“Lo empezó a Conocer en Su Tierra”: Africans and Their Descendants in the Marriage Files of Montevideo, 1768–1804

Marriage files contain rich data on the routes of Africans through slave trades across the Americas and the Atlantic. These files indicate the origin of the groom, bride, and witnesses. Thus, they reveal patterns of geographical mobility and networks created by common experiences. Marriage files can be easily quantified and each one is a unique story, a pattern that allows us to analyze hundreds of individual lives. This source provides a new route to examine the interconnections between the experiences of generations of Africans and their descendants in late-colonial Montevideo, and the social ties that subsequently developed out of these experiences. These files can be subjected to quantitative analysis which reveals the shared itineraries of the spouses and witnesses, and how these itineraries changed over time. Each marriage file is a short story, too. Close reading of these stories contextualizes the experiences of slaves and underscore common patterns of relationships in ways that lie outside techniques of quantification. This study shows how the routes trough which enslaved Africans arrived in Montevideo were reflected in the marriage files, and how these captives created networks based on their experience as shipmates.