Illicit Relations: Households of Color on Trial in Eighteenth-Century Antioquia

In 1800, a mulato slave Agapito Sierra was tried for concubinage with a white woman Isabel de Hoyos. Agapito’s case is just one of the numerous trials of men for concubinage from this region. These diverse cases include trials of men of colour for relations with white women, and vice versa, wherein all of the defendants are male. These cases speak to the ethnically and sexually mixed world of colonial Colombia that grew up both because of and in spite of colonial concepts of race and status. Moreover, they demonstrate the increasing interest of secular courts in controlling male sexuality. This paper focuses on the prosecution of men of colour for concubinage, illicit relations and deceit. During the early colonial period, ecclesiastical courts focussed on policing black speech and religious practices. Yet, in the early to mid-eighteenth century there was a shift towards a secular preoccupation with controlling the moral behaviour of people of colour. In discussion of familial and sexual choices of men of colour, this paper uses microhistory to explore the creolization and development of African descent familial practices. Simultaneously, it connects these cases to wider trans-Atlantic processes of Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It demonstrates the connections between experiences of people of colour in the realm of gender and sexuality, across the Americas and the boundaries of free and in bondage.