Monday, January 5, 2009: 11:20 AM
Clinton Suite (Hilton New York)
The paper analyzes slave women’s judicial complaints about sexual violence in late colonial Spanish America (1760-1821). Spanish law enfranchised slaves to litigate, and court notaries recorded the depositions of slaves and other litigants. Archived judicial depositions have become important sources for recent historical studies. This paper draws on court cases found in Central America’s archives, and cases described in historiography on Mexico and Peru.
The paper shows that behaviors documented in case law were not always anticipated in code laws on slavery and sexuality. For their part, the colonial judges exercised significant leeway. Although judicial rulings seem to have been unpredictable, they sometimes reflect a surprising degree of benevolence.
Remarkably, the Central American courts tended to grant emancipation to slaves who could prove that it had been promised to them. As part of this pattern, a number of slave women sued for manumission on grounds that their master (or another man) had promised them liberty in exchange for sex. Although not all these men used physical force, their manipulations were empowered by the violence that underwrote Atlantic World slavery. Yet individual men and women engaged in these bargains were using strategies specific to the conditions of the Spanish American courts—conditions apparently well-known among the populace.
Historians have recognized that early modern Spanish law was more reactive than activist, but slave women’s appeals about sexual violence demonstrate an arena in which the judicial system did intervene, albeit in unintended ways. While the courts did not fuel the violent/coercive acts studied in this paper, popular understandings of judicial practice shaped the perpetrators’ strategies of coercion and shaped the women’s strategies in dealing with both aggressors and the courts.
The paper shows that behaviors documented in case law were not always anticipated in code laws on slavery and sexuality. For their part, the colonial judges exercised significant leeway. Although judicial rulings seem to have been unpredictable, they sometimes reflect a surprising degree of benevolence.
Remarkably, the Central American courts tended to grant emancipation to slaves who could prove that it had been promised to them. As part of this pattern, a number of slave women sued for manumission on grounds that their master (or another man) had promised them liberty in exchange for sex. Although not all these men used physical force, their manipulations were empowered by the violence that underwrote Atlantic World slavery. Yet individual men and women engaged in these bargains were using strategies specific to the conditions of the Spanish American courts—conditions apparently well-known among the populace.
Historians have recognized that early modern Spanish law was more reactive than activist, but slave women’s appeals about sexual violence demonstrate an arena in which the judicial system did intervene, albeit in unintended ways. While the courts did not fuel the violent/coercive acts studied in this paper, popular understandings of judicial practice shaped the perpetrators’ strategies of coercion and shaped the women’s strategies in dealing with both aggressors and the courts.