Negros, mulatos, esclavos y libertos en la Costa Rica del siglo XVII (review)

This work investigates the role played by people of African descent in the society and economy of seventeenth-century Costa Rica. The scope of examination transcends the provincial setting, as the author endeavors to locate the history of Afro-Costa Ricans within the broader context of colonial Spanish America in the dynamic Atlantic world of the 1600s. Using notarial and judicial records, Cáceres explores the issue of whether Costa Rica's slave and free populations of African descent were a significant economic and social presence throughout the seventeenth century, or merely marginal until the late-century ascension of the cacao economy.

Cáceres succeeds in sketching the pivotal role of slaves in maintaining the economic position of elites during a provincewide economic and demographic crisis in the seventeenth century. The problems arose with the decline of the indigenous population following the conquest. At the same time, Costa Rica was becoming an exchange corridor between areas of greater colonial elaboration: Nicaragua, Panama, and Guatemala at the regional level, and Peru and New Spain on an even broader scale. Given the risks faced by commercially oriented provincial elites who depended on a shrinking pool of indigenous labor, slaveholding became a crucial mechanism for economic stability. African and American-born slaves brought to Costa Rica from external markets allowed provincial elites to maintain their wealth both through commodity production and exchange (specifically cacao in the later stages of the century) and the purchase and sale of slaves themselves, who in this capacity became an important medium of exchange. In addition, elites circulated slaves among themselves through inheritance, donation, and dowry, which further served to protect elite access to wealth. Finally, in the absence of a strong crown presence in Costa Rica, commercial activity built on slave labor connected the province and its elites with other regions, thus proving a key integrating force.

The work falls short, however, in analyzing the social roles of slaves. While it solidly addresses slaves as capital, the book devotes little attention to them as people. Some of this problem is no fault of the author, who faces the all-too-common problem of describing non-elite life experiences. This challenge is made even more difficult by an apparent lack of documentation generated and preserved in a peripheral locale such as Costa Rica. Several intriguing angles are raised, but are insufficiently explored. For example, Cáceres claims that the existence of important groups of mulattos and pardos in the seventeenth century demonstrates a process of mestizaje. She also documents contact between elites and slaves captured in notarial records, but says little on social contact of the racially mixed free population. For example, the fascinating claim that seventeenth-century afromestizos and afroamericanos shared the tastes and values of the provincial elite—and the preferences of Cartago and Esparza rather than the Iberian peninsula—is poorly supported beyond showing the adoption of an Hispanic institutional structure (in the form of a cabildo) by the population of Puebla de los Pardos, located just outside Cartago. In another case, the author presents the struggle of Puebla's pardo and mulatto militia members for service pay and tribute exemptions in light of abuses by the provincial government. This does not directly address tantalizing issues such as perceptions of Afro-Costa Rican racial identity, or interaction between militia members and indigenous groups during interior military campaigns. The absence of such contexts weighs toward the perceptions of Costa Rica's elites, and their use of slaves, rather than offering an "insider's view" of the province's free and slave populations.