In the 1660s, Elena de Paz y Vela engaged in a protracted judicial argument with her enslaver, a powerful landholder in Trujillo on the northern Peruvian coast. He argued that she paid the required
jornal, or the wages she owed as an enslaved laborer, as well as worked inside his home, tended to his businesses, and therefore was a slave because she had acted as one. Elena disagreed. She had not paid the expected wages, had arranged for her purchase price, and lastly worked with her freed husband and her freed mother. Based on her accounting outside of the legal disagreement, Elena had been working her way to freedom by not performing the enslaver’s legal requirements of enslavement. Certainly, enslaved people who engaged in legal processes of manumission sought “contingent liberty,” “fractional freedom,” or a patchwork freedom that included exchanging one owner for another or being allowed to pay installments towards a purchase price (Chira 2022; McKinley 2016). Living not as enslaved, but not able to prove a freed status, however, made enslaved and freed people experts in the failure of legal manumission.
This paper examines how enslaved and freed people relied on their own methods to calculate their freedom outside of the colonial courts. Cognizant of the dismissive, violent, and erasing qualities of notarial, judicial, and ecclesiastical archives controlled by enslavers as well as colonizers (Fuentes 2016, Johnson 2020), I examine how enslaved and manumitting people in seventeenth-century Trujillo treated legal manumission as the beginning of freedom’s work. I gather instances in the notarial record where enslavers and manumitting enslaved people disputed the multiple ways that both accounted for or calculated their achievement of freedom. Enslaved people understood their gradual payments, hard-won autonomy, contracted labor agreements, and independent documents to be significant wins in generational struggles to achieve freedom.
