Miscellaneous Afro-Latin America Collection

Collection Data

Dates / Origin
Date Created: 1726 - 1890
Library locations
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
Shelf locator: Sc MG 418
Topics
Black people -- History -- Latin America
Black people -- Social conditions
Slavery -- History -- Latin America
Black people -- Haiti
Black people -- Argentina
Black people -- Cuba
Black people -- Peru
Black people -- Mexico
Black people -- Venezuela
Black people -- Uruguay
Black people -- West Indies
Slave trade -- Latin America
Enslaved persons -- Latin America -- Social conditions
Genres
Correspondence
Documents
Notes
Content: The collection consists of a mix of official, private, and family papers from colonial Spanish American territories: Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. The documents are all from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for a chronology of the history of blacks in Uruguay from 1680-1990. Included in the official documents are a number of royal decrees concerning the commerce in Africans, the education, treatment and occupation of enslaved laborers, and the liberation of fugitives from the territories of imperial rivals. Other decrees include an 1810 Mexican prohibition against intermarriage between those of "known nobility and pure blood and blacks, mulattos and other castes" and an 1812 decree tackling the education of Spanish subjects of African origin in Mexico. Significant in the collection's family papers are the Magan family legal documents which contain a history of an Argentinian family's slave holdings, and records matriarch Inez de Cabrera y Magan's dying wish to grant freedom to her enslaved woman, Josefa. In addition to the Magan family papers, there are a number of other private legal documents that deal with the sale and manumission of enslaved people. A 1778 population register of 28 Puerto Rican cities and an 1815 record of the free black population in Buenos Aires offer a demographic picture of colonial Spanish America as do a 1753 Venezuela plantation inventory, a 1775 Cuban population register and a series of handwritten reports regarding maroons in Cuba's Matanzas Province (1837-1838).
Physical Description
Extent: .5 linear feet (2 boxes)
Type of Resource
Text
Identifiers
NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b18401028
MSS Unit ID: 22005
Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): f7ddf6d0-c608-012f-02d6-58d385a7bc34
Show filters Hide filters
13 results found
Filtering on:
x Genre: decrees
x Topic: Black people