Negotiating emancipation and social mobility. Crisscrossed biographies of Africans and Afro descendants in the Rio de la Plata (1810-1840)

Abstract

What did freedom mean to enslaved persons? How did they try to emancipate themselves? How their African backgrounds impacted on their views, possibilities and strategies? What kind of solidarities could they build as enslaved and freed persons And, especially, how they understood and defined themselves within structures of enslavement and which were their viewpoint of their situations and the whole society. Those were some of the thought-provoking questions the Conference on Slave Subjectivities invited us to address. If the reconstruction of historical subjectivity is a difficult task in general, it is particularly problematic when referred to persons who hardly had the chance to let written traces of their experiences. Since in the Río de la Plata we have especially scarce testimonies of enslaved persons, I will draw on different kind of sources (where judicial records played a key role) and follow the crisscrossed biographies of a small group of Africans and Afro-descendants in the Rio de la Plata.2 The particular aim is to reconstruct some of the intricate strategies of emancipation, social mobility and cooperation they deployed and created between 1810 and 1840.