Slavery, Race, and the Transatlantic Journey

As a part of Spain’s colonization scheme of the Americas, Canary Islanders were forced to relocate around the Atlantic world. This paper tracks the movement of Canary Islanders from the Canary Islands to Cuba to Louisiana in order to explore the shifting nature of their legal and illegal enslavement and coerced labor, as well as the communities they formed in each location. I investigate how these diasporic communities from just off the coastline of Africa (but which were rarely considered African) maintained their identity through the transatlantic baptismal archive of the Spanish empire. Beginning with the baptismal records from the Canary Islands, I show how the race recorded in an individual’s baptismal record followed them across the Atlantic. Looking at 17th-century baptismal records from Cuba and 18th-century records from Louisiana, this paper demonstrates how the terminologies of race became more complex in the Caribbean than the records kept in Spain. It also tracks the development of record-keeping practices such as keeping separate books for negros and blancos that were standard in the Americas but never in Spain itself. By following the movement of families and individuals across generations and geographies, I investigate the concept of belonging along the thin veil between slavery and other forms of coerced labor in the Spanish empire.