African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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257 p., Chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O'Toole examines the construction of a casta (caste) system under the Spanish government, and how this system was negotiated and employed by Andeans and Africans.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
414 p., Never-before-told story of the first black explorer and adventurer in America, Esteban Dorantes. An African slave, Dorantes led an eight-year journey from Florida to California in the early 16th century -— three hundred years before Lewis and Clark ventured west. Includes "Camino Real: The Royal Road to Mexico City, 1536," "Dorantes and the Archive of the Indies," and "Cuba: 1527-1528."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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282 p., Prior tO 1640, When the Regular Slave Trade to New Spain ended, colonial Mexico was the second largest importer of slaves in the Americas. Even so, slavery never supplanted indigenous labor in the colony, and by the second half of the 17th century there were more free Afromexicans than slaves in Mexico.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. The analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative.
Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
One way the Spanish used to make money like the British in New York was to rent slaves which was called Half Slavery to Freedom. In New York, the master would allow the slave to be free as long as the slave paid a yearly fee to the master. In the Spanish possessions, a slave master would rent his slaves to people who had need of their labor. This means the master did not have to be accountable, or responsible for the upkeep of the slave or the actions of the slave. Either way it was dehumanizing for the slave.
