13 - The Deportation of Free Black People from Seventeenth-Century Manila (1636–37, 1652)

Summary

Abstract

This chapter offers an introduction to a topic that has largely been elided in the historiography of colonial Manila: the emergence of free and enslaved Black communities. It further traces the transition from enslavement to freedom and the Spanish fear of socially mobile Africans and Afro-descendants. The two translated letters—from the governor, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, in 1636 (including a reply from 1637) and from the king in 1652—each attempt to justify and respond to the deportation of free Black men and women from Manila. They established that the free Black population numbered in the hundreds and that they were central to ongoing discourses about conversion and racialization.

Keywords: Philippines, slavery, Africans, Blackness, Pacific, race

Colonial Manila had one of the most diverse populations of the Spanish empire and, it must be said, of the early modern world. New trade circuits connected polities within the Philippines, the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, East Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas in unprecedented ways. Without doubt, the least studied of these convergences has been that of the negro/a (Black) populations in and around Manila that formed during the long seventeenth century. Most scholarship on non-Spaniards in the colony tends to center on the enormous communities of sangley (Chinese) traders and laborers in the Parián, Santa Cruz, and Binondo. The fluid nature of Spanish colonial social demographics, though, reveals that these groups cannot be studied in isolation. They were mutually constitutive and mutually dependent.

Despite a near-complete dearth of writing on the subject, a considerable Black community, both free and enslaved, lived in and around Manila beginning around the onset of the seventeenth century. Among the most important documents available to study this population are the following letters from 1636–37 and 1652, exchanged between Spanish governors in Manila and the Crown. They consist of a proposal to deport four hundred to five hundred free Black men and women from the city and its aftermath. In rebuilding the historical context of these letters, we must first account for the formation of Black communities in the Philippines and trace their mobility from enslavement to freedom