Lokken 1
Marriage as Slave Emancipation:
African-descended Men, Indigenous Women, and Mestizaje in Rural Colonial Guatemala
Paul Lokken
University of Florida
Prepared for delivery at the 2000 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association
Hyatt Regency Miami, March 16-18, 2000
On the 17th of August in 1671, a 49-year-old Angolan slave of a Dominican-owned sugar
plantation on Guatemala’s Pacific coast declared his intention to wed an indigenous widow from
the nearby town of Escuintla.1 The slave, Manuel de Morales, was one of about thirty belonging
to this particular Dominican ingenio, located in the corregimiento of Escuintepeque2 and the
smallest of several which the Dominican order possessed in the Spanish colonial Province of
Guatemala in the late seventeenth century.3 Morales’ proposed spouse, Inés Hernandes, worked
on a nearby sugar-producing operation held by a private landowner. Hernandes’ first husband had
also been of African origins, although it is not clear if he had been free or enslaved.
Four witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage, two on behalf of each
of the prospective partners. One of Morales’ witnesses was Silvestre Ramírez, a mulatto slave of
Captain Fernando Alvares de Rebolorio, from whom the Dominicans had purchased their
Escuintepeque property a few years earlier. Ramírez, who had worked alongside Morales for
twelve years on the ingenio, had himself been married to an Indian woman named María de la
1
Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez,” Guatemala City (hereafter AHA),
signatura A4.16, legajo T4 1.11, expediente 271 (hereafter A4.16, T4 1.11:271). Section A4.16 of the AHA is
designated “Informaciones Matrimoniales,” and holds diligencias matrimoniales submitted to the Bishop of
Guatemala and Verapaz from all over the diocese. I refer subsequently to these diligencias as “marriage petitions,”
although the meaning is more one of process. The Church solicited these petitions to ensure that intended spouses
were willing participants, and especially to prevent couples deemed to be too closely related to marry under
ecclesiastical law from doing so without obtaining a dispensation. On the particulars of the information solicited
from prospective marital partners, see Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias Occidentales y
particular de la gobernación de Chiapa y Guatemala, 2 vols., (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1988), 2:346.
2
For the sake of clarity, I refer to the district as Escuintepeque and its capital as Escuintla although the
two names were, in fact, interchangeable.
3
The figure of thirty slaves is taken from a 1670 survey of Guatemalan sugar plantations, cited in J.C.
Pinto Soria, El valle central de Guatemala (1524-1821): un análisis acerca del origen histórico-económico del
regionalismo en centroamérica, (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1988), 27-28. The provincia of Guatemala,
made up roughly of the present-day republics of Guatemala and El Salvador, was one of several provinces within
the larger colonial audiencia of Guatemala, which stretched from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Its boundaries essentially
paralleled those of the diocese of Guatemala and Verapaz.
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Cruz, since deceased. The remaining three witnesses included two other enslaved men--both
defined as negro--and a free mulatto.4
This case of marriage between an enslaved man of African descent and a free woman of
indigenous origins is remarkable only in the sense that it was not extraordinary in the context of
rural seventeenth-century Guatemala. The decision of Morales and Hernandes to marry fell
squarely within an identifiable pattern of similar marital unions between enslaved men and free
women during the last three decades of the century. An analysis of 407 marriage petitions dating
from 1671, 1681, 1691, and 1701 and originating in every corner of the Province of Guatemala,
with the exception of the capital,5 reveals that 41, or some ten percent, involved at least one
prospective spouse who was a slave. Twenty-six of the petitions involving slaves, or some twothirds of the total, brought together an enslaved man and a free woman. In only five, conversely,
was an enslaved woman preparing to wed a free man. The remaining ten petitions listed both
intended partners as slaves.6
It is perhaps not especially surprising that the famous Spanish endowment of slaves with
an array of legal protections, including the right to marry, appears to have been operative in
practice in seventeenth-century Guatemala.7 The burdens of labor in that society fell most heavily
4
AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:271.
5
I excluded diligencias produced in the capital of Spanish Central America, Santiago de Guatemala
(today’s Antigua), unless the prospective spouses were residents elsewhere. Christopher Lutz has already
published a comprehensive demographic survey of this city, which serves as my point of departure for research on
rural areas. See Christopher H. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773, City, Caste, and the Colonial
Experience, (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
6
The legajos examined, located in AHA, A4.16, include T4 1.12 (1670-1671), T4 1.11 (1671), T4 105
(1680-1681), T5 106 (1691), and T6 105 (1701). I looked at nearly 1,000 diligencias in total, but excluded for
statistical purposes all those from years other than the four mentioned above--including many misfiled ones--as
well as those from the capital. I did not project my statistical analysis back further than 1671 because petitions
dating from earlier years, collected for the most part in a single legajo, T5 1.21 (1618-1669), are too few for any
one year. It is of utmost importance to note that tributary Indians were exempted by papal decree from the
requirement to submit petitions to the Bishop, because of their supposed “childishness.” Indios tributarios
marrying non-tributaries or tributaries from other communities do appear, but, fundamentally, the petitions record
the marriage intentions of the small but growing minority of Guatemala’s inhabitants who were not defined as
indigenous tributaries. They appear as españoles/as, mestizos/as, mulatos/as libres or esclavos/as, negros/as libres
or esclavos/as, and indios/as laboríos/as. The latter term derived from the Caribbean naboría, referring originally
in colonial Guatemala to indigenous servants who were tied to Spanish households, and eventually to all
individuals defined as Indian who were not on the tribute rolls of an indigenous community. On the exemption
granted to tributary Indians, see Point 10 of Paul III’s 1537 bull “Altitudo divini consillii, quod humana ne sit, &
infra,” in Balthasar de Tobar, Compendio Bulario Indico, vol. 1, Manuel Gutiérrez de Arce, ed., (Sevilla: Escuela
de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1954), 211. Succeeding bulls reiterating this
dispensation are mentioned in Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida: discurso historial y
demostración natural, material, militar, y política del reyno de Guatemala, 3 vols., Biblioteca “Goathemala” vols.
6-8, (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1932-1933), 3:445.
7
For a concise and skeptical comparative assessment of the Spanish slave laws which grew out of the
medieval Siete Partidas, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, (Ithaca, N.Y.:
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on a vast indigenous tributary majority,8 making the category “slave” far less redolent of
extremely low social status than it was in places whose economies were more dependent on the
production of African-descended workers.9 While the Spanish racial hierarchy discriminated
severely in theory against people defined as negro/a or mulato/a, in practice, in Guatemala, even
African-descended slaves often filled supervisory and other social and economic niches above the
rank of manual worker, auxiliaries to Spanish rule. James Lockhart’s suggestion that “[w]ithin
Spanish American society overall, ‘slave,’ aside from some obvious disadvantages, was a rather
middling role” applies perhaps nowhere better than to colonial Guatemala, precisely because the
local economy was less dependent on African-descended labor than almost any other area of the
Americas.10
The fact that slaves were a decided minority of Guatemala’s population does not mean
that they were unimportant, however. Black and mulatto bondservants lived and worked
throughout the Province, even in remote western highland regions like Huehuetenango, where the
supply of indigenous labor was seemingly endless.11 It was especially in eastern and southern
lowland areas of the Province, though, that slave populations of African origins had a significant
impact on local societies. That impact was most notable with relation to the processes of
mestizaje which produced an ever-expanding social sector located between Spaniards and Indian
tributaries. Evidence cobbled together from the “Razón” and the marriage petitions mentioned
Cornell University Press, 1966), 102-106.
8
Outside of the capital, the district of Acasaguastlán, lying toward the Province of Guatemala’s Caribbean
outlet, was probably the most non-Indian region of the province in the late seventeenth century. Fully two-thirds of
its population was made up of Indian tributaries. My demographic estimates for total population in the province’s
various districts are based primarily on “Razón de las ciudades, villas y lugares, vecindarios y tributarios de que se
componen las Provincias del Distrito de este Audiencia (1682),” Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI),
Contaduría 815. Most corregidores and alcaldes mayores submitted their reports in 1683, but some, like the
administrator of Acasaguastlán, failed entirely to fulfill their census duties. My figures for Acasaguastlán, thus,
are taken from Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2:247.
9
Marvin Harris’ distinction between highland regions dominated by indigenous labor and lowland regions
dependent on African-descended workforces, and the differing consequences for racial hierarchies in highland
versus lowland regions, remains instructive. See Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas, (New York:
Walker and Company, 1964), esp. Chapter 2.
10
James Lockhart, “Social Organization and Social Change in Colonial Spanish America,” Leslie Bethell,
ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 278. Lockhart
could not, on the other hand, have had in mind a place like nineteenth-century Cuba, a Spanish colony and home
to one of the more brutal sugar-driven and slave-based economies in the history of the Americas. See, for example,
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: complejo economico social cubano del azucar, 3 vols., (La Habana :
Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978); Rebecca J, Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labor,
1860-1899, (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1985).
11
The 1687 will of Baltasar de Herrera of Chiantla, a village located just north of the town of
Huehuetenango, contained references to no fewer than nine slaves which Herrera either owned or was holding in
trust for others. See Archivo General de Centroamérica (hereafter AGCA), signatura A1.20, legajo 1497,
expediente 9974 (hereafter in the following format A1.20. 1497. 9974).
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above suggests that blacks and mulattos, both slave and free, made up roughly 40 percent of the
small but growing non-indigenous population of eastern and southern Guatemala in the late
seventeenth century. That proportion varied significantly from district to district, rising to as
much as two-thirds of the non-Indian sector in Escuintepeque and in and around the Valle de las
Vacas, just east of Santiago where Guatemala City now lies, and ranging closer to one-third in
many areas of what is now El Salvador.12
Almost without exception, this African-descended population was largely free and
identified as mulatto by the end of the seventeenth century.13 In part this development owed to a
near-cessation of slave imports into Central America between the 1630s and the 1690s.14 The
exact mechanisms through which enslaved people became free are not explained by a reduction in
imports, however.
Manumission certainly must have been one important factor contributing to the increase in
a free population of color. Indeed, the growth of a free population of African origins in colonial
Spanish America has been ascribed largely to processes of manumission, whether freedom was
granted by slave-owners or purchased by slaves themselves. Such processes, it has been
emphasized, favored young women on the whole, and were more characteristic of urban than
rural areas.15
12
For a full accounting of the Province’s population by region, see my forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation,
“From Black to Ladino: People of African Descent, Mestizaje, and Racial Hierarchy in Rural Colonial Guatemala,
1600-1730.”
13
In 1691, for example, just under 40 percent of petitioners in the Province-wide sample were defined as
mulatto or black, both slave and free. Fully four-fifths of this African-descended sector was made up of free
mulattos, who thus made up roughly 32 percent of petitioners from all categories. The next largest category of
petitioners, mestizos, comprised just over 16 percent of the overall total.
14
Lutz, Santiago, 86. One official said imports stopped altogether after 1638 for more than three decades.
A Spanish ban on the slave trade between 1640 and 1662 due to imperial crises, plus low demand, were the most
important factors in this development, although imports did not pick up again even when officials in Santiago
began requesting new supplies after the ban was lifted. See AGCA, A1.23. 1517. 10072. ff.108-108v. (1646);
A1.23. 2197. 15751. ff.97 and copies on ff.111v., 113 (1664); A1.23. 2199. 15755. f.50 (1670); Frederick P.
Bowser, “Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society,” in Bethell, ed., Cambridge History, 2:362. Smuggling
did occur, however. No fewer than 86 slaves were landed illegally at Trujillo from the ship Santa María de los
Remedios y San Lorenzo in 1641, and as many as 76 of these made it to San Miguel, east of San Salvador, the
following year. In 1660, meanwhile, the audiencia sold two slaves at auction who were said to have escaped from
a Dutch slaver docked for “re-supply” in Trujillo after being “blown off course.” See AGCA, A1.24. 1559. 10203.
ff.35-37v., 93-95v. (1642); A1.23. 1519. 10074. ff. 90-90v. (1662); Alonso Moratalla Tobar a la Corona, 10
February 1644, AGI, Guatemala 16, R.5, N.30.
15
For a summary of evidence concerning the nature of manumission and its relationship to the growth of
free populations of color in Spanish America, see Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the
Caribbean, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 217-230. A recent work demonstrating that
manumission was most often an urban phenomenon is Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family
and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854, trans. Alexandra Stern, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), 91-92.
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In this paper, though, attention is paid to the demographic effects of a different sort of
process of “emancipation,” that emerging out of relationships between enslaved men and free
women. In seventeenth-century rural Guatemala, it seems that these relationships, marital or not,
were also an important if not easily quantifiable source of growth for a free population defined by
African origins.16 Such relationships may have arisen in part out of the fact that as many as twothirds of imported slaves, as elsewhere in the Americas, were males.17 I argue here, however, that
formal marital unions in particular were likely to have been pursued consciously by male slaves as
a strategy not only for emancipating their children, but also for giving them legitimacy and thereby
further enhancing their social status.
Returning to the district of Escuintepeque, site of the proposed marriage between Manuel
de Morales and Inés Hernandes with which this paper opened, it can be argued that the intended
union between this negro esclavo and india serves in many respects as a microcosm of
seventeenth-century mestizaje in the Pacific coast region of which its participants were residents.
Escuintepeque was precisely the sort of place where one might have expected to encounter
significant concentrations of people identified by African descent in the Americas. Located
directly south of Santiago de Guatemala, it was comprised in the main of torrid and lightly
inhabited Pacific lowlands dotted with vast, sprawling rural enterprises on which cattle, sugar, and
indigo were raised. Marriage petitions, the 1683 Razón detailing Spanish Central American
populations, and scattered other observations by contemporary observers reveal that the nonindigenous sector of the lowland population of Escuintepeque was indeed dominated by people
who were defined on the basis of African descent.18
16
In the capital, Santiago, 56 percent of black slaves and 80 percent of mulatto slaves married free people
between 1593 and 1769. See Lutz, Santiago, 88-89. Unfortunately, Lutz does not break down the figures
according to gender.
17
Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 71-72. A 1613 inspection of the slaveship Nuestra Señora de Nazarén at
Guatemala’s Caribbean port of Santo Tomás de Castilla, for example, revealed a “cargo” from Angola of 97 men
and boys and 39 women and girls. Meanwhile, an inventory of the González Donis, or “Anís,” ingenio done in
1630 reveals that men outnumbered women more than two to one. This sugar plantation held more than
180 slaves at the time. See AGCA, A3.5. 67. 1291. (1613); A1.20. 536. ff.296v.-302 (1630).
18
Thirty-three of 52 petitioners in 26 petitions emanating from Escuintepeque in 1671, 1681, 1691, and
1701 were defined by African descent. The other petitioners included eight mestizos, seven Indians, one undefined
individual, and just one Spaniard. In two cases, a petitioner’s status was illegible. See AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:122,
140, and T5 1.21:143, 184, and T4 1.11:237, 256, and 271 (1671); AHA, A4.16, T4 105:258, 275, 294, 320, 380,
and 390 (1681); T5 106:26, 39, 66, 112, 133, 140, 160, 165, and 215 (1691); T6 105:2382, 2384, 2388, and one of
14 unnumbered cases included in T6 105 (1701). See also “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, ff.4v.-9.; Fuentes y
Guzmán, Recordación florida, II, 79, 104; “Descripción de los conventos de la Santa Provincia del Nombre de
Jesús de Guatemala, hecha el año de 1689,” transcription by J. Joaquín Pardo, in Francisco Vázquez, Crónica de la
Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la Orden de Nuestro Seráfico Padre San Francisco en
el Reino de la Nueva España, vol. 4, 2nd ed., Biblioteca “Goathemala” vol. 17, (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía
e Historia, 1937), 55.
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The activities of these people often centered on the only town in colonial Guatemala
founded explicitly by and for free blacks and mulattos, the lowland villa of San Diego de la
Gomera. Established near the Pacific coast shortly after the arrival in 1611 of the Conde de la
Gomera as President of the audiencia of Guatemala, the town had been founded as part of the
new President’s efforts to eliminate the threat people of African descent were said to represent
along the coast. These efforts had included the dispatch of an armed expeditionary force to
destroy a small maroon community which had been established a few years earlier along the coast
south of San Antonio Suchitepéquez, and the “reduction” of free blacks and mulattoes living
illegally in and around local Indian villages.19 Partial incentive for settlement at San Diego de la
Gomera was a grant to its townspeople of control over saltpans at Sipacate, on the coast. A
decade later, the traveler Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa described San Diego as a “village of free
blacks and mulattos, with their own cabildo, alcaldes, and regidores.”20
By the late seventeenth century, the town’s residents formed an important part of the
workforce on neighboring rural estates belonging to prominent landowners like don Juan de
Gálvez and Pedro de Loi Valdez.21 They also worked local fisheries, and the saltpans that had
been granted to the town’s founders. A substantial degree of local autonomy apparently existed,
owing to the relative absence in the area of Spaniards. The latter may in general have shared the
opinion of their compatriot Fuentes y Guzmán, who characterized the environment in which salt
was produced along the Pacific coast as “very disagreeable, and only fit for the mulatto fishermen
native to the region.”22 In any case, the inhabitants of La Gomera jealously guarded their
autonomy. In 1700, a dispute between themselves and don Juan de Gálvez over access to the
saltpans at Sipacate led to open rebellion by the local militia of color against the audiencia. A
space for this revolt was created by an outbreak of wider social unrest tied to the arrival of a
“meddling” royal investigator.23
Most significant with relation to the argument made in this paper, though, is that in 1683,
the 125 or so residents of a town founded some seventy years before by “blacks and mulattos”
19
Conde de la Gomera a la Corona, 14 November 1611, AGI, Guatemala 13, R.3, N.33; “Autos del
servicio que hizo el capitán Juan ruiz daviles . . . de la conquista y pacificación de los negros alçados que estaban
en la barra i montañas de tulat,” AGI, Guatemala 67 (1626).
20
Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales, (Washington,
1948), 208-209; “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, ff.5v.-6v.; “Testimonio de los Autos Proveydos Por El Señor
Licenciado Don Francisco Gómez de la Madriz en favor de los Mulatos de la Villa de San Diego de la Gomera,
1700,” AGI, Guatemala 285.
21
“Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, f.6v.
22
Fuentes y Guzmán’s reference was to the saltpans at the barra of Iztapa, a port and fishing community
just east of Sipacate. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2:104.
23
“Testimonio,” AGI, Guatemala 285; Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de
Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de Predicadores, Libro VI, Biblioteca “Goathemala” vol. 24, (Guatemala:
Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1971), 129; María del Carmen León Cázares, Un levantamiento en nombre del
Rey Nuestro Señor: testimonios indígenas relacionados con el visitador Francisco Gómez de Lamadriz, (México:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988), 68-69.
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were described as “ttodos mulattos.”24 Marriage petitions from Escuintepeque indicate strongly
that the marital strategies of enslaved men of African descent may have played an important role
in the mestizaje which the corregidor’s report suggests was occurring locally. Five of the
26 petitions from Escuintepeque--or nearly 20 percent of the total--included a slave as a marital
partner. All five cases involved an enslaved man as one intended spouse, while in at least four of
the five, the female partner was a free woman.25 The women who can be identified were defined
in two cases as indias, and in two as mulatas libres. Two of eight other, more random, petitions
from Escuintepeque which date from other years also involved slaves as petitioners. Both
exhibited the same pattern of marriage between enslaved men and free women, with the latter
being, again, an india in one case and a free mulatta in the other.26
It is especially important to consider the marital context within which these particular
unions were proposed. While three of the five enslaved men who appeared as petitioners in the
core sample from Escuintepeque were defined as black, as were both of the slaves who turned up
in the extra, more random petitions, no free petitioners from Escuintepeque were identified as
negro/a. By contrast, 28 of the 52 petitioners in the district’s core sample were designated as
mulato/a libre, some 54 percent of the total.27
The origins of Escuintepeque’s free mulatto population may thus have lain in substantial
measure in relationships, marital or otherwise, between African-descended men and indigenous
women.28 The predominance of men among enslaved workers on coastal landholdings must
certainly have been an important factor in this process. For example, a 1619 inventory of a local
ingenio which became the subject of a dispute between a prominent resident of the capital,
Francisco de Mesa, and his daughter and son-in-law, showed that 25 of 28 slaves on the property
were male. Two of the three enslaved women on the property were listed as wives of members of
24
“Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, f.6.
25
The fifth woman’s identity is illegible.
26
The eight additional petitions: AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:341 and 342 (1673); T4 105:224, 226, and
235 (1680); T4 105:388 (1685?); T6 105:2431 (1705); and T6 105:2376 (1708).
27
Underscoring to an even greater extent the central role of blacks and mulattos in Escuintepeque’s
variant of colonial mestizaje is the fact that 21 of 26 petitions--over 80 percent--involved at least one person
identified by African origins. The striking difference between the “racial” categorization of slaves and free people
of African origins in Escuintepeque, meanwhile, carried over into the ranks of witnesses to marriage petitions.
Seven black slaves, no mulatto slaves, one free black, and 26 free mulattos appear among the witnesses in the 26
core petitions.
28
The application of the term mulato/a to the children of African-Indian as well as African-Spanish
unions, incidentally, was the norm in seventeenth-century Guatemala. Fuentes y Guzmán, for example, said that
Chipilapa, the cabecera of the Pacific coast parish in which San Diego de la Gomera was located, was “poblado de
mulatos los más de ellos de los que llaman zambos; cuya generación es de la mezcla de indias con negros.”
Indeed, the chronicler’s use of the term zambo represents a rare occasion on which that term crops up in
contemporary sources. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2:79; Lutz, Santiago, 46, 267 note1. I discuss
below some specific examples in which the children of black slaves and Indian women were labeled mulato/a.
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the operation’s male slave population, but five other enslaved men on the ingenio were described
as being married to free women. These women included four indias and just one negra.29
Since matrimony was hardly a rigid prerequisite either for the initiation of sexual relations
or for the production of children in seventeenth-century Spanish America, factors other than
sexual desire were likely to have come into play in the decisions of enslaved men to pursue marital
bonds with free women.30 As I have argued above, these factors probably included the desire to
grant free birth to children. At the same time, though, a direct relationship did exist between slave
demographics and the likelihood that enslaved men would marry free women, as broader regional
analysis of marriage involving slaves in the Province of Guatemala reveals. The reasons for this
correlation, however, did not necessarily lie in slaves’ desires regarding marriage.
The only area of the Province of Guatemala in which marriage petitions involving two
slaves outnumbered those bringing together a slave and a free individual was the region just east
of Santiago de Guatemala. The area surrounding the Valle de las Vacas, where Guatemala City
now lies, was a major source of wheat, sugar, and other agricultural supplies for the colonial
capital.31 Eight of the ten marriage petitions from the entire Province-wide sample in which both
petitioners were slaves came from this one small area.32 These eight petitions, in turn, involved
only two properties: large ingenios owned, respectively, by the Jesuit order and the Arrivillaga
family. Both of these sugar-producing operations were located in the vicinity of Lake Amatitlán,
just south of present-day Guatemala City. In 1670, the Jesuit holding employed 108 slaves, while
121 labored on the Arrivillaga plantation.33
These plantations may have provided a critical mass of slaves of both sexes necessary to
the formation of a substantial number of marriages within the slave population. It is not at all
clear, though, whether slaves themselves preferred such marriages, or if they were promoted more
by owners of relatively large slave populations, who could not have failed to desire the
proliferation of such unions as a means of maintaining high numbers of bondservants during a time
of low imports. Enslaved women, of course, had few marital options other than unions with
fellow slaves, because of the “law of the womb.” Their unattractiveness to free partners is
29
AGCA, A1.15. 4103. 32523.
30
Illegitimacy rates ran at 50 percent or higher in seventeenth-century Guadalajara, in New Spain, and
may have been similarly high in Guatemala. See Thomas Calvo, “The Warmth of the Hearth: SeventeenthCentury Guadalajara Families,” in Asunción Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America,
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 287-312, esp. 293-295.
31
According to Fuentes y Guzmán, for example, sugar plantations in this region supplied most of the
capital’s needs. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 1:224.
32
The region produced just three petitions bringing together a slave and a free person. The 52 petitions
making up the sample from this area are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:94, 95, 102, 123, 146, 170, 190, 191, 193, 195,
204, and T4 1.11:216, 233, 239, and 293 (1671); T4 105:220, 244, 252, 263, 271, 295, 309, 361, and 369 (1681);
T5 106:16, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33, 56, 61, 80, 81, 82, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 115, and 147 (1691);
T6 105:2368, 2392, 2409, 2413, 2417, 2419, 2421, and 2443 (1701).
33
Pinto Soria, El valle central, 26-27.
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evidenced by the fact that male slaves married outside the slave population more than five times as
often as they did, according to the sample of marriage petitions examined here.34 It seems less
likely, though, that men among the slave population would have sought in general to wed female
slaves if the option of marrying free women were available. Indeed, while the Arrivillaga
plantation produced four marriage petitions uniting two slaves, it was also home to two of the
three enslaved men who appear in petitions from this region as proposed spouses of free women.
More extensive research into the marriage petitions from this area, colonial Guatemala’s
major sugar-producing region, might provide a clearer understanding of the decisions slaves were
able to make regarding marriage in the one area of the Province that held concentrations of slaves
reminiscent of areas of the Americas more dependent on coerced African labor. For one thing, no
slaves from the other major sugar plantations located in the immediate vicinity of Lake Amatitlán
turned up as petitioners.35 Two Dominican-owned ingenios, each much larger than the one in
Escuintepeque, held roughly 225 slaves between them in 1670, and another 84 slaves toiled on a
nearby sugar plantation owned by the Mercedarian order.36 The absence of any enslaved
petitioners from these landholdings is difficult to explain, unless they simply did not happen to
turn up in the particular years selected for analysis.37
It probably cannot be argued with certainty that enslaved men would have preferred to
marry free women even when living among relatively sizable populations of slaves, and were only
prevented from doing so by active intervention on the part of their owners. I would suggest,
however, that slaves in the sugar-producing region just south of the Valle de las Vacas must have
played a major role in the emergence there of a free sector of partial African origins that already
appears to have been much larger than the local slave population by the late seventeenth century.
While 19 of 104 petitioners in the sample from the region, or 18 percent, were slaves, 42 were
free mulattos. Including three free blacks who also appear as intended marital partners, members
of the free sector defined by African origins constituted over 43 percent of all petitioners.
34
Twenty-six petitions involved males slaves marrying free partners, and only five listed enslaved women
as proposed spouses of free men.
35
The region discussed here was near Petapa. See map.
36
Pinto Soria, El valle central, 27-28.
37
It is noteworthy that one other Dominican ingenio, a massive plantation in Verapaz called San
Gerónimo which possessed as many as 700 slaves by the mid-eighteenth century, also produced no petitions from
slaves in the years examined. Perhaps the Dominicans made slave marriages a private matter, in keeping with
their longstanding resistance to episcopal authority in colonial Guatemala. On the other hand, slaves from the
Dominican holdings mentioned above do appear as witnesses and as parents of proposed spouses in petitions (see
below), while, as already indicated, slaves from the smaller ingenio in Escuintepeque turn up as petitioners. On
San Gerónimo, see A.C. Beatriz Palomo de Lewin, “Esclavos negros en Guatemala, 1723-1773,” (Tesis de
Licenciatura: Universidad del Valle, 1992), 72; Miles L. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America,
1680-1840, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 55; Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo:
ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca,13th ed., (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones en Marcha,
1994), 285 and 702 note 79.
Lokken 10
The link tying marital relationships between enslaved men and free women to the growth
of a free sector of color in and around the Valle de las Vacas can be drawn somewhat differently
than was the case for Escuintepeque. Three marriage petitions involving local inhabitants, all
dating from 1671, specifically designate petitioners as the products of such unions. These
petitions have the added benefit of demonstrating that enslaved men from all three major
Dominican sugar plantations, as well as the Jesuit-owned one, found free spouses on occasion, at
least prior to the period from which my sample is taken.
In one petition presented by two free mulatto employees of the Jesuit ingenio, the woman,
Felipa de Jesús, was listed as the legitimate daughter of a mulatto slave of the Jesuits named
Diego de Godoy, and the free mulatta Polonia de la Cruz.38 The second petition was filed in San
Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, well to the northeast of the Valle de las Vacas, but listed the parents of
the female petitioner as residents of the Dominican-owned Anís ingenio near Lake Amatitlán.
The petitioner in this case, a mulata libre named Micaela Aguilar, was the legitimate daughter of
an enslaved black father, Francisco de la Cruz, and a free mulatta mother, Micaela Aguilar.39
Both petitioners in the third case appear to have been the children of enslaved fathers and
free mothers. The man, Pasqual de los Santos, was described as a free mulatto worker on the
other Dominican ingenio in the Amatitlán region, Rosario, and identified as the legitimate son of
Juan de la Cruz, a black slave on the Rosario property, and a free mulatta named María de la
Presentación. The woman, meanwhile, a free mulatta named Magdalena Ortiz, came from the
sugar plantation at San Gerónimo. Her father was listed as the mulatto slave Domingo de Sosa,
and even though her mother, María de la Cruz, was left undefined, chances are good that mother
and daughter shared free status.40
Another 1671 petition involving the ingenio at San Gerónimo provides additional evidence
of the important role that large sugar plantations may have played in mestizaje involving enslaved
men and free women, more important than statistics concerning petitioners alone indicate at first
glance. This petition was also presented in San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, which lay just a few
leagues to the east of San Gerónimo. The intended groom was the free mulatto Gerónimo Reyes,
a 19-year-old resident of San Gerónimo who was the son of a black slave of the ingenio and an
india tributaria from nearby Salamá. Reyes’ proposed bride was the free mulatta Paula de
Rivera, 22, of La Magdalena, in the district of Acasaguastlán. Rivera was also the child of an
enslaved man and a free woman, in this case a free mulatta and a slave belonging to a local
Spaniard named Blas Trujillo.41
38
AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:94.
39
AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:182.
40
AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:239.
41
AHA, A4.16, T4 1.11:268 (1671). The role of the ingenio at San Gerónimo in regional mestizaje is
further accented in a petition involving María de las Nieves, a mulata libre of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán who
worked there and was preparing to wed a migrant from Chiapa de los Indios named Nicolás Pérez. The witnesses
to this petition included two other mulatto employees of the ingenio, one slave and one free. See AHA, A4.16,
T4 1.12:178 (1671).
Lokken 11
The last petition, one of only fourteen from Acasaguastlán in the Province-wide sample
employed here, gives an important hint about the roots of the non-indigenous population of what
was perhaps the least Indian of all Guatemala’s districts.42 It is not surprising that it was in his
description of Acasaguastlán’s population that Fuentes y Guzmán, in an early instance of usage of
the term ladino in the approximate sense in which it is used today in Guatemala--as “non-Indian”-defined the term as being “what we call those people in Indian villages who are Spaniards,
mestizos, mulattos and blacks.”43
While this paper cannot explore in detail the marital circumstances of slaves in all parts of
the Province of Guatemala, a brief look at the region that is today El Salvador is in order, since
17 of the 41 marriage petitions in the Province-wide sample that involved slaves originated
there.44 Twelve of the seventeen reflected marriage between enslaved men and free women, but
four of the five unions between enslaved women and free men which turned up in the Provincewide sample also emanated from this region.45 Perhaps the key statistic here is that only one
petition brought together two slaves, a signal of the absence of large concentrations of slaves
which might have contributed to a higher rate of marriages between enslaved partners.46
El Salvador was the chief indigo-growing center of the Province of Guatemala and, since
indigo production required large amounts of labor only during a one-to-two month harvest
season, expensive slaves tended to be employed in small numbers in skilled or managerial
positions. It was instead residents of neighboring indigenous villages who were press-ganged
42
Seven of Acasaguastlán’s 28 petitioners were free mulattos, who together with two mulatto slaves made
up 32 percent of local petitioners. The total population of the district was only about 4,000 people, perhaps not
even one-half that of lightly-populated Escuintepeque, which held a minimum of close to 8,000 inhabitants, based
on the Razón. See Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2:247; “Razón,” AGI, Contaduría 815, ff.4v.-9. The
fourteen petitions from Acasaguastlán: AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:113, 178, 182, and T4 1.11:234, 268, and 274
(1671); T4 105:256, 278, and 344 (1681); T5 106:74, 146, 204, and 218 (1691); and T6 105:2395 (1701).
43
Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación florida, 2:242. I discuss the links between the sevententh-century
history of Guatemala’s African-descended population and the emergence of the ladino sector at length in my
dissertation.
44
The territory was comprised in the seventeenth century of the districts of Sonsonate, San Salvador, and
San Miguel.
45
One of the enslaved men was evidently not African-descended, being a “mulato de nacion chino en las
islas de manila filipinas.”
46
The largest group of slaves under one owner which I have come across for the period in question
included ten individuals listed in the 1669 will of Bartolomé Fernández, a resident of San Salvador who owned
rural estates named San Antonio Metapate and San Gerónimo Metapate. See AGCA, A1.56. 1975. 13399. This
example also points up the importance of manumission in swelling the free population, a topic I have not explored
systematically. Fernández freed all of his slaves in his will, although whether or not they were to be freed upon his
death or that of his wife, Isabel de la Serna, became the subject of a legal dispute between Serna and the slaves
after Fernández died.
Lokken 12
illegally into performing the most onerous work at harvest-time.47 Slaves, nevertheless, were
present throughout the territory. The seventeen marriage petitions mentioned above included four
from San Miguel, three from San Juan Evangelista Opico, two each from San Salvador,
Zacatecoluca, and San Vicente, and one apiece from Izalco, La Trinidad de Sonsonate,
Chalchuapa, and Apopa.48
The petitions from the districts of El Salvador give a particularly strong sense of the
manner in which a reduction in slave imports combined with manumission and the marital
strategies being discussed here to produce a decline in slave populations and concomitant growth
among a free sector of color. Nine of the 17 diligencias involving slaves from El Salvador were
produced in 1671, when they made up nearly 18 percent of 51 petitions examined in total from
that region. Petitions listing a slave as marital partner constituted only six percent of the
Salvadoran total in 1681 (two of 34), and just over four percent in 1691 (three of 70), before
rising slightly again to form about eight percent of the total in 1701 (three of 36), when slave
imports had begun to flow more regularly once again.
The fact that two-thirds of enslaved petitioners in El Salvador were men marrying free
women adds to the evidence that this particular form of marital union occurred with a good deal
of regularity across the Province of Guatemala during the later seventeenth century. Faced with
this evidence, one question comes to mind that has yet to be considered fully. Why were so many
free women willing to marry slaves? Indeed, the potential problems inherent in such matches for
free spouses were explicitly noted in diligencias matrimoniales, where it was standard procedure
to ensure that a free woman preparing to marry a slave fully understood the disadvantages of such
a union--including the possibility that her future husband might be sold to a buyer far away--and
was willing to proceed anyway.49
The question of what motivated free women who married slaves is especially intriguing if
considered in light of arguments made in discussions of other colonial Spanish American contexts
that free women of color tended to marry “up” in terms of “racial” status. In her classic study of
marriage in nineteenth-century Cuba, Verena Martinez-Alier indicated that the “most frequent
union was that between a white man and a free parda woman.”50 More recently, Elizabeth
47
See Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973), 184-192.
48
The seventeen petitions involving slaves are AHA, A4.16, T4 1.12:86, 87, 153, 210, and T4 1.11:232,
221, 229, 248, and 286 (1671); T4 105:300 and 319 (1681); T5 106:13, 78, and 192 (1691); and T6 105:2373,
2440, and 2445 (1701). For a full list of the 191 petitions making up the sample from the districts of El Salvador,
see the appendix.
49
An odd twist on this convention occurs in a petition involving a rare marriage between an enslaved
woman and a free man. Lorenza de Torres of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, the proposed bride, was asked not
once, but three times, if it was truly her will to wed Matheo Ortiz, mulato libre of nearby San Agustín de la Real
Corona. One wonders what role her owner, Lucía de Ribera, may have played in prompting this line of
questioning. See AHA, A4.16, T4 105:278.
50
Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial
Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed., (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 26.
Lokken 13
Kuznesof has suggested that, during the first decades of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas,
“race functioned primarily as a discriminator for men, putting non-Spanish women in a privileged
position for social mobility.”51 Is it possible that marriage to an enslaved man in colonial
Guatemala was, at the very least, not a drastic step down in social status for many free women?
Given the relatively “middling” status of slaves in colonial Guatemalan society that has
already been alluded to in this paper, I would argue that the work of Martinez-Alier and Kuznesof
finds echoes in an examination of seventeenth-century Spanish racial hierarchy in Guatemala. In
the first place, there is little question that free people identified by African descent ranked above
indigenous tributaries in practice in Guatemala, whatever the Spanish system of distinction on the
basis of origin said in theory. In Escuintepeque, for example, neither of the marriage petitions
which listed an indigenous man as a proposed spouse involved marriage to a non-Indian woman.52
By contrast, women defined as indias appeared as the intended spouses of three non-Indian men:
a black slave, a mulatto slave, and a free mulatto.53 Significantly, none of the women marrying
men of African origins were identified as tributaries. Only two of the six petitioners defined as
indigenous--one man and one woman--were explicitly described as tributaries, and both were
marrying other Indians.54
At the other end of the ladder of social rank in Escuintepeque, the lone español who
appears in petitions from that district was seeking to wed a mestiza from Escuintla.55 Two of
three other petitions involving mestizos reflected endogamous matches, while one brought
together a mestiza and a free mulatto, in what might be seen as a deviation from expected patterns
of women marrying men of equal or higher status. Not surprisingly, in an area where the majority
of non-indigenous petitioners were defined in some way by African descent, fully ten of the area’s
core sample of 26 marriage petitions involved free mulatto partners.56 Based on these figures, the
argument can be made that, just as enslaved men sought free birth for their offspring, indigenous
51
Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial
Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review, 4:1 (1995), 153-176. See quotation on 161. Kuznesof’s
statement appears to discount the possibility that women also practiced “racial” discrimination. As a counterpoint,
see the description of hierarchical divisions between españolas and mestizas in the convent of Santa Clara, Cuzco,
in Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1999), 32-34.
52
The one petition among the extras from Escuintepeque which involved an indigenous man also
represented marriage between Indians.
53
Another example of an indigenous woman marrying a black slave shows up in one of the extra cases
from Escuintepeque.
54
As indicated earlier, indios laboríos appeared regularly in marriage petitions, as tributary Indians did
not. The Province-wide sample also suggests that the former were more likely to find non-Indian partners.
55
The Razón makes reference to an español married to a mulata libre in the village of Santa Catarina
Siquinalá. See “Razón,”AGI, Contaduría 815, f.5v.
56
Five of the eight extra petitions from the area also involved two mulatos libres.
Lokken 14
women, at least in Escuintepeque, were attracted by the possibility of boosting their children into
this “middling” free mulatto category--even through marriage to slaves.
The relative status of African-descended slaves versus members of the indigenous
population is revealed more strikingly when all of the marriage petitions from the Province which
involved slaves are analyzed with “race” in mind. As noted above, 26 petitions from around the
Province brought together an enslaved man and a free woman. Ten of the men were defined as
black, and sixteen as mulatto. The intended brides of the ten negros esclavos included four
women who were listed as indigenous--just one of them called tributaria--along with three free
blacks and three free mulattas. Based on these ten petitions, it might be suggested that the three
categories into which the women fell were relatively equal in status.
But when the focus is shifted to the 16 cases which involved mulatto slaves, such a notion
becomes less tenable. Just one of the would-be wives in this larger number of cases was
described as indigenous, an india laboría. Twelve others were identified as mulatas libres, and
the remaining three as mestizas. Further evidence of the apparent status differential between the
indigenous population and African-descended people, free or slave, emerges in the five petitions
which involved enslaved women planning to wed free husbands. Only one of these women,
Gregoria de los Angeles of San Miguel, was identified as negra. She was also the only one slated
to marry an indigenous man, an indio laborío from Nicaragua named Diego de Ribera.57
It seems, then, that, although male slaves defined as black were able to choose from a
range of free partners, the latter ranked near the lower end of the racial hierarchy. Mulatto slaves,
on the other hand, actually possessed enough status to marry into the middle of casta ranks. They
thus seem to have been able to forego almost entirely the search for marital partners among
women who were identified in any way as indigenous.
A last example that is suggestive of the extent of access which enslaved men of African
origins might have had to surprisingly high status in seventeenth-century Guatemala involves the
marriages of a free mulatta named María Hernández. Hernández, resident of the village of Mixco,
just west of the Valle de las Vacas, became a widow in 1655, and quickly remarried. Her first
husband had been Matheo de Solís, a black slave. Her intended second husband, Francisco
Borallo, occupied, one would imagine, a far higher status. He was listed as a local Spaniard.58
While this petition admittedly represents an extreme, it would probably be incorrect to
view it as entirely aberrant. Rather, it may have reflected rather accurately the tendencies inherent
in a system of racial hierarchy in which African-descended slaves were not relegated to the bottom
of the social ladder. Under such a regime, it is far from surprising, and instead should probably be
57
AHA, A4.16, T5 106:13 (1691). Of course, the romantic possibility of love conquering all should not be
entirely lost sight of amidst this singular focus on status considerations in marital decisions. One of the most
unusual marriage petitions I examined in my research--not included in the sample used here--exhibited the efforts
of don Pedro de Castellanos, son of Capitán don Francisco Henríquez de Castellanos and doña Margarita de
Santiago, to wed Nicolasa Morán, mulata slave of the cleric Pedro de Almengor, in Santiago de Guatemala. The
petition, first submitted in November of 1680, was not approved until 18 months later, at which point Castellanos
and Morán had taken refuge together in the church of San Sebastián in order to press their case. This petition, as
might be expected, fits no pattern. See AHA, A4.16, T4 105:232 (1680).
58
AHA, A4.16, T5 1.21:81.
Lokken 15
expected, that enslaved men would, as often as possible, take the opportunity provided by the
legal fact that their own status was not heritable to bestow both freedom and legitimacy on their
children through marriage to free women. The demographic and social consequences for the free
population of color in such a circumstance have only begun to be explored here, and certainly
bear further investigation.
Lokken 16
Appendix
Marriage Petitions from Sonsonate, San Salvador and San Miguel
These diligencias matrimoniales are filed under Section A4.16, “Informaciones
Matrimoniales,” in the AHA.
1671 (51): T4 1.12:86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 96, 100, 125, 127, 128, 136, 137, 144, 149, 151,
153, 154, 164, 167, 168, 197, 199, 208, 209, 210, 213; and T4 1.11:217, 221, 222, 223, 227,
229, 231, 232, 236, 238, 240, 244, 246, 248, 250, 252, 255, 258, 262, 275, 277, 286, 290, 291,
and 294.
1681 (34): T4 105:249, 259, 260, 261, 272, 273, 276, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 297,
298, 299, 300, 303, 304, 305, 308, 312, 319, 321, 324, 352, 353, 355, 358, 366, 367, 376, 383,
and 385.
1691 (70): T5 106:10 (2 cases), 12, 13, 18, 20, 31, 37, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53,
55, 57, 58, 67, 78, 85, 86, 91, 111, 113, 114, 123, 131, 135, 139, 141, 143, 148, 149, 150, 155,
156, 157, 162, 163, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193,
195, 197, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 220, 227, 230, 231, and 232.
1701 (36): T6 105:2323, 2324, 2331, 2333, 2336, 2337, 2348, 2349, 2350, 2351, 2357,
2360, 2366, 2371, 2373, 2374, 2379, 2380, 2381, 2385, 2397, 2408 (2nd of two), 2410, 2411,
2412, 2414, 2415, 2426, 2428, 2436, 2440, 2442, 2444, 2445, and two unnumbered cases.