Chapter Two
From Rural to Urban Life

Slaves living in Lima did not always come from the countryside and many never underwent a rural experience. Disembarked in the port of Callao, they were purchased by limeños anxious to enjoy their services. Urban life without them would have been unthinkable, and slaves with urban experience tenaciously resisted relocation to haciendas or rural labor. Whatever they knew of rural life, slaves devised an endless number of mechanisms to resist transfer to the countryside—they worked, multiplied, and died in the city. In order to understand why the slave population in Lima remained high throughout the colonial period and what took place in the urban sphere, we need to examine the rural sphere and the links that the slaves established between the two, allowing them to move from the countryside to the city. These forms of rural-urban communication are a theme of particular relevance, but little studied, for places such as Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, which all received large numbers of rural migrants and saw slow increases in their black slave and free populations.^[1]

A drop in agricultural productivity marked the beginning of the nineteenth century and caused many slave owners on the haciendas bordering the city of Lima to relocate their slaves to the urban nucleus (Romero 1980). If a hacienda slave did not have skills that were useful in the new urban environment, with a little money an owner who had chosen to move the slave to the city could apprentice him or her to an expert artisan. In this way the slave's daily, monthly, or annual wages (depending on the contract agreed upon at the end of the apprenticeship) increased, and so did the slave's sale value. Such transfers of hacienda slaves can explain the growth of the urban black population and the decrease in rural slaves despite the intensification of the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. They also shed light on the rise of the rate of manumission. Training in crafts expanded slaves' potential for accumula-

tion, lessened their owners' control, and generated closer and more fluid connections within the black population.

Owners had many production-related incentives to transfer their slaves to Lima. And slaves had their own reasons to accomplish the same end. This chapter examines the process of relocation to the urban sphere from the perspective of the slaves themselves. My chief hypothesis is that moving to the city was a goal slaves desired and attempted because they knew—even given the impositions of the slave-holding system—that heading toward the city was a way to accelerate their attainment of freedom. The conditions on the hacienda and the character of the slave-master relationship shaped and often facilitated migration to the city. However, it was the relationships within the slave family and its links to the urban world that first and foremost determined the success (or failure) of slaves' relocation.

Statistics demonstrate that the number of slaves on haciendas decreased (as we will see, above all, on haciendas of small and medium size), and that the city's casta population grew. An analysis of rural conditions and of life inside the production units makes it clear that the reduction of the slave population on some haciendas was a result of the slaves' transfer to the city. The growth of the free casta population and the parallel decline of the slaves in the City was the result of self-manumission. But first, slaves from Lima's hinterlands had to reach the city.

Parishes and Haciendas: Geography and Statistics

According to a treasury census of 1829, the city of Lima had retained its colonial characteristics.^[2] It housed 58,326 inhabitants, of whom 4,602 were slaves living on estates and haciendas of various sizes on the outskirts of the city. The rural realm represented roughly the actual area of the province of Lima or the so-called valley of Lima.^[3] In this area approximately 200 production units classified as haciendas competed for the available cultivable space, a situation that would not change very much between 1780 and 1910.^[4] In this relatively small rural sphere I intend to correlate the size of the productive unit to its slave laborers, the slaves' opportunities for accumulation, and the links these haciendas had with the city.

There is no information about slave numbers or conditions of slave labor for all the haciendas on the outskirts of Lima. Nonetheless, the

1813 census provides some clues, and for Surco and Chorrillos, two rural areas located about ten miles from the city's main square, a second census allows us to compare the evolution of slave distribution between 1790 and 1813. Supplementary information from notarial registries for subsequent years has been elaborated by Aguirre (1990, 17 ff.; 1993, 51–52).

The rural environment was not uniform. Each parish had its most proximate rural region. And a little farther off was the area occupied by the haciendas, small conglomerate villages, and towns. One of Lima's six parishes, San Lázaro, may illustrate the rural environment's diversity. San Lázaro housed the largest black free and slave population. After independence this parish—like all others—was divided into cuarteles (districts) and the cuarteles into barrios. The small plots, farms, and estates were spread out behind the barrios. In cuartel one, formed by four barrios and several small plots of land scattered in the two areas of Guia and Amancaes, an examination of the distribution of people called citizens or slaves allows us to decipher the rural component of the environs of the urban centers (Table 2). If, based on these figures, we contrast the distribution of the Spanish and the slave populations in the rural and urban spheres, we obtain some interesting indicators. The average ratio of slaves to Spaniards in the four barrios

amounted to 1.3:1, while the same calculation for each barrio denotes a high degree of disparity (4.0:1, 0.7:1, 0.4:1, 1.0:1 respectively). Thus, we can see that the proportion of slaves to Spaniards was much higher in barrio VII than in the other three barrios. The dividing line between the rural and urban spheres was imprecise. This inequality probably reflects the more or less rural character of the barrios and their greater or lesser proximity to the estates or the city center. In the rural area of this parish (i.e., on the estates) the ratio of slave to Spaniard was even higher: 19.0:1.^[5] If we exclude the persons listed as female Spaniards on the estates, the result is a ratio of thirty-five slaves to each owner. The ratio would be only slightly higher if we included the fifty-nine priests and nuns in barrio X; they were probably also Spaniards. This is a low density per unit of production if we compare it to similar figures from the plantation zones of the northern and southern coast.^[6] Similar calculations suggest an equivalent density (as we shall see) for nearby areas of San Lázaro parish such as Surco, Chorrillos, Magdalena, and Miraflores. On the level of laborers per productive unit this figure indicates the existence of relatively small haciendas in Lima's hinterland. In a rural register of 1837 that took in the province of Lima—that is, all of Lima's hinterland—were 152 haciendas with 2,004 slaves (Aguirre 1993, 52). In a broader area encompassing the coastal valleys we see a similar distribution of the slave population (Figure 1). Seemingly, despite the great disparity among these haciendas, between 1813 and 1837 the average number of slaves per hacienda had dropped from 35.0 to 13.2. Only two years later, in 1839, the register listed 189 haciendas with an average number of 16.6 slaves (Córdova y Urrutia 1839, also quoted in Aguirre 1993, 52).

In San Lázaro's rural area there were 950 slaves, and in its urban center 1,874 (that is, rural slaves lived in the heart of the urban parishes). However, the urban presence alone was by far more important. According to the important 1792 census, Lima relied on 13,482 slaves. In 1818, the date of the next census after that of 1813, there were 8,589 slaves in Lima (Jacobsen 1974). If we assume that the two censuses covered the same geographical regions (though the later census did not refer to this matter), we notice that 32.9 percent of Lima's slave population lived in the parish of San Lázaro and that this slave population was concentrated in the urban zone of the parish, in the barrios. Thus, approximately one-third of the population within the parish of San Lázaro had occupations in the rural sector.^[7] The

Figure 1.
Distribution of Slave ownership in five Lima valleys: 1837. Source: Aguirre (1993,52).

parish's hinterland, in accordance with the boundaries established by decree in 1626 and apparently still valid in 1884 (Clavero 1885, 32 ff.), embraced a vast area whose borders were the present zones of Lurin, Hauchipa, Naña, Carabayllo, Surco, Pachacamac, and Magdalena. The rural space and the urban zone were extremely interconnected. San Lázaro was a parish located outside the city walls and a parish where—as we will see—a critical component of the daily life of the black and slave population evolved.

For Surco, Chorrillos, and Magdalena, three minor locations next to San Lázaro, we rely on separate figures that allow us to look more closely at the situation of slaves on some of the haciendas, the estates named in the next three tables. The essentially rural physiognomy of these sites farther removed from the urban center is evidenced by the much lower proportion of inhabitants than in the barrios of San Lázaro.^[8]

[8] Here is the mix of urban and rural elements in the parish of Miraflores:

4 male Spaniards, 4 female Spaniards
33 male Indians, 15 female Indians
11 zambos, 11 zambas
2 quarterones, 1 quarterona
2 mestizos, 7 mestizas
3 black men, 2 black women
o chinos, 2 chinas

=total of 97 persons (55 men and 42 women)

In Surco and Chorrillos the rural ingredient, based on an evaluation of the Spanish presence, was even more marked. Only one married Spanish couple lived in Surco, along with 2 single men and 5 forasteros (Indians who had abandoned their traditional land and village). But the indigenous presence was significant: 57 married couples, 34 single men, 35 single women, 8 widowers, 9 widows, 54 boys, and 50 girls. In Chorrillos there was not one single Spaniard, but here also the indigenous presence stood out: 174 married couples, 115 single men, 114 single women, 26 widowers, 37 widows, 110 boys, and 111 girls. Both Surco and Chorrillos had an almost perfect balance between the sexes, which is probably an indicator of ethnic endogamy. In Magdalena, 3 individuals were identified by the title don (which might mean they were of European ancestry) and the remaining 167 persons were all either casta, indigenous, or mestizo females.

The distribution of the slave population on the haciendas, as well as the ratio among men, women, and children in the productive unit was quite unequal. In Magdalena the average number of slaves per pro-

duction unit amounted to 38.1, which closely corresponds to the average (35.0) found for the rural setting in the parish of San Lázaro. If we leave aside the population of children, we obtain a figure of 32.9 (Table 3). Before hazarding what these figures mean, we should look at the equivalent data for the parishes of Surco and Chorrillos (Table 4, which also permits us to verify the variations between 1790 and 1813) and for the site of Miraflores (Table 5).

In Surco and Chorrillos the average number of slaves per productive unit was 88.8 in 1790, and 102.0 in 1813. We can attribute this rise to the existence of the Villa hacienda, the largest in either area.^[9] If we exclude it from the calculation, the average drops to 35.4 in 1790 (approaching the average of San Lázaro and of Magdalena in 1813) and to 56.3 in 1813 (still a high average given the enormous expansion of

the San Juan hacienda between 1790 and 1813). For Miraflores the average number of slaves per productive unit was 53.7 (excluding the case of Brabón), and 45.5 (omitting children). From these rough averages we can perhaps infer that the further from the urban nucleus, the greater tended to be a hacienda's ratio of slaves to productive unit and the ratio of slaves to Spaniards, if we consider Spaniard to be equivalent to owner. Here is the very small difference between the estates of Amancaes and the haciendas of parishes that bordered the urban center (Miraflores, Magdalena, Surco, and Chorrillos). Also reflecting this concentric gradation from the urban center is the size of the haciendas (which is not necessarily the same as the number of slaves). The closer to the city, the more dispersed the land-tenure pattern, and the greater the number of small-size productive units. The pattern held true for a later period as well. If we examine what was called the Lima-región between 1825 and 1840, we find that 53.4 percent of all production units in five valleys were garden plots. The Rí-

mac valley, the valley closest to the urban nucleus, in the parish of San Lázaro, contained by far the greatest number of small landed properties: 172 garden plots, 79 larger plots, 23 farms, and only 9 large estates (Table 6). Of the total of 183 garden plots, thus 172 (94 percent) were in the Rímac valley.

The size of a hacienda had a great deal to do with the degree of relative freedom slaves had within the hacienda, the mechanisms of control, and also the types of production that would eventually allow slaves to sell basic foodstuffs in the urban markets. Lima's haciendas were definitely much smaller than other coastal properties.

Pando (the hacienda where I placed the Lasmanuelos family), located in the district of Magdalena, was a typical hinterland hacienda with its forty-five slaves. Since I contend that family bonds were one important ingredient of manumission, let us analyze the gender composition of the slaves on haciendas. Here our central objective is to clarify how the distribution of men, women, and children inside the hacienda shaped families' and individuals' strategies of accumulation and the way in which slaves linked themselves to urban life and to other social groups. What determined the ratio of men to women in

the haciendas is unclear. The type of crop might have influenced the ratio and conversely, changes in the gender composition might have altered cultivation. Otherwise gender ratios may have been either completely arbitrary, as women also performed typically male tasks, or a conscious strategy in order to encourage slave reproduction. There is no evidence for either of these arguments. It is surprising, nonetheless, that in both Surco and Chorrillos the increase of the slave population between 1790 and 1813 exhibited an almost perfect balance between the female and male populations, even if on the level of each unit of production this balance was quite skewed. Despite the fact that marriage was not proof of a couple's union—much less in the world of the hacienda—in Surco and Chorrillos a significant portion of the women who lived on haciendas were married to slaves working on the same hacienda. On the Villa hacienda in 1790, 180 of the male and female slaves (out of a total of 277 male and female slaves) were married couples (65.0 percent); in the case of San Juan, of 44 slaves, 26 were married (59.1 percent); on San Borja there were 32 married slaves out of a total of 58 (55.2 percent). On the smaller haciendas, Valverde and Chacarilla, only three married men appeared in each case, and on the estate of Porras out of twelve slaves, six slaves were married (50.0 per-

cent). These figures indicate that an average of 60 percent of slaves were married to other slaves on the same hacienda. These percentages were slightly higher on the larger units of production.

The 1813 census of Magdalena gives us a good idea of some of the gender ratios on its haciendas.^[10] Above all, the largest haciendas tended to maintain a balance between the female and male populations. This makes sense as these percentages corresponded to those slaves who were actually married. Perhaps many more just lived together. This assertion echoes the findings of Cushner (1972, 193) for the Jesuit haciendas in Peruvian territory at the end of the eighteenth century. Among Magdalena, Miraflores, Surco, and Chorrillos, Magdalena and Miraflores exhibited quite similar total percentages of men and women, with about 30 percent more slave men; in Surco and Chorrillos the total number of male slaves almost equaled that of female slaves.^[11] Insofar as we believe that both family life and a strategy for freedom were important to slaves, the landed properties that contained the greatest conflict and instability must also be those in which the greatest gender imbalance prevailed. When slaves on one hacienda could not foster family ties there, they often moved from place to place and established contact with neighboring haciendas and towns. Marriages among slaves from different haciendas and transfers through purchase from one hacienda to another explained such mobility. Higher mobility in turn reflected (at least in slave owners' eyes) weakening control over slaves; for the latter it certainly meant broader experience. Mobility made them aware of what was happening on other haciendas and allowed them to adjust or strengthen their arguments before owners or administrators. Thus, although slave marriages were a desired goal for masters who wished to augment an increasingly scarce labor force, when marriage or sexual contact meant higher mobility it also widened slaves' perceptions, anxieties, and possibilities.

There is no evidence that any hacienda except Palomino in Magdalena lacked female slaves. To compensate disparities or imbalances in the distribution of men and women throughout a broader geographical area without the purchase of new slaves, possibilities and opportunities for movement beyond the edges of the hacienda were needed, to give the slave population a certain amount of emotional satisfaction. Contemporaries were quick to interpret the slaves' greater circulation as idleness and even arrogance and boldness or worse, when slaves ran away. It diminished the slave owners' control over their labor force, in spite of the fact that on occasions—as was the case

with Manuel—slaves were severely punished because they left the hacienda. Such punishment was arbitrary and depended on specific slave-owner relationships; contemporaries usually interpreted punishment as an act that contravened established customs.

Marriage was a serious matter, even on the haciendas. Owners and slaves alike took into account and honored the matrimonial rules valid for the rest of society. Beyond respect for marriage itself, and for ecclesiastical rituals, we find that in slave society it was possible to annul a marriage on the grounds of a "second degree of illicit copulation," or opposition from parents or newlyweds.^[12] Even slaves had to declare that they were voluntarily consenting to marriage. These factors further weakened masters' ability to make marital decisions on behalf of their slaves and demonstrated the extent to which the sacrament of matrimony could interfere with notions of private property.

In terms of the characteristics of economic development at the end of the colonial period and the significance of the Bourbon reforms, what is salient in this microscopic examination is that Lima's haciendas experienced an overall increase in the slave population. Only two haciendas, Valverde and Porras, reported a reduction in slave population; in 1790 each had twelve slaves. We might infer that the slave population on smaller haciendas decreased, even if Chacarilla, which between 1790 and 1813 augmented its slave labor force from three to twenty-three, contradicts this fact. Perhaps an additional argument that substantiates the decrease of slaves on small haciendas is that many of these recorded the presence of a non-slave labor force at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Such was the case with Brabón and Lobatón (in Miraflores).^[13]

The objectives and the organizational logic of the labor force are less clear if we include in our analysis slaves who were minors. We simply assume—but have no way to determine the reality—that all the under-age children were born of slaves living on the hacienda. The documentation available does not differentiate them from minors purchased outside the hacienda.

To evaluate the extent to which attempts to reproduce slaves within the hacienda were successful, we will construct two indicators. One records the average number of children per married couple and the other, of children per woman over sixteen years of age. Once again the only censuses that include these figures are the 1790 census of Surco and Chorrillos and the 1813 census of Miraflores and Magdalena (Table 7).

The five factors that researchers at various sites use to explain the low numbers of slave children are: (1) rates of low fertility and high infant mortality; (2) suspected (but not proven) choice of slave women to abort in order not to bear slave children; (3) matrimonial age and composition by age of the entire female slave population in each unit of production; (4) sale of children by an owner outside the unit of production; or (5) simple lack of concern among owners, a reason that could underlie all the others. Other researchers argue, on biological grounds, that a woman's procreative capacity might diminish as a result of excessive work or mistreatment. Some evidence suggests even more dramatic explanations for the cases in which masters, family members, or compadres were the parents of slave children. There were masters who, wishing—for a multitude of moral reasons—to erase traces of paternity, subjected pregnant slaves to harsh treatment and beatings. Their objective was to provoke an abortion or secure a confession that would blame the pregnancy on another man. In the case of Josefa Aparicio, for example, who in 1842 worked on the Retes hacienda, the owner had her locked in the pillory to be "subjected to a beating session every 24 hours ... compelling her with these punishments to ascribe paternity to Don Manuel Andrade."^[14]

It is true also, however, that the thesis of a low fertility rate is hardly surprising in a context where the fertility rate in general was

extremely low.^[15] Although the proof is yet far from convincing, we observe a decrease in the number of children per slave woman in Lima, to the point that the number of children dropped below the already very low birth rates on eighteenth-century Jesuit-owned haciendas (Cushner 1975, 190n.). Other factors beyond those we noted help explain why children were absent from haciendas. The closer to Lima proper, the more frequent the physical absence of owners; sometimes we might infer that slave children were taken into the city as house servants, were inherited by family members, or were sold. Combining the theses of an extremely low fertility rate, geographic proximity, and the particular characteristics of a hacienda's operation, we can infer a sixth reason for the low numbers of slave children: parents managed—even in the arduous context of the hacienda—to liberate their children and thus children appeared only randomly in inventories or censuses. Confirming this hypothesis are several different cases and some evidence that depicts slaves' capacity to accumulate on the haciendas, in order to pay or negotiate their children's purchase price. This is exactly what Manuel and Manuela did on behalf of their two sons, Manolo and Manolito.

Thus, even though a high degree of differentiation existed among haciendas in Lima's hinterland, on average these productive units were much smaller than the sugar and winery haciendas on the northern and southern coasts, where concentrations of six hundred or more slaves were common. The size of the property often determined a slave's success at procuring freedom. The smaller the property, the closer the connections between slaves could be; in a parallel manner the greater the chances of negotiation with owners, mayordomos , and caporales . Surely the capacity of these latter individuals to control the lives of their slaves was also greater, but greater control did not automatically bring harsher treatment. It is not necessarily true that larger productive units offered greater levels of liberty or provided slaves with any more anonymity. The slave's potential for negotiation—where channels of negotiation existed—increased when proximity between individuals was higher, that is to say, on the small and mediumsized units of production.^[16]

Production Units and Labor Relations

The relations between countryside and city were dynamic and fluid—for masters as for slaves. Lima's rural panorama consisted of estates

(eventually large truck gardens) and haciendas, divided principally by size, administration, and labor relations. With the work of Febres as a base, Haitin (1983, 140) estimates that of the approximately two hundred units of production in Lima in the 1820s, at least 47 percent did not exceed 145 hectares, and at least 16 percent had even fewer than 73 hectares. In spite of the difficulties of demarcating which properties belonged to which category because over the course of time names remained but the conditions of production changed, chacras (small estate farms) generally appeared to be the smaller units, and on those, obviously, the relation between owner (or in his or her absence the caporal or mayordomo ) and slave was more direct. Many of these estates were farmed by slaves, in conditions quite different from those in force on the haciendas, which were larger entities where organization and control were in several hands and the depersonalization of relations was greater.^[17]

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.

Hacendados and Mayordomos: Absence, Presence, and Ethnicity

An element that influenced the form of labor in the productive units was the type of control owners exercised. Some hacendados had no control over the labor force and others rigorously established varying relationships with their slaves, according to marital status, years of residence, their perceived loyalty, and their abilities and familiarity with the work. Masters varied from those who barred or at least limited slaves' contact with the outside to those who were concerned only with receiving daily wages: in short, from the situation documented in the words of Stevenson about Huaito to that on the smaller estates in the parish of San Lázaro. Apart from the owner's level of leniency and his or her ethnic group, the slave's readiness to receive and comply with orders also depended on the owner's gender. There were distinctions between a male white owner—or in his absence—of a mayordomo , an indigenous man or woman, or a casta . Even if frequently the larger properties were in the hands of whites, and the small and medium-sized properties in not-so-white hands, it was another issue altogether who effectively managed the reins of production. In the eyes of the slaves, perhaps the

combination that merited the least respect was that of female and indigenous.^[26] In order to gain an idea of the relative looseness that contemporaries carped about so much, perhaps it is worth the trouble to examine the figures we have for the owners, mayordomos , and caporales of the haciendas of Magdalena and Miraflores.

In Miraflores, all the property owners lived within the gates of Lima and had entrusted their properties to third persons; two haciendas had been leased to Spaniards. For Magdalena, six of the fifteen owners lived in Lima, whereas the remaining nine managed their own properties and six of these employed neither mayordomos nor caporales . Regarding the composition of mayordomos and caporales we see that of the fifteen caporales two were mestizo , three were casta , and one was black. In the ten noted properties of Miraflores, five were in the hands of Spanish caporales , one in the hands of two mestizas , and two in the hands of zambos . There was a relatively high percentage of absentee owners on the larger properties. The average number of slaves for all Magdalena's haciendas with absentee proprietors was 57.6, whereas the same average for those with owners present was 26.4. For Miraflores where, as we have indicated, all the owners were absent, the mean number of slaves per productive unit was 53.1 (close to Magdalena's average). In Miraflores the average number of slaves per unit of production not controlled by Spaniards, whether owners or mayordomos , came out to 59, and of those controlled by Spaniards, 49.8. This number suggests a slight imbalance toward non-Spanish mayordomos or administrators on the bigger haciendas, even if the numeric relation weighed in favor of the white administrators. The participation of castas and mestizos is surprising and seems to have been stronger on the properties of Magdalena.^[27] If it is true that there existed a correlation between absentee owners, nonwhite administrators, and greater disorder on the haciendas, then ethnic relations could serve as clues to explain the complaints and fears of those who observed the conduct of slaves in Lima's rural zones. What turns out to be more difficult to explain, without recourse to subjective racial evaluations, is the owners' choice of nonwhite mayordomos and administrators. Disinterest, falling agricultural profits, and even fear could be plausible explanations.

Less open to subjective evaluations is the analysis, in more general terms, of what occurred on a medium-sized hacienda when the legitimacy of control was under question. We have an extreme case: the

events on the estate of Buena Muerte, administrated by the religious order of the same name, where the property and management were in different hands. This estate in 1809 housed some twenty slaves. Apparently the religious order's chaotic condition (which the hacienda only prolonged) had been fermenting for several years.^[28] In March 1809 twenty black slaves, nine women and eleven men, decided to march to Lima. They came from Cañete, from the Quebrada hacienda, and wished to speak with the Buena Muerte priests since the hacienda belonged to the order. On their way—the hacienda's mayordomo reported—"Yesterday afternoon the people from Quebrada arrived, so haughty and insolent that from Cantagallo they started to throw flares: and when they arrived, even the church bells rang." The slaves brought to Lima a request for a change of caporal because of excessive abuse. They reached the church and were immediately surrounded by the city's militia. The slaves defended themselves with dried adobe and bricks from the convent's tower, but they were caught and taken to a panadería . They left the panadería each day from two to three in the afternoon to take food to all those in the monastery. Soon they were transferred back to the convent, from where—now that they were pacified—it was decreed that "persons not acquainted with these occurrences made them disappear from the place, without others ever seeing the action."^[29] Authorities tried to prevent such occurrences: people in Lima could easily be thrown into a panic.

After the convent episode the slaves were sent back to the hacienda, and soon afterward another priest came to speak to them. A riot broke out; the slaves reiterated that they did not want the mayordomo they had been assigned; the caporales they had were enough. They did not complain of excessive work but rather of a state of permanent punishment and said that even though they possessed papers giving them permission to leave their hacienda, the mayordomos still considered that to go beyond the hacienda's gates was a misdemeanor. Finally, the doters among the slaves were removed from the hacienda, and the priest in charge of the hacienda and considered responsible for the happenings was recalled to the monastery.^[30]

Slaves from the Quebrada hacienda had managed to procure some sort of papers that granted them the privilege to venture outside the hacienda. The papers enabled them to leave Cañete and go as far as Lima, confront the militia, and alert all the hacendados in the region.

This episode worked to intensify the fears of hacendados and limeños that if this stray gang were not contained—as one of the mayordomos explained—"all the haciendas would be up in arms, they have assured me that with news of the revolt, those in Gualcará were stirred up, and also those on the Guaca hacienda, and the slaves said that if those of la Quebrada being so well attended to and cared for, more so than on other haciendas, committed such excesses and fared well, they themselves had an even greater reason to protest." The dissemination of news of insurgency and defiance was not to be allowed. The desire to hush up such acts explains the swift judicial decision that ruled against the priest who had run the Quebrada hacienda and also sentenced the slaves to imprisonment.

The Quebrada case was an extreme one. Not all slaves marched to Lima to complain about mistreatment. Yet this case illustrates the mobility of slaves, as much in the context of relations established with the hacienda (they could live outside it and move about relatively freely), as in relations between countryside and city (march to Lima) or in the countryside (slaves on other haciendas perceived how much better or worse they were treated). Cañete was a few days' walk from Lima, and opposition had recently been encountered there. The slaves knew where to look for their owners to complain; they went straight to the Buena Muerte convent. If we listen to the tone of the mayordomo 's comments, we can add that apparently the slaves were taken aback by the lack of immediate reprisals and that they and many others interpreted the officials' response as an invitation to act as the Quebrada slaves had and with even more reason because on other contiguous haciendas slaves were more harshly treated.

And in fact, despite the precautions, there was an uprising on the Gualcará hacienda, which belonged to the marqués de Fuente Hermosa, and on the Guaca hacienda (owned by the count of Vista Florida), over the course of which nine male slaves, one female slave, and seven "vagrants and suspected thieves" were caught and sent to Lima with a company of soldiers consigned by the viceroy. Four more slaves were later sent to Lima by the subdelegate of Cañete, among which figured the leaders of the riot. The slaves from Guaca (more than twenty) returned to the hacienda after having tracked down a padrino ; the royal forces were unable to capture those from Gualcará.^[31]

A higher incidence of banditry or an increasing number of maroons often accompanies situations of economic crisis. Following this line of reasoning, Vivanco (1990, 42, 50) suggests that until the end of the eighteenth century the gangs that crowded the outskirts of Lima were primarily drawn from household slaves escaped from their masters. Between 1796 and 1810 agrarian slaves and hacienda day laborers dominated these groups of outlaws. To explain their increased presence, we must look beyond economic cycles to differing levels of internal control within the haciendas. A higher number of rural slaves in bands may reflect the loosening of social control on haciendas, which in turn reveals a decreasing interest from owners of small- and medium-sized estates. It is no coincidence that cases such as that of Gualcará or that of the priests of Buena Muerte involved the specific racial conditions of their respective owners and mayordomos , an intermediate property size and number of slaves, and the absenteeism of proprietors. Diversity of control, as well as access to maroon gangs, marked the slave population's options and opportunities for mobility and therefore influenced its avenues to freedom. Although slaveholders still exerted control and power, they saw this same power fade right before their eyes, as more and more slaves secured their small new prerogatives. The changes were tenuous but real and we can appreciate them if we turn our attention to slaves' deeds and actions within the hacienda. Recounting the episodes and lives of slaves helps us document the heterogeneity of conditions within, and the probability of leaving, the hacienda.

Accumulation on the Haciendas

Though the journey from the hacienda to Lima and eventually to freedom could be long and dangerous, it was often possible. The roads to emancipation were many and limited only by the ingenuity of the slaves themselves. Testamentary bequests, family relations, and complex strategies of accumulation all helped pave the way to freedom, which stretched forth even in the difficult context of the rural hacienda environment. In the following pages we will retrace the vicissitudes and the paths slaves devised as they accumulated money and decided which family member would be the first to leave and how the links with those still remaining on the hacienda would be maintained until their freedom was obtained. A whole array of mechanisms existed,

mechanisms subtler than dramatic marches to Lima demanding an audience with a hacienda owner. Our portrayal of negotiations within the hacienda will help reveal the dynamics and perceptions of slave families as well as give us insight into the relations between the free and slave populations. In this context, we will again be reminded of the lives of Manuel, Manuela, Manuelita, Manolo, and Manolito.

Mobility and Accumulation

In order to understand how slaves were able to leave the hacienda and use legal mechanisms to achieve increasing degrees of freedom, it is necessary to begin where the cycle of liberation began—within the world of the hacienda. Because the connections between the countryside and city were relatively fluid, as soon as an urban link was forged, the likelihood of relocation and freedom increased. Relocation did not automatically imply the accession of freedom: reaching the city might simply mean changing ownership and duties. But slaves knew that there were greater prospects for accumulation in the city; thus, a first step to freedom could be relocation to the city.

As if imitating the slaves on the Buena Muerte hacienda who one day marched to Lima, more than a handful of slaves staged similar actions, either on their own or collectively, with or without the permission of the mayordomo or owner. Generally, these slaves, dissatisfied with their situation, left the hacienda in search of a new owner; their owner or mayordomo had abused them or perhaps he or she had not provided the slaves with their accustomed provisions or treatment. In the city slaves would find someone who might take pity on them or see profit in them, and assign them to day labor. Many slaves took this first step from the hacienda to the city; hacendados did not protest, and no one stopped them as possible bandits or runaways. The move was too common to rouse suspicions. All might proceed smoothly if the hacendado was satisfied with the new owner's payment, the new owner was content with his slave, and the slave paid the agreed-upon daily wages. Nonetheless, conflict was almost inevitable. As in many transactions, and even more so when so many conflicting interests existed, some link in the chain of agreements could give way. The courts were full of the complaints of sellers, buyers, and slaves. For some slaves, the daily wage arrangement did not signify profits; the seller rarely received the slave's appraised price or agreed to the appraisal price. Fur-

thermore, buyers would always find defects in the slave. One urban owner, a free moreno , who had acquiesced to the requests of a slave couple originating from a limeño hacienda, described the conflicts that could arise:

I have as my slaves the couple of José and Mariana Saldonado ... the same slaves I purchased for 400 pesos each six or seven years ago from Don Ramón Saldonado to spare them the terrible punishment he was intending to give them. I assigned them to daily wage labor in order to make them more profitable, this assignment by virtue of the tasks for which they have the disposition and for which they have been effectively apprenticed, they certainly have not religiously paid me the moderate sum that I designated because, abusing my goodness and as I was of their same class, they have paid their daily earnings when they have so desired, leaving me to incur the greatest debts while they have profited from their diverse occupations.^[32]

The slave couple had not become a free man and woman, they had simply changed their owner and environment. Once in Lima and under the roof of a new owner, they agreed to the daily wage as a possible arrangement. Not much time passed, however, before the moreno owner claimed that the slaves had not complied with payment of the daily wages.^[33] To settle this complaint the Defensor de Menores (the judge or defender who represented legal minors) intervened in favor of the slaves and began a process of negotiation through rounds in which the slaves increasingly neared freedom. The Defensor alleged that the slaves, had not complied with the payment of daily wages because they had fallen ill and that the owner had not fulfilled his duty of administering them medicine. Moreover, the owner had demanded advance payment of the daily wages in order to acquire more slaves.^[34]

The daily wage was not a novelty in the experience of slaves in nineteenth-century Lima. It existed in slaveholding environments as rigid as those of the southern United States (Hart [1906] 1968, 130 ff.), and in Lima during a much earlier era than the one under analysis (Bowser 1977, 172 ff.). What is distinct in this case was its significance and value for slaves on their path to freedom. The argument of the Defensor de Menores illustrates that a new owner would not necessarily satisfy his proprietary obligations. The owner attempted to pass on to his slaves not only the costs of their maintenance but their medical expenses as well. Slaves could be subjected to demands for money from an owner who might place his or her

slaves in the city and turn them into his or her most important source of capital accumulation, using the daily wage system in order to purchase more slaves. Such were the contentions heard over and over again in the judicial courts, and they elucidate—despite the uncertainty underlying most decisions to abandon the hacienda—the gradual attempts by the slave population to expand mobility and gain ground on the road to freedom.

In spite of owners' exigencies and urban vicissitudes, it was not unusual for a slave to abandon a hacienda on his or her own in order to leave behind rural slavery. The complaints of hacienda owners and Lima's citizens about the looseness and disobedience of slaves outlined in earlier paragraphs shows that this was not an isolated occurrence. As long as these complaints were part of a widespread rhetoric, officials such as the Defensor de Menores (in the case of José and Mariana), became the protectors of slaves and opposed the interests of owners. For some officials the defense of slaves became a lucrative profession, as slaves paid them to assume this task. As we can see, legal arguments were useful not only to masters but also to slaves and eventually to a new kind of professional. In the words of Don Manuel Arsola, the hacendado of the Bocanegra hacienda:

It is correct to say, Your Honor, that the Defensor de Menores is agriculture's greatest enemy and most terrible obstacle. The smallest detail that any slave reports to him is enough to support notoriously unjust judgments against his owner, and enough to spark rural disorder between owners, slaves, libertos —this being so true that there is not one hacendado , who if asked, would not answer affirmatively.

Other slaves did not need or desire the intervention of the Defensor de Menores. Sometimes hacienda slaves did not even try to settle in the city. For these persons, escape from the hacienda and residence in Lima for given periods of time was a routine pattern. Generally, these slaves knew where to go in the city upon arrival. Tiburcio María, a slave on the Palpa hacienda (which in 1802 belonged to Don Vicente Salinas) located in Ica, south of Lima and much more remote than the chacras of Amancaes, provoked the ire of his master more than once. Each time the threat of punishment hung over his head Tiburcio fled and took refuge in Lima. He ran off three times between 1798 and 1802, each time hiding for five or six months in Malambo (San Lázaro), where he maintained relations "in no way

honorable" with "certain half-breeds and mestizas ... sleeping in their houses or lodges where he stored his clothes and saddle."^[35] Tiburcio's owner could not control the slave's behavior; Tiburcio left and entered the hacienda with ease. To avoid a beating he would take himself off and return when a half-breed in San Lázaro began to demand a longer stay or perhaps even a wedding ring. Ownership of a horse and saddle facilitated Tiburcio's movement, and perhaps for him the horse was an intermediate investment option until he gained freedom. His chosen solution was not a permanent escape from the system but rather an eloquent demonstration of how a slave could maneuver on the fringes of a slave system. Nonetheless, the repetition of such acts created the impression that slaves moved everywhere in search of work, day labor, change of ownership, or simply diversion. Some contemporaries interpreted these ventures as typical instances of maroonage, in part because they wished to elicit some response from those officials who were entrusted with the control and maintenance of public order and who—when faced with such slave behavior—exhibited a great deal of inertia and incapacity (or fear). Meanwhile, physical movement and contact with the city allowed the slaves to forge relationships (even matrimonial) and to have a destination. Slaves gradually grew familiar with the urban territory and their unsettled behavior and relative geographic mobility can explain why news traveled so quickly, not only in Lima, but also from one hacienda to another. Even if this freedom of movement did not exist on all haciendas or estates, it had wide recognition and was a key argument owners used to seek state support.

As we have seen, many owners were absentee; they controlled neither production nor the labor force. Nonetheless, they occasionally visited their properties. During arrival and departure they were usually accompanied by one or several slaves, who thus moved with regularity between the rural and urban spheres.^[36] And when hacendados or mayordomos had to leave the hacienda, for example, to buy or sell products, they were accompanied by one or several slaves who had privileged positions within the rural environment. Several episodes of rather peculiar negotiations have been recorded for slaves in this position. Given the frequency of arrivals and departures, slaves often had a relative or friend in the urban realm to ease their relocation from countryside to city. The mobility of owners as well, and conflict within an owner's family, created connections for slaves and perpetuated ex-

isting ones. Comings and goings were opportunities for family reunions—for example, allowing one grandmother to find her granddaughter who was living as a slave on a hacienda. When a slave was unable to negotiate his or her purchase price or simply did not have sufficient capital for manumission, the slave could use such intervals to attempt an escape to Lima, even if the fear of being sent back to a hacienda provoked scenes as dramatic as flight over a fiat roof, fall and injury, and stay in the hospital.^[37]

How disagreements within the families of owners could favor slaves and become part of the field of negotiations for freedom is illustrated by the case of a son who disobeyed the orders of his family, the Ocharán family, which owned a hacienda in Ica.

The destiny of the young slave was the subject of judicial debate from 1811 to 1815. The slave's mother, Tiburcia, lived in Lima. She stated that according to the orders of the owner, Doña Teresa de Arroserena, Doña Teresa's son had put Tiburcia's son up for sale in the city of Lima. Tiburcia had purchased him for 150 pesos because the owner's orders included "the condition that [the slave] could not be sold for a greater amount, nor leave this city, and that when and where he provided the money, to be free or slave, freedom be granted to him." One fine day when Tiburcia was walking with her son through the streets of Lima, a poor Spaniard, an agent of Doña Teresa, intercepted them and alleged that the slave had been sold for a sum below his true value. He seized the young slave and sent him to the Serrano panadería . The agent stated that the slave's stepfather and mother took advantage of the presence of the owner's son in Lima, the son's pressing need for money, and his defiance of his mother, in order to encourage the young Ocharán to sell the slave for the stated price. Furthermore, it appears that there was a romantic liaison between Tiburcia and the owner's son. By 1813 the slave had again changed owners. The owner this year, Doña Juana Lezpus, stated that she had paid 300 pesos for the slave but that the stepfather had appeared and made off with the slave for eight months, until he was captured by the patrol of dragoons. In his declaration the stepfather admitted that he had removed the slave and stated that he was disposed to pay the slave's guarantee of person and daily wages. But, the stepfather contended, the slave was a victim of cruelty: given the inflicted abuse, it would befit the slave's parents at this time to initiate litigation in the court of Ica.^[38]

Thus other members of an owner's family could become mediators of freedom as long as they received the money from the slaves themselves. The combination of Tiburcia's position (mother of the slave and lover of the owner's son), the stepfather's intervention, and the speedy sale in Lima (eased by discord within the owner's family), made it possible for the slave to remain in Lima for an extended time. Furthermore, the confluence of these factors also allowed a devalued price, even if the owner later managed to offset her loss through successive sales. This case exemplifies—in spite of its scant suceess—the existence of well-honed strategies slaves could use to reach the final goal: lower price and manumission.

Undoubtedly, contact with the city was part of davy life and essential to explaining the transfer of slaves from the countryside to the city. But each journey started from the hacienda and within the conditions of a master-slave relationship there. It required a complex range of maneuvers and strategies in discrete and diverse patterns of accumulation.

A slave's first step toward freedom involved the capacity to procure money. One viable tactic on haciendas of all sizes (from Huaito to Guia and Amancaes) was the sale of goods in urban and village markets; this process was especially successful in those cases where owners supplied their slaves land in usufruct and allowed them to sell the crops they raised, keeping their earnings as peasants did (a "peasantization of slaves," observed in Brazil [Cardoso 1979]). The level of control exercised by masters varied, as did the rate at which slaves could amass their purchase price and place it in the hands of their respective owners. We view one side of the process in an image of Lima's marketplaces transmitted by the English traveler Proctor.^[39] According to him, in Lima's two big markets at the beginning of the 1820s in the main squares of San Francisco and San Agustín all the wares were very expensive. In the plazas of the other churches many smaller markets existed, and they were the filthiest part of the city, crowded with people cooking and selling food in the open air.

Those who sell fruit and vegetables spread them on the ground beneath a huge umbrella of canvas: these commodities are conveyed by slaves from the farms and orchards in the vicinity of Lima: they are paid by their masters according to the price they can procure, and in general, everything of the kind is extremely dear.^[40]

Indigenous women from Chorrillos also sold fish in these same vivid marketplaces. Commercial activity offered wide margins for social interaction and also capital accumulation. An owner could not easily sit down beside his or her slave in the marketplace in order to control the slave's profits—from farm or market vegetables if from the outskirts of Lima or from pigs if from Huaito. The slave could also claim that sales had been bad that day; inevitably the difference would go into the slave's pockets. Whatever the level of sales, in contexts such as these owners preferred to ask slaves for a fixed weekly, monthly, or even annual sum. This arrangement transferred the risks of a bad harvest and an unprosperous day of sales to slaves but also gave them more responsibility and independence. Buying and selling directly correlated to slaves' mobility, just as leaving the hacienda of their own volition did. The greater the capacity for movement, the greater the chance to shun the master's control.

It is reasonable to assume that not all slaves had an opportunity to leave the estate or hacienda. Where slaves were more tied to the hacienda, the forms of negotiation became more sophisticated and were less visible at first glance. The small prerogatives granted to slaves for good service or for "abundant childbirths" (for example, for a woman on the Huaito hacienda who had borne six children) generated opportunities for accumulation. These privileges were the consequence of a slave's good service or level of specialization, at times simply of old age, and at others of pity. The slaves utilized all these bargaining tools to redefine their position on the hacienda. Slaves who had obtained perquisites usually remained on the hacienda. However, they generally spent fewer hours on hacienda labor than their slave status implied. As a consequence, these slaves had more time to cultivate their truck gardens and sell their goods in the small markets near the hacienda or eventually in larger city markets.

However, slaves also had at their disposal a reserve of work time that they could sell either on the hacienda where they worked or on other haciendas. In principle, they sold their labor to the highest bidder, and demand depended on the type and level of individual specialization and on the hacienda's requirements and rules. By staying on the hacienda and carrying out the same or different duties, slaves could receive a wage. The existence of this possibility indicates that the organization of the labor force on the haciendas was changing. We have scattered figures for several haciendas in the district of Miraflo-

res (which registered the emergence of salaried blacks) and information systematized through the cartas de libertad in notarial record books. Given the informality of these arrangements, they are difficult to measure. Nevertheless, some cases illustrate the varying ways in which this process of transition to wage labor took place.

In 1807 Francisca Suazo was a free morena day laborer on the Chancay hacienda; her slave daughter lived with her. This same year the hacienda owner passed away, and Jacinta, Francisca's daughter, was included in the appraisal of the hacienda's assets. In opposition to one of the heirs who had requested a new appraisal of the slave girl (valued at 350 pesos), Francisca petitioned to buy her daughter. The heir's request was denied, and Francisca paid her daughter's purchase price.^[41] In order not to abandon her slave daughter (from the sought price we infer that the girl was at least sixteen years old), Francisca probably remained on the hacienda. The price exacted of Francisca was equivalent to the price of her own manumission. The question that arises in this case concerns the source of the money Francisca used to purchase her daughter. We do not know if others contributed, but lacking evidence of assistance we must assume that Francisca, still on the hacienda's borders, was able to amass a sum of money that was quite an expenditure in that era, approximately equal to the annual salary of a state functionary or thirty-five years of an Indian's tribute.

Obviously, the fewer free hours dedicated to the slave's plot on the hacienda, the slower the process of accumulation. After all, an exemption of labor time or, as in Francisca's case, release from all type of obligatory labor, did not mean that the individual could abandon the hacienda. Thus, the potential for accumulation also depended on the regulation of work within the hacienda and hence on the master's control.

However, alongside opportunities to reduce the hours of required work on the hacienda were other levels of negotiation that could approximate the purchase price and the needed amount of remunerated free labor. Slaves used a two-sided strategy; on one hand, their objective was to acquire their own labor time, and on the other, to reduce their price. The closer slaves could come to both goals, the greater the amount of free labor remunerated on the hacienda, and the faster the reduction of their own price, the better the chances for freedom.

Conditional freedom granted in a will can be seen as a form of internal accumulation on the hacienda, to the extent that it represented

a daily wage (i.e., for the number of years of service under the testator) that masters would repay at the end of the contract with the liberation of the slave. Many slaves were aware of this trade-off, and they were not convinced by promises of freedom that an owner would devise and bequeath, an option that masters cherished as warrant for the trumpets of the Last Judgment. For many slave owners such divine redemption meant an expensive trade-off and they preferred to settle their matters in more mundane fashion.

According to the testamentary wishes of Don Dámaso Jáuregui, his mulata slave, Bernardina León, was to be manumitted at the age of twenty-five. Until that time, the will redacted in 1795 placed Bernardina in the service of Doña Nicolasa Lobatón who was entrusted to find a husband for Bernardina before she started on the road toward freedom. When she had barely reached twenty-five years, Bernardina presented herself before the Cabildo and requested that the promise of freedom be expedited immediately:

I will not address the inexplicable desires that I had of this moment's arrival because I have undergone misfortunes that have disturbed me, having been victim of the work and demands that in this period have been exacted of me; without hyperbole I can affirm that I did not receive liberty by the grace of my master, but rather, by justice in force of the work with which I purchased it.^[42]

Bernardina affirmed "without hyperbole" what she knew very well: her labor generously repaid her purchase price. She feared her owner's retaliation because of the legal proceedings Bernardina had initiated. But without incident she was declared free that same year. For Bernardina, having access to Lima's judicial court was critical, and apparently she managed to use the legal system without any problems, even though she had resided in the town of Supe on the northern coast her entire life.

Many years could elapse between the promise of freedom and actual emancipation. While the master was still alive, until the slave reached a certain age, until the details of the testamentary bequests were settled, the slave had to remain under the tutelage, property, or control of the master or those who had taken on the responsibility of executing a testator's wishes. In the end, sometimes the wait revealed that a testator's debts were greater than his legacy.^[43] Furthermore, all slaves knew that what brought them closer to freedom was not their

labor alone; each and every condition imposed on their freedom was vulnerable to legal judgments beyond their control. For this reason, slaves needed to accelerate the promise of freedom, make recourse to legal courts, and seize and make effective any initiative expressed by the masters that indicated their desire to free them. Freedom was the coveted goal at the end of this chain of possible situations of negotiation, perhaps more than simple relocation to Lima.

Testamentary pledges had another side. From the masters' perspective, conditional freedom was a way to assure the submission and permanence of a slave, even if cases existed in which a slave—the promise of freedom or price reduction already existing—wished for the quick death of his or her owner. In May of 1854 the female slave Candelaria Mora, a native of the town of Chineha, who classified herself as a liberta , signed a petition before the judge of Lima's court of appeals. This petition stated that her owner, Doña María del Rosario Velásquez, had requested in her will that Candelaria remain in the service of her daughter and one of the inheritors, Doña Irene Mora, until the latter died. Many years passed, but one fine day Doña Irene's husband decided to sell Candelaria "for the exorbitant amount of 350 pesos," to a señora who lived in Lima and, Candelaria alleged, "no doubt making no mention to the buyer of the testamentary clause that declared me free in an earlier epoch. As a result of that illegal sale, I have been transferred to this capital from Chincha, which is my birthplace." After a few months in Lima, Candelaria had located a relative of the Mora family, a presbyter, in whose house she found shelter while she wrote her petition. Candelaria's new owners would claim that she had been transferred for only four years, and that this did not contradict the testamentary wishes of her first owner. Nonetheless, it was decreed in 1855 (i.e., one year after President Ramón Castilla declared the abolition of slavery) that the money be refunded and the slave returned to the Mora family.^[44]

It is not clear if the slave wished to go to Lima or if, for reasons not mentioned in the document, the presbyter was interested in keeping the slave. Candelaria stressed the fact that Chineha was her birthplace, and given the connection of last names (the female slave, the presbyter in Lima, and the will's beneficiary all have the surname Mora), a common ancestor is possible. At the very least, the slave acquired her surname through birth into her master's control. Even if circumstances suggest that the slave wished to return to the hacienda, what this case

demonstrates is that when a fixed temporal horizon for freedom existed, an interim change of ownership became more difficult. Moreover, this transfer proceeded by the masters' initiative and included a high price for the slave (or perhaps, in Candelaria's case, set the slave's price for the first time in her life). The apparent philanthropy of conditional liberty was but a way to entrap a slave on the road to freedom. When the promise of freedom depended on someone else's death, permanence on the hacienda was almost assured; conditional freedom was a way to perpetuate the slave's loyalty. We should not forget that cases such as Candelaria's took place in an environment in which the slaves were becoming aware of the centrality of their work and claiming monetary compensation.

The manifold strategies of accumulation and of negotiation that slaves gradually secured from wills always revolved around the slave's price. Once the channels of negotiation were open, the purchase price was the bridge between slavery and freedom. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the average price for a male slave was 465 pesos, and 494 for a female slave (Haitin 1983, 166). Because of these elevated prices, it is not surprising that many manumissions and sales were transacted on credit. The ways varied. One form of credit was the successive reduction of a slave's value owing to good service, extraordinary service, or simply to aging; another was the payment of small installments to the master over many years, which a slave usually amassed by appealing to an entire network of family and urban connections. The most complex form of credit involved a third person who lent the money to the slave in exchange for services until the debt was settled (the arrangement between Manuel and Doña Agreda noted in chapter 1). This last way gave the slave freedom but kept him or her subject to slavery. It is possible that these various forms of credit help explain the depreciation of the average price for a slave, for slaves whose value was fixed by the market as well as those whose mean value can be deduced from an analysis of the cartas de libertad . Between 1840 and 1854 the average price of male slaves on the market was 289.4 pesos, of female slaves, 267.3. Of those slaves whose names appeared in the cartas de libertad in these same years, the mean price of men was 229.4 pesos and that of women, 207.3 (Aguirre 1991, 122).^[45] The average for slaves who obtained a carta de libertad was lower: their owners were apparently willing to accept the gradual reduction of their slaves' value and the slaves' emancipation

as well; perhaps the masters had no other alternative. It is also significant, despite the biases of averages, that female slaves at the beginning of the nineteenth century cost more than male slaves. The preference for female slave labor on Lima's big haciendas (such as Villa and San Juan) surely was part of this situation. A greater demand resuited in a higher price.^[46] However, it is also true—as we will see later—that the lower price of female slaves had to do with their particular skills (see chapter 3).

Arrangements even less transparent appeared in the lives of Lima's slaves. These fell somewhere between wage labor arrangements (with varying amounts of free time on or off the hacienda) and price reduction. Often, instead of paying a slave a daily wage in exchange for the market value of additional labor power, an owner calculated the daily wage according to the price stated on the slave's conque —in which case there was no promise of a grant of freedom or a sum of money to go into the hands of slaves; the slaves would make incremental payments that slowly reduced their price. Manumission was a calculable arrangement; masters and slaves carried debit notes. The manner in which this payment and its related negotiations could vary suggests that this arrangement allowed owners to assure the slave labor force's immobility and faithfulness, especially if both sides kept its terms. In a more sophisticated version of this process, the reduction of the slave's purchase price appeared to be a concession by the owner who had sold a slave below his conque value. What seems to be a benefit resulting from the owner's initiative might mask a sum owed to the slave's first owner, which the slave continued to pay after the official sale.^[47] The male or female slave labored for two masters, the work intensified, yet the slave's price decreased.

Among the most common explanations for the depreciation of a slave's price was old age, when the slave became useless for the work on the hacienda. The only way to sell him or her was to reduce the slave's price, adjusting it to the changes in the "quality of merchandise." Price reduction within an urban labor market permitted rural masters to minimize their losses and urban owners to exploit slave wage labor—a way to stretch the profitability of the system to its final limits, although slaves still found and benefited from some opportunities beyond the control of masters.^[48] Sometimes the master's final choice was emancipation of aging slaves, in order to avoid the medical costs and care.

Francisco Calderón and his wife had been slaves on the Monterrico hacienda, owned by the entailed estate of Quintanilla. In 1826 the hacienda was leased to a priest who had been granted the right to buy and sell slaves, provided that he replace them. Appraised, the slave couple received a document stating that they could freely circulate in search of a new owner. (Here the impetus to seek a new owner came from the priest, whereas in other cases slaves fled the hacienda to do the same.) On their journey, Francisco was caught by the police; he was not offered an opportunity to show his document and was deposited in the Tigre panadería . Soon thereafter, the military captors were reprimanded for this blunder, and under the protection of a bondsman Francisco was liberated.^[49] In this case it was the proprietor or the mayordomo who guaranteed the slave's departure and was willing to lower the slave's price and even endorsed the slave couple's quest to find a new owner. From another point of view, sadly, aging was also an aspect of credit that gradually eroded the slave's value but allowed greater and greater spaces of freedom. Freedom became a double-edged sword, especially for slaves with little or no urban experience if kinship and wider social networks could not subsidize their old age.

Time and time again, price is the reason behind negotiations. Price was a crucial issue for owners because business depended on it and for slaves because access to freedom rested on it. Price increases benefited owners who wanted to sell their slaves, and price reductions advanced slaves and those wishing to purchase slaves. Thus, the issue of price split owners into buyers and sellers, and buyers often invented strategies, working in unison with slaves, in order to obtain cheaper slaves. In chapter 5 we will look at this phenomenon as it affects the lives of masters and slaves in the urban context. Contemporaries frowned on the practice of increasing a slave's price. Occasionally, the infringement of a conque' s stipulations would invalidate the new owner's contract of sale. For the slave, this annulment could even mean return to the hacienda or relocation to Lima after several years. In a case in which the price of a female slave had been raised from 100 to 250 pesos, the slave's defender asked:

"What authority did these owners have to alter the price of the original conque ? Never [the Defensor made clear] has it been permitted to increase the value by even one real, and when owners have desired to do so, they have had to turn to the court and file a suit, in

order to prove the fairness of the reasons they have alleged for such pretensions."^[50]

Beyond fluctuations in value and negotiations between countryside and city were small sums of money that many slaves gradually amassed while in the service of their owners. They handed these amounts over to owners as collateral for the freedom they would earn when they had gathered together the entire purchase price or as repayment of sums they borrowed for self-manumission. This type of arrangement was ever-present in the minds of the slaves who put stock in the November 1821 decree on patronage, which stated that work should be remunerated.^[51] But slaves' wages were not the same as those of a free person, and the difference (along with its legal implications) never figured in coherent legislation. What value did the labor of a slave halfway between slavery and freedom have—especially within monetary arrangements so complex that slaves were paid? A rather unusual mulato , Patricio Negrón, related his experiences in 1840:

Being a slave originally from the city of Ica, I was brought up in the manner appropriate to my condition and according to the talents that were discovered in me. Nature more actively inclined me to the work that should occupy women. I washed and took care of the linen with skill, cooked, and ran a house as the best housekeeper might do. Never did any aspect of my integrity, conduct, or social behavior give occasion for remark. However, displeased with my master, I came to this city, and he arrived soon after in search of me—he wished to take me away by force; however Doña Estefa Palacios, who understood well the importance of my services, lent me 200 pesos to free myself, in such a way that I managed to release myself from servitude. The owner received the money for my freedom—returned to his estates, and I remained in Doña Estefa's service.

But from this moment on, Patricio realized, none of his services were going to be effectively remunerated:

My work earns more than 24 pesos monthly, however this señora did not give me anything. She planned a trip to Ica and took me with her. There I served her for the length of the four months that included the arrival, stay and return. There I gave her from the total amount of 200 pesos she lent me, 47 pesos and 7 reales, but she did not give me a penny in those four months. There I gave her 11 pesos on the one hand, and 8, on the other, according to her receipt, making her at the time a debtor of 133 pesos and 1 real; and the said señora owes me for all the time that I have served her without payment. Finally, she tells me that I have to give her the money or a guarantee.

When Patricio had offered to pay a guarantee, he was unexpectedly placed in the Pericotes panadería and cruelly whipped. Bed-ridden, he wrote his accusation against the owner and the panadero who had lashed him. He appealed to article three of the decree issued on 16 October 1821, which stated that owners who whipped their slaves were to be punished. He furthermore argued that even if this article had been later modified by the law of 1827, it still forbade an owner to flog a slave with more than six lashes (in the colonial era the maximum allowed was twelve) and required that the barrio commissary be present during any and all punishment. Owners who violated these laws were to be deprived of their slaves. Patricio managed to prove that this had not been the first time that Doña Estefa had advanced money and later abused the labor of her debtors.^[52] Patricio had not been her first victim.

The slave knew that the value of his labor should have been gradually subtracted from his purchase price. Formally he was free, he possessed a carta de libertad . But since he was a servant of the person who lent him money to manumit himself, his work was considered to be an interest payment, and the money for his purchase price was assumed to come from outside the established relation of servitude. Thus in fact Patricio remained a slave with a limited margin of accumulation.^[53] Persons such as Doña Estefa, who invested money in the manumission of slaves and later used slaves as retainers, were probably the last social agents who took advantage of a system in decline and of slaves' yearnings toward freedom as well. Not only did their actions change the patterns of slave ownership and the composition of slaveholders, they unbalanced the master-slave relationship.

When President Ramón Castilla decreed the abolition of slavery in 1854 many slaves were caught in the middle of paying for their freedom. Some had given money to their owners, were bargaining to lower their prices, or were fighting to obtain salaries their owners had left unpaid. Abolition also created tensions among owners eager to make their slaves pay and determined not to give back any part of the money that formed the slaves' price of freedom. None of the negotiations established clear dividing lines between salary, interest on invested capital, and self-purchase money.

Perhaps the events at the Molina hacienda best synthesize the crux of the issue in 1854. Ownership of the hacienda was contested, which meant that its slave population had no master or mayordomo . Absen-

teeism—as we have seen—was an impetus for slaves to mobilize, and for hacienda slaves to request transfers and price appraisals. But on the Molina hacienda these petitions coalesced into a collective effort toward freedom, whereas in the cases previously examined such negotiations had involved action only by individuals and by several couples. The slaves on the Molina hacienda sought the intervention of the courts. The complaints of the slaves had been building up over the previous years; many of the slaves from the Molina hacienda figured in the registers of the cartas de libertad in the 1850 notarial record books. One of the cartas de libertad referred to the free black Simón García, who in 1854 was pleading for the freedom of his sister, who was over forty years old: "the service rendered, her age, and because the many children she bore and raised have aged her." His sister's price was 400 pesos and Simón asked for a new appraisal, based on the argument of her age, "to try to grant her freedom so that she die free and in old age does not suffer what slaves must suffer." But on 18 August 1856, almost two years after Simón had filed his request, the case was ordered closed, "because the reasons for which this suit arose have disappeared since all slaves have been declared free."^[54]

Thus what started as a personal negotiation grew into a strategy that attracted more and more slaves from the same hacienda. Not only did rumors about the Quebrada slaves who marched to Lima to protest work conditions spread throughout the rural region, but communication among slaves on haciendas—especially the smaller ones—was also quite effective. Slaves were using the arguments of old age, or of numerous children and the exhausting effects of rearing them, to legitimize their requests for freedom. These arguments were no longer the exclusive property of masters. Since more than one slave learned about the abolition decree through the sentences issued in a pending file, and often after some time had elapsed, the delay brought in new claims for retroactive payment of a free laborer's salary. And an owner might argue, as in the case of Simon García's sister, that the slave hardly deserved payment—hadn't her brother stated she was too old and tired to be of any use to the hacienda? In this final expression of resistance to abolition, owners neatly reversed the slaves' arguments and built up a case for compensation payments from the state.

In contrast to a city such as Rio de Janeiro (Karasch 1987, 356 ff.), Lima had no mediating institutions specifically concerned with the negotiation of freedom—lending banks or savings associations. In Lima, negotiations between masters and slaves were much more direct, although they often took place before civil and ecclesiastical tribunals. Perhaps this absence of bureaucratic or state mediation explains the enormous diversity of means slaves devised to survive or leave the haciendas, as well as the intricate patterns of accumulation that existed. And perhaps it links the universe of family and kin that was so important to slaves in Lima. The lack of more organized intervention probably underlies the preeminence of slave family relations and the "moral" arguments asserted by slaves in defense of their right to form families and live a home life.

Family Relations

On the hacienda at least 60 percent of the slaves lived as couples, and any negotiations regarding freedom were likely to involve two heads of household. Insofar as slaves could gradually reduce their value or that of any specific family member, the probability of purchasing freedom for the entire family increased. In the worst of cases it would at least be easier to find a new owner and eventually live in Lima.

The incentive that encouraged slaves to remain on the hacienda also encouraged them to leave: namely, their families. Leaving or remaining on the hacienda depended on trivial, everyday, and personal factors: children's ages, other work opportunities, and earning potential on the hacienda. As we have seen, free persons might stay on the hacienda to assure the freedom of their children or spouses.

An entire family only rarely amassed enough money to leave the hacienda, on which all its members may have been born, at the same time. The usual pattern was staggered migration: one family member would leave, then another. If behind this gradual abandonment of the hacienda there was any logic that determined who should leave first—based on who had the greatest capacity to earn money to free the remaining family members or who had the best chances to exert pressure on the hacendado —then it should emerge from the frequency of

such occurrences. Which family members would stay, which would leave first? How was this departure to be accomplished?

A common figure during this time was a mother working in Lima whose slave children remained on the hacienda. The mother-child bond appeared to be the strongest, one that survived despite separation. When slavery was abolished in 1854 Magdalena Garcia, a free morena , was living in the city of Lima. Earlier she had worked on the Molina hacienda, where she had left a legitimate son under "exclusive patronage of the hacienda."^[55] After having worked in lama for some time Magdalena asked the court for a transfer of her son's patronage. In her petition she stated:

I, Sir, have yearned to free my son, the mentioned child, but my present work conditions have not allowed me this wish. It is for this reason, and as is a natural maternal feeling, that I am suffering from this separation from my child. Beyond this, in one of the visits I made to see my son, I found him incapacitated by wounds inflicted upon him in a cruel whipping by the present leaseholder. I made this fact known to the Síndico del Concurso who, aghast at the harm done to my son, consented to the request that I made ... that is, that my son's patronage be changed immediately.

As was usual in such cases, the slave was appraised, the former owner paid by the new owner, and the change of ownership ordered. Generally owners asked for a higher price—if only to keep the slave a bit longer. In Magdalena's case, given the maltreatment, this request was not heeded by the civil court; shortly thereafter the court determined that the sale of her son (in this case for zoo pesos) should proceed.^[56]

The slave's mother had maintained continual contact with her son on the hacienda, visiting him regularly. Thus, the mother—already free—became an external agent of security for her son; her goal was to free him. With much skill, she sought—given the inflicted abuse—the intervention of an official (in this case the Síndico del Concurso, since the hacienda had gone bankrupt and a judgment regarding its division among the heirs was pending) and quickly managed, while not to free, at least to loosen, for a relatively low price, the ties that bound her son to the hacienda and to relocate him to Lima. She had taken the first step toward his freedom and now she had him closer.

The Santa Clara estate was less removed from lama than the Molina hacienda. Francisco Mansilla worked here as a liberto among

the many slaves. His patronage belonged to Don Cristbal Armero, owner of the Santa Clara estate. Francisco had worked there for eight years. Although still a minor, he fell in love with a slave girl who worked on another estate belonging to Don Isidro Aramburú. One fine day he decided to elope with her. He immediately sought refuge with the Defensor de Menores in Lima, who, in a petition directed to the court judge, stated that Francisco had appeared in his office to accuse his master of maltreatment and noncompliance with the weekly payment of eight reales as decreed in November 1821. In addition, he pointed out that Francisco had found a new owner in Lima who was willing to purchase him for 250 pesos. Opposing the sale of his slave, Francisco's owner claimed:

Far from having acted with cruelty toward Francisco, I have always treated him with affection and generosity, and for that reason he remained with me, even after the emancipation of his mother and two sisters, which he took part in because of his prodigality and good behavior. Furthermore, Francisco Mansilla's mother, who should supervise and maintain guardianship of her son as he is still a minor, also opposes a transfer of ownership because under my patronage she has more facilities to free him, for which she has already amassed a certain amount of money.

While the slave was working on the Santa Clara estate, he had been able to free his mother and two sisters. The "prodigality" to which his owner refers can be interpreted in many ways, however; the most likely is that after many rounds of negotiations, Francisco was able to collect enough money to free the three women. The owner indicated that Francisco's mother had already accumulated a certain amount of money to purchase her son's freedom. And, effectively, the story ended when, three months after the Defensor's initial petition, Don Cristóbal Armero issued Francisco a carta de libertad . The mother paid his purchase price.^[57] Probably the next step was to purchase the girlfriend's freedom.

Here was a visible chain of decisions regarding freedom, with priorities based on the capacity for accumulation: inside the hacienda were the male slaves, outside the hacienda were the women, often mothers.^[58] Just behind them were collateral family members. And, once this process began—even if as in the previous case there were obstacles—the speed of accumulation increased as the number of family members multiplied. The owner's final allegation was probably correct:

Please permit me before concluding this petition, to make it known to the court as well, the pernicious example that has been set for the already corrupt slave population of this capital city, by favoring under false and frivolous pretexts the freedom of a slave who has committed a crime [in carrying off the slave girl from an adjoining estate], which has demoralized my own slaves, and which would demoralize them yet more, if this slave were to be granted the status he is requesting.

Perniciousness and corruption, however, often loitered on the road to freedom, and the slaves knew that the established facts made allegations of immorality mere rhetoric.

Part of the considerations of slaves to leave the hacienda was their family life cycle. It would be difficult for a mother with small children to leave for the city and quickly earn enough to free her husband and children. Neither could a parent easily abandon young children. Given such a situation there were three options, wait for a different phase in the family cycle, twist the master's arm, or struggle for permission to leave the hacienda. If, in addition, life on the hacienda offered no paid work, the only alternative was to find an owner in Lima interested in purchasing the slave and assigning him or her to day-labor. Some episodes on the Bocanegra hacienda illustrate the last two possibilities. A case of spectacular arm-twisting was perpetrated by Francisca and Josefa of the mentioned hacienda in 1840. The owner stated:

When the slave Francisca, wife of Joaquín, and Josefa, wife of Nicolás, managed to free themselves, each one was nursing a child, named Leandro and Evaristo, and had been ordered to leave the hacienda for being ungovernable. I mandated that each one be given four pesos a month to nurse their children.... A few months later they made several requests that I let them return to the hacienda, where the women, their husbands, and their children could be cared for.^[59]

Shortly afterward the hacendado threw them off the hacienda again, but this time they took their children and husbands. Other slaves followed their example. The Defensor de Menores, entrusted with the slaves' defense, claimed that the owner had not supplied them with food and that therefore in accordance with the law they were free. While the ex-slave mothers were outside the hacienda they lived in Lima, on Malambo street (in the familiar parish of San Lázaro), where they had contact with black maroons who cut firewood that the women sold in Lima. This urban experience of survival of-

fered them enough security to abandon the hacienda. The Bocanegra hacienda had long been considered a haven of thieves and maroons;^[60] it was probably the place where the link with the maroons came about. The judgment in this case was in favor of the libertos . The hacendado , Don Manuel Arsola, attempted an appeal but the. sentence was upheld. During the case the Defensor de Menores reappeared as a key player.

When in 1830 the same Don Manuel Arsola was Bocanegra's hacendado , one of his slaves, Udon, requested that he be sold, seeking protection in the decree on patronage of 1821. The hacendado stated that he would not consent to the sale because Udon had not been a victim of cruelty, and that in any case Udon should leave the hacienda with his wife and two children, one older, one recently born. Udon and his wife had both been born on Bocanegra. Apparently Udon's wife opted to stay on the hacienda, an understandable decision given the uncertainty of urban life and the minimum of security that the hacienda offered, especially for small children. This being the couple's choice, Don Arsola finally agreed to sell Udon, under the condition that he come to visit his wife and sons only on Saturdays and Sundays. Don Arsola received 300 pesos, and Udon went to work as a day laborer in Lima.^[61]

The hacendado knew that Udon was going to maintain relations with his family and thus become an external agent, who would not only free his family but also bring outside news that would spread to the other slaves on the hacienda. Therefore, he first attempted to remove the entire slave family and then to restrict Udon's access to the hacienda; family relations intervening, however, he could not prevent the perpetuation of family ties. The more slaves acted as did those on Bocanegra, the more time masters spent in court.

As time passed, slave children would mature and thus their value would increase. Therefore, many slave parents negotiated possibilities for purchasing their children before they reached full working age. This meant obtaining a pledge from one's master that he or she would proceed with the sale of the children and also quickly raising the money needed for manumission. The exposure of very young children to the unpredictability of the city not only represented a burden but also increased the risks of their death. Nearly adult children were too expensive. The most logical option was to free children at an intermediate age, between eight and ten years old, when they could contribute

to the family's expenses and were in good health. Circumstances did not always coincide, but for some these calculations worked out. Cases like that of the free morena Magdalena Garcia, who paid the appraised purchase price of 130 pesos to free her son on the Molina hacienda when he reached ten years of age,^[62] were repeated not only on haciendas but in the urban context as well and explain—as stated earlier—the very low concentration of a slave infant population on the haciendas.

Throughout the cases we see two important processes. One indicates a cycle of decisions by the slave family unit geared to finding bridges to Lima. The women were the first to leave, even if they had young children on the hacienda. They were the ones who forged and stabilized the urban links. This dynamic probably had much to do with the competition in the labor market between the free black and slave populations. Above all, men were the individuals who competed in an increasingly narrower labor market. Yet women also worked (because slave women did compete in the masculine labor market), at tasks always needed on the margin of the labor market's cycles of expansion and contraction (e.g., as wet nurses, cooks and bakers, household servants). An additional reason why women left the hacienda first could have been the greater propensity of masters to let women depart, not because they worked less but because without them the costs of reproducing the slave labor force were lowered. Although hacendados sought desperately to augment their slave labor force, bringing the costs of reproduction down was a way to confront the short-term crises of agriculture. Even though the average price of slave women was higher, their average productivity was less because they bore children.

A second key process was the nature of the relations that were established and maintained after women had left the rural sphere. The strength of these bonds was illustrated by the frequency of visits and by the degree of control exercised by those outside the hacienda over the status of those who remained inside. Furthermore, almost as an expected consequence of this behavior was the fear felt by owners who faced situations in which a slave outside with family inside became an agent of external security. Not only did the slave's own family have external ties, but by extension the rest of the hacienda workers did too. The new urban experiences of slaves could be transmitted even to those who had always experienced their world on the hacienda as a microcosm of conditions equal to or perhaps better

than those beyond the edges of the hacienda. Apprehensions about daily life existed among hacendados in Palpa, Nazca, and other areas discussed earlier.

Maroons, Bandits, and Militiamen: Darker Links between Countryside and City

Sporadically—yet persistently—maroons and brigands turned up in the life of the Lasmanuelos family, and one of its members even belonged to a band. Bands of guerrillas flourished before, during, and after the wars of independence. They appeared on the haciendas, cut firewood on the periphery of the city, and languished in jails and panaderías . They were the most mobile component of the slave population: an important link between countryside and city, a terror of the road for travelers and merchants as for the indigenous, casta , black, and slave populations.

At different times and in varying contexts, militiamen, soldiers, bandits, and maroons shared two fundamental experiences: segregation by ethnic group and use of weapons within or beyond the law. Slaves were members of all these groups and often found that participation broadened their horizons and increased their awareness of the weaknesses of the slaveholding system.

Companies of urban soldiers were formed during the seventeenth century, and blacks and their free descendants were found in their ranks. Their central function was ceremonial: to welcome and see off the viceroys. They occasionally achieved police duties. Around 1765 this situation began to change. Isolated signs of indigenous discontent in northern Peru (O'Phelan 1976), sporadic slave revolts on the coastal haciendas (Kapsoli 1975), as well as the Tupac Amaru uprising in 1780 in the southern Andes, convinced the colonial state that it was necessary to think about the permanent and conscientious organization of a military corps.

In 1776 Lima's infantry regiment of pardos included 947 men and the battalion of morenos had 474. The cavalry regiment of pardos numbered 104 horsemen and the cavalry battalion of morenos , 77. Similar companies began to emerge in the cities of the coastal region. They were commanded by whites; the colonial state preferred officers who were peninsulares (Spaniards) or criollos (Spaniards born in the New World) to an entirely casta corps with its risk of greater and

greater autonomy. The presence of castas tarnished the image of military duties, and morenos and pardos themselves soon realized that serving in these armies was not a privilege but rather an obligation from which it was difficult to free oneself (Burkholder 1972, 142–143). Moreover, the salaries they received were so low that soldiers usually engaged in some artisanal trade on the side and had permission to marry only if they could prove that their future wife had adequate resources to maintain the family. Yet in 1816 blacks, mulatos , and pardos made up approximately 4 percent of the entire viceregal military, and 53 percent of Lima's contingents.^[63]

Soldiers were part of the viceregal military structure under the ultimate authority of the viceroy. Before independence these corps had demonstrated the potential to rebel and revolt against the colonial state. In 1779 when Inspector Areche came to the colonial territory and wanted, among other things, to impose taxes on the castas , the soldiers of Lambayeque refused to pay what they called the "military tax." They wrote to the viceroy, who, faced with the threat of a casta riot, had to yield to the soldiers' petition. Armed and united, blacks, mulatos , and pardos negotiated an exemption from a payment they saw as denigrating because it relegated them to the same social rung as the Indians (Burkholder 1972, 124 ff.). Whatever the authorities' apprehensions and experiences, they had to trust the castas with some of the duties of defense and repression. Between 1779 and 1812 new military corps were created, but none in Lima.

We can assume, for lack of evidence, that a substantial part of these corps organized before the struggles for independence later enlarged the ranks of the royalist army. It is possible that many grew disaffected and deserted—as some in the patriot army did—since the wars of independence crystallized loyalties and perceptions but allowed margin for maneuver on the fringes of official acts.

Before the struggles for independence, the varying attempts to conscript slaves into the patriot ranks and the reactions by slaves illustrate an interesting gamut of alternatives and options. The choices slaves made reflect the diversity of labor conditions and life on the various rural production units. In fact, General San Martín sent commissioners to the haciendas of Lima's northern outskirts to read edicts to the slaves. They promised freedom and rewards for slaves who enlisted in the patriot armies: emancipation for slaves and capital punishment for owners who infringed the new proclamations (see

chapter 1). Recitation of the edicts was to proceed in the absence of masters; it was believed they would inhibit the slaves' free choice. The responses documented by the commissioners varied. After visiting several units in the district of Sayán, the commissioner Juan Delgado reported the outcome of his trip to the secretary of war and the navy, Bernardo Monteagudo: "I installed myself in the Quispico hacienda ... and ordered all the hacienda slaves to assemble without the presence of their master. And after making the proper reflections, eighteen slaves declared their willingness, stating that they would gladly serve in the army."

Matters proceeded otherwise among the slaves on the Andahuasi hacienda, many of them "having been deserters for some time, only one slave who desired to serve in the army voluntarily was produced." In the village of Sayán the commissioner ordered all the slave owners to present their slaves in the plaza, and when they were assembled "they were not only read the edict and communiqué on this matter but I also made known to them the prerogatives they would enjoy from their freedom by taking up arms; to which they replied that they could not forsake their owners."^[64]

The possibilities of slaves reflected the range of limited choices during the wars of independence. Slaves could take up arms and have faith that they were fighting for a cause and their freedom. They could flee from an uncertain future at a time when the overall atmosphere was turbulent. Or they could, as in the village of Sayán, remain with their master, either as the result of threats or as the most secure alternative in the general disorder of the time. Despite slaves' active participation on the battlefield, promises of freedom and rewards were not usually kept. Given the circumstances and opportunities on the haciendas and estate farms, the choice of remaining at the side of one's owner was surely the most rational because it allowed slaves to continue on a slow but sure route to freedom. Not all slaves were ready or willing to become soldiers.

Far from one's master, with-a rifle in hand, in contact with free blacks in the armies, and with permission to kill whites of the adversary's flag, a slave struggled with issues more complex than loyalty to patriots or royalists. The wartime experience undid old social ties and brought distinct ethnic groups, rich and poor, face to face (Bonilla and Spalding 1984, introduction). After five years of war, events such as that documented in the city of Callao in 1825 where the "slaves on the

Spaniards' haciendas revolted, ... imprisoning all officials," were not unusual.^[65]

In contrast to armies drawn from descendants of the black population and from soldiers captured by either side during the struggles for independence were the maroons, slaves who had escaped rural (and sometimes urban) slavery to band together and live by robbery and looting. Maroons did not emerge during the struggles for independence; they had existed since the establishment of slavery. Maroonage relates to slavery in the same manner that contraband does to monopoly, as a natural response to an arbitrary imposition. Throughout the colonial period the viceroys sporadically felt obligated to dispatch military expeditions to exterminate the havens of maroons each time that the complaints of those affected by the presence of the fugitives grew too loud. These complaints voiced not only property owners' fears of continual assaults, especially around the perimeter of the Lima valley, but also apprehensions of Lima's slave owners that the impunity of bandits and maroons would become a permanent incentive for their own slaves to escape.

It is not an easy task to uncover the essence of these groups of fugitives, vagrants, and social renegades. They had distinct strengths, leaders with divergent goals, and missions of varying objectives; and they were wary of one another. The strongest absorbed the weakest and kept the biggest part of the booty. In some respects their behavior was not unlike that of other sectors of society. Lima's wealthy residents paid certain gangs to protect their assets and properties against the urban incursions of their lesser cohorts. A contemporary noted dryly that "the practice of respecting persons of influence must to a great extent be attributed to the degree of impunity that these gentlemen of industry enjoy" (Miller 1829, 2:267). His statement indicates the propinquity of gangs to the urban area and explains the fluidity of relations between maroons and slaves, in Lima's hinterland as well as the city proper.

However, we can occasionally detect the more clear-cut and coherent objectives of these gangs in terms of a shared social aim. Army deserters, restless household slaves, and artisans displaced from their trades not only added members to these bands. The growth of their presence helped encourage attitudes that reflected incipient notions of social justice. It is no coincidence that their recorded beliefs were based more on social status than on ethnicity. Rather than bar certain

ethnic groups, some gangs brought together the displaced of all colors and occupations.

In 1811 a gang was captured that consisted of nothing less than the Europeans Antonio and Juan, the Oriental native of Chincha, Blanco, the friend of el Segatón, Mariano Marchan, black Joaquín from the Biejo sugar mill, Francisco Negro from the Puente estate, José Salas, Antonio Barrionuevo, known as Antonaso, Agustín Lesama, an old mulato, the zambo known by the learned woodcutter of Bocanegra, Indian Lucas of the Monte de Santa Rosa, and the black Josef Carabali, an alfalfa muleteer.^[66]

Assistance to the poor, downtrodden, and imprisoned could be seen as the concrete expression of social concerns.^[67] A short history of what happened in the Chillón valley illustrates not only this new social dimension, but also the manner in which maroons, slaves, and other social groups organized their relations, conversed, and communicated. Not everything that highwaymen needed to survive was found in sufficient quantity and at the appropriate moment in the knapsacks of travelers. For this reason, they would negotiate for whatever else they could secure through owners of tambos in exchange for protection, a strategy similar to the one wealthy limeños used. It was through these contacts—with merchants and shopkeepers—that the neighboring population could communicate with these gangs. And this dialogue did indeed exist.

On one of their raids the bandits stole chickens from a mestiza . The tambo 's owner, a Spaniard, described the events:

Owing to the fact that I am in charge of the tambo called Chillón, a mestiza named María came to me and told me that the stated blacks had taken some hens and chickens from her, and that since the aforementioned blacks intended to go to the tambo to secure food, I should tell them to hand over the chickens. She was poor and in need and advised me to give the said blacks something so they would agree to hand over the stated chickens. As a result of the request made of me by the aforementioned person, I summoned the black Antonio, who was the first to arrive at the tambo after this miserable girl had given up the chickens, and he responded that he would send the fowl, but only under the condition that I give him four reales because he was in need, and that I give a peso to another black, his companion, the one who would bring the fowl later. Thus it was that considering the good of the mestiza and in virtue of her request, I gave him the four reales; soon afterward the other black arrived, with fourteen chickens and hens in all, ten live and four dead, and I gave him the peso.^[68]

Although we have descriptive gauges to measure the composition and frequency of the actions of maroons and brigand groups (also see Flores Galindo 1990, Aguirre 1990), exact figures are elusive. Furthermore, to assess their numbers we must weigh accusations of banditry and maroonage that may owe more to fears than to objective and observational interest. In many of the cases examined we have seen how a slave's departure from the hacienda—even with a paper signed by the owner or mayordomo —could, in the hands of a soldier or urban owner, be taken for maroonage or banditry. In spite of this, there seems to be a consensus on two points. First, that maroonage and brigand bands (of mounted rebels, guerrillas, or maroons, the differences are not very dear) increased during the struggles for independence; and second, that brigandage in general (whatever its social connotations) seems, in the words of Flores Galindo, "to distance itself from the conscious history of the popular classes, reducing itself only to the expression of social malaise, a sign of the deterioration of the haciendas, the beginning of the commercial crisis and the political decomposition that preceded independence" (1990, 67).

The experiences of these groups during the independence period are pivotal to our general assertion that manumission through self-purchase accelerated. Bands of fugitives grew, in part because slaves did not want to join either army and there was no other option but to flee haciendas. Slaves felt increasing uncertainty, as from every direction came promises of freedom intended to gain their support. Occasionally, these gangs of maroons managed to ally or associate themselves with bands of bandits with more diverse ethnic composition and during the struggles for independence to become more cohesive, and dangerously autonomous, forces. Some of the leaders of the guerrillas and mounted rebels (such as General Miller in the south and Commander Francisco Paula Otero in the central highlands) incorporated these heterogeneous bands into their ranks. The most important bands were located in provinces nearby Lima and could block and stash in their headquarters supplies of food and munitions headed for Lima.

The English traveler Proctor described the extent of this situation:

This species of force [i.e., bands of guerrillas] was first encouraged by General San Martín and produced such an effect by its intrepidity that the men of which it was composed actually sometimes defeated large bodies of regular troops. They received no pay, but were allowed to plunder from the en-

emy wherever they could fall upon them. Nor were their depredations as may be supposed, confined to the Spaniards; for ere long they degenerated into bands of licensed and organized robbers, under the lax and defective police of the patriot governors: any wild idle fellow who had a little spirit and a great deal of disinclination to useful employment had nothing to do but to set up as a guerrilla official, or as he was termed, Capitán de Montoneros.^[69]

These groups became the "terror of civilized society" and sporadically appeared, always acting beyond the control of the current governor or military commander.

On the whole, the experiences of soldiers, bandits, and fugitives cover the diversity of the black and slave population's military options. The distinctions between what lay within the law and what was outside it grew increasingly tenuous, even though the military tried to locate fugitive havens and combat the maroons. The haziest distinctions were those assembled and coordinated throughout the struggles for independence. The experiences of the black population during the struggles for independence—spread among patriots and royalists, brigands, guerrillas, and mounted rebels—generated greater fluidity in the relations of mutual aid and support. Slaves' experiences and insurrectionary desires were absorbed into a changing system. In 1851—three years before slavery was abolished—fewer people were frightened by rumors of slave uprisings, "rebellious slaves" were sentenced to minimal punishments, and soon warnings of slave insurrections were revealed as little more than rhetorical flourishes to disguise the interests of white political factions (Blanchard 1991).

Patterns of Manumission in Lima's Hinterland

Amid the enormous variety of connections between countryside and city that we have seen, two questions remain. The first relates to the frequency of slave manumission on the hacienda and in the city; and the second concerns the significance and the trajectory of the changes.

The notarial record books and the cartas de libertad illustrate the frequency and methods of manumission (Table 8).^[70] If we take 1830 and 1850 as parameters, we observe an increase in the percentage of manumissions of slaves coming from haciendas: it went from 13.1 percent in 1830 to 21.0 percent in 1850 of all recorded manumissions in Lima. Rural manumissions were on the rise but urban manumissions

predominated and explain slaves' desire to abandon the hacienda and their strategies to relocate. Around 1840, in the years in which slave owners tried to reverse the trend toward manumission, the relative percentage of manumissions dropped; only about 5 percent of total manumissions were recorded in the rural area.

Self-purchase was the most common method of manumission on the haciendas and increased over the decades (from 41.2 percent in 1830 to 50.0 percent in 1850), and other methods (a master's grant of freedom—often conditional—and the intervention of relatives) declined. Among these, the mother intervened more and more often, as we have seen in the cases examined.

In the twenty years before slavery was abolished, the number of cartas de libertad registered in the notarial record books dropped in absolute terms, from 130 in 1830 to 106 in 1850 (the change was even greater for 1840: only 77 appear). But the speed of manumission was almost the same in 1830 and 1850, rising from 2.2 to 2.3, as the number of slaves decreased.^[71] The figures from the censuses of 1836 and 1845 show that Lima's slave population decreased from 10.4 percent to 6.9 percent of its total population. If we project the speed of manumissions over the percentage decrease of slaves, we see that the records of the cartas de libertad reflect the rhythm of decrease of the slave population in almost the same fashion. In other words, they not only verify the reliability of the figures but also show that slaves, through their own volition or ability to maneuver, were the agents central to this process. In 1850, acts by slaves—the total number of manumissions by self-purchase or purchase by a relative—account for 90.9 percent of all rural manumissions.^[72]

Even if the figures for Lima are above the average, it is not surprising that in broader terms, the conditions in Lima coincide with tendencies recorded elsewhere in Latin America:

A surprisingly high percentage of manumitted slaves were Africans in urban manumissions from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.... From 40 to 60% of the ex-slaves purchased their freedom, and one-third have been granted theirs free and unconditionally by their masters. The remaining 10 to 20% of the manumitted slaves had been granted conditional freedom, mostly having to do with continued demand for familial service. All recent studies have found that approximately 2/3 of the manumitted were women (from 60 to 67%) and few were found to be 45 years of age or older. (Klein 1986, 227)

Although maroonage and banditry were ways that some slaves used to free themselves from labor on the haciendas, day-to-day opportunities and attempts at permanent negotiation were the core responses of slaves on the road to freedom; these were the slave population's long-term options.

Maroonage and brigandage were considered crimes, subject to intermittent massive repression by governments—between 1760 and 1809 and between 1836 and 1839, coinciding toward the end of the colonial period with final attempts to strengthen ethnic segregation (Moerner 1969, 225) and in the 1830S to reinforce order on the haciendas—until slavery was abolished in 1854.^[73] Yet many times what the authorities termed an escape was nothing more than a search for protection (by a godfather, for example), a change of jobs (from rural work to day labor), or a protest against excessive or unlawful punishment. Slaves were attempting to deal with the conditions of rural slavery in legally defensible ways that owed as much to their involvement in the independence struggles as to their awareness of marches and countermarches against laws that were always imprecise and vague enough to permit the extreme alternative of escape.

The likelihood that slaves would use the methods of day-to-day and permanent negotiation we have described depended on various factors: occupational situation in Lima, contacts with persons (free or slave) who had urban experience or were willing to help, and circumstances on the hacienda. The actions of the Defensor de Menores, who represented the slaves in several of the cases examined, and—even more important—their chances of arrival in the parish of San Lázaro, where both social and working contacts (even with maroons) were established, illustrate that slaves quickly grasped opportunities for moving from countryside to city life.

Like their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, female slaves were the earliest and most fortunate travelers from the hacienda to freedom in the city. They owed their success to individual strengths and to a family strategy intended to benefit all its members. As we have noted, the bond between mother and children could survive the painful setbacks and obstacles of the journey; on the hacienda female slaves were judged less productive and more costly (Haitin 1983, 167). Less useful on the hacienda, women had better possibilities for work and friendship in the city.

On the whole, countryside-city connections indicate a blurry image of the rural-urban boundaries and may help explain those "tricky boundaries" in the census information. At the same time, this haziness perpetuated mechanisms of vertical ascent (the slave population's internal differentiation) and geographic-horizontal mobility. In slave patterns of mobility, agents appear (family members in Lima, relatives of masters, state officials, bandits and maroons, owners of tambos ) who interceded or acted unwittingly in favor of slaves. Thus, given the vast array of conditions and actors, we cannot think of rural slavery as the defining factor of the prevailing slave relations. The rural sphere without the urban, particularly in the context we have seen, is a partial truth.^[74]

Finally there is room for reflection on the significance of the success of slaves in arranging rural-urban relations and on what the over-arching implications of this dynamic implied with respect to slave relations in limeño society.

We have seen that, given the resistance of individual slaves and couples and the support proffered by authorities upon satisfaction of the conque —as well as slaves' preference for the city—masters could not simply transfer their slaves from the urban to the rural realm. Only in cases judged as extreme could the punishment of relocation be ordered. Apart from the recorded opposition, an owner's greater or lesser control depended on the conditions on the hacienda (which as we have seen were varied) and on the relations slaves established with the city. All forces were not equal: what prevailed was movement from the countryside to the city.^[75]

In the rural sphere we record a great variety of productive units, from units where relative control over the labor force existed, to cases of an owner's depravity or utter neglect (interpreted by the contemporaries as alarming). The margins of "rebellion" diminish if we evaluate the priorities of slaves in terms of their access to freedom. The contemporaries' rendition seems exaggerated. A related issue is to determine if the transfer of slaves to the urban realm could be considered part of this "chaos," which contemporaries spoke of so readily. If it was masters who assigned slaves to earn daily wages, they passed the costs of upkeep to the slaves themselves or to another master, by putting the slaves into a socioeconomic framework better suited to exploit (and control) their work. Along with Scott (1988, 31), I believe that the appearance of "chaos" did not necessarily coin-

cide with the system's collapse. In the short term, at least, slaves' options could bring about new contradictions, which could even revive the slave system. In addition, from a logic of urban expansion—which occurred at a still relatively slow pace in Lima—change could generate an increasing demand for services (Algranti 1988, 23), especially if other ethnic groups sold more expensive services or pursued other circuits of consumption, and if the ethnic-occupational structure were very rigid. Consequently, slave owners had incentives to hire out slaves' labor.

All such expansion and change eventually involved a certain amount of chaos and entailed above all the rationalization of a system, with greater individual exploitation, and not its eradication. The question is, thus, if the transfer from a hacienda to earn daily wages in Lima was the result of a greater rationalization of the system. And it is at this point that we must restate an apparent paradox, between more daily wages and less control (rather than more slavery), which we can resolve if we evaluate the logic of the system not from the interests of the owners but from the viewpoint of the slaves.

We have no evidence to show that masters transferred their slaves to the urban area. More likely the slaves were the ones who took the initiative, although a slave's advancing years might make this alternative the most rational option from an owner's perspective. Our assertion challenges the hypothesis that a decline in productivity in Lima's rural zones caused a relocation of slaves to the city and that the transformations of the slave system reflected a greater rationalization by slaveholders to safeguard a threatened system. In actuality, what took place (at least in the first two decades of the nineteenth century) was an increase in the number of slaves on big haciendas. Furthermore, the generalization of rural stagnation in the Lima valley at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth—as Haitin (1983, 145) points out—is also questionable.^[76] Another fact that contradicts the view that it was masters who initiated the hiring-out system is the gender composition inside the haciendas. The ratio of men to women documents a conscious policy of retention of the work force and of an aversion to its transfer to Lima. A complementary argument along the same lines is what has been termed in other regions as the "peasant gap," the cultivation of basic foodstuffs that simultaneously solved three problems for owners: it gave slaves food, secured the labor force, and served as a counterweight to the expansion of

commercial crops for the international market (Cardoso 1988). We have seen that in Lima, and beyond Lima (in Huaito, for example), slaves used this peasant gap not only to solve problems for hacendados and to meet a rising urban demand but also converted it into a base of accumulation within the hacienda through the supply of local and regional markets.

What owners did in a marginal fashion (for example, by paying their slaves) and slaves did in a substantive manner (by filling the "subsistence gap," earning wages, buying freedom) was to introduce a component of monetary interdependence into the relations on the hacienda. This interdependence eroded the basis of the slaveholding authority, practically at the level of interpersonal relations. Perhaps the most dramatic expressions of this relation between money, slave price, and freedom were payments on credit and reductions of a slave's value, which were considered a posteriori payments of outstanding daily wages. All things considered, these are also very specific aspects of the lengthy processes of formation of both the rural and urban labor markets. In the following chapter we use the same perspective—that of the slaves—to observe how distinctly urban processes unfolded in both a similar and a contrasting manner.