Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Freedom’s Captives is a profound achievement. Barragan’s thorough, painstaking research not only makes her arguments deeply persuasive but also gives the book unusual narrative power. It is packed full of detailed stories that communicate the human drama of life along the rivers of Colombia’s Black-majority Pacific region in roughly 1810–60, when being enslaved or being free came to have a whole register of shaded meanings. Throughout six fascinating, well-planned chapters, Barragan demonstrates that gradual emancipation was managed in the interests of the powerful and that the politics of freedom was harnessed to a project of governance tied to racial hierarchy. Readers grasp the disciplinary intentions at the heart of free womb legislation and are made to feel the awful violence inflicted on the bodies of those supposedly outside the boundary of slavery. Nevertheless, she maintains a productive tension throughout—exploring vernacular practices that blurred the lines between slavery and freedom in sometimes ambiguous ways.Barragan allows people and places to take center stage. Hers is a regional story in which towns that functioned as outposts of slave-owner power (Quibdó, on the Atrato River, and Nóvita, on a tributary of the San Juan River) are described with attention to internal conflicts about who lived where, what happened in which neighborhoods, and how notaries recorded sales. Her use of regional archives, including the Archivo Central del Cauca and the Notaría Primera de Quibdó in particular, enable the kind of rich, microhistorical description often associated with larger cities. Methodologically, the book is a tour de force. Archival snippets are presented with extraordinary attention to spatiality and human relationships. For example, a discussion of Nicolasa Becerra’s last will and testament includes rich contextual descriptions of Quibdó’s plaza; the plantain grove where she had been bitten by a poisonous snake near Bebará; the alluvial goldmine she owned, worked by thirty enslaved people she claimed as property, near the Tanando River, where her parents—who contested the will—lived farther upstream (73–76). Seemingly prosaic business transactions and documentation recording dowries are plumbed for the layered emotional information they contain, as well as how these archival materials chart the time-delimited economy within which “free womb children” could be bought and sold by reference to the amount of food and clothing they had supposedly consumed rather than to a price per se, or could be used to increase the value accorded to an enslaved mother (when, for example, the family group was used as collateral) (171–80). Telling details and a sense of drama move Barragan’s chapters forward even when their purpose is to highlight layered complexities, as when two men in their forties, Pedro and Antonio, found that the nation’s law abolishing slavery failed to protect them (the law was passed in 1851 and applied beginning January 1852). When the men were apprehended in 1854, their status as runaways meant that recapture allowed former owners to bring them before a court in an attempt to secure indemnification from the government in faraway Bogotá (252).A section discussing the way delegates to the Congress of Cúcuta argued the pros and cons of free womb legislation might have dragged, but Barragan’s skill as a storyteller ensures that readers are drawn into the disagreements that separated an abolitionist free womb advocate like José Félix de Restrepo from those who sought to guarantee profits to slave owners (110, 127–43). Similarly welcome are Barragan’s careful explanations of how the festive manumission ceremonies that became something of a political football for Colombia’s “abolitionist and anti-abolitionist publics” were also set pieces that obscured the significance of self-purchase and Black agency (200, 220–27). Here, her research expands on work others have done on legislative projects and juntas de manumisión elsewhere. And what a pleasure to see same-page footnotes! These serve as a guide to the literature available in Spanish and make Freedom’s Captives a model of good citation practices.Writing in Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America Series, Barragan does an outstanding job of contextualizing nineteenth-century Colombia as part of a hemisphere shaped by slavery and its “winding, protracted abolition” (12). Very occasionally, her willingness to frame her sources by pointing to trends in adjacent fields weighs the book down. More often, however, discussions of nineteenth-century patterns in the United States, Cuba, or Brazil are carefully mobilized and prove useful. For scholars unfamiliar with Colombian historiography about the Pacific Coast region, Barragan’s erudition will be especially valuable. For graduate students seeking insight into the kinds of archival materials available, this is an essential primer. Barragan’s chapters also demonstrate a commitment to rewriting the past in ways that provoke conversations in the present, making the book likely to stimulate seminar discussions for decades to come. Not everyone will agree with her use of terms like “captives” or with the somewhat convoluted syntax of “gradual emancipation rule.” Yet the urgency she brings to rethinking Colombia’s nineteenth century is compelling. This is a book framed as part of an ongoing project to unmake racism. Because stereotypes about Black history and culture in lowland Colombia still circulate widely, one hopes she finds a wide readership.