“The Wilderness Within”: African Diasporic Religion in New Granada, 1690-1790
By
Bethan Fisk
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of History
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Bethan Fisk (2019) University of Toronto ‘“The Wilderness Within”: African Diasporic Religion in New Granada, 1690-1790’ Doctor of Philosophy, 2019 Bethan Fisk, Graduate Department of History
Abstract
This dissertation examines African diasporic religions in New Granada in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, it argues for the constitutive role of black mobility, space, and state institutions in their creation and circulation. Africans and their descendants—whether black or of mixed African, indigenous, and European heritages—had a deep engagement with Catholicism and its material culture in New Granada. There were significant common experience and variations in African- descended experience of the religious world and interactions with colonial institutions, shaped by ethnicity, gender, geography, mode of labour, and place of birth. This dissertation challenges the notion of separate histories of Caribbean and Pacific African-descended communities in Colombia through an examination of the movement of black bodies, religious knowledges, and ritual objects. It examines
African diasporic religious creations situated within their social contexts, as well as the church and state’s criminalization of black ritual, medicine, and family life.
New Granada was a space where culture and capital flowed between different regimes of slavery and systems of free labour. Diverse everyday epistemologies and material objects circulated among people of African descent across eighteenth-century New Granada within a shared world, one created by the power structures of the Catholic church, the colonial state, and the institution of slavery.
This dissertation is based on a close reading of archival fragments from civil and criminal trials, government correspondence, and ecclesiastical records from collections in Colombia, Spain, and the
United States. It seeks to challenge prevailing chronologies of African diaspora populations, moving away from political periodizations, and is framed around black experience—with the years 1690 and
1790 coming soon after fundamentally different campaigns of conquest of free communities of colour.
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Acknowledgements
I have accrued innumerable debts throughout the course of my doctoral studies—intellectual, professional, spiritual, and material. First and foremost, I am deeply thankful to my supervisor, Melanie
Newton. I first came to Melanie as a student of colonial Spanish America and early modern Europe, and it is because of her knowledge and support that I finish my doctorate as a historian of Latin
America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. Melanie has spent countless hours with me, guided me on the interpretation of my material, and read and improved many drafts. She has provided me with a model of great teaching and her advocacy has ensured that I had ample opportunity to apply it. Melanie has been a mentor in matters academic—as a teacher, researcher, writer, and feminist—and supported my immigrant multiracial family in Canada with numerous complex issues.
At the University of Toronto, I have what I sometimes describe as my “dream committee.”
Natalie Zemon Davis has been an enthusiastic champion of me and my work since our first meeting.
Working with Natalie—whose scholarship inspired me to pursue graduate study—has been an honour and a pleasure. Our meetings taught me about persistence, imagination, and broad thinking—she leaves no footnote unturned. Natalie continues to be the ultimate example for historians, especially women in academia, not only due to her groundbreaking work, but also because of her kindness, generosity, and grace. Tamara Walker arrived at the University of Toronto as the project came to a close. Her expertise in gender and slavery in Spanish America has been particularly useful for my dissertation and she has gone above and beyond her role of committee member in reading article drafts and other materials.
Other members of the Department at Toronto offered crucial expertise and support. Peter
Blanchard cultivated my interest in Afro-Latin America and read my work closely. Ken Mills’ scholarship in colonial Spanish American religion and enthusiasm were crucial to my coming to
Toronto. During comprehensive exams, weekly meetings with Sean Hawkins were some of the most enjoyable and intellectually demanding of my doctorate. I thank Luis van Ischott for his support and
iii advice on teaching Latin American history and researching in and writing about Colombia. I am thankful to numerous professors in the Department of History for their interest and support, including
Adrienne Hood, Lori Loeb, Shami Ghosh, Russ Kazal, William Nelson, Mark Meyerson, Allison Smith, and Nick Terpstra. This research and the writing up process were supported by the Natalie Zemon
Davis Fellowship, the New College Senior Doctoral Fellowship, the School of Graduate Studies
Doctoral Completion Award, and Graduate Studies Research Travel Grant and numerous grants from the Department of History.
At University of Toronto, I have been blessed with wonderful friends, many who are now geographically scattered. My particular thanks to Karen Cousins, Ben Landsee, Kirsten James, Stefanie
Kennedy, David Robinson, Amanda Robinson, and Kathryn Segesser. In Toronto, I am thankful for the friendship, community, and inspiration I have found with Leslie Anderson, Melissa Caperelli,
Shenella Charles, Mónica Espaillat Lizardo, Yeimy Daza Fiallo, Deivis Ecchavaria, Sandra Fildes,
Kadian Gifford, Sandra Godoy, Allison Graham, Monique Gregory, Katrin Kocsis, Alice Lilwall,
Alexandra Logue, Vojin Majstorovic, Ange Martínez Arango, Domenica Mindrinos, Claudia Santilli,
Lindsay Sidders, Catie Thompson, Carla Tompkins, Lilia Topouzova, José Turizo, and Gili Zemer.
I am indebted to the assistance of archivists in numerous collections. In Colombia, my particular thanks go to Mauricio Tovar at the Archivo Histórico de la Nación in Bogotá, Betty Valencia of the Archivo Histórico de Cartago, Rodrigo Mejía at the Archivo Histórico de Cali, Mad Fernandez and Juan Francisco Peñaranda Borja at the Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón in Buga, and
Moisés Álvarez Marín at the Archivo Histórico de Cartagena. I could not have done this without the tireless labours of Francisco Javier Molinero Rodríguez and Luis Emilio Calenda Roa (mas Santa Fe!).
The whole team at John Carter Brown Library were wonderful and created intellectual community, particularly Neil Safier and Ken Ward.
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Intellectual interventions and discussions with scholars have been vital for this research. Early conversations with scholars in Colombia were vital for the direction it took, including Jaime Arocha,
Rafael Díaz Díaz, Margarita Garrido, Jaime Borja Gómez, and Edgardo Pérez Morales. I am indebted to conversations, suggestions, and correspondence from and Kenneth Austin, Manuel Barcia, Ernesto
Bassi, Celso Castilho, Fernando Cervantes, Adriana Chira, Marcela Echeverri, Ronald Hutton, Jane
Landers, Anthony McFarlane, Michelle Mckinley, Jim Muldoon, Rachel O’Toole, Diana Paton, Andrew
Redden, David Wheat, Kathleen Wilson, and Caroline Williams. Sherwin Bryant and Pablo Gómez have been particularly supportive of my work. I thank Katherine Bonil, Yesenia Barragán, Fernanda
Bretones Lane, and Aaron Alejandro Olivas for their inspiration and friendship. I special mention must go to my daily advisor in all things, Laura Correa Ochoa.
In Colombia, I found not only the histories I sought, but also family. Thank you to María
Teresa and all the Cambindo Carabalís for being mi familia en Puerto Tejada y donde vaya. Countless chats and changuas with Camilo and Miriam Sandoval enriched my time in Bogotá and await me. In
Cartagena, los familias Velasquez and Bravo, especially Ana María, Claudia, Elizabeth, Carlos Javier,
Dainer Bravo Mercado, provided me with a home and mucho cariño. I remember so many vecinos in
Ararca, Playa Blanca, el pueblo de Barú, and am especially thankful to Nidia Luz de Castro, Jarol, Juan
Pablo Cassiani Brown, Wilson Hinestroza Rodriguez, Señor Iñame, Señora Leo y toda la familia, los
Miranda, Boris Escudero Peinado, and Carolina Salamanca Soler. I thank Rayner Velasquez Bravo for being family, for always believing I can do anything, and for our boys.
In England, Anna Barratt, Joni Barratt, Melissa Dawkins, Celia Duff, Kisha Gaynor, Amy
Gardner, Katya Merkalenko, and Jaime Grier have provided lifelong friendships, examples of how to thrive, and wonderful distractions. My mother, Pip Fisk has supported me on the way with constant love, generosity, and patience. I am so thankful for her cultivation of a love of learning from an early age and trans-Atlantic grandparenting. My father Peter Fisk has always been a great supporter of my
v studies and my family. Carol Fisk has been an enthusiastic and tireless helper. Chris Pout has provided adventures, castles, and generous support. My grandfather Colin Hasler is unwavering in his love and quiet enthusiasm. His and Ethel Hasler’s devotion have been the great constant is our lives. You have all saved me too many times to count. I cannot imagine where I would be without Anna Fisk’s sisterhood, example, and patience. My brothers Sam and Tom Fisk have been the source of warmth, humour, computer salvation, and become surprisingly good tios. I am particularly thankful to Sam for braving the Toronto of February 2017.
The process of researching and writing this dissertation—in England, Spain, Canada, the
United States, and Colombia—has been characterized by life and death. This work has been long in the making, not least because of the gift of life of my two children, Jacob Daniel and Josiah Alejo. Thank you both for unceasing fun, warmth, and joy. There are no words to express how profoundly you enrich my life every day. I am a better person for your both. My beloved grandmother Ethel Hasler finally succumbed to dementia weeks before I finished a full draft. Nanny, your resilience and endless love has been the greatest inspiration and knowing you a source of constant comfort. I hope you knew how deeply grateful for and proud I am of you.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables ix
List of Figures x
List of Appendices xi
Introduction…………..…………………………………………………………….……………...….1
Colonial and Racial Geographies………………………………………..………………...... 5 Reconceptualizing Geographies of Slavery………………………………………..……...... 18 Religion and Historiography……………………………………………….……..……...... 24 Archives and Methodologies…………………………………………………………………31
1. Geographies of Slavery and Freedom………………………………………..………………...... 39
Historical Geographies and Black Space……………………………………………………...41 Caribbean New Granada: Santa Marta and Cartagena de Indias and its Environs…………….44 Tierra A Dentro: Rivers and Montes from the Province of Cartagena de Indias to Antioquia...51 Towards the Pacific: Popayán, Cauca, Chocó, and the Tropical Lowlands……………………64 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...76
2. Rites of Enslavement……………....…………………………………………………...………...... 78
Instruction and Conversion……………………………………………………………...…...81 Institutional Regulation and African-Descended Incorporation……………………………....93 Baptismal Records and the Enslaved……………………………………………….……...... 105 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….120
3. Worlds of Healing……….…………………………………………...……...………………...…..121
Gender, Criminalization, and the Archive……………………………………...………...….126 Black Atlantic Ritual Geographies…………………………………...………………...…...... 137 Healing and the Atlantic-Pacific World in New Granada………...…...... 153 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….163
4. Caribbean Catholicisms……….………………………………………...……...……………...... 165
Blasphemy and the Inquisition……………………………………....………………………………169 Speaking of the Divine……………………………………………………………………………...174 Materiality and African Diasporic Catholicism…………………………...……………………….…186
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Conclusion …………………………...………...………………………...…………………………205
5. Sex, Race, and the Atlantic Enlightenment……………………………..………………………....207
Miscegenation, Sexual Crimes, and Atlantic Reform..………………..……………………………....211 The Politics of Conversion: Conquest of Black-Indigenous Communities in El Monte……………..229 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….………246
Conclusion.…………...……………………………………………………………….….…………247
Appendices…………....…………………………………………………………………………….254
Bibliography…………..…………....…………………………………………………………...... 262
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List of Tables
Number Title Page No.
Table 1 Total number of baptisms of infants by ethnicity in stated years in San 112 Jorge Parish, Cartago Table 2 Total number of baptisms of infants by ethnicity and legitimacy status in 112-3 San Jorge Parish, Cartago
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List of Figures
Title Page No.
Figure 1 Moreno y Escandón’s Plan geográphico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá, 19 1772 Figure 2 Relief Map of New Granada 42 Figure 3 Map of the Provinces of Santa Marta and Cartagena by Antonio de 46 Arévalo (1766) Figure 4 Plan of the City of Cartagena de Indias from Antonio de Ulloa y Jorge 48 Juan (1736) Figure 5 Bogas on the River Magdalena 53 Figure 6 Map depicting the palenques in the provinces of Cartagena de Indias and 58 Santa Marta in the seventeenth century Figure 7 Plan of the rivers and routes through the province of Antioquia (1763) 61 Figure 8 The Provinces of Antioquia, Cartagena de Indias, Chocó, and Panamá in 64 1800 Figure 9 Map depicting western New Granada and the “Sea of the North,” the 68 Caribbean Sea, and the “Sea of the South” Figure 10 Image from 1759 Census of Enslaved People in Chocó 71 Figure 11 Entry for the Baptism of Maria Francisca, “Adulta, Nación Guinea” 109 Figure 12 Entry for Joseph de Castro’s mass baptism of 15 adult bozales, October 115 13, 1742 Figure 13 Image of the Relación de causa de fe 124 Figure 14 Eighteenth-century Monstrance from the church of Saint Ignacio in 194 Bogotá Figure 15 Map depicting the travels of Felix Fernando Martínez 195 Figure 16 Juana’s Testimony 219 Figure 17 Map of Referendum on the 2016 on the Peace Deal with the FARC by 251 Department
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List of Appendices
Title Page No.
Appendix 1 Legal Proceedings against African and African-Descended Ritual and 256 Healing Practitioners in Ecclesiastical and Secular Courts in New Granada, 1697-1789 Appendix 2 African and African-Descended People tried by the Inquisition of 258 Cartagena de Indias for Blasphemy and Propositions in 1697-1724 Appendix 3 All African-descended defendants before the Holy Inquisition of 259 Cartagena de Indias from 1695 to 1777
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Introduction
In 1788, after a campaign of violent conversion of Afro-indigenous peoples, military officer and
Catholic friar Joseph Palacio de la Vega described the wooded interior of Cartagena province as “el monte adentro.”1 “El monte” translates literally as “the bush,” “the mountain,” or “the wilderness,” land that has not been worked, while “adentro” is “inside” or “within.” Territory “adentro” was unconquered and unsettled land, beyond colonial order and Catholic Christian security. The “interior forest” also functions metaphorically, expressing the church and state view of unconquered black and indigenous territories, peoples and religions as physically and spiritually dangerous. I have drawn on this metaphor for the title of this dissertation. “The Wilderness Within” refers to colonial power’s conceptualization of people of African descent and the spaces they inhabited, both in and outside of the boundaries of Spanish settlements. It is also an instructive metaphor for unauthorized African and indigenous religious practices and the possibilities of freedom that the natural environment of New
Granada offered. Nevertheless, montes, were not isolated spaces; through mobility, montes were connected—and helped to constitute—urban environments.
El monte adentro describes both physical and conceptual space within New Granada. It was a geographic referent describing inaccessible uncultivated spaces that were inhabited by African- descended and indigenous peoples. The conceptual possibilities of el monte adentro are threefold. For people of African descent, el monte adentro could be a place of refuge, cultural creation, and community.
For elites and urban dwellers, el monte delineates lines of civilization and whiteness; to be of the monte is to be wild, and thus people of African and indigenous descent not only lived in the wilderness, they were the wilderness. At the same time, I argue that struggles over systemic marginalization and
1 This campaign is discussed in Chapter Five. 1 racialization in the wilderness were at the centre of the history of New Granada and Colombia.2
This dissertation is the first full-length study that brings together the Caribbean coast,
Antioquia, and the Pacific regions of New Granada to explore the rich history of black religion in the late colonial period. I construct a history of African diasporic religion in communities interconnected through ritual practice, material culture, and everyday life. This dissertation argues that New Granada’s
Atlantic and Pacific regions were connected by epistemological circulation and material exchange within a shared world, one created by the natural environment, black mobility, and the power structures of Catholicism, slavery, and the law. African-descended peoples, objects, and expertise travelled vast distances both via the Middle Passage and within the Americas. The majority of work on black mobility focuses on mobility in the context of revolutionary upheaval and exceptional movement and events.3
The significance of my argument for African diaspora studies and historical scholarship lies in my analysis of quotidian connections between Black Atlantic and Pacific communities through the ordinary mobility of African-descended peoples and cultures. My study sheds light on the porous boundaries between and within the Atlantic and Pacific, demonstrates how the black diaspora of the Americas cannot be reified as ‘Atlantic’ alone, and makes an innovative contribution to emerging scholarship about the role of the Pacific in the black historical experience.4
Centring black communities and mobility rather than the state, this study is framed by dates that made sense according to the experiences of people of African descent, rather than the priorities of
2 It is worth noting that since the nineteenth century, the term ‘the interior’ typically refers to the political centres of the Andean region of New Granada, which were demographically ‘whiter’ and more mestizo than coastal regions and where Hispanic-identified political and economic power was concentrated. 3 Julius Sherrard Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986 (A Common Wind: Afro-American Organization in the Revolution against Slavery, Verso, 2018); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2014) 4 Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993). 2 elites and the colonial state. The period 1690 to 1790 was bookended by military campaigns of destruction and resettlement of palenques, communities of maroons (escaped enslaved people and their descendants), and rochelas, small free rural communities. In doing so, I move away from ‘official’ political periodizations of Latin American history, such as the creation of new Spanish colonial administrative structures and independence from the metropole. Prioritizing political dates tends to overemphasize the significance of colonial European and state institutions and minimizes black experience. Such an approach obscures connections and similarities between African diasporic communities and their religions, politics, and experiences in different imperial and postcolonial territories.
Studying African-derived cultures without restricting analysis in terms of skin colour or legal status is crucial for understanding how religious practices and ideas were formed and circulated amongst people of African descent. Such an approach also highlights how communities constituted themselves in ways that circumvented, or even defied, categories imposed by the state. At the same time, I devote a great deal of attention in my analysis specifically to the religious and sexual lives of
African-descended persons who were inscribed in the Spanish colonial archive’s terminology as negro/a
(black), mulato/a (of black and European ancestry), and zambo/a (black and indigenous ancestry). I illustrate the commonalities and distinctions that shaped the religious lives of African-descended people, who were often part of the same communities, shared the same worlds of religious practice, and experienced the same forms of criminalization, even if they differed in terms of ethnicity and legal status. This is especially important in the study of New Granada, for it had a large African-descended and indigenous population, the significance of which has received limited scholarly attention.5
5 Zambaje, especially in Caribbean New Granada, has received far more attention in Spanish-language historiography than English. See, for example, Jorge Conde Calderón, “Castas y Conflictos en la Provincia de Cartagena del Nuevo Reino de Granada a finales del Siglo XVIII”, en Historia y Sociedad, 3 (1996): 83 -101, and Hugues Rafael Sanchez Mejia and Adriana Yanneth Santos Delgado, “La Presencia de Indios, Negros, Mulatos y Zambos en la Historiografía sobre la Independencia del Caribe Colombiano, 1770-1830,” in Revista Historia y 3
I adopt an inclusive understanding of what constitutes religion, following the late J.Z. Smith’s premise that the focus on doctrine has its roots in Protestant conceptions of ritual as empty.6 My capacious approach to the religious corresponds with the incorporative nature and materiality of
African-descended religions themselves. Spaces and processes that are understood as religious include the interaction of people of African descent with the natural world, the circulation and remaking of
Catholic sacraments and black ritual knowledges, and sexual and familial lives. My research also places gender at the centre of early modern black Atlantic religions—at present, there is little scholarly understanding of the importance of gender roles in colonial Afro-Latin American religions, or in how the church and state prosecuted practitioners.7 I examine the church and state’s systematic criminalization and persecution of African-descended communities through the intersectional lens of race and gender. Tracing these shifts over time illustrates changes in the policing of black people’s bodies, as the prosecution of religious practice moved from inquisitorial to secular and medical authorities over the course of the eighteenth century. Prior to 1700, the Inquisition prosecuted many women of African descent for religious crimes. From 1700 to 1800, there was a distinct decline in juridical interest in African-descended women as agents with spiritual and ritual power. Despite this decreased level of elite concern over women’s spiritual authority in the eighteenth century, officials demonstrated continued interest in controlling the sexuality of African-descended women, expressed through a foremost focus on prosecuting the men in their lives for secular sexual crimes.
Espacio 34 (2010): 11-39; Hugues Rafael Sanchez Mejia, “Esclavitud, Zambaje, ‘Rochelas’ y otros Excesos en la Población Libre de las Gobernaciones de Santa Marta y Cartagena, 1600-1800,” Historia, Cultura y Sociedad Colonial Siglo XVI-XVIII: Temas, Problemas y Perspectiva, ed. Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana-Bayona and Ana Raquel Portugal (Medellín: La Carreta Histórica, 2008), 127-157; Hugues Rafael Sanchez Mejia, “De Arrochelados a Vecinos: Reformismo Borbónico e Integración Política en las Gobernaciones de Santa Marta y Cartagena, Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1740-1810,” Revista de Indias 75 (2015): 457-488. 6 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 102. 7 Works that examine the importance of gender in vodou include Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Joan Dayan, “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti,” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 2, (Summer 1994): 5-31. 4
The three sections of this introduction lay the groundwork for the approach that I will take in the dissertation. The first section lays out the geographic space that is the focus of this work, as well as how these geographies informed the historical development of African-descended communities that inhabited and moved through them. Contrary to current historiography, I treat the provinces of Santa
Marta, Cartagena de Indias, Antioquia, Chocó, and Popayán as a conceptually coherent space connected by African diasporic experience space, rather than as a culturally distinct one only connected by physical geography. I situate my own approach to the history of these regions within the wider historical geography of blackness in the colonial period and contemporary Colombia. The second section of this introduction situates my work within a wide range of relevant historiography and scholarship from other disciplines, particularly work on black mobility and African-descended religions.
The final section argues that there is an archive of black religion in New Granada, setting the stage for the methodologies utilized in the dissertation, first introducing literature on archival interpretation applied here followed by a discussion of the archival materials on which this dissertation is based.
Colonial and Racial Geographies
I use the term ‘New Granada’ throughout, yet my project examines a time-span when the geographic space on which I focus was first within the New Kingdom of Granada (founded in 1549) and later became part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (established in 1717). While eighteenth- century New Granada was a single colony, it was a transnational space, consisting of the territories of modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. Given my close analysis of religious materials, it was not feasible to examine the Viceroyalty as a whole due to the sheer amount of documentary evidence, the locations of the collections that hold it, and the way in which those archives are
5 organized.8 The focus of this dissertation is principally on sites that lie within modern Colombia.9
However, some material outside these national boundaries is included due to the trial of persons of
African descent from these regions before the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in
Cartagena de Indias. Chapters Three and Four utilize cases from Caracas and Panama because individuals and cultural flows from these spaces were present in, and shaped, the city of Cartagena de
Indias, and the tribunal of the Inquisition that was situated there.
The Viceroyalty often ends up on the margins of analysis in the fields of Atlantic World,
Caribbean, and Latin American historiography, yet it is a key site in the history of the African diaspora.10 For over two hundred years, the city of Cartagena de Indias was the Caribbean seat of the
Spanish Inquisition and the principal slave port for the Spanish Americas, governed by the asiento de negros contract system, a monopoly for the supply of African captives. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade and gold mining using enslaved labour utterly transformed the western part of what is now Colombia.
The eighteenth century was a crucial period in African diaspora history, simultaneously the
8 As well as the countless archives in the countries themselves, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the archive that holds some 43 000 volumes of documents of Spanish colonial administration, is divided into audiencias. Consequently, documents from the Viceroyalty of New Granada are held in the sections Caracas, Panamá, Quito, and Santa Fe. 9 Rather than using ‘colonial Colombia’, it is standard within historiography to refer to its national territories within the Viceroyalty as ‘New Granada.’ 10 There are important exceptions to this. Anthony McFarlane’s work is the quintessential study of eighteenth- century New Granada in any language (Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon rule [Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993]). The majority of scholarship in English that has brought more attention to African-descended history in New Granada to a wider audience is quite recent: Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the northern Andes, 1780-1825 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016); David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2016); Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean; Ernesto Bassi’s monograph does not explicitly focus on people of African descent, however it connects New Granada to the wider Caribbean world and shows how sailors and commerce crossed linguistic boundaries. (Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016]). 6 height of the Atlantic slave trade and a period of intense creolization of the cultures and religiosities of
African-descended people in the Americas. In New Granada, the population of colour grew significantly. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, campaigns of territorial and spiritual
‘reconquest,’ such as those led by Palacio de la Vega, destroyed many free communities of colour.
These campaigns were an attempt to make Spanish hierarchies and distinct categories of racial difference ‘real’, and were an uncompromisingly violent face of the Enlightenment and imperial reform.
This set of relationships had profound legacies for the politics of race in republican Colombia.
The Crown ordered the first general census (padrón general) for all Spanish colonies in the
1770s—an Enlightenment project of enumeration and classification according to emerging racial taxonomies. The Crown’s census categories were blancos (whites) indios (Indians), libres de todos colors (free people of all colours), and esclavos de todos colores (slaves of all colours).11 The census category ‘free persons of all colours’ included free black people, as well as those that Spanish racial language usually referred to as mulato/as (of black and white descent), pardo/as (lighter skinned black and white descent), zambo/as (black and indigenous descent), and mestizo/as (white and indigenous descent) in New
Granada. I understand these categories as racializing terminology, language that sought to differentiate according to perceived ethnicity prior to the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consolidation of the concept of ‘race.’ Such terms had geographically specific and fluid meanings across colonial Latin
America. While Mexican casta paintings usually depict sixteen categories and there are lists of far more in race tables, in New Granada, the most often used were negro/a, mulato/a, zambo/a, pardo/a, libre or
11 In the padrón general, these categories were further subdivided as follows: for the clerical class, seculars (secular clergy), regulares (regylar clergy), legos (lay brothers and sisters), and religiosas (nuns), for the laity hombres casasdos (married men), solteros incluyendo párvulos (single men including children), mujeres casadas (married women), solteras incluyendo párvulas (single women including children). See, for example, the 1778 padrón general of Cartagena de Indias. Archivo General de la Nación de Colombia (AGN), Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11. 7 liberto/a (freed), and less frequently (in my documentation at least), moreno/a (brown).12
In the early modern Iberian world, as David Wheat states, terminology such as negro and moreno was “mutable.” An individual could be described as either, for they were “social categories” as well as descriptions of an individual’s skin tone.13 The term bozal—a newly arrived person from African who did not speak Spanish or Portuguese and who was “unfamiliar with Iberian systems of meaning espoused in Catholic practices”—was frequently used. While ‘African’ castas (castes), tierras (lands), or naciones (nations), continued to be in use in documentation from this period, they are far less common than they were in the earlier colonial period. I approach these terms, such as Congo or Arará, as colonial constructs and as the language of the slave trade, while cognizant that some may have had real social meanings. I treat these terms and their potential meanings on a case-by-case basis, given the particularity of the individual lives examined and the specificity of different ethnonyms.14
According to the padrón general the population of New Granada, including lands within the modern countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela, was 1 283 755. There were 4562 people (0.35%) of the ecclesiastical class and 320 333 whites (25%). The indigenous population was 461
12 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2004); Susan Deans-Smith, “Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth- Century Mexico and Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 2 (2005): 169-204; Magnus Mörner Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 58. 13 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, xix. 14 While nación, casta, or tierra were used in Spanish documents to describe the provenance of people born in Africa, the meaning that these terms actually had for individuals is particularly imprecise. First, often they referred to the point of departure from Africa, for example, ‘Luanda’ or ‘Angola’. In other instances, such as for people hailing from the Rivers of Guinea in the early colonial period, they were far more specific. For example, Wheat notes that precision of terminology was a mark of familiarity: “Unlike the ‘Angolas’ whom they supervised, these Upper Guinean overseers and work crew leaders bore surnames indicating precise ethno- linguistic identities,” with whom the Portuguese had had decades of contact. Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 27. He also notes “most of the Upper Guinean nations reproduced in early Spanish Caribbean sources reflect ethnolinguistic and geographical origins with considerable accuracy.” Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 53. There has been significant historical debate regarding the meaning of different African ethnonyms, see, for example, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “African ethnicities and the meanings of ‘Mina’” in Paul E. Lovejoy and David R. Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London, 2003), 65-81, and Robin Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa Vol. 32 (2005): 247-267. 8
528 (36%). By contrast, libres de todos colores numbered 432 314 (33.7%) and there were 69 590 (5.4%) enslaved people.15 This census data should be used with caution, as it likely underrepresented the number of people of African descent. Thousands of black and mixed people lived in the montes in palenques and rochelas and were not counted as living in Spanish settlements. The exception was Palenque itself, also known as San Basilio de Palenque, which was legally recognized and included in the census for the province of Cartagena de Indias.16 Census takers also likely underreported population numbers in an attempt to create an order that did not exist in reality. For example, there are instances where when listing the inhabitants of the pueblo de indios, agents only listed people whom they perceived to be indigenous and did not list enslaved black people. Moreover, there are settlements where all dwellers were listed as indios, for which there is considerable other evidence that there were many people of other ethnicities residing there.17
The demographic make-up of the different regions of study in this dissertation varied dramatically in the eighteenth century. In the Caribbean region, 62% of the population were free people of colour, while the enslaved made up just 8%. For the province of Antioquia, 59% were libres and 9% slaves. In Popayán, these figures were 6% and 19%, while in the Pacific Lowlands—mining areas—
22% were free people of colour and 48% were bondsmen and women. These regions also had significant indigenous populations: 18% of the inhabitants of both the Caribbean region and of
Popayán, and 22% of the Pacific Lowlands. Antioquia was an exception—the census only classified 4% of its population as indio. In most of late eighteenth-century New Granada, whites were a minority of the population, consisting of 12% in the Caribbean, 37% in the Eastern Cordillera, 25% in the Upper
Magdalena Valley, 17% in Antioquia, 15% in Popayán, 37% in Pasto, and just 7% in both the Pacific
15 Population statistics derived from the padrón general of 1778. Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora, and Camilo Ernesto Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al Poder del Número : censos y estadísticas de la Nueva Granada, 1750- 1830 (Bogotá: Archivo General de la Nación, 1995), 26. 16 AGN, Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11. 17 Pinzón, Tovar y Tovar, Convocatoria al Poder del Número, 102-104. 9
Lowlands and the Llanos.18
My focus on these regions within New Granada—the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the territory that connects them—contributes to a body of work that counters the historical and contemporary silencing of blackness. The narrative of mestizaje, race mixture, in Colombia has had a distinct trajectory from that of Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba. According to Peter Wade, the imaginary Colombian nation is a
“whitened mestizo nation,” one of Spanish and indigenous descent, “in which blackness and indianness are not only absorbed but also erased from the national panorama.” While it is well known in the country that a large proportion of the country is African-descended, the fact is little known outside of Colombia.19
The category of afrodescendiente, Afro-descendant, only formally entered Colombian law with the constitution of 1991, which granted Afro-Colombians collective cultural and land rights. In 2002, the
Colombian government estimated that afrodescendientes made up 26% of the population, yet—due to the failure of the census to accord with vernacular and urban categories of race—only 10.6% of the population self-reported as such in the 2005 census. The UN and Afro-Colombian groups continue to use the 26% estimate, and indeed, some activists approximate that up to 40% of the population is afrodescendiente today.20 It was this gap between state and self-representation that first sparked my interest in Afro-Colombian history. While it is crucial to acknowledge how people choose to self-represent, the gulf between these figures reflects a denial of blackness that has deep roots in Colombian history.
Taking the 26% figure, Colombia has the largest African-descended population in the Hispanic
Americas and the third largest in the hemisphere after Brazil and the United States.
Anthropologist Nina de Friedmann characterized the political, social and spatial marginalization
18 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 356. 19 Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1993), 19. 20 “Race and Poverty in Latin America: Addressing the Development Needs of African Descendants,” UN Chronicle Vol. XLIV No. 3, September 2007, accessed March 15, 2018, https://unchronicle.un.org/article/race- and-poverty-latin-america-addressing-development-needs-african-descendants 10 of people of colour in Colombia as “the invisibility of blackness.”21 The 1991 Constitution recognized that “black people, like indigenous peoples, were a distinct ‘ethnic group’ whose right to collective territory was to be legally protected.” The 1993 Law of Black Communities, focusing on those in rural areas, allowed such communities to practice “ethnic education, alternative development, natural resources, political participation, and local autonomy…profoundly disrupt[ing] the way that the
Colombian state had imagined the nation for nearly a century, as racially mixed and culturally homogenous.”22 While in public discourse there has been a celebration of black culture since the
Constitution, there has not been a concurrent celebration of black people or meaningful changes in terms of economic or educational mobility.23
Colombia is a nation of regions. It is no coincidence that the state has conventionally portrayed the Caribbean and Pacific regions—those with the largest black populations until recent years—as outside of the nation. As Peter Wade argues, in Colombia “black regions [are] seen as primitive and backward.”24 The conceptualization of the coasts as fundamentally different from the country’s interior region is rooted in a history of anti-blackness. The most common portrayals of costeños are of backwardness, characterizing them as being overtly sexual, practicing bestiality, and lazy.25 The Pacific is often portrayed as
21 Nina de Friedemann, “Estudios de negros en la antropologfa colombiana,” in Un siglo de investigación social: Antropologia en Colombia Jaime Arocha and Nina de Friedemann, eds. (Bogota, Colombia: Etno, 1984): 507-573. 22 Tianna S. Paschel, Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1. 23 Fernando Urrea-Giraldo’s extensive body of work charts the continued structural racism and social exclusion experienced by people of African descent, particularly in western Colombia. See, for example, F. Urrea, C. Viáfara, H. F. Ramírez, and W. Botero, “Las Desigualdades Raciales en Colombia: un Análisis Sociodemográfico de Condiciones de Vida, Pobreza e Ingresos para la ciudad de Cali y el Departamento del Valle del Cauca,” in Afro-Reparaciones: Memorias de la Esclavitud y Justicia Reparativa para Negros, Afrocolombianos y Raizales, eds. Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé and Luiz Claudio Barcelos, (Universidad Nacional de Colombia: Bogotá, 2007), 691- 710. María Fernanda Escallón explores the problematic transformations that the official ‘celebration’ of Afro- Colombian culture has brought to San Basilio de Palenque. María Fernanda Escallón, “The Formation of Heritage Elites: Talking Rights and Practicing Privileges in an Afro-Colombian Community” in Heritage in Action: Making the Past in the Present, eds. Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé and Luiz Claudio Barcelos, (Springer: New York, 2016), 63-74. 24 Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 337. 25 On the place of the Caribbean coast in the imaginary nation, see Peter Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 30-47. 11 backwards and undeveloped. Colombian scholars understand the political construction of the ‘Pacific region,’ since the eighteenth century, as the institutionalized and strategic ignoring of the area’s majority
African-descended population.26 Wade argues that Colombian nationhood is “a relational totality in the sense that any region, albeit ambiguously and contestably bounded, exists in relation to others, and the meanings attached to each derive in part from relations of difference.” The terms costeño and cachaco operate by “dividing both coasts from the interior and implying an equally relational opposition between blacker and whiter.” Yet, la Costa and El Pacífico occupy different places in the national imaginary of race. The Caribbean is perceived as being more integrated into the nation and more ethnically mixed than the Pacific. Wade argues “there is also opposition between the Atlantic and
Pacific coast, the former not so black, poor, or peripheral as the latter.”27
While cognizant of the pejorative roots and geographical issues with the term Pacífico, it is one I choose to use because of the ways in which African-descended communities have reclaimed it. The chocoano hip-hop group ChocQuibTown most famously articulated this concept of the Black Pacific in their first single, 2007’s Somos Pacífico. The chorus states “We are Pacific, we are united/The region unites us/The colour, the race, and the taste.”28 Reflecting popular understandings of what constitutes the Pacific, the song mentions numerous sites far into the interior: Chocó, Valle, Cauca, Buenaventura,
Guapi, Timbiquí, Tumaco, and El Bordo. The song’s capacious geographical definition of the Pacific reminds me of a woman I met in the 95% Afro-Colombian town Puerto Tejada in the north of Cauca, some 95 miles from the Pacific as the bird flies but much further by road.29 Upon visiting the Palo
26 Oscar Almario García, La Invención del Suroccidente Colombiano Tomo I “Historiografía de la Gobernación de Popayán y el Gran Cauca, Siglos XVIII y XIX” (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2005) 27 Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 64. 28 ChocQuibTown, “Somos Pacífico,” 2007. 29 Puerto Tejada is well known for its portrayal in Michael Taussig’s Esclavitud y Libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca (published under the name Mateo Mina). Mateo Mina, Esclavitud y Libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca (Bogotá: Fundación Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social, 1975). 12
River close to Guachané to swim, she told me, “I’m from the Pacific, but I’ve never seen the sea.”30 For
ChocQuibTown, the roots of this unity are in “la herencia africana,” in “la tierra,” and the cultural importance of spending time “en el lado del río.”31 This popular refrain reflects the relationship of
African-descended communities to land and water.
The connection between the two coasts has long been recognized by Afro-Colombians.
Throughout the twentieth century, intellectuals, and activists challenged the real and imagined divisions between the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. Organizers developed platforms and groups to promote black culture and history and fight racial discrimination, and acknowledged the experiences of black people in the country, while paying attention to regional particularities and interconnections between them.32 Most notable examples include the establishment of El Club Negro (the Black Club) in 1943, whose founders included costeños Manuel Zapata Olivella and Natanel Díaz, as well as Marino Viveros from the Pacific.33 A number of these intellectuals went on to found the Centro de Estudios Afro-
Colombianos in 1947. The Centro served as the launching point for pioneering research about Afro-
Colombians by Zapata Olivella and the Chocoan anthropologist Rogerio Velásquez.34
In the 1970s, activists envisioned blackness transregionally and transnationally with the expansion of racially defined social movements promoting black consciousness and solidarity. There were a series of conferences that created pioneering national spaces for dialogue and political organization, including the Encuentro Nacional de la Población Negra Colombiana from 1975 to 1977 and the
Congreso de Negritudes in 1977. Foregrounding questions of racism, marginalization, labour, and the need
30 Personal communication, Yorly Valdes, December 2012. 31 ChocQuibTown, “Somos Pacífico,” 2007. 32 Laura Correo Ochoa, email, July 17, 2018. 33 Francisco Javier Flórez-Bolívar, “En sus Propios Términos: Negros y Mulatos y sus luchas por la Igualdad en Colombia, 1885-1947,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 2016, 200. 34 Laura Correo Ochoa, email, July 17, 2018. Laura Correa Ochoa is a PhD Candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History in the History Department at Harvard University, whose research centres on black and indigenous mobilization in twentieth-century Colombia. 13 to mobilize for ethnic and cultural claims, these events laid the groundwork for the 1977 Congress in
Cali. The Congress brought together over 150 intellectuals from the black diaspora and set the foundation for the contemporary Afro-Colombian movement.35 For the first time, the Encuentro in 1975 assembled delegates from all over the country to discuss together the condition, challenges and future of people of African descent in Colombia. The first meeting resulted in the creation of the Consejo
Nacional de la Población Negra, led by Valentín Moreno Salazar. At the second Encuentro held in
Quibdó, Chocó in (1976), participants also generated a set of petitions for President Alfonso López
Michelsen. These centred on the expansion of secondary and post-secondary education in the Pacific and Caribbean regions, including the creation of the university Domingo Bioho in Palenque; the construction of hospitals and roads; as well as agricultural and industrial development.36
International currents shaped the debates about race, racism, and solidarity in these spaces and fostered new possibilities for collective political action. This was evident in the creation of the group
Soweto in 1976 (later renamed to Cimarrón) established by Juan de Dios Mosquera; the Centre for the
Investigation and Development of Black Culture and journal Presencia Negra and Revista Negritud by
Amir Smith Córdoba; and the ‘Research Centre Frantz Fanon’ led by Sancy Mosquera Pérez. These platforms addressed the experiences of black people on a national scale. Publications like Presencia Negra and Negritud were central in articulating the ideological and political basis and aims of El Movimiento de la
Cultura Negra, which sought to valorize blackness and make claims for racial justice. These organizations were careful to document and give a voice to the regional particularities of blackness while drawing national and diasporic connections.37
While historians often do not include New Granada as part of the Caribbean or the Atlantic
35 Laura Correo Ochoa, email, July 17, 2018. 36 Maguemati Wabgou, Jaime Arocha, Aiden Salgado, and Juan Carabali, Movimiento Social Afrocolombiano, Negro, Raizal y Palenquero: el largo camino hacia la construccion de espacios comunes y alianzas estrategicas para la incidencia política (Bogota D. C: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2015), 100. 37 Laura Correo Ochoa, email, July 17, 2018. 14 world, its long Caribbean coast, intimate connections with inter-continental trade, and high population of African descent made it so. Theories of the Atlantic world are crucial for understanding eighteenth- century New Granada. David Armitage proposes a three-fold typology of Atlantic history. ‘Circum-
Atlantic History’ is the “history of the Atlantic as particular zone of interchange, circulation and transmission” in constant interaction. ‘Trans-Atlantic History’ is international history, exploring the processes and forces that bring different sites into relationship with each other across the Atlantic
Ocean. ‘Cis-Atlantic History’ approaches individual sites in the Atlantic world as unique within and shaped by it.38 This study is a circum-Atlantic and especially cis-Atlantic history. It is circum-Atlantic as it is an account of populations on the Ocean’s coasts, of “people who crossed the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and participated in the communities it made possible.”39 The concept of the cis-Atlantic as articulated by Armitage has much to offer the study of Latin America. Cis-Atlantic approaches to the unique locations look to “define that uniqueness as the result of the interaction between local particularity and a wider web of connections (and comparisons).”40 Given the divergent but interlinked histories of the different areas of New Granada, this concept is particularly useful as it “confronts such separations by insisting on commonalities…by studying the local effects of oceanic movements.”41
Atlantic connections profoundly transformed local sites in New Granada, whether or not the Ocean’s shores touched them. Cis-Atlantic histories “protrude deep into the continents of the circum-Atlantic rim…as far as the goods, ideas, and people circulated.”42
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) is, of course, foundational for a study of black mobility and culture. My work follows on from Gilroy’s central point in the The Black Atlantic—that there is no
38 David Armitage “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in The British Atlantic World, 1580-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002), 16. 39 Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 18. 40 Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 21, 23. 41 Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 23. 42 Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 26. 15 single point of origins or original place but rather that movement and circulation characterize black cultural formation. Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic rightfully places African diasporic politics and culture at the centre of the production of ‘reason’ and ‘modernity.’ He argues that, “The history of the black Atlantic since then [since Columbus], continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people – not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship – provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory.”43
While the theorization of the Black Atlantic has a long history, that of the Black Pacific is developing considerably at present. Kris Lane examined the importance of African diasporic communities on the Pacific Rim, especially the cimarrones (Maroons) of Esmeraldas in the Audiencia of
Quito.44 Rachel O’Toole, Michelle McKinley, and Tamara Walker have produced important scholarship on slavery and gender in colonial Peru.45 Sherwin Bryant focuses on African-descended communities in the Pacific lowlands of colonial Quito, a jurisdiction that included much of western Colombia.46
Marcela Echeverri and Angela Perez-Villa’s work analyzes black politics, emancipation, and freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Yesenia Barragan examines Chocó in the mid-nineteenth century.47 The introduction to Sherwin Bryant, Rachel O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III’s Africans to Spanish
America: Expanding the Diaspora makes key theorizations about the Black Pacific. They write that
43 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 16. 44 Kris Lane, Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002) 45 Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Tamara J. Walker, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 46 Bryant, Rivers of Gold. 47 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution; Angela Perez-Villa, “Disorderly Love: Illicit Friendships, Violence, and Law in a Slave Society at War, Popayán-Colombia, 1809-1830,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2017); Yesenia Barragan, “Death, Slavery, and Spiritual Justice on the Colombian Black Pacific (1837),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 15 (2015); Yesenia Barragan, “Gendering Mastery: Female Slaveholders in the Colombian Pacific Lowlands,” Slavery & Abolition (July 24, 2017): 1–26. 16 understanding the importance of slavery in Pacific locales such as Trujillo (Peru), Guayaquíl (Ecuador) and Barbacoas (Colombia) makes clear “the ways that slavery and blackness impacted imperial attempts to restructure governance in the region.” They call for “explorations of blackness that extend the framework of Diaspora more explicitly to Spanish America.” While numerous sites along the Pacific
Coast of Spanish America “were actually old landmarks of early modern diasporic experience…today they represent new nodal points that are receiving broader consideration by a current generation of scholars working on the African Diaspora to Spanish America.”48
The Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific were spaces with different geographies and histories of race. However, recent scholarship has re-examined the connections between Atlantic and Pacific New
Granada through an interconnected history of blackness. Alfonso Múnera makes explicit the connections between the Caribbean and Cauca in Jorge Isaacs’s María. Isaacs’s own family history— son of a Colombian mother and Jewish father, born in Jamaica who converted to Catholicism had made his fortune in mining and trade with Jamaica—reflected these trans-coastal connections. Written in the 1860s, María was Isaacs’s only novel, which came to be seen as a quintessential national novel.
The presence of slavery and the Caribbean in the novel has typically been overlooked.49 Edgardo Perez
Morales’s research illustrates the mobility of people of African descent between Caribbean and Pacific
New Granada during the revolutionary wars.50 A section of a chapter on territories in Rutas de Libertad:
500 Años De Travesía titled “The Pacific, the Caribbean and the Colombian country” is suggestive in rooting this connected history in indigenous pre-Colombian river transport patterns.51 Perhaps the
48 Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III, “Introduction” Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (eds.) Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III (University of Illinois: Champaign, Ill., 2012), 3. 49 Alfonso Múnera, “María de Jorge Isaacs: la Otra Geografía,” Poligramas 25 (July 2006): 49-61. 50 Edgardo Pérez Morales, “Itineraries of Freedom: Revolutionary Travels and Slave Emancipation in Colombia and the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1830,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013) 51 Roberto Burgos Cantor, ed., Rutas De Libertad: 500 Años de Travesía (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana: Bogotá, 2010), 236-253. 17 chapter’s most important insight is the suggestion that the Caribbean and the Pacific were sites in conversation: “We cannot forget that the invention of America began with the invention of the
Caribbean, which brought as a consequence the invisibilization, but not the naturalization of the
Pacific.”52 Similarly, Sherwin Bryant argues that the binary between Atlantic and Pacific History is a false one, for “the Pacific was, if anything, constitutive of the very Atlantic world that somehow became delimited within the Atlantic basin.”53 Understanding how the Caribbean was connected to the
Pacific can illuminate and complicate the Black Atlantic, just as Atlantic world methodologies are instructive for the study of the Black Pacific.
I conceive, then, of a Black Atlantic and Black Pacific that intersected with one another through the mobility of African-descended persons, objects, and epistemologies. Both the Atlantic and Pacific are intrinsic parts of the African diaspora and were spaces always intimately connected and producing one another. My research connects the emerging literature on the Black Pacific—a space also shaped by conquest, slavery, and oceanic exchange—to that of the Black Atlantic by showing how the two coasts shaped the internal cultural geography of New Granada. The colony was not solely an Atlantic or
Pacific space, but a transnational and transcultural one. The whole space of New Granada was one formed by flows of exchange along rivers and waterways that were an extension of the forces that created the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds.
Reconceptualizing Geographies of Slavery
My research connects with the body of scholarship in Atlantic history that focuses on black mobility and emphasizes the interconnectedness of Atlantic World sites through the mobility of people
52 Cantor, ed., Rutas De Libertad, 236-7. 53 Yesenia Barragan, “Afro-Latin America and the Black Pacific: An Interview with Sherwin K. Bryant,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, April 22, 2017, accessed March 15, 2018. https://www.aaihs.org/afro-latin-america-and-the-black-pacific-an-interview-with-sherwin-k-bryant/ accessed 18 of African descent. Atlantic World historians have focused on black mobility during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly during the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Julius
Scott’s seminal 1986 dissertation “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” transformed how historians think about networks, epistemological circulation, and the centrality of mobility for understanding black life in the Americas and the Atlantic
World. Scholars working on black mobility—including Jane Landers, Rebecca Scott, Jean M. Hébrard,
Ada Ferrer, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker—have built upon the foundations laid by Julius
Scott’s dissertation, which has recently been published.54
Figure 1: Moreno y Escandón’s Plan geográfico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá, 1772
54 Julius Sherrard Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986 (A Common Wind: Afro-American Organization in the Revolution against Slavery, Verso, 2018); Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2014); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000) 19
New Granada was a testing site for Bourbon reforms that sought to transform the new Viceroyalty into a productive colony, a project that ultimately failed. This map was part of that project. Archivo Nacional de Bogotá, Mapoteca 2, 1248. The rectangle highlights the regions of focus in this dissertation. See Sergio Mejía “Moreno y Escandón’s Plan geográphico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá, 1772,” Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography Volume 68, 2016 - Issue 1.
In most historiography, Caribbean and Pacific New Granada are two distinct worlds with fundamentally separate literatures. Anthony McFarlane argues that eighteenth-century New Granada was
“a fragmented entity, geographically dispersed and each [region] tended to become a distinctive cell.”55
However, recent works have emphasized that, despite the Viceroyalty’s geographic and political fragmentation, people of African descent traversed and connected these different regions. Ernesto
Bassi illustrates the importance of New Granada within the making of the Greater Caribbean through a focus on the mobility of sailors, although he does not focus on the enslaved.56 Katherine Bonil’s recent work makes important contributions about mobility, the Magdalena River, and free black communities, especially bogas (free black boatmen).57 Jason McGraw’s The Work of Recognition uses Atlantic methodologies to analyze black politics after emancipation, with a focus on mobile people, including bogas, market women, and artisans.58 My argument’s significance for African diasporic studies lies in its analysis of the mobility of both free and enslaved African-descended people, as well as the movement and exchange of epistemologies and material culture between Atlantic and Pacific black communities. I focus on quotidian connections created by this mobility over the course of the eighteenth century,
55 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 10. 56 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory 57 Katherine Bonil Gómez, “The Political Culture of Free People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century New Granada,” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2017). 58 Jason McGraw, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 20 rather than on moments of intense revolutionary upheaval when the transformative political potential of these quotidian mobilities came into sharp relief.
Ernesto Bassi’s An Aqueous Territory is particularly useful in theoretically grounding New
Granada as a transimperial and Caribbean space. He shows the meaningful and lasting connections that
Caribbean New Granada had with the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean. Bassi addresses “the
‘decaribbeanization’ process through which early Colombia’s nation makers chose to erase these connections.”59 Bassi states that New Granada’s regions should be understood as “fluidly bounded and amorphously demarcated spatial units shaped and reshaped through everyday social interactions.”
Using Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman’s terminology, Bassi argues that mobility necessarily creates meaning—by moving through space actors “develop a ‘sense of place’; they ‘endow’ significance to space.”60 Through “an aggregation of innumerable lived geographies,” he constructs “an aqueous territory that constitutes the transimperial Greater Caribbean,” a region that is a “sum of individual sailors’ mobilities…[that] can be characterized as amorphously bounded, flexible, malleable, multicultural, geopolitically unstable, and both personally threatening and liberating.” For Bassi then, the sea is not “just…a space that facilitates movement” but a “central component of the regional configuration.”61
Bassi’s theorization of water, space and place is immensely useful for understanding the relationship between mobility and the construction of transregional diasporic communities. However, he views slavery in New Granada as more “a project in the mind of bureaucrats and local elites than as a reality experienced in the flesh by a large group of the region’s inhabitants.” He further asserts that the area was “more a society with slaves than a slave society.”62 In my understanding of New Granada’s
59 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory, 3. 60 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory, 8. 61 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory, 8. 62 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory, 4. 21 relationship to slavery, I follow Sherwin Bryant’s approach to colonial Quito, which he defines as a place in which colonial authorities governed through slavery, despite the relatively small number of slaves.
Bryant rejects the binary of ‘slave society’ and ‘society with slaves’, arguing that such dichotomies are
“based upon a limited, materialist-driven conceptualization of slavery via labour and economic outputs.”63 David Wheat also makes a convincing argument that the ‘slave societies’ and ‘societies of slaves’ binary is not appropriate for the early Spanish Caribbean (including regions within the New
Kingdom of Granada). He states that the region had the demographics of a ‘slave society’ but was not one, for “slave labor and large slaveholdings were central to these colonies that clearly were not designed to efficiently exploit local resources or produce export commodities in the most profitable manner.” “He argues that, even if the early Caribbean colonies “were ‘slave societies,’ then they were oriented towards settlement.”64
Wheat challenges assumptions that have dominated Caribbean historiography since the colonial era. First, he argues that “sugar was not the intrinsic destiny of all Caribbean colonies,” and second,
“that slavery was primarily important for colonies oriented toward extraction and exploitation, rather than settlement.”65 Bassi uses the term decaribbeanization’ to describe the national elite political move away from imagining Colombia and New Granada as being a Caribbean country. He also applies ‘decaribbeanization’ to the early Spanish Caribbean; as Wheat puts it, “slavery only became historically significant—and Africans only become visible—with the arrival of northern Europeans and the establishment of sugar plantations.” Indeed, “Areas that never developed extensive sugar
63 Bryant, River of Gold, 5. Ira Berlin famously outlines the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, stating that ‘what distinguished societies with slaves was the fact that slaves were marginal to the central productive processes; slavery was just one form of labor among many.’ By contrast, in slave societies, ‘slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relation…slaveholders…were the ruling class in slave societies; nearly everyone—free and slave—aspired to enter the slaveholding class.’ Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998), 8. 64 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 256. 65 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 8. 22 industries—including the Caribbean’s entire southern littoral from Venezuela to Panama—do not fit this version of Caribbean history.”66
To fully understand slavery in the region, it is crucial to connect the Caribbean and Pacific.
Bryant shows that, for imperial authorities, slavery in western New Granada was both a mode of conquest and a mode of governing: “colonial slavery promised to help claim this new territory, harness its natural resources, and thereby prove elemental to the establishment of its estates, towns, markets, and good governance.”67 In a similar vein, examining the first wave of the Portuguese slave trade from the Rivers of Guinea and West Central Africa to the early Hispanic Caribbean, Wheat argues that
Africans were “de facto colonists.”68 He states “Africans quickly adapted to Iberian customs and cultural mores and were more than capable of undertaking the sundry skilled and unskilled labors necessary to ensure the basic functioning of colonial society.” This was a Spanish Caribbean world that was “a network of port cities and hinterlands in which African migrants like themselves labored, not as chattel, but as surrogate colonists.”69
Both Bryant and Wheat’s monographs are about spaces within the New Kingdom of Granada, spaces with a shared history, yet Wheat does not engage with Bryant’s work or his connected argument on the relationship between colonial governance and slavery in the west of the same colony. The premise of Wheat’s argument about slavery as a mode of colonial rule is important, but it fails to
66 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 9, 8. 67 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 2. 68 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 8. 69 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 235. Cherokee literary scholar Jodi Byrd has critiqued the application of the term ‘settler’ to black historical ontologies in the Americas. She argues that this is not appropriate for people whose heritage is rooted in forced migration and slavery. Drawing on the writing of Barbadian poet, philosopher, novelist and historian Kamau Brathwaite, Byrd proposes the term ‘arrivant’ as a form of historical ontology that can account for black experiences in the Americas, and African diasporic histories of migration tha neither fit the categories of ‘settler’ nor ‘indigenous’. ‘Arrivant’, emerged out of Afro- creole religious practice - it was the term used by practitioners of Afro-Jamaica kumina in the 19th century to encapsulate their own historical and spiritual narratives of survival as the descendants of survivors of the Middle Passage. See Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1973). Thanks to my supervisor for pointing me to these references. 23 acknowledge the violence against the enslaved and the involuntary nature of their migrations in the way that Bryant does. Nevertheless, a comparison of these arguments—the use of enslaved peasant labourers in the Hispanic Caribbean and enslaved mining gangs in Quito’s tropical lowlands to colonize territory—are two sides of the same coin. Taken together, Wheat and Bryant’s scholarship illustrates how governance through slavery took distinct yet interconnected forms in the Spanish Caribbean and the Black Pacific due to economic, cultural, and environment conditions in the seventeenth century.
“The Wilderness Within” shows how the dynamics of racial slavery profoundly shaped the lives of the African-descended majority in Caribbean New Granada, including those who were legally free.
The city’s authorities lived in fear of the large population of enslaved and free people of African descent and punished them brutally in order to rule through what Vincent Brown describes as ‘spiritual terror.’70 The Governor of Cartagena stated this explicitly while writing to the King about the case of an enslaved man accused of murdering a child in May 1752: “As the Blacks and Mulatos of this city are much more numerous than the Whites, one can fear much evil if one does not punish such crimes of these people with rigour.”71 As Marisa Fuentes asks of eighteenth-century Barbados, “What then, did
‘freedom’ mean in such a society?”72
Religion and Historiography
Scholarship on African diasporic religion in the colonial Americas has long been animated by a debate over retentions versus creolization. Classic works that emphasize African survivals are Melville J.
Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and Roger Bastide’s African Civilisations in the New World
70 Vincent Brown, ‘Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society’, Slavery & Abolition, vol. 24, no. 1, (2003). 71 AGI, Santa Fe, 491. 72 Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 2 24
(1971).73 More recently Paul Lovejoy’s extensive body of work explicitly argues against creolization. He claims that approaching the study of enslaved cultures from the vantage point of the Americas,
“emphasizes the common features of society and thereby focus[es] on ‘creolization;’ [by which] the origins of individual slaves are ambiguous and generalized.”74
By contrast, the theory of creolization posits that the cultures and religions of people born in
Africa and their descendants were something entirely new, created in the Americas—a combination of
African, European and indigenous forms. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price’s seminal essay, An
Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past (1976) concludes that, due to the context of forced servitude, “enslaved Africans were compelled to create a new language, a new religion, indeed a new culture.”75 Their work called for more research on African American linguistic, religious and cultural creativity. Since then historians have generated brilliant scholarship on African American language and culture, but far less work has been done on religion in the Caribbean and Latin America.76
Scholars have reframed the debate to blend elements of both arguments. For example, James Sweet’s
Recreating Africa (2003) argued that African practices did not undergo a process of creolization, but were rather independent systems of thought “practiced in parallel.” He suggests a process of
‘Africanization’—while individuals gravitated towards their own ethnic group, there were also shared
73 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); Roger Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 74 Paul Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery,” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation II, 1 (1997): 6. 75 Sidney Mintz and Richard Price. An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), ix. 76 Examples of historical studies of religion include James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean; Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jerome S. Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby, Enacting Power: the Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean 1760‐2011 (Kingston, Jamaica: Univ. of the West Indies Press, 2012); Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2008); 25
“spiritual affinities between groups…an essential African core.”77 This notion of an “essential African core” risks homogenization, but it may be one that speaks to the historical realities of Brazilian plantations zones where enslaved captives arrived in large numbers from the same regions. It does not, however, apply to New Granada, with more geographic diversity in terms of the origins of enslaved peoples and large segments of the population being black, indigenous, and Afro-indigenous in close proximity.
Theories of retentions or survivals of African cultures assume the existence of a place experienced by its inhabitants as ‘Africa’ prior the Atlantic slave trade. “The West was created somewhere at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the midst of a global waves of material and symbolic transformations,” posits Michel-Rolph Trouillot.78 The colonial idea of a primitive Africa was created somewhere between the expansion of the West and the world of Atlantic slavery upon which it was premised.79 There is no evidence to suggest that people from Africa identified with the concept of being ‘African’ prior to the Atlantic slave trade, a fact that made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.80
The retention model does not capture the complexity of African diasporic cultural exchange and creativity. Fernando Ortíz’s 1947 concept of “intermeshed transculturations,” a process of interdirectional exchange in the midst of loss, is central to understanding African diasporic religions in
77 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 7, 132. 78 Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995), 74. 79 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, Indiana; J. Currey: London, 1994), xi, V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1988) 80 Joseph C. Miller explains the economics behind decisions of local leaders in Africa to enter into the slave trade. He argues that the abundance of land in Africa, much of which was difficult to grow on, led to the definition of capital as maximum productivity, which found in humans and livestock. (Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 [University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1988], 43). As Miller states, the desire of African elites to purchase European, Asian and American goods arose due to the “contradictions in the political economies of their lands.” This allowed them to alter local politics and left them “heavily dependent for their prestige on closer integration with a changing world economy.” Foreign goods allowed big men to enlarge their entourage of clients, kin and slaves and thus increase their political influence. However, power rooted in the import of foreign goods antithetically required the release of their gains in people to foreign slave traders. Miller, Way of Death, 71, 105. 26 the colonial Spanish world.81 Recent work on ‘Atlantic creoles’ in western Africa provides a crucial key to understanding transculturation on both sides of the Atlantic.82 Slave ships arriving in the early colonial Spanish Caribbean “brought passengers and crew members who were already accustomed to overlapping Iberian and African worlds.” Wheat argues that the integration of precedents in western
African is central to “revis[ing] creolization models by accounting for many African migrants’ prior familiarity with multiple cultures and languages.”83
Similarly, Pablo Gómez’s analysis in The Experiential Caribbean convincingly demonstrates that arguments about African survivals simply do not apply to the market of medical competition of the
Spanish Caribbean. He shows how “black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ strategies for creating power and knowledge were based on experiential phenomena, which they manufactured anew on the basis of localized circumstances in different Caribbean locales.”84 In his discussion of the example of Antonio
Congo in 1690s Cartagena, Gómez argues that such Old World traditions (specifically West Central
African practices in this case):
…would not have proven particularly useful in Antonio’s attempts to achieve social power in the minds of his multicultural Caribbean witnesses. Due to the multiple origins of Caribbean ritual specialists and their patients—and, more generally, of all willing and unwilling witnesses to their acts—the meanings of their wondrous acts did not necessarily hearken to unique or specific traditions.85
Instead, the Hispanic Caribbean was a majority African-descended space where “First-generation bozales…together with a creole population increasingly defined as free over the seventeenth century, pioneered novel ways of engaging with the natural world and human bodies that eventually became normative and mainstream.”86
81 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970) [1947] 82 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the making of the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 83 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 17, 220. 84 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 3. 85 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 152. 86 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 31. 27
There are still few studies of African diasporic religion in the colonial Americas beyond the
United States, which is surprising when one considers the importance of the religious in African- descended social and political life across the Americas. Significant recent studies of African diasporic religion such as Stephan Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists and James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares examine the relationship between African diasporic religions, the making of the Atlantic World, and modernity.
Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law (2011) examines the prohibition of the practice of vodou in Haiti from 1835 to 1987. Similarly, Diana Paton’s The Cultural Politics of Obeah (2015) traces the relationship between obeah, popular politics, and citizenship in the Anglophone Caribbean from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. She argues that the criminalization of obeah, and its intersection with political transformations, was crucial to obeah’s formation and development. Jerome Handler and
Kenneth Bilby chart the criminalization of obeah and the “unquestioning acceptance of witchcraft fears and accusations as an accurate reflection of normal spiritual practice” which has “fed into and reinforced the reductive, hegemonic definition of obeah as harmful witchcraft.”87
Stuart Schwartz’s All Can Be Saved (2008), examining the religious worlds of actors of all ethnicities, challenges stereotypes of the Iberian Atlantic as an intolerant space and demonstrates that inquisitorial records can be a window onto vibrant religious creativity, as well as ecclesiastical persecution.88 There are a growing number of historical works that specifically examine African diasporic religion in colonial Latin America. Monographs on the subject are few but include Jean-Pierre
Tardieu’s body of scholarship on enslaved and free black religion in Latin America and Joan Cameron
Bristol’s study of witchcraft in seventeenth-century-Mexico.89 Herman Bennett’s studies of inquisitorial
87 Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah; Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law; Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 104. 88 Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved. 89 Jean-Pierre Tardieu, El Negro en el Cuzco (Banco Central de Reserva del Perú/ Instituto Riva Agüero: Lima, 1998); Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Los Esclavos de la Provincia Jesuitica del Paraguay: Secuestro de 1767 (Editorial Académica Española: Saarbruck, 2012); Jean-Pierre Tardieu, El Negro en la Real Audiencia de Quito (s. XVI-XVIII) (Institut Français d’Etudes Andines / Ed. Abya-Yala de Quito / Cooperazione Internazionale, Italia, 2006); Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Cimarrones de Panamá: La Forja de una Identidad Afroamericana (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana 28 and baptismal records demonstrate the importance of Christianity and the Spanish Crown in the formation of black communities in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico.90
Brazilian scholarship accounts for a significant portion of published research on African diasporic religions in the Americas. Laura de Mello e Souza’s O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz (1986) emphasized the importance of Iberian, indigenous, and African syncretism in Brazilian witchcraft and healing far earlier than most scholars working in English. It was finally published in English as The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross in 2003 and is still seen as one of the best books in the study of colonial
Afro-Latin American religions.91 João José Reis’s Divining Slavery and Freedom (2015), first published in
Portuguese as Domingos Sodré, Um Sacerdote Africano (2008), intricately weaves together the nineteenth- century trans-Atlantic ritual genealogies and social contexts of candomblé, remarkably tracing Sodré’s beginnings as an African priest near Lagos, through his experiences of labour on sugar plantations near
Salvador, freedom and two Catholic marriages.92
Studies of African diasporic religions in New Granada have focused on the seventeenth-century
Inquisition, which was founded in Cartagena de Indias in 1610. New Granada was one of the key sites of judicial persecution of black ritual and healing practitioners in the Americas and the Atlantic world.
The Inquisition’s prosecution of African-descended men and women in the seventeenth-century
Cartagena de Indias generated a large body of cases that have received significant historiographical attention. Both María Cristina Navarrete’s Prácticas Religiosas de los Negros en la Colonia (1995) and Adriana
Editorial/Vervuert, 2009); Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007) 90 Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Herman L. Bennett Colonial Blackness: a History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) 91 Laura de Mello e Souza, O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz: Feitiçaria e Religiosidade popular no Brasil Colonial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986), The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in colonial Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) 92 João José Reis, Divining Slavery and Freedom: the story of Domingos Sodré, an African priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 29
Luz Maya Restrepo’s Brujeria y Reconstrucción de Identidades entre los Africanos y sus Descendientes en La Nueva
Granada, Siglo XVII (2005) focus on witchcraft cases.93 Kristen Block’s Ordinary Lives (2012) and Nicole
Von Germeten’s Violent Delights, Violent Ends (2013), examine the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religion in the port city.94 Literature scholar Larisa Brewer-García’s dissertation explores the authorial role of black interpreters who translated for people who could not speak Spanish when they came before the Inquisition in Cartagena and Lima.95 Pablo Gómez used Inquisition documents to reveal the role of Africans in shaping the early modern Caribbean. His scholarship and advice have been crucial for my own understanding of the Caribbean, African-descended ritual practice, and the history of medicine. Building upon the work of Pablo Gómez and David Wheat, whose scholarship envisions an
African-Spanish Caribbean in the seventeenth century, I look beyond the shores of the Atlantic through an inclusion of communities from Pacific regions.96
Historiography on New Granada is overwhelmingly focused on the political, secular, and the local. Independence looms large in Colombia. There is a vast and ever-growing literature on nineteenth-century politics but less growth in the fields of cultural, religious, and social history.97 There are remarkably few studies of religion in eighteenth-century New Granada, and few articles and book
93 María Cristina Navarrete’s Prácticas Religiosas de los Negros en la Colonia: Cartagena, Siglo XVII (Santiago de Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1995); Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y Reconstrucción de Identidades entre los Africanos y sus Descendientes en la Nueva Granada, Siglo XVII (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005). Other studies of witchcraft trials from the Cartagena de Indias Inquisition, although without an explicit focus on people of African descent are Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada: Un Duelo de Imaginarios (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1994) and Jaime Humberto Borja Gómez, Rostros y Rastros del Demonio en la Nueva Granada: Indios, Negros, Judíos, Mujeres y Otras Huestes de Satanás (Bogotá: Editorial Ariel Historia, 1998). 94 Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Nicole Von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013) 95 Larissa Brewer-García, “Beyond Babel: Translation of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada.” (PhD. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2013) 96 David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean; Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean. 97 For the most important works from this body of historiography are Alfonso Múnera’s El Fracaso de la Nación: Región, Clase y Raza en el Caribe Colombiano: 1717-1810 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, El Ancora Editores, 1998); Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution: Colombia 1795-1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution. 30 chapters that address African-descended religious and cultural lives in this period. Renée Souloudre-La
France’s numerous publications have examined infanticide by enslaved mothers, the reconstruction of
African identities, black popular politics, sacramental orthodoxy, and African descended religious material culture in New Granada.98 Orián Jiménez’s 2015 article analyzes the role of people of African descent in the formation of the cult of Ecce Homo in Popayán.99 On the one hand, scholarly disinterest in eighteenth century religion in a country so markedly Catholic is astonishing, yet on the other, this is understandable due to the challenges of the sources and archives, a subject to which I now turn.100
Archives and Methodologies
The lack of work on eighteenth-century religion in New Granada is not due to a lack of sources, which may be found in disparate and under-utilized archival collections. I use materials from thirteen archival collections from across Colombia, Spain, and the United States. My dissertation is principally based on three categories of sources—trial records from criminal and ecclesiastical courts,
98 Renée Soulodre La France, “‘Por el Amor!’: Child-Killing in Colonial Nueva Granada,”Slavery and Abolition, 23, no. 1 (April 2002): 87-100; “‘Socially not so Dead!’: Slave Identity in Bourbon New Granada,” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1 (June 2001): 87-103; “I, Francisco Castañeda, Negro Esclavo Caravali” – Caravali Ethnicity in Colonial New Granada,” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman (London: Continuum, 2003), 96-114; “‘Whites are our Enemies!’: Popular Political Culture and Ethnicity in Colonial Nueva Granada,” in Matthew Restall, ed. Beyond Black and Red: African- Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 137-158; “‘Los Esclavos de su Magestad!’ Slave Protest and Politics in Late Colonial New Granada,” in Jane Landers, ed., Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 175- 208; “Slaves, Saints and Statues: Baroque Catholic Imagery and African Sensibilities from Nueva Granada,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (Autumn 2008), 33, no. 1: 215-229; “Sailing Through the Sacraments: Ethnic and Cultural Geographies of a Port and Its Churches-Cartagena de Indias,” Slavery and Abolition 36 no. 3: 460-477. 99 Orián Jimenez Meneses, “Esclavitud, Libertad y Devoción Religiosa en Popayán: El Santo Ecce Homo y el Mundo de la Vida de Juan Antonio de Velasco, 1650-1700,” Historia Crítica 56 (April 2015): 13-36. 100 Approximately 90% of Colombia’s population is Catholic. This is very high, even for Latin America. By contrast, only an estimated 65% of the Chilean population is Catholic (“U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,” International Religious Freedom Report: Colombia (2009), accessed February 28, 2018 https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127384.htm; “U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,” International Religious Freedom Report: Chile (2006), accessed February 28, 2018 https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2006/71453.htm). 31 governmental and ecclesiastical correspondence, and parish records. I also use censuses, complaints of mistreatment, laws, maps, notarial documents, pleas for manumission, published books, treaties, travellers’ accounts and wills of people of African descent, including those of enslaved people. This research has provided me with a very rich source base for in-depth analysis of how African-descended religious knowledges and ritual objects circulated. I was able to situate these practices, epistemological forms, and material objects within their social and institutional contexts.
One of the greatest obstacles in writing this dissertation was the question of how to reconstruct
African diasporic religion and culture from an archive whose creators intended to erase such spiritualities and silence their practitioners. How could I resist the seductive, sequential narrative of the inquisition record? I took guidance from the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote that the production of history occurs at four moments: “the moment of fact creation (the making of the sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)’ and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”101
The making of archives and their afterlives for the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias was especially fraught. The Inquisition was famed for its meticulous record keeping. In the process, as
Silverblatt puts it they “were generating statistics” to reconstruct life histories of heretics.102 The
Inquisition recorded all of a defendant’s testimony, even where the evidence undermined the case against the accused.103 The traces that these women and men left in the archives reflected their lack of power in the historical moment when sources were made. White male inquisitors asked men and women of African descent formulaic questions and the answers were written down through a
101 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 25. 102 Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Duke University Press: Durham, 2004), 37. 103 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 59. 32
European Catholic Christian filter. As Mary Elizabeth Perry articulates, this “clearly reinforce[es] a form of ventriloquism in which the powerful speak for the powerless.”104 In the moments of ‘fact retrieval’ and ‘retrospective significance’ it is the responsibility of the historian to read between the lines of inquisitorial interrogation: “To leave [them] in obscurity…is to collude in [their] silencing and in the writing of hegemonic history—that is, studies of the past that promote and preserve the interests of those in power.”105
These voluminous records were stored in the local Inquisition archive during the colonial period, while copies of important cases and summaries of many cases were sent to Madrid for review.
Unfortunately, the Cartagena documentation, unlike the huge Mexico and less complete Lima
Inquisition records, has been lost. The story of the loss of the Cartagena documentation has evolved into something of an urban legend among archivists and historians. Different researchers along my archival travels spun me a wide web of tales, including one that the volumes were thrown into the sea and another that a zealous mayor recycled them in the 1970s—an indication of the potential power of local politicians to erase afrodescendiente populations in the past as in the present. Yet, I am more inclined to believe Moisés Álvarez Marín, the present archivist of the Archivo Histórico de Cartagena, which is housed in the former Palace of the Inquisition, who informed me that the tomes were lost when the
Inquisition fled the city during the wars of independence.106
If this is indeed what happened then, for those interested in the archive of African-descended experience in Colombia, the nationally romanticized moment of political liberation of the city from the
Spanish is transformed into an ambivalent one. As the inquisitors stole away, they simultaneously disappeared an extraordinary collection, taking what were in some cases the only records of the
104 Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Finding Fatima, a Slave Woman of Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Women’s History, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 151. 105 Perry, ‘Finding Fatima,’ 151. 106 Personal communication, Moisés Alvarez Marín, July 20, 2012. 33 existence of possibly thousands of people, and depriving future Colombians, scholars and students of crucial evidence about the history, culture, and religion of New Granada and the Hispanic Caribbean. It is possible that these documents remain in private archives, perhaps of the upper echelons of the
Colombian elite, and hopefully they will one day come to the surface. Álvarez Marín kindly allowed me to use the reading room of the Archivo Histórico de Cartagena to write, despite the fact that it is usually reserved for researchers using the material from the collection, which unfortunately does not contain any eighteenth-century documentation. I was painfully aware of the fact that I was writing in the same physical space where my subjects were imprisoned, tried, and sentenced. I hope that this awareness informs the sensitivity with which I treat their stories.
The intimate ties between politics, archives, and fact assembly is particularly potent in
Colombia. The regionalism of Colombian historiography is not only rooted in the “failure of the nation,” to use Alfonso Múnera’s terminology, but also in the potential dangers of travel until recent years.107 Michael Taussig discusses how the power of enslavers continues to be felt in the physical spaces of the modern archive of the Archivo Central del Cauca:
The archive is located in a white colonial building that belonged to the Mosquera family, the same family that together with the Arboledas owned the slaves in San Vicente on the other side of the cordillera. Nobody lives in the house anymore. Old papers of state have replaced the people, but it is a sign of the Mosqueras’ power, even in death, that the history of the province is archived in their house.108
The city of Popayán, known as the White City because of its white colonial buildings, “is little more than a monument to the aristocratic pretensions of the slave-owning past.” Taussig imagines the encroachment of the war into the city; “Petrified like a fossil, the city is surrounded by mountains and forest, home of the guerilla since almost forty years…The center of what had been a vast and
107 Múnera, El Fracaso de la Nación. 108 Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 94. 34 complacent gold-mining empire converted into a guerilla camp. How would the papers in the archive read then?”109
Researching in archives situated in colonial buildings with their own troubling histories ensured the material presence of the past in my own research, in the moment of fact retrieval. Archival itineraries, years spent in Colombia, and forests, forts, and islands thick with memories of the colonial past turned my attention to space, geographies, and materialities in a way I had not envisaged when I began this project. In addition to Trouillot’s work on historical silences, Marisa Fuentes’s 2016 study of enslaved women in Barbados expresses my own methodological approach. She states,
…the very nature of slavery in the eighteenth-century Caribbean made enslaved life fleeting and rendered access to literacy nearly impossible. Yet the women who appear in the archival fragments on which this book draws offer a crucial glimpse into lives under the domination of slavery—lives that were just as important as those of more visible and literate people in this period…I examine archival fragments in order to understand how these documents shape the meaning produced about them in their own time and our current historical practices.110
There is an Afro-New Granadan religious archive for the eighteenth century, yet it is one that is fragmentary and scattered. The focus on ritual materiality in this project emerged due to the scattered nature of the archive of black religion and the fragments of diasporic cultural flows in judicial records.
The Atlantic focus of current historiography on the subject reflects the preponderance of materials from Caribbean New Granada due to the large body of documents generated by the Inquisition (stored in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, or AHN). There are also far more Caribbean materials in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), and in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville than there are records from the Pacific region. However, there are numerous other archives that reveal the
Caribbean and Pacific worlds of African diasporic religions. The departments of Cauca (Archivo
Central del Cauca in Popayán), Valle del Cauca (Archivo Histórico de Cali, Archivo Histórico
Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón, Buga, and Archivo Histórico de Cartago), and Antioquia
109 Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, 94. 110 Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 2. 35
(Archivo Histórico de Antioquia, Medellín, and Archivo Histórico de Medellín) have particularly strong eighteenth-century collections.111 African diasporic religious lives can be reconstructed from secular sources, using documentation including, but not limited to, civil and criminal trials, complaints of mistreatment, notarial documents, pleas for manumission, published books, and wills.
There are a number of ecclesiastical archival collections aside from the Inquisition. Although there are relatively few pre-nineteenth-century records in Caribbean Colombia, I found the Archivo
Histórico Eclesiástico de la Catedral de Santa Marta very useful. Extensive baptismal records— thousands and thousands of photographs of the pages of parish books—from across Latin America are available through the Mormon website “Family Search.”112 The national Jesuit archive, (Archivo
Histórico Javeriano Juan Manuel Pacheco S.J. Bogotá), has records of Jesuit holdings in New Granada, with limited documentation pertaining to the vast number of enslaved people who were in their possession. In addition to these, further ecclesiastical records can be found on microfilm in the AGN from the Archivo Histórico Arzobispal de Popayán (AHAP).
The convergences between the power to silence African-descended voices in the past, with that same power in the present, was made obvious in my experience with the AHAP. Most, but not all of the records in the archbishopric’s archive were microfilmed, so I could view them in the AGN in
Bogotá. However, I came across an entry in the digital catalogue (provided by the AGN) that states
“abjuration and repentance of the free negra parda María Antonia Escobar. Crimes of sacrilege, blasphemy and demonic invocations.” While there is no date in the catalogue, the antecedent and subsequent records are from the early nineteenth century. The same catalogue entry states that
111 I am particularly grateful to Edgardo Pérez Morales in his example and guidance, and Renée Soulodre La- France for her advice, in plotting these archival itineraries. 112 Due to the Mormon interest in genealogy to prepare for the end times, the baptismal records of many parishes are scanned and available online on the website “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/). Despite the eschatological reasons for their creation, the tomes of baptismal books are available as unaltered images, thus making them a useful and trustworthy source for historians. Personal communication, Betty Valencia, (archivist of the Archivo Histórico de Cartago), June 2012. 36
“Important documents about the Holy Inquisition [were] reviewed by Monseñor Samuel Silverio
Buitrago Trujillo,” who was Archbishop of Popayán from 1976 to 1990. Documents related to María
Antonia Escobar’s case were among an unknown number of these cases which, on the orders of the
Monseñor, were “not microfilmed for security [reasons].”113 The threat that María Antonia Escobar and her invocations posed led her to be investigated, likely by the Commissary of the Inquisition in
Popayán late into the colonial period. The entry por seguridad no se microfilmó was a late twentieth-century bishop’s attempt to silence an African-descended woman who had died some two hundred years ago.
Yet what this silencing actually did was to bring the power of Escobar’s words into the present—her invocations reverberated through the centuries and continued to threaten white Popayán Catholic society. When I was in Popayán, I pursued the possibility of entering the archbishopric’s archive, but its
(lay women) gatekeepers only permit the entry of a small select group of local historians.
Chapter One, “Geographies of Slavery and Freedom,” is a historical geography of Afro-New
Granada, which analyzes the intersection between the lives of people of African descent and the landscape, waterways and physical space. It shows how mobility, cultural flows, and the environment tied together the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific. The second chapter, “Conversion, Baptism, and
Bondage,” examines the relationship between geographies of blackness and inclusion of Africans and their children into the Catholic Church through baptism. Tracing instruction in Christian doctrine and receipt of the sacrament—a central strategy of inclusion of enslaved people into Catholicism—it argues that geography and the specific labour regime of the locale in question had a constitutive role in the extent of ‘conversion.’ Chapters Three through Five analyze the church and state’s systematic imposition of their vision of racialized gender and its intersection with religious conceptions of black criminality. Chapter Three, “Worlds of Healing,” examines African diasporic healing, poisoning, and
113 AHAP, Legajo 04457, Rollo No. 258, “Importantes documentos sobre la santa inquisición, reseñados por Monseñor Samuel Silverio Buitrago Trujillo, Arzobispo de Popayán, abjuración y arrepentimiento de la negra parda libra María Antonia Escobar. Delitos de sacrilegio, blasfemia e invocaciones demoniacas.” 37 ritual practice, as captured through criminal and ecclesiastical trials and accusations. The chapter argues that African-descended healers constructed their practices and knowledges between the two coastal regions. By contrast, Chapter Four, “Caribbean Catholicisms” focuses on the Inquisition’s prosecution of primarily mulato men for the crimes of blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege. It places Catholicism at the centre of African-descended religion in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean. Together
Chapters Three and Four show how the intersection of legal status, place of birth, ethnicity, and, gender shaped the formation of religion in the Atlantic world. Chapter Five, “Sex, Race, and the
Atlantic Enlightenment,” examines the Bourbon reformist effort to separate and reorganize African- descended families according to solidifying concepts of racial difference and to make these categories concrete reality in the everyday lives of Spain’s imperial subjects. The chapter uses late eighteenth- century criminal trials and a military-friar’s conquest diary to show how the state moved to police interracial relationships.
Ultimately, “The Wilderness Within” offers an analysis of the relationship between mobility, blackness, gender, and religion in New Granada, with a focus on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and the rivers and routes that connected them. It interrogates how slavery and blackness shaped the lives of people of African descent in a colony where enslaved people were never the majority of the population.
In doing so, it argues that systems of governance, the natural environment, and black mobilities intersected in the production and circulation of African diasporic quotidian epistemologies and material cultures.
38
Chapter One: Geographies of Slavery and Freedom
This chapter examines eighteenth-century New Granada’s interconnected geographic and human environment. It shows that in different regions of the Viceroyalty, there existed fundamentally distinct regimes of slavery and free labour, demographic patterns, and politics, alongside competing or alternative systems of labour. Yet, these distinct sites were worlds made in relation to each other, connected by the slave trade and the movement of objects, ideas, and bonded and free people across New Granada. The seemingly distinct regions of the Viceroyalty—the provinces of Santa Marta, Cartagena de Indias, Antioquia, Chocó, and Popayán—were in fact tied together through a shared history, everyday black mobilities, and their relationship to the natural environment. Through an analysis of the interconnection of the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific, the chapter argues that there was a constitutive relationship between mobility, place, and the religious. I show how water and land shaped black itineraries, religion, cultural exchange, and
Spanish institutions, creating connections and shared experiences across the vast territory of the
Viceroyalty.
My understanding of water, space, and place builds on Ulrich Oslander’s work on twentieth- century Afro-Colombian political movements in the Pacific region. His concept of ‘aquatic space’ understands the relationship between humans and the natural world as a constitutive one. Aquatic space “considers these relations of ‘becoming’ between humans and nonhumans in a landscape characterized by diverse aquatic features of dynamic assemblages,” a concept that “transcends the idea of mere human adaptation to a physical environment.” Oslender’s focus on the particularity of place, and especially water, is useful for understanding how local, and very real, experiences of spaces shape the political. He asks: how did place—“ its year-round humidity, its water-based
39 cultures, its river thoroughfares, its people listening to the tides”—shape the political?1 In a similar way, I seek to interrogate the relationship between the natural environment and African diasporic religions through an analysis of geographies, multidirectional circulations, and materialities. Rather than engaging in direct comparison, this is a connective history that weaves between difference and separateness on the one hand, and exchange and movement on this other. Contact and direct interchange were frequent, although not constant, and there were always commonalities between individuals and communities across Afro-New Granada.
This chapter is both a historical geography of African-descended communities in New
Granada and an introduction to the ‘rival geographies’ that this dissertation explores. In Closer to
Freedom (2004), Stephanie Camp built upon Edward Said’s concept of ‘rival geographies’ in the context of colonial occupation. Camp’s conception of “rival geographies” was not a “settled spatial formation”—neither was it a mere physical space or one beyond the planter’s control. Rather, the concept referred to both a physical and political place that traversed and connected fixed locales.
Camp states that: “This rival geography was characterized by motion; the movement of bodies, objects and information within and around the plantation space.2 Camp’s rival geography was both characterized by motion and one constituted by that mobility.
Camp’s concept of ‘rival geographies’ is based on the dynamics of a region dominated by plantation slavery. However, it is also useful for understanding the spiritual politics of spaces shaped by black captivity—cities, mines, and haciendas. The application of rival geographies to New Granada allows us to understand the place of the spiritual in African-descended political and social life.
People of African descent engaged in ritual, healing, and sacramental practice in liminal spaces, sites
1 Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 12. 2 Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7. 40 imbued with meaning but not a refuge from racism and slavery. In doing so, they engaged in political action and articulated alternative ways of knowing and experiencing the world, alongside those dictated by the Spanish colonial state and Catholic Church. Camp’s ‘rival geographies’ focused on enslaved women. By contrast, this dissertation shows how women and men in New Granada were gendered and racialized and explores the ways that these forms of marginalization intersected and shaped religious and cultural life.
Camp’s ‘rival geographies’ is particularly useful for understanding New Granada—a place where African-descended freedom was the norm by the eighteenth century. Camp states that,
The rival geography did not threaten to overthrow American slavery, nor did it provide slaves with autonomous space. Much of the rival geography, such as woods and swamps, was space to which planters and patrols had access, and other parts, including quarters and outbuildings, were places over which they had also a large measure of control. Nor was there anything safe about bondpeople’s illicit movements or the temporary spaces they created; to the contrary, these activities and areas were truly dangerous. The rival geography did, however, provide space for private and public creative expression, rest and recreation, alternative communication, and importantly, resistance to planters’ domination of slaves’ every move.3
In New Granada, people of African descent made and moved through Spanish towns and cities, rochelas, palenques, haciendas, and mines. Even when and where people were free, they were not safe— as the experiences of captivity, physical violence, prosecution, reenslavement, and resettlement examined in this work demonstrate. Divergent yet mutually constitutive forces connected sites as different as gold mines and palenques—they were shaped by slavery and racialization on the one hand, and the rival geographies of black political and religious resistance on the other.
Historical Geographies and Black Space
To tell the story of the making of Afro-New Granada, it is first important to understand its natural environment. The provinces of Antioquia, Cartagena de Indias, Chocó, Popayán, and Santa
3 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7. 41
Marta—the geographic areas of focus in this study—were distinct yet coherent units. Mainland
Colombia is composed of five different natural regions, which are characterized by topology, climate, vegetation, and proximity to the sea. The natural regions of Colombia—the Amazon, the
Andes, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Orinoquía, often called Los Llanos, or the Llanos
Orientales—are all marked out by clear physical geographic distinctions. During the colonial period,
Spaniards and Afro-descendants established most of their settlements in the cold and temperate zones of the Andes, between the mountain ranges and near the Magdalena and Cauca rivers.4
Colombian territories are divided by the Andes yet are connected by the Magdalena and Cauca
Rivers. The three parallel mountain ranges—the Western Cordillera, the Cordillera Central and the
Eastern Cordillera—separate the land into three low-lying areas. The relatively low mountain range, the Cordillera Occidental, is about 6000 feet at its highest point. The 600-mile-long Cauca River begins in the southwest near Popayán and joins the Magdalena River near Managué in the
Caribbean. The Cauca River is separated from the Western Cordillera of the central chains of the
Cordillera Central. Its northern branch descends towards the Caribbean. The Cordillera Oriental reaches in places to about 8000 feet high, and there are three large fertile basins and a number of small basins, the sites of the most intensive settlement and economic production. The 994-mile-long
Magdalena River flows between Central and Eastern Cordillera. The River Cauca is navigable from the Caribbean as far as Neiva. Most of the western regions of the Pacific lowlands are characterized by dense rainforests, through which water from the Cordillera Occidental flows along rivers towards the ocean. Intermountain areas, west of Cordillera, descend to the Colombian plains or los Llanos east of the Andes, formed around many rivers. These rivers flow to the Orinoco and Amazon sources to form the coastal plain of the Caribbean.5
4 Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon rule (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13. 5 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 10-13. 42
Figure 2: Relief Map of New Granada
Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon rule (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne 1993), 11.
The two great rivers intersect and tie together the Pacific, interior, and Caribbean regions.
The vast river system of western New Granada connected the waters and peoples of the interior to the Atlantic Ocean. The Magdalena River begins in the Central Cordillera close to San Sebastián in
Cauca, the second most southerly of Colombia’s departments on the Pacific coast. It flows some
930 miles and is navigable from Neiva to Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast. The source of the
River Cauca is near the Laguna del Buey in the Colombian Massif and joins the River Magdalena
43 close to Pinillos in the south of the department of Bolívar. These two rivers and their basins have long been the centre of the Colombian internal economy.
During the eighteenth century, New Granada’s Caribbean region was part of the Atlantic economy. The journey from Cadiz to Cartagena lasted just four weeks, while the return trip, via
Cuba and the Bahama Channel, took around 70 days. McFarlane suggests that inland territory was isolated as the journey along the Magdalena was long and expensive.6 Despite the complications of travel, it was a frequently traversed fluvial route. The journey from Cartagena to Bogotá, as
Katherine Bonil Gómez states, was “a three-month odyssey that would cross through extremely hot tropical savannahs, flood areas traversed by an intricate web of rivers, channels, lagoons, and swamps, and then abrupt and muddy mountainous paths.”7 Certainly New Granada as a whole was not an Atlantic export economy. Rather, Atlantic transformations, extending inwards and circulating internally, transformed the region, as transnational peoples and products travelled through rivers, streams, ciénagas, marshes, bogs, or swamps. Bodies of water were fundamental to connecting New
Granada to the wider Atlantic world, through which people, goods, and ideas moved.8 These rivers fundamentally shaped Colombian history and culture.
Caribbean New Granada: Santa Marta and Cartagena de Indias and its Environs
The city of Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast had a population of less than 4000 and a small economy, animated by the pearl fisheries—the gems were often obtained via indigenous traders—and the contraband slave trade in Africans. The majority of the land remained free from
Spanish settlement. In the provinces of Santa Marta and Rio Hacha, over 40 000 members of the
6 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 39-40. 7 Katherine Bonil Gómez, “The Political Culture of Free People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century New Granada (1750-1810)” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2017), 120. 8 David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in David Armitage, and Michael J Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 26. 44 indigenous Guajira (or Wayuu) nation remained unconquered despite the military and Capuchin campaigns in the eighteenth century.9 A cuaderno (notebook) in the Archivo General de Indias, compiled from 1754-5, listed the inhabitants of Capuchin missions in the Guajira. While these were supposed to be indigenous villages, the notebook reveals far more complicated realities. The Capuchins had arrived to work with “the Indios of the Nation Guajira in the jurisdiction of Rio de Hacha” in 1726.
Most of the inhabitants of the villages were indigenous but the cuaderno also shows the extent of zambaje (black and indigenous ethnic and cultural mixture) on the frontier, as well as the importance of slavery in Guajira pueblos. The ‘indigenous’ pueblo San Antonio de Padua, founded in 1736, for example, had a very large African-descended population. The cuaderno states that the pueblo “actually consists of families and persons [that are] free, mulatos, zambos, and indios.”10
The village had 438 “souls” plus another 200 who had not been baptized, “who go…[as] fugitives, to the Mountains, and the Forests, without Ever coming to the Pueblo, for any subjection, and in the Extreme Freedom with which they live, without pressure of their Heads of Justice; and the same happens in the other Peoples.” The household of the cacique Don Cecilio Lopez Sierra offers a snapshot of the demography of the village, and demonstrates the importance of slaveholding in Guajira society. His listed family members were his wife María Candelaría Betancor, his sons Antonio Joseph and Joseph Francisco, and his daughter Isidora. The other people dwelling in his house were principally enslaved: Fabían Sierra and his wife Isabel, Andrés Sierra and his wife
María, a widowed woman Aniseta, Francisco Sierra, his wife Juana María, Almacigo Sierra and his free wife Dominga, a free man Antonio Thomas, Jacinto, Isidro, Marcos, Dominga, and, finally,
Antonio Sierra and the latter’s free zamba wife, María.11 A significant minority of the village was
African-descended. The other villages listed in the cuaderno also had persons referred to as zambo/a,
9 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 47 and 48. 10 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Santa Fe, 1185. 11 AGI, Santa Fe, 1185. 45 mulato/a, and with African last names, although they were fewer in number compared to San
Antonio de Padua.
Santa Marta was sparsely populated but it did have free black villages. A December 1768 index of the churches in the bishopric of Santa Marta lists all Spanish settlements in the province, principally towns but also indigenous villages, or “Doctrinas de Indias.” The list includes a number of settlements of free people of colour in the jurisdiction of the city of Ocaña, alias Nueva Madrid, deep in the interior of the province. The following are listed as “Benefices and Sites of Peoples of
Colour Pardo established on the banks of the River Magdalena”: San Antonio, Santa Ana, Santa
Barbara de Pinto, and San Joseph Alias Sitio Nuevo. All of the churches are listed as pobres but had their own clergymen.12
West of the province of Santa Marta was the province of Cartagena de Indias, with the major population focused around the administrative and military centre and port city of Cartagena de Indias. With a population of around 15 000 Cartagena dominated Caribbean New Granada commercially, as it did politically. Great estates in the Caribbean region produced mixed goods for local markets—beans, bananas, maize, cassava, sugar, pork, and beef, principally for Cartagena’s consumption. On haciendas, small numbers of African-descended slaves engaged in arable farming, raising cattle, and producing sugar cane. It was rare that enslaved people labouring on a hacienda numbered as many as fifty.13 In the eighteenth century, the concentration of ranch land ownership intensified with the occupation of frontier lands and purchase from the Crown, particularly following the arrival of Spanish families with a military expedition in 1698.14
12 AGI, Santa Fe, 1189. 13 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 42-46. 14 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 45. 46
Figure 3: Map of the Provinces of Santa Marta and Cartagena by Antonio de Arévalo (1766)
Archivo General de Indias, MP-PANAMA, 174
The city of Cartagena de Indias was the principal port for goods and people transported along the Magdalena River to the interior throughout the colonial period and a centre of administrative and military government.15 Given its geographical and commercial importance,
Cartagena was a particular target for Spain’s imperial rivals, the French and the British.16 From 1742 onwards the Spanish government strengthened local defences—using principally enslaved labourers and convicts—transforming Cartagena de Indias into one of the most fortified cities in the empire.17
Cartagena de Indias had a population of 13,531 in 1779. Of the city’s population, 1.8% (247) were
15 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 40. 16 Most notable attacks on Cartagena de Indias were the French raid of 1697 and battles with the British during the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1741. 17 E. M. Doria, Cartagena de Indias: Puerto y Plaza Fuerte (Fondo Cultural Cafetero: Bogotá, 1988), A. Herrera Diaz, “Bocachica Fortifications, Historical and Cultural Park,” Fortificaciones del Caribe: Memorias de la Reunion de Expertos: 31 de Julio, 1 y 2 de 1996, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, (Bogotá: Colcultura, Patrimonio Mundial, UNESCO, 1997), 45-48; A. Camara, 2005. Los Ingenieros Militares de la Monarquía Hispánica en los Siglos XVII y XVIII (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, Secretaría General Técnica, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2005) 47 clergy, 29.9% were defined as white (4057), 0.9% as indigenous (123), 49.3% as free people of all colours (6676), and 18.6% (2528) as slaves of all colours. By 1779 then, free and enslaved people of all colours totalled 68% of the population of the city.18 The category of libres de todos colores included mestizos, and it is not possible to know with greater precision how many were of African descent or not. However, given the small indigenous population in the city, it is fair to conclude that the majority of the city’s inhabitants listed in the census category of libres de todos colores were persons of
African descent rather than mestizos. While decreasing relative to the free African-descended population in the city, the enslaved population (18.6%) was relatively high compared to that of the
Viceroyalty as a whole.19 30% (4075 persons) of the population of the city lived in the principally
African-descended barrio, which was then an island, of Getsemaní.20
18 Archivo General de la Nación - Colombia (AGN), Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11. 19 Population statistics derived from the padrón general of 1778. Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora, and Camilo Ernesto Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al Poder del Número: Censos y Estadísticas de la Nueva Granada, 1750-1830 (Bogotá: Archivo General de la Nación, 1995), 73. 20 María Aguilera Díaz and Adolfo Meisel Roca, Tres Siglos de Historia Demográfica de Cartagena de Indias (Cartagena: Libros BRC, 2009), 27. Getsemaní was connected to the city centre in the mid-nineteenth century. 48
Figure 4: Plan of the City of Cartagena de Indias from Antonio de Ulloa y Jorge Juan (1736)
Jorge Juan y Antonio de Ulloa, Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional: hecho de orden de S. Mag. para medir algunos grados de Meridiano Terrestre, y venir por ellos en conocimiento de la verdadera figura, y Magnitud de la Tierra, con otras varias Observaciones Astronomicas, y Phisicas (Madrid: Por A. Marin, 1748)
Slave traders trafficked thousands of enslaved people through the port of Cartagena de
Indias. Current best estimates suggest that between 1550 and 1792, 123 000 captives were brought into the city.21 Under the exclusive contract system, asiento de negros, the Crown only permitted purchase of captives through Cartagena de Indias first, before transportation to other slave markets across South America.22 Wheat estimates that between 1585 and 1600 alone, 29 386 captives disembarked in the port, almost three times the number of Europeans who left Seville. Cartagena was a black city in the early seventeenth-century.23 During the earliest part of the trade, the majority
21 Tovar Pinzón, Tovar Mora, and Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al Poder del Número, 30. 22 David L. Chandler, Health and slavery in Colonial Colombia (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 64. 23 David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 7. 49 of captives arrived from ports in Upper Guinea and Cabo Verde, and then later shipments brought people from Lower Guinea and Angola through São Tomé.24 From 1703-14 the French Guinea
Company imported 4250 bondspersons; from 1714 to 1746 the English South Sea Company brought over 10 600 captives into New Granada during its asiento.25 In this latter period, Jamaica was the chief supplier of bondspersons to New Granada.26 The English brought in another 13 000 slaves from 1746 to 1757.27 Numbers declined in the second half of the century, with approximately 2000 arriving from 1759 to 1776 and 217 from 1791-2.28
David Chandler describes the process of disembarking and inspection that captives endured as they arrived in Cartagena de Indias. Given the prevalence of dangerous diseases, ships were first landed outside the city. The protomédico, the royal health officer, boarded ships to inspect captives.
Sick slaves were disembarked outside of the city for quarantine, or left onboard if the sick were too unwell to be moved, while the apparently healthy were sent to barracoons, slave pens, in the city.29
There was a particularly high mortality in barracoons due to both disease and the attempts to fatten them up quickly after a long period of privation. Two weeks after arriving, captives were processed in palmeo, a customs clearance where their height was measured in palms, which was followed by branding with the royal mark.30 Enslaved people were divided into groups according to sex and height. Piezas de indias were adults of seven palmos (over 5 feet), mulecones adolescents of about 6 palmos (4”3’ and over), older children around five palms (taller than 3”6’) were referred to as
24 Jane Landers, Pablo Gómez, José Polo Acuña, and Courtney J. Campbell, “Researching the History of Slavery in Colombia and Brazil through Ecclesiastical and Notarial Archives” in Maja Kominko (ed.) From Dust to Digital Book Subtitle: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 261. 25 Tovar Pinzón, Tovar Mora, and Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al Poder del Número, 32. 26 David L. Chandler, Health and Slavery in Colonial Colombia (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 77. 27 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 75-77. 28 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 75-77 29 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 66-67. 30 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 78-83 50 muleques or mulecas and mulequitos were young children around four palmos, or 2’10”).31 After sale in the slave market in the centre of the city, most bondspersons were transported beyond the city of
Cartagena de Indias.
Tierra a Dentro: Rivers and Montes from the Province of Cartagena de Indias to Antioquia
The majority of enslaved people who were sold in Cartagena found themselves taken to mines and haciendas in the interior of New Granada. The difficult journey can be seen as an experiential extension of the Middle Passage, especially in terms of health. Captives died in large numbers, travelling several hundred miles on foot across mountain ranges.32 African men were forced to walk across harsh terrain, mountains and jungle, chained at the hand or neck.33 In its desire to maintain control of the slave trade, the Crown only allowed a few routes. The permitted routes were the most arduous for captives. The only legal route for captives to Lima for example, until the last decade of the 1700s, was the 2000-mile overland route beginning in Cartagena, rather than rounding the Cape of Horn.34 The main artery through Chocó was the Atrato River, which has its delta at the Gulf of Darién, yet traders were not permitted to bring slaves by boat via what would have been just a 350-mile journey by water. This route was only legal after the 1780s.35
Most captives reached the interior by one of two routes. Along the first, they were either transported from Cartagena to Portobelo by boat, crossing the fifty-mile Isthmus of Panama on foot and then boarding ships from where they were transported to ports down the Pacific Coast, as far as
Chile. Many captives were sold in New Granadan ports along the Pacific Coast, including
Buenaventure, Isquandé, Timbique, Tumacó, and Barbacoas, many of which served mining areas.
31 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 84. 32 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 106-7. 33 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 113. 34 Chandler, Health and slavery, 107. 35 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 111. 51
Alternatively, slave caravans trekked 75-miles from Cartagena to the River Magdalena to the port of
Espiritu Santo, at its confluence with the River Cauca. From there, slave caravans either transited the
Camino Real, the royal road, to the Cauca Valley cities of Cali and Popayán, or went south to Quito and Lima. The second caravan route went south from Honda to Popayán, where most mine owners resided, which supplied enslaved people to Cali, Buga, and the Cauca Valley, as well as Chocó.
Alternatively, traders travelled from Espirtu Santo to Zaragoza via the Cauca River and its tributary the Nechi, to enter Antioquia.36 Three Antioquia slave routes also served Chocó. The first went west from Medellín to Urroa, then along the Atrato to the northern mines. The second began in
Anserma, from which captives walked to the River Atrato, and travelled by boat to Citará and
Nóvita. The third trail went from Cartago to Nóvita by land.37 Many captives endured a 900-mile journey south from Cartagena to Popayán, were they were sold to mine owners, and then marched another 300 miles north to Chocó.
A 1781-4 visita to the whole of Cartagena province illustrates the demography and geography of the region, albeit laden with ecclesiastical critiques of the behaviour of its mixed ethnicity inhabitants. The visita describes the major settlements of the province as being the city of Cartagena,
Simiti, Caceres, and the Villas de Mompox, Tolú, San Benito, and Ayapel, and there were an additional forty nine smaller sitios “whose free inhabitants were all class of people”—libres de todos colores—and twenty three pueblos de indios. The bishop, José Fernández Díaz de la Madrid, lamented the state of the majority of the churches in his bishopric, particularly in rural areas, where the churches had deteriorated.38 He complained of the difficulties he had in conducting the visita due to the challenging physical environment: “I experienced continuous labour already across land because
36 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 106-12. 37 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 110-111. 38 AGI, Santa Fe, 1063. 52 of the harshness of roads that offer no comfort, and because navigating the Magdalena River was so painful because of the excessive heat and the pests of poisonous insects.”39
The River Magdalena was the main artery of movement between the Caribbean and the interior. The river permitted extraordinary mobility and relative freedom for people of colour in the eighteenth century. Bogas, or rowers, of African descent were crucial to fluvial navigation and transport in New Granada. The labour of these free black men, who navigated the Magdalena River and controlled the movement of watercraft along it, connected the coast to the interior. Bonil
Gómez shows the influence of bogas due to their labour in “a territory highly dependent on the
Magdalena River for its political and economic articulation, and the bogas’ exceptional navigational skills, unrivalled knowledge of the rivers, and self-awareness of their irreplaceable role.”40 All travel via the Magdalena depended on such fluvial navigation, transporting all nature of goods and ranks of people. Mines received food, bondspersons, supplies, and clothing via the river, and the gold circulated down river to the mint in Santa Fe.41
39 AGI, Santa Fe, 1063. 40 Bonil Gómez, “The Political Culture,” 116. 41 Bonil Gómez notes, “All the newly named officials and priests coming from the Atlantic travelled this route. The highest ranks of civil, military and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, such as governors, royal officials, oidores, bishops and archbishops, Audiencia’s presidents and viceroys, their entourage and families were transported by bogas. Wholesale and petty traders, Consulado agents, adventurers, travelers, deserters, migrants, all of them traveled this river. And not only official trade but also contraband coming from Jamaica and Curaçao inundated the viceroyalty through the river (from Santa Marta to Mompóx, Honda and Santa Fe).” Bonil Gómez, “The Political Culture,” 123. 53
Figure 5: Bogas on the River Magdalena
“View of the Magdalena”, in Gaspard Théodore Conde de Mollien, Voyage dans la République de Colombia, en 1823. This is the earliest of such images but it depicts the main method of travel through New Granada throughout the colonial period.
Many settlements were situated along the River Magdalena, most importantly the Villa de
Mompox, with a population of 7179, the majority of whom were people of colour. Santa Cruz de
Mompox was a crucial link in the Viceroyalty’s internal trade network, through which gold from
Antioquia and Chocó, cacao from Cucuta and Neiva, and wheat from Pamplona travelled.42 The
1780 census for Mompox lists 5348 people as libres de todos colores and 841 as enslaved.43 Edgardo
Pérez Morales examines the political culture of the enslaved on the hacienda of San Bartolomé de la
Honda, eight days up river or three days down river from Mompox, during an uprising that took a year to plan. Upon their owner’s death, the slaves refused to work in April 1799 as they insisted they had been freed in the will of their later owner, Juan Martín de Setuain. They “fought hard to ensure their freedom, struggling to do so while remaining on the land. Pérez Morales states that they
42 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 40. 43 Tovar Pinzón, Tovar Mora, and Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al Poder del Número, 503, 496, 499. 54 aspired to obtain manumission, but they also imagined building a free community in La Honda itself under the authority not of masters and overseers, but of a priest and a magistrate.”44
Pérez Morales’s description of the hacienda of San Bartolomé de la Honda is particularly useful as it demonstrates the changing nature of the economies (particularly after the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits), material culture, and environments of haciendas, and their wider connections to free communities of colour outside of them in the late eighteenth century. The hacienda has been a Jesuit- owned prior to their explusion. After changing hands, La Honda had undergone a dramatic transformation, having shifted from cacao farming to fifteen large plots of sugar cane. The ranchería was a central piece of land around which buildings, trees, and garden plots were located and enslaved social life focused. Workers dwelled in nineteen houses situated alongside “a thatched-roof chapel for the celebration of mass and religious festivities, which was equipped with gold and silver utensils, religious icons, and bells.”45 La Honda is a particularly useful example detailing the nature of enslaved religion on haciendas. It demonstrates, on the one hand, the extent of Christianization of slaves living on rural estates. On the other, it showcases how Catholicism informed the politics of the bondspersons on the hacienda. Community members in La Honda had imbued their quest for freedom with a religious purpose; having “entrusted themselves to the Virgin,” they chanted mass monthly, celebrated her feast, and prayed the rosary regularly so that they might be free.46
There were numerous African-descended settlements situated along the banks of the
Magdalena River. The river and the natural environment surrounding it profoundly shaped black life in its environs. There were few palenques close to the banks of the Magdalena because numerous free communities of colour absorbed fugitive enslaved persons.47 Along tropical fertile lands that
44 Edgardo Pérez Morales, “Manumission on the Land: Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth- Century Mompox (Colombia),” Law and History Review 35, no. 2 (May 2017): 512. 45 Morales, “Manumission of the Land,” 517. 46 Morales, “Manumission of the Land,” 525. 47 Morales, “Manumission of the Land,” 518. 55 surrounded the network of rivers in Caribbean New Granada lived tens of thousands of free people of colour, including indigenous peoples that the Spaniards had not conquered. Aline Helg estimates that, up until the 1770s, around 60 000 inhabitants, arrochelados, dwelled in rochelas, “illegal settlements, established in forests, hills and swamps along the rivers and in isolated huts housing nuclear families.”48 Descendants of runaway slaves, indigenous peoples, and military and naval deserters, arrochelados lived relatively free from the gaze of the colonial Church and state, and lived from slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture and production of the liquor aguardiente.49 Indeed, the numbers for the estimates of the arrochelado population are based on accounts produced during a series of attempted campaigns of conquest in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.
The legal freedoms offered by the natural environment of the region created spaces for religious freedom. In the 1781-4 visita, the bishop claims that the number of vecinos that live “in the
Plan” near the church in settlements close to both the Magdalena and Cauca Rivers was very low for
“they choose to live scattered on the banks of the Rivers.” For Fernández Díaz de la Madrid, this dispersed mode of living was responsible for what he saw as the religious, moral, and political abandonment of the free peoples. He particularly lamented “drunkenness, ignorance of the Christian
Doctrine, and sensuality, principally incest, the sin most common not just to these, but to all the
Vecinos of all the Province.” He claimed “these families of Negros, and Mulatos that lives on these banks, don’t ever hear Mass, or comply with the Church, because they do not recognize a Priest, nor are they subject to any Judge.”50
While the above critiques are quite generic, the visita also includes more specific descriptions of religious practices in the region. He stated that it was the custom between some of these people
48 Aline Helg, Liberty & Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835(University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 21. 49 Helg, Liberty & Equality, 21. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 46. 50 AGI, Santa Fe, 1063. 56 that a woman who had recently borne a child (mujer parida) would choose the godfather (compadre) and he was the one who baptized the child. The bishop described the dances, or bundes, of the region, as occurring at night “in the most obscure and hidden Patios, streets, and Plazas.” “The mode of dancing,” he claimed, “is to join everyone in a heap without separation of sexes, some play, others dance, and all sing lewd verses, incessantly drinking aguardiente and other strong drinks.”51 The
Bishop called for the settlement of towns to prevent such immorality.52
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were numerous palenques in the interior of the Caribbean provinces of Cartagena and Santa Marta. The existence and duration of large maroon communities was possible due to Cartagena’s close proximity to the River Magdalena among thick forests and difficult terrain, especially of the Montes de María. Maroons chose the locations of their communities based on natural defences. Access to water for drinking and farming was crucial. In a
1686 letter to the King, the Governor and Captain General of the City of Cartagena de Indias Pedro de Zarate wrote that, “in los montes it was impossible to search [for maroons] in the time of rains.”53
Marronage had been a significant problem for the colonial state since the sixteenth century, most famously the maroon community of La Matuna led by Domingo Biohó, or Benkos Biohó in oral tradition.54 There were marked differences in Spanish colonial approaches to cimarronaje throughout the colonial period. Historiography on maroon communities in Caribbean New Granada has focused on the seventeenth century, yet the eighteenth century saw fundamental transformations in the history of marronage, including the famous agreement between the Bishop of Cartagena,
51 AGI, Santa Fe, 1063. 52 AGI, Santa Fe, 1063. 53 AGI, Santa Fe, 213. 54 María Cristina Navarrete, “De Reyes, Reinas y Capitanes: los Dirigentes de los Palenques de las Sierras de María, siglos XVI y XVII,” Fronteras de la Historia, 20, no. 2, (July-December, 2015): 50. 57
Antonio María Cassiani, and maroons that legalized the existence of the community that is now known as San Basilio de Palenque.55
The relationship between palenques and Spanish colonial authorities in the sixteenth and the majority of the seventeenth centuries were characterized by outright conflict. However, in 1680 a group of palenques from the Montes de María “sought to come to terms with the Spanish authorities through the intercession of a missionary who was exploring the region.” The missionary wrote of his meeting their ‘governor’ and that they were ruled by captains, each of their nación.56 As part of the terms, the maroons were “ready to acknowledge Spanish authority and to collaborate with it in returning fresh runaways, in return for a grant of freedom to themselves and their descendants, the provision of a priest to minister to them, and the allocation of cultivable lands sufficient to meet their needs.” The Crown planned to accept these terms but resistance from the Cartagena slaveholding elite prevented it, and the immediate afterlife of the negotiations was a renewal of conflict and conquest to the close of the seventeenth century.57
55 AGI, Santa Fe, 436. 56 Anthony McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques: Runaways and Resistance in Colonial Colombia,” Slavery & Abolition, 6, 3 (1985), 134. 57 McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques,” 135. 58
Figure 6: Map depicting the palenques in the provinces of Cartagena de Indias and Santa Marta in the seventeenth century
Alex Castaño, “Palenques y Cimarronaje: procesos de resistencia al sistema colonial esclavista en el Caribe Sabanero (Siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII),” Revista CS, 16, (2015): 76.
Scholars working on these campaigns and the documentation they generated have debated the nature of maroon culture and religion. Nina de Friedmann, for example, argues that the palenques of Montes de María were a beacon of African culture.58 By contrast, Jane Landers argues that
58 Nina S. de Friedemann, “Huellas de Africanía en Colombia,” Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 47, 3, (1992): 552-553. 59 maroons practiced both African and Christian religions. In 1693, the Franciscan friar Fernando
Zapata visited the palenque Matudere in an attempt to reduce the palenqueros to “Christian living.” The inhabitants of the palenques were allegedly organized and led by either criollo or Mina “captains.”59
Descriptions of the maroons employed colonial stereotypes of pacified creoles vs. wild vicious
Africans. Allegedly the Criollos were “naturally docile” while the Minas were “maliciously bloody.”60
Zapata describes meeting the war captain Pedro Mina “out on patrol with a squad of eight to ten men whose faces were decorated with red and white paints.”61 By contrast, according to one witness,
Juana, a female leader of Matudere and self-styled Virreina (Vice Queen) of Cartagena—a term of her own creation—“spoke as a Christian.” Juana’s husband Domingo de Padilla, or Domingo
Criollo, who commanded six hundred men, had built a church with “paper images” that were likely
Christian.62
María Cristina Navarette describes Domingo Criollo as both the principal leader and “the captain of the criollos.” She defines the criollos using the words of the priest Baltasar de la Fuente
Robledo as those born in the ‘monte’ or in ‘mountains.’” Navarette’s usage of de la Fuente’s words captures the relationship between creolization and the natural environment of el monte, yet the original does not specifically use the word criollo nor does it refer to culture. Rather, de la Fuente wrote of the price, 50 pesos, that slaveowners paid for the restitution of their fugitive bondspersons and their children, “those that learnt and had been born in the Palenques or in los montes.”63 De la
Fuente’s original reference to the financial systems in place to encourage and fund (re)capture of
59 AGI, Santa Fe, 213, 360v. 60 AGI, Santa Fe, 387r, 377v. 61 Landers refers to the red and white face paint as “the colors of Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and war. ” Jane Landers, “Founding Mothers: Female Rebels in Colonial New Granada and Spanish Florida,” The Journal of African American History 98, no. 1, (2013), 9; AGI, Santa Fe, 213. 62 Landers, “Founding Mothers,” 7, 9. 63 “Memorial presented before the Council of the Indies by Father Baltasar de la Fuente Robledo,” AGI, Santa Fe, 213, 9v. 60 fugitives and their children illustrate the “rival geographies” deep in the wilderness. Navarette’s definition of creole makes an important contribution in allowing us to think about the constitutive relationship between the natural environment and the meanings and lived experiences of creolization. Montes and montañas were formative and generative spaces.
Ultimately, the displaced inhabitants of the numerous palenques that had been destroyed by war formed Palenque de San Basilio, which negotiated peace with Bishop Cassiani on January 20,
1714. “They had reached such power that,” being unconquerable, they forced the authorities “to think about the peaceful solution.”64 The terms of the treaty included the presence of a priest and a general pardon if they refused to admit new fugitive slaves into the community.65 The padrón of 1778 lists the population of Palenque in the parish of Mahates as one clergyman, 1296 maroons, and 133 enslaved people. In Palenque, as elsewhere in New Granada, ownership of people was the primary mode of wealth creation in a society governed by slavery. Based on census data from the end of the century, the treaty was extremely successful in promoting Christian marriage—almost all adults were listed as married.66
Turning next to the Cauca River, slavery and gold were crucial for the development of the colony of New Granada. The early Spanish search for El Dorado centred on grave robbing rather than extraction.67 The focus on gold, crucial for trade in European goods, meant the Spanish established settlements in remote locations that were not obvious centres of commerce.68 The discovery of gold fields along the River Cauca led to the establishment of numerous small settlements. In Antioquia these settlements were Buriticá, Cáceres, Remedios, Santa Fé de Antioquia
64 María Cristina Navarrete, “Cimarrones y Palenques en las Provincias al norte del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Siglo XVII,” Fronteras de la Historia, no. 6 (2001): 113, 108. 65 McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques,” 135; AGI, Santa Fe, 436. 66 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11. 67 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 17. 68 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 16. 61 and Zaragoza. Arma, Anserma, and Cartago were situated on the south of the river near the city of
Popayán.69 Using indigenous labour, the gold rush of the 1560s-1580s focused on Pamplona and the west of the River Magdalena.70 From the 1580s to the 1620s, mining in Cáceres and Zaragoza was sufficiently profitable for miners to continue to purchase enslaved Africans.71
Figure 7: Plan of the rivers and routes through the province of Antioquia (1763)
Map for the understanding of roads that run from the Capital of the Kingdom to the Province of Antioquia, Pedro Biturro Pérez, (1763), Archivo Histórico de Antioquia, Fondo Gobernación de Antioquia. Planoteca, Código 2108.
The province of Antioquia was the foremost mining area in New Granada in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By the 1630s, alluvial and underground mining, largely
69 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 18. 70 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 19. 71 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 19. 62 conducted by indigenous labourers and enslaved people of African descent, had exhausted the richest veins.72 Diversification of the economy, internal colonization, and a move towards agriculture prevented Antioquia’s total decline. Ownership of land was concentrated in a few hands. The viability of commercial agriculture had its limits, as the major settlements, Medellin, Santa Fe de
Antioquia, Marinilla, and Rionegro, were two days journey from each other.73
The growth of gold mining in the eighteenth century sparked Spanish interest in the
Viceroyalty and prompted interregional trade.74 Gold mining attracted merchants selling products from local and distant markets—hardware, wheat, cheese, sugar, tobacco, and domestic cloth.75
While the mining industry in New Granada was significant, it did not rival those of Brazil, Mexico, and Upper Peru in size and scale. Based on tax records (quintos) from 1735 to 1764, Chocó (51%) and Popayán (25%) dominated gold production, followed by Antioquia (12%) and Barbacoas (12%).
In the late eighteenth century (1765-1799), while Chocó and Popayán still produced a large proportion of the Viceroyalty’s gold (30% and 21% respectively), the output of other regions had risen, with Barbacoas at 19%, and most significantly, Antioquia at 30%.76 The growth of mining in
Antioquia during the early 1700s was carried out first by the free peasantry. At the end of the century, however, slavery powered the rise of the province’s gold extraction. According to
McFarlane’s estimates, the province had around 900 slaves in the 1750, while the enslaved population grew to between 9000 and 13 500 by the 1770s, out of a total population of 45 000. In
Antioquia, gold miners included mazamorreros, free prospectors, alongside enslaved black people who worked in small groups.77
72 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 78, 17. 73 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 77. 74 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 88 75 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 39 76 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 78-9. 77 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 78-9. 63
Towards the Pacific: Popayán, Cauca, Chocó, and the Tropical Lowlands
On July 1, 1749, Manuel, a criollo black slave from Jamaica who lived in Cali, appeared before
Don Antonio Mola, the Governor and Capitan General of Popayán, claiming that he had been sold by his enslaver after he complained of mistreatment. His alleged owner Juan Antonio Mercado, however, could not prove the legitimacy of the legality of his possession. Manuel thus denounced
Mercado’s possession of him as being the result of “illicit commerce.” Manuel’s body was not scarred “with any mark of the asientos,” therefore his unbranded skin was evidence of his owner’s purchase of contraband captives. Moreover, Manuel’s presence in Cali and his labour in mines in the province of Popayán illustrates the vast distances across which captives travelled, whether they were brought to the territory legally or illegally.78
The flow of people, goods, and gold along New Granada’s river network connected geographical spaces and people across vast distances. Rivers formed and characterized the region of the Pacific Lowlands as a political, cultural, and environmental space. It was through water that New
Granada’s Atlantic and Pacific worlds intersected. The Pacific Lowlands are a “humid forest territory that runs parallel to the Pacific coast and where the rivers carry gold,” therefore, as Marcela
Echeverri explains, “the Spanish colonization of western New Granada was fueled by an interest in exploiting these rivers.”79 Echeverri argues that the construction of the Pacific as marginal reflects
Spanish disdain for its alleged inhospitality. She challenges William Sharp’s claim that “Spanish legislation and law regarding slavery was not generally known” in the region, arguing that the region was “not as isolated as these historians portrayed it, nor was it economically or politically
78 Archivo Central del Cauca (ACC), Sig.: 4223 (Col. C I -9 g), ff. 1r, 2r. 79 Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825 (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2016), 101. 64 marginal.”80 In fact the province of Popayán was “an intermediary in the slave trade between
Cartagena and Quito and therefore central to the Caribbean-Andean economic axis of New
Granada.” The Pacific Ocean was a “gateway for people, goods, and information traveling legally or illegally along the Pacific coast between Panama, Guayaquil, Lima, and Chile.” Echeverri characterizes these cities as “active commercial centers fully integrated into the Atlantic economy and culture.”81 The integration of the region was not through plantation agriculture like other sites in the eighteenth-century African diaspora, but through slave trading and gold mining.
Figure 8: The Provinces of Antioquia, Cartagena de Indias, Chocó, and Panamá in 1800
Route from Antioquia to Panama on the one hand from the Province of Chocó…, Archivo General de Indias, MP-PANAMA, 309 (1807)
80 William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish frontier: the Colombian Chocó, 1680-1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 128, quoted in Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 94. 81 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 94. 65
By the eighteenth century, in the provinces of Antioquia, Chocó, and the Pacific Lowlands, mining carried out by enslaved Africans and people of African descent was the motor of the local economy. Yet in most regions, economic activity was mixed, rather than dominated by one sector, and different systems of labour coexisted locally. On ranches and haciendas, agricultural products were destined for local markets rather than the Atlantic export economy.
New Granada was not a commodity export economy, integrated into the triangle trade, yet it was a space fundamentally shaped by Atlantic and transregional processes. A wide variety of interconnected economic and labour systems and forms of slavery coexisted within it. After the mid- sixteenth century, the settlement of New Granada was intimately linked to the structure of a colonial economy focused on farming and mining. Rather than relying on a plantation economy of few crops, the apex of the Caribbean and Caucan upper classes maintained its wealth through a combination of hacienda agriculture, overseas commerce, slaving, mining, and good marriages to
Spaniards.82 Spanish Caribbean colonies, including Cartagena de Indias and Santa Marta, were predominantly focused on agricultural production for local markets. The labour of black men and women, alongside people of other ethnicities, was central to the existence and sustenance of Spanish colonies. David Wheat argues that people of African descent “performed the bulk of all forms of agricultural labor throughout the Spanish Caribbean and most of this labor was associated with the cultivation of food crops and animal husbandry, rather than export stocks such as sugar.”83 While his argument is in reference to the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean, it is relevant to New Granada throughout the colonial period.
The economic potential of gold mining in New Granada was why the Crown directed its early reforming, yet mercantilist, impulses towards the Viceroyalty.84 Production in the eighteenth-
82 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 45. 83 Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 214. 84 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 88. 66 century Hispanic Caribbean, carried out by enslaved labourers alongside legally free workers, was not geared towards commodity markets. While the New Granadan economy was not a sole commodity market based on enslaved labour, capital in gold flowed from mines to urban elites who owned rural haciendas and ranches, which produced the plantains eaten by bonded persons on the mining frontier. Yet in most regions, economic activity was mixed, rather than dominated by one sector. Gold mining and slavery transformed and connected New Granadan societies and economies. From remote and undeveloped gold mining centres flowed profits to the centres of
Popayán, Cali, Bogotá, and Cartagena de Indias.85 Gold was the “basis for external exchange, [and] fostered the development of a money economy, and eased the pressures towards subsistence induced by isolation from overseas markets.”86
In 1726, the Bourbons created the jurisdiction of Chocó as an independent province.87
Mines were run by administrators on site, while the majority of mine owners were absentee and lived in the cities of Buga, Cartago, Cali, Anserma, and Popayán.88 Few Spaniards settled in Chocó, although many of those that did became extremely wealthy. “Spanish officials and mine owners
[who] constituted the ruling elite,” as Sharp states, “exhibited little interested in anything except the accumulation of wealth.”89 Chocó was divided into two jurisdictions: Nóvita in Citará on the San
Juan River and Quibdó on the Atrato River. Quibdó became the capital of Chocó only after the
Atrato was opened up to maritime commerce in 1784.90
For some time free and bonded people of diverse ethnicites performed labour on gold mines, yet the eighteenth-century revival of gold was only possible due to the expansion of enslaved
85 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 89. 86 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 63. 87 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 74. 88 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 18, Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists 102. 89 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 4; Orián Jiménez Meneses, El Chocó: Un Paraíso del Demonio Novita, Citara y El Baudó, Siglo XVIII (Universidad de Antioquia: Medellín, 2004), xi. 90 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 14-5. 67 labour.91 Eighteenth-century Chocó had a majority black population. By 1778, the date of the first census, the province’s white population was only 340, while there were 7088 bonded persons. Yet its demography did not conform to the dynamics of a classic ‘slave society,’ as alongside this bonded population there lived 3899 free people ‘of all colours’ and 6552 indigenous inhabitants.92 Orián
Jiménez argues that while, in literature, the Pacific “appears like [it has] geographic and cultural unity,” in fact, during the eighteenth century, there were significant differences between the Atrato,
San Juan, and Baudó Rivers. He notes that during the colonial period, the region was divided by natural borders and characterized by cultural politics; El Baudó was a space of “refuge and liberty,”
Nóvita was “black country” and Citará “was país indio.”93
The early conquest of Chocó had been largely unsuccessful due to indigenous resistance, particularly that of the Citará. Caroline Williams notes that there were distinct phases of Spanish contact, which was “not always conflict-ridden” but also characterized by a long history of peaceful contact, barter and trade.”94 The most significant of early Spanish colonization attempts in Chocó was that of the adelantado Juan Vélez de Guevara from 1638 to 1643. In an attempted “war of blood and fire,” the Spanish sought to eradicate all opposition to conquest. Ultimately indigenous peoples had a significant advantage, argues Williams, due to their knowledge of the terrain, their proficient use of canoes, and the small size of their communities.95
The 1660s and 1670s saw renewed interest in Spanish settlement through missionary activity.
Simón Amigo and Luis Antonio de la Cueva’s attempts at pacification from the mid-1660s sought to convert indigenous groups through pacification in reducciones. Williams states that the lack of a
91 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 18. 92 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 19. 93 Jiménez El Chocó, xii. 94 Caroline A. Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation of the Chocó, 1510- 1753 (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2005), 4. 95 Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation, 62, 56. 68 centralized political system and lack of incentives drove indigenous hostility to missionary activity.
She notes that reducción required that indigenous communities maintain the friars, where they exchanged food for things. In Chocó, with plenty of gold and a long history of contact with other
Europeans, there was little to entice them. In fact, she argues, “the very arrival of the friars threatened to disrupt existing and mutually beneficial alliances which already provided indigenous peoples with access to European goods on acceptable terms.”96 By the final decades of the seventeenth century, some advances had been made in Spanish settlement in the region, through pacification of some indigenous communities, mining through slave gangs, and missionary activity.
Tensions between Spanish colonizers and Chocó indigenous communities came to a head in the
Citará rebellion of 1784, which began in larger settlements and later spread to small mining communities.97
Figure 9: Map depicting western New Granada and the “Sea of the North,” the Caribbean Sea, and the “Sea of the South”
96 Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation, 102, 105. 97 Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation, 78, 127. 69
Map of the coast from the Port of San Buenaventura to Panama, the course of the Rios de San Juan and Atrato, and part of the North Sea coast from Chagres to Cartagena de Indias, AGI, MP-PANAMA, 193 (Likely 1779)98
Chocó’s distinct history of Spanish and indigenous contact is key to understanding the relationship between colonization and enslavement in the region. Traditional arguments about why slavery was so prevalent in Chocó rely on paternalistic myths about the nature of indigenous people.
Sharp, for example, argues that the “early use and need for black slaves in Chocó resulted in part from the rebellious nature of the Indians.”99 Such an argument ties into a long history as citing indigenous resistance or extinction as a rationale for increased use of enslaved labour in Latin
America and the Caribbean. However, indigenous and enslaved black people laboured in the same spaces in the Pacific simultaneously. As Bryant argues, the encomienda and slavery “were not mutually exclusive but rather interdependent systems of exploitation.”100
In the Pacific lowlands, slavery was the dominant form of labour and social and political organization. In a region that “would have otherwise been a colonial backwater, gold quickly became king” as Bryant encapsulates, and “enslaved Africans were its subjects…[and] the potentially moderating influences of the Church were scarcely recognizable.”101 Ownership of enslaved people and mines was concentrated in the hands of a small elite.102 Cuadrillas, or slave gangs, ranged from ten to one hundred people in size.103 A census of 1759 shows that 90% of enslaved people (3578 of
3918) were in cuadrillas of 30 bondpersons or more with members of seven powerful families as
98 The note in the online catalogue of the Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES) states “It seems to be the one sent by the Infantry Captain D. Antonio de la Torre, with his report of October 19 on the road from the Rio del Sinu, by land, to the Province of Zitará or the one sent by the Sergeant Major, D. Antonio Vázquez in relation to the Zitará Province,” Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), accessed May 16, 2018.
A complete picture of African-descended demographics in Pacific New Granada is not currently possible. According to Eccheveri, evidence suggests that the arrival of Africans in Popayán and along the Pacific littoral had declined by the eighteenth century. She claims that, to counter this shift in the slave trade, which “privilege[d] the Antillean context to the detriment of the mining economies of the South American continent” slaveowners in New Granada “stimulated a demographic policy to increase birth rates among the slave population.” In Popayán, the mining economy continued to be profitable “by maintaining an internal market of creole (American-born) slaves.”106 Certainly a significant number of bonded persons from the African continent continued to arrive in the Pacific region. William Sharp’s analysis of census data from Chocó suggests that, in the northern province, slaveholders both sought to increase creole enslaved populations and continued to purchase significant numbers of captives arriving from outside of New Granada.107 He argues that the Spanish “usually retained the bozales’ African tribal names, or their place of origin in
104 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 115. 105 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 72; Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 102. 106 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 101. 107 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 113-116. 71
Africa, as blacks’ surnames” and the second generation slaves “usually had no surnames, took the surnames of their masters, or were designated criollos.”108
Sharp’s analysis of a census of all enslaved people in Chocó from 1759 is particularly useful.
He found that of 3918 bondpersons, nearly 40% had no last name. Around “half the remaining” enslaved people (30%) were listed with the last name Criollo, and “the rest” (approximately 30%)
“had either African tribal or regional surnames.”109 Accepting Sharp’s conclusion that those listed without a last name were American-born, then in 1759, by his approximations, 70% of the enslaved population was born in New Granada, and 30% (approximately 1175) was born in Africa. In Pacific
New Granada, people of African descent born in the Americas formed communities together with bondspersons born in Africa.
Figure 10: Image from 1759 Census of Enslaved People in Chocó
108 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 114. 109 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 114-115. 72
AGN, Negros y Esclavos del Cauca, 4, D.38, f. 19 (1759)
The specific Old World origins of enslaved captives arriving in western New Granada remain unclear, but certainly the black population was culturally diverse. Due to the complexities of the cross-continental slave trade and contraband, there is insufficient data to trace precise demographics. In Popayán, as Echeverri states, similar to most of mainland Spanish America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade began in the sixteenth century, thus “the provenance of the captives varied throughout the centuries, generating deeply mixed and heterogeneous communities of people of
African origin and descent.”110
Bryant’s analysis of a 1712 visita de despacho, which he defines as internal customs clearances, demonstrates the diversity of origins of captives arriving in the region. Enslaved people were labelled with African castas (or breeds), Spanish racial and slave trading constructs, which indicate broad cultural zones but with little precision of origins. Bryant lists naciones from the despacho from across the African continent. He uses the visita de despachos’s terminologies of casta, while organizing them around approximate geographical zones of departure or provenance. From the Gold Coast, there were entries of 16 Chaba and 7 Caramantí bonded persons. Arriving from the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, there were 35 Arará, 16 Lucumí, 14 Mandinga, 3 Mondongo, and 1 Poropue captives. The visita de despacho listed 44 Mina, 7 Popo, 7 Ibo, and 4 Barbara enslaved persons from
110 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 102. 73
Upper Guinea. In this record, the smallest number had departed from Central Africa with, 4 Congo,
4 Luango, and 1 Boama people listed.111 Sharp’s summary of the ethnicities in the 1759 census also reflects the geographic diversity of the African-born enslaved population later in the century. Using
Spanish slave trade terminology, he lists African castas Mina, Congo, Arará, Carabali, Chamba, Chala,
Zetre, Mandingo, Popo, and Tembo, and to a lesser extent Lucumi, Nango, Vivi, Bomba, Longo,
Catanguara, and Caraba.112
Caleño families revived gold mining in Raposo, Iscuande, and Barbacoas on the Pacific coast.
The elite of Popayán and Cali expanded the mining frontier in the eighteenth century. These same families dominated the interconnected mining and agricultural economies, within which both enslaved and free labour worked their holdings.113 The majority of Colombia’s western coast was part of the province of Popayán. Most of that territory, excluding Cartago, Anserma, Caloto and
Toro, was part of the audiencia of Quito. The city of Popayán, with a population of 14 000, was the centre of the region, while Buga, Cali, and Caloto had around 5000 inhabitants each.114 The revitalization of mining was coupled with growth of the estate economy. Landowners employed their bondspersons on haciendas and mines, two “interlocking enterprises.” The temperate lowlands around Popayán, Cali, and Buga were the agricultural centres of the southern economy. Meat, cattle, sugar, and tobacco produced on haciendas were for the local urban centres and consumption by labourers in mines. Many of the livestock estates, specializing in cattle, horses and mules, were Jesuit owned until the expulsion in 1767, then government-administered until they were sold to large landowners in the 1770s.115
111 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 74. Bryant’s table lists Ibo captives in the Central Africa column, but the homeland of the Ibo or Igbo is the Bight of Biafra. 112 Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 115. 113 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 74, 75. 114 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 61. 115 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 65, 63. 74
From Caloto to Cartago, sugar, used to produce molasses for aguardiente, dominated agriculture, with tobacco cultivation on the increase from the 1770s onwards.116 In Popayán’s hinterland, agriculture was structured around three major institutions. Haciendas de campo produced cereal crops. Labourers on huge hatos (ranches) reared livestock. On haciendas de trapiche, enslaved people worked cultivating sugar products for consumption in cities and mines and were fed with meat from cattle ranches.117 In Cauca, beyond the hinterland of Popayán, agriculture was much more varied, with a large free black population and mestizo peasants and smallholders producing staples, alongside the powerful slaveholding Arboleda, Caicedo, and Mosquera families, cultivating sugar and cattle.118 In both the Caribbean and in Cauca, there were few opportunities for large profits from agriculture. Indeed it was principally gold from Antioquia and the Pacific that fed into local networks of trade and the Atlantic economies.119 Agrarian economies, although stimulated by the expansion of gold mining, principally serviced local, internal markets.
Despite the prevalence of racial slavery in the region, there were a number of palenques in
Pacific New Granada, although far less well known than their Caribbean contemporaries. Most notable of these were Cerritos close to Cartago and “El Castigo” near the River Bajo in the Patía
River valley, a region that the Spanish did not colonize until the 1720s.120 Clerical concern about these palenques echoes clerics’ criticisms of Caribbean maroon communities. Friar Augustín Melén, for example, wrote in 1727 that the residents of palenque lived “outside of the precepts of the Holy
Mother Church.”121 Like criollo maroons in the province of Cartagena de Indias, the palenques of both
Cerritos and El Castigo had appropriated the language and structures of Spanish colonial
116 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 63. 117 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 64-5. 118 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 68. 119 McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 70. 120 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 105. 121 Quoted in Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 123. 75 government and integrated elements of Catholicism into their social and religious lives. For example, trial records from the prosecution of its former inhabitants reveal that the maroons of Cerritos elected a viceroy, a governor, and a lieutenant-governor biannually.122 When they fled from attack, they took images of Christ and a number of saints and prayed daily. McFarlane interprets this adherence to “forms of Christian religious practice, like the mimesis of Hispanic political institutions” as representing “Creole or American slave culture” and that “far from being an unalloyed instrument for domination and control, the slaveowners’ religion contributed to both the slaves’ notion of freedom and their image of life in a free community.”123
While soldiers were successful in their destruction of the palenque of Cerritos, El Castigo, which was populated by both fugitive enslaved people and “renegade whites,” survived such attempts.124 Echeverri notes that in 1731 and 1732 its inhabitants sent messengers to Pasto requesting clerical visits to two towns they had established, Nachao and Nalgua, both of which had churches. This request, she argues, “exposed their strategy of aligning their community with the
Catholic precepts that were central to social and political life in Popayán.” The Audiencia of Quito responded by offering the palenque a pardon and seeking to establish civil government. El Castigo’s request for a permanent priest was successful but the inhabitants rejected the offer of being included within the audiencia’s jurisdiction.125 El Castigo survived throughout the colonial period, and it was in fact, “central to the royalist defense of Popayán during the wars of independence.”126 While it is far less known than San Basilio, El Castigo’s survival was rooted in both its military prowess and the importance of Catholicism within it.
122 McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques,” 143. 123 McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques,” 144. Also see Pablo Rodríguez, “A efêmera utopia dos escravos de Nueva Granada: o caso do palenque de Cartago,” TOPOI, 6, 11, (2005): 362-380. 124 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 123. 125 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 104, 105. 126 Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 104. 76
Conclusion
The Black Atlantic occupies a longstanding place in scholarship on the African diaspora, while that of the Black Pacific is in its infancy. Both in Colombia and beyond, the Caribbean and
Atlantic are generally understood as separate realms. An examination of the itineraries and religious cultures of black people through rivers, forests, and mountains of eighteenth-century New Granada, makes it clear that these were worlds that were made in conversation. The space that was part of the
New Kingdom of Granada in 1690 had become the Viceroyalty of New Granada and by 1790 had been transformed by slavery, gold mining, the Bourbon reforms, and black mobility. Water was crucial to the mobility of people, ideas, and objects of African heritage. New Granada’s rivers and caminos, were an extension of the Middle Passage, but they simultaneously offered enslaved and free people of African descent the possibility of flight and the creation of an alternative (rival) political and spiritual geography in el monte. The natural environment, slavery, and the search for freedom shaped black political life and made possible the religious and cultural creativity that this dissertation examines.
77
Chapter Two: Rites of Enslavement
Through an analysis of religious education and the availability of the Catholic sacrament of baptism in New Granada, this chapter examines the incorporation of enslaved bondspersons into Christianity. Scholarship has focused primarily on Spanish discursive constructions of blackness and conversion, rather than enslaved Africans’ experiences of conversion in New Granada.1 The chapter examines both aims of the authorities and the experiences of enslavement, Christian education, and baptism. It argues that African- descended people’s experiences of conversion and baptism were highly contingent on the presence or absence and interests of clergy and slaveowners, geographical location, and form of labour. On the one hand, enslaved and free people of African descent in Caribbean urban centres were often fairly knowledgeable in the tenets of the faith. On the other, bondspersons labouring in peripheral mining regions had irregular contact with Catholic sacramental orthodoxy. Cities and towns were spaces of partial and simultaneous
Christianization and creolization. The tropical lowlands were on the whole black spaces and there were few clergymen and little opportunity for consistent access to the sacraments.
Baptism was and is the sacramental mark of conversion—the formalization of a convert’s or an infant’s entrance into the church. The Catholic sacrament played a central
1 Margaret M. Olsen’s Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2004); Nicole Von Germeten, (ed and trans.) Alonso de Sandoval S. J.: Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instaurando Aethiopum salute (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2008). Larissa Brewer-Garcia analyzes images of black people “as beautiful black Christians” in religious art in Larissa Brewer-Garcia, “Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-century Spanish America,” in Envisioning Others: Representations of “Race” in the Iberian and Ibero-American World (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her forthcoming book Beyond Babel: Translation and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Spanish America makes an important argument about the authorial role of people of African descent in sixteenth century Peru and New Granada. She argues that “black men and women influenced the composition of texts as interpreters and Christian subjects.” Larissa Brewer-Garcia, “Beyond Babel: Translation and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Spanish America” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013), iii.
78 role in strengthening the institution of slavery in the Spanish Americas. Much of the debate amongst historians writing about slavery and baptism in Latin America has taken place within the terms set out by Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen (1947). Tannenbaum’s thesis is that the law and Catholicism mitigated the effects of slavery in Latin America as opposed to the Anglophone Americas.2 He argued that in Latin America both “slave and master…had to recognize their relationship to each other as moral human beings and as brothers in Christ.” An enslaved person had “a right to become a Christian, to be baptized, and to be considered a member of the Christian community.” Baptism was thus “his entrance into the community, and until he was sufficiently instructed to be able to receive it, he was looked upon as out of the community and as something less human.”3
The sacrament of baptism became an initiation into the Christian religion and the condition of enslavement. Captives entering the Spanish Americas were supposed to be baptized. In 1518, Charles I decreed that Africans enslaved by Portuguese traders and sold in
Spanish territories must first have been baptized in Africa.4 Papal decrees encouraged conquest and enslavement for missionary purposes.5 By contrast, in other parts of the
Americas, efforts to legally formalize the relationship between baptism and slavery were not
2 A discussion of the wider implications of the legal, rather than the religious, aspect of Tannenbaum’s thesis is outside the scope of this work. Such an analysis—with particular attention to gender can be found in Michelle A. McKinley’s Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); also see Alejandro de La Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, “Comparative Studies of Law, Slavery and Race in the Americas,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 6, (2010): 469–85 3 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) [1946], 63. 4 Before their forced embarkation across the Atlantic Ocean, many Africans received very little instruction, and quite frequently, they were not baptized at all. Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 68. 5 Conquest of non-Christian peoples and their sale into slavery was legally permitted by papal decree since the early period of imperial expansion in the Mediterranean, North Africa and the eastern Atlantic. For example, “Papal Bull, Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V), January 8, 1455,” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, eds. Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 37-42.
79 made until the late seventeenth century.6 To the vast majority of adult bondpersons, the sacrament of baptism inscribed them with a new legal status, that of slave. In his analysis of seventeenth-century Popayán, Sherwin Bryant notes that captives could be imported without having first received baptism, but the sacrament was “always mentioned” in the bill of sale.
Notaries stated where captives had not been baptized, perhaps to indicate they had entered as part of the contraband trade. He posits, “It certainly begs the question of how regular baptism was for slaves passing legally through Panama or even Cartagena during the eighteenth century.”7 This chapter takes up the issue of baptism and its relationship to the world of slavery. It explores how conversion and baptism were practiced and conceived of in eighteenth-century New Granada, both by slaveholders and the enslaved.
The first of this chapter’s three sections explores Spanish theological literature and law regarding the instruction and conversion of people born in Africa to Christianity, focusing on writing from, or circulating within, New Granada. The second section examines the intersection between black conversions and colonial state institutions. It offers an analysis of the instruction in Catholic doctrine that people of African descent received or acquired. It is based on records from the Inquisition’s Caribbean seat and numerous letters from the clergy and slaveowners complaining of the lack of spiritual provision for the enslaved in Pacific mining areas. The third part focuses on the relationship between baptism and slavery. This final section is based on baptismal records from the Cathedral of Santa
Marta, located on the Caribbean coast, as well as the extensive records from the parish of
6 In the French Caribbean, The Code Noir (1685) required the baptism of all slaves. “The Code Noir, 1685” Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus (eds.), Slave Revolution in the Caribbean: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006): 49-54; Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Introduction,” in Free Soil in the Atlantic World, edited by Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 2. 7 Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 52.
80 San Jorge in the city of Cartago—one of the key slave markets for the province of Chocó— in the Cauca valley. The evidentiary basis of this chapter moves between ecclesiastical and secular sources because, throughout this period, priests and slaveowners debated who was responsible for educating and converting and paying clergy to administer sacrments to the enslaved. Yet by the end of the century, according to the first comprehensive slave code for the education of enslaved people (1789), authority over enslaved religious life lay firmly with slaveholders, rather than the clergy.8
Instruction and Conversion
From the beginning of the Spanish colonial project, it was clear that religion was to take a central place in governing the lives of the enslaved. In theory, conversion of Africans to Catholicism was central to providence and divine history in the Iberian world. Iberian
Catholic powers justified colonialism as a means to convert conquered and enslaved people to Christianity. Africans fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, unlike indigenous people, so, in terms of institutional experience, they were judged as Christian subjects.9 While there is an extensive collection of early colonial texts describing and calling for the conversion of indigenous Americans, few advocates of indigenous conversion called for the religious education of black people in the Spanish Americas.10 While ‘conversion’ and the
8 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173. 9 María Elena Martínez argues that this stemmed from the desire to create a separate system for indigenous people: “The crown’s decision to allow the Holy Office to try blacks and not indigenous people was in consonance with its project to create a dual model of social organization and the concomitant establishment of special secular and religious institutions for the latter.” María Elena Martínez Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2008), 221. 10 See, for example, the numerous didactic works for the Nahua peoples of central Mexico. These ranged from confessional manuals to dramatic plays. Arthur. J. O., Anderson, Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody) (University of Utah Press: Salt Lake City, 1993); Bartolomé de Alva, A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634 Barry D. Sell and John
81 uneven effects of evangelization have become the central historiographical paradigm for understanding indigenous religion in colonial Spanish America, a focus on conversion fails to capture the experiences of people of African descent.11 The Church offered little special instruction for African-descended people for the vast majority of the colonial period. It was rare that the Church treated people of African descent as deserving of particular missionary attention. Spanish slaveholders and the Church expected people of African descent to grow up within the Catholic Church. In cities and towns, that meant receiving religious education from local clergymen as part of the wider congregation, while in mining areas slaveowners, irregular visits from itinerant priests and fellow labourers in cuadrillas were the principal mode of religious instruction.
The most concerted missionary efforts to convert enslaved Africans in the Spanish
American empire was in Cartagena de Indias from the 1620s through the 1650s. Jesuit
Alonso de Sandoval was the author of the only conversion manual for priests evangelizing to
Africans in the Americas, while his student San Pedro de Claver was sanctified for his work.
De Sandoval’s text was largely forgotten for centuries. First published in 1627, De Instauranda
Aethiopum Salute only appeared once more in 1647 until a Colombian edition in 1956.12 De instauranda Aethiopum salute is not a typical conversion manual; rather, his text articulates early
Frederick Schwaller, with Lu Ann Homza (eds.) (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1999); Louise M., Burkhart, Holy Wednesday; A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press: Pennsylvania, 1996) 11 Key works include: Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. (University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1989); Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World; the Impact of Diabolism (New Haven, 1994); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in early Colonial Peru (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1991); Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997); Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (eds.), Conversion: Old worlds and new (University of Rochester Press: Rochester, NY, 2003); Martin Austin Nesvig (ed.) Local religion in colonial Mexico (University of New Mexico: Albuquerque, 2006). 12 Olsen, Slavery and Salvation, 4.
82 modern Spanish understandings of slavery, African conversion, and providential history.
Sandoval’s interest in African, rather than indigenous, pre-contact culture appears to have been unique among missionaries in the Spanish Americas.13 His integration of a significant amount of ethnographic material follows the missionary tradition, epitomized by Ramón
Pané, Bernardino de Sahagún, and José de Acosta among others, of recording paganism and heathen cultures in order to extirpate them most effectively.14 Sandoval was highly critical of the abuses of slaves, which he saw as a hindrance to conversion, yet he portrays slavery as necessary to secure the salvation of Africa and Africans. This conception of slavery as part of God’s divine plan was well established within Jesuit thought.15
While de Sandoval’s intended audience were members of religious orders, other regular clergymen wrote didactic literature for members of the laity that addressed conversion of slaves. Interest in and methods of instruction and conversion of enslaved people featured in literature for Padres de Familia, male heads of households. Franciscan
Antonio Arbiol y Díez’s La Familia Regulada (1725), was a Spanish educational book that enjoyed considerable popularity and circulated widely in Spain and its empire. A copy of the book is present in the Missionary College of Popayán’s Library, so it must have been consulted by the institution’s Franciscan friars.16 Two of the twenty-six chapters address the
13 Von Germeten, ‘Introduction’ xiv. 14 Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex; A General History of the Things of New Spain (University of Utah Press: Salt Lake City, 1978); José de Acosta Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2002). 15 Jean-Pierre Tardieu, ‘La Esclavitud de los Negros y el Plan de Dios: la Dialéctica de los Jesuitas del Virreinato del Perú’ in Sandra Negro Tua and Manuel María Marzal, (eds) Esclavitud, Economía y Evangelización: las Haciendas Jesuitas en la América Virreinal (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 2005), 67-81. 16 Antonio Arbiol, La familia regulada, con la doctrina de la sagrada escritura y santos padres de la Iglesia Católica, para todos los que regularmente componen una casa seglar, a fin de que cada uno en su estado, y en su grado sirva a Dios nuestro señor con toda perfección y salve su alma (Madrid: Thomas Rodríguez Frias, 1725), [1715] Biblioteca del Colegio de Misiones de Popayán, Archivo Central del Cauca, No.: 0110 Clasificación: V/ 2196 EM
83 education and treatment of bondspersons. Chapter 18 outlines the role of the slave owner in the salvation of the enslaved, while Chapter 24 discusses bonded persons’ obligations of patience and loyalty to owners. Chapter 18, “Warnings for Fathers, with their male and female slaves, and the union of husband and wife they must have, for the good government of one’s household,” commands that the husband and wife, as heads of household, are responsible for providing a good example for their bondspersons.
Arbiol emphasized the responsibilities of slaveholders for the salvation of their slaves. In discussion of Augustine of Hippo’s advice for slaveowners, Arbiol stated “Let the master be humble, says the Saint, and show himself as the father of his slave, so that the slave may also be encouraged to be like a son in love for his owner, in the humble and affectionate performance with which he serves him.”17 He outlined the three obligations that owners had towards their slaves—the provision of food, learning for their internal salvation, and last, moderate work, defining moderate according to remarkably loose parameters as
“not being so excessive that it may take life.” In a similar trope to earlier Spanish priests writing on the condition of enslavement, Arbiol framed the condition of enslavement as a debased yet sacred one in this world, with the promise of salvation and deliverance from blackness in the next. Arbiol focused on the importance of the sacraments for the slave owner’s education of his slaves. He referred to the obligations of owners towards their slaves as a divine precept; “that the masters have an obligation of conscience to care for the education and good upbringing of their baptized slaves, for they do not have another father to look after them, and that they [have an obligation to] administer [to them] the good education of Christians.”18
17 Arbiol, La Familia Regulada, 512. Here he cites “S Agustin lib. 17 de Civ de Dei, c. 16.” 18 Arbiol, La Familia Regulada, 512.
84 Arbiol stated that the Catechism says, “Let masters look upon their slaves, and servants, as children of God, which they are because of Sacred Baptism.” He interpreted this as meaning that “Perhaps the poor slave among the manure of the stables, is more esteemed of God, than his proud master with his coaches, and vanities; And the poor little negra, most despised of all, will be more pleasing to the Lord than her profane mistress, and vanished by her dissipated prosperity. God attends to hearts.”19 Arbiol’s focus on a representational negra, an enslaved black woman or girl, as the most lowly and hated is the text’s most direct expression of the intersection of gender, race, and status in slaveholding society’s marginalization of women of African descent.
For Arbiol, slavery was something that black people must endure as they looked forward to the next life. The chapter on the obligations of the enslaved to their owners emphasizes patience in the face of temporal enslavement. Arbiol states that although in
“miserable slavery” while living “they are obligated to honour their masters, obey them in everything just, and…work honestly, for the benefit of their masters.” Moreover, he orders that slaves must “pacify their hearts and conform with the Divine will in the humble state of their servitude, for if they do not, they will endure a life full of unhappiness.”20 He claims that these reasons for their enslavement “must console” bondspersons, for “if their souls are saved, their temporal bondage has been happy, because there is no other true good except salvation.”21
Salvation was tied to obedience and the performance without question of labour for slaveowners. Laws directly expressed Catholic approaches to African-descended people’s conversion and conformity to Christianity from New Granada. The law is crucial for
19 Arbiol, La Familia Regulada, 512. 20 Arbiol, La Familia Regulada, 589. 21 Arbiol, La Familia Regulada, 590.
85 understanding how the slaveholding elite sought to govern, control, and render powerless enslaved and free people of African descent. Legislation, both universal to all Spanish colonies and local, regulated diverse aspects of black social and cultural life. Relevant legislation principally addressed morality and behaviour, rather than knowledge of Catholic doctrine or interiority. On the whole, laws attempting to control the behaviour of people of
African descent related to specific acts rather than being comprehensive in approach. The focus on the perceived immorality of people of African descent illuminates how the concern with sexual behaviour was a central part of the Spanish criminalization of blackness.
One of the most striking of these laws was a Real Cédula, or Royal Decree, of
December 2, 1672, which ordered that slaveowners across the Spanish Indies “must not permit that Black women, neither Slaves, nor Free, leave their houses at night.” The Decree was written in response to “the grave abuse that owners of female slaves have introduced in the Indies, for sending them to sell things.” The Cédula states that if black women “bring back profit, they go out at night, with blunder and dishonesty.” The Crown claimed that these women had caused “horror and scandal,” thus it ordered a general curfew “to avoid such ugly sins”—the nature of which is unspecified—“so undignified to Christian purity.”22
The Decree aimed to prohibit both the physical and economic mobility of women of African descent, free and enslaved. Black women’s participation in the marketplace, and the increased freedoms that their own income allowed, were as much of an affront to the Crown as their refusal to behave according to Catholic Christian moral norms. This general curfew for black women irrespective of legal status illustrates that the Crown conceived of free black women as being under the control of slaveowners and sought to minimize the growth of the free population of colour. It was also this involvement in the market that allowed women of
22 AHAP Legajo 588, Doc 5, f. 1r.
86 colour to earn their own money and save to purchase freedom for themselves and their families.
The Crown issued another Real Cédula policing black people’s behaviour on the same date, December 2, 1672, based on reports from Cartagena yet with the intention that the cédula should apply across the Spanish American empire. The Decree stated that in
“Cartagena de Indias, and other Provinces…black men and women, being so alien to
Christian honesty…[walk around] in total nudity.” The Decree ordered that Viceroys,
Presidents, and Governors “take particular care that the negros and negras go around dressed, or at least covered, in a form that may seem decent and without danger to those who see them.” While the colonial state legislated against the polluting influence of the nakedness of black people, the law targeted the city where the display of black bodies continued to be instrumentalized for sale in the slave market. The punishment for free people of African descent was a fine for a first offence, imprisonment for a second, and lashes of the whip or a corresponding sentence for a third or further incidences. Where black people who failed to dress appropriately were enslaved, the punishments were a fine to be paid by their owner for the first offence. If the owner had failed to dress their bondsperson, the sentence for a second and third offence was imprisonment and loss of the slave or sale to the local hospital.
If the bonded person was found to be at fault for their lack of attire, they were to be punished in the same way as free people of African descent.23
In the early decades of the eighteenth century, local laws regulated multifarious aspects of black social life. In Medellín in 1728, the alcalde ordinario, or municipal magistrate,
Mateo Álvarez del Pino ordered that negros and mulatos cease running in the plaza and streets in celebration of the fiesta of San Juan el Bautista and other religious festivals. Evidently,
23 AHAP, Legajo 588, Doc 3. f. 1r.
87 men of African descent had created a space for their own pastimes and a form of alternative celebration during Catholic religious festivals—and perhaps to ends different than, or hidden from, white society. In previous years, claimed Álvarez del Pino, “there had been so many rains and having run so [through the plaza] two or three times, the mulatos and black slaves had made it so impractical and flooded that one could not drive [a carriage].”24 Apparently the plaza had become muddy and impassable due to men of colour’s tradition of holding competitive races through the plaza during rainy seasons. Two men, Simón and Luis, whom the notary described as mulato, had requested permits to run through the square. The request was denied, supposedly due to the inevitable rains and the risk that the Holy Sacrament could not go out in procession due to the mud. The alcalde thus ordered that they do not run
“until it was dry so they do not end up mistreating [the plaza and the streets], it not being my desire to prevent it without reason, but rather looking out for the common good and public places.”25
While Álvarez del Pino permitted African-descended men to race in the city when the rainy season had passed, a subsequent alcalde ordinario of Medellín, Ignacio de Cárdenas, was far less understanding of their engagement in sport. In 1732, de Cárdenas ordered that
Ambrosio de Cuartas and his wife should not allow his slaves or his sons to play in his ball yard, “neither during días de fiesta nor workdays, and that he only allow labourers and poor farmers to play on días de fiesta.”26 It seems that, on Cuartas’s land, the fraternization of men of all social classes, including his son, his slaves and local labourers, was a commonplace and possibly a daily occurrence. Cárdenas ordered that the practice cease on all days, whether of work or holiday. Although the ball game is sadly not described, the prohibition indicates that
24 AHM, Concejo Colonia, Procesos, Tomo 6, f. 27v. 25 AHM, Concejo Colonia, Procesos, Tomo 6, ff. 28r, 29r. 26 AHM Concejo Colonia Tomo 7 f. 196r.
88 on the one hand, sport provided a space in which some families and communities mixed socially irrespective of ethnicity and status, and on the other, that ruling elites did not tolerate such interaction for long.
There were similar laws prohibiting inter-ethnic social interaction that focused particularly on dances. On January 3, 1711 the alcalde ordinario of Cali, Roberto Laso de las
Posas, ordered that mestizos, mulatos, and zambos were not to hold dances at any time, day or night. Laso de las Posas derided mulata and zamba women for being particularly idle and disruptive and ordered that they receive education in Christian Doctrine. Punishments for failure to comply included fifty lashes of the whip.27 A law from the city of Buga, from 1724, outlawed “dances [bailes] and zambras.” The Diccionario de Autoridades of 1739 defines a zambra as “A party, which the Moriscos employ with noise, rejoicing, and dancing.”28 Therefore the term zambra was necessarily racialized; its application here reflects the Spanish fear of people of colour claiming and corrupting the streets at night. The law goes on to say, “all the slaves…go about at night robbing houses and in the streets…their masters must [make them] subjects and not permit that they go outside after eight at night.” The decree orders that “no person of any status, quality, or condition, dare to assemble dances and zambras by any pretext or motive, that the night is closed from now on, with a penalty to Spaniards of
25 patacones applied entirely to the Royal Chamber of Their Majesties and three days in jail, and to the common people, 100 lashes and three days in jail.”29
27 AHC, Cabildo, Tomo 11, Vol 2, ff. 127r-128v. 28 Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo VI (1739) 29 Archivo Histórico Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón (AHAHLT), Cabildo Tomo 2, 1721-28, f. 1r. Similar law on Miscelanea SC.39, 117, D.34, ff. 322-323. Despacho del Lustrisimo Don Antonio de Monroy y Meneses, Obispo de Santa Marta, por el cual prohíbe, bajo fuertea censuras y penas, el baile de tambor o bunde, por considerarlo deshonesto (1719). A patacón was Spanish slang for peso de a ocho (pieces of eight), the common silver coin. Its worth varied considerably due to inflation and risks of debasement. Kris Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 26.
89 Dance continued to be controversial throughout the eighteenth century. Significant controversy arose in the province of Cartagena de Indias in 1770 when the Bishop of
Cartagena, Diego Bernardo de Peredo y Navarrete, tried to ban public dances, attended by people of all social classes and ethnicities, in the name of the King. While most of the debate did not discuss the ethnicity of the participants, in a letter defending his ban, the bishop wrote that the participants were “negros, sambos, mulatos, y mestizos, ignorant rustic people, [and] libertine people [who were] commonly vicious, [and] united in them [the dances] at the festivities of the mystery, or saints’ days in most lascivious terms.” The King’s response stated that such dances were not dishonest because “neither the man touches the woman, nor are the verses indecent.” Rather the amusement of dancing was “ancient” and practiced widely in all parts of the Kingdom. He added that these dances were similar to those in Spain and issued a retraction of the ban in all Spanish settlements in the province. The King further warned the bishop, “Do not overstep by prohibiting with censorships or any other punishment any festivities, and public amusements, or particulars because they are alien to your ecclesiastical jurisdiction and [which are] peculiar to the civil and political power.”30
This forgotten controversy indicates the Crown’s assertion of state control over moral behaviour—and clerical excess in trying to retain or regain the Church’s typical early modern oversight over the social and sexual—as part of a wider process of secularization. More significantly, however, the bishop’s efforts were unsuccessful because he endeavoured to ban public dances for everybody. While other decrees were upheld, this one ultimately failed apparently because it was a general ban and did not target black people specifically.
30 AGI, Santa Fe 1053a, 1776.
90 The Crown promulgated the first comprehensive slave law governing the Spanish colonies on May 31, 1789.31 The Real Cédula of His Majesty about the Education, Treatment and
Occupations of Slaves in all his Dominions of the Indies, and the Philippine Islands, was intended to create a unified decree out of what had been a legally varied colonial landscape. The law focused on “the education, treatment, and occupation that their [slaves’] Owners must give them [the enslaved],” situating responsibility for religious and moral education under the secular power of slaveowners rather than the church. The order focused on conformity to
Catholicism for the public good, “dictat[ing that] Religion, and the good of the state, [were] compatible with slavery and public tranquility.”32
The Crown envisioned transforming the Hispanic Caribbean, including regions within New Granada, into a plantation system after 1789. Although there was never any uniform slave law in the British colonies, Spanish legislation was remarkably late compared to the French case over a century previous. Bourbon King Louis XIV issued the Code Noir of 1685 before and in anticipation of the rapid growth of slavery in the French Caribbean.
Similarly, the Spanish Bourbon King Charles IV issued the Cédula in anticipation of an expansion of black slavery in his colonies. The 1789 Cédula references a law dated February
28 of the same year that allowed free trade “in blacks with the islands of Cuba, Santo,
Domingo, Puerto Rico, and the Province of Caracas, to Spaniards and Foreigners.”33 The
Cédula justified this departure from mercantilist policy on the basis of the expectation that the “number of Slaves…will augment considerably.”34 While this ultimately did not happen
31 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173. 32 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 1. 33 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 2. 34 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 2.
91 in mainland Spanish America, this law was part of a wider legislative move to prepare for the expansion of slaveholding that did occur on Hispanic Caribbean islands, especially Cuba.
The articles of the Réal Cédula themselves brought together themes that were common features of the piecemeal legislation that governed enslaved people in the Spanish
Americas, with some notable divergences. A number of the clauses, and particularly the first one, were explicitly religious. This clause, ‘Education,’ stated that slaveholders must baptize their slaves within a year of residence in Spanish dominions. Bondspersons were not to work on Holy Days, except during the harvest, and that would customarily require a licence. The law concentrated religious power over bonded people in the hands of owners and their agents, while simultaneously prioritizing labour during the harvest over the holiness of the
Sabbath; it superseded numerous previous laws that had prohibited the enslaved from working on holy days. Owners of haciendas were to pay for a priest, and the enslaved should celebrate Mass, be taught Christian doctrine, be administered the Holy Sacraments, and, after work every day, pray the Rosary, with “great composure and devotion” in the presence of the priest or the mayordomo.35 The Cédula explained how días de fiestas should be observed in a chapter titled “Diversions.” Once they had heard Mass and had Christian Doctrine explained to them slaves could meet to occupy themselves in diversions in the presence of owners and mayordomos, separated by sex and avoiding excessive drinking.36 The Cédula defines interaction between the sexes as only appropriate within the sacrament of marriage. Chapter Seven,
“Marriages of Slaves”, stated that slaveowners “must avoid the illicit treatment of the two sexes, fostering marriages without impeding” that enslaved people marry other bondspersons with different owners. In such cases, if the haciendas are distant to the extent
35 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 2-3. 36 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 5.
92 that “that the consorts cannot meet for the purpose of marriage, the wife will follow the husband”—the husband’s owner should purchase her at a “fair valuation of experts appointed by the parties.”37
In the Spanish colonies to that date, enslaved people engaged in a wide variety of pursuits and urban slavery was typical. Yet the Cédula clearly defines slavery as primarily agricultural and hacienda-based. The third chapter, ‘Occupation of the Slaves,’ states, “the first and foremost occupation of the Slaves must be Agriculture and other field work.” Chapter
Five outlines how slave quarters were to be organized on haciendas. Owners were expected to provide single-sex bedrooms for unmarried slaves “that are comfortable and sufficiently free from the elements” and with high beds and blankets. When there were more than two bondspersons to a room, it ordered that there should be a separate room for the sick who should be cared for, or if there was not space or the hacienda was close to a town, they were to go to hospital, the cost of which was the owner’s responsibility.38
This law was significant as it sought to unite and replace previous legislation about the religious and moral lives of enslaved people. Such laws are crucial for understanding the institutional environment that shaped the social world in which people of African descent lived. Moreover, the Cédula demonstrates how the Spanish government envisioned the centrality of slavery in its imperial future and the role of religion in ensuring docility, conformity, and productivity from enslaved labourers.
Institutional Regulation and African-Descended Incorporation
37 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 7. 38 AGI, Santo Domingo, 2588 no. 173, f. 6.
93 Enslaved peoples’ actual experiences of conversion differed considerably from what was laid out in Spanish theological and secular literature and in law. The institution charged with regulating African-descended religious and moral behaviour was the Inquisition. A comparison of Caribbean and Pacific sites demonstrates the relationship between geography, institutional presence, and access to Catholic teaching. This section analyses patterns of instruction of the Inquisition’s defendants, followed by an examination of letters lamenting the lack of religious education in western New Granada. The latter part of the section is a discussion of case studies that address conversion and baptism, revealing the extent to which people of African descent, principally in Hispanic Caribbean cities, had taken on church teachings.
Inquisitorial prosecutions of people of African descent were at their peak in the seventeenth century, declining by the end of the century. While there were almost thirty cases with African-descended defendants in the early decades of the eighteenth century, after
1730 there are only two cases, both from the 1770s. As explained further in Chapters Three and Four, the threat of prosecution by the Inquisition was thus almost negligible after the
1730s, reflecting the lack of interest in educating people of African descent in Catholic doctrine. The jurisdiction of the Cartagena de Indias Inquisition covered a vast and diverse terrain—the provinces of Santo Domingo, Santa Fe, Cartagena de Indias, Santa Marta,
Popayán, Panama, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Santiago de Cuba (modern day Dominican
Republic, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba).39 Nevertheless, almost all defendants before the Cartagena Tribunal stood accused of crimes that had allegedly occurred in Caribbean locales. From 1698 onwards, most cases were from the province of
39 Bernard Moses, The Spanish Dependencies in South America: an Introduction to the History of their Civilisation (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1914), 338.
94 Cartagena, Caracas, and Panama—with two cases from Antioquia further inland, and one from Quito.
The Inquisition measured integration into Christianity and the Church by the defendant’s ability to recite Catholic prayers, most often the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, Creed and the Mysteries of the Holy Trinity. Inquisitors described defendants’ fluency in recital of
Catholic prayers, with labels such as “well instructed,” “signs of instruction” (while noting on which prayers she or he had faltered) and “poorly instructed.” Using these as a gauge of instruction I have categorized the defendants as well instructed, with fair amount of knowledge, or poorly instructed. Of those 28 defendants for whom data is available, nineteen were well instructed. Of those 19, sixteen were born in the Americas, one in
Portugal, one in Morocco, and one in the Canary Islands. Two creole defendants had fair instruction. Of the six people who were poorly instructed, three were born in Africa— enslaved at the date of trial and hailing from lands likely mischaracterized in the language of the slave trade as “Guinea” or “Congo.” Besides these three Africans the “poorly instructed” also included one man who was born in the East Indies (“the Indies of Portugal),” and two creoles, one of whom was born in Curaçao. Most creoles—born and raised in the Spanish
Americas—had good knowledge of the Catholic prayers that they had learned in Church along with congregants of other ethnicities. In this small sample people born in Africa were far less likely to have good knowledge of the Catholic prayers than their creole counterparts.
This lack of ability to even recite the words, let alone understand the doctrine, of
Catholicism is evidence of clerical apathy towards missionary work among Africans on either side of the Atlantic by the eighteenth century.
Beyond Caribbean urban centres, Catholic religious instruction was even more lacking. On mines and haciendas, slaveholders had to pay itinerant priests to administer the
95 sacraments—a system that generated considerable abuse and controversy.40 The exposure of enslaved people to Catholic sacraments depended on location. Throughout the eighteenth century, clergymen, administrators, and slave owning families wrote numerous letters to the
Crown complaining about the absence of adequate religious observance in mines and haciendas in western New Granada. The most common complaint in this body of letters, written from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, was the failure of slaveowners to allow enslaved people to observe holy days.41 In 1751, secular priest Francisco Josef de Figueredo wrote to the King complaining that enslaved people laboured in the mines and on haciendas in the Provinces of Chocó and Popayán were inadequately instructed and cared for. De
Figueredo stated that they worked on holy days to earn money for food and clothes that, in many cases, their owners did not provide for them.42 Lack of instruction was not a clear-cut issue of clergy accusing owners of negligence. In 1766, Pedro Agustín de Valencia, vecino de
Popayán and owner of several mines and cuadrillas de esclavos in Raposo, wrote to the King complaining that clergymen overcharged for administering sacraments to enslaved mining communities.43
According to these letters, the church had a very small presence in the tropical lowlands and enslaved Africans labouring in mining had little opportunity to learn of and practice Catholicism. In 1769, one observer claimed that the enslaved volunteered to work on días de fiesta in mines close to Yurumanguí, “many of them being idiots: Neophytes and recent converts, with almost no Doctrine and spiritual pasture, so much so that many die
40 Bryant, River of Gold, 84. 41 These letters and orders are numerous and touch on very similar issues. Also see AGI, Quito, 185. (1743), ACC 12.151 (Col. E I -3 e) (1749); AGI, Quito, 186 (1756), AGI, Quito, 284, N.14 (1766), (1771), AGI, Quito, 185. (1767); AHAP, Legajo 8, No. 1; AGI, Quito, 284, N.14 (1766); AGI, Quito, 296, N.9 (1771); 17r-v, and AHM Concejo, Colonia, Tomo 21, ff. 459r-460r (1790). 42 AHAP, Legajo 8, No. 1, f. 5v. 43 AGI, Quito, 284, N.14, ff. 1r-1v.
96 without aid and assistance of other Holy Mother Church, or her sacraments.” Allegedly, when bondspersons in a cuadrilla actually died, the mine’s administrator buried them but “he does not speak of the Dead, so that the living do not take their voice and lend their ear to the clamour for Justice.” The administrator of the mine denied or radically altered the rituals of Catholic burial due to fear of enslaved resistance. Moreover, contrary to Catholic teaching, the sacraments were not carried out by a priest, but rather the mine’s administrator baptized the newborn children and a “Negro does the offices of the sacristan.”44 Mine owners practiced this unorthodox administration of Catholic sacraments in camps that were between a four and six-day walk for the nearest clergyman. Even where the distances were lesser, “the roughness of the mountains of these Provinces” made the journey arduous. The Cura de
Negros, the priest who administered to enslaved people, would thus only pass by once a month.45
In response to a letter from the Bishop of Popayán dated May 2, 1771, the Crown issued a Réal Cédula ordering that the Viceroy must aid the bishop in ensuring that holy days were to be observed and suggested that the clergy should not be in possession of mines or haciendas. The order stated that neither the bishop nor his predecessors had been able to prevent “the abuse of blacks working in the mines on Sundays and días festivos…because of the opposition…of the mine and slaveowners.” It also requested that priests should be forbidden from the ownership of mines and haciendas, and that they should attend to their parishioners with punctuality.46 These letters are just two of scores from clergymen and slaveholders. Even after the Royal Order of 1771 the issue of insufficient religious provision continued. In 1780, Capitan Antonio de Arboleda, vecino of the city of Popayán, gathered
44 AHAP, Legajo 375, No. 30, f. 11v. 45 AHAP, Legajo 375, No. 30, f. 12r. 46 AGN, Reales Cédulas y Ordenes, Tomo 19, f. 61r.
97 together letters from slaveholders and priests living in the province calling for the Church to send more clergy to minister to enslaved people residing in isolated mining areas. He wrote
“our slaves, servants, and other inhabitants of these coasts…die like Gentiles, without sacraments—without hearing mass, nor the Holy Word, which brings indubitable consequences…for the ruin of customs.”47 “The ruin of customs” is the destruction of tradition and the immorality of the unconverted inhabitants of “these coasts.” The failure of slaveowners to allow enslaved people to rest on holy days continued despite these laws and calls for change. For example, the governor of Antioquia, Francisico de Baraya, prohibited bondspersons from working on holy days as late as 1790.48
Unfortunately, these letters reveal very little about the religious practices of people of
African descent in Chocó and Popayán. However, they do suggest that mining areas in the tropical lowlands afforded enslaved and free people of African descent greater possibilities of religious freedom. The first of these letters dates from 1749 and they continue right through to the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that the letters concerned with the absence of clerical presence begin in the 1740s when the import of enslaved African captives increased.49 Due to the growing importance of people of African descent in the region and the extent of alarm demonstrated by the slaveholding elite, it is likely that black religions became predominant forms of practice, yet the nature of those spiritualities is unclear from these sources.
The apparent lack of commitment to actively instruct bondspersons in New Granada
47 Archivo Arzobispal de Popayán Legajo 3, no. 1, f. 1r. His letter mentions the mines close to the rivers of Guapí, Napi, Napanchí, Guajuí, Timbiquí, Sayja, Micay, Jolí, Choarí, San Juan de la Costa del Mar del Sur. 48 AHM Concejo, Colonia, Tomo 21, ff. 459r-460r. 49 During the asientos of 1714 to 1736 the South Sea company brought approximately 10, 300 people, and from 1746 to 1757 the English shipped around 13, 000 persons. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 40.
98 stands in stark contrast to Spanish practice when it involved fugitives who fled slavery in the
Caribbean’s rival colonies. The Spanish preference for integrating the enslaved into the
Church was long established and diverged considerably from approaches in other colonies.
In the first three quarters of the eighteenth century hundreds of slaves fled from nearby
Protestant Caribbean islands to the Spanish Main, claiming religious refuge, which was, according to Linda Rupert, “encouraged by a legal framework” that promoted Catholic baptism.50 As such, Spanish colonial state actors formally, through piecemeal legislation, and informally, through acquiescent toleration, encouraged enslaved people from Protestant lands to flee to freedom because of their supposed faith, and to associate conversion to
Catholicism with escape from bondage and obtaining legal papers to demonstrate their free status.51
Catholic interest in converting bonded persons was well known and indeed exploited by enslaved people themselves. On August 3, 1717, Juan de Rada, described by the notary as mulato, appeared spontaneously before the Inquisition. He had recently arrived in Cartagena de Indias on an English slaver that was stationed in the port. The 20-year old enslaved man was likely born in the Portuguese East Indies. He stated that he had been captured very young by an Englishman. De Rada, who spoke English and required a translator, gave his owner’s name as “Mestre Feishon.”52 Although de Rada appeared before the Inquisition without having been summoned, non-practice of Catholicism still merited a sentence if one appeared “espontaneo,” albeit lighter than if denounced. De Rada declared to the inquisitors,
“I asked for an audience to say that I wanted to be a Catholic, [so that I may] live and die in
50 Linda Rupert, “Marronage, Manumission, and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 30: 3 (September 2009), 363. 51 Rupert, ‘Marronage’, 363. 52 AHN, Inquisición, 5349 Exp. 5, f. 139v.
99 the Catholic Religion.”53
De Rada’s testimony suggests that he came before the Inquisition with an awareness of how to use Catholic-Protestant tensions and imperial divisions to his advantage. He declared that he had never practiced any religion and that while he had attended church a few times, he had never paid much attention.54 The English, he stated, “did not care if their slaves took up this or that religion, nor did they baptize them, but rather let them live as they wished.” When inquisitors asked why he wished to be Roman Catholic, de Rada presented a compelling conversion narrative. He stated that when he arrived in the city of Cartagena he saw people entering a church on their knees. He then did the same and an “affection for the
Catholic Religion sprang from his heart.”55
It is likely that someone had suggested to de Rada that he should appear before the
Inquisition because of his non-Catholic history. On one hand, like many other men and women arriving on the Caribbean coast of South America, de Rada may have utilized conversion to Catholicism as a means to emancipate himself from slavery. On the other, his confession and desire to convert may have been genuine. Either way, his appearance before inquisitors seems to have been an effective strategy. Inquisitors examined him and found him not guilty of “having known any error or sect, nor had he previously had any knowledge or instruction of the Holy Faith.” They ordered that he receive instruction in the Mysteries of Our Holy Religion from Dominican Father Andrés Lince, who had been translator before the Inquisitor, and examined him in his knowledge of the Catholic religion.56 Whether de
Rada’s conversion led to a change in his enslaved status remains unknown, but there is no
53 AHN, Inquisición, 5349 Exp. 5, f. 139v. 54 AHN, Inquisición, 5349 Exp. 5, ff. 139v-140r. 55 AHN, Inquisición, 5349 Exp. 5, f. 140r. 56 AHN, Inquisición, 5349 Exp. 5, f. 140v.
100 mention of him having an owner as was formulaic in inquisition trial summaries where defendants were enslaved, especially as owners were responsible for paying the court’s fees.
Most likely, his account of his illegitimate capture by “Mestre Feishon” and his voluntary appearance before the Inquisition to seek conversion were significant factors in shaping his future. Despite his lack of Spanish, de Rada’s travels, from Asia to Europe to Caribbean
South America, equipped him with the knowledge of global political and confessional conflicts that he likely successfully exploited in the pursuit of freedom through Catholic conversion.
For Juan de Rada, conversion had the potential to liberate from slavery. Another
Inquisition case, that of the aptly named Nicholas Baptista, demonstrates the emancipatory possibilities that baptism could offer, albeit temporarily in his case. Unlike de Rada, Baptista and, indeed, most enslaved adults receiving the sacrament, found that baptism served as an initiation into the world of Atlantic enslavement. For bondpersons, baptism could be simultaneously a moment of conversion to Christianity as well as a moment of legal transformation from captive to slave. Baptista’s case illustrates the centrality of baptism and baptismal papers in navigating routes towards insecure freedoms, and offers contentious reinterpretations of the sacrament’s liberating potential. In March 1719, while held in the
Royal Prison of Cartagena de Indias, Nicholas Baptista declared to an unnamed denunciante,
“I am free, and they want to enslave me.”57 He proceeded to show the visitor his baptismal certificate from the Cathedral of Cartagena de Indias, demonstrating his free status. The denunciante later heard about a fugitive slave who had been baptized in the Church of Santa
Rosa in Alipaya.58 Realizing that Baptista was the same man and that he had violated Catholic
57 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 61v. 58 The town is now known as Santa Rosa, Bolívar (or just Santa Rosa del Norte), 15 miles from Cartagena de Indias.
101 doctrine by receiving the sacrament of baptism twice, he denounced him to the Inquisition on March 4, 1719 for deriding the sacrament.59 During interrogation by inquisitors, Baptista revealed significant details about his life as an enslaved sailor. Born to enslaved parents, a
Mina father and Yolofo mother, in Curaçao in around 1690, he had left the island as a young man, embarking on a ship with his owner.60 He first engaged in various trade journeys along the Caribbean coast and then two trans-Atlantic voyages to Guinea to search for black captives.61 The use of American-born enslaved men in the Dutch Atlantic slave trade was common. By the 1740s, two thirds of Curaçao’s sailors were black.62
The physical environment of Caribbean New Granada offered the possibility of flight from slavery, but also exposed people of African heritage to numerous transnational threats of re-enslavement. On the last journey he had taken, Baptista had fought with his
Dutch owner and been stabbed while still on the boat close to the coast of the island of Barú near Cartagena. After fleeing, he was arrested and taken to the Royal Prison, where he was held for a year until released by the Governor. Baptista was soon captured by Salvador
Baptista, who claimed ownership of him. Illegitimately re-enslaved and without the Spanish to defend himself, Baptista was taken to the village of Alipaya, where he worked for four to five years.63 When sold again in Cartagena, Nicholas fled to Valle de Upar, 160 miles to the east in the province of Santa Marta, where contraband trade in goods and chattel was
59 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 62r. 60 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 63r. 61 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 63v. 62 Rupert, ‘Marronage’, 367. According to Rupert, a 1710 decree from the Dutch West India Company stated, “blacks as well as whites must have passports, or personal identity documents, provided by the Dutch West India Company before they could be transported off the island or put into service on board ships.” In addition to their passport, enslaved people were required to have a permission letter from their owners. Rupert, ‘Marronage’, 369. 63 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 63v.
102 prevalent.64 In Valle de Upar, English slave traders sought out Baptista, claiming that he was a captive who had escaped from one of their ships. He soon returned to Cartagena, fleeing the English threat of re-enslavement.65 Upon arrival in the city, he was arrested for flight, which is how he came to be held in the city’s Royal Prison.
After arrest by the Inquisition, it was procedure to leave defendants unaware of the crime of which they were accused. After days of waiting for Baptista to confess, he eventually offered a possible reason for his arrest. A recently married man, he stated that he believed his imprisonment was because “he was from a land of heretics, and as such he could not marry, but… he was ignorant, [and] didn’t understand these things.” Days later, he added that an old black man had advised him that the English could not take him if he were to be baptized in Cartagena. “In this way,” he claimed, “it had turned out well, and so that with it [the baptism] he freed himself and took the faith of his woman.”66 Baptista attempted to frame his plight within the wider context of Protestant neglect of enslaved spiritualties, likely cognizant of Spanish religious refugee policy. “Land of heretics” refers to the
Protestantism of the Dutch, who held imperial power over Curaçao. While Baptista was likely aware of confessional divides between the two colonial powers, Curaçao was not really a Protestant land in any experiential sense. The Dutch showed little interest in evangelizing to their slaves in the early eighteenth century. The missionaries that arrived most frequently in Curaçao were Catholic not Protestant.67
Baptista’s statements contain a variety of possible meanings. On June 26, 1719, after almost four months in the Inquisition’s secret prisons, he eventually confessed to the two
64 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 64r. 65 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 64r. 66 AHN, Inqusición, 5349,Exp.5, f. 64v. 67 Rupert, ‘Marronage,’ 366.
103 baptisms, but claimed that he had not meant to devalue the sacrament. He had received the first baptism “without knowing the things of God, nor the Spanish tongue, and that after he had opened his eyes he wanted to be baptized.”68 He emphasized the sincerity of his belief in the language of the Church, depicting his second baptism as marking the climax of his conversion, which (consciously or not) he framed as Pauline, as a transformation from ignorance and darkness into truth and light.69 Baptista’s claims of having been baptized without being adequately instructed appear veracious. Despite having lived in the Caribbean region of New Granada for at least six years, when tested by inquisitors he recited Catholic prayers with “signs of poor instruction and confusion.”70
In justifying his second baptism Baptista questioned the validity of the first and offered a critique of baptismal practices in the Iberian Atlantic. He stated that he had fled from Valle de Upar because his owner had sold him. In doing so the owner “had done him an injustice…he considered himself free for having come to search faith in God.”71 For
Baptista, a Christian man should not be sold as chattel. His conversion should have made him free, not only spiritually and in the next life, but also legally in this one. Through obtaining his baptismal certificate, if only for a short time, the aptly named Baptista tried to transform the spiritual benefits of baptism into permanently temporal and material ones.
Baptista received no clemency from the inquisitors. On August 22, 1719, they sentenced him to an auto particular de fe wearing a penitential garment with a cross, and a hundred lashes in the streets of Cartagena. He was then to work without pay for three years in the construction
68 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 64v. 69 “Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized.” Acts 9: 18. New International Version. 70 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. f. 63v. The majority of people of colour before Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias in this period the vast majority were actually well instructed. 71 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 65v.
104 of the castle of Bocachica.72 Forced labour on Spanish fortifications was a common sentence for men of African descent in Cartagena, a key site in the Caribbean theatre of the war of
European imperial rivalries. Baptista had made himself free, and through the sentence of forced labour, the Inquisition re-enslaved him. There is no description of what were to happen to him the three years were up, but it is highly unlikely he would have been freed considering his previous flight from his enslavement.
Baptismal Records and the Enslaved
Historiography on baptism and slavery in colonial Latin America reflects bondspersons’ ambivalent experiences of the sacrament. Some scholarship has tended to focus on how the sacrament has had positive effects for the enslaved. This is because of both baptism’s emancipatory potential and its role as a route to sacramental inclusion and the creation of community after the Middle Passage. As outlined above, Linda M. Rupert’s work illustrates how baptism offered enslaved individuals fleeing Protestant Caribbean islands the promise of freedom from slavery.73 Michelle McKinley examines more ambivalent cases of baptismal manumission of children and the likelihood of their re- enslavement, most common when the infant remained in the familial unit or household.74
Baptismal records indicate the social world of enslaved adults, revealing an intricate web of relations—of children, mothers, fathers, madrinas, and padrinos. As Bryant states, the
“ecclesiastical archive is both a product of colonial practices and a reflection of the communal life the enslaved crafted through racial subjugation to the crown.”75 Baptismal
72 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp.5, f. 66v. 73 Linda Rupert, “‘Seeking the Water of Baptism’: Fugitive Slaves and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean,” in Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (New York: NYU Press, 2013): 199-232. 74 Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 145. 75 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 91.
105 papers occupied a crucial role in shaping the lives of colonial subjects. Despite their repetitive monotony, baptismal records profoundly shaped the lives of racialized Spanish
Americans, a fact driven home by Nicholas Baptista’s case. In every parish, the priest’s notations in the parish records reflected and governed every aspect of political and social life.
Baptismal records could be freedom papers, proof of belonging, the place where ethnicity and legitimacy were first recorded, and documents that could be consulted in any future legal proceedings.
The ritualized acts of branding and baptism were experientially linked by their temporal closeness, as well as conceptually, through their imposition of a forced identity as
Christian and slave. Matthew Restall discusses baptism alongside branding in colonial
Yucatán. He claims that giving the enslaved a Christian name during the baptismal ritual was
“a further way of marking slaves with a new identity, but the act was one of inclusion, not of contempt; a slave’s new identity included being a Christian member of the Spanish-speaking community—an unjust and unequal community where some people were property, but undeniably a human community.”76 He also notes that when renaming their slaves, slaveowners gave them their names, those of their children, and their parents. He argues that the practice of renaming “was conservative, perhaps paternalistic and proprietary, but hardly dehumanizing.”77 According to Restall, branding and baptism were rituals “only similar in that they both involved the imposing of new identity markers by owners, the erasing of free
African identities with New World slave identities…baptism was nonetheless a nonviolent and solemn act conducted peacefully in a church and leaving no permanent mark.”78 He
76 Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 47. 77 Restall, The Black Middle, 46. 78 Restall, The Black Middle, 49.
106 emphasizes baptism as recognizing the humanity of enslaved people, based upon an assumption that slavery’s dehumanization rested on an ideology that Africans and slaves were not human.79 However, there is little to suggest that enslavers thought that enslaved people were not human. Slavery was dehumanizing, but not because it proceeded from the assumption that a slave was not seen as being human. Rather the dehumanization lay in the attempt to reduce enslaved people to the status of not being fully human and free. The circumscribed humanity that slaveowners prescribed for the enslaved was the lack of choice—in where to live, who their family members were, their religion, and their names. It was not their humanity itself that was taken away, but all the privileges of being human.
Baptism was not a choice. The imposition of the sacrament of baptism and the giving of a new name were thus an intrinsic ritual marking out the enslaved as differently human, without a lineage and infinitely exploitable.80
For adults, the act of baptism was a form of spiritual violence and renaming was a discursive violence. In the Iberian world, the sacrament of baptism ritually reified the concept of black people as debased and enslaveable. For Bryant “blackening, branding, and baptism” were the “Three juridical acts of domination and rituals [that] marked and incorporated them [slaves] differently.” The process of blackening, made up by a myriad of acts (inspection of marks, wounds, and physical conditions, and documentation of origins, nación and casta) “were the intitial processes and practices that constituted blackness upon, and within, both the bodies of the enslaved and the territories from which they hailed.” As
79 Debates about the humanity of non-European peoples reached a climax at the famous 1550-51 debates between Bartolomé de las Casa y Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Anthony Pagden, The fall of natural man: the American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982). 80 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: a Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Also see Stefanie Kennedy, “Remembered in the Body:’ Disability and Slavery in England and the Caribbean, 1500-1834,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2015.
107 Bryant states, “These practices naturalized the European colonial horizon that constructed
Africa as slave territory and Africans as slaves unless proved free.”81 Baptism was a space to create cultural life after social death, but, as he explains, it was particularly ambivalent for the enslaved. It was this “very spiritual redemption that first inscribed racial difference upon those born within captivity [that] became the moral and religious grounds of incorporation for colonial governance and its modes of racial differentiation.”82 The baptism, categorization, and recording of a person according to racialized terms, negro/a, mulato/a, zambo/a, free or enslaved, was first and foremost carried out by local priests. “Such sacred acts as baptism and marriage” then “can be recognized as both racializing practices and slaves’ attempts to make a life within the predicament of colonial servitude.”83
How frequent adult baptisms, such as Baptista’s, actually were remains unclear. His receipt of the sacrament twice suggests that baptism of enslaved adults was common in
Caribbean New Granada, but there are few surviving records from that region. There are baptismal records of enslaved adults within the Books of Baptisms of Mestizos, Free Pardos, Slaves, realized in the Church of San Francisco of this City of Santa Marta, from 1770-1778. Within extant records from New Granada, this separation of baptismal books according to ethnicity is particular to Santa Marta. Baptismal records listed babies as hijo legítimo (legitimate child), born to married parents, hijo natural (natural child) born to unmarried parents who both recognized their offspring although sometimes only the mother was listed, or simply hijo
(child)” if only the mother or no parents presented at the baptismal font. If parents of a
“natural child” were to marry after the birth, their offspring could later be legitimized.84 By
81 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 52. 82 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 86. 83 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 85. 84 Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
108 having a separate book for “Mestizos, Free Pardos, Slaves” the priest organized the church record according to ethnicity and separated out racialized children from the common people.
By doing so the priest of San Francisco prevented mixed children from legally whitening even if they were retroactively legitimized through the marriage of their parents. From the same parish, there are similarly segregated parish books for marriage and extreme unction.85
Baptism of bondspersons was typically of enslaved infants. Santa Marta entries describe the enslaved adults as being from ‘Guinea,’ the generic term for Africa, although the word had specific connotations of the Rivers of Guinea, the Cape Verde islands and the
Senegambian mainland in Spanish slave trading terminology.86 These bonded persons received baptism in a small time frame—between May 1772 and August 1773 and all but one in the same week—despite all having different owners. Given the concentrated nature of the baptisms of enslaved adults, it is likely that these women and men had entered Santa Marta as part of the common contraband slave trade, rather than legal trade through Cartagena de
Indias. If they had arrived through the legal trade in Cartagena, they likely would have already received baptism. The majority of enslaved people who were baptized in Santa Marta were babies. From 1770 to 1774, there are entries for baptisms of 42 babies, and just 8 adults.
It appears that enslaved people receiving baptism did not receive a high level of instruction beforehand. An entry for February 15, 1773, describes a woman as a “black from
Guinea” who appeared to be forty years old. The baptismal record shown below states that
“she had been before catechized and taught in the principal mysteries of Our Holy Catholic
85 Archivo Histórico Eclesiástico de la Catedral de Santa Marta (AHECSM), Tomo No. 353 Asientos de muertos de todo generó de personsas y colores 1756-1770, and AHECSM, Tomo No. 353 Casamientos de pardos mestizos, esclavos 1756-1770. 86 David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 21.
109 Faith by me the said priest, and the baptized, having detested her old law, asked for the Holy
Baptism and I gave her the name María Francisca.”87 With this limited instruction, baptism was both an initiation into Catholicism and into slavery. For an adult enslaved African like
María Francisca, baptism was a renunciation of their religion from before the Middle Passage and a loss of self through Catholic renaming. 18 of the 24 (75%) enslaved female babies and
African women who received baptism in Santa Marta had names that were some variation on María. The narrative of María Francisca’s baptism—of catechism and detesting her old law—was a departure from the convention text of the baptismal record. She was baptized sub conditione, conditionally, for it could not be known if she had previously received the sacrament at some stage earlier in the stage trade, and rebaptism was not permitted, as we have already seen. Baptisms sub conditione were frequently of infants at risk of death and took place without godparents.
Figure 11: Entry for the Baptism of Maria Francisca, “Adulta, Nación Guinea”
87 AHECSM, Tomo 333, 89.
110
Archivo Histórico Eclesiástico de la Catedral de Santa Marta (AHECSM), Tomo 333, 89.
The analysis of baptismal records of enslaved infants illustrates the dynamics of baptism on the ground—what it meant for individual families and the choices they made when constructing a spiritual community. Entries provide details about how families and communities were structured, and contain important indications about the lived experiences of Spanish conceptualizations of race, sex, and reproduction in a society increasingly governed by slavery. The city of Cartago, situated on the banks of the La Vieja River with the Cauca River to the west, has a particularly rich set of records, including baptismal, confirmation, and marriage records for the Parish of San Jorge.88 Cartago was an entry point into the tropical lowlands as the slave market for the province of Chocó. An examination of baptismal records over time allows us to see how the city’s demography changed over time.
This is particularly useful in tracing how slavery shaped Cartago’s population before the first comprehensive census of the 1770s.
In order to understand how baptismal practices in San Jorge parish changed with time, I examined all entries for one year every ten years from 1770 to 1750—in the years
1700, 1710, 1720, 1730, 1740, and 1750—totaling 362 baptisms. From 1700 to 1750, the same parish priest, Joseph de Castro y Rada, wrote all the baptismal records. His remarkably long tenure in the parish ensures a consistency in the record. Indeed, his death complicates
88 While I examined the parish records in the archive in Cartago itself, I conducted the quantitative analysis using the Family Search website. As such, I reference the image number on the Family Search website for the sake of clarity, rather than the folio number on the original documents.
111 the data; many enslaved people had served as padrinos up to 1750, yet after Castro y Rada’s death, there are no entries stating that the godparents were enslaved. The priest that succeeded him did not note the ethnicity of padrinos either, thus the later records are far less valuable in understanding how enslaved people formed community. This either means that the regular clergy prevented bondspersons from taking on the role of godparents, that parents ceased to choose enslaved persons as godparents, or that the next priest did not record this data. Given the sudden shift in the records, the latter appears most likely.
Baptismal records were formulaic. Baptismal books recorded, first and foremost, difference and status. Individual entries usually only diverged from one another when referring to the dates, donations (amount of money and size of candle), legitimacy (hijo/a legitimo, hijo/a natural, hijo/a), names, sex, and racialization of the person baptized, parents, and padrinos—negro/a, mulato/a, zambo/a, sambo/a, pardo/a indio/a, and chino/a. Racial terminology differed according to locale and reflected local racial politics. In Caribbean New
Granada, zambo/a referred to a person of African and indigenous descent. In Cartago, sambo/a had this meaning, but Castro y Rada also used the term to refer to infants whose parents were defined as negro/a and mulato/a. Chino/a has different meanings in different places. In New Granada and Peru it refers to an indigenous person, while in Mexico it refers to someone of Asian descent. Notably, all entries referring to racialized infants were in the diminutive—negrito/a, mulatico/a, sambito/a, pardito/a, and chinito/a—betraying de Castro y
Rada’s paternalistic affection towards these children who entered his congregation and the baptismal book as ethnically different from other (presumably white) children. A direct reference to an infant as a slave is rare. It did not need to be stated; if their mother was enslaved they inherited her status. There is one instance of a reference to María, “una negrita
112 esclavita,” in 1750.89 There is no indication as to why de Castro y Rada differentiated her from other enslaved infants in this affectionate yet debasing manner.
No ethnicity is stated for infants who were not racialized, so they are taken here as being socially accepted as white. Mestizo/a is not a category in these baptismal records, but it seems quite likely that de Castro left out racial terminology for people of indigenous descent who could pass as white. For de Castro ‘white’ was apparently a default that did not need to be stated, and infants of Spanish descent were not ‘different’ and did not need to be racially marked. Some of these unmarked, presumably ‘white’, children were the legitimate children of wealthy parents, while others could not afford a donation and are listed as “pobre.” Many were illegitimate, and most of the abandoned children (hijo/as) were white.
The examination of baptismal records demonstrates the demographic transformations that slavery had brought in the first half of the eighteenth century. Total numbers organized by racial terminology can be seen in Table 1. In 1700, no infants of
African descent received the sacrament (0% of live births). In 1710, there is only one entry for an African-descended child, a girl named Pascuala described as mulatica.90 In 1720 and
1730 there were 7 children of African descent baptized each year. Yet by 1740 and 1750, the slave trade had transformed the demography of the parish, the city, and the wider region. In
1740, 45 infants termed as negro/as, mulato/s, pardos/as, and sambos/as were baptized, representing 51.7% of live births.
Table 1: Total number of baptisms of infants by ethnicity in stated years in San Jorge Parish, Cartago
89 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 320. 90 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725 “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 189.
113 Mulato/a
Sambo/a
Negro/a
Pardo/a
Indio/a
White Year
1700 0 0 0 0 1 12 1710 0 1 0 0 3 19 1720 5 1 1 0 3 52 1730 1 3 1 2 5 66 1740 25 14 0 2 4 42 1750 19 12 1 2 1 49
50 31 3 6 17 240
114 Table 2: Total number of baptisms of infants by ethnicity and legitimacy status in San Jorge Parish, Cartago
Mulato/a
Sambo/a
Negro/a
Pardo/a
Indio/a
White Infant’s Legitimacy
Year Status 1700 Hijo/a legitimo/a 0 0 0 0 1 10 1700 Hijo/a natural 0 0 0 0 0 2 1700 Hijo/a 0 0 0 0 0 0 1710 Hijo/a legitimo/a 0 0 0 0 2 16 1710 Hijo/a natural 0 0 0 0 1 3 1710 Hijo/a 0 1 0 0 0 0 1720 Hijo/a legitimo/a 4 0 0 0 3 33 1720 Hijo/a natural 1 1 1 0 0 18 1720 Hijo/a 0 0 0 0 0 1 1730 Hijo/a legitimo/a 1 0 0 2 3 37 1730 Hijo/a natural 0 3 1 0 2 23 1730 Hijo/a 0 0 0 0 0 6 1740 Hijo/a legitimo/a 15 5 0 2 2 26 1740 Hijo/a natural 10 8 0 0 2 12 1740 Hijo/a 0 1 0 0 0 4 1750 Hijo/a legitimo/a 10 7 1 2 1 37 1750 Hijo/a natural 9 5 0 0 0 10 1750 Hijo/a 0 0 0 0 0 2
Attention to the legitimacy status of the newborn is instructive in understanding marriage practices and sexual relations in the parish, particularly in 1740. With the expansion of slavery came a statistically unprecedented growth in the number of children born to married black parents. In this year, the number of black children born inside and out of wedlock (15:10) mirrored the data for white children (26:16)—the majority were legitimate and just under two thirds were born outside of marriage. The rapid growth of the number of children born to enslaved parents demonstrates the existence of quite successful ecclesiastical policies that aimed to harness black women and men’s sexuality and reproductive capacities to create idealized black families and expand the bonded population.
115 There certainly was an ideal black family in Cartago—married, mono-ethnic, and belonging to the same owner—that the church promoted through sacramental inclusion. Priest
Bernardo Manuel de Castro y Mendoza, likely some relation to de Castro y Rada, possessed two slaves, Felipa and Thomas, who had a child, Bernadito, in 1720. The infant was baptized swiftly due to risk of death, so no padrinos are listed.91 In the same year, Theresa and Simon, whose owner was also the priest Marco Muñoz de Bonilla, had a boy named Julio. His padrinos were Francisco and Francisco’s “woman” Barthola, whose owner is listed as Doña
Manuela Berrera.92 Both baby boys were described as negrito in the full text of the entry and noted as negro in the margin.
By contrast, illegitimacy was far more frequent for children that de Castro y Rada describes as mulatico/a. Such data is highly suggestive of sexual violence and coercion. Most, but not all infants recorded as mulatico/a were hijo/as naturales, thus not recognized by their fathers and the children of enslaved black women and unnamed white men. Nevertheless, there are other entries that highlight the circumstances of African-descended families who made lives alternative to those prescribed by the colonial church and slave society. A married couple, an enslaved black man and a free white woman, had a boy in 1740. They were poor and could only donate ½ a real.93
91 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725 “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 281. 92 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725 “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 287. 93 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 35.
116 Figure 12: Entry for Joseph de Castro’s mass baptism of 15 adult bozales, October 13, 1742
Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 44-45.
Of the 362 baptisms that regular clergymen conducted in these years, 15 were of adults, all of whom were enslaved, and 347 of infants. One adult enslaved person, Agustín, reportedly of casta Mina and from a land called Guami, received the sacrament in 1720, while
117 two people born in Africa were baptized in 1750.94 However, the remaining twelve adults,
Fernando, Fabian, Cyriaco, Manuel, Joaquin, Bartholo, Joseph, Luisa, Gerturdis, Brigida,
Stephana, Barbara, received the sacrament in a mass baptism on October 13, 1750. No padrinos were named.95 The rarity of adult baptism in comparison with those of infants further illustrates how baptism of the enslaved was not a priority in Pacific New Granada.
Indeed, there are remarkably few references to bozales or specific castas in the records as parents either. For 1740, Manuel Mina and Bernarda Chala had a child, as did María Congo.96
Evidence of the individual choices of padrinos and madrinas (godparents) left behind in the baptismal records allow historians to appreciate enslaved peoples’ social aspirations and the breadth of their social ties. Choices ranged from other people of African descent— free and enslaved—to indigenous people to white people. Owners, however, were not a popular choice—in the Cartago documents, I only found one reference to a slaveowner (and his daughter) acting as padrinos.97 Writing about eighteenth-century Bahia, a plantation zone,
Stephen F. Gudeman and Stuart Schwartz argue that godparents offered an alternative authority to the master. They state, “The baptism of slaves thus represents a threat to slavery, whereas enslavement of the baptized is a potential contradiction for the church.”
This contradiction was resolved, they argue, for “Slaves were baptized in accord with pressures from the church, but their rebirth from ‘slavery’ was never to their own masters.
94 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725 “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 273, Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 297 and 318. 95 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 44-45. 96 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 28 and 29. 97 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1739-1754, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 38,
118 Others, whether they were slaves or free or the masters of others, served as godparents.”98
They substantiate these claims by showing that in Bahia bondspersons were never godparents for free people and that in plantation societies flight to another estate and seeking out a godparent as ally or intercessor was common.99
In contrast to the violence of the sacrament for enslaved African adults, who in the above instance did not even have godparents, the baptism of infants allowed both parents to imagine futures and to forge community ties, seek alternative authorities to their owner, and pursue the possibility of freedom, but also inscribing infants as slaves from the beginning.100
Although transcribed by a priest, enslaved parents also had an authorial role at the baptismal font. Choice of godparents not only reflected the society that they lived in, but also the one they wanted to create. The enslaved married couple Xavier and Susana named their son
Patricio Joseph. They baptized him on May 18, 1720, when he was just a day old, and selected Joseph Copese de la Torre, a free black man from Cartagena, and Rosa, a woman described as mulata and also known as La Española, as godparents.101 A married couple—an indigenous man named Basilio and his enslaved mulata wife—baptized their son Ignacio at two days old. They chose their friend Manuel, an enslaved black man with a different owner, to be padrino.102 The majority of godparents whom enslaved parents chose for their children
98 Stephen F. Gudeman and Stuart B. Schwartz, “Cleansing Original Sin: Godparenthood and the Baptism of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Bahia,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America ed. Raymond T Smith, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 42. 99 Gudeman and Schwartz, “Cleansing Original Sin,” 44 and 45. 100 Seeking out the protection of a godparent was a fairly common activity, although how successful it was in achieving a good outline for the enslaved godchild remains to be seen. For example, Caetana’s godparents urged her to marry against her will in the Brazilian case described in Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56. 101 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 273. 102 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1725-1739, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 80.
119 were people of colour, either of African or indigenous descent. While there is a silence in the archive surrounding these decisions, one can speculate that they chose fellow people of colour as they were their dearest friends and allies.
Of the 90 entries where the children were of African descent, it appears that parents chose a white person in at least 28 instances. Choosing white godparents could reflect parents’ strategic thinking in searching for protection and guidance for their children.
Nevertheless, one must always factor in the possibility of owner interference in the choice of godparents. For almost all of the entries, there is little evidence to suggest that enslaved parents or mothers were not permitted to choose godparents themselves. However, others indicate that perhaps the owner had a role in the selection process. For example, enslaved black woman Antonia, who belonged to Doña Sebastiana de Rada, elected as godparents
Francisco Mina and María, slaves of the priest de Castro y Rada himself, for her mulato son
Lorenzo in 1720. Sebastiana de Rada was highly likely a relative of de Castro de Rada, probably his mother. Through positioning the legitimately married enslaved African godparents to Antonia’s child with a white man, de Castro y Rada used godparentage as a mode of paternalistic protection for this legally fatherless child.103
For enslaved adults, the sacrament was baptism into slavery. Tannenbaum compares the Catholic “right” of baptism to the “persistent refusal” of the sacrament to the enslaved in the Anglophone Americas into the eighteenth century.104 Baptism was not a right, but rather a legally mandated abjuration of pre-capture culture and family. The ritual of baptism was either received in the slave fort, during transit in the slave trade, shortly after the Middle
Passage, or upon arrival to interior slave markets in the Americas. The sacrament was thus
103 Cartago, San Jorge, Bautismos 1633-1725, “Family Search” (https://www.familysearch.org/), accessed October 26, 2017, 287. 104 Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 84.
120 an extension of the Middle Passage’s attempted erasure of African culture and the ritualization of natal alienation begun in the process of capture. Indeed, one could argue,
Christian baptism by water was the ultimate stage and most potent metaphor of the Middle
Passage to New Granada—across the Ocean, along the rivers and across land, to the final moment of erasure, washing away the old self, language, and culture, before rebirth into a new life of enslavement. Baptism of enslaved adults was a ritualized manifestation of spiritual and physical bondage. While the sacrament still inscribed a Christian and racialized identity on enslaved infants, for their parents, baptism could also offer an opportunity to create community and possible futures for their children.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how people of African descent began their relationships with Christianity. The concept and practice of instruction, conversion, and baptism took on entirely different meanings when experienced by enslaved people. It was only in the early seventeenth century that people of African descent were treated as neophytes. Beyond Jesuit activities in the first half of the seventeenth century, there is little evidence of special provision for the spiritual education of people of African descent. Instruction was to be received in church along with the rest of the uneducated populace, in church and through sacramental orthodoxy. Baptism for enslaved people had ambivalent meanings. For adults it was experienced as a ritual of natal and cultural alienation and racialization. For children, the baptismal font was a moment of inscription into Christian communities and the forging of kinship ties, yet it was still a moment of inscription into the world of Atlantic slavery.
Evidence from the Caribbean suggests that most people of African descent, and especially those born in the Americas, were literate in the language of the Church. By contrast,
121 instruction in rural areas of Pacific New Granada, and particularly on mines, was absent and in vast swathes of territory there was almost no church presence. Partial Christian education of people of African descent, then, was achieved by sacramental orthodoxy in urban centres such as Cartago. By the eighteenth century, black people were expected to be part of the
Church, embrace its doctrine, and adhere to its social mores.
Some clergymen and slaveowners did want to lead enslaved people, yet this alleged concern for souls did not undermine their belief in the justness of slavery or counter the general disinterest in providing and, most importantly, paying for adequate religious education for enslaved people. Inclusion of Africans in Catholicism was not to be achieved by meaningful instruction, but rather by access to the sacraments. Bondspersons, then, were included but kept ignorant precisely to ensure that Catholicism did not make them equal.
Access to religious education still served as a means of entrenching inequality and difference, which were ritually enshrined through the sacrament of baptism and the creation of the baptismal records.
This chapter has charted the creation of this highly racialized religious world, one created by slavery, the law, and the church. The rest of this dissertation engages with religions of people of African descent and their persecution, which varied considerably according to ethnicity, status, form of labour, and geographical location. Chapters Three through Five examine African-descended religious practices in New Granada, all of which engaged with Catholicism to varying degrees.
122 Chapter Three: Worlds of Healing
This chapter examines the work of healing and ritual practitioners of African descent—both born in Africa and the Americas—in New Granada. The focus is on the material—the materiality of rituals, the physical spaces in which they travelled and occurred, and the creation of sources through which these stories entered the archive. By manipulating objects people of African descent exploited and explored, the “porous boundary…between the spiritual and the material,” to use the words of Renée Soulodre-La France.1 The focus on space and the movement of healing and ritual knowledges is not to claim that their genealogies can be traced to a single point of origin, quite the opposite.2 Rather, the chapter illustrates how movement through spaces and interacting with them played a central role in the process of constant creation and adaptation of African-descended ritual and healing.
Activities defined in legal documents as witchcraft, sorcery, and poisoning are understood and reinterpreted here on their own terms as healing. Healing encompasses the broad, and intimately connected, range of physical and spiritual activities in which black ritual practitioners engaged, and is the analytical framework that I use to interpret African- descended ritual practices. Unless it is present in the trial documents, I avoid the pejorative eighteenth-century term curandero, which the 1729 Diccionario de Autoridades defined as, “He who without being an approved doctor, goes applying medicines that are supposed to be specific for the remedy of some diseases.” This dismissive description fails to capture the power, knowledge and skill of African-descended healers.3
1 Renée Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues: Baroque Catholic Imagery and African Sensibilities from Nueva Granada,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos Vol. 33, No. 1, “La Constitución del Barroco Hispánico: Problemas y Acercamientos” (Otoño, 2008), 217. 2 Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993). 3 Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo II (1729), accessed January 20, 2016, http://web.frl.es/DA.html.
123 Healers engaged in a broad range of activities. They were priests, diviners, intellectuals, and herbalists.4 Healers used altars, divination, plants, and orations to bestow spiritual and physical protection, tell the future, heal, or curse. The ends of ritual practice could be either generative or destructive.5 Historiographical literature on African-descended healers in New Granada has focused principally on the Caribbean prior to the eighteenth century.6 People of African descent in the early modern Atlantic world had an adaptive and ultimately “experiential” approach to the world of medicine, illness, and healing.7 The construction of pluralistic and efficacious medical methods, sourced from diverse traditions, practiced in Africa and the diaspora, was an on-going process that, as this chapter shows, continued throughout the eighteenth century in communities across the viceroyalty, not just in New Granada’s Caribbean region. Gómez states, “black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ power and knowledge creating strategies were based on experiential phenomena they manufactured anew on the basis of localized circumstances in different Caribbean locales.”8
4 Few scholars have worked on African empiricism in the early modern Atlantic world on its own terms. See Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Timothy D. Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal During the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 5 Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, Brujería, Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada: Un duelo de imaginarios (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1994), 87. 6 Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jaime Humberto Borja Gómez, Rostros y Rastros del Demonio en la Nueva Granada: Indios, Negros, Judíos, Mujeres y Otras Huestes de Satanás (Bogotá: Editorial Ariel Historia, 1998); Larissa Brewer-García, “Beyond Babel: Translation of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada.” (PhD. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2013); Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, Inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada: Un Duelo de Imaginarios (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1994); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017); María Cristina Navarrete, Prácticas Religiosas de los Negros en la Colonia: Cartagena, Siglo XVII (Santiago de Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1995); Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y Reconstrucción de Identidades entre los Africanos y sus Descendientes en la Nueva Granada, Siglo XVII (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005). 7 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean. 8 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 3.
124 Indeed, Gómez defines the experiential nature of black healing as a particularly Caribbean phenomenon. While these processes were necessarily constituted by Atlantic and Caribbean flows, this chapter argues that they were not exclusively so. In New Granada, black healing and ritual knowledges and their applications intersected with and were produced in conversation and connection with those of the Black Pacific.
The first section of this chapter examines the role of gender in the criminalization of healing practices and the making of the sources used in the chapter. Section two analyzes the prosecution of Caribbean healers, while the third focuses on practitioners whose repertoires were constituted within both the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific. The similarities between African-descended ritual and healing in the Black Atlantic and Pacific are thrown into sharper relief through this comparative and connective approach. Connecting these two spaces with predominantly separate literatures emphasizes the movement of black ritual practitioners and their diverse repertoire and the fluidity of these cultural worlds across geographical space.
The interest of the state, church, and courts in particular kinds of black criminality connected African diasporic communities across the Viceroyalty. The movement of people of African descent across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds ensured the mobility of their ritual epistemologies and objects. Specialists, especially the enslaved and those born in Africa, used materials of African, American, or Iberian genealogies to construct the transnational, elastic, and modern ritual world of New Granada. While the systems of slavery in cities and the wilderness, in centres and peripheries, in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, were fundamentally different, in their interstices, through quotidian ritual materialities and the judicial interests of the church and state, they were worlds that shaped each other.
125 As the Introduction of this dissertation notes, the archive of black religion in eighteenth-century New Granada has a precarious history. During the colonial period, inquisitors stored their voluminous records locally; they also sent autos de fe, lengthy copies of important cases, and numerous relaciones de causas fe, short summaries of cases, to Madrid for review (See Appendix 1).
Figure 13: Image of the Relación de causa de fe
An image of the relación de causa de fe from the case of Bernardo Macaya (alias) de Rojas, black enslaved man of Luango descent, AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, 24v.
Unfortunately, the Cartagena half of the documentation is lost and the documents that arrived in Madrid are the main body of evidence with which we are left. The seventeenth-century documentation of the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias is far more extensive than that of the eighteenth century. For the eighteenth century, there are no remaining autos de fe of the trials of African-descended ritual practitioners, only relaciones—a reflection of the ever-decreasing priority of the crime of sorcery for the institution and the overall decline of the Inquisition. Therefore, this chapter is based not only on Inquisition records, but also those from other ecclesiastical tribunal and criminal courts. My analysis utilizes cases from the courts of the Archbishopric of Popayán and the courts of the Real
126 Justicia of Chocó and Cartagena de Indias, as well as the tribunal of the Holy Office of the
Inquisition based in Cartagena.
Gender, Criminalization, and the Archive
Different courts tried ritual practitioners of African descent for a number of separate, but intimately related, crimes. Authorities criminalized black healing as a range of offences including brujería (witchcraft), hechicería (wizardry), sortilegio (sorcery), and envenenamiento (poisoning). The courts’ perceptions of the ethnicity and sex of the defendants, as well as the content of the accusations, influenced decisions regarding the prosecution of these crimes. The criminalization of ritual crimes reflected gendered and racialized patterns of judicial persecution.
According to Spanish inquisitorial demonology, ‘witchcraft’ denoted a pact with the devil, giving one’s soul over to him, and denying Christianity. In contrast, the Holy Office qualified ‘wizardry’ as an act directed towards specific ends, rather than being in service of the devil. Neither did wizards necessarily do harm.9 Witches had extraordinary powers, such as flight or transformation into animals, while sorcerers used incantations, medicines, and plants in their arts.10 Although inquisitors tried people of colour for the crime of sortilegio rather than brujería by the end of the 1600s, they continued to interrogate defendants about being in league with the devil until the 1770s.11 Sex usually determined if a defendant faced
9 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, Brujería, Inquisición, 84, 87. 10 Iris Gareis, “Merging Magical Traditions: Sorcery and Witchcraft in Spanish and Portuguese America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 414. 11 In a 1776-1777 sacrilege case from the Inquisition, inquisitors interrogated the escaped slave, Felix Fernando Martínez, about whether he had made a pact with the devil. AHN, Inquisición, 1623, Exp. 5, 19r. Martínez recalled the story of a man who had made a contract with the devil and signed in his own blood, exchanging his soul for plentiful wealth. He stated that he had tried the same, but the devil never arrived. AHN, Inquisición, 1623, Exp. 5, 47v. This case is discussed at length in Chapter Four.
127 trial by the Inquisition for witchcraft or sorcery. Generally, the Holy Office tried men for sorcery and women for witchcraft. Even when cases against men involved evidence of witchcraft—signs or claims that they communicated with the devil for example—they were rarely prosecuted for this crime.
Diverse understandings of what constituted healing and poisoning circulated in the early modern world. It was widely understood by medics that the ontological dichotomy between medicine and poison was a false one—an excess of the former resulted in the latter.
Indeed, this separation did not exist for many early modern West African cultures and the intersection between medicine and poison was also common knowledge in early modern
Europe.12 For African-descended practitioners, there was little, if any, distinction between healing and religious practices. Poison, especially when administered by the enslaved to slaveowners, was potential medicine for community healing. Rather than imposing a system of separate analytic categories for rituals performed with different ends in mind, I have instead taken seriously practitioners’ idea that there was no opposition between such practices. As this chapter will show, medicine and religion were often ontologically and experientially synonymous for healers.
The boundary between healing and poisoning was particularly fluid in West African and West Central African societies. In my sources, the majority of African-born defendants whose ethnicity is directly stated are referred to by the Spanish ethnic descriptors of ‘Congo’
12 This has long been accepted in historiography on early modern Europe and Africa. See, for example, Steven Fiereman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Frederick W. Gibbs, Poison, Medicine, and Disease in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2018). For specific Atlantic world expressions, James Sweet notes that for the Fon people, of what is now Benin and southwestern Nigeria, medicine and poison were commensurate. The Fon word for powder, atin, translates to either medicine or poison. James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011), 124.
128 or ‘Arará’.13 ‘Congo’ slaves were the surviving captives who had been exported through the
Kingdom of Kongo. By the late-seventeenth century, captives were both foreign-born and citizens of the Kingdom.14 While captives did not necessarily originate from the Kingdom of
Kongo, they would likely have spoken or understood at least some kiKongo, and they almost certainly would have spoken related Bantu languages.15 In the kiKongo language, there was little conceptual space between medicine and poison. William Holman Bentley’s nineteenth-century Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language translates the term nlongo as
“medicine, drug, fetish or poison.” Food that doctors had forbidden was regarded as nlongo and became taboo, and so its consumption resulted in breaking the protection enacted by prohibition.16 In the Kingdom of Kongo, local understandings of witchcraft determined the commensurability of healing and poisoning. Kindoki, usually translated as witchcraft, was used for both benevolent and malevolent ends.17
Patterns of prosecution of people of African descent show the intersection of race and sex in Spanish conceptions of black criminality. While there was a significant reduction in the number of prosecutions, authorities did pursue ritual crimes in the eighteenth century.
13 There has been significant debate on the meanings of European terms to designate African ethnicity, which often reflected the port of embarkation rather than place of origin. For example, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Paul Lovejoy ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London: Continuum, 2009); and Robin Law, “Ethnicities of enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: on the meaning of ‘Mina’ (again),” History in Africa 32 (2005): 257. 14 In the early period of the Atlantic slave trade, citizens of the Kingdom were largely protected from export. After 1665, citizens increasingly found themselves captured and exported due to “anarchy and civil war.” Linda Heywood, ‘Slavery and its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491– 1800’, The Journal of African History 50, no. 1, (March 2009): 22. 15 For discussion of the relationship between Bantu languages see Jan Vansina’s Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 12. 16 William Holman Bentley, Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo language, as spoken at San Salvador, the ancient capital of the old Kongo empire, West Africa (London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1887), 389. 17 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706 (Cambridge, U.K and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55.
129 Of the sixteen defendants who appear in the late colonial trial documentation, over half were born in Africa and most were enslaved. This stands in stark contrast to the predominance of free mulato men for blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege, as discussed in Chapter Four, and free mulato and zambo men and women for the crime of marrying twice (see Appendix 3).
Given the small number of cases, there is not enough evidence to know if people born in
Africa were perceived by others as having superior spiritual authority or even if the origin of the practitioner had particular influence in their desirability to clients. However, the extant cases indicate two important trends. First, men of African descent were far more likely to be prosecuted for religious activity than women of African descent. Second, Spanish ecclesiastical and secular courts more often tried black enslaved men for ritual crimes
(sorcery, witchcraft, and poisoning), while men of mixed ethnicities were more likely to be investigated for perceived offences against God and Christianity (blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege).
Throughout the seventeenth century, the prosecution of black healing and ritual practitioners fell within the jurisdiction of the tribunal of Holy Office of the Inquisition, established in Cartagena de Indies in 1610. Hundreds of African-descended ritual practitioners were tried before the Inquisition during the seventeenth century. As had been the case in the seventeenth century the judicial attention that Africans and the enslaved received outweighed their small number relative to creoles in the eighteenth century.
However, the eighteenth century also witnessed a precipitous decline in the number of cases of all kinds brought before the Inquisition. The move away from prosecution by the Holy
Office led to secularization and principally medicalization; the practice of unauthorized healing shifted from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to a royal medical tribunal from 1719
130 onwards. In this small body of 15 cases, likely half of the accused on trial for sorcery, witchcraft, and poisoning were enslaved, male, and African-born (See Appendix 1).
While the Inquisition more often prosecuted women in the seventeenth century, men were seen as the more powerful practitioners. Pablo F. Gómez finds that in the entirety of the seventeenth century the majority of defendants were women, but states that “most of the records related to them offer no more than clearly formulaic demonologically inspired denunciations…processed by the Inquisition in the midst of two well-documented ‘witch conspiracies’ in Cartagena during the 1620s and 30s.”18 He argues that due to the “nature of the practices carried out by female ritual practitioners and the social spaces in which these occurred, most went unnoticed or unrecorded,” and where they are present in the record,
Inquisitors and witnesses described them in the stereotyped terminology of European witchcraft or “dismissed them as boberias (silly things).”19 Nevertheless, there were some cases of extremely powerful women healers, such as Paula de Eguiluz or Leonor Çape.20
Even with the significantly reduced number of cases it is clear that this pattern continued in the eighteenth century. Indeed, there is no evidence that the Inquisition tried any highly influential female practitioners in the 1700s like de Eguiluz or Çape from the previous century. Black women continued to be sought out as healers, but with the secularization—and more specifically medicalization—of the prosecution of ritual and
18 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 59. 19 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 60. 20 For examples of famous seventeenth-century women healers, see the case of Paula de Eguiluz, discussed in numerous works including: Adriana Maya Restrepo, “Paula de Eguiluz y el arte del bien querer, apuntes para el estudio de la Sensualidad y del Cimarronaje Femenino en el Caribe, siglo XVII,” Historia Crítica, 24, 2003: 101-124; Sara Vicuña Guengerich,“Paula de Eguiluz: The Witchcraft Trials of a Black Woman in Colonial Cartagena de Indias,” in Afro-Latino Voices: Documentary Narratives from the Early Modern Iberian World, eds. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009): 175-193; and Pablo F. Gómez, “Incommensurable Epistemologies? The Atlantic Geography of Healing in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Small Axe 18, no. 2, July 2014: 95-107.
131 healing crimes, courts no longer conceived of African-descended women as powerful practitioners. When compared to the seventeenth-century fear of black witches, this demonstrates the emergence of patriarchal notions of women’s lesser culpability.
Increasingly, throughout the eighteenth century, women of colour faced criticism and state intrusion into their personal lives, but they were infrequently the explicit target of church and state investigations.
Racism, patriarchy, and the criminalization of African ritual and religious practice intersected to shape eighteenth-century patterns of prosecution, with African-born enslaved men finding themselves the particular focus of prosecution. From 1698 onwards, of only sixteen people accused of witchcraft, sorcery, or poisoning, half were probably African-born, thirteen were in bondage, and eleven were male.21 The predominance of enslaved men within the archive of African-descended ritual reflected inquisitorial and state interests, rather than a popular preference for male healers either amongst enslaved communities or wider networks of clients. In fact, both men and women were skilled practitioners and were sought out for their expertise accordingly, as Marta’s case discussed below demonstrates. In discussion of seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, Gómez argues that “in terms of competition…the
Caribbean health marketplace was truly egalitarian” with a growing group of free black women (negras horras) competing “on an almost equal footing with males for power over bodily matters.” Moreover, “women commanded a level of authority on matters of knowledge production about the human body, as well as political authority, comparable to those of many male practitioners.”22 It is likely that Gómez’s observations about the role of
21 These cases are from fondo Inquisition, Archivo Histórico de la Nación- Spain (1697-1723), one from Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (1713), one from Archivo Histórico Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón, Buga, (1724), two from Archivo Histórico de La Arquidiocesis de Popayán (1748 and 1775), and three from Archivo General de la Nación-Colombia (1746, 1758, and 1789). 22 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 60.
132 black women in the “health marketplace” remained true in the eighteenth century, even if this was not reflected in the patterns of prosecution. The extant cases from the eighteenth century demonstrate the power of women practitioners, however, the lack of state interest means that there is little specific information about the ways in which gender might have influenced spiritual and intellectual authority.
All Inquisition trials of black healers began to decline in the mid-seventeenth century.
However, there were two crucial legal moments in the decline of inquisitorial prosecutions of
African-descended ritual practitioners, dated in 1691 and 1721. Following military failures against maroons of the Sierra de la María (detailed in Chapter One), the severity of the threat of black armed attack became apparent to Spanish colonial authorities. On March 1, 1691, the General Council of the Inquisition in Madrid sent an order that the Cartagena de Indias
Inquisition should give people of African descent under suspicion of idolatry “benign treatment without imposition of penalties” in the hope of attracting those “risen in the palenques of the city’s district” to Catholicism.23
In 1721, jurisdiction over unauthorized ritual and healing practice moved from the
Inquisition to a secular medical tribunal, the Real Protomedicato. Black medical practitioners were not to be tried as sorcerers, but rather as unauthorized healers. The Crown granted this tribunal jurisdiction over medical practice; its role and purpose was to be “a magistracy protecting the community and the sick from the danger of illicit medical practice.”24 The
Crown appointed Francisco Luzurriaga as the first Real Protomédico in Cartagena de Indias on
23 Quoted in Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 138. 24 Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 21. The person of the Real Protomédico differed from a protomédico, a medical examiner. The protomédico’s other responsibilities included inspecting the crew and cargo of slave ships anchored in the port for evidence of serious illness and acting as a medical examiner in criminal trials. David L. Chandler, Health and Slavery in Colonial Colombia (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 66.
133 July 20, 1719, although his confirmation was not until June 28, 1722.25 The effect and significance of the foundation of the Cartagena seat of the Real Protomedicato is backed up by trial evidence. For the period 1697-1723, the Madrid archive holds only seven trial documents from the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias involving defendants of African descent accused of sorcery. The last trial for sorcery of a person of African descent was that of Manuel de la Cruz, which began in February 1721 until inquisitors exonerated him—due to mistaken identity—in 1723.26
From the archive of the Archbishopric of Popayán, there are two accusations against people of African descent who were denounced to the Commissary of the Inquisition for ritual crimes after 1723.27 There is no other record of these cases beyond those in the archive of the Archbishopric of Popayán and there is no way of knowing if the Holy Office in
Cartagena de Indias pursued them. Their absence from the relaciones suggests that the
25 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Santa Fe, Legajo 667, Exp. 5, cited in Pilar Gardeta Sabater, “El Real Tribunal del Protomedicato en la Audiencia de Santa Fe durante la Segunda Mitad del Siglo XVIII. Un Acercamiento al Estudio de las Transformaciones de esta institución Española,” Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Meduinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 16, (1996): 222. The Protomedicato had been established in Spanish cities from the fifteenth century onwards. Following Luzurriaga, Real Protomédicos of Cartagena de Indias were Bernardo Guillén, and Francisco Xavier Pérez. Juan de Arias was the last protomédico in the 1790s. Sabater “El Real Tribunal,” 222. 26 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, 43r, 50r. 27 Comisarios were officials who operated smaller tribunals of the Inquisition situated in outlying regions, particularly in the Americas where there were only three permanent Tribunals. Commissaries of the Holy Office read edicts of the faith, made periodic visitations to districts, and received denunciations. John F. Chuchiak, “The Holy Office of the Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico): An Introductory Study,” The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820: A Documentary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 25. First, free woman of colour, Francisca Cortes, alias La Cucaracha (the Cockroach), was denounced to the Commissary for the practice of love magic in Anserma in May 1748. Archivo Historico de La Arquidiocesis de Popayán (AHAP), Legajo 1985, Exp. 1. Second, the bonded community in the Mines of San Antonio, belonging to the Convent of the Encarnación, accused an enslaved man Manuel, known as Aja, of cursing and killing enslaved women through the apparition of vipers inside their “secret parts” in 1775. AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1.
134 Tribunal did not prosecute the accused, but given that so many of the records are missing, it is impossible to be absolutely certain on this point.28
The shift away from prosecution by the Inquisition, Real Protomédico Luzurriaga’s appointment in 1722 and the medicalization of control over unauthorized healing, meant that courts dealt with ritual crime individually, intermittently and locally, if at all. The geographically and temporally scattered distribution of these cases suggests that prosecution in the eighteenth century was sporadic, rather than due to a concerted or systematic campaign to crack down on black ritual activities on behalf of judicial authorities. While the material richness, intellectuality, and defiant spirit of the defendants is striking and often moving, they were probably typical of the vibrant world of black ritual practice in New
Granada. These defendants of African descent were exceptional in two ways: first, they were unfortunate enough to face prosecution; and second, Spanish notaries put their words and life stories on paper and these documents have survived to the present day.
The diminished prosecution of black practitioners in New Granada was part of a wider shift in judicial interests in African-descended ritual practice in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic world. Just as in other Caribbean sites, legislators sought terminology alternative to that of ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery,’ as this concept was no longer acceptable in the eyes of
European elites. Yet, in contrast to New Granada, where Spanish colonial authorities’ interest in prosecuting black healing and ritual practitioners sharply declined at the end of the
1600s, other slave-holding societies across the Americas increasingly used the law and the courts to persecute African-descended practitioners.
With the professionalization of medicine in the early eighteenth century jurisdiction over unauthorized practices officially moved to the secular institution of the Real Tribunal del
28 The Introduction offers an in-depth discussion of the inquisitorial archive.
135 Protomedicato. Black medical practitioners were not to be tried as sorcerers, but rather as unauthorized healers, while those accused of poisoning faced secular rather than religious prosecution. Through the shift in jurisdiction, their practices were reclassified as material and secular rather than as spiritual offences. Due to the low number of physicians in New
Granada, there was insufficient infrastructure for meaningful regulation of unauthorized medical practice. In theory, healers found themselves before medical and secular courts rather than the Inquisition; what this meant in reality was a generally low rate of prosecution, except on rare occasions. As well as the Archivo Histórico Nacional de España in Madrid, I examined collections of all archives with eighteenth-century trial documents for the regions of focus in Colombia. The table in Appendix 1 outlines the fourteen cases of prosecution for ritual crimes that I have found. Out of the fourteen cases, one died of illness in the secret prisons of the Inquisition, and two were absolved (one for a case of mistaken identity).29
Seven of the cases—exactly half—were Inquisition cases and, of these seven, the record states the outcomes for four. The defendants in these four cases had sentences of varying severity, including spiritual penitence, exile, hard labour, and flogging.
These four cases suggest that between the 1690s and the 1720s the Holy Office shiftedaway from harsh punishments for ritual crimes. Practitioners who were tried for the offence of poisoning, if convicted, faced harsher sentences. This was the case whether their cases were heard by the Inquisition or by secular authorities. The defendants in the first three of all fourteen cases, dated between 1697 and 1708, received harsh punishments. Juan
Alomera appeared in an auto particular de fe in the church of the Jesús María in Mahates on
April 27, 1697. Inquisitors exiled him and handed him over to the Jesuit College of Mompox
29 The trial of Manuel de la Cruz, wronging identified as Salvador de la Cruz, is not analyzed here because the Inquisition concluded that it was a case of mistaken identity. Salvador de la Cruz had died. AHN Inquisición, 5350, Exp. 1. 43r-50v.
136 for instruction in Christian doctrine.30 On June 14, 1700, inquisitors sentenced Antonio
Mundei to exile in Cuba, sending him away from Caracas and his local town of Villa de
Madrid. He served a two-year sentence performing hard labour on the construction of
Havana’s El Morro castle. This was likely due to his refusal to confess, even under torture that exceeded the Tribunal’s limitations.31
Forced labour on public works projects, particularly military defences, was common during the eighteenth century, when the Spanish Crown invested heavily to protect
Caribbean port cities from European imperial rivals. Like Mundei, Bernardo de Macaya also received a brutally violent sentence. On December 15, 1708, inquisitors sentenced Macaya to appear in a public or church auto de fe, and to receive one hundred lashes of the whip while parading through the public streets of the city mounted on a donkey. In addition, inquisitors sent him for four months to the Augustinian convent of the city of Cartagena for instruction in the key tenets of Catholicism, after which they exiled him from his city of residence,
Portobelo, for three years.32
After Macaya’s case the courts’ taste for harsh sentences for ritual crimes seems to have waned. In the 1708 to 1713 witchcraft case of the enslaved mulata María, the frontispiece states that the sentence of torture was never carried out.33 The fact that María was sentenced to torture but never received that punishment illustrates that there was also increasing leniency towards those accused of witchcraft. This trend towards leniency was not evident in cases of poisoning, for which the courts responded with retributory force. The
Real Justicia of Cartagena de Indias sentenced to death convicted enslaved Congolese
30 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 27v. 31 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, ff. 97v-98r. 32 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, f. 28v. 33 Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (AHA), Criminal Caja B72, Legajo 1700-1740, No. 4, 1f. r.
137 poisoners Sebastian, Joseph, and Thomas, who were hanged on February 14, 1746 for poisoning Sebastian’s owner Mateas de Angeles in April 1742. The Protector of the Poor argued unsuccessfully for a lighter sentence as the three men had not killed de Angeles, and indeed Sebastian had confessed.34 In Cartagena de Indias, inhabited by thousands of slaves, the court judged it a risk too great to respond with anything less than capital punishment.
Mateas de Angeles pushed most fervently for their execution, including that of his own slave, Sebastian.35
Black Atlantic Ritual Geographies
The lives and trajectories of the defendants in all of the cases in this chapter—their histories, ritual objects, and knowledge—illustrate that the Atlantic was a space of constant circulation and re-circulation that was also connected to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific
World. In both the Atlantic and Pacific the social relations that existed around, and the political content of, African diasporic healing reveal the similarity and connectedness of ritual practice in African diasporic sites.
Practitioners competed against one another within ritual economies where expertise was bartered and exchanged for goods or paid for in cash. Trials for ritual crimes illustrate the public and often political role of African-descended practitioners. Some historians argue that religion was a site of “symbolic marronage,” where secret religious practices sustained the enslaved. Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, for example, examines the concept of
“cimarronaje simbólico,” which she defines as “resistance of the soul.”36 However, most of
34 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 127v. 35 AGN, Negros y Esclavos, Bolívar, Tomo 1, D.5, ff. 17v-21v. 36 Marronage generally was flight from slavery. “Petit marronage” was the flight of enslaved individuals or groups for short periods of time. “Grand marronage” refers to permanent flight from slavery through the establishment of armed maroon communities. Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo,
138 the healers whose cases came to trial practiced relatively out in the open. I contend that the public performance of black ritual and healing as showcased in these trial documents illustrates that black ritual economies were intimately connected to and transformative of the wider social world and the rival geographies of New Granada. At the same time, the fact that a ritual was performed in public did not necessarily suggest that meaning was intended to be transparent, or that its content, context, and aims were not subversive or secretive. Indeed, as David Barry Gaspar shows, during the Antigua slave conspiracy of 1736, bonded people performed oath-making ceremonies, pledging revolutionary violence in full view of planters, whose true meaning slaves knew they would not understand.37
The case of the Arará man Bernardo de Saavedra demonstrates the perils of the relationship between healing and poisoning for African-descended healers. He openly practiced medicine in the city of Cartagena de Indias. On March 5, 1699, slave-owner Joseph de Aguila denounced de Saavedra to the local royal court for killing another enslaved man,
Diego Arará.38 De Aguila was the Deputy of the Consulado del Comercio, Consulate of
Commerce of Santa Fe de Bogotá.39 Despite de Saavedra’s public role as a healer in the city, or perhaps because of it, respected members of Cartagena society and slaves alike were quick
Brujería y Reconstrucción de Identidades entre los Africanos y sus Descendientes en la Nueva Granada, Siglo XVII (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005), 22. 37 Gaspar argues that enslaved people formally swore obligation to revolution through an initiation oath held at a feast on the planation with forty participants. During trial, slave witness Jemmy stated that one organizer, Targut, brought out two bottles of liquor, and Tomboy raised a “Toast a Health, & Damnation to them that wont Pledge it or wont give their Assistance.” Judges concluded that oath ingredients included grave dirt, taken from the burial sites of deceased slaves. Ibo slave Oliver, and others who had taken the oath swore that they would die before betraying the secret “as they knew what would befall them after Drinking a grave Dram.” David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: a Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 242-244. 38 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 40r. 39 For information on De Aguila, see Manuel Lucena Salmoral, “Los Precedentes Del Consulado De Cartagena: El Consulado de Santafe (1695-1713) y el Tribunal del Comercio Cartagenero,” Estudios de Historia Social y Económica de América (1986), 2: 179-198, 189. Also see McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 164.
139 to testify against him. De Saavedra was accused of murdering other enslaved people as well as Diego Arará. De Aguila came forward with sixteen witnesses, including two doctors and a medic.40All of these witnesses testified that de Saavedra had used herbs that could cause blindness if ingested.41 Both de Saavedra’s owner and the doctor who had initially treated the victim denounced de Saavedra to the Inquisition for the religious crime of sorcery.42 De
Aguila denounced de Saavedra for murder to a secular court. However, there was later a second denunciation by a doctor to the Inquisition. The doctor’s choice of sorcery and the
Holy Office for this denunciation suggests that he resented the unauthorized but ubiquitous employment of black healers in the city and sought to discredit them.
In her work on plantations in colonial Suriname Natalie Zemon Davis writes that, when a slave tried to kill another bondsperson, it was often the wider enslaved community that denounced the individual and initiated the case.43 Enslaved people reporting other enslaved people for ritual crimes to enslavers were not exclusively Caribbean or Atlantic, as demonstrated by the case of Aja in western New Granada discussed in the final section of this chapter. Indeed, in the case of de Saavedra, a considerable number of the witnesses who testified that de Saavedra had killed Diego Arará were fellow slaves. However, there is little to indicate whether his compañeros in bondage chose this role or not. The only enslaved person to give testimony with particular detail was a former patient of de Saavedra, who had in fact recovered from his illness.44 It is unclear if the denunciation was an act of
40 Doctors had university degrees and medics did not. 41 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 40r. 42 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 41r. 43 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Physicians, Healers, and their Remedies in Colonial Suriname,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 33, no. 1, 20. I thank Natalie Zemon Davis for sharing this paper with me prior to publication. 44 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 40v.
140 recrimination by the enslaved community against de Saavedra or if de Aguila had compelled them to testify.
A third denunciation came from three prisoners who had been incarcerated with de
Saavedra in the city jail. The prisoners claimed that he had offered to help them escape, requesting that they assemble together the ingredients of hessian cloth, spoilt goat’s milk,
Portuguese stone, mint, and dirt from two paths.45 He combined the ingredients and put a small cup face down over them, and recited over it the words “work girl, the girl is sleeping, the girl is working, don’t go out like the chicks, girl.”46 In their telling of the event, the three prisoners proceeded to grab the ingredients and the cup. They asked de Saavedra why he did not leave the prison by the same means, to which he responded, “although I am a Zahori”— a powerful diviner—“my virtue only extends to third parties.” Another prisoner, who had stolen gold coins, reported that de Saavedra had advised him to put the form of a cross— perhaps a crucifix or a Kongolese cosmogram—on his headboard in order to retrieve the coins.47 Aiding prisoners’ escape and recover lost money with no immediate benefit to himself, de Saavedra engaged in acts that took on a subaltern hue, vesting the role of Zahori with New World political significance.
The account of de Saavedra’s case is a snapshot of the constant possibilities that the world of early eighteenth-century Cartagena de Indias offered for Zahoris and their potential
45 Dirt from crossroads is commonly used in African diasporic ritual. Carolyn Morrow Long notes that, in the southern United States, dirt from the crossroads was a common ingredient in charms in the early twentieth century and that it likely derived its significance from the Kongolese cosmogram. Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 83. Similarly, Wyatt MacGaffey states that, in Kongolese cosmology, the crossroads “mpambu a nzila (any intersection, or even a cross conveniently drawn on the ground), is often the site of ritual activity, a place of transition, of contact with strangers or the unseen.” Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 110. 46 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 41v. 47 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 41v.
141 clients. On the one hand, unlike the majority of the other defendants, the details of de
Saavedra’s alleged offences do not have overtly Catholic connotations. On the other, his ritual practice occurred in a space of cultural survival that seems to have been open to any significant or efficacious influences, either Catholic or other African traditions. On October
7, 1699, just over six months after his imprisonment, the surgeon of the Inquisition’s secret prison informed the warden that de Saavedra was gravely ill. He had tísico, or consumption, which was incurable. It is possible that it was this same disease had previously killed the patients whom he stood accused of murdering. On October 19, he died in the secret prisons of the Inquisition of what seems to have been tuberculosis.48
De Saavedra had worked extensively as a healer of enslaved people in Cartagena de
Indias. In more remote areas of New Granada, where educated doctors were rarely to be found, bonded healers were frequently medics. Indeed, David Chandler notes that many haciendas employed slaves full time to care for the sick.49 The case of Antonio Mundei reveals how lucrative the political economy of black healing could be—he requested high prices for his services.50 Mundei was African-born, Arará, like de Saavedra.51 He was certainly a healer whose services were in high demand, although he was not a full-time medic on a huge cattle
48 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 43r. 49 Chandler, Health and Slavery, 176. 50 Pablo Gómez transcribes Mundei’s names as Munoei, but I read it as Mundei as did both Hélène Vignaux and José Toribio Medina in their brief mentions of the case. Hélène Vignaux, L’église et les noirs dans l’audience du Nouveau Royaume de Grenade (Montpelier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009), 278, and José Toribio Medina, Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicioń de Cartagena de las Indias (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1899). 51 Under questioning before the Inquisition Mundei revealed that he knew nothing of his grandparents, parents, aunts, or uncles. Yet he knew two of his sisters, the quintessentially Iberian- named María and Juana: they were slaves of one Alejandro Blanco. The lack of knowledge about his family suggests that Mundei and his sisters had been captured as very young children, although he does not state this explicitly. AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 95r.
142 ranch, or hato, in Venezuela. He appears to have been well integrated into local society on the hato Paraima, in a remote interior region.
On November 12, 1688, an unnamed denunciante reported to the Holy Inquisition in
New Valencia del Rey that Mundei was a “curandero.” Apparently Mundei conducted a divination ceremony in the dead of night, in order to heal a woman.52 In exchange for his services he requested that he been given a hato, an entire cattle ranch, called Paraima.53 Given this request, it is likely that Mundei’s client was the landowner of the hato, since only he or she could have paid him in cattle and the estate. Mundei’s denunciation suggests that while healing knowledge was a valuable commodity, there were also boundaries for what constituted a fair price on the local market.
Allegedly Mundei had used a horn, which was plugged at the widest part, and attached at its point by a cord to his foot as a divining device. The horn moved of its own accord to divine whether hechizos, or spells, were the cause of the woman’s sickness. There are many possible origins of this ritual and comparisons with similar practices elsewhere in the African diaspora do not resolve the question.54 Mundei may have learnt this technique during the Middle Passage, in the slave market and barracks in Cartagena, or indeed, on the
52 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 93v. 53 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 94r. 54 In his dissertation (but not his book), Gómez cites the almost identical usage of a horn to divine the nature of an illness and which herbs had caused it by free black man Domingo López in 1651 in Cartagena. It moved up and down to say yes and sideways to say no. The horn was 10 inches long, with a hole in it. One end had a cord attached to López’s feet, and the other end to his hand. When inquisitors asked how he made it move, López replied that he did nothing; he only spoke to it in “its native tongue.” Pablo F. Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter: Health, Illness, and Death in the Early Modern African Spanish Caribbean” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2010), 181. This device bears similarities to an earlier act of divination that James Sweet describes. An enslaved man, Francisco Dembo, used a somewhat similar ritual in 1634, on Itaparica Island in Bahia, to divine who had committed a theft. He attached a threaded cord to a ball, and, holding the cord close to his face, he asked each person present to pull the ball up, which they could do only if they were innocent. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 125.
143 hato itself. This form of ritual exchange was central to the cultivation of a sophisticated and competitive spiritual repertoire.
As Atlantic exchanges determined the course of Mundei’s life, so they also constituted the ritual tools available to him. In addition to African-derived divining techniques, Mundei utilized indigenous terminology. During a night time ceremony, the denunciante purportedly heard the music of maracas and singing in low voices—in the
“melody of [the voice] he heard the word of Juani pronounced.” Juani was the name of the devil, “in an Indian language.”55 The reference to an indigenous name for the devil at healing sessions carried out by a man born in West Africa offers an indication of the cross-ethnic religious exchange of objects, ideas, and orations of African, European, and indigenous origin. Gómez argues that, using the horn, Mundei “captured the power of Native American numinous entities and channelled these through his techne (powerful objects with verifiable
West African inspirations) in order to heal.”56
By the date of his trial, some eleven years after being denounced, Mundei was 44 years old and had made a new life for himself. He had married María Magdalena, a free black woman, and had an eighteen-month-old daughter Rufina.57 When accused of sorcery, he denied all charges, affirming instead that he was baptised and confirmed, regularly heard mass, confessed and took communion, and was well instructed in the Catholic faith.58 Of course, Mundei’s self-representation as a devout Catholic is not necessarily sufficient evidence that he saw himself as a Christian. Defendants’ profession of their Christianity was
55 My italicization. AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 94r. I have been unable to find references to the word juani from other sources to verify if there was any basis to this claim. 56 Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 112. 57 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 95r. 58 He could sign the cross, say Our Father, Ave Maria, the Creed, the Salve Regina, and the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, ff. 95r-95v.
144 almost universal before the Holy Office, but most eventually confessed under torture. The inquisitors voted to torture Mundei until he gave in. Despite four turns of the rack—one over the limits set by inquisitorial regulations—he never did. Inquisitors sentenced him to two years of forced labour building the Castle of El Morro in Havana.59
Mundei’s defiance in the face of this extraordinary violence suggests that he genuinely viewed himself as a Christian. Like many other adherents of diasporic religious forms, he may have valued his Catholicism alongside African and indigenous ritual materials, despite being constrained by living in a social world governed by Iberian law and slavery.
Certainly, the boundaries between what was Afro-Christianity and what was a whole new religion that incorporated Christianity—like vodou or what came to be known as santería— were not well defined. Mundei had made his own Catholicism—for him, there was apparently no inconsistency between appealing to indigenous Venezuelan spirits and
Christian prayers, and using divination and Catholic symbols to heal the sick. He was one of the many practitioners who made the rich and heterogeneous world of African Iberian
Christianity.
By contrast, Bernardo de Rojas, also known as Bernardo Macaya, demonstrated a tenacious adherence to his own non-Christian religion.60 While most healers who came before the courts denied their involvement in non-Christian practice, Macaya was unique in his vocal and unapologetic proclamation of his engagement in unauthorized ritual. The
59 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 97v-98r. 60 Gómez discusses the Macaya case in The Experiential Caribbean, using him as an example of knowledge production in the Caribbean. While we reach similar conclusions about the case regarding the experiential and the material, he does not place the same emphasis on Macaya’s mobility or life story as I do. Gómez places the case as beginning in 1675 on page 1 but in the early eighteenth century on page 36. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 1, 36. The events are stated as beginning in 1705 and the case is entered in the section for the year 1708 in the relación de fe. Please see the image in Figure 13 as evidence of the date of entry (1708). AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3.
145 sheriff of Portobelo, Panama, had sent Macaya to the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition of
Cartagena de Indias with a letter dated October 10, 1705.61 Macaya was a 34-year-old bonded man. During interrogation, Macaya declared himself to be royalty of the Kingdom of
Loango. He stated that, “his Father was called Pedro in his language, his mother Maria, and they were kings of that Nation” and his siblings were named Miguel, García, and
Potenciana.62 The testimony centred on Macaya’s interactions with the local black leader, who is referred to as the “governor” of Nuestra Señora de Consolación, a “pueblo de negros” or free black town.63 The title of “governor” was reserved for the Governor of the Real
Audiencia of Panama.64 The letter’s use of the title to refer to someone who did not occupy
61 The comisario of Portobelo had held Macaya for six months, after which Macaya escaped. He was then recaptured, with a small box of herbs in his possession. The alguacil mayor then sent Macaya, according to the letter, to the tribunal for “fear that he would repeat the flight”. This, of course, was wholly against inquisitorial process as Macaya had not been formally denounced and inquisitors had not voted to arrest him. The inquisitors in Cartagena found no records pertaining to Macaya. They ordered the new comisario to consult the archives and send any relevant testimony or documentation, and ordered that in future, no one should be arrested without explicit orders from the court. On January 21, 1706 the Tribunal received a letter from the new comisario with denunciations against Macaya that he had found amongst his predecessor’s papers. AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, f. 25r. 62 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, f. 27r. It is unclear if Macaya was indeed of Loango royal descent, or posturing to increase his reputation and spiritual authority. His decision to reveal his lineage and precision in naming his family members, however, suggests that his account could have been true. To date, very little is known about the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century rulers of the Kings of Loango. John Thornton informed me that in the 1660s some rulers from Loango were baptized and took Portuguese names. He told me that, around this period, people from Loango and others of the smaller kingdoms were aware of events in the larger and more powerful Kingdom of Kongo, and “considered Christian items of spiritual value; they may well have taken Christian names without being baptized.” John Thornton, email message to author, November 23, 2017. 63 I have found little mention of the settlement, except the statement that “the town of Our Lady of the Consolation is populated by blacks” in one of the earliest of the eighteenth-century Spanish scientific travel accounts. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional hecho de orden de S. Mag. para medir algunos grados de meridiano Terrestre, y venir por ellos en conocimiento de la verdadera figura, y Magnitud de la Tierra, con otras varias Observaciones Astronómicas, y Phísicas, (Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1748) Primera Parte, Tomo Primero, Book III, 181. 64 During the events of the case, from 1702 to his death in 1707, the Governor of Panama was the Lima-born Fernando Dávila Bravo de Laguna. Antonio de Alcedo, Diccionario Geográfico-Histórico de las Indias Occidentales ó América… Tomo IV, (Manuel Gonzalez: Madrid, 1788), 45. Also see AGI, Panamá, 184.
146 this position reflects how the black town’s authorities rooted their claims to political legitimacy in Spanish administrative language.65
When the governor hurt his hand, Macaya performed an all-night divination ceremony in order to ascertain if bewitchment was the cause of the governor’s injury.66
Macaya dressed in a pollera, a large, layered skirt, and put Macaw feathers on his head, played a deer’s antler and a cowbell and danced for seven or eight hours straight.67 He identified a number of villagers as witches, smearing ash on their faces. In response the town rose up against his judgment and the governor sought his arrest. There are a number of possible reasons why the community turned against Macaya. His extravagantly public ritual displays had likely caused a scandal. In addition, he may have accused respected or powerful individuals in the village of being brujos. It is also possible that this incident was the last in a long list of grievances against the accused.
The townsfolk brought forward numerous charges against Macaya. Accusations included that he had predicted the future and carried out divinations of a political nature. He had warned the town that the mayor (alcalde provincial) of Panama wanted to make war against them. He took a piece of coal, rubbed it with his hands and on his chest. He took a sharp knife, put it against his chest and beat it with a stone; “despite its sharpness and the violence of the hits, he did not wound himself…a demonstration that the knife had not entered his chest, nor would the war enter their lands.”68 In this ritual, Macaya’s chest embodied the land
65 Indeed, their adoption of this Spanish title and the appropriation of the authority if bestowed was fairly successful, for court officials from Portobelo included it in their letter to the Inquisition in Cartagena. I reflect the original usage in the relación by using the term ‘governor’ here. 66 The vine bejuco refers to the family of climbing vines, but according to the Diccionario de Autoridades of 1726 it was a “species of very thin flexible cane, whose sting is poisonous.” “Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo I (1726),” accessed July 20, 2015, http://web.frl.es/DA.html. 67 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, f. 25r. 68 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, f. 25v.
147 of the pueblo de negros, while his knife symbolized war. His body therefore became a geo- political symbol. Allegedly Macaya had subsequently planted the roots of two plantain trees in the path, thus “manifesting with this providence that [the village would] stay free of the annoyances” of the mayor. Macaya’s divinations reveal the political nature of his ritual, reflecting the political religiosities that surrounded Macaya in his Kongolese youth.69
During his arrest, Macaya beseeched the saints to liberate him. Officials who arrested him attempted to transport him by canoe but faced troubles due to high winds and seas allegedly conjured by Macaya. He proclaimed that he had made arrangements that “the
Saints that he had left placed on his altar, one reclined and the other standing, would go to the Heavens and throw rays [of lightening] and split the canoe and kill those who transported him so that he might flee.”70 The figures on the altar were physical representatives of the “Saints”—by manipulating them he could control the elements.
Macaya used the word “Saints” but his real meaning appears to be a recasting of Kongolese minkisi—fabricated sacred objects that embodies spirits—in the language of Catholicism.71
Macaya had grown up in the Kingdom of Luango, where Catholic concepts and local terminology were used interchangeably. The missionary tradition of translation of Iberian
69 Political power was contingent on spiritual authority in the Kingdom of Kongo. Anne Hilton argues that it was crucial to the integration of Catholicism there. The mani Kongo, the Kingdom’s ruler, and the Mwissikongo elite, had failed to dominate the spiritual realm and “It was this absence of a unique source of legitimation under their direct control which caused the mani Kongo and the ruling elite to welcome the Christian cult in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.” Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 49. 70 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, 26r. 71 Put simply a Nkisi (plural minkisi) is strategic, human-made object that embodies a spirit. Minkisi, as MacGaffey identifies, “are fabricated things, yet they can be invoked to produce desired effects, they have a will of their own, and they may wilfully command the behavior of human beings.” Wyatt MacGaffey, “The Personhood of Ritual Objects: Kongo Minkisi,” Etnofoor, 3, no.1, (1990): 45. In 1900, Nsemi Isaki wrote that a Nkisi “has life; if it had not, how could it heal and help people? But the life of an nkisi is different from the life in people... nkisi has an inextinguishable life coming from a source.” Robert Fariss Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy (New York: First Vintage Books, 1984), 117.
148 Catholic concepts into African languages inevitably led to this correlation between African deities and the Christian saints.72
Events took a dramatic, potentially lethal, turn. The governor took out his pistol to kill Macaya, but those present prevented him. Macaya then asked his captors for a caña flecha
(a tall, dense grass) that he might chew it, and instructed them to “take a piece of it to the altar and hurl another in the Sea of Serenity, so that he could make the canoe turn over.”
Macaya’s captors imprisoned him again in a palmed hut that housed his altar. It consisted of
“a tabernacle painted various colours and embellished with tiny sea shells, and for the tablecloths [it had] a piece of thick linen with a worked circular lining, where there were two ridiculously dressed earthen statues.” Macaya warned his captors at the moment of embarkation not to put “the saints face down because they will become angry and destroy the earth.”73 The relación includes two further details from the letter. It states that when officials asked Macaya why he “did not comply with the Church”, he had responded, “I have
Saints to whom I confess.”74 He had grown up with the language of ‘Saints,’ but his were not
Catholic saints; he had his own divinities. Macaya denied Catholicism during his arrest, a rare moment where an enslaved African made such a clear reference to an alternative pantheon of divine power. Macaya’s rejection of Christianity and bold proclamation of his own religion is suggestive of a wider religious world constituted by black people’s circulation of ritual knowledge. His uncompromising proclamation of his origins and beliefs are extraordinary.
However, when confronted by authorities, Macaya readily incorporated elements of
Catholicism into his ritual and even into his vocal defence of his own practice.
72 Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo, 63. 73 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, 26r. 74 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 3, 25v.
149 The ritual objects and words that Juan Alomera used reflect his life experiences in environments where both Catholicism and African-descended religions were in ascendance.
On September 1, 1695, Alomera, an enslaved black man, was denounced before the
Inquisition in Coro, Caracas. He was 40 years of age at the time of the trial, and laboured as an harriero, a mule or workhorse driver.75 The notary’s classification of Alomera as being of the casta Mozambique disguised a more complex heritage; according to his testimony, he had been born free in Portugal and descended from black parentage from Lisbon and the coast of Mozambique. At this point in time, there was not a significant slave trade from
Mozambique, which was at its height in the nineteenth century.76 Alomera’s description suggests that one or more of his parents or grandparents was from Mozambique. They would have arrived in Lisbon via the Portuguese Carreira da Índia, the maritime route from
Goa to Lisbon. Indeed, Lisbon had a large black population with diverse ancestries. Growing up in Lisbon, Alomera learned his craft in a city that was a cosmopolitan spiritual nodal point of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic. Alomera travelled from Lisbon to El Puerto de Santa
María in Spain’s Cadiz Province with a godfather, where he was kidnapped, sold, taken to
Cartagena, and purchased by one Francisco de Llerena.77 Alomera’s mobilities and itineraries, both free and forced, played a central role in the creation of his ritual epistemologies and materials.
The medicines applied by black practitioners were simultaneously physical and spiritual in cause and treatment, as exemplified by this case. Alomera told inquisitors that his
75 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 23r. 76 Through the example of enslaved musicians from Mozambique working in the Caribbean, David Wheat showcases the global maritime connections between the Carreira da Índia, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Spain’s Carrera de Indias. David Wheat, “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570- 1640” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2009), 51-57. 77 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 24r.
150 cures only worked where illnesses were caused by curses, rather than natural causes.78 When treating a black man with ulcers on his legs, he had sprinkled cooked and pulverized leaves from the caríoco plant and anamú tree, repeating the blessing, “Jesus in the name of God and the Holy Virgin and the Trinity.”79 The practitioner informed his patient that a curse was not the cause of his condition, because “if so, these remedies would have cured him.”80 Across the early modern world it was a common belief that witches manipulated the interconnections between the physical and spiritual realms through unnatural means.
However, Alomera’s words indicate a distinct epistemology—the presence or absence of a curse determined the effects of his applications on a patient’s symptoms, rather than the treatments having innate properties. For Alomera, botanical remedies only affected illnesses with supernatural causes — those caused by curses.
The origins and potential meanings behind Alomera’s practice point to a long history of iconographic exchange between peoples in Africa and in the Afro-Hispanic and
Lusophone worlds. The denunciante accused Alomera of performing rites of protection.
Allegedly he had done so for three persons, making incisions in the form of a cross on the hands, feet, and back.81 Sweet debates the significance of the cross in rites performed by
Africans, reasoning that they could have been Congolese cosmograms rather than a
78 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 25r-25v. 79 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 25r. Anamú (Petiveria alliacea) is widely known today to have medicinal properties, including antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant effects. Ania Ochoa Pacheco et al, “In vitro antimicrobial activity of total extracts of the leaves of Petiveria alliacea L. (Anamu),” Brazilian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences 49, 2, (April and June 2013) 241-250; and César Zaa, Martha Valdivia, and Álvaro Marcelo, “Efecto antiinflamatorio y antioxidante del extracto hidroalcohólico de Petiveria alliacea,” Rev. peru. biol. 19, no. 3, (Dec. 2012): 329-334. Unfortunately, I have found no other references to the caríoco plant. 80 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 25v. 81 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 23r.
151 crucifix.82 Whatever the genealogy of the cross, clearly the use of scarification to make the protective mark permanent indicates a form of religious expression not sanctioned by the
Church. If it was intended to be the Christian symbol, scarring flesh was not just a veneration of the cross, but also a re-imagination of how its power could be harnessed and applied.
Alomera proceeded to rub powder from a gourd into the incisions, while saying that
“he did it in the name of God so that no evil was done to these persons by yerbateros
[herbalists].”83 When inquisitors asked him about this act and others, he referred specifically to healing a woman. He stated that he had “cured her body,” so that no person could curse her, nor would snakes bite her: “Over her big toe I made a blessing, saying in name of God and the Holy Trinity, Jesus.” With a knife he made an incision in the shape of the cross and sprinkled powdered root of capitana and the leaves and bark of the carara tree.84 Alomera then gave her a thread of twisted cotton to place around her waist and told the negra, “no one will do you evil and if they wish to do so you will know because the thread will tighten and with luck it would break.” He also warned against leaving the carara plant, from which he had taken the leaves, in plain sight on the floor. If a brujo were to enter and see it, he would harm
Alomera and the herbs would lose their power to heal.85 Alomera gave another one of his
82 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 126. The cosmogram occupies a central role in BaKongo ritual. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of The Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 108-116. 83 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 23v. 84 The capitana root is Tripodion tetraphyllum. While there are few modern scientific studies stating its benefits, other healers used it in the early modern Americas. Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter,” 182. Gómez also cites Alomera’s usage (183). I have been unable to find other references to the carara tree. 85 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 25v. The use of cords tied around parts of the body for protection in this way continues to be prevalent in Cartagena today. A maté is a, usually red, cord, tied around the wrist or ankle. Women use them frequently during pregnancy and to protect babies against the ‘evil eye.’
152 clients some roots to burn, instructing them to store them in a hole in the doorframe so that yerbateros could not enter to do evil.86
Alomera’s own words in his defence attest to the importance of notions of efficacy in determining which materials formed part of diasporic practice. Alomera admitted conducting acts of healing, but he did not see them as incongruous with his Catholicism. He was a baptized and confirmed Catholic, heard mass, confessed, and took communion.87 The simultaneous use of African-descended rites and Catholicism was not a contradiction but, rather, their use together was effective and appropriate, both logically and experientially.
Inquisitors asked him if sticks and leaves had natural virtue to “preserve against curses and cure them,” or, alternatively, did he believe that the healing effects stemmed from the
“natural virtue” of the words. Alomera responded that he based his practice on having had the “experience himself” when a negro mandinga had cured him, demonstrating the benefit of the “words of Jesus, God, the Spirit and the Holy Virgin.”88 His remarks further exhibit a
86 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, 23v. Other instances of placing objects in the entrance or around the door suggest that this practice was of African descent, although the point of origin is unclear. In the 1705 Inquisition case of Bernardo Macaya, originally from Kongo but residing in Panama whom I have previously discussed in this chapter, Macaya had made a hole in the inside of the doorframe, “pouring blood in it that he had removed from a chicken and a few drops of blood from a seven- year-old boy, whom he had wounded for this purpose.” When he had done so, the child passed by the hole three times before it was closed, saying, “no brujo shall enter this house through here.” AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 25v. From wherever it came, hiding sacred items in the doorframe either to protect or curse reflects the flexibility of this rite and the ritual world within which it operated. Gómez suggests “the moment of dying was a particularly dangerous instance and was represented in every day life by the threshold between the worlds outside dwellings and inside them.” He cites the case of Antonio Congo from Cartagena in 1687, who would not allow anyone near to the threshold of the door of him home, for “he had all of his wellness there and that that was his place.” Gómez, “Bodies of Encounter,” 120. These three instances from Caribbean New Granada indicate the threshold as a site of protection. However, the case of Domingo Álvares, who was from the Kingdom of Dahomey or modern-day Benin and who faced trial in Portugal in 1745, shows that items hidden in doors could also be placed there in order to do harm. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 159.When ritualized, the every day object of the door was an object flexible in its symbolism through which the power to bring safety or danger could be channelled. 87 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 24r. 88 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 26r.
153 logic based on empirical method: “he only believed in the virtue of experience that he had had with sticks, leaves, or powders, to heal, applying them to whatever person in the same circumstances they had the virtue to impede and preserve against said spells.”89 Alomera’s emphasis on experience of what worked reveals a trial-by-error method in which different elements were selected from multiple traditions and sites in the Atlantic world based on their functionality.
The cases that I have discussed in this section illustrate that the politics of ritual intertwined healing, harm, and profit. Bernardo de Saavedra stood accused of serial murder when trying to heal his companions in bondage. His public acts of healing led him to both the prisons of the Real Justicia and the Holy Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias, yet he still demonstrated his power by seeking to liberate his fellow prisoners. Antonio Mundei demanded payment in the form of a field of cattle, far surpassing the market price of the local healing economy for his creative performance of African, indigenous, and Catholic rites. Alomera demonstrated a systematic and empirical approach to healing, applying ritual materials of transnational genealogies. In contrast with the other cases, it appears Macaya utilized materials based on knowledge that he acquired in the Kingdom of Kongo. Of its own merit, this case provides a fascinating sketch of the life and ideas of a radical ritual practitioner and a very early detailed description of an African-descended altar in the
Americas. But more than this, it warns against the application of exclusive models—such as retention vs. creolization—to black cultural and religious creativity. Each region, community, and practitioner in New Granada had varied and often-conflicting experiences of and relationships with enslavement, freedom, labour, and blackness upon which negotiations with Catholicism, African-descended and indigenous religions were contingent.
89 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 26r.
154
Healing and the Atlantic-Pacific World in New Granada
A focus on black mobilities—both the journeys of individuals across vast terrain and the circulation of material objects and knowledges about their use—illustrates the dynamic interaction between the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific. The following cases demonstrate the ritual and epistemological exchange between the Atlantic and the Pacific
Worlds, connected by water and movement of people of African descent. The ‘Atlantic-
Pacific’ trajectories of these cases demonstrate how the life trajectories and ritual knowledge of African-descended practitioners defy the geographic constraints of historians’ assemblages.
A poisoning case from Cartagena de Indias illustrates the incredible mobility of
African-descended knowledge via the Middle Passage as well as across vast spaces within the
Americas. In 1742, Don Mateas de Angeles reported to the alcalde ordinario that his slave,
Sebastian, along with two other enslaved men, Joseph and Thomas, had administered poison to him. All three were of the casta Congo but had different owners. While there is little information about the owners of Sebastian and Joseph, Thomas belonged to Don Domingo
José Fernández de Miranda y Llanos, the first Marquis of the Premio Real, a Spanish hereditary title created by Philip V on March 5, 1741. De Miranda was thus at the pinnacle of
Cartagena and New Granadan society. His grand household, the Casa del Marques de Premio
Real, was situated adjacent to and in full view of the Plaza de la Aduanas, the customs plaza, and the city’s slave market. According to Sebastian, the three enslaved men had all met one day in la calle San Juan de Dios, a street only a few steps from the plaza where traders paraded recently arrived captives who had survived the Middle Passage.
155 During interrogation, Sebastian claimed that he had asked Thomas and Joseph for “a remedy to break in my owner,” in order that he could “more freely enjoy my freedom, without causing [de Angeles] any harm.”90 Joseph and Thomas asked for 300 pesos. Despite the fact that they received far less in payment for their services, they still provided Sebastian with a plant called ramón, a breadnut or maya nut. Joseph claimed that ramón was not fatal on its own, but was only dangerous when combined with dog excrement and the drink agua de maíz.91 Sebastian administered the remedy for several days, until de Angeles became ill with vomiting and a headache. Sebastian stated that, when he had informed Joseph and Thomas of this, they told him that the ingredients would end his owner’s life.92 Killing de Angeles had not been his intention, and Sebastian decided to confess to his owner.
This case has a number of striking features. Sebastian testified that he had sought the aid of local Zahoris because he wished to enjoy his freedom, not kill his owner. Joseph and
Thomas chose to sell Sebastian lethal medicine, although Sebastian claimed he had never sought his owner’s death. The court asked Joseph numerous questions about his botanical knowledge: Where had he found the herbs? What other herbs were in the monte? Did he keep the herbs with him?93 Interrogators did not accept that these ingredients should have had such an effect, but neither could the protomédico identify why the mixture was poisonous.94
This denial of the efficacy of black medical knowledge was accompanied by questions about what other medicinal plants there were in the bush. This exchange captures the Spanish elite’s derision of black medicine on the surface, along with simultaneous efforts to harness
90 AGN, Negros y Esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 2r. 91 Ramón is Brosimum alicastrum. Agua de maiz is a popular beverage, similar in consistency to a chicha but paler in colour. It consists of corn, water, and sugar, which one first boils and then liquidizes. 92 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 2v. 93 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 7r. 94 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 8v.
156 that knowledge for the elite’s own purposes. Enslaved Africans and Afro-creoles often had an intimate understanding of the properties of American plants and of the natural environment beyond the city walls, as well as methodologies of botanical collection — knowledge that was deeply concerning to Cartagena’s white elite. Francisco Luzurriaga,
Cartagena’s first Real Protómedico, continued to deny the veracity of that knowledge, concluding that the herb used must have been another, not ramón, to have such an effect.95
In the face of this disbelief, Joseph simply replied, “the herb that looks like Ramón combined with excrement and water make up the venom.”96
The notary described all three enslaved men as Congo. According to Thomas,
Sebastian had sought them out, while the latter claimed it was a meeting of coincidence.
Either way, there is little evidence to indicate that being of the same provenance was of significance in his employment of them or in their repertoire. The ritual materials employed do not suggest a particularly Congolese genealogy. According to Thomas, Sebastian had told him that he “had heard the news that they knew how to give herbs.”97 Thomas claimed that he had initially denied this knowledge, until Sebastian disclosed that he wished to poison his owner. Through this admission, Thomas revealed his own willingness to challenge slaveholder authority. According to Joseph, an enslaved Arará man had given him the plants and instructed him on their use while he was in Mompox. Joseph’s household had fled
Cartagena while “hiding from the English,” likely as a result of one of the battles of
Cartagena from 1740 to 1741 during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The Arará man was in
Mompox serving his owner, a vecino of Quito.98 This exchange was transcultural—knowledge
95 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 18r. 96 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 7v. 97 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, 4r. 98 AGN, Negros y esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, 4v.
157 passed from Arará to Congo, from Pacific to Caribbean, and from Quito to Cartagena. The circulation of medicinal knowledge—including expertise that promised the power to bring death—occurred at multiple transcultural and geographic points in the interstices of colonial society, even while fleeing inter-imperial armed conflict, and especially in the streets. The everyday exchange of the material object of ramón and black botanical knowledge of its use as a poison from the Pacific to the Caribbean and between enslaved people of different ethnicities illustrates the extensive networks of communication and circulation.
While the case of Joseph, Thomas, and Sebastian illustrates Atlantic-Pacific connections, others occurred in spaces situated in areas of New Granada firmly understood as Pacific. Away from colonial centres such as Cartagena and in Pacific areas where bondage was the principle form of labour, enslaved medical and ritual practitioners of African descent both harmed and healed. One of the most notable cases is that of Manuel, or ‘Aja.’ Among the enslaved in the mines of San Antonio in the Cauca valley, belonging to the Convent of the Encarnación in the city of Popayán, Aja was widely believed to have killed numerous bondspersons.99
The appellation ‘Aja’ may have been a reference to his place of birth: the Aja people lived in what is now south-western Benin and southeastern Togo. It is likely, although inconclusive, that he was born in Africa, particularly due to the high rate of importation of
Aja captives and the increase of the slave trade to mining areas of the Pacific in western New
Granada in the early to mid-eighteenth century.100 The record does not state if Aja was born
99 AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1. 100 The convent of the Encarnación had owned cuadrillas since the early seventeenth century. However, the enslaved population in gold mining areas of the Pacific lowlands grew dramatically at the beginning of the eighteenth century. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 34. Paul Lovejoy states that 1.5 million captives departed the Bight of Benin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He estimates that before the mid-eighteenth century, 80-90% of those slaves were Aja or Yoruba, especially due to “coastal struggles for power among the Aja.” Paul Lovejoy, Transformations
158 in Africa nor does it not refer to him as a negro bozal. The only mention in the archive of Aja is a letter that contains no testimony from the defendant himself, nor do we know if he ultimately faced trial. Usually, information about the accused’s place of birth would have come from the testimony of the defendant on her/his own behalf. Previously, Aja had been known as “one of the most fervent [of the slaves] in his attendance of spiritual worship, always arriving first.” It is likely that Aja’s self-representation as a someone who was well versed in Catholicism shaped how other bondspersons in the mine and the authorities perceived him, making it unlikely that he would have been commonly referred to as a negro bozal in his local community.
The letter stated that Aja had always kept himself “separate from his fellows, denying all communication and always living apart…he only left his house to go to Church and conduct his daily affairs.”101 This social isolation may have facilitated the perception of him as someone who endangered the community through witchcraft. It seems quite likely, however, that Aja’s separation was due to his serial murder of enslaved women in the mines.
Despite his purported fervent Catholicism, Aja supposedly underwent a dramatic, unexplained transformation. According to the letter from Don José Gregorio de Alegría, Aja
“is now of terrible conduct, a Witch, and he has cursed various of his fellow blacks and slaves” who labour in the mines of San Antonio, to the point of “taking away the life.” The catalyst for the letter’s denunciation was Aja’s alleged murder of an enslaved woman, Javiera, who the letter describes as having been his “concubine.” Apparently, after an argument one day with one of Aja’s daughters, Javiera had shouted that he was a witch, “as is generally known,” and Aja “promised to give her blows of a dagger should the Captain not punish her
in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77, 80. 101 AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1.
159 [for this].”102 In the Pacific lowlands, enslaved people worked in cuadrillas, or slave gangs.
Gangs were supervised by trusted slaves with the title of ‘Captain,’ who could read and write and translated the owner’s power downwards to the enslaved.103 Marcela Echeverri argues that, by the eighteenth century, the captain of the mining gang was the “leading man” within slave society in the lowlands, “crucial to exercising the oppression necessary to sustain slavery.” The position of captain was an ambiguous one—his responsibilities ranged from punishment of fellow enslaved people to denouncing injustices against them.104
Shortly after this incident Javiera was struck with pain in her knees that lasted for fifteen days. The Captain visited her and she recovered not long after. Subsequently, Aja appeared at her home and she repeated the same accusation that he was a brujo. Once he had departed, Javiera tried to urinate in her bedpan but could not. Instead “she felt entering her secret parts a certain instrument of great speed and violence that arrived up to her stomach, biting it and causing her grave pains and woes, from which moment both channels closed.”105 The local community determined the cause of Javiera’s pain to be a viper, an instrument of Aja’s retribution for her attempt to publicly shame him as a brujo. Javiera’s pains continued throughout the day. Josepha, Aja’s “woman,” arrived to administer “aids and drinks of leaves or herbs called Guasimo.” Curandera María Tumba was present and questioned the utility of such a treatment, which Josepha insisted was an “efficacious remedy.” Indeed, Josepha’s insistence on the medicinal properties of guácima was accurate,
102 AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1. 103 Luis Ervin Prado Arellano, “El consenso trastocado: esclavismo y sedición en las cuadrillas mineras del Pacífico: Popayán 1810–1840,” Reflexión Política 16, No. 32, (December, 2014): 145. 104 Quotations from Marcela Echeverri, “Popular Royalists and Revolution in Colombia: Nationalism and Empire, 1780–1820” (PhD diss., New York Univ., 2008), 32, 126, 130. See also Mario Diego Romero Poblamiento y Sociedad en el Pacífico Colombiano, Siglos XVI al XVIII (Cali: Editorial Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad del Valle, 1995), 75. 105 AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1.
160 but soon after its application Javiera’s “pains and woes grew and soon she delivered her Soul to the hands of her Creator.”106 The level of detail in the letter’s description stands out from other such records, and likely reflects the outcry among the enslaved community at the extent of the brutality that Aja had inflicted on his victims.
The letter concludes that, over the course of the last seven years, seven enslaved people had died after suffering from “turns in the belly and stomach.” Allegedly, it was the
“general voice” that Aja was responsible for these deaths. Among the fatalities were Javiera, a woman named Sebastiana, and others of Aja’s “concubines.”107 His denunciation came after he had allegedly killed numerous women in the predominantly enslaved community of the mining area where he lived. Unlike Mundei, Aja does not seem to have been well integrated into his community. While the politics of labour practices were distinct, the dynamics of accusations of poisoning coming from within cuadrillas of the Pacific lowlands parallel those of accusations coming from within enslaved communities that Zemon Davis describes on plantations.108
In contrast to Aja’s accusations by the enslaved community, in Quibdó, Chocó— another Pacific site dominated by slave-based mining—an enslaved bozal woman Marta faced suspicion after slaveholders employed her as a healer. While shaped by slavery, Quibdó does not fit a classic demographic model of an eighteenth-century slave society. The white
106 Guazuma ulmifolia is now known to have effects including anti-diabetic and antiviral properties. See, for example, Angel Josabad Alonso-Castro and Luis A. Salazar-Olivo, “The anti-diabetic properties of Guazuma ulmifolia Lam are mediated by the stimulation of glucose uptake in normal and diabetic adipocytes without inducing adipogenesis,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 118, no. 2, (2008): 252–256; A.M. Felipe (et al), “Antiviral effect of Guazuma ulmifolia and Stryphnodendron adstringens on poliovirus and bovine herpesvirus,” Biol Pharm Bull. 29 no. 6, (June 2006): 1092-5; and B. Berenguer et al., “The aerial parts of Guazuma ulmifolia Lam. protect against NSAID-induced gastric lesions” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 114 (2007): 153–160. 107 AHAP, Legajo 3023, Exp. 1. 108 Zemon Davis, “Physicians,” 20.
161 population of Chocó was tiny: censuses from 1778 to 1782 show only 340 white people (just
2%), while there were 7088 bonded persons, 6552 indigenous people, and 3899 free people of colour.109 The lieutenant governor Joseph de Montes, asked Francisco Fernandez de
Caicedo to send an enslaved woman, María, to heal a Spanish man. De Caicedo instead sent bozal Marta. Orian Jiménez suggests that Marta’s case shows that “the miners trusted that recently arrived blacks were bearers of medical knowledge against evil…in the Reales de
Minas, those who had this capacity were blacks recently deported from Africa.”110 The records describe Marta as bozal (an unacculturated, recently arrived African) and mulata. The use of these two terms to describe the same person is unusual, but it is possible that Marta was a light-skinned African woman. There were communities of people of European and
African ancestry along the western and west central coast of Africa, especially near to slave forts or along trade routes. However, the description of Marta as bozal contrasts with the description of mixed and especially Luso-African communities from these areas, which
Linda Heywood and John Thornton characterized as Atlantic creole.111
A focus on the material elements of this case showcase the extent of white anxieties about the threat of enslaved healers in Chocó. Marta prepared a remedy of molasses, salt, and urine for her patient. Just as she was about to administer the concoction, a messenger arrived sent by her owner de Caicedo calling her back to his house. After four days the concoction had coagulated “in the form of a tortilla in distinct colours.” Various people
“recognized an animal in the middle.”112 In the absence of a medical examiner, the two
109 William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish frontier: the Colombian Chocó, 1680-1810 (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 19. 110 Orián Jiménez Meneses, El Chocó: un Paraíso del Demonio: Nóvita, Citará y el Baudó, siglo XVIII (Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 2004), 82-3. 111 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Making of the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 112 AGN, Criminales y Juicios, 135, D.4, 1r-1v.
162 priests inspected the concoction. Upon first inspection, they resolved, “there was something
[in the mixture], and a little animal with the form of a toad that seemed to have nails.”113 The moment of investigation of the concoction was one where early modern demonology and proto-forensics met. Two men “emptied the animal figure in a large wooden pan of clean water,” where it was found to actually be “a potato enveloped in the coagulation of the remedy.” Marta was immediately absolved, freed from prison, and returned to her owner.114
The highest members of Chocó slave society sought out an enslaved female healer, and likely de Caicedo sent Marta because she was particularly skilled. The furore over a potato reveals the tension between the regular use of enslaved healers, and the constant fear of bewitching or poisoning in slave societies. Chocó was a place characterized by cruel terrain, harsh work, brutalizing slavery and virtual absence of the Church and state, coupled with the ubiquity of African-descended religion and culture and a small white presence. In such a charged context this case was a serious one. Those involved in the case were men of considerable status in local society and politics. Due to the lack of a notary, the lieutenant governor, Don Joseph de Montes, wrote the autos. Nine other men of the local elite gave testimonies or served as witnesses in the proceedings, including the sergeant major Don
Alonso de Córdoba, local priest Francisco Gutiérrez, and Javier Quintero, visitador general.115
In the Viceroyalty’s administrative capital, by the mid-eighteenth-century, there was little interest in trying black ritual practitioners. Anonymous comments on the frontispiece of
Marta’s arrest record that had been sent to Bogotá encapsulate this disdain for the prosecution of black practitioners, and indeed for the paranoid white men of Chocó slave
113 AGN, Criminales y Juicios, 135, D.4, 4r. 114 AGN, Criminales y Juicios, 135, D.4, 5v. This pan was a batea, a large, shallow pan used in pit placering, the most common mining technique in Chocó. McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 72. 115 AGN, Criminales y Juicios, 135, D.4, 1v, 4r.
163 society who feared enslaved witchcraft. The comments made by an unknown official in
Bogotá, who could have been creole or peninsular, also illustrated the attitude of the colonial
‘centre’ towards the ‘periphery’. The note states that this criminal case “verifies with how little reflection they prosecute in Chocó.”116 The incredulity of the Bogotá administrator’s comments contrasts with white Chocó society’s rallying against Marta; this juxtaposition was itself a performance of the self-fashioned administrative project of Spanish reform and
Enlightenment working against the local, provincial white elite fear of poisoning and witchcraft. The case also highlights the effort of central administrators to reimagine the empire as a struggle by its enlightening centres and capitals, such as Bogotá, to administer the provincial and superstitious peripheries, like Chocó. In this instance the administrator dismissed the slaveholding elite for believing in witches, as well as for thinking, perhaps, that an African woman could have any power worth the trouble of a trial.
Likely Aja and certainly Marta had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean via the Middle
Passage as captives, were sold in Cartagena de Indias, and made the arduous journey to
Pacific New Granada. These practitioners, one of whom sought to heal and the other to harm, were important in their societies, whether influential, sought after, or feared. Some black medics were enslaved people under the employ of slaveholders; others more overtly challenged the basis of slavery, while others violated the social order of their communities.
Trans-Atlantic slavery created medical and ritual spaces where people of African descent were knowledgeable actors; in turn, they created a world in which the ritual transformation of social realities was a constant possibility. These dynamics are crucial to understanding the functioning of ritual in the African diaspora, but, as this section has shown, such rituals and knowledge were not exclusively Atlantic or Caribbean.
116 AGN, Criminales y Juicios, 135, D.4.
164
Conclusion
This chapter has traced the intersection of the Caribbean or Atlantic World with the
Pacific through the prosecution of people of African descent for ritual activities in New
Granada during the eighteenth century. In the cases tried, many of the sentences were grave and included brutal violence and even execution. The change in the nature of the production of sources between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from the centralized creation of the Inquisition, to those generated by and dispersed among local courts—obscures the prominence of black religious culture in many spaces across late colonial New Granada.
Although it appears that the eighteenth century afforded significant possibilities for the exchange of medical knowledge with less threat of judicial persecution than the previous century, the documentary evidence from judicial sources can only hint at a wider world of black ritual. The most striking finding here is the predominance of enslaved practitioners even where they were a small fraction of the population. Clients from all levels of society, from bonded persons to slaveholders, sought out enslaved black healers for their spiritual and medicinal knowledge.
De Saavedra himself died of consumption, following months of imprisonment and after being accused of murdering his fellow slaves. Mundei overreached, demanding extravagant payment in the form of an entire cattle ranch, yet refused to confess despite extraordinary torture and the prospect of years of hard labour in Cuba. Alomera combined the symbolism of a Christian cross or Kongolese cosmogram, Catholic prayers, and herbal knowledge to heal. Relative to other practitioners, his sentence of a year’s exile was light, but must have been keenly felt. Macaya’s prophecies angered the free black population of
Nuestra Señora de la Consolación and his proclamation of adherence to his own “Saints”
165 resulted in the sentence of 100 lashes through the streets of Cartagena de Indias. The city of
Cartagena de Indias hanged Joseph, Thomas, and Sebastian for an attempted poisoning that they had carried out to rescue one of their number from the restricted mobility of enslavement. Aja may well have escaped unpunished for cursing women that crossed him with a fatal “viper” that appeared inside their “secret parts,” striking fear in the heart of his enslaved community. The slaveholders that sought Marta out soon released her when it was revealed that there was only a potato in the remedy she had prepared.
Despite the obvious differences in the details of these cases and their outcomes, there are some crucial similarities. Most of these practitioners were sought after and central in local society. African-descended healers were employed by diverse groups of people. De
Saavedra, likely Mundei, Aja’s “woman” Josepha, and Marta, were commissioned by slaveowners. Others were sought out by enslaved people, as shown by Sebastian’s solicitation of Thomas and Joseph, while the free community of colour had engaged
Macaya’s services. The identity of Alomera’s clients is unclear. Clearly, people of African descent continued to be highly sought out for their medical knowledge in New Granada throughout the eighteenth century. In most of these cases, it would be fallacious to draw a sharp distinction between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Although there was a move towards medicalization and secularization in colonial centres, the danger of black sorcerers continued to be convincing in peripheries with a high African-descended population through the middle of the eighteenth century, as shown by the interest in Aja and Marta in the mining communities of Cauca and Chocó respectively.
166 Chapter Four: Caribbean Catholicisms
In March 1697, Antonio Broncano, a barber-surgeon referred to in inquisitorial records as mulato, received a request to go to a house in Panama City to bleed a Spanish woman. He began the procedure in the presence of two other españolas. Of the three, only one was married. As Broncano bled his patient, his conversation took a rather risqué turn.
According to the Spanish women, who subsequently denounced him to the Inquisition
Tribunal’s Commissary on March 13, Broncano had uttered three shocking, and potentially heretical, statements. They alleged that he had said that no woman being in the state of
“doncella could have the perfect love of God without first knowing the love of a man” and that “the state of marriage was more perfect than that of doncella.” They claimed that he had surmised, “in the other life, those that have been more sinful and offended God the most would have more joy and pleasure when they pass from this life [than] when a mujer doncella, without having had carnal communication with any man.”1
Historians researching people of African descent accused of blasphemy in Spanish
America have often understood such offences as statements uttered during physical punishments and as a means of using the Inquisition as a site to denounce mistreatment.2
The statements Broncano allegedly made, and those of other defendants of African descent,
1 AHN, Inquisición 5349, Exp. 2, 37r. While today doncella has connotations of employment as a servant, Diccionario de Autoridades defines it as “The woman who has not known a man.” Tomo III (1732), accessed November 25, 2016, http://web.frl.es/DA.html. 2 See Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1976); Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Blasphemy as Resistance: An African Slave Woman before the Inquisition,” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 229-53. Javier Villa- Flores, ‘“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 82, 3 (August, 2002): 435-468; Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, blasphemers, and witches: Afro-Mexican ritual practice in the seventeenth century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); and Kristen Block Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2012), 249.
167 complicate such a picture. Analysis of the African-descended defendants’ alleged blasphemies, the social contexts in which they were made, and testimonies in trials offer a far more suggestive and vibrant image of African diasporic vernacular theologies and material culture.
This chapter advances an argument that is at once methodological, religious and cultural. If we look beyond inquisitorial categories, beyond simple renunciations of God and the saints, utterances and testimonies in blasphemy cases embody the richly gendered, social, corporeal, and material world of the Afro-Hispanic Caribbean. My argument is based on
Inquisition records from across the Hispanic Caribbean, including cases from Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela. Cases from beyond territories that form part of modern Colombia are used because they demonstrate the connectedness of Caribbean communities of diverse origins.3
While recognizing the importance of transimperial mobilities, the Caribbean was a space delimited by the geographical and linguistic boundaries of empire and the institution of the
Spanish Inquisition.
For the Inquisition, blasphemy was insulting the divinity, and was either non- heretical, a simple insult, or heretical—the adherence to ideas that went against holy doctrine.4 Stuart Schwartz explains that, to the Inquisition, the crime of blasphemy “was closely related to propositions as an act of speech indicating deviant belief.”5 Blasphemy included jocular speech, such as jokes about “the sexual peccadilloes of the Virgin, the saints, or Christ himself.” As Schwartz states, “This was humor that displayed not necessarily
3 While the majority of this dissertation focuses on sources coming from sites within moden Colombia, this chapter includes those territories and goes beyond following complex boundaries of the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. 4 Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain Volume Four, (New York: MacMillan, 1906), [electronic resource], accessed December 12, 2015, 328, 329. http://libro.uca.edu/lea4/8lea15.pdf. 5 Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 19.
168 disbelief but intimacy; it humanized the sacred, but it also represented a certain kind of resistance to doctrinal purity.” Blasphemies contained “potential social content” and revealed how people were “discontent with their station in life.”6 By contrast, propositions were statements of more theoretical gravity, utterances which could indicate thought that erred in the faith, endangered the soul and corrupted others. Persistence in error and failure to admit sin were of particular concern. Such utterances included questioning the pope’s authority, the sacraments, Catholic dogma and sexual morality; criticizing indulgences, clergymen or tithing, and expressing doubt about the central tenets of Christianity.7
In this chapter, the focus is on cases of blasphemy, heretical blasphemy, propositions
(all verbal crimes) and the behaviourally similar category of sacrilege, defined as inflicting “a lesion or violence to a holy thing” in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1739).8 These offences are analyzed together due to the intrinsic connections in their typology; they were all, in essence, perceived insults to God and Christianity. Reading outside of narrow inquisitorial categories, which, for example, separated the crimes of blasphemy and propositions, is extremely fruitful for understanding black intellectuality and religious thought more broadly. Rather than being about impulsively renouncing God alone, when seen collectively, Inquisition trials for blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege show us a far broader panorama of African diasporic religious culture and thought.
In many of these cases, there is little to differentiate the statements and actions of people of colour from those of their European or white criollo contemporaries. The majority of African-descended persons in Spanish America did not receive extensive religious
6 Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in The Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 21. 7 Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 19, 18, 19. 8 Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo VI (1739), accessed May 17, 2018, http://web.frl.es/DA.html.
169 education, as demonstrated in Chapter Two. Much of what they picked up, whether they were enslaved or free, was from conversations with laypersons. Colin Palmer roots the origins of enslaved blasphemies in this colloquial instruction: “Since the slave in Mexico acquired his basic vocabulary from the Spaniard, he could hardly avoid learning the profane as well.”9 This phenomenon speaks to the extent of linguistic, ritual, and theological exchange in the colonial Hispanic Atlantic. The adoption of African-derived cultural practices by whites from fairly early on in the colonial period demonstrates that there was significant multidirectional exchange across racial and class lines.10 Afro-Catholicism was not fundamentally distinct from either authorized or folk versions of Spanish Catholicism that circulated in colonial cities. Although African-descended people challenged the figures and hierarchy of the colonial Christian church, Catholic material culture and symbolism were key aspects of their religious, intellectual, and social worlds.
I utilize a close reading of the content of the cases within their institutional and social contexts in order to examine how this religious and cultural world was being constituted, one only accessible to historians because of the regulatory and descriptive power of the state and the monarchical religious institution of the Inquisition. These documents cannot be read as transparent documents capturing religious realities. There is no world of entirely independent African-descended religious ‘practice’ that a historian can reconstruct from
9 Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 152. Writing in early seventeenth-century Cartagena, Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval claimed that creoles and ladinos were less valuable than bozales as they had picked up bad habits from Spaniards. See Alonso de Sandoval, Un Tratado Sobre la Esclavitud trans. Enriqueta Vila Vilar (Madrid: Alianza, 1987 [1627], 239. 10 For example, David Wheat cites the 1636 case of a wealth Portuguese resident of Cartagena whose wife sent an enslaved Upper Guinean to deliver “a pot of stewed chicken and a dozen kola nuts.” From this Wheat concludes: “Although deeply implicated in the commodification and trafficking of enslaved Africans, Portuguese, and Luso-African migrants also selectively adopted sub-Saharan African customs more thoroughly than any other segment of Spanish Caribbean society excepting sub-Saharan Africans themselves.” David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 107-108.
170 them. What they do reveal to us, however, is the dynamic interplay between practice and speech on the one hand, and institution and power on the other.
Blasphemy and the Inquisition
In order to foreground the rich religious and social content of blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege cases, this section outlines the historiography on inquisitorial trials of African-descended practitioners accused of these crimes, especially blasphemy because it has dominated that scholarship. The latter half examines how these offences were utilized by inquisitors in the institution’s Caribbean seat. I discuss the Inquisition’s prosecutorial practices and the sentences received by the men and one woman of colour whose cases are explored in this chapter.
Historiographical analysis of blasphemy cases with African-descended defendants has tended to assume that enslaved people committed blasphemy under duress, such as during violent punishment, or under the influence of alcohol. The argument goes that, through uttering blasphemies, bondspersons sought to use the Inquisition as legal recourse for harsh punishment by an owner. In much of the literature, blasphemies by persons of
African descent typically follow a formula of a beating, blasphemy, and denunciation to the
Inquisition. Historians of New Spain have most been at the forefront of this argument. After describing such a case Colin A. Palmer states: “It would be tedious to enumerate any more of these cases. The pattern is familiar: blasphemy usually under stress, denunciation, trial and punishment.”11 Kathryn Joy McKnight focuses on the case of María Blanca, one of the 101 cases of blasphemy tried by the Mexican Inquisition from 1590 to 1620, noting that Blanca’s
11 Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press: 1976), 152.
171 offence “was identical to those of many slaves: while being whipped for running away from her owners, she renounced God and all his saints.”12 Javier Villa-Flores contends that enslaved people accused of blasphemy were really “victims of cruelty and mistreatment who renounced God and His saints…as a way to be freed, at least for a moment, from the harsh working conditions they endured.”13 Focusing on early colonial Cartagena de Indias, María
Fernanda Cuevas Oviedo and Kristen Block make a similar argument about blasphemy.
Block writes, “slaves verbally called upon the Christian god and his representatives to intercede, to set down limitations on those acts of violence and cruelty that their masters tried to uphold as customary.”14 Block concluded that the Tribunal rarely prosecuted blasphemy cases by the 1680s and 1690s.15
Current historiography does not reflect the broad range of blasphemies, or other connected offences, that came before the Inquisition. Blasphemy may often have been a route to denunciation of mistreatment before the Inquisition but cases from the eighteenth century illustrate that this was not always so. There are six cases from 1697 onwards in
Cartagena that do not conform to this pattern of formulaic blasphemies that has been the focus of historians to date. The only case found from this period that does echo Block and
Cuevas Oviedo’s interpretation is that of Juan Maranjo. The events of this 1721 case occurred in the town of Río del Sinu, a settlement situated on a river of the same name, one
12 McKnight, “Blasphemy as Resistance,” 229-230. She notes that blasphemy was the most common crime for which the Mexican Inquisition tried enslaved people. 13 Villa-Flores, “‘To Lose One’s Soul,’” 436. 14 Block, Ordinary Lives, 56. 15 Block, Ordinary Lives, 249; María Fernanda Cuevas Oviedo, “Reniego y Resistencia de los Esclavizados y sus Descendientes en la Nueva Granada durante el Siglo XVII” (Unpublished Masters’ Thesis, Universidad de los Andes, 2002). Block suggests that the shift in prosecution could have been due to the change in the monarch, that the ascension of Philip V in 1686 led to a “new political atmosphere that affected a range of hierarchical relations in the colonies” (Block, Ordinary Lives, 249).
172 of the many rivers that connected the interior of the Caribbean coastal region with the sea.
Maranjo, an enslaved mulato man who laboured as a sawyer, quarrelled with another bondsman. As punishment, his enslaver placed him in shackles and Maranjo declared “that he renounced God and Baptism and all of the Sacraments, and the Mother than bore him.”16
While cases like his were common during the seventeenth century, they were not by the eighteenth. We should nevertheless be careful not to view blasphemy too simplistically as renunciation, and renunciation as a spontaneous reaction to pain. Rather than focusing on the motivations for blasphemy and related crimes, through analysis of the content of defendants’ speech we might learn far more about African-descended religion and thought.
Additionally, given that all but one of the defendants after 1697 from Cartagena de Indias were free, we might learn much about what blasphemy reveals about the shared religious worlds of afrodescendientes by exploring cases involving free descendants of colour, rather than just those involving enslaved people.
The sources for this chapter are all drawn from inquisitorial records held in the
Spanish national archive in Madrid. There are six cases of prosecutions of people of African descent for blasphemy, two cases of propositions, and one of sacrilege.17 These nine cases are examined together due to their typological similarity. All of the cases but one are from summaries, relaciones de causas de fe. Reflecting the substantial decline of interest in prosecuting people of African descent, inquisitors wrote up only two full procesos de fe for persons of
African descent in the eighteenth century; the controversial case of fugitive enslaved mulato
16 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp. 5, 50v. 17 The most common offences were bigamy, polygamy, and marrying twice (12), blasphemy (6), and sorcery (6). Other crimes included fautoría (3) or aiding the accused, propositions (2), rebaptism (1), sacrilege (1), Judaizing (1), and espontaneo (1), appearing before the Inquisition through choice. Bigamy, polygamy, and marrying twice are grouped together because in these instances they were ultimately the same crime—entering into the sacrament of marriage in the church for a second time.
173 man Fernando Felix Martínez from 1776, discussed at the end of this chapter, and that of
Quito-resident mulato Bernardo de Silva, who was absolved for judaizing in 1774.18
By the eighteenth century, African-descended defendants tried by the Inquisition tended to be enslaved men born in Africa, who typically faced trial as sorcerers, and “mulato” men born in the Americas, who tended to be tried for the offences of blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege. Of the nine cases of blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege, before the Holy Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias, only one of the defendants was not
American-born, and notaries described seven of the nine accused as “mulato/a” (5) or zambo/a (1). Of the eight American-born defendants only one was described as black. From these findings, we can deduce, first, that prosecutorial authorities had developed conceptions of the relationship between blackness and mixed African descent and certain kinds of criminality. Inquisitors had defined archetypes, based at least in part on lightness and darkness of skin, of who committed and could be tried for specific religious crimes. Second, when analyzing the speech and actions of defendants, it becomes clear that legal status and ethnicity shaped the criminalization of and sentences received by people of African descent.
The punishments the Inquisition handed out to black and enslaved people were more violent than those given to free people of mixed ethnicities.
Inquisitorial intentions were largely didactic, for both the defendant and the wider community.19 In late medieval Spain and in sixteenth-century tribunals in the Iberian peninsula and in the Americas, the climax of the Inquisition’s brutal lesson was the grand spectacle of the auto de fe, where the guilty party was paraded through the streets of the city in penitential garb with insignia marking her/his crime for all of the faithful to witness. An auto
18 AHN Inquisición, 1623, Exp. 5 and AHN Inquisición, 1623, Exp. 10. 19 Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 32.
174 de fe, a public procession of defendants, was, as Irene Silverblatt argues in reference to the
Peruvian context, a crucial part of instilling fear in colonial subjects.20 By the eighteenth century the Holy Office of the Inquisition was in decline globally so the displays of the auto de fe were replaced by much cheaper autos particulares, processions held in a fixed location, usually a church or convent. In the cases that I have found, the most severe judgments for blasphemies and propositions were in the cases of Manuel Francisco Zapata’s ten-year exile
(1713), and Isabel de la Torre’s exile for four years.21 The sentence of exile was intended to purge the community of the contamination of the condemned and was most frequently applied in cases of blasphemy and heresy.22 Traditionally in Europe, heresy was viewed as a contagion and generally considered to be a far more serious crime than sorcery, a mere superstition.
The Cartagena de Indias Tribunal clearly discriminated against convicted blasphemers and heretics who were African, black, and/or enslaved men, punishing them more severely than men who were creole, mixed-race and/or free. These authorities also handed down graver punishments to dark-complexioned and African-born sorcerers accused of sorcery than to mulato men who were convicted of blasphemy and propositions. Given the nature of the sentences, it appears that prosecutorial authorities viewed black sorcerers engaged in practices of clear African origin to be more dangerous to Catholic Christianity, while mulato men accused of blasphemy and propositions had committed offences that were treated as though they were typologically similar to European versions of the crime (See table in Appendix 3 for a summary of Inquisition cases and sentences).
20 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 7. 21 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 7r, AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 19v. 22 Escobar, “Del dicho”, 71.
175 Offences against God—blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege—are an entry point into the ambivalent religious world that was an in-between space between enslavement and freedom. It is clear from these cases that racialization profoundly shaped the lives of people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean. Nevertheless, in spite of its persecution, the inquisitorial archive reveals a vibrant world of belief, doubt, mockery, praise, curiosity, and philosophizing, a Caribbean world about which we can certainly know more.
Speaking of the Divine
Analysis of the content of speech illustrates the incorporation of people of African descent born in the Americas into the Hispanic Caribbean’s culture of Catholic vernacular irreverence. Many of the alleged conversations and testimonies that appear in inquisitorial records centred on sexualities, bodies, and divine figures in the Catholic hierarchy. They reveal how patterns of and ideas about gender, race, honour and moral behaviour intersected to determine who came before the Tribunal. The incriminating utterances recorded by the
Cartagena de Indias Tribunal from the last decade of the seventeenth century onwards principally contain insults directed toward the saints and, to a lesser extent, God, the sacraments, and the clergy. Utilizing four Inquisition cases, this section explores the nature of these insults and what they reveal about African-descended religious thought and its relationship to the social constructs within which that thought circulated.
Inquisitors prosecuted the defendants based on diverse allegations: mulato Juan
Joseph Godoy for renouncing the faith; mulato Bartholome Francisco de Vera for comparing his daughters to the Virgin Mary; mulato Antonio Broncano for articulating unorthodox ideas about sexuality and salvation; and African-born Manuel Francisco Zapata for proclaiming adherence to the Law of Moses. While there are significant divergences between the context
176 and content of these cases, their convergences are illustrative of how people of African descent were integrated into the cultural and religious world of the eighteen-century
Hispanic Caribbean.
The predominance of the saints in the blasphemies and propositions that people of
African descent allegedly spoke reflects the meeting of African-descended and Iberian religious traditions. Popular Catholicism in early modern Iberia was adaptive and based on a pantheon of saints. The saints were agents powerful enough to bring real change for worshippers in the temporal realm; human yet holy, they functioned as inspiring models and intercessors between the Catholic and God. The saints had been central to Catholicism since its arrival in the Iberian Peninsula, and indeed to the process of Christianization in Latin
Europe.23 The saints were invisible, intimate friends, channels of communication between
God and man, protectors of nations, cities, villages, confraternities, and individuals. The shrine and the chapel were the permanent every day physical manifestations of the cult of the saints, visited, prayed to, and given offerings by devotees. Further, saints’ days were fiestas, which organized and marked the passing of time. The cult of the saints also played a pivotal role in the process that has been termed ‘Christianization’ in Latin America, as it had done in early medieval Europe. As Kenneth Mills has shown for Peru, during the colonial period, the Iberian cult of the saints was naturalized in the Americas and became connected to the local landscape; as such it “passed from being a mere foreign ceremonial adjunct to becoming firmly embedded both in Andean religious consciousness and rural political economy.”24 Renée Soulodre-La France argues that Iberian encouragement of the cult of the
23 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61. 24 See Kenneth Mills, “The Naturalization of Andean Christianities,” in R. Po-chia Hsia ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 Volume 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge
177 saints among “Africans and American Indigenous populations [w]as a way to maintain easy
25 access to labour and to assure European social control.”
On July 20, 1720, a soldier denounced free mulato Juan Joseph Godoy to the Tribunal in Cartagena for blasphemy. He had said something to the soldier’s wife that he deemed offensive. The soldier proceeded to beat Godoy with a stick and then tied his hands behind his back. Godoy then uttered “many things against the faith,” including that he renounced the Holy Trinity and his father and mother.26 Witnesses added that he had also renounced
“the holy oil, the consecrated Host, the Saints, the clergy and all of their caste, and many other oaths.”27 Godoy was a free man, yet the soldier beat him as if he were enslaved, calling into question the boundaries of enslavement and freedom. Such punishment was possible, meted out to Godoy by someone who had no legal power over him, because of the ways that Atlantic slavery and racialization shaped Caribbean social hierarchies. While the
Inquisition qualified his crime as heretical blasphemy, the secular authorities perhaps did not take it as seriously. When the secretary of the Inquisition went to collect Godoy from the
Royal Prison where he had been held, he found that the Governor had already freed him.28
Because there was no trial there is no record of his testimony about his backstory, including the father and mother that he had allegedly denounced.
University Press, 2007), 504-535; see also Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff eds. Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003). 25 Renée Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues: Baroque Catholic Imagery and African Sensibilities from Nueva Granada,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (Autumn 2008), 33, no. 1, 220. She notes that devotion to saints particularly took the form of cabildos de nación and African brotherhoods. Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 221. 26 For other cases of renunciation of parents (in colonial Mexico) see Javier Villa-Flores, ‘“To Lose One’s Soul,” and Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 114. 27 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp. 5, f. 119v. 28 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 119r.
178 The social context of Godoy’s alleged utterances is particularly suggestive. The soldier who beat him claimed to have done so in response to an initial insult. The soldier found Godoy’s words so offensive to his and his wife’s honour and reputations that he would not restate them during the denunciation. His reticence to repeat Godoy’s words suggests that for the soldier, the insult was in fact the primary offence, and the alleged blasphemies provided him with an opportunity to punish Godoy for the insult by bringing him up before the Holy Office. While insult cases involving castas were not frequent in colonial Spanish America, the use of a variety of courts, including the Inquisition, as sites to settle scores between people across the ethnic spectrum was common.29
Antonio Broncano, the ‘mulato’ man who offended two white Spanish women, made remarks that similarly fell far outside the realms of socially acceptable speech and are indicative of the social and religious milieu of the Hispanic Caribbean on the eve of the eighteenth century. His words might indicate that he intended to encourage the Spanish women to engage in sexual activity, in general or with him, or perhaps he simply meant to shock them. If that was the case, he was successful, for the women were supposedly thoroughly scandalized. There are other possible readings of his statements than that of simply the desire to surprise. The calificadores, the Inquisition’s highly educated and unpaid classificatory specialists, categorized the first statement (that knowing the love of God was contingent on knowing the love of a man) and the third (that the greatest sinners have the most joy) as heretical and scandalous blasphemy. They classified his second statement—that marriage was more perfect than el estado de doncella—as heresy. While he said doncella specifically, the inquisitors interpreted this as an attack on clerical celibacy amounting to
29 Tamara J. Walker, ‘‘Blanconas Sucias’ and ‘Putas Putonas’: White Women, Cross-Caste Conflict and the Power of Words in Late-Colonial Lima, Peru” Gender & History Vol. 27 No.1 April 2015: 5.
179 heresy, worse than the irreverence expressed in the first and third pronouncements.
Inquisitorial records only contain the defendants’ responses, not inquisitors’ questions. The relación states that, in the third audience, Broncano answered “that he did not remember
[saying]…that the state of marriage was more perfect that that of the ecclesiastical.”30
Broncano’s words were then a response to a question from the inquisitors that interpreted his alleged statement “that marriage was more perfect than that of doncella” as meaning that marriage was superior to the ecclesiastical state.
The Tribunal was especially affronted by the supposed attack on the clergy, but it was arguably the third proposition that possessed the most radical theological potential.
Broncano’s claim that knowledge of God first required knowledge of the physical love of a man implied that meaningful experiences of the sacred could be reached through sexual intercourse—that women who prided themselves on their holiness and chastity were in fact in error. Broncano’s final pronouncement, that the greatest sinners who have offended God the most have the most joy, is very much open to interpretation. It could be that he was suggesting that it was acceptable to displease God, or that people who are the biggest sinners but who then repent, are the ones who will most appreciate or enjoy heaven. An alternative reading could be that God might not forgive you for the sin in this life, but that worldly joy is worth divine displeasure in the afterlife. These comments could have conceivably been a reinterpretation of Jesus’ anointing by a sinful woman, traditionally understood to be Mary
Magdalene. For example, the biblical story includes Jesus’ proclamation, “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”31 It is probable that Broncano had heard this parable since he
30 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 38r. 31 Luke 7: 36-50. Quotation verse 47, New International Version.
180 regularly attended church.32 That joy (regocijo) in passing from this life to the next should be bound up with “carnal communication” rejects orthodox Catholic ideas about moral behaviour and salvation and offers an alternative vision of carnality as spirituality.
Broncano’s rejection of single status and clerical celibacy may speak to a personal theology of spirituality rooted in the body and physical experience.
Broncano went on to explain his family history in his confession. His father was white Spanish and his mother was black, although he did not state her place of birth. He was a baptized and confirmed Christian who heard mass. He claimed that he had only said that the state of marriage was “more burdensome” than that of the ecclesiastical because a married man had a “wife and children to sustain.” During the acusación (accusation),
Broncano stated that he had only remarked that “sinners too are saved like virgins” and that
“the state of marriage was good because they [men] could sleep with their women and not create a scandal.”33 He then pleaded mercy for his ignorance, explaining that he had not known that his statements were against the faith and “that he was known as a Catholic
Christian and would die before [speaking against the faith].” He continued to deny the third proposition, that sinners pass from this life to the next with more joy than a virgin, stating,
“if he had said such a thing it would have been a sin for him to enjoy God and be liberated from the fires of hell.”34
The concept of sexual spirituality is also present in another Inquisition case from the period, which suggests that it may have been a wider intellectual current in the Hispanic
Caribbean and one that crossed boundaries of ethnic difference. The Inquisition in
Cartagena tried Juan de los Santos, a white Portuguese man living in Cuba, for heresy in
32 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 37r. 33 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 37v. 34 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 38v.
181 1698. He was engaged in an “illicit friendship” with a free black vecina of Havana, Francisca
Tronpeta. He had alleged declared that “when he slept his body was in the bed and his soul was in heaven with God and that he and Francisca Tronpeta were saints.”35 One could infer from such a statement that for de los Santos, the union of their bodies initiated their spiritual journey.
The Tribunal charged defendants of different ethnicities for making comparisons between women and the Virgin Mary and for questioning God. Bartholome Francisco de
Vera was a married mulato man in his sixties from the city of Barinas, but resident in
Guanaguanare in the province of Caracas. A denunciante came before the Inquisition on
March 3, 1711, which led to De Vera’s subsequent trial for heretical blasphemy by the
Tribunal. The allegations against him were that, around ten years previously, De Vera and his two daughters had sat with their backs to Christ in the church in the Valle of Tupicio.
Allegedly, when the denunciante challenged him, De Vera had responded, “they could well sit there, that his daughters were so pure like Our Lady Virgin Mary, and that Jesus Christ erred, like they had not erred” and that “just as Our Redeemer Jesus Christ had committed errors, he [De Vera] too had erred.” Another witness added that de Vera had replied, “That his daughters were like the Holy Virgin, and that Our Lord God, being God, ignored [humans]; how should he [God] not be ignored?” The third witness added that Bartholome had said
“That God our Lord, in being God, erred.”36
In view of the ten-year gap between the event and the denunciation, it is likely that
De Vera’s accusers were attempting to use the Inquisition to settle scores. In a discussion of how concubinage cases came to court, Michelle McKinley notes that ecclesiastical courts
35 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 2, f. 51r. 36 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 73r.
182 served as a space for castas and enslaved people to work out conflicts in colonial Peru. She shows how “ecclesiastical courts served as important venues for the public pursuit and the performance of enmity and grievances between social actors in closely monitored environments.”37
In his testimony, De Vera presented a radically different version of events than that given by the denunciante. De Vera, whom the notary described as being well instructed in the faith, claimed that the events took place after he had reprimanded some men that lived in
“concubinage” and that they denounced him to the Inquisition in order to punish him for his overzealous enforcement of Catholic Christian morality. 38 He stated that he had admonished the denunciante and the witness, saying that “God would punish them, that while he had the faith that the quality of mercy was greater than that of justice, that when you enrage Him, he was righteous, that they should not take refuge in his mercifulness and continue to offend him.”39 Throughout his imprisonment in the secret prisons of the
Inquisition, De Vera approached the Tribunal astutely. On August 3, he asked for a voluntary audience with the judges to request that witnesses should pay damages. On August
7, he demonstrated the fervency of his faith to the court, requesting that he be allowed to observe the Day of Santa Rosa de Lima, the saint of his devotion, which did not fall until
August 30 that year.40 De Vera’s own performance of Catholic devotion was clearly effective in casting doubts on the piety and reliability of the witnesses. The Inquisition reached a rare verdict, finding Bartholome de Vera innocent.41
37 Michelle McKinley, “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1689,” Law and History Review 28:3 (2010): 781. 38 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 73r. 39 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 73r. 40 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 75v. 41 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 76r.
183 The denunciante’s accusation, that De Vera had compared women in his life to the
Virgin Mary, seems to reflect a common colloquial expression that circulated in the Hispanic world and one that traversed boundaries of ethnic difference. In the 1723 case of a white sailor Juan Francisco Ruiz, the Seville-born defendant was then a resident in the inland
Caribbean river city of Mompox in New Granada.42 While mulato De Vera coherently articulated and interpreted Catholic Christianity, Spanish-born Ruiz recited the prayers of the church with signs of poor instruction. Ruiz, who had “both arms painted and in one Figured
[sic] a crucifix,” had been in a “bad friendship” with a black woman in Cartagena who became pregnant. Ruiz allegedly had said that “what la negra had in her womb was better than the Holy Virgin” and that “he esteemed more the arse of la negra and his son than all the consecrated oil backwards and forwards.”43 It was la negra’s sister who denounced Ruiz to the Inquisition for blasphemy. She also added that when she had remarked that her nephew
“was a crab”—perhaps a reference to the baby’s conception out of wedlock—Ruiz responded, “the young boy was more than God, and he compared better than the Holy
Virgin.”44 In both the cases of De Vera and Ruiz, the men found themselves before the
Inquisition because free people of African descent used the Tribunal as a space to denounce perceived moral and social transgressions in the eighteenth century.
These cases of blasphemies are indicative of the intersection of the sacred and the profane in African-descended vernaculars that circulated within a shared lower caste society in the Hispanic Caribbean. By contrast, the following proposition case reveals religious
42 AHN Inquisición, 5350, Exp. 1, f. 34v, f. 33v. 43 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 33r, f. 32v, f. 32r. “Que estimaba mas el culo de la negra, y de su hijo que toda la crisma de cristiano al derecho y al rebes.” 44 AHN, Inquisición, 5350, Exp.1, f. 32r. According to Joan Corominas, in eighteenth-century Peru and Bolivia, the term cangrejo may have signified “immoral, incorrect, cheating.” “Martha Hildebrandt: el Significado de ‘Cangrejo,’ El Comercio April 1, 2014), accessed March 5, 2018. https://elcomercio.pe/opinion/habla-culta/martha-hildebrandt-significado-cangrejo-305974
184 thought that not only directly challenged Christianity, but revealed adherence to other faiths.
Enslaved man Manuel Francisco Zapata, tried in 1713, was the only defendant prosecuted for blasphemy or propositions who was not American-born. The range of crimes for which the Inquisition had charged him during the course of his life reflected the transcultural and transcontinental forces that shaped it.
Zapata recounted his life story to inquisitors. Born in Mequines (modern Meknes in
Morocco) to Yolof parents (negros de Casta Yolofos), he began working as a sailor at the age when he could bear arms. He was employed on a ship named Mulei Mari until a Spanish
Royal galley captured it. He was taken to Cadiz, where merchant officer Francisco Navarro purchased him and brought him to Cartagena de Indias.45 After labouring in Cartagena for four years as a bricklayer, he followed his owner to the Andalucian town of Osuna. Zapata stated that he was accused of being a Moor (a Muslim) and that the Inquisition in Seville imprisoned both him and his owner Navarro.46 Zapata was then taken to Cartagena de
Indias for a second time where he was sold. While in Cartagena he was taken to the church of the Holy Trinity, where he married, before being relocated to Panama.47 He later insisted that he had not been baptized before his marriage.
During the Inquisition’s investigation into Zapata, the notary found baptismal records stating that he had received this sacrament in the Holy Cathedral of Panama on
December 4, 1712.48 In Panama City, Zapata found himself under investigation by the
Inquisition again. A denunciante reported him to the Commissary of the Inquisition on May 1,
45 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 3v. 46 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 4r, 5v. The 1734 Diccionario de Autoridades (1734) defines a “Moro” (Moor) as “a natural of Mauritánia [North Africa], Province of Africa. It is taken regularly [to mean] those that follow the sect of Muhammad.” Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo IV http://web.frl.es/DA.html 47 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 4r. 48 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 2v.
185 1713. When questioned if he was a Christian, Zapata had allegedly stated that he had recently sought baptism to avoid being categorized as a Moor, despite having no intention to follow
Christianity. The denunciante reported the following exchange:
“He believed none of this [Catholicism] and he would follow the law of his [former] Owners, and he would die like them.” “How did they die?” “They burned them.” “You are not a Moor, but a Jew. “Yes, my law is of Moses.” “The Jews suffered the curse that was cast on them when they crucified Christ.” “This is a lie and I do not believe [it]. Even if they were to subject me to more fire than they could fit in the City, I would say the same, even though they published that garbage (porquería) edict I do not believe it. I know the True God, the God of Israel, the God of Jacob.”
After declaring his faith, he supposedly raised his eyes to heaven and said “Holy is his
Name.”49 His Jewish “owners” who were burned at the stake were likely Navarro and his family members, for it was with him that Zapata was imprisoned.
Zapata’s extraordinary mobility and unusual itineraries continued even while under investigation by the Inquisition. The comisario in Panama City sent a letter dated February 26,
1715 detailing Zapata’s case to inquisitors in Cartagena, who then ordered his arrest. Later a second letter sent to inquisitors in Cartagena from the Comisario of Portobelo, dated August
25 and likely accompanying Zapata’s transport, stated that two prisoners, Zapata and another, had boarded a small sailing ship ready for transport to Cartagena and pirates had captured them. After some time, the pirates returned Zapata to Portobelo. Zapata arrived in
Cartagena and was placed in the secret prisons on August 27. Zapata’s testimony revealed an even more complex religious past. During confession, he stated that in Mequines he had grown up with the “Law of Mahoma”—of Mohammed.50 He stated that when he left the
49 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 1v. 50 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 3r.
186 prisons of the Seville Inquisition he heard mass daily and prayed the rosary. Zapata insisted that he had not wanted to go with the pirates or take up arms, yet when they let him go and returned him to Portobelo they provided him with freedom papers. He finished his confession stating that he would not confess to anything else, even under the pain of torture.51
Three world religions shaped the course of Zapata’s life. Born a Muslim, captured and sold into slavery, it appears he adopted the Judaism of his former owner. Highly mobile yet enslaved, Zapata had to adapt to participate in Catholic rituals both in Spain and
Cartagena de Indias before his formal conversion and baptism in Panama City. If we take the allegations against Zapata at face value, it appears these adaptations were expedient. His likely adherence to Judaism shows that his conversion to the religion of his former owner had taken hold to the extent that this devotion may have continued years after that owner had been burned at the stake. The striking story of Zapata’s theological and ritual integration into Islam, Judaism, and Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world occurred over two hundred years after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. He defied the boundaries of religious uniformity in his own lifetime. Among the extant cases from
Cartagena’s inquisitorial archive, Zapata’s story is unique. It is a rare glimpse of the sheer variety of religious traditions that enslaved people encountered in the Atlantic world.
The vivid language of these individuals demonstrates the fine line between the sacred and the profane in Hispanic world vernaculars: the mulato man who censured his peers in church for their immorality; the black woman who denounced her nephew’s white Spanish father to the Inquisition for comparing his infant to the Virgin; a tattooed Spanish sailor who knew little about the key tenets of the church but had plenty to say about the divinity of “his
51 AHN, Inquisición, 5349, Exp. 5, f. 5r.
187 woman’s” body and their son. These discussions are not unique to the Caribbean, but they do reveal the extent to which the African-descended were part of a wider Catholic world of insults, sexuality, and debate. Following his public criticism of his neighbours’ illicit relations and their retributive denunciation, Bartholome Francisco de Vera’s successful and coherent confession reveals the extent to which he was integrated in the world of Catholic orthodoxy.
Antonio Broncano’s sexual suggestions went further than more commonplace blasphemies of the sacred and the profane, potentially implying that carnality could be an expression of spirituality and offering a radical reinterpretation of the parables he heard in church. Manuel
Francisco Zapata’s physical journey between Morocco, Spain, Cartagena, and Panama, before finally ending up back in Cartagena facing trial by the Inquisition, indicates the extent of enslaved mobilities across the Atlantic Ocean and the Hispanic Caribbean. Zapata’s exceptionality lies in his journey from Islam, to Judaism, to marriage and baptism into
Catholicism, while continuing to profess loyalty to the God of Israel. This case is an important outlier, for other trial records indicate that Catholicism was central to African- descended religious vernacular speech by the eighteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean.
Materiality and African Diasporic Catholicism
In contrast to the similar utterances of African-descended persons and whites in the previous section, the alleged offences of other defendants, or the contexts in which they were made, suggest something distinctly African diasporic in terms of engagement with
Catholic material culture. In comparison to Marian apparitions in postwar Italy, Renée
Soulodre-La France argues that, through the cult of the saints and relationship to material objects, “enslaved people in New Granada…strove to shape their economic and social situation through a judicious and practical application of the ideological frameworks that
188 shaped their lives within enslavement.”52 Taking this as a starting point—utilizing two cases of blasphemy and heretical acts, and one of sacrilege—this section examines how people of
African descent engaged with and discussed Catholic ritual objects in diverse ways and to a variety of ends. Accusations included throwing a cross to the ground, perfuming a cross with burning donkey dung, and the theft and burial of a monstrance and the Host. The words and acts themselves and the motivation behind them varied considerably, revealing how Catholic material objects were embedded in an Afro-Hispanic religious culture that was characterized by exuberant worship, performance, and consumption.
Defendants often uttered profane speech and engaged in irreverent acts simultaneously, although calificadores distinguished quite clearly between the various allegations. In a 1715 trial, they judged the supposed words and actions of Isabel de la Torre as heretical blasphemy with vehement suspicion of heresy and heretical acts. In 1718, Phelipe
Carrillo was found guilty of heretical blasphemy and a heretical act.53 These two cases indicate the importance of Catholic ritual objects and their unorthodox manipulation in
African diasporic culture on New Granada’s Caribbean coast.
African-descended defendants who were fully integrated into the formal hierarchy of the Catholic Church were unusual. Phelipe Carrillo, a priest that the notary described as mulato, found himself before the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias in 1718 for heretical blasphemy. While it was fairly common for white priests to face trial, this was usually for the crime of solicitation. Canonical law did not prevent the ordination of people of African descent or indigenous people in the Americas, but neither was such ordination encouraged
52 Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 220. 53 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 20v, AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, 16r.
189 for the majority of the colonial period.54 Born and educated in Cartagena de Indias, Carrillo studied Grammar with the Jesuits and finished the subject in the convent of Santo Domingo; he also studied Philosophy in the convent of San Francisco.55 At the time of his trial he was a priest in the Villa de Tolú, a small town in the province of Cartagena de Indias, 100 miles southwest of the city on the Caribbean coast.56 Carrillo was forty-five when he appeared before the Inquisition, placing his birth around 1673. Most likely he began his education in the final decade of the seventeenth century. This level of education for a man of African descent in this period was rare.
The relación de causa de fe refers to Carrillo and the witnesses as mulato. He stated that his parents and grandparents were “quarteroons of mulato and Spanish [lineage],” although he could not name the latter. The phrase “gave his genealogy in the ordinary form of mulatos without knowledge of their grandparents” was generic in Inquisition documents regarding mulato defendants, suggesting that inquisitors’ expectations included lack of knowledge of antecedents—a product of Atlantic slavery’s natal alienation—and a family history of illegitimacy. Although Carrillo did not know of his grandparents he still laid claim to being of cuarterón de mulato —three quarters white and one black—heritage.57
The incident for which Carillo was denounced occurred on the night before the Day of the Cross, May 3, 1714.58 He was accused of disrupting celebrations in a local home.
54 In 1769, the Crown ordered that a third of prelates in Spanish America and a quarter in the Philippines should be of indigenous origins, but this law had little effect in reality. C. R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440-1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 22. 55 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 21v. 56 A villa was a town smaller than a city but larger than a village (aldea). Diccionario de Autoridades - Tomo VI (1739) http://web.frl.es/DA.html 57 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 21v. 58 In contemporary Latin America the Day of the Cross is celebrated with processions and the cross is often adorned with flowers. While I have been unable to find descriptions of the celebrations in colonial Spanish America, the procession as a mode of veneration in public is typical of Iberian and
190 According to the witnesses, he entered the neighbouring house at midnight and interrupted a fiesta asking, “Who is the bastard that lives in this house?” The priest crossed the room to the altar where a cross was hanging, adorned with ribbons and jewels, and said, “What cross of shit is this?” He knocked the cross on the ground with his staff and scattered the jewels and lit candles from the altar to the floor.59 The actions of the witnesses, “eight men and one woman, all mulatos,” reveal some of the social contexts and materiality of religious celebration in Caribbean Colombia. As with the accusations against De Vera and Ruiz, this trial demonstrates how African-descended individuals utilized the Inquisition for retribution against members of their own community, in this case against someone whom the accusers perceived to be an overzealous defender of Catholicism in a similar vein to Bartolomé de
Vera who had allegedly compared his daughters to the Virgin.
Carrillo had vigorously opposed his parishioners’ celebrations of the Day of the
Cross. In turn, they punished his behaviour by reporting him to the Inquisition. The time period of over a year and three months between the initial event and the denunciation
(September 12, 1715), suggests that there was more at play than just the one occurrence.
Considering the priest’s tenacity in overseeing the congregation’s social rituality, it is quite possible that the denunciation was an expression of long-standing inter-personal conflicts and frustration with his conduct. Carrillo had transgressed local or group concepts of what a cleric ought to do. With excessive vigour, he tried to enforce solemnity in the face of their celebratory approach to the festival of the cross.
Latin American Catholicism in the early modern period. Perhaps Carillo’s rage stemmed from the private and unsanctioned celebration in a home of what may have resembled an African-descended altar. 59 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 20r-20v.
191 According to Carrillo’s testimony, the group celebrated the fiesta with “lost voices and dishonest songs.” The lyrics of these songs are, sadly, unknown , but since he interrupted their fiesta at midnight, it appears that their devotions had taken on a raucous tone. He claimed that, upon entering the house, he had asked them, “How is this possible that this could happen in Christian lands?” and “What filth are you to raise up an altar? Nor do you treat the cross with any decency!”60 For Carrillo, his neighbours had transformed their home into a ritual space, adorned the cross inappropriately (including with earrings, he added) and had not acted with the appropriate reverence. He denied that he had knocked the cross to the floor, claiming that he had left it on the first table of the altar. Yet, by his own admission, he then warned them that if they put the cross up again, he would burn down the house and the altar.61 Two weeks later, Carrillo apologized for the scandal that he had caused while enraged and conceded that he may have accidentally knocked the cross to the floor with his cape.62
According to inquisitorial logic, Carrillo had denigrated the cross by knocking it to the ground, although the Tribunal’s lenience suggests that they did not judge his intent to be malicious. However, his punishment also legitimized the behaviour of his neighbours, who had put up an altar in their own home, decorated it, and celebrated the fiesta. While it was common for jewels to be used in Catholic sacramental objects, the construction of an altar in the home festooned with jewels and ribbons certainly transgressed the boundaries of
Catholic orthodoxy. These items most likely belonged to the men and women of African descent who were present at the fiesta. Precious stones and metals took significant labour to
60 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 22r. 61 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 23v. 62 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 23v.
192 purchase: placing objects of high material worth on an altar likely denoted the spiritual value that people associated with the altar.
Inquisitors handed down a light sentence, on April 2, 1718, of praying daily on his knees until the end of Easter, fifteen days later, and the relatively small fee of 25 pesos in costs.63 Nevertheless, the partying parishioners’ denunciation of their priest to the Inquisition and his subsequent punishment, however mild, must have been a significant and scandalous moment in local parish politics. In condemning his actions, but not those of the denunciantes, the Tribunal responded with flexibility to these reinterpretations of Catholic celebrations, revealing its capacity to tolerate creative and idiosyncratic forms of worship, within limits.
The decision not to punish the denunciantes suggests the church’s tacit tolerance of African diasporic expressions of religious devotion, so long as such expression did not go against the central tenets of Catholic Christianity.
The makeshift bejewelled altar of Carillo’s accusers speaks to a creative African diasporic engagement with Catholic ritual objects that may also be seen in the trial of Isabel
María de la Torre, known as la Cachete, ‘the Cheek’. The comisario of the Puerto de La Guaira, on the coast close to Caracas, received a denunciation of de la Torre, a fifty-year-old free black seamstress, on November 2, 1715. Authorities deemed her mode of attire in church as outlandish and beyond the boundaries of respect for sacred space. La Cachete’s first alleged crime was entering the church indecently on a day of fiesta, wearing a crimson headdress, mismatched shoes (one black and the other white) and “other things that provoked laughter.” At the time of the offence, an ecclesiastical judge had admonished her and she responded that she had deliberately dressed in this way to displease the eyes.64 The judge
63 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 24v. 64 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 14r.
193 imprisoned her in the castle, where she proclaimed in front of many people that she “abjured the Mass, the consecrated Host of God, and of his saints, and of the Holy Mother.” A soldier then “reprimanded and punished” her with a whip—much like the soldier who beat the free man of colour Godoy for his perceived moral transgressions. She allegedly repeated her previous comments with more rage, throwing her rosary to the ground. When the soldier tried to give her back the rosary, she apparently replied that she did not want it and told him to burn it along with her headdress of taffeta.
The incident was the last in a long line of actions by de la Torre that concerned the local community. Other accusations included an incident some seven or eight years previously. During a procession of the Stations of the Cross during Lent, she left her house carrying a pot of hot coal and lit donkey dung. When the via cruces procession arrived in front of her house, she ‘incensed’ the cross with the lighted donkey dung. When asked why she had done this, she allegedly stated, “Because they had stolen the smell that it had.” Four or five years later, she reportedly again incensed a cross with dung, “praying in cries like litanies,” in the presence of many people. Witnesses stated that La Cachete had proclaimed that “she abjured God and the Saints, and that she was more pure than the Holy Virgin, and that she had delivered her soul to the devils.” On another occasion when accused of stealing a shirt, she allegedly stated, “[I am] so pure like the Santísimo Sacramento,” the Holy
Sacrament, adding: “even if they put me underneath the balls of the Santísimo, they would have to remove me, and tell me what I had said.”65 These esoteric proclamations are difficult to decipher and open to interpretation. De la Torre’s statements that the faithful had removed the cross’s former smell implies that, through perfuming it with burning donkey dung, she had returned its original odour. This moment, on Holy Friday when the
65 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 14v-16v.
194 procession of the cross symbolizes Christ’s walk to Calvary, was perhaps a radical and public rejection of the saving power of the cross, or rather a return to its purity or simplicity and a rejection of the Catholic ritualistic burning of incense. Her reference to the balls of the Holy
Sacrament similarly upended conventions of sacramental veneration and scorned sacramental orthodoxy.
The accused’s confessions reveal multifaceted attitudes towards the divine and authority. Upon interrogation, de la Torre denied knowledge of the reason for her imprisonment—although she admitted to the relatively minor infractions of the headdress and the shirt. She also denied the other charges. When Inquisitors asked her why she thought she had been arrested she admitted to visiting a Zahorí, a black diviner, to help her find some things of hers that had been stolen.66 Again, for de La Torre, it was the material that mattered. Her visit to the Zahorí demonstrates her eclectic approach to the sacred: she was open to utilizing a whole range of ways to access the supernatural and to calling upon a variety of divine actors and human agents to assist her.
After her arrest, de la Torre refused to confess to the priest sent to visit her and insisted that she would confess only with the Vicar General of Caracas, the bishop’s deputy, a high post in Catholic church hierarchy. When the priest asked why she would not confess with him, she answered, “There was no place for it [her confession].” Likely she referred to spiritual, rather than physical, space because, on another two occasions, she laughed out loud and told the priest that she did not even say his mass, “much less would she confess with him.”67 Here her words were more than a rejection of the authority of the priest. De la Torre self-selected with whom she confessed; the identity of her medium for communication with
66 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 17r, 17v. 67 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 17v.
195 God mattered to her. She understood the relationship between the priest and worshipper as one based on trust, or at least respect, and proudly declined to participate in the sacraments with a priest whom she deemed unworthy, demanding to be heard by the highest authority in the local clerical hierarchy. De la Torre, a poor black woman, appreciated and exercised her autonomy in matters of the spiritual, and would not be coerced into relationships of unequal power with intermediaries whom she did not respect.
On the matter of the cross and the donkey dung, de la Torre provided a wholly different version of events. She claimed that on the day in question, a soldier—“who had come to her house several times to solicit her”—had chased her. She followed him with a cross in hand and a pot of hot coal in the other. She had thrown a rosary into the pot, as she had heard that it cast out evil, and warded him off saying: “Be gone devil, do not tempt me.”
According to de la Torre, she used the cross to ward off unwanted sexual advances. While men of the city threatened her sexually, the community doubly scapegoated her, as her status as an older, single, and assertive woman positioned her to be a target of the Inquisition. All of the eight witnesses against her were male. In her testimony, she added that the day she had incensed the cross during the Stations of the Cross, it was with incense and balm, not dung. De la Torre, unmarried and with one child, insisted that she had not entered a pact, nor was she a witch, but a “fragile woman who had had some sins with men.”68 She then argued that when she had been imprisoned in the castle the soldiers “chained her up and put her in stocks,” mistreating her due to her resistance. She had only denounced the Holy
Sacrament for an instant and did so “with pain and rage.” This last aspect of her behaviour does fit an analysis of blasphemy as a spontaneous response to punishment but the full narrative of her ‘crime’ clearly tells a more complex story.
68 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 16v.
196 De la Torre then convincingly argued that many of the witnesses were her enemies.
She referred to the specific incidences to which they testified, “but always denying the propositions, with very long references, that forced the audiencia to be divided in two, and in all she manifested notable relief,” likely because she had succeeded in splitting the opinion of the inquisitors. De la Torre, La Cachete, proved to live up to her moniker. She said and did as she wished and had done so for many years. Through her testimony, she was even successful in causing disunity between the inquisitors during the course of the trial. Nevertheless, the
Inquisition condemned her to do mass on her knees in the chapel of the Tribunal, exiled her from the bishopric for four years and prescribed that she pray the rosary every day for that time.69
While Isabel de la Torre, a well-known presence in Puerto de la Guaira, had engaged in subversive acts and speech knowingly for years, the young fugitive enslaved mulato man
Felix Fernando Martínez’s time in Cartagena de Indias was short before he engaged in actions that led him before the Tribunal. On April 22, 1776, Martínez entered the church of
San Francisco in Cartagena de Indias. He stole the monstrance—the vessel used to display the Host—as well as a crown from the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and another from the arms of a statue of Jesus. He also tried and failed to remove the cloak of another image of the Virgin.70 Martínez spent the rest of the day in the church where he separated the rays of the monstrance and then broke it into pieces.
Figure 14: Eighteenth-century Monstrance (La Lechuga) from the church of Saint Ignacio in Bogotá
69 AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. 19r. 70 AHN, Inquisición, 1623, Exp. 5., Image 39-40.
197
This image depicts an eighteenth-century monstrance from the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Spanish metal smith José Galaz produced this monstrance between 1700 and 1707.71 The monstrance of San Francisco would have been far less intricate than this one. According to the description in the trial records, it was made of gold, silver, and glass.72
Martínez then carried the monstrance out of the church in his hat and hid parts of it, including the Host covered by two pieces of glass, in the plaza of the slaughterhouse. The next morning, a seemingly intoxicated Martínez entered the shop of the merchant Joseph
Sobrino, trying to sell pieces of gold and silver from the broken monstrance.73 Sobrino sent for the magistrate who immediately arrested Martínez and soon handed him over to the
Inquisition. For several weeks, he claimed that he was sixteen years old, a minor, and free. It was not until May 16 that he confessed that he was a fugitive slave, who had run away from his owner in San Gil, a small Andean town.74 During confession, Martínez provided details of his short, itinerant life. He had travelled throughout the Viceroyalty extensively, illustrating the possibilities that the geographical terrain and large free population of colour offered to fugitive enslaved people. His movements are mapped out below in Figure 15.
71 “Barroco en Tierra de Orfebres: La Custodia de la Iglesia de San Ignacio de Bogotá,” Colección de Arte del Banco de la República, accessed November 28, 2016, http://banrepcultural.org/coleccion- de-arte-banco-de-la-republica/articulos/barroco-en-tierra-de-orfebres. 72 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 25. 73 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 25. 74 San Gil is in the present-day department of Santander (A in the map above). AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 113.
198
199 Figure 15: Map depicting the travels of Felix Fernando Martínez
Martínez’s itineraries: A San Gil, B San Juan Girón, C Chiquinquirá, D Tunja, E Pamplona, F Ocaña, G Mompox, H Honda, I Tenerife, J Real de la Cruz [not pictured, no modern references to this location found], K Sabana Larga, L Santa Marta, M Valledupar, N Riohacha, O Cienaga, and P Cartagena de Indias.
Born in San Juan Girón, Martínez was sold to an owner who lived in the Villa of San Gil.
Here he learned to read. He fled from San Gil and went to the Sanctuary of the Virgin
Chiquinquirá, later to Tunja, and then to Pamplona where he worked in the service of a
Jesuit. He said that he passed all this time “without a job or any exercise, and he maintained himself by only doing a few errands.”75 From Pamplona he journeyed to Ocaña, then to an unspecified place further north than Mompox (not included on the map), then to Mompox, to Honda, then on to Tenerife where he served in the house of the magistrate. Martínez then travelled from Real de la Cruz, to Sabana Larga, to Santa Marta, to Valle de Upar, to Rio de la Hacha, back to Real de la Cruz, to Triana, to San Stanislao, and then to Cartagena de
75 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5, Image 37.
200 Indias. Martínez had traversed a great part of the vast and dense territory of New Granada on foot and most likely by canoe, a feat indeed. For inquisitors, Martínez’s itinerant lifestyle was further evidence of his bad character. In this same confession, he stated that he did not have a house and slept in any place he found at night. They rebuked him for the “seriousness of his crime, his life of idleness, and the vagrancy in which he lived.”76
The discovery of the crime and the search for the Host provoked considerable alarm and an emotional outpouring of public religious expression. Upon hearing of the location of the Host, the magistrate, a priest, a state lawyer, and six soldiers went with Martínez to the place where he had hidden it. The inquisitors use the word ‘sepultar’ in reference to the burial of the Host, a term that denotes burial of the dead, indicating that Martínez had failed to give the Host a decent burial. For inquisitors, he was worse than the Jews, because at least they buried Christ when he was dead.77 There in the plaza the priest sifted through the trash where he found the majority of the monstrance, divided into pieces, and the consecrated
Host covered with glass. The discovery prompted a spontaneous, solemn procession. The priest, Gregorio Joseph Guillen, began to pray and gave thanks to God that they had found the Host. He sent for a table where he put the “Most Divine Blessed Sacrament,” the Host, and began a procession back to the convent of San Francisco. People carrying lighted candles joined the procession, accompanied by bells and music and the prayer Te Deum laudamus.78 The magistrate called for the head mason and other manual labourers to build a pyramid in the place where the host had been buried, as if it were a grave, on the top of which they placed a wooden cross.79
76 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 39. 77 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 68. 78 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 32-33. 79 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 34.
201 The magistrate initially arrested Martínez on suspicion of heresy, however, the
Tribunal tried him for sacrilege, on “general suspicion of his bad beliefs and a sacrilege so scandalous that it deserved pena de sangre,” pain of death. His case deeply divided the
Inquisitors. At the beginning of the trial one Inquisitor, Joseph Urreres, questioned whether or not they should proceed with the case. Based on medieval precedent, the clergy could not shed blood. Therefore, when ecclesiastical courts tried people for religious crimes that merited capital punishment, it was the secular authorities who executed the condemned— usually referred to as handing over to the secular arm. The Inquisition in Cartagena rarely gave the death sentence in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, Urreres suggested that the
Tribunal had no jurisdiction in the case, because the defendant “deserves pain of death”.
The other inquisitors swiftly dismissed Urreres’s concerns, stating: “He is never punctual or efficacious in this office, like he has been on this occasion.”80 Despite his initial concerns,
Urreres worked the whole trial.81 Martínez was sentenced to death for sacrilege and the
Inquisition handed him over to the secular authorities, who carried out his execution.82
For the Inquisition, Martínez’s crimes were manifold. He had doubted the real existence of Christ in the Eucharist, touched it with his unworthy hands and impure fingers, profaned the divine cult, stepped on the altar and put the Host in the dirtiest of places.83
Martínez and his actions, and especially his hands, are referred to using language of filth and dirt. The Inquisition’s racist understanding of his ‘filthiness’ was even explicitly stated once, when the Inquisitors referred to him as a “vile creature abject even in quality, colour, and endowments.”84 Furthermore, Martínez had imprisoned the Host, “and subjected it with his
80 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 17. 81 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 10. 82 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 1. 83 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 64, Image 44. 84 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 65.
202 diabolical hands, enveloping it with disgusting hat and blanket and driving it out of its temple with force.”85
A significant concern of the inquisitors in questioning Martínez was whether it had been his intention to only “take advantage of the metal of the monstrance, or if he had also stolen the sacred Host to retain it for a bad end as with others of his relaxed life[style].”86
Martínez confessed that he had been in doubt if Christ existed in the Host. He stated that:
According to his understanding it seemed that God was not there in the form when it [the Host] was covered, but [was present] when they celebrated the sacrifice of the mass, or some festival, when it was carried to the sick, and when communion was given, not when it was in this state.87
Upon confessing this, Martínez then went on to say that he had doubted the presence of
Christ in the Eucharist, but he had been in error and he begged for forgiveness.
Understandably, given the sentence that awaited him, Martínez eventually retracted this confession, claiming that he had pretended to doubt in order to delay sentencing.88 As such, the inquisitors determined that the act was not heretical because of interest in the “gold and silver, [which was] very far from retaining the Host for a superstitious or heretical act.” They based their conclusion on the fact that he had kept the Host between two pieces of glass, and therefore treated it with veneration.89
Martínez’s confessions reveal a flexibility in his approaches to the sacred. When
Inquisitors asked if Martínez had had a pact with the Devil, he stated:
That when he was in Tunja he heard of a man who had called the Devil, who gave him a lot of money. Accordingly, shortly after he arrived in Mompox he had the desire to call the Devil, being afflicted with such need. Yet, on reflection, he concluded that God could do more than the Devil. During the evening he went to plead alms but could not find anyone to give it to him. So, he then called the Devil thinking that he
85 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 67. 86 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 17. 87 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 114-115. 88 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 2. 89 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 105-6.
203 would appear, and he went to the riverbank to await him. He remembered the story of a man who had offered the Devil a certificate (cédula) with blood from his veins, offering up his soul in exchange for money, and the Devil rewarded him with plenty.90
Martínez had tried to do the same, but the Devil never came. As his hunger quickened he thought of hanging himself or throwing himself in the river, but he then remembered the
Holy Virgin and decided against it.91 After trying to embark upon Faustian-style blood magic,
Martínez pondered seeking help from God, back to the Devil, to the Virgin, all in one night.
He was open to utilizing a whole range of divine actors to access the supernatural.
In a later confession when inquisitors asked if he had a pact with the Devil, Martínez stated that twice that night he was awoken and it felt like someone was pulling at his legs, but there was no one there. After the second time he could not sleep anymore but stayed where he was because he was afraid of the two severed heads of hanged men that he saw before him at the hill of Saint Lazarus, another name for the Castle of San Felipe de Barajas.92 These heads were a reminder of the constant landscape of terror in which enslaved people lived, especially a young fugitive from slavery like Martínez. In the acusación, the Inquisitors told
Martínez that it was in fact Christ who had awoken him, stating:
Unhappy Felix (Infeliz Felix), look, merciful Jesus Christ warned you like he did with Judas, who was taken over with greed for money, like you for gold and silver. He spoke to your heart…he frightened you from sleep, and the heads of the blacks just in front of where you slept at half moon terrified you.93
Despite such lines of enquiry, the inquisitors were swift to conclude that Martínez had not believed anything of the sort and had only stolen for material reasons. They concluded that he stole the monstrance not because of anything he may have thought, but rather as a reaction to extreme hunger and physical need.
90 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 116. 91 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 116. 92 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 57. 93 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5., Image 67.
204 It is important to analyze the religious significance of this case, rather than it being simply the case of a petty thief who had finally stolen the wrong thing. Soulodre-La France argues that people of African descent had distinct “notions of incarnation and the embodiment of God or the saints in the holy statues.”94 Soulodre-La France observes that
Martínez made distinctions between which Catholic material objects he was willing to steal.
While he stole the monstrance, the host, and the jewels of Nuestra Señora del Pópulo, he ultimately chose not to also take the Virgen de Dolores’s cape because “he could not continue because it gave me shame to denude the Virgin of Mercy.”95 She writes,
…in his mind at least, the physical manifestation of the Virgin's sacredness was complete. The statue was the Virgin, and so he could not despoil her. Even while Felix had a shaky understanding of his own beliefs he firmly attributed special status to the statue of the Virgin, unable or unwilling to distinguish between her sacred spiritual symbolism and the physical symbol of that spirituality.96
She concludes “It seems odd that he could not distinguish between the statue and the Virgin, but he made a very explicit choice about the distinction between the body of Christ and bread.”97 Martínez was aware of the norms of the church and chose to steal the monstrance, but not the robe. For the inquisitors, this decision, an act of theft that called into question transubstantiation and the physical presence of Christ in the host, merited the most severe of judgments.
The gallows were usually located in the African-descended neighbourhood of
Getsemaní, an island separate from the main part of the city. The magistrate moved the gallows to the Plaza of the Inquisition, where the Tribunal held trials and imprisoned inmates. The usual placement of the city’s gallows, displaying the instruments of death in
94 Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 218. 95 Quoted in Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 223. My translation. 96 Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 223. 97 Soulodre-La France, “Slaves, Saints and Statues,” 223.
205 Getsemaní, a black space, was an exertion of white power in death as in life. The magistrate’s repositioning of the gallows both moved them to a more public space and closer to
Martínez’s cell in the secret prisons. Martínez’s execution was a spectacle of extreme violence and ritual humiliation, a severe punishment for a religious offence in the eighteenth century. To justify his execution by hanging in 1776, the inquisitors cited European legal precedence, including cases from Bordeaux, Lérida, Seville, and Naples where defendants had stolen or injured the Host and been executed, although the most recent of those cases was a case from Seville, where the defendant had cut the host up with scissors in 1713.98
Inquisitors were keen to apply unusual punishment to Martínez, by equating
Martinez’s theft of the Host with treason, including attempted regicide or “putting violent hands, or other indignities” on the king. Comparisons included to the Távora affair where members of the aristocratic Aveiro family were executed for allegedly attempting to kill the
Portuguese king Joseph I in 1758. They also cited the case of Robert Damiens, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered for attempting to stab Louis XV in 1757. Martínez was found guilty of committing a crime against God, as well as a political crime against the body politic.
They concluded, “the Devil had put this treason in his [Martínez’s] heart, as he had with
Judas.”99
Priests accompanied Martínez to the foot of the gallows and exhorted him to have a
“good death,” while the town crier made his crime public. At 1:30 on June 11, 1776, the gallows were placed in the Plaza of the Inquisition. Felix Fernando Martínez was carried from the prison to the gallows on an animal.100 The proceso de fé detailing Martínez’s trial contains no information about his actions or words on the day of his death. The executioner
98 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5, Imagen 83-6. See the case of Francisco Delgado, Imagen 84. 99 AHN, Inquisición 1623 Exp. 5, 66-7. 100 Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Santa Fe, 1051, Exp. 13, 105v.
206 then throttled him with a garrotte, not being adept enough to hang him from the gallows alive. He then hanged Martínez’s body. The crier announced no person be bold enough to remove the body from the noose on pain of death.101 On the same afternoon, his hands and feet were cut off; they were burnt on a bonfire and his body was sent to a confraternity—the document does not tell us why.102 Martínez’s head was then put on a spike upon a gate entering the city—while the crier announced that his head was not to be removed on pain of death. His mutilated body would serve as a warning for all who entered Cartagena to see, exactly like the two severed heads that had so terrified him at Saint Lazarus.103
Given the demographics of the city, it is most likely that the men that built the gallows, placed Martínez’s dead body in the noose, and cut off his head and feet—manual labour and dirty work that whites did not undertake in Cartagena de Indias—were also of
African descent. The Inquisition and the secular arm intended the execution of Martínez as the ultimate personal punishment for his crime while simultaneously terrorizing the spiritual imagination and controlling the spread of unorthodox religious acts and speech.104
The trial records of Phelipe Carrillo, Isabel La Cachete, and Felix Fernando Martínez all present us with stories of the exceptional, and in many ways, they could not be more different. Carrillo’s level of education, de la Torre’s defiant proclamations, and Martínez’s mobility, actions, and fate, mark them out from the other people of African descent that came before the Inquisition in this period. There is easily much more in common between the cases of de la Torre and Martínez due to their subversive misuse of ritual objects— disruption of processions in the former and destruction of the monstrance and the burial of
101 AGI, Santa Fe, 1051, Exp. 13, 106r. 102 AGI, Santa Fe, 1051, Exp. 13, 107v. 103 AGI, Santa Fe, 1051, Exp. 13, 108r. 104 Vincent Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society,” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 24, no. 1 (April 2003), 24-53.
207 the Host in the latter—alongside overt criticisms or doubts about the Trinity, the saints, and the sacraments. Yet Carrillo’s trial, present in the archival record due to his attempts to enforce ritual orthodoxy, simultaneously reveals the parishioners’ performance of “lost voices and dishonest songs” before their makeshift, bejewelled Afro-Catholic altar. When taken together, these three cases demonstrate the intense materiality of African diasporic religion and the importance of Catholicism within it.
Conclusion
Historians have traditionally focused on blasphemies of enslaved and black blasphemers, and not those of free and mixed people of African descent. They have understood these verbal crimes as reactions to pain or mechanisms to seek legal recourse for mistreatment, rather than appreciating the intellectual sophistication of these formulations.
The cases that I have discussed instead highlight the vibrancy and complexity of African- descended intellectual culture and popular theologies. Analysis of the words and acts contained in the trial records for blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege—separate but intimately connected offences—can be extremely fruitful for understanding African- descended religious thought and ritual material culture and how they were constituted in relationship to the regulating power of Spanish colonial institutions.
These cases suggest the importance of Catholic figures in the social milieu in which people of African descent moved and in their sacred-profane formulations. Most of the offencess were verbal alone—Juan Joseph Godoy’s renunciations, Bartholome Francisco de
Vera’s supposed comparisons between his daughters and the Virgin, and Antonio
Broncano’s suggestions about sacred sexuality—betray nothing uniquely African diasporic.
The lack of distinctiveness in the speech of eighteenth-century African-descended
208 blasphemers reflects the extent to which they were integrated into and actively contributed to the Catholic culture of the Hispanic Caribbean. The majority of the population was, after all, African-descended. By contrast, theologically, Manuel Francisco Zapata’s proclamations could have been uttered in the Iberian peninsula, but his movements around the Atlantic world as well as between world religions reflect a life and spirituality shaped by slavery, as was the case on both counts for Felix Fernando Martínez’s New Granadan travels and theft of the Host. The trials of Phelipe Carrillo and Isabel de la Torre, both of which include blasphemous speech and heretical acts, are suggestive of African diasporic interactions with
Catholic ritual objects.
The inquisitorial archive uniquely showcases the intricacies and intimacies of African diasporic intellectual, ritual, and social lives in the colonial Hispanic Caribbean. Inquisitors left a vast world of Afro-Catholic thought and practice untouched and out of the historian’s view. Evidence from these trials indicates that, alongside a vibrant African diasporic ritual materiality, Catholicism occupied a central place in the religious culture of people of African descent in the eighteenth century.
209 Chapter Five: Sex, Race, and the Atlantic Enlightenment
This chapter examines church and state attempts to enact Atlantic Enlightenment reform by reordering the families and communities of African descent peoples, and disrupting the sexual lives of interethnic couples in the 1770s and 1780s. This late eighteenth-century moment, in which the colonial state moved to suppress extra-marital relationships and exert greater control over black sexuality, was both the moralizing and the racist face of the Bourbon reforms. Legislators and prosecutors focused on the transformation of colonial behaviour, policing interracial relationships and, through policies of prosecution and resettlement of mixed black and indigenous communities, seeking to inscribe emerging ideas of racial difference onto lived realities.
Historians have increasingly recognized the importance of the eighteenth-century Spanish state’s social reforms in the Americas, although there has been little scholarly attention paid to prosecution and military conquest of African-descended communities as crucial elements of the
Bourbon reforms. Attempts to reorder interracial and black communities were not exclusive to
Spanish territories, but, rather, was part of a trans-imperial late eighteenth-century trend of violent reordering intended to suppress black and indigenous rebellion, enforce the segregation of different
‘races’, and strictly separate free and unfree peoples across the Atlantic world. Colonial governments separated and forcibly resettled African-indigenous communities, families and communities according to conceptions of race and gender.1
1 For example, the French government banned the immigration of free black people from the colonies to metropolitan France from the 1750s onwards and established a Police des Noirs and detention centers to prevent such immigration. See Sue Peabody, There are no Slaves in France: the Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The British exiled the rebellious Trelawny maroons from Jamaica, first to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone in 1975. They also organized migration schemes for free black people from Nova Scotia and many of the ‘black poor’ of London to Sierra Leone, citing inappropriate ‘climate’ as part of the reason why Nova Scotia and Britain should not be home for black people. The British also exiled the Garifuna (known in colonial language as the ‘Black Caribs’) from St. Vincent after their defeat in the ‘Carib War’ with the French in 1796 and 1797. Those whose physical features conformed to English colonial soldiers’ notion of what an indigenous person looked like were allowed to remain in St. Vincent, while those persons that they perceived to be black were first interned and then
210 Perhaps the best-known expressions of Spanish American Enlightenment concerns about miscegenation and racialization are casta paintings, or cuadros de castas. These expressed white colonial anxiety about ‘racial mixing’ and the significant mid-eighteenth-century growth of casta populations, and began to appear at the point of the emergence of European scientific theories of criollo inferiority. Casta paintings spoke to European tropes of exoticization of the Indies and the Orient and the Enlightenment drive to classify.2 These paintings attempted to create discursive order in the face of rapidly growing populations of various ethnicities; in the words of Susan Deans-Smith, to recast and reinvent the “dystopia of uncontrollable racial miscegenation and of escalating social and political conflict in Spanish American colonies” as “an orderly colonial society composed of idealized casta subjects.”3 In concert with this pictographic reordering, authorities in New Granada attempted to impose emerging hierarchies of difference through violent, physical separation and removal.
In the eighteenth century, inspired by the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and imperial rivalries with the English and French, the Spanish Bourbons endeavoured to ‘modernize’ Spain and strengthen its control over its colonies. Philip V (ruled 1700–1746) and Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–
1759) engaged in administrative and economic reform, yet historians have most closely associated the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) with the Bourbon reforms, particularly military and religious reorganization. Historiographical debate on the Bourbon reforms in the Americas has traditionally focused on creole dissatisfaction with metropole policies and the relationship between the reforms
removed to Central America. Alvin O. Thompson Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, University of West Indies Press, 2006), 83-4. 2 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1, 67, 93, 177. 3 Susan Deans-Smith, “Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth- Century Mexico and Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 14:2 (2005), 175.
211 and the wars of independence.4 Although there is extensive scholarship on the reforms’ commercial, administrative, fiscal, and military aspects, there is a small but growing body of scholarship on the moral and social dimensions of the Bourbon reforms.5 Agents of reform were both ecclesiastical and secular, and the positions of those pushing for change in behaviour varied across the empire.
While there were numerous secular trials for concubinage in eighteenth-century New
Granada, Eugenia Rodríguez-Sáenz’s work on Costa Rica indicates that, at least in that context, ecclesiastical tribunals also prosecuted such crimes.6 Similarly, Sarah Chambers finds in Arequipa that Bishop Pedro José Chaves de La Rosa oversaw a morality crusade in the city from 1788 to
1805.7 Chaves de La Rosa’s methods included the introduction of enlightened curricula in schools, nunnery reform, attention to how his parishioners dressed, and the establishment of a home for foundlings.8 Chambers argues that while the church had traditionally been alarmed at “sinful and immoral behaviour among the populace[,]…elites and civilian authorities” had not always shared these concerns: “a little drinking, gambling, and ‘illicit’ sex were enjoyed by people at all levels of society and posed no threat to public order.” It was not until post-independence political instability
4 Jacques Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980); D. A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 5 See Ann Twinam, Public lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Reuben Zahler, Ambitious rebels: Remaking Honor, law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780-1850 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013); Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution: Colombia 1795-1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Margarita Garrido, ‘Free Men of all Colors in New Granada: Identity and Obedience before Independence’, in Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950, eds. Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 165-183. 6 Eugenia Rodríguez-Sáenz, “Relaciones Ilicitas y Matrimonios Desiguales”: Bourbon Reforms and the Regulation of Sexual Mores in Eighteenth-Century Costa Rica,” in Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre, Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821, (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), 192. 7 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 125-160. 8 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 126, 128, 129, 132.
212 and the influence of liberalism that republican officials became increasingly “uneasy” with the perceived “‘excesses’ of popular culture.”9
While there was significant location variation, direction from the imperial centre remained important: royal officials made judgments and passed legislation relating to social reform that applied to imperial subjects across Spanish America. Bourbon administrators carried out a number of changes to marriage law. The most significant and controversial was the Royal Pragmatic of
Matrimony. This law, first passed in 1776 in Spain and then applied to the colonies in 1778, gave parents the right to oppose ‘unequal’ matches. Some historians have seen this legislation as an attempt to try to limit ‘miscegenation’ in Spanish America. For example, Rodríguez-Sáenz states that the Royal Pragmatic and laws like it aimed at strengthening parental influences over their children’s partners, “to avoid ‘unequal’ and interracial marriages that threatened to deteriorate the ‘quality’ and
‘class’ of families in the highest hierarchies.”10 In contrast, Steinar Saether argues that this legislation was not peculiar to Latin America. He notes that it was neither “a ban on inter-racial marriages nor a conservative and old-fashioned law in a period characterized by progressive reforms.” Rather, he states, it was an integral part of the Bourbon reforms that “aimed to make the Spanish imperial state stronger and more efficient, to modernize the state and society and to strengthen the power and influence of the Crown.”11 Indeed, the Crown crafted the legislation in response to the proposed marriage of King Charles III’s younger brother Luis Antonio de Borbón (1727-1785).12 The Crown’s universal legislation in response to a specific family problem demonstrates the extent of Charles III’s paternalistic concerns. As Staether argues, the law’s most important end was “to strengthen paternal
9 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 125. 10 Rodríguez-Sáenz, “Relaciones Ilicitas,” 187. 11 Saether, “Bourbon Absolutism,” 476. 12 According to Saether, the infante had such a reputation that a respectable wife of high standing could not be found for him, so he married a daughter of a captain from Aragón. The law declared that the union was morganatic, meaning that neither she nor his offspring were to inherit noble status. Saether, “Bourbon Absolutism,” 478.
213 authority and filial obedience, and in this manner enhance the power of the King, who, according to the Bourbon absolutist rhetoric, was the father or all fathers.” For the Americas, it was to “fortify the paternalist, hierarchical bonds on which the empire was thought to rest.” 13
This chapter is organized around two distinct evidential bodies. The first explores forty criminal trials for extramarital relations, where one of the parties was a person of African descent.
These cases fell in the final decades of the 1700s, following the visita general of royal audiencia judge
Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde to the province of Antioquia from 1785 to 1789. This rise in prosecutions does not denote a sudden change of sexual practices on the part of people of African descent but rather a new level of institutional interest. During the course of the eighteenth century, there was a shift of prosecutorial focus towards men—a reflection of reduced notions of female power and culpability.
The second section uses the diary account of Spanish officer-friar Joseph Palacios de la
Vega’s religious and military campaigns against arrochelados, inhabitants of rochelas, small, unsanctioned settlements of rural free people of colour, and maroons in the province of Cartagena de Indias from 1787-8. These campaigns were aimed at territorial conquest, resettlement, and religious conversion. Palacios de la Vega’s campaigns reflect an understudied aspect of the Bourbon reforms. Through military intervention, conquest, resettlement, and religious conversion, the reforms endeavoured to remake the moralities, spiritualities, sexual practices, and racial make-up of
New Granada’s rural African-indigenous communities.
Miscegenation, Sexual Crimes, and Atlantic Reform
The Andean province of Antioquia, far from the Ocean’s shores, was one fundamentally shaped by Atlantic slavery and Enlightenment reform of black families through prosecution. There
13 Saether, “Bourbon Absolutism,” 476.
214 are forty trials for sexual crimes involving people of African descent from the province of Antioquia from 1786 to 1811, cases generated in the context of the journey of a visitador. These sources illustrate the evolution of the state’s imposition of particular elite conceptions of racialized gender in the late eighteenth century and provide a window into the complex social and sexual relations of a colonial frontier society. They reveal a preoccupation with the frequency of interethnic relations, particularly between whites (Spaniards and creoles) and enslaved people. These records of secular trials for sexual crimes tell us primarily about Atlantic Enlightenment criminalization of interethnic relations, as well as how the state and white society conceptualized, prosecuted, and punished
African-descended sexuality outside of marriage.
This late-eighteenth-century prosecution of sexual behaviour was not typical of the Spanish
Americas throughout the colonial period. In her study of elite families in colonial Spanish America,
Twinam finds that the
…pervasive tolerance of a Spanish Catholic society in which human frailty was conceded, and in which sins could always be forgiven, seems to have eased the exigencies of social discourse. Yet there were limits of this tolerance, for unwed mothers generally remained spinsters all their lives, and they and their children suffered the civil and social barriers imposed against those who lacked honor.14
In the early eighteenth century, there were relatively fewer cases of sexual crimes compared to the latter 1700s. The most common moral or sexual offences involving people of African descent in the first half of the century was marrying twice. The Inquisition charged people who had married twice for the offences of bigamy, polygamy, or duplicí Matrímonio, although in practice these were all the same crime. Between 1700 and 1723, there are eleven cases of people of African descent tried for marrying more than once before the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias.15 There are no extant examples of such cases from this tribunal after 1723. This shift was a reflection of the Inquisition’s
14 Ann Twinam, Public Lives, 82. 15 Archivo Histórico Nacional de España (AHN), Inquisción, 5349, Exp. 2, Exp. 3, Exp. 4, Inquisción, 5349, 5350, Exp. 1 and Exp. 2.
215 dwindling interest in trying people of African descent and it marked the transition from the judicial persecution of sexual practices in ecclesiastical to secular courts.
Prosecutors frequently utilized the legal categories of concubinato and amancebamiento in the eighteenth-century secular courts. Anthony McFarlane notes that the former two words were used interchangeably. He states that in New Granada in the eighteenth century, the terms meant “a relationship between a man and a woman in which they cohabit like husband and wife outside of marriage.”16 Twinam notes that ‘illicit’ may have signified relationships with no possibility of matrimony.17 In this body of cases of sexual crimes involving people of African descent in eighteenth century Antioquia, charges of ‘illicit relations’ were also interchangeable with concubinage and occasionally amancebamiento. The term did not necessarily imply briefer liaisons. In fact, categorization was inconsistent; in some cases charges of concubinage were brought against people who did not cohabit, and in others, people who cohabited were charged for “illicit relations.”
These prosecutions created an archive of desire, sexual violence, and state power over enslaved sexuality. A focus on investigating these crimes began after the announcement of the visitador general, the visiting judge, Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde, and continued for two decades.
While visits from bishops and administrators to the provinces were commonplace throughout the colonial period, this visit was distinct. There was substantial resentment towards his visita throughout
Antioquia and, as Twinam notes, Mon y Velarde “probed, criticized, and regulated almost every
16 My translation. Anthony McFarlane, “Las Reglas Religiosas en una Sociedad Colonial: el Concubinato en La Nueva Granada, Siglo XVIII’, in Iglesia, Religión y Sociedad en la Historia Latinoamericana 1492-1945: Congreso VIII de la AHILA (Universidad Jozsef Attila de Szeged: Szeged, 1987), 95. Many thanks to Professor McFarlane for providing me a copy of this chapter, which otherwise would have been inaccessible to me. 17 Twinam, Public Lives, 83.
216 facet of Antioqueño life.”18 The scale of the prosecutions and his willingness to try even elite white men for relations with women of African descent were unprecedented.
From this body of cases, it is evident that prosecutors directed their attention towards men, at least initially. Of thirty-nine defendants, thirty-seven were male and two were female.19 Both of these women faced accusations of relations with enslaved men, and one of these women was the legal owner of the man in question. In the thirty-nine of the forty cases where the ethnicity of the defendant is known, twenty-three were white, while nine were black and seven “mulato.” Eighteen of the twenty-three African-descended women allegedly in relationships with white men were enslaved, four were free, and one had been freed. The trial records identify twelve of the women as black, eight as mulata, and three as zamba.
Relationships between white men and women of African descent, both enslaved and free, were ubiquitous in Antioquia. Baptismal records demonstrate that the majority of children born to enslaved mothers were born illegitimate. In the parish of Santa Bárbara, Santa Fe de Antioquia, in
1788 and 1789, members of the clergy baptised 403 children. Sixty-nine of those children were born to at least one enslaved parent. Only 9 of those were born legitimate, to married enslaved parents.20
In these criminal cases, there were twenty-three where the defendants were white men allegedly in relations with women of African descent. All but six of these women were enslaved. The
18 Ann Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in colonial Colombia (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1982), 91. Twinam’s study, an economic history of the province in the late period, does not examine these cases. 19 One of the defendants, Valentín de Areíza, faced trial twice. AHA, Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3A and AHA, Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3 20 Eleven children were baptised to enslaved parents, both of whom were named and appeared at the baptismal font. Seven infants were born to one enslaved parent and one free—three of these enslaved children. Thirty-nine babies were baptized as hijos to enslaved mothers, meaning that they were illegitimate and the father had not taken responsibility for his child. One male slave baptised his child, with no mention of the mother in the baptismal register. Colombia, Registros parroquiales y diocesanos, 1600-2012," index and mages, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-267-12158-26052-43?cc= 1726975&wc=M9WB-VLB:1491058080 : accessed 25 Nov 2013), Colombia, Catholic Church Records, 1600- 2012 > Colombia, Catholic Church Records, 1600-2012 > Antioquia > Santa Fé de Antioquia > Santa Bárbara > Bautismos 1787-1796, Image 1-47.
217 status of the other party is known in thirty-six cases. Of these, twenty-four were enslaved, nine were free or freed and one enslaved woman’s manumission was in process. There were seventeen cases where white people, all but two of them men, were accused of being in relations with an enslaved person. Clearly, prosecutors were particularly concerned with addressing relations between white men and women of African descent women.
In 1786, in the city of Santa Fe de Antioquia in the Colombian Andes west of the Cauca
River, it came to the attention of the visiting judge Mon y Velarde that one Don Valentín de Areíza, the septuagenarian owner of a hacienda in nearby San Jerónimo, had been cohabiting with a formerly enslaved woman named Teresa. She had previously belonged to his mother. The court’s notary described Teresa as zamba, of black and indigenous heritage according to Spanish racial terminology, and approximately 35 years old. While authorities had known of their cohabitation since 1780, it was not until 1786, after the arrival of Mon y Velarde, that the court pursued de Areíza’s prosecution. By this time the two had had three children.21 In May 1786, the court sentenced de Areíza to a fine of a
100 pesos.
Yet, it was Teresa and her children whom the court punished most severely. First, she was exiled to Maranilla, 100 miles southeast of Santa Fe de Antioquia. Her three daughters, Bárbara,
María Teresa, and Rosalía were confirmed to be free but all of her children were taken from her and handed over to unnamed persons, referred to in the record as “some people,” to be “brought up and educated.”22 During Holy Week in 1787, Areíza sent Joaquín, Teresa’s enslaved brother, to bring her back from exile. When caught and tried a second time, Teresa fled, and Areíza was sentenced to stay in the city of Santa Fe de Antioquia for four years. There is no further mention of Teresa and
21 Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (AHA), Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3A and AHA, Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3 22 AHA, Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3A, f. 28r-28v
218 one of her daughters Rosalía in the court’s records. However, her daughters Bárbara and María
Theresa were re-enslaved, as they are listed as property in an inventory of Areíza’s goods.23
There are seven cases of alleged relations between a slaveowner and an enslaved person.
While colonial society tolerated the sexual activity of enslaved people, it occurred within a field of power necessarily determined by the dynamics of racial slavery. While prosecuting white men for relations with their female slaves was in itself significant, these trials took no account of the possibility of white sexual violence or the limited autonomy of enslaved and free women of African descent. There are nine cases of white people accused of engaging in sexual relations with enslaved women where there were no apparent ties of ownership. Nevertheless, women’s enslaved status invariably shaped their relationships, whether they were voluntarily entered into or not. The danger of sexual violence, the hope of economic resources or the pursuit of freedom for themselves or family members could all factor into women’s decisions about their sexual lives.
Where prosecutors did acknowledge sexual violence, men of African descent were typically the ones accused. For Spanish state actors, only black men could rape. Even so, sexual crimes involving defendants of African descent were only addressed where there had been loss of the productive capital of a foetus. Nicolás Errón faced trial for the attempted rape of Tiburcia, an enslaved woman described as mulata. Tiburcia had been pregnant and lost the foetus as a result of the attack.24 Juan Felix Santana, alias Sauceda, was tried for incest for relations with his free mulata daughter María Francisca, and for infanticide for allegedly killing their child. In contrast, white man
José Molina only faced trial for illicit relations, and not the more serious crime of incest, for his purported affairs with his enslaved niece, Juana Londoño.25
23 AHA, Criminal Caja B36, Legajo 1780-1790, No. 3, f. 22r. 24 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96. 25 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 13, B51.
219 It is striking that there were only eight legal cases concerned with relations between people of African descent, including Tiburcia’s rape case, and only three that addressed relations between enslaved people. This suggests either that extramarital relationships between people of African descent and/or that the morality of enslaved people was not a principal concern of the local authorities. Reform, thus, centred on changing the behaviour of whites engaged in relationships with people of African descent, policing racial boundaries and regulating interracial sexual relations.
A 1786 case from the village of Sopetrán was one of the three trials that involved enslaved defendants and partners. An enslaved man, Juan María, and two enslaved women, Juana and Blasa were tried for concubinage.26 Juan, a married man, was accused of cohabiting with the two women.
All three were around forty years of age.27 According to one witness, Juan María had abandoned his wife Juana María completely.28 The accused himself stated that for the last ten years he lived apart from her in the same house while he carried on relationships with Juana and Blasa.29 Another witness stated that the relationship between the three had lasted sixteen years.30
The village of Sopetrán, where the bondspersons charged in this case lived, is close to Santa
Fé. Records of the village’s demographics are unfortunately skewed, an example of how census takers deliberately under-counted enslaved people. In the census of 1777, it was designated a pueblo de indios, and is listed as having one clergyman and 344 indigenous people.31 By the end of the eighteenth century, the village had undergone significant mestizaje. One observer noted that those
26 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16. 27 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 8r, 11r, and 13r. 28 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 4r. 29 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 9v. 30 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 3v. 31 Pinzón, Tovar y Tovar, Convocatoria al Poder del Número, 102-104.
220 indigenous people “that remain so designated are such by their origin and census-listing and not by their quality, given the mixture and ties that have occurred.”32
Juan María’s wife, Juana María, also an enslaved woman, had constantly complained of her husband’s infidelities.33 Don Pablo Rodríguez Luján was originally the owner of all four bondspersons, but he had sold Juana María three years before the trial. Although a man in the same village had purchased her, Luján had her sold away from her husband. According to Juana, Luján had sold Juana María because she had pleaded many times to be sold.34 Whatever his reasons were for selling her, in this instance at least, he was uninterested in maintaining the sacrament of marriage.35 The court questioned him as to why he had failed to prevent such “offences against
God,” namely the separation of a married couple.36 Court officials made it clear that Luján’s physical punishments of the three enslaved people—Juan María once, Blasa four times and Juana once— were insufficient.37 He had, for example, demonstrated his lack of authority by only beating Blasa for the first three of her six pregnancies.38 In his testimony he stated, he had rather reprimanded her verbally because she said that the fathers were not “of the house.”39
32 Archivo Histórico de Medellín, Consejo Vol. 69, No. 17, 1804. Cited in Twinam, Miners, Merchants and Farmers, 93. 33 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, ff. 2v, 10v, 11v, 14v, 15r, and 16v. 34 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 11v. 35 Slaveowners were supposed to promote the institution of marriage amongst their slaves, at least in theory. An early eighteenth century manual for heads of families, states, “the master errs that separates his slave from the use of marriage.” Antonio Arbol, La Familia Regulada, con la Doctrina de la Sagrada Escritura y Santos Padres de la Iglesia Católica, para todos los que regularmente componen una Casa Seglar, a fin de que cada uno en su estado, y en su Grado sirva a Dios nuestro señor con toda Perfección y Salve su Alma (Madrid: por Thomas Rodríguez Frias, 1725) Biblioteca del Colegio de Misiones de Popayán, Archivo Central del Cauca (ACC), No. 0110 Clasificación: V/ 2196 EM, 514. 36 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 9v. 37 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 5r, 15r, and 17r. 38 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 14r, 17r. The enslaved women were asked if he had punished the women each time they were pregnant, and Luján was asked why not. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 14r, 17r. 39 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 17r.
221 When Juan was asked about his ‘illicit friendships’, he initially only mentioned a relationship with an indigenous woman. After having heard witness testimonies, he claimed that he had only been in the relationship with Juana and Blasa for three years, and that they had separated two years ago.40 He dated their separation from the moment when they no longer slept in the same room; he now slept in the kitchen, and the women in the house.41 The length of these relationships is not entirely clear, due to inconsistencies in the testimonies of the accused. It eventually transpired that
Juan and Blasa had three children, aged fifteen, twelve, and seven, and the defendant had two children with Juana, aged twelve and seven. Based on the children’s ages and other statements of the slaves, it appears that Juan María was in a relationship with Blasa from around 1771 to 1779 and with Juana from around 1773 to 1782, so for six years concurrently.42
There is no indication as to the nature of the relationship between Juana and Blasa— whether they were in a romantic relationship, if they were friends, or if there was conflict between them. They lived together in very close quarters. They raised children of the same age in the same house. Twice they were pregnant simultaneously by the same man. Why they both chose Juan María as a lover, and for a considerable time a shared one, is unclear. There were, however, clearly tensions between Juana and Juan’s wife Juana María. Juana stated that she had quarrelled with Juana María once, adding that she had left this relationship because la negra, presumably Juana María, loved him a
40 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 8v. 41 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 9r. 42 Juan admitted to only having one child with either of the women, a son with Blasa, who was twelve years old. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 9v. Juana testified that she had been in “bad friendship” with Juan for seven years. She stated this relationship had ended four years ago and that they had two children. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 11v. Even after Juana had testified, he only admitted to having two children with Juana and two with Blasa. Juana did not state the age of her children, but later Juan said that his children with her were twelve and seven years old. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 15r. Blasa testified that they had three children, who were fifteen, twelve and seven years of age. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 13v. While Blasa does not state when she separated from him, she said that later she had a child with another man; that child was six when she testified in 1786. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 13v.
222 lot. The use of querer, to want or to love, is open to interpretation.43 This ambiguity in Juana’s words—the intimation of love just out of reach—is a metaphor for the fact that the intimate worlds of the enslaved often elude historical analysis.
Figure 16: Juana’s Testimony
AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 11v.
The investigation into the relationship between Juan and Juana and Blasa prompted the unravelling of a complex web of sexual relations between slaves and free people of various ethnicities. The accused were compelled to list their ‘illicit friendships’ before the court. These partners were then called to give their testimony, and in turn, name their sexual partners. The majority of those interrogated only mentioned relationships that had resulted in children, probably not listing all of their sexual partners. Juan named the two enslaved women and an indigenous woman from the village. Juana had a previous relationship with a man who had since passed away, with whom she had two adult children.44 Blasa stated that Juan was the first man that “she had known.” She went on to have three more relationships, with men several years her junior. The
43 “…se apartó de esta amistad porque la negra la quería mucho.”AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 11v. The use of the second ‘la’ here is most likely a scribal error, where it should say ‘lo’. 44 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 12r.
223 revelation of Blasa’s partners led to further investigations into the sexual activities of inhabitants of the village. She had a two-year relationship with a twenty-four year old single mestizo man, Ventura
Rivera, with whom she had a six-year-old daughter.45 Blasa then had a two-year relationship with
Florentin Tascón, a thirty-year-old married mestizo man, with whom she had a son who was one at the time of the trial.46 This wide web of partners and lovers were also interrogated.
Although these testimonies principally describe what happened, they offer some explicit examples of enslaved attitudes towards sex and desire. Another enslaved former lover of Blasa was also interrogated. Josef was single, described as mulato, and twenty-five years old. He named numerous lovers. The first was Rita, a bondswoman with a different owner, with whom he had had a son.47 Josef boasted of his own sexual proclivity, perhaps surprisingly given the judicial context in which he spoke. He stated that he was with Rita “carnally whenever he had the occasion” and that she was a doncella, a maiden or virgin, when he first “met” with her.48 Josef then named Blasa.
Demonstrating pride in his own virility, he stated that he “only had to see her two times” which resulted in a son.49 Josef also had a yearlong relationship with Bartola, an enslaved woman whose owner was the mayor of Sopetrán, and with another enslaved women named Rita who lived in the same house as him, also for a year. Although she was married, according to Josef, their relations did
45 Rivera also had a daughter with a widowed indigenous woman, Francisca Guingue. Rivera claimed that he had not promised to marry Guingue, but she had denounced him before the cura doctrinero of the town. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 24v. 46 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 13v. Blasa and Tascón did not agree on the length of their relationship. She stated that it was for two years and ended a year beforehand, while he thought that it was shorter and ended more than a year ago. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 18r. Tascón simultaneously had a two-year relationship with a single woman called Isabel Ceballos, which had ended nine months previously. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 19r. Isabel was later interrogated. She was a single sixteen-year-old mestiza. As well as Tascón, she had also had a four-month relationship with another man. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 22r. 47 He had been with Rita since August 1785 until she gave birth to a son in May of 1786, after which their relationship ended. AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 19v, and 20r. 48 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 20r. 49 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 20v.
224 not bother her husband. Josef also had an eight-month relationship with another married slave woman from the house in which he lived, Margarita.50
For these ‘bad friendships’, Mon y Velarde handed down harsh sentences to the defendants and Josef: Juan María was sentenced to two years labour on public works, Josef to six months of forced labour, and Blasa and Juana received two years in prison.51 The documentation does not indicate what was to happen to Blasa and Juana’s young children. Their lovers largely escaped unpunished. Of the thirteen named in this case, eight were enslaved and seven were free people, described as indigenous or mestizo. Of those named that were not enslaved, only the married Tascón was ordered to pay costs, which he could not pay. Luján was also ordered to pay costs and to buy back Juana María, or, if not possible, to sell Juan to his wife’s owner.52 The sentencing betrays the visitador’s primary concerns with punishing black sexuality, with no interest in what happened to their enslaved children, and with few consequences for free people who were not black.
This case provides a window onto a complicated landscape of human relationships, where slavery necessarily played a formative role in those dynamics. Juana María continued to complain bitterly of her husband’s constant infidelities, although they were long separated and he had lived with two other women for years. The reasons for Juana María’s sale are unclear, and perhaps Luján sought to keep the peace amongst the enslaved community in his household, yet her husband’s prosecution was a result of her protests. While Juana alleged that Juana María had asked to be sold, irrespective of the veracity of the claim, she seems to have felt deeply the violence of her sale and the severance of her ties to her husband. Juan María, Juana, and Blasa were all beaten and imprisoned for having sex and having children with the person of their choosing. It is likely that such dynamics were common, but the case was unusual in such detail.
50 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 20v-21r. 51 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, ff. 32v-33r. 52 AHA, Criminal Caja B85, Legajo 1770-1790, No. 16, f. 27v.
225 While the former case demonstrates the freedom that enslaved men and women sometimes were able to exercise in choosing their sexual partners, it stands in stark contrast to another in the same body of cases. In March 1791, Nicolás Errón, a free man, whom the notary describes as mulato, was arrested in Santa Fe de Antioquia for attempting to rape a pregnant, enslaved woman. Tiburcia, the alleged victim, lost the foetus, which Errón then buried.53
Across the colonial Americas, sexual violence against enslaved women was ubiquitous, yet its prosecution was extremely rare. That the case of Tiburcia was reported and ever came to trial was not actually due to the fact that she was the victim of sexual violence. Rather, it was due to the loss of her foetus—the potential reproductive capital of any enslaved woman—as well as the low status and ethnicity of her attacker. While the trial is atypical, Tiburcia’s experiences nevertheless speak to those of thousands of other enslaved women, shedding light on the apathy and hostility directed towards those who experienced sexual violence even in spaces where prosecution was possible.
The case of Tiburcia stands out among others previously analysed in the historiography of rape, slavery, and prosecution in the Americas. Despite what we know about the frequency of sexual violence—particularly of enslaved women by their male enslavers—prosecution was rare.54 Legal action was more likely in situations where male slaves were tried for sexual violence against white women.55 Certainly Spanish American law afforded enslaved people avenues of complaint and potential redress for mistreatment.56 In late eighteenth-century New Granada, there appeared
53 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 2v. 54 Melton Alonza McLaurin, Celia, a Slave (Athens: University of Georgia, 1991) and Trevor Burnard, Mastery, tyranny, and desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 55 Melanie Newton, ‘The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823–1834’ Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 47, Issue 03, (July 2005): 583-610; Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the early South (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 56 This point was most notably argued by Frank Tannenbaum in the seminal Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1946).
226 hundreds of cases of enslaved men and women denouncing mistreatment and either requesting manumission or a change of owner.57 Nevertheless, in practice, the legal system rarely offered recourse to justice for enslaved women like Tiburcia who were victims of sexual violence. There is only one other example of a man tried for sexual abuse of enslaved women in the regions under analysis—an inquisition trial of a Catholic priest from Panama, convicted of solicitation for sexually assaulting bondswomen after confession.58
Tiburcia and her assailant lived in the community of Santa Fe de Antioquia. While mining carried out by slave labour had become a vital part of Antioquia’s economy, within the city itself enslaved people like her would have laboured principally in domestic settings.59 Trial records provide little additional information about her life. We know her age (around twenty-five years old), the name of her owner (Gervasia Sierra), and the probability that her owner’s household included other female bondspersons.60 The defender argued that Tiburcia had been the property of her owner from a young age and was prone to theft and running away.61 Two omissions are striking. The judges neglected to record Tiburcia’s marital status, a standard question in legal proceedings. Nor did they inquire about the identity of the father of Tiburcia’s unborn child—likely reflecting the fact that what ultimately mattered to the court was Gervasia Sierra’s ownership of mother and offspring.
57 These representatives were either known as the Padre (Father) or Procurador General (Attorney) of slaves or minors. 58 In 1721, the tribunal brought the Panama-born priest Don Ignacio Joseph de Aybar y Eslava to trial for ordering enslaved women to strip before beating them as a penitential act after confession. Rather than trying him for the more serious crime of heresy (based on his distortion of the sacrament of penance), the Inquisition tried Aybar y Eslava for solicitation and imposed a lenient punishment. The Inquisition forbade him from hearing confession forever, prohibited him from giving mass for six months, and exiled him ten leagues from the Villa de Los Santos for five months. He was also to confess and recite the penitential psalms every Sunday for three years. Aybar y Eslava remained a priest. AHN, Inquisición, 5439, Exp. 5, f. ff. 128r- 137r. 59 McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence, 78-9. 60 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f.3; 5r. One of the witnesses Antonio, an enslaved man, referred to her as as una negrita of Doña Gervasia, suggesting that the latter possessed more than one female slave. 61 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 18v; 24r. The records indicate that Tiburcia stole an earring from Gervasia Sierra when she was a muchacha, a young girl. They also mention her tendency to wander through el monte, only returning at the time of her choosing.
227 By contrast, the case documents provide far more information about Nicolás Errón, the man on trial. We know Errón was over thirty years of age, free, married with children, and worked as a labourer and a rancher. His profession and the fact that he could not afford to pay for his own bail or for his own lawyer indicate his low social status.62 In the entry for Sierra’s initial accusation, the notary writes that Errón was of the “quality Mulatto, and also vecino” of Antioquia—the latter term, in its early modern context, implying that municipal authorities determined that Errón lived in legal compliance with the social and religious norms of the local community.63 This was further emphasized by the padre general de menores (the public defender representing Errón), who stated that the defendant’s prior conduct “[had] been good, as [was] public and noted.”64 Given his public respectability, Gervasia Sierra had trusted Errón to accompany Tiburcia to work in the countryside on at least three previous occasions.65
The narrative of Errón’s attack is recorded as follows. According to Tiburcia, in mid-January
1791, Gervasia Sierra sent her at dawn in the company of Nicolas Errón to run an errand on the other side of the River Cauca. At the time, Tiburcia was five months pregnant.66 When it began to drizzle, Errón suggested taking cover beneath a large tree on the edge of the path. While under the tree, “he grabbed her from behind by the shoulders, threw her back, and slammed her into the roots of the tree.” He then proceeded to turn her over, placing his knee on her stomach “in order to have
62 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 4r-v; 27r; 37r. Errón’s brothers Manuel and Gregorio posted bail for him once, and later Manuel and a friend Juan Antonio Monte posted bail for him a second time. 63 Vecino translates literally as neighbour, but in the early modern Spanish world this was a legal category determined by municipal authority. According to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, vecinos were the “citizens” of the early modern Spanish world. They were “those who had demonstrated through actions and religious compliance (Catholicism; homeownership; marrying into local families, living in town longer than 10 years) that they wanted to belong in a community, usually a town or a city.” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America,” in American Literary History, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2005, 433. 64 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 25v. 65 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 8r. 66 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 2v; 3r-3v.
228 access to her, and in doing so he aborted her child in the struggle.” Tiburcia then attempted to catch the foetus and realized that it was moving. Errón took it away, searched for a stick, dug a hole, and buried it. When the magistrate asked if the foetus was alive when buried, Tiburcia stated that it already appeared dead.67 After these acts, Errón cleaned up Tiburcia’s haemorrhaging by pressing her with his handkerchief. Asked if Errón had succeeded in “having any dishonest act with her,”
Tiburcia responded that “he had no such thing; after he saw the child, he left her be.”
Tiburcia initially remained silent about the incident. According to Tiburcia, she said nothing out of “fear that it would be thought she had done damage [to the foetus].”68 Tiburcia’s decision to conceal the attack is understandable: she feared retribution for the termination of the foetus, unsurprising given the frequency of abortion and infanticide amongst enslaved women across the
Americas.69 However, Tiburcia’s silence actually put her in further danger of sexual violence. At his own admission, Errón had accompanied her twice to fetch corn from the other side of the River
Cauca since the time of the alleged attack.70 It was not until the final weeks of March that Gervasia
Sierra noticed that Tiburcia was no longer with child. Tiburcia eventually confessed what had happened, and four days later Sierra reported the crime to the magistrate, who immediately arrested
Errón.71
The legal documents do not explicitly name the charges against Errón. Still, as noted above, they clearly indicate that Tiburcia’s owner and the court were primarily concerned with the loss of
67 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 2v. 68 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 3r. 69 For works on infanticide in New Granada, see Marcela Echeverri, “‘Enraged to the limit of despair:’ Infanticide and Slave Judicial Strategies in Barbacoas, 1788-98,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 30 Issue 3, Sep (2009): 403-426, and Soulodre La France, Renée, “‘Por el Amor!’: Child-Killing in Colonial Nueva Granada,”Slavery and Abolition, 23, no. 1 (April 2002): 87-100. For works on abortion and infanticide in slave societies in the Americas see Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c .1776–1834,” History Volume 91(Issue 302), April 2006, 244-249, Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Kingston and Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Heinemann Caribbean: 1990), 120-150. 70 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 8r. 71 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 1r.
229 the foetus, not the attempted rape. When Tiburcia’s enslaver, Gervasia Sierra, initially reported the crime, she referred to it as “an attempt to inflict violence against [Tiburcia] with a lascivious act, making her abort [a live foetus].”72 Likewise, the magistrate emphasized that Errón’s attempt to rape
Tiburcia had above all caused her to lose the foetus.73 The formal charges made by the fiscal, the public prosecutor, further highlighted that the “horrendous crime” had been “making [Tiburcia] abort an animated foetus”—the fact that this happened during an attempt to rape her seemed almost incidental.74 Legal proceedings were conducted against Errón, but despite initial outrage over the attack, the criminal court failed to resolve the matter for over a year, and there is no evidence that officials even enforced the sentence.
Prosecuting Errón proved to be difficult. The fiscal ordered Tiburcia and the court notary— for there was no protomédico in Antioquia—to retrieve the foetus from the crime scene as evidence, but because of an exceptionally long summer, by then the ground was too hard to dig it up.75 Errón was released from the royal jail on bail within two and half months of his arrest after one of the witnesses, an enslaved man named Antonio, failed to reappear in court.76 Andrés Pardo y Ocalora, the padre general de menores who defended Errón in court, countered the charges by mounting a character assassination of Tiburcia. He dismissed the accusations as “manifest slander” on her part and even called upon a local priest to verify her “bad conduct.”77 Pardo declared Tiburcia untrustworthy on account of her previous attempts at escape and her “fragile sex.” Moreover, he
72 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 1r. 73 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 9r. 74 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 15r. 75 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 9r; 13r; 16r. The fiscal commented that “the present summer was so long and vigorous, that everyone knows that the earth is solidified and hardened in such a way that it resists even the blows of the farm labourers that cultivate with the plough.” He also suggested that—in the four months that had passed—an animal could have unburied the body and eaten it, or Errón could have returned to the scene of the crime to remove the evidence. 76 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 27r, 29r. 77 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 25r.
230 argued that her “unholy status as a slave” deprived her of any possibility of good faith in regards to her allegations.78
The resolution of the case was protracted. The local magistrate suspended the proceedings by October 1791 and more than a year passed before he deferred to a prosecutor of the Audiencia in
Santa Fe de Bogotá in December 1792. Numerous witnesses contradicted Errón’s initially claim during interrogation that he had not accompanied Tiburcia to the countryside.79 The court interpreted this perjury as evidence of his guilt.80 The audiencia determined that the punishment for
“abortion of an animated foetus” should be death or excommunication. Yet, since the abortion was an involuntary accident “resulting from a lascivious and grave attempt,” the audiencia prosecutor recommended that the magistrate in Antioquia impose an alternative punishment such as two years of hard labour on public works and the payment of all court fees.81 In the end, the local magistrate found Errón guilty in January 1793, but only sentenced him to a year in prison without hard labor –
Errón was also to pay court fees.82 Errón soon convinced the magistrate that the court had denied him the opportunity to mount a proper appeal. Before the end of the month, he was released on bail from the Royal Jail. The case does not reappear in the city’s judicial records. After spending just 101 days in prison, it is possible that Errón faced no further consequences for his attack on Tiburcia.83
While colonial society often tolerated enslaved sexuality, Antioquia was a space governed by the dynamics of racial slavery. Enslaved people who transgressed the boundaries of Catholic
Christian morality were usually not prosecuted. For those who were, there were harsh sentences and harrowing personal consequences, as evidenced by the experience of Teresa, Juan María, Juana,
78 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 18r. 79 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 4r. 80 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 10r. 81 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 33v, 34r. 82 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 34v. 83 AHA, Negros y Esclavos, Tomo 37, B96, f. 37v.
231 Blasa, Josef, and their children. While the colonial state expressed intermittent interest in controlling enslaved sexuality, these efforts were haphazard and largely ineffectual until the reforming efforts at the close of the eighteenth century. Enslaved people in eighteenth-century Antioquia selected their sexual and emotional partners, and in spite their bondage, often did so quite freely. Most of these cases offer a mere snapshot of typical familial structures of enslaved and free people of African descent.
By contrast, the example of Tiburcia illustrates how reproduction in the world of Atlantic slavery came with a particular set of meanings about the child as commodity and potential labour.
Despite the ubiquity of sexual violence in the world of Atlantic slavery, the trial of a free man for sexual violence against an enslaved woman is atypical. Tiburcia’s case offers a unique look at judicial apathy in the face of a horrific crime, primarily because of the identity of the victim. If Tiburcia had not been pregnant and had not lost the foetus, we would likely never have heard her name.
Tiburcia’s case is instructive of how the state regulated and exercised institutional oversight over all aspects of black life, but that its agents were only concerned with productivity. There was little or no redress for enslaved women who experienced sexual violence.
The Politics of Conversion: Conquest of Black-Indigenous Communities in El Monte
Connected to the province of Antioquia was an aquatic and forested interior, deep inland in the province of Cartagena de Indias. This was a remote yet frequently traversed territory, with a large but scattered free population of African and indigenous descent. This region also experienced a dramatic reordering according to race in the 1780s, yet carried out by a missionary-conquistador rather than through the judicial persecution discussed in the previous section. In 1787, the
Archbishop-Viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora ordered the Spanish officer-friar Joseph Palacios de la Vega and one hundred soldiers to subjugate and resettle the inhabitants of this inland region in
232 Cartagena province. Palacios de la Vega wrote a diary account of the conquest in 1787-1788, which was later sent to the Archbishop-Viceroy.84 While his campaign occurred alongside other campaigns of resettlement, the Franciscan’s mission was unique in its dual secular and religious aims and character. Histories have analyzed de le Vega’s account of his mission principally for its political and social content, yet it also provides us with a wealth of information on the religious experiences of people of African descent in a frequently traversed yet frontier region.85 It includes considerable ethnographic information and thus reveals the kinds of freedom that people had carved out in the monte. People of African descent had constructed their own local economies, communities, and religions, away from the incursion of the colonial church and state.
Territorial reform was one of the key aspects of the Bourbon reforms. Spatial reorganization was most evident in the creation of the new viceroyalties of New Granada in 1717, and Rio de la
Plata in 1776. Yet, perhaps the most keenly felt reforms—in terms of human experience—were the attempts at territorial conquest in Caribbean New Granada. Few historians have understood this campaign as part of the Bourbon reforms. Aline Helg’s Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia,
1770-1835 (2004) includes an in-depth discussion of the various campaigns of conquest and their social ramifications, yet she does not characterize them as part of the broader Bourbon reforming efforts.86 Jorge Conde Calderón’s Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos en la Provincia de Cartagena, 1740-1815
(1999) offers a broad synthesis of what he calls the Bourbon settlement policy, through the subjection of the region’s residents into communities that the Spanish authorities recognized as
84 José Palacios de la Vega, ‘Diario de viaje: Entre los indios y negros de la provincia de Cartagena en el nuevo Reino de Granada’, Óscar Medina Pérez et al. (eds.) Lemir 14 (2010), 800. 85 For example, Jorge Conde Calderón, “La Administración de Justicia en las Sociedades Rurales del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1739-1803,” Historia Critica No. 49, Bogotá, January-April 2013, 268: 35-54; Aline Helg Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); María Dolores González, “La Política de Población y Pacificación Indígena en las Poblaciones de Santa Marta y Cartagena - Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1750-1800,” Boletín Americanista (Barcelona) 28 (1978): 90-118. 86 Aline Helg Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 31-41.
233 parishes. His work gives a long-term analysis of these policies, which, according to him, reached their greatest intensity from 1762 to 1787.87 He does not consider Palacios de la Vega’s campaigns due to their “accentuated missionary character.”88 However, Palacios de la Vega’s position as both a military officer and a priest speaks to continuity, rather than a dichotomy, between the secular and religious aims of Bourbon reformism. Furthermore, Archbishop-Viceroy Antonio Caballero y
Góngora ordered the campaigns that Palacios de la Vega carried out, blurring any distinction between policies of religious and territorial conquest. Caballero y Góngora had a reputation for having a firm hand in maintaining political control, even before he gained formal political power as
Viceroy. He is widely credited with having put down the comunero revolt of 1781, an uprising that was, in part, a response to Bourbon fiscal reform.89
By 1779, 65% of the population of the province of Cartagena were libres de todos colores, free people of all colours.90 Free people of African descent lived in colonial cities, palenques (maroon communities), and rochelas, small rural settlements consisting of a few dwellings, away from the authority of the Spanish colonial state. A significant number of the population of rural Caribbean
New Granada were arrochelados and descended from indigenous communities, maroons, or African slaves working in placer mining in the seventeenth-century gold boom, or they had come to the region as military and naval deserters or runaway slaves. Some were poor Spaniards.91 While the port city of Cartagena de Indias dominated the region during the colonial period, currents emanating
87 Jorge Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos en la Provincia de Cartagena, 1740-1815 (Barranquilla: Fondo de Publicaciones de la Universidad del Atlántico, 1999), xi, 56. 88 Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos, 70. 89 Antonio Caballero y Góngora, Edicto para Manifestar al Publico el Indulto General, concedido por nuestro Catholico Monarca el Señor Don Carlos III. A todos los Comprehendidos en las Revoluciones Acaecídas en el año pasado de Mil Setecientos Ochenta y Uno (Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1782), 5. 90 There were 76 696 free men and women of todos colores in the census of the province in 1779. This compares to 394 clergymen and women (0.3%), 11 982 whites (10%), 20 509 indios (17.3%), and 9103 enslaved persons (7.7%). Archivo General de la Nación-Colombia (AGN), Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11. 91 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 33, Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos, xii.
234 from both the Caribbean and Pacific regions shaped the interior of the province. The indigenous inhabitants of the pueblo de indios San Cipriano had arrived in the region having fled from “internal indigenous struggle” in Chocó.92 In the eighteenth century, mestizaje was responsible for demographic growth in the province of Cartagena de Indias, after a century of population decline.
Conde Calderón concludes that this rise was due to the expansion of subsistence level family production and the colonization of empty rural spaces. With the Bourbon succession, the Spanish
Crown attempted to reduce and convert this mixed population that had long lived outside of the república de españoles and the control of the city Cartagena.93
Palacios de la Vega’s campaign was the fourth of the Viceroyalty’s campaigns in the latter half of eighteenth century, which attempted to resettle these mixed free communities into Christian
Catholic villages. From 1744 to 1765, José Fernando de Mier y Guerra conducted a campaign against arrochelados and the indigenous Chimila nation east of the Magdalena River. In 1745,
Francisco Pérez de Vargas resettled free people living amongst pueblos de indios in Tierradentro, between Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Barranca.94 The most well-known campaigns were those of
Antonio de la Torre y Miranda, between 1774 and 1778. Torre y Miranda is widely credited with having founded 43 towns, augmented 22, and resettled 41 333 people.95 According to Conde
Calderón, settlements already existed in the vast majority of towns that Torre y Miranda claimed to have founded, and only one or two of these were entirely new.96
92 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 34. 93 Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos, 61, xii. 94 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 31-32. 95 Antonio de la Torre Miranda, Noticia Individual de las Poblaciones nuevamente Fundadas en la Provincia de Cartagena, la mas principal del Nuevo Reino de Granada, de la Montañas que se descubrieron, Caminos que se han abierto de los Canales, Ciénagas y Ríos que se han hecho navegables, con expresión de la ventajas que han resultado a la propagación del Evangelio, al Comercio y al Estado (Cartagena de Indias: D. Luis de Luque y Leyva, 1794), n.p. 96 Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos, 70. Today, the inhabitants of the towns de la Torre established continue to celebrate the day of their reduction as the day of foundation.
235 Torre y Miranda wrote to the King requesting payment for the campaigns, for which he received a relatively small monthly wage and which left him 6000 pesos in debt. He was highly critical of the arrochelados; he wrote that they danced with naked excess and much drunkenness.97
Mothers with a number of children never took them back to the church where they were baptized and lived in “pernicious debauchery.” For Torre y Miranda, the offenses of the arrochelados stemmed from their immorality and their failure to use land productively. They were “living in the greatest abandonment, voluntarily deprived from the inestimable aid of Society and the many advancements that their lands could give them for their greater comfort.”98 The solution was to put them to work as agricultural wage labourers and resettle them in Christian villages. Katherine Bonil argues that de la Torre—using adjectives such as “dispersión,” “abandono,” “distancia,” “libertinaje,” “ociosidad,” and “desidia” to discuss their freedom—assigned “free people of African descent a very specific role in the enlightened pursuit of the public happiness as the main source of a labor force.”99
It is difficult to estimate the number of inhabitants in the region the campaigns targeted, despite the existence of thorough census data for the period. For the Villa de Ayapel, the jurisdiction on which much of Palacios de la Vegas’s campaign centred, the padrón of the province of Cartagena de Indias for 1779 only lists five settlements. There were the Villa de Ayapel itself, the cities of Simití and Tablada, the town of Morales, and the mines of Guamaco. According to the padrón, the whole region had a population of 4004 people, made up of five clergymen, 380 whites, 335 indios, 2402 libres de todos colores, and 507 slaves.100 Given the disparate and hidden nature of the communities, this estimate for the number of free people of colour is most likely very low. Based on the evidence from
97 De la Torre, Noticia Individual, 10. 98 De la Torre, Noticia Individual, 10. 99 Katherine Bonil Gómez, “The Political Culture of Free People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century New Granada,” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2017), 73-4. 100 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población, Caja 12, Carpeta 1, f. 11.
236 non-quantitative documentation, such as Palacios de la Vega’s text among others, in smaller rochelas and pueblos there were probably several thousand free people of all colours and indigenous people, in addition to those listed in the census.
Palacios de la Vega’s diary account of the campaign, from June 18, 1787, to February 12,
1788, demonstrates the social and religious realities of the mixed inhabitants of the region and the attempts of the church and state to reorder them. The text provides a glimpse of the relatively free multi-ethnic space of the frequently traversed yet dense frontier, that its would-be conqueror described as el monte. For Palacios de la Vega, el monte was a lost place, far from the civilizing effects of Hispanic pueblos. Yet, for its inhabitants, and those who aspired to escape to it, el monte had connotations of a refuge from slavery and from the confines of the economic, cultural, and spiritual regime of the Spanish colonial state in the circum-Caribbean. Palacios de la Vega’s campaign of resettlement was against the indigenous villages and rochelas in the region of the San Jorge, Cauca and
Nechi Rivers, south of San Benito Abad. This geographic space was peopled by culturally and geographically mobile women and men of African descent, who created a sustainable and relatively free way of life. They farmed small plots of land for self-sustenance and sale, and engaged in the sale of contraband tobacco and aguardiente to those working in the mines of the Nechí River and northern Antioquia.101
Joseph Palacios de la Vega began his account presenting himself as the cura reductor, the reducing priest, of the recently founded indigenous village of San Cipriano.102 For Spaniards, the town or the city after the Iberian model was the ideal community. According to Jeremy Mumford, the introduction of reducciones in the colonial Andes from 1579 onward aimed to reorder Andean
101 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 33. 102 According to one report, these indigenous runaways had begun to arrive in San Cipriano from around the 1750s. Faustion Lorenzo Gómez to Governor, ‘los indios de San Cipriano de Ayapel’ 20 November 1782 in Manuel Ezequiel Corrales (ed.), Efemérides y Anales del Estado de Bolívar Tomo I, (Casa Editorial de J. J. Pérez: Bogotá, 1889), 456.
237 society, but still preserved aspects of indigenous organization and leadership. The goals of achieving
“cultural survival and cultural change,” were not contradictory, but rather designed to reconcile “an ideology of civilizing Andeans, and an ethnographic tradition that warned officials to be careful about how they did so.”103 However, missionary priests rarely paid such close attention to the study or preservation of indigenous culture in the formation of reducciones in the Caribbean as they did in the ‘great civilizations’ of Mexico and Peru.104 Rather, the friar outlines his mission as one of punishment and education.105 In New Granada, pueblos de indios were inside resguardos, communal indigenous lands. There were twenty-one resguardos in the province of Cartagena de Indias.106 While, in theory, territorial reorganization was designed to protect indigenous people, the unrest and mobility of other ethnic groups following the campaigns, combined with the lack of land titles and meditation, actually resulted in invasions and the reduction in size of indigenous lands.107
Palacios de la Vega used a “scorched earth policy” to forcibly resettle approximately two thousand people during this campaign. He and his men separated men from women and children based on what ethnicity he perceived them to be. With the threat of forced labour in the fortifications of Cartagena or the Darien, he forced them to burn their crops and dwellings.108 The officer-friar’s particular methods of evangelization and conversion were profoundly informed by his
103 Jeremy Mumford, Vertical Empire: the General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 3-4, quotation 4. 104 See the extensive study of indigenous culture and history in works such as José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina and London, 2002) and Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex; A General History of the Things of New Spain (University of Utah Press: Salt Lake City, 1978) 105 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 800. 106 The resguardos were Baranoa, Colosó, Chilloa, Chinú-Pinchorroy, Galapa-Paluato, Guazo, Jegua, Malambo, Mahates, Menchiquejo, Morro, Pansegua, Piojó, Sampués, San Andrés Pinchorroy, Sincé, Talaigua, Toluviejo, Tubará, Usiacurí, and Yatí. Conde Calderón, Espacio, Sociedad y Conflictos, 39. 107 See Martha Herrera, ‘Ordenamiento Espacial de los Pueblos de Indios: Dominación y Resistencia en la Sociedad Colonial’ Revista Fronteras, No 2. Vol 2, (Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica: Bogotá, 1998), 93-128; Margarita González, El Resguardo en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Dirección de Divulgación Cultural, 1970); Carmen L. Bohórquez, El Resguardo den la Nueva Granada: ¿Proteccionismo o Despojo? (Editorial Nueva América: Bogotá, 1997) 108 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 34-5.
238 concepts of behaviour according to gender and the emerging hierarchies of race, and sought to remake territorial and political realities. Through the destruction of dwellings and crops, and forced resettlement, along with the sacraments of marriage and baptism, the campaigns used terror to bring about demographic change and religious and cultural conversion for those black-indigenous communities affected.
Palacios de la Vega’s account focuses on differences and conflict between indigenous people and those of African descent. Palacios de la Vega exploited potential animosities between indigenous and black people to maintain order, and even created what Helg terms two competing networks of spies.109 The narrative begins with stereotypical descriptions of black male sexual violence and simultaneous portrayals of indigenous brutality and naïveté. In San Cipriano, two black men supposedly raped and murdered an indigenous woman. In response to the murder, the indigenous community rose up against free black people in the village. Her kinfolk enacted violent retribution by murdering both men, one of whom was hanged by his genitals. The officer-friar persuaded an indigenous man to inform on the perpetrators, the family of the murdered woman, by instructing him to listen to hypnotic sounds of a watch that “tells the truth” while plying him with alcohol.110
Palacio de la Vegas’ belief in indigenous naïveté ties into the long history of Spanish conceptualizations of indigenous peoples as either innocent or savage.111
109 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 35. 110 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 804. 111 Spaniards first encountered indigenous Americans in the Caribbean and these first meetings profoundly shaped the consequent category of ‘Indian.’ The idea of the ‘savage’ has existed since early meetings with ‘Caribs’, as European colonizers called natives of the southeastern islands of the region, whom they deemed more barbarous than the supposedly peaceful, innocent northern Arawaks or Taino. Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, (eds.) Wild Majesty: encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the present day, an anthology (Oxford, 1992), 3. The myth of innocence was spread through the dissemination of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542). He wrote this work, in part, to end the encomienda system that was leading to the rapid decline of the indigenous population on the island of Hispaniola. Las Casas characterizes the indigenous people of the northern Caribbean as the “simplest people in the world – unassuming, long- suffering, unassertive, and submissive – they are without malice or guile, and are utterly faithful and obedient.” Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London Penguin Books, 1992), 9.
239 For Palacios de la Vega, black-indigenous populations had their origins in the abduction of indigenous women. On September 6, 1787, the Franciscan disembarked with twenty armed men to inspect four “new and well-constructed dwellings” on the shores of the Caño de Barro, a body of water between the Ciénaga de Ayapel and Cauca River. At five the next morning, the officer-friar ordered his men to destroy the meadow, where the dwellers grew food for sustenance and sale, uproot the tobacco plants, and burn the dwellings.112 As the men began their destruction, Palacios de la Vega heard a dog bark half a league away, and with four soldiers, he followed the noise, breaking through a thicket to reach it, where he encountered a woman. He proceeded to question the woman about what she was doing. She informed him that she was with five other women and their children and that they were the women of the zambos who inhabited the dwellings—the huts that the officer- friar and his men were in the process of destroying. When asked if they were married, she responded in the negative and told the following story of her origin and arrival to el monte. One day, when washing clothes in the Boca de Sejebe, a man, whom she called indio Savalete, told her to embark in his boat, saying that her mother had sent for her so that she would arrive home quickly. Although
Savalete is called “indio,” in Palacios de la Vega’s interpretation he inexplicably becomes one of the zambos. She embarked, but rather than take her to her house, he took her to the middle of the swamp where he “deflowered her.” Because she was crying the man threatened to throw her in the water. She then quieted herself because she did not want to die by his hands.
Two days later, he moved her and the other “stolen women.” She stated that she had given birth to two children, whom the men had thrown in the river. The other women also had children, none of whom had been baptized. When asked which man was “hers,” the woman responded that she did not have one, “that all the men sinned with her and the other women.” The officer-friar, embracing the woman, told her “she could marry whom she wanted, and the others too.” He sent
112 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 816-8.
240 her and two soldiers to search for the other women, who did not respond to her calls. Eventually the five women and their twelve children all emerged naked from el monte. Palacios de la Vega wrote that he tore up cloth to clothe them and conceal their “shame.” The women then stated that the zambos had carried them there to look after them and tied them up with their clothes, garments that symbolized the women’s former civilization.113 For the officer-friar, clothes, like houses, possessed the power to convert and redeem.
Palacios de la Vega understood the existence of mixed-race communities, especially zambos, as inevitably a product of sexual violence. He readily accepted the women’s claim that they were forced to live with the zambos, although it seems likely that the women made these claims because they feared that de la Vega and his soldiers would commit violence against them and separate them from their children. He revealed that the women did not come when called, only when brought by his armed men, who had just destroyed all the arrochelados’ crops. The threat of violence was a particular consideration for women in this frontier region. In the monte, a space where safety was in numbers, in male protection, and in accessibility to food, the women had few avenues of escape.
Given their dependent and swiftly changing position, the women might well have crafted their narratives in response to the newest male power in the wilderness.
Palacios de la Vega left no room for the possibility that these women might have chosen this life, nor did he give any details about who they were. They and their children were presented without names, personalities, desires or ethnicity. In the entire text, the only instances where women are ascribed ethnicity are in his discussion of indigenous women. Ethnicity is gendered throughout the text; those of African descent are always men. There are no references to a negra or a zamba in any of the entries. The enemy in the monte is male, and usually black. The officer-friar focused his redemptive efforts on women and children. They were easier prisoners to seize than armed men,
113 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 817-8.
241 who knew the terrain better than their would-be conquerors. Moreover, Palacios de la Vega understood women and children as more suitable potential candidates for moral remaking and
Catholic Christian conversion. Despite the women’s descriptions of kidnap and years of sexual violence, the aid and solace he offered in this moment was marriage, the ‘legitimate’ containment of their sexuality. These efforts, in turn, reproduced a male-dominated hinterland, albeit one modelled on Catholic Christian notions of civility, while many former arrocheladas were then settled in villages with male companions from less remote regions.114
Colonial authorities in the circum-Caribbean had levelled accusations of abduction of women against maroon and Afro-indigenous communities since early in the colonial period.115
Abduction of females, including enslaved women, was used to explain their presence in palenques, in spite of the obvious attractions of flight and grand marronage.116 The idea that sexual violence was the root of the existence of mixed communities in Latin America has not been sufficiently challenged and echoes colonial narratives themselves. As Karen Viera Powers, one of the few to have challenged the predominant view, states, indigenous women, “[w]hether enticed participants or raped victims, […] remain ‘sexually conquered’” within the dominant historiography of Latin
America, “the only difference being the presence or absence of violence.”117
Similar myths about black male rape of indigenous women circulated in other Caribbean sites. For example, the Garifuna of the Lesser Antilles, who were disparagingly called the ‘Black
114 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 36. 115 In the early seventeenth century, Yanga’s maroons in Mexico were accused of kidnapping indigenous men and women, and even Spaniards. Jane Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean,” in Jane Landers and Barry Robinson (eds.) Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 2006), 123. 116 Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973), 109. 117 Karen Vieira Powers, “Conquering Discourses of ‘Sexual Conquest’: Of Women, Language, and Mestizaje,” Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2002, 7.
242 Caribs’ in colonial documents, were said to be descendants of escaped or shipwrecked slaves who had kidnapped indigenous women to increase their numbers.118 Following victory in the Second
Carib War (1795-7), the British employed a scorched earth policy and removed 4600 Garifuna to
Baliceaux. Those whose physical features conformed to English colonial soldiers’ notion of what an indigenous person looked like were allowed to remain, while those persons whom they perceived to be black were forcibly removed and relocated thousands of miles away. Devastated by disease, over two thousand Garifuna were shipped to the island of Roatán, over 1700 miles away in the Bay of
Honduras. In the final decades of the 1700s, colonial authorities in the Caribbean went far farther than legislating against the presence of and removing individual non-indigenous people from pueblos de indios. In this way, Palacios de la Vega’s campaign ties into wider processes of Atlantic reform that aimed to make theories of race into lived social realities.
As the campaign continued, Palacios de la Vega’s narrative emphasized differences between indigenous and African-descended people far less, and he no longer presented women as only victims. This transition reflects the continuation of his journey and the incongruity between the realities of the mixed world in el monte and colonial hierarchies of race. He came upon more ranches, whose owner, Antonio Lopez, was described in de la Vega’s text as between mulato and indio; “a very tall man with bristly hair and the face of the devil.”119 Lopez later mounted a rebellion against
Palacios de la Vega, with “all classes of Indians but the majority, mulatos, Zambos and negros,” including women and children, who had apparently been told that the latter was a criminal dressed as a priest
118 William Young, An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s; with the Charaib treaty of 1779 and other original documents. Compiled from the papers of the late Sir William Young, Bart. London, 1795.
243 who had come to rob them. The men escaped from the officer-friar and the soldiers, but the women and children were arrested.120
Palacios de la Vega condemned the immorality of the women who had chosen to defend such a way of life. Near the end of the text, he discussed the case of a young man named Agustín de
Herrera who had come to the mission fleeing from his father. His mother and siblings had taken refuge deeper in the monte, where “there were many ranches of entertaining women with many sons from different fathers.” Palacios de la Vega journeyed further in, to the monte adentro—the interior bush, the deeper wilderness, or wilderness within—where he discovered fourteen men, twenty-two women and seventeen children, none of whom were baptized. “Those women” were taken away on a boat with their children, while the male prisoners were taken away in another.121 Palacios de la
Vega and his soldiers continued to remove men of African descent from their families because their chosen way of life did not conform to Spanish Christian concepts and because of their freedom from colonial racial and social hierarchies.
While this campaign was part of a wider set of military conquests, it stands out for the religious profession of its leader and its religious tone. The territorial and ethnic reorganization was paralleled with an attempted spiritual reordering through the introduction of sacramental orthodoxy.
Yet, Palacios de la Vegas’s conversionary methods entered a world where unauthorized, reinvented sacramental practices flourished. He used the sacrament of confession as the main mode of religious conversion. In Catholicism, the sacrament of baptism is used to usher new believers into the faith; for Palacios de la Vega, whether during the fullness of life or close to death, penance was the most prevalent sacrament in his conversionary repertoire. The missionary-conquistador wrote of a conversation with a man he describes as a zambo, who had brought his dying female companion to
120 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 831-2. 121 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 856.
244 the settlement to confess. Palacios de la Vega asked the zambo whom he had brought her to confess with, to which he replied,
My Father, with whomever; if your mercy was not here, like my Father, then anyone is good. As we do not have a Father, when we are close to dying we confess like Christians among ourselves. Given that I was with this woman for a long time, and because of this I haven’t confessed her, for this I bring her to confess as a Christian with anyone.122
This entry contrasts with the brutal treatment women received at the hands of zambos that Palacios de la Vega describes throughout the text. This zambo spoke with affection, regard, and concern for his long-term companion, and exhibited profound concern that she should receive a good death. His version of a good death did not necessarily require that a priest perform extreme unction, but rather that her sins be offered up through any intercessor.
These confessions could have been versions of the Catholic sacrament on the one hand, or a non-Christian form of confession on the other. It appears, then, that in remote spaces people of diverse ethnicities came together and forged their own local reimaginations of Christianity. In these communities, in the absence of the priest, laymen and women spoke to and communicated directly with their deity or deities and eased the passing of the dying. Palacios de la Vega gave the woman confession and anointed her with oils. He discounted the unauthorized confessions practiced within her community by stating that this was the first confession that the woman had received. Palacios de la Vega’s text warned of the dangers of the lack of priests in the depths of el monte.
According to Palacios de la Vega, in these communities anyone could take the role of priest and mediate between the penitent and the divine. He wrote that having heard the zambo’s story, he could not calm himsel so he questioned elders about the practice in the settlement.
They responded that it was true, that all the time that they had inhabited those montes these were the confessions that they did when they were dying, and that there had been several horrendous passages with women, such as that the dying women expired in the carnal act
122 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 845.
245 with the confessors. They had caught some for this, informed the ecclesiastical and secular judges, who had not paid attention.123
Given the decision to report these events to local judges, acts of sexual violence against dying women was not a form of confession but viewed by the community as a crime. Yet Palacios de la
Vega’s reference to the men committing such acts as “the confessors” suggests that this was regular or ritualized occurrence. Certainly the arrochelados were engaging in their own form of confession, yet
Palacios de la Vega’s report of sex with dying women was practised as a form of confession seems like a distortion, or reminiscent of false claims made about ‘aberrant’ black and indigenous sexuality by European conquerors in other colonial contexts. Across the Atlantic world, colonial military men and chroniclers leveled such accusations against African and indigenous communities to justify conquest, exploitation and resettlement. 124
Palacios de la Vega reported further violent penitential performances in Majagual close to the River Cauca, where he gave a sermon on immorality. After the sermon, a man fell at the door of the church pleading for the missionary-conquistador’s forgiveness: “There was so much confusion that all night there was no quiet; all abandoned their homes, walking like madmen in the streets, screaming and crying and bowed on their knees, asking one another for forgiveness.” He claimed that people came in droves to the church and seized him, “dislocated his arm and shouted, asking to be pardoned.” The priest reported being beaten on the floor for an hour and a half until rescued and that other Christians were beaten by “these unrepentants.”125 Palacios de la Vega saw them as unremorseful, violating Catholic sacraments by engaging in violence towards the priest, seeking forgiveness from one another, and displaying excessive religious exhilaration and weeping. The
123 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 845. “Que habian sucedido varios pasajes horrosos con mujeres, como era los confesores acabar a las moribundas en acto carnal.” 124 Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1-10, 20-24. 125 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 853.
246 actions of the inhabitants of Majagual could be interpreted as a powerful rejection of Christian teachings and lamentation in response to them, or an unfettered expression of approval for Palacios de la Vega’s message. This incident could demonstrate both the community’s fervent response to the Catholic Christian message and the resilience of their own religious and cultural practices.
Following this public and violent display of religious fervour, de la Vega engaged members of the community in an orderly Catholic procession of penitence—where the penitents followed the priests and their images through the streets. After the procession, the officer-friar returned to the pulpit, “telling of the rebellious and the wicked, such was the confusion and weeping of these creatures that it was necessary to stop for over quarter of an hour.” He preached until 10:15 at night.126
In Majagual, Palacios de la Vega and other clergymen carried out mass confessions. From
December 1 to 13, 1787, he and two other priests confessed arrochelados from the environs of
Majagual, night and day. Apparently over two thousand received confession. In the sixteenth century, for which accounts of missionary-conquistadors are far more common, mass baptisms carried out by Franciscan friars were the norm, yet the practice was discouraged after the initial conquest period.127 Throughout the text, Palacios de la Vega is concerned with adult confession and child baptism. In giving the adults the sacrament of confession, he assumed that they had already received religious instruction and baptism, although many may not have. The speed of these confessions sheds light on the superficiality of his evangelization efforts. He noted that recent
Spanish settlers had not witnessed anything similar to these religious outpourings occurring in the region in the twelve years previous. He then sent families “that did not wish to make home there to places of their choosing, so that they could make home and shelter, realizing that the ecclesiastic and
126 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 854. 127 See Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989)
247 secular judges would not permit them to return to their rochelas.”128 Palacios de la Vega attempted, rather unconvincingly, to construct conversion and resettlement as more-or-less voluntary, although clearly the former arrochelados only accepted their relocation because they were told they would not be permitted to go back to their homes and former lives.
According to Helg the campaigns resulted in thousands of small landholders, arrochelados, palenqueros, and indigenous people losing their lands, which were transferred to the possession of a few hacendados. Untitled lands left vacant became the property of the Crown and were sold to the highest bidders. Male heads of households were granted small plots and many people became dependent on work on the great haciendas.129 Helg claims that the new concentration of power in the hands of hacendados diminished the availability of communal land and disenfranchised arrochelados, increasing tension between indigenous communities and free people of African descent. While
Palacios de la Vega intended to separate people according to race, for many communities the campaigns actually had the reverse effect, “produc[ing] intense demographic movement and mixing that further blurred racial and ethnic boundaries.”130
Palacios de la Vega believed that the victims of his campaign were “living increasingly according to the sound of the church bell.”131 For those who were resettled, the process of conversion removed them from the freedoms of their former way of living. Yet their
Christianization did not go beyond swift confession. Where Palacios de la Vega did carry out conversion through the sacrament of confession, he received an ambivalent response, with supposed neophytes demonstrating more fidelity to their effusive ritual practices than enthusiasm for his teachings, as evidenced by the mixed reactions to his sermons in Majagual. Rather than offering
128 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 857. 129 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 34. 130 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 855. 131 Palacios de la Vega, “Diario de Viaje,” 855.
248 spiritual conversion through meaningful instruction, Palacios de la Vega and his men principally brought the black-indigenous inhabitants of the region violent separation from family and lands.
While the officer-friar set out to destroy the cultural and spiritual practices he encountered, his text nevertheless communicates autonomous and emotive local forms of communal Afro-Neogranadino religiosity. As a campaign of religious conversion, it ultimately failed. Thousands of arrochelados and palenqueros were resettled at the end of the eighteenth century, yet many more retreated further into the wilderness of New Granada that the colonial church and state could not control.132
Conclusion
Tolerance of extramarital sexual activity in colonial Spanish America was relatively common.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, there was a high degree of acquiescence from owners and colonial society towards sexual activity of people of African descent, whether it was among enslaved or free people across the socio-legal spectrum.133 It was only with Atlantic reform that state actors made serious and concerted efforts to control the sexual lives of people of African descent, both on haciendas in Antioquia, and deep into the forests of Cartagena province.
As often was the case in New Granada, colonial attempts to regulate and reorder black lives were uneven, but when colonial authorities made such efforts the results were uncompromisingly violent. Concerns over impious and potentially subversive behavior of the lower classes, according to Margarita Garrido, “motivated the Bourbon social and urban project.”134 Reform was also manifested in prosecution of sexual relationships that transcended emerging Atlantic concepts of race in Antioquia and, most violently, through conquest of mixed communities. These trials in
132 Helg, Liberty and Equality, 40-41. 133 The ineffectiveness Spanish law and the sistema de castas in preventing the creation of an ethnically mixed world of urban commoners is well represented in R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) 134 Garrido, “Free Men of all Colors,” 179.
249 Antioquia and the reconstitution of black-indigenous communities in the eighteenth-century according to the racist and gendered visions of the colonial religious and secular authorities are some of the less remembered aspects of Atlantic reform. Through these violent separations of families, legal persecution and military attacks on African-descended communities, state actors attempted to reform black families and claim their land for the Crown. They expropriated land in order to put it to ‘good use’ and separated people according to increasingly fixed biological theories of race. These reforming efforts in the late eighteenth century were the apex and manifestation of colonial fears of zambaje and attempted to inscribe colonial hierarchies of race and gender onto lived social realities in
New Granada.
Conclusion
This dissertation has demonstrated the intimate connections between African-descended communities and cultures in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada and in the interior region of
Antioquia that connects them. In tracing similarities and circulations between these regions—spaces too often portrayed as both separate and divergent in terms of progress and development—this dissertation showed how black mobility and culture have long created New Granadan and
Colombian politics, culture, religion, and space. Situating African diasporic epistemologies and objects in their institutional and social contexts, “The Wilderness Within” is a history of religion, slavery, and black freedom that were constituted within, and also shaped gender, materiality, and the natural environment. This research has focused on black life as central to and formative of New
Granadan society and culture.
The first chapter, “Geographies of Slavery and Freedom,” connects the Black Atlantic and
Black Pacific through water in New Granada, this chapter foregrounded the major arguments of the dissertation—how the Middle Passage, slavery and freedom, and black religions extended far beyond the province’s two coasts—they were actually worlds making each other. Chapter Two, “Rites of
250 Enslavement,” contrasts the availability of the sacraments and the extent of conversion between different sites—urban vs. rural and Caribbean vs. Pacific. Baptism for the enslaved was more than the symbolic washing away of the sinful self for a white Christian; it was a moment of cultural and historical erasure through cleansing of their pre-Middle Passage past and even their own names. The chapter found that, while baptism of the enslaved played a central role in the rationale for the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, there was inadequate provision for the religious education of bondspersons. The third chapter, “Worlds of Healing,” drew on the records of
Inquisition and secular trials in order to explore the exchange of ritual objects and methodologies in
New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific regions, demonstrating the intersection of these worlds through material exchange and circulation as a central part of the production and creation of
African-descended healing knowledges in New Granada. “Caribbean Catholicisms,” the fourth chapter, examined the Catholicism of people of African descent in the Hispanic Caribbean as revealed in blasphemy, propositions, and sacrilege trials before the Inquisition of Cartagena de
Indias, offering a glimpse into the trajectories, intellectuality, and defiance of the defendants. The final chapter, “Sex, Race, and the Atlantic Enlightenment” demonstrated that Enlightenment ideas about racial difference were violently put into practice in New Granada in the 1770s and 1780s, making an important contribution through its demonstration of a late-eighteenth-century move to police interracial families and attempt to make real Enlightenment theories of racial difference. The struggle over land, race, and productivity between mixed rural communities on the one hand, and the state and military on the other hand, has played a central role in modern Colombian history.
This campaign, and others like it, is crucial for understanding the role of land, dispossession, and race in conflict in the history of modern Colombia. Who gets to occupy, own, and profit from land, and the forceful removal of black people from their territories has a longer history than the country of Colombia itself. In the 1770s, thousands of free black people inhabited the Caribbean
251 area of New Granada, or colonial Colombia, due to the protection and possibilities offered by its montes (forests) and waterways. During Antonio de la Torre’s campaigns of resettlement from 1774 and 1778, he reportedly resettled 41,333 people, which he recorded in a book published in 1794.135
The language De la Torre used to describe his conquests of free black people anticipates contemporary rhetoric about their descendants and their use of land: “Mothers with a number of children never took them back to the church where they were baptized and lived in “pernicious debauchery.” They were “living in the greatest abandonment, voluntarily deprived from the inestimable aid of Society and the many advancements that their lands could give them for their greater comfort.”136 These sentiments mirror those of the present-day Colombian elite, who, with the state’s help, leverage their philanthropic work for land grabs and purchase territory for a fraction of the cost after limpieza—the violent cleaning up of territory by killing and disappearing inhabitants and insurgents.
One of the principal afterlives of slavery in Colombia is that black people themselves are disproportionately victims of violence and displacement. The country has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world, 7.2 million.137 On October 2, 2016, Colombians voted in a referendum on the peace accords between the government and FARC (Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia) guerrillas, which aimed to end the longest civil war in the Americas. While the referendum was rejected in the plebiscite, the margin of difference was just 54 000 votes. The outcome of the vote revealed stark divisions in terms of race; Afro-Colombian and indigenous
135 Antonio de la Torre Miranda, Noticia individual de las poblaciones nuevamente fundadas en la Provincia de Cartagena, la mas principal del Nuevo Reino de Granada, de la Montañas que se descubrieron, Caminos que se han abierto de los Canales, Ciénagas y Ríos que se han hecho navegables, con expresión de la ventajas que han resultado a la propagación del Evangelio, al Comercio y al Estado (D. Luis de Luque y Leyva: Cartagena de Indias, 1794), n.p. 136 De la Torre, Noticia individual, 10. 137 “Colombia Has World’s Largest Internally Displaced Population,” Telesur, May 23, 2017, https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-Has-Worlds-Largest-Internally-Displaced-Population- 20170523-0027.html.
252 people, the main victims of the war, voted overwhelmingly in favour. The Afro-Colombian town of
Bojayá in Chocó, for example, which was the site of one of the worst massacres of the war, voted
96% in favour of peace.138
138 Daniel Gómez, “Bojayá, the Town we Left Without a Voice or a Vote,” Dejusticia, January 13, 2017, https://www.dejusticia.org/en/column/bojaya-the-town-we-left-without-voice-and-vote/; “Colombia Referendum: Voters Reject Farc Peace Deal,” BBC News, October 3, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37537252
253 Figure 17: Map of Referendum on the 2016 on the Peace Deal with the FARC by Department
Holly K. Sonneland, “Weekly Chart: Colombia's No Vote by the Numbers,” Americas Society Council of the Americas, October 5, 2016, https://www.as-coa.org/articles/weekly-chart-colombias-no-vote- numbers.
This map shows how different departments voted. With the exception of the department of paramilitary-dominated Antioquia, the departments that voted “yes” correspond with the areas that I have analysed in the eighteenth century. These areas historically have had the highest African- descended populations—spaces that I conceptualize as Afro-New Granada during the colonial period. Many of the same regions that have endured the most intense violence of drugs, war, and revolution were focal sites of racialized colonial violence—of slavery, war, and revolution.
The relationship between mobility, material culture, religion and the natural environment continue to inform black life in Colombia in powerful ways. The rivers and waterways frame black activism, in Caribbean locales such as Playa Blanca and the Islas de Rosario, as well as in the Pacific
Coast. Political mobilization in the Pacific has long operated through interconnections along waterways, which contributed to the political movement that culminated in the 1991 Constitution that recognized black people as a distinct ethnic group and granted collective land titles with a right
254 to consulta previa, previous consultation, before construction on traditionally black lands. While constitutional conceptions of afrodescendientes were originally framed with the Pacific in mind, after
Ley 70, these rights have been claimed in the Caribbean as well. For example, the Constitutional
Court in 2016 recognised the rights of afrodescendientes of Playa Blanca for consulta previa before any development of the beach.139
The Proceso de Comunidades Negras de Colombia (Black Communities’ Process), a national afrodescendiente organization formed of over a hundred local groups, was created in 1993 after Ley 70 was passed. Through the PCN, communities have organized effectively to defend rights to collective land titles (territorios ancestrales) and to protect the ecosystems of this region, thus challenging neoliberal forms of economic expansion. Following decades of war, people of African descent have used processes of transitional justice to gain reparations, using their own cultural frameworks to define the crimes committed against them and for which they are seeking redress. For example, extrajudicial killings and disappearances have prevented communities from performing black burial rites. The return of bodies has been central in Afro-Colombian claims for reparations and justice.140
Colombia recently voted on June 17, 2018 in an election that revealed the deep cleavages in society. Regional divisions were even more pronounced in the presidential race than during the
Referendum—between the inexperienced, ultra-right, uribista Ivan Duque and the former guerilla
Gustavo Petro. Characterized as Castro-Chavista by his opposition, Petro’s platform included reducing the power of the elite, climate change prevention, a move away from dependence on extractive economic models (particularly oil), and reducing disparities in wealth in a country that
139 “Corte deja en Firme Fallo que Protege a los Afrodescendientes de Playa Blanca,” El Espectador, November 23, 2016, https://www.elheraldo.co/bolivar/ordenan-consulta-previa-antes-del-cierre-de-playa-blanca- 506060. 140 Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé and Claudio Barcelos, Luiz Afro-Reparaciones: Memorias De La Esclavitud y Justicia Reparativa Para Negros, Afrocolombianos y Raizales, (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional De Colombia, 2007), 434.
255 “has the worst inequality in Latin America behind only Haiti.”141 The right and the elite continue to politically exclude and plunder African-descended communities and lands in the Black Atlantic and
Black Pacific, and vast swathes of indigenous territories too), the very peoples, forests, and rivers that have been central to New Granada’s history and are Colombia’s future. Petro’s campaign was ultimately unsuccessful but the fact that a leftist politician made it to the final round of the presidential elections and received over 8 million votes potentially signifies real change in Colombian politics.
The recirculations and creations of black culture in New Granada was one of transformation— transformations of the geographies, materials, and epistemologies that are central to the history of the colony. These transformations occurred through such experiences as the journeys of slave caravans across the caminos reales; the rerouting of rivers and streams to harness the water for use in placer gold mining, and the construction of the Caribbean harbours and fortresses. Beyond the experiences permitted within the parameters of enslavement, these transformations also occurred in the construction of well-defended palenques deep in the woods, the labours of arrochelados who cultivated sugar cane to produce aguardiente, which they sold on the market for their own profit, and medical practitioners gathering herbs and medicinal plants in the forest. Just as the enslaved “Congo” man Joseph, who had learned how to apply poisons from an “Arará” man previously resident in
Quito, stated in his 1748 poisoning case from Cartagena de Indias, black knowledge travelled vast distances in New Granada traversing tough terrain and defying the imagined limits of area studies and academic theories of African diasporic culture. Black bodies, healing and ritual objects, and their knowledge travelled across and around the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and flowed through the rivers of New Granada. People of African descent recirculated and constructed
141 Sibylla Brodzinsky, “Who’s Afraid of Gustavo Petro?,” Americas Quarterly, accessed June 14, 2018, http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/whos-afraid-gustavo-petro
256 religion in the interstices, in the streets, along rivers, and between oceans. While Joseph and Thomas had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and their knowledge a continent, Sebastian’s testimony most potently captures the intersection of the ritual with the political, for he sought “a remedy to break in my owner to more freely enjoy my freedom, without causing [him] any harm.”142
142 AGN, Negros y Esclavos, Bolívar, 1, D.5, f. 2r.
257 Appendix 1: Legal Proceedings against African and African-Descended Ritual and Healing Practitioners in Ecclesiastical and Secular Courts in New Granada, 1697-1789
From fondo Inquisición, Archivo Histórico de la Nación-Spain (AHN), Relaciones de Causas de Fe and Procesos de Fe; fondo Criminal, Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (AHAP); fondo Cabildo Archivo Histórico Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón, Buga, (AHAB); Archivo Histórico de La Arquidiocesis de Popayán (AHAP); fondos Negros y Esclavos and Criminal from Archivo General de la Nación-Colombia (AGN-Colombia)
Category of Case Docume Name(s) of Described Place of Location Sentence Status Crime/ no. nt date accused ethnicity Birth of events Description
Black man; Exile for a year 1 1697 Juan Alomera Enslaved casta Lisbon Coro Sorcery Mozambique
Bernardo de Black; de Casta Cartagen Died in prison. 2 1699 Enslaved Guinea Sorcery Saavedra Arará a
2 years exile; 2 years forced 1699- Antonio Mundei Black man; 3 Enslaved Guinea Caracas Sorcery labour (Castle del Morro, 1700 de Casta Arara Arará Havana)
Bernardo Black; de 100 lashes Black man: Portobel 4 1708 Macaya (Alias) Enslaved Casta Congo Sorcery Luango o de Rojas (Luango)
1708- Torture, not carried out. 5 María Enslaved Mulata Unknown Sopetrán Bewitching 1713
Francisco Propositions and Result never arrived. 6 1721 Free Zambo Unknown Panama Rodríguez sorcery Unknown.
Black man; Kingdom of Must not use games or 7 1721 Christoval Enslaved Coro Sorcery Luango Luango cures, spiritual penances.
258 Category of Case Docume Name(s) of Described Place of Location Sentence Status Crime/ no. nt date accused ethnicity Birth of events Description
Manuel de la Rio del Mistaken identity; found 8 1723 Free Zambo Mompox Sorcery Cruz Oro innocent.
Felipa, use of 9 1724 Felipa Free Mulata Unknown Buga herbs and curses N/A (No evidence of trial)
Sebastián, Cartagen All All black men; Attempted 10 1746 Thomas, and Congo a de Death by hanging. enslaved Congo poisoning Joseph Indias
Bozal and Unknown Citara, Use of herbs; 11 1748 Marta Enslaved Mulata in Africa Chocó bewitching Absolved.
Francisca Cortés, Love magic; Negra and 12 1748 Alias ‘The Free Unknown Anserma bathed with N/A (No evidence of trial) Mulata Cockroach’ herbs.
Unknown, Mines of Manuel, Alias 13 1775 Enslaved Black man likely San Wizardry N/A (No evidence of trial) Aja Africa Antonio
Cartagen Juana María Possession of 14 1788 Enslaved Unknown Unknown a de Returned to her owners. Rodriguez poison Indias ‘An auto de fe, or act of faith, was, in the words of Henry Charles Lea, ‘an elaborate public solemnity, carefully devised to inspire awe for the mysterious authority of the Inquisition, and to impress the population with a wholesome abhorrence of heresy, by representing in so far as it could the tremendous drama of the Day of Judgement.’ Far more common were the far more affordable autos particulares, which were usually held in churches. A sentence read con meritos, with merits, was lengthy and listed the crimes of the convict. Abjure de Leví, light abjuration, signified that if the convict failed to carry out their sentence or committed further crimes they would submit for correction, while Abjure de Vehementi, was the abjuration for strong suspicion of heresy, for which failure was considered a relapse and execution. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York and London: Macmillan Company, 1906), Book VII, 541, 568-571, Book IV, pp. 338-9.
259 Appendix 2: African and African-Descended People tried by the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias for Blasphemy and Propositions in 1697-1724
From fondo Inquisición, Archivo Histórico de la Nación-Spain (AHN), Relaciones de Causas de Fe
No. Doc. Name of Age Status Described Place of Location of Category of Sentence Date Accused Ethnicity Birth events Crime/ Description 1 1697 Antonio 35 Free Mulato Panama Panama City Blasphemy Auto de fe, con meritos, abjure de Broncano City Vehementí, exiled for 2 years, spiritual penances. 2 1713 Manuel 34 Enslaved Black Mequines Panama Propositions Exiled from Panama City for 10 Francisco years, spiritual penances. Zapata 3 1715 Isabel María 50 Freed Black Puerto de Puerto de la Blasphemy and Spiritual penances, exiled for 4 de la Torre la Guayra Guayra heretical acts years from bishopric, spiritual (La Cachete) penances. 4 1718 Phelipe 45 Free Mulato Tolú Tolú Heretical Spiritual penances and 25 pesos. Carrillo blasphemy and heretical acts 5 1721 Juan Joseph N/ Free Mulato Cartagena Cartagena Heretical No sentence. Godoy A blasphemy 6 1721 Francisco 22 Free Zambo N/A Panama Propositions and The result never arrived. Rodríguez sorcery
7 1723 Juan 26 Enslaved Mulato Cartagena Río del Sinu Blasphemy Spiritual penances. Maranjo 8 1724 Bartholome 60 Free Mulato Barinas Guanaguana Heretical Absolved. Francisco de re blasphemy Vera
260 Appendix 3: All African-descended defendants before the Holy Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias from 1695 to 1777
From fondo Inquisición, Archivo Histórico de la Nación-Spain (AHN), Relaciones de Causas de Fe and e Procesos de Fe
No Date Name Age Occupati Status Married Spanish Place of Residence Crime Sentence on / Single racializing Birth accused of M/S category 1 1697 Juan 40 Mule Enslaved N/A Black; casta Lisbon Coro Sorcery Exile for a year Alomera driver Mozambique
2 1697 Antonio 35 Barber Free N/A Mulato Panama Panama Blasphemy Exiled for 2 years. Broncano City City 3 1699 Bernardo 54 Wheelbar Enslaved N/A Black; de Casta Guinea Cartagena Sorcery Died in prison. de row Arará Saavedra driver 4 1699 Antonio 44 Cowboy Enslaved M Black - casta Guinea Caracas Sorcery 2 years exile; 2 years - Mundei Arará forced labour (Castle 1700 del Morro, Havana) 5 1704 María 30 Washerw Free M Cuarterona Pueblo Cartagena Twice 4 year exile; serve in Romero oman Nuevo married the Hospital of San Madrigales Juan de Dios (alias) Ana María Romero 6 1708 Bernardo 34 Labourer Enslaved S Black; de Casta Congo Portobelo Sorcery 100 lashes Macaya (in Congo (Luango) (Alias) de owner’s Rojas lands) 7 1715 Juan 36 Tailor Free M Cuarterón de Cartagen Cascajal Twice 200 lashes; forced Lorenzo Mulato a married labour (King’s de Ochoa galleys) for 5 years
261 No Date Name Age Occupati Status Married Spanish Place of Residence Crime Sentence on / Single racializing Birth accused of M/S category 8 1715 Nicolás 40 Carpenter Free M Mulatto Villa de Medellín Twice 200 lashes; forced Casiano Aburra married labour (King’s Garzón galleys) for 5 years 9 1716 Manuel 34 Bricklayer Enslaved M Black Mequines Panama Propositio Exiled from Panama Francisco ns City for 10 years Zapata 10 1716 Cristina 40 N/A Free M Zamba Mompox San Martín Twice To serve as a recluse María de Loba married in the Hospital of Cayetana San Juan de Dios for de Torres 4 years serving the poor sick; 4 year exile 11 1717 Isabel 50 Seamstres Freed S Black Puerto de Puerto de Blasphemy Exiled for 4 years María de s la Guayra la Guayra and la Torre heretical (alias la acts cachete) 12 1718 Juan de 20 Barber Enslaved S Mulato Natural Cartagena Spontaneo To be instructed in Rada de la us “the Mysteries of Indias de Our Holy Faith” Portugal
13 1718 Phelipe 45 Clergyma Free Priest Mulato Cartagen Tolú Blasphemy Fine and spiritual Carillo n a and penances. heretical acts 14 1719 Nicholas 29 N/A Enslaved M Black Curacao Cartagena Rebaptize 100 lashes; 3 years Joseph d forced labour (Castle Baptista of Bocachia)**
262 No Date Name Age Occupati Status Married Spanish Place of Residence Crime Sentence on / Single racializing Birth accused of M/S category 15 1721 Juan N/A N/A Free N/A Mulato Cartagen Cartagena Heretical Freed from gaol. Joseph a blasphemy Godoy 16 1721 Francisco 22 N/A Free M Zambo N/A Panama Propositio Result never arrived. Rodríguez ns and Unknown. sorcery 17 1721 Christoval 45 Farmwor Enslaved M Described as Guinea Coro Sorcery Must not use games, ker Casta Luango, cures, or spiritual but also states penances. “that he did not know fixedly of which casta of Blacks his parents had been” 18 1722 Salvador 25 Carpenter Free M Zambo (also Capacho Maracaibo Twice 200 lashes; 3 years Bran states Indio married forced labour Barberí azambado) (Bocachica) 19 1723 Manuel de 33 Carpenter Free M Zambo Rio del Mompox Sorcery. Mistaken identity; la Cruz Oro found innocent.
20 1723 Juan 26 Sawyer Enslaved S Mulato Cartagen Río del Blasphemy Reprehended, Maranjo a Sinu condemned, and warned in the audience hall. Spiritual penances.
263 No Date Name Age Occupati Status Married Spanish Place of Residence Crime Sentence on / Single racializing Birth accused of M/S category 21 1724 Francisco 60 Labourer Free M Black Guinea Cuba Twice Went out “a la Macaya married vergüenza” in the public streets; to be a recluse in a monastery for three years; a year’s exile. 22 1724 Bartholom 60 Labourer Free M Mulato Barinas Guanagua Heretical Absolved. e nare blasphemy Francisco de Vera 23 1725 Gaspar de 30 Tailor Free M Mulato “La Bayamo Twice 200 lashes and 5 los Reyes ciudad de married years forced labour Cuba” (on the works of his majesty). 24 1727 Valerio 30 Blacksmit Free M Zambo (States Santa Fe Sopetrán Polygamy Died with food in Martínez h “son of mestiza de his mouth (no signs and black) Antioqui of violence). To be a buried in the cathedral “without pomp or ceremony.” 2 1728 Pedro 31 Cobbler Free M Zambo Nueva Coro Twice 100 lashes Andrés de Valencia married Moronta 26 1728 Agustín de 36 Silversmit Freed M Mulato Villa de la Panama Twice A year of forced Mesa h Orotava, married labour (Bocachica). Balcazar Canary Islands
264 No Date Name Age Occupati Status Married Spanish Place of Residence Crime Sentence on / Single racializing Birth accused of M/S category 27 1730 Agustín de More Silversmit Freed M Mulato Villa de Panama Twice *** Mesa than h la married Balcazar 30 Orotava, Canary Islands 28 1730 Francisco 35 Cobbler Free M Mulato Mompox Mompox Heretical 200 lashes Xavier speech Montilla and acts
29 1730 Pedro 19 Silversmit Free S Cuarterón de Cartagen Cartagena Fautoria 6 months of exile Thomas h Mulato a (Aiding from the city de Ituren accused) 30 1730 Phelipe de 26 Tailor Free S Zambo Cartagen Cartagena Fautoria A year of forced Zerpa a (Aiding labour (Bocachica). accused) 31 1730 Juan 22 Tailor Free S Mulatto Cartagen Cartagena Fautoria A year of forced Mario a (Aiding labour (Bocachica). Polo accused) 32 1776 Felix Uncle Enslaved S Mulatto San Juan Cartagena Sacrilege Hanged. -7 Fernando ar Girón Martínez * Initially described as free, then referred to as slave of Sargento Mayor Don Lorenzo de Villegas ** Bocachica refers to the the forts at Castle of San Luís de Bocachica on Tierra Bomba *** After first case, had been labouring in Bocachica, taken to hospital and fled to Alipaya where he was apprehended. Auto de fe on an ass, exiled to work on the King’s galleys for 8 years. When not at sea, should be held in shackles in the Castle on Bocachica, which should not be removed even if he is ill. Negotiated down to 6 years of galley labour and a ball and chain rather than shackles when on Bocachica
265 Bibliography
Unpublished Archival Sources
ACC Archivo Central del Cauca (Popayán, Colombia)
AGI Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain) AGI-Indiferente AGI-Mapas y Planos AGI-Quito AGI-Santa Fe AGI-Santo Domingo
AGN Archivo General de la Nación (Bogotá, Colombia) AGN-Colonia AGN-Criminales y Juicios AGN-Negros y Esclavos AGN-Colección Enrique Ortega Ricuarte, Censos de Población AGN-Visitas
AHA Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia) AHA-Criminal AHA- Planoteca AHA-Visitas
AHAHLT Archivo Histórico Academia de Historia Leonardo Tascón (Buga, Colombia) AHAHLT Cabildo
AHAP Archivo Historico de La Arquidiocesis de Popayán (Popayán, Colombia – Microfilms held at Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá)
AHC Archivo Histórico de Cali (Cali, Colombia) AHC-Cabildo
AHCT Archivo Histórico de Cartago, (Cartago, Colombia)
AHECSM Archivo Histórico Eclesiástico de la Catedral de Santa Marta
AHM Archivo Histórico de Medellín (Medellín, Colombia) AHM-Concejo
AHN Archivo Historico Nacional de España (Madrid, Spain) AHN-Inquisición
John Carter Brown Library (Providence, Rhode Island)
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