Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross (review)

Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a comparative study on the interconnection between citizenship and racial subordination in slave societies. The book was cowritten by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross and builds on their previous work.¹ Among the many contributions of the study, it is worth mentioning the authors' analytical shift from slavery to freedom. In Slave and Citizen (1946), Frank Tannenbaum explained the divergent modern race relations in the United States and Latin America as resulting from their distinct slave legal regimes.² Over the years, revisionists criticized Tannenbaum for overemphasizing law at the expense of slave agency, whereas recent scholarship have been trying to synthesize these two variables. De la Fuente and Gross draw on the latter approach but reveal a major blind spot that have permeated the whole debate. For them, "it was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law" (4).

The book covers three and a half centuries in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, locations that developed "successful, brutal slave societies" (223). This broad scope allows the authors to investigate the legal constructions of the Spanish, English, and French colonial enterprises, and to unveil how these structures induced the different historical paths taken by each society. Drawing on extensive primary research, De la Fuente and Gross demonstrate that the historical outcomes were above all conditioned by manumission and communities of free people of color, insofar as these factors resisted elite projects to restrict black freedom and citizenship and to associate blackness with slavery: "The larger the community, the greater the opportunities for freedom" (221).

De la Fuente and Gross indicate multiple variables that shaped the differing trajectories taken by communities of free people of color in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Yet they devote particular attention to the "mutual constitutiveness" (9) between legal traditions, politics and culture, and the agency of historical actors. In Cuba, the right to manumission was not tied to race, as in Virginia and Louisiana, because Iberian traditions mostly applied the practice to the liberation of Christian or Muslim captives. Consequently, "communities of free people of color attained significant numbers in Cuba, while those in Virginia and Louisiana dwindled" (7). However, if the size of these communities were key to the expansion of freedom, how come slavery lasted longer in Cuba than in the United States? Although the authors do not address this question directly, one could infer from their rationale that the answer would lie in the vicissitudes of American sectionalism. By the 1830s, as a direct response to Northern abolitionism, Southern slaveholders started to articulate an explicit defense of slavery framed around the idea of "positive good," which helped enlist nonslaveholding white men in the support of a Southerner way of life. As white supremacy gathered momentum, the terms of black subordination were gradually reframed from property or status (slavery) to race (citizenship). Thus, while it is true that slavery lasted longer in Cuba, the laws regulating free people of color in the United States "also served as templates for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place" (224).

The book leaves research openings for scholars to further explore. How did black claims to citizenship differ when one compares Cuba (a colonial regime based on census suffrage) with the United States (a democratic, constitutional, federal, and representative republic)? Did the expelling of people of color from the Americas suggest the absence of a labor deficit in the United States? Has an Atlantic law, constituted by European legal traditions and local dynamics of American colonies, been formed along the centuries?

By avoiding the traditional notion that slavery was the main social factor governing slave societies, the book to work as an alternative to formulations in which slavery is the...