Commentary No. 038
Date: 1575, December 14. Seville, Spain
Theme: After serving for more than ten years to two female mistresses in Seville, Spain, a young female Black slave born in Santo Domingo City was granted freedom by her second mistress and, a few years later, requested license to travel back to the Americas
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles--Archivo General de Indias, Contratación 5222, N.4, R.70
Every now and then in the Spanish empire during the sixteenth century, domestic Black slaves were granted freedom by their masters after a varying number of years of service. The process of liberating an enslaved servant was called ahorramiento or manumisión (manumission in English) and it was recorded in a document that became like a certificate of freedom that the formerly enslaved person had to have always handy, in case they came across any socially powerful individual or government official that did not know them enough, and based on a racialized prejudice about slavery that tended to identify Black people and enslavement status, would express doubts about the veracity of the freedman or freed woman’s non-slave status and would show an inclination or desire to treat them as slaves. La Española was the scenario of some of the earliest manumissions in the colonial world of the Americas.
On November 27th, 1568 “doña Barbara de Arana,” wife of a “don Alonso de Avellaneda” and daughter to parents that had enough means as to have lived in Santo Domingo and then return to reside in Seville, issued her testament in Seville in which she declared freed two female slaves of hers, “Juana, de color mulata” and “Maria de Cota, de color negra”, both of whom Barbara had inherited from her mother Maria de Arana. Both slaves were being granted freedom, as per Barbara’s statement, “for the good services they have provided me.” Each slave was valued by Barbara in 100 ducados. She also ordered that, besides been issued a certificate of freedom, each of these slaves was to be given 20ducados at the time of Barbara’s passing.
Years later, when Barbara de Arana passed away, she was survived by her husband, and he followed her wish as expressed in her will, issuing a carta de ahorramiento or manumission certificate in favor of María, who thus became officially free. Once free, María decided to return to the Indies. To obtain the required governmental license, she needed to proof that she was a free woman, and that she was not married and was in good standing with the Catholic Church. She was able to produce the necessary witnesses who attested that she was indeed the free woman she claimed to be. With these statements, she was able to obtain the license and get on a ship for the other side of the Atlantic.
On November 16th, 1575 in Seville, Maria de Cota, after spending eighteen years in the empire’s administrative capital serving a Spanish family that had returned to Seville from La Española, requested license to get onto a ship and travel back to the Indies, in this case, apparently to Peru, the main precious metal-producing economic center of the empire. To support her request Maria presented the required testimonies of acquaintances that confirmed her place of origin as well as her freed person’s legal status and her condition of unmarried woman with no criminal history. There is indication that Maria left Spain for Peru onboard a ship roughly a month later, on December 14th, 1575.
This document tells us, then, about a Black woman that after being enslaved most of her life at what at the time was the most vibrant city of Spain, decided she wanted to try living somewhere else, facing the always risky and very long journey through two oceans: crossing first the Atlantic on one ship until reaching what is today Panama, and from there sailing on another ship along the Pacific coast of South America to Peru. Her choice of declared final destination may have had many motivations, but one that cannot be discarded was the possible expectation of more opportunities for material personal improvement in a precious metal-mining region.
On the other hand, her identifying herself before the authorities as a person born in the colonial city of Santo Domingo seems to talk to us about a sense of identity related to this place from which she was removed when a girl. And whatever happened to María after December 1575, the fact is that additional historical records show that, four and a half years later, she, then the mother of a young girl, embarked with her to Santo Domingo.
In a peculiar way, the forced migration from Santo Domingo to Spain by María de Cota and others like her during the second half of the 16th century, and her later yearning to get back to La Española, inevitably reminds us of similarities between her historical experience and time and today’s migration dynamics the Dominican Republic as a “sending” nation-state and Spain as a “receiving” society.