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ABSTRACT
This article illuminates pivotal moments in the lives of eighteen—enslaved and free—African descent peoples listed as mulatto from 1732 to 1803 in New Spain’s north frontier. The records consulted reveal that both enslaved and free peoples employed the legal system to petition abuses and request transfers of ownership in places such as San Luis Potosí, Saltillo, Monclova, and San Antonio de Béjar, Texas. Two instances of manumission are detailed below. This article also highlights one escape from a semiliterate enslaved man who voluntarily returned to Saltillo, illuminating emotional ties to friends and family.
Acknowledgement
The author remains indebted to insights made by Michelle Honeybun, Jose Manuel Moreno Vega, Xochiquetzalli Cruz Martínez, José Javier Rodríguez Vallejo, Rachel O'Toole, and Donald Chipman.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Archivo Municipal de Saltillo (hereafter AMS), PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, fols. 9; I have altered the spelling of Ysidoro as found in the document (see ) to the more accessible Isidoro. The 1790 criminal record does not provide any information about Isidoro’s ethnicity. However, the census of 1777 lists Isidoro as mulato. See Martha Durón Jiménez, Elsa de Valle Esquivel, and M. del Rosario Villarreal Rodríguez, eds., Censo: Villa de Santiago de Saltillo Año 1777 (Monterrey, N.L.: Grupo Impresores Unidos, S.A. de C.V., 2015), 48.
2 Born in Spain, don Rafael became an elite member of colonial society. He held the post of administrator of mails for decades. He was also in the military. He attained the rank of captain of the Second Squadron of the Dragoons of Santiago. Leslie S. Offutt, Saltillo, 1770–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 168–69. For don Rafael’s rank, see AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 1r; AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, ff. 2v-3r.
3 Isidoro provided the signature ‘I Isidoro’ (yo ysidoro) to ratify his recorded testimony. Whether Isidoro was fully literate remains difficult to discern from case testimony. Testimony makes no mention of personal writings, letters, or work contracts that would necessitate added literacy.
4 For an overview of the north frontier, Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); For African descent peoples in southern New Spain, Anderson Hagler, ‘Exhuming the Nahualli: Shapeshifting, Idolatry, and Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico,’ The Americas 78, no. 2 (April 2021): 197–228.
5 Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas, ‘The Slave Trade to Latin America: A Historiographical Assessment’ in Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews, eds., Afro-Latin American Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 33.
6 The first two cases surveyed occurred in 1732 and 1746. The remaining ten occurred during the Bourbon Reforms. These ten cases cover the following years: 1759, 1774, 1777, 1778 (2 cases), 1783, 1790, 1791, 1792, and 1803/04.
7 John C. Super, ‘Querétaro Obrajes: Industry and Society in Provincial Mexico, 1600–1810,’ The Hispanic American Historical Review 56, no. 2 (1976): 197–216; Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclavos Negros En Las Haciendas Azucareras de Cordoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830 (Xalapa, Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987); Richard Salvucci, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539–1840 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Manuel Miño Grijalva, ‘El Obraje Colonial,’ European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, no. 47 (1989): 3–19; J. Arturo Motta Sánchez and Abigaíl Meza Peñaloza, ‘La reproducción de la población esclava del ingenio de San Nicolás Ayotla, Oaxaca, siglo XVIII,’ Estudios de Antropología Biológica 10, no. 2 (2010); Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Laura A. 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); Frank T. Proctor III, Damned Notions of Liberty: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531–1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
8 I draw insights from Fuente and Gross’s comparative study, which illuminates how communities of enslaved peoples harnessed colonial law to ameliorate their circumstances in disparate locales such as Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia. Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–9.
9 Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila (hereafter AGEC), FC, c 25, e 18, ff. 4.
10 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 22f.
11 AMS, PM, c17, e3, 26f.
12 AMS, PM, c30, e6, 6f.
13 AGEC, FC, c10, e45, 9f.
14 AGEC, FC, c10, e45, 9f.
15 AGEC, FC, c10, e45, 1f.
16 AGEC, FC, c10, e45, 4f.
17 AGEC, FC, c10, e45, 5f.
18 Proctor III, Damned Notions of Liberty, 154; Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), 217.
19 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 242–55; 281–82; James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 90–93; Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 122–25; Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, 41–49; 155–60.
20 For the Bourbon Reforms, see Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17–20.
21 José Cuello, ‘The Economic Impact of the Bourbon Reforms and the Late Colonial Crisis of Empire at the Local Level: The Case of Saltillo, 1777–1817,’ The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 301–23.
22 Oakah L. Jones, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).
23 For an overview of the Spanish Borderlands, David J. Weber, ‘John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands: Retrospect and Prospect,’ Journal of the Southwest 29, no. 4 (1987): 331–63.
24 Notable studies include Hilary McD Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (Rutgers University Press, 1989); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: The Anglo-Jamaican World of Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves, 1750–1786 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black; Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).
25 Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1997), 21–22; Susan M. Deeds, Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 39–42.
26 Ross Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
27 No veins of silver were found in Saltillo. However, local farmers and stockmen supplied nearby mining areas, hence the demand for slave labor. Offutt, Saltillo, 1770–1810, 2–3.
28 Individual acts can provoke society at large. For one case of bestiality in New Mexico, see Anderson Hagler, ‘Archival Epistemology: Honor, Sodomy, and Indians in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico,’ Ethnohistory 66, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 515–35.
29 Trouillot reminds scholars that ‘Everything can become resistance to the point that we are not sure whether or not the word stands for an empirical generalization, an analytical category, or a vague yet fashionable label for unrelated situations.’ See, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘In the Shadow of the West: Power, Resistance and Creolization in the Making of the Caribbean Region,’ in Wim Hoogbergen, Born Out of Resistance: On Caribbean Cultural Creativity (Utrecht: ISOR, 1995), 9; Johnson eloquently notes the problems surrounding the conflation of agency with resistance. See Walter Johnson, ‘On Agency,’ Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (September 5, 2003): 115–16; For an overview of debates among scholars, Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,’ Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (ed 2004): 339–69; Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall, eds., Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009).
30 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 1, 38.
31 Proctor III, Damned Notions of Liberty, 184.
32 Proctor III, 184.
33 Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, 4.
34 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 55f.
35 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 8f.
36 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 9f.
37 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 10f.
38 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 11f.
39 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 21f.
40 ‘servidumbre perpetua’ AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 30f.
41 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 54f.
42 AGEC, FC, c2, e37, 8f.
43 AGEC, FC, c2, e37, 1f.
44 ‘dicha mulata que es de color corcho y pelo crespo’ AGEC, FC, c2, e37, 1f.
45 AGEC, FC, c2, e37, 8f.
46 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 5f.
47 This record does not provide Joseph’s ethnic designation; AMS, PM, c35, e25, 1f.
48 A man named don Joseph Sotelo.
49 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 1f.
50 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 3f.
51 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 3f.
52 ‘que la madre es de color más retinto que la hija.’ AMS, PM, c35, e25, 5f; Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Local authorities investigated bloodlines before a marriage as well as the professional and social claims made by each party. See Ramon A. Gutierrez, ‘Honor Ideology, Marriage Negotiation, and Class-Gender Domination in New Mexico, 1690–1846,’ Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (1985): 81–104; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets.
53 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 5f.
54 AMS, PM, c35, e25, 5f.
55 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors; Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
56 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 60f.
57 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 1r.
58 Charles IV’s Royal Instruction of 1789, stated that masters should not administer more than twenty-five lashes, preferably with a ‘soft instrument.’ Richard Konetzke, Colección de Documentos Para La Historia de La Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810., vol. 3 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 647–48.
59 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 1v.
60 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 1r.
61 AMS, PM, c22, e23, 4r; Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 79–82.
62 AMS, PM, c22, e2, 17r.
63 I draw much from Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Sean F. McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Arturo Guevara Sánchez, El Nomadismo En La Comarca Lagunera: Siglos XVII y XVIII (Saltillo: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2009).
64 AGEC, FC, c14, e48, 55f.
65 AGEC, FC, c11, e18, 15f.
66 AGEC, FC, c11, e18, 5f.
67 AGEC, FC, c11, e18, 8f.
68 AGEC, FC, c11, e18, 14f.
69 Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain, 26–27.
70 Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclavos Negros En Las Haciendas Azucareras de Cordoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830.
71 Durón Jiménez, Valle Esquivel, and Villarreal Rodríguez, Censo: Villa de Santiago de Saltillo Año 1777, 48.
72 Durón Jiménez, Valle Esquivel, and Villarreal Rodríguez, 48.
73 Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain, 27.
74 Durón Jiménez, Valle Esquivel, and Villarreal Rodríguez, Censo: Villa de Santiago de Saltillo Año 1777, 48.
75 For the role of Protector of Indians, see Charles R. Cutter, The Protector De Indios in Colonial New Mexico, 1659–1821 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).
76 AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 1r.
77 Bigamy cases show skilled mulattoes who used their trades to relocate and remarry. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, 185–89.
78 For procedural law, Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
79 The 1777 census lists Rodríguez Hacienda as being 1.75 leagues from Saltillo. Durón Jiménez, Valle Esquivel, and Villarreal Rodríguez, Censo: Villa de Santiago de Saltillo Año 1777, 133. Calculating leagues into miles remains difficult as there was no single standard. Alexander states that one league equaled approximately four kilometers (or 2.49 miles), roughly the distance one could walk in an hour. Rani T. Alexander, Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán: An Archaeological Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).
80 AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 2v.
81 The case states ‘y que en Zacatecas estuvo trabajando en la mina del conejo, un mes y ocho días.’ AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 2v.
82 AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 2v.
83 Isidoro’s case shows that a single individual fulfilled multiple roles in his lifetime. See Proctor ‘Slave Rebellion and Liberty in Colonial Mexico,’ in Vinson III and Restall, Black Mexico, 23.
84 Parras is approximately 85 miles west of Saltillo.
85 AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 3r.
86 The case states ‘de mi pedimento;’ AMS, PM, caja 42/1, exp. 47, f. 5r.
87 Juan Pedro Viqueira Alban, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999).
88 ‘color negro fino;’ AGEC, FC, c25, e18, 1f.
89 AGEC, FC, c25, e18, 3f.
90 AGEC, FC, c25, e18, 1f.
91 AGEC, FC, c25, e18, 2f.
92 For ‘transcolonial’ slave trade, Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas, ‘The Slave Trade to Latin America,’ in Fuente and Andrews, Afro-Latin American Studies, 33.
93 Slaveholders in sixteenth-century Havana held similar reservations about disfigurement. See Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 148–49.
94 AGEC, FC, c25, e18, 4f.
95 AGEC, FC, c15, e17, 4f.
96 Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810.
97 AGEC, FC, c15, e17, 1f.
98 AGEC, FC, c15, e17, 3f.
99 AMS, PM, c 17, e 3, ff. 26.
100 Miguel Cavasos’s casta designation remains ambiguous. Although Miguel refers to himself as Spanish (español), don Juan deems Miguel to be either ‘lobo’ or ‘mestizo.’ AMS PM, c 17, e 3, ff. 26; According to contemporary notions of taxonomy a lobo, literally wolf, was the offspring of a negro and india. A mestizo was the offspring of a Spaniard and a Native person. See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 11–18; Colonial officials blamed male cigarette rollers for ills afflicting the community due to their alleged shiftlessness, truancy, and penchant for drink. Susan Deans-Smith, ‘The Working Poor and the Eighteenth-Century Colonial State,’ in William H. Beezley, Cheryl E. Martin, and William E. French, eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1994), 55.
101 Recogimiento directly related to morality as colonial society believed women who failed to maintain enclosure tacitly gave permission for sexual encounters. Lipsett-Rivera, Gender, 77; Elite families hid illegitimate pregnancies by keeping the mother indoors for the entire gestation period. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 66–73.
102 AMS, PM, c 17, e 3, ff. 26.
103 Twinam notes that many couples in the eighteenth-century pledged matrimony and became ‘sexually intimate before they wed; some lived together openly and produced children before they finally tied the knot.’ See, Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 38.
104 AMS, PM, c 17, e 3, ff. 26.
105 For an overview of honor, see Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
106 Anna’s predicament corroborates Twinam’s assertion that ‘sexual intimacy did not damage a woman’s honor if there were promise of an eventual [marriage] ceremony.’ Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 39.
107 AGEC, FC, c11, e3, 6f.
108 De Croix served in his capacity as commander in chief of the Comandancia General of the Interior Provinces from 1776–1783. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 225; Alfred Barnaby Thomas, Teodoro de Croix and the Northern Frontier of New Spain 1776–1783 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1941).
109 AGEC, FC, c11, e3, 5f.
110 AGEC, FC, c11, e3, 6f.
111 Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
112 Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
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Anderson Hagler
Anderson Hagler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Religion, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI 49008-5320, USA. Email: [email protected].