“Immoral” Black Families in Southwestern New Granada, 1800–30

The early nineteenth-century wars of independence in New Granada, modern-day Colombia, brought dramatic changes in social and cultural relations. In the southwest, Popayán City experienced an increase in black population as well as a perceived increase in criminality that heightened the catholic fervor among elite city officials and their families. Unlike historians who have analyzed how Catholicism impacted Popayán elites’ political affiliations with autonomist projects throughout New Granada, I am interested in understanding how it shaped moral discourses and laws about family and sexuality. My paper analyzes a set of judicial cases and criminal trials that involve enslaved and free black men and women who appeared before legal authorities to engage in disputes over different family issues. An interpretation of those cases not only provides new insights about black people’s conceptions of family values, but may also reflect the ways in which black families interacted with the colonial and early republican legal systems. Furthermore, my paper will also use official correspondence between Popayán’s governor and conservative judges to analyze how different black family structures became central issues of debate among conservative elites after independence in 1821. I believe a critical reading of these primary sources can help us understand why common types of relationships at the time such as concubinage, amancebamiento, single parenthood, and incest began to seem publicly threatening to elite city officials who judged on the grounds of “religious purity.” I expect my overall analysis will demonstrate how formal independence from Spain represented an opportunity for a new social order that, in the Popayán elite imaginary, required a more sacred definition of “the family.” This inevitably led to further discrimination of blacks and the criminalization of their family structures.