Liberta by Trade: Negotiating the Terms of Unfree Labor in Gradual Abolition Buenos Aires (1820s-30s) (original) (raw)

Free Womb Law, legal asynchronies and migrations. Rio de la Plata 1810-1860

The Americas, 2020

This article analyzes in depth the history of Petrona, an enslaved woman sold in Santa Fe (Argentina), sent to Buenos Aires and later possibly to Montevideo (Uruguay). By reconstructing her case, the article demonstrates how the legal status of enslaved persons was affected by the redefinitions of jurisdictions and by the forced or voluntary crossings between political units. This study also shows the circulation and uses of the Free Womb law in Argentina and Uruguay and traces legal experts’ debates over its meaning. At the same time, it reflects on the knowledge enslaved people had of those abolitionist norms and how they used them to resist forced relocations, attempt favorable migrations, or achieve full freedom. The article crosses analytical dimensions and historiographies—legal, social, and political— and articulates them by reflecting more broadly on these factors: the impact of the revolution of independence on enslaved persons’ lives, the scarce circulation of abolitionist public discourse in Río de la Plata, the gendered bias of the process, and the central yet untold uses of antislavery rhetoric in the national narratives.

"Pacified Indians' and the legal fight against enslavement at the crossroad between free and unfree labour conditions (Charcas, 16th -18th centuries)". Labor History. Routledge: Taylor & Francis group.

Labor History, 2019

The captivity, trafficking and labour exploitation of indigenous people from the southern Lowlands of the Andes, in the Real Audiencia de Charcas, and the fate of their descendants in the colonial period, are studied here through individual histories as well as the legislation and its application. When observing diverse experiences of captives, the author considers that these cannot be understood through the slavery-freedom dichotomy or through the use of the language of ethnification, but rather it is necessary to reflect on other more complex phenomena such as non-free work, related to the legal status of the person in the colonial order. This reflection addresses the vulnerability of captives and their descendants to the paterfamilias, but also reveals the ability they showed to enforce their rights before the courts. This historiographical look invites us to observe the complexity of social and labour relations, reminding us that people, in their daily practices, transform the meaning of the denominations imposed by political power.

Free Womb Law, Legal Asynchronies, and Migrations

The Americas, 2020

This article analyzes in depth the history of Petrona, an enslaved woman sold in Santa Fe (Argentina), sent to Buenos Aires and later possibly to Montevideo (Uruguay). By reconstructing her case, the article demonstrates how the legal status of enslaved persons was affected by the redefinitions of jurisdictions and by the forced or voluntary crossings between political units. This study also shows the circulation and uses of the Free Womb law in Argentina and Uruguay and traces legal experts’ debates over its meaning. At the same time, it reflects on the knowledge enslaved people had of those abolitionist norms and how they used them to resist forced relocations, attempt favorable migrations, or achieve full freedom. The article crosses analytical dimensions and historiographies—legal, social, and political— and articulates them by reflecting more broadly on these factors: the impact of the revolution of independence on enslaved persons’ lives, the scarce circulation of abolitionist...

As if she were free: A collective biography of women and emancipation in the Americas (book review)

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

, ISBN 9781108737036 This book seeks to provide a deeper understanding of how enslaved and free(d) women imagined and built individual and collective projects of freedom in the Americas, and how they disputed, transformed, and enlarged the very meaning of freedom in the process. The four parts of the work refer to particular periods: the rise of slavery, its expansion, emancipation, and post-emancipation. Each of the 24 chapters presents a biography focusing on recovering (mostly) African and African descendant women's agencythat is, creative thinking and strategic actionin liberation projects encompassing multiple levels and dimensions of life and society. Historical maps, copies of letters, court documents, and illustrations included in the text enrich the life stories and reduce the distance between the women whose lives are depicted and the reader. The book adopts an ambitious time framefrom the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuryand broad geographic extensionregions of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English colonization in North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The chapters portray women fighting for freedom for themselves, their families, and their communities. Law, literature, spirituality, philanthropy, social connections and networks, and wealth were their tools to subvert the racial order and patriarchy. They fought in the courts, in the streets, and on battlefields to ensure manumission, national independence, secure rights, and reach equality and full citizenship as they saw themselves as entitled, even though racism and patriarchy legally or de facto stated otherwise. The biographical approach succeeds in uncovering marginalized voices and their understanding of what freedom meant. Whether or not the women succeeded in their original intents, read as a whole, their stories tell of definitions of freedom, aspects, and experiences of liberation struggles that remain obscured by male-centered and masculinist historical records and academic narratives. Challenges and constraints to Black women's liberation were (and are) several and multilayered; gender roles, slavery, and poverty meant that they tended to establish close ties to family and community. By centering African and African-descendant women as subjects of history, the book defines freedom as 'surveilled, contingent, and endangered' (77), which means it could only be achieved 'in degrees' (28). Also, piecing together the biographies allows the reader to step away from the traditional conception of freedom as an essentially individual status and permanent state. As the chapters show, protecting a child from slavery, granting future ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES

The Bonds of Kinship, the Ties of Freedom in Colonial Peru

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