Saturday, January 7, 2023: 9:10 AM
Independence Ballroom II (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown)
The presentation will explore the competing valuations of paper, goods, and people when a sloop arrived in a tiny inlet in Guantánamo in 1852 with two men of color on board sailing from Haiti (and Guadeloupe before that). Cuban authorities took note of all of the goods on board and apprehended the men, claiming that they had no transit papers; the men testified that the authorities were stealing their stuff and ignoring the identity papers of the older man, who was trying to sell the younger man into slavery. The uneven values ascribed to papers, cargo, and the adolescent by each actor in this drama opens up a wider view of mobility’s materiality than “paper-thin” legal freedom in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. What deserved to be documented, and what was better off without a paper trail, depended on how each actor understood the maritime transit of people and goods.