This chapter explores how enslaved people developed legal know-how about Castilian laws of slavery and freedom, and shared and exchanged such information with others. In particular, the chapter focuses on the history of enslaved Black people’s determination to raise capital or credit to purchase their liberty from their enslavers. The chapter explores how enslaved Black men and women often plotted their paths to liberty through economic decisions by focusing on the lives of enslaved Black people who resided in the towns along the Camino Real in New Spain between Veracruz and Mexico City during a time of economic boom in the late sixteenth century. Notarial records that cataloged the self-purchase and liberation of enslaved people in port towns of the Spanish Atlantic often reveal how enslaved Black people developed social ties and capital among kin, friends, and charitable residents, and consorted with people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who lived or passed through the places where they resided. These records index a history of conversations about strategies to obtain liberty among enslaved Black people and relationships across different socioeconomic spheres that allowed for some enslaved people to access precious credit to pay for their liberty.

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.