Yesenia Barragan. Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. Afro-Latin America Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Illustrations, maps. 346 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-83232-8; $20.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-108-93636-1.
Reviewed by Angela Pérez-Villa (Western Michigan University)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2022)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Yesenia Barragan’s long-awaited book is a welcome contribution both to Colombian historiography and to the scholarship on slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. Barragan focuses on the northern Colombian Pacific lowlands to examine how enslaved and free African-descended people navigated the social entrapments that emerged between the promulgation of the Free Womb law in 1821—which mandated that children born to enslaved mothers would not inherit their legal status as slaves—and the final formal abolition of slavery in 1852. She refers to this thirty-one-year period as the time of “gradual emancipation rule” and argues that it was a distinct historical moment in which slaveholders paradoxically reinforced the exploitation and disciplining of captives under a system of slavery in decline. Her examination of this paradox in the province of Chocó reveals not only the pitfalls of liberal freedom but also the existence of other modes of freedom devised by enslaved men and women living in the Pacific lowlands. These modes of freedom, argues Barragan, constituted “small-scale, ordinary revolutions” that allow readers to learn about enslaved families’ participation in the contentious legal terrains of gradual emancipation through decades of political turmoil, conservative backlash, and civil war (p. 281).
The book is structured in three parts that take readers on a journey through the social universe of the Black Pacific. Readers learn about the daily life of skilled enslaved people who navigated rivers or extracted gold and the critical questions that emerged about freedom and emancipation in the context of the Wars of Independence. Readers also learn about Colombian elites who debated, drafted, and ratified the Free Womb law in a nascent public sphere; the persistent actions of enslaved families to secure freedom; and eventually the constraints faced by former slaves determined to live autonomously in a deeply fragmented society. Barragan’s commitment to upholding an “ethics of historical care” in this painstakingly documented book is demonstrated through her attention to detail and her creative effort to center the voices of the enslaved while making visible the analytical challenges posed by slavery’s archive (p. 31). To do this, Barragan is inspired by the methodological labor of scholars like Marisa Fuentes, Saidiya Hartman, and Stephanie Camp. In every chapter, Barragan weaves the stories of African-descended men, women, and children from the Chocó into a larger historical narrative with utmost respect and imagination. Through this historical ethnographic approach, readers are compelled to engage with African-descended people’s struggles for freedom while facing the frustrations generated by incomplete or silent archives.
Barragan is good at guiding the reader through those silences by engaging other sources, raising questions, and using informed speculation when necessary. For instance, in chapters 1 and 2, she examines foreigners’ travelogues when reconstructing the everyday life of bogas (black rowers) and mazamorreros (free black gold prospectors) in the Pacific lowlands. She mines their detailed descriptions of natural landscapes and social relations in order to complicate highly violent and gendered perspectives about African-descended people while pointing at alternative scenarios. Beyond this, her analysis also unveils how foreigners wrote about Colombia’s new laws for international audiences and the diplomatic exchanges that emerged concerning abolition. In chapter 3, Barragan discusses the intricate legislative construction of the law in Colombia and compares it to the versions ratified in Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. This comparative perspective provides helpful insights to understand how they differed from one another, despite having the same end goal, on issues like breastfeeding and designated age for sale. Differences among these laws point to the priorities of lawmakers at the time. In the case of Colombia, Barragan’s close examination of periodicals from the period helps her reconstruct intellectual, legal, and economic discourses in defense or against the Free Womb law. The passionate letters and rebuttals published by these newspapers—examined carefully by Barragan—reveal the deep economic anxieties felt by a segment of the slaveholding class as well as the rivalries that existed between family clans with different perspectives on slavery.
Barragan’s meticulous approach to civil and notarial records shines through specifically in chapters 4 and 5, where readers are introduced to several episodes involving Free Womb captives and their families. Readers learn that the Catholic Church played a crucial role in the public dissemination of the law by displaying details on its doors. Aware of the legal possibilities to secure freedom for their children, enslaved parents often mobilized their limited resources to obtain important documents like birth certificates, to claim the right to motherhood, or to initiate lawsuits against slaveholders who sold or traded children who were “free by the law” (pp. 175-76). On this last point, Barragan’s discussion reveals how slaveholders engaged in the trafficking of Free Womb captives through their inclusion in wills, dowries, inventories, and notes of sale. Furthermore, Barragan argues that slaveholders’ management of Free Womb captives as “assets” is a reflection of developing modern capitalist practices that intensified in the 1840s and that, as discussed in chapter 6, might have motivated them to privatize land and forests in attempts to contain the physical and economic mobility of Afro-Colombians.
The book contains a careful selection of images, primary sources from endangered archives, and original maps that illustrate arguments and offer an excellent example to undergraduate and graduate students about the historian’s craft. The author’s creative use of sources appears, for instance, in chapter 2 where Barragan used an inventory list to create a map that displays house values on three main streets in the city of Quibdó. The map provides a striking image of the city’s urban and social organization while visually revealing how property with greater value almost always stood along the riverbank. Additionally, the author’s elegant writing style and ability to interconnect every chapter deliver a great reading experience. This means that it is worth assigning the book rather than individual chapters since the scaffolding that appears through the narrative could confuse or distract single-chapter readers. Overall, this book excels at placing the Chocó at the center of discussions on abolition in the Atlantic world while positioning Barragan as an innovative voice in the study of Colombian history today.
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Citation:
Angela Pérez-Villa. Review of Barragan, Yesenia, Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57538
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |