Civic Freedom in Colonial Peru

Life histories of African and African-descent people in the provincial colonial Peruvian city of Trujillo, found in local archives, do not tell a triumphant story of slavery to freedom. Enslaved people and their free kin sued for manumission, knowing that their petitions would be rejected in colonial courts by slaveholding magistrates. Forum shopping (McKinley 2016; Premo 2017) among distinct courts was not an option for the majority of urban inhabitants of the early modern Atlantic. Instead, enslaved and freed men and women marked their freedom by brokering many, small, informal, and contingent contracts to gain increasing control over their households and kin.

This paper, therefore, demonstrates how the urban civic space allowed men and women of African descent to claim a firm location of freedom as powerful merchants and peddlers in Trujillo. I piece together their family histories from fragments of notarial records, parish entries, and judicial cases collected by reading all the extant archives in the city archives. I demonstrate how people of color such as Cristóbal de Valencia, Andrea de Castro, and others purchased their manumission, and then developed commercial relations to increase their free reputation. People of color such as Juan Davila established themselves in particular neighborhoods, became property-holders and slaveholders, contributed to their communities as cofradia mayordomos and claimed the status of vecino and vecina. In these public positions, freed and free people of color defined freedom as the ability to establish and maintain their own households while claiming a gendered municipal “citizenship” that included military service (Vinson 2002) as well as tribute payment (Gharala 2019) Proving themselves as loyal servants of the Crown, free men of color employed their dual roles as militiamen and merchants to enter into colonial public space that was freedom (Camp 2004; Winters 2016).