This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter traces how formerly enslaved Black men and women partook in a legal culture of freedom papers in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire. After enduring lifetimes of enslavement and precarious and lengthy routes to obtain their precious liberty, formerly enslaved Black people often took careful measures to document and protect their hard-won freedom by engaging in the paper-based bureaucracy that underpinned the central tenets of power and justice in the Spanish empire. This often involved investing in the services of notaries to duplicate freedom papers or requesting that various royal and ecclesiastical authorities issue confirmatory paperwork to document their freedom. Their participation in this legal culture of freedom papers reveals how people from the lowest socioeconomic echelons of colonial society measured and valued paperwork – even if they could not read or write – and invested resources to produce and safeguard an array of legal documents to protect their status.

The opera Carmen has been at the centre of vivid debates on Spanish national identity since its premiere. Praised abroad for its Spanish melodies, Bizet’s work could hardy be taken as authentic in the country where Mérimée set his 1845 novella. This chapter explores the interpretation of the opera by intellectuals and music critics from Andalusia and the Basque provinces, the two most prominent geographical references in the work.

The chapter offers a contextualisation and charts the reception of the opera within the Spanish cultural politics of the period which coincided with the blossoming of peripheral regionalisms, and nuances existing accounts of the opera’s reception in Spain. First it surveys the case of Andalusia, placing the arrival of the opera alongside the assimilation of its culture as the quintessential expression of the nation’s identity. Secondly, it shows Basque reactions to Carmen, which further exemplified the difficulty of consolidating the one-size-fits-all idea of Spanishness that the opera transmitted abroad. The chapter presents a cultural history of the reception of the opera together with a discussion of the cultural politics of the rich web of ethnic identities that constitute modern Spain.