Last edited Thu Nov 14, 2024, 12:35 PM - Edit history (1)
My wife’s ancestors started running away from their masters some five centuries ago after being kidnapped in Africa and brought here to America.
Slaves also sought freedom extra-legally, and flight was typical across the Pacific lowlands. Some escaped slaves traveled as far as the cities while others formed maroon communities, or palenques, along the margins of the mining region. The most important palenque that was formed within the jurisdiction of Popayán was located east of the Pacific mines, in the Patía River Valley. This palenque was significant because it evolved into a town that, as we shall see in later chapters, was central to the royalist defense of Popayán during the wars of independence. Runaways settled in a place called "El Castigo," taking advantage of the frontier area around the Patía River Valley north of Pasto and east of Barbacoas, which was not colonized by the Spanish until the 1720s. By then, when exploration of the area and land titling began to take place, the palenque was populated mostly by renegade whites and runaway slaves from the mines of Barbacoas and Iscuandé and from the haciendas in the Cauca River Valley. During this period Spanish colonial officials unsuccessfully attempted to conquer or destroy this palenque.
Yet, as occured in the neighboring palenques of Esmeraldes and Baudó, and in other runaway communities in colonial contexts, the inhabitants of El Castigo sought the presense of representatives of the church in their territory. Between 1731 and 1732, they sent three messengers to the city of Pasto to request that a Priest visit Nachao and Nalgua, two towns they had established, each of which had built a church within its boundries. This request exposed their strategy of aligning their community with the Catholic precepts that were central to social and political life in Popayán.
The Quito Audiencia tried to take advantage of the maroons' interest in the church, attempting to co-opt the palenque into establishing civil government in the area in exchange for a pardon from the state. The runaway community resisted the audencia's attempt to include them within its juristiction (reducción) but succeeded in securing a permanent priest for their settlement. Morover, the Popayán municipal council conceeded their right to name two people from the palenque to "administer justice in the name of His Magisty to all the individuals who currently are congregated in those towns," with the condition that they not admit any more runaways to the community, detaining the fugitives and informing the Popayán authorities to their presence. Thus, the maroons of Patía not only used religion for the purpose of community building; they also seem to have preferred to establish a relationship with the church rather than with the civil authorities.
In the Hispanic context, the crown promoted a corporate organization of society, and thus collective rights could be secured to a greater extent than individual rights. This constituted an incentive for enslaved and free blacks to link their legal strategies to the colonial corporate logic. Indeed, the politics of freedom and community building among free people of African descent pivoted around the struggle to gain recognition, aquire political rights, and overcome racist assumptions of the larger society. During the eighteenth century, those goals coincided with the crown's interest in integrating the maroons into society - to "reduce" the community of runaways to legitimate towns - by negociating and extending certain concessions in exchage for their professed loyalty. The integration of free blacks in to civil life reminds us that maroon communities were forged within the colonial would and not outside it.
In Popayán, free and enslaved blacks of Africal origin and descent upheld justice through their underlying pattern of engagement with imperial legal institutions. This was visible in instances when, as in Patía, maroons negociated their conditions of integration into colonial society. Yet legal freedom was not the only goal of the enslaved. As we will see next, in the Pacific mining region, garnering greater rights within the institution of slavery may have been their most realistic goal.
(pages 104-106)
Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (Cambridge Latin American Studies, Series Number 102)
by Marcela Echeverri
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