Free Black Community in Sixteenth Century Panama: An Interview with Robert Schwaller
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Robert Schwaller about his new article, “Free Black Community in Sixteenth Century Panama: Communal Mobilization against Tribute.” In 1575, free Black residents of Panama, identifying as negros and mulatos, protested the imposition of tribute on people of African descent. Their protest generated a casefile that recorded their unique, collective legal arguments for exemption from tribute. The case also included the tribute rolls documenting over three hundred free people of African descent in the region. The article analyzes this rich case to illustrate the collective efforts of Panama’s Black community to resist the imposition of tribute and to highlight the social and economic diversity of this community’s members. Because of their collective efforts, the Black community of Panama created one of the richest historical sources for understanding Black life in late sixteenth century Spanish America.
Dr. Schwaller is a professor of Latin American History at the University of Kansas specializing in the history of the African Diaspora to Spanish America and the development of race in the Americas. He has published five books in addition to eleven book chapters and articles. He serves as the co- editor of the journal Ethnohistory. His first monograph, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) compares the legal framework of race to the lived experiences of persons of mixed ancestry to illustrate how individuals leveraged social positions and networks to mediate their racial categorization. His recent documentary history, African Maroons in Sixteenth Century Panama: A History in Documents (OUP, 2021), traces how Africans in Panama tenaciously defended their communities from the Spanish and succeeded in negotiating a peace that guaranteed their freedom establishing the first two free-Black communities in the Americas.
Ashley Everson (AE): The legal exemptions to tribute that Black Panamanians successfully attained created a permanent record that preserved the diversity of Black Panamanians and explicitly refuted anti-Black stereotypes. How do you see this archive—both in its content and its existence—reshaping our understanding of the Black presence in Panama’s colonial history?
Robert Schwaller (RS): The impact of Black people on Panama’s history is undeniable; however, so much of the extant archival documents that allow us to access this period simply do not consider or comment on Black Panamanian’s experiences. The archive preserves Spanish perspectives, often favoring those of officials. The power of the sources I analyze is that not only do they record the hopes, aspirations, and legal arguments of Panama’s Black community, the very documents themselves came into existence because of that community mobilizing to protect their interests. I hope that future scholars continue to mine these documents in new and innovative ways to help further uncover the silences that shroud Black experiences.
AE: You frame this case as an example of Black intellectual thought in the colonial archive. What methodological approaches helped you uncover these intellectual dimensions?
RS: I have been very inspired by the work of Saidiya Hartman and her methodology of “critical fabulations.” Although I do not deploy that method to its fullest extent, her scholarship illustrates how the work of recovering Black perspectives requires imagination to fill in the gaps created by the archive. Recently, I have been inspired by the work of Miguel Valerio and Chloe Ireton. Both have done an amazing job teasing out Black intellectual activity from sources that typically are not considered intellectual history. My approach is also informed by the pioneering work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Christina Shape, and Katherine McKittrick. They challenge us to think about how power structures in the past have created narratives that shaped not only the production of archives but even the bounds of what we can imagine within the past. In my work, I try to balance Sharpe’s notion of the wake of slavery and “wake work” with McKittrick’s call to move beyond “the repetition of death and violence.”
AE: How do you see this research contributing to broader conversations about African diasporic legal activism before the nineteenth century?
RS: This article adds to a growing body of scholarship on the Spanish Empire that has shown that the legal regime could be responsive to agitation by even the most marginalized subjects of the empire. The work of Adrian Masters, Bianca Premo, Michelle McKinley, and Adriana Chira have helped reveal that the legal landscape of Spain’s empire was co-produced by subjects themselves. This research offers a window into that process.
I have tried to follow the case step by step to illustrate how Black Panamanians not only deployed legal arguments but reacted to negative decisions with new novel arguments. Their success had ramifications elsewhere.
The royal exemption for tribute that was ‘co-produced’ by their legal arguments would be cited by Black and Afro-descended subjects across the empire in future attempts to gain tribute exemptions.
AE: In your discussion of Black Panamanians’ “shared Black consciousness that transcended the racial categories used by the institutional state and broader society,” you also note that the free Black population could not be disentangled from enslaved Black subjects or self-liberated maroons. How do you see this collective identification challenging the colonial racial hierarchy, and how might it have informed political and legal strategies in Panama?
RS: This is a great question and one that I could only allude to in the article. Within the legal record we see that ascriptions of negro and mulato do not appear to divide the community, they in fact work together as a single unit. What I find very interesting are the women who claim to be zambaigas (Afro-Indigenous persons) because they attempt to deploy that racial category as an exception to the imposition of tribute because that category was not included in the royal decree. This deployment should not be read as a distancing from the community of individuals who identified as negro or mulato, rather a shrewd legal argument that sought to trap royal officials in the very language that was being deployed to racialize individuals of African descent.
What is interesting is how individuals move between collective and individual efforts to secure tribute exemption. Such attempts should not be read as a rejection of the collective but rather an attempt by individuals within the collective to maximize their chances of gaining an exemption.
The issue of maroons is also interesting precisely because we know that maroons and free/freed Black Panamanians communicated frequently shared information and material support. Yet, the collective efforts I trace had to rhetorically distance themselves from maroons and even emphasize the sacrifices that free/freed Black Panamanians made to combat maroons.
Again, I think it is useful to remember that the Black community, free/freed, enslaved, self-liberated, likely recognized that individuals could and should pursue varied strategies for securing freedom or gaining financial advantages or pursuing autonomy. The work of McKinley, Chira, and Ireton offers other examples of how to interpret disparate and collective strategies within broader Black communities.
AE: You reference African traditions in which subjects paid tribute to kings and lords. To what extent do you think Black Panamanians invoked or rejected these traditions in negotiating whether they should be allowed to accumulate wealth in the colonial nation? Were they reframing these customs for their own political advantage?
RS: This is a very interesting issue because it reveals that the Spanish had a greater understanding of African rulership than we have generally assumed. Recent work by Herman Bennett has helped draw attention to this incorrect assumption. But in the case I examine what is interesting is that the Black community makes the argument that the African precedent does not really apply. Many free Black Panamanians had only known the Spanish monarch, so African practices did not justify imposing tribute on them as Spanish subjects. In this sense, their legal maneuvering sought to educate the monarch on the fact that many of their community were criollos (American-born) and had never been subject to African rulers. Here is an example where we see divergence between maroons and the free Black community. Maroons tended to be African born.
By the period of this article, maroon communities had coalesced around groupings that mirrored African cultural regions. David Wheat has explored this and shown that maroon groups tended to contain men from closely related regions of Atlantic Africa. Although archival silence clouds our ability to interpret maroon rulership, the extant sources suggest that maroons adapted African traditions of rulership to the context of life in the Americas. For their part, free Black Panamanians emphasized their loyalty and dutiful service to the Spanish monarch. Their choice reveals a shrewd awareness that under the Habsburgs service to the monarch represented a viable means by which to gain personal and collective privilege.
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