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.