by Rosa M. O’Connor Acevedo, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy

On February 20, 1824, a mayor in Puerto Rico writes to Governor Miguel de la Torre pleading for support to apprehend a fugitive slave referred to in the colonial documents as “Negra Martha.” According to the letter, Negra Martha ran away from the grips of her enslaver, Daniel Peterson, two years before the letter was written describing the maroon woman’s whereabouts.¹ The letter details confidential information that located Martha first on a smaller island of Puerto Rico, Vieques, and later, in the mainland town of Humacao. While the letter was intended to gather support for the apprehension of this cimarrona (maroon woman), the story that the colonial archive tells is one of resistance and mobility, not from a generic slave or maroon, but from a maroon woman.

I am able to recount Martha’s act of running away from her enslaver, crossing land and water, thanks to the support of CSWS and CLLAS Research Grants that allowed me to carry on archival research in Spain and Puerto Rico during the summer of 2023. With the support of CSWS and CLLAS, I visited the Archivo Nacional Histórico in Madrid, Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, and Archivo General de Puerto Rico to investigate how enslaved women were described and presented in colonial documents about Puerto Rico. 

The proposal was inspired by a gap I found in research: a lack of a gendered analysis of slavery in the Spanish speaking Caribbean. While works like Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery and Hilary Beckles’s Centering Women: Gendered Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society have provided important feminist analysis about enslaved women in North America and the Caribbean, they mostly reflect the history of British or US slavery. This lens cannot be imposed to explain gender dynamics during slavery in the Spanish Caribbean since racial and gender formation varies according to the systems imposed by the different colonial powers. 

My archival research provides a gendered analysis about slavery in Puerto Rico that counteracts the traditional representations of the enslaved as a generic and masculine category. This traditional representation hinders our understanding of enslaved female experiences and resistance, which my research seeks to address.
As I accessed colonial documents from the late sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries in Madrid and Sevilla, I faced practical and conceptual limitations. At a practical level, old documents, especially those handwritten before the nineteenth century, were difficult to read and transcribe. At a conceptual and affective level, it was hard to navigate colonial documents that dehumanized and reduced enslaved people to mere numbers, statistics, and items authorized in commercial transportation and contracts. The difficulties I faced are theorized by Sadiya Hartman as limitations of colonial archives to describe enslaved women’s experiences and perspectives.²

However, because Puerto Rico has not even grappled with our “official” history, I was convinced that the archives can tell more than its colonial scripture. I was inspired by the decolonial work of historian Jean Casimir who advocates for reading against the archive in his rearticulation of the Haitian Revolution.³ I followed Hartman’s method of critical fabulation which allows one to imagine and exploit the possibilities of a story already gestured to by the archives. Following Hartman’s critical fabulation, I moved elements of the story and interrogated its context, assumptions, and implications to say more than what was written in the colonial documents. 
I want to close with an example of reading against the grain with the Collection “Esclavos prófugos 1801-1806” located at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. A document dated June 30, 1806, lists “runaway Blacks” (Negros prófugos) that escaped from the Hacienda of Santiago Rixos. What stood out to me from this document was the participation of enslaved women in the collective flight. From a list of fifteen runaways, four were women and two were children. While the document listed enslaved men first and then enslaved women as their companions, I interrogated the intended centering of enslaved men as main actors and wondered about the role of the fugitive women. What if the four enslaved women listed were actually the main organizers and conspirators for this act of marronage? Moreso, in the case of the enslaved woman who ran with her two children: How could she not have had an active role in organizing the fugitive act? 

Against the colonial obsession of documenting all instances of enslaved flight, I read this document as evidence about the central role enslaved women played in organizing collective flights. The list of runaways from the Hacienda Rixos reveals an important and often occluded feature of marronage: kinship or family marronage, despite its precarious nature. Ultimately, the colonial letter discloses enslaved women as cimarronas and the social relations that were required to actualize the dreams of freedom.  

—Rosa M. O’Connor Acevedo, Philosophy, received a 2023 Graduate Student Research Grant for this project.


References

1  Maroon, cimarrón in Spanish, is a term used to name slaves that ran away from their owners or plantations. Originally, the term was dehumanizing since it started to be used in the Hispaniola to name pigs that ran away and later was used to describe enslaved people’s flight from their owners. Today, marronage or cimaronaje has been reappropriated to describe a wide arrange of disruption, resistance, and flight by enslaved people across the Americas. See Pedro Lebrón, Filosofía del Cimarronaje, 2020; Alexandra Roche, Le marronage dans la littérature caribéene, 2017; and Neil Roberts, Freedom As Marronage, 2015. 

2  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2008. 

3  Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, 2020.