The Self-Liberated Slave Periquillo Saves the Missionary Juan Pobre: Blackness, Indigeneity, and the Origins of the Black Pacific

Seeking to chart the depth of the history of the Black Pacific, this article utilizes a contemporaneous Spanish chronicle to interrogate an episode from 1602 in Luta (Mariana Islands), where a former slave named Periquillo negotiated with CHamorus to spare the life of the missionary Juan Pobre de Zamora. I demonstrate that Indigenous CHamoru notions of community, the singular position of diasporic Africans in the Pacific (which made possible their role as go-betweens), and awareness of both groups of Spanish inhumanity drove the course of events. Resurrecting this episode draws backward the timeline of studies of the Black Pacific, which tend to focus on the second half of the 20th century.