"Legal Asynchronies and Enslaved Migrations in the Río de la Plata, 1810?1840"

CANDIOTI, MAGDALENA

Providence

Simposio; Trans-American Crossings: Enslaved Migrations within the Americas and Their Impacts on Slave Cultures and Societies; 2018

Omohundro Institute and the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

Interprovincial slave purchases were very frequent in the Río de la Plata since colonial times. However, the closure of the Atlantic slave trade functioned as a catalyst for the internal and even external redistribution of enslave labor. This practice, along with the new policies of gradual abolition, were key in the series of conflicts analyzed here. Spanish legislation, combined with locally produced norms intended to ensure its applicability, had given some homogeneity to the regulation of slavery and access to freedom in the Hispanic American world for three centuries. The rupture of the colonial bond and the process of construction of new republics it generated, opened a process of simultaneous redefinition of borders, jurisdictions and legislation. Among the later, legislation on slavery and abolition. The paper addresses particularly the question of how asynchronies in anti-slavery legislation affected the experiences, strategies and possibilities of freedom of slaves moving across those borders. It analyzes a series of judicial cases where forced or voluntary crossings of enslaved people impacted on their legal status and, by doing so, it reconstructs the circulation and uses of the principles such as "free soil" and ?free wombs? in future Argentina and Uruguay. It also reflects on the knowledge that slaves had about such norms and how they use them in order to resist forced relocations, to promote convenient migrations, to increase their degrees of autonomy or to achieve full freedom.