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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 144-146



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Honor y libertad: Discursos y recursos en la estrategia de libertad de una mujer esclava (Guayaquil a fines del período colonial). By María Eugenia Chaves. Göteborg, Sweden: Departamento de Historia e Instituto Iberoamericano de la Universidad de Gotemburgo, 2001. Notes. Tables. Bibliography. 311 pp. Paper.
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Honor y libertad tells the story of a mulatto slave woman from Guayaquil, María Chiquinquirá Díaz, who attempted to obtain her freedom and that of her daughter through the judicial system beginning in 1794. Whether she was ultimately successful is not known, because the detailed expediente on which this work (a doctoral dissertation undertaken at Göteborg University) is based does not specify the outcome. It is even possible that María Chiquinquirá died before her civil suit—undertaken on her behalf by the port city's procurador de esclavos—ended, inasmuch as she was between 40 and 50 years old when the proceedings began. Her master, diocesan priest Alfonso Cepeda, inherited María Chiquinquirá from a sibling, who in turn had inherited her from their parents. María Chiquinquirá (named after the future patron of Colombia, the Virgin of Chiquinquirá) argued that she was born [End Page 144] free because her own mother had allegedly been abandoned by Cepeda's parents before María Chiquinquirá's birth when the mother developed leprosy.

Honor y libertad—based on extensive archival research, especially judicial and notarial records in Ecuador (Guayaquil and Quito), Spain (Seville and Madrid), and London, as well as published primary sources and apparently all of the appropriate secondary literature—is exceptionally well researched, well written, and articulated. This reviewer, an unabashed constructionist, finds it refreshing to read a postmodernistic work that is intelligible and that ably combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to the past. Chaves places María Chiquinquirá's story within the larger context of place, time, and circumstances. Chapter 1 recreates Guayaquil and its inhabitants of the late eighteenth century, focusing primarily on slaves and the economic opportunities afforded them as day laborers in a city where labor was much in demand. Chapter 2 examines the legally and socially circumscribed—but, at the same time, in many respects remarkably "free"—world open to slave women in the port city during the late colonial period. Chiquinquirá was married to a freeman tailor, lived with her husband in their own lodgings, and worked for herself. Father Cepeda was happy with this arrangement, as long as he and his family received gratuitous tailoring services from Chiquinquirá's spouse. Chapter 3 examines the judicial, political, and social circumstances that enabled some slaves in Spanish colonies, especially in Guayaquil and its districts, to obtain their freedom through the courts.

Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the specific proceedings of María Chiquinquirá's suit for freedom, milking this source for the specifics of her life. Chaves also examines testimonies of witnesses in order to exemplify how a slave woman could mobilize resources against her master. Chapter 6 examines of the role that honor played in María Chiquinquirá's quest for freedom, especially as attenuated by her gender. Chapter 7 focuses on "the pivotal role judicial conceptions of possession and protection had in the construction of slave/master identities."

Although Guayaquil was hardly unique as a place where slaves could expect to achieve their freedom by one means or another, it was one of those places where it appears to have been relatively "easy," as Camilla Townsend has argued. Townsend analyzed the political beliefs of some slaves in the port city and the active roles they took to obtain their freedom during the late colonial and independence periods, using the court case of Angela Batallas to exemplify her points. Batallas even approached the Liberator Simón Bolívar to intervene on behalf of the suit being brought for her own liberation.

Regardless of how well María Chiquinquirá served her coeval master, her story...

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