Introduction

Urban slavery was never envisaged as one of the possible important consequences of the slave trade. Nevertheless, over the course of time cities such as Lima, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro saw a gradual increase in their slave populations. Initially, slaves were sent to rural areas such as plantations or to mines located on coastal areas where, since the beginning of the frontier years, the indigenous population had either died or moved away, escaping Iberian encroachment. Of the approximately nine and a half million Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, about 98 percent were destined for plantations that raised and exported crops such as sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and cotton. More than three million slaves were deposited in the French and British Caribbean. Around one and a half million slaves, or 17 percent of the total, came to the Spanish colonies; of these, slightly more than seven hundred thousand remained in Cuba.^[1]

Neither the cities in general, nor the viceroyalty of Peru in particular, became the main entrepôts for slaves: about one hundred thousand slaves came to Peru, of whom 40 percent either stayed in, or over time relocated to, Lima. In the Peruvian highlands Indians were and are the predominant labor force. But the concentration of slaves in and around the city made their presence significant, even if in absolute terms slaves were only a small percentage of the Atlantic trade. For Lima's slaves, the element that most defined their lives was the city and all that it implied. Even slaves in the rural hinterlands had expectations and social networks that were primarily urban.

The incorporation of slaves had manifold repercussions on Peruvian society. They ranged from the purely economic consequences of an occupational structure defined by race and ethnicity, to the more complicated and evasive cultural implications of the diffusion of black traditions, and of the creation of novel processes of resistance and adaptation. In the urban centers, slaves and free blacks were the back-

bone of day-to-day existence. Without black artisans, water carriers, muleteers, or house servants, life would have been unthinkable.

The disintegration of slavery over the course of the nineteenth century was a process that—in a global sense—radically changed the structure of human relations; it destroyed capital, reduced commercial exports from America to Europe, shifted the sites of production, transformed productive social relations, spurred Asian emigration, and reorganized the international division of labor (Klein and Engerman 1985). Such widespread effects explain the existence of a comprehensive bibliography on slavery and slave systems, which I use to compare the many trajectories of slavery and movements toward abolition and to go beyond the initial dichotomy in academic circles between the southern United States and Latin America. A growing understanding of the heterogeneity of slavery in different countries, distinct regions, and varied historical settings results from the incorporation of new methodological approaches into work on slavery, the most successful of which bring cultural and family perspectives to evaluate change at the microlevel and from the slaves' point of view. My analysis of urban slaves in Lima and of their participation in the unfolding of abolition is just one additional facet of the mosaic of research about different slave systems.

By the turn of the nineteenth century the contradictions of colonial rule had polarized Peruvian society. Indian uprisings against bureaucratic corruption, excessive work loads, and arbitrary tributary exactions, as well as criollo protests against royal taxes and monopolies, and scattered slave revolts: all these signs of a declining colonial relationship had been accumulating for many years. Spain's attempts to solidify its dominion through the Bourbon reforms backfired; instead of reaffirming loyalty to the ruler, the implementation of these reforms provoked sporadic outbursts that ultimately led to the viceroyalty's political separation from Spain.

In Peru, this last bastion of Spanish rule in Hispanic America, General José de San Martín declared independence on 28 July 1821. Battles persisted until 1825, however. The first incursions of rebels—who called themselves "patriots" and who opposed the "royalists"—into the Peruvian viceroyalty occurred in 1809 when forces came from the south (Chile and Argentina); the first uprising against Spain failed. The Cádiz constitution was approved in 1810 and partially implemented in the Peruvian viceroyalty starting in 1812. Yet royalist op-

position to enjoining the liberal constitution caused three insurrections (in Cuzco, Huánuco, and Tacna) in which the participation and leadership of Indians were critical. Lima's criollos , Spaniards born in Latin America, remained on the side of the royalists or, at very least, were neutral. They feared the loosening of social control that a period of war implied and were hesitant about proclaiming their fidelity to the patriots or taking at face value the promises touted first by San Martín and later by General Simón Bolívar.

The apprehensions of the criollos were based on their previous encounters with rebelling blacks and Indians. Throughout the colonial period Lima's inhabitants often glanced toward the sea, awaiting the arrival of some African tribal chief who would unleash a generalized slave rebellion. Although this event never took place, such fears were deeply ingrained in the minds of limeños . Premonitions of uncontrollable anarchy were among the main reasons—along with growing demands for plantation labor—why slaveholders wavered so long when the time came to emancipate the slave population. For them liberalism was an idea, not a reality—one that surely did not include the participation of Indians and blacks.

The years during and following the war of independence were marked by political unrest and general uncertainty. Competing factions fought over power.^[2] The contenders for power knew that one way to secure victory was to invite slaves to participate. They knew that their best strategy was to promise liberty to slaves who would fight their battles. Many slaves responded to the offers and enlisted in the army; but by the time the battles died down most of them felt they had been cheated. Again and again slave owners managed to reverse their pledges and perpetuate the slave system, until 1854 when—almost by inertia—it was finally formally abolished. Yet we must not conclude from this achievement that Peru had a strong abolitionist movement, or that liberalism gained firm ground. In Peru both elements were weak and vacillating.

Abolition of slavery in Cuba—one of the best studied areas of Latin America—had distinctive and common variables that underlay its emergence, according to Rebecca Scott's synthesis of several sources (1985, 25 ff.). One important argument is the "technological innovation argument," which contends that the use of better and more sophisticated technology was antithetical to the continuity of slavery. The abbreviated message of this approach is that when industry grows,

slavery declines; in this context, decrees abolishing slavery are but footnotes to reality (Moreno Fraginals 1978, 3, 37). A second argument ascribes the abolition of slavery to the initiative of slaveholders who, pursuing the conveniences stemming from new markets and cheap free labor and perhaps influenced by moral concerns, increasingly convinced themselves that abolition's time had arrived (Genovese 1971, 69–70). A third argument asserts that abolition was the direct consequence of a worldwide diplomatic and political campaign against slavery (Corwin 1967). The three arguments have a common thread: they all locate the reasons for abolition outside the lives and world of slaves and maintain that abolition resulted from pressures originating from the elites and from transcendent humanitarian ideals. In contrast to these views, Scott suggests that "as one moves away from the invocation of internal contradictions or diplomatic pressures as explanations for abolition, and shifts the focus to the dialectic of, on the one hand, stalling and improvisation by slave owners, and, on the other, pressure and initiatives from slaves, gradual emancipation emerges as a form of social change largely controlled by planters and the state, but which nonetheless drew much of its character and timing from slaves and insurgents" (1985, 48).

From these varying arguments we can isolate one issue linked to the question of perspective—of what vantage point or whose vision allows us to see and interpret historical processes: it is the question of timing. When and under what conditions did slavery disappear? For slaveholders the answer to this question hinged on the profitability of the system. Profit was largely an ideological construct, however; the more slave owners became convinced that alternative sources of labor were less expensive, the less they supported the slave system. In Peru, slavery was abolished after decades of financial and fiscal crisis when guano revenues started to fill the state coffers and also when an alternative labor source became available through the importation of Chinese rural workers (coolies). As in other regions, slaveholders were unwilling to grant slaves freedom without some form of compensation.

My assessment of urban slavery—in all its diverse mutations—allows us to reexamine the meaning of profitability. Slave owners found means to keep profitability high despite rural decay and the massive insertion of slaves in the urban context.^[3] For slaves, urban life permired the reinforcement of familial and social ties. Some authors see slavery and family as incompatible institutions, given the precarious-

ness and instability to which slaves were subjected. Others persuasively demonstrate that slave families did indeed exist; moreover, they gradually replace the image of the "socially dead" slave with that of a highly socially active slave—a change that apparently applies to very different slave systems.^[4] Such a perspective not only challenges longstanding assumptions about differences between North American and Latin American slave systems but also enhances our understanding of slave life within the family and the larger community. In Lima, the slave family was the body around which life revolved and the combative unit through which individuals could attain freedom. The family and marriage were important realities and were also a major ingredient of a more encompassing ideological power struggle.

When President Ramón Castilia abolished slavery in Peru in 1854, slaves had already taken many steps toward emancipation. Since the beginning of the colonial era slaves had been constructing avenues to freedom; these strategies grew stronger over time. My central aim in the following chapters is to describe the myriad and diverse mechanisms that slaves created in anticipation of freedom and despite the resistance of slaveholders. There is little truth to the assertion that "in manumitting slaves, Castilia achieved in our fatherland the ideals of human equality and forever banned odious racial prejudices" (Labarthe 1955, 23). Castilia did not give slaves their freedom; they had long been purchasing it with the fruits of their own labor. Furthermore, abolition did not rise from a notion of human equality but was part of a process of domination that underwent reformulation and redirection. And last but not least, racial prejudices still play a critical role in Peruvian struggles for identity. Processes and ideologies are historically constructed; they cannot simply be erased by a decree.

As a human group smaller than the indigenous population, black slaves had profound ties to whiter societal groups. As daily wage laborers, craftspersons, and household servants, slaves shared parts of white interests and culture. Their interaction with the white population was quite different from that of the indigenous population, not only because of their distinct fiscal and legal status but also because of their steady search for social links and the manifold ways they found to insert themselves into the occupational urban structure. From the outset, blacks were a more flexible and adaptive group—to a great extent because their social and cultural connections had been disarticulated by the Atlantic passage. In order to survive, slaves had to mold

themselves to the world that surrounded them; through this process they learned how to use the internal contradictions of an exploitive system to their advantage and to appropriate the tools of oppression and transform them into instruments of liberation. The moral, social, and economic inconsistencies of limeño society lay at the heart of the relative—yet still significant—benefits that slaves could turn to their advantage.

The complexion of Peruvian society has grown lighter over the past two centuries. Only small nuclei of blacks still exist, both in Lima and in some coastal valleys. Yet their permeation into society as a whole has been quite significant, from their cultural heritage to their racial features. How did blacks become a part of Peru's ethnic spectrum? Only an account of their day-to-day trials and tribulations, achievements, and debacles will help us answer this question.

In order to illustrate the variety of processes in which Lima's blacks were involved, I adopt a family outlook. Basing my analysis on the social microcosm of the family I explore the more intimate and emotional realms of the slave system. The archives I consulted contain episodic slices of the lives of many black and not-so-black slave families. But diaries or journals similar to those written by slaves in the United States—accounts that would have offered a look at the more subtle dimensions of slave life—are not available in Peru. For this reason the book opens with a fictive reconstruction of the life of a slave family, a combination of situations from real cases. My Lasmanuelos family history attempts to design a family biography that, beyond familiarizing us with the discordant expressions of day-to-day life (since conflict was the primary element of the legal cases we examined), helps us see and trace the development and consequences of a family's internal mechanisms of articulation. Fiction begins with the names I chose: Manuel, Manuela, and their children Manuelita, Manolo, and Manolito. During the period under discussion, someone named Manuel was almost inevitably black and, thus, a slave. With names such as these as a point of departure, I want to emphasize the homogenizing tendencies that a slave system can impose, despite the fact that a detailed analysis also reveals the actual porosity of such a system.

In the second chapter I present statistical indicators of Lima's rural hinterland and of the diversity of units of production and their development, as well as their marked differences from haciendas and plantations in Peru's other coastal areas. My primary contention is that the

tenor of rural slave life, to a great extent, depended on the size of the estate, which in turn determined the mechanisms of internal social control, which in turn shaped the kind of familial and social life slaves could construct. This chapter also sets out the fluidity of relations between the rural hinterland and the city, caused both by the plans of masters and by the spatial mobility of slaves.

The third chapter examines the urban environment and reveals a diversification of slave activities in this context and different levels of slave-master interactions that shaped their relations. I pay special attention to day laborers and artisans and to how slavery and manumission affected men and women in different ways. From this perspective we can recognize many forms of social articulation, expressed by the varied ways slaves managed to obtain fractions of freedom and the manner in which they organized their lives with their owners. Negotiation involved issues such as whether workers lived in or outside a master's household, the amount of daily wages that had to be handed over to the master, and the management of slave children. Neither owners nor the Roman Catholic church were in a position to impose arbitrary rules without the validation of widespread cultural and social mores. In other words, this chapter also broaches a discussion of the legitimacy of power.

This discussion continues in the fourth chapter, where I explore the degree to which slaves were involved in white culture—or better yet—to what extent slaves' use of moral contradictions was self-defeating or created new traps. The lens of slaves' marital conflict lets us identify the limits slavery set on the formulation of alternative mechanisms of social cohesion. Both slaves' resistance and their family unit, which they fiercely defended, dissolve before our eyes when we see how inequality and conflict became social expressions that served to separate couples, dissolve marriages, or perhaps cause a female slave to wish to return to the protection of her master. The inevitable distortion of marriage and family relations transformed marital conflict into an arena open to the intervention of owners and in many senses turned these dimensions of social life into more subtle mechanisms that reproduced the slave system. In the fifth and final chapter I assess the more encompassing relations between slaves and masters as well as their implications on Lima's slave system as a whole.

The various axes of thought and historical analysis in this book are components of several current debates. Thus, extrapolating from the

findings for Lima—while not losing sight of the particularities of Lima's slavery—I propose some comparisons with other slave systems. To a great extent, I echo Sidney Mintz's (1969, 27–28) contention that slavery is slavery but that not all slave systems are equal, economically or culturally.

Several reasons underlie my decision to study the region of Peru during the period of abolition. The first is the existence of an already classic study of Peruvian slavery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, written by Frederick Bowser (1977). Bowser uses documents similar to my own to identify the type of slave system that developed in Peru, a generally peripheral area but one where urban slavery was particularly salient. Second, Peru represents an interesting case because its ethnic composition was so diverse: the interaction between Indians, blacks, and whites provides a uniquely challenging environment in which to explore colonial socioeconomic structures (1977, 12). Bowser's research traces Peruvian slavery from the arrival of the Spaniards to the middle of the seventeenth century when the Westphalia Treaty, which clearly interrupted Spain's commercial monopoly (and thus its slave trade), was signed. Bowser believes that the basic model of Peruvian slavery developed during this initial stage; subsequent changes would just be smaller adjustments. In a general sense he is correct; yet the validity of such an assertion always depends on how and from whose perspective changes are being assessed. I hope that someday we will have an account of Peruvian slavery for the intermediate period (i.e., between the mid-seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, where my analysis starts). For the time being, my general sense is that substantial transformations took place between both periods, especially if we consider the changing attitudes of slaveholders and examine the acceleration and increasing fulfillment of slaves' demands. And a final reason for the choice of Peru—one that Bowser also mentions—is my belief that the broad debate on slave systems should incorporate the peculiarities of Lima and, more generally, of Hispanic American urban slavery.