The Notoriety of Freedom and the Slavery's "Private" in Colonial Peru

By illuminating how enslaved and freed women of African descent articulated freedom in not only in the written documentation, but in public performance, this paper explores the shifting terrain between the “private” and the “public” in colonial Latin America. As Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Camilla Cowling, and other scholars have illustrated, enslaved and freed women claimed honor and were adept at employing the courts and legal discourses to negotiate their manumission and that of their families. This paper traces particular women, men, and families through their uses of notarial documents, judicial cases, baptismal records, and public gatherings to emphasize how enslaved and freed people of African descent created their own archives to claim legal freedom. Additionally, in bitter contestations over freedom in the seventeenth-century sugar and wheat economies of coastal Peru, enslaved and freed women consciously exposed slaveholders’ household secrets and intimate truths, including sexual crimes against enslaved women and children. Their bold archival acts made notorious what male and female slaveholders alike preferred to keep private. Drawing on Thavolia Glymph’s call to recognize the violence within the slaveholding household, this paper demonstrates how “going public” lay at the heart of enslaved and freed strategies to obtain legal freedom. These examples also challenge the historiography regarding colonial Latin American definitions of honor that have taken European-descent experiences as the standard. Honor, for enslaved women and their families, however, meant publicly revealing the dishonor done to them and theirs.