Miscellaneous Afro-Latin American collection

1726-1990 [bulk 1789-1859] D

The Miscellaneous Afro-Latin American collection consists of a mix of official, private, and family papers documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent in the colonial Spanish American territories of Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The documents are all from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for a chronology of the history of blacks in Uruguay from 1680-1990. The family and private papers are concerned primarily with the sale and manumission of enslaved persons. Significant in the collection's family papers are the Magan family legal documents which contain a history of an Argentinian family's slave holdings, and records matriarch Inez de Cabrera y Magan's dying wish to grant freedom to her enslaved woman, Josefa. Included in the official documents are a number of royal decrees concerning the commerce in Africans, the education, treatment and occupation of enslaved laborers, and the liberation of fugitives from the territories of imperial rivals. Other decrees include an 1805 Mexican prohibition against intermarriage between those of "known nobility and pure blood and blacks, mulattos and other castes" and an 1812 decree tackling the education of Spanish subjects of African origin in Mexico. A 1778 population register of 28 Puerto Rican cities and an 1815 record of the free black population in Buenos Aires offer a demographic picture of colonial Spanish America as do a 1753 Venezuela plantation inventory, a 1775 Cuban population register and a series of handwritten reports regarding maroons in Cuba's Matanzas Province (1837-1838).