Marriage as Slave Emancipation in 17th Century Guatemala

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

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 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 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...