Latin America and the West Indies

In Latin America and the West Indies, enslaved Africans and their descendants made up a significant part of urban populations, especially in coastal areas and in regions in which mining activities prevailed.

Depending on the region, in the Spanish Americas and Brazil, in as early as the sixteenth century, slave ownership in urban areas was not limited to rich households. More modest families and individuals could own one or two enslaved persons, who hired themselves to perform a variety of services. European and locally born white settlers, including women (as we explored in chapter 6) owned enslaved people. But in cities such as Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, it was not uncommon to find men and women who owned Black enslaved persons, although rarely in great numbers.²⁶ A comparable context existed in Brazilian cities such as Salvador in Bahia, where studies suggest that during the nineteenth century, about 67 percent of slaveholders owned between one and ten slaves.

Black enslaved populations have been present in the Spanish Americas since the conquest and the early colonization period. But the use of an enslaved Black workforce in urban and rural areas often depended on the size of the available Indigenous population in the various Spanish colonies. Where the native populations became scarce after being decimated by military conquest, diseases, and excessive work, Spanish colonizers increasingly imported enslaved Africans. For example, as early as the sixteenth century, Spanish colonial cities such as Mexico City and Cartagena had significant populations of Black enslaved men and women who worked as domestic servants, laundresses, street vendors, tailors, blacksmiths, carpenters, gardeners, and shoemakers. By the seventeenth century, Indigenous, Black, and, to a lesser extent, enslaved workers from Asia (known as chinos) coexisted and often shared the same professions in this vast region.²⁸ In Lima and Puebla de los Ángeles, the second largest city of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (or Mexico), a significant number of enslaved Black workers labored in textile mills (obrajes) during the seventeenth century.²⁹ Enslaved people also worked in convents, hospitals, and colleges.

In Bridgetown in Barbados, enslaved women worked as prostitutes in brothels run by freedwomen at the end of the eighteenth century.³⁰ During this same period in Cuba, enslaved people made up approximately 28 percent of Havana’s population.³¹ As the city developed, many bondsmen worked in the city’s defensive fortresses, construction sites, and shipyards. Havana’s newspaper advertisements between 1791 and 1815 show enslaved men in a variety of professions such as blacksmiths, tailors, cooks, vendors, hairdressers, barbers, tobacconists, coachmen, helmsmen, and bakers.

The eighteenth-century mining boom in the area of present-day Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso led to the increase of imports of enslaved Africans to Brazil. Many bondspeople lived and worked in gold and diamond mining towns such as Sabará, Ouro Preto, and Mariana in Minas Gerais. A number of men were faisqueiros. These enslaved men were itinerant miners who worked and lived away from their owners in exchange for providing them a fixed amount of their gains.³⁵ In the cities of this mining region, enslaved women worked as street vendors and prostitutes as well. These activities allowed them to save money to purchase their freedom, therefore contributing toward an increase in the region’s freed population.³⁶

The use of slave labor was widespread in all spheres of Brazilian society, and in urban areas, owning between one and five enslaved persons was common. In urban settings all over the Americas, even in the United States, but especially in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, enslaved Black men and women could work autonomously as wage earners. In this system, their owners allowed them to hire out their services. In exchange, they gave their owners a fixed daily or weekly amount of their income and kept part of it for themselves.³⁷ In Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro, these enslaved workers were often in charge of their own housing and living expenses and resided outside their owners’ households.³⁸

In the Spanish Americas and Brazil, manumission (the practice of freeing enslaved persons) subsisted until the abolition of slavery and was much more widespread in the urban areas.³⁹ Because manumission, especially through self-purchase, was widely practiced in countries such as Brazil, and there was never any legislation preventing slave owners from freeing their enslaved property, many foreign observers concluded that social relations between slave owners and enslaved people were harmonious.

However, this idea could not be further from the truth. Slave owners rarely granted unconditional emancipation. Most enslaved people purchased their own freedom in urban areas by accumulating over the years the necessary amounts. Once they amassed the resources, they usually purchased their freedom in several installments (coartación or coartação). In Cuba, for example, a royal order of 1778 determined that slave owners could not refuse to manumit enslaved persons who wanted to purchase their own freedom.⁴⁰ In other words, the fact that slave owners could free their slaves in Latin America was not an indication of the alleged benevolent nature of slavery in this region. As bondspeople paid the market price to purchase their own freedom, slave owners obtained financial gains with this practice, and they could use the money to purchase another enslaved person. In Rio de Janeiro, despite the large proportion of enslaved men, slave owners granted manumission especially to enslaved women and children and made it more difficult for African-born men. This lucrative strategy allowed them to reinvest profits in the slave market.⁴¹

Figure 8.3. Une dame brésilienne dans son intérieur (A Brazilian Lady in Her Interior), in Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 2, plate 6.

Especially in the domestic space of urban areas, enslaved men, women, and children lived in close proximity with slave owners, as illustrated in European nineteenth-century travel accounts (figure 8.3). Yet, these illustrations showing households in which slave owners and enslaved people harmoniously interacted often conceal the horrors of slavery in domestic settings, where enslaved servants worked extremely hard and had to stay available day and night. Living so near to their owners also exposed many enslaved women to constant sexual abuse. Of course, bondspeople toiling in urban areas had much higher chances of purchasing their own freedom that eventually provided opportunities for social mobility. But despite many nuances, slave owners still regarded them as commodities, exactly as they were considered and treated on plantations.