Puebla de los Esclavos: West Central Africans and Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico, 1595–1635

This paper examines the massive influx of West Central African slaves to the city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, from the perspective of the enslaved and resident slave dealers during the first half of the seventeenth century. I argue that as Puebla's dwindling Nahua populations became increasingly protected by the Crown, Africans alleviated sharp demands for urban labor as construction workers, textile specialists and domestic servants. Thus, Puebla must come to be understood as a key recipient of the early seventeenth century African Diaspora to Spanish America, both as a slave distribution center and a consumer of slave labor.

During this period, Puebla's Spanish residents came to rely almost exclusively on Portuguese slave trading networks in order to secure thousands of new African arrivals. Through the figure of the monopolistic encomendero de negros, Lusophone slave traders provided Puebla with an unrelenting supply of West Central African laborers. Drawing from notarial, parochial and judicial sources, this paper suggests that these lucrative encomendero networks were actually in place and operating in Puebla well before their Crown-sanctioned establishment in 1615.

This presentation will also highlight the demographic traits of new African arrivals that were sold in the Puebla slave market. Adolescents labeled as "Angolas" formed the overwhelming majority of the city's enslaved population, although many of these involuntary migrants would have originated in Ndongo, Kongo, and other inland African states. The paper also advances the first reported age averages for new African arrivals at their time of purchase in Puebla from 1610 to 1635. By serving as a "destination" vantage point, these data will aid in specifying key characteristics that slave traders sought out in enslaved individuals at their point of origin in Africa.