History

This article celebrates and explores the current historiography on colonial Afro-Latin Americans in the Spanish Americas to illuminate how scholars can continue to develop their methodological approaches to recuperating enslaved and free agency. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's distinction between historical actors and purposeful subjects, the essay suggests that even within slavery, men and women of African descent were able to contest slaveholding, develop their own standards within racial hierarchies, claim subject positions as Catholics, and lay claim to freedom. By asking questions regarding African-descent defined objectives, scholars have begun to allow Africans and their descendants to articulate interior selves. evaluating when enslaved or freed people adapted to slaveholding and racial paradigms. In turn, historians who emphasize structural force tend to essentialize means of resistance, measuring success based on the dismantling of the structure of slavery, rather than considering the multiple factors constituting enslaved and freed experiences.

On a Sunday of rest in 1662, three enslaved men from today's Guinea-Bissau disrupted the dancing and drumming on a sugar hacienda along the northern coast of Peru. Witnesses reported that these enslaved men, who were known as brans, demanded that a group of criollo and other African men (born in west or southwestern Africa) cease to play. One of the brans confessed at trial that he and his companions wanted to play and had been rebuffed by the American-born criollo owner of the drum. 1 As a result of this rejection, the three spoke their language together and destroyed the drum. Then they returned later to assault the drummers and kill the owner of the instrument. Seeking restitution for their wounded and murdered criollo slaves, slaveholders filed a criminal suit against the brans. The African origins of the accused were not significant to the slaveholders who took legal action to recover the value of their human property. Nevertheless, the three enslaved men acted collectively, suggesting their diasporic affinities.

Resumen En este artículo sostengo que en el contexto de la esclavitud en la costa peruana, los llamados bran articularon una identidad pluricultural que era a la vez reconocible, conflictiva e incluso sorprendentemente adaptable. Al hacer el seguimiento de aquellos llamados bran desde Guinea-Bissau al Perú colonial, reconfiguro las fronteras " transnacionales " que separan la historiografía latinoamericana y la africana, así como la etnicidad compleja como un denominador constante de la identidad moderna temprana. Muestro cómo el accionar de los hombres esclavizados no siempre fue de resistencia a la esclavitud, sino de conflicto entre sí y con otras personas subalternas en aplicaciones particulares de las prácticas de Guinea-Bissau.

By contrasting how families who mobilized African-descent networks gained more autonomy than those who relied on slaveholder patronage, this article explores the interplay between kinship and manumission on the northern Peruvian coast from the mid-seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. For enslaved and freed people, kinship did not constitute a status, but a series of exchanges that required legal or public recognition and mutual acknowledgment. Manumission was embedded in articulated kinships, or announced relations, as well as in silenced kinships that often occurred because owners refused to recognize their relationships with enslaved women. In the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo, María de Segura gained her legal freedom in 1670, the same time as her sons. 1 With her husband, Segura ran a number of pulperı´as, or corner stores, in Trujillo and in the port of Huanchaco, and supervised warehouses of goods from ships that plied routes northward to Guayaquil and Panama or southward to Lima and Chile. 2 Their children and grandchildren, who were not born into slavery, would be known as free people of color and honorable descendants of legitimate marriages. Freedom and kinship intertwined as the family's honorable reputation grew, along with their increasing distance from legal enslavement. Bondage also joined with kinship. The family's economic success appeared to coincide with María de Segura's continued involvement with a former owner who declared her children to be ''like his sons.'' 3 At the same time, the slaveholder's simultaneous kinship and patronage hindered the Segura family members who were perpetually marked as ex-slaves and tied into new relations of dependency. Out of slavery, but still grappling with its costs, María de Segura and her husband still served their former slaveholder through the exchange of mutual favors and obligations. If family ties facilitated freedom, then, kinship arrangements with previous slaveholders rewarded freed people of color and their descendants while tying them into new terms of servitude. By contrasting how families who mobilized African-descent networks gained more autonomy than those who relied on slaveholder patronage (such as the Seguras), this article explores the interplay between kinship and manumission. Scholars have emphasized how marriage choices or

Este artículo explora la manera en que una "morena libre" de casta lucumí, Ana de la Calle, se identificó en Trujillo, Perú, en el temprano siglo dieciocho, y destaca el carácter intersticial de las identidades de la diáspora africana en la Hispanoamérica colonial. Explicando cómo términos de casta, como lucumi, marcaron un estatus elevado en un mundo atlántico, el articulo subraya la manera en que mujeres esclavizadas construyeron sus identidades adentro y más allá de la esclavización.

This chapter argues that although colonial authorities and church officials in the Iberian Americas limited Afro-Latin American participation in Catholic religious practices, men and women of the African Diaspora shaped colonial Latin American Catholicism. The Iberian Crowns, as well as early modern colonial clerics, profited from the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. As a major financial and political institution of the early modern world, the Catholic Church participated in and developed the idea that black people could be sold and purchased because of their racial identity. Furthermore, early modern clerics, as well as the Spanish Crown, engaged in a Foucauldian governmentality of incorporation and control that included Afro-Latin Americans, enslaved and free, as Catholic subjects. Nevertheless, men and women of the African Diaspora in colonial Latin America employed Church structures to organize their communities. Africans and their descendants placed the worship of black saints at the center of colonial municipal celebrations and called on Iberian ecclesiastical courts to de fend their families against the definitions of property by slaveholders. As a result, Afro-Latin Americans played a central role in the formation and development of Latin American Catholicism.