Reading Legal Petitions as Early Afro-Latin American Intellectual History

Free Black towns (pueblos de negros) in the Spanish Americas have been identified as liberatory spaces, from the marketers to Colombian tourism to historians studying the survival of African practices. The towns, the narrative often goes, were formed by members of palenques, runaway slaves who negotiated with Spanish monarchs to construct a new status as free vassals. But the story is far more complicated. Monarchs came to the negotiating table because of the impossibility of containing palenques, it is true, but they placed enormous burdens on the new townsmen and women which turned them into agents of policing and biopower. By reading archival sources that seem to name a variety of different practices – reducción, palenques, repúblicas de negros – across the Circum-Caribbean in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, I draw out the intentions of the monarchs who negotiated, and contemplate the coerced responses of the former slaves and free people of color who sometimes embraced but also rejected such colonial opportunities.