Magdalena Candioti shows how the colonial practice of manumission (individual release from slavery) shaped the “time of the libertos,” the life of people freed from slavery in Argentina between the revolution of independence and abolition, roughly 1810 to 1860. During these turbulent decades, men, women, and children of African ancestry had to provide additional labor, money, accommodations, and military service to achieve greater degrees of freedom. Candioti examines strategies of enslaved and freed people to make these freedoms less fractional (as defined by Michelle McKinley) and more comprehensive.
As gender is one of the main analytical tools to explore the lives of men, women, and children, this book could be read together with the work of Erika Edwards on Córdoba. Candioti applies gender analysis to situations ranging from the strategies and narratives of enslaved and freed people as documented in judicial cases to the discourse on abolition coming from elites. This book systematically scrutinizes the politics, arguments, and laws leading to the end of slavery in what became Argentina, and gender was there too.
Candioti also shows how the construction of Argentina as a country, from Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Santa Fe, and other places, shaped antislavery and abolition. This aspect will attract scholars focusing on countries like Mexico and Colombia, where the fight between federalism and centralism also intersected with abolition. As Buenos Aires was different from the provinces of the littoral, various jurisdictions (provincial, federal, central, and even international) could be claimed by men and women trying to free themselves from slavery, as well as by those who wanted to continue subjecting them. The author offers genuinely new details on how and when abolition took place in Buenos Aires and the provinces, as well as on the issue of government payments to former owners of captives.
The writing is marvelous. I was electrified by the relationships of Antonio Porobio, his wife Maria Maza, and Francisca accompanied Porobio on the battlefields from Montevideo to Bolivia. This great on-the-ground story illustrates the connected constructions of race and gender, in times when warfare redefined slavery and abolition. I have not seen such great prose addressing these subjects for this period and place before. The book is comparable to Paulina Alberto's work, but in Spanish.
Some scholarship on Spanish American abolitionism is anachronistically secular, which is odd for societies where Catholicism was everywhere. Candioti excels when analyzing the political economy of Catholicism in the language of freedom trials, and from there, showing the inclusion of this language in the discourse on abolition. Enslavers created and recreated bonds of dependency with captives through these pledges of freedom. In the political economy of Catholicism, these vows entailed obligations to those manumitted. The author illustrates that the language of Christian love and fraternity shaped judicial arguments to prolong the servitude of former enslaved men, and particularly women. Candioti also brings up the old Valladolid debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda but focuses on legal implications for nineteenth-century abolitionism, in which Spanish American intellectuals went back to las Casas and his criticism of slavery based on “just war.”
The book will attract those interested in abolition and state formation, especially those who may want to consider how the revolutionary state (Buenos Aires and Corrientes, for examples) increased or decreased its interventions to regulate the last generation who lived under slavery. Candioti provides new evidence on the overlapping language of abolition and the disappearance of people of African ancestry, showing intersections in the discourse promoting abolition with early iterations of the myth of “disappearance”—the racial narratives depicting the extinction of people of African ancestry from Argentina. This book may interest those examining the late nineteenth century, by connecting the politics of post-abolition with the efforts of elites to extract labor from subaltern populations through the increasing presence of the police, military, public health, and public education in everyday life.
