an indio and the legitimate son of Don Juan Francisco and Ysabel María. The
two women of African descent married indio men who were from legitimate families and
with some form of Spanish-recognition since they both claimed titles as dons, which may
indicate that they were current or former leaders in their indigenous groups or the
descendants of these early caciques. The india women whom the African-descended
men married likely came from slightly different socio-economic circumstances according
to some of the language used in the marriage contracts.
The first marriage between an African-descended man and an india woman in the
1724-1736 collection took place on September 1, 1726, and involved a free pardo man
named Nicolas Francisco who had been legitimately born in Oaxaca to Francisco Juan
and Floriana María. Francisco’s wife was an india named María de la Encarnación and
her familial background is left unresolved. While she is noted as an india, María is said
to have been raised “in the house” of Ynes Lópes, a vague descriptor most often tied to
children who were orphaned and raised by a non-family member. The second Afrocasta–india marriage took place on March 15, 1728, and involved Juan Anttonio López, a
free pardo from the town of Tepeaca and the legitimate son of Miguel Francisco and
María Jacoba, both deceased. His wife, Michaela de la Cruz, was noted as an india and
vecina of Xalapa, but nothing about her parents was recorded. The only other piece of
information about her that was documented by the church recorder was that she was a
80
widow of Santiago Alvero, whose caste was not identified.58
The final marriage of this category was dated on September 18, 1730, and
involved Christóval de Peña, a free mulato shoemaker and widower of María de la Rosa.
His bride was María Francisca a thirty-year-old india woman who had never married
before. María is noted as the “hija” of Manuel Alonzo and Epolonia María, but no
specification was included to determine whether she was an hija legítima (legitimate
daughter) or an hija natural (child out of wed-lock). While both African-descended
women married indio men who were legitimate and from titled families, the three india
women who married African-descended men had neither cited legitimacy or access to
public claims to “honorable” birth as children of dons or doñas.
While no Spanish dons or doñas married people of African descent, titled men
and women 59 served in two other capacities in wedding entries: as witnesses and
ceremonial madrinas and padrinos (godparents). Of the ninety-four marriages contracted
between 1724 and 1736, eighteen unions had either a don or a doña who served as a
witness (19.15%). An additional eight marriages included people noted as dons and
doñas who served as marital godparents (8.51%). While the two women married indio
men from “don-families” accounted for all cases of titled spouses in this collection, the
presence of dons and doñas in twenty-four unions indicate that close relationships
between people of African descent and españoles existed in supportive capacities nearly
as often as they did as marital partners.
58
Often times in Xalapa’s parish archives, if someone was a widow or a widower, their deceased
spouse was named in lieu of citing the marriage petitioner’s parents.
59
For an insightful discussion of titles and how they were assigned to individuals in colonial
Spanish America, see Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 38-45.
81
Other than the 1724-1736 sample, the only other marriage records are found in
two mixed collections labeled “Entierros, Casamientos, y Bautizos” (ECB), which cover
the years between 1641 and 1702 in books labeled as Caja 1, Libro 1 and Caja 1, Libro
3.60 While these two collections cover more years than the previous sample, they are less
complete. The first page of Caja 1 of the ECB collection reads, “This book was formed
by various loose pages that contain baptisms, marriages, and burials from distinct years
and dates that could not be coordinated because of its antiquity.”61 A similar forewarning
does not accompany Caja 2, but an examination of pagination reveals that the data has
substantial gaps.
For example, a marriage record dated August 13, 1696, is then
interrupted by seventeen pages of missing documents before the records resume for a
marriage on February 25, 1702. Libro 1 has fewer missing pages (only four), but the
gaps in years that recorded marriages indicate that the loose sheets were subsequently
numbered and may have more missing pages for which cannot be accurately accounted.
In the two books of Caja 1 of the ECB collection that documented sixty-one years of
marriages, only thirty-six unions of at least one person of stated African descent have
survived. While a significantly smaller sample than the 1724-1736 collection, the details
offered in the 1641-1702 entries offer important information about the African-descended
population in Xalapa.
The first marked difference in the earlier collection is the terminological
preference for the term mulato compared with the eighteen-century preference for the
60
AEP, “Entierros, Casamientos y Bautizos” Collection, Caja 1, Libro 1 (1641-1646) and Libro 3
(1647-1655).
61
AEP, ECB Collection, Caja 1, Libro 1 (1641-1646).
82
casta category of pardo and parda, with rare usage of mulato and mulata. Between 1641
and 1655 (Caja 1, Libro 1), the only two categories used to describe people of African
descent are negro (two people) and mulato (fifteen people). No pardos were cited. The
proceedings years of 1656 through 1702 (Caja 1, Libro 3), witnessed a shift that
documented seventeen spouses described as mulato/mulata and seventeen more identified
as pardo/parda, and only one person noted as a negro. This gradual predominance of the
usage of the term pardo in conjunction with the limited number of affective ties with
indio men and women in all of the marriage collections indicate that parish recorders had
a significant hand in shaping archival information with casta categories that did not
reflect, with any demographic specificity, the African-descended population in Xalapa.
Mobile Partners
Beyond terminological preferences, the earlier cases offer clues about significant
geographic mobility by men and women of African descent who married between 1641
and 1702. Nearly one third of spouses of African descent were not born in Xalapa. This
migratory group included eight men and two women who hailed from Puebla de los
Angeles, La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz, and Mexico
City.
One case cited that a free mulato man named Miguel de la Cruz, who was
originally from Guatemala, had moved to Xalapa where he married a mulata slave named
Cathalina Martín on February 20, 1642. Unfortunately, by the early eighteenth century,
few marital cases stated where the applicants had been born, usually only stating that they
were vecinos or residentes of Xalapa or lived nearby within its jurisdiction. Between
1724 and 1736, nearly 20% of spouses of African descent were born out of the
83
jurisdiction of Xalapa. Although this group’s percentage had shrunk, likely due to
population stabilization before the ferias introduced more outsiders, the number of places
that African-descended spouses hailed from had increased significantly. While a few still
came from Mexico City, Puebla, La Nueva and La Antigua, and Guatemala, the eighteen
transplants now counted home locations of such places as Oaxaca City, Perote, Tepeaca,
Hualingo, Tezuitlan, and Hilotepec.
The occurrence of such a high number of spouses from distant locals reflects the
prominence of mobility and transportation in Xalapa. Women and men came from all
over the region, and a few people arrived from towns and cities further afar in the colony,
and landed in the way-station to take advantage of the profits earned in the pack train
business, sugar production, and various other trading markets. Some African-descended
people would stay for the economic opportunities. A few probably stayed because of the
lure of an attractive spouse and a more open society that would allow for greater
interracial social networks.
Seventeenth-Century Cases
The incomplete marriage collection from 1641 to 1702 offers some insight into
Xalapa’s early tendency towards endogamy that gradually progressed towards exogamy
at the turn of the century.
84
1. 3 Overview of Marriages: 1641-1702
Of the thirty-six unions, half (50%) were endogamous. Ten marriages (27.78%) were
exogamous and eight unions (22.22%) involved a partner of African descent and a spouse
of undisclosed racial or caste designation. Of the ten exogamous couples, an equal
number of African-descended women and men married people who were not of African
descent. The spouses of the five women of African descent included two mestizos, one
castizo, and two españoles. The five exogamous relationships involving men of African
descent included one india, two castizas, and two españolas. It is statistically difficult to
compare this smaller and obviously incomplete sample with the larger data set.
Fortunately, these ten cases are of the more detailed variety. By scrutinizing the ten
exogamous cases for partner details, this set may offer more information about the “type”
of people with whom African-descended women and men affiliated themselves through
85
the bonds of marriage.
The first seventeenth-century case of exogamy among African descendants in the
ecclesiastical archives was recorded on March 21, 1642. The bride, Luisa de Solis, was
identified as a free mulata, and she worked “in the service” of a man named Pedro
Serrano. By the time she married, Luisa was a vecina of Xalapa, but she had been born
in La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz and raised as an orphan by the charity of the Church.
Her husband, Juan de Castro, was a castizo62 born and raised in Xalapa. No information
was documented about his employer, but it was noted that he also was an orphan raised
by the Church. The couple had no stated familial ties, perhaps freeing them from the
pressure that some families exerted on the marriage choices of their children. They knew
at least three españoles: Pedro Serrano, Alonso Gonsales, and Antonio de Castro, who
were their fellow vecinos and served as their witnesses.
Asking españoles to serve as witnesses to marriages involving African-descended
people was not an uncommon experience as documented in the 1724-1736 collection.
Between 1641 and 1702, 61.11% of exogamous relationships included at least one
witness who was either cited as, or implied to be63 español. It is of some note that while
Luisa de Solis and Juan de Castro differed in race, they were, as people who both lacked
documented familial support and perhaps the life chances that accompanied familial
networks of other mulatos and castizos, “equals.”
The second case of exogamy occurred a year later on July 20, 1643, between Juan
62
A castiza was someone of purported español and mestiza (or española and mestizo) parentage.
The inference is drawn from the inclusion of the don or doña designation. While two indios
were cited with don-titles, it was more likely for Spanish men to carry such titles in the seventeenth
century.
63
86
de León and Juana Pinto. Their marriage also appeared to unite “equals” but likely those
with greater opportunities. Juan was a free mulato and the son of español Diego Beges
and mulata Luisa de Leon, both deceased at the time of the marriage contract. Juan had
been raised in La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz, but when he married he was noted as a
vecino of Coatepec, which belonged to the jurisdiction of Xalapa. His wife Juana was a
castiza and the legitimate daughter of Cosmo Pinto, an español, and Cathalina Ximenes,
a mestiza. Juana was also noted as a vecina of and residente at the Ingenio de San Pedro,
a prominent sugar refinery located on the outskirts of Coatepec under the political
administration of Xalapa.
The Ingenio de San Pedro had substantial holdings, and on March 27, 1631, a
poder registered in the notarial office by the founder’s son, Diego de Orduña Loyando,
and grandson, Antonio de Orduña, established the scale of the business. The sugar
refinery included houses of fine masonry with tiled roofs, various machines for sugar
extraction, collection, and storage, along with living quarters, and houses designated for
“negros and indios,” all on 559 hectares of land for sugar cultivation, which boasted
production capabilities as high as 2,000 “cartloads” of sugar cane.64 In comparison with
other prominent operational ingenios in seventeenth-century Xalapa, San Pedro had
seven sugar boilers, while Almolonga, La Concha, San José Zoncuantla, and Nuestra
Señora de los Remedios all had only two.65 Historian Bermúdez Gorrochotegui adds that
San Pedro “was one of the two largest ingenios in the jurisdiction of Jalapa, given its
64
65
ANX, March 27, 1631, f. 518vta - 520 fte.
87
ability for great sugar production and its wealth.”66 By 1646, the Ingenio de San Pedro
and its adjoining properties were valued at the astronomical price of 230,000 pesos de
oro común.67 As a couple who lived in relatively close proximity to one another in the
town of Coatepec, Juan de León’s and Juana Pinto’s families may have known each
other, especially if Juan or his Spanish father had worked at San Pedro or was affiliated
with the same social circles as the influential Orduña family that owned the refinery
where Juana and her family lived.
Some cases of exogamy are more difficult to frame possibilities of the social
world in which the couple existed when people from disparate backgrounds were joined
in holy matrimony. On February 2, 1646, Juan de la Cruz married Pasquala Ramíres. He
was a mestizo who lived in the jurisdiction of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz. Juan was
the legitimate son of Francisco Lópes and Juana de la Cruz. Pasquala was a free mulata
born and raised in Xalapa, and her late mother was a negra slave owned by a man named
Andrés Ramíres.
Their witnesses included three Spaniards, one of whom held the
distinction of don. The couple did not share any obvious commonalities. The record
even alludes to the possibility that at the time of the marriage, Juan and Pasquala did not
even live in the same city.
Some couples had inferential links to one another. Alonso Esquibel and Ana de
Buesto married on October 4, 1650. Alonso was an español who was born and raised in
Xalapa but did not know his parents. The entry did not specify whether he was raised by
the Church or whether he was adopted by another family. Ana was also born and raised
66
67
88
in Xalapa, but unlike Alonso, she was the legitimate daughter of free mulata Clara
Ordones and español Pedro de la Crus. All three of their witnesses were españoles.
Their status as native residents of Xalapa and their common Spanish heritage may have
allowed them social spaces in which they could have interacted, but it appears irregular
that an orphan, even a Spanish one, would have had access to Ana de Buesto’s circle,
which included her legitimate family of español and mulato members.
The exogamous case that followed on June 9, 1654, between Christóval Figueroa
and Francisca de Yepes made more “social sense.” Christóval was a free mulato born in
Puebla de los Angeles but was already a vecino of Xalapa when he married. He was the
legitimate son of Xpóval de Figeroa and Isavel de Medina, both deceased. It is noted that
Christóval owned a recua, a transportation business.
His bride Francisca was an
española, born and raised in Xalapa, and the legitimate daughter of Francisco Muños and
Magdalena Días. This was not Francisca’s first marriage; she was cited as the widow of
Lazaro Gonsales. The couple had two Spanish witnesses, both vecinos of Xalapa. While
Christóval was not born in Xalapa, as a man in the transportation business at mid-century,
before the boom in recuas, it is probable that he was a relatively well-known man in
Xalapan society. Transporters were much in demand in the way-station post by the
seventeenth century but not yet as numerous as they would become by the eighteenth
century with the advent of the ferias. Although his marriage contract notes that he was
already a recua owner by 1654, he did not appear before the notary of Xalapa with any
business to register.
Between 1621 and 1660, twenty-six people were registered as recua owners or
89
arrieros (transportation workers), Christóval Figueroa did not appear on this list.
However, Christóval did make his debut on the list of the nineteen transportation workers
and owners found between 1661 and 1699.68 Francisca, her parents, and even perhaps
her late first husband, would have been aware of Christóval or his social circle, which
likely included members of the relatively small social world of transporters who
generated significant profits in the recua business and were public figures. It would not,
therefore, be surprising that a Spanish family with a legitimate daughter chose to unite
with a mulato recua owner from the archbishopric center, Puebla de los Angeles.
The sixth exogamous case took place on June 16, 1659, and united people of a
shared life experience. Diego de la Crus, a mulato, married Angelina María, an india.
Both were born in Xalapa. Both were widowed from indigenous partners. The couple
had two español witnesses, but Angelina and Diego seem to have established more
intimate ties to the indigenous community. The next three entries for exogamous couples
offered no assistance in discerning the couples’ economic opportunities, social circles, or
even whether they were living as permanent residents in Xalapa when they married. On
May 28, 1670, a free mulato named Joseph de los Santos married an española named
Phelipa de Orlachea. Both were identified as legitimately born. However, not even the
two witnesses had identifying markers, just their names having been recorded. None of
the remaining exogamous contracts contained any specific details about the witnesses,
and even information about the betrothed became scarce. On January 21, 1672, Francisca
Servantes, a free mulata raised by a single mother, married an español widower named
68
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 276-277.
90
Francisco Peres. The exogamous relationship that was next recorded had even less to
offer: It simply noted the date as December 15, 1694, and mentioned that the groom,
Juan de los Ramos, was a mulato and his bride, Antonia Pérez, was a castiza.
The final case of exogamy in this collection was recorded on June 5, 1702, and
recalls the cases with economic allusions, but it also had misrepresented or poorly
documented biographical information about the couple. The bride was a parda named
Juana María who was not identified specifically as a legitimate daughter but whose
mother and father were both named. Her husband, Miguel de los Santos, was cited as a
mestizo and an hijo natural, or illegitimate child, who was raised by a single mother.
Miguel was also noted as a “sirviente” (servant) at the Ingenio Pacho, also known as the
Ingenio Nuestra Señora de los Remedios.
The Ingenio Pacho was founded as a site for sugar cultivation and processing in
1592 on the road towards Coatepec in the jurisdiction of Xalapa.69 When it was sold in
1698 to Licenciado Miguel Pérez de Medina, the ingenio fetched 7,762 pesos de oro
común and 4 reales.70 Bermúdez Gorrochotegui comments that while it was free of
mortgage and debt, the ingenio had suffered great losses, including, he writes, that of “its
equipment, slaves, and cattle.”71 Economic crisis and the lack of commercial investment
available led the new owner to rent out the lands to members of the surrounding
indigenous communities. Bermúdez Gorrochotegui notes, “It was preferable to rent the
69
8 reales accounted for 1 peso de oro común.
71
70
91
land and obtain some benefit than to keep them idle and unproductive.”72 As the Ingenio
Pacho was no longer being utilized as a unified sugar refinery by the time Miguel de los
Santos was working on it, he may have been a minor wage earner on a smaller farming
plot. Miguel’s designation as “sirviente” on rented land indicates that his economic
prospects were probably not extensive. His wife’s profile noted only that she was raised
in a two-parent household and made no allusion to her family’s financial footing in
Xalapa and its environs.
The only other detail of interest about this couple is that in the body of the entry,
Juana María is clearly documented as a parda. However, in the margin of the document
adjacent to their entry, both Miguel and Juana María are described as mestizos. As
workers on land rented to indigenous groups, perhaps the couple intended to pass
themselves off as both being mestizos as a strategy to overcome potential social barriers
raised by their being an exogamous couple living and working with indigenous groups.
Both Miguel and Juana María were labeled as castas with some indigenous background.
Miguel, as a mestizo, would have been of purported Spanish and indigenous heritage and
Juana María of indigenous and African descent as a parda. Ingenio Pacho was located in
the jurisdiction of Xalapa, but its more rural environment may not have been as socially
open as Xalapa “proper” for interracial couples, such as Miguel and Juana María. If they
had been the ones to assert the mestizo designation, they may have done so as a practice
to diminish their casta differences as they may have done with workers of the Ingenio
Pacho.
72
92
Or, perhaps Juana María had a fair complexion and ambiguous features and this
was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the notarial practice of qualifying casta designations:
“She looks like a mestiza even though she is a parda.”
Or perhaps this was a
miscalculation of the record keeper and the contradictory information denotes his own
confusion about how best to categorize a mixed-race couple, which should not have been
the case given that Xalapa’s parish had witnessed exogamous marriages since 1642.
There is always, however, the possibility that a novice record keeper muddled the
documenting of this interracial relationship.
The exclusion of data on non-identifiable spouses is unfortunate. Between 1641
and 1702, the cases with unidentifiable castes of partners accounted for a fifth of all
marriages involving African-descended people and nearly a tenth between 1724 and
1736. These marriages may have slightly shifted the percentages of the categories but
probably did not significantly alter the trends found in the collections examined. What
the data suggests is that exogamy had a strong rate among African descendants in Xalapa.
Exogamy held a steady rate between 30% and 50% over the course of nearly one hundred
years. These percentages indicate that the level of social interaction between indigenous
groups, mestizos, españoles, and people of African descent had stabilized by the midseventeenth century. This is corroborated by the context that Xalapa, founded in the
early sixteenth century, had had free people of African descent integrated into various
labor systems since at least the late sixteenth century, unlike the agriculture-intensive
markets of Córdoba. One of the earliest notarial cases in Xalapa involved a free negra
named Beatriz de Porras who had contracted to work as a cook at the inn the Venta de
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Plan del Rio.73 By 1586, there were even documented free women with wealth. Half a
century of social and economic encounters had likely solidified the terms of interracial
interactions by the 1640s, especially given that by that time the influx from the Port of
Veracruz of newly-arrived Africans, mostly enslaved, had slowed. This gradual increase
and stabilization of exogamous couples positions Xalapa as a socially “open” society that
not only allowed for casual interaction between people of different racial backgrounds
but also the benefit of enjoying the Church’s full sanction of exogamous marriages.
High exogamy rates, it is important to note, were not commonplace in every
corner of the Spanish empire. Endogamy abounded throughout the colonies even as late
as the early nineteenth century.74 Some areas did not witness high rates of marital
exogamy until the later colonial and independence eras. By 1810 in Argentina, writes
Jeffrey Shuman, “Eighty-seven percent of spouses were of the same race. In 1827, that
percentage had declined to 73%.”75 Vinson’s work on late eighteenth-century Africandescended marriage patterns in Pacific Coast communities of Mexico finds that
endogamy continued to be a prominent feature. From a 1791 census record, Vinson
establishes that the majority of free people of African descent in coastal Igualapa married
other people of African descent. The endogamy rate among “free colored civilians” was
73
ANX, December 29, 1584, f 185fte-185vta.
Frank Proctor contends that while numerous historians posit that African-descended people
sought out indigenous and mestizo partners, he argues that endogamous marriage “was more typical” in
Mexico City. Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty, 40. He found that before 1650, only 11 out of 185
African-descended spouses chose partners not of African descent, resulting in an exogamous rate of 5.95%.
Between 1660 and 1749, Proctor established that African-descended men contracted endogamous marriage
70% of the time and African-descended women did at the rate of 80%. Proctor, Damned Notions of
Liberty, 62.
75
Jeffrey M. Shumway, “‘The purity of my blood cannot put food on my table’: Changing
Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” The Americas 58, no. 2
(October 2001): 212.
74
94
91% while the rate for “free colored militiamen” was 94%.76 Vinson notes that relative
isolation and greater concentration of African-descended people in what he describes as
“subcommunities” influenced such a significant endogamous marriage pattern. 77
However, Xalapa's African-descended population was one of the oldest, boasting free
people with wealth for at least one hundred years by the time exogamy had reached the
rate of 50% in 1736. Greater social interaction, a hallmark of Xalapa since its inception
as a Spanish post between Mexico City and Veracruz, played an important factor in the
high exogamy rate.
High incidences of exogamy have often been interpreted by scholars to signify a
group's interest in escaping their caste identification or their desire to whiten (blanquear)
their families.78 Some scholars have argued that economic considerations motivated
African-descended people to seek marriage partners outside of their race.
This
perspective figures prominently in Edgar Love's work on marriage choice among
African-descended people in Mexico City. He posits that the high occurrence of Africandescended men marrying indigenous women indicated a trend of utilizing the “free
womb” laws that made emancipation matrilineal, thereby ensuring that bride and child
would be part of free society.
However, this same “goal” to procreate with free
indigenous women to have free children could have also been accomplished by marrying
free women of African descent. Mexico City counted a large number of free urban
women and men. The conclusion that men strategized to this degree regarding their
76
Vinson, “Racial Profile of Rural Mexican Province,” 279-280.
Vinson, “Racial Profile of Rural Mexican Province,” 278.
78
Literally, to whiten or lighten oneself, one’s family, or their future progeny through marriage.
Usually by avoiding marriage or sexual partners with darker skin or with less European features.
77
95
choice of india marriage partner leaves the women involved without any agency in the
matter.79 Indigenous women would have also had family interests and investments in
marriage partner choice and they, and likely the greater indigenous community, would
have objected to accepting African-descended male partners who consciously sought out
india brides for the benefit of their “free wombs.”
Others have argued that exogamy represented a group's “preference” for another
group.
And it is precisely this question of consciousness where the historiography
positions marriage choice as over-determined by race and strategically considered
primarily via the caste system.
In order to offer a more nuanced interpretation of
exogamy we must be willing to examine understudied variables of difference and
similarity that may have allowed the couple to have met, established the relationship, and
be married without a single impediment, including objections from one’s family. Few
scholars have taken on this task. Colonial Latin Americanist Rebecca Earle writes,
“Marriage and sexuality are now rightly considered core topics within colonial history.
Far less attention has been paid to charting the history of love. Often the concept is
conspicuous primarily by its absence.” 80 If we continue to couch these issues as
intellectual untouchables, we miss sight of the “disorder and violent passions of youth”
that so concerned the Crown and that compelled King Charles III to issue a Royal
Pragmatic in 1776 aimed to “avoid the abuse of contracting marriages between
79
Paul Loken also posits that enslaved African-descended men specifically sought out free brides,
mostly indigenous women, to take advantage of their “free wombs.” Loken, “Marriage as Slave
Emancipation in 17th Century Guatemala,” The Americas 58, no. 2 (October 2001): 175-200.
80
Rebecca Earle, “Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas 62, no. 1
(2005): 20.
96
unequals.” 81 Because marriage involved a multitude of factors (both rational and
emotional) as well as outside influences, we must continue to examine other
methodological approaches that do not rely exclusively on race as the sole explanatory
device in high or low incidences of exogamy.
Not all men of African descent specifically sought españolas and mestizas as
status symbols; some of these women were their socio-economic equals. Importantly,
there are no records that attest to, for example that, Juan the mulato had the option to
court and then marry one india, one negra, one mulata, one parda, one mestiza, one
española, and he chose the española above all other options available to him due to his
“preference” or desire to blanquearse. Perhaps Juan the mulato had to “settle” for an
española because there were few pardas, negras, and mulatas in his town. Or, none of
these African-descended women found Juan to be an ideal marriage partner. Just as this
example is highly speculative regarding Juan the mulato's marriage prospects, this is
often the framework proffered to explain why Spanish men would choose to marry
women of African descent. Spanish men are positioned as having to marry negra and
mulata women because there existed a scarcity of “ideal” Spanish and mestiza women.82
These explanations are based on defining social interactions by a driving
81
Earle, “Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America,” 22.
Vinson notes that due to the significantly larger African-descended population in Igualapa,
“white and mestizo males had difficulty in maintaining high endogamy rates given the dearth in females
form their castes.” He adds, “Hence, exogamy was indeed a prevalent force in Igualapa. However, rather
than greatly affecting free-colored marriages, as we might normally expect, the province’s demographic
imbalances meant that whites and mestizos would be forced to seek spouses from among the darker hues.”
Ben Vinson, III, “Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province,” 280. Jake Frederick specifically notes that
among subjects in colonial Teziutlán, “For mestizo men there was a clear preference for marrying ‘up’”.
Jake Frederick, “Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 67,
no. 4 (April 2011): 511.
82
97
preoccupation with the caste system and maintaining racial difference, which may have
been the case with Mexico City’s most elite Spanish families.
However, long-
established, highly-integrated towns, such as Xalapa, proved less invested in enforcing
strict social and familial isolation on the basis of casta identifications. In the chapters
that follow, free African-descended women in Xalapa are seen as colonial subjects of
means who negotiated various business relationships and certainly could not be
categorized as “social pariahs.”83 The free African-descended families who lived in the
jurisdiction of Xalapa documented in this chapter demonstrate high percentages of
exogamy and significant rates of affiliations with other racial groups through kinship ties
that are overlooked when specific social markers in addition to race are not applied in the
analyses. Not all variables can be accounted for: Maybe Juan’s española wife had been
the only woman to impress his mother? Or maybe the española was the best cook of his
marriage prospects? Indeed, a survey of marriage records demonstrates that documents
varied in the type of information recorded, a situation that does not easily lend itself to
standardizing an analysis of socially salient markers in various collections. While record
keepers may have employed details and labels inconsistently, I argue that even so these
details offer important clues into assessing other, non-racial preoccupations of colonial
subjects.
During the early colonial period, Spanish and African men had few options for
sexual partners other than indigenous women, accounting for the high percentage of
mestizo and pardo children born out of wedlock. However, exogamy signified a different
83
Ilona Katzew asserts, “Being identified as black or as a descendant from blacks in the sistema de
castas was tantamount to being a social pariah.” Katzew, Casta Paintings, 46.
98
level of investment. Scholars have established that there was little social pressure on
early Spanish and African men to legitimize their sexual relationships with indigenous
and African-descended women.84 If fathers had established substantive relationships
with their illegitimate children they could, and some did, offer financial assistance,
provide for training or job opportunities, and include them among their legitimate
children in the last will and testament. Nor did these men have to be lawfully married to
their mulata, negra, parda and india consorts in order to provide for their economic wellbeing. Of interracial but unmarried unions, Jane Landers asserts,
Even in the cases involving concubinage, the law and community
consensus protected [Spanish men’s] widows and heirs, and the church
often interceded “paternally” on behalf of mothers of African descent.
Many men left substantial property to their common-law wives and
natural children, and the community respected the desires of the
deceased, as well as the rights of the bereaved.85
As such, exogamy cannot be explained away as an obligatory act performed by the
couple since illicit interracial relationships were subjected to so little social pressure.
Recent studies have begun to search for non-race-based explanations for trends of
endogamy and exogamy among African-descended groups. Robert Schwaller’s explores
Afro-indigenous relations in late-sixteenth century Mexico and asserts, “In general, rural
areas probably represented the most important venue for the formation of Africanindigenous unions.” 86
Schwaller further argues that even exploitive relationships
84
Aguirre Beltran, La Poblacion Negra, 255. Christopher Lutz and Matthew Restall, discuss the
paucity of marriages between Mayas and “mulattos.” Although, they add, there were “informal unions.”
Christopher Lutz and Matthew Restall “Wolves and Sheep?: Black-Maya Relations in Colonial Guatemala
and Yucatan,” in Beyond Black and Red, 203.
85
Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 150.
86
Robert C. Schwaller, “‘Mulata, Hija de Negro y India’: Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early
Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Spring 2011): 896.
99
between the two groups could be mitigated by geographic isolation. He writes, “While
Africans were frequently employed as overseers or managers of native labor, the harsher
rural environment necessitates a greater degree of mutual cooperation and friendship.”87
Spatial proximity and relative seclusion, then, figure as prominent determining factors
that helped facilitate affective relations that could lead to marital bonds between
indigenous groups and African-descended populations.
In his work on mid-eighteenth-century Teziutlan in northern Veracruz, Jake
Frederick examines how marriage choice reflects cultural mores or preferences. He urges
the scholars of the field to consider statistical probabilities of the specific community
when analyzing marriage patterns. Frederick writes,
The fact that all of the pardos in the sample married exogamously is likely
a result of the fact that the Afro-Mexican population of Tezuitlan was
apparently quite small, thus reducing the likelihood that pardos would find
acceptable partners among such a small group.88
While he notes that other studies have concluded that “Spaniards avoided Afro-Mexican
partners,”89 he adds that the lack of marriages between Spaniards and pardos did not
necessarily reflect social barriers between the two or a specific aversion in Tezuitlan.
Frederick writes, “[T]he simple fact of the relative rarity of pardos in the area could very
well have meant that Spaniards were unlikely to find a pardo with whom they felt a close
affective bond.” 90
And while greater frequency of interracial unions is often
characterized as an aspect of the lower social echelons “because the economic stakes
87
Schwaller, “Mulata, Hija de Negro y India,” 896.
Frederick, “Without Impediment,” 510.
89
90
88
100
were lower and left more room for sentiment,”91 Xalapa's particular social landscape
would likely account for exogamy between people of means, and it is this demographic
that the historiography does not account for when data is based solely on casta
identifications recorded in marriage contracts.
Unlike rich notarial records that documented economic prospects or the vivid, and
sometimes salacious inquisitorial records, marriage records on their own rarely offer
details about the individuals involved in the sacrament. I examined marriage records in
all extant files for the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in parish archives of
Xalapa,92 and all were documented in near identical form as follows: Name of groom,
caste/slave status, name of owner (if slave), legitimacy of birth, name(s) of parents, and
identification of vecino status. The same corresponding information for the bride would
then be followed by the names of the two or three witnesses along with their vecino status
and occasionally their casta designation. Sometimes the ages of the people involved
were included, but most times they were not. A widow was usually identified along with
the name of her deceased spouse. Occasionally people were identified as having been
born and raised in a particular location. An example of a relatively more detailed entry
was provided when, on June 22, 1727, an español man married a free parda. His part of
the entry reads: Pedro Rangel, an español, a natural and vecino of the “Castillo93 of San
Juan de Ulúa,” resident of Xalapa, legitimate son of Joseph Rangel and Sebastiana
91
Navarro and Sanchez Korrol, Women in Latin American and the Caribbean, 51.
AEP, ECB Collection, Caja 1, Casamientos Libro 1 (1641-1646); AEP, ECB Collection, Caja 1,
Matrimonios Libro 3 (1647-1655); AEP, ECB, Caja 2, Matrimonios Libro 4 1656-1702; and AEP, ECB,
Matrimonios Caja 2, Libro 4 (1724-1736).
93
Castillo literally means castle, but San Juan de Ulúa functioned as an island fortress or military
post located off the shore of the Port of Veracruz (La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz).
92
101
Fernándes, who were also vecinos of the fort. His wife’s part of the entry reads: Phelipa
de la Trinidad Juares, free parda, natural 94 and vecina of Xalapa, hija natural
(illegitimate daughter) of Pasquala Peres Juares, a vecina of Xalapa. Their witnesses
were cited as Don Juan Ricardo de Gusman and Don Juan Batista de Arroya (a vecino of
Xalapa).
A few inferences can be made regarding this couple. The Spanish husband was
born and raised in La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, where the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa is
located. He and his father may have been militiamen or they may have been common
laborers at the fort. Phelipa was raised by a single mother in Xalapa but nothing in the
entry indicates how she sustained herself before meeting Pedro Rangel. The two “dons”
who served as witnesses might have been associates of Phelipa, as she, not Pedro, was the
one born in Xalapa. In addition, many titled men served as witnesses for people of
African descent in ecclesiastical records, almost 20% of the time in marriage records
alone. On October 20, 1732, when Thomas Juachín Bázquez, a twenty-two-year-old free
pardo, sought to marry Bonifacia Josepha, a fifteen-year-old free parda, Don Juan de
Campos served as one of the three witnesses to the marriage contract.
Even with more “detailed” entries such as the union between Phelipa de la
Trinidad Juares and Pedro Rangel, their specific socio-economic backgrounds are
impossible to confirm from the marriage collections. Perhaps Phelipa was a wealthy free
parda and Pedro was the son of legitimate parents well positioned in La Nueva Ciudad de
94
A natural had three meanings in the colonial archives of Xalapa. The first described an
indigenous person, ie. The naturales who lived in the peripheries of Xalapa. The second meaning
generally denoted birthplace, ie. Phelipa was a natural of Xalapa but later moved and became a vecina of
Puebla. The third referred to illegitimacy. If a child was designated as an “hijo natural” or “naturally
born,” she was born out of wedlock.
102
Veracruz. When exogamy involved people of African descent, assumptions are usually
about “marrying up” or “climbing the social ladder” through marital partners, when the
only available information is the casta designation documented by the parish recorder.
Phelipa and Pedro are on the more detailed spectrum of marriage records; most standard
entries provide much less information about the intended spouses. On December 15,
1694, the matrimony of one couple was recorded with the following information: Juan
de los Ramos was a mulato, his wife was a castiza named Anttonia Pérez, and they had
two male witnesses of unstated caste named Domingo de Olivera and Sebastian Días de
Acosta. Such marriage records provided only limited information about the residency,
occupation, financial prospects, or business connections of the parties named because
most marriage records only incidentally included glimpses into the personal lives of the
bride and groom. Such documents were not designed to do more than that.
Exogamous couples in Xalapa followed similar tendencies found in other studies
when race is the only factor accounted for as an element of difference. When people of
African descent married non-Afro-castas, they decidedly married mestizos.
Other
scholars have established this coupling pattern among informal relationships and among
sanctioned unions in the late colonial period, but no other study has found this to be the
case for marriage in the earlier stages of Mexico’s colonial development. While mestizo
partners accounted for the greatest number of exogamous spouses in Xalapa, Africandescended women married Spanish men three times as often as African-descended men
married Spanish women. Few women and men of African descent married people from
the large indigenous population in the jurisdiction, which mirrors other areas of New
103
Spain during the long seventeenth century.95 Even as my contribution to the early
colonial historiography mirrors some of the marriage patterns of later-colonial studies,
these parameters of difference and similarity, thus far, have focused on race and caste.
The reasoning for such limitations is usually based on the postulation that someone of
African descent was of the lower classes, likely illegitimate, and lacked wealth and social
connections. The constraints of the marriage records do not always offer clues about all
of these elements, but I believe that the notion that the Church united equals is found in
other ways beyond race that require our attention.
Legitimacy
In The Secret History of Gender, Stern argues that colonial subjects of African
descent were targeted as “symbols of licentiousness, people who lacked lineage and
respect for social order.”96 Licentious may have been what others thoughts of Africandescended people, but their investments in approximating Spanish ideals, especially
regarding religious duty and spiritual commitment, demonstrates that people of African
descent valued the measures of orderliness. A reconsideration of the criteria of social
status demonstrates legitimacy to have acted as a significant variable for marriage choice
among people of African descent in colonial Xalapa.
Between 1724 and 1736, 188 individuals were involved in marriages with at least
one person of African descent. Only one free person, a mulata woman, married a slave, a
95
Gutiérrez notes that between 1694 and 1739, indigenous exogamy accounted for only 5% of
marriages. This rate would increase drastically to 20% between 1760 and 1790, Gutierrez argues, because
of greater social mobility that resulted from the Bourbon Reforms. However, Gutierrez notes that only 5%
of marriages were classified by race between 1694 and 1759, which may skew the 5% down. Gutiérrez,
When Jesus Came, 328.
96
Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 213.
104
mulato man. Interestingly enough, the free mulata was an hija legítima, or daughter of
married parents, a child born in-wedlock. Of the ninety-four marriages, sixty-eight
couples (72.34%) involved at least one person of legitimate birth, establishing that a
significant percentage of people who married in the early eighteenth century came from
legitimately born families of African descent.
1. 4 Both Spouses of Legitimate Birth: 1724-1736
Of the ninety-four couples, thirty-four of them (36.17%) involved cases where
both spouses were hijos legítimos.97 Of these all-hijo legítimo marriages, people of
African descent more often (52.94%) married other hijos legítmos of African descent
than hijo legítimos of other classifications, namely mestizos (26.47%), españoles
(14.71%), indios (2.94%), or those not identified by caste (2.94%). While the Church
claimed to unite wills, with more than one third of all marriages involving two people of
legitimate birth, it was also uniting statuses. Being an hijo legítimo did not seal one's
97
I have shortened the term “hijo legítimo” to “HL” in all charts presented in this study.
Additionally, the abbreviation “AD” in all charts refers to people of African descent.
105
position in society, but it did offer a modicum of social legitimacy at a time when being
legitimate held some currency and it seems to have made a difference in marital choices
in a colony with widespread illegitimacy among all subjects.
Although there were fewer women in New Spain during the early period of the
colonial era, and honor tied to virtuous women was a long-held Iberian notion,
illegitimacy was prevalent. Patricia Seed writes, “Spanish women in the New World
followed their European cousins, having extraordinary high numbers of births outside of
marriage, significantly higher than even their European counterparts.”98 Seed tracks the
change in tide by the eighteenth century when parents made more public efforts to
strongly influence the marriage choices of their children, efforts that flew in the face of
the Church's stance of free-will unions. Perhaps what we see here is evidence of this
growing trend among people of African descent in Xalapa. Parents of African-descended
legitimate children may have encouraged them to associate more with other legitimate
families and thus would have established a social circle of potential mates who were also
hijos legítimos.
98
106
1. 5 Exogamy, AD non-HL Spouse with HL Spouse: 1724-1736
Few people (10 cases) of not of African descent who were specifically cited as
hijos legítimos married people of African descent who were not acknowledged hijos
legítimos by the parish record keeper. Three legitimately born Spanish men and three
mestizo men married African-descended women who were not designated as legitimate.
Only two legitimate Spanish women and two legitimate mestizas married men of African
descent who were not specified as having been born to parents legitimately united in the
Church. I believe these cases may evidence a larger trend that if people were going to
cross caste boundaries, they were more likely to do so with their peers, in this case
legitimacy based on whether one's parents were married or not.
107
1. 6 African-descended Legitimate Spouse with non-HL Spouse: 1724-1736
While legitimately born African-descended women and men found many of their
marriage partners with other hijo legítimos,99 they also married a number of non-hijos
legítimos.
Of the ninety-four marriages, twenty-four (25.53%) involved African-
descended hijos legítimos with people not designated with that stated parental status.
African-descended hijos legítimos married twelve (50%) African descended partners who
were not hijos legítimos, but married nine people not of African descent (37.50%) who
were not hijos legítimos and three individuals (12.50%) who did not have a designated
caste in the record. Compared to the mere nine cases of non-African hijos legítimos who
married African-descended non-hijos legítimos, people of African descent appear to be a
bit less discriminating when it came to marrying people who were not of African descent
and who were not specifically cited as hijos legítmos.
99
Of the 58 marriages involving people of African descent who were legitimate, 34 marriages
(58.62%) involved people who both claimed legitimate birth.
108
1. 7 Neither Spouse Designated as HL: 1724-1736
While being a legitimate son or daughter increased one's chances of marrying a
legitimate spouse, twenty-six marriages (27.66%) involved unions in which neither
spouse was stated of legitimate birth. Of these twenty-six unions, ten (38.46%) involved
both spouses of African descent, thirteen (50%) involved at least one person of nonAfrican descent, and three cases (11.54%) involved at least one person of non-stated
caste.
In The Limits of Racial Domination, Cope argues that as plebeians, poverty
facilitated greater interaction between Afro-castas, Spaniards, and indigenous groups.
He writes, “The existence of such impoverished Spaniards diminished the social
distances between whites and castas.” 100 Cope’s assessment of plebeian society in
Mexico City certainly may explain the lack of caste-based marriage preference amongst
people from illegitimate heritage. The absence of cited legitimate parents also may have
allowed for greater personal choice in marital partners. However, it is important to
remember that just as legitimacy did not intrinsically mean social and economic well 100
109
being, illegitimacy did not necessarily equate with poverty or life as a social pariah.
Unfortunately, the nature of the ecclesiastical documents limits the details of the lives of
those who had one or more of the four sacraments recorded and documented by clergy.
Identifying markers such as the occupations of the entrants or their neighborhoods in
Xalapa were not cited. The vast majority of the records merely stated the date, name of
the person (sometimes just the given name), a caste designation, “associative characters”
(e.g., godparents or witnesses), and whether the entrants and associative actors were
vecinos or not. I found that in some baptismal records, godparents were specifically cited
as feligreses, or parishioners. At times, entrants were cited as living at a specific sugar
refinery, but no specifics were included to indicate social or economic status, with the
exception of being cited as a slave. However, in a time when inter-generational wealth
was rare and social legitimacy was a site often negotiated through virtue of the family,
protecting one’s public reputation of honor certainly found traction among many colonial
subjects.
The importance of legitimacy among elite families is well-documented. 101
Patricia Seed notes that families who objected to their child’s proposed spouse used an
indirect approach to address racial concerns that “focused on illegitimacy, a specter
rooted in a centuries-old Mexican tradition of miscegenation.”102 Seed adds, “Because in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries liaisons between the races occurred
predominantly outside of marriage, being of racially mixed parentage usually meant
101
For an indepth discussion of preoccupations with blood purity, see: Martinez, Genealogical
Fictions (2008); For elite concerns of legitimacy across Spanish America, see: Twinam, Public Lives,
Private Secrets (1999).
102
Seed, To Love Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico, 215.
110
being illegitimate.”103 While illegitimacy may have become “synonymous for being
racially mixed”104 in other areas of the colony, women and men of African descent in
Xalapa understood the cultural currency of legitimacy, demonstrated by the trend of
legitimately born people marrying one another at higher percentages.
Afro-Casta Families in Xalapa
Some scholars have found evidence that families of African descent in Mexico
suffered from poor treatment in the popular imagination of other colonists. Seed writes,
“[I]t was normatively believed that pregnancy outside of marriage was the province of
black and casta women, while it was similarly believed that virginity was the rule among
Spanish women.”105 While this discourse may have held true in some areas of the
colony, it was not universally evidenced. In the case of Xalapa, during the mid-colonial
period, African-descended people were highly concerned with legitimacy and
demonstrated their investment in Hispanic cultural norms through attempts at preserving
the “honorable family.” In my review of the seventeenth-century and early-eighteenthcentury confirmation records of Xalapa housed in the city's Metropolitan Cathedral,
religious as well as social identities were placed in the historical record and reveal new
narratives of African-descended families. While I have reviewed baptismal records in
order to discuss aspects of family life, I found that confirmation records documented
more accurately the strength of the family over time.
The Church firmly recognized the baptismal record’s prominence by utilizing it as
103
105
104
111
the “principal record of family lineage.”106 The production of documentation, however,
is key in understanding the importance that the baptisms and confirmations hold for this
project. Church protocols stipulated that children should be baptized by their third day of
life. Twinam argues that cases in Mexico held fairly close to these regulations with most
children being baptized by the fifth day.107 There was greater variation from the threeday expectation in Xalapa, although the majority of children with cited ages were less
than two weeks old when they were baptized. On February 18, 1650, parents Juan
Hernándes and María Lópes baptized the “eldest” recorded baby in all collections
reviewed for this study.
The mulato child was named Joseph and he was forty-seven
days old at the time of his baptism. Confirmations, on the other hand, took place
sometime between seven and ten years of age, documenting that a two-parent household
had persisted past the first few days of a child’s life.
For the following data analyses of confirmation and baptism records, I have
developed a key code for charts to represent the six designations of children found in the
parish records. A legitimate child was noted as an “hijo legítimo” (HL), a child raised by
the charity of the church was an said to have been raised “de la iglesia” (DLI), and an
orphaned child was said to have “padres desconocidos” (DKP). All children without
documented claims to legitimacy with one parent cited only were labeled with the code
(HN) to refer to hijos naturales. While children born out of wedlock and raised by two
parents would have been considered “hijos naturales,” I have decided to label them as
(HN2) to distinguish them as hijos naturales raised in a two-parent household although
106
107
Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 135.
Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 130.
112
lacking the specific distinction of legitimacy.
1. 8 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1642
The 1642 Libro de Confirmaciones included 108 children of African descent who
had been confirmed.108 Nearly half (47.22%) were children born to legitimately married
parents. This large percentage of hijos legítimos contradicts much of the information we
have had concerning African-descended families. Nine (9.09%) confirmed children were
cited as “hijos de la iglesia,” or children raised by the charity of the Church. Twenty-two
(20.37%) were classified as children who did not know their fathers. An additional
sixteen children (14.82%) were not classified as hijos legítimos but had both parents
listed in the record. Ten children (9.26%) are specifically cited as orphaned children. If
we collapse the illegitimate categories, 54.54% of children were not raised by parents
108
113
legally united by the tenets of the Church. Seed found similar illegitimacy rates for
children of African descent in baptism records of the central parish of Mexico City during
the second half of the seventeenth century.109 However, by collapsing the legitimate
category with the category of children with both parents cited, the number of Africandescended children in two-parent households accounts for 62.04% of the confirmations in
1642.
Stern explores the various reasons that unmarried relationships, which he refers to
as “consensual unions,” were commonplace among plebeian subjects. He writes, “The
fragile economic and institutional support of plebeian marriage brought knotty dilemmas
to prospective sexual partners, especially women.”110 Stern cites the economic burden
experienced by poor Mexico City residents that may have influenced lower rates of
sanctioned unions.
He argues, “Marriage fees and celebrations imposed expenses
difficult to finance, and formal marriage implied potentially unwelcome economic,
social, and institutional obligations and entanglements.”111 In eighteenth-century New
Mexico, Gutiérrez notes, residents accused priests of charging exorbitant fees to perform
marriages, perhaps offering a rationalization for dodging marriage as determined by the
Catholic Church.112
Stern asserts that the lack of a religious sanction did not always mark the people
involved in consensual unions as infamous. He writes, “From these considerations and
their social negotiation there emerged a culture of respectable consensual union among
109
111
112
Gutiérrez asserts that such claims were unfounded since fees were set “on the basis of
established fee schedules.” Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 312.
110
114
persons too poor to marry.” 113 Gutiérrez argues both an economic and cultural
explanation for Church-sanctioned marriages. He writes, “If one had no property to
transmit to legal heirs, if one did not cherish the cultural ideals of Spanish society, if one
valued Pueblo or nomadic Indian conceptions about the meaning of the marital bond,
then there was little reason for entertaining a sacramental Christian marriage.”114
Richard Boyer’s examination of bigamy demonstrates that those prosecuted as
bigamists were not intentionally subversive of the Catholic Church’s mandates. As
Boyer attests, “We should see [bigamists], then, not as people bent on disorder but as
wanting to fit in and settle in.”115 People became involved in bigamous relationships
because of long-term separations from their families, unsatisfying lawful marriages, or
coercion. The bigamous marriage, then, was an approximation of the ideal of a lawfully
united couple.
Had the offending parties remained unmarried, Boyer asserts, the
Inquisitorial Courts would not have prosecuted them as bigamists, although they would
have been guilty of barraganía. Boyer describes barraganía as “a long-term and stable
arrangement…an informal union deeply rooted in Hispanic popular culture and accepted
to a degree in the Siete Partidas.”116
The socio-cultural landscape that allowed for tempered acceptance of barraganía
but that punished those who married their cohabitating partner, albeit with disregard to
the existence of a first spouse, Boyer writes, “emphasizes the coexistence of toleration
113
115
116
114
115
and prohibition.”117 While a two-parent family could not claim legitimate birth for their
children, they appeared to make them as legitimate as possible through the social opening
of tolerance. Unmarried couples of African descent (those “guilty” of barraganía) raised
families together, baptized and confirmed their progeny, and approximated the religious
ideal by fulfilling their obligations as parents of Catholic children, even if the couple did
not feel compelled to legitimate their relationship through the Church.
The consensual unions documented in the confirmation records of Xalapa, in
particular, demonstrate that mothers and fathers in such relationships were committed to
the idea of the family unit for at least the first seven years of their children’s lives, the age
at which most children were confirmed. Perhaps poverty proved prohibitive to these
families or perhaps these women and men wanted to avoid “institutional obligations” but
still felt compelled to ensure that their children were initiated into religious life through
baptism and confirmed as members of the Church.
I argue that legitimacy served as a socially salient marker for African-descended
families, but by collapsing categories I found that two-thirds of children were raised in
two-parent households even though they were not all religiously sanctioned,
demonstrating that some colonial subjects fulfilled an important Catholic rite of passage
by marrying and some found ways to approximate the ideal. Distinctively for Xalapa, the
47.22% legitimacy rate among confirmed children was only a starting point for people of
African descent, and more lawfully married couples appeared in the archives.
The baptism records that chronicle the years 1641 to 1669 confirm this growing
117
116
trend in legitimacy.
The two aforementioned ECB Collections were knowingly
incomplete when contemporaries compiled them. I have combined data from Caja 1,
Libro 1 (1641-1646) with Caja 1, Libro 3 (1646-1655) to analyze trends in the first half
of the seventeenth century and then compared that data with the results of my analysis of
baptism records in Caja 2, Libro 4, which includes documents from 1656 to 1669.
1. 9 Baptisms and Legitimacy: 1641-1655
Between 1641 and 1655, seventy-seven children of African descent were
baptized. Legitimacy as found in baptism records during the mid-seventeenth century
differed somewhat from what was established by the 1642 confirmation records (47.22%)
with the percentage of baptisms of legitimate children at 41.56% between 1641 and 1655.
However, by adding the two children who were confirmed in the presence of both of their
parents, but not specifically cited as hijos legítimos, the number of children being raised
117
in two-parent household climbs to 44.16%.
Slightly more children, thirty-five kids
(45.46%), were cited with only their mothers at the time of confirmation. Of these single
mothers who baptized children, fifteen were noted as enslaved and twenty were cited as
libres (free women). The significant number of enslaved in this category skews the
perception of African-descended families in Xalapa, as enslaved families could be
separated at the will of their owners.
In addition, some of these enslaved “single
mothers” could have also been the victims of sexual violence from owners that resulted in
pregnancy. As such their lack of a “sanctioned family” must be understood with regard
to their limited agency to construct one.118 Only 5.19% of children were designated as
being raised by the charity of the Church with an equal number of children who had
“unknown parents” but not specifically cited as being raised “de la iglesia.”
118
While this study focuses on free people of African descent, I included (and specifically
differentiate) cases of enslaved women because their children were not specifically cited as enslaved and
some newborns were granted freedom and lived with their still enslaved families.
118
The two books of Caja 1 (1641-1655) document fourteen years of baptisms in
which seventy-seven children of African descent received that sacrament. Libro 4 of
Caja 2 documents thirteen years from 1656 to 1669 and yielded cases of sixty-six
baptized children from which a drastic turn of events in legitimacy rates is witnessed.
While the legitimacy rate held strong at 41.56% between 1641 and 1655, it plummeted to
21.21% between 1656 and 1669. Even when two-parent households not identified as
legitimate are included in the legitimate family category, the combined categories only
account for 31.82% of children baptized.
Free single mothers baptized 21.21% of
children and enslaved mothers baptized children 30.30% of the time. Children raised by
the charity of the Church had declined to 3.07%. However, the category of unknown
parents (DKP) accounted for 13.64% of children baptized.
119
The final surviving baptism collection for the seventeenth century, labeled
“Libros de Baptismos,” documents a recovery of legitimacy rates.119 Between 1666 and
1689, 183 children were baptized.
Of these 183 children, 33.88% of them were
legitimately born. Another 7.65% of baptized children received the sacrament with both
parents cited as present but not designated as legitimate. If the two categories are
combined, 41.53% of children were raised in a two-parent household at least until they
were baptized. Children with only their free mothers cited in the records accounted for
27.32% of the baptisms. Enslaved single mothers baptized an additional 23.50% of
children. The category of children considered charges “de la iglesia” disappeared and
likely replaced with the language of “padres desconocidos” (DKP),120 which accounted
119
120
AEP, Libro de Bautizos Caja 1, Libro 1, 1666-1689.
Unknown parents.
120
for 7.65% of baptized children.
No surviving baptism or confirmation records were available to close out the
seventeenth century; a twenty-three-year gap of legitimacy data is the result. The 1712
book of confirmation records resumes the work and the results demonstrate a significant
upswing in legitimacy among mulato and pardo families but also some interesting
categorical shifts among illegitimate children at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Of
the 175 children documented in the 1712 Libro de Confirmaciones,121 63.43% involved
parents confirming their legitimate children of African descent.
In seventy years,
families of African descent who had their children confirmed had increased their
legitimacy rates by more than 30%, significantly higher than what Seed found, which is
121
121
the only other study on legitimacy/illegitimacy rates among people of African descent in
Mexico during the same relative time frame. Only 1.14% of the cases involved orphaned
children. Cases involving children not specified as hijos legítimos but that had two
parents cited accounted for 1.72% of the data. Children who did not have a cited father
accounted for 2.28% of entries, which represents a significant decrease in single-parent
households when compared to the 20.37% of fatherless children confirmed in 1642.
Beyond the striking increase in legitimacy among Afro-casta families and the
decrease of absent fathers in 1712 is the conspicuous jump in cases of children raised by
the charity of the Church. It seems as though this seventy-year gap period between the
two confirmation books of 1642 and 1712 witnessed a bifurcation in social labels: either
a child came from a two-parent home of married individuals or they were being raised by
the Church with little or no contact or knowledge of their biological parents. Of the 175
cases of confirmations of African-descended children, 31.43% involved children
classified as “hijos de la iglesia,” almost four times as many cases than in 1642. The
relatively low percentage of cited orphans for 1712 (1.14%) compared to the higher
percentage of orphans in 1642 (9.26%), may have more to do with a terminological shift
by the parish notaries than an actual social trend among Afro-casta families. It appears
that by 1712, the parish sacrament recorder may have begun to use the terminology “de la
iglesia” to define all orphaned children instead of differentiating them with “de la
iglesia” and “padres desconocidos,” literally unknown parents (orphans). It is possible
that the number of orphaned children drastically decreased in this seventy-year time
frame. However, it is more likely that the pattern took such a significant turn because of
122
an official’s preference for the language to refer to parentless children. Terminological
preferences, whether individual (i.e. the parish recorder) or group (Xalapan society atlarge) shed light on some of the patterns I found in the next set of confirmation books that
I reviewed.
The 1726 book of confirmations recorded a total of sixty-three children. 122
Significantly, only 11.11% percentage of children are listed as hijos legítimos. Notably,
two-parent households not cited as legitimately formed accounted for 47.62% of cases of
confirmed children. By combining the two categories, the percentage of children raised
in two-parent households climbs to 58.63%, slightly less than in previous years but much
closer than the drastic shift to 11.11% legitimacy. There was an increase in the cases of
122
123
absent fathers, a total of 11.11% of sixty-three cases. Nearly a third of children (30.16%)
were cited as not having any parents, children with “padres desconocidos.” However,
not a single child was classified as having been raised by the Church unlike the 31.43%
of the 1712 sample.
1. 14 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1728 (partial)
The partial confirmation collections of 1728 and 1736 also evidence a growing
trend of children not specifically classified in terms of legitimacy. Of the thirty-four
surviving cases from 1728, 8.82% involved children raised by the Church. Orphaned
children represented 2.94% of the cases and a paltry 2.94% of children were specifically
cited as coming from legitimately married parents, the lowest rate of legitimacy recorded,
even given the smaller sample size. However, 85.30% of children confirmed had both
parents cited in the records but were not designated as legitimate families.
124
1. 15 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1736 (partial)
For the 1736 partial collection, only thirteen cases have survived the test of time.
Orphaned children comprised 30.77% of these cases and two-parent families not cited as
legitimate confirmed 69.23% of children. No children were noted as having been raised
by the church. Nor were any children classified as being raised in a single-parent
household or specifically cited as a legitimate child.
125
1. 16 Confirmations and Legitimacy: 1726, 1728 (partial), 1736 (partial) Combined
Totals
When the data is collapsed for 1726, 1728, and 1736, these trends become more
pronounced.
Of the 110 confirmation cases, a mere 7.27% of children came from
legitimate unions. Another 61.82% of children were confirmed by both parents but were
not cited as legitimate. More than one fifth (21.82%) of children had no parents to speak
of at the time of confirmation. Children of single mothers made up 6.36% of the 110
cases and just 2.73% of children were raised by the Church. This trend towards not
classifying children in terms of legitimacy has a number of possible explanations. We
can posit that the parish recorder was careless, which is possible considering the
inconsistencies found in all of the ecclesiastical records. However, this seems unlikely
given the high percentages involved. It may be possible that the parish recorders no
126
longer considered legitimacy as a salient socio-religious label and therefore stopped
recording it in the confirmation books, which would explain the increased number of
unclassified children. The lack of classifications in a world preoccupied by classifying
may then have an explanation written into the fabric of society or cultural codes of
notarial record keeping that is not explicit in the surviving records. Kathryn Burns urges
historians to engage with these “chessboards” of notarial documents and attempt to
decipher such practices. She writes,
To get the most from our sources, then, we need to go into the archive –
not just literally, but figuratively, getting into the rules and gambits that
contoured the ways people made documents. Happily, the rules aren't hard
to find. They are hidden in plain sight, in the modern editions of legal
codes and classics.123
The silences in these records may indicate less of a need or desire to proclaim one's
legitimacy, either because it was a more expected status or, conversely, the least likely
status and only stated in exceptional cases.
However, since the percentages were
gradually increasing for cited legitimate children up until the 1726 confirmation records,
it is hard to conceive that fourteen years later the desire for documented legitimacy would
have fallen off so dramatically from the rate of 63.43% witnessed in 1712.
Given these trends, I argue that legitimacy may have become a rule rather than an
exception by the early 1700s in Xalapa and so therefore did not have to be stated
explicitly in this type of documentation. The high number of people entering legitimate
unions in Xalapa who also came from legitimate families in the early 1700s also
evidences this growing trend.
A smaller baptism sample chronicling records from
123
Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke
127
January 1, 1724 to March 27, 1732 appears to corroborate my theory.124
Forty-four children of African descent, twenty girls and twenty-four boys, were
baptized in this twelve-year period that overlaps with the incomplete 1726, 1728, and
1736 confirmation records. Of these forty-four children, 25% of them were born to
legitimately married parents, which first seems to correspond with the data that signals a
drop in legitimacy but far and away from the legitimacy rate of 2.94% in 1728 and 0% in
1736. However, when combined with the twenty-two children who were baptized with
two parents cited but not specifically designated as legitimate, the percentage of children
in a two-parent household at the time of baptism climbs to 75%, the largest percentage
documented in nearly one hundred years of Xalapa’s parish archives. Children baptized
with only their mothers present represented 13.64% and those raised by the charity of the
124
AEP, Bautizos Caja 2, Libro 6 (1724-1732).
128
Church accounted for 11.36%.
Xalapa's comparatively “old” population of African descent, a presence since at
least the second half of the sixteenth century, demonstrated greater levels of Spanish
acculturation through their participation in fulfilling their religious obligations to marry
in the Church and baptize and confirm their children. These higher rates of children born
“in wed-lock”, especially the growth in legitimately born children over the course of the
century evidences greater approximation to Spanish ideals, including those regarding
respectability and social legitimacy, which I believe influenced the contours of marriage
choice and familial stability among Africans and their descendants. In addition to these
trends, the ecclesiastical records of Xalapa offer another way to examine the forms of
families through the webs of fictive kin documented through the Catholic practice of
godparentage.
Godparentage
Godparents were, and continue to be, prominent features of the Catholic tradition.
The role of the godparent was to serve as the baptized child’s spiritual sponsor and offer
instruction in the tenets of the Church. Godparents could be men or women, free or
enslaved, and be of any racial or caste background.125 They could be friends or family
members, excepting the mother or father of the baptized child. With the responsibility of
religious instruction, the godparent had to meet certain requirements. The proposed
125
Proctor discusses the role of godparents for enslaved children. While he notes that Spanish
godparents were prevalent, Proctor clarifies that rarely did they play a role in the manumission of the
godchild. “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review
86, no. 2 (2006): 325-326.
129
godparent had to be as least sixteen years old and had to have been confirmed in the
Catholic Church, received Eucharist, exhibited “to be in harmony” with the faith, and
demonstrated his or her commitment to the religious community, such as regular mass
attendance. The colonial baptism records of Xalapa often include the specification of
“feligres” (parishioner) after the godparents identifying information, demonstrating the
importance of how the godparent was known in the community. Additionally, and
similar to the vetting of marriage choice by the Catholic Church, priests had to establish
that the godparents had not a single canonical impediment that would exclude the
person’s participation as a spiritual counselor for a newly initiated member of the flock.
Two godparents were preferred, a man and a woman, but canonical law only required one
(either man or woman). The acceptance of this responsibility sealed a sacred covenant
between the godparent, the parents, and the baptized child.
The choice of godparents was an important consideration for a variety of reasons.
Baptism represented the child’s incorporation into the religious fold and a worthy
godparent would see that the child moved on to be confirmed and then fulfill all other
Catholic sacraments in his or her lifetime.
It was not uncommon, however, that
godparents were chosen to augment a family’s social capital and strengthen patronage
ties to colonial subjects with greater influence, wealth, or status. Whether they were
“proper” sponsors committed to the spiritual development of a new member of the faith,
a choice that reflected less religiously tied investments, or a mix of both, godparents
formed part of an intentional extension of a family that was supposed to include spiritual
support but could also include social benefits and a buffer for families living more
130
precarious socio-economic lives. In the following, I examine the pattern of godparents to
assess how the African-descended population configured their chosen families and how
these decisions changed over time in the integrated spaces of Xalapa.
The extant baptism books in Xalapa’s parish archives record nearly a century of
African-descended family history. Some of the information, namely legitimacy, has been
utilized already in this chapter.
Baptism records are unique because of the social
expectations embedded in them. Unlike the chosen members of other sacraments, such
as the witnesses to a marriage, godparents alluded to greater intimate ties, or the desire
for such connections. To begin to understand the shape of interracial social interactions,
we return to the data collapsed from Libros 1 and 3 from Caja 1 of the “Entierros,
Casamientos, y Bautizos” (ECB) Collection, documenting baptisms from 1641 to 1655.
These are the earliest available cases of baptism in Xalapa and they document significant
interracial interactions through godparentage.126
126
For the following charts, the Spanish term madrina (godmother) is abbreviated to “mad.” The
Spanish term padrino (godfather) is abbreviated to “pad.” The term “set” refers to cases in which a child
had two sponsors (one godmother and one godfather).
131
1. 18 Baptisms by Designation of Godparent and Gender of Child: 1641-1655
Of the seventy-five children with cited godparents in the Caja 1 baptism records,
82.67% of African-descended children had Spanish godparents. Spanish women served
as godparents more often (60%) than Spanish men (40%) among single-sponsor
baptisms.127 Children with two godparents with at least one cited as Spanish accounted
for 30.67% of all children baptized between 1641 and 1655. Adults of African descent
were godparents to 10.67% children, serving an equal number of boys and girls. Notably,
no African-descended men were cited as any of the single-sponsor godparents in this
category. However, most children (62.50%) with godparents of African descent had two
godparents. And while no mestizos served as godparents to any boys of African descent,
one mestiza was the madrina to a girl of African descent and another case found one
127
Proctor also finds that Spanish women served as sponsors more often than Spanish men,
“Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain,” 323-326.
132
mestizo was padrino to another African-descended girl, which account for only 2.67% of
baptisms.
Three girls had godparents without a designated caste/race, which only
accounted for 4% of baptisms in this collection.
The collection that follows, Caja 2 Libro 4 of “Entierros, Casamientos, y
Bautizos,” documented the baptism of sixty-six children in sixty-five entries128 between
1656 and 1669. A few new patterns arose in the choices parents made in selecting
godparents, but some trends persisted. Spanish godparents once again predominated,
accounting for 68.18% of all recorded sponsors for African-descended children. Almost
twice as many Spanish women served as single-sponsor godparents than Spanish men,
although most children (40%) in this category had two-godparents. Few children, only
128
One entry documented the baptism of two siblings.
133
three girls, had godparents of African descent (4.55%). Of these three girls, one had a
godparent pair that included a madrina specifically cited as an enslaved woman with a
padrino that was not identified as a slave. Two girls had mestizo godparents (3.03%) and
one boy had a castiza godmother (1.55%).
The number of unknown caste/race
godparents increased significantly, accounting for 22.73% of madrinas and padrinos
recorded.
By the end of the seventeenth century, significantly more children were being
baptized. A total of 183 children of African descent were baptized, 106 girls and 77
boys, between December 6, 1666 and February 15, 1689.129 Of these 183 boys and girls,
180 of them had identifiable godparents.130 Among godparents for these 180 children,
stark differentials by both race and gender persisted.
1. 20 Children with Godparents of African Descent: 1666-1689
129
AEP, Bautizos Caja 1, Libro 1 (1666-1689).
Two girls and one boy had either incomplete entries that excluded the identities of the
godparents or the deteriorated condition of the book precluded the discernment of the names of the
godparents.
130
134
Only nineteen (10.56%) African-descended children had godparents of African
descent. Half of these children had godparents who were specifically identified as both
being of African descent. African-descended women and men served as single-sponsor
godparents for the same number of children. It is important to note that two of these kids
had godparents who were enslaved; a rarity for free families. The first child had an
enslaved madrina and a padrino not identified by caste. The second child had a free
madrina of African descent but an enslaved padrino.
Only one mestizo ever served as a godfather, he was the padrino to a girl of
African descent. No indios were named as godparents to children of African descent
between the 1666 and 1689.
1. 21 Children with Spanish Godparents: 1666-1689
135
The most significant pattern from this numerically larger collection was that a
plurality of African-descended kids (60 or 33.33%) continued to be baptized with at least
one Spanish godparent. Of these children, thirty-six girls and twenty-four boys had
Spanish godparents.
Most children (69.05%) who had a single-sponsor Spanish
godparent had a Spanish madrina. A total of nineteen girls and ten boys had only
Spanish madrinas. The second largest category of Spanish godparents included cases
that involved both a madrina and padrino who were both identified as españoles, which
accounted for 30%.
Ten girls and eight boys had two Spanish sponsors.
Spanish
godfathers accounted for 21.67% of the cases with single-Spanish sponsors, with more
girls (seven) than boys (six) as their godchildren.
While the majority of children (51.11%) had at least one godparent with cited
caste or race designation between 1666 and 1689, a statistically significant amount of
children did not.
1. 22 Children with Godparents of Unknown Caste: 1666-1689
136
Of the 180 children with identifiable godparents, eighty-eight or 48.89% had godparents
named in their records but were of unknown caste/race. Forty-two girls and forty-six
boys had godparents of unknown race/casta identification.
Most of these children
(52.27%) still had a two-godparent baptism with twenty-one girls and twenty-five boys in
this category. Madrinas once again dominated in the single-godparent category serving
as sponsors to thirty-one children (35.23%), which included eighteen girls and thirteen
boys. Single-godparent padrinos accounted for only 12.50% of unknown caste/race
godparents, serving as sponsors to three girls and eight boys of African descent.
137
For the 1666-1689 collection of baptisms, twelve children of African descent
(6.67%) had godparents not of the same race. Only one case identified the race of both
sponsors, which involved one girl of African descent with a godmother of African
descent and a Spanish godfather. Including this case, Spanish godparents served as
sponsors more often (83.33%) to children of African descent. Only three godparents of
African descent appeared in this category, the previously cited godmother along with one
other African-descended godmother with a godfather of unknown caste and an additional
case of an African-descended godfather with a godmother of unknown caste.
The final baptism collection chronicled baptisms from January 1, 1724, to March
27,
1732,
and
documented
forty-four
children
but
only
forty-one
had
identified/identifiable godparents, which included nineteen girls and twenty-two boys.131
131
AEP, Bautizos, Caja 2, Libro 6 (1724-1732).
138
The racial background of the godparents follows similar patterns to the previous
collections. A low number of African-descended people served as godparents, only two
(4.88%). These two were African-descended madrinas who were sponsors to two girls of
African descent.
Spanish godparents account for 19.51% of sponsors and Spanish
madrinas accounted for most of these cases. For the first time in the baptism records,
more boys (7) than girls (1) had Spanish godparents. The lack of race/casta designations
obscures the majority of information that this final collection may have yielded as
75.61% of godparents were not specifically identified as español, castizo, mestizo, indio
or a casta of African descent.
Of the 363 children who were baptized with named godparents between 1641 and
1732, a total of 37.46% of them had godparents not identified with race or casta, which
139
considering the predominance of Spanish godparents over a century, it is likely that the
majority of this unknown group would have also reflected Spanish-sponsor dominance.
As there were so few members of this unknown group in the earlier cases (only three
documented between 1641 and 1655), colonial record keepers have shown to exclude
information when it belongs to dominant cultural norms.
Perhaps a few of these
unknown race/casta godparents were of African descent. However, it is clear that even
when this group is taken into account along with the proportionate representation, very
few people of African descent were godparents of African-descended children, usually
accounting for 10% or less of the baptisms.
When godparents of African descent were chosen, they were most often free
people. Only three cases of enslaved godparents were found in the five baptism books
examined.
Enslaved godparents, while not canonically disqualified from serving as
sponsors, may have been considered less desirable because the clergy may have not seen
slaves as living “in harmony” with the tenets of the Church. If African-descended
parents hoped to establish an economically advantageous relationship with their
children’s sponsor, enslaved godparents with few resources would not have posed as
ideal candidates. While some slaveowners followed the instruction of the Church and
ensured that their slaves had access to religious instruction and the time to hear mass,
some slaveowners found such religious obligations as distractions to the greater interest
in profit generation that slaves could produce.132 I also argue that the inherent instability
of slavery may have also marked enslaved people as less desirable godparents for free
132
Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations of Veracruz and Pernambuco, 183-184.
140
families. As unfree people, such godparents would not have had the same opportunity for
unrestricted geographic mobility to assist with the spiritual development of a child who
may not have lived near them. Nor would many slaves have much financial capital to
offer the godchild and family. Although, some enslaved godparents may have had both
cultural and social capital to contribute.
Other than the large percentage of Spaniards, it is striking that only a handful of
mestizos (6) and castizos (1) were ever documented as sponsors to African-descended
children. The restrictive life of slavery can account for the low participation rate of
enslaved African-descended godparents, but the low representation of people designated
as mestizos and castizos may be explained in one of two ways. The first is that perhaps
castizos were indifferent in forming godparent-relationships with African descended
families. The lack of opportunity or interest in developing affective ties to Africandescended people through godparentage cannot be true for mestizos, since they
represented most of the exogamous partners involving people of African descent
discussed in this chapter.
High mestizo-Afro-casta exogamy along with mestizo
“aversion” to godparentage for African-descended children during the same time period
is too incongruent. The most plausible explanation for the lack of mestizo and castizo
godparents would be that the two groups were likely “passing” as Spaniards or not being
identified and subsequently counted in the unknown caste/race group. With an increasing
mestizo population in seventeenth-century Xalapa and clear contact with Africandescended people as evidenced by the number of marriages between the two groups, it is
clear that if mestizo men and mestiza women were not just obscured by clerical error,
141
then they would likely soon serve as godparents to African-descended children based on
demography alone. As mestizos began to outnumber Spaniards in the eighteenth century
in Xalapa, statistically they would probably serve more often as sponsors if the exogamy
rate also remained steady into the mid-eighteenth century as it did in the early part of the
century.
Conclusion
The seventeenth century has been characterized as the “Age of Integration.”133
The sixteenth century witnessed exploration, war, Spanish settlement, population
decimation, and the establishment of the administrative arms of the Crown and the
Church in Mexico. The advent of the mid-colonial period found that the colony’s diverse
population began to settle into their new environments and greater interaction among
Spaniards, Afro-castas, and indigenous peoples followed. Xalapa’s diverse families of
African descent exemplified this wave of integration in the formal stages of religious
identity. Exogamy, mostly with mestizo partners, influenced the interracial milieu in
Xalapa since the earliest recorded marriages and steadily increased throughout the
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Legitimacy figured more prominently than
previously believed, demonstrating that even during the early and middle stages of the
colonial period, people of African descent strived to reproduce, or at least approximate,
Spanish socio-religious expectations in their own families. For those couples not (yet)
married, they still presented themselves as a united front for the important religious
133
Juan Gonzalez Esponda, Negros, Pardos y Mulatos: Otra Historia Que Contar (Tuxtla
Gutierrez, Chiapas: Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas, 2002), 69.
142
milestones of their children. The high incidences of Spanish godparents evidence robust
interracial contact. While Spaniards did marry people of African descent, albeit to a
lesser degree than mestizo and mestiza partners, españoles appeared frequently alongside
African-descended parents during baptisms.
Interestingly, gender divided Spanish
involvement in the religious lives of African-descended people. While Spanish men
served more often than woman as official witnesses of Afro-casta weddings, the
predominance of Spanish women serving as godmothers alludes to the possibility that
they were more likely to perform a more sustained role as interracial social mediators
than Spanish men.134
The structured monotony of the ecclesiastical archive occasionally provides rich
details about the relationships and lives of African-descended people who sought to fulfill
their religious duties through one of the sacraments. Many children enjoyed the social
legitimacy of being born to married parents. Others enjoyed a two-parent household in
which the potential for economic security was greater. Single motherhood existed but in
lower numbers than previously documented. However, a number of children of African
descent had been abandoned and their fates left to the discretion of the Church. Extended
family may have adopted some of the children designated as those “without known
parents.” African-descended families included extended members that served as fictive
kin, spiritual advisors, and advantageous patrons. The diversity of experiences of their
families and the multiple configurations offer more insight into the socially open
134
Proctor research in San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato, Mexico corroborates this pattern. He
found that between 1652 and 1749, Spanish women served as godmothers to enslaved children 30% of the
time. Proctor, “La familia y comunidad esclava en San Luis Potosí y Guanajuato, México,” in La ruta de
la esclavitud en Africa y América Latina, ed. Rina Caceres (San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial de la
Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), 240-250.
143
environment in which they lived, raised families, and attempted to sustain work and
safeguard multi-generational wealth.
This chapter also highlights the significance of divorcing race from serving as the
“always already” indicator of socio-economic status.
People of African descent in
Xalapa had wealth, sometimes by way of three generations of careful asset management.
The notion that marrying Spanish partners, even if they were poor, was the way to greater
social mobility cannot be substantiated in Xalapa, where free people of means had the
opportunity to marry other free people of means. These theories are based on records
that, by and large, do not offer evidence about the contracting bride and groom’s
economic prospects. The infrequent inclusion of notes regarding professions precludes
assumptions about the economic backgrounds of those contracting marriage. I argue that
other signifiers offer more salient information about marital choice, such as legitimacy of
families, geographic proximity, and shared life experiences, such as that of the couple
who had both suffered the loss of their indigenous spouses.
“Youthful passions” were rarely expressed in marriage logbooks, but the patterns
analyzed here intend to redirect methodological approaches of marriage records. The
focus on violence, elite disputes, interventions by the Crown and the Church, and notions
of plebeian indifference have enriched our understanding of gendered strategies, familial
expectations, and the challenges of patriarchy. I argue that for a greater examination of
marriage partner choice among people of African descent, we must call upon these
spectacular displays of interposition in addition to quotidian details recorded by parish
priests.
144
My examination of legitimacy rates among marriage partners attempts to
highlight the importance of non-race based signifiers that held social currency in colonial
Mexico. I do not posit that the legitimacy signifier alone explains how and why people
joined in holy matrimony, but I argue that legitimacy, geographic proximity, age, race,
perceived class, honorific titles, and other signifiers must be considered when the
documents allow for this exploration, which they do not always permit. Parish record
keeping largely involved routinized productions of documentation of baptisms,
confirmations, marriages, and burials. And yet, these collections signal preferences and
discrepancies in the type of information that clerics requested and recorded from
petitioners. Inconsistency may thwart our current efforts in quantifying and ordering
subject matter into “statistically relevant” data, but the inconsistent social markers may
prove to be the small determining factors that united couples. In line with these efforts to
open up what we understand as socially salient, Rachel O’Toole argues that “other factors
may have deterred rural inhabitants from formalizing their unions, such as lack of clergy,
high marriage fees, and difficulties in obtaining permission from slave owners.” 135
Instead of relying on the sole explanatory device of race, O’Toole argues that matters of
practicality may have inhibited and deterred greater formalized unions between people of
different racial backgrounds.
In his examination of Afro-indigenous marriages in
seventeenth century Guatemala, Paul Loken cites shared workspaces as an important
variable that influenced exogamy.136
135
Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “‘In a War against the Spanish’: Andean Protection and African
Resistance on the Northern Peruvian Coast,” The Americas 63, no. 1 (July 2006): 36.
136
Loken, “Marriage as Slave Emancipation in 17th Century Guatemala,” 176.
145
For the collections examined here, legitimacy served as a primary designation that
arose in the records almost as often as casta identifications. However, as has been
demonstrated by the disparate information found on exogamy in Mexico City by Seed
and Love, even parishes in the same city could have vastly different recordings of social
phenomena. Baptism records in the same parish archive of Xalapa across less than a
century demonstrated variant recording practices. I proffer that in order to fully explore
marriage choice, there is a need for the development of flexible, multi-variable models of
analyses. My investigation has demonstrated the salience of the legitimate-illegitimate
divide among free African-descended people in Xalapa during the long seventeenth
century, but other markers must be examined to determine whether they influenced
marriage partner choice and shaped the families of free people of African descent.
In the following chapter, we begin to explore the role of free African-descended
women in the social landscape of Xalapa through their negotiation of more intimate and
familial concerns and challenges. For these stories, we turn to the stage of colonial truthmaking, the office of the notary public.
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Chapter Two
Notarial Presence
The Church’s insistence on documenting and intervening in its flock’s religious
milestones meant that most colonial subjects would have some primary or secondary
knowledge of the conventions involved. For instance, even if Juana the free negra never
served as a madrina, she likely knew someone who had. The notarial archive was unique
in that one could live a lifetime of lawful activities without the necessity of the notary’s
workshop of record keepers. Kathryn Burns writes, “For most people…a close encounter
with a notary was unusual and bound up with a major turning point of some
kind…Putting people's important, even intimate, business in legal language was the
notary's everyday job, his bread and butter.”1 We know that different castes, economic
groups, and genders could be baptized, confirmed, married, and given extreme unction if
they had fulfilled the other requirements of the Church. Fewer people would have the
occasion to register a transaction or become a secondary actor in notarial business, and
doing so marked most of these free people as individuals of means. The majority of the
notarial records documented the transference of property and goods, including implied
resources through the request for legal representation. The registration of business with
the notarial office also involved fees, 2 further demonstrating that people had the
economic resources to guarantee their various arrangements and that they understood and
1
Burns, Into the Archive, 26-27.
Burns notes that the Spanish Crown set fees for notarial services in order to avoid extreme
abuses by the notaries. Burns, Into the Archive, 28. While there were standardized aranceles (fee tables),
Burns notes that they are rare finds. One cabildo arancel that she found for Potosi noted fees from 4
tomines (one half peso de oro común) for one page, depending on the type of document requested. Burns,
Into the Archive, 181.
2
147
valued the legitimizing power of the notariate.
Potentially, anyone could request the services of the notary, but there is some
inferential evidence that only certain types of free women of African descent did. Before
proceeding to the intimate and business matters of the notarial archive, I present a
demographic profile of the business involving free women of African descent during the
long seventeenth century. While free women engaged in a number of ventures, their
demographic representation in Xalapa is small because of their exceptional economic
opportunities and the relatively small general population as compared to that of Mexico
City or Puebla. As such, the profile is not a traditional analysis measuring statistical
significance, because we do not have an accurate total population for Xalapa or for
African-descended women and men.
In addition, the population estimates cited
previously do not differentiate between free people of African descent and those still
enslaved. While the numbers cannot speak directly to representations of the general
populace because of the lack of contextualizing data, they may suggest patterns of
behavior that require more focused examination. With further research in the central
Veracruz region to develop a more substantive sample size, more in-depth analysis may
be possible. Until then, I present the following preliminary profile to begin the work of
identifying socially salient markers that may have influenced the lives of free women of
African descent.3
3
I reviewed the following for the data and cases examined in this chapter: ANX, Protocolos 15781594, Protocolos 1600-1617, Protocolos 1617-1651, Protocolos 1651-1674, Protocolos 1675-1699,
Protocolos 1700-1706, Protocolos 1707-1712, Protocolos 1713-1719, Protocolos 1720-1725.
148
Gender and Caste Representation
The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed both free women and men as
active agents in notarized arrangements.
2. 1 Demographic Profile: 1600-1625
Between 1600 and 1625, twenty-five individuals of African descent registered business.
Women represented the majority of cases (16), while men registered less than half (9) of
all cases. During this early period, far more morenas (11) than mulatas (5) conducted
business.4 Not a single negra or parda registered business with the notary. All of the
nine men were mulatos. Business registered during the second quarter of the seventeenth
century began to reflect the greater Afro-casta diversity of designations found in Xalapa.
It also reflected increased opportunities for people of African descent, as their presence in
4
I have chosen to differentiate by caste here to show the change overtime with usage of casta
designations in Xalapa.
149
the notarial sources grew by 75%.
Between 1626 and 1650, forty-four free Afro-castas, including twenty women
and twenty-four men, and one couple of African descent registered with the notarial
office. The twenty women who went to the notarial offices included nine mulatas, seven
morenas, two negras, and two pardas.
The twenty-four men comprised similar
representations of casta differentiation, including eleven mulatos, two morenos, four
negros, and seven pardos. The one couple who registered jointly were noted as a negra
wife and negro husband.
150
When the data is collapsed for the first half of the century, free women and men
demonstrate near parity of exposure to the notarial offices with thirty-six (51.43%)
women and thirty-three (47.14%) men along with the one couple cited (1.43%). Most
women were recorded as mulata (14) or morena (18), whereas most men were designated
as mulato (20) or pardo (7). As the next half of the seventeenth century demonstrates,
most of these casta trends would persist.
151
Between 1651 and 1674, the notarial offices saw fewer people of African descent.
Only twenty-nine such people registered business—seven women and twenty-two men.
All women were cited as mulatas (7), whereas the caste designations of the twenty-two
men who conducted business included seventeen mulatos and five pardos.
152
By the end of the seventeenth century, those of African descent found in the
notarial archive had increased by 25% from the previous quarter-century. Between 1675
and 1699 fifty-five individuals (thirty-five men and twenty women) and two couples of
African descent were cited. A shift towards the usage of pardo had also taken place. The
majority of women (12) were designated as pardas, with only four mulatas, two morenas,
one negra, and one unspecified 5 Afro-casta woman cited.
Men found a closer
representation between pardos (16) and mulatos (14), with just four negros and one
unspecified Afro-casta man conducting business at the escribanía.
The two couples
included a negra wife and negro husband and a free mulata woman and a free mulato
man.
5
I designated people as “unspecified Afro-casta” if they had no caste label but I had identified
their parents as people of African descent.
153
The collapsed data demonstrates that the second half of the century saw
significantly fewer free women seeking the services of the notarial offices, nearly 40%
less. From 1651 to 1699, a total of eighty-four individuals of African-descent, twentyseven women and fifty-seven men, and two couples notarized business. Most women
were identified as mulatas (11) or pardas (12) and men as either mulatos (31) or pardos
(21).
154
The overall number of African-descended people who notarized business at the
dawn of the eighteenth century dropped markedly to only thirty-five individuals and one
couple. Although there was greater gender parity between 1700 and 1725, with eighteen
women (14 pardas, 3 mulatas, and 1 negra) and seventeen men (14 pardos and 3
mulatos) as well as one mulata-mulato couple, the decrease in representation of people of
African descent by the early eighteenth century is telling, as is the decrease in the number
of cases registered by them, particularly those by free women.
In an examination of cases registered by free women during the entirety of the
eighteenth century, the numbers fall dramatically after 1720. Between 1700 and 1710,
free women of African descent registered thirteen cases in the notarial offices of Xalapa.
Between 1711 and 1720, the number of cases had decreased to eleven. For every
155
subsequent decade of the eighteenth century, there were no more than four cases each.
The last twenty years of the century had a solitary case for the 1780s and the 1790s. The
decline of cases either brought by free women or involving them as secondary actors
becomes more pronounced when the eighteenth century is divided at mid-century.
Approximately 78% of all cases relating to free women of African descent during the
eighteenth century took place between 1700 and 1750. When the data is sectioned off to
account for the parameters of this study’s primary periodization of focus, 60% of all
cases involving free women of African descent in the eighteenth century took place
between 1700 and 1730. Of these cases, 89% took place during the first two decades of
the eighteenth century.
The ecclesiastical archives corroborate the growing absence of free Africandescended people during this same time frame.
The lax practices assigning casta
designations by record keepers can account for some of the discrepancies. The concept
of “racial drift” might also explain why free women of African descent began to fade
from the baptism, confirmation, and marriage records of Xalapa.6 Unlike the rites of
passage, notarial activity was an exceptional encounter, but the dearth of free women
contracting business after 1720 is conspicuous. However, it might correspond to greater
problems of Atlantic trade during the eighteenth century.
For much of the long
seventeenth century, the economy of Xalapa depended on external factors. Starting from
its Spanish founding, Xalapa depended on the investment of capital from local and trans 6
Robert McCaa defines “racial drift” as “the disagreement in racial classification between census
and marriage book” that he examined for his work on marriage choice in colonial Mexico. The
discrepancies that I found in notarial and parish archives indicates that racial drift might have also occurred,
intentionally or accidently, in Xalapa. McCaa, “Calidad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The
Case of Parral, 1788-1790,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. 3 (August 1984), 480.
156
Atlantic merchants, wealthy colonial officials, and well-financed clergy from Veracruz
Port, Puebla, Mexico City, and even as far as Manila.7 Xalapa’s proximity to the port
meant that some of its prosperity was tied to maritime commerce, dependent on the
importation of goods from Spain, Cuba, and Peru as well as the exportation of products
produced in the central Veracruz region, principally sugar. The reforms that arrived with
the ascension of the House of Bourbon to the Spanish throne after the War of Spanish
Succession in 1713 also had effects that reverberated in Xalapa.
The first Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V, soon realized the value of Xalapa’s
strategic location for economic growth. In 1718, King Philip V selected Xalapa and
Portobello as Spanish America’s largest trade-fair (feria) sites.8 Great merchants and
landed-elites, along with petty seller and transportation workers, flooded Xalapa when
the ferias began. Of the wealth they poured into the trading post, Patrick Carroll writes,
“Jalapa’s streets may not have been paved with gold, but they were often stacked with
silver.”9 Carroll also notes that after the first feria in 1722, “the village of Jalapa became
a clearing house for goods from three continents.”10 Everything from silver bars, silk,
porcelain, firearms, vanilla, spices, and books could be found crowding the streets of the
principal plaza of Xalapa, but it was not to last for long. Optimistic officials had planned
the ferias to last for three months every two years. However, Xalapa’s economy suffered
when not a single feria was celebrated from 1736 to 1756.11 Five more ferias took place
in Xalapa before ending completely in 1776. Xalapa’s economy recovered during this
7
Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Xalapa, 303-304.
9
10
11
8
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time period, but free women in notarial life would not. Only two cases were registered in
the 1750s, an additional two during the 1760s, and four cases between 1770 and 1780.
The slippages of racial descriptors, the newly-implemented Bourbon economic reforms
along with the inconsistency of the feria presence in Xalapa provide important
circumstantial conditions that might have affected free women’s ability to continue the
kind of notarial presence in the eighteenth century that they had established in the
seventeenth.
This data demonstrates key patterns in notarial engagement by free people of
African descent. Near gender parity is found over 125 years of notarial documents, with
the exception of the period between 1651 and 1675, when a mere seven women
registered business. The increased usage of the terms mulato and pardo corresponds to
the data found in the parish archives of Xalapa, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
The demographic profile also documents the decline in the representation of free Africandescended women by the eighteenth century.
Perhaps Bourbon-spurred financial
investment and the attraction of more “outsiders” to Xalapa consequently shifted the
demography of economic players in the region. Gender and differentiations based on
racial heritage were the most consistent markers but other labels also served as edifying
markers in the analysis of the activity of free women.
Vecinas and Outsiders
While people living in cities or central towns had greater access to notarial offices
158
that were centrally located in main plazas,12 at least for the first half of the seventeenth
century, free women traveled from slightly further away than a few blocks from the town
square to register business.
2. 8 Vecina Status: 1600-1650
Of the eighteen women with identifiable vecina-status, only seven lived in Xalapa
“proper.” The eleven women who were not vecinas but who had cited “home towns”
lived at nearby inns, such as the Venta del Rio, the Venta de Los Naranjos, and the Venta
de la Riconada, and at sugar ingenios, including Nuestra Señora de los Remedios and San
Pedro Buenavista.
One woman was cited as living in nearby Coatepec, located in
Xalapa’s administrative jurisdiction, and two other women hailed from La Antigua
Ciudad de Veracruz. This type of geographic mobility by free women of means nearly
disappeared by the second half of the seventeenth century.
12
Burns, Into the Archive, 26.
159
Between 1651 and 1699, fourteen women were cited with specific vecinastatuses. Of these fourteen, all but two free African-descended women lived in Xalapa.
The non-vecinas included one woman who was a vecina of La Antigua while the other
lived in La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz.
160
From 1700 to 1725, of the fifteen women with a cited vecina status, every single
one called Xalapa’s town limits home. In the new century, the women of means had
decided to establish their primary residential affiliation with Xalapa, instead of its more
agricultural and rural periphery, perhaps wanting to stake a claim in the wealth brought
by greater Atlantic trade and the establishment of the economic boom brought by the
ferias.
Marital Status
The distribution of women by marital status during the first half of the
seventeenth century highlights an important aspect of women’s ability to navigate
colonial institutions.
2. 11 Marital Status: 1600-1650
161
From 1600 to 1651, only six women of African descent were ever documented as married
when they registered with the notarial offices.
However, three other women were
identified as widows. The rest of the women were cited without spouses, accounting for
50% of all cases concerning free women during this time period.
2. 12 Marital Status 1651-1699
From 1651 to 1699, more married women (11) came into purview of the notarial
authorities while women without cited husbands still accounted for nearly half (10) of the
cases. Only one widowed woman of African descent appeared before the notary public
162
in the later half of the seventeenth century.
2. 13 Marital Status: 1700-1725
From 1700 to 1725, twenty-four free women of African descent appeared before
the notarial authorities, including eight married women, eleven women without a cited
spouse, and five widows. One woman was cited in two entries, in which she was married
and later cited as a widow during this time frame. Married women likely most often
deferred to their husbands to conduct official business, which may explain why free
single women were more highly represented in these documents.
As we will see, this would not always be the case, but such gendered divisions of
labor and notions of who qualified as the legitimate head of household likely influenced
the numbers found here. The pattern of document production in Xalapa finds that
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documents initiated by women often had references to a spouse, if only in passing. For
example, “María, wife of José,” might have inherited a piece of land that she (and the
notary) considered her sole property, but her husband’s name was still documented. The
job of the escribano was not to investigate, verify, and then notarize the marital status of
his clients, but it was included on a number of occasions when clarifying that a wife had
the permission of her husband to conduct business. Other times, it seemed to be cited
incidentally. For those women who were not cited with spouses, representing half or
more of all cases, it would appear that being free from the male supervision of a husband
allowed them greater economic opportunities in their notarial lives.
Types of Notarial Business
From 1600 to 1725, free women of African descent engaged or were cited in
primarily seven types of notarial business: the registration of a poder, the sale and
purchase of real estate, the sale and purchase of slaves, manumission, and the registration
of a will (or codicil). Free women of African descent filed a plethora of other types of
business with Xalapa’s notary public, but I have chosen to focus on these seven types of
activities because they most frequently appeared during the long seventeenth century.
164
2. 14 Primary Types of Business: 1600-1650
From 1600 to 1650, seven free women registered poderes,13 but most women were
involved in the buying and selling of land and slaves. Five women sold property and two
women purchased land. Five women also sold slaves and an additional five women
bought slaves. Only two women were involved in manumission cases that involved
themselves or stated family members. Not a single woman of African descent entered a
will or codicil at the notarial offices.
13
A poder was an act to provide another with permission to serve as one’s legal proxy.
165
2. 15 Primary Business Type: 1651-1699
The second half of the seventeenth century (1651-1699) saw slightly less activity
by women in these seven categories. Only six women registered poderes. Four sold
properties and another three bought tracts of land. One woman sold her slave, and no
free woman purchased a slave in this period, perhaps indicating increased economic
instability, a situation in which high value “commodities” were less likely to be
relinquished. However, questions of freedom were more prevalent. There were five
registered cases of manumission, one woman helping to free her husband and two
African-descended slaveowners freeing four of their slaves. For the first and only time in
the seventeenth century, a woman of African descent filed a last will and testament with
the notary. A sick twelve-year-old girl of African descent also made a declaration “in the
166
form of a will,” which I also included in the will and codicil category.
2. 16 Primary Business Type: 1700-1725
The final period examined (1700-1725) saw increased activity at the notarial
offices by free women of African descent. During the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, five women required poderes, ten sold real estate, three bought property, and
two sold slaves.
Not a single woman purchased a slave.
Only one manumission
involving a free woman of African descent took place. During this twenty-five year
period at the dawn of a new century, three women registered wills and codicils. Of note
is free women’s active participation in Xalapa’s real estate market.
With such
involvement in property and the slave trade, it is striking that only three free women
registered wills hoping to protect their assets and ensure that they were properly
167
distributed when they passed away.
Multi-Variant Analysis: Gender, Marital Status, and Primary Business Type
Between 1600 and 1725, free women of African descent registered seventy-one
cases of primary business types with the notary.
From 1600 to 1650, twenty-six primary business cases were registered. Of these twentysix, 46.15% involved free “unattached women” of African descent. Most of these cases
dealt with the purchase (two cases) or sale of their slaves (five cases). Two “unattached
women” each required a poder, one woman sold one piece of property, and bought one
tract of land. One single mother even secured freedom for herself and her daughter
through a loan. Cases involving free married women during this time accounted for
34.62% of primary business activity, most involved the purchase of a slave (three cases)
168
or the assignment of a poder (three cases). The remaining cases involved the sale of one
property, the purchase of another, and a wife’s assistance in the manumission of her
husband. Widowed women were minimally represented (19.23%) during the first half of
the seventeenth century. Their activity was limited to two cases of assigning poderes and
three cases of selling their properties.
Between 1651 and 1699, markedly different results were found using marital
status. During this period, free women without cited spouses were responsible for all five
cases of manumission recorded, which accounted for 50% of activity by “unattached
women” among the seven primary business types. “Unattached women” also purchased
two properties and registered two wills, and, in one remarkable case, a free woman had a
poder assigned to her. Married women accounted for 33.33% of cases in the latter half of
169
the seventeenth century, but registered fewer types of primary cases: three poderes, two
sales of property, one purchase of property, and one sale of a slave.
Once again,
widowed women accounted for less than a fifth of all cases, registering two poderes and
selling two pieces of property.
Finally, between 1700 and 1725, the registered cases indicate greater parity
among women of all marital statuses. Women without cited spouses accounted for
33.33% of cases with most matters (50%) involving the sale of real estate. The other half
of cases brought by unattached women included one poder, one purchase of a slave, one
purchase of real estate, and one manumission of a family member. Married women
accounted for 37.59% of early eighteenth-century cases and they followed suit with
similar patterns of notarial activity. Married women found that selling their properties,
170
whether because of serious necessity or as measured business decisions, provided
immediate profits. Married women also purchased nearly as many properties as they
sold. They also required the distribution of three poderes so that their assigned agents
could conduct business on their behalf. Testaments of married women for this period
reflected the same single entry pattern as the previous two intervals examined. The
number of cases involving free widowed women finally increased, representing 29.17%
of cases between 1700 and 1725. Widowed women, too, sold property as their principal
activity among the seven types of primary business surveyed. Their other activities
included the issuance of one poder, the sale of one slave, and the registration of two
wills, highlighting the increased diversity in the types of primary business in which they
engaged compared to the limited activity documented in the previous 100 years.
The multi-variant analysis of a small sample does not establish definitive patterns
for free women, but it provides suggestions about the ways in which women of different
marital statuses and means found themselves before notaries and their assistants. The
sale of property figured prominently for unattached, married, and widowed women, as
did the need for a legal agent through the bestowals of poderes issued exclusively to men
with the single exception of a Spanish man who requested a free woman as his
apoderada.14 Single women were the most likely to register primary business types and
widowed women the least. No women registered wills or codicils in the first half of the
seventeenth century, while single women in the latter half of the seventeenth century
accounted for all wills and codicils registered by African-descended women. Widowed
14
One who is empowered to serve as a legal representative for another through the registration of
a notarial poder, a legal proxy.
171
women took this place when they registered two wills of free African-descended women.
While only one single woman registered a will between 1700 and 1725. Notably, only
free “unattached women” manumitted their slaves or assisted in the manumission of a
family member from 1651 to 1725, after half a century between 1600 and 1650 when one
married woman accounted for the solitary case of manumission involving free women.
As already mentioned, this small notarial pool likely cannot speak to greater trends in the
colony, nor does it provide statistically relevant data, but the cases may provide
instructive categories for further studies on free women of African descent in colonial
Mexico and indicate how best to subject their business interactions to multi-variant
applications.
The Intimate Public Life: Private concerns in Notarial Records
Ecclesiastical records of families paint a picture that is far more quantifiable than
the demographic profile based on notarial records. Variations of marriage partners can be
assessed. Legitimacy can be calculated and trends in godparentage can be established
mathematically. While parish archives document that Spanish women and men served as
godparents to African-descended children, they do not offer any clues as to how these
relationships were initiated. Was a negro father employed by the Spanish doña who was
his daughter’s madrina? Did a parda woman conduct business with a mostly mestizoclientele and find her groom among these connections? The notarial archives of Xalapa
offer rich sources that assist in rebuilding the social worlds of African-descended people
in the mid-colonial period. And while the notarial collections examined in this study
supplement the statistical analysis, they do not always corroborate the demographic
172
landscape formed by data collected from the ecclesiastical archives. The most striking
example is that while marriage records evidence high levels of exogamy, the notarial
archive reveals a much different story.
In 139 years of records (1586 to 1725), only a
handful of exogamous couples registered business with the notarial offices, distorting the
depiction of interracial relationships in Xalapa. What notarial records do contribute are
gradations of the lives of women of African descent as they left traces or lengthy trails of
themselves in public records that documented business but occasionally captured private
trepidations about life, family, and economic security.
The Pursuit of Liberty
The notarial records I reviewed chronicle the lives of free women of African
descent from 1586 to 1725.15 In this section, I explore the more intimate and familial
concerns of women.
Women of African descent appeared in notarial records that
registered a wide variety of personal and business dealings. Some women notarized very
straightforward bills of purchase. For instance, María García and her husband Juan
Godínez, both free mulatos, bought a house and a plot of land for thirty-five pesos de oro
común that measured fifty square varas.16 However, many of the notarial entries that
dealt with more personal affairs were centered on slavery. Free women continued to find
themselves confronted with the tragedy of negotiating their own free lives with the
tenuous existence that their loved ones experienced as enslaved people, as was the case of
15
Archivo Notarial de Xalapa, La Unidad de Servicios Bibliotecarios y de Información (USBI),
Colecciones Especiales, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz (ANX), Protocolos 1578-1594,
Protocolos 1600-1617, Protocolos 1617-1651, Protocolos 1651-1674, Protocolos 1675-1699, Protocolos
1700-1706, Protocolos 1707-1712, Protocolos 1713-1719, Protocolos 1720-1725.
16
ANX, September 30, 1681, f 31vta - 32 bis fte. The measurement of a “vara” fluctuated with
time and place. It roughly measured less than one meter, ~0.84 meters.
173
a free negra named Micaela and her enslaved mulata criolla daughter Bernarda.17
Bernarda was the slave of Don Antonio de Orduña Loyando, the alcalde mayor18
of Xalapa. The notarial entry cites that she had been born in his parents’ home. Don
Antonio’s parents had bequeathed Bernarda to him and she had served as his slave since
he inherited her. Don Antonio was the owner of the sugar ingenio San Pedro Buena
Vista, the same prominent refinery discussed in the previous chapter. By 1657, when
Don Antonio registered her manumission card with the notarial offices, Bernarda was
“twenty-four or twenty-five” years old. The entry reads, “For just causes that move me
and the good service that she has provided me, I promised to give her freedom…I grant
her freedom so that she may have it today and onward and that she may spend no more
time in servitude.”19 Bernarda’s mother, Micaela, had also been Don Antonio’s slave at
one point, but documents do not specify when she was freed or whether she had bought
her freedom or if Don Antonio freed her without monetary compensation. As a free
mother, Micaela likely felt incredible gratitude that her daughter Bernarda was no longer
a slave. And as Bernarda’s manumission did not stipulate that she had to reimburse Don
Antonio for her value, Micaela and Bernarda both must have also been relieved that
Bernarda’s freedom did not cost them the insurmountable debt and annual payments that
would drain some African-descended families of any spare peso de oro común.
17
ANX, January 17, 1657, f 157fte - 157vta.
The alcalde mayor was an “Official appointed by the provincial governor to administer a district
composed of one or more towns and their countryside. The chief political and military officer in the district
who presided over the cabildo meetings with a tie-breaking vote. He had judicial responsibility on a local
or district level. Local chief magistrate and administrative officer of a province. Equivalent of a
corregidor. Deputy governor.” Ophelia Marquez and Lillian Ramos Navarro Wold, eds. “Compilation of
Colonial Spanish Terms and Document Related Phrases,” Accessed January 19, 2013,
http://www.somosprimos.com/spanishterms/spanishterms.htm.
19
18
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Even non-compensatory manumissions came with a price of cultural capital that
tested whether free women had the legal knowledge to navigate estate law. Catalina20 de
Morales was a free mulata and vecina of Xalapa.21 She was also the mother of two
mulata daughters, Lucia de Vergara and Juana Moran Betancourt. Both Lucia and Juana
were slaves. Catalina was cited as the “madre legítima” (legitimate mother) of Lucia and
Juana, but the name of her husband or their father was never provided. Nor is Catalina
described as a widow. From the proceedings that she initiated, it does not appear that
being a woman without a sanctioned male relationship prevented her from utilizing the
legal system. On December 29, 1661, Catalina de Morales went before Alcalde Mayor
Don Antonio de Orduña Loyando to affirm an arrangement made between her and
Licenciado Juan de Bera Betancourt, a former beneficiado of the town of Tlacolulan in
the jurisdiction of Xalapa. Before the beneficiado had passed away, he included a
specific clause in his last will and testament that ordered his executors to follow through
with his intentions for Catalina de Morales’ two daughters. Catalina’s petition declared,
Per a clause in his last will and testament and by virtue of a poder granted
to Don Alonso Gutierres de Cevallos and Diego de Bera Betancourt, his
executors, [Licenciado Juan de Bera Betancourt wanted Catalina’s] mulata
daughters to serve in the convent of the discalced nuns in the city of
[Puebla] de Los Angeles. [And in the event] that they were not received
through the doors, they should be conceded their liberty.
Catalina’s case before the alcalde mayor stated that her daughters Lucia and Juana had
not been admitted “[f]or it was against their constitutions.”
20
Also spelled “Cathalina” in the two-page petition.
ANX, December 29, 1661, f 419fte - 419vta.
21
175
It is unclear whether Catalina was referring to the constitutions of the convent of
Puebla or those of her daughters. While the petition does not document the name of the
convent, is it likely the Discalced Carmelite convent of San José in Puebla that was
founded in 1604.22 The convent was no stranger to women of African descent. In
Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, Joan Cameron Bristol provides an extensive
profile of the exceptional case of an enslaved woman in this same convent named Juana
Esperanza de San Alberto, who would become a “nun revered for her piety.”23 Bristol
notes that Juana had been bequeathed to the convent as a child and had been there for
sixty-eight years as a servant when she fell ill in 1678.24 Juana Esperanza de San
Alberto’s chronology is important because that would mean that when Catalina’s two
mulata daughters, Lucia de Vergara and Juana Moran Betancourt, arrived in Puebla to be
received by the nuns, the convent had already had at least one highly lauded servant of
African descent for more than half a century. This is not to say that the discalced nuns of
the convent welcomed other women of African descent into their religious community as
servants.
Bristol poignantly notes that the early biographers 25 of Juana Esperanza
couched her life in “the language of exceptionalism [which] allowed her biographers to
assert that Esperanza was not representative of the spiritual potential of black women.”26
Bristol further notes that biographers positioned Esperanza’s story as that of a woman
22
Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World
(Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2008), 86-87.
23
Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 24.
24
25
Joan Cameron Bristol provides an excellent summary of the function of “early modern vidas” or
biographies of men and women with exceptional religious experiences. Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers,
and Witches, 48-62.
26
176
who succeeded in overcoming the “base qualities” of her African heritage to achieve
remarkable piety.27 While Catalina’s daughters might have been unruly or disrespectful
servants and viewed enslavement at a convent as against their “constitutions,” the nuns in
charge of the convent might have also decided it was against their constitutions to accept
more African-descended women since they were considered to have “base qualities.” As
the story of Juana Esperanza suggests, her contemporaries believed that it was truly
extraordinary for women of African descent to prevail over such perceived innate hurdles
to join a religious community. Perhaps this discrimination also included the choice of
servants at the Discalced Carmelite convent of San José, all the better for Catalina and
her two daughters.
Catalina’s defense of her daughters’ liberty did not rest on their mere rejection
from the convent; she called upon the influencing power of her patron’s right as a
slaveowner to dictate how and when his “goods” were dispersed. She further argued that
her daughters should, per the last will and testament of the beneficiado, “enjoy the
aforementioned liberty as they should enjoy the will of their aforementioned
slaveowner.” In the petition, Catalina stated that she had in her possession an edict by the
bishop and procedural documents from the vicar of the convent. With her daughters’
liberty at stake, Catalina de Morales arrived before the notarial authorities well-prepared,
not only with the language to make her case, but also with the documentation to secure
her family’s well-being. Most families of African descent, however, needed more than
paperwork to secure the freedom of their loved ones.
27
177
Most people owed debt in colonial Xalapa, but not for all of the same reasons
found in cases involving African-descended families. One single mother of African
descent named Antonia de Sánchez relied on her three adult children to secure her
liberty.28 Juana Pascuala, a free mulata, and her two brothers, Christóbal Romero y
Gregorio Romero, took on considerable debt in order to free their mother.
The
documents did not specify the residency of her brothers, but Juana Pascuala was a vecina
of Xalapa. And while Christóbal and Gregorio could sign their own names, Juana
Pascuala, who did not sign at the end of the four-page file, was the primary initiator of
the notarial case. All three were responsible for paying off a large debt of 252 pesos de
oro común to Juan Guerrero Basques, a vecino of La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz. The
debt agreement noted that their mother Antonia had been the slave of Juan Bravo de
Alarcón, a vecino of Xalapa. There had been a lawsuit and a lien against the goods and
properties, which included slaves, that remained from Juan Bravo’s estate after his death.
Juan Guerrero Basques acted as administrator of Juan Bravo de Alarcón’s assets. The
documents read, “We are obligated to pay Juan Guerrero Basques…or to whom he
designates as a representative.”
Fortunately for Antonia Sánchez’ family, Juana,
Christóbal, and Gregorio arranged for a nine-year payment plan with Juan Guerrero
Basques. The extended time frame for the settlement of the 252-peso de oro común debt
and the status of Antonia’s three adult children, provided optimal circumstances to allow
the family to remove their mother from enslavement and gradually to accumulate funds
for the planned installments.
28
178
In the case of free morena Juana de la Cruz and her moreno husband Francisco
Camacho, the couple was saddled with a debt of 100 pesos de oro común owed to Juan
Martín de Abreo when they decided to purchase Francisco’s freedom.29 The entry,
registered on November 7, 1641, lacks biographical information for Juana, but a few
details about her husband were included in the purchase agreement. Francisco was
described as being approximately fifty years of age and originally from Palm Island of
the Canary Islands, located near the Northwest coast of mainland Africa.30 Juana and
Francisco became long-time residents of the central Veracruz region, but before they
could continue with their lives, they had to consider this debt, which would loom large
for them since it was cited as being due on April 7, 1642, giving the couple a mere sixmonth window to raise the money. At first, this might appear to be an insurmountable
feat for Juana and newly-freed Francisco to accomplish. However, 100 pesos de oro
común was significantly below market value for an enslaved adult man, barring physical
disability or advanced age.
The low cost might have indicated a more personal relationship with Juan Martín
de Abreo, Francisco’s former slaveowner, or even perhaps an outside interest that
influenced his decision. Juan Martín de Abreo’s notarial life reveals little about his
relationships with the slaves who he owned, but we do have biographical details about his
life in Xalapa. Juan worked as a goods merchant in Xalapa from at least the 1620s and
consequently had business ties to many members of the jurisdiction’s elite. While he
owned slaves, he involved himself primarily in the trade of highly-desired foodstuffs,
29
30
ANX, November 7, 1641, f 211vta - 212vta.
ANX, November 7, 1641, f 210vta - 211fte.
179
such as wine and oil.31 In 1621, he even rented a space for a store from the religious
brotherhood who ran the Hospital of Nuestra Señora de Convalescientes, a store located
conveniently a block away from the hospital.32 By 1638, Juan Martín de Abreo had
purchased a recua, perhaps to cut out the middleman-costs of having to hire arrieros
when his shipments of goods arrived from the port of Veracruz or Mexico City.33 In
November 1641, the same month and year as Francisco Camacho’s manumission, Juan’s
wife María Rodrígues finally appeared in his notarial records. By June 5, 1944, Juan
Martín de Abreo had passed away as his wife María was noted as a widow.34
Juan Martín de Abreo’s original manumission declaration for Francisco Camacho
was not located, precluding us from examining the language used when he agreed to
allow Francisco to purchase his freedom. However, perhaps the notarial appearance of
Juan’s wife, which coincided with Francisco’s case, moved him to decide to allow his
slave to live freely with his wife Juana de la Cruz. Fortunately, the recorded narrative of
the moreno couple did not end with indebtedness to Juan Martín de Abreo. They might
not have been the wealthiest couple of African descent in the seventeenth century but still
they demonstrated financial competency.
Seventeen years after the debt entry for the 100 pesos de oro común to Juan
Martín de Abreo, Juana de la Cruz and Francisco Camacho reappeared in the notarial
record, this time with a few notable additions to their entries and some evidence of
31
ANX, July 8, 1620 f 285vta - 286fte.
ANX, October 21, 1621, f 315vta - 316vta.
33
ANX, June 23, 1638, f 29vta - 30fte.
34
ANX, June 5, 1944, f 468fte - 468vta.
32
180
upward mobility.35 At this point, both Juana and Francisco were described as free
negros, instead of morenos as they had been designated in the earlier notarial entry. By
1658, they must have opted to live closer to the coast, because they were described as
both vecinos of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz. During that time, the couple likely
needed someone to manage their affairs in Xalapa because they were no longer full-time
residents. They might also have required an agent because of their advanced years.
Although we do not know the age of Juana, Francisco Camacho would have been
approximately sixty-seven years old when he issued a poder to a vecino of Xalapa named
Bartolomé de Oliveros to serve as the couple’s legal proxy. Bartolomé was charged with
selling a plot of land that belonged to both Juana and Francisco. He eventually sold the
property for the price of twenty pesos de oro común. While the cost indicates a smaller
property than most others documented in the notarial archive, the record demonstrates
that the couple were landowners. Juana de la Cruz and Francisco Camacho, whether
morenos or negros, began their notarial life as many other people of African descent did
in the colonies, with the purchase of the liberty of a spouse. Francisco’s freedom resulted
in their being responsible for a debt five times greater than the house they would later
sell, but Juana and Francisco always appeared together in notarial transactions and they
always expressed their property as joint, shared goods. Their entries all demonstrate that
years of hard work, or luck, brought them economic opportunities in Xalapa and in La
Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz.
35
ANX, March 22, 1658, f 218fte - 218vta.
181
Some women had resources to assist their husbands when freedom could be
purchased. Other women benefitted from advantageous patron-client relations that might
be important as they negotiated life with an enslaved spouse. On August 3, 1678, a
notarial entry documented that free mulata Antonia Hernándes was married to a negro
named Lorenzo Hernándes, a slave of Licenciado Don Juan de Bañuelos Cabessa de
Vaca, a cura beneficiado of Xalapa. 36 A notarized document fourteen years later
indicates that while Don Juan de Bañuelos Cabessa de Vaca was her husband’s
slaveowner, the cura beneficiado was Antonia’s committed patron.37 On February 17,
1692, the licenciado registered a five-page codicil that included some twelve new clauses
to his will. The first addendum reads, “Firstly, I want, and it is my will, that to Antonia
Hernándes, parda libre who has served [me] and lives in my company…that over the
course of her life…she be given 30 pesos each year.”
beneficiary of African descent in the amended will.
Antonia was not the only
A free pardo named Miguel
Bañuelos received a one-time gift of twenty pesos de oro común. The licenciado also
instructed his executors to distribute thirty pesos de oro común to a free negra named
Juana Rodríguez Bañuelos and to her two mulato sons, Francisco and Juan, so that the
amount could be shared by all three. Antonia received the largest amount and Don Juan
de Bañuelos Cabessa de Vaca’s instruction that she be financially supported for the rest
of her days alludes to a much more invested relationship than that had by Juana
Rodríguez Bañuelos, who received only a ten-peso de oro común gift.
36
37
ANX, August 3, 1678, f 464vta - 465fte.
ANX, February 17, 1692, f 503fte - 505fte.
182
No note is made of Antonia’s husband, Francisco, in Don Juan de Bañuelos
Cabessa de Vaca’s addendum. It is unclear whether Francisco was free by that time and
living and worked with his wife “in the company” of the cleric. Or, perhaps Francisco
was still enslaved or even already deceased. If he were still alive and not yet freed,
Antonia’s yearly stipend from Don Juan de Bañuelos Cabessa de Vaca could have helped
finance Francisco’s purchase from whoever inherited him as part of the licenciado’s
estate. Whatever circumstances Francisco faced, Antonia had her husband’s slaveowner
to thank for the financial security that she would benefit from for the rest of her life. The
knowledge that even if she never found another job, was too sick to work, or too old to
labor, thirty pesos de oro común would be distributed to her every year must have
comforted Antonia immeasurably.
Because of her limited notarial footprint, it is unknown whether Antonia urged
her benefactor to free her husband or whether the couple had to devise a plan to pay for
his freedom with the money she would inherit. Antonia’s case is left unresolved, but at
least one woman had to take a more active role when the freedom of her husband was at
stake. Catalina Perdomo was a free negra and the legitimate wife of Antonio de Yebra,
an enslaved negro.38 Both were vecinos of Xalapa. Unfortunately, Antonio de Yebra had
become involved in some unspecified legal trouble, and on April 26, 1693, his case was
pending before the Real Justicia of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz. Antonio required a
fiscal insurer and so his wife Catalina acted as his fiadora. Catalina’s implied resources
are not documented anywhere in the notarial archive, but she must have had some cash,
38
ANX, April 26, 1693, f 618vta - 619vta.
“Chatalina Perdomo.”
183
In the documents, her name was also spelled
goods, or real property to demonstrate that she was financially solvent enough to serve as
Antonio’s fiador.
A matter concerning the Real Justicia in La Antigua Ciudad de
Veracruz may have warranted a more sizeable down payment than a thirty-peso home,
which suggest that Catalina may have owned a particularly desirable tract of land or had
a very profitable business.
Antonio’s legal troubles clearly jeopardized his life with his free wife. He was
identified as an enslaved man in the records, so perhaps he was being punished and sold
to another owner. Specifics regarding the legal proceedings were not included in this
entry but Catalina’s determination to see that her husband was not sold away is clear in
the case material registered. The notarial order specified that in the event that Antonio
were to be sentenced to slavery he should not be handed over to an unknown owner.
Instead, a vecina of Xalapa named Doña Ana de Lara had authorized Capitán Don
Francisco de Arriaga to act in her stead and pay the cost of Antonio’s value to the
intended slave owner if he were to be sold. Doña Ana must have had quite a bit of
disposable income if she was willing to pay an undetermined sum of money for
Antonio’s freedom. Doña Ana de Lara’s relationship to Catalina Perdomo and Antonio
de Yerba was not specified and this case was her only entrée into the notarial archive.
Having a wealthy Spanish patroness along with a wife who had the resources to be a
financial backer likely protected Antonio from the tragic fate of being shipped away from
his free wife and their life in Xalapa.
Not all enslaved husbands were as fortunate to have such women in their lives.
On November 23, 1694, a free mulata named Gertrudis witnessed what many of the
184
African diaspora in colonial Spanish American would have to experience, the insecurity
of having an enslaved spouse owned by a powerful and wealthy español.39 Gertrudis’
thirty-three year old mulato husband Nicolas was the slave of the alcalde mayor of
Xalapa, Capitan Don Juan Francisco de Herrera. The notarial entry states that Capitan
Don Juan Francisco sold Nicolas for 300 pesos de oro común to Capitan Don Juan de
Santiago, a vecino of Puebla de los Angeles. And with a simple property purchase
agreement between the two men, Gertrudis had to consider what she would do when her
husband, a slave, was transferred over to his new owner in Puebla. Would this free
mulata petition the Church to intervene on her behalf as others did?40 If Gertrudis had
been an active presence in the religious community, she might have publicly established
herself as a faithful Catholic who could call upon a cleric to protect her right to a
conjugal life with her husband. Herman Bennett asserts, “Appeals to matrimony or the
maintenance of a Christian marriage energized the clergy to act swiftly on behalf of the
supplicants.”41 However, as a free woman, the priest might have advised her to relocate
to preserve the conjugality of her marriage, which would provide a well-meaning cleric
with the means to uphold the Church’s stance on protecting a Catholic sacrament but also
sidestep the possibility of offending powerful Spanish patrons.
As a relatively young man with no apparent disfigurements, according to the bill
of sale, Nicolas would likely serve at least another twenty years before his slaveowner
would consider a non-compensatory manumission. If Capitán Don Juan de Santiago
39
Herman Bennett discusses cases in which men and women of African descent petitioned priests
to prevent slaveowners from selling their spouses. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 128-130.
41
40
185
wanted Nicolas’ full purchasing price, would Gertrudis have the resources to buy her
husband’s freedom? With a recent valuation at 300 pesos de oro común, it would likely
take her a considerable amount of time before that was a possibility if she did not own
personal property or a private business. Would she be forced to uproot her life to follow
her husband if she could not buy his freedom? Given that the notarial entry did not
document last names for either her or her husband, Gertrudis was likely not in a position
economically to purchase Nicolas’ liberty immediately. Nor did Gertrudis appear to have
the social capital to call upon a wealthy patroness as Catalina Perdomo did in the
previous case. Without any noted resources and without any other further notarial entries
documenting her life, Gertrudis probably believed that she had no recourse to challenge
the decisions of the alcalde mayor of Xalapa or a capitán-don of Puebla.
The insecurity of having enslaved family members is a prominent narrative in
Xalapa’s notarial archive.
As witnessed with Gertrudis, not all women of African
descent had families they could rely on to purchase their freedom or altruistic fellow
vecinas to intervene with a substantial financial contribution to save an imprisoned
spouse. Sometimes assistance came from unexpected places because of connections
made and sustained over great distances. On February 10, 1620, a recua owner named
Jerónimo de la Vega from Puebla de los Angeles notarized that he owed 500 pesos de oro
común to a regidor42 from Mexico city named Luis Pacho Mejía who paid for the liberty
42
A regidor is described as “City councilman, whose most important duties in the sixteenth
century, dealt with supervising foodstuffs and the distribution of public lands. He was appointed directly by
the King and his duration of office was five years. His salary was 1,800 or 2,000 pesos in gold annually.”
Ophelia Marquez and Lillian Ramos Navarro Wold, eds. “Compilation of Colonial Spanish Terms and
Document
Related
Phrases,”
Accessed
January
19,
2013,
186
of an enslaved morena named Ana Zavala and her six- (or seven-) year-old mulata
daughter, Ananina.43 Two days later, Ana Zavala registered her first entry as a free
woman with the notary public.44 Ana was cited as the former slave of Contador Alonso
de Villanueva and his wife Doña María de Zavala. The case notes that she and her
daughter lived at the ingenio Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the jurisdiction of
Xalapa. Ana’s entry sheds more light on some of the circumstances that would have
precipitated a recua owner from Puebla to have obligated a regidor from Mexico City to
pay for her and her daughter’s freedom. The first clarification establishes that Jerónimo’s
“gift” was actually a loan. The notarized document outlines that repayment of the loan
was to be made in the following manner: Ana had to make the first payment of 125 pesos
de oro común in exactly one year’s time and make 125-peso de oro común payments on
the same date in the three subsequent years.
As a newly free woman with a child to care for, Ana Zavala would face
tremendous sacrifices to collect such an amount in a four-year time span. She likely
would not even have the resources to piece together the money for the first payment.
Ana noted in the entry that Jerónimo made the loan because of their “amistad,” or
friendship.
As a recua owner in Puebla, Jerónimo might have met Ana while he
conducted transportation business in Xalapa. Ana was the slave of a doña and a Crown
treasury official, so Jerónimo might have had a contract with them and had the
opportunity to know Ana incidentally. Whatever the terms of their friendship, it was
likely not as intimate as it would initially appear. A 500-peso de oro común debt with a
43
44
ANX, February 10, 1620, f 256fte - 256vta.
ANX, February 12, 1620, f 258vta - 259vta.
187
four-year deadline was a hardship that would test the “amistad” of even two great
Shakespearean lovers.
Blended Families, Legitimate Birth, and Rightful Claims
As was discussed in the previous chapter, children of African descent were born
to legitimate parents at rates as high as 63%,45 socially marking them and their families as
more closely approximating Spanish ideals. If we include boys and girls living in twoparent households with the percentage of legitimately united parents, the data suggests
that by the early eighteenth century, 88%46 of children of African descent, lived at the
time of confirmation in a home with both their mother and father, which likely meant
greater opportunities for the children’s upward economic mobility. Still, we know that
“good” or “stable” homes were not always the ones where both parents resided, not even
if they were married under the tenets of the Catholic Church. Gertrudis del Barrio, a free
parda, was the legitimate daughter of Francisco del Barrio and Feliciana Hernández.47
However, Francisco and Feliciana did not raise Gertrudis and they were not designated as
deceased in the notarial archive. Fortunately for Gertrudis, she was not relegated to the
life of a begging orphaned child or taken in as a charge of a parish where she would
likely have had to work as a slave even though she was born free. A widow named Juana
de Orantes, with no cited ties to Francisco or Feliciana, raised Gertrudis and, from the
available notarial records, always treated Gertrudis as her own daughter.
A few details about the life of Juana de Orantes’ are divulged in the notarial
45
Legitimacy rate for Xalapa as recorded in the 1712 confirmation records.
Data based on the 1728 confirmation records.
47
ANX, December 22, 1708, f 167vta - 169fte.
46
188
documents. Juana is cited as a vecina of Xalapa. She was married but her husband,
Antonio de los Santos, had already passed away when her notarial life began. Juana and
Antonio never had any children and did not designate any other biological heirs. A
Spanish woman named Juana de Orantes appeared in the parish archives on August 25,
1668 to serve as godmother for a mulata girl named Luisa whose mother was a free
morena named Ageda María.48 Juana’s spouse was not cited in the baptism entry and
Juana was not designated as an española in the notarial case, so it is uncertain if it is the
same woman as in the notarial record. If the two women were one and the same, then
Juana had more than one connection to the free African-descended population in Xalapa.
On December 12, 1708, Juana de Orantes donated a plot of land and a house to
her adopted daughter Gertrudis.
The property was centrally located on Calle Real
towards the main public plaza, and the plot measured thirty-five varas in the front and
forty-five towards the back. The stipulation in the transfer of property was that Getrudis
del Barrio was to pay for Juana de Orantes’ burial when she passed away. Gertrudis did
not hold on to Juana’s donation for very long. Five years later, Gertrudis appeared before
the notary public to sell it.49 She found a buyer, Juan Joseph Rincón, and was able to turn
her adopted mother’s generosity into a profit of thirty-seven pesos de oro común. The
sale agreement noted that Gertrudis had begun to start her own family, having married a
man of unstated caste or race named Manuel Francisco. However, by at least 1713, she
too was a widow. Juana de Orantes, on the other hand, was still alive. The selling of the
house after her husband’s death might have been a way for Gertrudis to raise some
48
49
AEP, Bautizos Caja 1, 1666-1689, Libro 1, August 25, 1668.
ANX, February 2, 1713, f 81vta - 83fte.
189
liquidity, but she may also not have needed it any longer and sought out the familiar
companionship of her adopted mother. Gertrudis may have moved in again with Juana,
mother and daughter together again under one roof, living out their days as widows. A
home bounded not by legitimately tied parents, but by the generosity of a woman who
shared her life and her wealth with a free parda girl who needed her.
Gertrudis was adopted and still was able to claim legitimacy through her absent,
but married, parents. She was also able to enjoy a life of relative economic comfort,
which is what most parents sought out for their children. One woman of African descent
in Xalapa was determined to accomplish economic stability not for her child but through
him. In 1641, Teresa López, a free morena, took decisive action to secure her economic
well-being by claiming her rights as a mother through the proper legal channels.50 Teresa
López was the legitimate wife of Spaniard Bartolomé de Betancourt.
She and her
husband resided at the sugar refinery Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the jurisdiction
of Xalapa. Before she married Bartolomé de Betancourt, Teresa López had a relationship
with a man named Andrés Domínguez. She did not specify whether the relationship was
serious or casual, but it did result in the birth of her son, Miguel Domínguez.51 Miguel
was labeled as an hijo natural in the documents, signaling that whether Teresa and
Andrés were in a committed, loving relationship or not, they were not lawfully married in
the Catholic Church. In addition, the records identify Teresa’s son as a mestizo even
though she is clearly designated as a woman of African descent.
Miguel’s father, Andrés Domínguez, apparently did not initially believe that
50
51
ANX, November 8, 1641, f 217fte - 218fte
ANX, December 6, 1643, f 428vta - 430vta.
190
Miguel was his child, as it was noted that paternity was not acknowledged until Andrés
was dying. However, as the child was eventually legally recognized, young Miguel
Domínguez was due his part of his biological father’s inheritance. Before it could be
claimed on his behalf, Miguel had passed away at roughly the age of three. Infant and
childhood mortality rates were high throughout the seventeenth century, and a toddler’s
early passing was not uncommon. According to death records in Xalapa’s parish archive,
a number of young children passed away without any noted explanation in the early
1700s. On August, 29, 1704, María de la Asunsión and Gregorio Albares, both free
pardos, buried their one-year-old hija legítima Francisca without a note from the parish
recorder regarding possible cause of death.52 Some parents had even less time with their
children. On September 2, 1705, newborn Clara was only 24 days old when she passed
away without a stated cause.53
Baby Miguel might have also succumbed to one of the many pestilences and
deadly fevers ushered into Xalapa by the constant stream of travelers from Mexico City
or the Port of Veracruz. Burial records from the parish archive evidence that an outbreak
of illnesses occurred in the Port in the mid-seventeenth century. In the summer of 1650,
the parish of Xalapa buried three free mulato men within days each other. The parish
record keeper noted that the men had died of the “mal pestilente de Veracruz,” or “bad
pestilence from Veracruz Port.” The first man, Juan Alonso, a vecino of Mexico City,
died on July 24, 1650.54 The second man, Lorenso Martín, from Puebla de los Angeles,
52
AEP, ECB Collection, Entierros Caja 1, Libro 1, August, 29, 1704.
AEP, ECB Collection, Entierros Caja 1, Libro 1, September 2, 1705.
54
AEP, ECB Collection, Entierros Caja 1, Libro 1, July 29, 1650, f 262fte-262vta.
53
191
died five days after Juan Alonso.55 A few days later on August 2, 1650, Diego de Perea
from Mexico City passed away from the same bad pestilence from Veracruz.56 None of
the men appear to have known either of the others, but they were all in the same business.
Juan and Lorenso were both noted as arrieros (but not of the same companies), and
Diego was cited as a recua employee. They may have died of completely unrelated
causes, but the rhetoric of Xalapa’s clergy makes it clear that they believed that men in
the transportation business were once again bringing the “mal pestilente” from the humid
and disease-ridden Port of Veracruz.
Whatever the ailment was that claimed the life of three-year-old Miguel, Teresa
López knew her rights and the legal implications of the deaths of both her son’s father
and the child. On November 8, 1641, with the approval of her husband Bartolomé de
Betancourt, Teresa López took her case to probably the most powerful man whom she
knew and signed over a poder to Licenciado Gabriel de Pantoja, a lawyer of the Real
Audiencia of New Spain, the highest tribunal of the Spanish Crown in the viceroyalty.
She charged him with traveling to the city of Puebla de Los Angeles in order to confront
the executors of her son’s father’s will and have them hand over what was rightfully hers;
all money, goods, or property that would have been bequeathed to her deceased son,
Miguel Domínguez. She argued that as his mother, it was now legally hers to claim, and
Teresa López seemed to know that choosing someone of Licenciado Gabriel de Pantoja’s
stature would ensure that legal proceedings would run smoothly and in her favor. Her
55
56
AEP, ECB Collection, Entierros Caja 1, Libro 1, July 24, 1650, f 263fte.
AEP, ECB Collection, Entierros Caja 1, Libro 1, August 2, 1650, f 264fte.
192
strategy seemed to have been successful, but only partially so, because a few months
later, she returned to the notarial offices to issue a poder in order to claim the rest of the
inheritance.57 On February 8, 1642, Teresa López bestowed her representative authority
to Licenciado Andrés Juarez de Arce to travel to Puebla de Los Angeles and “judicially
request and recover all goods, furniture, real property, and other things” left by her son’s
father.
Teresa López could not be accused of being insufficiently litigious.
She
continued to pursue the executors until they complied fully and turned over everything
they owed her from the estate.
On December 6, 1643, Teresa López temporarily
suspended the poder issued to Licenciado Andrés Juarez de Arce and issued a final poder
regarding this matter, this time to her legitimate husband, Bartolomé de Betancourt.58
Perhaps displeased with how her two previous representatives served in her legal stead,
Teresa López might have felt more confident with her husband, a Spanish man who
would directly benefit from the matter, to resolve finally the inheritance dispute and
claim the “pesos de oro común” that had not yet been transferred to her. Although the
final result of this poder is not documented in the notarial archive, Teresa López’
determination over more than two years of legal action in order to collect her late son’s
rightful inheritance leads one to believe that she pursued the executors living in Puebla de
Los Angeles from her residence in Xalapa via legal representation until she and her
husband had accounted for every last peso.
Teresa López did not have to establish that she was in a lawful relationship with
57
58
193
Andrés Domínguez in order to lay claim to her son’s rightful inheritance because Andrés
freely admitted before a notary that he acknowledged Miguel as his own, even if he did
so on his deathbed.
Some legal matters were far more complex and required the
participation of many more actors. María de la Candelária, a free parda, was one of the
most active widows of African descent found in the seventeenth-century notarial archives
of Xalapa, and she was not even a resident of the jurisdiction but a vecina of La Nueva
Ciudad de Veracruz.59 María and her late husband Diego Ordóñez had had five children
– Francisca, Juana, María, Mariana, and Joseph, all of whom were designated as
legitimately born. In one month’s time, the widow María was named as the primary
agent or secondary actor to six pieces of notarial business. Five of these took place on
March 30, 1685, perhaps because María was trying to avoid multiple trips to Xalapa.
María’s husband Diego Ordóñez left a substantial estate to her and to his children.
María, who served as the administrator of Diego’s assets for her four daughters, first
issued a poder to her son Joseph, who was over the age of twenty-five, so that in her
name he could sell his late father’s acres of land and livestock grazing sites located on the
edge of Xalapa’s borders.60 The documents noted that Diego Ordóñez had received these
lands as a generous donation from Doña Luisa Ordóñez, the widow of Manuel Rodríguez
de Amaya, but did not specify the relationship between the two.
The next four entries registered on March 30, 1685, dealt with a much more
personal family matter concerning María de la Candelária and her husband Diego
Ordóñez. The first of these cases involved the solicitation of Señor Capitán Don Andrés
59
60
ANX, March 30, 1685, f 238fte - 239fte.
194
García de la Peña, the alcalde ordinario of La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, to authenticate
the legitimacy of her five children with Diego. The document reads in the first person,
“[W]e appear here…to establish and ascertain…that between me, María de Candelária,
and Diego Ordóñez, my deceased husband, we had and procreated legitimate children,
Francisca, Juana, María, Mariana, and the aforementioned Joseph. And as legitimate
children, any reales or goods that may have been left [by Diego], correspond and belong
to them.” The statement concludes with, “We ask for justice [in this matter].”
The next three entries involved the presentation of witnesses who claimed to attest
to the validity of María de la Candelária’s declaration that she was the lawful wife of
Diego Ordóñez and that all of her children were legítimos. María and Joseph presented
Francisco Maldonado before the notarial offices to testify on their behalf.61 Francisco, a
free pardo and a vecino, testified that he had known Diego and María for more than thirty
years. Francisco declared that he had “seen them legally married” and that all five
children were hijos legítimos. He might have meant that he had seen the couple “act”
legally married and not that he attended an actual wedding ceremony. María and Joseph
also presented Manuel de Ortega, another free pardo.62 Manuel asserted that he knew
María and that he had seen her in a “married life” with Diego Ordóñez. He stated that he
knew them to have five legitimate children, whom he saw María and Diego care for and
feed. Francisco nor Manual testified that they had been listening to mass when María and
Joseph’s impending nuptials had been announced three Sundays in a row prior to the
wedding. Neither man noted that they had enjoyed the festivities that followed but both
61
62
ANX, March 30, 1685, f 241fte.
ANX, March 30, 1685, f 242vta.
195
confirmed that María and Diego had lived a “married life” and “acted” as if they were
lawfully joined together by the Church, and for some couples that was enough for others
to believe that the couple was legitimate.
Steve Stern argues, “The key point in
determining social respectability and quasi-marital obligation outside formal marriage
was intention and appearance rather than marriage itself.”63 The notarial authorities, and
likely María and Joseph, must have understood the inherent ambiguity of the statements
offered by Francisco and Manuel, and the apparent need for someone who could offer
more definitive testimony with regard to the legitimacy of María and Diego’s
relationship.
A third witness called to testify was Licenciado Don Juan Sánchez de Tovar, a
presbítero and vecino of Xalapa. Licenciado Don Juan Sánchez de Tovar asserted that he
knew both María de Candelária and Diego Ordóñez. His testimony reads, “[I knew that]
they were married and velados according to the order of our Holy Church. Because I saw
them in a married life, they had legitimate children.” When the presbítero named all five
children, he added that Joseph was present in Xalapa and that Mariana was in Mexico
City at the time of the entry. When he cited María, he casually added, “who was taken
prisoner by the enemy.”
The archivists and paleographers at the Universidad
Veracruzana - Xalapa campus believe that “the enemy” refers to the infamous pirate
Lorencillo, who held La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz hostage for nearly two weeks in May
1683.64
63
For a more detailed account of the 1683 pirate attack on Veracruz, see David F. Marley Sack of
Veracruz Sack of Veracruz and Pirates: The Great Pirate Raid of 1683 (Windsor, Ontario, Canada:
64
196
Not only had María Candelária provided an unassailable witness who would have
known if María and Diego had followed the proper protocol of a religious union, the
presbítero assisted her enterprise for restitution of her rights by calling on the power of
recent memory. Laurens Cornelis Boudewijn de Graaf, or Lorencillo, was a native of
Holland who had been recruited by a Spanish fleet bound for the American colonies.65 In
a few short years, the Dutch buccaneer made a name for himself by terrorizing the
Caribbean, overtaking important vessels and demanding ransom from what was believed
to be an incredible sacking of Veracruz Port. On May 17, 1683, Lorencillo approached
the port of Veracruz bent on what would become one of Mexico’s “most alarming raids
of the century.”66 Pirates overtook the port’s island fortress, San Juan de Ulúa, ransacked
and looted elite homes, and rounded up officials and their families while others hid in
fear for their lives. For nearly two weeks, the residents of Veracruz lived in fear that
their beloved city would be left in shambles or, worse, that they would all be murdered.
In the middle of this, we find the innocent, unmarried (virginal?) daughter of
María de la Candelária and her legitimate husband Diego Ordóñez. The narrative aside
about “the enemy” offered by Licenciado Don Juan Sánchez de Tovar would have
elicited a visceral response from people all over the region, and perhaps across the
colony. That a widowed woman petitioning for “justice” in a private family matter had
also been victimized by the hated scoundrel Lorencillo, who had devastated the lives of
thousands in Veracruz Port just two years prior, positioned María as a thoroughly
Netherlandic Press, 1993). For a history of pirating and buccaneering in the Golf Coast region, see Juan
Juarez Moreno, Corsarios y Piratas en Veracruz y Campeche (Sevilla, Spain: Escuela de Estudios
Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1972).
65
Marley, Sack of Veracruz, 8.
66
Vinson, “Articulating Space,” 159
197
aggrieved mother. Through careful selection of the witnesses she called upon, María had
skillfully orchestrated a narrative that featured her as the archetype of the pitiable female
protagonist. As further investigation into her notarial life reveals, María de la Candelária
was far from destitute.
On April 26, 1685, Joseph went on his mother’s behalf to register the final entry
in the notarial archive by the Candelária-Ordóñez family. 67
With María de la
Candelária’s permission, he sold a significant combination of properties in the
jurisdiction of Xalapa to Francisco Hernández, a vecino of the town of Ixhuacán de los
Reyes.68 For 400 pesos de oro común, the Candelária-Ordóñez family relinquished two
grazing areas for smaller animals, such as sheep or pigs. The first was located on the
outskirts of Chiltoyac and measured three acres. The second was located about a league
and a half from Ixhuacán and two leagues from Xalapa and measured two acres. The
second pasture also had the advantage of being located near the Joloatl River.
Importantly, this entry finally explains how Diego Ordóñez had received these lands.
The March 30, 1685 documents cited only that Doña Luisa Ordóñez had given Diego
some properties. The April 26, 1865 bill of sale specifies that Doña Luisa Ordóñez was
Diego’s wealthy and generous aunt.
This additional information suggests that María de la Candelária might have had
more in common with Teresa López than initially revealed. Both women had to gather a
whole team of legal representatives and witnesses to prove that they had rightful claims
to the relationships in their lives, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned. Not only were
67
68
ANX, April 26, 1685, f 242fte - 243fte.
198
María and Teresa pursuing public acknowledgements for their children, but they also
wanted the right to access the financial holdings of the wealthy men with whom they had
relationships. María might have wanted to bring in three witnesses, one a presbítero, to
prove that she was still an upstanding colonial subject who wanted to ensure that her
children continued to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy for potential material benefits later
in life.
Although more widely documented among the Spanish elite,
69
African-
descended women also understood legitimacy as socially important. However, it was
more probable that María de la Candelária was suddenly motivated to prove that her adult
children were legitimate so that she could access the land that her husband had inherited.
Whether African-descended women were the legitimate wives or lovers, the men’s
families, who had greater cited economic opportunities, likely were not as welcoming to
the mulatas and pardas who sought legal redress that would yield them money and
properties and perhaps some confirmation as to their social status.
Religious Expression
Legal proceedings to confirm one’s legitimate rights were not the only public
demonstrations that united public and private concerns. Free women of African descent
were active in religious life, demonstrated by their presence as godmothers more often
than free men were named as godfathers. However, some free women of means found
more public ways to express their religious convictions. María Godínez was a free
69
Twinam discusses the specific consequences and benefits of legitimacy among elites. Twinam,
Public Lives, Private Secrets, 46-47.
199
morena (sometimes noted as a free parda) and homeowner in Xalapa.70 She must have
been fairly well settled economically because at some point in the late seventeenth
century, María had established a capellanía.71 A capellanía was a private chapel founded
by individuals, often so that masses could be said for their souls. It required a principal
sum of money or the value of the property was assessed to determine the amount that
would yield its 5% annual interest. This interest would then be used to pay the cost of the
cleric who would administer mass at the chapel. On October 22, 1691, the Bachiller
Manuel del Posso, who was the vicar and ecclesiastical judge of the ingenio La Santísima
Trinidad, was cited as the administrator of María Godínez’ capellanía. Bachiller del
Posso also mentioned in the notarial case that in addition to María’s chapel, he managed
the capellanía founded by Don Francisco de Leiva Irasi, the corregidor (district
magistrate) and lieutenant general of Veracruz. Don Francisco’s chapel was founded
with an initial investment of 1,000 pesos de oro común, while María financed her
capellanía with 400 pesos de oro comun. Others in Xalapa endowed their capellanías
with principal sums between 500 and 3,000 pesos de oro común, marking them as elite
religious endeavors.72 María Godínez’ chapel may not have been as generously backed
as the lieutenant general’s, but she sought to demonstrate her religious identity and her
economic standing through the investment in a chapel where masses could be said for her
spiritual fortification by a well-connected cleric.
70
ANX, January 31, 1693, f 584vta - 587fte.
72
71
200
A modest display of religious commitment by one young woman demonstrates
that even those who could not afford to finance their own chapels were still concerned
about the welfare of their eternal souls in relation to the consecration offered by particular
religious properties. On March 6, 1668, a twelve-year-old mulata named Ana Ruiz had a
unique reason for visiting the notarial offices.73 She was the hija natural of Ana María, a
vecina of Xalapa. In a notarial declaration that served as her last will and testament, Ana
Ruiz made a somber request as she lay sick in bed. The notary’s dictation reads, “She
said that it was her wish that God…rid her of her illness or that her body be buried in the
Church of the Señor San Francisco.” Ana’s request referred to burial at the Monastery of
San Francisco, an appeal often found in wills of Xalapa’s elite. Bermúdez Gorrochotegui
notes, “Before dying, Spaniards of a certain heritage and lineage ordered their relatives to
have their bodies enterred preferably inside the interior of the church of the Convent of
San Francisco.”74 Ana Ruiz’s resources and financial standing are unclear. Ana named
her mother as her sole heir and tenedora of whatever goods she might have had. She was
“of a certain heritage” as a mulata but she included no details about her resources to
determine whether she was truly a woman of means or merely a sick parishioner with one
last favor to ask of her religious leaders. Ana may have been short on funds, and likely
on hope too, but she was clear on the expectation that as a Catholic she had the right to
request that the sanctity of her interred body be respected and laid to rest where she had
indicated. In an examination of the existing, but largely incomplete, burial records for
Xalapa during the seventeenth century, I found no record for Ana Ruiz, precluding us
73
74
ANX, March 6, 1668, f 139vta - 140fte.
My translation, Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, 408.
201
from knowing whether the twelve-year old got the final rest that she wanted at the
cemetery of the Monastery of San Francisco.
Protecting Womanhood
Protecting familial honor through the sexual purity of the female body figures
conspicuously in the historiography of women75 but also in the regulatory edicts issued
by the Spanish Crown and his colonial proxies.76 The safeguarding of a woman’s
virginity was often posited as an elite Spanish cultural norm, one in which the entire
family was invested and in which men of the family took pride and on which they based
their honor.77 The price of losing that honor before marriage could be the stigmatization
of families, which would challenge their ability to find ideal marriage partners for eligible
75
There has been significant work on questions related to preoccupation with female sexuality, the
politics of an honorable woman, and social consequences of breaching the codes of respectability. Many of
these narratives are based in familial concerns of the maintenance of an idealized public reputation
garnered through the virtue of womanhood. While colonial edicts do appear, attempts at controlling
women and their bodies through Church and community self-regulation predominated. See: Mannarelli,
Private Passions and Public Sins, 97-126; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 59-88; Patricia Seed, To
Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico, 102-108; Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists, 109-164.
76
Julia Tuñón Pablos notes early royal concerns regarding the “type” of woman authorities would
allow to travel to New Spain, She writes, “A 1554 royal letter ordered officials of the House of Trade in
Seville to see that ‘women be obliged to provide information on their cleanliness, as men [must do], and
not to let any [women] through without express permission”; it also prohibited the departure of gypsies and
persons of ‘loose morals’.” Julia Tuñón Pablos, Women in Mexico: Past Unveiled, 24. Of the viceroyalty
of Peru, María Emma Mannarelli describes early seventeenth-century efforts to control women’s behavior.
She writes, “In his 1604 report to his successor, the viceroy Luis de Velasco (1595-1603), complained
about the behavior of Lima’s women. The ‘laziness and abundance of luxuries’ were, by his account, a
breeding ground for female sexuality. He requested permission to build a house of retreat where ‘wicked
and insolent’ women could be kept. This would serve to intimidate other women and keep them from
behaving in disgraceful ways.” María Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, 101.
Importantly, Robert Slenes argues that in the case of enslaved African-descended women in the Brazilian
historiography, “The image of slave promiscuity was drawn from an uncritical reading of nineteenth
century accounts left by Europeans travellers and well-to-do Brazilians…Their distortion of the experience
of slave women was particularly severe.” Robert W. Slenes, “Black Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions
of the Slave Family and of Slave Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” in More than Chattel, 126-146. I
argue that the same could be said of the Mexican historiography when African-descended people are
posited as people who did not share Spanish ideals of the family and female respectability.
77
Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey, 66. For a more in-depth discussion of female honor and
social hierarchies, see María Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, 97-126.
202
daughters and challenge their claims of respectability.78 How seriously families took
their responsibility of safeguarding the virginity of female family members may have
depended on the family’s wealth or social rank.79 What one case in Xalapa demonstrates
is that the preoccupation with virginity was not the sole domain of the Spanish elite. On
January 19, 1702, a man named Juan Verdugo sat in the public jail of Xalapa.80 He
called upon a fiador named Andrés de Castro to front the seventy pesos de oro común he
needed to make bail. His crime? Juan had “deflowered” a mulata woman named
Bernabela.
In Private Passions and Public Sins, María Emma Mannarelli argues,
“Sexual relations outside of marriage were considered a serious offense.
Virginity
nevertheless had a price that varied according to who the deflowered woman was.”81 The
social price might have been a loss of public reputation, but the courts also decided to
exact a price on the male offender, which began with the large sum of seventy pesos de
oro común.
Imprisonment of the male “delinquent” was also a common course of action by
local police in response to allegations that a man had broken his promise to marry a
woman after wooing her with his “solemn word” in order to begin a sexual relationship.
Patricia Seed notes that a local jail was not the only threat of punishment possible. She
writes, “Offenders were given the opportunity to marry or be sent to the Philippines to
work on His Majesty’s fortresses, a severe punishment for breaching the code of
78
Twinam discusses the importance of “public persona” tied to women’s bodies. Her examination
of the practice of private pregnancies to guard against negative social effects, most directly speaks to this
issue. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 60-73.
79
Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, 106.
80
81
Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, 106.
203
honor.”82 Fines against the men would later be more common as a compensatory option
to a forced marriage.83 Although this notarial entry did not specify that this was a case of
broken promises, it certainly has many of the characteristics that easily fit with the
narratives of women who became sexually involved with men who had no intention of
fulfilling the engagement promise. With the need for seventy pesos de oro común and a
fiador, perhaps Juan Verdugo began to calculate the costly mistake he had made in
besmirching Bernabela’s honorable status as a virgin.
The lack of information on Bernabela tells its own story. Bernabela had neither a
cited last name nor age, but she was identified as a vecina, so she was likely an adult at
the time that Juan’s fiador was notarized. Not having a last name might have indicated
that Bernabela was of limited means. In a case of lost virginity and possible familial
shame, the exclusion of her surname might have been done purposely to protect her
identity and preserve the honor of her family.84 Additionally, Bernabela status as a
mulata makes this an exceptional case. While Seed asserts that African-descended and
indigenous people did not “share the Spanish reverence for virginity,” Bernabela and her
family must have comprised the demographic of “mixed persons” who Seed notes as
people who had “assimilated or inherited Spanish ideas about social respectability.”85
Given the exorbitant bail, twice the price of houses in Xalapa, her family or the judge
82
Seed, “Marriage Promises and the Value of a Woman’s Testimony in Colonial Mexico,” Signs
13, no. 2 (Winter, 1988), 260.
83
Seed, “Marriage Promises,” 267.
84
Twinam discusses the practices of protecting the identity of women who had given birth to
illegitimate children to preserve the public reputations of their families and of themselves. Twinam,
Private Lives, Public Secrets, 63-64. Also, Seed, “Marriage Promises and the Value of a Woman’s
Testimony in Colonial Mexico,” 256.
85
204
understood a serious crime had taken place and held Juan accountable for the offense
against Bernabela and the potential public infamy he had invoked against her unnamed
family.
Familial honor was on the line even when marriage proposals accompanied the
loss of virginity. In Xalapa, African-descended families sought to defend their daughters
through the legal system as Spanish families did. On July 20, 1716, a vecino of Xalapa
named Alberto Fernández found himself imprisoned in the city’s public jail.86 He too
required a fiador and asked a free pardo named Bartolomé Bustillos to pay for bail,
although it was not indicated in the documents for how much it was set. Alberto was
being held in jail because he had begun an “illicit friendship” with a parda named María
de la Higuera, a vecina of Xalapa. The entry notes that Alberto had given María “his
word” that they would be married, and he was “convinced” that he would follow through
with the engagement. However, he had been imprisoned for not fulfilling his promise to
María and her family.87 Seed establishes that by the early eighteenth century, written
promises and the extended valuation of literacy changed the way a woman’s testimony
that her paramour had secured the relationship with “his word” was respected. However,
for much of the seventeenth century, which is the primary focus in her article, Seed
argues, “Speaking and doing were synonymous, and words were widely regarded as
86
ANX, July 20, 1716, f 376vta - 377fte.
Dyer establishes that a broken promise to marry was considered a crime perpetrated against the
woman involved. Abigail Dyer, “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in SeventeenthCentury Spain,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 34, no. 2 (Summer, 2003), 443.
87
205
deeds.”88 Verbal agreements during the seventeenth century in New Spain carried the
weight of documented commitments and breach of such contracts had consequences.
Alberto and María likely had started a sexual relationship with one another, but
his promise of marriage meant there was less risk of the liaison’s damaging María’s
honor or that of her family. 89 Alberto may have decided to rescind outright his
commitment to fulfill his promise to make María an honorable woman after enjoying an
“illicit friendship” with her, or perhaps his ardor for her simply cooled. As a result,
María and her family demanded a legal remedy, which was their obligation. Richard
Boyer writes,
Relatives had a duty to protect their women’s honor when it looked as if a
suitor wanted to enjoy her sexual favors without following through with
marriage. In so doing they protected their own honor, for the behavior of
daughters, sisters, or cousins reflected on the honor of fathers, brothers,
cousins, and uncles.90
Whether Alberto’s crime was understood as one committed against María or the entire
De la Higuera family, he was punished with incarceration for not complying with the
verbal agreement he made that allowed him to satisfy a more carnal interest that
jeopardized María and her family’s social standing. Both Bernabela and María (and
importantly, their families) understood themselves as people who had honor to lose when
unsanctioned sexual relationships were discovered, men left promises unfulfilled, and
women (and their families) demanded the legitimization of sexual relations. Remarkably,
88
Dyer, “Seduction by Promise of Marriage,” 444.
90
Boyers, Lives of the Bigamists, 89.
89
206
the courts of Xalapa agreed with the aggrieved women in these cases and recognized
them as members of respectable families who deserved justice when honor was at stake.
Conclusion
This chapter began with a demographic profile of free women of African descent,
including a multi-variant analysis of registered businesses, and ended the chapter with
personal matters that made it to the notary’s door, sometimes by way of the involvement
of third parties. While the sample size was small, the result of examining the notarial
activities of free women suggests a high level of diversity among business interests and
socially salient markers. Free African-descended women who were single, married, and
widowed bought and sold homes, purchased tracts of lands, enslaved women and men,
and requested legal representatives. Throughout the early- and mid-seventeenth century,
most of these women would be designated as mulatas, as would most men of African
descent found in the notarial archives of Xalapa be designated as mulatos. As the long
seventeenth century advanced, the categories used to describe African-descended women
and men would open up to include the terms parda and pardo, with limited appearances
by people described as negra or negro, which is corroborated by the parish records
examined in the previous chapter. Interestingly, the data on vecina status suggests that
free women of means initially lived in the agricultural periphery and gradually became
more closely tied to Xalapa “proper” by the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth
centuries, demonstrating their geographic mobility and possibly their aspirations to be
closer to greater economic opportunities that funneled in and out of the town on the
207
Camino Real. By working with a larger sample size and multi-variant analyses that
analyze the perennial categories of race and gender in addition to under-examined
markers, we can develop a more complex understanding of free women’s personal
relationships, business connections, and economic opportunities.
In addition to the economic opportunities found in the profile that will be
discussed in Chapter 3, African-descended women also revealed personal matters to
Xalapa’s escribanos that demonstrated the strength of support found in families of
African descent. Free women with enslaved family members faced the harsh realities of
drained resources after freeing a loved one or when they realized the debt had to be
settled in a matter of a few short months. Important patrons, allies, and friends (and
sometimes just luck) aided in the process of securing freedom for oneself or enslaved
parents, husbands, or children. African-descended family members even took out loans
with wealthy vecinos or made payment plans with slaveowners if they did not have
access to immediate liquidity. However, not all were successful and the notarial archive
bore witness to at least one free woman who apparently lacked the economic and social
capital of financial security and important associates to prevent her husband from being
sold away by a wealthy and politically important slaveowner. While most of the free
women with newly freed family members examined here did not reappear again in the
notarial archive, the ones who did demonstrate that while free family life had its
challenges, some free woman were able to move on from servitude to the comforts of
relative financial security in one lifetime.
208
As the previous chapter documented on a larger scale but that this chapter
reinforced, African-descended people understood the social price and benefit of
legitimacy. The ability to claim legitimate birth and legitimate birthrights for oneself or
for one’s children might have made the difference in the loss or gain of economic capital.
The notarial records demonstrate that free women understood well these consequences
and, by soliciting witnesses to testify to their claims of legitimacy, attempted to ensure
that their interests were not compromised. Free women also found ways to assert a
legitimate public persona beyond the family. The right to express religiosity through
investments in chapel endowments marked socioeconomic status and one’s public
commitment to the Church.
The investments in ideas of belonging to a religious
community, such as the young woman who asked to be buried in the monastery’s
cemetery, also made space for free women of African descent, wealthy or not, to imagine
themselves as members of a whole, a parishioner of the Church.
For the cases of tarnished reputation through the loss of virginity, the
imprisonment of the male offenders allowed women and their family members to position
themselves as people of honor and respectability that demanded criminal redress.
Criminal courts took the claims of African-descended women who had been
“deflowered” seriously and followed up on such cases by arresting the offending men,
demonstrating that free women and their families were seen as honorable enough to be
viewed as victims of a social crime. The more intimate cases examined here allow a brief
glimpse into the personal lives of free women and offer clues as to how free Africandescended women positioned themselves and how authorities in Xalapa allowed them to
209
be located in relation to slavery. They also allowed women of African descent to
reaffirm their investment in legitimate families and female respectability.
In the
following chapter, I will examine how access to economic capital affected the ways in
which free women of African descent could shape their narratives for notarial authorities
and influence how they mobilized both cultural and social capital to produce their
notarial truths.
210
Chapter Three
Social Credibility and Capital
Throughout the colonial era, women of African descent made an indelible mark
on the social landscape of central Veracruz. However, as actors who worked to secure
their own financial footing along with that of their families, free pardas, mulatas,
morenas, and negras also engaged in a number of economic activities that resulted in
their involvement with a cross-section of society. As colonial Mexico’s governing bodies
took shape and local economies diversified to include transatlantic trade, elaborate
transportation businesses, varied agricultural and mining ventures, and real estate
investments, free women of African descent began to access developing labor markets,
demonstrate greater geographic mobility, and key into social networks and patronage
systems not available to many of their enslaved or less economically stable brethren.
Historian María Elisa Velázquez argues that free women of African descent “had, to a
certain degree, a greater ability to choose for whom they worked in addition to [greater]
mobility, which many other women of the viceroyalty lacked, including women of more
substantial economic resources who were dedicated [only] to family life.”1 This relative
autonomy, denied to wealthier Spanish women, allowed free Afro-casta women to make
significant contributions to the local economy in a number of occupations and by a
variety of investments.
1
My translation, Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano, 174.
211
Few works on the African diaspora in Mexico specifically address the economic
influence of women of African descent outside of slave labor.2 The scarce references to
African-descended women’s labor tend to focus on their capacity as caregivers for
Spanish families, petty sellers of goods in town squares, or actors in various informal
markets. To date, only Velázquez Gutiérrez’ full-length monograph, Mujeres de origen
africano en la capital novohispana, provides an expansive examination of the economic
lives of women of African descent in New Spain, focusing on the viceregal capital of
Mexico City. She writes, “Despite many formally coercive laws, cultural exchange,
bonding and various social alliances enabled mechanisms for promotion and upward
mobility.”3 It was precisely these factors in Xalapa, Veracruz that allowed some women
of African descent to improve their life chances. Velázquez Gutiérrez posits that in
Mexico City during the mid-eighteenth century 60% of mulatas and 88% of negras
worked in various domestic and urban industries.4 While we do not have sufficient
occupational data for women of African descent who lived in Xalapa, notarial
2
The historiography on the economic activities of free women is much more developed for the
United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Important contributions include: Susan Socolow, “Economic
Roles of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” in More than Chattel, 279-280; David P. Geggus,
“Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint Domingue,” in More than Chattel, 259-278; Higgins, Licentious
Liberty, 43-88; Hanger, “Landlords, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slave-Owners,” in More than Chattel, 219236; B.J. Barickman and Martha Few, “Ana Paulinha de Quierós, Joaquina da Costa, and Their Neighbors:
Free Women of Color as Household Heads in Rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835,” in More than Chattel, 179-188;
Mary C. Karasch, “Free Women of Color in Central Brazil, 1779-1832,” in More than Chattel, 237-270;
Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991); Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva (2009); Whittington B.
Johnson, “Free African-American Women in Savannah, 1800-1860: Affluence and Autonomy Amid
Adversity,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 76, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 260-283; Thomas Ingersoll, “Free
Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812,” The Williams and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (April
1991): 173-200.
3
My translation, Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano, 106.
4
This data is based on a 1753 Mexico City census. Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen
africano, 175.
212
transactions document their employment in sugar ingenios, inns, private residences, and
their own businesses.
Socio-economic mobility made way for women of African descent to claim a
level of social credibility that is reflected in the choices they made, the rights and
protections they demanded, and the capital they invested in for themselves and their
families. This did not go uncontested in every jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of New
Spain. In Mexico City, authorities attempted to curb the possibilities that some free men
and women had begun to enjoy because of their successful economic ventures. One
ordinance threatened to punish any free man or woman of African descent with a public
whipping of 200 lashes if they did not work with “known masters.”5 The declaration
further stated that such punishment was necessary to “prevent damages that may be
caused by having their own [trade] houses that imitate those of the Spaniards.”
Velázquez Gutiérrez clarifies that such juridical forays into regulation through public
ordinance were often unsuccessful and few African-descended people likely ever
experienced repercussions, as was the case for many ordinances during the seventeenth
century.
However, she adds that the lack of enforcement did not impede colonial
officials from reiterating their anxieties. Eleven years after the threat of public violence,
another ordinance was issued reasserting the necessity of forcing free people to work
with known masters and not in their own businesses. According to viceregal authorities,
arrangements had to be made to stimulate enforcement and their frustration with their
5
My translation, Silvio Zavala, Ordenanzas del trabajo, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico: Elede, 1947),
223.
213
inability to control the colony’s African-descended population was evident.
One
seventeenth-century viceregal ordinance reads,
To avoid the inconveniences that may result by freeing them…because as
vicious and badly inclined people who live with little Christian education
and who assist escaped slaves hiding them for long periods of time and
committing many other excesses and offenses…the ordinances have not
been observed and kept and as a result there are more of these types of
people and an escalation in disorderliness.6
The disorder here may have read as a contemporary cultural code of increased
debauchery, but it may have also alluded to the anxiety of a disrupted colonial order
wrought by free men and women whom the Spanish Crown did not unequivocally regard
as independent and self-determining subjects.
The vast majority of women and men in seventeenth-century Xalapa, regardless
of race, would never live to realize personally the economic advantages of the more
fortunate individuals and families profiled in this chapter. While Velázquez Gutiérrez
outlines other challenges free and enslaved women encountered in various economic
undertakings, she asserts, “It was not always an obstacle to be slave, African, and a
woman in order to garner the recognition of certain social sectors and to have economic
and social opportunities in the viceregal capital.”7 Free women employed a number of
economic strategies to ensure their livelihoods. At times, African-descended women
contracted work arrangements and purchased and sold their real property that included
both minor plots of land and impressively large estates. Other times, they brokered
6
7
Silvio Zavala, Ordenanzas del trabajo, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico: Elede, 1947), 227.
Velázquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africano, 32.
214
important business deals and maintained profitable social networks that included the local
and regional elite.
Free women of African descent issued poderes, settled debts, registered wills,
fashioned their own “notarial truth,” secured the freedom and livelihoods of their family
members, or engaged, as consumers, in one of the region’s biggest sources of economic
development, slavery. The cases that will be discussed demonstrate the litigiousness,
determination, and shrewdness expressed by these women throughout sanctioned avenues
of economic engagement that delivered a cross-section of Xalapa’s economic elite in
sometimes temporarily or permanently obscured ways. I present free women of African
descent as negotiating, with varying degrees of success, the complexity of economic
influence and challenging social spaces. Some struggled with debt that threatened their
freedom, while others reaped the benefits and privileges of intergenerational wealth and
inheritance. Left as widows, some free women of African descent skillfully found ways
to sustain themselves financially by either selling off their late husbands’ businesses or
making their assets income-generating by renting out their properties. Whether it was
arranging for an apprenticeship or a dowry of 100 pesos de oro común (or even 1,000
pesos de oro común), they did what they could to give the next generation the best
economic start that they could afford. One discerning mulata even attempted to re-write
her own history, seemingly to cement her economic position in Xalapa. In the following
chapter, I address some of these tactics, discuss free women’s successes, and examine the
particular challenges that they and their families encountered on the journey to financial
security that eluded most subjects of New Spain. I focus on four types of notarial
215
engagement: inheritance, social networks translating to personal net worth, gendered
strategies, and the management of wealth through notarial truth. Moreover, I analyze
how these economic ventures spoke to particular investments in social and cultural
capital that empowered free African-descended women with the legitimacy that shaped
their lives and those of their progeny.
The Heirs of Privilege
In an unpredictable economy dependent on crops and fair-weather seas for
merchants to bring goods from Spain, Africa, and the Caribbean into the port of
Veracruz, the notarial archive recorded many women of African descent investing in the
relatively more stable economy of real estate.8 Most women were second- or sometimes
third-generation landowners and enjoyed the privilege of a healthy inheritance from
family members who had been long-time property owners in the region. Of all the types
of business recorded with the notary public, free women of African descent appeared in
matters primarily of real estate management over the course of the long seventeenth
century. Land and houses served as significant factors in intergenerational wealth among
African-descended women.
Notably, no notarial entry documented a free woman
inheriting a business from her parents or bequeathing one to her children. Property gifted
by relatives, on the other hand, offered an heir the financial leverage, potential rental
8
Land and home ownership have long been characteristic activities of economically mobile free
African-descended women throughout the Americas and the Caribbean during the colonial period. Of
women in Cap Français, Socolow writes, “Widows of successful free black and mulatto artisans showed a
special penchant for investing in expensive real estate.” Socolow, “Economic Roles of the Free Women of
Color of Cap Français,” in More than Chattel, 283. In “Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint
Domingue,” David P. Geggus writes, “Women landowners varied from solitary ex-slaves living in
ramshackle cabins on an acre of land to the proprietors of coffee plantations with large families and forty or
more slaves.” Geggus, “Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint Domingue,” in More than Chattel, 270.
216
income, and means to generate high yields of revenue when selling the land, or just a part
of it, made economic sense. Whether the property was small or grand, the inheritance of
land offered free women opportunities for geographic mobility and increased acquisition
of capital, economic, social, and cultural.
The case of free pardos Ana de la Cruz and Francisco Hernández demonstrates
the awareness of the value of intergenerational wealth, but it also establishes that
sometimes the heirs were not as forward thinking as their parents had been. Ana and
Francisco attempted to secure the financial well being of their three legitimate pardo
children, Salvador Hernández, Theresa Hernández and Olaya Hernández.9 Ana and her
husband Francisco were both from the province of Xalapa and had accumulated some
real estate that they would later bequeath to all three of their children. On October 16,
1713, when Ana and Francisco had already passed away, the three heirs sold a thirty vara
by seventy-eight vara piece of land to Juana Francisca de Villa for thirty pesos de oro
común. Salvador Hernández signed his own name at the end of the notarial document,
and it appears as though the notary signed for both Theresa and Olaya. Approximately
two weeks later, Salvador, Theresa, and Olaya sold another piece of their inheritance, a
property measuring twenty by seventy-eight varas, to Juan de los Santos, a vecino of
Xalapa, for twenty pesos de oro común. 10 And while the first sale named both Theresa
and Olaya and had their names as “signatories” with the other stakeholders and witnesses,
the second bill of sale named them, but only Salvador Hernández appeared as a signatory
and seemingly in his own hand.
Ana and Francisco left their son and two daughters at
9
ANX, October 16, 1713, f 91fte - 92vta.
10
217
least 200 varas of land, which they sold for an unimpressive gain of fifty pesos de oro
común. Split evenly among the three siblings, the money would have left each with not
quite enough to purchase smaller plots on which to build their houses.
If the two sales they registered alluded only to larger, more profitable holdings,
then Ana de la Cruz and Francisco Hernández’ gift of second generation landownership
to Theresa, Olaya, and a possibly literate Salvador offered greater social mobility and a
continued buffer from the taxing physical labor of agricultural work and the societal risks
that women without economic means endured. However, if Theresa and Olaya were left
with only slightly more than sixteen pesos de oro común with no other resources
available to them, then choosing to relinquish two properties with their brother in order to
divide evenly the inheritance may have proved disastrous for women who generally did
not have access to higher-paying, skilled labor professions that would have been
available to their brother Francisco. Women had to be much more circumspect when
selling off land. However, a third party, such as a male sibling, may have influenced the
decision to liquidate the real estate at a lower market rate because of an urgent need for
funds.
A woman of greater means, of course, had the privilege to sell off property at will
knowing that she had more than she would need. Free parda Jacinta Domínguez fit that
bill. Jacinta had a Spanish husband named Nicolas Fernández, but it was her first
husband who had provided her with the property that would position her well above
subsistence.11 When Jacinta decided to sell a piece of property that she had inherited
11
ANX, April 18, 1684, f 178vta - 180fte.
218
from her late first husband Don Francisco de los Santos, she did so with Nicolas’
licencia, or permission. Jacinta’s transaction was much more significant than the profits
of fifty-pesos de oro común garnered by the Hernández siblings, and perhaps citing her
husband’s approval facilitated the sale. Jacinta’s late first husband Don Francisco de los
Santos had passed away by at least 1671, when the division of his estate had been settled
upon. 12 His two legitimate children received a small monetary allowance, his son
Nicolas de los Santos received 100 pesos de oro común and his daughter Juana de los
Santos inherited roughly 127 pesos de oro común. Jacinta, on the other hand, inherited a
large home made of stone and wood with a tiled roof. When she later sold it thirteen
years later to Juan Lorenzo Velázquez in 1684, she parted with it for the astonishing price
of 500 pesos de oro común, sixteen times the price of most homes sold in Xalapa.
This exceptional residence was not Jacinta Domínguez’ only property. Before she
sold the larger estate to Juan Lorenzo Velázquez in 1684, Jacinta had agreed to rent him a
house and a store in 1675.13 The house and store were made of stone, and the roofs were
tiled. They were also centrally located in Xalapa. Her contract with Juan Lorenzo had
stipulated that he would take occupancy of the properties on February 1, 1676, for a
period of nine years at twenty-six pesos de oro común per year, proving once again that
Jacinta was a dynamic real estate owner.
Most other homes in Xalapa could be
purchased outright at nearly the same amount that Jacinta had rented this commercialresidential property, but she shrewdly decided to lease it to a deep-pocketed vecino and
establish a long-term agreement that would maintain for her a high rental income.
12
13
ANX, July 22, 1671, f 390fte - 391vta.
ANX, December 16, 1675, f 133fte - 134fte.
219
Jacinta Domínguez’ notarial history was not always so simple. On August 27,
1676, Jacinta found herself in a legal dispute over a much smaller piece of land from her
first husband’s estate.14 According to this entry, Xalapa’s treasurer Gaspar de los Reyes
purchased in 1658 from Francisco Camacho and his wife Juana de la Cruz, both free
negros, a parcel of land on behalf of Don Francisco de los Santos. The plot was priced at
only twenty pesos de oro común. Don Francisco de los Santos later constructed houses
on it, where he resided until he died. Jacinta Domínguez and her two children were the
intended inheritors, but they encountered a legal snag. Gaspar de los Reyes was still the
legal owner of the land even though he apparently never lived on the property and merely
had made the sale transaction for Don Francisco de los Santos. By 1676, when she
wanted to sell the property along with the houses, Jacinta could not legally do so. The
problem of ownership was left unresolved, but Jacinta Domínguez certainly did not suffer
terribly from it as she owned other properties and enjoyed incredible profits by selling off
her home for 500 pesos de oro común and renting out a store in Xalapa’s bustling centro.
Inherited land was not always properly safeguarded through legally recognized
agreements, and such missteps could jeopardize the heir’s stake in the property. María
Pacheco, a free parda and vecina of Xalapa, was a second-generation landowner.15 She
had been lawfully married to Luis de la Cruz. However, at some point before 1707, Luis
passed away, and by the time that María Pacheco registered business with the notary
public, she had already remarried to a free pardo named Antonio de la Cruz. Unlike
14
15
ANX, August 27, 1676, f 163vta - 164vta.
ANX, August 17, 1707, f 64fte - 65fte.
220
Jacinta Domínguez, María Pacheco came into property by the generosity of her mother,
María Magdalena, a free mulata who had owned a piece of property near the Convent of
Señor San Francisco in Xalapa. Measuring 197 ½ varas long and 108 varas wide, it was
one of the largest single plots registered by a woman of African descent in Xalapa. María
Magdalena had bequeathed this sizeable property to her daughter María Pacheco. With
the “licencia” of her husband, María Pacheco made a trip to the notarial offices on
August 17, 1707, because of a critical oversight by her mother. María Magdalena had
originally purchased the land from a man named Pedro de la Cruz, and while she had
some form of declaration performed by a man named Francisco Gomes, an official deed
was never issued to her. María Magdalena and Pedro de la Cruz may have been friends
who did not find it necessary to legitimize this transfer of property through a more legal
avenue or perhaps they simply forgot to finalize the paperwork.
By 1707, María Magdalena had already passed away, and the responsibility of
confirming ownership fell on her daughter, who acknowledged her stake in this matter.
María Pacheco declared, “I am the sole inheritor and I want and accept the inheritance.”
The entry stated that she was in the process of selling the property to a fellow vecino,
Diego Vázquez de Ochoa, for fifty-two pesos de oro común and four reales. Neither
María Pacheco nor her husband Antonio de la Cruz could sign their own names to the
notarial documents, but they appeared steadfast in their desire to settle the matter of
proprietorship so that they could move forward with the sale. And while María Pacheco
visited the notarial offices because of an economic motivation, she may also have wanted
to reaffirm legally her position as her mother’s sole heir.
221
The notarial authorities must have believed María Pacheco’s story regarding the
deal made by her mother and Pedro de la Cruz, because she was granted official
ownership and sold the property to Diego Vázquez de Ochoa on the same day. The deal
from August 17, 1707, is revisited with greater detail in the 1713 notarial case of
Gertrudis Jácome, the widow of Diego Vázquez de Ochoa.16 Gertrudis decided to sell
this same property that she had inherited from her husband, all 197 varas by 108 varas.
The 1713 sale agreement described the property as including a house and a barn. And
while María Pacheco only received fifty-two pesos de oro común for the property,
Gertrudis Jácome was able to sell it for seventy pesos de oro común and four reales just
six years later. Perhaps it was not María Pacheco’s wisest move to sell such a valuable
inheritance in 1707, but maybe she and her husband were looking to downsize or
liquidate their assets. Less than a year later, on May 10, 1708, María Pacheco and her
husband Antonio de la Cruz decided to make another, albeit smaller, investment in land.17
The pardo couple purchased for twenty-one pesos de oro común a vacant plot of land
located in the neighborhood of Techacapa, a plot fifty-six and three-quarter varas by
fifty-four varas—half the size of the property inherited from María’s mother.
Some women had more at stake than a solitary property valued at fifty-two pesos
de oro común; some had large properties, and even substantial fortunes, to safeguard. On
March 17, 1707, a free parda named Agustina de Acosta registered her last will and
testament.18 Agustina, born and raised in Xalapa, was the legitimate daughter of Antonio
16
ANX, May 10, 1708, f 106fte - 107fte.
18
17
222
de Acosta Clemente and María de Salazar Romero. Agustina was also the legitimate
wife of Juan Manuel de León and noted that upon contracting the marriage, neither party
had any wealth, and that before meeting Juan, she had a daughter out of wedlock named
María de la Candelária who lived in La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz. Agustina declared
that the house in which she lived was not owned by her but by her daughter. The will
also noted that she and her daughter were slaveowners, albeit modest ones. Agustina and
her daughter María owned three negro slaves: a female slave named María de Guadalupe
who was with her daughter but belonged to her, and two male slaves named Antonio and
Juan Gerónimo who were in her service but belonged to her daughter María. Agustina
declared that she owned a house located near the Hermitage of Santiago and had later
bought the land but was never given a deed for the property. Agustina had appointed
both her daughter and her husband Juan Manuel de León as executors of her will but
declared, “All of the stated possessions that I have will belong to the aforementioned
María de la Candelária, my daughter.”
Fortunately for María de Candelária, her mother was diligent about organizing her
affairs because just two months later Agustina de Acosta made certain that there would
be little debate about her rights to the property she had purchased.19 On May 21, 1707, a
woman named María de la Trinidad appeared before the notary to resolve the matter of
the missing deed on behalf of her grandfather Diego de Moral, who had originally sold
Agustina the empty lot below the Santiago hermitage. Diego de Moral was noted as a
19
ANX, May 21, 1707, f 36fte - 38vta.
223
cacique20 and principal of the “naturales,” or indigenous people of Xalapa. According to
the entry, the undeveloped plot measured 60 by 120 varas, a significant piece of property.
María de la Trinidad acknowledged that Agustina had purchased the land from her
grandfather and that the deed “which she now has requested” had not been given to
Agustina. Agustina had purchased the 180-vara property, which included entrances and
exits, at the bargain price of a mere twenty pesos de oro común. It must have been a
bitter sweet visit to the notary public for María de la Trinidad to affirm her grandfather’s
deal with Agustina de Acosta, losing such a large piece of property for such a paltry
return.
While a twenty-pesos de oro común house would appear to communicate an
image of a less economically established family, Agustina de Acosta and her husband
Juan Manuel de León must have had another, more lavish home given the stately manor
their daughter María de la Candelária enjoyed as a single woman.21 On December 20,
1702, María de la Candelária had purchased from fellow vecino Domingo de Olivera a
house measuring fifty-four by fifty-two varas, a relatively smaller lot in comparison to
the property that her mother Agustina had bought. However, María’s estate consisted of
masonry pillars and walls of stone and mud – all materials of high cost rarely seen in
descriptions of houses in seventeenth-century Xalapa.
María de la Candelária, the
illegitimate daughter of a free parda mother, paid a staggering 200 pesos de oro común
for the estate. Agustina’s 1707 will stated that María lived in La Nueva Ciudad de
Veracruz, and as it was cited as her primary residence, she likely owned property in the
20
21
A cacique was a chieftain, noble, or untitled leader from an indigenous community.
ANX, December 20, 1702, f207fte - 207vta.
224
Port too. Given this information, María de la Candelária’s extravagant 200-peso de oro
común home was, in all likelihood, her “country” abode and sojourn away from the heat,
humidity, and chaos of the Port of Veracruz.
The family’s total assets cannot be
determined from the available documents, but suffice it to say that this Xalapa-Veracruz
family lived well above the average Xalapan, regardless of race.
The notarial archive also bore witness to the more complex legal lives of women
of African descent determined to defend their financial well-being and that of their loved
ones. Ana de la Cruz, initially referred to as a mulata in 1694 and a decade later referred
to as a parda, was the legitimate wife of Juan Jacinto. Ana began her notarial history
while Juan was still alive and she served as her family’s representative when on
September 22, 1694, she registered her first piece of business.22 She granted a poder to
Miguel Jerónimo López de Ontanar, a vecino of Xalapa, to appear before the justices of
Xalapa and request the lifting of a hold that had been placed on Ana and Juan’s assets.
By March 11, 1704, Ana was a widow but one left with what appears to be a farm, which
means that apoderado Miguel Jerónimo López de Ontanar must have been at least
partially successful in restoring the couple’s rights to their assets.23 In the 1704 entry,
Ana de la Cruz declared that she owned several houses, seven oxen, four cows, four
calves, eight mares, a sorrel horse, an “old mule,” seven pieces of unspecified cattle, four
turkeys, and three chickens. In addition to the stable of livestock, Ana added that she had
leased a few of the houses on her property to some of the religious fathers of the
Monastery of San Francisco.
22
23
ANX, September 22, 1694, f 39vta - 40vta.
225
Ana served as her family’s legal proxy in the initial reclamation of goods and
property, but the estate was named jointly with her husband. After his death, Ana
assumed accountability for her well-stocked farm of animals that likely yielded her some
revenue, as most were pack train animals that could be hired out for seasonal work or
sold in the transportation markets of Xalapa. The houses that Ana de la Cruz rented to
the monastery would have also have proved significant for this widowed woman. While
she had an adopted daughter, Ana de la Cruz could not afford to assume that someone
else would provide for her in her advanced years. However, as she had sought protection
of her interests even before her husband had passed and had secured leases with a
religious institution that would likely continue to need boarding houses for its members,
Ana de la Cruz had made important decisions to mitigate her future future as a widowed
woman.
Not all free people of African descent had the funds to bequeath real estate to
their children in order to ease their progeny’s economic transition to adulthood.
Whatever they might have lacked in economic capital, children of African descent
benefitted from the cultural and social capital of their free mothers. Arranging for early
education in trades that would accept boys of African descent represented one of the most
important investments outside of property ownership that a mother could make for her
son. María de Jesús, a free morena, was the mother and “legal administrator” for her
twelve-year-old son Gregorio de la Cruz, a free pardo.24 On September 30, 1689, María
went before Don Francisco Miguel de Campo, the lieutenant general of the province,
24
ANX, September 30, 1689, f 361vta - 363fte.
226
instead of a notary public because there was not one present in the jurisdiction according
to Don Francisco.
He served as the acting judge when María de Jesús wanted to
document legally a four-and-a-half year apprenticeship that she had arranged for
Gregorio. María contracted with a master shoemaker named Hipólito de Amaya and they
had agreed that Gregorio would live in Hipólito’s house while he taught Gregorio shoemaking and repair. María added that Hipólito stated that he would provide her son with
meals and clean clothing. Hipólito also assumed the responsibility of paying for the cost
of any medical care that Gregorio might need. When Gregorio eventually completed the
apprenticeship, Hipólito was to provide him with a proper suit with pants, a doublet, two
shirts, a hat, one pair of shoes, and a set of the tools of the trade.
It was further stipulated that if Gregorio de la Cruz absconded from Hipólito de
Amaya’s guardianship before he completed the term of the agreement, Hipólito was
charged with finding and bringing back the boy from whereever he might be. However,
María agreed to reimburse Hipólito for the trouble of having to search for and retrieve
Gregorio. If Hipólito decided to dismiss Gregorio before the end of the four-and-halfyear residency, he was obligated to place him with another master shoemaker. Hipólito
affirmed in the first person in the same document that he agreed to all of the stipulations
outlined by María. Neither party could sign their own names, but María de Jesús had
made an important decision that would likely save her son Gregorio from the arduous
unskilled labor of cutting cane in the sugar fields of Xalapa’s agricultural periphery. In
Mexico City, many guilds and skilled worker societies barred people of African descent
from membership, ultimately handicapping free people’s ability to obtain the most stable
227
jobs and highest paying positions.25 As a shoemaker, Gregorio would have greater
opportunities available to him in order to earn a higher wage. If he ever achieved the
level of master zapatero, perhaps he would have purchased a shop and taken on his own
apprentices in his later years, grateful to his mother María de Jesús for her foresight and
planning.
But Gregorio was still under the legal guardianship of his mother, and he may not
have appreciated fully the weight of María’s choice to remove him from the home, send
him off with a man who was not a family member, and subject him to endless days of
thankless labor as a new apprentice. As a young man who was not quite independent and
now subject to a master shoemaker, he may even have decided to abscond for a day or
two before seizure and punishment by Hipólito or his mother’s rebuke for costing her
money for the retrieval. Unlike children of landowning parents, Gregorio benefitted from
the cultural capital that came with his mother’s appreciation for early education and
training in a field that would yield reliable work in the future. Even as a single mother,
María de Jesús had the social capital to pass onto Gregorio a network of tradesmen in
order to contract the arrangement with Hipólito. And it is precisely this social capital
reflected in the grids of association that proved indispensable for free women of African
descent as they navigated colonial Xalapa.
Capitalizing Connections
A diverse group of friends, acquaintances, and business partners proved to be a
formula for successful strides towards economic viability across all sectors of colonial
25
228
Mexico. Free women of African descent arrived on the stage of the notarial archive
through cases that demonstrated their particular preoccupations with questions of social
legitimacy as women and as people of African descent. As has been witnessed by the
previous cases discussed, archival footprints were often incomplete and unresolved,
resulting in rich narratives that have been obscured because documents were destroyed,
lost, or irreparably damaged by the passage of time. Due to the scarcity of sources on
free women of African descent in the early colonial period, notions of female “place”
have misinterpreted their social networks. In addition, free women of African descent
had less opportunity to reveal their economic histories in notarial sources, and
assumptions based on master-slave relations carried over to free women, even if they had
been free for three generations. 26 In order to move beyond such postulations, the
historiography must reposition free women as legitimate social actors with economic
interests that did not always result from the graces of others but instead from thoughtful
26
Kimberly Hanger notes how free women were negatively implicated by virtue of their gender,
race and status. She writes, “The free black women who engaged in sexual relationships with white men,
and even those who did not, were often condemned as ‘lewd,’ ‘lascivious,’ and ‘licentious’ in New Orleans
and throughout the Americas.” Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 97. Hanger notes that
perceptions of free women as “always already” immoral was prevalent in eighteenth-century Spanish New
Orleans, “One late-eighteenth-century observer of New Orleans lifestyles, Claude C. Robin, denounced the
many white men who were tempted to ‘form liaisons with these lascivious, coarse, and lavish [libre]
women’ and subsequently were ‘ruined.’ He blamed the women for such sinful practices, however, as did
physician Paul Alliot, who believed that free black women inspired ‘such lust through their bearing, their
gestures, and their dress, that many quite well-to-do persons are ruined in pleasing them.” Hanger, Bounded
Lives, Bounded Places, 97-98. For other colonial conceptions of African and African-descended women,
see: Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1990), 11-22; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 12-49; Robert Olwell, “ ‘Loose, Idle
and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More than Chattel,
97-109; Susan Socolow, “Economic Roles of the Free Women of Color of Cap Français,” More than
Chattel, 279-280; Henrice Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous: Proslavery Representations of Jamaican Slave
Women’s Sexuality, ca. 1780-1834,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic, 209-230; Hilary McD.
Beckles, “Freeing Slavery: Gender Paradigms in the Social History of Caribbean Slavery,” in Slavery,
Freedom and Gender, Brian L. Moore eds et al. (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press,
2003), 212-213.
229
management of social networks within the realm of social respectability. The case of
Isabel López serves as such a poignant reminder.
Isabel López was a free mulata and widow at the beginning of the seventeenth
century.
On March 3, 1605, she decided not to take on the full responsibility of
managing all of her economic affairs and issued a power of legal representation to Pedro
Calderón, the owner of an inn named the Venta de la Hoya.27 Isabel granted Pedro
Calderón full authority to represent her “in all civil and legal disputes” in order to settle
matters regarding any goods, furniture, and real property.28 Free women appeared in the
notarial archive to conduct a wide array of business, but they often appeared when they
registered a poder, a form of legal representation to act on another’s behalf. Free women
requested poderes to allow their family members or trusted confidants to conduct
business for them. Many wealthy people preferred to assign poderes to family members
for the care and discretion that they carefully cultivated to protect one another’s public
reputations. However, sometimes the risk of assigning a poder to a non-family member
was required because of the apoderado’s particular expertise and influence, or simply
because of a lack of trusted family members. Imprudence could be mitigated if the
apoderado was selected from an inner circle of trusted confidantes. Unfortunately, Isabel
López did not personally register another piece of business with the notary, so her
notarial silence might have precluded us from knowing fully why a free mulata with
implied resources sought out legal representation and why she chose Pedro Calderón, a
prominent businessman from Xalapa.
27
28
ANX, March 3, 1605, f 329fte - 329vta
230
According to notarized bills of sale and purchase, Pedro Calderón was an active
slaveowner. In 1601, he purchased both a negro slave, between eighteen and twenty
years old, named Manuel from the “nation of Angola,” and a negra slave, about the same
age, named Magdalena from the “nation of Congo.”29 He paid 400 pesos de oro común
for each slave, a price reflecting the era of costly slave investment. A few years later in
1607, he sold his twenty-eight-year-old negra slave María to Mexico City resident
Francisco Martín Espejel.30 A year later, he sold two more of his slaves, this time a
mother and her son, for a gain of 650 pesos de oro común.31 In 1609, it appears as
though Pedro Calderón intended to retire when he sold the Venta de la Hoya to his sonin-law for 500 pesos de oro común.32 And while the archive also reveals that Pedro
Calderón was married to Ana Díaz, had a daughter,33 sold another one of his male
slaves,34 and a number of his mules,35 nothing more is ever mentioned of Isabel López,
the mulata who entrusted him with her legal power of representation in the 1605 poder.
Most of what could have been discerned from the relationships free women
developed with people of all sectors of society is shrouded in notarial silence when a
poder was unaccompanied with a specific request or if only one piece of business was
registered by them. However, by examining the notarial footprints of those tangentially
tied to the primary agent, connections among all parties can sometimes be illuminated. In
the case of Isabel López, the “why” may never be able to be answerable without the
29
ANX, June 20, 1601, f 51vta - 52fte.
31
32
ANX, August 3, 1609, f 156fte - 156va.
33
ANX, May 10, 1611, f 215fte - 215vta.
34
35
30
231
discovery of more documents, but “how” she may have known Pedro Calderón is within
reach because of a solitary transaction by a third party recorded in the notarial archive.
Isabel’s poder noted that she was a free mulata who was legitimately married to
Francisco de Sea until his death.
As the poder was the only case naming her as a primary actor or recipient and the
only time Pedro Calderón ever served as an apoderado, how Isabel López could have
known Pedro Calderón, her legal representative, might have fallen prey to sordid
assumptions about Spanish benefactors and their mulata beneficiaries, a narrative not
supported by any other available evidence in this particular context. Isabel López’ status
as a widow offers a different narrative. On January 12, 1603, Isabel’s husband, Francisco
de Sea, took over the purchase contract of a man named Urbán de Pineda, who had
bought the inn the Venta de Las Vigas for the price of 320 pesos de oro común.36
Francisco’s notarized contract for the inn not only reveals that he owned a business,
which his wife Isabel likely inherited, but also, since they had the disposable income of
320 pesos de oro común, that they were a fairly wealthy family.
Both Isabel’s husband and her legal representative Pedro Calderón owned
boarding facilities in the same town. Francisco purchased his inn in 1603 and Pedro had
purchased the Venta de la Hoya just a few years earlier on June 4, 1599.37 It is also of
some importance that Francisco de Sea was never identified with any family history or
racial background. If he were Spanish, it would be very likely that two Spanish family
men of means from Xalapa who both owned inns during the same years would have
36
37
ANX, June 4, 1599, f 530vta bis - 532fte.
232
known each other as social peers and/or economic competitors. Their relationship was
likely more amicable considering that Francisco de Sea’s wife sought Pedro’s assistance
in the legal domain. Had it not been for Francisco de Sea’s only entry in the notarial
archive documenting his purchase of the Venta de Las Vigas two years before his wife
authorized a poder to Pedro Calderón, there would be no evidentiary lead as to why a free
mulata widow of means would have known a wealthy Spanish slaveowner and business
owner. While this seemingly limited case divulges few specifics of the financial holdings
of free mulata Isabel López, it offers a poignant reminder about the importance of
expanding the realm of possibilities when working with scarce source material and
examining the lives of under-researched demographics. More specifically, it steers us
away from the unsubstantiated narrative that most free women of African descent likely
acquiesced to illicit sexual relationships for their financial security and social standing.38
As there were multiple entry points for women of African descent to attain wealth, the
mediated (we must remember that most subjects of New Spain could not read or write—
Isabel could not sign her own name) notarial footprint suggests a much more complex
reality.
With the additional information regarding her husband’s deal, Isabel López is no
longer a widow with indeterminate economic status; she is a woman of economic
38
Conjectures about Spanish men and their African-descended beneficiaries as concubines was a
narrative that even some contemporary African-descended women were painfully aware of and offended
by. Kimberly Hanger notes a case in which a free parda named Maria Cofignie (Coffiny) living in Spanish
New Orleans was brought up on charges in May 1795 for insulting the daughter of a white captain after an
altercation in which the free woman’s son was harassed and threatened by the girl and other white
neighbors. Cofignie had apparently scolded the captain’s daughter with scathing remarks that rebuked
racialized and gendered stereotypes of the time, stating, “Just because they are white, believe that we
[libres] are made to be scorned, spurned, and slighted. I am free and I am as worthy as you are; I have not
earned my freedom on my back." Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 149.
233
privilege, or at least she was while her husband was alive and able to make such
substantial business investments. If her husband had not decided to purchase an inn (an
expensive business at that!), Isabel’s economic standing would be less determinable and
her relationship to her apoderado more ambiguous. While women employed specific
gendered strategies, free women of means were considered by others to be reliable
business associates and knowledgeable brokers of cultural and economic capital. The
notarial archive even witnessed how they served in capacities usually occupied by
Spanish men.
Women of African descent sought out prominent members of Xalapan society
when they could to serve as their legal representatives, though this was more common
when they had no cited husband or male children and the business required travel outside
of the jurisdiction.
Ursula de Villanueva, a free parda and the widow of Xpóval
Hernández, was a resident of the sugar ingenio San Pedro Buenavista.39 Ursula and
Xpóval had five daughters, María, Agueda, Juana, Antonia, and Magdalena López. On
January 8, 1642, Ursula de Villanueva issued a poder to her fellow vecino Francisco de
Orduña Castillo. Francisco was the administrator of the ingenio San Pedro Buenavista,
his uncle’s property. Ursula charged Francisco with “selling at the price that he saw fit
some properties located in La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz that remained after the death
of María López, the maternal grandmother of my husband, which were bequeathed to
him and the other heirs.” This poder reveals that Ursula de Villanueva had married a
man whose family members were, at the very least, third generation landowners in the
39
234
region. None of the primary figures in this case lived in La Antigua, but Francisco
succeeded in accomplishing the task of finding a buyer in less than a year’s time. He sold
one of the properties on October 6, 1642, to Sargento Manuel de Riveros, a vecino of La
Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz, for thirty pesos de oro común.40
It would appear that Ursula had chosen well when deciding on whom to bestow a
poder, even if the choice resulted more from convenience than thoughtful strategy.
Francisco de Orduña Castillo happened to reside at the same ingenio as Ursula but he was
also a member of Xalapa’s elite agricultural families. His connections, along with those
of his ingenio-owning uncle, must have facilitated his ability to serve as an effective
broker for property outside of Xalapa’s jurisdiction. Coincidence of residency favored
Ursula in her search for an apoderado. However, she must have also realized the
advantages of choosing an agent with a recognizable family business and who likely had
a wide social network of potential buyers. And given that a mere ten months had passed
from the original issuance of the poder and the sale of the property, Ursula de Villanueva
reaped the benefits of having a “neighbor” willing to sell property on her behalf in a
jurisdiction more than seventy-five kilometers away from her home on the ingenio.
While widowed women like Isabel López and Ursula Villanueva sought out
representation, at least one of Xalapa’s most influential and wealthy Spanish residents
trusted the business savvy of a free woman of African descent to represent him on an
important business matter. On December 22, 1664, the well-connected and highly visible
Licenciado Pedro de Yrala documented his choice for legal representative. The poder
40
ANX, October 6, 1642, f 337fte - 337vta.
235
reads,
I, the Licenciado Pedro de Yrala, cura beneficiado for his Majesty of this
district of Xalapa, grant and give my poder to assign and transfer, with
proper cause and as required, to Polonia de Ribas, free mulata and my
vecina of this town, so that in my name and representing my person she
may request, receive, and charge Joseph Cogollos y Zarate, owner of the
inn La Venta de Lencero and administrator of the refinery named Nuestra
Señora de los Remedios of this jurisdiction that used to be owned by the
Regidor Luis Pacho Mexia. [Joseph Cogollos y Zarate] owes me 257
pesos de oro común and 2 tomines according to a decision made in my
favor before the present notary.41
Pedro de Yrala, a prominent figure in Xalapa, would have had an expansive social circle
from which to choose and appoint a business proxy, which he often did because of the
number of business dealings in which he involved himself. In 1641, Licenciado Pedro de
Yrala granted his poder to Sargento Manuel Viveros, a resident of La Antigua Ciudad de
Veracruz, in order to lease property he had in that city.42 He also had available to him a
number of eminent family members, such as his brother, Bachiller José de Goitia, whom
he did call upon to represent him through a poder issued in 1637 in order to conduct
business for him in Puebla de Los Angeles.43 Pedro de Yrala could also have appointed
his nephew, Don Joseph Seballos y Burgos, owner of the sugar refinery Nuestra Señora
del Rosario, with whom he was close and to whom he had donated a considerable amount
of his belongings, including real property, jewels, silver, and slaves.44 Choosing a
distinguished local man, such as Sargento Manuel Viveros to carry out his wishes in La
Antigua and asking his brother to conduct business on his behalf in their hometown of
41
43
44
ANX, January 18, 1655, f 65fte - 66fte.
42
236
Puebla de Los Angeles, all demonstrate very logical and strategic actions. Given his past
history of choosing prominent Spanish men as apoderados, why, then, entrust free
mulata, Polonia de Ribas? This is where the mundane, formulaic processes of notarial
“truth-making” provide greater qualitative explanations than might be expected.
A poder was an official document used to corroborate verbal agreements,
substantiate rights and authority, and record intended legal actions. People notarized
business dealings for fear of dispute and to ensure that third parties and witnesses attested
to the validity of statements provided. Colonial subjects usually did not take the time and
incur the cost of registering mere business errands or impromptu transference of small,
immaterial goods with the notary public. With the knowledge of its function, the notarial
archive serves as an additional witness and offers testimony that suggests that Pedro de
Yrala purposefully and thoughtfully appointed Polonia de Ribas to manage the business
transaction with Joseph Cogollos y Zarate, business owner and administrator of one of
Xalapa’s main sugar refineries. With houses valued at approximately thirty pesos de oro
común during the same time period in Xalapa, the debt of 257 pesos de oro común and 2
tomines was considerable.
Pedro de Yrala could have chosen from any number of Spanish men from
Xalapan society, including the affluent ones in his own family, but he did not. He
entrusted a free mulata to do the job for him, to collect a large sum of money from a
prominent Spaniard. Not because she was the only person he had available to him and
was therefore his reluctant substitute legal agent. Nor was it the case that Pedro de Yrala
sent Polonia de Ribas on a casual errand to pick up a parcel full of notes from Joseph de
237
Cogollos y Zarate’s home. Sometimes legal proxies were unsuccessful at collecting fully
on debts, which could lead to costly and lengthy processes of choosing new agents and
dispatching them again. Pedro de Yrala either knew with confidence that Polonia de
Ribas had some influence over Joseph de Cogollos y Zarate or that she was a resolute
mediator and shrewd negotiator who would ensure that the matter would be resolved in
one visit. What we can discern from this case is that Polonia de Ribas, a free mulata,
held the regard of one member of Xalapa’s elite. Polonia de Ribas found herself attached
to a poder that not only spoke to her network of formidable economic associates but also
to her position as a highly esteemed and trusted confidante of one of Xalapa’s influential
power brokers, clearly marking Polonia de Ribas as a member of Pedro de Yrala’s inner
circle.
Not all matters of debt were settled so dully by sending over a wealthy free
mulata apoderada to collect on a financial liability.
One late seventeenth-century
married couple of African descent experienced just how serious some were about
repayment.45 A notarial entry for March 16, 1679, describes the tenuous situation debt
had put the couple in when they could not gather sufficient funds together. Ana María, a
free mulata criolla of the sugar ingenio Pacho, was the legitimate wife of Sebastian de la
Cruz, a free negro criollo of the sugar ingenio Mastlatlan. Both were vecinos of Xalapa.
The entry noted that Sebastian was being held in prison because of an unpaid debt to
mulato recua owner Cristóbal de Figueroa for 236 pesos de oro común and 4 tomines. It
is not specified for how long Sebastian was held in custody, nor is there any information
45
238
as to how the debt was initially incurred. However, with a price tag that substantial, two
explanations are possible.
The first is that Ana and Sebastian had purchased an
impressive estate or business, possibly an inn or a recua, and then defaulted on payment.
The second possibility is that one of the spouses paid for the freedom of the other and
then attempted to dodge their financial obligation. Although, 236 pesos de oro común
would have been a markedly low value for an adult slave of either gender. That Cristóbal
de Figueroa sought legal action and had Sebastian imprisoned likely meant that the
couple had little in the way of disposable income to make a purchase as significant as a
large estate or a new business.
What the notarial entry does reveal is that what Ana and Sebastian may have
lacked in economic capital, they made up for in social capital. Fortunately for Ana and
her husband Sebastian, a vecino from La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, Capitán Don Juan
Francisco de Herrera, came to their financial rescue and paid their debt. In exchange for
the liquidation of the monies owed to Cristóbal de Figueroa, Ana and Sebastian agreed to
pay off their new debt of the same amount to Don Juan Francisco by working in his
“personal service” until the debt was paid off. Their monthly compensation for labor was
set at three pesos de oro común each. If Ana Maria and Sebastian de la Cruz had no other
income prospects, given this rate, it would have taken the couple more than three years to
reimburse Don Juan Francisco de Herrera if they handed over all six pesos de oro común
every single month. If they needed at least half of their joint earnings to pay for their
living expenses, the couple faced more than six and a half years of indentured servitude
together to resolve the debt, a steep price to pay. However, Ana María and Sebastian
239
were noted as “owing their gratefulness to [Don Juan],” demonstrating that the couple
likely preferred a paid labor agreement to the continued imprisonment of a loved one.
Despite the misfortune of the free mulata and (temporarily less free?) negro
couple, some debt cases favored free women of African descent. The free parda Isabel
Bautista had the good fortune of a fellow vecino’s honoring his financial obligation to
her.46 Juan de Olmedo’s May 1, 1710, last will and testament declared that he owed
eighteen reales to Isabel and that he wanted the funds to come from the liquidation of his
estate. Juan de Olmedo was the legitimate son of Juan de Olmedo and María Rodríguez,
and he was lawfully married to Isabel León. His will outlined that he was indebted to the
Alférez Sebastian de Flores (two pesos de oro común) to the Captain Bonefacio De
Castro (six reales), and to the estate of the late Don Juan de Medina (twelve reales).
Juan de Olmedo was by no means destitute; he owned two houses and a plot of land.
Additionally, at the time of the registration of his will, his son-in-law Juan Rodríguez
owed him 200 pesos de oro común for the eight mules he had sold him, likely the passing
on of a family pack train business. He was owed another seventy pesos de oro común by
a vecino named Sebastian de Flores and four pesos de oro común and two tomines by
Lorenzo Chacala. Juan was clearly adept at managing his resources, because he owed
very little at the time the will was registered, just eleven pesos de oro común. While Juan
de Olmedo had assets and substantial sums due to him, it is curious that his “largest”
single debt holder was the free parda Isabel Bautista, among other, smaller amounts
owed to titled men. Unfortunately, Juan de Olmedo’s will served as the only notarial
46
ANX, May 1, 1710, f 319fte - 322fte.
240
appearance by Isabel and the documents do not specify the reason for the eighteen reales
owed to her. Whatever her financial situation, Isabel Bautista legally benefitted from
Juan de Olmedo’s stated indebtedness to her in his will if Isabel ever had to confront his
executors for the repayment.
Executing a will that owed but a few pesos de oro común to a free woman of
African descent likely did not cause an undue burden to the heirs of Juan de Olmedo’s
estate, but what about items or debts of greater value? A free negra named María de
Jesús appeared to be less confident as to how the inheritors of her benefactor would
honor previous agreements, and she sought to have them legally preserved.47 On January
17, 1720, Fernando de Orduña Castillo, a vecino of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz,
made a visit to the notary public of Xalapa. Serving as the executor and heir of his
father’s estate, Fernando declared that his father Juan de Orduña Castillo had indeed
bequeathed a plot of land measuring seventy-five by sixty varas to María de Jesús
because she was “devoted and had labored in his house.” The declaration further stated
that María de Jesús had been the one to request this documentation. However, Fernando
did not dispute María’s claim to the property and noted that he and his brother, Juan
Pantaleón de Orduña, had acknowledged her entitlement to the property in documents
that they had produced on March 16, 1717, in front of witnesses. Fernando did not state
whether the 1717 settlement had been properly notarized. It was likely that he had
overlooked that process, and María de Jesús subsequently insisted on having the donation
officially recognized by authorities. While the property value was not estimated by Juan
47
ANX, January 1, 1720, f 22vta - 23vta.
241
de Orduña Castillo or his sons, a different property sold on January 30, 1717, measuring
twenty-five by forty varas, less than half the size of María de Jesús’ inherited plot, was
valued at twenty-nine pesos de oro común.48 Another plot of land registered on August
5, 1720, that measured twenty-five by thirty varas was sold for twenty-five pesos de oro
común.49 If María de Jesús’ plot was of approximately the same estimated value per vara
of land (roughly 0.45 pesos de oro común per vara), then it was likely valued at around
sixty pesos de oro común. With such an expansive piece of land at stake, María de Jesús
reaffirmed her rights by ensuring that the heirs of Juan de Orduña Castillo declared
before the notary public that all 135 varas belonged to her, free and clear.
Some women could count on wealthy Spanish patrons and patronesses to follow
through with promises to free an imprisoned spouse, pay owed debts, and legally
acknowledge donations.
However, other free women of African descent skillfully
managed their finances, conducted business with the local elite, but lived more
economically privileged lives when they could leverage their social connections into
profitable business deals. Gerónima de Barrios was a free parda and the widow of
Bartolomé de Guevara.50 She was a vecina of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz but had
connections to the province of Xalapa. Gerónima owned tierras and a solar51 in the town
of the Xilotepeque “and below on the borders where the indios congregate in the town of
San Andrés.” On April 16, 1644, she sold these properties to Don Joseph Seballos y
Burgos, resident of the ingenio Nuestra Señora de la Concepción in the jurisdiction of
48
ANX, August 5, 1720, f 87fte - 88vta.
50
ANX, April 16, 1644, f 459fte - 459vta.
51
A solar was a piece of land intended for the development of a house. Unlike “tierras” which
was more generally designated for agricultural development.
49
242
Xalapa.
Gerónima and Don Joseph agreed upon sixty pesos de oro común. Gerónima’s
notarial case files do not specify when she purchased the “lands,” how much they
measured, or how much she had originally paid for them. She might not have purchased
them at all as many families of African descent left their children sizeable tracts of land.
Whether later generations of landowners who had the fortune of inheriting their
properties could manage them and make the lands profitable were challenges that would
test their pecuniary skills. Gerónima de Barrios’ sale agreement notes that she had
provided Don Joseph Seballos y Burgos with the titles to the properties because he had
already given her the money. Discerningly surrendering her deeds only after she had
been paid, Gerónima avoided the hassle of reaffirming rights years later as other women
profiled here had to confront.
Gendering the Economy
In addition to the demonstration of commercial skill, the concepts of esteem and
status appeared as frequently throughout many cases brought before the notary public of
Xalapa by free women of African descent. By examining the gendered approaches to
economy demonstrated by these women, we take into account how African-descended
women experienced gender as a classed phenomenon. Perhaps a poor woman might not
spend the time and energy to ensure that her family was firmly planted on the plane of
legitimacy. With so few resources, a woman of the popular classes would likely not have
the money to hire a lawyer to verify such a “non-essential” concern for her family who
labored in the sugar cane fields or sold odd supplies to travelers entering the center of
243
Xalapa. However, the benefactors of intergenerational wealth in the early eighteenth
century had parents and grandparents who had witnessed the colony at the upswing of
development by the mid-1600s and during its greater economic diversification and
stabilization at the turn of the century. The cultural capital that could be passed on to
them during that time reflected greater proximity to Spanish social and cultural norms.
But what about the classed gender concerns during the more frontier period of Xalapa’s
history? One of the earliest poderes registered by a woman of African descent tied in
preoccupations with social status, legitimacy, and wealth that were only tangentially
revealed.
On July 11, 1586, a woman described as “de color negra”52 named Ana de
Arriaga issued a poder to Juan Ruiz, a procurador53 in Puebla de Los Angeles.54 She
requested that he represent her before an ecclesiastical tribunal to resolve the matter of
the legitimacy of her marriage to Jordan Pérez, a Portuguese man. The guardian of the
Monastery of San Francisco had officiated their nuptials and Ana de Arriaga wanted
absolute confirmation that her marriage was valid. Sometime between 1531 and 1534,
Franciscan friars founded the Monastery of San Francisco in Xalapa to minister to the
indigenous communities in the area and to care for the travelers who passed away on
their journeys to and from Veracruz Port and Mexico City.55 And while it was the oldest
religious institution in Xalapa, Ana de Arriaga must have dreaded an unforeseen
discrepancy in her marriage contract with Jordan Pérez and sent for clarification from all
52
Literally, “of black color.”
A procurador was an attorney, distinct from an apoderado who did not have to have any legal
education to serve as a lawful proxy.
54
ANX, July 11, 1586, 366fte - 366vta.
55
53
244
the way to the top of the religious power structure in her region. Guaranteeing the
validity of one’s marriage preoccupied families of elite circles across the SpanishAmerican colonies.56 Confirmations were not overly common, but families that feared an
unforeseen canonical impediment that might interfere with the legitimacy of their
children or the forfeiture of dowries and inheritances deemed them necessary. Ana de
Arriaga did not state specifically why she or her family requested the confirmation, but
the poder did reveal some of her family’s background that situates Ana’s petition in the
same realm as those of other elites.
Ana de Arriaga’s mother, Beatriz de Arriaga, was noted as the “mujer”57 of Pedro
Rodríguez de Alcazar. Ana’s parents are noted as living at the Venta de Aguilar in
Xalapa. Ana also had a brother named Tomás Rodrígues de Alcazar.58 None of Ana de
Arriaga’s family members were designated by caste. While Ana had only one notarial
entry and her father is only ever superficially mentioned, her mother Beatriz de Arriaga
made a few notable trips to the notary public. Beatriz de Arriaga was a fairly well-to-do
woman in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which explains her
daughter’s concern regarding legitimacy and the lengths to which Ana de Arriaga was
willing to go in order to prove that her marriage to her Portuguese groom, Jordan Pérez,
was lawful in the eyes of the Church and Xalapan society.
Beatriz Arriaga went to the notary public on January 20, 1592, to register two
56
Ann Twinam discusses the importance of legitimate ancestry and the lengths to which elite
families were willing to prove legitimacy, purchase it through gracias al sacar petitions to the Crown, or
“pass” as legitimate children or a legitimately united couple. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets (1999),
especially 35-58, 126-215.
57
The entry does not does not specifiy if she was the mujer legítima or if Ana de Arriaga was an
hija legítima.
58
245
pieces of business, which reveal much more about her personal life and economic
position. While her daughter’s 1586 entry mentioned only that her parents lived at the
Venta de Aguilar, both entries six years later noted that Beatriz de Arriaga was actually
the owner. The first entry involved the granting of a poder to her son Tomás so that he
could purchase a negro slave.59 The poder did not specify whether Beatriz owned other
slaves at the time, but it was likely that she had either slaves or employed staff to help her
run the inn. The second entry was a general poder that she issued to her son in order to
collect on any debts that others might have owed her.60
Not until a January 9, 1597, entry did Beatriz de Arriaga offer a fuller picture of
her wealth.61 Unfortunately, when the entry was registered Pedro Rodríguez de Alcazar
had passed away and Beatriz was a widow. She still could count on her son Tomás to
assist her, and on this occasion the two cataloged her property.
They created an
inventory, which included land and goods left to her by her late husband, in order to
figure out how it would be apportioned. The first item listed in her estate was the Venta
de Aguilar and it was estimated to be valued at 1,000 pesos de oro común, her highestvalued single asset. According to the inventory, Beatriz de Arriaga was also the owner of
a number of slaves, which accounted for the majority of her personal property wealth as
the value of her slaves totaled 1,700 pesos de oro común. She owned a negra named
Joana valued at 450 pesos de oro común, two of Joana’s children described as a mulato
and a negro (200 pesos de oro común), a negra named Isabel (350 pesos de oro común),
59
ANX, January 20, 1592, f 390fte.
61
60
246
two of Isabel’s children described as mulatos (200 pesos de oro común), and a negro
named Diego valued at 500 pesos de oro común.
Beatriz’ household items further disclose just how wealthy she and her family
were and perhaps the level of comfort and privilege in which Ana de Arriaga had grown
up and into which her Portuguese husband had married. Her collection included a
number of items of silver, including a 100-peso de oro común silver casserole dish. She
owned a set of twenty bed sheets and ten sleeping mats valued at 120 pesos de oro
común. Beatriz also had a collection of jewelry, which included gold rings and a rosary
valued at forty pesos de oro común. With most monthly salaries for unskilled workers
hovering around seven pesos de oro común in Xalapa, such items were well out of reach
for the average vecino demonstrating the lavish lifestyle that Beatriz de Arriaga had
enjoyed and likely afforded her two children.
Along with material wealth, Beatriz de Arriaga and her husband Pedro Rodríguez
de Alcazar had also accumulated a sizeable debt. To nineteen individuals, they owed a
total of 540 pesos de oro común, usually totaling less than thirty pesos de oro común for
each financial commitment.62 However, the couple owed 112 pesos de oro común to the
aforementioned member of Xalapa’s elite, Pedro de Yrala. By 1600, Beatriz Arriaga was
referred to as “señora Arriaga,” which accounted for the only time in a review of 150
years of notarial documents in Xalapa that a woman with a family of African descent was
cited as such.63 She was also still in considerable debt to Pedro de Yrala; the entry notes
62
The original notarial tally sheet says 541 pesos de oro común, but the individual entries only
account for 540 pesos de oro común.
63
ANX, no date specified, sometime between May 27 and July 11, 1600, f 4fte.
247
that this time she owed him ninety pesos de oro común. The case was later marked as
canceled, perhaps because an agreement could not be reached between Beatriz and Pedro
regarding the terms of the repayment or perhaps, as was common, there was a dispute
about how much was owed. Debt plagued nearly every level of the social echelon in
colonial Mexico. Even the wealthy Beatriz de Arriaga had reimbursements to manage.
However, they did not appear to affect her or her family adversely because her assets
were valued at more than she owed. Beatriz’ largest liability was to Pedro de Yrala and
the two elites may have decided to resolve the question of the ninety pesos de oro común
amicably outside the purview of the notary public, as many did. Considering the status of
both individuals, it is possible that Pedro de Yrala actually canceled the ninety-pesos de
oro común debt as a favor to Beatriz and her family.
Later that year on September 2, 1600, Beatriz de Arriaga returned to the notarial
offices with her son, Tomás Rodrígues, and served as his fiadora.64 Beatriz’ ability to act
as a fiadora decidedly placed her amidst Xalapa’s economically stable members. The
poder cites that Tomás needed his mother Beatriz to cosign a rather large debt of 115
pesos de oro común. If Tomás defaulted on the amount, the courts would have obligated
Beatriz to pay the debt or have a lien placed on her assets until items could be liquidated.
Only wealthier colonial subjects could afford to put their possessions and economic
reputations up for collateral in such large transactions and Beatriz could. She was
probably motivated by the prospects of growing her family’s wealth by investing in her
son’s new business enterprise. Tomás had accrued the 115 pesos de oro común debt
64
248
when he purchased from the muleteer Jerónimo de Vega two transport horses and one
mule with all of its gear. It would appear that Tomás intended to profit from the
burgeoning transportation market that would become a mainstay business venture for
many throughout the seventeenth century in Xalapa. Tomás was not the only family
member looking to invest. On November 14, 1601, Beatriz de Arriaga continued to
expand her family’s holdings by purchasing a piece of land on the Camino Real of
Xalapa from Bartolomé Martín, owner of the Venta de Los Naranjos, for which she paid
thirty pesos de oro común.65
Ana de Arriaga, her mother Beatriz de Arriaga, her father Pedro Rodríguez de
Alcazar, and her brother Tomás Rodríguez formed a nuclear family of considerable
wealth and opportunity. And while Ana did not even know how to sign her name, her
petition to establish the validity of her marriage reflected an upbringing accordant with
her family’s wealth. Ana de Arriaga’s mother Beatriz had successfully embedded her
family into a higher echelon of society. Through the one poder that Ana registered, we
know nothing of how Ana de Arriaga, a negra, and her Portuguese husband Jordan Pérez
made a living or how this interracial couple navigated colonial Xalapa. Her mother
Beatriz de Arriaga, never identified as a casta, left a much more accessible historical trail
in the archive as she sought to secure her personal economic position as well as her
family’s legacy through continued engagement with local markets and the regional elite –
a legacy certain to affirm the marital legitimacy expected of the daughter of a wealthy
family.
65
ANX, November 14, 1601, f 69vta - 70fte. (This date is approximated by surrounding entries
because the second page where the date would be is deteriorated.)
249
Gendered conventions permeate the language of notarial documents, as do the
contradictions that they present. Many appear to be rhetorical devices, while others
appear to have influenced how free women understood their autonomy and how colonial
authorities acknowledged their agency. For instance, the citation of having acquired the
“licencia” of one’s husband in order to conduct business has been witnessed in some of
the cases already profiled in this chapter. However, the inclusion of the “licencia clause”
was not consistently found in cases filed by women, not surprisingly, as some notaries
were not known for their strict adherence to uniformity. Free African-descended women
Jacinta Domíngues and Theodora Diáñez both cited that they conducted business with
their husband’s licencia. Other women had to provide their husbands with the legal right
to represent them through a poder. In 1671, Sebastiana de Rivas y de Irala, the daughter
of the wealthy free mulata Polonia de Ribas, went to the notarial offices to issue a poder
to her Spanish husband, Phelipe de Santiago Falcón.66 The poder was a general order
granting Phelipe the right to “request, receive, and charge…the persons who may owe
[Sebastiana] pesos, silver, jewels, slaves and other things.” The poder also included the
declaration that Phelipe would represent Sebastiana in all civil and criminal matters,
standard language for a general poder. Only a person of means would have issued a
general poder to have such high-valued items claimed on one’s behalf, situating the
wealth that Sebastiana alluded to as separate from her husband’s. Sebastiana’s mother
and at least one of her sisters were slaveowners who owned jewelry, so it is within the
realm of possibility that she too owned such luxury items worth hundreds of pesos de oro
66
ANX, August 10, 1671, f 394fte.
250
común or that others might be indebted to her because she made loans to other members
of Xalapa’s society.
Sebastiana’s inferred wealth is important here as is her decision to elect her
husband.
Even though they were married, Phelipe de Santiago Falcón was not
Sebastiana’s de facto representative, nor could he act on his wife’s behalf without an
official poder; he needed her licencia. Sebastiana had to declare him formally as an
assigned administrator of her affairs, which demonstrates not often-cited norms of
Spanish legal culture that allowed women forms of legally recognized autonomy in their
marriages. The choice of Phelipe was not particularly of note as many subjects preferred
the confidences forged by familiar ties to the risks of giving an outsider access to the
private details of one’s financial standing or any pending civil and criminal litigation that
might tarnish their public reputations. Permission as a rhetorical device may have also
been a possibility considering that women who held closest to socially acceptable gender
norms, especially among elite circles, were more likely to find more sympathetic ears to
hear their cases.
Of course, the preservation of gender norms, social legitimacy,
confirmation of religious adherence and piety, along with the wealth of the family
combined to offer a time-tested narrative that women of African descent employed.
As discussed previously, many women continued to benefit from the families’
seventeenth-century investments in real estate. How their interests were reflected in how
they managed their properties is rarely revealed. One eighteenth-century woman found a
way to make her public religious identity, and perhaps some familial strife, well known
as she oversaw the distribution of her wealth. On March 8, 1708, Manuela Martín went
251
to the notary public to sell a piece of land to Felipe Rodríguez.67 The piece of land was
not grand; it measured sixty-four varas in front and only six varas towards the back. It
was located in front of Xalapa’s main church and the Convent of San Francisco. With
her husband Manuel de los Santos’ licencia, Manuela sold the property for the “just
price” of twenty pesos de oro común. Unlike many bills of sale, Manuela’s included
some biographical information. The document reads, “I speak as the legitimate daughter
and heir of Miguel de la Cruz and Catharina Martín, both free pardos…who were from
Xalapa but are now deceased.” Manuela’s parents had purchased the land in 1672 from
Antonia de la Rey, the widow of Manuel de Rojas, making Manuela Martín’s pardo
family second-generation property owners in Xalapa, which is not remarkable given that
100 years earlier, people of African descent also owned property in town.
Nineteen years later, Manuela Martín returned to the notary to make arrangements
regarding her remaining property.68 She declared that her only assets were a piece of
land and a small house made of wood that she had inherited. She also noted that she had
not made a last will and testament because she had no descendants. Without children to
inherit her property, Manuela decided to bequeath everything to the Cofradía de Nuestra
Señora de la Piedad, a confraternity in Xalapa.
Confraternities were religious lay organizations that focused on charitable works
open to all races. Since the sixteenth century in New Spain, religious leaders encouraged
African-descended people’s participation in and organization of cofradías.
67
ANX, October 16, 1727, f 49vta - 50fte.
69
68
252
69
Confraternities provided members with space to express their religiosity by participating
in feast day processions and sponsoring the maintenance of altars dedicated to saints.
Manuela Martín did not specify that she was a member of this particular cofradía, but she
likely was active in the confraternity given the donation. In Black Blood Brothers, Nicole
Von Germeten finds that women served as active members of confraternities and
constituted the major donors to the lay organizations.70 Manuela was not the only free
woman of means to join a cofradía in Xalapa. The free mulata Polonia de Ribas was a
member of two cofradías, Santo Nombre de Jesús and Animas de Purgatorio, both
founded in Xalapa’s parish.71 Confraternities served as mutual aid societies and required
an economic commitment from members. Polonia admitted in her will that she had not
yet paid her yearly dues of three pesos de oro común for each and requested that her
executors ensure that both confraternities were paid from her possessions. These lay
organizations also conferred some of the benefits of membership post-mortem. Polonia
gently noted in her will, “I charge the leaders of the cofradía to fulfill their obligation
with my burial and the masses [said for my soul].” While Polonia gave to her lay
organizations, she also guaranteed that her children also received part of her estate.
Interestingly enough, Manuela Martín left absolutely nothing to her husband who
was still very much alive. She was not legally required to bequeath her belongings to her
husband and as Manuela had no children to maintain with an inheritance or dowry, she
exercised her right to donate her estate to a confraternity. The decision of two wealthy
70
Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 11. For a more detailed examination of Africandescended women’s involvement in confraternities, see Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 41-70.
71
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free women to affiliate with cofradías might have also reflected their investment in
asserting respectable public identities.
Von Germeten writes, “[Women of African
descent] relied on their labor in confraternities to provide them with respect and authority
in life and tangible benefits for their survivors after their death.”72 Manuela’s choice
demonstrates her determination to be self-governing and signals the ways in which free
women of means performed their religious identities and sought out organizations that
affirmed one’s respectability through public displays of support for Christian institutions.
Male relatives and acquaintances sometimes represented free mulatas, pardas,
negras, and morenas on legal matters, but women continued to serve as significant actors
in legal procedures, as was the case of the free parda Theodora Diáñez.73 Theodora and
her husband Juan Manuel, a free negro, were vecinos of La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz,
but found themselves in need of representation in Xalapa. On July 21, 1714, Theodora
granted a poder to Juan Manuel’s uncle, Miguel de Morales, who was a vecino of Xalapa,
in order to conduct business for her in the city. Theodora intended to sell a piece of
property located in Xalapa that she had inherited from her father, Gonzalo Diáñez. The
records confirm that her father Gonzalo had inherited the land from his father Gerardo
Diáñez, making Theodora Diáñez a third-generation landowner.
And while she was the sole beneficiary, Theodora Diáñez gave her poder to
Miguel de Morales with the expressed “licencia” of her husband Juan Manuel. She
affirmed in seemingly formulaic language that she “had not been forced by her husband
or by anyone else in her husband’s name” to grant this poder and that she did so by “her
72
73
254
own free will.” By August 3, 1714, Miguel de Morales had found a buyer for Theodora’s
larger property holdings. The buyer was none other than Capitán Pedro Zapata de
Ezquerra, the alcalde mayor and war captain of the province of Xalapa and Jalacingo.
The sale meant that Theodora would relinquish a substantial portion of her inheritance –
half of the Ingenio Viejo and its lands valued at the high price of 200 pesos de oro
común. The bill of sale stated that Capitán Pedro had already paid sixty pesos de oro
común and that the balance, 140 pesos de oro común, would be forthcoming in two
installments with the first due in six months and the second at the end of the following six
months.
Theodora’s assertion that her husband Juan Manuel nor anyone else had coerced
her is significant because it was not standard notarial language found in other bills of sale
by women of African descent. She was selling a much more expensive piece of property
than most women and her buyer was a powerful persona in Xalapan society, both
militarily and likely economically since he could afford to make such large land
purchases. Theodora Diáñez, the notary public, or perhaps even the buyer Captain Pedro
Zapata de Ezquerra, wanted to clarify that she had come to the decision wholly on her
own to avoid possible dispute of land ownership after the paperwork was finalized. The
notion of “free will” permeated Spanish legal culture and was a defining characteristic of
ecclesiastical protocols. In addition, the patriarchal Spanish legal system categorized
women as a protected class. Jane Landers writes, “Castile’s thirteenth-century legal
code, the Siete Partidas, classified women along with children, invalids, and delinquents
255
as in need of supervision but also deserving of familial and societal protection.”74 Juan
Manuel may have influenced Theodora, as any spouse would have wanted to express an
opinion on how high-valued property was to be bought or sold. What is significant in
this case is that the convention of the licencia was elaborated upon and Theodora Diáñez
was given voice to assert independence through a gendered legal convention meant to
protect women’s choice from outside abuses. A key aspect of Theodora Diáñez’ story is
that she was a third-generation landowner, who likely had acquired a property-rights
education from members of her own family. The couple did not live in Xalapa, but they
may have left further traces in other archives in the region that, with further research,
might substantiate that Theodora was the primary initiator of real estate matters in her
family. Without further records, we are left with only a fleeting glimpse into how a free
woman of African descent declared her experience with and knowledge of the legal
system that offered safeguards for women perceived as fragile and easily persuaded.
The Value of Notarial Truths
Many of the women discussed here obtained the resolution they sought without
any documented legal dispute of the events or agreements they presented, but not all
women were so fortunate. Kathryn Burns asserts that the job of the notary was to
“discipline the messy particulars of their [clients’] business into approved legal forms.”75
Sometimes the messiness of reality seeped into official documents to garner sympathy.
Sometimes the messiness was a kind of notarial truth aimed at the maintenance of social
74
75
Landers, Black Society in Spanish America, 137
256
legitimacy with just enough despair to sway the opinion of a judge or notary. The
balancing act of preserving one’s public persona as one of good repute with the desire to
garner legal consideration through tempered pity was a socially dangerous game to play.
However, if the stakes of remunerative gain were high enough, it may have been well
worth it economically to lose just a bit of one’s social respectability. At least one woman
had to divulge some unfortunate financial hardships that her family had been
experiencing, but she then backed up these admissions with a team of influential contacts
that formed a line for her credibility defense.
Juana Fernández, a free parda, was lawfully married to Martín Bentura, and the
two first appeared before the notary public when she granted him her poder on November
22, 1659.76 Martín was not Juana’s first husband. They were virtual newlyweds with
about a year of marriage under their belts when the poder was issued. Juana had been
previously married to Francisco Sánchez, who had passed away. Juana’s poder allowed
Martín to represent her before the alcalde mayor of Xalapa to see that her endowed
dowry and other belongings were protected and that she was granted ownership of them
under the terms of the last will and testament registered by her first husband Francisco.77
According to Spanish family law,
The property which a woman brought into marriage as a dowry remained
legally hers and could not be alienated without her permission. The
husband had the right to administer the dowry, but he had the duty to
76
ANX, November 22, 1659, f 368fte - 368vta.
For a more detailed discussion of women’s rights to their personal property and their dowries,
see Asunción Lavrin and Edith Courturier, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women’s Socioeconomic Role
in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640-1790,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 2
(May, 1979): 280-304.
77
257
return its value on the dissolution of the marriage or to make provisions
for its restitution in his own will.78
Juana and Francisco had five children and since all were still minors, she used the legal
avenues available to her to protect her assets so that she and her new husband could care
for the their large family. Validating the claim to her dowry would have proven essential.
The more intimate and sobering family part of the poder cites the need to liquidate the
assets in order to feed the children. While Martín Bentura signed his name with such
flourish that he may have been literate, the notary documented that Juana Fernández did
not know how to sign her name.
Juana Fernández and Martín Bentura’s second notarial entry came on September
23, 1660, when Martín appeared before Don Antonio Rosel y Lugo, the alcalde mayor of
Xalapa.79 The couple needed to prove that Juana’s first husband Francisco Sánchez had
indeed lawfully made the appropriate addendum in his will that allocated to Juana all that
belonged to her. In Juana’s name, through the aforementioned poder, Martín Bentura
presented his first witness, Miguel de Quintana. Miguel was an español and vecino of
Xalapa. He was also the alguacil mayor80 of the province; a nearly unassailable witness
that Juana and Martín had the fortune of knowing. Miguel swore that he served as a
primary witness when Francisco Sánchez, who was sick in bed but within full capacity of
reason, signed the documents protecting the legal rights of his wife, Juana.
78
Lavrin and Courturier, “Dowries and Wills,” 282-283.
80
An alguacil mayor was the equivalent of a local sheriff or a chief constable with a vote as a city
councilman in the town council when the office was purchased for a life-term. In other areas of the
Spanish empire, the alguacil mayor was an annually elected position by the town council and was not
permitted to vote at council meetings.
79
258
On the same day of Miguel de Quintana’s testimony, Martín presented his second
witness, Antonio de Acosta Clemente, another español and vecino of Xalapa.81 Antonio
confirmed Miguel’s narrative, stating that sometime in September 1658, he witnessed
Francisco Sánchez sign the documents with his own hand and in good judgment even
though he was ill. This testimony also revealed that Francisco Sánchez was on his
deathbed in September 1658. In November 1659, Juana noted that she and Martín had
been married for about a year, which means that Juana had a fairly short mourning period
before she moved on from her late first husband and married Martín Bentura. However,
as a widowed mother of five, she likely wasted no time in considering new suitors, if only
for her economic welfare. Four days after the first two witnesses appeared before the
alcalde mayor, Juana and Martín presented one final witness in this case, Juan Jacinto
Romero, a vecino of the ingenio named Chico, located on the outskirts of the city but still
within the jurisdiction of Xalapa.82 Juan Jacinto stated that while he was not present at
the signing, as the other two men had been, he knew of the written agreement and that
Francisco Sánchez had made it while he was still mentally competent to do so.
The personal finances of Juana Fernández and Martín Bentura are not revealed in
any of their notarial entries. It is unclear whether the stated urgency to settle the affairs
of her first husband in order to feed their five children reflected a period of destitution or
the creation of a “notarial truth” to win the sympathies of those that might be able to
secure her greater economic holdings. She also drew from an influential social network
to testify on her behalf, lending her social credibility before authorities. Juana even had
81
82
ANX, September 23, 1660, f 370fte - 371fte.
ANX, September 27, 1660, f 371fte - 371vta.
259
the ability to have someone who was not present at the principal affair in contestation to
testify to events he supposedly knew to be true. Juana Fernández’ engagement with the
notary demonstrates her knowledge of key aspects of notarial truth-making. The first
involved the possible benefits of an affective narrative: a widow left with five children to
raise, trying to provide for them and their hungry bellies, albeit with a new husband. In
her examination of notarial entries by women in colonial Cuzco, Peru, Burns asserts that
“when availing themselves of legal forms of protest against ‘bad patriarchs,’ women
(through their chosen notaries) seem to have gone in for a saturated femininity, the most
concentrated possible version.” 83 Jane Landers also notes the gendered approaches
utilized by women of African descent in Spanish Florida, “In a community which
operated within the idiom of family, women frequently referred to themselves as mothers
and made references to their children. If they were sick, widowed, or abandoned, they
made sure to mention it.”84 The devout widowed mother, who happened to be remarried
at the time of the entry, was a notarial “character” that was legible for officials as were
the socially indisputable witnesses to said widow’s truth claims.
The roles played by well-known, politically important, or economically influential
witnesses serve as determining factors that, in this case, change the tone of a plea of a
widowed woman of African descent in need of assistance. Juana claimed some level of
poverty when she admitted to her inability to provide even basic necessities for her
children, but she certainly was not without means to fight for the compensation she
believed rightfully belonged to her. Juana shrewdly assembled her social capital, which
83
84
260
included a group of individuals to vouch for her legal status as the rightful administrator
of her late husband’s estate, a tactic employed to bolster her social credibility before
notarial authorities. She also skillfully employed notions of gender that would have been
recognizable for Spanish authorities. Juana Fernández called upon widely held cultural
codes of masculine duty and fatherly responsibility to the economic security of one’s
family and especially to one’s children.85 Even Spanish families cited the rhetoric of the
“abandoned mother” living in “abject poverty” to their advantage.86 The importance of
positioning oneself as the virtuous but aggrieved widowed mother, instead of the
materialistic newly-wed, cannot be understated. Juana’s notarial fashioning, whether an
accurate description of her indigence or an exaggeration, was a familiar, and sympathetic
argument for the men who would decide the validity of her case, and she was wise to
employ it as elite women had also done. And while the ultimate resolution of the case
was not registered, or perhaps was lost, Juana Fernández exhibited that she was savvy
enough to call upon the gendered strategies that would likely provide her the settlement
she sought from her late first husband’s contested will and the social legitimacy she
would have gained by the impressive social capital she called upon to testify on her
behalf.
The refashioning of identities was probably more common than can be assessed
through an examination of mediated sources. Not always a complete fabrication, a
85
Stern discusses how women understood obedience in relation to patriarchal duty as a type of
“social pact,” in which men held a responsibility to fulfill their roles as protectors and providers. Stern, The
Secret History of Gender, 70-111. For a discussion of how capital and the dawn of capitalism influenced
the juridical position of patriarchy, see Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico, 134, 234-237.
86
Twinam offers cases in which illegitimate children of dons and doñas described living in “the
worst extreme of poverty…lacking a thousand necessities…and without comfort.” Twinam Public Lives,
Private Secrets, 175.
261
notarial truth could be mobilized to fix details of one’s earlier life, especially if it was less
documented because of a lack of resources. However, literacy may have played the
culprit in the foiling of Mariana Rodríguez’ adapted life history. Mariana was lawfully
married to Miguel Jiménez Carralero, and both were free mulatos. And unlike the
couples who sold off plots of land for thirty to sixty pesos de oro común, Mariana and
Miguel had to protect property, goods, and cash worth thousands of pesos de oro
común.87 Miguel and Mariana had dozens of primary initiator or secondary receiver
entries in the notarial archive, chronicling their prominence in Xalapan society. Miguel
was an hijo natural, or illegitimate son, of Juan Martínez Carralero and Magdalena de la
Cruz and was born in Acatzingo. By 1712, when he registered his will, both of his
parents were deceased. The wealthy couple had not always enjoyed material comfort.
The second clause of Miguel’s will reads,
I declare that I am married, according to the dictates of our mother
Church, to Mariana Rodríguez, mulata…and when we contracted the
aforementioned marriage, she did not bring a dowry nor did I have any
wealth…And in the said time that we have been married, we have
acquired a fortune totaling eleven thousand pesos, more or less, in the
pack train business, slaves, real property, furniture, and jewelry.
Miguel was the owner of an extensive recua, or pack train business, with more than 200
mules. He must have been incredibly successfully in contracting business, which his
significant fortune reflected. And like many businessmen, he had a lengthy list of debts
and collections outlined in the will.
Trusting his wife’s abilities, Miguel declared
Mariana along with Licenciado Manuel de Pozo, a presbítero, the executors of his debts
and assets. He also named Mariana as the sole beneficiary of his estate. Significantly,
87
262
Miguel Jiménez Carralero could sign his own name at the end of the will and in a style
that denoted literacy.
Mariana and Miguel also owned quite a few slaves, which is not surprising
considering his 200-mule transport business. Miguel claimed a total of thirteen slaves88
in his will: Antonio Arroyo (negro), Manuel de Ortega (negro congo), Joseph (son of
Catarina de Yralla), Juan Joseph (negro congo), Baltazar (mulato prieto), Joseph (mulato
prieto), Paula and Gregoria and Domingo (three children, negros), Manuel (mulato), Juan
Antonio (mulato prieto, who did not belong to Miguel but that he presented to his wife),89
Francisco (negro), and Juan (mulato). He also noted that in addition to his thirteen
slaves, he had in his house an additional negro slave named Juan Pachupin who did not
belong to him (likely a hired-out slave). Throughout the early part of the eighteenth
century, the couple had owned several other slaves. On November 3, 1701, Miguel
purchased a mulato criollo named Joaquín for 400 pesos de oro común.90 Five years
later, he sold Joaquín, by then twenty-seven years old, to Christóbal de Yáñez de Vera, a
vecino of the city of Tlaxcala.91 Miguel Jiménez Carralero did not lose on his investment
of Joaquín as he recouped all 400 pesos de oro común in the sale. On October 30, 1709,
Miguel purchased a twenty-three-year-old mulato named Cayetano from a Mexico City
merchant, but less than a year later, he was ready to sell him.92 For 315 pesos de oro
común, he sold Cayetano to a fellow Xalapa vecina named María González.
88
I counted only twelve slaves.
The will is vague as to whether he owned Juan Antonio and had only recently presented his wife
with the gift of this particular slave. Or, whether Juan Antonio was in his employ as a slave and separately
owned by his wife, Mariana Rodríguez.
90
ANX, November 3, 1701, f 119fte - 120fte.
91
ANX, January 21, 1706, f 444vta - 444vta bis.
92
ANX, May 21, 1710, f 327vta - 329vta.
89
263
Miguel dictated in his will that he and Mariana had no children. However, they
were still parents. For nearly seventeen years, the mulato couple cared for an orphan girl
in their home named Gertrudis Josepha, whom he referred to as “mi niña” (my girl).
Through his will, he demonstrated the closeness of this relationship by ordering that
1,000 pesos de oro común be given to her from his assets. The aforementioned Ana de la
Cruz with the farm did not have any biological children either, but she and her husband
too raised a young girl as their adopted daughter, Juana Teresa, who was only twelve at
the time of the will. A day later, Ana de la Cruz made an addendum to her will regarding
Juana Teresa.93 She clarified that the 100 pesos de oro común that she had intended to
leave Juana Teresa should be given to the girl when she married. It further stipulated that
if Juana Teresa was not married by the time that she was twenty-five years old, the 100
pesos de oro común should be given to her to do with them as she pleased. Ana also
instructed her two executors, Miguel Jerónimo López de Otanar and Don Antonio
Cardeña, to sell her properties after her death to pay for the costs of her altar and to use
the remainder of the profits to pay for masses performed for her soul. By May 18, 1704,
just two months after she had entered her will into public record, Ana de la Cruz had
passed away.94 Ana’s final notarial entry on that date was registered on her behalf by her
two executors reiterating the changes she had made on March 12 concerning Juana
Teresa’s inheritance and the assets listed in the original will along with an inventory of
debts owed.
Ana de la Cruz’ total wealth is difficult to quantify because her estate was not
93
94
ANX, March 12, 1704, f 291vta - 292vta.
ANX, May 18, 1704, f 299vta - 301fte.
264
itemized and valued, but she was clearly of means and had a source of income from
renting out her houses to the religious community. She also attempted to provide for the
future of her adopted daughter with 100 pesos de oro común, not the grand gesture of
1,000 pesos de oro común bestowed by Mariana Rodríguez and Miguel Jiménez
Carralero to their adopted daughter, but Ana de la Cruz provided a valuable dowry
necessary for Juana Teresa to “marry well,” perhaps into an equally wealthy family of
African or Spanish descent.
Miguel’s generosity extended out to members of his wife Mariana’s biological
family. On March 28, 1707, Miguel donated a piece of land measuring twenty-one varas
by fifty-six varas to Mariana’s sister, Micaela Rodríguez.95 Micaela was certainly not
destitute. She was the wife of Sargento Don Alférez Sebastian de la Higuera, a soldier in
the militia and named amongst other influential men of Xalapan society in a petition to
request funding from Señor Don José Sarmiento Valladares, the viceroy of New Spain.96
Miguel noted in the documents that he made this gift to Micaela for favors and services
that she had done for him. Likely, it was a good-will gift between two wealthy families
to solidify bonds.
On January 30, 1720, Miguel Jiménez Carralero returned to the notarial archive to
make changes to his will.97 He declared that he owned the house in which he lived, but
this time he stated that he owned only eighty-two mules and five slaves. He owned a
piece of land in front of the primary residence, where his nephew Tomás de Figueroa had
95
97
96
265
constructed a house. He also made changes to the executor list. While his wife Mariana
remained, the presbítero was replaced with Tomás de Figueroa. He bade his executors to
order as many masses as they could for his soul after his passing, a typical request made
by wealthier colonial subjects. Miguel Jiménez Carralero must have not been long for
the world because by February 26, 1720, just a few weeks later, Mariana Rodríguez was
cited as a widow.98 The following month, Mariana sold three of her slaves, the three
children, Paula, Gregoria, and Domingo, for 750 pesos de oro común, perhaps to raise
liquidity to pay off the debt left by her husband. She later sold a smaller piece of
property, measuring thirteen varas by forty varas, to Joseph de Castro for thirteen pesos
de oro común.99 On the same day, Mariana and Tomás also sold fifty-four rigged mules
and two houses to fellow recua owner Alférez Juan José Rincón for 2,460 pesos de oro
común.100 Alférez Juan José must have been a very wealthy man because they agreed to
a short one-year contract to pay off this tremendous debt. A year later, Mariana and
Tomás were once again in business with Alférez Juan José.101 This time, they sold him a
twenty-seven-year-old mulato blanco102 slave named Juan Jiménez for 300 pesos de oro
común. On June 10, 1723, Mariana and Tomás sold another slave named Joseph for 350
pesos de oro común to Alférez Jerónimo de Acosta.103 After only five business deals,
Mariana Rodríguez had amassed 3,873 pesos de oro común from the sale of assets
bequeathed to her, a small fortune for a widowed woman. If she had decided to live
98
100
101
102
A mulato blanco was probably a mulato with features that could allow him to “pass” for
Spanish but who was of purported African descent.
103
ANX, June 10, 1723, f 458vta - 459fte.
99
266
“modestly” and spend only twenty pesos de oro común a month (more than twice the
average unskilled male worker’s salary) and had not accumulated any further debt,
Mariana could have lived on this amount alone for more than sixteen years.
On September 9, 1725, Mariana Rodríguez, the widow of one of Xalapa’s most
wealthy men of African descent, registered her last will and testament.104 Her own
parents are finally revealed as Agueda Hernández and Juan Rodríguez. Five years after
her husband Miguel’s death, she possessed only half of his estate. As she lay sick in bed,
she disclosed that for about the last year and a half, the house that she was living in was
leased from Andre Coto for a monthly rent of six pesos de oro común. However, at six
pesos de oro común a month, it must have been a fairly large home given that many
houses in Xalapa during this period were sold for thirty pesos de oro común. She named
as sole heir to her estate her twenty-five-year old unmarried niece Melchora de los Reyes.
The most fascinating twist in Mariana Rodríguez’ notarial life is the biographical
license that she took in her final entry. In his 1712 will, Miguel Jiménez Carralero
clearly stated that when he married Mariana, she had no dowry to offer, and that he was
not of means either. Miguel seemed to want to affirm that his current wealth belied an
important truth about his relationship with his wife: the two contracted the marriage from
humble beginnings and with no financial gain to be had by either partner at the time. In
Mariana’s 1725 will, she revised a bit of her own history by asserting that when she
married Miguel, she brought with her 100 pesos de oro común. This major alteration by
Mariana (100 pesos de oro común was a considerable amount of money) was a notarial
104
267
narrative that better suited the station in life that she and her husband had accomplished
over the years. Perhaps she had forgotten that her husband had already notarized that
neither party brought noteworthy assets to the marriage. Or, perhaps Miguel was the one
who took creative license and attempted to construct his own notarial truth as a self-made
man who built a mule business from nothing, without the resources of a wealthy spouse
or her family, and would leave this world a wealthy man because of his own herculean
efforts. Kimberly Hanger asserts, “Like [free people of African descent] throughout the
Americas, the majority earned their liberty and whatever property they acquired
themselves rather than benefited from the generosity of individual masters.”105 We do
not know how far removed from slavery Mariana or Miguel were nor do we know whose
notarial narrative was closer to the truth.
What we can examine are the gendered
investments in both narratives that were imbibed with classed understandings of selfsufficient men and respectable women with dowries.
Mariana Rodríguez and Miguel Jiménez Carralero were free mulatos who owned
land, a profitable transport business, and slave.
They also managed business
relationships with elite members of society from Xalapa, Veracruz, and even Mexico
City. The two had worked to create a life of luxury that they shared with their adopted
daughter and other family members. Mariana Rodríguez may have refused to let her
husband mar their social status with his notarial truth of their modest beginnings given
her current position in Xalapa society, and declared a notarized “corrective” in her own
will to affirm her rank in the public record. Mariana Rodríguez took on the expected
105
Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 170.
268
notarial narrative of a wealthy landowner and lady of many economic resources, even if
she had to refashion the earlier years.
Conclusion
Free women of African descent documented a multitude of business
arrangements, allowing previews into certain aspects of their private lives through the
structured style of the notarial entry.
The notarial documents dictate the types of
information available to illustrate the business lives of free women of African descent,
with both the benefits and limitations of that particular archive. Kathryn Burns argues
that notarial records are not merely cold summaries of everyday business but pieces of an
elaborate slice of colonial life composed of legal etiquette, social relations, business and
personal ventures and other myriad configurations of colonial subjects and their
activities.106 The formulaic nature of these elements offers the historian a sense of false
assurance because of the standardization and inclusion of mundane features of people’s
“legal lives.” As seen in the details divulged in the cases discussed, the notarial archive
is also home to sources as diverse, emotional, and intimate as those belonging to the more
“colorful” archives of criminal cases and inquisitorial records. With them, I offer a
glimpse into the tapestry of economic challenges and triumphs that women of African
descent experienced in Xalapa and how these notarial interactions articulated
preoccupations with respectability.
The case of Mariana Rodríguez and her declaration of having a dowry of 100
106
Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.” The American Historical Review 110, no
2 (2005), 351-352.
269
pesos de oro común at the time of marriage speaks most directly to the desire for social
credibility that is dispersed throughout all of their journeys towards economic solvency.
Dowries attempted to safeguard young girls from less than desirable marriages. A trade
education was arranged with the hope of upward social mobility. Generational wealth
needed to be established through legal measures. Married women demanded that their
nuptials be verified before the proper authorities. Poor women were made “of means”
through a manipulation of their personal history. All of these cases address the ways in
which economy played not only a role in financial status but also in the types of social
respectability that these historical actors strove for and that had been denied to many
people of African descent. Free women of African descent of means in Xalapa were not
like the cloistered Spanish women of the most elite families. Whether they were single,
married, or widowed, free women proved active participants in the care of their assets,
large and small. Male members of families played important roles in the notarial lives of
women when they served as apoderados, as did unrelated male confidantes. The archive
demonstrates that women established profitable networks that included generous
patronesses, politicians, religious leaders, military personnel, and business administrators.
The cultivation of such advantageous social capital and the acquisition of invaluable
cultural capital provided African-descended women with the means to claim legitimacy
through economic endeavors.
Strikingly, free women of African descent who were unrelated did not engage
with one another in any of these economic endeavors. Daughters inherited goods and
property from their mothers. But outside of sanguineous ties, there appeared to be few
270
economic interactions between free women of means of African descent. According to
the notarial records, free African-descended women conducted business almost
exclusively with men.
No unsettled debts to other women declared. No poderes issued
to other women. Not a single piece of property purchased from another woman of
African descent. The parish archives allude to fairly even gender ratios among the
population of African descent and yet the notarial archive is wont to tell another story.
Burns argues, “Documents of all kinds – contracts, wills, legal petitions, and depositions
– were crucial to obtaining justice, and the making of valid documents was the exclusive
province of the notary.”107 This goal of “obtaining justice” is the differentiating factor
between the notarial archive and most of the ecclesiastical archive.108 The emphasis on
resolution, I argue, contributes to the theater of truth-making. Free women may have
engaged one another to a much greater degree than can be revealed by such sources.
They may have co-owned commercial properties, worked for one another in various
businesses, and served as each other’s informal fiadores – all beyond the offices of the
notary public.
The notarial archive documented business, but it was also a theater, and the
performers knew their roles to varying degrees. I have argued throughout this chapter
that free women’s economic investment demonstrated an interest in particular kinds of
social and cultural capital to garner social legitimacy. I posit that free women of means,
perhaps not needing to use one another as actors in legitimizing theater, may have
107
Twinam discusses how baptismal records were fraught with social agendas that obscured
paternity and even maternity in the case of private pregnancies. Twinam, Public Lives, 130-138.
108
271
foregone the performances and interacted with one another in economically meaningful
ways outside of the sanctioned realm of the notarial offices. The notarial office could
not, and was not designed to, capture all economies, but it did happen to capture an array
of relationships. Burns notes that “documents were made by people in relationships” and
affected by the power imbalances among those participating in the production.109 By
parsing out the specific imbalances of such relationships, the investments of the
performances can be better understood. No other form of documented activity better
coalesces to address such questions of economic interest and theater than slave-owning,
which is the focus of my final chapter.
109
272
Chapter Four
Slaveowners
Slave ownership among people of African descent offers a complicated narrative
to parse out.1 Unlike the cooks, spinners, weavers, food purveyors, laundresses, and
house servants of the colonies, women of African descent who owned slaves carried with
them a social marker that identified their economic status as one that firmly placed them
above the challenges of subsistence. As slaveowners, free women of African descent in
Xalapa established alliances and business connections with other people of the same
class, regardless of race or caste. Inge Dornan argues that the omission of the narratives
of slave-owning women in the U.S. “has led to a distorted picture of the relationship
between women and slavery in the colonial era.”2 Dornan adds, “The surviving sources
indicate that there was very little public or private debate regarding women’s ability to
manage their slaves.”3 In the case of colonial Mexico, where the Spanish Crown never
prohibited its subjects of African descent from owning African and African-descended
1
Important contribution to these efforts in the historiography include: Frederick P. Bowser, The
African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); William F. Sharp,
Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Choco, 1680-1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1976); Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1974); John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1943); Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free
Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free
Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985);
Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1924); Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991); Inge Dornan, “Masterful Women: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the
Urban Low Country,” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 383-402.
2
Dornan, “Masterful Women,” 402.
3
Dornan, “Masterful Women,” 400.
273
slaves, an elite group of female slaveowners emerged.4 Their experiences during the long
seventeenth century reshape how we imagine free women’s relationship to slavery and
slave-owning for the Mexican context. As slaveowners, they benefitted from tangible
and intangible advantages, as many others did. While the economic lives of free women
discussed in the previous chapter offer important insights into how women navigated
society, the status marker of slaveowner uniquely encapsulates, perhaps more than any
other social marker, the experiences of free women with wealth in seventeenth-century
Mexico.
Slave-owning was not a venture accessible to all. With the average cost of a slave
at 400 pesos de oro común in the central Veracruz region throughout the long seventeenth
century, purchasing slaves was a steep, and therefore exclusive, economic undertaking.
For an elite set of free women, being a slaveowner represented a status that offered them
financial security, an entrée into greater social networks, and, in turn, greater social
legitimacy. Sugar ingenio owners who had dozens or hundreds of slaves to work their
substantial properties were more likely to have access to financial credit because of the
collateral they possessed. Slaveowners with just a few slaves bore a higher economic
burden due to the initial financial investment followed by the long-term maintenance of
“personal service”5 slaves. Only people with financial backers, profitable family ties, or
4
Female slaveowners were prominent features in other colonies during the long-seventeenth
century. From the Brazilian context, Higgins notes, “Women who were former slaves were 70 percent of
all the women slaveholders listed in 1720…They did not often directly compete with White men in the
more alluring and lucrative gold-mining sector of the economy, which had first attracted free immigrants to
the [jurisdiction].” Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 82.
5
Here, I differentiate between personal-service slaves and those purchased specifically to work in
designated large-scale industries, such as sugar production or the transportation business. Lockhart uses
274
particularly well-honed pecuniary skills could engage in slave ownership during Xalapa’s
economically unstable long seventeenth century.
Slaveowner as a status or social marker provided free African-descended women
with new gateways to the free social world. Free people in Mexico, much like other
colonial subjects who could afford it, bought and sold slaves. Women and men of
African descent who owned slaves found slavery to be a worthwhile economic venture,
especially in Veracruz, where the use of enslaved African labor was intrinsically tied to
the development of the local economy. In a review of nearly 150 years of Xalapa’s
notarial history (1580 to 1725), I found that the elite group of slaveowners consisted of
less than a dozen people who were marked as free women of African descent. An
examination of notarial documents from Córdoba dating from 1635 to 1730 yielded only
one case, and documents from Orizaba dating from 1585 to 1730 did not yield a single
case of slave ownership by a free woman of African descent.6 And while this may appear
to be an extremely low occurrence of slave ownership by free women, we must
remember that these records account only for women who, for whatever reason,
registered slave ownership with the notary and do not account for those who did not need
notarial services.
the term “personal servant,” but states, “Personal service was indeed the role most closely associated with
blacks in the minds of the Spaniards.” Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 198.
6
Archivo Notarial de Córdoba, USBI, Colecciones Especiales, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa,
Veracruz (ANC), Protocolos 1635-1694, Protocolos 1693-1706, Protocolos 1707-1715, Protocolos 17161725, Protocolos 1726 - 1746; Archivo Notarial de Orizaba, USBI, Colecciones Especiales, Universidad
Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz (ANORZ), Protocolos 1585-1643, Protocolos 1644-1683, Protocolos 16841700, Protocolos 1702-1709, Protocolos 1710-1720, Protocolos 1721-1726, Protocolos 1727-1730.
275
The intentional or inadvertent obfuscation of racial identifications by notaries or
registrants, in addition to lost documents, would also lead to the under reporting of
women of African descent as slaveowners. In a case that will be discussed later in the
chapter, the free parda Petrona de Arauz was not identified by caste designation in every
document in which she appeared. Only after tracing her family history and tracking
down all of her notarial entries was I able to discern that it was the same free parda who
was no longer identified as such in later documentation. Owning slaves socially marked
these women as substantial economic actors, and as so marked, this elite group of women
would not have escaped the radar of colonial officials, their economic peers, or other
people of African descent.
Racialized Fears and the Lawful Subject
Spanish authorities expended an inordinate amount of time preoccupied by the
activities of the varied populations of their colonies, regardless of how small the
demographic. In 1574, Martín Enriquez, the Viceroy of New Spain, expressed concern
about a growing “problem” in the colony. Viceroy Enriquez wrote, “The grand number
of free mulatos is multiplying and these people are bellicose and not inclined to work.”7
He cautioned colonial officials against these unemployed free mulatos, warning the
colony’s administrators to “avoid a great danger.”8 Joan Cameron Bristol notes that
colonial authorities urged that free African-descended people be more strongly tied to
structured labor markets to avoid the disruption that could be wrought by vagabondage.
7
8
AGI, Mexico, 19, n. 125 (1574).
AGI, Mexico, 19, n. 125 (1574).
276
Bristol adds as an aside that these orders did not specify whether women were also the
intended targets of such anti-vagabond decrees. 9 However, in the imaginations of
colonial officials in the Americas, vagabondage left the proverbial door open for greater
lawlessness,10 which translated into the fear of violent and economically “dangerous”
maroons.11
Whether free or enslaved, people of African descent caused great anxiety for
Spanish officials, both in the colony and the metropole.12 According to an edict by
Viceroy Martín Enriquez, colonial officials feared the war-like characteristics of its free
population but also the dangers inherent in sloth and cross-caste unions.
Spanish
9
Laura Lewis offers an overview of colonial notions of free, “untethered” people of African of
descent. Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors,78-80. Vagabondage created great concern in many societies not
just those with populations of people of African descent. Michel Foucault cites a French judge who, in
1764, “…demanded that these useless and dangerous people should be ‘acquired by the state and that they
should belong to it as slaves to their masters…A vagabond is infinitely more dangerous for society [than a
wolf].” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 88.
11
The historiography of maroon communities and escaped slaves is particularly rich from the
Caribbean and Brazil. Some notable contributions across the Americas include: Jane Landers, “Maroon
Women in Colonial Spanish America: Case Studies in the Circum-Caribbean from the Sixteenth through
the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Beyond Bondage, 3-18. David Barry. Bondmen & Rebels: A Case Study of
Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1985); Richard Price, ed.
Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press, 1979); Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1992); Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica: 1655-1796 (Granby,
MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988); Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, “The Early Political Development of Jamaican
Maroon Societies,” The William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (April 1978); Carey Robinson, The Iron
Thorn: The Defeat of the British by the Jamaican Maroons (Kingston, Jamaica: 1993); Bev Carey, The
Maroon Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica, 1490-1880
(St. Andrew, Jamaica: Agouti Press, 1997); Thomas Flory, “Fugitive Slaves and Free Society: The Case of
Brazil”, The Journal of Negro History 64, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 116-130; David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave
Control and resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 46, No.
3 (Aug., 1966): 235-253; Patrick J. Carroll, “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave
Community, 1735-1827,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 4 (October, 1977): 488-505;
Octaviano Corro R., Los Cimarrones en Veracruz y la fundación de Amapa (México: Imprenta Comerical
Veracruz, 1951).
12
With regard to racial anxiety, Rachel O’Toole notes that distinctions between Africandescended and indigenous people began to dissolve in late-seventeenth-century Peru. However, she argues,
“Nonetheless, viceregal authorities focused on blacks as a more likely cause for disorder.” O’Toole, Bound
Lives, 33.
10
277
authorities belabored the idea of a looming African threat or “grande peligro,” as
Viceroy Enriquez described and that others expressed in edicts, decrees, and anecdotal
stories throughout the colonial era.
By 1570, approximately 23,000 Africans and African-descended people existed
across the expansive territories of New Spain.13 At the height of the slave trade in the
seventeenth century, the colony’s population already consisted of more than 150,000
African and African-descended people.14 The free population had steadily increased by
the late 1600s, but free people of African descent did not represent a majority in any of
the high population density regions of Mexico during the sixteenth century.
Nevertheless, the possibility of increased vagrancy due to a growing free population
prompted the viceroy to express his concerns publicly. On the opposite end of the
spectrum, authorities aspired for control of their colonial apparatus and attempted to
create hard lines against activities in which African-descended people could participate.
Discriminatory practices were most apparent in two sectors, the notary public and the
clergy. As notaries held the responsibility of creating official documents and maintaining
the daily operation of colonial orderliness, only Spaniards could serve in these
positions.15 As “instruments of the early modern archive,”16 Spaniards were particularly
13
Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra, 210.
This number is based on data by Aguirre Beltrán in La Población Negra, 219. I collapsed the
“Africano” and “Afromestizo” categories for the year 1646 to yield a population count of 151,618. This
data is compiled from information on populations in only seven juridical demarcations: Mexico, Tlaxcala,
Michoacan, Nueva Galicia, Yucatán, and Chiapas. The population of Africans and African-descended
people is likely higher because high Afro-casta population areas such as Veracruz were not accounted for
in the sample. Ben Vinson questions the exactness of Beltran’s number due to questions of methodology
but concurs that “as indicators of general trends, he seems accurate.” Vinson, Bearing Arms for His
Majesty, 143.
15
16
14
278
occupied with the possibility of “infiltration.” Kathryn Burns cites a 1588 case in which
a Spanish priest stationed in the Andes expressed concern about who had access to such
systems of knowledge. The priest wrote that indigenous people who spoke Spanish
attempted “to penetrate our usages, the better to resist us.” Priests also served in the
capacity of arbiters of truth and order, which made theirs a prized occupation for a
privileged Spanish set.17
The Catholic Church prohibited African-descended people from entering religious
orders on more prejudicial grounds. In 1739, Pope Clemente XII powerfully reaffirmed
the Church’s position “holding that the mestizos and mulattoes were ‘individuals
generally despised by society, unworthy of holding public office and of directing the
spiritual life of others.’” 18 Discriminatory notions about the inability of Africandescended people to serve as religious ministers served to perpetuate stereotypes of their
racial inferiority. Regardless of how small the demographic, Spanish authorities invested
time in attempting to monitor and regulate the perceived “deviant” or “unsanctioned”
behavior of people of African descent. Neither the Crown nor the viceroy of New Spain
ever communicated a similar apprehension about people of African descent involved in
the lucrative business of slave-owning, probably because they behaved as other
slaveowners did. From the context of Spanish Florida, Jane Landers writes,
It does not appear that black slaveowners had a relationship with their
slaves that was significantly different than that between a white owner and
a slave. They rented out and sold slaves and posted them as bonds. Like
17
18
279
white slaveowners, black masters sometimes assisted slaves to become
free and sometimes opposed their manumission.19
While untethered mulatos, pardos, morenos, and negros represented unpredictability and
possible sources of colonial instability, a commitment to the colony’s economic structure
symbolized a level of acculturation that Spanish authorities hoped would be the case for
all of their subjects.20 This appears to have been particularly true for slave ownership.21
Kimberly Hanger poignantly asserts, “Ownership of black slaves fostered free black
identification with white society and thus dissipated white fears of racial collusion.”22
Hanger’s assessment may be accurate for Spanish New Orleans, but I take on the
challenge of attempting to parse out what slave-owning meant for African-descended
women in colonial Xalapa.
Rare Gifts: Becoming a Slaveowner through Donations
Notarial documents reveal that women of African descent entered the slave
economy predominantly through three different patterns: donations, “acknowledged
19
There is a well-established historiography of the function of cultural intermediaries in colonial
Spanish America. During the Conquest Era, free and enslaved Africans assisted Spanish conquistadores in
numerous expeditions. In the early colonial period, they served as interlocutors between Spanish and
indigenous communities in addition to serving in a more formalized capacity as militiamen for the colony’s
defense. For more in depth examinations of intermediaries, see: Matthew Restall, The Black Middle:
Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2009); Matthew Restall, ed. Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The
Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004); Matthew
Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no.2
(October, 2000), 171-205; Nicole Von Germeten, “Colonial Middle Men? Mulatto Identity in New Spain’s
Confraternities,” in Black Mexico, 136-154; Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in
Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
21
Of the eighteenth-century Brazilian context, Furtado notes, “Owning slaves was an essential
mechanism in the pursuit of insertion into the world of the free where a disdain for work and for living by
one’s own graft reigned supreme.” Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva, 146.
22
20
280
family” inheritance, and individual industry. While not a widespread practice, donating
slaves was not uncommon in Xalapa.
Approximately 33% (12 of 36 cases) of all
property donations registered with the notary public by people who were not identified as
being of African descent between 1617 and 169923 involved the transfer of human chattel
to family members, individuals, or religious entities. In 1640, Licenciado Don Alvaro de
Samano y Quinones, the clerk, presbítero, vecino of Mexico City, and resident of the
ingenio of San Miguel de Almolonga in the jurisdiction of Xalapa donated his part of the
sugar mill, including all slaves, to his brother Capitán Don Juan de Samano y Quiñones,
the alcalde mayor of Xalapa.24 In 1688, Capitán Don Antonio de Orduña Loyando also
donated his sugar ingenio, San Pedro Buenavista, to his only daughter, Doña Juana Josefa
de Orduña y Sousa. The notarial record notes a donation of all land, supplies, and slaves
belonging to San Pedro Buenavista, effectively making Doña Juana a wealthy slaveowner
if she had not already been one.25
In 1663, Don Fernando Ruiz de Cordova y Arrellano, the owner of the hacienda
San Sebastian Maxtlatlan, donated a fifteen-year-old mulato slave named Simón to Doña
María de Vargas Matamoros.26 Doña María was the daughter of a fairly wealthy family;
her mother was also noted as a doña. In addition to titles, a number of Xalapan residents
were indebted to her deceased father, Cristóbal Martín Matamoros, monies that were
collected on her behalf and that of the other inheritors.27 In 1693, slave owner Doña
María de la O. Palacios donated a seven-year-old negro slave to the cofradía of Nuestra
23
No individual property donations were cited between 1600 and 1616.
25
ANX, July 28, 1688, f 320fte - 321fte.
26
27
24
281
Senora del Rosario in Puebla de Los Angeles, so that he would serve in perpetuity in their
capilla.28 Doña María also did quite well by her family. She married her doña titleholding daughter to a fellow don.29 She was also wealthy enough to buy her don-son-inlaw an impressive house for the hefty price of 150 pesos de oro común. 30 From
expensive property to titled men and women,31 these cases highlight the class exclusivity
of Spanish subjects donating slaves. It was ostensibly an elite activity, the transference of
expensive and in-demand commodities that directly contributed to one’s material wealth
and economic security.
In 1655, Polonia de Ribas became the only woman of African descent to receive a
documented slave donation in Xalapa from someone not specifically cited as a family
member.32 This donation represents a uniquely class-based notarial entry that depicts the
complicated juxtaposition of slave ownership, family, and identity. On February 25,
1655, Don Joseph Seballos y Burgos donated two slaves to free mulata Polonia de Ribas,
her half-brothers, Juan and Gerónimo de Yrala. At the time of the donation, Juan and
Gerónimo were twenty-five and twenty years old, respectively. Both men were identified
as negros criollos.33 The notarial records document that Juan and Gerónimo had been
slaves on the Tenampa hacienda, the same sugar hacienda where their mother had
28
ANX, May 16, 1691, f414fte - 415vta.
30
31
The designations “don” and “doña” were bestowed on people far more discriminately during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late eighteenth century, Twinam cites the case of a Spaniard in
Cuba who requested a noble title for services to the crown instead of accepting only the acknowledgement
of “don” because “…all the Spanish who lived there and had means” were addressed as such. Twinam,
Public Lives, Private Secrets, 363. Twinam also outlines the reputational value that “don/doña” held for
illegitimately born Spaniards and the lengths to which they would go to assert their public personas via
titles. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 3-5.
32
33
Men of African descent born in the colonies.
29
282
worked as an enslaved laborer. The owner of the Tenampa hacienda was Pedro de Yrala,
the wealthy uncle of Don Joseph Seballos y Burgos and the same Pedro de Yrala who
made earlier appearances in the lives of other women profiled here.
A closer
examination of both men is necessary to consider this unique donation case.
Pedro de Yrala was born in Puebla de los Angeles to Doña Catalina Pérez Molero
and Pedro de Yrala, both residents of Puebla. Pedro de Yrala was the owner of the
hacienda where at least three of Polonia’s family members were enslaved in San Antonio
de Huastusco, and he was also a man of distinction in Xalapa. His birth date is unknown
but by 1637 he was a resident at a sugar refinery in Xalapa and held the title of
bachiller34 and was a priest.35 As the years passed, he adeptly increased his visibility and
his titles. In 1643, he was cited as the “cura beneficiado36 of Jalapa, for his Majesty.”37
As cura beneficiado, Pedro de Yrala held a formal title amongst diocesan parish priests,
which allowed him certain privileges and required of him greater responsibilities. The
title gave him “head priest” status, a position without term restrictions.38 He would have
also “held the parish as a benefice or quasi-feudal property,”39 which allowed him access
to “parish income, labor, and provisions permitted by law or custom,”40 making him a
34
A bachiller is defined as a “holder of a bachelor's degree. Less common and more prestigious in
the sixteenth century than at present. The honorific title of a secular priest.” Ophelia Marquez and Lillian
Ramos Navarro Wold, eds. “Compilation of Colonial Spanish Terms and Document Related Phrases,”
Accessed January 19, 2013, http://www.somosprimos.com/spanishterms/spanishterms.htm.
35
36
A cura beneficiado was a “Secular priest subordinate to a bishop.” Ophelia Marquez and Lillian
Ramos Navarro Wold, eds. “Compilation of Colonial Spanish Terms and Document Related Phrases,”
Accessed January 19, 2013, http://www.somosprimos.com/spanishterms/spanishterms.htm.
37
ANX, December 29, 1643, f 425fe - 426fte.
38
William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century
Mexico (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79.
39
Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 79.
40
283
central figure in Xalapa’s religious life. While a titled man of a religious order, Pedro de
Yrala had inherited from his mother a considerable estate, the sugar hacienda named
Tenampa. He was also the owner of a number of slaves.41 In addition to owning
Tenampa and conducting other business in the region, by 1660, Licenciado Pedro de
Yrala increased his prestige in Xalapa when he found a seat as an ecclesiastical judge,42
which was a common ascension of duties for curas beneficiados.43
Don Joseph, Pedro de Yrala’s nephew, came from a well-established family in the
jurisdiction of Xalapa and was a wealthy man in his own right. In Xalapa, he owned at
least two sugar refineries, the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción44 and the Nuestra Señora
del Rosario,45 and an unspecified mill called El Molino del Río Frío.46 Additionally, Don
Joseph owned a sugar mill named La Natividad de Nuestra Señora and a cattle ranch
called La Palmilla, both located in the jurisdiction of La Antigua Ciudad de Veracruz.47
He also conducted business in La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz and Mexico City. By 1655,
Don Joseph was identified as the justicia mayor of Xalapa, a chief magistrate appointed
by the viceroy.48 It is no wonder that between 1617 and 1661, Don Joseph’s notarial
activities are documented in more than sixty entries. Why, then, did he donate two
slaves, still expensive commodities during the long seventeenth century, to a mulata
woman with no cited connection to him?
41
ANX, June 14, 1660, f 348vta - 349vta.
43
44
ANX, April 19, 1642, f 270fte -270vta.
45
ANX, January 19, 1655, f 66vta - 67vta.
46
47
48
ANX, December 31, 1655, f 95vta.
42
284
On January 18, 1655, Pedro de Yrala donated to Don Joseph all of his goods,
furniture, silver, jewelry, slaves, debts, rights, and actions.49 This donation explains how
Don Joseph owned slaves previously owned by Pedro de Yrala and how the two men
knew each other for this donation to take place. These tangential actors explain how
Polonia de Ribas came into possession of her half-brothers, Juan and Gerónimo, but not
why. Another piece of this puzzle does not appear for another nine years.
As we recall
from Chapter 3, Pedro de Yrala had issued a poder to Polonia in order to retrieve a
substantial sum of 257 pesos de oro común from Joseph Cogollos y Zarate, the owner of
an inn and manager of a sugar refinery in Xalapa’s environs. Polonia’s involvement in
the business affairs of Pedro de Yrala establishes that at least since 1655, she was a
trusted confidante of his. However, Polonia’s further entanglements with Pedro’s family
necessitate further inquiry into the life history of this enterprising free woman.
Polonia de Ribas was born in San Antonio Huatusco (now Huatusco). It is
located in central Veracruz and is one of the oldest Spanish towns in the region, dating its
founding to Cortés’ visit in 1521. By at least 1655, Polonia was a resident of Coatepec in
the jurisdiction of Xalapa. Polonia’s date of birth is unknown. I posit that Polonia was
likely in her fifties when she submitted her last will and testament in 1679. When she
received the donation of her enslaved brothers in 1655, she was not noted as being a
mother but was legally acknowledged as an adult since no guardian was cited, which
likely placed Polonia in her mid-twenties.50 At the time of the will, her children were
49
Laura Lewis notes that the legal age of consent for women under Spanish law was 25 years of
age. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 60.
50
285
adults and at least two had been married with young children. Given that twenty-four
years had passed between the donation and the will, I believe that fifty years of age is a
fair approximation. The notarial entries offer a few clues about Polonia’s heritage.
Polonia’s mother, Clara Lópes, was cited as a negra born in “Guinea.” Clara had also
been a slave for some unspecified amount of time at Pedro de Yrala’s sugar hacienda,
also located in San Antonio Huatusco. She did not remain a slave in perpetuity because
on November 17, 1643, Don Joseph Seballos y Burgos granted a woman named Clara
López a carta de libertad (freedom card) when she was approximately sixty years of
age.51 Clara López was not a particularly unique name, but she was noted as a negra
from “Berbesi,”52 which would have made her a bozal53 and likely the same woman
Polonia described as a negra bozal from “Guinea,” given that Don Joseph was the owner.
It is uncertain when she passed away, but Clara López was noted as deceased in Polonia
de Ribas’ 1679 last will and testament.
Although information on Polonia’s father is lacking, she did reveal more about
her family in her last will and testament. In this entry, Polonia cited that she had four
daughters named Sebastiana, Josefa, Micaela, and Melchora de Yrala and a son, Juan de
Ribas. Through her last will and testament, it becomes clear that Polonia de Ribas was a
fairly wealthy woman. When her daughter Melchora later married Diego de Villar, a
Spaniard from Xalapa who relocated to the Port of Veracruz, Polonia provided her
51
Berbesi loosely referred to groups of Africans who lived near the Guinea rivers, now known as
the western Niger River. Other groups in this area included Biafara, Mandinga, and Jelof. Rolando
Mellafe, Negro Slavery in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
53
An unhispanicized person of African descent. Usually assigned to someone born in Africa or
who had not yet learned the Spanish language or had not yet become acculturated to Spanish customs.
52
286
daughter with a substantial dowry. The dowry included 3,000 pesos de oro común worth
of slaves, jewelry, oxen, reales, clothing, and other items of value. In comparison, Doña
Aldonza Antonia de Neyra Claver, the legitimate daughter of a “doña-mother” and the
notary public of Xalapa, brought with her only 653 pesos de oro común in items when
she married Don Diego de Arce y Tovar.54 Likewise, Doña Agustina de Orduña Castillo,
the legitimate daughter of don-doña parents could only offer her “don spouse” 846 pesos
de oro común, which included one female slave, clothing, jewels, and other goods.55
However, some don-doña families in Xalapa could provide staggeringly exorbitant
dowries. When vecina Doña Juana Josefa Orduña Loyando y Sousa, the legitimate
daughter of don-doña parents, married Don Juan Velázquez de la Cadena from Mexico
City, her family offered a dowry of 30,000 pesos de oro común in cash, slaves, and other
goods.56 However, the family did not have the total amount available and Doña Juana
Josefa’s family still owed 23,274 pesos de oro común and 6 reales when the matter was
registered at the notary public’s office with a note that the balance would be charged a
5% interest rate each year it was not paid in full.
Dowries made for serious
considerations in titled-families, but so did they for a few untitled free women of African
descent as they attempted to secure the best possible marriage prospects for their
daughters.
In addition to the 3,000-peso de oro común dowry for her daughter, Polonia also
cited among her personal belongings and property one modest house and a medium-sized
54
ANX, May 11, 1682, f 59fte - 62vta.
ANX, November 2, 1683, f 133vta -135vta.
56
55
287
pine box with a lock and key (probably a chest). Her final notarial entry reveals Polonia's
financial literacy. In the first-person narrative, it reads, in a formulaic statement for
testaments, “I declare that I do not owe anything to anyone…my conscience is free and
clear.” As a single mother of five children who knew how to manage her finances,
Polonia de Ribas certainly proved to be a fiscally responsible woman. Polonia was also a
woman never described as a widow nor did she ever identify the father (or fathers) of her
children. However, Polonia’s family tree and network of associates extended out in a
complex narrative, one that included distinguished members of Xalapan society, which
may illuminate how an “unattached” woman of African descent negotiated her life
chances.
From at least 1655 until her death in 1679, Polonia de Ribas was a slaveowner.
And much like other slaveowners, Polonia was open to the idea of manumission.57 In
1675, Polonia freed her half-brother Juan de Yrala after twenty years laboring as her
slave.58 In 1676, she freed one of her slaves, a negro criollo named Diego de Yrala (no
relation).59 The documents state that Polonia’s love for Juan and his loyal service moved
her to free him. Polonia cited the same “for love and loyalty” rhetoric found throughout
manumission records. However, it was not until she was on her deathbed in 1679 that
Polonia freed her other half-brother, Gerónimo de Yrala. At that point Gerónimo was in
57
Frank Proctor explores the juridical origins of manumission and examines how the freeing of
slaves served as fertile ground for contestation. Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty, 152-185. Higgins
discusses the anxiety of increased numbers of free people in Brazil, which led Governor Dom Pedro de
Almeida to state in 1719 that the mining region would be a “land being populated by free blacks, who like
brutes, do not maintain the good order of the community. In a short time this land could fall into the hands
of the blacks.” Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 151-152.
58
59
288
his mid-forties, married with children, and living and working at a sugar refinery in
Xalapa as Polonia's hired-out slave. Although Polonia acknowledged Gerónimo de Yrala
as her brother, she declared him as her slave among her other goods and property, which
is emphasized by the order in which both brothers appear in the will. In the paragraph
preceding her mention of Gerónimo, Polonia noted that she owned a house, a chest, and
had some borrowed dishes. Gerónimo and Diego are mentioned in the following two
paragraphs and the immediately subsequent paragraph states that Capitán Don Antonio
de Orduña Loyando and the deceased Capitán Don Joseph de Seballos y Burgos owed
unspecified debts to her with instructions that such monies should be collected and
distributed to her executors. The order of their cited manumissions, in between other
goods and property and reminders of debt-collection, may indicate how unexceptional
owning her half-brothers was for Polonia or the escribanos in the notarial office.
The paragraph relating to Gerónimo reads like most other clauses offering
freedom to slaves in wills and testaments, “I declare that among my belongings is
Gerónimo de Irala, negro criollo, my slave, who is the son of Clara López, my deceased
mother, for whose respect and for other causes it is my will…that my executors provide
him with a liberty card.” Markedly, the instruction to free Diego de Irala, who is not
noted as her family member, offers language that would be more expected in the
manumission of Gerónimo. The will reads,
I declare that to Diego de Irala, my negro slave, I have given and granted
liberty before the present notary…and I declare that he has always aided
and supported me with much love and by his own will from La Nueva
Ciudad de Veracruz, where he is presently and has been working to assist
me.
289
While “love” and “free will” were common rhetorical devices used by slaveowners in
manumission cases in Xalapa, they were reserved for her slave Diego in the Port of
Veracruz and not her brother Gerónimo.
Unlike the understanding of love as an
expression of affection or intimacy, this notarial “love” was meant to express a sense of
loyalty experienced by the slaveowner. If Polonia believed that Diego had “dutifully”
fulfilled his obligation with “much love,” his manumission was her expression of the
recognition of such loyalty. In his manumission entry, Diego was also noted as a man of
thirty years of age who had been “born and raised” in Polonia’s house.60 Polonia may
have also owned Diego’s wife since Polonia included personal information about the
woman in the manumission case, adding that her named was Catalina and that she was a
negra from Guinea. The distinctions in the manumission descriptions in her will and in
Diego’s carta de libertad allude to how Polonia de Ribas understood herself as a
generous but grateful slave owner and as a person who owned her family members with
noted indifference. The apathetic tone regarding her half-brother may have also been
affected by his status as a hired-out slave and not living with her and being bonded by the
intimacy experienced by slaveowners with slaves living in closer proximity or “born and
raised” in the slaveowner’s home.61
That Polonia made use of her slaves as hired-out workers is also telling. In the
context of Spanish New Orleans, Hanger writes, “Both free men and women augmented
60
ANX, September 2, 1676, f 164vta -165vta
Higgins highlights the importance of physical proximity to develop the intimacy between slave
and slaveowner that could lead to manumission. Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 47-48, 52.
61
290
their incomes by hiring out skilled slaves.”62 Manumission records evidence a similar
trend with Polonia. At least two of her slaves, Gerónimo de Yrala and Diego de Yrala,
worked in Xalapa and Veracruz Port, respectively, as Polonia’s “hired out” labor. Both
men also lived at their work sites and were married with children. James Lockhart
describes a similar situation for Peru, in which “[m]any or most of these blacks [in the
agricultural industry] were without any direct Spanish supervision.” 63 For Africandescended people involved in ranching and herding, Lockhart asserts, “most
characteristic were the lone blacks living deep in the country, far from the Spaniards, in
charge of several cows, goats, or pigs.”64 Lockhart notes the “extraordinary trust” of
absentee Spanish owners since slaves would have “infinite opportunities to run away.”65
Some scholarship outside of the Mexican context argues that hired-out slaves freed slaveowning women from the burden of supervising their slaves’ activities but others argue
that women managed their slaves as others did.66
62
Hanger, “Landowners, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slaveowners,” 225-226.
Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 210-211.
64
Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 211.
65
Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 212.
66
Writing about white women slaveowners in the U.S. South, Inge Dornan argues, “[Hiring out]
enabled them to receive from their slaves’ work at the same time as it extricated them from a great deal of
the practical side of slave management. Unlike women who employed their slaves in their own businesses,
or female planters who put their slaves to work in their households and fields, urban women slaveholders
who hired out their slaves did not have to supervise their slaves’ work.” Dornan, “Masterful Women,” 390.
Dornan argues that hiring out slaves also excused women from having to mete out punishment, an option
he theorizes that was more ideal for women who owned adult male slaves. Dornan, “Masterful Women,”
391. Dornan later clarifies that slaveowners ruthlessly abused their slaves when they saw fit, regardless of
the gender of the owner. Dornan, “Masterful Women,” 399. He writes, “The evidence suggests that women
slaveholders generally conformed to contemporary notions regarding the management of slaves and
differed little from their male peers in [disciplining their slaves].” Dornan, “Masterful Women,” 400. U.S.
historian Koger writes, “In many instances, black slaveowners were no different from white slave masters.
They both exploited the labor of slaves to extract a profit and used their slaves as commodities.” Koger,
Black Slaveowners, 94. Evidence from the Brazilian context demonstrates the similarity of behaviors
exhibited by Portuguese slave owners and African-descended women. Kathleen Higgins cites a case of a
63
291
Outside of Spanish America, there is evidence that offers possible explanations
for the actions of African-descended slaveowners.
The problem that then arises is
whether such assessments hold true for slaveowners of African descent in colonial
Mexico. Did the practice of hiring out slaves allow free African-descended women to
enjoy economic and social advantages while simultaneously shielding them from having
to face the reality of actively perpetuating a system that bore witness to incalculable
atrocities against other people of African descent? Did African-descended women who
owned slaves prefer the distant participation of hiring-out their slaves to avoid meting out
corporal punishment? Slaveowner absenteeism or hired-out slaves who lived “nearly
free” was commonplace in many slave societies in the Americas.67 Perhaps this was the
case for Diego de Irala and his family while Polonia enjoyed the benefits of absentee
slave-owning. Where Polonia de Ribas’ story complicates the historiography is on the
subject of owning family members as slaves.
While many scholars agree that free people of African descent understood slavery
as a profitable economic endeavor, at least in other parts of the Americas, this narrative
drastically changes in the case of owning family members.68 What reason could have
motivated Polonia de Ribas’ decision to keep her brothers as slaves for more than twenty
free woman of African descent named Roza de Azevedo who had enough resources to buy “property and
thirty slaves valued at twenty thousand cruzados.” Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 54.
67
Lockhart describes the privileges of slaves who were owned by temporarily absent slaveowners
in Peru. One shipmaster’s female slave had keys to the house, “received visitors and guarded the chest [her
slaveowner] kept in his bedroom, full of gold, silver, and papers.” Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 205. For
Brazil, Higgins notes that nearly 75% of the slaves in jurisdiction “did not live in the town boundaries of
Sabará, and for many of those living both inside and outside town, personal contact with their masters was
limited.” Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 47.
68
Of the Spanish Louisiana context, Hanger writes, “[F]ree blacks often could afford to purchase
their slave relatives and free them with few constraints, and thus they did not need to hold them as slaves.”
Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 225. Similarly in the United States, Koger argues that, “After the
freed slaves purchased their kinsfolk, they manumitted their loved ones.” Koger, Black Slaveowners, 44.
292
years before finally freeing one in 1675 and the other as she lay dying in 1679? For the
United States, Carter G. Woodson argues for what would later be referred to as the
“philanthropy” or “benevolence” thesis. Woodson’s theory of benevolent slave-owning
posits that free African Americans purchased family and friends and kept them as slaves
in order to preserve family ties and protect them from the insecurity of “free” life – a
supposition taken up by other scholars.69 Woodson’s logic rests on the condition that
many U.S. states and territories had enacted laws impeding manumission in ways that
made freeing an enslaved family member once they were with family-owners a less
desirable option.
Free Africans and their descendants in colonial Mexico were also confronted with
various types of projects to restrict their freedom. As historian Laura Lewis writes,
“Legislation controlled their spatial and temporal movements, for all blacks and
mulattoes were forbidden from holding dances ‘in the plazas and streets,’ gathering in
groups of ‘more than three,’ and going out at night.”70 Men were prohibited from
carrying firearms unless they had filed a petition and had it approved by local Spanish
authorities.71 Regardless of the disparate level of enforcement of such restrictions across
69
In David L. Lightner and Alexander M. Ragan’s “Were African Americans Slaveholders
Benevolent or Exploitative? A Quantitative Approach,” they provide a succinct summary of scholars who
have re-asserted Woodson’s philanthropy theory, 537. Notably, they include some of the early
foundational books on slavery, including Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the
Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A
History of Negro Americans (New York: Knopf, 1967); James Oakes, James, The Ruling Race: A History
of American Slaveholders (New York: Norton, 1998); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution:
Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
70
71
293
the colony, free men and women were also required to meet their financial obligations
and pay all due tribute.72
And while some subjects endeavored to dodge paying their tributary obligation,73
many free people continued to navigate hurdles that affected their social and economic
prospects. But could these hurdles have driven Polonia de Ribas to maintain her own
family members in slavery? Was it possible that Polonia de Ribas merely understood her
two half-brothers as chattel even though they were cited as her brothers in every single
document in which they appeared together? Could these status-based considerations
trump acknowledged blood ties? The historiography on the Spanish empire has remained
largely silent on this rare practice. Kimberly Hanger notes a case of a free pardo man in
Spanish New Orleans who purchased his enslaved son but did not manumit him for
another twenty years.74 Unfortunately, Hanger does not offer any conjectures as to why
this father would not provide his son with a freedom card and kept him from enjoying the
legal status of a free man. In a later piece, Hanger briefly addresses the topic of Africandescended people owning family members, “As long as slave prices remained low, free
people of color who could afford bondspersons used them. In addition, free blacks often
could afford to purchase their slave relatives and free them with few constraints, and thus
they did not need to hold them as slaves.”75 There has been some evidence of this in the
U.S. (and perhaps in Spanish New Orleans too) due to restrictive manumission laws, but
no similarly prohibitive codes existed in colonial Mexico.
72
Ben Vinson asserts that pardos and mulatos employed a corporate identity strategy historically
tied to military service to avoid paying tribute. Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty, 164-166.
74
75
Hanger, “Landowners, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slaveowners,” 225
73
294
As the historiography of African-descended slaveowners has developed,
historians working on other American colonies began to challenge the “benevolence”
theory. U.S. historian Calvin D. Wilson warns against drawing the perceived conclusion
that those who owned their own family members as slaves did so for altruistic reasons.76
While the philanthropy theory may apply to their initial purchase, it seems as though
some family members in the U.S. South also understood the value of leverage that slave
ownership offered them in familial disputes. This type of exploitative power play may
explain how Polonia was able to maintain two adult male siblings as her slaves for
approximately twenty years. If they feared that their sister could sell them to a traveling
negrero,77 then Polonia would have accomplished the slaveowner’s perennial goal of
balancing the threat of retribution for disobedience with the goal of continued
productivity. As at least one of her brothers had a wife and children, the cost of losing
them due to insubordination to his sister-owner likely motivated him to continue what
would be a long tenure.
Polonia de Ribas hired out one of her brothers in a way that might have allowed
him to live nearly free with his family (there is no suggestion that Polonia owned his wife
or children). However, she did the same for an unrelated slave, Diego de Yrala. This
76
Wilson cites a few cases in which African-descended people owned family members. He
discusses a particularly interesting case of an African American woman named Dilsey Pope from Georgia
who owned her husband. Her husband had offended her and as retaliation, Pope sold him to another
slaveowner. Another woman named Fanny Canady of Kentucky owned her husband and had threatened to
sell him “down the river,” a common warning directed towards unruly slaves by white slaveowners. In
North Carolina, a mother and son pulled together their resources to buy the freedom of their
husband/father. As punishment for having criticized his son, the son sold his own father to a slave trader
with his farewell being, “…the old man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might
learn him some manners.” Calvin D. Wilson, “Negroes Who Owned Slaves,” Popular Science Monthly 81
(November, 1912): 485.
77
A slave merchant.
295
decision implies that economic considerations or reasons of practicality, rather than a
familial connection, motivated Polonia’s actions. While some scholars do not allow for
the possibility that “exploitative” slavery was possible among slaveowners who
possessed family, Polonia de Ribas’ case indicates that for at least one woman of African
descent in seventeenth-century Xalapa, there was no conflict. There is nothing in the
documents that indicates that this familial connection “meant” anything to Polonia other
than a detail that she documented for some unknown reason. Perhaps the notary or his
assistant even had to remind her to mention this information.
When she freed her first brother Juan de Yrala in 1675, Polonia cited two reasons
for his manumission: 1) his good service and 2) the love she had for him. However,
stating one’s love for the slave they were to manumit and citing their loyal service were
two of the most common tropes in the genre of manumission cases. With no further
qualitative evidence to describe the conditions of Juan de Yrala’s enslavement, the
documents beg the question, did being a slaveowner trump familial considerations in a
way that aligned Polonia de Ribas so closely to Spanish elites in Xalapa that not even her
own family members “mattered” anymore? Even if she never physically abused Juan and
Gerónimo de Yrala, they were nevertheless her slaves for more than two decades. If
there were no abuses, did she merely keep them as slaves to secure her place among
Xalapa’s elites? There is evidence across the Americas that slaveowners, especially
urban dwellers, owned slaves as performative displays of wealth and social legitimacy,
296
and Mexico was no exception. 78 Herman Bennett writes, “In Mexico City, [slaves]
represented both labor and symbols of the status of their owners.”79 If this was the case
for Polonia, perhaps she kept her brothers as a way to claim social legitimacy in the
colonial order. Perhaps the slaveowner status shielded Polonia and offered her the social
legitimacy often denied to women of African descent as public and economic actors. If
asserting and maintaining one’s status as slaveowner offered the possibility for greater
social legitimacy, it is not surprising then that Polonia de Ribas, a mulata single mother
of five children, held fast to her title and refused to relinquish her slaves, even family
members, until she lay sick on her death bed.
Polonia de Ribas’ declarations to the notary were the mediated final versions of
drafts of information that she offered to notarial authorities. Echoes of her “voice” exists,
but her truth may no longer be accessible. Of the notarial sieving process, Kathryn Burns
78
Of the early colonial Peru context, James Lockhart writes, “No encomendero felt happy until he
owned a large house, land, livestock, and – most to the point here – black servants. Most Spaniards could
not hope to achieve this goal in its entirety, but they aimed at least for two essentials, a house (which could
be rented) and blacks.” Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 205. In Chica da Silva, Ferreira Furtado writes of the
Brazilian context, “Once living in free society, with no way of going back, their only chance of diminishing
the social exclusion and stigma of their origins was to avail of precisely the mechanisms the whites used for
their survival and promotion. The first of these mechanisms was to purchase a slave, which enabled the
owner to remove herself from the world of work. For the freedwoman who registered wills in Tejuco in the
eighteenth century, slaves were not only their main source of wealth but also of social affirmation.”
Ferriera Furtado, Chica da Silva, 147. Also from the colonial Brazilian milieu, Kathleen Higgins addresses
this specific gendered concern for free female slaveowners. She writes, “[In] assuming the role of
slaveholders, [formerly enslaved women] undoubtedly protected themselves and their families from any
threat of re-enslavement that freeborn colonists may have posed. The best proof to others that one was no
longer a slave or enslaveable was surely to become a master.” Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 85. In Black
Masters, Michael Johnson and James Roark study the history of one free African American family in the
antebellum U.S. South and legitimacy and social viability often arise in their narrative. Johnson and Roark
write, “…nothing was more lucrative, more respectable, and more patriotic than owning slaves.” My
emphasis, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters (New York: 1984), 143. The
influencing power of status symbols cannot be dismissed among slaveowners of African descent. U.S.
historian R. Halliburton Jr. argues, “The free black could elevate his status to a greater degree by owning
slaves than in any other way – and status was desired.” R. Halliburton Jr., “Free Black Owners of Slaves: A
Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 76, no. 3 (Jul., 1975), 137.
79
297
writes, “Words got to paper through a complicated relay process, one that might involve
several people and considerable filtering and rewriting.”80
Burns emphasizes that this
method operated to make legible the chaotic nature of interpersonal interactions. She
asserts, “This was, after all, what people paid notaries to do for them: discipline the
messy particulars of their business into the approved legal forms.”81 I add that what
qualified as “messy particulars” and “unnecessary information” was left to the discretion
of the members of notarial office. Even with all of its standardization and pretense of
strict uniformity,82 local custom and individual notaries dictated important variations. In
Polonia’s case, the distinct language used in the manumissions of her brother and an
unrelated slave may have been Polonia’s, or her notarial intermediary’s, indication that
there was a valued difference between the two men. As a woman who had to appear
before the notarial authorities at least three times before her will was registered, Polonia
may have also developed the cultural capital to negotiate her words carefully to craft the
most advantageous narrative. Whether it would have been monetarily significant due to
debts owed to her or publicly beneficial to her because it aided in the performativity of a
slaveowner, the narrative that would finally reach the bound protocolos merged both
personal and public interests.
80
82
81
298
The documents do not reveal if definitively she was a benevolent or a strategic
slaveowner engaging in the “theater” of respectability,83 or whether she saw beyond
caste, race, and blood ties and primarily understood herself as a slaveowner among many
others who owned slaves in colonial Xalapa. What the documents allow us to know is
that she was a single woman with a large family to support. Being marked as a mulata
did not seem to inhibit her ability to provide for her children and see them to adulthood
and eventually married. Polonia existed in a circle of elites who owned slaves and made
business transactions with others in the region. At the time of her will, at least two elite
Spanish men owed her money. In many regards, she behaved as they did. There is no
indication in the available documents that she was ever raised with them, as she was a
free woman, and they were slaves on an ingenio until they were about twenty years old.
Polonia de Ribas may have never identified with them in a familial sense and could have
treated them as she did her other slaves, which according to the documentation, she very
likely did.
What can be gleaned from these highly mediated sources is Polonia’s
relationship to the notarial archive, her role in notarial truth-making.
Identifying Polonia’s role in this process makes her not only a woman in an
exceptional and unlikely position of power but also an active agent in her own notarial
truth. In her last will and testament, Polonia was described as a “mulata libre soltera,” an
unwed free mulata. Even though it is later noted in the same document that she had
83
For the Brazilian context, Mariana L. R. Dantas discusses the dual benefit of slave owning. She
writes, “Because owning slaves allowed [people of African descent] to avoid the types of labor usually
associated with slavery, it marked more publicly their transition from property to property holder,
improving the general perception of their quality.” Mariana L. R. Dantas, “Humble Slaves and Loyal
Vassals,” in Imperial Subjects, 126.
299
children, Polonia must have had some reason to exclude the identity of her children’s
father(s). Why, then, would a free woman of means not divulge the identity of her
children’s father(s)?
If these missing fathers were men who could not be publicly
acknowledged because she did not have the right to do so or if they were men not suitable
for her to name given her relatively high social status, then Polonia had successfully
fashioned a notarial life as a self-made free woman of African descent in Xalapan
society.84
The absence of two fathers, hers and her children’s, indicates that Polonia did not
need them to gain social legitimacy for herself or her children. She was a financially
stable slaveowner and someone well connected to the Xalapan Spanish elite. Polonia had
amassed wealth, navigated the notarial system, reared all five of her hijos naturales, and
managed at least three slaves all without an acknowledged familial patriarch.
The
notarial truth that is fashioned by or for Polonia is quite remarkable. According to her
notarial history, Polonia de Ribas came from humble beginnings as the daughter of an
enslaved African woman. Her position as a woman of means was aided by her ownership
of slaves, including her enslaved siblings. By her twenties, she was a slaveowner and
would later serve as an apoderada85 in her thirties. As she lay in bed, she offered a
concluding act of benediction as a prototypical “benevolent” slaveowner and freed one of
her brothers. Polonia’s notarial life was exceptional, whether personally constructed or
84
Many children who were cited as “illegitimate” had biological fathers, including Spanish ones,
who were acknowledged publicly in Xalapa’s parish records. This was especially evident among the
confirmation and baptism collections already examined in this study.
85
A woman who has been appointed as the legal representative for another by way of notarial
poder.
300
influenced by the interests of the notarial offices, but much of it also followed the same
narrative path as other slaveowners in Xalapa.
Multi-generational Slaveowners
Polonia’s donation case appears to be unique. It was even quite rare for elite
Spanish women to have such social cache independent of men. Still, other women of
African descent became slaveowners. The case of free parda María Yañez, who freed
her forty-year-old negra slave named María Yañez, is an example of a woman of African
descent coming to own a slave through an inheritance. María Yañez “the slaveowner”
noted in this manumission entry that she had inherited María “the slave” from her
deceased grandfather, Francisco Pérez Romero.86 Of course, that the slaveowner and the
slave had the same name is curious. It is possible that María “the slaveowner” and María
“the slave” were related. However, slaves and slaveowners often shared surnames and
María was and continues to be a common Spanish first name. Without more sources to
contextualize either the slaveowner or the slave, it is difficult to discern the relationship
between the two beyond the master-slave narrative. What is most important in the case
of this slaveowner is that María Yañez inherited at least one of her slaves from an
acknowledged male relative.
The case of slaveowner María Yañez and her grandfather Francisco Pérez
Romero, a wealthy vecino of Xalapa, further demonstrates that slave donations were an
elite activity. While few details are offered about the life of free parda and slaveowner
María Yañez, more than twenty notarial entries document the lives of her relatives living
86
ANX, October 6, 1686, f 305vta - 306fte.
301
in Xalapa. Her grandparents Francisco Pérez Romero and Juana Martín de la Hinojosa
were both born in La Villa de Ayamonte in the Kingdom of Castile and migrated to New
Spain to become vecinos of Xalapa, likely around the turn of the seventeenth century.87
Their two sons, Juan Jacinto Romero and Fernando Yañez Matamoros, also lived and
conducted business in the jurisdiction of Xalapa.88 Fernando Yañez Matamoros owned at
least one slave in his lifetime, 89 making María Yañez at least a third-generation
slaveowner. Through her last will and testament, the free mulata Polonia de Ribas also
ensured that at least one of her children would be a slaveowner by providing her daughter
Melchora with a dowry that included slaves, making her family at least secondgeneration slaveowners.
María Yañez’ grandfather, Francisco Pérez Romero, was a long-time resident of
Xalapa and owned homes valued at 240 pesos de oro común as early as 1606.90 He was
also a slaveowner at a time when slave prices were at their highest.
In 1606, he
purchased a negro slave named Pedro “from the nation of Angola” for 530 pesos de oro
común.91 Later that same year, he purchased three more Angolan slaves named Pedro,
Antonio, and Felipe for 380 pesos de oro común each.92 In 1608, Francisco Pérez
Romero purchased a forty-year-old negra slave named Isabel Zape for 400 pesos de oro
común.93 In 1608, Francisco Pérez Romero made a definitive move to incorporate
himself into the regional economy. On August 31, he purchased the sugar ingenio
87
ANX, June 24, 1657, f 176fte - 178fte.
ANX, July 9, 1661, f 254fte - 255vta.
89
ANX, June 17, 1673, f 38vta - 39fte.
90
ANX, July 29, 1606, f 289fte - 290fte.
91
92
93
ANX, June 23, 1608, f 575vta - 576fte.
88
302
Nuestra Señora del Socorro, one of the principal mills of the region, from the Spaniard
Baltazar Vázquez de Herrera for the price of 40,000 pesos de oro común. This expansive
estate, located in Xalatengo, included fields to grow sugar cane, houses, 94 four
“caballerías” of land (~425 acres), an area for larger cattle (~4,337 acres), a site for
smaller cattle (~1,927 acres), a house for grinding (likely a mill) which included a press,
three copper kettles, three water pumps, a distributing or sorting machine, 260
wagonloads of cane planted in an area called La Vega, thirty wagonloads of cane planted
near the main houses of the ingenio, twenty-five draught oxen, two wagons with all
equipment included, five iron grills, four horses, twenty-two mattocks, ten axes, 600
forms of clay, twenty negros esclavos, and an inn with all of its houses and belongings
called Xalatengo, located near the sugar mill.95
Seemingly in need of a greater workforce than the slaves he already owned and
the twenty that came with his recent acquisition, Francisco Pérez Romero purchased eight
additional slaves on March 16, 1609: seven men and one woman at the price of 425 pesos
de oro común each.96 However, his interests reached further than his slaves and newly
acquired plantation. In 1611, Francisco Pérez Romero contracted a tutor, Francisco
Fernández, for a yearly salary of 200 pesos de oro común to teach his children how to
read and write, and to instruct them in the Christian doctrine.97 Literacy rates varied
greatly but were generally low, even among the colonial elite in the early seventeenth
94
95
96
97
ANX, August 31, 1608, f 490vta - 493vta.
ANX, June 17, 1611, f 207vta.
303
century.98 By arranging for an instructor, Francisco Pérez Romero ensured that his two
sons would be members of this privileged class of literate colonial subjects. Significantly
fewer women had the opportunity to learn how to read and write, regardless of the
resources of their families. In the 1686 manumission case, the notary public specifically
states, “[María Yañez the slaveowner] did not sign because she said that she did not know
how.”99 Although she had a wealthy Spanish grandfather, María Yañez did not enjoy the
privilege of literacy. Women were rarely formally educated outside the confines of a
convent.100 However, at least two of her male family members received some instruction,
which demonstrates the investment in cultural capital that likely benefitted María as she
negotiated the legal etiquettes of selling her slaves.
The acquisition and long-term maintenance of wealth challenged even the most
economically resilient families throughout the seventeenth century. In his study of the
elite of Mexico City during the late colonial period, John E. Kicza identifies a mere 100
families who had the assets to qualify as members of what he describes as the “Great
Families.”101 Kicza eliminates all but the most impressive wealth managers in the colony
98
Kathryn Burns writes, “Most Spaniards could not read or write and did not know the inner
workings of the legal system.” Burns, Into the Archive, 23.
99
ANX, October 6, 1686, f 306fte.
100
Kathryn Burns discusses the importance of convents in the education of españolas and
mestizas. Burns, Colonial Habits, 27-37. She notes that girls were instructed on a variety of “good
manners” dictated by normative gendered Spanish behavior, which “probably included everything from
prayer to stitchery, perhaps literacy.” Burns, Colonial Habits, 27. Some women of African descent who
had been donated to the religious order could have been indirectly exposed to the same convent education.
Joan Cameron Bristol discusses the case of an enslaved African woman named Juana Esperanza de San
Alberto who belonged to a convent who demonstrated an acute awareness of the value of religious cultural
capital. So much so that Juana requested that she receive the habit on her deathbed and received
permission from Puebla’s bishop for the allowance because she demonstrated years of piety. Bristol,
Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 23-62.
101
John E. Kicza, “The Great Families of Mexico: Elite Maintenance and Business Practices in
Late Colonial Mexico City,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 3, (August, 1982), 432.
304
with a daunting criterion for Great Family-membership set at “possessions valued at more
than a million pesos de oro común or very nearly so.”102 Outside of Mexico City, only
about a dozen other families in the colony could compete with the enormous fortunes
accumulated, managed, and sustained by the Great Families who reigned from the heart
of New Spain.103 According to Kicza, one of the defining characteristics of this exclusive
group of economically advantaged families was the diversification of their financial
activities.
María Yañez’ Spanish grandfather, Francisco Pérez Romero seemed to aspire to
Kicza’s definition of “Great Families” but encountered difficulties that many in the
colony’s relative periphery experienced. Francisco Pérez Romero established himself
with other prominent members of society by serving as an active member of the Cofradía
de las Ánimas del Purgatorio by at least 1615, a cofradía that also counted as members
the alcalde mayor of Xalapa, Don Fernando Cortés de Monroy, and a number of
diputados, mayordomos, and capitanes.104 He must have found it challenging to raise
further liquidity in order to make the ingenio that he had purchased in 1608 fully
operational. Nearly six years passed before he requested a special license from the
viceroy of New Spain, Diego Fernández de Córdoba. The license granted Francisco
Pérez Romero the right to cultivate sugar cane on his property, which, it is noted, would
be worked by indigenous laborers.105 For what purpose he planned to use the slaves he
purchased in previous years or the twenty that had come with the plantation is left
102
Kicza, “The Great Families of Mexico,” 432.
Kicza, “The Great Families of Mexico,” 432.
104
105
103
305
unanswered if they were not going to work the land alongside indigenous workers.
According to the notarial archive, he only sold one slave, a fourteen-year-old negra
named Francisca, for 400 pesos de oro común in 1619.106 And only once did he ever
agree to manumit a slave. In 1619, Francisco Pérez Romero and his wife Juana Martín de
la Hinojosa granted fifty-year-old negra Isabel “from the land of Zapa” a carta de
libertad after eleven years in their service because “she served them so well and with so
much love.” However, the freedom card was not a gift. Isabel “from Zapa” paid
Francisco and Juana 300 pesos de oro común for her freedom.107
Of course, this is not the same as the manumission without requisite payment that
his granddaughter María Yañez conceded to her slave sixty-seven years later. However,
according to her virtual absence in the notarial archive excluding the one entry discussed
here, María Yañez also did not have the responsibility found in her grandfather’s notarial
life to pay off a 40,000-peso debt for an ingenio or to feed and clothe more than twodozen slaves.
María Yañez materially benefitted from a generous grandfather, a man she could
legally claim, when he made the rare donation of a slave that she later manumitted. And
like many other epistemological roads that end unceremoniously in an archive that
creates pervasive silences, this manumission case provided María Yañez’ only mark on
the historical record.
Unlike the “associative beneficiaries,” 108 María Yañez and
Polonia's daughter Melchora were slaveowners best described as “acknowledged-family”
106
ANX, November 23, 1619, f 251fte - 252vta.
108
I describe associative beneficiaries are all those who have no cited or legally acknowledged
familial connection to the benefactor.
107
306
beneficiaries, as both women came into the ownership of slaves through legitimate family
ties that were publicly recognized by the notary.
This type of intergenerational
slaveownership allowed for greater social legitimacy for people of African descent. The
status firmly placed them among other subjects who were long-time sponsors of slavery,
unquestionably in the dominant fold and far removed from the maroons that disrupted
commerce on the Camino Real.
These cases also redirect “exceptional cases” to the normativity of slaveholding
practices found among people of non-African descent. Because of limited opportunities
to work outside of the home in trade positions and the high price of slaves, many female
slaveowners, regardless of race, acquired slaves through bequeathment, donation, or
dowry offered by an acknowledged family member. While many women of various
castes owned property and businesses in seventeenth-century Xalapa, familial support
continued to be a key identifier amongst free people of means.
Whether from an
acknowledged family member or an unrelated benefactor, the donation of a slave was a
rare gift from which many in the colonial social order would reap significant benefits.
The donation of even one slave could change one’s life chances. With an average value
at 400 pesos de oro común throughout the long seventeenth century, a slave donated to a
free woman of African descent meant that she had a source of long-term earning
potential. Or, if after the donation, she decided to sell the slave, the profits would amount
to the value of thirteen modest houses and would be nearly seven times as much as the
307
average laborer earned in a month.109 Donations, then, resulted in a windfall for women
who may have had limited options for gainful employment.
Entrepreneurial Slaveowners
Some free women slaveowners fell outside of these two types of recipients of
associate and familial benefactors. The cases of María Nuñez and María López highlight
the existence of women who were enterprising slaveowners of African descent in Xalapa
during the long seventeenth century. María Nuñez represents the earliest case of a free
female slaveowner of African descent in Xalapa’s notarial archive.
She registered
business at the notarial offices six times between 1609 and 1615. María’s executors also
registered two posthumous pieces of business on her behalf in 1631. Little evidence of
María Nuñez' personal or family life is revealed in her notarial documents. She does,
however, mention that she was lawfully married to Vicente Rodrígues but does not add
any identifying information about him, such as age, occupation, caste, or legal status.110
María Nuñez eventually managed her own business, but she was first cited in the notarial
archives because of her interest in buying and selling slaves. On March 16, 1609, she
bought a negro slave named Francisco for 460 pesos de oro común.111 With the aid of a
fiador, she had a year to pay off the debt to the slave seller Andrés Moreira. The need for
a financial backer did not mark her negatively as the need for one was common among all
economic groups. Even the wealthiest subjects of New Spain lacked liquidity in the
109
The average home with a small plot cost 30 pesos de oro común. Average monthly salary of a
laborer based on 5 pesos de oro común a month.
110
ANX, July 10, 1609, f 149vta - 150fte.
111
308
early- and mid- colonial periods. Kathryn Burns aptly describes the Spanish American
colonies as “perpetually cash poor.” 112 Most people had to rely on their financial
reputations and personal relationships, hence the financier.
Three months later, María Nuñez purchased an inn named the Venta del Río from
Melchor de la Bazares for 400 pesos de oro común.113
The purchase included all houses
and storage areas of the Venta del Río and carried a price tag ten times greater than the
average parcel of land bought by most residents of Xalapa. María Nuñez not only
became a business owner but was now the dueña114 of a substantial property. Instead of
keeping the inn, she decided to make the property immediately profitable. The very next
month on July 10, 1609, she sold the Venta del Río to a man named Juan Gallegos for
550 pesos de oro común.115
María and Juan agreed on installment payments, probably
because Juan Gallegos also lacked cash on hand. He may have also realized that he was
in over his head with the new business. Just a few years later on May 31, 1613, Juan
Gallego sold the Venta del Río for the same price to a man named Pedro Ruiz, also a
vecino of the jurisdiction of Xalapa.116 Not until 1615 did María Nuñez make another
large purchase: two slaves, a mother and her son, for 550 pesos de oro común.117 She
purchased the slaves through a slave seller from Xalapa named Capitán Jorge Veneciano.
The entry also notes that at least by 1615 she was a resident of the Venta del Río even
112
ANX, June 10, 1609, f 149vta - 150fte.
114
Owner.
115
ANX, July 10, 1609, f 150vta - 151fte.
116
ANX, May 31, 1613, f 318vta - 319vta.
117
113
309
though she was no longer the owner. The same 1615 entry reveals that María Nuñez was
a widow, her husband Vicente Rodrígues having died.
It would take another sixteen years for María Nuñez to reappear in the notarial
archive, this time represented by Licenciado Jerónimo Gisberto, priest and vicar of the
sugar refinery Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, located in the jurisdiction of Xalapa. On
January 31, 1631, on María’s behalf, Licenciado Gisberto sold a 34-year-old negra slave
named Isabel to a man named Alonso Gaitán for 350 pesos de oro común. 118
Unfortunately, by April 27, 1631, Licenciado Gisberto was taking care of all of María
Nuñez’ affairs because at some point in those short months, she had passed away.119 The
April entry specifically cites her as deceased and Licenciado Gisberto as charged with
seeing that funds were allocated to pay for masses for her soul and that of her second
husband, Pedro Ruiz. This is the same Pedro Ruiz who had purchased the Venta del Río
in 1613 from the man that María Nuñez had sold it to in 1609.
Not until this 1631 entry is her second marriage disclosed, which demonstrates
that the notarial archive chronicled business lives and only sometimes inadvertently
included more personal details about its entrants. Because she never left the Venta del
Río, the two likely met on the same property she had previously owned for just a month.
So while she was no longer the sole owner of the Venta del Río, she had found a way,
either purposefully or coincidentally, to become the next best thing, wife of the owner.
Finally, Licenciado Gisberto proved himself to have been a wise choice for a
loyal and diligent executor of María Nunez’ will. On July 8, 1631, he collected on a debt
118
119
310
of sixty-three pesos de oro común owed to María’s estate.120 In this final posthumous
entry, María Nuñez was cited as having become the innkeeper of the Venta del Río
before her death – her final occupation after serving as the previous owner and buying
and selling slaves for more than twenty years in the jurisdiction of Xalapa. María Nuñez
was an active contributor to the local economy. She was an employee, briefly a business
owner, and once again an innkeeper until the end of her days. Throughout that time, she
was a slaveowner, and a busy one at that. Not all slaveowners had the fortune to be
absent supervisors of their slaves’ industry. Some, such as the free parda María Nuñez,
had to manage greater responsibility by also working as primary owners or salaried
employees of other economic ventures.
Although there is no evidence that María Nuñez knew her, María López was most
certainly her peer in Xalapa as another slave-owning woman of African descent who
lived during the early seventeenth century.
María López, described as “de color
morena,” lived in a few different locations in and around Xalapa for the two years she
registered business at the notarial office, from 1609 to 1610. In March of 1609, María
López was noted as an innkeeper, like María Nuñez, though López was at the inn the
Venta de la Riconada, where she was also a resident.121 On March 16, 1609, she
purchased a negro slave from Capitán Andrés Moreira for 460 pesos de oro común,
which happens to be the same price María Nuñez paid for a male slave when she did
business with the same Capitán Andrés Moreira.122 The costly price tag of 460 pesos de
120
ANX, July 8, 1631, f 536vta - 537fte.
122
121
311
oro común likely represented the market value at the time. María López and Capitán
Andrés agreed on a financial arrangement that gave María a year to pay the debt. Since a
fiador is never mentioned, this allowance demonstrates a certain familiarity between
Capitán Andrés Moreira and María López and the credibility of her financial reputation.
The following day on March 17, 1609, María López commissioned a man named Juan de
Sosa del Castillo, a resident of Xalapa, to sell for her a negro slave named Juan, who was
described as a bozal.123 She noted in the entry that Juan de Sosa del Castillo should sell
Juan “the bozal”124 at a price he deemed fit, an indication of María López’ trust in his
ability to bargain and ensure that her best interests were served.
Juan de Sosa del Castillo appeared again two months later on May 15, 1609, to
finalize another agreement on María López’ behalf. Acting as her business manager, he
registered the paperwork verifying a debt owed by María López to Mateo Jorge for
another slave purchase. María López had purchased a negra slave named Lucrecia from
“the nation of Angola” for 420 pesos de oro común and had only six months to pay off
the debt to Mateo Jorge.125 With 880 pesos de oro común in debt by midyear, María
López did not reappear until 1610, perhaps occupied by raising liquidity before she
decided once again to buy and sell slaves, which she did starting in the spring of 1610.
On April 21, 1610, María López made headway in securing more funds by selling a
twenty-five-year-old negra slave named Esperanza “from the land of the Bran”126 for a
123
An unhispanicized person of African descent. Usually assigned to someone born in Africa or
who had not yet learned the Spanish language or had not yet become acculturated to Spanish customs.
125
ANX, May 15, 1609, f 101fte - 101vta.
126
According to Rachel O’Toole, the designation of “bran” suggested “origins in Guinea-Bissau.”
O’Toole, Bound Lives, 15.
124
312
significant profit of 600 pesos de oro común.127 In this transaction, María López is noted
as the “vendedora,” or seller, of the inn. That same day she also granted to Francisco
Hernández Franco, a man from La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, the authority to represent
her in selling another negra slave of hers named Ana López (no cited relation).128 The
price that Francisco sold Ana López for is not recorded in later documents, but even if
she were sold at the low market price of 300 pesos de oro común, María López would
have made enough in these two sales to cover her debts from 1609 for the purchase of the
two male slaves. María López registered a third piece of business on April 16, 1610, in
which she finally revoked the representative power she had granted to Juan de Sosa del
Castillo a year earlier, perhaps because she was no longer in need of his services.129 On
April 22, 1610, now a resident of Xalapa proper, María López continued to sell her
slaves. She maintained her business relationship with Francisco Hernándes by selling
him a twenty-five-year-old negra slave named María “from the Angola nation” for 325
pesos de oro común, significantly lower than the market price.130
In María López’ notarial life, she owned at least six slaves and had business
connections to men in Xalapa, its agricultural environs, and La Nueva Ciudad de
Veracruz. Although the notarial archive only documented two years of her very involved
business life, María López, a woman “de color morena,” who was never identified as
married, widowed, or a mother, made her way in Xalapa by actively engaging in the
regional slave trade at a time when more people of African descent than not were still
127
129
130
128
313
enslaved or scraping by as a free person, making her not only exceptional by caste but
also savvy as a business person.
Not until the late 1600s does another well-documented and enterprising slaveowning woman of African descent appear in the notarial archive of Xalapa, a free parda
and vecina of Xalapa named Petrona de Arauz. Fifteen notarial entries involve Petrona,
who was also one of the few women who left a distinct enough archival footprint to parse
out both her business and personal life. Petrona de Arauz had various social markers that
would have provided her with social legitimacy. The first is that she was legally married
to Pedro de Licona, a man who left few details about his life in the notarial archive.
However, one entry provides some biographical information about his life and the
possible economic circumstances of his slave-owning wife, Petrona de Arauz.
Pedro de Licona was a free mulato, and while he was noted as being a resident of
Xalapa, he had only recently moved to the jurisdiction.131 In his only notarial entry dated
January 21, 1679, Pedro de Licona was noted as having arrived in Xalapa from Veracruz
Port only three years prior. The case that Pedro de Licona registered dealt with a matter
of stolen personal property. Pedro had left a macho de carga, or transport mule, in the
care of Juan López Ruiz Matamoros, a vecino of Xalapa, and owner of a cattle ranch.
The mule had been stolen but found on the day of the notarial entry to be in the
possession of an indio ladino132 named José Hernández, who was also a vecino of Xalapa
working at a local mill. The two men were able to resolve the dispute amicably when
José agreed to pay Pedro the value of the mule. Pedro de Lincona may have been an
131
132
A Hispanicized person of indigenous descent.
314
owner of a recua or perhaps he rented his mule out to arrieros in need of pack animals
with “fresh legs.” The theft, then, was a serious matter but resolved fairly uneventfully.
Pedro de Licona’s notarial life was short-lived, because by at least 1691, he had
passed away, making Petrona de Arauz a widow.133 Even without her husband, Petrona
conducted high-value business in Xalapa. In her first notarial entry, dated May 25, 1691,
Petrona de Arauz purchased a substantial piece of land from fellow vecinos of Xalapa
Lucas Díaz de la Cueva and his wife, Josefa del Espíritu Santo.134 With a price tag of
sixty pesos de oro común, Petrona made a significant purchase of property that measured
approximately eighty-two by seventy-eight varas. And while the real estate was larger
than average, the actual materials used in construction of the house were seemingly more
humble. The notarial purchase agreement described the house as made of wood, with
enclosures made from branches and clay, and a straw-covered roof. However, when
compared with materials used in other homes documented in the notarial archive in the
late seventeenth century, it is difficult to ascertain whether Petrona’s home was as modest
as it might appear at first glance.
In a review of twenty four houses with physical descriptions documented in the
notarial archive from 1675 until the end of the seventeenth century, thirteen were
described as having tiled roofs, eight had palm leaf roofs, and three had roofs made from
straw. Straw appears to have been the least common material used, perhaps because it
was cheaper. But straw was also used in more expensive homes. On July 22, 1697,
Doña Isabel de Neira sold her straw-roofed house in Naolinco for 220 pesos de oro
133
134
ANX, May 25, 1691, f 417vta - 419fte.
ANX, May 25, 1691, f 417vta - 419fte
315
común; more than three times the price of Petrona’s home.135 Similarly, in 1697, a house
made with branches and clay sold for 250 pesos de oro común.136 Petrona’s home of
sixty pesos de oro común was made with wood, which reveals less about the type of
home we can imagine because in 1684 a home made of wood and stone sold for 1,250
pesos de oro común.137 While Petrona’s house and property were not the grand estate
that sold for 1,250 pesos de oro común, it is difficult to tell from the building materials
how elaborate her home was in comparison to others in the jurisdiction of Xalapa at the
end of the seventeenth century. We do know that it was valued at sixty pesos de oro
común, still double that of most homes in the jurisdiction at the same time. And while
the house was not constructed with more durable materials, such as tile and stone, its
prime location on the street of the main public plaza headed towards Mexico City
increased its desirability and property value.
Fourteen years passed before Petrona de Arauz appeared again. While she had
fallen silent in her notarial life, she forged ahead with other economic activities. In that
course of time, Petrona de Arauz had become a slaveowner.
While the available
documents do not offer information regarding how many slaves she owned, she likely
had more than two because in 1706, she granted a poder to Don Francisco García de
Mendoza to sell one of her slaves, a fourteen-year-old negra criolla named María
Josefa.138 Petrona had originally purchased María Josefa in October of 1701 from Don
Ignacio de Herrera Loza, a vecino from La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz. Don Francisco,
135
ANX, July 12, 1697, f 406fte - 408fte.
137
138
136
316
the man she charged with selling the slave María Josefa, was also a vecino from La
Nueva Ciudad de la Veracruz. Like many other residents of Xalapa, Petrona de Arauz
established business connections with merchants, landowners, and transient businessmen
from one of the colony’s most economically significant ports.
It was a sound financial consideration for Petrona to sell her slave considering the
amount of debt she would incur in years to come. In March of 1709, Petrona de Arauz
granted a poder general to Blas Fernández Álvarez in order to represent her on all civil
and criminal cases that she might have had.139 Four months later, it appears as though
Petrona would need him for a more specific matter than the general legal proxy indicated.
In July 1709, she found herself indebted to the descendants of Juan de Thormes.140
Alférez Sebastian de Flores Moreno, the executor for Juan de Thormes’ family, noted
that Petrona had borrowed 500 pesos de oro común and 8 reales and that she had two
years to pay off the debt. Instead of using a financier, she put up her house in Xalapa,
located on the Camino Real, as collateral. Considering the large sum of 500 pesos de oro
común and 8 reales, it seems extraordinary that Petrona de Arauz was not required to
offer a fiador. And while she bought her 1691 home for sixty pesos de oro común, how
could Petrona de Arauz’ house have been sufficient collateral for the executor of the
inheritors of Juan de Thormes? The first reason is deduced from her family history and
the second is not revealed until more than a decade later.
Petrona de Arauz is noted as a widow who had been lawfully married to Pedro de
Licona in nearly every document in which she appears since 1691. However, we do not
139
140
ANX, July 19, 1709, f 244fte - 245fte.
317
learn that she had a son until a 1716 document, which states that he was a minor child at
the time.141 This child must have resulted from an unsanctified union that never resulted
in a second legal marriage as she continued to be referred to as the widow of Pedro de
Licona. However, the liaison must have been of some substance, given the courtesy
extended by the man’s family in later years. Petrona de Arauz’ son was none other than
Juan Joseph de Thormes, the acknowledged but illegitimate child of the merchant Juan de
Thormes whose family offered Petrona de Arauz the 500-peso de oro común loan. Her
relationship to Juan de Thormes and her status as the mother of his child provide a
reasonable explanation as to why she did not need to provide a fiador to his family.
However, it should not be presumed that other members of Juan de Thormes’ family felt
affinity towards Petrona de Arauz just because she bore his illegitimate child. Although
widowed and then again left to fend for herself after her child’s father also dies, Petrona
de Arauz was certainly not short of opportunities and means. The years that followed
demonstrate a woman with resources and well-positioned acquaintances.
Petrona’s
notarial trail documents a women who navigated her social world to her benefit and to
that of her hijo natural, Juan Joseph de Thormes.
Between 1709 and 1710, Petrona de Arauz must have expanded her social circle,
because she once again sought out legal representation, this time from someone of greater
social status. On July 23, 1710, Petrona granted a poder general to Capitán Diego
Rosado, a vecino from Mexico City.142 While many people established connections with
the regional elite of central Veracruz, especially with those in the Port of Veracruz, the
141
142
ANX, July 23, 1710, f 353fte - 354fte.
318
ability to claim as confidantes people of real or perceived influence from the heart of
New Spain’s seat of power. She may have intended to conduct business with someone in
Mexico City and depended on Capitán Diego Rosado to represent her interests.
However, Petrona did not enter another piece of business with the notarial offices that
would verify any new acquisitions or transactions for another two years, which suggests
that perhaps she registered her legal representative, Capitán Diego Rosado, as a
performative act to substantiate her own social position. If Petrona de Arauz had no
definitive business to contract or debts to collect on, she may have used the authoritative
power bestowed upon the notary to direct her own notarial truth.
Petrona de Arauz re-entered notarial life on March 2, 1712, when she sold off a
portion of her estate, the same one located on the Camino Real that she used for collateral
in 1709.143 She sold a piece of her estate to Pedro de Flandes and Diego Méndez, both
from the same region, for fifty pesos de oro común. However, the bill of sale describes
the property as measuring twenty-five by twenty-five varas, whose solar was free of any
mortgage or any other financial lien. And while fifty varas, or approximately one-quarter
of her 1709 estate, was a significant sale, Petrona de Arauz may have been facing
pressure to pay off the loan she had acquired from Juan de Thormes’ family, or perhaps
she needed to raise funds for the maintenance of the 146 varas of land that remained in
her ownership.
Another four years passed before Petrona de Arauz reappeared. If selling part of
her property implied that she had fallen on more precarious economic times, her next
143
ANX, March 2, 1712, f 502fte -503vta.
319
entry marked a change for the better in her finances. It also reveals more about her
personal life than her routine business transactions divulge. On August 13, 1716, Petrona
received 414 pesos de oro común and 4 reales from Doña Gertrudis de la Gala y
Thormes, the widow of Alférez Sebastián de Flores Moreno.144 Doña Gertrudis had
taken up the responsibility bestowed on her late-husband to administer the estate of Juan
de Thormes, father of Petrona’s son Juan Joseph de Thormes.
As Juan Joseph de
Thormes was still a minor in 1716, Petrona de Arauz received the funds on his behalf.
The record also states that funds came with a specially mortgaged house and since the
documents could not be located for the house, Petrona received the aforementioned
quantity as a deposit. She was to save it with the obligation to provide for the minor
child with the returns that accrued to him each year at the rate of 5% during the time that
she had him in her custody or, during this time period serve as administrator of the goods
remaining in the aforementioned mortgaged house.
For three years, her notarial path lay dormant. On August 23, 1719, Petrona de
Arauz returned to the notarial offices to register the sale of a piece of her property to José
de Aguilar for thirty pesos de oro común.145 The solar, measuring thirty by twenty-five
varas, belonged to a larger part of her property. After more than fourteen years of
notarial history, Petrona de Arauz’ next notarial entry finally revealed the scope of her
financial holdings. The previous year’s sale alluded to a larger property but failed to
provide any further details about the land’s size or degree of development. On August
31, 1720, Petrona de Arauz decided to grant her son, Juan Joseph de Thormes a generous
144
145
320
gift.146 The documents mention that her son had requested an undisclosed quantity in
order to buy a home. Instead, Petrona de Arauz presented him with a house and some
land located on the Camino Real. The entire property measured more than 80 varas in
the front and an expansive 116 varas that stretched behind the house. With such a vast
estate, it seems improbable that Petrona de Arauz would not own more slaves beyond the
one she purchased in 1701 and later sold in 1706. A property of that size would have
required a considerable amount of maintenance, but no other notarial documents
involving Pertona de Arauz cite any other slaves that she may have owned or any
employed seasonal or full-time wage laborers.
Given the description of the property and its location, this lavish donation must be
the same estate that Petrona de Arauz purchased in 1691. The original 1691 property
measured roughly eighty-one varas in the front and seventy-eight varas in the back.
Throughout the years, she had sold pieces of it, perhaps to raise funds during economic
downturns. In 1712, she sold fifty varas and in 1719, she sold another fifty-five varas.
However, Petrona de Arauz, a widowed free parda who had raised a child on her own,
found a way to recuperate her losses and increase her 1691 estate by 27% by the time she
donated it to her son Juan Joseph de Thormes in 1720, twenty-nine years later. And
while Kicza would not have classified her as “wealthy,” given his demanding
benchmarks, Petrona de Arauz maintained an enviable property for nearly thirty years of
her life, expanded it, and passed it on to her child, proving her strengths as a
146
321
conscientious landowner who created intergenerational wealth during a time of great
economic change in the region.
Petrona de Arauz’ son, Juan Joseph de Thormes, entered only sparse clues in the
notarial archive to provide evidence of how his mother’s financial abilities assisted her
progeny and later generations. On December 31, 1721, Juan Joseph de Thormes granted
permission to Capitán Juan Rodríguez de Tejada and Don Manuel de Santibáñez, both
vecinos of Puebla, for them to prepare his last will and testament.147 While he had two
men from Puebla compose the documents, Juan Joseph de Thormes named as executors
of his will two people closer to “home” – his wife Juana Rosa de la Higuera and his
mother Petrona de Arauz. He also named his three legitimate minor children as his
principal inheritors: Gaspar Joseph, age three; Francisco, age two; and a daughter named
María, only a year old at the time. Something may have occurred that prevented the last
will and testament from being drawn up, because two years later, Juan Joseph de
Thormes once again returned to the notary public to request that his will be prepared. On
December 11, 1723, he granted a poder to his friend and “teniente de caballos,”148 José
Pérez de Arellano and Capitán Bartolomé de Castro, both vecinos from the jurisdiction of
Xalapa, to arrange for a will.149 The orders of the will had not changed; his wife and
mother Petrona de Arauz remained as executors and his children as inheritors. Juan
Joseph probably realized that choosing men from Puebla complicated the process of
having his will written and notarized.
Perhaps the men from Puebla had become
147
The caballería was a military division of cavalrymen. A teniente de caballos or caballería was
the presiding officer of this defensive arm.
149
148
322
unavailable, failed to carry out their responsibilities to the satisfaction of Juan Joseph de
Thormes, or he simply preferred men of closer physical proximity, and perhaps greater
familiarity, to execute this personal matter.
It is unclear how much wealth Juan Joseph de Thormes had generated in his
lifetime, but the 1720 donation of the land by his mother made him the title owner of a
sizeable property. However, later documents reveal that Petrona de Arauz generous
donation of land to her son had become an overwhelming responsibility. On September
2, 1724, a mere four years after taking custody of the land, Juan Joseph de Thormes and
Petrona de Arauz arrived at the notarial offices to relieve him of the onus of managing
property that he could no longer sustain.150 Juan Joseph de Thormes and his mother
conceded that because the donation was so immense and that he would have to maintain
and sustain the property throughout his entire life, and finding that doing so would be
impossible, they both determined to transfer, revoke, and cancel a part of the initial
donation. For nearly thirty years, Petrona de Arauz managed this estate and her son
could not bear the burden of responsibility for four years. Juan Joseph de Thormes
acknowledged his shortcomings, and instead of forfeiting the property through
mismanagement or debt, he and his mother decided to relieve him of most of its
administration and ownership. The decision to remove Joseph as sole proprietor of the
estate may have also resulted from a familial dispute. Petrona de Arauz may have, as
punishment, reclaimed her property before it was lost in the incapable hands of her son.
150
ANX, September 2, 1724, f 596fte - 598fte.
323
After she rectified her short lapse in judgment, Petrona de Arauz did not
contribute to the notarial archive for another six years until she once again returned to the
profitable business of selling her real estate, which seems to have been her perennial
source of income. On May 2, 1730, Petrona sold to Lucas de Olachea, a vecino of
Xalapa, a plot of land located near the main public plaza.151 It was a significant property
that measured twenty-five varas by thirty-six varas, which she was able to sell for the
extravagant price of 270 pesos de oro común.
Unfortunately, the 1730 case closes the chapter on the notarial life of the free
parda Petrona de Arauz.
From slave-owning, property management, and familial
obligations, Petrona de Arauz had encountered a vast array of subjects in the thirty-nine
years in which the notarial archive documented her life. Most of her revenue appears to
have been derived from the astute acquisition of some of Xalapa’s most sought-after
properties. As a landowner, Petrona de Arauz’ involvement in the slave economy is
“logical.” That is to say, that a widowed woman with a large estate probably experienced
the need to have at least one slave girl to assist her with chores. Petrona de Arauz
purchased nine-year-old María Josefa, whom she eventually sold, likely for this very
purpose. When Petrona sold María Josefa five years later when she had reached the age
of fourteen and likely sold for a high price, it was possibly due to economic
considerations and the need to raise liquidity for further investment in real estate.
Petrona de Arauz lived an exceptional notarial life as a free parda and widow at
the dawn of the eighteenth century. Petrona outlived her mulato husband Pedro de
151
ANX, May 2, 1730, f 107vta - 109fte.
324
Licona. She later engaged in an illicit relationship with a Spanish man, which resulted in
the birth of her hijo natural, Juan Joseph de Thormes. And while Petrona was noted as
not even knowing how to sign her own name,152 she maintained seemingly endless
properties from which she continuously profited. She lived a privileged life not only
because of her advantageous economic dealings, but also because Petrona de Arauz and
her family immortalized their saga through more than a dozen trips to the notarial offices
of Xalapa.
Familial Disruptions
Most people, regardless of caste or status, would not have continued or sequential
years of engagement with the notary public that would allow us to reconstruct more
developed histories of their public and private lives as seen with Polonia de Ribas and
Petrona de Arauz. Most subjects of some means would have only fleeting experiences
with the organizing apparatuses of New Spain. On November 12, 1710, the free parda
María Rodríguez, vecina of Xalapa, granted a poder to Don Juan Miguel de Monsava.153
María Rodríguez entrusted Don Juan Miguel, a vecino from La Nueva Ciudad de la
Veracruz, to sell a slave on her behalf. María’s slave, a fifteen year-old named Joseph,
was described as a mulato prieto who had been raised in María Rodríguez’ home.
Joseph’s mother, María Ysavel, was also María Rodríguez’ slave. As this poder was
María Rodríguez’ only notarial footprint, very little can be discerned about her economic
status, family history, or her history of slave ownership. She was the owner of at least
152
153
ANX, July 19, 1709, f 244fte - 245fte.
325
two slaves, a mother and a son. And while Joseph would not have been considered a
minor as a fifteen-year old, his owner María Rodríguez had plans to sell him off and
disrupt his familial ties. There were no other documents regarding María Rodríguez in
the notarial archive that would verify whether Don Juan Miguel de Monsava sold Joseph
or for how much. And while we know she was a slaveowner, we know nothing about her
personal life:
Was she married?
Did she have children?
Did she manage other
businesses? And so María Rodríguez’ life remains an open-ended story, like that of
many others who registered only one point of business in the public domain.
However, in comparison to other towns in the central Veracruz region, Xalapa
was home to a considerable number of free women with the means to purchase and then
economically support their own slaves. For this project, I reviewed all of the notarial
holdings from Córdoba housed in the USBI Special Collections from 1635 to 1732.154 In
that time, only one woman of African descent was a documented slaveowner, a free
parda named Theresa Francisca Hernándes.155 Theresa, the legitimate wife of Francisco
de Soto, a free pardo, was a vecina of San Antonio de Huastuco. However, on August 3,
1714, Theresa went to the notary public of Córdoba to register business.
Theresa
intended to sell her three-year-old mulato slave named Baltasar. Baltasar was born and
had been raised in Theresa’s house because his mother, Andrea, had also been her slave.
At some point, Theresa sold Andrea to Capitán Don Juan Joseph Fernandes and Baltasar
remained with Theresa. This case is particularly telling, as no other case of slave-owning
women of African descent involved the sale of a minor child without the mother.
154
155
I had intended to review all documents until 1735, but the years 1733-1735 were missing.
ANC, August 3, 1714, f 2133vta - 2135fte.
326
Theresa Francisca Hernándes no longer had ownership of his mother and so therefore
could not sell mother and child as a pair, as others did according to the records of the
notarial archives of Xalapa.
At the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the transatlantic slave trade was at
its height, few patterns arose in cases of the separation of minor children156 from their
parents.157 After reviewing nearly 700 documents relating to slaves from 1600 to 1620 in
Xalapa’s notarial collection, I found only thirty-three cases of this phenomenon. When
minor children were sold off, 48% of the time they were accompanied by at least their
mothers, if not by their mother and other siblings.158 Slaveowners or professional slave
sellers sold off slightly more than half of all minor children (52%) unaccompanied by a
stated family member.
This data may include sales in which the slaveowner had
previously purchased the mother (perhaps only a short time before) but then decided later
to purchase the woman’s child. This, of course, is speculation, but a factor that must be
considered given incomplete archival collections and using documents not meant to
speak to the familial structures of enslaved people.
156
I define “minor child” as children twelve years old and younger. Many times the ages children
or young adults had to be estimated and the record would read, “Twelve years old, more or less.” The
“more or less” rhetorical device often signaled a shift in life cycles that was culturally established and that
indicated that the age-range/life cycle age, and not accuracy, was significant because many enslaved people
did not have exact birth dates recorded. Twelve as a marker of “adulthood” is also established in the U.S.
historiography regarding when children joined their parents, kin, and fellow slaves in primary duties of
production. Twinam corroborates for the Mexican context by establishing that adulthood was marked at
age 10. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 181.
157
I define “minor child” as children twelve years old and younger. Many times the ages children
or young adults had to be estimated and the record would read, “Twelve years old, more or less.” The
“more or less” rhetorical device often signaled a shift in life cycles that was culturally established and that
indicated that the age-range/life cycle age, and not accuracy, was significant because many enslaved people
did not have exact birth dates recorded. Twinam corroborates by establishing that adulthood was marked at
age 10. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 181.
158
As an important aside, I did not find a single case during this period in which a father was sold
with a minor children.
327
What the data does reveal is that among nearly 700 slave-related cases recorded
between 1600 and 1620 in the notarial archive of Xalapa, only seventeen children were
ever separated from their mothers during a period of great influx of slaves to the central
Veracruz region. These seventeen minors sold by themselves had varying characteristics
that leave few clues as to why children so young would have been sold away when they
did not yet have the same capacity to work as adults. Boys represented the majority of
these cases (12).159 Only five cases of girls were documented. The youngest, a two-yearold girl named Catalina, was sold by her owner, Catalina de Villafuerte, for 100 pesos de
oro común in 1605 to Juan Díaz Matamoros.160 We do know that slaveowners who
bought slightly older minors paid about half of the market price for adult slaves. In 1601,
eight-year-old Isabel was sold for 250 pesos de oro común to Don Juan Ochoa de Lejalde
Reynoso.161 Eleven-year-old Catalina de San Juan also was sold for 250 pesos de oro
común to Juan Rodrígues by a mercader de negros (slave trader).162 In 1610, twelveyear-old María was sold to Diego González for 225 pesos de oro común.163 Catalina
Villafuerte must have needed the income, because only a year after she had sold twoyear-old Catalina for 100 pesos de oro común, she sold ten-year-old Magdalena, a negra,
for 300 pesos de oro común.164
159
However, boys were also more likely to be imported than girls during the early years of high
slave importation. Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 169
160
161
ANX, October 25, 1601, f 68fte - 69fte.
162
ANX, July 29, 1617, f 682fte - 682vta.
163
ANX, June 2, 1610, f 28fte - 28vta.
164
328
The twelve boys were assigned similar valuations. The youngest boy, Juan, was
only twenty months old when he was sold in 1618 for 150 pesos de oro común.165 In
1616, seven-year old Domingo was sold for a mere 130 pesos de oro común.166 The sale
prices of eight boys between the ages of ten and twelve, varied between 200 and 290
pesos de oro común.167 Only one ten-year old sold for less than 200 pesos de oro común.
Francisco de la Nieves held the dubious honor of being sold for a piddling 150 pesos de
oro común, the same amount as the twenty-two-month-old Juan. Perhaps Francisco had a
physical defect, or perhaps he was a difficult child and his owner had grown tired of his
defiance.168 One young boy, ten or twelve years old, was sold with a woman who was
not identified as his mother for the total price of 675 pesos de oro común.169 Because
they were sold together without differentiating the two in the sale, it is unclear what his
market value would have been had he been sold by himself. Blas Duarte, a slave
merchant from La Nueva Ciudad de Veracuz, sold three of the eight twelve-year-old boys
– Francisco, Gaspar, and Vicente, all noted as being “recién llegado” (recently arrived) or
“recién venido” (recently came) from “Guinea.” If they had indeed just arrived from
Africa, they may have lost their mothers to disease or exhaustion during the Middle
Passage. However, twelve years of age was considered near “adulthood” and buying a
165
ANX, May 12, 1618, f 604fte - 604vta.
167
Sebastian, age 10, sold for 200 pesos de oro común, ANX, July 8, 1604, f 278fte - 278vta.
Jose, age 10 or 12, sold for 200 pesos de oro común, ANX, May 26, 1610, f 26vta - 27vta. Juan, age 12,
sold for 230 pesos de oro común, ANX, August 31, 1611, f 236fte - 237fte. Pedro, age 10, sold for 250
pesos de oro común, ANX, November 22, 1612, f 290fte - 291vta. Alvaro, age 10, sold for 225 pesos de
oro común, ANX, October 1, 1617, f 569fte - 569vta. Francisco, age 12, sold for 290 pesos de oro común,
ANX September 28, 1617, f 696fte - 697vta. Gaspar, age 12, sold for 270 pesos de oro común, ANX,
September 28, 1617, f 698fte - 698vta. Vicente, approx. age 13, sold for 260 pesos de oro común,
September 1, 1617, f 704vta - 705vta.
168
ANX, July 15, 1609, f 153fte - 154vta.
169
166
329
boy of this age probably depended on his level of maturity and physical strength. It was
certainly not a common practice.
During the period of Spain’s significant involvement in the transatlantic slave
trade, only seventeen children in Xalapa ever parted ways with their mothers – twelve
boys and five girls. If I lower the threshold age to eight and younger, then only four
minors were ever sold without their mothers between 1600 and 1620. These children
included two boys (ages twenty months and seven years) and two girls (ages two years
and eight years). By lowering the age range of “minor child,” the paucity of cases
demonstrates how exceptional it was to buy or attempt to sell children because the
percentages shift drastically from minor children being sold by themselves only 20% of
the time and with their mothers at least 80% of the time, instead of the nearly 50% split
when ten- and twelve-years-olds were included.170
Clues in the notarial archive of Xalapa suggest that such a practice was judicially
frowned upon.
Of the sixteen cases in which minor children were sold with their
mothers, one case sheds light on what colonial authorities may have thought about selling
children. On April 11, 1607, the General Judge for the property of the deceased in
Xalapa, Licenciado Antonio Rodríguez, charged his subordinate, Justice of Commissary
Alonso Ordóñez, to carry out his order regarding the property of the late Bartolomé
González.171 Justice Ordóñez was to sell five of González’ slaves, two men (Pedro and
170
Patrick Carroll argues, “Until the eighteen century children were often separated from their
parents in this manner.” Carroll cites three cases: one in 1635, the second in 1641, and the final case in
1667. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 84. I found this not to be the case in the early-seventeenthcentury Xalapa. Including Carroll’s three cited cases, only seven children under the age of 10 were ever
sold away from both their mother and father in the entirety of the seventeenth century.
171
330
Manuel), two women (María and Lussia) and a child (Antón), to the ingenio owner
Francisco de Orduña all for the price of 1,850 pesos de oro común. General Judge
Antonio Rodríguez included a specific instruction to Justice Ordóñez with regard to
Antón, ordering that because Antón was a “niño” (boy), he should not be sold from his
mother María and that where she went he was to accompany her. Unfortunately, Antón’s
age has become the victim of the passage of time; the page is torn away at the top left
corner where his age had been documented.
Perhaps economic desperation led slaveowners to sell a child.
The notarial
archive suggests that these cases were rare in Xalapa even during the peak of the
importation of African slaves. The one case of Antón and María also demonstrates that at
least one high judge in the jurisdiction found it to be illogical, perhaps even distasteful, to
sell a young child away from his mother as the free parda Theresa Francisca Hernándes
did 100 years later in Córdoba. Many free women sold both male and female slaves and
purchased them when they could afford to take on the responsibility and risk that slaveowning entailed. However, Theresa’s case is unique in demonstrating an instance in
which free women also acted outside of the expected, normative behavior for
slaveowners. Rarely were minors sold away from their mothers in Xalapa. Even justices
thought to intervene when it became a possibility, such as the declaration that Antón and
his mother be sold together to prevent their separation. This cultural code may have been
much more pervasive in Xalapa than in Córdoba. While the two towns were both
situated in the central Veracruz region, they were distinctly founded and subsequently
developed on two very different paths with regard to slavery and free people of African
331
descent.172 Selling slave children without their mothers was not common in Xalapa,
which stresses the importance of jurisdictional specificity if a free woman near Córdoba,
but not a single free woman in Xalapa, sold a minor.
Free Men of African Descent and Slave-owning
The cases discussed offer singular displays of women who knew how to manage
skillfully their assets and their social circles. These cases are indeed exceptional during
the long-seventeenth century among people of African descent. 173 After reviewing
materials for all free men of African descent residing or conducting business in Xalapa
during the seventeenth-century, I found only three men cited as slaveowners.174 The
three cases offer three different types of slaveowner business. The first appeared before
the notary on April 21, 1618. Tomás Rodríguez, a mulato libre and vecino of Xalapa,
sold a slave to Diego Hernández del Hierro, a beneficiado of the district of Tlaculula.175
Tomás’ slave was a fifteen-year-old named Gabriel, a mulato criollo born in Xalapa.
Tomás sold Gabriel to beneficiado for 350 pesos de oro común.
The second case
involved the purchase of a slave. On May 17, 1620, a free mulato and vecino of Xalapa
named Andrés Ramírez bought a twenty-year-old negra slave named Catalina,
172
For an in-depth examination of the history of Africans in Córdoba, see: Naveda, Esclavos
negros en las haciendas azucareras de Córdoba.
173
Higgins finds that African-descended female slaveowners outnumbered men of African descent
in eighteenth-century Sabará, Brazil. She ties this phenomenon to the high manumission rates of women
compared to enslaved men. Higgins, Licentious Liberty, 82-83.
174
During the era of Spanish control of New Orleans, Kimberly Hanger establishes that Africandescended women slaveowners also outnumbered male slaveowners of African descent. She writes, “Why
female purchasers were so prevalent in the early years of Spanish rule is not clear; perhaps they had access
to greater cash or credit resources than males did.” Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 72. Further
research on African-descended men’s economic opportunities must be carried out to see whether this was
also the case for Xalapa.
175
332
purportedly from Angola.176 Andrés purchased Catalina from a widow named Isabel de
Maya, a resident of Xalapa, for 300 pesos de oro común.
The third and final case of a free man of African descent in Xalapa owning slaves
involves a more complicated story of family. On June 19, 1645, Juan Biafara, a free
negro and vecino of La Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz, bought a negra slave woman named
Magdalena for 360 pesos de oro común from a fellow vecino named Bernardo
Antonio.177 Nearly six months later, in January of 1646, Juan Biafara returned to the
notarial offices to register a trade he had contracted with Xalapa resident, Capitán Don
Sebastian de la Higuerra Matamoros.178 Juan agreed to hand over the aforementioned
Magdalena, in return for the freedom of one of Don Sebastian’s slaves, a forty-year-old
negra criolla named Leonor.179 Don Sebastian issued the carta de libertad to Leonor and
the matter was settled. The notarial authorities also noted an important detail about
Leonor: she was the wife of Pedro Biafara, Juan Biafara’s brother. It would appear as
though a family of African descent worked diligently to reunite.
The two entries
registered in Xalapa were the only pieces of notarial evidence that Juan Biafara and his
brother left likely because they were not vecinos or residents of the jurisdiction but of La
Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz. As such, it is unclear whether Juan sacrificed his one and
only slave, Magdalena, for his brother – or whether Juan Biafara bought the slave six
176
ANX, May 17, 1620, f 275vta - 276fte.
178
179
It is difficult to assess how common a practice this was. Hanger notes a case in which a sixtyyear-old female slave provided a young male slave to her owner in exchange for her own freedom.
However, she asserts, “Although the practice of substituting one slave for another in order to obtain
freedom was rare in New Orleans, it was customary in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and occasionally found in
other American slave societies.” Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 44.
177
333
months previously with the specific purpose of trading Magdalena for the freedom of his
brother’s wife.
Either option demonstrates a tremendous financial sacrifice on Juan Biafara’s
part. To put it into perspective, if Juan Biafara earned even the relatively high monthly
salary of ten pesos de oro común and was able to save three pesos de oro común a month
in order to buy a slave, then it still would have taken him a decade to accumulate the 360
pesos de oro común to purchase Magdalena in order to free his sister-in-law, Leonor.
Even if Juan and Pedro Biafara both earned thirty pesos de oro común a month and
collectively saved twenty pesos de oro común a month, together it still would have taken
them a year and half to save enough to buy a slave and make the trade with Capitán Don
Sebastian de la Higuerra Matamoros. This case demonstrates the complexity of identity
highlighted by the cases of women that I profiled in this chapter. The narrative of free
people going to great lengths to secure the freedom of their family members, including
pulling together economic resources available to any and all members, is well-established
in the historiography of slavery.
However, in the case of Juan Biafara, he both
perpetuated a system of involuntary servitude through his ownership of a slave while he
acknowledged the detriment of slavery to his own family in the enslavement of his
brother’s wife. The Biafara family’s predicament exemplifies the many ways in which
people of African descent had constantly to negotiate the tension of their identities both
as slaveowners and as women and men often intimately tied to slavery as family
members of enslaved laborers or as formerly enslaved people themselves.
334
Conclusion
Slave-owning accorded free women of African descent in Xalapa the opportunity
to access a greater cross section of society.
As they bought and sold slaves, they
interacted with professional slave traders from the Port, ingenio owners in the agricultural
peripheries of the jurisdiction, and elite and more modest slave owners in Xalapa.
Examining the practices of these women reveals how they understood and positioned
themselves as members of a particular slice of the populace, that of slave owners. Some
of the women were first-generation slaveowners while others benefitted from multigenerational involvement in the slave market. Owning slaves formed part of a broader
repertoire of elite activities in which free women engaged, including owning expensive
properties, managing their businesses, and offering dowries to their daughters. Being a
woman of African descent and being a slaveowner in the seventeenth-century were not
mutually exclusive identities, and the silences from colonial authorities regarding free
women owning slaves suggest that this phenomenon posed little or no threat to accepted
normative behavior. Few people of African descent partook in this economic activity,
which may have also influenced the near indifference that Spaniards expressed, at least
legally, towards this demographic. Xalapa was home to free women of African descent
who had owned slaves since the turn of the seventeenth century. This long history, along
with their limited numbers, created an environment in which free women enjoyed
significant opportunities in trade, business, and property ownership that enriched their
economic standing and social status.
335
Questions of economy motivated many of their activities as slave owners, such as
in the cases in which women sold slaves to invest in more real estate. Rarely did they
engage in socially unacceptable slave-owning practices, such as selling away minor
children. In many ways, free African-descended women demonstrated patterns similar to
those of Spanish elites who owned slaves and property. Women of African descent
acquired slaves as many others did: through donations, familial inheritances, and personal
purchase from acquaintances or regional slave traders. Some women owned separate
businesses that generated the economic capital that allowed them to continue to
participate in the slave trade. A few had advantageous patrons. How some women of
African descent came to be slaveowners will remain shrouded in the shadows of the
archives.
Notarial documents divulged only what they legally needed to and only
incidentally disclosed the nature of personal relationships and life experiences. However,
not all choices regarding their slaves appeared to be mobilized by purely economic
considerations, and these instances of variation documented by the notary public
communicate how both race and gender influenced the decisions of free women.
In “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott astutely argues, “[Historians must]
take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be
arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge
itself.”180 An examination of the production of notarial knowledge reveals that free
women of African descent who owned slaves worked within a prescribed narrative to
gain legal recognition of their public lives. Nonetheless, they had access to an apparatus
180
Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991), 797.
336
of truth-making to establish their own social legitimacy. From these documents alone, it
is challenging to deduce whether these women understood themselves as part of a larger
community of African-descended people of means, because casta categories were
assigned at the discretion of the notary public or his subordinates. The notarial footprints
that we do have access to, however, indicate that free women of African descent managed
the social markers of people of means and mirrored many elite preoccupations.
Slave-owning women of African descent were not merely colonial subjects being
acted upon but actors who found avenues to assert their own self-fashioned notarial lives
within the constraints of familiar formulae and tropes. They were not only forced into
“orderly” subjects through the regimen of notarial procedure; they made themselves
socially legible through the inclusion and exclusion of elements of their life stories and
tailored their own notarial truths.
María Yañez ensured to include that it was her
grandfather who had provided her with the female slave that she intended to free. The
detail of her grandfather’s name allowed for greater examination of a man who was a
wealthy Spaniard and a long-time resident of Xalapa, a detail that the notary public likely
knew when he registered this information in María’s case.181 Importantly, the inclusion
of this detail allowed María Yañez to claim her own social space by publicly identifying
her familial benefactor and aligning herself with a source of economic influence and
social legitimacy. In the case of María Nuñez, she noted that she was legitimately
married to Vicente Rodrígues but offered nothing in the way of identifying markers for
181
Burns discusses the importance of having a notary be familiar with the population of their
jurisdiction. She asserts, “Notaries were required to certify that they knew the people whose business they
recorded.” Burns, Into the Archive, 27.
337
him that would allow her to claim greater social legitimacy beyond the legitimacy of
marriage. Unlike María Yañez, María Nuñez was a slaveowner and a well-established
business owner, a business that is never referred to as a shared operation with her spouse.
María Nuñez claimed legitimacy through her economic activities, as did Petrona de
Arauz, a widow and single-mother of an hijo natural, who owned slaves and land and
negotiated the financially fraught relationship with her son’s Spanish family.
Although only a “kind of truth,” free women who owned slaves made sense of
their own unlikely position of power in seventeenth-century Xalapa. They exercised the
ability to be self-determining through slave ownership in ways that most subjects would
not because of their lack of economic resources and exclusion from certain professions
and trades.
They also experienced as slaveowners the power to determine the life
chances of other people. The case of the central protagonist, Polonia de Ribas, brings this
to the fore. As a woman of African descent who had neither husband nor legitimate
familial ties to claim, Polonia found social legitimacy through slave-owning. Polonia
owned a modest home and had no cited business other than hiring out her slaves. While
at least two of her slaves were her siblings, she held fast to the title of slaveowner. Not
manumitting slaves at peak-production years ensured that she would have fairly reliable
income if she had long-term contracts for the slaves.
Polonia’s decisions are economically understandable, but there remains a sense of
the “theater” of respectability in her case because of the familial connection to her slaves.
Although only a “kind of truth,” free women of African descent who owned slaves
offered the notary and his assistants only a fleeting glimpse into a world that was in
338
constant negotiation. These exceptional women engaged with as many as diverse actors
as New Spain had to offer and pushed agendas that highlighted questions of respectability
and social legitimacy when such matters were perceived to be the domain of the Spanish
elite. The free African-descended women who owned slaves during the long seventeenth
century in Xalapa demonstrate that they too deserve our consideration in this
historiographical discussion but with greater attention to how race influenced their
approaches in asserting and having legitimated their concerns about their finances, their
families, and their own social statuses. More than just a financial consideration, free
African-descended slaveowners, by virtue of their participation in the institution, could
position themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown in the theater of respectability, an
opportunity that might explain why our protagonist, Polonia de Ribas, engaged in slaveowning practices rarely discussed in the historiography of colonial Spanish America.
339
Conclusion
Mexico holds the distinction of laying claim to the first free town of the
Americas, Yanga. Long-time residents of the small central Veracruz town beam with
pride when they speak of their beloved founder, the African maroon leader Gaspar
Yanga, more commonly referred to as “El Negro Yanga.” While the town of Yanga is
not the original site of the maroon settlement that Yanga and his fellow escaped slaves
defended against Spanish troops (it was relocated from the mountainous terrain to the
Camino Real), it nonetheless serves as a source of esteem for the families who have lived
in the area for generations. A short walk from the town’s square, the municipality
founded a park dedicated to Gaspar Yanga with a statue of his “likeness.” Yanga stands
proudly with shackles and broken chains on his left wrist as he holds a palo of sugar cane
as his right hand lifts a machete defiantly in the air.
340
Image 1: Statue of Gaspar Yanga located in Yanga, Veracruz
The commemoration below the statue reads, “ ‘El Yanga’ black African, precursor to the
freedom of black slaves, founded this town of San Lorenzo Cerralvo (today Yanga) by
the power granted by Viceroy of New Spain Don Rodrigo Osorio, Marquez de Cerralvo,
on October 3, 1631.”
The statue was unveiled on August 10, 1976 and the final
engraving of the tribute boasts what all visitors to the town see from banners and
welcome signs: Yanga, “First Free Town of America.”
341
Yanga’s narrative looms large in the region.
A grand revolt in which enslaved
people fled their plantation, scavenged for survival, and spent years on defensive action
against Spanish-led troops set on dismantling their hard earned conclave of maroons that
had grown to include audacious women and men and even their families. In recent years,
Yanga has captured national and international recognition as it continues to celebrate
more than 400 years as “The First Free Town of the Americas.”1 Yanga’s annual
carnaval festivities, which have grown tremendously since its first congregation in 1976
organized by the town’s youth, have garnered notoriety as a lively destination for early
August.2 The municipality has made efforts to steer daytime activities to more cultural
and educational events, including symposia of national and international scholars
presenting on a wide range of topics from the history of “El Negro Yanga” to health care
concerns in a town surrounded by sugar cane for nearly four hundred years.
1
Leticia Sánchez, “Yanga: 400 años de independencia,” Milenio, January 6, 2009; Alfredo Grande
Solís, “Arranca la remodelación de la plaza Negro Yanga,” Esto, January 24, 2008; Jorge Hernández
Delfín, “Primer Festival de la Danza, en Yanga,” El Sol de Córdoba, September 23, 2008; Melchor Peredo,
“Los Muros Tienen la Palabra,” Diario de Xalapa, April 20, 2010; Julieta Riveroll, “Revela escritorio
historia Mexicana,” Reforma, June 9, 2007; Charles Henry C. Rowell, “ ‘El Primer Libertador de Las
Americas’/The First Libertator of the Americas,” Callaloo 31, no. 1 (2008): 1-11. There have been some
lively disputes about whether Yanga can claim this recognition as the first free town or whether it belongs
to the town of San Basilio in Colombia. The debate centers on documents that declare Yanga a Spanish
town in 1630 while other documents record 1631. José Alfredo Grande Solís, “El primer pueblo libre de
América,” El Sol de Córdoba, January 4, 2010.
2
Carnaval de Yanga’s first iteration took place on August 10, 1976. A group of youths from
Yanga, among them Beatríz Mendoza Díaz, Soledad Mendoza Díaz, Marcela Mendoza Díaz, Jorge
Martinez Díaz, María de Jesús Morales Martinez, Antonio Aguilar, Ubaldo Gordillo Trujillo, Miriam Páez,
León Díaz Villagómez, and Raul Nava, organized a costume party and then decided that since the costumes
turned out so well and it was the feast day of the Patron Saint of San Lorenzo, they also coordinated a
parade through the streets of Yanga, effectively starting the tradition of Carnaval de Yanga.
342
Image 2: Official Folk Dress of Yanga, Veracruz
While certainly not as incorporated into the national imaginary as Cortés or La
Malinche, Gaspar Yanga claimed a space for his story to be recorded by his
343
contemporaries, so much so that he is now commemorated through poetry,3 public works,
murals, academic colloquia, and even t-shirts and coffee mugs. Yanga’s accomplishment
was singular in the early seventeenth century. His group succeeded in securing freedom
and receiving official viceregal recognition by confronting the expected social order and
by negotiating for a legally sanctioned space by way of a treaty.
Yanga’s story embodies the experiences of free people who did not seek to
displace the Spanish social structure but chose to disrupt it when necessary, usually when
conditions became extraordinarily untenable for enslaved people. The recognition of
Yanga’s maroon settlement as a free town was exceptional, but the negotiation that
followed was not and had more in common with the more quotidian experiences of free
women of African descent less than 200 kilometers away in Xalapa. Yet their stories
have not yet become such a central component of local, regional, and national memory.
This dissertation has sought to begin to correct this imbalance, to make a series of
exceptional free women, beginning with Polonia de Rivas, a memorialized symbol.
Scholars have highlighted the turmoil of slave insurrections and maroons in
eastern central Veracruz compared with the relative tranquility found in Xalapa. 4
However, I see these as two manifestations of negotiation in the same system. While free
women made less dramatic entrances onto the notarial stage, their concerns and
3
In 2004, Alfonso Mendoza Sánchez, Yanga’s local poet laureate, self-published his collection of
poems dedicated to the town and its founder. Alfonso Mendoza Sánchez, Poesías, cuentos y relatos de mi
pueblo Yanga, Mexico: Registro Público del Derecho de Autor, 2004. On September 1, 2012, the
organizers of a cultural event held in Yanga called, “Soy El Pueblo que No Conoces” (“I am the Town that
You Do Not Know”), honored Alfonso Mendoza Sánchez for his contributions in uplifting Yanga through
poetry.
4
Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 93-111; Proctor, Damned Notions of Liberty, 14-17;
Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclavos en las haciendas azucareras de Córdoba, 113-146.
344
preoccupations were no less fraught and in many senses paralleled those of the residents
of Yanga. The people living in the maroon settlement-turned-sanctioned town presented
themselves as self-determining but not dramatically subversive. On March 24, 1608,
Yanga’s group outlined the conditions of a peace treaty that was presented by Fray
Balthasar de Morales to Viceroy Luis de Velasco II.5
Yanga and other leaders stipulated that in order for a treaty to be reached, they
had eleven conditions. Fourth among these was that no Spaniard be allowed to live or
stay in the town, with the exception of market days, and that the new location of the town
be of their choosing. They further stated that only Franciscan friars would be allowed to
minister in the town’s church and demanded the right to form a town council. Yanga and
the other maroons appeared very aware that such demands also required them to fulfill
Crown-centered obligations. The treaty also included terms that reimagined the former
slaves as the most loyal vassals who would pay tribute, return escaped slaves to their
owners, attend mass, and defend the lands of the colony “whenever Your Majesty has
need of [us].”6 That Yanga and his group likely owned slaves too and offered to track
down and return slaves of other owners in the region is not remarkable given that, as Jane
Landers argues, “the institution of slavery in Africa would suggest that Mexican maroons
would have no qualms about enslaving non-kin.”7 Like the women discussed in this
work, Yanga and his followers accepted the enslavement of other people of African
descent. Slavery, in other words, was an acknowledged norm for many free people of
5
Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free
Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives, Jane G. Landers and
Barry M. Robinson, eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 133.
6
Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen,” 133-134.
7
Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen,” 127.
345
means, even for those who had spent three decades fighting for their autonomy as a
maroon community.
Free women of African descent in Xalapa also aspired to the role of good and
loyal subject through slave-owning, involvement in other regional economies,
participation in the Church’s rites of passage, and the establishment of legitimate
families. Chapter One examined family as captured by parish record keepers that tell a
strikingly different story than previously documented. We know that the elaborate caste
system failed to maintain the color line.
The large mixed-race population in the
seventeenth century confirms this inability to prevent interracial affairs. However, high
rates of exogamous marriage had not been documented previously, demonstrating more
substantive interracial engagement in Xalapa than in other seventeenth-century sites with
a significant population of African descent.
Further, by first examining race to explore marriage partner choice, it became
clear that a racial analysis alone was far too limiting. The most significant trend outside
of race indicated that partners legitimately born to married parents often married one
another. The majority (nearly 62%) of all marriages involving African-descended people
in the early eighteenth century counted at least one partner of legitimate birth. In addition
to the prevalence of racial and legitimacy markers in the marriage records, I found
anecdotal evidence that suggests that factors such as shared life experiences, geographic
proximity, social networks, and economic mobility influenced marriage choice partners.
As standardized parish records do not offer the colorful disputes of marriage contracts
that document familial and betrothed disapproval of an intended spouse, we must still
346
broaden the scope of what qualified as important social markers.
While racial
designations likely influenced marriage choice in Xalapa, so did other categories of
difference and similarity. Other factors, which were only rarely documented in the
records examined in this study, such as age, occupation, and status as a feligres
(pashioner), may prove to be rewarding lines of exploration in other archives.
Families of African descent in the seventeenth century also demonstrated
significant investment in religious acculturation by attending to the baptisms and
confirmations of their children.
The data that I present establishes that African-
descended children were often born to parents united through legitimate marriage. It is
also of note that even for families not united by the dictates of the Church, most children
were still being raised by two parents, perhaps along with other kin.
Trends in
godparentage allow us to see that the vast majority of children were baptized by Spanish
sponsors, most of them women. While Xalapa’s indigenous population had declined by
nearly 90%, they still remained the numerical majority in the jurisdiction, with Spaniards
and African-descended people comprising the second and third largest demographics.
Yet few African-descended people contracted marriage with indigenous partners. Rarely
did indigenous women men serve as godparents for children of African descent. This
may mark racial antipathy, though there may be another plausible explanation. Most of
the indigenous majority lived in the agricultural periphery in the jurisdiction of Xalapa,8
while most of the Spanish and African-descended vecinos and transient residents lived
closer to the town’s square or the Camino Real. The limited experiences documented
8
Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 8-14.
347
between indigenous people and people of African descent do not allow for the creation of
an imagined landscape in which free, economically privileged women, engaged in the
same social spaces as indigenous people to have occasion to later marry or become
involved in child-rearing through the religious instruction of godchildren.
Through
marriage and the development of connections through godparentage, free people of
African descent formed varied groups of fictive kin and wide social networks that
included people from across Xalapa’s diverse landscape.
In Chapters Two and Three, we witnessed some of these patterns of interracial
associations extended out to the business realm. Notably, the primary notarial and social
networks of free women of means did not involve indigenous people, and for the most
part did not involve other people of African descent to whom they were not related.
Rather, these business circles were primarily made up of Spaniards. Free women were
active notarial actors, documenting both upsetting circumstances and enviable life
chances. For the women who had enslaved husbands or children, perhaps heartache
would pain them, but so would the debt they would become saddled with if they were
able to negotiate the purchase of freedom cards for their loved ones. Other women
owned properties and managed them well enough to pass them on to their children who
either continued the success or failed and had to sell the house or tract of land for a
pittance.
Free women with wealth were an elite group and they most often behaved as all
other people with wealth did: by requiring the assistance of apoderados to conduct
business for them, offering their daughters attractive dowries, and serving as financial
348
insurers for their family members. They and the local institutions also negotiated the
terms of their existence by circumventing some rules and completing ignoring others.
For instance, free women of African descent in Xalapa appeared to disregard some of the
sumptuary laws of which they were likely in violation. Law 28 from the Recopilación de
las Leyes de Indias reads,
No negra or mulata woman, free or slave, can wear gold, pearls, or silk.
But, if the free negra or mulata were married to an español man, she may
wear gold earrings with pearls, a choker, and velvet on the hem of the
skirt. They cannot wear crepe mantles or mantles of any other fabric,
except for capes that fall just below the waist. The penalty for violating
this law will result in the removal and forfeiture of the gold jewelry, silk
dresses, and mantel.9
A few of the women profiled throughout this work cited owning jewelry in the dowries
they offered their daughters or in their wills. By legally acknowledging their finery with
the notary, free African-descended women (and the notary himself) ignored a royal order
that was supposedly distributed widely in the colony.10 This suggests a broader social
structure that too ignored some of the race-based decrees of the time.
As women who owned jewelry, as well as homes, land, and slaves with
connections to the local and regional elite, they likely unknowingly violated viceregal
edicts. Xalapa’s residents probably did not question their rights to such finery because of
their capital, both economic and social. In Chapter Four, we explored the ways that
slave-owning affirmed these statuses. As high-cost and highly valued commodities, free
9
Spain, Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias, Seventh Book, Fifth Title, Ley
XXVIII, 325.
10
Much like other decrees, it is unknown how often they became common knowledge for everday
colonial subjects, but officials in the notarial office should have been well-versed in such matters. María
Elisa Velázquez notes that such sumptuary laws situated women as “juridically determined by the social
rank of their spouse,” but adds, “…in practice, these laws were rarely enforced.” Velázquez Gutiérrez,
Mujeres de origen africano, 337.
349
women who bought and sold slaves staked a claim in one of the region’s profitable
economic activities.
This social marker also differentiated them from the enslaved
population and offered social legitimacy that the freedom fighters of Yanga also sought.
This is the history of free women of African descent in colonial Xalapa. Some of
their stories chronicled the more truthful happenings of this group (purchasing a slave or
requesting the issuance of a poder). Other narratives appear to be more embellished.
The differences between the two are not always clear. Did the young woman of African
descent, raised and effectively adopted by an unrelated Spanish woman, really have
legitimately married parents? Or did she claim these absent parents to assert social
legitimacy? Did Polonia treat her half-brothers as she did her other slaves? The “notarial
truth” says that Polonia was indifferent to owning members of her own family as slaves.
However, the slaveowning practices in other parts of colonial Mexico demonstrated that
owners were invested in the spectacle and socio-economic status that slaves represented.
These kind of truths, legitimated through the notarial office, are important not necessarily
because of the truthfulness, but to witness how colonial subjects, both free women and
notaries, understood the importance of positionality. We know that some elite members
of Spanish America even attempted to forge documents and provide false witnesses to
alter their life stories to vie for claims to a legitimate heritage.11 As we witnessed here,
one free African-descended woman refused to allow her notarial truth to include any
reference to the more modest beginnings that her husband had already declared. While
this practice is largely seen as an elite phenomenon, we must consider that perhaps free
11
Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 273-275.
350
people of means, whether of the middling or wealthy sectors, felt the societal pressure to
present and have legitimized the narratives that best served the story they wanted
chronicled.
Free men may have taken more visible roles in the conquest era, but both women
and men played integral roles in the years that followed as Spain attempted to secure its
newly acquired American territories.12 Little is known about the everyday lives of
colonial subjects, regardless of race or status. Free people of African descent left an even
smaller archival footprint than most.
Restall importantly notes that, “Some black
conquistadors only made it into the historical record either because they were killed in
notable battles…or they killed a notable native ruler…” 13 Cases of free Africandescended women demonstrate their ability to navigate multiple identities in which race
and gender shifted in meaning. Through their stories, I looked to re-examine colonial
narratives of women, from which free women of African descent have largely been
excluded from the historiography but certainly not from the array of surviving historical
records that documented their complex lives.
This project began with a woman named Polonia de Ribas. I found the first
reference to her a decade before I realized that she would become my muse. As I
returned to the archives year after year, I uncovered more and more about a woman who
seemed completely out of place as a well-connected, wealthy, slave-owning mulata in
Xalapa. Polonia served as my initial protagonist, but I began to find other “Polonias.” I
12
Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1-20; Hugh Thomas, The Slave
Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (New York: 1997), 25-86; Landers, Black Society
in Spanish Florida, 7-9. Ruth Pike, “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 47 (1967): 344-59.
13
Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 192.
351
delved into the lives of these women who were most apparently marked socially by race
and gender, but also by multiple other identifiers. Their economic capital removed them
from the Spanish king’s idea of the loathed African vagabond “sin oficio.”14 These
women were integrated into various economies and well positioned with the social capital
they gained through their affiliations across class and race.
Census data from 1646 counted more than 150,000 free and enslaved Africans
and African descendants in Mexico.15 By 1810, the number of free people of African
descent alone had ballooned to 624,000, accounting for approximately ten percent of the
colony’s population.16 With more than half a million subjects and nearly three hundred
years of colonial history available in varying degrees across the colony left to uncover,
and likely equally as many stories to parse out, the field is ripe to broaden the
historiography, develop innovative methodologies, and apply new theoretical approaches.
This project sought to examine and challenge traditional narratives of racial
hierarchies, gendered mobility, and the navigation of interracial interactions during the
early and mid-colonial period of central Veracruz. Both the quantitative and qualitative
data demonstrate that analyses based on race alone are insufficient. For women of means
who navigated myriad social circles, managed wealth, and maintained connections with
elites, capital shaped their lives. Importantly, this capital was not limited to economic
opportunities. Awareness of different systems of knowledge and expectations (cultural
capital) and development of networks of people (social capital), which counted Afro 14
Without a job.
Aguirre Beltran, La población negra, 214-219.
16
Aguirre Beltran, La población negra, 232-234.
15
352
castas, Spaniards, mestizos, and a few indigenous people, shaped the experiences of
African-descended women in substantial and subtle ways. The ecclesiastical and notarial
records attest to interests in establishing and maintaining claims of respectability and
legitimacy, much in the same way that Gaspar Yanga and his flock did as they sought
official recognition from the viceroy of New Spain.
By focusing on capital-owning and capitalizing free women of African descent,
this dissertation serves as my “contribution to the personalization of black history in
Spanish America,” 17 with the hope that understudied subjects are brought into the
national imaginary. Perhaps Polonia de Ribas’s story does not carry the sensationalism
of Gaspar Yanga’s valiant efforts, but in order to understand the complex formations of
race and status in Mexico, my muse must become our memory.
17
Restall’s description of Peter Gerhard’s work on Juan Garrido. Restall, “Black Conquistadors,”
171-172.
353
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Biography
Danielle Terrazas Williams was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She attended Cornell University and earned a B.A. in Afro-Mexican Studies as a College
Scholar in May 2005 and earned an M.A. in History (January 2008) from Duke
University. Starting in Fall 2013, Danielle Terrazas Williams will begin a post-doctoral
fellowship at Princeton University.
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