Friday, January 7, 2011: 10:10 AM
Great Republic Room (The Westin Copley Place)
This paper examines the twofold condition of black leaders –subaltern elite– in late-colonial and early-independent Argentina and Uruguay, and shows how the formation of leaderships reshaped the collective identities of Afro-descendants. I follow a biographical approach to study these exceptional personages. In colonial and early-independent Latin America, historical research on Afro-descendants generally explores fragmentary data on individuals from an array of sources –judicial and police files, church records, censuses, etc. This path provides fragmentary information on subjects at one stage of life and shows disconnected aspects of personal experience without evaluating the multidimensional meaning of lifetime. However, biographical strategies of research illustrate how changes affected the life-span of individuals who left records about themselves –a tiny minority of the black population of the Río de la Plata.
My case studies are Ventura Patrón and Pablo Agüero, two free Africans who lived in Buenos Aires during the 1780s, and Jacinto Ventura de Molina, who lived in Montevideo from 1800 up to his death. In 1784, Patrón sailed from Buenos Aires to Cádiz to ask the Spanish King to be appointed as Colonel of black militias. In Cádiz, Patrón introduced himself as the “capataz de los de su nación Etiopia.” While Agüero was commissioned by the Cabildo of Buenos Aires to chase runaway slaves and watch black celebrations, Molina defended the African associations of Montevideo and appealed on their behalf before the Uruguayan government. Molina was a free black who lived between reality and delusion, the white and black worlds, and between the world of letters and the world of arms. While exceptional, the lives of Patrón, Agüero and Molina show consistent patterns of black leadership formation and collective identities emerging from experiences in colonial militias, Catholic lay-brotherhoods, African-based associations, and the relationships between black communities and the colonial and post-colonial state.
My case studies are Ventura Patrón and Pablo Agüero, two free Africans who lived in Buenos Aires during the 1780s, and Jacinto Ventura de Molina, who lived in Montevideo from 1800 up to his death. In 1784, Patrón sailed from Buenos Aires to Cádiz to ask the Spanish King to be appointed as Colonel of black militias. In Cádiz, Patrón introduced himself as the “capataz de los de su nación Etiopia.” While Agüero was commissioned by the Cabildo of Buenos Aires to chase runaway slaves and watch black celebrations, Molina defended the African associations of Montevideo and appealed on their behalf before the Uruguayan government. Molina was a free black who lived between reality and delusion, the white and black worlds, and between the world of letters and the world of arms. While exceptional, the lives of Patrón, Agüero and Molina show consistent patterns of black leadership formation and collective identities emerging from experiences in colonial militias, Catholic lay-brotherhoods, African-based associations, and the relationships between black communities and the colonial and post-colonial state.