The Working Life of Hacienda Slaves

Life on the farm—on the outskirts of the cities—was part of the first African experiences on the new continent (Bowser 1977, 128). A male or female slave was often put in charge of a rural estate while the property owner, male or female, awaited the profits of cultivation in some comer in Lima. Thus a key element of country-city relations involved handing the administration of rural duties over to slaves, who—in their terms at least—exhibited excellent management skills. What was true in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still held true in the nineteenth century, when what had once been a necessity of survival transformed itself into tradition.

In this respect the experience of Doña Elena Maldonado, the owner of a slave named Romualda, is exemplary. Doña Elena purchased a female slave in 1790 for 250 pesos. As soon as she verified that the slave had been born into the possession of her former master and was convinced of her "honest management," she entrusted the slave with an estate called Compuertas. To facilitate the running of the estate, Doña Elena Maldonado "kept the slave for a long time, granting her all discretion with regard to money and other things necessary for the upkeep and construction of the lands and crops. As a consequence she ended up losing a considerable amount of money." The owner had invested in the estate, hoping to garuer profits through

the slave. But in the meantime the slave hired a black woman named Juana, the slave of Doña María Garses, as a sharecropper for the course of two years; during this period Romualda (and Juana too) "forgot" about the owner.

The owners of small estates or truck gardens, especially if they were single women or widows such as Doña Elena and Doña María, had little choice but to hire slave labor, in part because of their racial and social status: for individuals with white skins (or who considered themselves white), the only proper and decent work option was sewing. And there were more than enough tailors and seamstresses in Lima. Single women and white widows could furnish the work tools and the means of production in exchange for the slave's daily wages or a percentage of the proceeds from landed property. However, all intermediate decisions that led to the acquisition of the daily wage or the marketing of produce were in the hands of the slave. Thus, it can be understood why Romualda hired another black woman, and furthermore, given the relative distance from Doña Elena's control, why she did not remit earnings and the daily wages to both owners. Doña Elena was able to recover her losses and Romualda was deposited in a panadería , from which she later fled—protected by a prospective buyer in Lima. Given the unpaid amount she owed Doña Elena, the judge increased Romualda's purchase price from 250 to 400 pesos. Even though this case had a negative outcome, it shows what slaves might do, and the dependence of certain urban sectors on slave labor.^[18]

Even though the mechanisms of subjugation were stronger on the larger haciendas located along Peru's coastal valleys, there is evidence even these slaves had margins for maneuver. The traveler William Bennet Stevenson transmitted an image of the Huaito hacienda, property of Doña Josefa Salazar de Monteblanco during the second decade of the nineteenth century.^[19] According to the visitor—who had seen many haciendas—it was one of the best organized estates. It was located north of Lima, in Barranca, and housed 672 slaves (thus surpassing Villa, the largest hacienda recorded for Lima's hinterland). It produced primarily sugarcane, but a portion of the land was dedicated to the cultivation of basic foodstuffs (corn, beans, sweet potatoes, squash) and it had pastures for livestock. The visitor wrote that the annual value of its produced goods amounted to 55,870 dollars and its expenses, including payment of clothes, food, and recompense to slaves, to 6,320 dollars.^[20] The slaves were sustained by the hacienda's

products and often a surplus remained after goods had been sold in the local market.

Whatever space—even on large haciendas—slaves had to maneuver, whippings and other harsh treatment were part of slaves' lives and of strategies used to discipline an increasingly disobedient slave labor force. But whippings never proceeded without the explicit consent of an owner, who based the number of lashes the slave would receive on the complaint from the hacienda manager or caporal . The slave's allegation was usually ignored in order to avoid questioning the manager or caporal 's authority. The beatings were public so that all other slaves on the hacienda would be informed of the reasons for the punishment. If a slave was captured while attempting to escape from the hacienda, he or she would have to earry irons on his or her legs for the number of weeks equal to the days he or she had been absent. Captured after a second attempt to escape, the slave was condemned to the harshest labor in the sugar mills. If the slave tried once again to escape, he or she was sold. At least the attempt gave a slave the chance for sale to another, better, owner.

In order to encourage marriage between slaves, all children born out of wedlock were sold while they were young. Another objective of this sale was to prevent male slaves from establishing relations with the inhabitants of surrounding villages.^[21] On the haciendas black girls of eleven to twelve years of age lived apart from the men under the surveillance of the female owner until they married; the oldest female slave cared for them. The marital policy was also expressed by the particular attention given to married women who had children: they worked less, ate better, and had separate quarters with beds. If a slave bore six children who lived at least until they were old enough to walk, the mother obtained her freedom or a reduced workweek of three days. If she remained on the hacienda during these days off she was paid for her labor.^[22] Furthermore, married and widowed slaves annually received a pig that was fed with leftover sugarcane and squash, and a plot that could be cultivated with the hacienda's oxen and plows. The traveler Stevenson estimated that each year an average of two hundred pigs were sold in Huaito, and that each pig yielded the amount of twelve dollars. The workday started at seven in the morning and ended for some at four in the afternoon, for others at six; slaves had a two-hour break at midday. The remaining time was used to cultivate one's own plot. Giving credence to a benign inter-

pretation of Peruvian slavery, Stevenson commented that "a laborer in England worked more in a day than any slave in three days ... in the Spanish colonies." Portions of tobacco, two changes of work clothes each year, and the use of the remaining sugar mill and sugarcane equipment to prepare guarapo (an alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane) completed the picture.

Situated between the large sugar plantation and the tiny garden plot was a large sector of intermediate units that exhibited some characteristics quite distinct from those of the units already illustrated. These properties combined traits of the small estates and the big haciendas: the freedom of activity common to the small estates, a certain amount of control by mayordomos or masters, as well as collective responses from slaves to the daily conditions on the hacienda. Here communication among the slaves was effective and would occasionally manifest itself—as we will see—in requests to the authorities in Lima or even in protest marches to the city. These middle-sized haciendas supported twenty to fifty slaves, an average number of slaves per productive unit recorded for some of Lima's haciendas.

In July 1816 José Chala lodged a complaint against Don Manuel Menacho, the new owner of an estate in San Lázaro's rural hinterland.^[23] On his own behalf and that "of my companions," he claimed:

Ever since the said owner purchased us he has not let us rest for a moment, and where it has happened, Señor Excelentisímo , that he makes us work on holidays, even the Indians observe this day of obligation and we, for being slaves, have to suffer. This is impossible and for this reason God has sent Your Excellency to be a father to the poor in order that my master be summoned and in order that he let us seek another owner since we already have someone who will purchase us and give us our papers. When we have said to him that we wanted a new master, our owner has forced us to work until two or three in the afternoon, and forced us to return to the hacienda at six in the afternoon just to be locked up, without being able to leave even to buy a few cigarettes. This causes us pain because not even criminals of the worst kind undergo the hardships we undergo.

What José Chala described here does not reflect the work conditions on the Huaito hacienda recorded by Stevenson. In San Lázaro the workday usually ended before two in the afternoon and afterward slaves could leave the hacienda to buy tobacco. They did not remain locked in the hacienda's usual slaves' quarters or barracones . The new owner felt the slaves' claim was exorbitant:

The clauses of the claim are enough to manifest the inconstancy and credulity of the proceedings. These slaves are used to extraordinary freedom that produces the most deplorable effects in the environs of Guía [in the parish of San Lázaro], where the estate that, along with the slaves I have just purchased, is located. The slaves have found it strange that owners should contribute to controlling their laborers, especially those on rural estates, so that surrounding estates do not experience robbery and looseness, to which these owners are subject when there is no master willing to tighten the limits on slaves' behavior; and just as they consider all that does not flatter this permissive attitude to be oppression, cruelty, or irreligion: hence it is that they fabricate stories of their feigned hardships, that they demand with no limit what their whims dictate.

When the new owner acquired the estate and saw how these slaves worked, he gave them the option to leave in exchange for their appraised price. None of the slaves accepted. And now, "when they see that the work necessary on a rural estate is more urgent because we are in the months of the greatest difficulty, that is when they complain and when the integrity of Your Honor cannot accede to their demands: if everyone involved in this conspiracy were to leave, the estate would be mined with no other cause than caprice."

Slaves knew well how to choose the moment of their protest, and the new owner could do little. The harvest was in jeopardy while the slaves advanced their desires for a new owner and asked for a month's extension to carry out the transfer. The master interpreted their request as a pretext to stretch the protection of justice. He argued, additionally, that even before he had brought an old black man to the hacienda to teach the slaves how to prune, break up the soil, and clean the irrigation ditches, the only thing they did was "go out onto the road and assault and intimidate unwary travelers." The judge called for a summons and listened to both sides. He decided that the sale of the slaves should be realized slave by slave as the respective replacement for each was sought; in this manner the estate's operations would not be harmed: "so a door detrimental to other haciendas and estates of this class would not be opened." As would happen over and over again in later years, courts mediated between slaves and slave owners, giving precedence to ownership and thus supporting landed interests. But at the same time slaves found an audience and vindication for their basic desire to switch masters.

Here was an example of what owners perceived and feared as possible contagion. Furthermore, in the same summons the property

owner declared—and this the slaves confirmed—that he sometimes appealed to day laborers. Apparently, in the described context more could be exacted of a day laborer than of a slave—one of the reasons, as I suggest, that slavery collapsed first on small agricultural enterprises. Disobedience, pressure on owners, and lax supervision were making slavery a less satisfactory system for haciendas. Added to these factors were slaveholders' fears of possible revolts and their spread to other haciendas, and owners' preference to sell unruly slaves in the best possible condition.^[24] In several contexts, slaves' protests increased, leading to the killing of hacendados, mayordomos , and administrators. Although these actions never spread into a slave uprising, the threat convinced many proprietors that it was dangerous to restrict or modify the privileges gained by slaves and to deny further claims.

The acquiescence of slaveholders to the demands of rural slaves seems more plausible given that those slaves often included ones who had been accused of several crimes, escape, or nonfulfillment of their obligations (after a judicial ruling) and who had been sold to haciendas outside the city as a form of punishment. Following this logic, the "most vicious" slaves often ended up on haciendas. But rebellious and disobedient slaves, thieves, and clever maroons had an advantage: from the point of view of owners eager to buy slaves, they were cheaper. These slaves' urban and criminal experience, however, could easily "contaminate" other slaves on a hacienda, estate, or farm, especially if the number of slaves was relatively small and the communication among them effective.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the valleys surrounding Lima had become dangerous places. Don Juan Evangelista Theves, a colonel of the regiment of trained dragoons in the valleys of Palpa and Nazca, was accused of causing the death of one of Pedro José Mejía's slaves. In his defense the colonel exhibited a letter describing "the repeated homicides, perpetrated by the slaves of the said Pedro José Mejía, as he buys nothing else but villainous blacks for ridiculously low prices. These slaves have scandalized the valley of Palpa and all its borders with their insults, robberies, and murders." In one of the frequent and dreaded skirmishes the mayordomo of a hacienda had died.^[25] Many times maroon incursions and slave revolts did not correspond to the mission and goals of the slave population but grew rather from incidents only marginally connected to the slave population or were of little concern to the slave or black world (Blan-

chard 1991). The possibility of local riots was perennially present in the minds of those who dared to alter relationships and ways of daily life that had become a part of tradition and established custom.

Beyond the size of the productive unit and its proximity to the city, the characteristics of internal control on the hacienda played a key role in determining slaves' behavior and the alliances realizable with other social groups. A more diversified spectrum of working conditions (i.e., the presence of racially mixed laborers, and variations in payments), as well as the coexistence of "good" and "troublesome" slaves in the labor force accounted for the difficulties administrators and hacendados encountered. These difficulties also explain the complaints hacendados voiced about insubordination and irreverence. We also gain the impression that the degree of control over the labor force was linked to the ethnic features of the owner or mayordomo as well as his or her physical presence or absence. Oftentimes those who were in direct control of hacienda business were not the white owners, but rather hired nonwhite administrators. Seemingly slaves showed more resistance to nonwhite governance.