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Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Frank T. Proctor III
Frank T. Proctor III*
Affiliation:
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington
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Extract

On April 5, 1723, Juan Joseph de Porras, a mulatto slave laboring in an obraje de paños (woolen textile mill) near Mexico City, appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for blasphemy. According to the testimony of six slaves, including Porras’ wife, while his co-workers prepared to bed down for the night in the obraje Porras had blasphemed over a beating he had received from the mayordomo (overseer) earlier in the day. Señor Pedregal, the owner of the obraje, testified that Porras was one of nearly thirty workers, all Afro-Mexican slaves or convicts, who lived and labored in his obraje without the freedom to leave.

The case against Juan Joseph de Porras and dozens of others like it in the Mexican archives raise important questions, not only about the makeup of the colonial obraje labor force, but also about the importance of Afro-Mexican slavery in the middle of the colonial period. Was the Pedregal labor force, composed entirely of slaves and convicts, the exception or the rule within obrajes of New Spain? If it was not exceptional, how important were slaves to that obraje and others like it? What exactly was the demographic makeup of the obraje labor force in the middle of the colonial period? And, how might the answers to those questions change our understanding of the histories of labor and slavery in colonial Mexico?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , July 2003 , pp. 33 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2003

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References

1 The manufacture of cotton textiles was largely a cottage industry and falls outside the scope of this study.

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29 Super, “Querétaro Obrajes,” pp. 206–7. Super presents a similar timeline for changes within the obraje labor force of Querétaro.

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48 Interestingly, Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita found that slaves represented nearly 25–50 percent of the total value of sugar haciendas in Córdoba. Thus the worth of slave workforces compared to the total value of the productive units, haciendas or obrajes, in industries that relied upon slaves was very similar. See Chávez-Hita, Naveda “Trabajadores esclavos,” p. 178.Google Scholar

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50 AHN, Andrés de Almogueras, #11, vol. 50 fs. 48–67.

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53 The size of the slave labor force was reduced from 35 when he purchased the obraje in 1659 to 21 in 1666. The documents did not indicate what happened to those 14 slaves.

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In part these trends reflect the changes in fortune of the sugar industry. Around the 1690s sugar began a long and protracted recession that lasted well into the second half of the eighteenth century, recovering in the 1760s. Whether or not declining prices made slaves more affordable for obrajeros is difficult to ascertain, but that trend should not necessarily be equated with declining demand for slave labor. See Martin, , Rural Society, p. 7.Google Scholar

73 O'Gorman, , “El trabajo industrial,” pp. 33–116.Google Scholar

74 AGN Inq vol. 583 exp 4 fs. 491.

75 AGN Tierras vol. 1056 exp 5 fs. 22v–23.

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81 AGN Inq vol. 435 exp 4–5 fs. 287–93.

82 AGN Inq vol. 454 exp 21 fs. 445–454.

83 AGN Inq vol. 431 exp 9 fs. 265–279. José I. Urquiola found similar complaints by Indian obraje workers in the pre-1630 period and it is certainly possible that such abuses against Indians continued after 1630.

84 AGN Inq vol. 583, exp. 4, fs. 390–519. Similar atrocities in the Díaz de Posadas obraje were investigated in the inspection of 1660. See O'Gorman, , “El trabajo industrial,” pp. 61–62.Google Scholar

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86 Despite the myriad forms of slavery in Africa, the distinctions between them and in the Americas were significant. The racialized nature of slavery in the Americas, economies based solely upon mono-crop agriculture and slave labor-the higher levels of violence and workloads slaves faced in mono-crop production-and the greater social distance between masters and slaves may have all been unexpected to Africans. See Lovejoy, Paul E., and Trotman, David V., “Experiencias de vida y expectativas: Nociones Africanas sobre la esclavitud y la realidad en América,” in Rutas de la esclavitud en África y América Latina, ed. Càceres, Rina (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), pp. 379–403.Google Scholar

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89 I am exploring this hypothesis in greater detail in my current project.

90 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).Google Scholar

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93 Eric Van Young argues that in the second half of the eighteenth century the growth in urban demand for foodstuffs coupled with the population growth of the Indian population, resulting in a reduction in absolute access to land, forced Indians into a labor market in which manpower was no longer the scarce commodity it had been even up to the early decades of that century around Guadalajara. He dates this transition to a “buyers’ [labor] market” to a few decades after a similar transition occurred in the Valley of Mexico. See Hacienda and Markets in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 249.

94 Libby, Douglas Cole, “Proto-Industrialization in a Slave Society: The Case of Minas Gerias,” Journal of Latin American Studies 23:1 (1991), pp. 1–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. After the collapse of mining in the eighteenth century a burgeoning cottage textile industry, based largely upon slave labor, developed during the nineteenth century.