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Notes Introduction 1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. and intro. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 247. 2. I use the terms “African” and “free blacks” advisedly since the colonial authorities usually referred to direct arrivals from “Guinea,” the early modern Spanish and Portuguese referent for West and subsequently West Central Africa, as “bozales.” While the Spaniards employed the term “negro libre” (free black), they avoided it in describing a population segment. Nomenclature occupies an important role in the history of racial formation and thus in the meanings of categories , terms, and concepts that emerged during particular administrative and historical moments. In New Spain and throughout the Americas, naming practices re®ected the ®uctuations of the slave trade. As African and European slave traders drew their victims from different areas and imposed cultural speci¤city on generic territorial points of origin, the survivors of the middle passage assigned multiple and contradictory meanings to being from the land of “Angola,” “Bran,” “Congo,” and “Terra Nova.” Though slavers bestowed the name of the port of embarkation on the enslaved, such territorial referents thrived because the structures of dominion privileged the African elite and the European merchants . “Angola” is a case in point. People from the “land of Angola” constituted the majority of arrivals in seventeenth-century New Spain. As the symbol of political rule, “Ngola” de¤ned the port and subsequently became the name ascribed to the enslaved people who passed through that region. In its commercial/political speci¤city, the term overshadowed the unstable meanings embedded in the use of “Angola.” Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 104–105. Recently, Joseph C. Miller wrote that “northern Europeans knew the entire coastline of Central Africa south of Cape Lopez as ‘Angola,’ and they designated slaves they purchased there as ‘Angolas,’ employing the term in a sense entirely different from, and considerably less distinct than, Portuguese and Brazilian uses of it. For the Portuguese, the ‘Kingdom of Angola’ had referred in the 1570s to the region subject to the ngola a kiluanje, the African ruler along the middle Kwanza; after government of¤cials established their principal slaving port at Luanda in the early seventeenth century, they designated the inland regions subject to their military control as the ‘reino e conquista d’ Angola.’ ‘Angola’ thereafter served in Brazil as cognate to ‘Luanda’ in distinguishing slaves embarked through government formalities executed at the designated port of embarkation. However, the ‘Angolas’ reaching the Caribbean and North America aboard the ships of the French, Dutch, and English from 1670s onward had begun their Middle Passages at any of the bays north of the Zaire—Mayumba nearest Cape Lopez, then Loango, Malimbo, Cabinda, and the ‘Congo’ River (as the Zaire was known) mouth itself.” “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28–29. Instability also characterized the term “black,” since it referred to creoles born in the Indies, to ladinos who had spent considerable time on the Iberian peninsula and the Caribbean or simply could converse in Spanish or Portuguese, and, ¤nally, to bozales, persons directly from Africa, when the term was used to classify race rather than ethnicity. The usage of “mulatto” underscores the complexity informing corporate labels, as it carried no intrinsic social or cultural meaning. In urban areas, “mulatto” often referred to persons of both black and white origins, while in the countryside the term usually referred to the offspring of a creole (and in some cases an ethnic African) and an indigenous parent. Among the proliferating population of freedpersons, a complex and elusive cultural dynamic was at work that precluded the emergence of a coherent and selfconscious mulatto population. Indeed, all that mulattos shared was a notion that usually one parent (and in many situations a distant grandparent) was of African descent. In the de¤nition of “mulatto,” this real or imagined relative of African descent represented the only constant. Thus, the complexity of the kinship ties, the memory of kin, and the range of relationships that could produce a mulatto rendered the category culturally unstable, if not useless. For many individuals, especially secular and ecclesiastical authorities, mulatto simply constituted a descriptive and juridical referent to transgression and impurity. In an effort to regulate the population, such terms acquired meaning—for authorities and for...

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