Enlightenment Peru to Liberal Madrid: Images of Africans and Early Hispanic Anti-Slavery Discourse

This poster session explores the visibility and invisibility of Afro-Peruvians in the utopian plan for reform created by Bishop Martinez Compañón in late-eighteenth-century Trujillo, Peru. Martínez Compañón was a classic Bourbon Bishop of the Hispanic Enlightenment, a dedicated civil servant who engaged in a wide array of political economy reforms and natural history investigations. This poster session is based on a select group of the 1,372 watercolors he commissioned from local artisans that depicted the people, plants, and animals of his bishopric. Of this vast array of images, only 12 feature people of African descent. However, the Bishop's own population statistics show that during his tenure in Trujillo, people of African descent outnumbered Spanish and Indians three to one in the bishopric's main city, and that there were also large African populations throughout the coastal regions, where slaves had been imported to work on sugar plantations. Why are the people of African descent invisible in Martínez Compañón's portrait of Trujillo? The posters of “Not Indians, Not Spanish” will invite viewers to explore and discuss unique watercolor images where Africans appear as domestic servants, as slaves, and carnival dancers. Viewers will be invited to discuss what the images might convey about the ideal place of people of African descent in the reformed, enlightened, Trujillo the Bishop sought to create.