In Transatlantic Bondage, the editor brings together eight historical studies that highlight the Black experiences of race, freedom, and enslavement in Spanish Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century (with one chapter on slavery and laws in Iberia and another on Extremadura). Ranging from 20 to 40 pages each, with notes and bibliographies, these chapters examine daily life and community, families, men’s and women’s roles, slavery laws, and resistance and punishment, and they pose new questions and invite further archival research.
The editor introduces the Spanish Caribbean and its relation to Spain, “Afro-Spain,” as central to “the formation of Black identities and Black societies in the Americas” and “representations of the Black presence in Spain, …one of the receivers of the largest diasporic experience in the Western Hemisphere” (pgs. 1, 2). Aurelia Marín Casares, perhaps too briefly, reviews 2,000 years of laws governing enslavement in Roman, Visigothic, Muslim, Christian, and imperial Iberia, covering justifications for enslavement, bans, taxation, and regulation, control of ethno-religious background, introduction into the Americas, suppression of uprisings, and abolition. Rocío Periáñez Gómez narrows this focus to Extremadura’s municipal ordinances from 1500 to 1800, concluding that a pejorative view of an enslaved minority motivated authorities to control conduct, limit activities and interactions, and impose penalties. Although interesting, this chapter leaves readers wishing to also see actual cases of people punished or resisting these proscriptions.
Richard Lee Turits analyzes the interplay between statutes and real people by skillfully presenting the early sixteenth-century royal court case of Rodrigo López in Santo Domingo and his sister Catalina in Cape Verde, who sued successfully for his liberty “[i]n the context of the growing equation of slavery with Blackness in Santo Domingo and so much of the Atlantic world, [where] free people of African descent were especially vulnerable to illegal reenslavement, even if they had secured freedom through legal manumission” (p. 80). Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo describes Santo Domingo as “the cradle of Blackness, Black slavery, and Black fight against slavery in the modern, post-Columbus Americas” (103), and he uses legal codes and ordinances to identify a wide range of ways authorities in the 1530s and 1540s sought to limit, control, and chase enslaved and free Black people as they became the majority in “the first permanent European colony of the Americas” (p. 104), establishing enduring patterns of “modern colonization in the Americas” (p. 103).
Lissete Acosta Corniel’s chapter returns readers to the lived experiences of individual Black women in sixteenth-century Santo Domingo, portraying them as “free, enslaved, founders, and explorers” and as essential to official strategies to encourage marriage among the enslaved and discourage marronage. This solidly archival chapter is one of the stronger essays, using extensive quotes and tables to introduce readers to exactly what can be found in the historical records she calls “the archival mass graves where too many Black women lay buried” (p. 157). Shifting readers’ attention to San Juan and 1672–1706, David M. Stark brings baptismal records together with records of troops to “reveal much about how men and women who belonged to different communities and kinship networks used the selection of godparents to (re-)create and expand social networks and to affirm community solidarity” (p. 213) and develop a “common culture” (p. 212).
Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco and Jorge L. Chinea cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, the first for Santo Domingo and the second for Puerto Rico. Royal court cases show that urban Dominican “women of color” circumvented and transgressed “the unequal gender rules of the patriarchal capitalist system” (182). Traders and Puerto Rican planters subverted royal restrictions to smuggle enslaved Africans, who in turn “asserted their humanity by engaging in a variety of day-to-day forms of resistance” (p. 255). Both document historical agency and the space between laws and compliance.
These short chapters will appeal to scholars of the African diaspora, Atlantic world, and colonial Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, particularly if they are looking for help in identifying future research questions or where additional archival research could extend what is already known and published in this collection. Undergraduates will find the writing accessible, even lively, and the length of the chapters easily manageable.
