Carework, Parenthood, and Protection in Politics of Peruvian Colonial Freedom

On the Peruvian northern coast, freed and free people relied on manumission contracts, testaments, and parish records along with public performances to create an archive of freedom. This paper examines how enslaved and freed people employed these legal records of claims-making (Chira 2022; Scott Hébrard 2012) as well as baptismal, marriage, and other ecclesiastical documents to achieve their “small-scale, private emancipations” or what Michelle McKinley (2016) called their fractional freedoms. Accrued generationally, enslaved and freed families of the colonial Peruvian city of Trujillo also relied on collective storytelling (Barragan 2021) but also public performances of reputation to create paper trails and public records. In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, freed propertied artisans and homeowners of the transpacific port collected sales receipts and copies of baptisms and accumulated notarial records that substantiated their claims to freedom. In some cases, African-descent men or women called on these family archives to prove judicial arguments for their legal freedom. But what other futures did the freed people of Trujillo speculated, imagined, and projected with these familial archives of freedom? Calling on the work of Tina Campt (2017) and Jennifer Morgan (2021), I explore the futures that freed people conceived in the making and the use of their familial archives of freedom. Decades if not centuries away from Black men joining independence armies to secure their citizenship or the advocacy of Black women for gradual abolition to ensure their children’s free birth, this paper explores how Black colonial Peruvians recognized how their early modern work towards fragmented freedom coincided, and did not, with a future of citizenship, sovereignty, and independence of the modern era precisely through its paper and non-paper practices.