Hello, everyone. I am thrilled to share some thoughts on the publication of my new book, Mexico, Slavery, Freedom: A Bilingual Documentary History, 1520-1829. In many ways, this source reader is a direct consequence of the early Covid pandemic in 2020, when all my research and conference plans were swiftly discarded. What I soon came to realize, however, is that I had a viable intellectual project in hand (or rather, on long forgotten files in my laptop). The project did not require visas, airplane tickets, bizarre Airbnb stays, or face masks, so I began.
In my courses on colonial Latin America, the African diaspora and Atlantic history, I had consistently stumbled on a structural issue. My students were interested in writing research papers on African and Afro-Mexican populations, but they could not find the primary sources to do the work. Where does one find information about Puebla’s Carmona family, or documents to shed new light on Gaspar Yanga’s maroon community? In truth, their choices were slim and the rare Spanish source reader was almost always out of print. So I set out to transcribe early modern documents from Spanish (castellano) and began the arduous process of translating them into English. (The run-on sentences of the seventeenth century are vexing, that much I will confess.)
The project soon snowballed into something much larger than I had ever imagined. Dozens of documents that I had flagged in the archives soon re-emerged from old Word documents. Years removed from my years of graduate study, they carried a different significance and read differently. The last will of Gaspar Hernández, the baker born in the Canary Islands and of the most successful free men of African descent in Puebla, provided new insights on the rhythms, textures, and flavors of everyday life in the 1620s. The case of the wet nurse, Nicolasa and her daughter, moved me in a different way. Gradually, I moved away from the people of Puebla, the focus of my first book, to search for digital documents on free and enslaved people in Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Acapulco. The Portal of Spanish Archives (PARES) proved to be a treasure trove of digitized sources on the free and enslaved people of colonial Mexico.
Before I knew it, I had translated 118 documents with the modernized English translation followed by the Spanish (or Portuguese) original. The geographic scope of the book expanded once again, as Guatemala and Spanish Louisiana snuck in to the final version. This mass of documents gradually led me to themes, which became chapters for undergraduate research and classroom instruction: the Transpacific Slave Trade, Afro-Indigenous Interactions, Freedom Papers, to name but a few. Anyone interested in understanding the context of the legendary Yanga might want to take a look at the Rebellion and Marronage selections.
In a nutshell, the book invites students, researchers, and curious readers to consider and grapple with the deep history of freedom and enslavement in the vast viceroyalty of New Spain and the first years of the independent Mexican nation. An introductory essay will lead them to my own views of these histories, from the early days of the conquistadors in 1520 to the abolition of slavery by President Vicente Guerrero in 1829. Ultimately, Mexico, Slavery, Freedom is an open invitation to engage the raw materials that historians use to weave their stories. I wrote the book in hopes that in those primary sources many people, but mainly you, may find the inspiration to craft the histories that need to be told.
Prof. Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva
February 2024