Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interview with Erika Edwards
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Erika Edwards about their role in editing the “Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean” special issue of Global Black Thought. This special issue grapples with the complexities of race and identity in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. Centered on Black freedom, the articles complicate our understanding of the freeing process. Through a myriad of choices and decisions, people of African descent articulated their freedom in societies and institutions that sought to socially degrade them. The essays featured in the issue expand our understanding of Blackness by exploring the ideas and experiences of people of African descent in present day Dominican Republic, Panama, Peru, and Puerto Rico.
Dr. Edwards is an Associate Professor of Latin American History. She received her PhD from Florida International University in Atlantic History with concentrations in Latin America and Pre-colonial Atlantic Africa. Edwards’s research advocates for re-learning Argentina’s black past and the origins of anti-blackness. She is the author of the award-winning book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic, which is a gendered analysis of black erasure and the construction of race in Argentina. She is currently working on her next book project Her Presence Insults Me: A Family History of Race-Making in Argentina. Edwards has been interviewed and consulted by Buenos Aires Times, BBC, National Public Radio (NPR), The Atlanta Black Star, The New York Times, World Bank, The Guardian, Telemundo, and profiled in AskMeAnything, The Guardian, New York Review of Books, and Fox News. She has provided various talks to institutions and organizations in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She teaches courses on African Diaspora, Latin American History, State-formation, and Black Women’s history at the graduate and undergraduate level.
Ashley Everson (AE): The concept of calidad plays a central role in your framing of this issue. How do you see it complicating or enriching our understanding of Blackness in the colonial period?
Erika Edwards (EE): The concept of calidad (quality in English) continues to enrich our understanding of how Blackness manifests, shifts, and ultimately defines a person’s identity.
In colonial Spanish America, a person’s calidad was based on a combination of factors: phenotype, status (occupation, wealth, honor), and place of origin. The most common labels were español, indio, negro, mestizo (español and indio), mulato (español and negro), and zambo (indio and negro mixture). But social, economic, and political factors also played a role.
To be labeled negro, or Black, in colonial Spanish America often described a person who had dark skin, was enslaved or impoverished, born in Africa or to African-descended parents, or lacked virtue. Three hundred years of colonization and miscegenation led to more labels with some of the most common being pardo, moreno, ladino, and cuarterón. At times, as many as 100 calidad labels existed in St. Domingue, and it was used to account for drops of Black blood in a person.
Yet what makes calidad complex, and particular to its application to Blackness, is that most of these characteristics were mutable—i.e. a slave can be freed (negro libre) or an African-descended person could be light skinned (mulata blanca). Moreover, a Black person’s virtuous and honorable acts, such as serving in the militia, gave them privileges that other Black people could not obtain.
Ultimately, a person’s calidad was based on two factors: self-identification, which at times led to self-abandonment, and how they were perceived by others. Blackness, or the lack there of, came forward during various daily contact points, such as in legal proceedings and petitions, or how the state shifted and shaped one’s identity. The articles featured in this special issue reflect the complexity of calidad labels and their applicability among Black communities when confronted with the law, public health, self-abandonment, and anti-colonialism.
AE: You describe the articles as complicating the “freeing process.” How does this complication shift the way we think about freedom as a legal, social, and intellectual construct?
EE: The freeing process is just that—it did not stop with emancipation. It continued as an active process that involved constantly finding ways to combat the marginalization and discrimination that occurred after the release from bondage.
Freedom occurred via collective legal petitioning in Panama. Regardless of their legal status–free, enslaved, or maroon–they successfully fought against the implementation of tribute. Tribute, a form of coerced labor, would have continued to marginalize free and freed populations, which revealed how their free status did not define their freedom. The social networking among the Black population (slaves, free, and maroons) further revealed that Blackness could not be disentangled from their lived realities despite legal distinctions.
Freedom also came forward intellectually as La Negra revealed freedom could serve as a healing praxis for impoverished areas in fifteenth-century Santo Domingo. Sophia Monegro described this as “shadow intellectualism” as La Negra applied knowledge via her healing labor in the shadows. This is especially noted as her bohío was purposely set away from the colonial center. It is still disputed whether she was enslaved or not, but what she provided through healing practices arose from within the intellectual milieu of medicine derived from African healing practices, and its application saved many Indigenous lives.
Social and, at times, contradictory approximation to whiteness did bring freedom but it came at a price. Robert Schwaller examined how legal exemptions from tribute temporarily exempted Black women married to white men. Andrea Morales’s discussion of Ramón Marín y Sola’s play, El Hijo de Amor, revealed the price of freedom came with self-abandonment and the tragic rupture of family ties and exile. It is through assimilation that legal frameworks and social customs created freedom, but it came at the cost of people as African descendants sacrificed their selfhood in reinforcing the socioracial hierarchy.
Rebellion and anticolonial resistance further defined the ways in which freedom manifests socially and intellectually. Tacuma Peters delves into the misidentification of Antonio Oblitas, which has contributed to the rendering of Afro-descended attitudes toward Indigenous people as passive or antagonistic. Instead, Peters sheds light on how the groups interacted and the ways both enslaved and free people attempted to dismantle institutional bondage.
AE: Each essay in this volume employs its own methodological lens, yet together they create a coherent conversation. How do you see these different approaches complementing each other, and where, in your view, does the heart of their synergy lie?
EE: At the heart of the issue lies the rebellious act of being Black.
Robert Schwaller’s article reveals that when enslaved, freed, or maroons used collective bargaining successfully to seek redress from colonial authorities, they, in turn, helped to define and contribute to the making of policies that directly influenced their daily lives.
Sophia Monegro highlights how Black women are, in many ways, at the nexus of the colonization process despite remaining nameless. La Negra represented countless Black women who carried their knowledge from Africa and then passed it down for generations—resulting in many saved lives.
Andrea Morales’s analysis of Ramón Marín y Sola’s play provides a moment of “art imitating life.” She details how Black people’s presence was seen as a negative determinant in Puerto Rico, and her work allows us to identify conversations about self-abandonment and the whitening process within Black populations. Assimilation may not seem like a rebellious act, but doing so resulted in their detriment.
Tacuma Peters centers Black men in the anticolonial struggle. The 1782 rebellion has predominately focused on indio participation and white colonial Spaniards. Yet his work reminds us that Antonio Oblitas, a Black man, committed the first rebellious act of freedom. His erasure from public memory, by no fault of his own, underscores a simmering if not smoldering fear of Black rebellion that originated from the oppressive and dehumanizing act of slavery.
Together these articles reveal that to be Black—to live, labor, and love—was a constant state of rebellion.
AE: For educators teaching about race formation in colonial Latin America, the essays in this volume offer multiple entry points into the study of racialization and empire. How do you envision these pieces being used in the classroom, and what key insights or skills do you hope students will carry forward from engaging with them?
EE: These pieces provide students a historical context for Black experiences in Spanish America. But they also give voice to Black petitioners, rebels, healers, and writers. In that sense, it opens students to the ways Black people contributed to the making of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. These texts also provide unique methodologies in how to approach the archive. They reveal how to gain access to or find Black voices in primary documents that were often created by colonial governments, including trials, petitions, letters, and literature. I stress this aspect because this issue is quite multidisciplinary—involving a political scientist, literary scholars, and historians—and they all analyze how the Black past continues to inform our present.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.