From Slaves to Citizens: Slave Law and Claims-Making in Colonial Cuba

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Recent scholarship has identified a set of social and economic conditions that led to the creation of segregation and of a legally-defined racial order in the United States and South Africa. Yet similar circumstances and needs did not result in comparable institutional and social arrangements in Latin American countries with a substantial population of African descent. Why? That is the central question that this research project seeks to answer. Building upon recent historiography on Atlantic slavery and using Cuba as a test case, this study seeks to identify some of the conditions that prevented the creation of segregation in Spanish America. The researcher suggests that the legal, institutional, and ultimately cultural settings in which slave regimes developed are indeed crucial to understand post-emancipation race relations. These settings established the ideological and cultural boundaries of what would later be politically possible. This research attempts to identify the opportunities for claims making that colonial legislation and institutions created for slaves during the long colonial period. Traditional Iberian law, represented mainly by the 13th-century code Las Siete Partidas, conferred a limited legal personality to slaves, as illustrated by several slave "rights": to marry even against the will of the master, to seek judicial protection in case of abuse and mistreatment, and to access manumission. These opportunities for claims making could have contributed to the creation of a political culture of inclusion and indeed to what has been described as the integration of the Africans and their descendants into colonial society. In turn, a political culture of inclusion and integration would facilitate the emergence of cross-racial forms of mobilization such as the nationalist coalitions that fought for independence in Cuba and elsewhere in Spanish America. To test these hypotheses, the principal investigator will use archival resources that contain local regulations, court decisions, cannon laws, pastoral letters and church documents.