Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Panos of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

On April 5, 1723, Juan Joseph de Porras, a mulatto slave laboring in an obraje de paños (woolen textile mill) near Mexico City, appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for blasphemy. ¹ According to the testimony of six slaves, including Porras' wife, while his co-workers prepared to bed down for the night in the obraje Porras had blasphemed over a beating he had received from the mayordomo (overseer) earlier in the day. Señor Pedregal, the owner of the obraje, testified that Porras was one of nearly thirty workers, all Afro-Mexican slaves or convicts, who lived and labored in his obraje without the freedom to leave. ²

The case against Juan Joseph de Porras and dozens of others like it in the Mexican archives raise important questions, not only about the makeup of the colonial obraje labor force, but also about the importance of Afro-Mexican slavery in the middle of the colonial period. Was the Pedregal labor force, composed entirely of slaves and convicts, the exception or the rule within obrajes of New Spain? If it was not exceptional, how important were slaves to that obraje and others like it? What exactly was the demographic makeup of the obraje labor force in the middle of the colonial period? And, how might the answers to those questions change our understanding of the histories of labor and slavery in colonial Mexico?

Traditional historiography contends that although a few obrajes in New Spain relied upon slave labor, it was Indians and convicts who provided the bulk of obraje workers throughout the colonial period. ³ Afro-Mexican slaves, according to this argument, were too expensive to be the primary workforce and only supplemented other forms of labor. For example, Charles Gibson estimates that in the first half of the seventeenth century, it would have cost between 15,000 and 20,000 pesos to staff the average-sized obraje with slaves, based upon an average selling price of 400 pesos per slave. Gibson concludes that this was far too costly for an obraje to be financially successful and thus obrajeros (obraje owners) did not look to Afro-Mexican slaves as their primary labor force. Instead, they turned to debt-peonage and convicts. ⁴

The contention that slavery was not significant to the woolen textile industry is given further support by traditional understandings of that institution in New Spain. Most researchers agree that slave labor became less and less important after 1640. The historiography makes strong connections between the history of African slavery and the demographic fate of the native population in colonial Mexico. ⁵ The period of highest demand for slaves, 1580-1640, ⁶ coincided with a precipitous decline of the indigenous population. ⁷ In the absence of Indian workers, important colonial industries such as sugar and mining relied heavily upon imported slave labor. ⁸ After 1640, however, the consensus is that the growth of the Indian and the casta (mixed race) populations resulted in the increased availability of free wage labor, making slavery correspondingly obsolete. ⁹ Furthermore, the external supply of slaves was cut off in 1640 when, in response to Portugal's independence, the Spanish Crown cancelled all slaving contracts with Portuguese merchants. ¹⁰

Due to the growth of free wage labor, many argue that the slave population became increasingly urban and economically unimportant over time. R. Douglas Cope best summarized conventional treatments of urban slavery in New Spain when he wrote, "[t]he typical Mexico City slave was a maid, a coachman, a personal servant . . . [s]laves were status symbols rather than an economic necessity. Mexico City elites liked to advertise their social standing by, for example, parading around town with a retinue of armed mulattos." ¹¹ Thus, the vision of slavery in New Spain after 1640 is one of a small, skilled rural...