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chapter 2 Of Life and Freedom at the (Tropical) Hearth: El Cobre, Cuba, 1709–73 María Elena Díaz . . . the natives of El Cobre were all treated and known as free people for they knew no other owner than the King . . . [and that Rafaela Sanchez] enjoyed freedom without subjection to any other person but to her referred mother. —Jose Basilio Maestre, 1793 . . . everyone lived in his house serving their parents, without any other known master than the King. —Francisco Xavier de Quiala, 1793 The inhabitants of El Cobre,an Afro-Cuban village on Cuba’s eastern frontier region, were slaves of the king of Spain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this corner of the Caribbean, royal slavery became an ambiguous and gendered status that blurred boundaries between freedom and bondage in many spheres of life. The court testimonies of Jose Basilio Maestre and Francisco Xavier de Quiala suggest ways in which the blurring of status occurred, or was perceived to occur, among these enslaved villagers.1 Having houses of their own,living with their own families and relatives,heading their own households, and having potestad (authority over their own children ) were,according to Maestre and Quiala,distinctive practices of the cobreros (natives of El Cobre) as free subjects, despite their subjection to the king. If, as some scholars have stated, slavery entailed the natal alienation of a person and his or her “social death,” then any tie to family and kin—or any entitlement over them, even if acquired by customary right—could presumably be regarded as a manifestation of personal freedom.2 That seems to be the main proposition implicit in the declarations of Maestre and Quiala. Lack of a private master 20 maría elena díaz whose property or quasi-absolute rights over a slave could directly interfere with those prerogatives further blurred boundaries between freedom and slavery in the case of the royal slaves of El Cobre. Not to be overlooked in Maestre’s and Quiala’s statements either is the reference to the possibility of female domestic authority and a mother’s potestad over her child, in this case a daughter. As elsewhere in the early modern world, the pervasive (and hegemonic) discourse of hierarchy is used to depict the proper relation between parents and children or elders and juniors in the domestic sphere. Yet there is no rigid patriarchal language here because the maternal figure is also invoked as a possible symbol of power and authority. As I argue elsewhere, the royal slaves of El Cobre also claimed natal ties to local territory and homeland,but those broader communal ties that further blurred lines between freedom and slavery in a slave society will not be a direct concern in this chapter.3 The village of El Cobre is mostly known today as the abode of a “miraculous” image of the Virgin of Charity (patroness of the Cuban nation) and, since colonial days, as an important copper-mining center. The unusual history of the village as Cuba’s only Afro-Cuban pueblo is less known, however. Neither a maroon community on the periphery of Spanish colonial society nor a mere slave community in the plantation world, El Cobre constituted a peasant mining village of royal slaves and free people of color and was in many ways similar to an Indian corporate community. In 1670 the Spanish crown confiscated the copper mines of El Cobre after decades of declining mine production and neglect in the hands of a private contractor. At that point, 271 private mining slaves became the king’s slaves, a category whose ambiguous meaning would be negotiated in subsequent years. By the end of the seventeenth century the former mining settlement had been transformed into a pueblo. The establishment of a pueblo of royal slaves and free people of color with a corporate land grant, limited self-government, and local militia companies that had their own officers strikes historians as unusual. Legally, slaves, as “outsiders” in the body politic, were not allowed to form such a polity. Even pueblos constituted largely or exclusively by free people of color were uncommon in the Spanish Americas.The transformation of El Cobre into a pueblo, and its acquisition of land, meant that royal slaves had increasing autonomy in provisioning themselves and their families. The family-based, peasant mining economy that resulted had far-reaching repercussions in regard to social identity and status. After the crown confiscated the mines of...

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