Don Carlos Chimo of Peru and Rupturing the Boundaries of Spanish Empire

For African and African-descent people of the Pacific cities along the Peruvian coast, the vibrant regional economy offered the possibility of freedom. During the late seventeenth century, local and intra-colonial merchants and traders moved wheat, sugar, and cattle through the cities of Trujillo, Piura, and Guayaquil to connect the markets of the viceregal capital of Lima to the Caribbean gateway of Panama. Along with indigenous muleteers and marketers, enslaved and free women and men worked as sailors, laborers, and traders.

With access to the courts and the markets of these Pacific ports, urban, enslaved women were more likely to gain manumission from slaveholders than their rural counterparts. Other historians have documented these same trends of manumission in the colonial Americas (Karasch 1987; Lauderdale Graham 2002; Childs 2006). Women were more likely than men to secure legal freedom and urban women were more likely than rural women to manumit themselves and their families (Hünefeldt 1994; Hanger 1997; Higgins 1999). More than in rural environs, cities hosted markets, encouraged credit, and brought together patronage networks that suggest port cities’ unique possibilities to enslaved and free people of color.

The paper will examine how women and men were subject to and, in turn, negotiated the gendered language of paternalism in urban arenas in order to secure manumission. Slaveholders were motivated by profit to free enslaved people, but also by their construction of affective ties to enslaved members of their households. Depending on their status as mothers or fathers, wives or husbands, enslaved people capitalized these relations to gain access to urban courts and notaries. Employing civil disputes and notarial records, the paper will demonstrate how freedom and slavery constituted overlapping webs of debts, family ties, and dignity as articulated by claims between owners and slaves in Peru’s Pacific ports.