Description
Read only p.72-p.92. Answer each of the following in a fully developed paragraph. In your responses, include short quotations from the text or paraphrase the author’s language, providing page numbers for content referenced at the end of sentences.What new terminology appears in this chapter and what do the terms tell us about the multiethnic population of Spanish Florida? (4-6 sentences) What do the chapter’s stories reveal about men and women of African descent in Florida? (4-6 sentences)What do the chapter’s stories reveal about the interactions between natives and people of African descent in Florida? (4-6 sentences
Unformatted Attachment Preview
chapter three
The Wars Women Were
Already Fighting
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
M
aría jacoba had been fighting for years. Hers was a
long, quiet fight for the right to live as she saw fit.
She wanted to choose what she did, where she lived,
and with whom she interacted, and until 1678, she
had expertly dictated the terms of that engagement. As a thirtyfive-year-old Timucua woman from the Potano region, María Jacoba lived in a world notably different than the one her mother or
grandmother had known. Consider her name. She self-identified as
María Jacoba and was known and called by that Spanish name.1 She
was a practicing Catholic, spoke some Spanish, and wore clothing
that adapted to Spanish norms. María Jacoba was unmistakably and
firmly part of a colonial world. And yet, she was not. She was from
a town Florida officials claimed no longer existed (but it clearly still
did), and served a cacica who had, according to Spanish intelligence, relinquished power (but she clearly had not). María Jacoba’s
presence was enough to counter Spanish assumptions about a place
and people they thought they knew; she was a living, breathing embodiment of the precarity of Spanish colonial control in Florida.2
María Jacoba lived “in her style” for the better part of a decade.3
She forged a space for herself at the edges of an empire that could
72
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
73
not control what she did, where she traveled, or who belonged in
her world. She had married her husband in church but did not share
a home with him and visited him only when she wanted to. Moreover, she knew she had to attend confession at least once a year to
remain in the good graces of San Agustín religious officials, and that
is exactly what she did. She came into town on a yearly basis to fulfill this minimum requirement but otherwise continued living the
way she wanted to. Spanish sources do not let us see María Jacoba
thriving, however. Instead, they show us only her moments of loss.
She enters the archive right when the spaces she had so carefully
carved for herself begin to fall apart.
In 1678, María Jacoba was brought to San Agustín in chains.
She had been apprehended after coming into a nearby Timucua
town alongside a known murderer, Calesa. María Jacoba argued that
she should be rewarded, not imprisoned. She had done what Spanish authorities had failed to do: she had captured a dangerous man.
María Jacoba explained how she had persuaded Calesa that she was
on his side, urged him to walk into the nearby town of San Francisco, and then turned on him. But her actions and her rendition of
events raised more eyebrows than support. Spanish officials immediately distrusted her. They had little appreciation for a Native
woman who seemed more capable and better informed than they
were. Governor Pablo Hita y Salazar cared less about how she had
ended up in the company of a known criminal—or how she had
managed to convince him to surrender, as she insisted—than he did
about how she had managed to move in and out of San Agustín in
the first place. He launched an investigation into her movements,
rather than into Calesa’s crimes.4
Testimony after testimony confirmed María Jacoba’s story and
autonomy, but that did little to ameliorate the distrust that Florida
officials felt. Governor Hita Salazar decried her choices and declared her freedom excessive. After all, María Jacoba’s movements
had not taken place in some distant Indian village; she was traveling to and from the main Spanish town in Florida. Florida officials
feared that María Jacoba’s actions would inspire others to behave
as she did. She was even accused of encouraging slaves to flee their
masters. The Potano woman who had always lived in accordance
with Spanish law, had gone routinely to confession, and had
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
74
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
tried to bring a criminal to justice was now charged with inciting
unrest.
The testimonies in María Jacoba’s trial spoke of Alonsso, an Indian slave who had abandoned his master and followed her out of
San Agustín. María Jacoba had insisted that “she dissuaded him many
times from going away with her because he was in the service of his
employer, but he followed her and came out on the trail to meet
her.” She had “urged him to return home,” and her defense attorney
claimed that “it was his [Alonsso’s] persistence that won out over the
pressing arguments which she made to him as a woman.”5 But if the
defense contended that María Jacoba was a lowly woman overpowered by Alonsso’s will, the prosecution portrayed her as a temptress,
capable of seducing Alonsso or any man away from his proper place.
The actual relationship between María Jacoba and Alonsso is hard to
ascertain, and this ambiguity points to the complicated spectrum of
freedoms that existed within this colonial context.
Due to her repeated abscondence, Spanish authorities labeled
María Jacoba “una fugitiva,” “una cimarrona por los montes,” a fugitive, a cimarron who fled beyond the control of Florida officials.6
The word cimarrón tended to refer to someone or something wild
or undomesticated, and in Spanish America, the term was most
commonly used to describe runaway slaves of African descent. In
Florida, there are only a handful of instances where the word cimarrón was used to describe Native people who fled Spanish control, and it is “believed to be the origin of the name Seminole . . .
[especially since] Muskhogean languages lack ‘r,’ [and therefore]
Natives pronounced the name as cimallon.”7 María Jacoba was a cimarrona because she willingly abandoned her “settled” Christian
life. Authorities deemed her decisions dangerous, and though her
struggle for self-determination paled in comparison to Calesa’s
murders, she paid dearly for her actions. Sentenced to one hundred
lashes, she faced the full wrath of a colonial apparatus that did not
and could not accommodate her choices or freedom.8
The word cimarrón also racialized María Jacoba. It tied her
transgressive movements and associations with those of the Black
community, whose mobility and labor were far more restricted
than her own.9 And while Spanish officials never identified María
Jacoba as a parda, mulatta, morena, negra, or anything but an Indian,
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
75
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
they understood her actions in the context of a sharpening racial
slavery regime that was steadily reshaping who could be enslaved
and how to do so.10 The Spanish need to control María Jacoba’s
whereabouts, body, and life was intimately connected to their ability to do the same for free and enslaved people of African descent
living in San Agustín.11 As Native women like María Jacoba pushed
to make their lives in Spanish Florida more palatable, livable, or
simply safe enough, they found their struggles enmeshed with
those of Black women.
Black and Native women fought hard and repeatedly to protect
their bodies, livelihoods, and freedoms. Their stories, though distinct, share many commonalities. Some dealt with the personal,
communal, or even physical vulnerabilities endured in colonial settings. Others exposed the fraught and incomplete archival practices
that failed to record their names or even acknowledge their humanity. But these women were not—or rather could not be rendered—
invisible or silent. Tugging and pulling at snippets that mention
them in the sources not only unravels some of these women’s life
stories, but also reveals the centrality of Black and Native women
to colonial articulations of power and control, as well as to the gendered, racialized, and very real limits of both.
In 1687, as the summer air began to blow a little colder, two enslaved women and a group of ten others, including a small, nursing
child, made the dangerous choice to flee Carolina, head south, and
seek freedom, or at least safety, in Florida. The Spanish archive
does not list any names of the enslaved, and English sources only
record the names of the male fugitives: Mingo, Dicque, Jesse,
Conano, Gran Domingo, Jacque, Robi, and Cambo. The women
were described only by their skin color and sex. They were Black
and women. One had a nursing child that was mentioned only
once. Florida governor Diego Quiroga y Losada left the infant out
of later retellings, even though the child offered the clearest bit of
evidence for how these men and women understood their actions
and each other. The infant, whose unpredictable cry could put the
whole enterprise in danger, showed that these runaways were likely
a family unit, if not by blood or marriage, then by circumstance
and need.12
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
76
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
The small group of enslaved men and women had “fled from
San Jorge [Charles Town] to be with the Spaniards and be Catholic,” or so the Spanish deposition claimed.13 But the Black men and
women who escaped by boat in the cover of night were not merely
running to Spanish Florida; they were escaping from English slavery. Almost nothing is known about who they were or what they
did in Carolina. The large plantation economy associated with the
American South, which forced millions of men and women to work
sunup to sundown in fields producing staple crops, was still in its
incipient stages at the eve of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless,
the importation of enslaved people was already big business. By
1700, half of the population in Charles Town was enslaved. English
chattel slavery was a racial, heritable, and deeply exploitive institution that was expanding rapidly.14
Spanish Florida offered these fugitives an alternative, not a
guarantee. The Catholic Church and the Siete Partidas—a legal
code compiled in the thirteenth century that sought to codify legal
and customary traditions, including the treatment of women and
slaves—gave enslaved persons in Florida certain rights and opportunities foreclosed to them by English law. Perhaps most importantly, enslaved people had access to coartación, the process by
which they could buy their own freedom, which meant that Spanish law, as historian Jane Landers explains, “considered slavery a
mutable legal condition, neither racially defined nor permanent.”15
In other words, though children born to an enslaved woman in
Spanish America also inherited her status, they had other avenues
for negotiating, redefining, and even ending their enslavement that
were simply not available under the English legal code.
Both slavery and the fight for freedom were an integral part of
Spanish Florida, not in an abstract or esoteric way but embodied in
the lives and struggles of people of African descent.16 Most commonly called negros and morenos in the sources, Spanish officials also
used the terms pardo and sometimes mulattos to refer to people with
mixed African and European ancestry, and the word chino to describe a person of Native and African descent.17 These terms meant
a great deal to those being described and those doing the describing, but they were also highly malleable. Someone who was moreno
in one document could become pardo or mestizo in the next.
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
77
The fugitives from Carolina were identified as “negros and negras,” and while they had left an emerging slave society built on the
backs of enslaved African peoples, they found that the exploitation
of Black labor was also a constant in San Agustín. From the very
earliest Spanish incursions in the region, African and Africandescended people played an active role in this colonial space. They
served in the militia, worked on the construction of the Castillo de
San Marcos (as the San Agustín fort was called), labored as overseers in the growing cattle ranches, and ran several businesses in
town, including pulperías (grocery stores).
The status of Black people within this emergent Spanish society often proved tenuous, however. In 1608, Governor Pedro de
Ybarra sent a report to the crown about the dangers San Agustín
faced due to its shrinking Spanish population and its growing
Black commmunity.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
There are no other people or citizens than the soldiers and
one hundred blacks who on the day that the opportunity
presents itself to fight, I have no assurances from them, because they are more likely to want their freedom . . . than
to remain as slaves to their masters[.] And for that reason it
has been two years since I issued an order that no person
was to bring me a black person from elsewhere.18
Ybarra worried about the safety of a city protected by a Black population. He doubted that the enslaved would fight to protect their
enslavers. If given the chance, the governor predicted that Africans
and people of African descent would always “want their freedom.”
The church and the army proved the two strongest pillars of
the Black community in San Agustín. The Catholic Church recognized and recorded the marriages, baptisms, and burials of hundreds of Africans and their descendants. This powerful religious
body also welcomed Black participation in cofradías (confraternity)
like Nuestra Señora de la Leche, which served as a religious fraternity,
provided funds for funerals, and held festivals hosted by its members.19 Black men could also serve in the army. In 1683, Governor
Juan Márquez Cabrera authorized the creation of a free pardo
and mulatto militia. The surviving roster includes the names of
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
78
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
six officers and forty-two men.20 Jane Landers notes that while almost nothing is known about these men, where they came from,
and how they had gotten to Florida, their service in the army “was
also an effort to define their status as members of the religious and
civil community, and as vassals of a King from whom they might
expect protection or patronage in exchange for armed service.”21
During the 1680s, as pirate raids off the coast of Florida intensified, this Black militia repeatedly proved to be one of San Agustín’s
best lines of defense, disproving Governor Ybarra’s earlier fears.22
Spanish sources from this period contain scattered mentions of
Black men bravely acting as spies, interpreters, and soldiers, including some who rose in the military ranks, but Black women are conspicuously missing. Their empirical absence in the Spanish archive
is not the same as actual absence. Black women lived, toiled, made
lives for themselves, and defied Spanish authority. In her study on
Black women in New Orleans, Jessica Marie Johnson has shown
how French “officials especially failed to acknowledge or represent
black women, enslaved or freed, in their census documentation.”23
The same could be said of San Agustín, and the two unnamed, fugitive women who arrived in 1687 prove a telling example. No longer English slaves but not quite free, these two women found
themselves bound to domestic labor in the house of the Spanish
governor, while the men in their group were sent to work on the
Castillo de San Marcos, the main military structure in town.
In San Agustín, Black women, both enslaved and free, often
worked in the homes of Spanish elites, serving as laundresses or
cooks and performing tasks that the Spanish population relied on
to survive but rarely bothered to quantify or record.24 The two
runaway women who arrived in 1687 might have disappeared entirely from the archive had the governor not been forced to make
sense of them and their labor. Jennifer Morgan reminds us that
“when gender, parenthood, or other familial relations make their
way into the records, they need to be understood as a particular
type of irruption.”25 The women who had fled from English slavery
were an irruption, a force that had rushed into the governor’s
home and demanded freedom. Quiroga y Losada refused; he kept
them in bondage, with no desire to acknowledge their experiences
or lives. His most articulated expression was one of annoyance: he
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
79
complained that no one would pay enough for their labor and now
he was burdened by them.
The sudden visibility of these fugitive women came at his expense. He was “required to keep them [in his home] to avoid scandal
through recogimiento,” a loaded term that usually referred to the
cloistering of women to protect their honor, virginity, and any element of their sexuality.26 Quiroga y Losada’s stated efforts to protect
or rather to control the sexual lives of these non-Spanish women offers a complicated contrast with English society. Unlike Carolina,
Florida was not steadily moving toward the racialized chattel slavery
of Africans and their descendants. But like English officials, Spanish
officials sought to regulate Black women’s lives and freedoms. Thus,
the governor argued that the only way to shield the two Black
women from the physical and sexual violence that surely awaited
them was to keep them enslaved in his home. These women had escaped English Carolina and arrived in Spanish Florida, but the freedom they had worked for and wanted still remained out of reach.
Governor Quiroga y Losada explained how an earlier attempt
to sell these women had gone terribly wrong. During the auction, a
soldier had lewdly commented that he would gladly buy them “for
the day,” as if they were prostitutes, and another had mocked them
and offered a meager two pesos for each woman. The governor,
embarrassed by the men’s taunting, had quickly ended the sale and
then downplayed the soldiers’ actions as nothing more than a bad
joke. Quiroga y Losada claimed that the men had shouted obscenities at the women “for the sole purpose of being scandalous.”27
These were clearly threats, not jokes. The governor patently
understood that; he had quickly removed the women from the auction block and asked for permission to purchase them himself. As
the Spanish soldiers were openly stating their intentions to rape
and physically abuse these Black women, Quiroga y Losada worried about himself. How was he going to feed and clothe these
women? Would he be reimbursed for his troubles? How would his
inability to sell these women affect his reputation and finances? In
his letters, he made it seem as if these two Black women would certainly lead to his ruin.28 But these women had bigger concerns than
Quiroga y Losada’s bruised ego or shrinking purse. They had to
find a way to defend their own well-being and safety.
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
80
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
These two women left no testimonies or reports, but their
bodies, first in bondage, then in flight, and finally somewhere in
between in San Agustín, were their archives. They spoke of resilience and daring, but also of commodification and violence. Marisa
Fuentes argues that examining “the workings of power on the bodies and historical afterlives of the enslaved . . . produce[s] new
knowledge about their lives from the records left by the regime of
power.”29 With their movements and bodies, these fugitive Black
women pushed against the silences of the Spanish archive. They
showed how gender shaped not only their experiences in slavery
but also their access to freedom, a difference that becomes especially poignant when considering their struggles alongside those of
the men who had absconded with them from Carolina. Their male
companions had been “put to work in the making of the Castillo,
which has already saved the treasury a great amount,” and whereas
the Black men were deemed valuable and useful, the Black women
were considered both burdensome and exploitable.30 Quiroga y
Losada whined repeatedly that these women cost more than they
produced and, if they were ever hired out, he would be responsible
for the sexual violence that undoubtably awaited them. He even
reprimanded them for spending their time “caring for two children,” never acknowledging the reproductive labor of these women
or the fact that these two children would likely remain in his possession. The degradation of Black women and their labor went
hand in hand with the violent sexualization of their bodies.
The unnamed Black women were still in the governor’s house
when English officials arrived in San Agustín and demanded their
return. The two women were not included in the list of runaway
names presented to Governor Quiroga y Losada, but their absence
did not imply that the Carolinians had somehow forgotten about
them or that they were safe in San Agustín. Florida officials at first
refused the slave owners, pleased with their new ability to undermine English advances. But the Carolinians proved relentless, asking, demanding, and then threatening violence if their property
was not returned in a timely manner. When Spanish officials finally
responded, they did so with ambivalence, unsure of what to do
with these Black individuals who had chosen where and how they
wanted to live their lives. The mere act of refusing to hand over to
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
81
the English any of the fugitive slaves proved critical, however. Over
time, this refusal became policy, and in 1693, Florida officials issued a cédula (edict) promising freedom to any enslaved person
who arrived in San Agustín and vowed to serve both the Catholic
Church and the Spanish Crown.31
Florida’s small, free Black community began to grow in the late
seventeenth century. Its members served as soldiers, shop owners,
day laborers, overseers, cattle ranchers, interpreters, laundresses,
maids, and any other occupation available to them. Enslaved and
free people of African descent were both everywhere in San
Agustín and almost nowhere in the records. Their presence and actions seem folded into the everydayness of colonial life in Florida.
Marriage and baptism records from San Agustín offer some of
the only surviving bits of evidence for what was a booming and
complex Black community.32 These records show that people living
in Spanish Florida, like those living in other parts of Latin America,
engaged in endogamous marriage practices. Susan Richbourg
Parker and Diana Reigelsperger have done extensive work on baptism and marriage records from San Agustín and have shown that
Black women not only followed this pattern but did so at higher
rates than Black men.33 In other words, Black women tend to appear
in marriage records only alongside free or enslaved Black men, both
as their partners and as the witnesses to unions, as the marriage between García, a slave of Captain Lorenzo Joseph, and María, a slave
of Captain Francisco Canisarez, on July 8, 1674, clearly shows. The
church sanctified the “deposition and relation,” and since there was
willingness on both sides and no impediments, the marriage ceremony went on as planned. García and María had three testigos (witnesses) to verify their union, all of them male and all part of the
emerging Black community in San Agustín. There was Simón, a
free moreno who was employed as a bricklayer; Lorenzo, a slave in
the service of Captain San Francisco de Lara; and Francisco, who
was enslaved by María Ruíz, a member of the Spanish elite in Florida. García and María had found diverse and established members
of the Black community to support their union.34
Black women depended on these relationships to negotiate
their lives in San Agustín. Their parentela (a collective formed of
kin, including relatives by marriage) and compadrazgo (godparents)
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
82
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
represented their networks of support and allies. Although some
Spanish officials and members of Florida’s elite signed on as witnesses to these marriage records, most of the people in these Black
women’s networks were also of African descent.
Black men had slightly larger social networks. Whether free or
enslaved, Black men could marry Native and mestiza women. The
marriage of Juan, a “mulatto slave” of Captain Lorenzo Joseph de
León to Isabel, “India Católica Yamase [sic] daughter of Pedro,
gentile,” on February 17, 1675; or the union between Bernardo
Pediosa, a slave of Captain Don Lorenzo de Horryutiner, to Francisca, “Indian of Tolomato, widow of Ascensio,” on June 30, 1675;
or even the marriage of Phelipe de Santiago Candia, a pardo slave
of Adjutant Joseph Rodrigues, to Micaela María, a Native of
Pueblo de Nicolás who now lived in Nombre de Dios outside the
city walls, on April 15, 1692, showed the intimate connections
Black men could and did forge outside of slavery and San
Agustín.35 Black women were not afforded those same possibilities;
they had to establish kinship and marriage ties with Black men in
order to ensure some level of protection for themselves and their
children.36
Of course, Black women had other relationships that were
never recognized by the church, as evidenced in the baptism rec
ords.37 There were about thirty infants baptized between 1687 and
1702 who were regarded as illegitimate, either listed as naturales
(born out of wedlock) or with no known father. Enslaved Black
women bore many of these children, and though it is impossible to
know if these children were conceived from a relationship that was
consensual, strategic, coercive, or shifting unpredictably along that
range, these baptisms hint at the different relationships Black
women entered into and to which they were subjected.
The church allowed the baptism of children born out of wedlock but still required padrinos (godparents) to perform the rite.
Enslaved and free Black women in San Agustín worked hard to secure well-regarded and -connected padrinos for their children,
even though they often faced an uphill battle trying to find padrinos for illegitimate children. On April 1, 1687, Theresa managed to
baptize her daughter María, who had been born a week earlier and
had “no recognized father.” The priest warned Juan Anbrada, the
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
83
selected godfather, of this young baby’s parentage, “le adverti el
parentesco.” But Theresa had chosen well, and this padrino readily
agreed to have María as his ahijada (goddaughter).38 Following
long-established patterns for other parts of Spanish America, in San
Agustín enslaved women and “free women of color used compadrazgo [godparentage] to create powerful bonds of obligation between themselves and other free black and mulatta women.”39
Often enslaved women with illegitimate children listed only a madrina (female godparent) for their child, and that madrina was most
often also Black and enslaved.40 In other words, Black women relied
on one another.
On occasion, Black women also served as madrinas for Spanish
and Criollo children. Their documentation in non-Black or enslaved baptismal records shows how Black women created their
community. Compadrazgo allowed them to extend kinship ties that
were otherwise unavailable to them. They inserted themselves in
the very foundational and intimate relationships that built Spanish
colonial society. Why were these women committing to support
the spiritual well-being of the children of slave owners, children
who could grow up to own slaves and support the continued enslavement of their own godmothers? Perhaps the answer lies in the
choice. Black women, enslaved or free, were never required to
serve as madrinas; but in their choice, they could potentially provide for themselves and their families vital connections and access
points to Spanish society.41
These records outline a growing Black population free or freed
from bondage in San Agustín. By the 1730s, there were more than
1,500 people of African descent in Florida, and within thirty years
that number doubled. In 1738, Governor Manuel de Montiano allowed the establishment of Santa Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de
Mose, or Fort Mose, a free and autonomous Black town just beyond the border of San Agustín. The town was operational for only
a short while, but it allowed Black men and women to own property, grow food, elect a governing body, and live away from prying
Spanish eyes.42 As people of African descent negotiated their place
within (and outside of) Spanish colonial society, they also had to
contend with the Native populations in the area. Black-Native relations in Florida were poorly documented, but it is clear that
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back : Native Women and the Making of the Early South, Yale University Press, 2023. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pepperdine/detail.action?docID=7242971.
Created from pepperdine on 2024-01-21 17:40:50.
84
The Wars Women Were Already Fighting
Copyright © 2023. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
within city walls, people of African and Indigenous descent labored
and struggled alongside each other. Sometimes they found comradeship in their shared, precarious arrangements, but often these
relationships proved fraught, strained by the racial policies and violence of the Spanish colonial regime.43
In 1651, Don Manuel, the holata (chief) of the Timucua town of
Asile, wrote a letter in Timucua complaining about rampant Spanish abuses. Don Manuel criticized a blatant land grab by some of
the highest-ranking Spanish officials in Florida. He also wrote
about the promises of goods never delivered, the damage done to
Native crops by roaming cattle left unsupervised, and, more pressingly, the dwindling number of men left in his town due to exploitative Spanish
