Elena: Running to Dance and Other Defects in Colonial Santo Domingo (1771–73)
Lissette Acosta Corniel
Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, Department of Ethnic and Race Studies liacosta@bmcc.cuny.eduPublished : 2023-05-24
Section : Scientific articles
Abstract
Despite being physically absent from the court hearings related to her enslavement and her sale to a new owner, Elena, an enslaved woman in late colonial Santo Domingo, becomes the most ever-present witness and gives voice to her life through the testimony of others. The details shared by Sebastián Álvarez, the buyer; Baltazar Guerrero, the seller; and the witnesses bring Elena’s character to life by means of the descriptions of her alleged “defects.” This article studies Álvarez’s lawsuit against Guerrero for not properly specifying all of Elena’s flaws in the bill of sale. I argue that Elena’s carefree behavior —described in the redhibition case— allowed her an ascribed “freedom” that she attained by using her body as “rival geography” to contest the limitations of space. Accordingly, this article proposes that, at the same time enslaved people endured suffering, they used their bodies and minds as a refuge. Moreover, this article uses Elena’s story to highlight Santo Domingo in the historiography of slavery in the Americas, within the context of “the unexpected” in Caribbean studies, and stresses the importance of archival research in giving a voice to the enslaved, even if they are not speaking for themselves.
How to Cite
References
Acosta, Lissette Corniel. «Negras, mulatas y morenas en La Española del siglo XVI (1502–1606)». En Esclavitud, mestizaje y abolicionismo en los mundos hispánicos, editado por Aurelia Martín Casares, 202–18. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2015.
Albert Batista, Celsa. Mujer y esclavitud en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Búho, 1993.
Berry, Daina R. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.
Berry, Daina R. y Leslie M. Harris. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. The Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica. Londres: New Beacon Books, 1981.
Bush, Barbara. Slavery Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
— «The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861». The Journal of Southern History 68, nº 3 (2002): 533–72.
Deive, Carlos E. La esclavitud del negro en Santo Domingo, (1492– 1844). Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 1980.
— Los guerrilleros negros: Esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1997.
De Utrera, Cipriano. Santo Domingo: Dilucidaciones históricas. Santo Domingo: Centenario, 1995.
Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Gikandi, Simon. «Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement». Early American Literature 50, nº 1 (2015): 81–102. Doi.org/10.1353/ eal.2015.0020.
Gil, Juan. «Tres notas colombinas». Historiografía y Bibliografía Americanistas 28 (1984): 73-91.
González, Raymundo. De esclavos a campesinos: Vida rural en Santo Domingo colonial. Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2011.
Guitar, Lynne. «Boiling it Down: Slavery and Rebellion on the First Commercial Sugarcane Ingenios in the Americas (Hispaniola, 1530–1545)». En Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Black in Colonial Latin America, editado por Jane G. Landers y Barry M.
Robinson, 39–82. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Hall, Gwendolyn M. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Hernández Soto, Carlos. «To Die in Villa Mella». En The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, editado por Eric Paul
Roorda, Lauren H. Derby y Raymundo González, 403–5. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Landers, Jane G. «The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Communities». En Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, editado por Linda M. Heywood, 227–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
— «Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean». En Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives, 111–45, 2006.
Lewis, Catherine M. y J. Richard Lewis. Women and Slavery in America: A Documentary History. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011.
Liriano, Alejandra. El papel de la mujer de origen africano en el Santo Domingo colonial (siglos XVI–XVII). Santo Domingo: Centro de Investigación para la Acción Femenina, 1992.
Malagón Barceló, Javier. El código negro carolino o Código negro español: Santo Domingo, 1784. Santo Domingo, R. D.: Taller, 1974.
McKinley, Michelle A. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700. Nueva York:
Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Elie y William Cobbett. A Topographical and Political Description of the Spanish Part of Saint-Domingo: Containing, General Observations on the Climate, Population and Productions; On the Character and Manners of the Inhabitants; with an Account of the Several Branches of the Government. Philadelphia: Impreso y vendido por el autor, 1798. Recuperado de https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435030861819&view=1up&seq=11, acceso el 25 de agosto de 2021.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Moya Pons, Frank. The Dominican Republic: A National History. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006.
— «The National Archives of the Dominican Republic». En Research Guide to Central America and the Caribbean, editado por Kenneth Grieb, 303–6. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Ozuna, Ana. «Rebellion and Anti-Colonial Struggle in Hispaniola:
From Indigenous Agitators to African Rebels». Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 11, nº 7 (mayo 2018): 77–95. Recuperado de http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol11no7/11.7-5-Ozuna.pdf, el 31 de diciembre de 2022.
Ponce-Vázquez, Juan José. «Unequal Partners in Crime: Masters, Slaves, and Free People of Color in Santo Domingo, c. 1600– 1650». Slavery & Abolition 37, nº 4 (2016): 704–23. Doi.org/10.108 0/0144039X.2016.1174451.
Postigo, José Luis B. «Las dos caras de una misma moneda: Reformismo y esclavitud en Santo Domingo a fines del periodo colonial». Revista de Indias 74 (2014): 453–82. Doi.10.3989/revindias.2014.015.
— «Sobre esclavitud y otras formas de dominio: Gradaciones de libertad y estatus social en Santo Domingo a fines del periodo colonial». En Gente de color entre esclavos, editado por José
Antonio Piqueras e Imilcy Balboa Navarro, 160–78. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2019.
Premo, Bianca. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Reddock, Rhoda E. «Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective». Latin American Perspectives 12, nº 1 (1985): 63–
Recuperado de https://www.jstor.org/stable/2633562, acceso el 31de diciembre de 2022.
Rodríguez Demorizi, Emilio. Relaciones históricas de Santo Domingo, II. Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1945.
Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Sáez, José Luis. La Iglesia y el negro esclavo en Santo Domingo: Una historia de tres siglos. Santo Domingo: Patronato de la Ciudad Colonial de Santo Domingo, 1994.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Nueva York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Stevens-Acevedo, Anthony. The Santo Domingo Slave Revolt of 1521 and the Slave Laws of 1522: Black Slavery and Black Resistance in the Early Colonial Americas. Nueva York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, Research Series, 2019.
Stevens-Acevedo, Anthony, Tom Weterings y Leonor Álvarez Francés. Juan Rodríguez and the Beginnings of New York City. Nueva York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2013.
Stoler, Laura Ann. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870. Nueva York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silenciando el pasado: el poder y la producción de la Historia. Granada: Comares Historia, 2017.
— Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995.
Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came before Columbus. Nueva York: Random House, 1976.
Varela, Consuelo. La Caída de Cristóbal Colón: El juicio de Bobadilla. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006.
— Cristóbal Colón y la construcción de un nuevo mundo, estudios1983–2008. Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2010.
Washington, Giavanni R. S. «Performing Africa: Memory, Tradition, and Resistance in the Leimert Park Drum Circle». Tesis doctoral, University of California, 2013.
White, Sophie. Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista Estudios Sociales
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
