Jane
Landers, Pablo Gómez,José Polo Acuña and Courtney J. Campbell© J. Landers, P.
Gómez, J. Polo Acuña and C.J. Campbell, CC BY
http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0052.09
This chapter addresses the history of slavery and development in
two of the most African locales in colonial South America: the Pacific and
Caribbean coasts of modern Colombia and northeastern Brazil. Both modern
nations have recognised the historical and civic neglect of the “black
communities” within their borders and now offer them legal and cultural
recognition, as well as, at least theoretical, recognition of ancestral
communal land ownership.1 The endangered archives digitised under the
auspices of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme enable
researchers, as well as these neglected populations, to know more about their
often hard to discover past.2
Colombia’s rich colonial history began in the
early sixteenth century when war-hardened adventurers like Alonso de Ojeda,
already experienced in the conquest and colonisation of Española (modern
Dominican Republic and Haiti) first explored its Caribbean coast in search of
gold, Indian slaves, and potential profits.3 In 1525, after decades of brutal coastal raids, another veteran of
Española, Rodrigo de Bastidas, founded Santa Marta using slave labour. However,
some of the slaves soon rebelled and burned the fledgling town before running
to the rugged interior hinterlands where they formed runaway, or maroon,
communities known as palenques. Some of these maroon settlements
survived for centuries, resisting the Spanish military expeditions that
attempted to eradicate them.4
Undaunted, in 1533, another émigré from
Española, Pedro de Heredia, founded Cartagena de Indias, also on the Caribbean
coast of New Granada.5 Treasure hunters from Cartagena initially
employed African slaves to extract gold from looted tombs of the Sinú Indians.6 As those treasures were depleted, Spanish settlers established
plantations, ranches and gold mines in the central valley of Colombia, all of
which required large numbers of enslaved African labourers.
The Magdalena River, which runs through the
central valley, became Colombia’s main artery to the interior and it, too,
became a largely African region (Fig. 9.1). Soon enslaved Africans replaced
Indian rowers on the boats transporting goods to and from Cartagena and Mompox,
which was essentially an inland Caribbean port. Enslaved Africans also built
the vast complex of fortifications and public works that protected Cartagena,
while potentially more fortunate slaves served as domestics in
the private homes and the many convents of the city.7
Cartagena was designated as an official port
of the Spanish fleet system as early as 1537, and became “by far the largest
single port of [slave] debarkation in the Spanish Americas”.8 Most of the early slave shipments into Cartagena originated from
Upper Guinea (the Rivers of Guinea) and Cabo Verde. Later shipments through São
Tomé brought slaves from Lower Guinea and Angola.9 David Wheat has used previously unknown port entry records to
document 463 slave ships arriving in Cartagena between 1573 and 1640 that
disgorged more than 73,000 enslaved Africans who were recorded by port
officials.10 How many more were smuggled into Cartagena
cannot be known, but these numbers clearly show that the city and its
hinterlands, where even fewer whites resided, quickly took on the aspect of an
African landscape. When the slave ships came into port, agents from as far away
as Lima descended upon Cartagena to conduct purchases, and a number of the
newly arrived slaves were subsequently transported to Portobello (modern
Panama) or to the mines of Potosí in modern Bolivia.11 Many also escaped to form a network of palenques encircling
Cartagena.12
Spanish efforts to control Colombia’s western
Pacific coast were simultaneous to those made on the Caribbean coast, and
followed a similar trajectory. Gold-seeking raiders killed hundreds of natives,
burned native villages, attempted to establish fortified settlements, and were
repeatedly driven away. From the Isthmus of Panama, the Spaniards moved
eastward into the Darién and then eventually pushed farther south into the
rugged Chocó, Colombia’s northwestern region of dense jungles noted for its hot
and humid climate and extreme rainfalls. Hostile native groups with deadly
poison-tipped arrows also prevented Spaniards from settling in the area in the
early years of exploration.13
One unhappy Spaniard
called the Chocó “an abyss and horror of mountains, rivers, and marshes”.14 Although for many years, Spaniards considered the Chocó a useless
and unhealthy frontier, discoveries of gold, silver, and later platinum,
attracted miners to the region, and they brought large numbers of enslaved
Africans to extract the precious metals.15 As in other contact zones, smallpox and later epidemics of measles
combined with unaccustomed labour led to a dramatic decline among the native
populations of the Chocó, and more African labourers were brought in to replace
them in the mines and agricultural production. The newly imported African bozales
arriving in Quibdó and Buenaventura in the eighteenth century lived in
small villages or rancherias located in the tropical rainforest while
working on alluvial mining centers.16 Independent free prospectors called mazamorreros were also
drawn to work in the Chocó.17
The region, therefore,
acquired a distinct culture that blended indigenous, African and European
peoples and traditions, although people of African descent predominated by the
eighteenth century.18
In 1654, Spaniards established San Francisco
de Quibdó along the Atrato River that leads to the Caribbean and the small
village served as the first regional capital of the Chocó (Fig. 9.1). Quibdó
remained relatively isolated, however, because in 1698, in a
vain attempt to curtail contraband trade, officials of the Royal Audiencia of
Santa Fe de Bogotá banned commerce on the river. The village of Nóvita, on the
San Juan River in the southern Chocó, therefore, became the first important
mining center in the region, as well as the Chocó’s new regional capital.
Although Indian attacks led Spaniards to abandon Nóvita several times, the
area’s gold deposits always lured them back to re-build it. In 1784, Bourbon
reformers re-opened the Atrato River to legal maritime trade, and Quibdó
finally gained importance as a commercial center. In the nineteenth century, it
again became the regional capital.19 The abolition of slavery in 1851 disrupted labour supplies for the gold
mines of Nóvita causing it to decline in economic importance, but Quibdó’s
commerce was relatively unaffected.20 Many of the formerly enslaved in Quibdó had already purchased their
freedom with gold mined on days off or stolen from their owners, and by the
eighteenth century the Chocó was home to a large free population of African
descent.21
Still considered an inhospitable locale for
its distinctive climate, the Chocó is today also notorious for the activities
of leftist and paramilitary groups and drug trafficking organisations including
the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), which has been waging
war against the Colombian state for more than five decades. An estimated 20,000
Chocoanos, most of African descent, have been displaced by the violence.22 While creating misery for the local inhabitants of the Chocó, this
military conflict has also exacerbated the threat to local history and the
remaining archives in the region. Supported by the project EAP255, Pablo Gómez
trained students from the Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó “Diego Luis
Córdoba” to digitalise some of the most endangered colonial records of the
region (Fig. 9.2). The project captured images from the First Notary of Quibdó
and the Notary of Buenaventura, a city in the Department of Valle, in southern
Colombia. All date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and many have
suffered damage from humidity, fungus and lack of attention in poorly
maintained storage space.
Africans and their descendants living in
Colombia’s remote peripheries like Quibdó received little attention either from
the colonial or state-building projects and, later, they were largely ignored
in Colombia’s historical narratives. The records recovered by the EAP255
project allow researchers to reconstruct the history of these largely forgotten
regions and populations. Notarial documents from the region include land sales,
mortgages, and many slave sales that offer interesting data not only about the
age, sex, and profession of each slave, but also, occasionally, information
about the slave’s past history, physical appearance, characteristics and
health.23 These records contain untapped information
related to the most important economic activity in the region: gold and
platinum mining by black slaves, and the social conditions in the towns and
mines developed around this enterprise. They hold registers related to the sale
and transfer of property (including slaves), certificates of payment and of
debt cancelation, wills, ethnic origin of slaves arriving in Chocó and the
south Colombian Pacific, and activities of different state and ecclesiastical
actors, including visits by the Inquisition office during the eighteenth
century.
These sources also provide important data
related to the development of independent communities and maroon settlements
and their relationships with Emberá-Wounaan groups that inhabited the area for
centuries. Indeed, almost every slave inventory from the eighteenth century
lists at least one or two slave runaways. Registers of slave manumission in
Chocó date as early as 1720, and after buying their freedom former slaves
started migrating to places like the Baudo valley where they formed largely
black towns with cultural and social characteristics similar to the palenques
established by escaped slaves.24
These communities lived in the most difficult
conditions. The Colombian Pacific still has — as it has since reliable records
begin — some of the highest morbidity and mortality rates of any place in the
Americas. This should not be surprising given the harsh climate of the area,
the impoverished conditions in which most of the inhabitants of the region still
live, and the violence that has characterised the rise and decline of mining
and narcotic plantation booms in the region. Starting in the mid-eighteenth
century notarial records, most of the registers of slaves’ sales, denunciations
for mistreatment, or death registers, also describe the usual roster of
diseases that challenged life in the early modern era: yellow fever, malaria,
typhus, smallpox, bubonic plague, syphilis and leprosy, among many others.
While traveling around the Atrato and San Juan Rivers in the 1820s, French
geologist Jean Baptiste Boussingault wrote:
The black sailing my piragua was a
magnificent human specimen. However, he had on his thigh an enormous
scrofulous, or venereal tumor, a disease that was very common around the places
through which we were traveling. […] At around six in the afternoon we
disembarked in a Rancheria close to a place called “Las Muchachas”. The blacks
who received us were covered in venereal ulcers and disfigured by cancerous
afflictions [certainly symptoms of leprosy]. They live very happily as a family
when there is a complete nose for ten people. This is a most sad spectacle.25
The register of slave sales from
Chocó and Buenaventura amply confirm Boussingault’s observations about the
prevalence of leprosy. Among the specific designations uniquely referring to
leprosy that appear in the records we have digitalised are “galico reventado,
llaga, ahoto, gota coral, and tumors”, among others. For instance, Fig. 9.3
provides an example of the sale in 1810 in San Francisco de Quibdó, capital of
the province of Citará (today Chocó) of two slaves, Antonino and his wife,
Micaela. The seller was José María Palomeque who was registered as a vecino (registered
inhabitant) of the city of Cartago, but lived in the province of Citará.
Palomeque sold the two slaves to Rita Alarcon, also a resident of Citará for
four hundred and two hundred pesos respectively. In the sale document,
Palomenque expressly took responsibility for “all the vices, tachas [marks or
scars], defects, and public diseases, such as it is the galico reventado [my
emphasis] of which said Micaela suffers and other hidden ones [they might
have]”.26
Hundreds of
similar records contain information about the different diseases suffered by
communities of free and enslaved blacks, with most of the cases pertaining to
leprosy and/or syphilis. The records coming from the Colombian Pacific also
illustrate the dynamics of community formation in these rancherias that
were outside the purview of the state. They add an important chapter to the
historiography of public health in the country, centered, in this case, on
descriptions of leprosarium and the “aldeas de leprosos” (villages of
lepers) in the Andes and northern Colombia.27
Eighteenth
and nineteenth-century slave trading records from Chocó and the Colombian
Pacific include cases of masters who had to sell their slaves for a reduced
price due to the lesions produced by leprosy. These cases are probably but a
fraction of the real incidence of the disease in the population. Except for
anecdotal reports coming from travellers like Boussingault, there is virtually
no information, outside the records saved by the EAP255 project, regarding the
health conditions, or for that matter, economic, demographic and social
conditions of the black population of these villages on the banks the Atrato and San Juan Rivers at that time. The isolation of most of
the towns in the Chocó and the Valle del Cauca gave rise to communitarian
models for the perception of disease that emerged spontaneously and preceded
mandatory isolationist projects that public health officials enacted during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The early
twentieth century saw the consolidation of the Colombian State, the formation
of a national bourgeoisie and the inclusion of the nation within the world
economy through the expansion of coffee exports. Modernisation of the country
became a national priority, for which leprosy was an obstacle. According to
nineteenth century publications on the geography of leprosy, Colombia competed
with India for primacy in terms of incidence of the disease — a contest that
the Colombian elites refused to win. If Colombia was seen by outsiders as a
pestilent country, a “leprosarium” in the words of none other than Gerard
Amauer Hansen, the Norwegian scientist who discovered the mycobacterium causing
the disease, Chocó became increasingly portrayed as a place inhabited by sick
black people.28
While the
Chocó’s early settlers struggled to exploit the gold and platinum mines and
survive its hostile environment and inhabitants, the lesser frequented, and
less settled northeastern coasts of Colombia, first noted as a source of
pearls, became infamous in the later sixteenth century as sites of contraband,
piracy and illegal slave importations.29 Nuestra
Señora de los Remedios del Río de la Hacha, later known simply as Riohacha, was
said to be “rich only in pearle and cattell”.30 Its
beleaguered governor reported it suffered repeated attacks by “the cruelest
Indians of these regions”.31
Riohacha also suffered frequent
attacks by French and English pirates and smugglers. In the 1560s, John Hawkins
illicitly sold slaves seized in Sierra Leone to local pearl fishermen and, in
1596, his kinsman, the famous English pirate Francis Drake, sacked Riohacha and
sailed away with 100 African slaves as part of his booty.32 Riohacha
remained a smuggling centre in the seventeenth century for
buccaneers such as Henry Morgan sailing out of newly-English Jamaica.33
In this
Caribbean port, as in the mines of the Chocó and on the Magdalena River of the
central valley, African slaves soon replaced native labourers, working
primarily as divers in the coastal pearl fisheries. Conditions were brutal and
many of the enslaved, like their counterparts elsewhere in Colombia, soon fled
their misery eastward to the La Guajira Peninsula where they joined indigenous
rebels fighting their mutual Spanish oppressors.34
Although
Riohacha’s pearl fisheries were eventually exhausted, smuggling continued along
Colombia’s northern coast throughout the eighteenth century. Riohacha became
part of a wider Caribbean and Atlantic commercial network of informal trade and
smuggling, centred on nearby Jamaica and Curaçao. The bulk of this highly
profitable, but in Spanish law, illicit, trade was in livestock (horses,
cattle, mules and goats), textiles and slaves.35 In
1717, Spain’s Bourbon Reformers attempted to regain economic and political
control of the region by making Riohacha part of the newly created Viceroyalty
of New Granada, but based on his extensive research in Spanish colonial
treasury accounts, Lance Grahn argues that “as much if not more, contraband
passed through Riohacha than any other single region in the Spanish New World”.36
East of
Riohacha, the La Guajira Peninsula jutted northward into the Caribbean and
closer, still, to British commercial centres. The Wayúu Indians controlled the
Guajira Peninsula and long resisted Catholic evangelisation and Spanish
domination. The peninsula existed in a state of almost permanent war well into
the eighteenth century and the beleaguered Spanish governor Soto de Herrera
referred to the Wayúu as “barbarians, horse thieves, worthy of death, without
God, without law and without a king.”37 A
large Spanish force sent from Cartagena in 1771 “to reduce the rebellious
Guajiros to obedience through respect for Spanish military
might” thought better of a fight when met with more than seven times their
number of Indians armed with British guns.38 The fierce Wayúu acquired many of those guns through adept contraband
trade in pearls and brazilwood.39 The Wayúu also acquired contraband slaves from British and Dutch
merchants. For example, in 1753, Pablo Majusares and Toribio Caporinche, two
powerful Wayúu chiefs living in the northern region of the Guajira Peninsula,
owned eight African slaves who they employed in pearl fishing.40 Other slaves belonging to them were destined for
service in the Wayúu’s feared military force.41
EAP503:
Creating a digital archive of a circum-Caribbean trading entrepôt: notarial
records from La Guajira42 enabled students from the Universidad de Cartagena, under
the supervision of José Polo Acuña and assistants Mabel Vergel and Diana
Carmona to digitalise notarial documents that show that slaves continued to be
important in the economy of nineteenth-century Riohacha (Fig.
9.4).43 Documents from the Notaría Primera of
Riohacha offer numerous examples of slave transactions. For example, on 23
March 1831, the widow Ana Sierra sold a 25-year-old mulatta slave named Felipa
to Maria Francisca Blanchard, a merchant in Riohacha, for 250 pesos.44 Sometime later, Blanchard sold the same slave to
Miguel Machado for 200 pesos, although the documents offer no clues as to why
the slave’s price dropped.45 The same
Miguel Machado appears again in the notarial documents when he bought a
seventeen-year-old slave named Francisco Solano from Maria Encarnacion Valverde
for 100 pesos. Francisco was the son of another slave who served in Valverde’s
household.46
These notarial records also document links
between merchants in Riohacha and their factors in the islands of Aruba,
Curacao and Jamaica, and show how authorities in Riohacha were able to
strengthen their grip on the fertile lands located south of the Rancheria River
through peace treaties with formerly hostile indigenous groups. Peace allowed
for the southward expansion of the agricultural and cattle ranching frontier,
increased production for internal consumption and commercial exchange, and the
further integration of Riohacha. As Bourbon reformers of the eighteenth century
attempted to halt smuggling and encourage development in Riohacha, they also
established new towns to help support their most important port of Cartagena de
Indias. Some of the new towns located south of Cartagena in the Department of
Córdoba were connected to it via the Sinú River, which also connected the
southern towns to the Atrato River, Quibdó and the Pacific.47
The EAP640 project also enabled teams from the
University of Cartagena to digitalise ecclesiastical records from the churches
of Santa Cruz de Lorica and San Jerónimo de Buenavista in Montería in the
Department of Córdoba in northern Colombia (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6).48
Montería was established in the eighteenth
century along the Sinú River, which links it to the Caribbean Sea. It is noted
as a ranching capital and also an ethnically and culturally diverse region
where Zenú Indians and descendants of Spaniards and Africans all interacted. An
official history of Montería states that two different delegations of Zenú
Indians presented their chiefs’ petitions to the governors of Cartagena asking
that the Spanish town be established in their territory.49
The ecclesiast records of San Gerónimo de
Buenavista (as it was earlier spelled) (Fig. 9.7) provide insights into one of
the most ethnically diverse areas of Córdoba. The Catholic church mandated the
baptism of African slaves in the fifteenth century and extended this
requirement across the Catholic Americas. Once baptised, Africans and their
descendants were also eligible for the sacraments of marriage and a Christian
burial.50 Baptism records such as the one below give the
date of the ceremony, the name of the priest performing it, the
name of the person baptised (whether child or adult), the parents’ names if
known, and whether the child or adult was born of a legitimate marriage, or was
the “natural” child of unmarried parents. Priests also noted if the baptism was
performed “in case of necessity”, allowing researchers to track epidemic
cycles. The names of the baptised person’s godparents are also given in these
records. Godparents had the responsibility for helping raise their godchild in
the Catholic faith, and in case of the parents’ deaths, they were to raise the
child as their own. Thus, community networks can be traced through patterns of compadrazgo
(godparentage).
The records of San Gerónimo de Buenavista,
unlike those from other Caribbean sites, do not specifically note the race of
the person baptised, supporting modern theories about the historical
invisibility of Afro-Colombians. However, researchers can at times find racial
clues in the names of parents. In Fig. 9.8, the priest, Don Manuel José Beractegui,
baptises the legitimate child, María Olalla, born on 12 February 1809 to
parents Victoriano Congo and his wife, Simona Sánchez. That the father bore an
ethnic surname suggests that he is African-born, or at least not recognised as
fully acculturated. However, he is a free man; otherwise his enslaved status
would have been noted. A notation to the left of the entry indicates that the
baptism was performed as an act of charity, meaning that the parents could not
afford the standard ecclesiastical fee.51
1 “Ley 70 sobre
negritudes”, cited in Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean
Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), pp. 1-2; “Lei No. 7.668, de 22 de agosto de 1988”,
http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/L7668.htm; “Programas e ações”.
2 In 2005, with funding
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University launched
a major international initiative to begin locating and preserving
ecclesiastical and notarial records of Africans in Cuba and Brazil,
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies
(http://www.vanderbilt.edu/esss/index.php). With funding from the British
Library, the project was expanded into Colombia (EAP255, EAP503 and EAP640) and
into additional areas of Brazil (EAP627).
3 Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1966), pp. 104-19 and 161-177; Erin Stone, Indian Harvest:
the Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade from Española to the Circum-Caribbean,
1492-1560 (Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 2014); and Nicolás del
Castillo Mathieu, “Población aborigen y conquista, 1498-1540”, in História
Económica y Social del Caribe Colombiano, ed. by Adolfo Meisel Roca
(Bogotá: Ediciones Uninorte-ECOE, 1994), pp. 25 and 43.
4 Jane Landers, “The African Landscape of 17th Century Cartagena
and its Hinterlands”, in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave
Trade (The Early Modern Americas), ed. by Jorge Cañizares-Ezguerra, James
Sidbury and Matt D. Childs (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013), pp. 147-62.
5 Castillo Mathieu, pp. 43 and 25; Anthony McFarlane, Colombia
before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 17-18; and María del Carmen Borrego Plá,
Cartagena de Indias en el Siglo XVI (Seville: Escuela de Estudios
Hispano-Americanos, 1983), pp. 58-61 and 423-35.
6 McFarlane, p. 8.
7 Castillo Mathieu, pp. 44-45; and María
del Carmen Borrego Plá, “La conformación de una sociedad mestiza en la época de
los Austrias, 1540-1700”, in História Económica y Social, ed. by A.
Meisel Roca (Bogotá: Ediciones Uninorte-ECOE, 1994), pp. 59-108 (pp. 66-68).
8 António de Almeida Mendes, “The Foundation of the System: A
Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries”, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. by David Eltis and David Richardson
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 63-94.
9 After the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580,
the Portuguese Company of Cacheu began to export more slaves from Angola and
the Kingdom of Kongo. Borrego Plá, Cartagena de Indias, pp. 58-61 and
423-35.
10 David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean,
1570-1640 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
forthcoming), ch. 3. Wheat also participated in the EAP project in Quibdó,
EAP255: Creating a digital archive of Afro-Colombian history and culture: black
ecclesiastical, governmental and private records from the Choco, Colombia,
http://eap.bl.uk/database/overview_project.a4d?projID=EAP255
11 Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The
Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth
Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Borrego Plá, “La conformación”, p. 68.
12 Landers, “The African Landscape of 17th
Century Cartagena and its Hinterlands”; Jean-Pierre Tadieu, “Un proyecto
utópico de manumission de los cimarrones del ‘Palenque de los montes de
Cartagena’ en 1682”, in Afrodescendientes en las américas: trayectorias
sociales e identitarias: 150 años de la abolición de la esclavitud en Colombia,
ed. by Claudia Mosquera, Mauricio Pardo and Odile Hoffman (Bogotá: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 2002), pp. 169-80.
13 Sauer, Early Spanish Main, pp. 161-77, 268-69 and
288-89.
14 William Frederick Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier:
The Colombian Chocó, 1680-1810 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
1976), pp. 19 and 13.
15 Vicente Restrepo, Estudio sobre las
minas de oro y plata de Colombia, 2nd edn. (Bogotá: Banco de la República
1952); Enrique Ortega Ricaurte, Historia documental del Chocó (Bogotá:
Editorial Kelly, 1954); Helg, p. 72; and Sergio A. Mosquera, El Mondongo:
Etnolingűística en la historia Afrochocoana (Bogotá: Arte Laser Publicidad,
2008).
16 See William F. Sharp, “The Profitability of Slavery in the
Colombian Chocó, 1680-1810”, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 55
(1975), 468-95.
17 On the early establishment of mines in the Chocó and the
enslaved miners and mazamorreros who worked them, see Mario Diego
Romero, Poblamiento y Sociedad en el Pacífico Colombiano siglos XVI al XVIII
(Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1995). For an overview of the
historiography of this region see Mónica Patricia Hernández Ospina, “Formas de
territorialidad Española en la Gobernación del Chocó durante el siglo XVIII”, Historia
Crítica, 32 (2006), 13-37.
18 On the artistic traditions of the
region, see Martha Luz Machado Caicedo, La escultura sagrada chocó en el
contexto de la memoria de la estética de África y su diaspora: ritual y arte (Bogotá:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2011); and Sharp, pp. 20-21.
19 Orián Jiménez, “El Chocó: Libertad y
poblamiento, 1750-1850”, in Afrodescendientes en las américas, pp.
121-41.
20 Royal orders repeated this prohibition many times over the
course of the eighteenth century. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier,
pp. 10, 14 and 15.
21 Ibid., pp. 148-70; and Sergio Mosquera,
“Los procesos de manumisión en las provincias del Chocó”, in Afrodescendientes
en las américas, pp. 99-120.
22
Carlos Rosero, “Los afrodescendientes y el conflicto armado en Colombia: La
insistencia en lo propio como alternativo”, in Afrodescendientes en las
américas, pp. 547-59.
23
Some published examples appear in Sergio A. Mosquera, Memorias de los
Ultimos Esclavizadores en Citará: Historia Documental (Carátula: Promotora
Editorial de Autores Chocoanos, 1996).
24 Sharp, Slavery on
the Spanish Frontier.
25
As quoted in Sergio A. Mosquera, Don Melchor de Barona y Betancourt y la
esclavización en el Chocó (Quibdó-Chocó: Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó
“Diego Luis Córdoba”, 2004), p. 162.
