The Archives of Virtual Slavery

Abstract This article rethinks nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism and abolitionism in relation to contracts of indenture of Black and Indigenous workers from Mexico’s borderland regions of Texas and Yucatán. These contracts reveal practices of unfree labor that blurred the conceptual boundaries between slavery and freedom and the physical boundaries between “slave” and “free” territory. This ambiguity complicates Mexican elites’ creation of an abolitionist politics and culture that presume the linear progress from slavery to free labor. This article situates these contracts within Mexico’s recurring transition to freedom, the longue durée history of colonial New Spain’s attempts to eradicate Spanish colonial Indigenous slavery, which gave rise to documentation that performatively reinterpreted unfree labor as legitimate forms of bondage and exploitation. This widespread dissimulation in the archives of virtual slavery, in which the enslaved person is granted a voice simulating their “consent” to bondage, suggests how these labor forms avoided prominence in the shadow of chattel slavery. This article critically analyzes a corpus of contracts that demonstrates how traffickers negotiated the borders between slavery and “free” contract labor and, in doing so, reveals gaps in the legal borderlands between “slave” and “free” territory. It also examines petitions for freedom that the same Black and Indigenous persons created as they exploited the borderlands’ divergent legal regimes and drew from their own colonial traditions of using the law to pursue justice and liberty. Their words reveal how they improvised their own meanings of freedom that eluded nationalist narratives of abolition and progress.