INTRODUCTION
In April 1577, fifteen free Black women and seven free Black men appeared at the offices of one of the city of Panamá’s public notaries to finalize a power of attorney. The document enabled two procurators, Juan González Camacho and Alonso de Herrera, to bring their paperwork to Philip II’s (r. 1556–98) court in Madrid and represent them in an important legal matter.Footnote 1
The notary recorded the names of the individuals he identified as “free Black men and women, permanent and temporary residents in this city”: Juan Cauallero, Anton Mostrenco, Francisco Ruiz, Manuel Gomez, Juan Perez, Ysabel Nyñez, Juan de Naba, Francisco de Molina, Catalina Morena, Violante Rruyz, Gracia de Rrodas, Ysabel de Rivera, Juana la Rroca, Juana de Molina, Maria de Velasco, Ana Pacho, Gracia Domynguez, Leonor Pascual, Polonia Burgas, Leonor Perez, Catalina Hernandez, and Juana de Lossa. The ratio of women (fifteen) to men (seven) reflected that of the city, where free Black women outnumbered free Black men by about two to one.Footnote 2 None of the twenty-two could write, so three Spanish male witnesses signed the document for them.
The room where the group met must have been crowded; perhaps instead of the notary’s office they used a room in the cabildo’s (city council’s) building, or even a chamber in the large building by the port that housed the Audiencia, or royal high court, where the petition had been approved the year before. Those in attendance represented many others. The documents that the procurators were to present at court were written on behalf of the “negros y negras mulatos y mulatas horros desta dicha ciudad e rreyno,” the free Black and mulato men and women of this city and kingdom. The petition asked the king for a collective exemption from his 1574 order imposing a substantial annual tax on them, to compensate for the comforts he claimed they received living as his subjects.Footnote 3 In its final successful form, the petition temporarily freed more than two hundred Black women and men, already registered in a tribute census, from a painful obligation. And it did so with the express backing of the city’s cabildo, its Audiencia, and twenty Spanish male witnesses, representing Spanish interests on the isthmus. Indeed, the Black men and women instructed their procurators to, after they presented the petitions, depositions, and other paperwork relevant to the case, return any royal response through ships consigned to Martín Barriga, a city official, underlining institutional support for this mission. Spanish- and African-descended residents of the isthmus here acted in concert, though not always for the same reasons.
The free African-descended population opposed the tax in part because of economic privation. Despite the Crown’s claim to the contrary, most were poor, laboring on farms, ranches, or in domestic service, transporting goods and people across the isthmus, and working as artisans, assistants, or in other marginalized occupations. The pesos the king demanded would prove a hardship, particularly to those employed seasonally and the elderly or infirm. Many also complained that they already contributed to the Crown’s cause through honorable military service, rendering this an excessive demand.
The cabildo, in contrast, was driven by fear. For decades, city leaders had been engaged in violent conflicts with cimarrones (formerly enslaved people who had freed themselves from Spanish masters to live in fugitive communities in the mountains). Now, with English and French corsairs recently allied with the cimarrones, cabildo members were demonstrably alarmed. The ordinances they wrote in 1571 to discipline cimarrones—and persons, free or enslaved, who aided them or failed to control the enslaved persons under their command—included punishments so brutal that the king’s council returned them for moderation and clarification.Footnote 4 Philip II issued an order in 1573 authorizing Panamá’s officials to negotiate toward resettlement with any cimarrones who agreed to peaceful surrender. The process of turning former cimarrón communities into free Black polities would not begin in earnest until 1579.Footnote 5 In the midst of this uncertainty, the cabildo was concerned that the tribute requirement might make the cimarrones balk or even incite free Blacks to join forces with them. Nonetheless, in July 1575 the king’s local representatives began the process of registering free people of African descent in a series of padrones, or tribute rolls. The padrones utilized two main adjectival descriptors to register tributaries: negros, those whose parents were both considered Black, and mulatos, those understood to have mixed parentage.Footnote 6 This was in response to the king’s instructions to include people of mixed heritages, although the distinction was not one much utilized by Spanish residents in everyday life.Footnote 7
By August, one of the city’s procurators, Hernando de Ribera, had petitioned the Audiencia to abandon tribute collection entirely.Footnote 8 He articulated the cabildo’s concerns that the African-descended population might flee or commit crimes under this new pressure; the continuing presence of cimarrones in the mountains was also on their minds. While the Audiencia deliberated, many free women and a handful of men of African descent individually petitioned the court for personal exemptions, on grounds ranging from poverty to military service to miscategorization. Most of these petitions were unsuccessful.Footnote 9
In 1576, the Audiencia finally allowed a collective petition to move forward, granting permission to carry out an información, a series of sworn witness depositions in response to a questionnaire (interrogatorio), a necessary step before sending the petition, testimony, and their favorable opinion to the king’s council in Madrid. Here the named parties in the petition were six free Black men—Melchor de Garai, Gaspar Ruiz, Juan Antonio, Melchor García, Antonio Mostrenco, and Juan Cavallero—but they wrote, they said, on behalf of the entire free Black and mulato population, male and female. This was the material that the Black women and men entrusted to their procurators to deliver to the Consejo de Indias in Madrid.Footnote 10 In October 1578, the Consejo and the king issued a cédula, or royal decree, partially in their favor, lifting tribute obligations for the “negros libres” of this land on the basis of their procurator’s representation of their poverty.Footnote 11 The mulatos and mulatas— spoken for but not represented in the group that managed the litigation—would have to re-petition before successfully receiving their own exemption the following year.
This compelling narrative offers an unprecedented story of Black collective success in the early modern Spanish empire. But the documents offer the historian a great deal more. They describe conflicting narratives about the nature of relationships between Spanish and African-descended communities, both free and unfree. The tiny Spanish population—perhaps eight hundred men, women, and children—was entirely dependent upon the free and enslaved African-descended majority of about six thousand, and they also feared them, particularly the thousands of cimarrones said to be living in the mountains, outside of all Spanish jurisdiction.Footnote 12 The isthmus was among the most important strategic locations for the Spanish treasury, as Potosí’s silver traveled by ship from the Port of Callao in Perú to Panamá City, then was loaded onto muletrains—often operated and/or owned by free people of African descent—and carried toward the northern ports of Nombre de Dios and Portobelo. If conditions allowed, the cargo might be moved first by muletrain over the Camino Real, and then transferred to small boats, to be navigated up the Chagre River about halfway across the isthmus; during months when the river was too dry, the entire trip was made over treacherous terrain.Footnote 13 In either case, in Nombre de Dios and Portobelo, the treasure, correspondence, and other valuables would await the arrival of the fleet in the Caribbean to remove it to Spain. Return trips from Spain to Perú would be laden with imported merchandise, royal correspondence, and passengers, and joined by shipments of enslaved African laborers destined for the South American market. The isthmus was key to Spanish wealth and power; it was symbolic of imperial control of this vast and still unwieldy realm.
Ironically, this symbolic stronghold was a region that Spain held tenuously, or not at all. Columbus first attempted to secure Belén near Veragua in 1503, but its native peoples repeatedly repelled invasions. Spaniards founded and usually abandoned other settlements, though the existence of mines in Acla and Veragua held persistent appeal, lending the region its new name, Castilla del Oro.Footnote 14 Pedro de Arias Dávila (1440–1531) and his colleagues established the municipalities of Panamá on the Pacific coast in 1519 and Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean in 1520, as part of failed attempts to gain control of the center of the isthmus or connect it to Spanish-held territories to its west.Footnote 15 More successfully, Panamá became a locus from which exploration of South America would take off, and through which Andean silver could make its way back to the royal coffers.
The interior of the isthmus, however, remained largely under Indigenous control: each Spanish town had Indigenous satellites, and Spanish jurisdiction remained minimal and subject to negotiation with Indigenous leaders. In 1551, the cabildo of Nata, the rare municipal holder of an encomienda, sent a collective petition to the king opposing the promulgation of the New Laws of 1544, which threatened to end the institution. In it, the cabildo warned that if “their Indians” were released to their own pueblos, they were likely to find common cause with “yndios caribes” and “Blacks in rebellion,” and return with them to wreak havoc.Footnote 16 The relatively few settlers on the isthmus considered themselves always on the verge of losing control to many and diverse enemies. The president of Panamá’s Audiencia wrote a report in 1575 describing its cities but noting that that the rest of the region “is still to be conquered from the warrior Indians who inhabit it.”Footnote 17 Enslaved people regularly escaped from the muletrains as well as the haciendas, mines, pearlfisheries, and other sites where they labored. They set up mobile polities in the mountains and threatened the merchants trekking across the isthmus. As Ruth Pike notes, these palenques were unequaled across the sixteenth-century Spanish Americas in numbers, extension, duration, and leadership.Footnote 18
In their many official letters, petitions, and ordinances, Spanish settlers at Panamá and Nombre de Dios described these threats as relentless and existential. Peril also came from other Europeans: political rebellions and corsairs threatened commerce and imperial life. Notably, Panamá was invaded by the rebellious Contreras brothers, sons of the deposed governor of Nicaragua, who plotted to take Panamá, the Spanish treasure ships, and Perú in 1550.Footnote 19 Some French and English corsairs had allied with cimarrones, who helped them gain access to the Chagre River in hopes of capturing merchandise and the treasure ships. The cimarrones themselves were known to be organized into multiple political and military units, under the control of their own leaders or kings.Footnote 20
These periodic crises were only staved off through the work of informal militias largely composed of the free and enslaved African-descended populations, who were forced to deploy against innumerable enemies, including, one imagines, their own fugitive relatives.Footnote 21 An osteological study of remains in the cathedral of Panamá (occupied 1519–1671) shows that 16 percent of the burials, mostly young adult men and women from Europe, the Americas, and Africa, show evidence of traumatic head injuries. Contemporary documents also testify to both constant military combat and to informal interpersonal violence, particularly committed by those who considered themselves immune to prosecution because of lax oversight.Footnote 22 Purportedly Spanish Castilla del Oro was Indigenous and African, a place where its nominal Spanish vecinos (permanent residents) were well aware of their dependence on people whom they also feared.
SINGLING OUT BLACK WOMEN
The proceedings also tell us an unexpected story about Panamá’s free Black women, about whom very little has been written. The new tribute demand placed upon them was unprecedented. Across densely populated Mesoamerica and the Andean region, the king had imposed tribute upon Indigenous households through a process that usually involved sending inspectors to count a community’s adult men and multiply that number by some standard rate.Footnote 23 Laws promulgated in 1575 and 1618 specifically exempted Indigenous women.Footnote 24 The community as a whole was then responsible for the total, in effect protecting groups with large numbers of single and widowed women. There were localized exceptions to this pattern in the late sixteenth century, and the assignment of tribute to Black subjects was part of a rash of attempts to generate more income and force non-Spaniards into labor markets.Footnote 25 So the 1574 ordinance was a radical move not only because it added people of African descent to a process that originally was tied to Indigenous reorganization and self-governance (guaranteeing them access to land and other resources), but also because it made women equally obligated with men, and individualized a familial or community obligation. Even in regions where Indigenous tribute was not significant (like Castilla de Oro), the new scheme arrived as a massive overreach.
The Crown singled out women for obvious reasons. As many historians have shown, Black women were emancipated at a higher rate than Black men: they had more ways to earn small amounts of money, enslavers were more likely to concede their emancipation for reasons of intimacy of some kind, and some enslaved families acted strategically to free women—and thus any future children—first.Footnote 26 This gender asymmetry seized the attention of royal officials, who saw the growing numbers of free Black women as a way to bolster faltering treasury accounts.
The free Black population of Castilla de Oro was indeed dominated by women. According to the tribute censuses carried out in 1576 (see appendix), nearly twice as many women as men were registered in the four censused towns (Panamá, Nombre de Dios, Concepción, and Villa de los Santos).Footnote 27 The category of mulato was smaller but more evenly distributed. Mulato men and women were more likely to have been born free, so their equal numbers reflect birth rates more than emancipation rates. Like Philip II, we should take seriously the fact of a female majority among free Black subjects, and consider its implications.
Women of African descent actively protested their incorporation into the ranks of tributaries: eighteen women filed petitions for personal exemptions, while only six men did so (one on behalf of his wife). They scored the first victory as well, filing for uniform exemptions for women of African descent married to Spanish men, arguing that they should “enjoy the liberty of their husbands just as women who marry hidalgos do.” The Audiencia adapted its order in 1575, exempting such families categorically.Footnote 28 Women of mixed Indigenous and Black ancestry, some of whom identified themselves using the term zambaigas, filed petitions claiming they were not covered by any of the categories, but the fiscal (Crown attorney) dismissed them as “mulatas” and ruled that they were subject to the order.Footnote 29 Indeed, the only petitioners who found individual success were two elderly Black men, granted exemptions on the basis of age and infirmity.
Although the collective petition was filed under the names of six Black men, Black women participated in its organization and implementation, as shown by their overwhelming presence when the community drew up the power of attorney in April 1577. The petition itself ignored their names in favor of men recognized as leaders in militias and politics, but when the community composed itself to authorize legal actions, Black women were in the majority.
Black women also influenced the way that the case was framed and litigated, either through their own participation or through the actions of men who were their husbands, fathers, sons, and friends. Their influence can be excavated from the documentation. Colonial legal paperwork is notably obscure, and scholars have attempted to trace its itineraries and marginalia toward a deeper understanding of complex juridical processes.Footnote 30 Some have drawn attention to the roles of architecture and space to illuminate the way that power, race, and gender permeated legal relationships.Footnote 31 Black feminist scholars have engaged with critical practices of historical imagination to restore a fragmented subjecthood to those erased by the documentary record and archival practices.Footnote 32
This essay offers another method: close textual readings to return dialogue and conflict to what notaries crafted as straight monologue. Its methods are influenced by Thomas Abercrombie’s magnificent study of Antonio Yta, who was raised as a girl and lived as an adult man until his wife turned him in to authorities in Charcas in 1803.Footnote 33 Abercrombie parsed the shifting gendered pronouns and adjectival endings in the legal proceedings, where the accused, officials, and witnesses all moved between Antonio’s two genders depending upon their self-interest, their immediate perceptions of Antonio’s clothing or name, and their history with Antonio. Abercrombie used those small changes to demonstrate the variety of ways that people in late colonial Charcas experienced and thought about gender.Footnote 34
Also methodologically essential is Cristina Rivera Garza’s work with early twentieth-century institutional psychiatric interviews that show female patients and male doctors clashing and borrowing from one another in narratives of the patient’s mental illness. Rivera Garza argues that institutional files are inherently dialogic even when they present as monologic. Her work on Mexico’s La Castañeda Insane Asylum’s records show how the institutional setting, the presence of authority figures with an imperative jargon, and formulaic questions that do not offer much room for self-directed meandering must be read as contestations over meaning and narrative, even as the records appear to be self-narrated life histories.Footnote 35 By bringing Rivera Garza’s and Abercrombie’s methodological sensibilities to the genre of the legal información, this essay identifies the invisible interventions of free Black women, who acted as powerful experts alongside more visible petitioners and their procurators. This offers a new way to return Black women to the courtroom and the documentary record, despite their relative absence from this set of documents.
“NEGROS Y NEGRAS MULATOS Y MULATAS LIBRES”
The expansion of tribute to men and women of African descent was an attempt to increase royal income, which was in decline as Indigenous populations contracted due to disease, slavery, flight, and warfare. The specific policy may have drawn on Philip II’s correspondence with the viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez (r. 1568–80). In many of his annual reports, Enríquez had expressed hostility toward Mexico City’s free people of African descent, whom, in tandem with the Indigenous population, he thought likely to rise up in rebellion.Footnote 36 As Miguel Valerio shows, Enríquez explicitly opposed the establishment of a confraternity and hospital to serve the city’s free mulato population, as requested by the tailor Juan Bautista in 1568. Enríquez opposed, he said, “black gatherings” which were “very difficult to disband.”Footnote 37 In 1574, Enríquez wrote to Philip that “only one thing daily brings the worsening of the state of affairs, and if God and your Majesty do not remedy it, I fear it will be the downfall of this land, and that is the enormous growth of the mulato population…and each year a great number of blacks come to this land.”Footnote 38 Enríquez’s obsessive fear of Black autonomy surely left an impression on the monarch and his council, including the potential for such a numerous population to contribute to the royal treasury.
The emphasis on Black women might, in turn, be traced to the expansion of Indigenous tribute and a new focus on Indigenous women’s production, especially in textiles.Footnote 39 In regions lacking active mines, textiles proved to be the most valuable tribute good, often shipped to regional markets. While Indigenous women were not the sole producers of textiles, they were targeted as a captive labor force, while authorities perceived Indigenous men to be more mobile and subject to labor drafts, taking them away from home. As populations declined, and with cyclical falls in agricultural production due to natural disasters, the reliance upon Indigenous women’s weaving increased. By the 1570s, the sequestration of Maya women in camulnae, or carceral workshops dedicated to textile production, was notorious, and authorities sent a series of inspectors to examine the situation. In 1583–84, the inspector Diego García de Palacio formally designated unmarried Maya women as tributaries, based on his belief that they were remaining single in order to avoid labor.Footnote 40 In this context, it makes sense that the tributary expansions of the 1570s and 1580s would target women of African descent in particular.
In order to ensure that free Black and mulata women paid as men did, the king’s orders to his audiencias and cabildos, and much of the writing that came from consideration of those orders, repeated the phrase “negros y negras mulatos y mulatas libres” over and over again (fig. 1).Footnote 41 There was to be no confusion. Royal officials underscored that men and women were to pay equally, and that any person with African ancestry was obligated. While the Crown’s representatives referred, in these documents, to the male and female cimarrones only as “los negros cimarrones,” using the masculine plural to capture a mass that they felt no need to differentiate by gender or parentage, when speaking of tributaries they broke the group down into parts as a technical and legal device. The precision of the repeated nouns ensured that men and women both understood their obligations, and that officials collected from them all. A town cryer would read the royal order aloud at all major population centers: “negros y negras mulatos y mulatas libres” were called upon to fulfill their roles.
Figure 1. “A todos los negros e negras mulatos e mulatas libres.” Excerpt from real cédula of 1574, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Panamá 42, N1, fol. 18r. With permission of Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
The collective petitioners, then, had to articulate why women, as well as men, should be exempted. Their poverty was an easy point: free women of African descent, like their male counterparts, were largely impoverished.Footnote 42 This was the general tenor of the first petition against tribute that Panamá’s cabildo presented: Blacks and mulatos were poor and desperate, and forcing them to pay might have dangerous consequences for Spanish settlements, including crime, violence, and prostitution.Footnote 43 But the collective litigants went beyond this unpleasant speculation, instead modeling their request on the common form known as the relación de méritos y servicios, a request to be rewarded for uncompensated (usually military) service already performed for the Crown. They presented themselves as men and women who had sacrificed for the Crown and now sought the privilege of exemption. In order to gain the exemption for the full community, the petitioners had to prove that women had also performed such valorous service.
This posed some problems. African-descended men had, since the earliest invasions, been called upon to support Spain’s hold on the territories around Panamá. One of the named petitioners, known as Francisco capitán, wrote that he had arrived in the region as a lengua, or interpreter, with the conquistador Pedro de Arias Dávila during the early entradas. Since then, free and enslaved Black people had been mobilized to fight Spanish rebels, had been settled near mines to hold land expropriated from Indigenous groups, and had served as an ad-hoc militia to hunt cimarrones. To demonstrate these decades of service, the petitioners drew up twenty questions (the interrogatorio or questionnaire) in the legal format called información to a set of witnesses, inviting them to substantiate their claims. While the opening and closing sequences of questions focused on poverty, the rest asked about participation in expeditions, settlement, and military service. They asked about the contributions of “negros y negras mulatos y mulatas,” although some of the questions about soldiering asked about “los negros” only.
Black women almost certainly participated in military expeditions. As Jennifer Morgan has shown, white enslavers did not apply their own gender norms to enslaved women, and they required them to carry out roles that they would never have asked of white women.Footnote 44 And as Vanessa Holden and Aisha Finch demonstrate, Black women might be involved in military actions from a less visible strategic or support position, in addition to serving as combatants; moreover, under conditions of conflict, support workers could easily turn into combatants.Footnote 45 But Spaniards likely paid little attention to women in these positions, perceiving military service as a masculine activity. The petitioners would have to extract that information if they were to receive exemptions for their female majority.
Witnesses, all adult Spanish men, mostly long-term permanent residents and many with military experience, were attributed answers that often repeated the language of the question or simply indicated their assent to it.Footnote 46 But many also offered their own narratives, inserting material that added to or was distinct from the content of the questions.Footnote 47 There was likely a great deal of back and forth as well, between procurators, witnesses, and notary. The scribe had to make decisions about how to render those answers.
Historians are well aware that colonial depositions are not direct transcriptions of testimony. The notary’s summaries generally repeat the language of the question, embed the witness’s response, and incorporate information garnered from any conversation between the parties in the room. They also depend heavily upon repetitious language. As a result, written testimony often has irregular or complicated grammar, with run-on sentences, interjected clauses, and disconnected thoughts.
In this particular case, the sentences often become more irregular when there is an insistence on gendered (and, to a lesser degree, raced) content, growing in complexity as information is emphasized or inserted. In part this is a function of the way the questionnaire was written by the petitioners and procurator: some questions ended with an injunction to discuss women, while others used the generic masculine term negros when the procurator or witnesses wished to break that term down to speak specifically of Black women, or of mulatos and mulatas. As became increasingly obvious during the deposition process, using the masculine plural of negros as a generic term risked an outcome that identified Black men as exempt and left Black women, mulato men, and mulata women as tribute-payers.
The next sections identify and interpret patterns of interruptions, repetitions, and grammatical variations in the depositions, in the context of the concerns about the representation of Black women actors. While all of this evidence remains circumstantial, the clear patterns, as well as marginal evidence that judges and procurators were carefully reading the case records for specific words, indicate that the procurators and petitioners pressured witnesses to speak about Black women. That pressure also emanated from Black women themselves, who, even if they were not present in the deposition rooms, exercised influence through those who were.
WITHIN THE DEPOSITION ROOM
How, then, did testimony take place, and how it was recorded? Judges of the Audiencia presided over hearings in Panamá’s Casas Reales, located near the city’s port (fig. 2), where they would have sworn in witnesses; they likely received testimony in the courtroom, in another chamber or semi-public threshold room within the Casas, or sent the parties to the cabildo offices across the way or a notary’s place of business.Footnote 48 In the room would have been the procurator Gabriel Maldonado and his witnesses, appearing serially; Luis Sánchez, son of a conquistador,Footnote 49 would have presided as secretary and escribano de cámara of the Audiencia; Cristobal de Luque, the escribano receptor or county clerk, would have taken notes, possibly with assistants. Others might have been present as well; while the courtroom was a closed setting, other types of rooms, including a notary’s office, might be accessed by the public. Luque would have established the identity of witnesses and asked them about conflicts of interest as he swore them in, read them the questions that the procurators had submitted, and taken notes to compose the written depositions.Footnote 50 At the end of testimony, Luque would have read his notes back to each witness for verbal ratification; once written up, the notes would have been presented to the witness to sign, if he knew how. Luque also signed and added his rubric after the witness’s signature, though the version in the archive is a copy sent to Madrid and does not include the original signatures or rubrics.
Figure 2. Plan of Panamá indicating the location of royal and municipal offices, by Bautista Antonelli, 1586. Reproduced with permission of Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, AHA JSE 013-C-09 (MPD 03691).
Procurators shaped their cases through their witnesses, whom they chose to support their parties’ claims and who were not subject to cross-examination. They prepared their witnesses, inviting them to answer in particular ways, perhaps prompting them as they spoke under oath. As Brian Owensby has shown, interrogatories were scripted to produce specific narratives, and witnesses were aware that their stories needed to be clear and not evasive in order to sway a judge.Footnote 51 In this case, the witnesses had strong reason to make statements that would convince the Consejo to suspend tribute in the region, as they claimed to see the possibilities of violence on the horizon. The witnesses were mostly local Spanish notables, including military commanders, procurators, and cabildo members, as well as a handful of artisans, all of whose livelihoods would be disrupted by Black unrest. Moreover, some had family members with African heritage; others were slave owners or employed free Black people. While procurators had reason to wish for particular kinds of statements, witnesses used their testimony to promote their own perspectives, leading to the need for clarifying questions and dialogue in the deposition room.
The scribe translated his notes on testimony into a statement in the third person.Footnote 52 This statement would have been guided by the language of the question but also shaped by follow-up questions or answers that exceeded the language of the question, but without indicating the interruptions. The notary “file[d] down the rough edges,” as Cristina Rivera Garza says of the historical novelist, excising the noise in the room as well as his own archiving work.Footnote 53 Thus it is impossible to identify precisely what was said and by whom, and it would be wrong to place too much emphasis on a singular word or phrase, which might represent the speech of the witness or procurator but might also be the notary’s understanding of what was said in the moment, or his later recollection. That said, clear patterns of linguistic idiosyncrasies across twenty witnesses and nearly a hundred folios allow the historian to assert that the written testimony also reflects undocumented activity in the room.
That is, the notary did not file the language down completely. Depositions offer signs of disruption: evidence of conflict between the parties, confusion over what was said, or at the very least a conversation involving the witness in the room.Footnote 54 Answers did not always repeat the written question precisely; they often accumulated a number of barely connected thoughts. These disruptions may mark interventions from the witness or the procurator, or a scribe trying to make sense of that debate. While this reading is a speculative move (or what David Kazanjian calls a productive “overreading”), it is one that opens up the text in a plausible and generative way.Footnote 55 There are disruptions of this kind in nearly every deposition, and on nearly every page. They largely fall into three related categories.
DISRUPTIONS: HORROS AND HORRAS
The petitioners’ anxiety about the possibility that testimony would fail to mention Black women can be seen by tracking a grammatical variance. The Crown’s order concerned the kingdom’s “negros y negras mulatos y mulatas libres.”Footnote 56 But the petitioners, in their questionnaire, oscillated between listing the four nouns and summarizing them as negros. They also used the adjective horros in lieu of libres. Horro, now a somewhat archaic term, described someone who had been freed from slavery rather than libre, someone in a state of freedom.Footnote 57 More important, the adjective horro marks gender, as horra, when attached to a feminine noun, while the gender-neutral libre remains unchanged. During the depositions, the notary or procurator posing questions seems to have often used the expanded phrase (negros y negras mulatos y mulatas), and when they did so, witnesses in response repeated the four nouns but sometimes used the feminine and other times the masculine ending for the adjective horro (figs. 3 and 4). Given the care with which scribes rendered sensitive legal materials, this almost certainly means that the shifting between the masculine and feminine endings is a report of what took place during the questioning. In the sixteenth century, as today, either case was common in such a compound phrase. But the pattern of attraction of the feminine adjective to the adjacent feminine noun suggests that the deponents might have placed some verbal emphasis on the final feminine noun, in response to the procurator’s extended questioning.
Figure 3. “Queste t[estig]o conoze e tiene noticia de los negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas horras.” AGI Panamá 42, N.1, fol. 125r. With permission of Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
Figure 4. “Negros e negras mulatos e mulatas horros.” AGI Panamá 42, N.1, fol. 148r. With permission of the Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
While both horros and horras would have been conventional, the patterns in which they appear and how those relate to other contemporary uses bear examination. In Spanish, nouns may be masculine or feminine, sometimes following the sex of a designated human but often following less transparent or more arbitrary principles (a male monarch is rey, a female reina; but a house is feminine, casa, and a book is masculine, libro). An adjective modifying a noun usually takes the gender and number of that noun (with the exception of gender-neutral adjectives, such as libre, which do not change with the noun’s gender). But when strings of nouns are modified by adjectives, the outcomes can be more complex.
Hayward Keniston analyzed a sample of sixteenth-century Castillian manuscripts for such grammatical patterns. In the case of mixed-gender singular nouns, most commonly the adjective would agree with the nearest noun: in his examples, “a la hora y tiempo concertado” or “tan poco fundamento y ofensa hecha a vosotros.”Footnote 58 But these examples feature unrelated nouns followed by a singular adjective, rather than a group (negros) being expressed as its parts (negros y negras). In a more apt case, where the two differently gendered nouns referred to human individuals of the same kind, differentiated only by gender, the adjective was usually rendered plural and masculine: “del Rey y Reina Cathólicos,” or “El Abencerraje y su dama quedaron admirados.”Footnote 59 Similarly for mixed plural noun constructions, in the texts Keniston studied the adjective was usually masculine and plural: “las Villas y Lugares y Castillos y Ciudades que estavan sujetos a la Real Corona” or “todos mis trabajos y fatigas hasta entonces passados fueron pagados.”Footnote 60 Keniston’s examples suggest that the masculine plural was the naturalized case when agreement with the nearest noun did not occur; that is, “mujeres y hombres bellas” would be unusual, while “hombres y mujeres bellos” or “bellas” were equally normalized.
Keniston’s survey of manuscripts reveals enormous grammatical complexity and flexibility, with outcomes often depending upon the perceptions and expectations of the particular author. In this light, the tendency of witnesses to use the feminine in a heightened conversation where the parties are focused on including women in their testimony should be understood as a linguistic tell rather than a random occurrence. The fact that the adjective was gendered in both ways cannot be explained by one witness’s inclination over another’s: most witnesses used both constructions intermittently. Instead, the documents show patterns where the usage correlates with an emphasis—either in the speaker’s mind, from an interlocutor, or even from the notary—on the female gendered noun.
The depositions constantly move between the two gendered adjectives. Twenty witnesses answered twenty questions each, all of which included some form of the Spanish word for Black: negro, negra, negros, negras. The word for free—libre or horro/a—was only occasionally used in the written questions but showed up very often in answers, as Spanish witnesses considered distinctions between the enormous enslaved population, the self-freed in the mountains, and the free men and women petitioning. When the sentence included a phrase combining both the male and female nouns (negro, negra, and sometimes also mulato, mulata) that was followed by a form of the adjective horro (eighty-three cases in all), in thirty cases the adjective was horros, but in fifty-three it was horras.
Often the answer to the very first question (which simply asked whether the witness had knowledge of the parties) called them “negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas horras,” possibly indicating that the questioner opened by cuing his expectation of information about men and women. But in general, the inconsistency across and within the depositions suggests an interruption or emphasis. Perhaps the questioner asked deponents to expand upon women’s roles, or perhaps the witness caught himself speaking generically and wished to account for women. There might have been meaningful pauses in the oral statements that guided adjectives to take on the gender of the noun closer to it in time.
Consider, for example, the witness Melchor de Medina, a fifty-year-old Spaniard who was an eyewitness to much of the military action to which the questions referred. He answered the first question with reference to “los negros e negras mulatos e mulatas horros” but left out the adjective horros in his answers to questions 2 through 5. In questions 6 through 8, he spoke specifically of Melchor de Garai, Juan Cavallero, Anton Mostrenco, and Francisco capitán as leaders of “los demás negros horros” (the rest of the free negros), and discussed their uncompensated military service to the king. In questions 10 and 11, on two recent and long-term campaigns against the cimarrones, he switched to “muchos negros y negras horras,” perhaps responding to a secondary conversation trying to reinsert women after the masculine military answers, which the scribe synthesized.Footnote 61
In contrast, Francisco Hernández Hermosillo’s testimony was reported using the feminine construction five times and the masculine horros only once.Footnote 62 As will be discussed below, Hernández Hermosillo was also extraordinarily forthcoming about women’s actions, either in response to a prompt or out of his own enthusiasm. Similar patterns come in the testimony of seventy-year-old Diego de Velasco, who was unique both because he served as a procurator—and was thus very attuned to the legalisms—and because he was the father of a mulata daughter, rendering him extra-sensitive to the issue at hand.Footnote 63 His answers to the first questions are recorded using “negros y negras mulatos e mulatas horras.” This changed with the middle questions of the interrogatorio, those concerning particular military campaigns and which, in the original written questions, asked only about “negros.” His answers here spoke of “negros horros” organizing themselves under their own captains and banners as a militia.Footnote 64 But when he returned to questions where he mentioned women, he stayed with the less emphatic “negros y negras horros.” That is, when the witness was not insisting on the participation of women, or when the questioners were not drawing attention to women, the scribe tended to record the masculine plural.
Another example comes from the testimony of Diego Desquivel, himself a notary. Given his occupation, he would have been extremely aware of the importance of language in his deposition: he spoke precisely and efficiently, using fewer run-on constructions than other witnesses. He is recorded as stating “negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas horras” three times, “negros e negras horras” three times, “negros e mulatos horros” five times, and only “negros” twice.Footnote 65 The second reference to “negros horros” came in response to a question about the Black community’s cash contribution to fund a campaign against cimarrones, but he added that the contribution came from “los d[ic]hos negros e negras horras,” correcting the question’s implicit assumption that only men paid.Footnote 66 The fastidiousness suggests that the gendered language was purposeful, perhaps representing a verbal emphasis: free Black women paid too.
While adjectives attached immediately after compound-noun phrases slipped between masculine and feminine endings, this was not the case when adjectives were placed at greater distance from the nouns. For example, in the final questions of each deposition the phrase “negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas son tan pobres y necesitados” (“the negros and negras and mulatos and mulatas are so poor and needy”) was commonly offered, and the adjective necesitados was almost always masculine plural. Desquivel, for example, noted that “because the said negros and negras mulatos and mulatas horras are so poor and needy [masculine plural],” mixing his gendered endings despite their proximity in the sentence.Footnote 67 Or, as Francisco de la Peña is said to have stated, “if the said negros and negras and mulatos and mulatas horras of the city and kingdom of Tierra Firme were to be so harrassed [masculine] and disturbed [masculine] to pay His Majesty the said silver marc, it would be the cause of their carrying out certain unfortunate thefts.”Footnote 68 In all but one case where the adjective necesitados occurred, it was given the masculine plural ending to align with the mixed nouns.Footnote 69 There was something important about the “negras horras.”
DIALOGIC INSERTIONS
If the gendered slippages are simply suggestive of this conversation, the insertions of information interrupting the flow of the witnesses’ sentences provide more compelling evidence. These moments of backtracking, clarification, and emphasis suggest that witnesses were responding to prompts in the moment. They likely represent interruptions and clarifying questions proffered by the petitioners and their representatives when a witness’s answer was too amorphous or incomplete, as would happen in any legal proceeding. It is also possible that witnesses, prepared in advance by the petitioners’ representatives to give particular information, interrupted themselves to add it on their own or in response to nonverbal communications in the room—a raised eyebrow, a gentle cough, a sharp look. The questions were constructed to produce specific answers, and witnesses could ignore those cues or could redirect themselves to a better narrative.Footnote 70
The scribe or clerk held a great deal of power, as he was the vehicle transferring the witnesses’ testimony to the king and his Council of the Indies.Footnote 71 The notary created what he believed to be an accurate record of the testimony, such that any magistrate or the king himself could carry out justice. Indeed, as Tamar Herzog states, “testimonies delivered by notaries were believed to be by definition truthful narratives,” although they were also notorious for corruption and often farmed out important tasks to auxiliary staff.Footnote 72 In creating these depositions, the notary was a participant, even asking clarifying questions himself: a manual of the period demanded that notaries break down each question to ensure that witnesses explain how they know what they know, not only the facts as they see them.Footnote 73 Thus what another manual calls the notary’s “purifying” acts could reflect confusion in the room or introduce new errors.Footnote 74 And while rendering all this conversation as a singular third-person narrative, Cristóbal de Luque, the escribano receptor, left undeniable traces of his efforts.
For example, the petitioners explicitly wrote question 13 to produce information about Black and mulata women’s participation in putting down attacks by corsairs and cimarrones: “Item, does [the witness] know that the said negros went in the company of General Gabriel de Navarrete to Ballano, against the French and English [corsairs] and the Black cimarrones, in service to the said General, people and soldiers that he brought with him including a quantity of negras horras, in which [labor] they spent six months, more or less.”Footnote 75 The petitioners worried that Spanish witnesses would fail to report the participation of women without an embedded reminder.
Francisco Hernández Hermosillo answered that question with an emphatic insertion of gendered pronouns: “and the said negros and negras, on all these expeditions and entradas, they [ellos, masculine] and they [ellas, feminine] served quite well and with great diligence.”Footnote 76 Here, as happens today when a Spanish-speaker wishes to use inclusive pronouns, Hernández Hermosillo deconstructed ellos into its component parts for precision. Similarly, Juan de Navejada answered the same question by referring only to “los negros” initially, but then, noting that the Spaniards would be lost without “ellos e los mulatos” as soldiers, added “and the negras and mulatas have served and continue to serve in the service of the combatants in the entradas that they have carried out and carry out, because the Spanish [men] get sick often and the environment is very bad for them and many die from it.”Footnote 77 Similarly, Navejada expanded his answer to a question about Black and mulato defense against cimarrones and corsairs, noting that “they and their negras horras, being well treated, are very crucial to the city.”Footnote 78 In both cases, the construction suggests that the witness revised his initial answer, which used the masculine negros, to include women. Indeed, across his testimony Navejada was eager to offer expansive replies; while most witnesses simply repeated back the boilerplate language about Black poverty, he injected a gendered anecdote, stating that: “just yesterday a Black woman was going about selling a saya [skirt] in order to pay [tribute].”Footnote 79
Evidence of conversation or interrogation also indicated concern about mentioning mulatos, who were often forgotten in the testimony. The shipmaster Rodrigo Roldán aggregated information in his response, perhaps because he was being interrupted for clarifying questions, or because he was remembering things in real time. In a question about Black and mulato participation—indeed, leadership—when the Contreras brothers threatened the region with a rebellion, “the tyrants returned to meet where the negros of the said city of Panamá, the free ones [horros, masculine plural], and the mulatos took great advantage because the said negros and mulatos killed the tyrants.”Footnote 80 Roldán inserted horros long after the noun, negros, it modified, and then added mulatos after the fact. One can imagine that his original statement only mentioned negros, but interruptions or his conscience prompted him to clarify that the Blacks were free, and that mulatos also participated in the rout. Mulatos was occasionally inserted into testimony in awkward ways, presaging the fact that the Crown would not consider the case to have been made for their exemption, and requiring them to stage their own información later. Markings in the documents’ margins indicate that officials paid attention to this type of insertion (fig. 5).Footnote 81
Figure 5. “Mulatos” written in margin in a different hand. AGI Panamá 42, N.1, fol. 144v. With permission of the Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
In contrast, the deposition of Diego Desquivel, the notary, was written efficiently, reflecting his professional understanding that the readers of the testimony would be looking for particular phrases and frameworks. He used all four nouns whenever they were included in the original question, and Luque’s synopsis of his deposition is smooth, without signs of interruption or contestation. Even in his longest and most complex statement, his language is fluid and easily followed:
If the said negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas horras were harassed into paying the said marc it would be a cause of their doing unpleasant things, such as joining up with the negros cimarrones who are risen up in the mountains and scrublands and carry out great robberies and deaths and thefts and those who might remain in the city could give information to those [cimarrones] about the thefts and they could do it for their own benefit when the fleet comes in as well as before and after.Footnote 82
Procurators and notaries coaxed what they considered relevant and factual information from sworn witnesses. This required, at times, reminding them of the case at hand, of its particular language, and of details that were necessary to present the full truth to the king and his council. While colonial depositions often contain unclear and messy language, in this case the repetition of language regarding gender and race falls into patterns that indicate interventions. While all of the witnesses were there voluntarily and in support of the petitioners, they were also accustomed to their own ways of thinking about the past, and had to be coached to support another narrative. Francisco Ortiz, the first sworn deponent, and one who offered substantive and enthusiastic eyewitness testimony for many of the questions about Black participation in military actions, told a very different story almost fifteen years later in his own relación de méritos y servicios.Footnote 83 There he and his own witnesses recounted his, and only his, contributions to these same battles: his person, his horse, his weapons. No Black auxiliary or militia appears in any of those pages. But in the service of Panamá’s procurator, he sang their praises, “the said negros and their captain were part, and the most principal reason why the tyrants were defeated and killed.”Footnote 84
INSERTED INFORMATION
Finally, deponents who offered specific information about women’s work often did so by inserting additional thoughts into their sentences. Juan de Navejada recalled the use of Black men and women to hold the mines in Veragua against Indigenous inhabitants for eight months, which required long stays for the Spanish and Black forces: “the said negros and the negras horras served the troops by grinding corn for them and serving them in whatever they were ordered.”Footnote 85 While Black men might well have participated in cooking and related service, Navejada here seems to refer to the particular work of Black women, whom he does not characterize as soldiers, as he expanded in the answer to another question: “the Spaniards cannot be nor have they been able to be effective [in warfare] with [the cimarrones], and the mulatos have served and do serve as soldiers and the negras and mulatas have served and do serve in support of those fighting.”Footnote 86 In both cases, the recorded sentence structure suggests the inclusion of additional thoughts about women in a sentence that originally focused on men.
When Alonso de la Plaza, a silversmith, was asked to describe the enthusiasm of the free Black and mulato community, he was reported answering as follows:
the said negros and negras and mulatos and mulatas, the men to fight and the women to serve, every time the opportunity has arisen to go out against cimarrones and French and English [corsairs] they have done so and fought like good and skillful soldiers in His Majesty’s service, and the women have served and continue to serve the combatants without receiving any pay or salary for it.Footnote 87
Here de la Plaza interrupts his own train of thought to offer specific information about male and female roles in combat, so crucial to their case.
Antonio de Molina also offered answers that piled up information, including this to question three, about the dangers that the cabildo identified as emerging from the demand for tribute:
they have arrested many of them [free Black tributaries] and placed them in jail, and they have freed some because they have no funds to pay with, and others the Spaniards [have bailed out] so that they can work, and others [masculine plural] have sold their clothing in order to pay the silver marc and other negras were selling themselves in order to be able to serve and pay.Footnote 88
Molina was responding to a question that specifically invited comment about “negros e negras e mulatos e mulatas” selling their clothes and entering into paid service arrangements as an outcome of the excessive demand. But Molina’s answer accumulated more clauses, and the scribe seems to have written them down as spoken, shifting from subject to subject, and then adding the particular emphasis on Black women at the end. Molina, like many other Spaniards, regarded the sale of one’s labor as servant to be a mark of humiliation, but he assigns the humiliation to women specifically, hinting at prostitution as well as domestic service.Footnote 89
CONCLUSION
In contrast to the documents analyzed by Abercrombie and Rivera Garza, there is here no “involuntary autobiography” or confession that reveals a subject pushing back directly against the narratives being built around him or her.Footnote 90 Instead, these are traditional legal documents, depositions, which show evidence of the presence of many speakers, a cacophony that disrupts the scribe’s attempts at precision. Such a method might be beneficial for reading many similar documents, especially when, as here, the cacophony emanates from particular tensions over the narratives being presented.
The documents present only the petitioners’ questions and the testimony of twenty Spanish men confidently asserting their evaluation of the crisis-ridden colonial society in which they lived. Those stories often depicted free Black men as little different from the enslaved cimarrones they were forced to police; according to their Spanish neighbors, Black people in Panamá were poor, often desperate, dangerously agile, sometimes violent, and aggressively male. Witnesses called them “appropriate to guerilla warfare, because they are fiercer and more daring and foolish to suffer the hunger and labor.” Because they shared a “caste and color” with the fugitives, they might “advise” them or even “confederate with them” against Spaniards.Footnote 91 This was the very cabildo, including witnesses such as alcalde ordinario Alonso Cano, that had in 1571–73 called for the brutal punishment of both cimarrones and free Black residents who supported them. Reflecting the anxiety that Spanish settlers felt at their extremely fragile hold on the region, the testimony regularly circled back to a trope of Black barbarity under a shallow veneer of discipline and order.Footnote 92 This racist narrative produced the intended effect—it convinced the king and his council to suspend tribute for Black subjects in a fragile Panamá—but it contradicted the petitioners’ own self-description as brave, loyal, and disciplined vassals. More than insulting the petitioners, it threatened their intention: as more than half of the free Black and mulato population was female, testimony that centered masculinity risked a royal order that only exempted Black men. The resulting tension between witnesses and petitioners produced depositions that evinced a concern about Black women through grammatical variances.
In this light the petitioners’ documentation reveals itself as dialogic, or multivocal: witnesses responded to precise questions, they reformulated their beliefs and experiences in those answers, and they were coaxed or redirected by procurators, scribes, and other people in the room who, in turn, were responsible to people not in the room. The notary, at a later moment, reorganized all of this into a narrative that still bears evidence of those conversations. Those traces reveal the mediating process between the procurators, witnesses, county clerk, and scribes that is rendered on the page as monologue.
Most important, the method offers the possibility of restoring the actions of Black women, who were not named petitioners, were not invited to give testimony, and were presumably not in the deposition room. They were, however, the largest group affected by the tribute assignment, and the ones who were most likely to be left behind if witnesses’ assumptions carried the day, explaining their overwhelming presence in the notary’s office as they sent their best hopes to the king. They were also the friends and family of the petitioners and even of the procurators and cabildo members, whose interests could not be disentangled from their own. This intimate connection placed pressure on witnesses and legal agents to pay attention to their actions, to make sure that their labor was constantly mentioned and not subsumed into masculine plurals or ignored with descriptions of male soldiering. While this method of reading cannot return free Black women to full archival personhood, it shows their influence, as their urgent interests transformed the conversations.
In short, reading depositions and similar materials dialogically, recognizing that they were produced collectively and might contain evidence of the hands of unnamed parties, suggests a way to recenter the lives of those mostly absent from our archives. As Jennifer Morgan has powerfully argued in a different context, Black women’s “comprehension of [their] embeddedness in racialized structures of meaning and labor in the Atlantic fades from our view…left out of the archives.”Footnote 93 In response, historians might favor methods that begin from the recognition of Black women’s actions and strategies, both direct and indirect, and search for those traces. They may appear in the documents, but they can also be seen in the actions of the men who filed and wrote these documents, who gave testimony and schemed for desired outcomes, who likewise lived in a world of dependencies on and intimacies with Black women. In this case, the insistence on accounting for Black women produced the unique tribute exemption for free Black women and men in Panamá.
APPENDIX
Registered free African-descended populations of censused cities and towns, 1576 (sources: AGI Panamá 40; AGI Panamá 42, N.1; Jopling).
Karen Graubart is Professor of Latin American History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of two books, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2022), as well as articles in journals including The William and Mary Quarterly and Colonial Latin American Review. She has held major fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and Fulbright.
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