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Marriage as Slave Emancipation in Seventeenth-Century Rural Guatemala*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Paul Lokken
Paul Lokken*
Affiliation:
Bryant College, Smithfield, Rhode Island
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Extract

On the 17th of August 1671, Manuel de Morales, a 49-year-old Angolan slave employed on a Dominican-owned sugar plantation in the Pacific coastal hotlands of what is now the republic of Guatemala, came before a priest and declared his intention to marry. Accompanying Morales was his proposed spouse, Inés Hernández, an Indian widow from the nearby town of Escuintla, capital of the colonial Guatemalan corregimiento of Escuintepeque in which the Dominican ingenio lay. Four male witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage between Morales and Hernández, two on behalf of each contrayente, or prospective spouse. Three of the witnesses were slaves: Silvestre Ramírez, defined as mulatto, and Jacinto Pereira and Miguel de la Cruz, both identified as black. The fourth was Diego de Arriasa, mulatto and free.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , October 2001 , pp. 175 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2001

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Footnotes

*

The research on which this article is based was funded in part by a Field Research Grant from the Tinker Foundation, a Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association, and a dissertation fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. I wish to express my gratitude to Matt Childs, David Geggus, and Aline Helg for facilitating the presentation of a version of this study at LASA 2000 in Miami; to Murdo MacLeod for assessing a revised draft; and to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped immeasurably in the preparation of the final submission. The article's shortcomings remain my own.

References

1. The geographic focus of this article is the Spanish colonial province of Guatemala, which incorporated roughly the territory of the modern republics of Guatemala and El Salvador. The province was one of several within the larger audiencia of Guatemala, which stretched from the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas to modern Costa Rica. See Figure 1.

2. The names Escuintla and Escuintepeque were used interchangeably, but are distinguished here for clarity's sake.

3. Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez,” Guatemala City (hereafter AHA), signatura Google Scholar A4.16, legajo T4 1.11, expediente 271 (hereafter A4.16, T4 1.11:271). Section A4.16 of the AHA is designated “Informaciones Matrimoniales,” and holds diligencias matrimoniales submitted to the Bishop of Guatemala and Verapaz from all over his diocese. That diocese, like the colonial province of Guatemala, took in the territories of modern Guatemala and El Salvador. The Church solicited diligencias matrimoniales in order to ensure that intended spouses were willing participants, as well as to block unions between couples deemed under ecclesiastical law to be too closely related to marry without a dispensation. I refer frequently to diligencias matrimoniales as “marriage petitions” and to contrayentes as “petitioners,” convenient shorthand for the records of matrimonial investigations and their subjects. On the particulars of the information solicited from prospective marital partners, see de Remesal, Antonio, Historia general de las Indias Occidentales y particular de la gobernación de Chiapa y Guatemala, 2 vols. (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, 1988), 2, p. 346;Google Scholar de Contreras Gallardo, Pedro, Manual de administrar los sanctos sacramentos a los Españoles, y naturales desta Nueva España conforme à la reforma de Paulo V. Pont. Max. (México: loan Ruyz, 1638), pp. 64–72.Google Scholar The latter may be consulted at the John Carter Brown Library, whose staff I thank for facilitating my research there.

4. The literature on sugar and slavery in the Americas is voluminous. For an introduction to the topic, see Klein, Herbert S., African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),Google Scholar esp. chapters 3–5. Important recent interpretations of slavery's impact more generally on the Atlantic world include Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);Google Scholar Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997).Google Scholar

5. The figure of 30 slaves is taken from a 1670 survey of Guatemalan sugar plantations, cited in Soria, J.C. Pinto, El valle central de Guatemala (1524–1821): un análisis acerca del origen históricoeconómico del regionalismo en Centroamérica, Colección Estudios Universitarios 31 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1988), p. 28.Google Scholar

6. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:271. It is unclear from the document whether Mundo had been free or enslaved.

7. A popular older Guatemalan textbook mentioned the colonial African presence only to indicate that it was “extremely slight.” The continuing vitality of this notion is apparent in the extensive entry on Guatemala written for the 1998 version of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia by a noted historian of Central America. The entry leaves the impression that the region experienced no African-associated immigration during the colonial period until “black Caribs” were settled on the isolated Caribbean coast around 1800. See Daniel, J. Contreras, R., Breve historia de Guatemala, 2nd ed. (Guatemala: Editorial “José de Pineda Ibarra,” 1961), p. 56;Google Scholar Lee Woodward, Ralph Jr., “Guatemala,” in Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia (Redmond, Wa.: Microsoft, 1993–1997).Google Scholar

8. Inattention to the impact of African slavery in the region has not been universal, and is becoming less tenable in the wake of recent research. Classic general works providing useful information on the topic include MacLeod, Murdo J., Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973);Google Scholar Wormian, Miles L., Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982);Google Scholar Martínez Peláez, Severo, La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca, 13th ed. (México, D.F.: Ediciones en Marcha, 1994).Google Scholar In the early 1970s, students at Guatemala's University of San Carlos made the topic a specific area of research. See Diemecke de González, Ofelia Calderón, “El negro en Guatemala durante la época colonial” (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad de San Carlos, 1973);Google Scholar Palma Ramos, Danilo, “El negro en las relaciones étnicas de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII y principios del siglo XIX en Guatemala” (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad de San Carlos, 1974).Google Scholar Despite these efforts, sustained scholarly interest has developed only recently, owing in large measure to the impact of Lutz's, Christopher H. comprehensive demographic work on the colonial capital, published in Historia socio-demográfica de Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773 (Antigua: CIRMA, 1982),Google Scholar and Santiago de Guatemala: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 Google Scholar), esp. chapter 4. Examples of recent scholarship, which has focused mostly on the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, include Palomo de Lewin, A.C. Beatriz “Esclavos negros en Guatemala (1723–1773)” (Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad del Valle, 1992);Google Scholar Herrera, Robinson “The African Slave Trade in Early Santiago,” Urban History Workshop Review 4 (1998), pp. 6–12,Google Scholar and “‘Por Que No Sabemos Firmar’: Black Slaves in Early Guatemala,” The Americas 57:2 (October 2000), pp. 247–267; Komisaruk, Catherine “The Work it Cost Me’: The Struggles of Slaves and Free Africans in Guatemala, 1770–1825,” Urban History Workshop Review 5 (1999), pp. 4–24.Google Scholar The best examination, if brief, of slavery and sugar production specifically is Soria, Pinto, El valle central.Google Scholar

9. Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio de , Recordación florida: discurso historial y demostración natural, material, militar, y política del reyno de Guatemala, 3 vols., Biblioteca “Goathemala” 6–8 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1932–1933), 1, p. 224. Fuentes y Guzmán, Google Scholar tended to exaggerate in describing the wonders of his homeland, but several of these mills were large enough to employ more than a hundred slaves. See below.

10. Ximénez, Francisco, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, Libro 5, Biblioteca “Goathemala” 29 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1973), pp. 104, 210;Google Scholar Soria, Pinto, El valle central, pp. 27–29.Google Scholar These ingenios were located near Lake Amatitlán, just south of present-day Guatemala City.

11. Gage, Thomas, Travels in the New World, Thompson, J. Eric S., ed. (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), pp. 210–211;Google Scholar de Lewin, Palomo “Esclavos negros,” p. 72;Google Scholar Wortman, , Government and Society, p. 55;Google Scholar Peláez, Martínez, La patria del criollo, pp. 285 and 702 note 79;Google Scholar Soria, Pinto, El valle central, p. 32.Google Scholar

12. See Stuart Hall's comment that “critical points of deep and significant difference” (emphasis in original) have marked the African experience in the Americas, in Hall, , “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 394.Google Scholar Good places to begin explorations of sugar and slavery in Brazil and the English Caribbean during the seventeenth century include Schwartz, Stuart B., Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);Google Scholar Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).Google Scholar

13. The sample employed here consists of 407 petitions dating from the years 1671, 1681, 1691, and 1701. Almost all are held in AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12 (caja 157, 1670–1671), T4 1.11 (caja 197, 1671), T4 105 (caja 2, 1680–1681), T5 106 (caja 200, 1691), T5 107 (caja 205, 1691) and T6 105 (caja 77, 1701). The sample excludes hundreds of petitions filed in Santiago de Guatemala and its immediate environs—unless contrayentes were noted to have been residents elsewhere in the province—since Christopher Lutz has already written a thorough and exemplary historical demography of that city. Statistical analysis is pushed back no further than 1671 because petitions from earlier years—collected largely in a single legajo, A4.16, T5 1.21 (1618–1669)—are too few for any one year. The petitions available for 1691 far outnumber those available for other years, for reasons unknown. Only the first two-thirds of that year's petitions were consulted for this study. Meanwhile, a recently published and monumental guide to the AHA's informaciones matrimoniales indicates that 44 petitions produced outside the capital during the years studied here are misfiled in legajos other than those mentioned above. See Mazariegos Anleu, José Fernando, Indice General de Informaciones Matrimoniales en Guatemala, 1614–1900, Libro 1, Tomo 1 (Guatemala: AHA, 1999).Google Scholar

14. Legally, children inherited the condition of the mother: the so-called “law of the womb.” In his study of the capital, Lutz found that 56 percent of black slaves and 80 percent of mulatto slaves married free people between 1593 and 1769. Unfortunately, these figures are not broken down by gender. See Lutz, , Santiago, 88–89.Google Scholar This study suggests that enslaved women married free people far less than their male counterparts did.

15. See Rosemary Brana-Shute's recent claim that “[a]ll the free black and ‘colored’ (mixed-race) communities [in the Americas] before general emancipation in the nineteenth century were descended from one or more ancestors who had themselves been manumitted,” in Brana-Shute, , “Manumission,” in Drescher, Seymour and Engerman, Stanley L. eds., A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 262.Google Scholar

16. For a summary of evidence concerning the nature of manumission and its relationship to the growth of free populations of color in Spanish America, see Klein, , African Slavery, pp. 217–230.Google Scholar A recent work emphasizing the urban character of manumission is Hünefeldt, Christine, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854, Stern, Alexandra trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 91–92.Google Scholar

17. Marriage, of course, was not a prerequisite for the production of offspring in seventeenth-century Spanish America. During that century illegitimacy in Santiago ran, with few exceptions, at rates greater than 50 percent among gente ordinaria, and 30 percent among Spaniards. Similar rates held in seventeenth-century Guadalajara, New Spain. See Lutz, , Santiago,Google Scholar Appendix 3; Calvo, Thomas “The Warmth of the Hearth: Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara Families,” in Lavrin, Asunción ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 293–295.Google Scholar Precisely because marriage and sex were not indissolubly linked (and rarely have been), the former represented a special type of reproductive strategy, decipherable only by attending to factors other than sexual desire.

18. On the exemption granted to the indigenous population, see point 10 of Paul III's 1537 bull “Altitudo divini consillii, quod humana ne sit, & infra,” in de Tobar, Balthasar, Compendio Bularlo Indico, vol. 1, Gutiérrez de Arce, Manuel ed, (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1954), p. 211.Google Scholar Succeeding bulls reiterating this dispensation are mentioned in Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 3, p. 445.Google Scholar

19. The term criollo never appears in these seventeenth-century documents as a means of differentiating American-born Spaniards from their European-born counterparts.

20. Sauer, Carl O., The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 50;Google Scholar Lutz, , Santiago, pp. 7,Google Scholar 96–99, 270 note 1.

21. Indios laboríos and free black and mulattos owed an alternative tribute known as the laborío, but it does not seem to have been collected systematically. Nevertheless, the association of tribute status with “Indianness,” the least attractive “racial” classification in practice in colonial Guatemala, led blacks and mulattos to use records of militia service to end their subjection to the laborío during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When officials in San Salvador attempted to reinvigorate collection of the tribute in 1720, the city's blacks and mulattos rioted. See Archivo General de Centroamérica (hereafter AGCA), signatura Al.56 (3), legajo 626, expediente 5795 (hereafter in the following format: A1.56(3). 626. 5759.); Lokken, Paul “Undoing Racial Hierarchy: Mulatos and Militia Service in Colonial Guatemala,” SECOLAS Annals 31 (November 1999), pp. 25–36.Google Scholar

22. My comparative demography of the province of Guatemala's various districts is based primarily on a royal census, the “Razón de las ciudades, villas y lugares, vecindarios y tributarios de que se componen las Provincias del Distrito de este Audiencia (1682),” Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Contaduría 815. Christopher Lutz analyzes this document in some detail in an important preliminary assessment of late seventeenth-century Guatemala's rural non-indigenous population, in “Evolución Demográfica de la Población No Indígena,” in Chinchilla Aguilar, Ernesto ed., Historia General de Guatemala, vol. 2 (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1994), 249–258, esp. 255–257. Most of the reports included in the document, known hereafter as the “Razón,” were filed in 1683 by Central American corregidores and alcaldes mayores. They are of wildly varying utility, and must be approached with great caution. Most unfortunate is that a few administrators—including Acasaguastlán's—failed entirely to submit a count of local populations. My estimates for Acasaguastlán, thus, draw heavily on the observations of Fuentes y Guzmán, Google Scholar , whose reliability is also less than unquestionable. See his Recordación florida, 2, p. 247.

23. On the Maya peoples of the western highlands, see Lovell, W. George, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1992).Google Scholar On the Pipil, the Xinca, the Chortí and Pokomam Maya, and other indigenous peoples of the eastern and Pacific coastal lowlands—the major geographical focus of this article—see Feldman, Lawrence H., A Tumpline Economy: Production and Distribution Systems in Sixteenth-Century Eastern Guatemala (Lancaster, Ca.: Labyrinthos, 1985), p. 6,Google Scholar figure 5; Fowler, William R. Jr., The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), pp. 51–56,Google Scholar 60–65; Orellana, Sandra, Ethnohistory of the Pacific Coast (Lancaster, Ca.: Labyrinthos, 1995), pp. 24–27.Google Scholar

24. Marvin Harris’ venerable distinction between highland areas dominated by indigenous labor and lowland regions dependent on African-descended workforces, and the differing consequences for local racial hierarchies, is instructive here. See Harris, Marvin, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker and Company, 1964),Google Scholar esp. chapter 2. Classic studies of populations of African descent in colonial Mexico and Peru include Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo, La población negra de México, 1519–1810 (México, D.F.: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946);Google Scholar Palmer, Colin A., Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bowser, Frederick P., The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar For recent historiographical discussion of the Mexican case, see Chávez-Hita, Adriana Naveda “Los estudios afromexicanos: los cimientos y las fuentes locales,” La Palabra y el Hombre 97 (1996), pp. 125–139.Google Scholar

25. Lockhart, James “Social Organization and Social Change in Colonial Spanish America,” in Bethell, Leslie ed., Cambridge History of Latín America, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 278.Google Scholar In making this statement, Lockhart could not have had nineteenth-century Cuba in mind, a Spanish colony and home to one of the more brutal sugar-driven and slave-based economies in the history of the Americas. See Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, El ingenio: complejo económico social cubano del azucar, 3 vols. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978);Google Scholar Scott, Rebecca J., Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

26. For evidence that even slaves might successfully make claims to the honor, and hence heightened status, associated with marriage and legitimacy in seventeenth-century Spanish America, see Boyer, Richard “Honor among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation,” in Johnson, Lyman L. and Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya eds., Sex, Shame and Violence: The Faces of Honor in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), pp. 152–178,Google Scholar esp. pp. 155–164.

27. Map by author, Reuben Olinsky, and Ron Pitt.

28. The 1687 will of Baltasar de Herrera of Chiantla, north of the town of Huehuetenango, refers to no fewer than nine slaves Herrera either owned or held in trust. See AGCA, Al.20. 1497. 9974.

29. Judging the extent to which the number of diligencias matrimoniales available represents the total number of marriages that occurred is not an exact science. Given that the number of petitions known to exist in the AHA varies substantially from year to year, the best claim to be made is that a comparison of the relationship between estimates of rural populations—drawn mostly from the “Razón”—and the number of rural marriage petitions found with the relationship between Lutz's population estimates and decennial marriage totals for the capital suggests that the rural petitions located constitute a significant proportion, and perhaps a majority, of those drawn up, at least for 1691. For more extensive discussion of this comparison, and a breakdown by region of the province's population of African origins, see Thomas Lokken, Paul “From Black to Ladino : People of African Descent, Mestizaje, and Racial Hierarchy in Rural Colonial Guatemala, 1600–1730” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 2000),Google Scholar chapters 4–5.

30. For the province as a whole, the number of petitioners identified by African origins in diligencias matrimoniales ranges from a low of 33% of the total in 1681 to a high of 46% in 1691. See Table 1.

31. Blacks and mulattos actually formed a clear majority of petitioners who were not defined in any way as indigenous, but the argument made here is that “Indians” appearing in diligencias were in transition to “non-Indian” status, and are thus best associated with the non-indigenous population.

32. Demographically useful evidence is almost non-existent for rural areas of the province of Guatemala in the late sixteenth century, but Lutz suggests that black slaves made up about two-thirds of the population of African origins in the capital during the 1590s. See Lutz, , Santiago, p. 242.Google Scholar Meanwhile, in all four years isolated for analysis here, roughly four-fifths of the persons defined by African origins were identified as free mulatto. People defined as free mulattos far outnumbered the members of any other category, including mestizos. See Table 1.

33. A Spanish ban on the slave trade between 1640 and 1662 due to imperial crises, plus low demand, were the most important factors in this development, although imports did not pick up again for a couple of decades even after officials in Santiago began requesting new supplies following the ban's lifting. See AGCA, A 1.23. 1517. 10072. fols. 108–108V. (1646); A1.23. 2197. 15751. fol. 97 and copies on fols. lllv., 113 (1664); A1.23. 2199. 15755. fol. 50 (1670); Bowser, Frederick P. “Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society,” in Bethell, , ed., Cambridge History, 2, p. 362;Google Scholar Lutz, , Santiago, p. 86.Google Scholar The impact of this reduction in imports was perhaps evident on the Anís ingenio, which held 119 slaves under Dominican ownership in 1670. Forty years earlier, an inventory requested by the heirs of the ingenio's founder, Juan González Donis, listed 191 slaves, nearly half of them identified explicitly as African immigrants, including 45 as “angola.” See AGCA, Al .20. 536. 9039. fols. 296v–302 (1630); Soria, Pinto, El valle central, p. 27.Google Scholar

34. In one of the 15 cases remaining, the identity of an enslaved man's marital partner is unclear.

35. Brion Davis’, David concise and skeptical comparative assessment of the “humane” Spanish slave laws which grew out of the medieval Siete Partidas remains useful, in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 102–106.Google Scholar For discussion of slave law in colonial Guatemala, see de Lewin, Beatriz Palomo “La esclavitud negra en Guatemala durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Aguilar, Chinchilla ed., Historia General de Guatemala, 2, pp. 281–282.Google Scholar

36. Crespo, Alonso “Relación geográfica del partido de Escuintla, 1740,” Boletín del Archivo General del Gobierno 1:1 (Guatemala 1935), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

37. “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 4v.–9.; Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 2, pp. 79,Google Scholar 104; “Descripción de los conventos de la Santa Provincia del Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala, hecha el año de 1689,” transcription by Pardo, J. Joaquín in Vázquez, Francisco, Crónica de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la Orden de Nuestro Seráfico Padre San Francisco en el Reino de la Nueva España, vol. 4, 2nd ed., Biblioteca “Goathemala” vol. 17 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1937), p. 55.Google Scholar

38. The other petitioners included eight mestizos, seven Indians, a Spaniard and an undefined person. In two cases, a petitioner's status is illegible. See AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:122, 140, and T5 1.21:143, 184,andT4 1.11:237, 256, and 271 (1671); AHA, A4.16, T4 105:258, 275, 294, 320, 380, and 390 (1681); T5 106:26, 39, 66, 112, 133, 140, 160, 165, and 215 (1691); T6 105:2382, 2384, 2388, and one of 14 unnumbered cases included in T6 105 (1701).

39. Conde de la Gomera a la Corona, 14 November 1611, AGI, Guatemala 13, R.3, N.33 (in digi-talized format). In a related move, in the fall of 1611 the new President dispatched an expeditionary force to destroy a small maroon community established about eight years earlier near the coast at Tulate, directly south of Mazatenango. See “Autos del servicio que hizo el capitán Juan ruiz daviles … de la conquista y pacificación de los negros alçados que estaban en la barra i montañas de tulat (1626)” AGI, Guatemala 67.

40. “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 5v.–6v.; “Testimonio de los Autos Proveydos Por El Señor Licenciado Don Francisco Gómez de la Madriz en favor de los Mulatos de la Villa de San Diego de la Gomera, 1700,” AGI, Guatemala 285.

41. de Espinosa, Antonio Vásquez, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales, Upson Clark, Charles ed., Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 108 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1948), pp. 208–209.Google Scholar

42. “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, fol. 6v.

43. Fuentes y Guzmán's, reference was to the saltpans at the barra of Iztapa, the port and fishing community just east of Sipacate which had once hosted Pedro de Alvarado. See Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 2, p. 104.Google Scholar

44. “Testimonio,” AGI, Guatemala 285; Ximénez, Francisco, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, Libro 6, Biblioteca “Goathemala” vol. 24 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1971), p. 129;Google Scholar León Cázares, María del Carmen, Un levantamiento en nombre del Rey Nuestro Señor: testimonios indígenas relacionados con el visitador Francisco Gómez de Lamadriz (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988), pp. 68–69.Google Scholar

45. “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, fol. 6.

46. The fifth woman's identity is illegible.

47. Interestingly, two of eight additional petitions from Escuintepeque encountered during the course of research but not included in the statistical sample because of their dates also included slaves as petitioners. Both involved marriage between enslaved men and free women. The eight additional petitions are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:341 and 342 (1673); T4 105:224, 226, and 235 (1680); T4 105:388 (1685?); T6 105:2431 (1705); and T6 105:2376 (1708).

48. The application of the term “mulato/a” to the children of African-Indian as well as African-Spanish unions was the norm in seventeenth-century Guatemala. Fuentes y Guzmán, Google Scholar, for example, described Chipilapa, cabecera of the Pacific coast parish in which San Diego de la Gomera was located, as “poblado de mulatos los más de ellos de los que llaman zambos; cuya generación es de la mezcla de indias con negros.” The chronicler's use of the term zambo represents a rare occasion on which that term crops up in contemporary sources. See Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 2, p. 79;Google Scholar Lutz, , Santiago, pp. 46,Google Scholar 267 note 1 ; Table 1 in this article. A specific case in which the son of an enslaved black father and an Indian mother was labeled “mulato libre” is mentioned below.

49. The sex ratio among slaves imported to the Americas was notoriously skewed: nearly two-thirds were male. In Guatemala, for example, a 1613 inspection of the slaveship Nuestra Señora de Nazarén at the Caribbean port of Santo Tomás de Castilla revealed a “cargo” from Angola of 97 men and boys and 39 women and girls. See AGCA, A3.5. 67. 1291; Rout, Leslie B. Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 71–72.Google Scholar

50. AGCA, Al.15. 4103. 32523. Not surprisingly, two of the three enslaved women on the property were listed as spouses of male slaves.

51. Soria, Pinto, El valle central, passim;Google Scholar Luján Muñoz, Jorge, Agricultura, mercado, y sociedad en el corregimiento del valle de Guatemala (Guatemala: author's publication, 1988),Google Scholar esp. 35–37 and chapters 5, 7.

52. The region produced just three petitions bringing together a slave and a free person. The 52 petitions making up the sample from this area are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:94,95, 102, 123, 146, 170, 190, 191, 193, 195, 204, and T4 1.11:216, 233, 239, and 293 (1671); T4 105:220, 244, 252, 263, 271, 295, 309, 361, and 369 (1681); T5 106:16, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33, 56, 61, 80, 81, 82, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 115, and 147 (1691); T6 105:2368, 2392, 2409, 2413, 2417, 2419, 2421, and 2443 (1701).

53. Soria, Pinto, El valle central, pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

54. Twenty-six petitions involve male slaves marrying free partners, while just five list enslaved women as proposed spouses of free men. See Table 4. Similar imbalances—though not always as acute— also prevailed elsewhere in colonial Spanish America. See evidence from seventeenth-century Peru and eighteenth-century Rica, Costa and Rico, Puerto in van Deusen, Nancy “The ‘Alienated’ Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680 to 1700,” The Americas 56:1 (July 1999), p. 6 Google Scholar note 23; Acuña León, María de los Angeles and Chavarría López, Doriam “Cartago Colonial: Mestizaje y Patrones Matrimoniales, 1738–1821,” Mesoamerica 31 (June 1996), p. 175,Google Scholar Table 6; Stark, David M. “Marriage Strategies among the Eighteenth Century Puerto Rican Slave Population: Demographic Evidence from the Pre-Plantation Period,” Caribbean Studies 29:2 (July-December 1996), pp. 196–197.Google Scholar

55. Soria, Pinto, El valle central, pp. 27–28.Google Scholar

56. It is worth noting that the massive Dominican ingenio at San Gerónimo also produced no petitions involving slaves in the years examined. Perhaps the Dominicans made slave marriages a private matter, in keeping with their longstanding resistance to episcopal authority in colonial Guatemala. On the other hand, slaves from the three major Dominican holdings do appear as witnesses and as parents of proposed spouses in the petitions (see below), while Manuel Morales, a slave on the smaller Dominican operation in Escuintepeque, turned up as a contrayente.

57. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:94.

58. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:182.

59. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:239.

60. AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:268.

61. Seven of Acasaguastlán's 28 petitioners were free mulattos, who together with two mulatto slaves made up 32 percent of local petitioners. The total population of the district was apparently no more than 4,000 people, perhaps half that of Escuintepeque, which was itself lightly populated but probably held no fewer than 8,000 inhabitants. See Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 2, p. 247;Google Scholar “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, fols. 4v.–9. The 14 petitions from Acasaguastlán are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:113, 178, 182,andT4 1.11:234, 268, and 274 (1671); T4 105:256, 278, and 344 (1681); T5 106:74, 146,204, and 218 (1691); and T6 105:2395 (1701).

62. Fuentes y Guzmán, , Recordación florida, 2, p. 242.Google Scholar “Ladino” continued to be used at this time primarily as a label for non-Spaniards—especially Indians—who spoke Spanish, as in the phrase “indio ladino en [la] lengua castellana.” This phrase appears countless times in seventeenth-century documents. The links between the seventeenth-century history of Guatemala's population of African descent and the emergence of what is now known as the ladino sector are explored at length in Lokken, “From Black to Ladino.”

63. The 17 petitions are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:86, 87, 153, 210, and T4 1.11:232, 221, 229, 248, and 286 (1671); T4 105:300 and 319 (1681); T5 106:13, 78, and 192 (1691); and T6 105:2373, 2440, and 2445 (1701). One of the enslaved men listed was evidently not of African origins, being described as a “mulato de nacion chino en las islas de manila filipinas.”

64. The largest regional instance of slaveholding encountered during the course of this study emerges in the 1669 will of Bartolomé Fernández, a resident of San Salvador who owned rural estates named San Antonio Metapate and San Gerónimo Metapate, and ten slaves. See AGCA, Al.56. 1975. 13399. Fernández’ will indicates that manumission did indeed swell the free population of color, along with the relationships between enslaved men and free women emphasized here. Fernández freed all of his slaves in his will, although after he died a dispute arose between his wife, Isabel de la Serna, and his slaves over when exactly they were to be liberated. One of the slaves at issue, Francisco Hernández, then turned up in a 1671 marriage petition seeking to wed a free woman. Hernández’ marriage may have served in part as an insurance policy against an uncertain manumission process. See AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:86.

65. MacLeod, , Spanish Central America, pp. 184–192.Google Scholar

66. Unfortunately, neither the questions posed by parish priests nor the women's responses departed much from the general script followed in these cases, giving little direct sense of individual motivations. Interestingly, free men intending to marry enslaved women were not questioned in the same way. Indeed, in one of these relatively rare cases it was the prospective bride, the slave Lorenza de Torres of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, who was asked—not once, but three times—if it was truly her will to wed Matheo Ortiz, a free mulatto from nearby San Agustín de la Real Corona. One wonders what role Torres’ owner, Lucía de Ribera, might have played in shaping this interrogation. See AHA, A4.16, T4 105:278 (1681).

67. Martinez-Alier, Verena, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68. Anne Kuznesof, Elizabeth “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 4:1 (1995), p. 161.Google Scholar Kuznesof's statement obscures to some extent the existence of discrimination as practiced by Spanish women. As a counterpoint, see the discussion of efforts to sustain a hierarchical division between españolas and mestizas in the convent of Cuzco, Santa Clara in Burns, Kathryn, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 32–34.Google Scholar

69. The disjuncture between the Spanish ideal of “racial” hierarchy—which placed Indians above blacks—and social practice in places like Guatemala is nicely illustrated in schematic form in Lockhart, James and Schwartz, Stuart B., Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 130.Google Scholar

70. As indicated earlier, indios laboríos appeared regularly in marriage petitions, while tributary Indians did not. The province-wide sample also suggests that the former were more likely to wed non-Indian partners.

71. Unions between enslaved black men and indigenous women may thus have constituted, socially, a “win-win situation.” I owe this succinct formulation to Kathryn Burns.

72. AHA, A4.16, T5 106:13 (1691). Of course, the romantic possibility of love conquering all should not be entirely lost sight of amidst this singular focus on status considerations in marital decisions. One of the most unusual marriage petitions 1 examined in my research—not included in the sample here— exhibits the efforts of don Pedro de Castellanos, son of Capitán don Francisco Henríquez de Castellanos and doña Margarita de Santiago, to wed Nicolasa Morán, mulatta slave of the cleric Pedro de Almengor, in Santiago de Guatemala. The petition, first submitted in November 1680, was still pending 18 months later, at which point Castellanos and Morán had taken refuge together in the church of San Sebastián in order to press their case. This petition, as might be expected, fits no pattern. See AHA, A4.16, T4 105:232.

73. AHA, A4. 16, T5 1.21:81.