Criados and Slaves: Colonial Yucatan's “Freed” and Enslaved Household Workforce

In “societies with slaves” as opposed to “slave societies,” enslaved Africans composed a prominent minority of the population, but did not make up the majority of the workforce.  Yucatan was a “society with slaves” in which most of the economic production was undertaken by the Maya peasantry.  African slaves were concentrated in the province’s urban centers of Mérida and Campeche.  As inhabitants of a poor and peripheral province, few Spanish householders had the resources to become large slaveholders, and sought other means to maintain a domestic workforce at as low a cost as possible.  This led to the existence in Yucatan of a large number of criados, nominally orphans of Maya, African, or mixed (casta) ancestry who were “adopted” into households to serve in a domestic capacity.  Close examination of the lives of criados and household slaves in Yucatan reveals that although they were nominally free, criados worked in similar domestic tasks, suffered from similar restrictions, and that little distinguished criados from slaves in terms of their place in the colonial social hierarchy. In particular, the criados from Maya, casta, and African backgrounds were often removed by coercion if not by force from their communities and were not always orphans.   In most cases, their relocation resembled the “social death” experienced by slaves.  They also resisted their subservient status in similar ways, insulting their masters when out of earshot, testifying against them in criminal trials, and running away when opportunities to do so presented themselves.  Moreover, attempts by masters to reinforce a race-base hierarchy that placed casta criados in a higher stratum than black slaves did not meet with success.   This paper examines the strikingly similar conditions experienced by slaves and criados, especially their residence, nature of work, restrictions on mobility, and social dislocation.