“La Negrita”: A History of African Girlhood in the Spanish Caribbean Slave Trade - Dr. Elise A. Mitchell - 2nd March
On 2nd March at 17:00 (GMT)/12:00 (EST) we will discuss a pre-circulated paper titled “La Negrita”: A History of African Girlhood in the Spanish Caribbean Slave Trade” by Dr. Elise Mitchell (Swarthmore College). During the seminar, Dr. Mitchell will introduce the paper for discussion. To attend, please register here:
https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/2022021
To receive the pre-circulated materials, please ensure you register a week in advance of the seminar.
Abstract
In November 1769, an enslaved African girl and her forty-six shipmates journeyed from San Juan (Puerto Rico) to Cumaná (Venezuela) on a Compañía Gaditana ship. After undergoing the visita de sanidad, the girl was sold to Cumaná’s treasurer, Antonio de Alcalá, and began working in his home. Several days later, members of Alcalá’s household and his guests became ill with smallpox. They attributed the outbreak to the enslaved girl. As news of the outbreak spread, Cumaná’s residents pressured local officials to implement precautions to protect their families from the disease. Thus, government officials removed the enslaved girl from Alcalá’s home and quarantined her and her shipmates. After relocating their quarantine several times, Cumaná’s officials ordered that the surviving enslaved people return to Puerto Rico in December.
Hundreds of pages of conflicting testimonies, correspondence, and financial records chart the enslaved girl’s movements and raise questions about whether the enslaved girl had smallpox at all. In conversation with scholarship concerning medicine, the Spanish slave trade, gender, childhood, and urban slavery in the Caribbean, this article manuscript examines how girlhood, kinship, and the classification of “bozal” (acculturated African) informed Cumaná’s public health policies and the enslaved girl’s experiences of them. The enslaved girl’s status made her vulnerable to physical scrutiny and sanctioned her quarantine and re-embarkation. Her intra-Caribbean voyages and movements through the morbid geography of San Juan and Cumaná’s quarantines illustrate the degree of precarity that newly enslaved African girls experienced when caught in the crosshairs of the slave trade, enslavement, and public health policies.
Bio
Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is a historian of the early modern Black Atlantic. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Swarthmore College. Broadly, her work examines the social and political histories of embodiment, healing, disease, race, and gender in the early modern Atlantic World, with a focus on the Caribbean region. Her articles in The William and Mary Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, and The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies have received awards and distinctions. She is currently completing her first book manuscript about enslaved Africans' experiences of smallpox and public health interventions in the transatlantic slave trade before 1800. Her book manuscript, Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World, is under contract with Penn Press. Dr. Mitchell's research has been made possible by funding from New York University, Princeton University, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Image Citation: Isla de Cabras, Puerto Rico by Elise A. Mitchell (2019).