Sobreviviendo a la esclavitud: negociación y honor en las prácticas cotidianas de los africanos y afrodescendientes. Lima, 1750-1820 by Maribel Arrelucea Barrantes (review)

This book, by one of Peru's specialists in the history of slavery, is the combination of a master's thesis on colonial slavery in Lima and subsequent research on slaves' legal complaints. Arrelucea Barrantes's purpose is to highlight everyday practices by enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants to assert their full humanity and participate in society.

Based on archival research conducted mostly in Lima's Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Arzobispal of Lima, and on a bibliography of works predominantly published in Spanish, the book is organized in three parts and nine chapters. Part I, Slavery and the Colonial Order, presents the demography and geography of Peruvian slavery, as well as the complexity of colonial Peru's social stratification. Part II, Relative Slavery, Family and Honor, aims at reconstructing enslaved Africans' and Afro-descendants' agency and slave-master negotiations. In Part III, Slavery and the Transformation of the Slave System, Arrelucea analyzes slavery as a social system within the colonial order that implied a tacit "social pact" between slaves and masters, according to which she classifies slaves' experiences and strategies. By acting within the social pact, enslaved men and women avoided direct conflict while "effectively relativizing the slave system in the long term" (197). This was notably the case for those who embraced Catholic practices and joined religious brotherhoods, those who managed to negotiate working conditions with their owners, and those who based claims on the law and customs. The author then turns to another group, the "infamous slaves" who played with the limits of the social pact: the incompetent and unreliable, vagrants, and seducers, witches and healers, and drunkards and those who committed suicide. Finally, she considers the slaves who openly broke the social pact: murderers, runaways, robbers, maroons, and rebels.

Each subsection is carefully documented with examples found in the archives or the press (mainly the newspaper El Mercurio Peruano) and discussed in light of the existing historiography. Many cases are poignant testimonies narrating slaves' daily lives, with their ordeals and hopes. Enslaved litigants who presented their claims to the Ecclesiastical Tribunal had better trial conditions than those who filed with the Royal Audience. They could personally present their cases, without having to pay a lawyer or obtain legal paper stamped with an official seal. Additionally, for the historian, these less formally written statements present unique opportunities to retrieve the voices of enslaved men and women.

The book, however, would have benefited from some editorial guidance. It is long: only on page 131 does the author begin the analysis of Lima slaves' everyday resistance. Some of the general information given in the first hundred pages could have been summarized, and the main argument clarified. Arrelucea distinguishes "archaic" slavery from "relative" slavery (103-13), a distinction that remains unclear. Moreover, her argument on the "slow relativization of slavery in Lima" (38) as a result of enslaved Africans' and Afro-descendants' agency is not fully convincing. Certainly, she has given many varied instances of slaves' resourcefulness and perseverance in asserting what they considered their rights. But it is less evident that their actions progressively weakened slavery as an institution. For instance, the author illustrates her analysis with a myriad of cases that occurred over a 50-year period (from the 1760s to the early 1800s), without documenting a process of change over time. She also omits the fact that slavery remained strong (and even led to new slave imports) between 1820 and 1854, when Peru finally declared abolition.

This book is, nevertheless, a thought-provoking study that will interest historians of Latin American slavery. Within Peru, as Arrelucea hopes, it will shake well-established images of the country's slavery by showing enslaved men and women's resilience and their creative struggle to shape their future.