UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Urban Slavery in Colonial Puebla de los Ángeles ...

240 Pages·2013·0.98 MB·Spanish

UCLA
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Urban Slavery in Colonial Puebla de los �ngeles, 1536-1708
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84k1z5fp
Author
Sierra, Pablo M.
Publication Date
2013

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles

Urban Slavery in Colonial Puebla de los Ángeles, 1536-1708

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in History

by

Pablo M. Sierra

2013
© Copyright by
Pablo M. Sierra
2013
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Urban Slavery in Colonial Puebla de los Ángeles, 1536-1708
by
Pablo M. Sierra
Doctor of Philosophy in History
University of California, Los Angeles, 2013
Professor Kevin B. Terraciano, Chair

This study addresses the emergence, rapid development and gradual decline of chattel
slavery in the city of Puebla de los Ángeles during the early and mid-colonial period. The
presence and exploitation of African slaves in Puebla has been ignored in the historiography of
colonial Mexico (New Spain), Latin America, and the greater African Diaspora. By
crossreferencing extant municipal, notarial, parochial and judicial records with Spanish- and
Nahuatl-language colonial chronicles, I reconstruct the history of African slaves and their
descendants in Puebla from 1536 to 1708. My notarial investigation focuses on bills of slave
purchase, letters of manumission, apprentice contracts and loans produced between 1600 and
1700. I find that during the seventeenth century, 20,000 slaves were bought in notarized
transactions in the Puebla slave market. The city's large and wealthy Spanish population
demanded large retinues of skilled and unskilled slaves to labor as domestics, water carriers, wet
nurses, textile workers, etc. The owners of sugar plantations (ingenios) in nearby Izúcar, Cuautla,
and the Cuernavaca basin also required large numbers of enslaved workers in the context of
extreme Indigenous depopulation.

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By the 1620s, a series of epidemics, combined with exploitative labor practices, reduced
the Indigenous population of Central Mexico and the greater Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley to 10% of
its pre-Hispanic levels. In response, the Spanish Crown authorized the implementation of a
sophisticated slave trading system, led by Angola-based Portuguese merchants, to operate in
Puebla de los Ángeles. These Lusophone networks relied on the encomendero de negros, a
locally-based merchant to regulate the entry and sale of all new African arrivals to the city
between 1616 and 1639. Yet African slaves had already begun to erode the foundations of chattel
slavery well before these dates. Although theoretically reduced to human property under Spanish
law, Afro-Poblano slaves actively resisted their bondage by exercising their religious rights as
practicing Catholics. In particular, male slaves established numerous formal unions with free
women (of all races) through the sacrament of matrimony. In turn, children born of these unions
were legally free, leading to numerous generations of free Afro-Poblanos by the end of the
seventeenth century.


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The dissertation of Pablo M. Sierra is approved.

Lauren Derby
Mark Q. Sawyer
William R. Summerhill
Kevin B. Terraciano, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles
2013


 iv
To Marina Sánchez Gómez, mi abuela.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables vii
List of Acronyms viii
Acknowledgments ix
Vita xii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 - Formative Slavery in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, 1536-1580 21
Chapter 2 - The Transatlantic Voyage: From Angola to Cuextlaxcoapan, 1595-1635 52
Chapter 3 - The African Influx and the Puebla Slave Market, 1600-1700 81
Chapter 4 - Failed Freedoms, Manumissions and Apprenticeships 122
Chapter 5 - Slave Matrimony and Afro-Indigenous Interactions 158
Conclusion - A City of Freedmen 200
Bibliography 219

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1. Slave trains conducted from Veracruz to Puebla de los Ángeles 63
Table 3.1. Male-female slave ratios in the Puebla slave market, 1600-1639 90
Table 3.2. Average purchase price for slaves in Puebla by age group, 1600-1635 92
Table 3.3. African slaves sold in Puebla by ethnic labels/origin, 1595-1635 107
Table 5.1. Number of married slaves owned by obrajeros in 17th-century Puebla 171
Table 5.2. Groom marital preference by ethnic/cultural labels, 1585-1615 177
Table 5.3. Slave-free marriages in Sagrario and San José by legal status, 1585-1657 183
Table 5.4. Number of grooms and brides by race and legal status, 1660-1700 186


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LIST OF ACRONYMS

AGN Archivo General de la Nación (México)
AGNP Archivo General de Notarías del Estado de Puebla
AHJP Archivo Histórico Judicial de Puebla
AHPA Archivo Histórico de la Parroquia del Santo Angel Custodio de Analco
AMP Archivo Municipal de Puebla
APSJ Archivo Parroquial del Señor San José, Puebla
ASMP Archivo del Sagrario Metropolitano de Puebla


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