Review of Bowser's "The Free Person of Color in Mexico City and Lima." (1975)
Article Review
Frederick P. Bowser, “The Free Person of Color in Mexico City and Lima: Manumission and Opportunity, 1580-1650,” in ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)
Bowser’s work illustrates two major themes of the 1970s literature on slavery. First, the essay is a social history, combing through massive amounts of raw data to tell a story about practices in Mexico and Peru in the 16th and 17th centuries in regards to slavery and free people of color. Second, his work situates itself comfortably in ideas of paternalism, a theme that was made most popular by the work of American scholar Eugene Genovese. This scholarship, while emphasizing the brutality and harshness of the slave regime also reminded readers that planters sought to make themselves into patriarchs, holding land and power while “justly” governing over their small holdings. Bowser’s slaveholders certainly are shown as having these ideas of paternalism.
Bowser’s history brings out several important points in Spanish imperial historiography. First, though later generations of authors have moved away from acknowledging this fact, personal relationships in the Spanish Empire between the enslaved and enslavers, resulted in freedom. On what he terms a “broad” road of freedom, he contends that people of color in Latin America, while certainly suffering from discrimination, had a much more open path to freedom. He also reminds the reader an important point about Spanish manumissions. They were much higher and as a result a larger, more robust free Black community developed across the empire. Finally, an interesting aspect of Spanish American slavery was the ability of the enslaved to have time to work in order to purchase their freedom. My question is now, why did that develop here and not in North America?
While certainly more has been done on this important topic, Bowers helps provide initial raw data that can be used in future works on the subject as well connect stories together to form a fascinating read.
Robert Swanson