Spanish Caribbean Frontiers and Transatlantic Alliances

The frontier space of the 17th-century Caribbean was an ideal space for creating Trans-Atlantic alliances and identities. This paper will compare the experiences of several groups of people who were migrants or residents in Spanish Caribbean port cities—such as Cartagena de Indias, St. Domingo, and Havana--to explore the ways that the rhetoric of the One True Faith (Catholicism) gave marginalized groups the opportunity to build international alliances that would protect them and connect them to the majority Spanish colonial community. First, Protestant merchants and mariners from Northern European nations looking to trade with the Spanish (legally or illegally) often used the Church and Inquisition's procedural opportunities for public conversion to Catholicism to safeguard their personal safety in these Catholic enclaves, or relied on the support of local mercantile connections to overlook their Protestantism and represent their commonalities as whites, as Christians, as individuals serving the market needs of the community. Second, I will compare how enslaved blacks serving in the households of those foreign merchants learned to employ both legal and rhetorical strategies to try control their own fates. Slaves also expressed their attachment to Catholicism as a way to build meaningful transnational identities, identities that might become useful in the case that merchant owners decided to leave the city (where slaves may have developed relationships with locals) or threatened punishments that removed the slave from his or her affective ties. This paper shows how slaves learned to take advantage not only of religious refuge laws promulgated by the Spanish crown, but used the religious norms of Spanish colonial society and the precarious space of international merchant agreements to assert their choice of community dominance.