As Slaves and Not Vassals: Interethnic Claims of Freedom and Unfreedom in Colonial Peru

Across much of the Spanish empire in the Americas, indigenous and African-descent peoples lived in close contact. The entangled nature of labor, both in urban centers and on massive complexes, gave them the opportunity to measure themselves against one another. Law that developed across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggested an eventual clarity about their separate conditions, but experience revealed the muddiness of both definitions and enforcement. Indigenous and Black subjects used those colonial discourses about freedom and hierarchy to understand their own positions and to argue for comparable protections and privileges. Rather than consider indigenous and Black lives separately, the essay argues for a more integrative approach to reading legal documents produced by and about them.