Between Kinship and Patronage: Women's Manumission in Colonial Peru

In 1719, Ana de la Calle composed her will in the northern Peruvian provincial town of Trujillo. She identified herself as a free woman of color from the Yoruba-speaking interior of West Africa’s Bight of Benin. By excavating her extraordinary life from notary and judicial records, this paper posits that enslaved and free women of color were central in the coastal commercial trade in alcohol and foodstuffs along the Pacific corridor between Panama and Lima. Leveraging their material worth, women of color asserted their households were as honorable as those of the slaveholders even if they worked in the streets and ports of the Pacific coast.

The implications of this paper are two-fold. First, if women of color rather than African-descent men overwhelmingly could pay for their freedom and those of their relatives (as argued by Christine Hünefeldt and Kimberly Hanger), this paper suggests that they did so based on their extensive—and profitable—networks. Second, Yoruba-speaking women and others played a particularly powerful spiritual role among African and African-descent communities who composed over half of the Pacific coastal populations. Women of color, indeed African women, constructed their own spiritual economy (as coined by Kathryn Burns) that hinged on their interpretations of colonial honor rooted in profit and not descent that accompanied their rise in commercial power. Known as “Mama Anica” to her household, the example of Ana de la Calle demonstrates how commercial power and spiritual reputation hinged on each other among a larger community of free people of color of the Pacific coast. Lastly, the paper traces her networks, contacts, and relationships to demonstrate that kinships, credit, and honor among people of color rather than patronage to slaveholders powered the growth and vibrancy of freed populations in the coastal Andes.