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220 Epilogue Conceiving Citizenship ^& The patrono, as a master and a rich man, does as he pleases, and . . . thus violates the articles of the law, which, like every subject resident in the place where it has been promulgated, he is obliged to obey, or suffer the consequences of his disobedience. —Ramona Oliva to Gobierno General, Havana, 9 August 1883 With these words, Ramona Oliva’s 1883 petition proclaimed a radical vision of freedom: that the force of the law should apply equally to all, regardless of status, wealth, sex, or skin color, and that, in the same way, its protection might be actively sought by all who were entitled to it. Written in the dying days of a slave regime, and a few years before a new uprising in Cuba would transform the language of “subjecthood” to that of “citizenship ,” the words evoke a hope not just of combating slavery through the law, but of staking a broader claim within national life. Despite the denial to them of active citizenship rights, formal petition and legal redress had long allowed women of all classes and colors to make demands of public authorities and polities beyond their own families and acquaintances. Petitioning bridged the gulf between the public and the private that circumscribed elite women’s worlds, while, for nonelites, it helped span the yawning chasm between literate culture and the oral worlds of the illiterate majority. As we have seen, in the process claims-making also crossed (although it could not eliminate) another divide: between the notions about womanhood held by these different worlds. In her study of women’s antislavery campaigns in the nineteenthcentury United States, historian Susan Zaeske examines petition as a tool Epilogue / 221 for political change, out of which would emerge much broader women’s rights claims.1 While antislavery mobilization in Brazil and in the Spanish colonial world did not directly produce calls for women’s suffrage, nonetheless it did constitute a new form of popular politics, bringing new groups into the public arena to influence an issue of national importance, and these groups included women from different social sectors. Linked to this process, ordinary enslaved and free(d) women’s claims-making influenced not only their own destinies but those of their societies more broadly. Defending their rights, space, property, families, and bodily integrity, they sought their “rightful share” in postabolition society.2 In this sense, they staked a claim to a citizenship that, formally, they would continue to be denied.3 Soon after coming across Ramona’s petition in the Cuban National Archives, I made a visit to the beautiful colonial town of Trinidad. Visiting the city museum, I was drawn to the part that recounts the history of slavery and abolition. Representing the resistance of the enslaved was an artist’s impression of “El Cimarrón” (the maroon), a black-and-white sketch depicting a black man with a bare, rippling torso, a broken shackle on his foot, and a machete in his hand, running through the Cuban countryside pursued by dogs and a man on horseback. Leaving the quiet cool of the museum to walk the bustling streets of the town—named, like so many streets in revolutionary Cuba, after familiar male heroes of the wars of independence like Antonio Maceo and José Martí—I began to wonder where Ramona’s story fitted into these narratives about abolition and nation-building. Not long afterwards, researching a paper on gender and marronage in the Americas, I spent time analyzing public memories of slave resistance in Brazil, most commonly represented by the figure of Zumbi dos Palmares. Zumbi, the leader of Brazil’s longest-lived quilombo, has monuments dedicated to him in a number of Brazilian cities, while 20 November, the anniversary of Palmares’s final destruction, has become a national holiday, symbolizing the achievements of the black movement in celebrating “freedoms won” rather than the “freedoms given” by Princess Isabel on 13 May 1888.4 Although he has been chosen to represent universal black struggle in Brazil, Zumbi’s masculinity is actually a central part of his image, as can be seen from a scandal whipped up by historian and gay rights activist Luis Mott in 1995, during the celebrations marking the four hundredth anniversary of the destruction of Palmares. Partly in an attempt to create awareness about gay rights, Mott published a series of articles in leading national newspapers, suggesting he had uncovered [18.189.170.17] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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