Beyond Escape: Fugitive Practice in Colonial Mexico

The period of the Iberian Union (1580-1640) was an early and important phase in the formation of the world-system. Part of this process involved the building and maintenance of material infrastructures, especially ports and roads, that served to extend, accelerate, and secure commodity flows across vast distances and varied terrains. Colonial Mexico occupied a key place in this project to make global circulation governable, since it was not only a site of resource extraction but also a major commercial route linking Asia to Europe via the Spanish Philippines. One leg of the so-called camino real (royal highway) passed through the corridor between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz on the Gulf coast, where a plantation-based sugar economy was beginning to emerge. The growing population of enslaved Africans who worked these plantations translated into growing numbers of cimarrones or maroons in the region, who frequently escaped and set up semi-autonomous communities in the mountains. But they also carried out raids on wagon convoys transporting silver and other commodities along the road. As a result, the colonial authorities viewed these negros cimarrones (black maroons) as a major threat to the colonial economy and even to global commerce—a fugitive threat to the smooth flow of commodities across global space. This paper develops an analytic of fugitive practice along the camino real in early seventeenth-century Mexico. While many critics have understood the politics of fugitivity in terms of escape, withdrawal, or “lines of flight” from oppressive institutions, maroon activities in colonial Mexico make clear that fugitivity went beyond this conceptually “negative” act—fugitive practice was “positive” as well, constituting an attack on the emerging system of racial capitalism and productive of social life even in the context of what the sociologist Orlando Patterson calls social death.