The Bonds of Kinship,the Ties of Freedom in Colonial Peru

The Limits of Kinship

Slaveholders clearly profited from manumission. Owners received cash or a debt agreement (that could include a promise of labor) in exchange for the legal recognition of freedom. ¹⁷ In some cases, slaveholders lived from the payments made by slaves or former slaves or agreed to a future manumission holding an enslaved person in indefinite servitude. ¹⁸ Manumission also benefited enslaved and freed people who celebrated their change in status by choosing new names and moving away from their former owners. ¹⁹ Manumission was also a process undertaken by kin. If slaveholders and enslaved understood themselves to be part of the same kinship group, then the transition from slavery to freedom could be mutually beneficial. The structures of slavery, therefore, influenced what was possible to construct as kinship. In this sense, manumission and inheritance worked together in the few families who openly acknowledged their affinities, revealing the mobility of kinship.

The relationship between María de Segura and her former owner took on the qualities of both enslavement and kinship. At age twenty-two, María de Segura with her two sons, Joseph de Segura and Blas de Segura, secured legal manumission in 1670. ²⁰ As in the case of many manumission agreements throughout the Americas, María de Segura’s former owner and future patron imposed obligations, and she appears to have taken his family surname. ²¹ Joseph de Segura (the slaveholder) would raise her sons as part of the conditions of her manumission. ²² María de Segura’s kinship relation with her sons, then, continued to be entangled in conditions of slavery and freedom negotiations even after she married a free man of color. In one sense, Joseph de Segura asserted his continuing control by maintaining the children whose mother was legally free, thus laying claim in name and in practice to a family caught between bondage and freedom. ²³ On the other hand, the combination of domestic arrangements and manumission conditions may have been beneficial for María de Segura’s children regardless of her consent. Astute observers would have noticed how the lieutenant and successful local tradesman, Joseph de Segura, built up his “relatedness” with the quarterón children left in his care. ²⁴ In María de Segura’s manumission agreement, Joseph de Segura (and his wife) agreed to raise young Blas and Joseph “as sons” since they did not have children of their own. ²⁵ A conditional manumission that tied María de Segura to her former slaveholder, still the agreement also made public the kinship between her former owner and her children. Without a baptismal record acknowledging paternity, María de Segura could rely on the manumission agreement as a way to make official this mobile kinship construction.

More than a statement regarding the past, the notarized record served as a predictor of the young Seguras’ prosperous future. I have not found more documentation of Joseph and Blas’ childhoods, but twelve years following their manumission Joseph de Segura donated an enslaved man to the two Segura children. The postmortem gift could easily be read as a way to indebt the two minors into an eternal cycle of gratitude to their patron’s family. ²⁶ The donation can also be read through the lens of kinship, suggesting that Joseph de Segura was the boys’ father and sought ways to support his sons but avoid making his parentage public and official. Joseph de Segura, an Inquisition familiar (local official), a militia lieutenant in Trujillo, and native of Castile, was heavily involved in the trade of wheat, flour, and other goods from Panama and Portobello. ²⁷ Given the Southwestern African casta of the donated slave, Manuel angola could have spoken Portuguese and assist the young men in the Atlantic-based trading that had supported Joseph de Segura. In other words, it is plausible that Joseph de Segura was training and then setting up his quarterón “like sons” to participate in the family business. ²⁸ Kinship, with its obligations, could function with and alongside the conditions of manumission. Furthermore, Joseph de Segura arranged an apprenticeship for Blas de Segura and bequeathed him a blacksmith forge that the young man would use in his trade as a master and vecino (a municipal citizen) when he took on his own apprentices years later. ²⁹ By 1700, the two brothers had established themselves among Trujillo’s urban middling sectors. They owned a house together near other prosperous free men of color. ³⁰ Certainly, the written documentation silences María de Segura’s contribution to her son’s economic and social ascent. It was her “good service” (as recorded in the manumission agreement) in the Segura household that secured Joseph de Segura’s favors to her sons. ³¹ Nonetheless, raised and promoted by their former owner, the success of the Segura brothers was intimately tied with the patronage of Joseph de Segura.

Joseph de Segura was motivated as a slaveholder to establish his clients, the freed Segura brothers, as artisans and petty merchants, but he was also acting as a kinsman. In a rare instance in the documentation, Joseph de Segura controlled how his relationship with the Segura brothers was made public. Throughout his life, he made clear the connection was through their mother when he described Blas and Joseph as “quarterones de mulatos, sons of María de Segura, mulata” in his 1682 will. ³² The slaveholder also declared in María de Segura’s 1670 notarized manumission agreement, and again in his publicly registered 1682 will, that he had raised Blas and Joseph as sons. ³³ Joseph de Segura, however, was not the father of the brothers, a kinship connection not uniformly mentioned in official manumission agreements and bequests of freedom. ³⁴ Still, his gift of manumission expressed an unarticulated kinship, or one so rooted in family honor that he kept it private. ³⁵ With the assistance of a notary, Joseph de Segura composed a second will in 1687 that was not witnessed by his household or an array of peers, colleagues, and neighbors. As opposed to a will recorded in a notary’s registers, a public document with a specific audience, the 1687 will was sealed with red wax and was not to be read until the testator’s death. ³⁶ The closed or sealed will was opened in 1688 and revealed that Joseph de Segura had entitled María de Segura as doña, a term of honor and respect for a peer or a kinswoman. In this private document, to be executed after his death, he revealed his biological relations to María de Segura as well as her two sons; she was the daughter of Pedro de Segura, his nephew. ³⁷ It is possible that even in this private document, Joseph de Segura was lying in order to protect the inheritance of his nephew. In any event, his declaration constructed María de Segura as his great niece and her sons, Blas de Segura and Joseph de Segura, as his great grandnephews (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Segura–Cortés family (abbreviated).

It is highly plausible that Joseph de Segura described, in opaque terms, coerced sexual relationships between Pedro de Segura and the unnamed mother of María de Segura, hidden from Trujillo’s slaveholding elite in a sealed will. Nonetheless, Joseph de Segura was in need of kin. He was a migrant from Castile, did not have children with either his wife or any other woman, named his nephew, Pedro de Segura as his only known, legitimate relative, and willed his property to the Church. ³⁸ He acted as a generous slaveholder, but also as a patriarch. While the fostering of her children could be understood under a rubric of extended slaveholding, in the sealed document Joseph de Segura secretly willed the rents of his Huanchaco port warehouses to María de Segura. He named her as his “ahijada” or goddaughter and, in this sense, marked the formerly enslaved as an extralegal heir. ³⁹ Joseph did not recognize María de Segura and her children because of their illegitimate births as well as enslaved or ex-slave status. Nonetheless, he still constructed a kinship and recorded his relationships. ⁴⁰ Understood within a mobile construction of kinship that simultaneously recognized practices within slavery, Joseph de Segura privately passed on property to a relative and publicly left a bequest to a favored ex-slave.

Kinship, however, obfuscated and required maintenance. In the same sealed will, Joseph de Segura granted Tomasa Cortés de Segura, the daughter of María de Segura and her husband Cristobal Cortés, 200 pesos. ⁴¹ Joseph de Segura had not raised Tomasa, who was born free following her mother’s manumission, and he did not connect her to his nephew. Marking the multiplicity of her kinships, she employed the name of both her father (Cortés) and her family’s patron (Segura). She had a distinct role than her brothers, Joseph and Blas, given the “set of gendered and generational dependencies” that produced Segura kinships. ⁴² Decades following Joseph de Segura’s death, she was still unable to claim utensils, retablos or domestic altarpieces, and a trunk from his property that were owed to her mother. ⁴³ In other words, the executors of the Castilian Joseph de Segura’s will dismissed her second-generation claim to her mother’s patronage affinities to an ex-slaveholder. In contrast to her manumitted mother, Tomasa Cortés de Segura’s kinships were more explicitly forged within Trujillo’s African Diaspora. She named an inheritance from her father, and her brother, Joseph de Segura, served as her executor and children’s tutor. ⁴⁴ Having been born free of a free pardo and a freed mulata who were legitimately married, by 1705 Tomasa asked to be buried in her parish and was a member of a middling family of color in Trujillo. Still, she was not married, had three young children, and very little property even after cash and in-kind donations from slaveholder Joseph de Segura following his death in 1688. ⁴⁵ Her example indicates how kinships required continual action. ⁴⁶ More, as demonstrated by the case of the Segura–Cortés family, even freed and free people’s kinships and economic situations fluctuated according to slavery’s hierarchies and the lasting relations of manumission. Once the patron died, the direct bonds of kinship, with its material benefits and certainly unrecorded obligations, ceased.

Separation from the slaveholder Joseph de Segura, nonetheless, was key to the economic success of María de Segura and her husband. Leaving her children in the household of Joseph de Segura, María established a home with her husband, Cristobal Cortés a free pardo barbero (barber-surgeon), and member of Trujillo’s militia. ⁴⁷ Declaring that “all the goods that today I have, my husband and I earned together with our personal industry and labor,” María de Segura listed warehouses in Huanchaco stocked with saint’s images, tools, and wood in her 1684 will. ⁴⁸ Together, and in partnership with other free people of color, María and Cristobal grew their communal property to include a pulpería, or corner store, with a substantial pawn operation, and a business trading durable goods such as textiles, flour, and furniture based in the port. ⁴⁹ They took loans out together and, starting with María of casta biojo (from Guinea-Bissau), age forty, purchased in 1680, they obtained slaves of higher value such as María of casta conga who was much younger and recently sold from Panama slave traders to Trujillo. ⁵⁰ When María de Segura dictated her will in 1684, she described a rich array of debts and loans indicating her integration into the local economy and listed the substantial household goods accumulated by herself and her husband during their marriage including furniture, reliquaries, and clothing, in addition to their businesses. ⁵¹ Manumission, and the economic success that could follow, was bound with kinship arrangements. María de Segura had left her children with her ex-slaveholder, but she had secured a critical patronage, translating a covert kinship into the financial success of her family that spread out into Trujillo’s African Diaspora. Following María de Segura’s manumission, the family had mobilized their kinships to become free commercially active agents.

Cristobal Cortés relied on the financial success built with his first wife long after her death. Because they were officially married and their children were legitimate descendants, Cristobal Cortés was easily able to assert his status as administrator of his wife’s inheritance and serve as his children’s tutor. ⁵² In other words, his status as the patriarch of his family was not questioned, a clear victory for a family who had emerged (at least partially) from slavery. ⁵³ Cristobal Cortés was enveloped in and activated a mobile construction of kinship, bound by slavery and motivated by the practices of manumission. He was able to maintain his household from the profits of the Trujillo pulpería (corner store) and raise his young children. He freed his second wife, Leonor Bela in 1688, by providing an enslaved woman as a replacement, purchased from the slave traders in Panama. ⁵⁴ While Leonor Bela’s age is not listed in the manumission agreement, the price of her freedom—850 pesos—and the required age of her replacement—twenty two years—suggest that she was much younger than her new husband. A free man, Cortés employed the mechanics of slavery and manumission to create his kinships as his wealth translated into a freed spouse and familial stability.

In contrast, kinship ties with María de Segura’s former owner, godfather, and great-grand uncle were laced with uncertainty. As discussed above, in his sealed will Joseph de Segura secretly donated, for two years, the use of his Huanchaco warehouses, and supposedly the trading licenses, to María de Segura. But, by the time he made his bequest in 1687 and then when the will was opened in 1688, she and her husband were prosperous traders in their own right. Still, operating within the framework of a slaveholder’s patronage, Joseph de Segura also tied his support to patriarchal oversight. He lent the Huanchaco warehouses to nephew, Pedro de Segura, as a means of helping the nephew’s daughter, María de Segura. ⁵⁵ Understanding Joseph de Segura’s actions within the context of a mobile construction of kinship encompassing both the demands of slavery and the generative strategies of the African Diaspora reveals the weight of his patronage. In the act of gifting, Joseph de Segura tied María de Segura to a dependency with her father while she clearly was building a strong family, household, and business with her husband. Additionally, María de Segura was caught between her articulated kinship with her husband and her silenced kinship with her father. The slaveholder Joseph de Segura’s actions had ramifications within the Segura–Cortés family because of how their kinships were created within slavery and manumission. Just as he secured María de Segura to her father, he created a legal separation within the Segura–Cortés family when he bequeathed to the daughter, Tomasa, but not to María and Cristobal’s sons. Perhaps his choice was due because, illegitimate male children represented a much stronger threat to inheritance than female descendants. ⁵⁶ More pointedly, these children had not been raised in his household, and therefore were not subject to his slaveholder patronage, even if gifted after manumission. Joseph de Segura, therefore, marked the lines of kinship within and around the Segura–Cortés family, emphasizing kinship’s mobility within the contexts of slavery and manumission.

Publicly, María de Segura and Cristobal Cortés were wealthy traders, slaveholders, and legitimately married, but their family’s relations with Joseph de Segura (and his nephew Pedro) made them vulnerable. In 1676 (seven years after her manumission), an indigenous patrol of Huanchaco accused María de Segura of having sex with a boatswain in her store and “always” creating scandal with Spaniards. ⁵⁷ Partially, these accusations can be understood as part of a strategy of indigenous officials in Huanchaco defending the legal control of their reducción or Indian colonial town. María de Segura was an easy target. She was African descent and therefore officially could not reside in an indigenous reducción. ⁵⁸ Clearly, she had ongoing relations with Spanish and Spanish-descent men such as borrowing, lending, and fostering her sons to Joseph de Segura. Her mother had also had sex with a Spanish or Spanish-descent man and so had she was labeled by Trujillo’s notaries as a mulata, meaning of African and Spanish descent. When the notaries described her sons, born out of wedlock, Joseph and Blas as quarterones, or people of a quarter African descent, the casta or racial labels again announced that María de Segura had sex with a Spanish man. As opposed to elite women of Spanish descent, María de Segura could not claim privacy to hide her illegitimate birth or her premarital liaison (or coercion) given her enslaved status. ⁵⁹ The slaveholder Joseph de Segura had cared for his silenced relations, María’s children, but not formalized their familial ties. ⁶⁰ As a result, she could not claim public honor of a “decent” woman and was known as María Ñonga (meaning “stupid” or “good for nothing”) to the witnesses who testified at her criminal trial. ⁶¹ The mobility of her kinship, structured within slavery and the resulting colonial racial hierarchies, meant that María de Segura did not gain public protection from her silenced kinship with slaveholders. Without public acknowledgment of her kinship with Joseph and Pedro de Segura, María de Segura could inhabit a marginal location in Trujillo’s legal and public spheres.

Likewise, her husband, Cristobal Cortés, could not move fully into a respectable position that was due to a free man. In 1688, he was imprisoned under suspicion of robbing a Real Audiencia judge’s daughter. ⁶² Running a pawnshop made Cortés susceptible to these types of accusations as his business would have been thought to traffic in stolen goods as well as legitimately traded objects. Still, he was a militia leader, a married man, and a prosperous trader in the city, and certainly, it would have been foolish to risk his reputation (the foundation of his business) by becoming involved in theft. Adding insult to injury, that same year when he attempted to manumit his second wife, Leonor Bela, the owner insisted that she continue to serve “inside her house” until her death. ⁶³ Cristobal Cortés, therefore, could purchase his spouse and therefore secure her legal manumission, but part of her labor would be owed to her former owner indefinitely. As his long-term relationship with María de Segura suggests, Cristobal Cortés was accustomed to multiple family forms. ⁶⁴ He was married and presumably lived with his first wife and then his second wife, while both women continued to work or maintain contact with their former owners. He raised their children, but clearly maintained bonds with María de Segura’s children, Blas and Joseph de Segura, constructing kinship, but adapting to its mobile forms produced within slavery and manumission. The continuing dishonor of having his second wife work where she had once been enslaved, however, was a mark against Cortés’ honor as a husband. ⁶⁵ He still claimed his location as Leonor Bela’s legal spouse, working to secure their lives apart from her slaveholder, demonstrating the immense creativity of kinship work within the African Diaspora.

Acknowledgment of shared, or articulated, kinship could be mutually beneficial to freed people as well as slaveholders. Joseph de Segura did not publicly acknowledge he had shared ancestry with María de Segura or her sons. Instead, like other owners or their families, he incorporated her and her children, newly manumitted, into extended patronage networks generated from slaveholding. In turn, freed people of color provided an additional means to “make kin” for slaveholders who lacked legitimate heirs or sought alternatives. In the case of the Segura–Cortés family, assistance from the slaveholder turned patron was materially and economically useful. The same assistance, however, marked the Segura–Cortés family within a continuing legacy of slavery equated with dishonor that María de Segura and Cristobal Cortés resisted. The participation of enslaved and free people suggest that in its mobile formation, the next generation, that of Blas and Joseph, would claim honorable positions as Trujillo vecinos.

Named Kinships

Slaveholders who declared themselves as parents of former slaves added public recognition to the economic support of their offspring. By creating common knowledge of descent, slaveholders added to the reputational wealth of their children—regardless of illegitimate births or former enslaved status. ⁶⁶ Like other middling and elite people in colonial Latin America, freed kin built on the honor of their fathers. ⁶⁷ Constructing kinships in the context of slavery and manumission, if their relationships were named, families of color capitalized on the social prestige that came from an open acknowledgment of their heritage. There were also parallel strategies. They also carefully guarded their families from dishonor, worked hard to create prosperous households, and established a cohort of high status free people of color in Trujillo.

In the case of María del Rosario y Nieves, her kin were able to achieve more prosperous positions than those of the Segura–Cortés family due to the elevated status of their matriarch. Unlike María de Segura who was born enslaved and gained her manumission as a young mother, María del Rosario y Nieves was recognized as a free parda throughout her life. Her mother was also known as a free woman of color as well as the woman who raised her. ⁶⁸ By 1652, she was married to Captain Gabriel Pardo Ortiz, the leader of Trujillo’s pardo militia and a pharmacist for San Sebastian hospital, two positions that bespoke his leadership among free people of color. ⁶⁹ Together, they built ties to the city’s middling communities. For instance, they served as godparents for slaves, and, in turn, the slaveholders signed as guarantors for their loans, underlining how constructing kinship was tied to hierarchies of slavery. As a result of their social standing, Nieves and Pardo Ortiz were able to expand their properties and the number of investors in their dry-goods store. ⁷⁰ After her husband’s death (probably in 1687), María del Rosario y Nieves continued to live in the family home, selling and buying property, collecting debts, and occasionally freeing the daughter of a loyal slave. ⁷¹ In the midst of the poor wheat harvests that followed the flooding from a 1701 El Niño episode, Nieves sought to consolidate her holdings in order to pay mounting debts. She weathered the financial storm and still supported her half sister Juana de las Nieves Rodríguez, assuring that she could live in one of the couple’s small houses outside the city’s walls. ⁷² Born as a free girl of illegitimate birth, Nieves died as a respectable widow with considerable wealth.

Enslavement still shaped María del Rosario y Nieves and Capitan Gabriel Ortiz Pardo’s crowning achievement, the placement of their daughter in Santa Clara, Trujillo’s only convent at the time. The nunnery housed roughly fifty professed nuns with their large staffs of servants and slaves and also served as a refuge for widows or other women who sought to live a cloistered life. ⁷³ As evidence of her economic means, Ana Pardo Ortiz, who took the name Ana de Santo Domingo when she professed, owned a cell that in many ways functioned as an apartment, housing slaves, servants, and dependents. ⁷⁴ She joined a powerful religious community. Santa Clara, like other colonial convents, collectively managed the professed’s dowries, purchased and managed properties for profit, and lent money to local elites. Because of her parents’ pardo/a casta, however, Ana de Santo Domingo did not profess as a nun of a black veil but was a nun of the white veil. Though born of a legitimate Catholic marriage, the family was known as African descent and thus associated with slavery. ⁷⁵ As a result, the young woman was regulated to a permanent position of a novice, as in the Americas the veil distinctions marked racial differences. ⁷⁶ Nonetheless, when she died an untimely death, by donating her cell to a black-veiled nun, the Nieves–Pardo Ortiz family gained a charitable upper hand. ⁷⁷ Their gift, in many ways, purchased an entry that their racial location had denied. Officially, their daughter could not claim the public descent to profess at the highest level, but because of their ability to contribute a dowry and maintain a cell in the convent, the family gained a public foothold in one of Trujillo’s most influential and exclusive institutions that could provide credit as well as mark prestige.

Instrumental to María del Rosario y Nieves’ success was her father’s public recognition. Alonso de las Nieves, a well-known mason and architect in Trujillo, constructed churches for the Jesuits, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Mercedians as well as houses for the landed elite. ⁷⁸ A self-described “natural son” (meaning recognized but born out of wedlock) of Galician parents, Alonso de las Nieves declared in his 1644 will that María del Rosario was his “natural” daughter and granted the ten- or eleven-year-old girl her legal manumission. In addition, he gave her 500 pesos, a house, and a wool mattress, sheets, and other clothing. ⁷⁹ In this articulated kinship, Alonso de las Nieves employed the notarized will to carefully provide for his daughter’s future. ⁸⁰ Since her mother, Augustina de Miranda (only described as a morena), was deceased, he appointed a tutor for his daughter to manage her affairs until she reached the age of twenty. Alonso de las Nieves constructed a clear and direct relationship to his child, born of an African-descent woman whom he had not married. He (or his estate) would later provide a substantial dowry, 1700 pesos, to María del Rosario y Nieves. ⁸¹ Named in a will registered with a public notary, this open recognition of Alonso de las Nieves’ paternity was highly unusual and remarkably useful. In my extensive research of most Trujillo’s extant seventeenth-century notary records, I have found only one other case of a Spanish or Spanish-descent father recognizing his children with an enslaved woman. ⁸² By naming María del Rosario y Nieves as his daughter, Alonso de las Nieves made his slave into his publicly-recognized kin and named his slave as his daughter.

Since the Portuguese mason was not officially married, he created family that existed beyond orthodox Catholic practices. As he neared death, he sought to make his relationships public. A few months following the composition of his will he completed a codicil listing a payment of twenty pesos to a Dominican friar for “a certain thing regarding paternity that he had communicated.” ⁸³ Clearly, Alonso de las Nieves silenced a kinship relation, as it is unclear, and unwritten, which paternity issue Nieves wished to resolved since he listed five girls, who appear to be his daughters, in his will. ⁸⁴ Acting as a slaveholder even as he asserted his paternity, he claimed three daughters, but to various degrees. He “married” (probably meaning he provided a dowry) his natural daughter (whose mother and casta remains unmentioned), Isabel de Nieves, to a local artisan. In this sense, he followed the logic of maintaining endogamy among social classes. ⁸⁵ In addition to his generous support of María del Rosario y Nieves, he put aside extensive funds to free her sister, Fabiana Cavero. ⁸⁶ Constructing slaveholding as much as he constructed kinship, Alonso de las Nieves did not favor Fabiana as much as he did her older sister María del Rosario. While María was raised in Nieves’ household, Fabiana served his customer and wealthy slaveholder, doña Angela Cavero de Henao. The mobile construction of kinship could, therefore, work to develop a slaveholder’s patronage ties with other slaveholders. Still, when Fabiana gained her legal manumission in 1650 at the age of twelve, she cast off her patron’s surname and identified herself as Fabiana de las Nieves, a “natural” daughter of Alonso de las Nieves. ⁸⁷ Clearly, Fabiana constructed her kinship cognizant of slavery’s impositions and mobilized her own kinship identities. She understood that claiming the identity of an illegitimate daughter, particularly of a slaveholding father who recognized his kin, was superior to being known as a former slave (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Nieves–Pardo Ortiz–Rodriguez family (abbreviated).

Alonso de las Nieves, however, did not name all of his kinships. He maintained an additional relationship with María de Llanos, a free woman of color. In his 1644 will, he explained that he had raised her two “orphan” daughters, Juana de Nieves and “the other” María del Rosario. The term orphan could signify that the young women’s parents were unable to care for them or that the father, such as Alonso de las Nieves, did not recognize them. ⁸⁸ Uncertain, unwilling, or not needing to claim his paternity, Alonso de las Nieves awarded the two sisters, ages sixteen and twelve, 200 pesos to each for their service during his illness. ⁸⁹ Nieves couched his relations with the two sisters in terms of servitude by exchanging cash for service and echoing agreements between slaveholders and enslaved people. ⁹⁰ At the same time, Juana and her sister María del Rosario were clearly Nieves’ dependents and therefore within the realm of kinship. By pushing the transaction into what Nara Milanich describes as “the extralegal realm of charity,” Nieves clearly signaled that these daughters, even though born of a free woman, would remained a hidden kinship. ⁹¹ Cognizant of slavery’s racial hierarchies and of his own racial location, Nieves declared he retained documentation proving that his parents were “old Christians” of a raza (or lineage) “free of Moors and Jews”. ⁹² His concern with sixteenth-century religious distinctions based on European religious definitions translated into lineage in the Americas. ⁹³ Clearly, Alonso de las Nieves favored his parda (usually of African descent) enslaved daughter María del Rosario y Nieves over her mulata (African and Spanish descent) half-sisters. In doing so, Nieves destabilized what historians have assumed where seventeenth-century casta hierarchies by choosing the presumably darker child over those with supposedly Iberian phenotypical characteristics. ⁹⁴ Nieves operated as a slaveholder and understood how race worked in Iberia, but in many senses, he was a casta-crosser, who did follow the public rules of race, being native of Portugal but a member of the confraternity San Nicolas, dedicated to African-descent people in Trujillo. ⁹⁵ He constructed the kinship he needed, given that proven lineage was more important to the migrant man without legitimate heirs from Galicia. As opposed to the free mother of Juana and María, Nieves had maintained control over María del Rosario y Nieves’ enslaved mother and therefore was certain of his paternity.

While the other María del Rosario disappears from the records, Juana’s life reflected her position as an unnamed daughter of Alonso de las Nieves. Sixteen years old at the time of Alonso de las Nieves’ 1644 will and daughter of María de Llanos, a free woman of color, Juana de las Nieves would rename herself Juana Rodríguez after marrying her husband, Juan Rodríguez de las Quintas, a free man of African descent. She was prosperous enough to leave property to her grandson. A well-known inhabitant of the city, she served as a witness in a judicial case, lent money to prestigious vecinos (municipal citizens), and sold them slaves. ⁹⁶ She did not discard her heritage but reworked a silenced relationship according to her relationship to slaveholding. In her 1716 will, she claimed her kinship and her status when she asked to be buried in the chapel of Nuestra Señora del Rosario in the Dominican church constructed by her father, Alonso de las Nieves, and also where he was laid to rest. ⁹⁷ In doing so, Juana Rodríguez publicly united her family with that of her Portuguese father, through their shared devotion, as the name of her sister and half sister suggest, to a well-known confraternity of slaves and free people throughout the Americas. ⁹⁸ A slaveholder like her father, Juana Rodríguez (nee Juana de Nieves) claimed her place within the mobile construction of kinship, and in doing so, practiced her free status.

Juana Rodríguez/de Nieves was not passing into Trujillo’s Spanish and Spanish-descent society so much as expressing the hybridity of her kin. In her construction of kinship, she created a public link between African-descent and Iberian-descent family, but also demonstrated how racial hierarchies could be discarded and evoked, or shifted. Signaling his intermediary status, Alonso de las Nieves was a member of the San Nicolas confraternity of Trujillo’s morenos, a term preferred by free people of African descent. ⁹⁹ Perhaps his Portuguese identity, especially in the 1640s when the kingdom split from Spain, had made him a bit of an outcast among Spaniards and the creoles of Spanish America in spite of his superior skills as an architect. ¹⁰⁰ In this sense, Nieves did not have a public identity as a Spaniard, and certainly, he was not an elite who guarded a distinguished lineage. The mobility of kinship’s construction in this context of slavery and manumission allowed multiple possibilities. Undoubtedly, María del Rosario y Nieves as a named descendant was much more successful than her half sister Juana Rodríguez in part due to her father’s favoritism. Nonetheless, paternal silence allowed Juana to name her kinship and her status simultaneously, long after her father had passed.

Unequal Kinships

Free people of color articulated their status and identities, generation by generation, forming their families through a process of manumission. María del Rosario y Nieves faced a problem of property and inheritance after she placed her only daughter in the Santa Clara convent. Ana de Santo Domingo could serve as a business partner for her mother and certainly assist in arranging loans from the convent. But following her daughter’s untimely death and that of María del Rosario y Nieves’ husband, the widow needed to make new kin to help her manage her assets. Kin, in this sense, was not biological, but as more recent anthropological work has suggested, consisted of “the social construction of social relations.” ¹⁰¹ In addition to raising orphans, adopting children, serving as godparents, and other forms of creating relationships, María del Rosario y Nieves employed the mechanisms of slavery and manumission to secure kin.

A mobile kinship did not imply a relationship of equals. María del Rosario y Nieves engaged in many conditional manumission arrangements, a common tactic employed to control enslaved people throughout the Americas, to secure her new kin. ¹⁰² She awarded María Conga with a legal manumission that included the obligation that each Saturday the manumitted woman prayed for María del Rosario y Nieves’ deceased daughter, and María Popo would be manumitted following her former owner’s death to pray for her slaveholder’s soul. Manumission also did the work of kinship. Carrying on her family’s devotion, María del Rosario y Nieves left two young enslaved boys to serve the Dominicans, the order intimately associated with her father. In addition to caring for her future soul in purgatory, and that of her daughter, another enslaved girl was left to serve the widow’s nephew for fourteen years following her death. Activating the manumitted kin in service of her own family, a few years later, María del Rosario y Nieves mandated that María Conga’s youngest son care for a confraternity housed in the Santa Clara convent (her daughter’s institution) for thirty years and then be freed. ¹⁰³ These promises worked on two levels. Since slaveholders revised manumission agreements, the enslaved continued good service supposedly ensured the eventual freedom of their children. ¹⁰⁴ At the same time, María del Rosario y Nieves could count on the loyalty of the enslaved women who served her as she wound their lives closer into her own.

The loyal service of the enslaved or freed was part of a kinship continuum. In 1701, María del Rosario y Nieves declared that Jacinta Lopez, age twelve, would be freed on her death that would not occur until 1714. ¹⁰⁵ Jacinta Lopez was also bound to care for and “teach good customs” to her younger sisters whom María del Rosario y Nieves freed following her death. ¹⁰⁶ By 1710, the widow revised her wishes perhaps in light of her elderly and widowed state. She freed María Jacinta Lopez (who now born the first name of her patron), age twenty-three along with her quarterón sons, Joseph de la Cruz and Manuel del Sacramento, whose father was an unnamed Spaniard. María del Rosario y Nieves, like other slaveholders, provided a common reason for her actions; María Jacinta Lopez’s mother (María Popo) had been a very loyal and good slave. At the same time, she underlined her kinship with the newly freed young woman by declaring that María Jacinta Lopez had been born in her household and “into her arms.” ¹⁰⁷ In this mobile construction of kinship, slavery made the relationship.

Two years later, María del Rosario y Nieves added two additional ties to deepen her relationship with María Jacinta Lopez. First, she advocated that Juana Pardo Ortiz, another daughter of María Popo, and María Jacinta Lopez’s sister, be freed from the Santa Clara convent where she had been held as a slave following the death of her owner, Ana de Santo Domingo, María del Rosario y Nieves’ legitimate daughter. In addition to collecting long overdue compensation from the nuns, María del Rosario y Nieves claimed that her husband had freed the twenty-year-old black woman after serving as her godparent. ¹⁰⁸ Regardless of the claim’s outcome, María del Rosario y Nieves set up a debt that could not be repaid and a reason for interminable gratitude from Juana Pardo Ortiz as well as the rest of her family. ¹⁰⁹ Set in the context of slaveholding, bonds such as these could only be absorbed into the continuity of kinship.

Second, María del Rosario y Nieves donated her house to her newly freed former slave due to her great love that “having been born and raised in my arms and in my house as if she was my daughter.” ¹¹⁰ Ties of intimacy between enslaved and freed people of color and their current or former slaveholder were not unusual, especially among women who took part in shared domestic lives. ¹¹¹ Within slavery, calling on an enslaved or manumitted woman with the kinship term of “daughter” also signaled continuing obligations. With the gift of her house, María del Rosario y Nieves also declared that María Jacinta Lopez (and her family) would allow her sister, Juana de las Nieves Rodríguez to continue living in the small annex for the rest of her life and for María Jacinta Lopez’s descendants to pay for masses at the Dominican church indefinitely. Ex-slaves became family caretakers.

A year before her death, María del Rosario y Nieves continued to employ promises of freedom and gifts of property as a way of influencing her enslaved or freed domestic staff. In her 1713 will, she updated the initial manumission conditions for the two enslaved families of María Popo and María Conga. She also attempted to further create or solidify her kinship with Jacinta Lopez (who no longer employed the name of her former owner). ¹¹² María del Rosario y Nieves set aside 500 pesos to provide shoes, clothing, food, and other assistance for Jacinta Lopez’s three young sons. ¹¹³ Caring for children was both a familial gesture and a mark of ownership. In doing so, María del Rosario y Nieves provided material assistance. The gift of patronage also implied that Jacinta Lopez was incapable of sufficiently providing for her children, the task of a parent. At the same time, María del Rosario y Nieves continued to assert her position as slaveholder such as issuing new manumission agreements to people she had previously declared legally free. ¹¹⁴ Though previous notarized entries attested that Jacinta Lopez was freed, María del Rosario y Nieves declared in her 1713 will that the “letters of freedom…I approve and ratify.” ¹¹⁵ In these notarial acts, the widow reaffirmed her slaveholding position and indicated that she had been withholding her final blessing of Jacinta Lopez’s manumission. In many ways, theirs was a kinship that was indefinitely wrapped within the dynamics of slaveholding.

Kinship also challenged slaveholding, as María del Rosario y Nieves needed Jacinta Lopez. Four days before her funeral, María del Rosario y Nieves provided Jacinta Lopez with additional means to serve as her proxy, a role suitable for kin. In a codicil, she left a desk, a trunk with a lock, and eight devotional paintings to Jacinta Lopez, now identified as a free woman of color. ¹¹⁶ With these gifts, Jacinta Lopez could continue to conduct business, collect funds, and engage in the Nieves’ family devotional leanings. The control or care that María del Rosario y Nieves lavished on Jacinta Lopez and her family implied that the young woman of color continued to work for her former owner. ¹¹⁷ Two days before her death, María del Rosario y Nieves declared that Jacinta Lopez would collect one of the widow’s outstanding debts. ¹¹⁸ The widow sealed her deal with an act of slavery and patronage. She donated an enslaved fourteen-year-old, Feliciano, to serve Jacinta Lopez and her mother (María Popo) until their deaths. ¹¹⁹ Feliciano proved to have “bad habits” especially running away, and a year following María del Rosario y Nieves’ death, Jacinta Lopez sold him since he “was too young to be of service to anyone.” ¹²⁰ Nonetheless, the work of an enslaved person translated into the labor of a freed kinswoman who had been manumitted to serve her former owner.

Conclusions: Meanings of Freedom

Public fatherhood mattered, and was both constructed and mobilized, in the negotiation between slavery and freedom. In 1702, the first notarized evidence of Andrea de Castro’s lengthy manumission negotiations appears. She began by requesting her own freedom from doña Beatriz María Gonzales de Nodales who also agreed to raise her youngest son and “generously” allowed her manumitted slave to leave the city. ¹²¹ Freeing her four children proved much more difficult. In 1707, the slaveholder agreed to free the children upon her death with Andrea de Castro paying 100 pesos for each of the three younger children and a donation received for her oldest son, Joseph Valeriano. ¹²² When this arrangement was finally executed, a notary issued four cartas de libertad for the young children in 1709 with a higher price for the eldest. ¹²³ Andrea de Castro’s relationship with her former owner extended into her manumitted status while her children remained enslaved and she remained a servant. Indicating the continuing obligations between the two women, upon her death, the former owner paid Andrea de Castro an exact sum (suggesting a debt or payment for wages) and the cost of her younger children. ¹²⁴ The meaning of these payments went beyond an exchange of slaveholding and manumission, and these funds may have provided Andrea de Castro with the ability to purchase a house in 1717. ¹²⁵ A mobile construction of kinship certainly allowed enslaved and manumitted people to manage their relations with slaveholders, but Andrea de Castro made a definitive move of freedom by creating an independent domestic sphere for herself and her children.

Andrea de Castro’s son marked his free status by revising his public identity. First, as a married man, he paid for the manumission of his wife. ¹²⁶ Underlining her freed status, and perhaps making a claim to that of their three children, the young tailor revised his will immediately. He declared his wife was “at present is free and enjoys her freedom” and would serve as his executor. ¹²⁷ Second, he named himself as Valeriano de Ortega, a “natural” (recognized though born out of wedlock) son of Francisco de Ortega. In Valeriano de Ortega’s version, his father had provided the funds to their owner “to whom he owed his freedom.” ¹²⁸ According to Valeriano de Ortega, the generous father contrasted with a stingy master who had retained the funds and not passed them along the appropriate channels. Third, Valeriano de Ortega claimed to be a native of Cuzco in his 1724 will while his owner had claimed he had been born in her house. It is possible that the entire household had moved to Trujillo, but, more interestingly, Valeriano de Ortega gestured to a network that lay outside local boundaries. According to his will and other notary records, he was connected to clerics who traveled to Spain and were in debt to him. ¹²⁹ Moving into freedom, therefore, implied untangling from slaveholder attachments, even if they were framed as kinships. Valeriano de Ortega built his expanding networks on a connection to his father who, with the assistance of his mother, provided the financial means and the surname to step away from a former owner.

What do these accounts of enslaved and freed kinship or kinship across slavery illuminate? To enslaved and freed people of Trujillo in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and elsewhere, freedom meant the ability to control what happened to themselves but also to their family, as well as the ability to come and go as they please, attend to their own affairs, and receive wages for their labor. ¹³⁰ These goals were not so easy to obtain even if slaveholders granted a legal manumission. How could a free man be free if his wife worked in intimate capacities for another man? How could a woman be free if her children remained with their former slaveholder? These quandaries could sometimes be resolved through kinship. Many slaveholders throughout the Americas did not claim their relations. Those who did, as this article has suggested, added to the bonds of slavery but also facilitated manumission and even promoted the financial well-being of their descendants. At the same time, by recognizing how kinship was constructed within the demands of slaveholding, this article has pointed to how slaveholders bound their kin and their slaves closer to them by recognizing their relationships. Women and men of the African Diaspora were deft handlers of kinship construction. Enslaved men and women also improved their family’s status with the financial support of these kin owners regardless of how public their paternities or demands made of those treated “like daughters.” By examining strategies of kinship, slavery, and manumission in conjunction with each other and exploring when enslaved men named kinships with slaveholders that normally went unspoken, I posit that freedom, like kinship, was a social process that included a range of destructive and nurturing relations. Enslaved or freed, people of the African Diaspora understood kinship and slavery’s intimate ties, and as a result, constructed freedom with articulated and silenced families, slaveholders, and enslaved.