At the Heart of the Borderlands

This collection of essays is born out of the concern of its editors that despite the great number of works published in recent years about people of African descent in colonial Latin America, these stories do not seem to permeate the general narratives of the period. When they do, it is in the form of aggregate numbers or discussions of economic production rather than as part of an attempt to reconstruct individuals’ day-to-day lives. This volume focuses on the lives of Afro-descendants in both internal and external borderlands—that is, cultural spaces in which Spanish institutional presence was weaker and the possibilities for upward mobility among Afro-descendants were the greatest.The book gathers ten contributions from all over the Americas. In the first chapter, Cameron D. Jones describes the roles that Afro-descendants played in California missions from the late eighteenth century to 1821, challenging white Eurocentric narratives about westward expansion in the process and presenting the missions as complex multiethnic and multiracial spaces. Next, Christina Marie Villarreal explores Black fugitive strategies in the Gulf of Mexico during the eighteenth century, including the intriguing attempts by Black runaways from Spanish colonies to claim asylum in other Spanish colonies. Black fugitives constantly had to adapt to the geopolitical changes in the gulf, but they also influenced Indigenous and imperial interventions in the Spanish borderlands.Joseph M. H. Clark provides some guidance in chapter 3 on the foundational role of Afro-descendants from Mexico and the Caribbean in new settlements, either as kidnapped workers in French and English frontier settlements or in those settlements that Spain created in the gulf region from Texas to Florida in the eighteenth century. Clark highlights the social, cultural, and economic continuities and connections that these regions maintained as a result of the material and cultural knowledge that these men and women brought with them. In chapter 4 Anne M. Reid presents a speculative (her word) but fascinating look at Nueva Galicia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when locals regularly undermined the sistema de castas by transcending racial categories, adopting their own, and in the process achieving an important level of social mobility.Chapter 5 takes us to the borderlands between Guatemala and British Honduras before and after independence. Enslaved Africans regularly fled to Petén seeking their freedom. Mark W. Lentz analyzes the sanctuary policy that the Spanish government enacted in the last decades of Spanish control of the region. Such policy continued after independence. Enslaved people exploited the rivalries between both territories to free themselves from their English slavers. Chapter 6 stays in Central America, but with a comparative twist. Robert C. Schwaller invites us to analyze side by side the experiences of maroons and Spaniards in both sixteenth-century Panama and Hispaniola and extracts some lessons from the different experiences of these groups in each enclave.Juliet Wiersema brings chapter 7 to the Chocó region in the second half of the eighteenth century. There she has found numerous examples of Black men and women who achieved their freedom and prospered as mineowners, slave owners, and heads of powerful local mining dynasties with great impact in the regional economy in multiple sectors, thus proving how Afro-descendants took advantage of the relative isolation and wealth of certain Latin American regions to prosper beyond bondage. We continue moving south through the Pacific coast in chapter 8, in which Charles Beatty-Medina takes the reader to the coast of Esmeraldas, a region that he presents as an “Atlantic borderland”—by which he means that its inhabitants, Amerindians and African maroons, sought to integrate themselves in global circuits that originated in the Atlantic and beyond its confines. The people of Esmeraldas took full advantage of its remoteness to dominate local conditions and establish connections with Spaniards and other passing Europeans. They enjoyed enormous ability to control the terms of engagement with outsiders while maintaining their independence.The two last chapters continue our move south. In chapter 9, Rachel Sarah O'Toole takes us to the coastal region of northern Peru. Putting to excellent use the concept of “rival geographies” proposed by Stephanie Camp (p. 155), O'Toole suggests that what the Spaniards labeled as “monte”—an uncivilized and dangerous place full of criminals and fugitives, the opposite of the lettered city—was something very different. These were spaces that enslaved Africans ran away to and made their homes. These homes stood as a challenge to Spanish colonial laws, the enslavement of the Africans residing in them, and the multiple narratives that marginalized enslaved Africans in colonial society. The last chapter brings us back to the Atlantic coast. Alex Borucki focuses on both the land and the seas surrounding the Río de la Plata in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines how Afro-descendants on land shaped the borderlands in their interactions with both Indigenous peoples and Spaniards. Their knowledge of the land, as well as of Indigenous American culture, gave them opportunities both to free themselves from Spanish ties at times and to act in the colonial world as guides, experts, and go-betweens. At sea, Afro-descendants found opportunities and at times freedom but also dangers. War periods could lead to their capture from Spanish and Portuguese territories and reenslavement. These cases led to prolonged litigation in the region's port cities by these captured men and women seeking their freedom, often with the support of local Afro-descendants in these seafaring communities.A volume like this one is highly necessary in the academic landscape of colonial Latin America. The articulation of the borderland as an area of study was once an important breakthrough in the field, and the scholars in this collection show the new levels of complexity and maturity that the field has reached in recent years. Centering Africans and Afro-descendants in the historical analysis allows these scholars to bring up a very different version of the region, one that the authors of the colonial documents rarely wanted us to see: a world in which Afro-descendants had carved important niches of power and influence beyond the limitations that the colony tried to impose on them. Studying those sites of power beyond colonial cities is complex work that will take several generations of scholars. The contributions in this volume provide some hints of the path to follow.This collection will be very useful to graduate students and specialists, but I can also see myself using quite a few of these chapters in undergraduate classes. It is also worth mentioning the excellent work of the editors and staff at the University of New Mexico Press, who once again have put out a beautifully designed book

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

• El único remedio para florecer la provincia’

  Juliet Wiersema•Colonial Latin American Review•2024

  Add to list