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chapter seven Africans in a Colony of Creoles: The Yoruba in Colonial Costa Rica Russell Lohse The Yoruba diaspora in Central America differed substantially from betterknown examples such as that in Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad, where Yoruba influence proved particularly strong. Colonial Costa Rica, arguably among the most isolated and neglected of all Spanish American colonies, developed no large-scale plantation economy dedicated to the export of staple crops, nor did large port cities emerge—conditions favoring the growth of African ethnic communities in other places. The slave trade to Central America had ended by the time the largest numbers of Yoruba-speaking slaves arrived elsewhere in the diaspora , and nowhere in the isthmus did the Yoruba become numerically dominant among African slaves. These conditions ensured that the Yoruba slaves who arrived in Costa Rica constructed identities and cultural practices on lines other than the homelands, languages, or religions they had known in Africa, and in ways different than Yoruba in other periods and other parts of the diaspora. In Costa Rica their small numbers and geographic dispersal prevented Yoruba speakers from forming organizations , marrying endogamously, or otherwise maintaining cultural practices on exclusively Yoruba lines. Yet their origins remained important and formed the basis of an African-derived identity in Costa Rica. Shared understandings of enslavement and the middle passage encouraged bonding between captive Yoruba and natives of the Slave Coast. During the “seasoning” process, the Yoruba continued to reach out to shipmates of different ethnic origins. The shipmate bond, implying broader webs of relationships than either ethnicity or estate could provide in Costa Rica, became a key point of reference for enslaved Yoruba and other Africans. At the same time, sustained and intimate con130 Falola_Childs,Yoruba Diaspo 2/2/05 1:34 PM Page 130 tact promoted relationships with Creole blacks, mulattoes, Indians, mestizos, and Spaniards born in Costa Rica. Unlike those of Cuba or Brazil, Costa Rican archives do not contain abundant documents pertaining to Lucumi or Nagô slaves, whether in shipping records, plantation inventories, criminal investigations of slave rebellions, or membership rolls of religious confraternities. These names rarely occur in Costa Rican documents, in part because few Yoruba arrived in the colony, but also because slave masters and authorities often confused Yoruba with members of other ethnic groups, such as the Popo or Arará of the Slave Coast, or identified them by unfamiliar names, such as Nangu and Aná. In this chapter I examine how the particularities of Costa Rican slavery shaped the experiences of a group of captive Yoruba carried on two specific slave ships. Before doing so, it is necessary to discuss at some length the sources which permit the identification of the Yoruba in Costa Rica. Negros Bozales de Casta Aná: Identifying the Yoruba in Costa Rica Although Yoruba-speaking captives, usually known as Lucumí, arrived in Spanish America from the sixteenth century, before about 1750 they could usually be counted in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries first Upper Guinea, then West-Central Africa supplied most of the Africans to the New World; few Yoruba speakers were sold into the early Atlantic slave trade.1 Not until the mid-seventeenth century did the Bight of Benin become a major supplier of slaves to the Americas, earning the name “Slave Coast” and leading all African regions in the export of captives between 1700 and 1730.2 Yoruba speakers comprised a significant share of these captives, but in the early eighteenth century they remained a minority of the hundreds of thousands of captives exported from the Slave Coast.3 As important to consider as trends in the African sources of slave supply are conditions in the American colonies receiving the Africans. For much of the colonial period, the asiento system restricted the legal Spanish American slave trade to a handful of authorized ports such as Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena, and Panama City. Before the mid-eighteenth century even Spanish American colonies with regular access to slave imports, such as Mexico, Peru, and Colombia , received scores of Yoruba at most, rather than hundreds or thousands.4 In their small, isolated, and impoverished province, Costa Rican slave owners enjoyed no direct access to the African slave trade. Captives almost never— and never legally—arrived in large shipments directly from Africa. Masters usually purchased slaves singly or in small groups from the neighboring provinces of Panama and Nicaragua, and, as often as not, these were...

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