Marriage as Slave Emancipation in Seventeenth-Century Rural Guatemala*
Paul Lokken
[Tables]
On the 17th of August 1671, Manuel de Morales, a 49-year-old Angolan slave employed on a Dominican-owned sugar plantation in the Pacific coastal hotlands of what is now the republic of Guatemala, came before a priest and declared his intention to marry. 1 Accompanying Morales was his proposed spouse, Inés Hernández, an Indian widow from the nearby town of Escuintla, capital of the colonial Guatemalan corregimiento of Escuintepeque in which the Dominican ingenio lay. 2 Four male witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage between Morales and Hernández, two on behalf of each contrayente, or prospective spouse. Three of the witnesses were slaves: Silvestre Ramírez, defined as mulatto, and Jacinto Pereira and Miguel de la Cruz, both identified as black. The fourth was Diego de Arriasa, mulatto and free. 3 [End Page 175]
Most of these individuals had been brought into contact with one another via their participation in sugar production, a process intimately associated with African slavery throughout the Americas over a period of several centuries. 4 Although only Morales was numbered among the 30 or so slaves who worked the Dominican ingenio in Escuintepeque in 1671, both Ramírez and Pereira had toiled alongside him on the property a few years earlier, before the religious order bought it from Fernando Alvarez de Rebolorio, a prominent landowner. 5 Hernández, meanwhile, may have had a long acquaintance with laborers of African origins engaged in the making of sugar. Not only was she an employee of a local sugar-producing operation owned by one Mauricio de Sosa when she decided to wed Morales, but work on Sosa's plantation, or a similar holding, may earlier have united her with her deceased first husband, Bernabé Mundo, also identified as black. 6
Until recently, few scholars associated colonial Guatemala with either the African slavery or the sugar production made evident in the example above. 7 Both, however, played an important role in seventeenth-century life there. 8 [End Page 176] Late in the century, the Guatemalan-born chronicler Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán wrote that "eight marvelous and opulent sugar mills" located near the colonial capital of Central America, Santiago de Guatemala, supplied most local demand. 9 The Dominican order owned two of those "marvellous and opulent" mills, each far larger than the operation in Escuintepeque that was home to Manuel de Morales. Known respectively as the Anís and Rosario ingenios, they came under the order's control during the mid seventeenth century, and held between them some 225 slaves in 1670. 10 Further north, in the Verapaz, the Dominicans had operated another plantation, San Gerónimo, since the late sixteenth century. According to Thomas Gage, the renegade English Dominican monk, a "multitude of slaves" was already working this property by the 1630s, and it would grow to become the largest employer of slave labor in the region in the eighteenth century, with as many as 700 bondservants. 11
The slave-sugar complex maintained by the Dominicans and their fellow plantation owners in late seventeenth-century Spanish Guatemala ensured [End Page 177] that--as in contemporary settings more closely identified with sugar production, notably Portuguese Brazil and the English Caribbean--local society was in part a society of African origins. It would be a mistake, however, to presume that the African presence had the same effects in each of those places, or that the experiences of African immigrants and their descendants in Guatemala mirrored the experiences of their counterparts in Pernambuco or Barbados. 12 Guatemala, simply put, was not a slave-driven sugar colony organized fundamentally around the brutal subjugation of African labor. Slaves there had access to a startling measure of social mobility, illustrated exceptionally well in an analysis of the kind of marriage that Manuel de Morales was able to make there in 1671. Evidence presented below, taken from late seventeenth-century marriage records produced throughout the province of Guatemala outside of the capital, suggests that marital unions like the one that Morales, an enslaved man, succeeded in forging with Inés Hernández, a free woman, may have constituted some two-thirds of all marriages involving slaves in that time and place. 13
These findings raise important questions for studies of the origins of free populations of color, since the offspring of an enslaved man like Morales and a non-slave partner would have been free at birth. 14 The liberty these children [End Page 178] enjoyed would have owed nothing to manumission, commonly distinguished as the key factor behind the expansion of free populations of African origins in the Americas. 15 In fact, emphasis on manumission as the crucial point of origin for free populations of color is certain to obscure the role played by enslaved men on rural landholdings in the emergence of those populations. The consensus on manumission is that it was disproportionately an urban phenomenon, and favored enslaved women, who benefited more frequently than male slaves from owner-granted liberty while achieving self-purchase in roughly equal measure. 16 But enslaved men possessed an avenue to freedom--for their offspring if not for themselves--which none of their female counterparts enjoyed. Thus, the mechanisms by which people of African origins slipped the bonds of hereditary servitude must be sought not only in processes of manumission, but also in the marital and other reproductive strategies employed by male slaves to secure free birth for their children. 17
The marriage petitions employed to make this argument bring individuals of African origins like Manuel de Morales into unusually sharp focus. A crucial characteristic of these diligencias matrimoniales is that members of the indigenous tributary population rarely appear in them, exempted by a sixteenth-century papal decree on the basis of their alleged "childishness" from the Church's prohibition on marrying close relatives. 18 Indios tributarios seeking to wed non-tributaries or tributaries from other communities do [End Page 179] show up in the petitions, but, fundamentally, the documents record the marriage intentions of the small but growing minority of Guatemala's inhabitants who were not defined as Indian tributaries. Such people are listed in the petitions almost exclusively under the following classifications tied to origin: español/a, 19 mestizo/a, mulato/a libre or esclavo/a, negro/a libre or esclavo/a, and indio/a laborío/a.
The last category derived from the Caribbean term naboría. It referred originally in colonial Guatemala to indigenous servants tied to Spanish households, and eventually to all individuals defined as Indian who were not on the tribute rolls of an indigenous community. 20 Indios laboríos constituted a small minority of the total Indian population in Guatemala, but a clear majority of persons defined as indigenous in diligencias matrimoniales (see Table 1). Inés Hernández, for example, was listed as "india laboría" in the petition which recorded her intention to wed Manuel de Morales. Individuals assigned to this category appear to have been viewed as something other than fully "Indian," and were in fact frequently lumped together with [End Page 180] the non-indigenous population. One premise of the argument made here, in fact, is that "Indianness" and tribute status were closely linked. 21
The Demographic Context
Marriage to free women, it might be assumed, is not commonly associated with the life experience of enslaved men, let alone marriage on the scale suggested in this article. In colonial Guatemala, a specific set of demographic and socioeconomic factors shaped the lives of slaves in such a way as to allow numerous men among the slave population to wed free spouses. Most important among those factors was the overwhelming dependence of colonial Guatemalan society on the labor of a tributary indigenous majority that dwarfed all other social sectors. Outside of Spanish and casta-dominated Santiago, the most non-Indian region of the province was probably the district of Acasaguastlán, lying towards the territory's Caribbean lowlands. Yet even there, indigenous tributaries constituted as much as two-thirds of the total population in the 1680s. 22 Elsewhere, the non-indigenous presence was often barely perceptible in numerical terms, particularly in the Maya-dominated western highlands. Along the Pacific coast--home primarily to non-Maya indigenous peoples like the Nahuatl-speaking Pipil and the Xinca--the presence of Spaniards and, especially, castas was somewhat greater, but still exceedingly light in terms of overall numbers. 23 [End Page 181]
Such demographic dominance by indigenous peoples was not unique in contemporary Spanish America. Indeed, the Guatemalan situation corresponded quite closely with those existing in New Spain and Peru, the centers of colonial Spanish power. A specific effect of such indigenous demographic dominance was that slaves of African origins enjoyed an unusual degree of social mobility in all three places, because local economies were so little dependent in the aggregate on their labor. 24 Evidence of this mobility has led James Lockhart to suggest that "[w]ithin Spanish American society overall, 'slave,' aside from some obvious disadvantages, was a rather middling role." 25
If Lockhart's formulation cannot be applied universally, it does provide a solid basis for understanding the case studied here. Enslaved men's access to strikingly "middling" status in seventeenth-century rural Guatemala apparently enabled them regularly to secure formal marital unions with free women. By making such marriages, men like Manuel de Morales were able to bestow not only free birth upon their offspring, but also legitimacy, a prized mark of social distinction at all levels of Spanish colonial society. 26 [End Page 182] The children of slaves who, like Morales, married free women, multiplied the ranks of the free population of color, and found themselves occupying social positions which compared very favorably with those inhabited by most members of the indigenous tributary majority.
Given the overwhelming demographic dominance of that indigenous majority, the casual observer might suggest that the minority African presence was socially irrelevant. Such was not the case. It is notable, for example, that black and mulatto bondservants lived and worked throughout the province, even in remote western highland regions like Huehuetenango, where Maya peoples represented a seemingly inexhaustible source of [End Page 183] labor. 28 Unquestionably, though, it was in eastern and southern lowland areas of the province that enslaved populations of African origins had the most extensive impact on local societies. Evidence cobbled together from the 1682 "Razón" and marriage records produced at ten-year intervals between 1671 and 1701 suggests that persons defined as black or mulatto, both enslaved and free, made up as much as two-thirds of the non-Indian sector in both Escuintepeque and the sugar-producing region around Lake Amatitlán during the late seventeenth century. 29 Concentrations of people identified by African origins were lower elsewhere, but even in what is today El Salvador--the territory in the eastern sector of the province that appears to have held the fewest people identified as black or mulatto--one-third or more of the non-indigenous population was so designated in many areas. 30
In other words, even though people defined by African descent represented a very small proportion of the total population in Guatemala during the late seventeenth century, they formed a plurality, at the very least, of the small non-indigenous sector. 31 Most of these people were not black slaves, however, as the vast majority of their predecessors had been a century earlier. Instead, most were free and identified as mulatto. 32 This transformation undoubtedly owed in part to the fact that slave imports into Central America slowed to a trickle between the 1630s and the 1690s. 33 Such a reduction [End Page 184] in forced African immigration was almost certain to enhance the mulatto character of a slave population. One must look elsewhere, however, to explain the rapidly growing numbers of free mulattos in late seventeenth-century Guatemala.
Marriage data provide substantial evidence that relationships between enslaved men and free women contributed in substantial, if not easily quantifiable, measure to the expansion of this population. These data suggest, first of all, that one in ten marriages contracted by members of the non-Indian population in late seventeenth-century rural Guatemala may have involved at least one slave as a spouse. Forty-one of 407 marriage petitions examined list one or both contrayentes as slaves. Second, and more strikingly, at least 26 of the 41 petitions involving slaves--or roughly two-thirds of the total--brought together an enslaved man and a free woman. 34
Mere evidence that the famed Spanish endowment of bondservants with the right to marry was operative in practice in a place like seventeenth-century Guatemala, little dependent on slave labor, should come as no surprise. 35 But the ability of so many enslaved men to marry outside the confines of the slave population seems remarkable. Closer attention to local patterns of slave marriage in different regions of the province of Guatemala reveals more clearly the specific factors that enhanced or hindered that ability. The following sections focus on three of those regions: the Pacific coast district of Escuintepeque; the sugar-plantation zone in the area of Lake Amatitlán, just south of the Valle de las Vacas where Guatemala City now lies; and the territory of modern El Salvador.
Slaves, Marriage, and mestizaje in escuintepeque
A close analysis of marriages involving slaves in the corregimiento of Escuintepeque, home of Manuel de Morales and Inés Hernández, underscores [End Page 185] the disjuncture between the extremely low social status associated in theory with rural slaves, and the significantly higher one that many seem to have enjoyed in practice in that particular district. In many respects, the matrimonial relationship linking Morales, a black slave, with Hernández, an indigenous women, was a microcosm of seventeenth-century mestizaje in coastal Escuintepeque. The broad contours of that particular process of mestizaje are clearly reflected in an eighteenth-century description of the local village of Santa Ana Mixtán, home in 1740 to some 100mulatto and 30black residents. The lengua materna of these mulattos and blacks, the description's author noted, was "mexicano," or Nahuatl. 36
Escuintepeque was precisely the sort of place where people of African origins were likely to have been concentrated. Located directly south of Santiago de Guatemala, it was comprised in the main of torrid and lightly inhabited coastal lowlands dotted with vast, sprawling rural enterprises on which cattle, sugar, and indigo were raised. A 1683 report contained in the "Razón," and scattered observations made in other contemporary descriptions, indicate clearly that the region indeed sustained a significant African presence, 37 while marriage petitions confirm that people defined by African descent dominated the non-indigenous sector of Escuintepeque's lowland population. Thirty-three of 52 contrayentes listed in 26 marriage petitions emanating from Escuintepeque in 1671, 1681, 1691, and 1701--nearly two-thirds of all petitioners--were identified as mulatto or black. 38
The activities of this population centered on the only town founded in colonial Guatemala explicitly by and for free blacks and mulattos: the Pacific lowland villa of San Diego de la Gomera. Established near the coast shortly after the arrival of the Conde de la Gomera as President of the audiencia of Guatemala in 1611, the town was apparently the linchpin in a strategy aimed at eliminating the "threat" which people of African descent residing [End Page 186] illegally in local indigenous villages were said to represent. 39 As an incentive to settle at San Diego de la Gomera, residents of the town were granted control over saltpans along the coast at Sipacate. 40 A decade or so after its founding, the traveler Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa described La Gomera as a "village of free blacks and mulattos, with their own cabildo, alcaldes, and regidores." 41
By the late seventeenth century, La Gomera's residents formed an important part of the workforce on neighboring rural estates belonging to prominent landowners like don Juan de Gálvez and Pedro de Loi Valdez. 42 They also worked local fisheries and the coastal saltpans the town controlled. A substantial degree of local autonomy apparently existed, owing to the relative absence of Spaniards in the area. The Spanish population may in general have shared the opinion of Fuentes y Guzmán, who characterized the environment in which salt was produced along the Pacific coast as "very disagreeable, and only fit for the mulatto fishermen native to the region." 43 Whatever the origins of local autonomy, La Gomera's inhabitants jealously guarded it. In 1700, angered by Gálvez' attempts to seize control of the town's saltpans, and emboldened by wider social unrest unleashed by the arrival in Guatemala of a "meddling" royal investigator, the local militia unit of color rose in revolt against the audiencia. A year passed before the town again submitted itself to Santiago's control. 44
The shift in the character of Guatemala's early populations of African origins over the course of the seventeenth century is well illustrated in the case [End Page 187] of La Gomera. In 1683, the residents of a town founded some seventy years earlier by "blacks and mulattos" were described by Escuintepeque's administrator as "ttodos mulattos." 45 Marriage petitions from Escuintepeque indicate that enslaved men's marital strategies played an important role in furthering the processes of mestizaje implied by the corregidor's terminology. Five of a total of 26petitions from the district included a slave as a marital partner. All five cases involved an enslaved man as one intended spouse, while in at least four cases a free woman was the other partner. 46 Two of those free women were defined as "indias laborías," and two as "mulatas libres." 47
The broader marital context within which these particular unions were proposed further underscores the nature of the contribution that relationships between enslaved men and free women appear to have made to the emergence locally of a free population of color (see Table 2). While three of the five enslaved men who appear as contrayentes in the statistical sample from Escuintepeque were defined as black--as were both of the slaves who turned up in additional petitions dating from years not included in the statistical sample--none of the free petitioners from Escuintepeque was so identified. A clear majority of free contrayentes was nevertheless associated with African origins: 28 of 47 free petitioners in the sample of 26 petitions are designated as mulato/a libre.
The crucial role of blacks and mulattos in Escuintepeque's variant of colonial mestizaje emerges even more strikingly when one considers that 21 of the 26petitions--over 80percent--involved a contrayente identified by African origins. At the same time, however, distinctions in the classifications of slaves and free people of African origins in the district carried over into the ranks of witnesses to marriage petitions. Seven black slaves, no mulatto slaves, one free black, and at least 26 free mulattos served as witnesses to the 26 petitions which form the area's statistical sample.
The origins of Escuintepeque's free mulatto population, thus, may have lain in substantial measure in relationships, marital or otherwise, between enslaved men of African origins and indigenous women. 48 The longstanding predominance of men among the slave populations of coastal landholdings [End Page 188] almost certainly played a significant role in this process. 49 For example, a 1619 inventory of a local ingenio which became the subject of a dispute between a wealthy resident of the capital, Francisco de Mesa, and his daughter and son-in-law, indicated that fully 25 of 28 slaves on the property were male. Five of these men were married to free women, four of whom were identified as Indian, and just one as black. 50 A shift in focus to an area with [End Page 189] larger concentrations of slaves--the sugar-plantation zone of Lake Amatitlán--reveals that slave demographics indeed influenced the likelihood that enslaved men would marry free women. The exact relationship between slaves' desires regarding marriage and their actual marital patterns remains more difficult to discern, however.
Slave Marriage and Guatemalan Sugar Plantations
In the late seventeenth century, the only part of the province of Guatemala where marriages joining enslaved partners outnumbered those uniting slave and free was the agricultural region just east of Santiago de Guatemala. This region--especially the area to the south of the Valle de las Vacas--produced much of the wheat, sugar, and other foodstuffs consumed in the colonial capital. 51 It was unique not only as the sole place in the entire province of Guatemala where slaves were more likely to marry within the slave population than outside of it, but also because it appears to have been almost the only area in which slaves married each other at all. Ten of the 41 petitions involving at least one enslaved contrayente that turned up in the province-wide sample of 407 diligencias matrimoniales examined here list both prospective spouses as slaves. Eight of the ten came from this one small territory. 52 Those eight petitions, in turn, involved just two rural properties: large ingenios owned, respectively, by the Jesuit order and the Arrivillaga family. They were located, like the Dominican-owned Anís and Rosario ingenios, in the vicinity of Lake Amatitlán. The Jesuit operation employed 108slaves in 1670, while 121 labored on the Arrivillaga plantation. 53
These plantations may have provided a critical mass of slaves of both sexes necessary to the formation of a substantial number of marriages within the slave population. It is not at all clear, though, whether slaves themselves preferred such marriages, or if they were promoted instead by owners of relatively large slave populations, who could not have failed to desire the proliferation of such unions as a means of maintaining high numbers of bondservants during a time of low imports. Enslaved women, of course, were restricted in their marital options because of the "law of the womb." These [End Page 190] women's unattractiveness to free partners is demonstrated by the fact that, according to the evidence presented here, their male counterparts married outside the slave population more than five times as often as they did. 54 This very imbalance, of course, suggests that enslaved men were likely to reject female slaves as marital partners where the option of marrying free women was available. That option was not entirely absent even in Guatemala's sugar-plantation zone. The Arrivillaga plantation produced four marriage petitions uniting two slaves during the years examined here, but was also home to two enslaved men who intended to wed free women.
More extensive research into marriage records from colonial Guatemala's major sugar-producing region might provide a clearer understanding of the decisions slaves were able to make regarding marriage in the one area of the Province that held concentrations of slaves reminiscent of areas of the Americas that relied more on coerced African labor. For one thing, none of the more than 200 slaves said to be laboring on the Dominican-owned properties near Lake Amatitlán in 1670 turned up as petitioners in the sample discussed here, nor did any of the 84 noted to be attached to a nearby Mercedarian operation in the same year. 55 The absence of any enslaved petitioners from these landholdings is difficult to explain, unless they simply did not happen to turn up in the particular years selected for analysis. 56
It cannot be argued with certainty here that enslaved men would have preferred to marry free women even when living among relatively sizable populations of slaves, and were only prevented from doing so by active intervention on the part of their owners. There is little doubt, though, that slave/free relationships--marital or otherwise--played a crucial role in the emergence in Guatemala's major sugar-plantation zone of a substantial free [End Page 191] sector of partial African origins. Judged on the basis of diligencias matrimoniales, that sector appears already to have far outnumbered the local slave population by the late seventeenth century. While 19 of 104 petitioners listed in the area's marriage records were slaves, 43 were identified as free mulatto, another simply as mulatto, and three as free black. Together, free and enslaved people of African origins made up over 60 percent of local petitioners, making it likely that these groups constituted a clear majority of the region's non-indigenous population (see Table 3).
Several marriage petitions demonstrate quite directly the manner in which relationships between enslaved men and free women contributed to the growth of a free sector of color in and around the Valle de las Vacas. Three petitions involving local inhabitants, all dating from 1671, explicitly designate contrayentes as offspring of such unions. Two of them also reveal that enslaved men from all three major Dominican sugar plantations found free spouses on occasion, at least prior to 1671.
One petition records a union between two free mulatto employees of the Jesuit ingenio. The petition lists the parents of the prospective bride, Felipa de Jesús, as Diego Godoy, a mulatto slave of the Jesuits, and a free mulatta named Polonia de la Cruz. 57 The daughter's designation as legitimate in the petition indicates that her father and mother were almost certain to have been formally married.
In another petition, it is the Anís ingenio which shows up as the site of a slave-free marriage which produced free children. Although the petition itself was filed in San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, well to the northeast of the Valle de las Vacas, the parents of the female contrayente were described as residents of the Dominican-owned operation near Lake Amatitlán. The daughter and bride-to-be was Micaela Aguilar, mulata libre and legitimate. Aguilar's mother shared her daughter's name and designation, while her father was identified as Francisco de la Cruz, black and enslaved. 58
The third petition links the other major Dominican plantations--Rosario near Lake Amatitlán and San Gerónimo in the Verapaz--and appears to have united two individuals with enslaved fathers and free mothers. The intended groom, Pascual de los Santos, was a free mulatto worker on the Rosario ingenio, and the legitimate son of Juan de la Cruz, a black slave on the same property, and a free mulatta named María de la Presentación. The prospective [End Page 192] bride, a free mulatta named Magdalena Ortiz, was a native of San Gerónimo and the daughter of Domingo de Sosa, a mulatto slave there. Although Ortiz' mother, María de la Cruz, is not defined by origin in the document, she was likely to have shared free status with her daughter. 59
If these three cases provide suggestive evidence regarding mestizaje on and around the sugar plantations in the Lake Amatitlán region, they also reveal something about the manner in which people of African origins were integrated into the local population in the more northerly reaches of the province, in the vicinity of San Gerónimo. Another 1671 petition filed in the community of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán directly links that area's inhabitants with San Gerónimo, a few leagues to the northwest in the Verapaz, again indicating that large sugar plantations may have played a more important role in mestizaje involving enslaved men and free women than statistics concerning petitioners alone might indicate at first glance. In this petition, the intended groom was Gerónimo Reyes, a 19-year-old free mulatto resident of San Gerónimo whose father was a black slave of the ingenio and whose mother was an india tributaria from nearby Salamá. Reyes' partner was the free mulatta Paula de Rivera, 22, of La Magdalena, Acasaguastlán. Rivera was also the child of an enslaved man and a free woman. Her father belonged to a local Spaniard named Blas Trujillo, and her mother was a free mulatta. 60 [End Page 193]
This last petition is one of only 14 in the entire province-wide sample of 407 diligencias to have come from Acasaguastlán. The petition hints at the contribution the sugar plantation at San Gerónimo may have made to non-indigenous population development in that apparently least Indian of all Guatemala's districts. 61 Evidence of that contribution may also be evident in a description of Acasaguastlán's population left by Fuentes y Guzmán, in which he employed the term ladino in the approximate sense in which it is generally used today in Guatemala: to mean "non-Indian." In an early usage of the label along these lines, the chronicler said it was "what we call those people in Indian villages who are Spaniards, mestizos, mulattos and blacks." 62
Slave-Free Marriage in El Salvador
One final region of the colonial province of Guatemala deserves attention in this discussion of the marital circumstances in which slaves found themselves during the late seventeenth century: the territory that is today the republic of El Salvador. In the seventeenth century, this territory formed the southeastern-most portion of the province of Guatemala, and was comprised of two alcaldías mayores: that of Sonsonate, and that of San Salvador and San Miguel. Seventeen of the 41 diligencias matrimoniales involving at least one enslaved partner that turned up in the province-wide sample of 407 petitions analyzed here originated in this region. Those 17 petitions included 12 representing marriages between enslaved men and free women, and four others listing enslaved women preparing to wed free men. 63 Just one petition from the two Salvadoran districts united slaves, a signal no doubt of the absence of the sorts of large concentrations of bonded labor which might have contributed to a higher rate of marriages between enslaved partners. 64 [End Page 194]
Little sugar was produced in colonial El Salvador, which was instead the chief indigo-growing center of the province of Guatemala. Since indigo production required large amounts of labor only during a one- or two-month harvest season, expensive slaves tended to be retained in small numbers, for use in skilled labor and managerial positions. The most onerous harvest-time work was generally performed by residents of indigenous villages located in the vicinity of the indigo obrajes. These villagers frequently found themselves press-ganged illegally into service on the obrajes in spite of oft-repeated royal prohibitions on their participation in such work, which the Crown saw as ruinous to their health. 65
Although the peculiar demands of indigo made reliance on large numbers of slaves impractical in the Salvadoran countryside, slavery was by no means absent from the region during the seventeenth century. In fact, the primary effect of indigo seems not to have been the elimination of slave labor, but its dispersion throughout the districts in question. The 17Salvadoran marriage petitions mentioned above included four from the city of San Miguel, three from Opico, two each from Zacatecoluca, the villa of San Vicente, and the city of San Salvador, and one apiece from Izalco, Chalchuapa, Apopa, and the villa of Sonsonate.
These petitions hint strongly, nonetheless, at the manner in which a reduction in slave imports could have produced--in combination with both manumission and the slave/free relationships discussed here--a decline in slave populations and concomitant expansion of a free sector of color. Nine of the 17diligenciasinvolving slaves from El Salvador were produced in 1671, when they made up nearly 18percent of 51cases from that region. Petitions listing a slave as marital partner constituted only six percent of the Salvadoran total in 1681 (two of 34), and just over four percent in 1691 (three of 70), before rising slightly again to form about eight percent of the total in 1701 (three of 36), when slave imports had begun to flow more regularly once again. [End Page 195]
Slave Status and Marriage in the Province of Guatemala
The fact that marital unions between enslaved men and free women made up some two-thirds of marriages involving slaves in El Salvador adds weight to the notion that this particular type of union contributed significantly to the expansion of the free population of color in the province of Guatemala during the later seventeenth century. Given the evidence, one must finally ask: Why were so many free women willing to marry slaves? The potential problems inherent in such matches for free spouses were usually explicitly underscored during the interviews recorded in diligencias matrimoniales. Free women in particular were subjected to a line of questioning that emphasized the disadvantages of such a union, including the possibility that enslaved husbands might be sold to buyers far away. Before the marital investigation could be concluded, these women were required to make a clear, if formulaic, statement of willingness to proceed with the marriage in spite of the difficulties the match might encounter. 66
The question of what motivated free women to marry slaves is especially intriguing if considered in light of an argument that has been made in discussions of other colonial Spanish American contexts: that free women of color tended to marry "up" in terms of "racial" status. In her classic study of marriage in nineteenth-century Cuba, Verena Martinez-Alier indicated that the "most frequent union was that between a white man and a free parda woman." 67 More recently, Elizabeth Kuznesof has suggested that, during the first decades of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, "race functioned primarily as a discriminator for men, putting non-Spanish women in a privileged position for social mobility." 68 Is it possible that marriage to an [End Page 196] enslaved man in colonial Guatemala was, at the very least, not a drastic step down in social status for many free women?
Evidence from the late seventeenth century certainly suggests that enslaved men were not by definition unattractive marital partners for free women. This evidence would seem to confirm the extent of access which many of those men had to relatively "middling" social status. There is little doubt, for instance, that free people defined by African descent ranked above indigenous tributaries in Guatemala in social practice, whatever the abstractions of Spanish thinking about social hierarchies based on origin. 69 Neither of the marriage petitions from Escuintepeque listing an indigenous man as a proposed spouse involved marriage to a non-Indian woman, for example. By contrast, three women defined as "indias"appeared in that district as the intended spouses of non-Indian men: a black slave, a mulatto slave, and a free mulatto. None of those three women were identified as tributaries. In fact, just two of the seven petitioners defined as indigenous in Escuintepeque's 26 petitions--one man and one woman--were explicitly listed as tributaries, and both were marrying other Indians (see Table 2). 70
At the other end of the social spectrum in Escuintepeque, the lone Spaniard who appears in that district's petitions was seeking to wed a mestiza from Escuintla. Two of three other petitions involving mestizos reflected endogamous matches, while one brought together a mestiza and a free mulatto, the single deviation from the expected pattern of women marrying men of equal or higher "racial" status. The majority of the district's free mulattos married each other, not surprising given their demographic dominance within the non-indigenous population. Ten of the area's 26marriage petitions involved free mulatto partners, and those 20 partners represented more than 70 percent of the 28 free mulattos who appeared as contrayentes. Indigenous women in Escuintepeque, it seems, sought to "boost" their children into this free mulatto category--even through marriage to slaves--just as enslaved men sought to provide free birth for their offspring through marriage to non-slave women. 71 [End Page 197]
If the evidence from Escuintepeque regarding status relationships based on origin seems unduly sparse, the relative social standing of enslaved people of African descent versus members of the indigenous population is revealed more strikingly when all of the province's marriage petitions that involved slaves are analyzed. The 26petitions which brought together an enslaved man and a free woman include ten in which the male partner was defined as black, and 16 in which he was classified as mulatto (See Table 4). Among the intended brides of the ten black slaves were five women identified as indigenous--although just one as tributary--along with two free black women and three free mulattas. Judging on the basis of these ten petitions, it would be difficult to claim that the three categories into which the would-be brides fell were anything other than relatively equal in social status.
But when the focus is shifted to the 16 cases which involved mulatto slaves marrying free women, any notion of relative equality among the classifications "india," "negra," and "mulata" becomes far less tenable. None of the prospective female spouses in this larger number of cases was said to be black, and just two were described as indigenous, in neither case tributary. The majority, eleven, were identified as mulattas, while the remaining three were actually defined as mestizas. Further evidence of the apparent status differential between the indigenous population and people of African descent--especially mulattos, free or enslaved--emerges in the five petitions from the province-wide sample which record the plans of enslaved women to wed free husbands. Only one of the women who appeared in these cases, Gregoria de los Angeles of San Miguel, was identified as black. She was also the only one slated to marry an indigenous man, an "indio laborío" from Nicaragua named Diego de Ribera. 72
In sum, enslaved men in late seventeenth-century Guatemala appear to have experienced surprisingly few restrictions on their marital mobility, although distinctions between black and mulatto did affect that mobility. Enslaved black men were by no means prevented from finding free partners of varied origins--they did so frequently--but those partners tended to rank near the lower end of the colonial "racial" hierarchy. Mulatto slaves, by contrast, [End Page 198] actually enjoyed enough status to marry almost exclusively into the middle ranges of that hierarchy. They seem, for example, to have foregone almost entirely the search for marital partners among women who were identified in any way as indigenous.
Conclusion
The extent of access which enslaved men of African origins had to "middling" status in seventeenth-century Guatemala is underscored in relatively unique fashion in one last example from the region's marriage records. The example involves the marriages of María Hernández, a free mulatta from the village of Mixco, just west of the Valle de las Vacas. Hernández was widowed in 1655, and remarried shortly thereafter. Her first husband was Matheo de Solís, a black slave. Her second was Francisco Borallo, a locally born Spaniard. 73
At first glance, this example reflects most clearly the social and "racial" mobility of free mulatta women in colonial Guatemala. As scholars like Martinez-Alier and Kuznesof have demonstrated, instances of this mobility [End Page 199] may be encountered regularly across boundaries of time and space in colonial Spanish America. Hernandez' marriages also say something, however, about the social place of enslaved men of African origins in seventeenth-century Guatemalan society. Francisco Borallo, a man of Spanish status, did not appear to have been terribly disturbed by the fact that his intended wife's first husband had been a black slave.
Hernández' two marriages are hardly representative of marital norms in Guatemala during the late seventeenth century. Viewing them as entirely aberrant would probably be inaccurate, however. They may instead reflect--in exaggerated form--normative patterns of marital mobility in a society in which enslaved men of African descent were not in practice excluded from all but the lowest reaches of the social hierarchy. Far from being tightly bounded within a world made up mostly of other enslaved workers like themselves, male slaves appear to have experienced relatively few social restraints, at least outside the area in which the province's sugar production was concentrated. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they would have attempted whenever possible to exploit the legal fact that their own status was not heritable to bestow both freedom and legitimacy on their children by marrying free women. That they did so frequently is demonstrated by the evidence presented in this article. The impact of the relationships they formed on the emergence of a free population of color has only begun to be explored here, and certainly bears further investigation.
Bryant College
Smithfield, Rhode Island
Paul Lokken received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2000, under the direction of Murdo J. MacLeod. He is currently assistant professor of history at Bryant College in Smithfield, Rhode Island. He is writing a book on people of African origins and the politics of descent in mid-colonial Guatemala.
Notes
* The research on which this article is based was funded in part by a Field Research Grant from the Tinker Foundation, a Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association, and a dissertation fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. I wish to express my gratitude to Matt Childs, David Geggus, and Aline Helg for facilitating the presentation of a version of this study at LASA2000 in Miami; to Murdo MacLeod for assessing a revised draft; and to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped immeasurably in the preparation of the final submission. The article's shortcomings remain my own. 1. The geographic focus of this article is the Spanish colonial province of Guatemala, which incorporated roughly the territory of the modern republics of Guatemala and El Salvador. The province was one of several within the larger audiencia of Guatemala, which stretched from the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas to modern Costa Rica. See Figure 1.
2. The names Escuintla and Escuintepeque were used interchangeably, but are distinguished here for clarity's sake.
3. Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano "Francisco de Paula García Peláez," Guatemala City (hereafter AHA), signatura A4.16, legajo T41.11, expediente 271 (hereafter A4.16, T41.11:271). Section A4.16 of the AHA is designated "Informaciones Matrimoniales," and holds diligencias matrimoniales submitted to the Bishop of Guatemala and Verapaz from all over his diocese. That diocese, like the colonial province of Guatemala, took in the territories of modern Guatemala and El Salvador. The Church solicited diligencias matrimoniales in order to ensure that intended spouses were willing participants, as well as to block unions between couples deemed under ecclesiastical law to be too closely related to marry without a dispensation. I refer frequently to diligencias matrimoniales as "marriage petitions" and to contrayentes as "petitioners," convenient shorthand for the records of matrimonial investigations and their subjects. On the particulars of the information solicited from prospective marital partners, see Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias Occidentales y particular de la gobernación de Chiapa y Guatemala, 2 vols. (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, 1988), 2, p. 346; Pedro de Contreras Gallardo, Manual de administrar los sanctos sacramentos a los Españoles, y naturales desta Nueva España conforme à la reforma de Paulo V. Pont. Max. (México: Ioan Ruyz, 1638), pp. 64-72. The latter may be consulted at the John Carter Brown Library, whose staff I thank for facilitating my research there.
4. The literature on sugar and slavery in the Americas is voluminous. For an introduction to the topic, see Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chapters 3-5. Important recent interpretations of slavery's impact more generally on the Atlantic world include John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).
5. The figure of 30 slaves is taken from a 1670 survey of Guatemalan sugar plantations, cited in J.C. Pinto Soria, El valle central de Guatemala (1524-1821): un análisis acerca del origen histórico-económico del regionalismo en Centroamérica, Colección Estudios Universitarios 31 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1988), p. 28.
6. AHA, A4.16, T41.11:271. It is unclear from the document whether Mundo had been free or enslaved.
7. A popular older Guatemalan textbook mentioned the colonial African presence only to indicate that it was "extremely slight." The continuing vitality of this notion is apparent in the extensive entry on Guatemala written for the 1998 version of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia by a noted historian of Central America. The entry leaves the impression that the region experienced no African-associated immigration during the colonial period until "black Caribs" were settled on the isolated Caribbean coast around 1800. See J. Daniel Contreras R., Breve historia de Guatemala, 2nd ed. (Guatemala: Editorial "José de Pineda Ibarra," 1961), p. 56; Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., "Guatemala," in Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia (Redmond, Wa.: Microsoft, 1993-1997).
8. Inattention to the impact of African slavery in the region has not been universal, and is becoming less tenable in the wake of recent research. Classic general works providing useful information on the topic include Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Miles L. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680-1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca, 13th ed. (México, D.F.: Ediciones en Marcha, 1994). In the early 1970s, students at Guatemala's University of San Carlos made the topic a specific area of research. See Ofelia Calderón Diemecke de González, "El negro en Guatemala durante la época colonial" (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad de San Carlos, 1973); Danilo Palma Ramos, "El negro en las relaciones étnicas de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII y principios del siglo XIX en Guatemala" (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad de San Carlos, 1974). Despite these efforts, sustained scholarly interest has developed only recently, owing in large measure to the impact of Christopher H. Lutz's comprehensive demographic work on the colonial capital, published in Historia socio-demográfica de Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773 (Antigua: CIRMA, 1982), and Santiago de Guatemala: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), esp. chapter 4. Examples of recent scholarship, which has focused mostly on the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, include A.C. Beatriz Palomo de Lewin, "Esclavos negros en Guatemala (1723-1773)" (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad del Valle, 1992); Robinson Herrera, "The African Slave Trade in Early Santiago," Urban History Workshop Review 4 (1998), pp. 6-12, and "'Por Que No Sabemos Firmar': Black Slaves in Early Guatemala," The Americas 57:2 (October 2000), pp. 247-267; Catherine Komisaruk, "The Work it Cost Me': The Struggles of Slaves and Free Africans in Guatemala, 1770-1825," Urban History Workshop Review 5 (1999), pp. 4-24. The best examination, if brief, of slavery and sugar production specifically is Pinto Soria, El valle central.
9. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida: discurso historial y demostración natural, material, militar, y política del reyno de Guatemala, 3 vols., Biblioteca "Goathemala" 6-8 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1932-1933), 1, p. 224. Fuentes y Guzmán tended to exaggerate in describing the wonders of his homeland, but several of these mills were large enough to employ more than a hundred slaves. See below.
10. Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, Libro 5, Biblioteca "Goathemala" 29 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1973), pp. 104, 210; Pinto Soria, El valle central, pp. 27-29. These ingenios were located near Lake Amatitlán, just south of present-day Guatemala City.
11. Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World, J. Eric S. Thompson, ed. (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), pp. 210-211; Palomo de Lewin, "Esclavos negros," p. 72; Wortman, Government and Society, p. 55; Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo, pp. 285 and 702 note 79; Pinto Soria, El valle central, p. 32.
12. See Stuart Hall's comment that "critical points of deep and significant difference" (emphasis in original) have marked the African experience in the Americas, in Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 394. Good places to begin explorations of sugar and slavery in Brazil and the English Caribbean during the seventeenth century include Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia 1550-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).
13. The sample employed here consists of 407 petitions dating from the years 1671, 1681, 1691, and 1701. Almost all are held in AHA, A4.16, T41.12 (caja 157, 1670-1671), T41.11 (caja 197, 1671), T4105 (caja 2, 1680-1681), T5106 (caja 200, 1691), T5 107 (caja 205, 1691) and T6105 (caja 77, 1701). The sample excludes hundreds of petitions filed in Santiago de Guatemala and its immediate environs--unless contrayentes were noted to have been residents elsewhere in the province--since Christopher Lutz has already written a thorough and exemplary historical demography of that city. Statistical analysis is pushed back no further than 1671 because petitions from earlier years--collected largely in a single legajo, A4.16, T51.21 (1618-1669)--are too few for any one year. The petitions available for 1691 far outnumber those available for other years, for reasons unknown. Only the first two-thirds of that year's petitions were consulted for this study. Meanwhile, a recently published and monumental guide to the AHA's informaciones matrimoniales indicates that 44 petitions produced outside the capital during the years studied here are misfiled in legajos other than those mentioned above. See José Fernando Mazariegos Anleu, Indice General de Informaciones Matrimoniales en Guatemala, 1614-1900, Libro 1, Tomo 1 (Guatemala: AHA, 1999).
14. Legally, children inherited the condition of the mother: the so-called "law of the womb." In his study of the capital, Lutz found that 56 percent of black slaves and 80 percent of mulatto slaves married free people between 1593 and 1769. Unfortunately, these figures are not broken down by gender. See Lutz, Santiago, 88-89. This study suggests that enslaved women married free people far less than their male counterparts did.
15. See Rosemary Brana-Shute's recent claim that "[a]ll the free black and 'colored' (mixed-race) communities [in the Americas] before general emancipation in the nineteenth century were descended from one or more ancestors who had themselves been manumitted, " in Brana-Shute, "Manumission," in Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 262.
16. For a summary of evidence concerning the nature of manumission and its relationship to the growth of free populations of color in Spanish America, see Klein, African Slavery, pp. 217-230. A recent work emphasizing the urban character of manumission is Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800-1854, Alexandra Stern, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 91-92.
17. Marriage, of course, was not a prerequisite for the production of offspring in seventeenth-century Spanish America. During that century illegitimacy in Santiago ran, with few exceptions, at rates greater than 50 percent among gente ordinaria, and 30 percent among Spaniards. Similar rates held in seventeenth-century Guadalajara, New Spain. See Lutz, Santiago, Appendix 3; Thomas Calvo, "The Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families," in Asunción Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 293-295. Precisely because marriage and sex were not indissolubly linked (and rarely have been), the former represented a special type of reproductive strategy, decipherable only by attending to factors other than sexual desire.
18. On the exemption granted to the indigenous population, see point 10 of Paul III's 1537 bull "Altitudo divini consillii, quod humana ne sit, & infra," in Balthasar de Tobar, Compendio Bulario Indico, vol. 1, Manuel Gutiérrez de Arce, ed. (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1954), p. 211. Succeeding bulls reiterating this dispensation are mentioned in Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 3, p. 445.
19. The term criollo never appears in these seventeenth-century documents as a means of differentiating American-born Spaniards from their European-born counterparts.
20. Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 50; Lutz, Santiago, pp. 7, 96-99, 270 note 1.
21. Indios laboríos and free black and mulattos owed an alternative tribute known as the laborío, but it does not seem to have been collected systematically. Nevertheless, the association of tribute status with "Indianness," the least attractive "racial" classification in practice in colonial Guatemala, led blacks and mulattos to use records of militia service to end their subjection to the laborío during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When officials in San Salvador attempted to reinvigorate collection of the tribute in 1720, the city's blacks and mulattos rioted. See Archivo General de Centroamérica (hereafter AGCA), signaturaA1.56 (3), legajo626, expediente5795 (hereafter in the following format: A1.56(3). 626. 5759.); Paul Lokken, "Undoing Racial Hierarchy: Mulatos and Militia Service in Colonial Guatemala," SECOLAS Annals 31 (November 1999), pp. 25-36.
22. My comparative demography of the province of Guatemala's various districts is based primarily on a royal census, the "Razón de las ciudades, villas y lugares, vecindarios y tributarios de que se componen las Provincias del Distrito de este Audiencia (1682)," Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Contaduría 815. Christopher Lutz analyzes this document in some detail in an important preliminary assessment of late seventeenth-century Guatemala's rural non-indigenous population, in "Evolución Demográfica de la Población No Indígena," in Ernesto Chinchilla Aguilar, ed., Historia General de Guatemala, vol. 2 (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1994), 249-258, esp. 255-257. Most of the reports included in the document, known hereafter as the "Razón," were filed in 1683 by Central American corregidores and alcaldes mayores. They are of wildly varying utility, and must be approached with great caution. Most unfortunate is that a few administrators--including Acasaguastlán's--failed entirely to submit a count of local populations. My estimates for Acasaguastlán, thus, draw heavily on the observations of Fuentes y Guzmán, whose reliability is also less than unquestionable. See his Recordación florida, 2, p. 247.
23. On the Maya peoples of the western highlands, see W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1992). On the Pipil, the Xinca, the Chortí and Pokomam Maya, and other indigenous peoples of the eastern and Pacific coastal lowlands--the major geographical focus of this article--see Lawrence H. Feldman, A Tumpline Economy: Production and Distribution Systems in Sixteenth-Century Eastern Guatemala (Lancaster, Ca.: Labyrinthos, 1985), p. 6, figure 5; William R. Fowler, Jr., The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), pp. 51-56, 60-65; Sandra Orellana, Ethnohistory of the Pacific Coast (Lancaster, Ca.: Labyrinthos, 1995), pp. 24-27.
24. Marvin Harris' venerable distinction between highland areas dominated by indigenous labor and lowland regions dependent on African-descended workforces, and the differing consequences for local racial hierarchies, is instructive here. See Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker and Company, 1964), esp. chapter 2. Classic studies of populations of African descent in colonial Mexico and Peru include Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519-1810 (México, D.F.: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946); Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). For recent historiographical discussion of the Mexican case, see Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, "Los estudios afromexicanos: los cimientos y las fuentes locales," La Palabra y el Hombre 97 (1996), pp. 125-139.
25. James Lockhart, "Social Organization and Social Change in Colonial Spanish America," in Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 278. In making this statement, Lockhart could not have had nineteenth-century Cuba in mind, a Spanish colony and home to one of the more brutal sugar-driven and slave-based economies in the history of the Americas. See Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: complejo económico social cubano del azucar, 3 vols. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
26. For evidence that even slaves might successfully make claims to the honor, and hence heightened status, associated with marriage and legitimacy in seventeenth-century Spanish America, see Richard Boyer, "Honor among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation," in Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., Sex, Shame and Violence: The Faces of Honor in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), pp. 152-178, esp. pp. 155-164.
27. Map by author, Reuben Olinsky, and Ron Pitt.
28. The 1687 will of Baltasar de Herrera of Chiantla, north of the town of Huehuetenango, refers to no fewer than nine slaves Herrera either owned or held in trust. See AGCA, A1.20. 1497. 9974.
29. Judging the extent to which the number of diligencias matrimoniales available represents the total number of marriages that occurred is not an exact science. Given that the number of petitions known to exist in the AHA varies substantially from year to year, the best claim to be made is that a comparison of the relationship between estimates of rural populations--drawn mostly from the "Razón"--and the number of rural marriage petitions found with the relationship between Lutz's population estimates and decennial marriage totals for the capital suggests that the rural petitions located constitute a significant proportion, and perhaps a majority, of those drawn up, at least for 1691. For more extensive discussion of this comparison, and a breakdown by region of the province's population of African origins, see Paul Thomas Lokken, "From Black to Ladino: People of African Descent, Mestizaje, and Racial Hierarchy in Rural Colonial Guatemala, 1600-1730" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 2000), chapters 4-5.
30. For the province as a whole, the number of petitioners identified by African origins in diligencias matrimoniales ranges from a low of 33% of the total in 1681 to a high of 46% in 1691. See Table 1.
31. Blacks and mulattos actually formed a clear majority of petitioners who were not defined in any way as indigenous, but the argument made here is that "Indians" appearing in diligencias were in transition to "non-Indian" status, and are thus best associated with the non-indigenous population.
32. Demographically useful evidence is almost non-existent for rural areas of the province of Guatemala in the late sixteenth century, but Lutz suggests that black slaves made up about two-thirds of the population of African origins in the capital during the 1590s. See Lutz, Santiago, p. 242. Meanwhile, in all four years isolated for analysis here, roughly four-fifths of the persons defined by African origins were identified as free mulatto. People defined as free mulattos far outnumbered the members of any other category, including mestizos. See Table 1.
33. A Spanish ban on the slave trade between 1640 and 1662 due to imperial crises, plus low demand, were the most important factors in this development, although imports did not pick up again for a couple of decades even after officials in Santiago began requesting new supplies following the ban's lifting. See AGCA, A1.23. 1517. 10072. fols. 108-108v. (1646); A1.23. 2197. 15751. fol. 97 and copies on fols. 111v., 113 (1664); A1.23. 2199. 15755. fol. 50 (1670); Frederick P. Bowser, "Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society," in Bethell, ed., Cambridge History, 2, p. 362; Lutz, Santiago, p. 86. The impact of this reduction in imports was perhaps evident on the Anís ingenio, which held 119 slaves under Dominican ownership in 1670. Forty years earlier, an inventory requested by the heirs of the ingenio's founder, Juan González Donis, listed 191 slaves, nearly half of them identified explicitly as African immigrants, including 45 as "angola." See AGCA, A1.20. 536. 9039. fols. 296v-302 (1630); Pinto Soria, El valle central, p. 27.
34. In one of the 15 cases remaining, the identity of an enslaved man's marital partner is unclear.
35. David Brion Davis' concise and skeptical comparative assessment of the "humane" Spanish slave laws which grew out of the medieval Siete Partidas remains useful, in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 102-106. For discussion of slave law in colonial Guatemala, see Beatriz Palomo de Lewin, "La esclavitud negra en Guatemala durante los siglos XVI y XVII," in Chinchilla Aguilar, ed., Historia General de Guatemala, 2, pp. 281-282.
36. Alonso Crespo, "Relación geográfica del partido de Escuintla, 1740," Boletín del Archivo General del Gobierno 1:1 (Guatemala 1935), pp. 10-11.
37. "Razón," AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 4v.-9.; Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2, pp. 79, 104; "Descripción de los conventos de la Santa Provincia del Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala, hecha el año de 1689," transcription by J. Joaquín Pardo, in Francisco Vázquez, Crónica de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la Orden de Nuestro Seráfico Padre San Francisco en el Reino de la Nueva España, vol. 4, 2nd ed., Biblioteca "Goathemala" vol. 17 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1937), p. 55.
38. The other petitioners included eight mestizos, seven Indians, a Spaniard and an undefined person. In two cases, a petitioner's status is illegible. See AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:122, 140, and T51.21:143, 184, and T4 1.11:237, 256, and 271 (1671); AHA, A4.16, T4 105:258, 275, 294, 320, 380, and 390 (1681); T5106:26, 39, 66, 112, 133, 140, 160, 165, and 215 (1691); T6105:2382, 2384, 2388, and one of 14 unnumbered cases included in T6 105 (1701).
39. Conde de la Gomera a la Corona, 14 November 1611, AGI, Guatemala 13, R.3, N.33 (in digitalized format). In a related move, in the fall of 1611 the new President dispatched an expeditionary force to destroy a small maroon community established about eight years earlier near the coast at Tulate, directly south of Mazatenango. See "Autos del servicio que hizo el capitán Juan ruiz daviles . . . de la conquista y pacificación de los negros alçados que estaban en la barra i montañas de tulat (1626)" AGI, Guatemala 67.
40. "Razón," AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 5v.-6v.; "Testimonio de los Autos Proveydos Por El Señor Licenciado Don Francisco Gómez de la Madriz en favor de los Mulatos de la Villa de San Diego de la Gomera, 1700," AGI, Guatemala 285.
41. Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales, Charles Upson Clark, ed., Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 108 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1948), pp. 208-209.
42. "Razón," AGI, Contaduría 815, fol. 6v.
43. Fuentes y Guzmán's reference was to the saltpans at the barra of Iztapa, the port and fishing community just east of Sipacate which had once hosted Pedro de Alvarado. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2, p. 104.
44. "Testimonio," AGI, Guatemala 285; Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, Libro 6, Biblioteca "Goathemala" vol. 24 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1971), p. 129; María del Carmen León Cázares, Un levantamiento en nombre del Rey Nuestro Señor: testimonios indígenas relacionados con el visitador Francisco Gómez de Lamadriz (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988), pp. 68-69.
45. "Razón," AGI, Contaduría 815, fol. 6.
46. The fifth woman's identity is illegible.
47. Interestingly, two of eight additional petitions from Escuintepeque encountered during the course of research but not included in the statistical sample because of their dates also included slaves as petitioners. Both involved marriage between enslaved men and free women. The eight additional petitions are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:341 and 342 (1673); T4 105:224, 226, and 235(1680); T4 105:388 (1685?); T6105:2431 (1705); and T6105:2376 (1708).
48. The application of the term "mulato/a" to the children of African-Indian as well as African-Spanish unions was the norm in seventeenth-century Guatemala. Fuentes y Guzmán, for example, described Chipilapa, cabecera of the Pacific coast parish in which San Diego de la Gomera was located, as "poblado de mulatos los más de ellos de los que llaman zambos; cuya generación es de la mezcla de indias con negros." The chronicler's use of the term zambo represents a rare occasion on which that term crops up in contemporary sources. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2, p. 79; Lutz, Santiago, pp. 46, 267 note 1; Table 1 in this article. A specific case in which the son of an enslaved black father and an Indian mother was labeled "mulato libre" is mentioned below.
49. The sex ratio among slaves imported to the Americas was notoriously skewed: nearly two-thirds were male. In Guatemala, for example, a 1613 inspection of the slaveship Nuestra Señora de Nazarén at the Caribbean port of Santo Tomás de Castilla revealed a "cargo" from Angola of 97 men and boys and 39 women and girls. See AGCA, A3.5. 67. 1291; Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 71-72.
50. AGCA, A1.15. 4103. 32523. Not surprisingly, two of the three enslaved women on the property were listed as spouses of male slaves.
51. Pinto Soria, El valle central, passim; Jorge Luján Muñoz, Agricultura, mercado, y sociedad en el corregimiento del valle de Guatemala (Guatemala: author's publication, 1988), esp. 35-37 and chapters 5, 7.
52. The region produced just three petitions bringing together a slave and a free person. The 52 petitions making up the sample from this area are AHA, A4.16, T41.12:94, 95, 102, 123, 146, 170, 190, 191, 193, 195, 204, and T41.11:216, 233, 239, and 293 (1671); T4105:220, 244, 252, 263, 271, 295, 309, 361, and 369 (1681); T5106:16, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33, 56, 61, 80, 81, 82, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 115, and 147 (1691); T6105:2368, 2392, 2409, 2413, 2417, 2419, 2421, and 2443 (1701).
53. Pinto Soria, El valle central, pp. 26-27.
54. Twenty-six petitions involve male slaves marrying free partners, while just five list enslaved women as proposed spouses of free men. See Table 4. Similar imbalances--though not always as acute--also prevailed elsewhere in colonial Spanish America. See evidence from seventeenth-century Peru and eighteenth-century Costa Rica and Puerto Rico in Nancy van Deusen, "The 'Alienated' Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680 to 1700," The Americas 56:1 (July 1999), p. 6 note 23; María de los Angeles Acuña León and Doriam Chavarría López, "Cartago Colonial: Mestizaje y Patrones Matrimoniales, 1738-1821," Mesoamerica 31 (June 1996), p. 175, Table 6; David M. Stark, "Marriage Strategies among the Eighteenth Century Puerto Rican Slave Population: Demographic Evidence from the Pre-Plantation Period," Caribbean Studies 29:2 (July-December 1996), pp. 196-197.
55. Pinto Soria, El valle central, pp. 27-28.
56. It is worth noting that the massive Dominican ingenio at San Gerónimo also produced no petitions involving slaves in the years examined. Perhaps the Dominicans made slave marriages a private matter, in keeping with their longstanding resistance to episcopal authority in colonial Guatemala. On the other hand, slaves from the three major Dominican holdings do appear as witnesses and as parents of proposed spouses in the petitions (see below), while Manuel Morales, a slave on the smaller Dominican operation in Escuintepeque, turned up as a contrayente.
57. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:94.
58. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:182.
59. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:239.
60. AHA, A4.16, T41.11:268.
61. Seven of Acasaguastlán's 28 petitioners were free mulattos, who together with two mulatto slaves made up 32percent of local petitioners. The total population of the district was apparently no more than 4,000 people, perhaps half that of Escuintepeque, which was itself lightly populated but probably held no fewer than 8,000 inhabitants. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2, p. 247; "Razón," AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 4v.-9. The 14petitions from Acasaguastlán are AHA, A4.16, T41.12:113, 178, 182, and T41.11:234, 268, and 274 (1671); T4105:256, 278, and 344 (1681); T5106:74, 146, 204, and 218(1691); and T6105:2395 (1701).
62. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2, p. 242. "Ladino" continued to be used at this time primarily as a label for non-Spaniards--especially Indians--who spoke Spanish, as in the phrase "indio ladino en [la] lengua castellana." This phrase appears countless times in seventeenth-century documents. The links between the seventeenth-century history of Guatemala's population of African descent and the emergence of what is now known as the ladino sector are explored at length in Lokken, "From Black to Ladino."
63. The 17 petitions are AHA, A4.16, T41.12:86, 87, 153, 210, and T41.11:232, 221, 229, 248, and 286 (1671); T4105:300 and 319 (1681); T5106:13, 78, and 192 (1691); and T6105:2373, 2440, and 2445 (1701). One of the enslaved men listed was evidently not of African origins, being described as a "mulato de nacion chino en las islas de manila filipinas."
64. The largest regional instance of slaveholding encountered during the course of this study emerges in the 1669 will of Bartolomé Fernández, a resident of San Salvador who owned rural estates named San Antonio Metapate and San Gerónimo Metapate, and ten slaves. See AGCA, A1.56. 1975. 13399. Fernández' will indicates that manumission did indeed swell the free population of color, along with the relationships between enslaved men and free women emphasized here. Fernández freed all of his slaves in his will, although after he died a dispute arose between his wife, Isabel de la Serna, and his slaves over when exactly they were to be liberated. One of the slaves at issue, Francisco Hernández, then turned up in a 1671 marriage petition seeking to wed a free woman. Hernández' marriage may have served in part as an insurance policy against an uncertain manumission process. See AHA, A4.16, T41.12:86.
65. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, pp. 184-192.
66. Unfortunately, neither the questions posed by parish priests nor the women's responses departed much from the general script followed in these cases, giving little direct sense of individual motivations. Interestingly, free men intending to marry enslaved women were not questioned in the same way. Indeed, in one of these relatively rare cases it was the prospective bride, the slave Lorenza de Torres of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, who was asked--not once, but three times--if it was truly her will to wed Matheo Ortiz, a free mulatto from nearby San Agustín de la Real Corona. One wonders what role Torres' owner, Lucía de Ribera, might have played in shaping this interrogation. See AHA, A4.16, T4 105:278 (1681).
67. Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 26.
68. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Ethnic and Gender Influences on 'Spanish' Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America," Colonial Latin American Review 4:1 (1995), p. 161. Kuznesof's statement obscures to some extent the existence of discrimination as practiced by Spanish women. As a counterpoint, see the discussion of efforts to sustain a hierarchical division between españolas and mestizas in the convent of Santa Clara, Cuzco, in Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 32-34.
69. The disjuncture between the Spanish ideal of "racial" hierarchy--which placed Indians above blacks--and social practice in places like Guatemala is nicely illustrated in schematic form in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 130.
70. As indicated earlier, indios laboríos appeared regularly in marriage petitions, while tributary Indians did not. The province-wide sample also suggests that the former were more likely to wed non-Indian partners.
71. Unions between enslaved black men and indigenous women may thus have constituted, socially, a "win-win situation." I owe this succinct formulation to Kathryn Burns.
72. AHA, A4.16, T5106:13 (1691). Of course, the romantic possibility of love conquering all should not be entirely lost sight of amidst this singular focus on status considerations in marital decisions. One of the most unusual marriage petitions I examined in my research--not included in the sample here--exhibits the efforts of don Pedro de Castellanos, son of Capitán don Francisco Henríquez de Castellanos and doña Margarita de Santiago, to wed Nicolasa Morán, mulatta slave of the cleric Pedro de Almengor, in Santiago de Guatemala. The petition, first submitted in November 1680, was still pending 18months later, at which point Castellanos and Morán had taken refuge together in the church of San Sebastián in order to press their case. This petition, as might be expected, fits no pattern. See AHA, A4.16, T4105:232.
73. AHA, A4.16, T5 1.21:81.
