“As Slaves and Not Vassals”: Inter-Ethnic Struggles to Define Freedom and Unfreedom in Midcolonial Peru

In 1687, four enslaved mixed race (pardo) men sent a petition to Spanish authorities from their jail cells in Lima. They were incarcerated for their roles in an uprising at an obraje (hatmaking manufactory) outside the city. They requested, first, transfer to a new master, and second, freedom for themselves and all "like them." This second petition, clearly co-written with a legal advisor, made a series of complex arguments about the illegitimacy of African slavery and the continued enslavement of subsequent generations, children of enslaved African women and free white men. The arguments combine ideas that were circulating in the Spanish colonies, often raised by religious, and radically novel ideas that seem to be the contribution of the four enslaved men themselves. Notably, they ask why they are not naturales or natives of Lima, like the indigenous men and women they presumably labored with at the obraje. They produce the recent legislation freeing all Indians from slavery as well as earlier orders ending Indian "personal service," coerced and unpaid labor done for Spanish individuals. While these petitions appear sui generis, they are also clearly part of a moment when Indians and Blacks were articulating their legal and subject positions in part by comparing their statuses. Indigenous men and women regularly used the metaphor of slavery to critique their individual and collective experiences, but they also pointed to the ways that free people of African descent evaded tribute payment and received salaries for offices that Indians were required to fulfill without pay. The seventeenth century produced a rigorous and wide-ranging conversation about social hierarchies between indigenous and African-descent peoples that demonstrates the ways that ideas moved between elite and non-elite classes but also arose from the particular predicaments and interactions of non-Spanish subjects.