Pawnage, Debt Culture, and Poverty: Mobile Black Women in the 17th-Century Spanish Empire

Under the Spanish Inquisition, prisoners were expected to pay for the majority of the costs related to their trials including food, water, and transportation for themselves and any witnesses called forward. Some exceptions were made in instances of extreme poverty, in which former detainees were given leeway to make gradual payments. Due to its highly bureaucratic nature, the Inquisition meticulously recorded the debts, financial linkages, possessions, and the history of payments of thousands of individuals who often lacked substantive enough assets to appear in other archival sources.

This paper focuses on two free Black women who claimed poverty before the Inquisition in the mid-seventeenth century: Ana María Vázquez and María Geronima. Both women were born in Spain and arrested in Mexico City, having moved across large swaths of the Spanish empire including Havana (Cuba), Cartagena (Colombia), Santiago (Guatemala), and Veracruz (Mexico). Though in possession of significant assets—including a lodging house, a shop with an attached apartment, and an enslaved woman—both Vázquez and Geronima argued that they lived in extreme poverty and were thus unable to pay off the costs of their trials. This was because most of their possessions were being held as pawns as they worked to pay off debts.

Their testimonies reveal a fascinating world of precarious economic mobility and wide-spread financial networks including the commercial connections they built with other free Black women, their eventual alienation from the Black community, their falls into poverty, and their strategies in paying off debts. Through a close reading of their trials, this paper traces Vázquez and Geronima’s performances of being “miserables” before the Inquisition, the social and legal framings they drew from (particularly as Spanish-born Black women), and their participation in the debt and pawn culture of the Spanish Empire.