''My Conscience is Free and Clear'': African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico

On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa.¹ The will included information about Polonia's family, possessions, debts to be collected, and how she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.

On March 14, 1679, just six days later, as she lay sick in bed, Polonia de Ribas notarized one final act by commissioning an official carta de libertad (freedom card) for one of her slaves.² In this notarial entry, she freed Gerónimo de Yrala, a 50-year-old man designated as a negro criollo (an African-descended man born in the colonies).³ At first, this act might appear ordinary. Many slave owners freed some or all of their slaves on their deathbeds because they believed it to be their final act of generosity. But this manumission case is remarkable for two reasons: Polonia de Ribas was a wealthy free mulata and Gerónimo de Yrala was her brother.

This article explores questions of family, status, and colonial economic sustainability through the complex and provocative life of free African-descended slave owner Polonia de Ribas. While Polonia occupied an exceptional position as a slave owner of her own family members, she was not the only woman of African descent who owned slaves or wielded economic influence in late seventeenth-century Mexico. In the 1600s, when many African-descended people in Mexico still labored as slaves in fields and urban centers, a new demographic of colonial society began to emerge: free African-descended women of means. Although free African-descended people existed throughout the Spanish colonies, as early as the Conquest era, the seventeenth century witnessed tremendous growth in their numbers.⁴ As colonial Mexico's institutions took shape and local economies diversified, free women accessed developing labor markets, demonstrated geographic mobility, and keyed into interracial networks to secure their livelihoods.⁵ Free women employed strategies similar to those of other people of means, but they also applied gendered strategies and found themselves in circumstances specific to their race, such as having enslaved family members or having been enslaved themselves. This article argues that while slavery loomed large in the extensive rural periphery, some free African-descended women in the jurisdiction of Xalapa, Veracruz, attempted to create social distance from slavery with their classed status as slave owners.

Seventeenth-Century Xalapa

Xalapa, the present-day capital of the state of Veracruz, represented a significant hub of regional influence.⁶ Throughout the early colonial period, new viceroys rested in Xalapa on their way to their investitures in the viceregal capital, often staying with a wealthy resident while enjoying the cooler weather of the hilly way station.⁷ Spanish soldiers from the interior of Mexico traveling to the coast for expeditions to Florida also stopped in Xalapa for respite en route to the port of Veracruz.⁸ Commercial businessmen from the port chose to maintain their stocked warehouses in the hillside town.⁹ Most of the principal economic power players preferred the more moderate weather of Xalapa to the sweltering heat of the port, which helped shape the former town's distinctive profile.¹⁰

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Xalapa and its agricultural environs counted a population between 7,000 and 9,000 inhabitants.¹¹ Indigenous people always accounted for the largest percentage, although estimates vary widely, between about 60 percent and 85 percent of the total population.¹² Excluding the largely indigenous agricultural zones that surrounded Xalapa proper, the demographics of the town changed drastically over the course of the second half of the seventeenth century, with the indigenous population doubling from 1,163 in 1651 to 2,487 by 1700...