Session Abstract

Slavery in the Americas is typically described as a fixed condition, a race-based institution with specific and limited avenues to freedom.  Emancipation, attained either as a result of restrictions on the enslavement of particular ethnic groups or individuals, or as a result of sweeping abolition decrees, theoretically led to an unequivocal end of the conditions of forced servitude, limited freedom of movement, and domination by one master entailed by the status of a slave in society. Recent studies reflect more ambiguity regarding the actual conditions surrounding slavery and abolition as applied to particular ethnic and racial groups during the colonial and early national period.  Slaveholders and colonial administrators seeking to exploit a captive labor force found loopholes in laws, pushed for revisions, or created new institutions that limited the impact and reach of laws passed to improve the lives of their workforce without outright defying restrictions on slavery.  Economically dependent upon slave labor, they often found ways to circumvent royal decrees in order to hold subject populations in thrall, avoiding complying with the crown’s intent if not the actual letter of the law.  “Free” blacks, people of mixed ancestry, Asians in Latin America, and natives often lived in conditions that can hardly be considered liberty.  At the same time, slaveholders were not always the beneficiaries of the exceptions and exclusions inherent in French and Castilian legal systems regarding slavery.  Turning race-based regulations of slavery to their own advantage, a few individuals managed to have their racial identity re-defined, benefiting from a change in status that freed them from slavery. 

The following papers examine the ambiguities of the institution of slavery in the Americas and the long-term effect of ambiguous legal definitions of slavery on subject populations.  Céline Flory opens with an examination of the practice of “repurchase” in the Francophone Caribbean, a system that while not as permanent as slavery, in effect prolonged the conditions of subservience and limited mobility that abolitionists intended to end, in the guise of a humanitarian project.  Tatiana Seijas follows with a paper highlighting a loophole in Spanish codes dealing with slavery that implied that “indios” – subjects of Spain’s “Indies” – were not to be enslaved.  The ambiguous category of “indio” led to an effort on the part of Asians in the Americas to pursue an identity as “indio” rather than “chino,” a seemingly insignificant detail that in fact often meant the difference between freedom and slavery.  Mark Lentz’s paper, the third in the panel, contrasts the lives of domestic slaves in colonial Yucatan with a remarkably similar yet poorly understood group of household workers, criados.  Slaves in colonial Yucatan were invariably of African descent, but criados, who worked in similar conditions and suffered comparable restrictions on their mobility, were nominally orphans of African, Maya, or mixed ancestry.  John Chuchiak concludes the panel with a paper that examines the development and nature of indigenous slavery and its role in financing and profiting the conquistadors who joined Francisco de Montejo’s conquest of Yucatan (1527-1545).