Chapter One
Major Events and Everyday Life
In 1800 the slave family Lasmanuelos lived on the Pando hacienda in the parish of Magdalena, ten kilometers from the Plaza de Armas, Lima's central square. The proximity of hacienda to urban center illustrated the city's rural character at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A decade earlier the urban nucleus held 3,641 houses along 355 streets, 4 districts with 35 barrios, and 6 parishes with a total of 13,483 slaves (Haenke [1808] 1901, 55–68). By 1876 the province that formed Lima counted 198 localities, within 16 districts divided into 2 towns, 9 villages, 18 hamlets, and 169 haciendas. Even in 1884 the city spread over 608,500 square meters but existed in the middle of a rural hinterland fifteen times larger (Clavero 1885).
Despite the intensification of the slave trade between 1790 and 1802 (Rout 1977, 97, 217) that brought bozales —slaves from Africa, knowing nothing of the Spanish language, religion, or customs—into the heart of the black population, the number of slaves kept decreasing in the following decades. In 1812 the viceroyalty contained 89,241 slaves, 40 percent of them living in the province of Lima. In 1818 the number of slaves in the city of Lima had fallen to 8,589; in 1836 it stood at only 5,791, and in 1845 it was calculated to be 4,500 (Jacobsen 1974; Aguirre 1990, tb. 1). The final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth were marked by political turbulence followed by a long cycle of economic decline. Instability was symptomatic of this period. Problems such as food scarcities, fluctuating prices (Ramos 1967; Febres Villaroel 1964), labor unrest, and rapid presidential changes were all part of a hectic daily life.[1]
Added to the economic ups and downs were institutional uncertainties and their repercussions, which directly affected the black population: the publication in 1789 of the Cédula Real on the treatment of slaves,[2] the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the liberal constitutions of 1810 and 1820, the struggles for independence and subsequent civil conflicts. The respective contenders for power
sought, on more than one occasion, the support of slaves to settle their disputes and battles, often broadening the vision that slaves had of their world. This public or "historic time," of increasing general awareness and of military participation, blended with and reproduced itself on a smaller scale in "family time" (Hareven 1977). The walls of houses were thin, streets were full of ears, and rumors flew everywhere: even individuals who did not participate directly in the events of the period felt and assessed the changes.
In 1800 the heads of the Lasmanuelos family, Manuel and Manuela, were single. Manuel was a bozal slave from Angola, purchased by the owner of the Pando hacienda from one of the last tradesmen to bring slaves through the Panamanian route.[3] Manuela had been born on the hacienda, and she was the daughter of a mulata slave (of African and Spanish descent) and a black slave ironsmith. By 1800 both her parents had passed away. In 1813 the Pando hacienda housed forty-five slaves, approximating the average holdings of the sixteen haciendas in the region.[4] Manuela was one of thirteen women under the control of the wife of the mayordomo (overseer) who were housed apart from the hacienda's twenty-one male slaves in a barracón (slaves' living quarters). In 1800 Manuela had a three-year-old daughter and a seven-month-old son, the only offspring who had survived her several pregnancies. The baby was sold to a priest of the Buena Muerte hacienda and monastery, a decision guided by the reasoning that child-rearing costs were too high and that male slaves, upon maturing, usually established connections with slaves on other haciendas and, more important, with the nonslave (including indigenous) population in neighboring towns. High infant mortality also lent credence to the idea that even if the amount was insignificant, at least something could be obtained for a young slave.[5] Another reason for selling a child might be that there were other "disgraces" to hide, such as the master's consanguinity.
The remaining child, Manuelita, was considered a quarterona —a person of one-fourth African blood—and her skin color revealed her descent from the administrator's mestizo compadre (his godfather, of European and Indian descent). Still quite young, Manuelita could play with ten other girls and share with them the small chores of production on the hacienda. An elderly female slave was in charge of caring for the children so that their mothers could work. The owner of the Pando hacienda was a member of the nobility, a marqués who lived in
Lima; a zambo (of African, indigenous, and European descent) oversaw the slaves and the production. Manuela, considered part of the hacienda's inventory, had been one of the contributions included in the marquesa's dowry.
To obtain a plot of land on the hacienda for cultivating corn, squash, sweet potatoes, and beans and for raising pigs was easier for slaves if they were married.[6] Partly for this reason, Manuel and Manuela decided to marry. The allocation of small subsistence plots was a way for owners to give slaves incentives for reproduction, to lower the costs of food, and also to strengthen the slaves' links to the hacienda. The ceremony took place in the hacienda parish church at the same time as the marriages of two other slave couples, one from the same hacienda, the other from the Mirones hacienda, which was smaller (it had only six male and two female slaves) and did not possess its own church. Naturally, the priest who traveled from the village of Magdalena to perform this social and religious ceremony did not wish to duplicate his efforts. And the arrangements for this wedding were simple: both the mayordomo of Pando and the chino (of undefined African blood) owner of Mirones had houses in the village of Magdalena.[7] After complying with the divine precepts and assigning land plots to the newlyweds, the mayordomo sent a letter to the hacendado , informing the owner of the ceremony's consummation.
In this fashion Manuel and Manuela participated in the Catholic ritual. After the wedding came a big party in the barracones ; the mayordomo furnished special endowments of meat, salt, cañazo (an alcoholic beverage prepared with sugarcane), and bundles of new coarse cotton rope purchased from Magdalena's artisans. From then on, both slaves dedicated Sunday and their spare time to cultivating their plot and raising pigs, relying on the hacienda's tools for their work. Thanks to preexisting customs and links, they could later sell these products in Magdalena's market or exchange them for other products in or outside the hacienda. Occasionally even the mayordomo bought fresh vegetables from them. Each pig was worth twelve pesos. Manuela's price, according to her conque (the legal document detailing the conditions of a slave's sale or purchase), was 350 pesos, Manuel's was 500, and Manuelita's 80. Thus the sale of 6.4 pigs would have allowed Manuel and Manuela to purchase their daughter's freedom. The agent for the sale of animals and crops in Magdalena was a mulata midwife who had assisted Manuela and the administrator's wife during their childbirths.
On the Pando hacienda, slaves worked from dawn until four in the afternoon. The schedule followed the requirements of production and in seasons of sowing and harvest easily reached sixteen hours a day. Plot cultivation was subordinated to the demands of the hacienda, and fulfillment of these demands was one of the conditions necessary to maintain access to, or receive more land for, cultivation. At times the hacendado 's promise to grant his slaves plots of land was the only incentive effective enough to induce them to intensify their working day on the hacienda's commercial crops during key seasons.
When Manuelita reached seven years of age, the administrator's wife took her to the big house on the hacienda so the child could learn domestic chores and keep her two sons company. Moreover, in accordance with the tradition of "womb assignment," even before Manuelita's birth she had become the property of Doña Baltasara, the daughter of the owner of the Pando hacienda. Doña Baltasara wanted to take Manuelita to Lima where she would be trained in urbane propriety and household service. Manuelita was sent to the city in 1809 when she reached twelve years of age. According to an appraisal carried out to notarize Doña Baltasara's dowry to her husband, Manuelita's value had increased to 200 pesos. Because Manuelita observed modest and subservient behavior under Doña Baltasara's employ, and because Manuelita's mother (Manuela) had already been born into the marquesa's control and had further endowed her owner with two more living slaves (Manolo and Manolito), when the marquesa made out her will in 1812 she lowered Manuela's price to 180 pesos and declared that—provided Manuela could pay this price—she should be granted freedom. The marquesa's daughter, Doña Baltasara, was more generous. In her own will, she later stipulated that when Manuelita reached twenty-five years of age she should be liberated and should receive an inheritance of 200 pesos. Furthermore, she recommended that her husband and son make sure that Manuelita was "happily married," by the time of Doña Baltasara's death, to a man capable of giving her a comparable standard of life. In the meantime, this special consideration translated into teaching Manuelita not only to clean and take care of the house but also to sew, the central (and sometimes the only permitted) activity of white women and of mestizas who wanted to be white but whose economic status did not correspond with such racial aspirations.
Manuel and Manuela remained on the hacienda for some time longer. In 1812 their sons (Manolito and Manolo) were seven and eleven years of age, respectively, and the parents knew that time was against them. The older the children, the greater difficulty their parents would have buying their freedom. As they became a valuable labor force for the hacienda, their price would increase and mayordomos and hacendados would be much more reluctant to accept a slave's self-purchase money from slaves or from their parents.[8] As long as they remained slaves, the costs of maintenance and health were the owner's responsibility, even though—as we will see—the subject of who should assume these costs often generated considerable debate.
The year of 1812 had special significance. Regarding slaves, the liberal constitution of Cádiz reiterated many of the postulates of the Cédula Real issued in Aranjuez in 1789. The Caroline code stated that the central objective for slaves, "according to the principles and laws that dictate religion, humanity and the good of the state [that are] compatible with slavery and public tranquillity" (Clementi 1974, appendix), was to make good use of them. It granted freedom to slaves if they denounced a slave conspiracy or remained in loyal service to their master for a period of at least thirty years. This code represented full protection of the slave system, recommending fair treatment of slaves and installation of a fining system for excesses committed by masters and mayordomos ; it demanded that masters make lists of slaves under their mandate.[9] There was nothing new about such recommendations. Their reiteration makes an observer suspect that they were often dismissed, not instituted.
Despite its liberal aura, the Cádiz constitution did not radically change this panorama. Few advances disturbed the general trend of the Caroline code (see King 1953), but several special situations reflected the social changes that had been taking place over the previous thirty years and marked contemporary burgeoning notions of liberalism. In general, an important fraction of American representatives at the Cádiz courts agreed that persons of color were "the source of all our good and happiness. They provide hands to cultivate the earth ... to dig from its bowels ... the river that activates commerce.... From them come our artisans and they lend themselves to any work, private or public. They order armed service in those countries ... and at present they are the robust column of our defense ... on whom fall the formidable blows of the rebellion of some of our brothers."[10]
On 17 August 1811 the Cádiz courts converted all vassals, except slaves, into citizens. On 29 January 1812 residents of black descent were declared eligible to enroll in universities, study at seminaries, and wear habits. On 17 August 1813 corporal punishment was forbidden in secondary schools, correctional facilities, and jails for being "contrary to the decency, the dignity of those who exist, and are born and educated, to be free men."[11] The gracias al sacar , a certificate that could be bought certifying lighter skin, and thus higher status, was abolished even in the military corps (Lanning 1985, 175–200).
The enmity of slave owners and the logic intrinsic to colonial domination based on ethnic segregation and distinct civil and fiscal treatment ensured that restrictions to these general and well-intentioned decrees were quickly implemented and adapted by the separate legislatures of colonial institutions. What was decided upon by the liberals of Cádiz, thus, would only be implemented provided that "blacks satisfy the rest of the requisites and conditions of [Catholic] canons, the laws of the kingdom and of the specific constitutions of the different corporations in which they wish to be admitted because according to the present decree, only specific laws or statutes opposed to the sanctions herein ceded to slaves are understood as repealed."[12]
Here, in short, was a way to vent and circumvent liberal and humanitarian aims in a society whose slaves and black population were a labor source that neither liberals nor conservatives were willing to relinquish.
Even so, there was a feeling of change in the air. Throughout the viceroyalty, amid two uprisings by indigenous groups and criollos (Spaniards born in Latin America), the authorities were drawing up lists of citizens capable of commissioning the delegates who would represent American interests at the newly founded Cortes de Cádiz after King Ferdinand VII had been dethroned. The public climate had changed considerably since the mid-sixteenth century, a time in which a Spaniard walked the streets of Lima surrounded by fifteen or more slave lackeys who either defended him from his neighborhood rivals or advertised his social position (Bowser 1977, 143–146); at the end of the eighteenth century blacks in Lima could congregate in city squares to stage parodies of the mayor's parade, dressing up like urban officials and toting a banner that depicted a black man with a chain around his neck (Burkholder 1972, 2, 33, 152n.). Some of the liberal mood infected even the slaves.
An atmosphere of anticipation was generated and contemporary ideology was polarized by several lawyers who defended slaves and owners before Lima's Audiencia Real (the highest court of justice and governing body under the viceroy). As in other urban settings, the free professionals here were the ones most persuaded by the liberal discourse, and they were willing to carry it to its furthest limit: they proposed the abolition of the slave system. Even the most liberal, however, did not believe in overnight changes and believed even less that their own slaves should become free unless the slaves paid the costs of their manumission or the state assumed its costs.[13] Certainly, there were also those who echoed the clamors of hacendados about the shortage of workers and the deterioration of the haciendas. They often hid these interests behind arguments about slaves' lack of education and the social disasters that would come about if slavery were abolished, even using comparative historical experiences to substantiate their positions.[14] The juzgado de menores , the court for litigation of cases involving legal minors (slaves included), was one of the entities to which slaves brought their complaints—to such an extent that many hacendados saw it as one of the main factors contributing to the downfall of agriculture. Many suits filed in the name of slaves reflected a conflict within the dominant sectors of society that would not abate until after abolition.
Directly, through her will that lowered Manuela's price and guaranteed the slave an inheritance, the marquesa of the Pando hacienda transformed Manuela's future. Lima's nobles sensed that control was escaping from their grasp, both within their landed estates and in the colony. From a greater distance, Manuel and Manuela heard rumors about the Cádiz constitution and the indigenous-criollo uprisings, which brought thousands of refugees to Lima, setting off a crisis of subsistence and driving up the prices of foodstuffs (Haitin 1986, 148).
Two circuits of production functioned on the hacienda: the basic foodstuffs produced by the slaves for their own subsistence and occasional sale at the nearest marketplaces; and the products cultivated on the grounds of the hacienda destined for larger markets and, to a limited extent, the international market. The relation between these spheres of production was determined by the quantities of available land and slave labor. Little by little—as will be detailed later on—the smallest haciendas in Lima's environs redirected their production toward the domestic urban market. To compensate for the lowering of
prices over the long term they began to produce what was most in demand, thus approaching—and competing with—slave production. A rational response on the part of hacendados would have been to reduce or even eliminate the plots granted to slaves. It would have forced slaves to dedicate more hours to the hacienda grounds and would have restricted the competition between hacienda and smallscale plot production.[15] This response apparently did not occur, however, because the reduction of slave plots would have induced slaves to abandon the hacienda, for refuge either in the city of Lima or within one of the many groups of highwaymen in the valleys surrounding the city. Thus, from a microeconomic standpoint, this scenario not only demonstrates the difficulties of controlling slave labor, expressed in the outcries of hacendados over the "indolence" and the "impertinence" of their subordinates, but also explains why increases on the supply side tended to depress agricultural prices.
In the years that had elapsed between their marriage and 1812, Manuel and Manuela had managed to amass only enough money to free either Manuela or the two sons. Manuela, with the assistance of Manuel and her two sons, could take care of the cultivation of the plot and the breeding of the pigs; it was she who sold vegetables in the Magdalena market once a month. Buying the two children's freedom made no sense. The costs of maintenance outside the hacienda would only rise, adding new expenses such as paying a relative or friend in Lima to watch over the children. While the sons were still young and both parents on the hacienda, the most reasonable option was to pass the maintenance costs on to the owner or, in this case, to the unit of production. A rise in the slaves' price as they became adults would always be less than the cost of the children's upkeep. Following this logic and taking into account Manuela's lower price, the couple dedicated themselves to negotiating Manuela's departure from the hacienda. Manuela would have more opportunities to find an occupation and earn daily wages in the city. She could raise her two children, rent a truck garden from a widow or single woman in exchange for a monthly sum, sell bread dough in the streets, prepare food for transients, or look for a position as a domestic. In the worst case, she could find an urban owner willing to purchase her. Her low level of specialization and her knowledge of typically female tasks were a combination that promised more success to her than to a male slave with the same lack
of specialization or with a specialization of little use in the urban realm (and who could not cook or be a wet nurse).
At the end of the eighteenth century, even though the archdiocese of Lima collected 37 percent of the tithes in the viceroyalty and though this revenue rose between 1775 and 1815, Lima was a city with few occupational alternatives beyond occasional jobs in craftsmanship, domestic service, or construction tied to investments in infrastructure. A handful of mills producing flour and chocolate, several textile mills, an active manufacture of ceramics and woolen alpaca hats, and a small soap factory made up the entire spectrum of the city's manufacturing. The only large-scale factory was the gunpowder factory; in 1791 the state-owned tobacco factory had closed (Haitin 1986, 117). According to the 1790 census, 76.9 percent of the economically active population was part of the tertiary or service sector and of the 16.9 percent located in the secondary sector, nearly all were artisans. Slaves were not considered part of the economically active population (Haitin 1986, 108–109, 122). Even if we must guess at the numbers of slave artisans who worked in the city, the wide divisions between economic sectors give us an idea of job prospects for slaves as well as nonslaves.
Manuela obtained her carta de libertad after two years of negotiation with her owners in which she struggled with the marquesa's heirs to get a copy of the will that showed her price reduction. One inheritor had asked for a new appraisal of the slave's value because the liquidation of the real estate had left the executrix indebted to several creditors. At last Manuela managed to leave the hacienda but without her sons, despite her claim that she and Manuel had been responsible for providing food for their children and that the owner should either return the couple's investment or renounce his ownership rights to their children. The court lawyer defending the marqués, however, managed to impose his opinion: the slave children had until this time lived on the hacienda and what the slaves had invested in their upbringing stemmed from the hacendado 's "gratuitous" donation of land plots. Thus children born of a slave womb were the property of the hacienda. The defender of the hacendado 's interests meticulously detailed the costs incurred by his client and other hacendados who elected to raise the children of slaves. He stated that, based on these costs, a realistic calculation of a slave's price meant that a slave of working age (fourteen years) should be worth approximately 1,500 pe-
sos, a price that no one would pay and that greatly exceeded the average price (450 pesos) of slaves in Lima. Backed by this argument, the hacendado won the legal battle and Manuela's children remained on the hacienda. Pando's administrator tried to prevent Manuela from returning too frequently to see her family and conditioned the concession of her carta de libertad on the agreement that she would not visit her family more than once a month.
Walking barefoot, Manuela reached the parish church of San Lázaro, where a majority of Lima's black population lived. She was detained at the doorway by a sergeant from the company of dragoons. Accused of being a maroon, a fugitive black slave, she showed the soldier her carta de libertad . Because cartas de libertad had no standardized format and the soldier—a pardo (of mixed descent, two-thirds European and one-third African)—did not know how to read, he did not understand. Deposited in a panadería (a bakery and place of punishment where slaves and others were kept), Manuela was recognized by Antonio, a fugitive slave who had taken refuge on the Pando hacienda in 1807 to escape the viceregal forces. After capturing him the soldiers put him in the panadería .
Antonio was a slave with a profession and for a long time had worked with his brother, a free mulato (of African and indigenous descent), in a shoe repair shop near the panadería . One night the mulato brother heard screams coming from the panadería . Recognizing his brother's voice, he went to find the neighborhood mayor. When they reached the commotion, the manager of the panadería accused Antonio of inciting a riot and of offenses of "word and deed." Those present, including Manuela, later testified before a magistrate about the manager's mistreatment of Antonio; they complained about the panadería 's unsanitary conditions and bad food and indicated that the ruckus had been a consequence of inebriety. The inhabitants had been celebrating the manager's birthday. The judge ruled that the manager should moderate his behavior and further ordered an inspection of the approximately forty panaderías in Lima. A short time after this incident Antonio escaped and, with the intervention of his cobbler brother, tracked down Manuela's former owner, the marqués , begging him to intercede on her behalf and liberate her from the panadería . The marqués assisted Manuela, and she was freed.
Manuela had a few friends in the city. One, a mulata , was a maid in the marqués's house and had for a long time kept an eye on
Manuelita; another, a bozal , had worked on a neighboring hacienda and had then been sold to a mestizo widow, who relied entirely on the earnings she garnered from a small plot in Lima's outskirts. A third woman had a meat stall in the San Francisco plaza and a relationship with a slave from the Bocanegra hacienda. Mounted on a horse he owned, this slave would regularly take off from the hacienda to visit his girlfriend, a practice that caused the mayordomo of Bocanegra to nickname him the "regular runaway" (cimarrón consuetudinario ). With the help of her friends, Manuela invented her own strategy of survival; her aim was to gather together enough capital to free her husband and sons on the hacienda. The "regular runaway" introduced Manuela to a small group of maroons on the outskirts of Lima who occupied themselves with cutting firewood.[16] They supplied Manuela with wood, which she then sold alongside her friend's stall in the plaza. Even though her family's land endowment had been trimmed when she left the hacienda, Manuela still received produce from the plot each month when she visited her family. Manuela's market basket now included an additional commodity: firewood, which stood for something more than just a salable product. It was the mechanism that allowed Manuela to establish new social relations with a wide range of members of the black population: slaves, freed slaves, maroons, mulatos , blacks, zambos —men and women linked by their shared occupation.
On one visit to the hacienda, Manuela found out that her husband had been cruelly abused by the manager, a free mulato , because Manuel had gone into town to buy tobacco—as slaves often did. In 1818, with allegations of the sustained abuse, Manuela presented a request before the criminal judge pleading that her husband's owner be changed. Once the abuse was corroborated, Manuela experienced difficulties finding a new owner because the mayordomo of the Pando hacienda insisted that the new owner purchase Manuel and the couple's two children at the same time. On the one hand, the mayordomo wanted to rid himself of the entire family in order to avoid the external interferences of having half the family outside the hacienda and half inside. On the other hand, he knew it would be difficult to find a new owner willing to pay 400 pesos for Manuel and the 300 and 350 pesos that he intended to receive for each of the children, given that they were now thirteen and seventeen years old and were thus old enough to start doing an adult's work on the hacienda.
Raising the total cost increased the likelihood of keeping the three men on the hacienda.
With the mediation of a slave realtor Manuela filed a suit, initially requesting an appraisal of her sons and protesting the arbitrariness of the mayordomo 's announced price. Manuela alleged that her younger son was physically weak and almost useless for labor. Neither son had a conque and had therefore never before been assigned a price. Two appraisers were chosen, one by the hacendado and the other by Manuela, the slave realtor, and the interested buyer. For ten months the appraisers could not reach an agreement, but finally in 1819 they decided on figures that partially vindicated the hacendado : the final agreement stated that he would receive 250 pesos for Manolito and 300 for Manolo. Through an arrangement of the realtor, separate owners residing in Lima bought Manuel and each of the children (now fourteen and eighteen). Manuel went to the Casa de la Moneda (the mint) in the parish of Santa Ana; Manolo, the older son, was placed by his owner with an artisan to learn the trade of chocolate making; and Manolito was bought by Doña Agreda, a spinster who already had an older slave whom she detailed to earn day wages as a water carrier. The realtor received 5 percent on top of the final transaction amount. The new owners were charged the legal fees, meaning that these did not translate into higher prices for slaves. One last desperate attempt by the mayordomo to retain his slaves was to accuse the realtor, a moreno (person whose appearance vaguely suggested African ancestry), of complicity with the slaves for "being of their same rank." In the end the administrator realized that his objection was pointless and opted to replace the slaves with free black laborers.
The Lasmanuelos family had taken the first steps toward the city, each at a different time and in a distinct circumstance. Now the family members were closer and could see one another more often. But one family member vanished: Manuela's older son, who had been given to the priests of the Buena Muerte monastery in 1812. Perhaps he died, as many others did, or ended up as just another slave on one of the various properties owned by the Buena Muerte congregation. Manuela had managed to accumulate 200 pesos through her market sales and thought that she would be able to purchase her sons' freedom when they and her husband relocated to Lima. Given the hacendado 's pressure, however, and the enormous increase of the requested price, this money was not enough to free even one of them, least of all her husband.
When in 1814 Manuelita, residing with the marqués, reached seventeen years of age, she was moved to the home of the marqués's daughter, Doña Baltasara, who was now married to a criollo merchant of Lima's consulate.[17] In this way, Manuelita was complying with her destined womb assignment. She had been there barely a few months when Doña Baltasara's husband, seizing the opportunity of his wife's excursion to mass, raped Manuelita. With the aid of her mother's friend who lived in the marqués's home and who had become Manuelita's godmother, and with the marqués's knowledge, Manuelita filed a report in the ecclesiastical court supplicating that her owner free her on account of "corrupted virginity." She added that in any case she had been promised freedom at the age of twenty-five but that—to avoid the advances of her owner's husband and to respect moral and religious precepts—it was necessary to adjudicate her freedom sooner.
Don Baltasar, Doña Baltasara's husband, contended that it was common for female slaves in Lima to accuse their masters of rape in order to obtain liberty, and that if everyone took notice of these allegations then the ties that bound slave to master would soon fall apart. The owner won the suit and Manuelita continued "under the authority of the master," subject to his sexual appetite. Doña Baltasara was aware of the situation and her anger fell on Manuelita's shoulders. This resulted in more work, worse treatment, and the retraction of all the small privileges Manuelita had enjoyed in the marqués's home. Manuelita ultimately became pregnant; Doña Baltasara knew that her husband had fathered the child born shortly thereafter. The young slave tried to prove her daughter's paternity, appealing to the Protomedicato, whose job it was to speculate on possible fathers based on skin color (then the best proof available). If Manuelita was quarterona , her daughter would be quinterona . The master, however, was an infiuential person. Therefore, the Protomedicato abstained from judging the obvious. Manuelita denounced the owner's immorality and claimed that he had abused his authority. Speaking before the judges with candor she declared it was strange that the child of a Spaniard could be a slave.
The life of the Lasmanuelos family went on quietly, far from all abstractions or debates between liberals and conservatives. Its daily life and interactions kept to their own rhythm. More than the liberal measures of the Cádiz constitution, it was the wars of independence (1820–1825) that influenced the lives of slaves during the conflict and its aftermath. Because of the repercussions and length of the wars
of independence as well as the constant shifting of the battlefronts (which brought with them pledges of freedom), the slaves eagerly followed the struggles for independence. Many of the legal arguments later used by slaves (or in their names) were based on measures announced by the leaders of the rebellion between 1821 and 1828. Partly because these patriots needed the black population's support during these years, they generated a discourse about the possibility of freedom that the black population clearly understood.
In a more immediate sense, what the wars did was intensify the importance of urban labor. The ethnic-occupational rigidity began to crack. Before the wars of independence the position of officer or soldier in the regular viceregal forces could be a royal privilege or a duty for pardos and morenos and even for slaves who replaced their masters.[18] Later, experience in handling a rifle and in military maneuvers would give soldiers means to confront a growing state of anarchy as well as to gain social status.
In opposition to a long-term drop in overall prices, agricultural prices made amazing gains in the midst of the severe political crisis of the first half of the 1820s. War certainly affects prices, but it also affects the conditions and potential of production. There is much evidence of the participation of blacks in the struggles for independence and also cases in which masters and slaves abandoned the hacienda to flee closely occupying battalions or troops.[19] As an immediate consequence, areas of cultivation were reduced and haciendas lost workers. It is also clear that the open military conflict tended to break down the bonds of social domination; more than one hacendado (especially if he was a Spaniard) had to abandon a place where the ratio of whites to blacks (as on the Pando hacienda) was one to thirty-four. We probably cannot know the circumstances of each case, but we can assume that the slaves who managed to keep up their production and marketing of food had a good chance of accumulating some money during these years. Similar changes took place in artisanal activity. Begun so that slaves would provide their owners with a greater amount of daily earnings, artisanal activity later became indispensable for the outfitting of the army. This kind of occupational redesign could be observed in all the arenas of daily activity: marketplaces, transportation (muleteers and water carriers), and the farming of essential foodstuff on the outskirts of Lima. The war increased demand yet simultaneously took men and land out of commission and destroyed the centers of pro-
duction. The wars of independence and the ensuing internal conflicts they engendered did not come to an end (at least temporarily) until the same year that slavery did.
In the decades before independence, the notarial registry of cartas de libertad tells us that the rate of self-manumission within Lima's rural and urban slave population remained constant (Table 1). The rate in turn reveals that many slaves were permanently bargaining with their owners and among themselves to lower their prices, save money, and free their children and themselves. How well they fared depended on the individual achievement or misfortune of each slave and on various overall socioeconomic and political conditions. In spite of the slaveholders' counterattack that began in the 1830s (Blanchard 1992) after decades of increased leniency toward slaves, slaves were able to maintain and even increase their pace of self-manumission. How much suffering this effort could involve emerges from the sketch of the lives of all the Lasmanuelos family members.
According to the newspapers of the era, on 28 July 1821 people went out into the streets to listen to General San Martín's proclamation of independence. Surely the Lasmanuelos family was there to hear that everyone born from that date on—including all slaves with Spanish masters who had abandoned the country, and all slaves who had enlisted in the ranks of the patriots—would now be free. But promise and reality frequently clashed. Shortly before the arrival of San Martín, when the Casa de la Moneda shut its doors, Manuel had been incorporated into the royalist army, under the command of Viceroy Pezuela. Manuela continued to sell firewood in the San Francisco market throughout the war; Manuelita remained with the marqués's daughter and lost a protector and mediator when the marqués returned to Spain. Manolo had to leave his profession as a chocolate maker. Before independence he had given to his master the daily sum of seven reales , a wage that placed him in the top third of slave workers. Alongside the daily wages contributed to his master, nonetheless, Manolo had managed to accumulate half of his purchase price; in other words, he had earned more than what he was obliged to give to his owner. In the middle of the war that continued until 1825, his owner demanded that he continue to pay him his usual daily wages. When Manolo did not comply with this demand, the owner ordered him interned in a panadería , charging him with being a maroon and a thief. Manolo escaped from the panadería , located his mother, and
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became a member of the gang of maroons that had long been supplying her with firewood. During the war years he survived on the fringes of the conflict, raiding haciendas, tambos (roadside inns where travelers could sleep and buy various items), and villages.
Even during the war, firewood and water (sold by Manuela and her son) represented two key necessities, not only for civilians but for soldiers as well. As a water carrier, Manolito helped Doña Agreda and her aging slave survive. Doña Agreda did not demand a fixed daily wage from her slaves. She was interested only in having enough to eat; she let her slaves figure out how that could be accomplished. Her dependence on slave income was so great that in her will she requested that in exchange for their freedom, the two slaves take on paying her burial costs. She died in 1824. Manolito received his carta de libertad and in compensation for looking after the elderly slave, Esteban, was able to keep the water-carrying tools, pipes, and two mules.
Shortly after 1821 stirrings of dissatisfaction with the patriot forces emerged in protests and marches through the streets of Lima. These demonstrations were headed by Lima's artisans, the majority of whom were castas (persons of European and African ancestry without clearly indigenous or European traits).[20] The patriot army was not paying for what it consumed, they said; for artisans, the patria , or fatherland, had become a "thieving fatherland." Disenchantment with the promises of the patriots had begun. Little by little, the offers initially made to slaves and Indians had been pruned back. Black participation in the patriot, as well as the royalist, army was significant.[21] Each contending side offered freedom to slaves who enrolled in its ranks. To this background of the conquest of the black population must be added the options that the context of war made available to slaves. For many, enrollment in the army represented a way of loosening ties to their masters. Once enlisted in the army, slaves often deserted and turned to thievery or perhaps became a part of guerrilla groups, many of which rapidly switched their loyalties. This dispersal had its roots in the freedom previously granted to some hacienda slaves (Vargas Ugarte 1984, 6: 172). Even before the wars of independence began—so masters believed—the bonds of subjugation were already coming undone. A similar image occurred to General Miller when he stated that Lima was from time to time infested with bandits, generally "mulattoes and mestizos of other colored races, an evil that has existed since time immemorial" (Miller 1829, 1:266 if.). And, certainly, shortly
after the struggles for independence, this line of reasoning and the fear it invoked became part of a broader justification about the advantages of keeping the slave system intact.
Over the five-year period starting in 1820, when the patriot incursions into the south of the country took place, until the war's close in 1825, much changed in the rural sphere, particularly in the vicinity of Lima. After all, the capital had been the center of victory marches, countermarches, and conspiracies. Rumors ran rampant: from Riva Agiiero's plan in 1817 to greet San Martin in Ica by granting freedom to between seventy and eighty able slaves so that they would spread reports about the proximity of patriot forces and San Martín's intentions of liberty, to rumors that the royalist General Canterac wanted to liberate the slaves, make them proprietors of the haciendas, leave them all the women, and decapitate the most important patriot leaders.[22] These rumors increased the anxieties and uneasiness of everyone. In a relatively small city, where close black-white interaction was part of daily life, these events, attitudes, and propositions were unlikely to escape the notice of the slave population. For all slaves, these were years of expectation and also of the hands-on experience of freedom and death on the battlefield. Yet few slaves became citizens of the republic. Between liberal desires and the perpetuation of slavery appeared several conciliatory forms: patronage, the figure of the liberto (a freed slave who was required to stay with his owner for a specified time), and a sometimes imposed term of apprenticeship. No slave was freed by the decrees passed under San Martín. At very best a slave might achieve the status of liberto , which in the majority of the cases was synonymous with slave conditions of life until a certain age, yet might mean the payment of a minimal wage.[23] If during the wars of independence an owner had had to leave the country—an absence that according to the San Martín decree cost the owner his or her slave property—that same owner in 1830 could argue that the departure had not been caused by "hatred of the system" but by business obligations. In this fashion an owner could recover slaves.[24] If the authorities had carried out the declaration freeing slaves belonging to Spaniards, the slave labor force on some haciendas might simply have disappeared altogether.
After the war many soldiers (some who had even ascended the military hierarchy) found that offers of freedom often led to a panadería , into prison, or back to the hacienda. There was no dearth of cases in
which the reconversion into a slave occurred through the violent retraction of a decree of manumission written by owners shortly before they died on the battlefield.[25] Surely the statement by one of these soldiers is true: "Considering this, will blacks lend their services, be ready to defend Peru? This, sir, would be deceiving oneself voluntarily."[26] The disillusionment that his words indicate coincides with more general assertions: "Since 1825, the war terminated, the demands made on blacks by their freedom statute seem in practice to equal the massive nullification of previous manumissions" (Sales 1974, 129).
As early as September 1822 one session of the legislature produced the rule that slaves should not be assigned to public works, and that only in situations of dire urgency and "considering first and foremost the good of owners and the promotion of agriculture," could the authorities call on their labor power.[27] Here the freedom of slaves was not even under discussion, rather the state itself was renouncing the use of their labor power to benefit owners. And this meant that slave owners were trying to firmly reimpose slavery. Political turmoil after independence and the state's dependency on their goodwill helped to push legislation toward this end.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, slaves for their own part underwent experiences that would affect their attitudes and decisions, but by now they had to face owners willing to defend slavery with the traditional argument that coastal agriculture lacked laborers. In the decades following independence hacendados attempted to refinance their enterprises; they achieved skewed results as they applied a wide array of schemes to reverse the measures declared between 1821 and 1825. Opposing the interests of the hacendados —and continuing the liberal ideology that had rescued many slaves from misery—functionaries from the government and occasionally from the Church echoed the slaves' demands, as did several lawyers and defenders. A few scattered haciendas prospered, but inventories of several haciendas between 1836 and 1845 show that the number of slaves on the haciendas near Lima decreased an average of 60 percent. Working conditions on the haciendas, political and military turbulence, and unmet expectations all had their part in the decrease, which also reflected the new circumstances of the black and slave populations. The number of runaway slaves increased and banditry rose (Aguirre 1990, 145, 180), but many slaves also found their way to the city and to freedom.
Behind all these public experiences that affected the slaves' relations to the system, and alongside the conflict between master and slave, an analysis of everyday events in the heart of the black population reveals a multiplicity of individual strategies to obtain freedom. This battle was a daily one and went on unchecked during the earlier struggles for independence and the subsequent aspirations of hacendados . Its continuation relates less to official proclamations than to the specific characteristics of Peruvian slavery and to the delicate links between countryside and city.
Manolo was wounded in 1823 in an altercation with a patriot company on the outskirts of Yauyos. Taken in by this company, whose commander was the indigenous leader Ninavilca, he participated in the patriot army until 1825, convinced that his participation would lead to his freedom. Ninavilca's followers split; some remained guerrillas or became bandits in the following years.[28] Others, encouraged by the declarations of the discontinuation of recruitment, went back to their previous activities. The return to civilian life was qualitatively different. Slaves carried with them what they had learned along the road, and their horizons had broadened beyond the narrow confines of the household, the centers of production, and the universe that had until then constituted their social and mercantile relations. Manolo knew that during the struggles he had fought on the side opposing his father's, he had learned of the existence of patriots and royalists, he had heard from members in Ninavilca's company that royalists lopped the ears off their deserters, he learned how to handle weapons, and he could survive outside the law.
Manolo returned to Lima with these new experiences. Don Baltasar ran into him walking on the street; he called the barrio's serenos (night watchmen) and ordered them to throw the young man into prison. Don Baltasar thus reclaimed his slave property, while Manolo claimed that he should be free because of his involvement in the patriot struggles. Don Baltasar questioned Manolo's patriotism, accusing him of being a maroon and a bandit. Manolo would remain a slave for some time. The criollo merchants of the consulate and the hacendados had not lost their power; they still dictated the rules of the game.
To keep the slave was not Don Baltasar's idea, however. As a merchant holding a small bit of land inherited from his mother, he had litfie use for Manolo and knew that he had a problematic and rebellious slave on his hands. Given this, he requested that Manolo be trans-
ferred to one of his nephew's haciendas. When this request was carried out, and when Manolo reached the age of twenty-five, he asked Don Baltasar's consent to marry Manola, a free zamba , who worked in a store in Lima's central plaza.[29] Before independence, Manola had been the queen of a black cofradía (a mutual-aid society, established by the Church, dedicated to the cult of a specific saint). Don Baltasar refused. Manolo immediately presented himself before the Church's vicar-general, who wrote to the owner accusing him of not complying with divine precepts and of perpetuating the immoral cohabitation of his parishioners. Manola and Manolo were married in 1829. As a married man, Manolo was able not only to avoid relocation on another hacienda but also to negotiate the future terms of his existence. He offered to pay his daily wages in exchange for permission to live outside the master's household. For the entire year, Manolo religiously handed over the agreed-upon daily wages, and after a year passed he paid Don Baltasar his purchase price of 650 pesos. Manolo's value had doubled between 1812 and 1829 for two reasons: he was now an adult slave, and he had a job. A slave with a trade had better chances of accumulating capital but would have to pay more in the case of selfmanumission. Manolo's price was an approximate average for artisan slaves. It is possible that Manolo picked up a portion of the 650 pesos during the war. Another portion came from his wife's savings.
Because of the marital conflicts between Manolo and Manola that soon followed, we know that Manola earned most of this money. After a brawl in the streets with his cronies over a game of dice during which accusations were exchanged about which player was the blackest, Manolo returned to his home in San Lázaro where he lived with Manola, who was now pregnant. He found her washing clothes for a soldier in the pardo battalion—as she often did—in exchange for money. Incensed with jealousy and blinded by liquor he attacked Manola, kicking her in the stomach. She lost the child. In her complaint before the Church's vicar-general, she stated that this was not the first time she had been left "completely black and blue" by blows inflicted by her husband. A medical report indicated that in addition to the beatings she had also contracted a venereal disease. Manola, therefore, filed marital litigation requesting that the vicar-general make her husband listen to reason. In addition to the beating, Manolo took all of the money and left her very little to eke out a living, aware the whole time that it was she who had helped him obtain
his freedom. During the litigation, Manolo's entire past came to light; now it was Manola's turn to describe her husband's violence during his years among the maroons. He had even threatened her with sharp weapons. Manolo was summoned by the vicar-general, in the hopes of a marital reconciliation. But a similar incident occurred a few months later. This time, in 1832, Manola demanded permission to leave their matrimonial house in order to avoid worse harm. She asked for a divorce, which in the nineteenth century amounted to a temporary separation.
Manolo's father managed to return to Lima in 1827, at the age of forty-seven. His destiny with the royalists had taken him as far as Upper Peru (now Bolivia). No carta de libertad mentioned his participation in the war. The marqués—his master—was no longer around. Weak and recovering from a sword wound, he knocked on the door of Don Baltasar, who quickly recognized that this slave could neither do much useful work around the hacienda nor bring a high Price at auction. Manuel was also aware of this; it was the reason he had returned to the protection of his former master. Don Baltasar, hoping not to forfeit everything and to be able to sell Manuel, lowered his price to 200 pesos. But Manuel's wife did not have enough money to purchase his freedom. She herself had fallen ill and, as a mastedess person, had paid for her own treatment at the San Bartolomé hospital. Their son Manolo had lost a great deal of money gambling, and the funds furnished by his wife had dried up after the separation. Manuelita had married an expert silversmith, and neither she nor her husband wished to be reminded of her birth as a slave. After all she was a quarterona , three-fourths white, and following her former owner's wishes had married a white artisan. Manolito was in love with María, a black slave who worked in one of the houses in the parish of Santa Ana where he distributed water. He was determined to liberate her and convert his Sunday visits to her master's house into a union that existed outside the caprices and control of a master. The experiences of his half sister Manuela had warned him of the hazards María faced as a female household slave.
Manuel, not being able to turn to his family members who were scattered around the city, went out in the streets to look for a buyer. He found a mestiza , Doña Estefa, who specialized in the commerce of tinware and shoes between Lima and Ica. In exchange for his commitment to work for her, the mestiza lent Manuel the money to man-
umit himself. He received a wage for his labor, which he handed over, bit by bit, to Doña Estefa, assuming that with this he was paying off "the principal" of the loan. However, she would later claim (after Manuel had been in her service for seven years) that the slave had only paid the interest on the borrowed money. In other words, he remained a slave. Manuel died in 1837 on one of the trips to Ica when a small group of bandits attacked the pack train he was leading. Manuela died in San Lázaro three years later at the age of fifty-seven without ever finding out what became of her husband. Manolito paid for his mother's burial costs; he did not want her to be buried in a pauper's grave. The funeral cost 147 pesos, a sum that represented half of the price that would free his betrothed, María. María was thirty-five years old in 1853 when Manolito finally purchased her freedom and paid for the marriage. In the same year Manolito, still a water carrier, reached forty-eight years of age. Everything he had managed to save had been invested in María's manumission and his mother's burial. There was no capital left over to replace his tools, much less to expand his business. Fortunately for him, Lima was still a city with an undeveloped sewage system; his services were always needed and his trade did not encounter competition from members of other social groups. María and Manolito never had children. This state of affairs came about because of her long and continued residence at the master's house, their older ages at matrimony, and surely also their reluctance to bring more slaves into the world.
Manolo's destiny as an artisan was distinct from his brother's. The marriage dissolved, he continued as a chocolate maker. Market conditions, however, had changed. The start of guano exportation had altered patterns of consumption. Imported European chocolates began to appear; their few consumers were among the select group of colored persons who could purchase this luxury item. Thus, if indeed Manolo worked formally as an artisan, an important complement to his earnings came from a whole set of activities on the border of the law and through his affairs with various women. Economic shortage and instability followed him his entire life, including a judgment ordering him to supply his illegitimate children with food. For him the abolition of slavery also meant the loss of the final protective check against competition, from his cohorts as well as from new European immigrants who rapidly infiltrated the most sophisticated artisanal spheres.[30]
The economic growth sparked by guano production left Manolo behind. Probably the most important reasons for his state were his dark skin and a shortage of funds that came from his choice of selfpurchase over the purchase of tools or the acquisition of new techniques. Closely following these explanations of lack of success in the labor market came what we might describe as the failure to transfer survival strategies from the family setting to society as a whole. The joint attempts and tactics that a couple might use within the family setting found no outlet in particular or original alternatives to shape the individuals' work or destiny in the larger world. Just as the bandit leader could personify "a sui generis seignorial actor" (Vivaneo 1990, 41)—keeping both virtues and faults—slaves reproduced within the family forms of survival and expressions of conflict very like those of other groups.
Thinking Out Loud
The factors both large and small that shaped the life of the Lasmahuelos family would sooner or later affect the experiences of Lima's entire black and slave populations. Leaving aside several questions that unique or isolated eases bring up (for analysis in the following chapters), I attempt here to ereate a history close to the reality of the era. Its message is complex. On the one hand, slaves found imaginative ways to circumvent their masters' schemes and force their owners to confront their liberal hypocrisy. But on the other, a great deal of suffering took place, from beatings and lashes to unfilled promises and separated families.
Some hacienda slaves (above all, ones on haciendas bordering Lima) were able, through funds accumulated by individuals and by families, to buy freedom and take part in a heterogeneous range of urban activities. The most effective means of accumulation was the sale of goods either on or outside the hacienda, an activity that involved a constant exchange of ideas and products from one hacienda to another, and to villages, and to the city. The individuals who were the most successful and the first to leave the hacienda, often following a family decision, were women. Women were the ones who possessed, through mercantile activity, a certain level of urban experience. In addition, the mother-child bond could withstand long separations, female labor was always useful in the urban market, and the price of
slave women was the lowest in absolute terms. When the hacienda slave managed to move to the city, be it through manumission or various rounds of negotiations with administrators or hacendados (for example, a slave born into the owner's possession could more easily arrange a lower price) or simply by a search beyond the hacienda for a buyer, he or she had preexisting connections with other members of black society. Some connections were established through runaways' experiences as they sought refuge in hacienda barracones (as in Antonio's case); others were part of the links established by masters and cases of selective relocation to the urban context (Manuelita, for example); still others were the result of commercial activity (Manuel and the midwife).
If male slaves were relocated to the city, masters usually sought to have them apprenticed in a trade. Women were basically destined to domestic service, hence to a common female position. This whole universe brought about the formation and consolidation of relations in the slave populace and among slaves and descendants of the black urban population. There was a clear tendency toward mutual support, according to an individual's closeness to other members of the group under consideration. The persons who assisted Manuela in her first contacts with the city were all women, black and slave, of varying levels of independence relative to their respective masters. Men (often maroons) were incorporated into this support network as the most distant node and through the relationships established by female friends or, for Manuela, through a maroon's temporary stay on a hacienda. And, even more important, the support Manuela received came from the least differentiated component of slave society: the women. This support reflected an attitude—which men shared—about the advantages of liberating women from the hacienda first. The gamut of mechanisms of social and spatial articulation also elucidates the fluidity of the links between countryside and city.
Different levels of experience in the urban context, influenced by the relative place in the ranking of jobs, along with skin color, determined the internal hierarchies of black society. Strategies of support and of domination existed among black, as among mayordomos on the hacienda (mayordomos versus caporales ) and members of the military corps (the soldier in the company of dragoons); they found expression in the estrangement of family members (as was the case with Manuelita) and in brawls and street insults. These fissures manifested
themselves in an even more subtle manner between married couples. It was the black Manolo who married a free zamba and later tried, with the approval of society, to impose his male authority. As we can see, the gender relation was used as a means of subjugation when others, such as ethnicity (more whiteness) or legal subordination (slave or nonslave), were missing.
The varying strategies also resulted from the imposition of cultural mores that ranged from the supposed modesty of women and Catholic marriages on the haciendas to denunciations of the immorality of masters. Thus, to a certain degree, divisions and conflicts within black society reflected the actions of masters. They assigned slaves to certain tasks and geographic areas, split up slave families, and often fathered not-so-black children (masters such as the merchant Don Baltasar, or the friend of the Pando hacienda's administrator). Along with the creation of an economic and racial hierarchy came the expansion of varying avenues of social mobility that the black population absorbed and used to procure freedom.
On the journey toward freedom over the course of the fifty years examined, we observe a progression that represents slaves' capacity to exercise freedom of choice. Mothers were the first to move toward freedom. Second came the children, and finally new wives or husbands. This final option (we could also call it preference) depended more than anything on the logic behind matrimonial alliances. Slave men sought free women: in this way their children were born free. And the likelihood of obtaining their own freedom would be greater, both because marriage allowed slaves to control what they earned and because it gave them a reason to leave an owner's home. The farther slaves were from the master, the better able they were to accumulate capital. Slave women who were whiter, however, preferred free and white men (Manuela married an expert silversmith). Only rarely did a free black man (like Manolito) choose a black slave woman; yet this choice offered a stabler marriage. Only with a wife of lower social status was it possible for a man to maintain control in the new household and submit the woman to his will; in marriages into an equal or higher social group, matrimonial conflict tended to be more intense, as it was in Manolo's case. But in his marriage—for which the ecclesiastical court records indicated no conflict—Manolito fought against his master to prevent him from sexually abusing his companion, not against his wife. And insofar as he was free and she a slave, the subordination
of the woman was inevitable from the start. In these ways matrimonial choices, through gender lines, illustrated more sophisticated levels of internal conflict as well.
Perhaps the most dramatic image of divisions within black society was the very composition of the family I have described. In other words, the faction is visible in the family history. At no time in its family history did the Lasmanuelos family have only one racial or sexual actor. Different members always coexisted: slaves and freed persons, zambos , blacks, quarteronas , members in the city, members on the hacienda.
Despite the complex and manifold universe of internal conflict and faction, the priority of the slave population remained clear: freedom. All efforts aimed at obtaining it, and the most important methods were negotiation and the daily wage. Negotiation occurred in two ways. The first was a gradually lowering of a slave's purchase price; the second was the accumulation of money. In the end, a reduced purchase price and savings would come together in the acquisition of freedom. Many times this goal involved the intervention of relatives, cofradía , Church, and state. Clearly the possibility for negotiation was greater when the owner was a woman. As the weakest elements of the society—and many limeñas compared their own life to that of slaves—women relied more heavily on slave labor and perhaps had other sympathies. The two methods might combine. The vast realm of negotiation included a variety of factors: a slave's good behavior, a master's declared will, the number of children a couple had, whether a slave had been born into the master's possession. Negotiations reflected conditions that ranged from those in which slaves had little part (generally ones predetermined by masters and their views) to those that slaves could actively manipulate and that varied from case to case. They all, however, had a common characteristic: the slaves' skillful use of the system's own contradictions to their advantage.
Probably the number of slaves who could choose their profession was low, despite the fact that one could feign inability in a wide assortment of professions in the hopes of finally obtaining the one desired (obviously within certain limits). This choice, however—which occurs as frequently today as yesterday—determined the outcome and the slave's relative success in life. Manolo and Manolito well exemplify the use of artisanal possibilities. The most sophisticated artisanal jobs were off limits to the black population, and probably the construction
of sewage systems at the end of the nineteenth century also put laborers with jobs like Manolito's out of work.
What this family history shows is an initial process of success. Savings accumulate, and family strategies allow their members to survive; nonetheless, misfortune and layoffs follow. In the background of this process are the particularities of Lima's urban slave system. Not even the overwhelming diversity of personal conditions and the high degree of internal conflict and differentiation could keep the black population from a common destiny: exclusion. In Lima the slave system fell apart because the slaves caused its downfall and the owners permitted it to collapse. All this took place at an economic and political crossroads where the liberal ideology absorbed by the slave population was gaining ground, where the movement of prices and internal productive rearrangements on the hacienda started to revalue slave relations, and where the state was losing its ability to rule.
In synthesis, we cannot understand the events in the sphere of Lima's rural hinterland without examining the connections between the rural and urban realms. And to perceive these connections, we must look at the relationships established by the slaves themselves and must chart the direction and the success of changes in the slave system. Slaves' acts and deliberate attempts to exploit moral and social gaps in the Peruvian urban fabric explain not only the increased numbers of slaves in Lima's workplaces but also the absolute decrease in the number of slaves. In the case of Lima, therefore, the transformation of the slave system, based on urban articulation, fueled the system's collapse and promoted the specialization of urban work to satisfy growing demands. The paths slaves took to this end were many and myriad. Artisanal activity was often key to their success. Misfortune reflected changing patterns of consumption and the reduction of import duties; and artisans could not get organized to protest against cheap imports because non-black artisans had superseded them and because the black population was economically and ethnically divided.
In the follow chapters we attempt to look more analytically at the experiences of the Lasmanuelos family in order to document the processes examined here and to compare the experiences of Lima's slaves with other slave realities. And, as we have seen, part of the history of urban slavery starts on the haciendas.