Conclusion
Lima's Slaves and Slavery

As individuals and as members of social groups, slaves and slave owners interacted on a daily basis. Since each group contributed to this interaction, in assessing slavery and the varying and multiple processes of manumission we must take account of the heterogeneity of their perspectives that make up the dialectical nature of the slave system and encapsulate its contradictions. Mintz (1969, 27–28) suggests that even though slavery created the most comprehensive kind of fracturing of human relations, it was still "in every historical instance a way of life, a conception of the human condition, an ideology of society and a set of economic arrangements, in short, a cultural apparatus, by which slaves and masters are related."

Relations among slaves, masters, and other individuals all took place within the same social fabric. "Europeans and Africans encountered one another through the unequal relations of slavery and engaged in a day-to-day struggle, sometimes implicit, sometimes overt, over the organization of work and the norms and values it entailed.... The ability of the slaves to adapt to the routine of the plantation, to organize their own capacity for collective activity, and to physically carry out the tasks assigned to them ... discloses the contradictory process at the heart of New World slave systems" (Tomich 1990, 216). In this sense, a plate of spoiled food set before an owner was equivalent to a whipping endured by a slave: both actions represented facets of the complex universe of the slaveholding system that grew from daily interaction.

When we grant that slaves were part of a continuous dialogue—which although skewed did exist—they become visible historical actors within a social group that constructed its own destiny and participated with other groups in the destiny of the society around them. Such an analysis not only views historical processes from different angles but also emphasizes a perspective that starts with the daily trials of slaves; in this widely neglected genre of history the creation of a

black culture assumes a more important role than the action of political forces per se (Morrisey 1989, 13). And it is the creation of black culture in this very wide sense that makes up power, politics, and policies. The focus on black culture, as Gutman (1976, 31) indicates, is not slavery's effects on slaves, or external modifications in slaves' behavior, or owners' treatment of their chattel. Its interest centers on the many resources that allowed slaves to survive, a process that Mintz aptly calls "the repertory of socially-learned and inculcated resources of the enslaved." Lima's slaves expressed these resources in a multiplicity of ways.

Two of the long-standing characteristics of slavery in Latin America hold true for Lima: the importance of the Church in the lives of slaves, and miscegenation. As Tannenbaum recognized several decades ago, religion was a central component of Latin American slavery. Although the Church was a decisive agent in creating slavery, it also provided the institutional mechanisms to express and defend slaves' moral personality. Thus tradition, law, and religion were key elements in the definition of social relationships and of slavery itself. The system based on such traditions was receptive to possibilities of freedom, even as slaveholders fiercely defended their property rights over slaves. In this context, one of our central conclusions acknowledges the importance of Church and religion and, more broadly, the existence of prevalent moral codes that helped slaves attain freedom. This more general pattern not only gave owners a mechanism to profit from individual manumissions but also, and most significantly when slaves took the mechanism into their own hands, enabled slaves to negotiate both their conditions within slavery and—ultimately—their freedom.

The concepts of love for humanity, marriage as a sacrament, and broader notions of justice and ethical obligation, all intended to be valid for members of polite society rather than for slaves, became arguments that Lima's slaves used to generate compassion, exemptions, and support from judicial and ecclesiastical authorities. Without asking permission, slaves incorporated themselves into a society that claimed to stand for moral equity and impartiality. These values became those of the slaves themselves and shaped the language in which slaves conveyed their messages to their masters. It was moral breaches—codified into law and prosecuted in the courts—that gave slaves the strongest arguments against their masters. If sexual trans-

gressions against women were unlawful, why not punish a master who forced a woman into sexual relations and who abused his authority? If the separation of the family would produce moral deviation, why tear apart slaves' families? At the core of such allegations lay the defense of slaves' family life. The Church mediated because it wished to correct immorality (in slaves and perhaps in their owners as well) and the slaves manipulated this aim in order to fortify their family links and concomitantly widen their possibilities of freedom.

Miscegenation—the other feature that distinguished slavery in Latin America—meant that over time the equation of black with slave lost its meaning. The existence of mulatos, pardos, zambos and an increasingly complex choice of marriage partners not only made it difficult for medical experts to determine the filiation of the offspring but encouraged slaves to view themselves as slowly merging with the white population. In their eyes, whitening distanced them from slavery. We encountered two extreme expressions of this process: slave women who bore their masters' children and questioned the justice of enslaving "Spanish" children; nonslaves in the black population who were themselves owners of slaves or perhaps intermediaries between owners and slaves. Probably what best illustrated the simultaneous process of approximation and estrangement were the power struggles within the black population of the cofradías or the guilds and the gracias al sacar , a document devised by the dominant society to confirm the whiteness of its purchaser. These institutions and the gracias al sacar were similarly "directed toward the castas to reward individual merits and at the same time to give some the possibility of social mobility to disentangle them from their fellow group and thus alienate possible leaders and generate an increased willingness to pay taxes" (Olaechea 1961, 228–229).^[1] Masters in Lima were both originators and victims of the black population's racial diversification. Street frays, matrimonial conflicts, and hierarchies within institutions governed by castas and blacks (guilds and cofradías ) depict the active role these distinctions played in the minds of the black population and their white owners. In extreme cases, blacks and castas even resorted to white judicial intermediation in order to manage the hierarchies in black society that observed racial and economic lines.

Impulses toward miscegenation were greatly related to the numeric relation between the white and black populations, as well as to the ratio of men and women within each racial group or subgroup. Accord-

ing to Genovese (1975, 427–438), in places where blacks predominated, whites erected an intermediate sector of castas in order to strengthen their power. As a result this intermediate group, both in racial and economic terms, typically expanded and used this enlargement to activate a whole set of subterfuges and strategies, creating a "casta society." Such societies were more open to gradual adjustments, ongoing negotiations, and racially homogenizing tendencies than societies in which economic and racial segregation prevailed. Intermittently, societies with a strong inclination toward miscegenation would reinforce racial prejudices in order to accentuate racial and economic divisions in the hopes of lessening the trend toward homogenization and reestablishing social hierarchies.^[2] But such behavior characterized not only black-white relationships in limeño society but those within black society as well. Thus we observed one effect of a continuous process of miscegenation, the simultaneous emergence of many cleavages that undermined potential political alliances.

If we believe the arguments of Lima's landowners that there were too few slaves, how are we to understand why, instead of remaining hard at work on plantations and haciendas, slaves were able to engage in a diversity of trades—with the free population and among themselves? Since slaves were successful in relocating to the city and staying there against slaveholders' expectations, they did so by creating mechanisms resilient and sturdy enough to counter their masters' desires. Furthermore, rewards, rather than punishment, opened more and more bargaining space to slaves and became the only way for owners to keep enough slaves under their control. In rural areas slaves cultivated truck gardens or used commerce and barter of slave produce and the possibility of leaving the hacienda either to find a new owner or simply to buy tobacco at the local tambo . And what they achieved in Lima's hinterlands was even easier in the city itself, where the most successful slaves lived out of the reach of their masters, had their own families, and still maintained savings for their own purposes. Yet not all slaves—as we have seen—were so effective: some found themselves snared by the dual imposition of slavery and the family's upkeep, which often fell completely to a slave as part of the agreement with an owner. Some slaves collapsed under the burden; others took their own lives.

Slaves often tacitly acquired civil rights although society formally denied them. Slaves also learned to create or implement their rights,

using resources from family relations, culture, and daily life. Fields (1985, 52) synthesizes this process: "Where slave and free workers are volatile substitutes for one another on the market, there slavery has become an attribute of individuals, not any longer of the system that organizes their labor." Through recognition of their moral personality and through repeated efforts to be valued as individuals in all spheres of life, slaves paved the way for their conversion into free persons. All the strategies slaves employed, ranging from obtained promises of future freedom to spatial mobility, had a single goal.

The integrated portrayal of the lives of slaves and other members of the black population in the previous chapters has given us a sense of the essence of slave life in Lima. From the experiences of the Lasmanuelos family we gained a concentrated and microscopic view of the meaning of family life for slaves. But we also looked beyond individuals to slavery's broader and more insidious effects on the family. By breaking down the experiences of the members of the Lasmanuelos family, we explored the most human aspects of slavery during that era and set out a theoretical framework for additional arguments. There is a thread of continuity in the lives of slaves that transcends the turmoil of this historical period. Lima's slaves had wide margins for negotiation. But every negotiation was also an overt power struggle of some kind. Many slaves had no choice but to resort to intermediaries or assert themselves violently (for example, by stealing) to make their voices heard. Slaves could bargain, outwit, and exasperate their masters. With sympathy and admiration we watch their progress: three steps forward and two back.

Over time, marriage became an exceedingly significant aspect of slave life. Many more slaves married in the first decades of the nineteenth century than in earlier eras.^[3] Approximately 60 percent of the slaves in Lima's hinterland haciendas were married to slaves living on the same estate or chacra ; the parochial registers (from Santa Ana and San Lázaro) show that about 20 percent of all marriages involved slaves. But matrimony did not necessarily mean family, and there were few children in either rural or urban areas. Thus, few slaves carried on a family life in their masters' households or in the hacienda's barracones . Owners might allow parents to free their children in order to avoid the high costs of maintenance. Sometimes, even before parents managed to raise the money for their children's manumission, they assumed the expenses of child rearing. These kinds of filial arrange-

ments later allowed slave parents to allege that an owner had not fulfilled his or her obligations and no longer held property rights over individuals he or she had neither fed nor clothed—part of the cautious construction of doorways to freedom through which slaves could eventually pass. Such strategies help explain not only the rapid diminution of Lima's slaves but also their urgent need to build wide social networks in the city and with other members of black society, the fluidity of urban-rural connections, and the desperate struggle to free at least one of the slave parents (as we have seen, usually the woman) from rural bondage.

Slave family members were slowly reaching the city and attaining freedom, each at a different pace and in a distinct condition. This temporally staggered and geographically dispersed pattern created a very peculiar family life, which could range from a situation in which a slave woman would abandon domestic service and leave her child behind to be wet nursed by her mistress to a situation in which a slave woman would take her children with her on frequent and long journeys from the haciendas to the city, sometimes visiting other family members who were still unable to leave the hacienda, and finally to the situation in which a slave committed suicide under the simultaneous burden of wages for the master and food and medical expenses for his family. The fight for freedom unified slave families around a common goal that sustained and permanently reinforced their bonds. Yet stress and anxiety were the perennial companions of slaves and often made owners wary of their every move. At no time in their family history did all the members of the Lasmanuelos family live together under one roof, eat at the same table, or even possess the same legal status.^[4]

Gutman (1976, 273) asserts that family solidarity among slaves in the southern United States did not rest on the solidity of religious or civil norms granted by national or regional culture, but that slave marriages obtained their vitality from norms within their own culture. In Lima, however, marriage became a strategy to attain freedom, by which slaves simultaneously opposed and were assimilated into the system. Female slaves would argue that they were not sexual objects and that their masters were obligated to honor their virginity as they respected that of their own sisters and daughters. A master who was not willing to listen or abide by such codes could not be considered a gentleman; social morality repudiated such scandalous behavior because good and honorable masters should not behave so.

Given that family and marriage were so critical to the development of slavery in Lima, it is not surprising that slave women took an especially important role. They were the primary link among slaves in the most intimate realms of life. But we must not conclude that slave women were matriarchs or that their predominance in household chores proves the existence of a matrifocal slave family: to do so would be to confer on them more power than they actually had (Bush 1990, 166). Although it is true that female slaves were of paramount importance on the family's road toward freedom, and that it was they who organized the marketing of truck garden produce and of their own reproductive tasks, this situation was more the result of how slavery was constructed and production organized. Since male labor was more valuable on the haciendas, slave women were the ones who went to nearby markets and took care of the family plots. Older women were in charge, tending to and cooking for the few children on the haciendas, thus enabling their mothers to labor on the hacienda.

When women made up their minds to leave the hacienda, they could usually base their decision on a hacendado 's preference that the women pay their purchase price and search for a new owner in the city. From the slaves' point of view, the decision reflected wider occupational opportunities for women in the urban sphere. The universe that Lima's female slaves were defending was a family universe, not a female universe. Only later, when female slaves were in the city, would a preponderantly female network evolve, a network that responded to shared female activities: selling food together in a market stall, meeting in the cofradías , babysitting one another's children. But there were also quarrels over husbands, bouts of jealousy, street insults, fights, and competition within community organizations (such as the cofradías or guilds). In other words, women's personal conflicts compounded the racial and economic strife within that sphere of black society where mutual aid was of such crucial importance.

Occasionally such gendered confrontation went beyond the boundaries of black society and involved whiter women. In the British Caribbean, "as opposed to white women who were accorded a status on par with children, black women had far more independence of actions and a greater degree of equality with their menfolk. The jealousy white women exhibited toward their 'inferior' rivals may have been motivated as much by envy of their relative 'freedom' of action as by their husbands' philanderings" (Bush 1981, 259). In Lima, black house

servants felt the rage and resentment of their mistresses. Yet on more than one occasion such conflicts proved—perhaps in a slave's involuntary alliance with a master's wife—that a master had impinged on his moral and authoritative duties. Enraged wives desiring divorce were unexpected witnesses whose testimonies favored the arguments of female slaves in court. Many white women were aware of their own subordination and asserted that some of them were treated more harshly than slaves; occasionally husbands admitted that, despite potential ecclesiastical and social recrimination, they preferred their slaves or were unwilling to relinquish the slaves' sexual favors.

Whether circumstances in Lima did indeed allow black women "the opportunity to rank and order themselves and obtain a sense of self [that] was quite apart from the men of their own race and even the women of the master class," (White 1983, 254), is a debatable issue. Lima's female slaves were neither matriarchs nor asserting selves. Their combined options showed success, yet they opted to play by the rules set in place by the system, their owners, and their husbands.

The relationship between female slaves and masters was much more complex than that between masters and male slaves, unless—as in an exceptional case that we saw—a slave became the lover of his mistress. Sexual tensions and conflicts over gender issues and property rights were the central components of this intricate universe.^[5] Their ubiquity leads us to believe that female slaves' amorous relations with their masters was an important facet of the mosaic of slave family life in Lima and contributed to the particular nature of its organization. Sexual liaisons not only transgressed moral codes and influenced slaveholders' authority but, even more significantly, permitted attempts by female slaves to secure advantages and small privileges and even to manipulate their way out of the system. Although these relations were not a solution in the same sense as marriage, they nonetheless built up personal and even affective bonds. Many female slaves had long-standing ties with their masters and never sought husbands within their own ranks. Given the existence of these intimate bonds, it is difficult to imagine how masters could simultaneously achieve their goal of augmenting the available labor force and increasing labor productivity without condemning their own offspring to coerced labor. Such a rampant contradiction, in Lima and elsewhere, could but signal the end of slavery (Morrisey 1989, 10). Aims that highlighted this

incompatibility were formulated by Lima's slave women and wittingly used to blackmail masters.

Christian marriage was more than a strategy for freedom: both female and male slaves continued to work after the wedding. Nevertheless, the mutual expectations of slave spouses were very explicitly drawn from what other members in society determined to be the proper behavior for each gender. Furthermore, this behavior bore a clear resemblance to that demanded from society as a whole. Slavery made the fulfillment of this goal almost impossible. Out of this discrepancy arose conflict, which even in its manifestations, such as domestic violence against women, did not stray very far from the sufferings of women of other classes.

Thus, family and marriage also represented a social web from which women found it difficult to disentangle themselves. Slave women could not selectively choose only the convenient aspects of marriage (such as an argument to obtain freedom), they had to take the whole package and live in a situation where they tried to achieve moral ends that their slave status made impossible.

For slaves in Lima, as compared to other areas, it was much easier to purchase the freedom of family members because the Church backed both institutions of marriage and family and because slaves there were able to work and to save.^[6] The greater the number of family members who could escape a master's control or even manumit themselves, the higher became the chances of freedom for the remaining members. Self-purchase contained its own dose of acceleration. What Lima's slaves did was to negotiate or manipulate their purchase prices so that it would eventually approximate what they were capable of amassing. Not only did slaves evade their masters' attempts to raise their prices but also used any subsequent transactions, negotiations, or even changes of ownership to gradually reduce their price. The lower the price, the closer the goal. Nothing obligated an owner to accept a slave's purchase price; but social pressure, custom, and expectations dictated that once a slave was able to pay, it was the duty of an owner to give the slave her or his carta de libertad .

Ultimately, as we search among the complex mechanisms that slaves used to obtain freedom for an increasing understanding of slaves' actions, we must look beyond the explanations of religion or miscegenation or family networks to the economic arena in which these negotiations took place. Success or failure on the road to free-

dom depended on highly subjective circumstances that were dictated by the working environment. Freedom was closely tied to the rate of accumulation.

In many different regions in which plantations and slaves existed, masters allocated plots of land to their slaves. From the point of view of masters, this tactic was particularly profitable in those areas where the price of food was high. By granting slaves subsistence plots and allowing them to cultivate them on certain days or for specific hours, masters reduced the costs of maintenance required for their slaves' upkeep. Furthermore, the tactic gave owners ways to secure and retain the labor force as links were created that bound their slaves to the plantation. The sizes of plots varied; in this sense, allocation controlled the labor force through the establishment of low levels of differentiation among slaves on the plantation and incentives for "good" behavior. After a slave or slave family was actively reaping products from a plot, means and ways to commercialize the produce would follow. To a great extent, success depended on the availability of excess crops and on the proximity of a marketplace. In Lima, small estates were the norm, and many slaves worked on chacras in Lima's immediate hinterlands. The smaller the unit of production, the greater the relative autonomy of slaves to determine production and even marketing. Although these slaves did not own the means of production, they tended to act like peasants. In some places, processes homologous to those in Lima have been interpreted as the fundamental impetus for slave peasantization, from which—after abolition—a black peasantry would evolve (Cardoso 1988). Given the pace of manumission in Lima, peasantization was well under way long before abolition and became a vehicle for self-manumission.

Urban markets in Lima were open to slaves, whom we observed preparing and selling food there. From this process of monetization developed more diversified occupations. Although we have scant quantitative evidence for Lima, as well as other regions, which directly refers to these mercantile and service activities, travel accounts substantiate their unparalleled importance for urban life. The memoirs of voyagers and visitors suggest that the participation of slaves in markets was as important for Lima as it was for Martinique during the middle of the nineteenth century, where some slaves amassed two to three times their own value (Tomich 1990, 278). However, in contrast to Martinique, Lima's slaves rushed to purchase their own freedom, in-

stead of hiring or even buying other slaves to assist them with their work. Similarly in Cuba, "Reading through the daybook [of the Angelita sugar mill], one gets the sense that relations within the plantation were shifting as slaves, particularly women, found ways to buy their freedom and as the plantation increased the use of monetary incentives." Most of the money slaves used for self-purchase probably came from their frequent sales of pork and crops to the plantation or to nearby marketplaces: "a circuit of money exchanges had now been introduced to replace a relation of direct control—and not necessarily entirely at the planter's initiative" (Scott 1985, l06).

For Lima there is no evidence that slaves sold their produce to the plantation or adjoining estates. However, given the propinquity of town markets and the city market, as well as the advantages of a higher consumer concentration, slaves probably preferred to sell their produce in urban markets. The additional gains from such a decision included the proximity of other slaves and free blacks and the distance from the reach of one's master. The slaves' urban jobs not only meant that they had access to money but also meant increased spatial mobility and protean and subtler levels of social interaction. In this sense, the rural-based experiences of slaves were very comparable to those recorded—for example—in Brazil, where the "relations of production were typified by the large plantations, but in reality neither the majority of slave owners, nor the majority of slaves interacted within that context" (Schwartz 1982, 87). The more intense and diversified the slaves' participation in the market, the greater the alternatives and opportunities to obtain freedom. By the final years of slavery, about one-fifth of all manumissions occurred in Lima's hinterland; over the course of time the rhythm of accumulation increased, essentially as a result of slaves' widening market participation.

Another component in the sequence of varied forms of accumulation was the artisanal and service skills of slaves as well as the hiring-out system, which was much akin to systems that have been detailed for cities as disparate as Buenos Aires, São Paulo, or Caracas. Often, artisan skills had already been fostered within the rural setting, but occupational diversity was much greater and more sophisticated in the urban sphere as a result of the organization of city life.^[7] Lima's slaveholders were very aware that the positions of their slaves in the urban occupational structure and their consequent accumulation hindered owners' capacity to control the slave population and thus put the exis-

tence of the slave system itself into jeopardy. From the point of view of slave owners, even though the hiring-out system permitted the slave labor force a higher degree of spatial mobility, it also guaranteed the profitability of that system.^[8] Thus, while slave owners sought to adapt slavery to a changing economic situation, they were also undermining the slaveholding structure. As we consider the lucrativeness of the slave system, Scott reminds us, we must not forget that slaves participated in determining how, when, and where wages were given to their owners. Lima's slaves document an enormous variety of possible agreements and arrangements: a slave could reside in or outside the master's household, sign a daily, weekly, or long-term contract, reside with or without children, work with or without tools, have a master who decided where and with whom a slave could work or who relinquished this decision to the slave. The wide spectrum of possible combinations of all of these options can also explain the diversity of outcomes: from the most expedient of self-purchases to suicide.

In contrast to Brazil, where apparently wages and the hiring-out system did not allow for a widespread process of manumission, accumulation by slaves through this system can help account for the decay of slavery in Lima.^[9] As we have shown, the particular denouement of slavery in Lima partly resulted from the process of parallel bargaining on behalf of the slave's price. By using a vast gamut of mechanisms to reduce their price, slaves managed to narrow the gap between accumulation and price. Overall, and in comparative terms, Lima's slaves were very successful at accumulation, even despite the disparate outcomes of individual cases. Their success not only gives us an idea of how busy judges must have been on their benches, but—more important—the tremendous impact that self-manumission had on the abolition of slavery. No rules existed that precisely defined how, when, or under what condition slaves could be hired out, as in other slaveholding situations, concrete behavior was determined by common practices and long-established traditions.^[10]

By suggesting that wages among urban slaves represented a process parallel to that of slave peasantization, Nogueira da Silva (1988, 116) proposes an interpretation of the hiring-system as a process in which the monetization of the relations within the slave system illustrates the contradictions inherent to slavery. Departing from such a global perspective, we can use daily wages to suggest that slaves' efforts even more than masters' desires for profits fueled abolition. Repeatedly, it

becomes clear that Lima's slave owners very much wanted (and needed) the daily wages earned by their slaves, but that they also were increasingly unable (and unwilling) to keep track of how these wages accrued. In Lima, individuals like José Gregorio (mentioned in chapter 5) gradually came to dominate the streets as slaves gained increasing control of the hiring-out system and daily wages, transforming the relations between slaves and masters. Beyond accounting for self-manumission, their greater control also explains slaves' effectiveness at avoiding transfer back to a hacienda or plantation.

On their way to self-manumission, Lima's slaves displayed manifold expressions of protest, from rebellion and banditry to what is now termed "passive resistance" (that is, refusal to work, inefficiency or laziness, witchcraft, even suicide). All these faces of dissent complemented other strategies aimed at the acceleration of manumission—ways to persuade masters that the only reasonable option was to accept their terms. Concretely, these attitudes or actions brought transfer to another owner, replacement of an administrator or caporal , better working conditions, less anxiety, or support from a wife against the master of the house. In short, "more than fight overtly, slaves negotiated" (Nogueira da Silva 1988, 112).

The ultimate proof of slaves' success at manumission emerges from statistics. From a total of 375 manumissions for three years (1830, 1840, and 1850) in Lima, an average of 125 slaves obtained their freedom each year, a number that, if multiplied by intercensus years (18 slaves between 1818 and 1836; 9 between 1836 and 1845), suggests a notarially recorded manumission frequency of Lima's total slave population of 1.24 between 1818 and 1836, and 1.14 between 1836 and 1845. Thus, we can see that only a small percentage of liberated slaves was not notarially registered and this percentage decreases the closer we come to the year of abolition. These calculations also indicate that during the first period about 31.3 percent of all slaves became free. In the second period this percentage comes to 21.9;^[11] it is equivalent to approximately one out of three between 1818 and 1836 and to one out of five between 1836 and 1845.^[12] The closer we come to the year of official abolition, the smaller Lima's slave population became. It was an irreversible process despite the contrary and influential argumentation of slaveholders.^[13]

One of the questions we have tried to answer is why slaveholders let slaves buy their freedom, or better yet, why they could not prevent

them from doing so. The dependency on slave labor, the distribution of slave ownership, and the slaves' agency lies at the heart of an answer to this question.^[14]

When in chapter 3 we analyzed the distribution of slaves in the Santa Ana parish we found that about 20 percent of its inhabitants had at least one slave, and that most of them had one or two slaves.^[15] This distributional pattern shows a diffused ownership and widespread reliance on slaves' wages, even among members of black society who owned slaves or those fewer slaves who owned slaves. In other words, the relative concentration of wealth in slave form was low. The dependence increased the potential for conflict in individual relations but also fragmented owners as a class, making them unable to reaffirm their reliance on slavery. Thus, to ensure the continuation of slavery there were no staunch interests emanating from a concentrated pattern of slave ownership but rather individuals, urban slave owners and their rural counterparts as well. As individuals, they bargained with slaves and set up relationships that gave the slaves potential for maneuvering and relative success. Open insurrection was unnecessary.

Within this schematic explanation of Lima's slave system we should not forget to stress the absence of state-based control mechanisms.^[16] In Lima, the only way to punish a slave but still receive a daily wage was to send him—more frequently than her—to a panadería . The panaderías soon became overpopulated; for quite obvious reasons, administrators and owners of these establishments preferred to sell bread baked by their own slaves rather than by slaves who had already exhibited predilections for incorrigibility and protest. In a similar vein, slaveholders feared the contamination of their own slaves by the bad example of other slaves and the diminished working capacity, health, and value that arduous panadería labor would bring the slaves. Thus, possessing only ineffective mechanisms of control, masters were further vulnerable to the clamors of slaves.^[17]

If we synthesize all the images we have of Lima's slaves, we must surely include the pictures slaves drew of their multiple connections with this urban society. But first we must ask, how did slaves view themselves?^[18] Given their varied positions in urban life and their success at obtaining freedom, did they see themselves as peasants, as small merchants, as water carriers—or did they exist simply as slaves? Most probably, they perceived a combination of roles. On the one hand, slaves had constant and urgent reminders of their duties; on the

other hand, they knew that the terms of these obligations rested on their own occupations and that means existed to circumvent a master's control. An occupational honor code existed within slave society along with other reasons that encouraged slaves to interact continuously with those who worked at similar and adjacent tasks. The presence of hierarchies within slave society itself sustained the notion that occupational proximity was linked to slaves' opportunities for social ascent and manumission.

What eased the artisans' mobilization against British imports in Lima after abolition was an occupational placement that emerged from slavery. Without an occupational identity constructed during the previous decades, this incipient demonstration of class interests would have been impossible. Furthermore, the fact that this response was so weak has much to do with the slave system. Before becoming full-fledged artisans, slaves had to invest in their manumission. Thus their first savings did not go to purchase superior tools or to perfect their trade but to pay off slaveholders, giving them a last small victory over their former chattel. In colonial Lima "one could freely buy artisans." Over time a growing number of slave artisans emancipated themselves. Because they were much in demand, Spanish guilds were unable to impose a monopoly or control for "blood purity" (Bowser 1977, 178, 197) on artisanal trades. From a European comparative perspective, the ability to "buy" artisans is certainly an aberrant historical process. Yet among societies in which slavery existed, including the United States, slaves and free blacks existed from the first stages in the formation of artisanal groups. In the United States, white immigrants gradually replaced them; in Lima, free persons of color did. But replacement was just a legal artifice: the people were the same. Race and occupation kept their correlation and—in this case—their measure of disdain. Only after abolition in 1854, and the emergence of an augmented and more sophisticated pattern of consumption, would European immigrants occupy some artisanal rubrics.

All these processes have long-term effects on society at large. The social conditions they create are a focus of research for the United States and, increasingly, one for Latin America as well. Moreover, it forms part of the broader issue of the still very important and over-arching construction of national and social identities.^[19] The pivotal issue is how racism and a racially determined occupational structure occur and develop; how conceptions of integration and identity may or may

not appear. Even the most arduous defenders of liberalism—then and now—are not free from such historically constructed racial prejudices rooted in the systematic marginalization of entire social groups, whether through slavery (as in the case of blacks) or through tributary payments (as in the case of Indians). Even though slaves exhibited their own desires for whitening and great job potential, their racial and economic mobility alike remained in check. As soon as slaves lost their value—as a consequence of economic liberalization in the wake of guano exports—they found themselves on the fringes of the urban economy. "The aristocratic tradition, the essentially castelike way people are grouped and identified, and the paternal concept that the poor must always be poor, that the servant must always remain a servant, has made the gap between 'upper' and 'lower' very great indeed.... It is an ingrained part of the total scheme of things" (Tannenbaum 1969, 6).

The structures of domination and the prejudices necessary for the perpetuation of the slaveholding system were the two sides of the same ideological coin, by which the dominant sector sought "to present to itself and to those it rules a coherent world view that is sufficient, flexible, comprehensive, and mediatory to convince the subordinated classes of the justice of its hegemony. If this ideology were no more than a reflection of immediate economic interests, it would be worse than useless, for the hypocrisy of the class, as well as its greed, would quickly become apparent to the most abject of its subjects" (Genovese 1969, 245). The Gramscian "hegemonic trick," the continual willingness of elites to change their power foundations when they perceive that doing so is the best or the only possible way to retain real power in a given context, offers a comprehensive explanation of slaveholders' lack of concern about their slaves' expanding liberty. After all, the abolition of slavery—especially if slaves financed it—opened the doors to British capital, an opening long preceded by British pressures to abolish the slave trade. And while Lima's slaveholders finally conceded that slavery had seen its heyday, they simultaneously robbed slaves of their former means of survival. Abolition became a matter of principle and not part of a consciously constructed policy to incorporate these groups as free persons into a rapidly changing socioeconomic context. Slaves' bitter struggles and ingeniously invented strategies to assimilate into society dropped from sight or drew at best hypocritical interest—in the guise of humanitarianism—and did not

translate into improved living conditions for the newly emancipated individuals.

Nevertheless, still on the fringes of "hegemonic tricks," slaves developed amazing alternatives to existing rules and through their actions clearly devised multiple tactics that elites had to counter and overcome in order to assure their own predominance in society. Slaves saw many challenges ahead of them. On the road to freedom, they won decisive human victories that brought them greater recognition. In this sense, and despite the costs, the life of the Lasmanuelos family and the lives of all the other historical characters we have followed illustrate idiosyncratic and wonderful responses to the challenge of constructing identity.