Transgressing the Household: The Laws of Slaveholding and the Practices of Freedom in Colonial Peru

Spanish colonial law in the seventeenth century limited slavery to the domestic sphere, and enabled slaveholders to restrict negotiations with enslaved people to the confines of the intimate. This paper explores how enslaved and freed people, primarily women, created their own written documentation to gain their freedom in colonial coastal Peru. In doing so, they countered paternalistic authority, expanding civil locations for the African Diaspora in colonial Spanish America. 

Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Assistant Professor, History Department, University of California Irvine. National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows, 2015-16.