Enslaved and free men and women throughout the Caribbean and Pacific contended with numerous calculations of their bodies, extractions of their labor, and disruptions of their kinship ties. Categorized as discardable though highly valuable, quarantined as diseased while expert health practitioners, charged as dangerous but required to serve as armed protectors, and suspected as heterodox while the paragons of Catholic piety, enslaved and free people were experts in the legal, religious, political, and economic structures as well as geographies that governed their lives.

This panel examines how enslaved people in Puerto Rico, Cumaná, and Peru contested and survived property impositions, colonial anxieties, white privilege, and enslavers’ financial motivations. Taking our cue from the current Black feminist methodologies that require locating evidence within the violent, disruptive, and dismissive archive (Fuentes 2016, Johnson 2020, Morgan 2021), we work to examine how notarized manumission cases, the political economy of the slave trade, militia categorization, criminal accusations, and construction of disease expressed regulatory practices of racialized capitalism that accompanied chattel slavery of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Examining criminal cases, hundreds of pages of conflicting testimonies, correspondence, and financial records surrounding the sale and quarantine of forty-eight Africans, and notarial records of legal manumission with their disputes, this panel attends to the archival and narrative challenges of writing enslaved histories.

Each paper highlights how a particular man, woman, or child juxtaposed how age, gender, disease, and labor requirements indicated enormous demands of enslavement and limited possibilities of freedom. With a focus on an enslaved African girl with her forty-seven shipmates caught in a forced journey from San Juan to Cumaná, Elise Mitchell illuminates the precarity of enslaved people traded through Caribbean markets and imperial quarantines. Classified as ill with smallpox, an unnamed African girl reveals the dangers of moving through enslavement’s morbid geography of slavery. By following the protracted and failed attempts by enslaved woman Elena de Paz y Vela to secure her legal manumission, Rachel O’Toole reveals how in seventeenth-century Peru, enslaved and freed people relied on their own accounting towards freedom. Instead of the courts, 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. Gabriel J. Rivera Cotto examines how Juan Bautista and José Joaquín engaged in a recurring pattern of resistance to cross imperial boundaries between Puerto Rico and Haiti. While Spanish authorities and sugar plantation owners tried to insert Puerto Rico into what we now understand as the ‘second slavery’ of a sugar economy, enslaved people plotted a maritime escape to the Haitian revolution.