Promised Freedom: A Global Biography in a 17th-Century Lawsuit

This paper reconstructs the biography of Antonio, an enslaved man from the Indian Ocean world, who contested his inclusion in the will of his former master, a merchant based in Mexico City. Most likely enslaved as a boy in Mozambique and trafficked through Portuguese India into the Spanish Philippines around 1630, Antonio quickly caught the notice of his master’s friends and business associates in Manila and Mexico City. These men later supported Antonio’s pursuit of freedom, enumerating the many admirable qualities he possessed before the Inquisition. Some aspects of this case mirror arguments of African and Asian enslaved men and women as they sought freedom by legal means in Spanish America. Importantly, Antonio and his witnesses detailed not only his loyalty and service to his master, but his bravery, character, and emotional ties to the man who had purchased him in Manila. In effect, he left behind documents that resembled the report of merits and services that his master created to demonstrate his own loyalty to the crown and Spanish empire as a soldier and merchant in the early-seventeenth century. I will argue that this case provides an opportunity to examine self-presentation in legal settings when an enslaved person was likely the author behind some of the key strategy. This research also follows new scholarship on New Spain in Pacific spaces. Antonio’s journeys, which he contended were evidence of his freedom, linked Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He lived in Spanish-dominated, masculine spaces where his intimacies were ambiguous, his freedom understood but not fully legal, and his personhood grounded in his gestures of bravery, service, and duty. The stories told about Antonio provide historians a window into some of the motivations, experiences, deliberate silences, and inner thoughts of a global traveler and survivor of a trade in enslaved children.