| Sumario: | Using a series of unusual parish books that record the sacraments performed by naval chaplains, that are in the Cartagena de Indias Cathedral, this work examines the intimate relations between various individuals and ethnic groups in the port city. Through these documents, it is possible to discover a slave society set within a frontier or even liminal social topography that reveals the multitude of possible dynamics created within the structures of such a heterogeneous community. We discover that much as the Spaniards and their Creole offspring may have sought to maintain the boundaries of what they envisioned as an ideal caste system, institutions such as the navy, the military and the church were forced to incorporate Africans and their descendants for various reasons. Free people of color (pardos libres) as well as the enslaved were agile in their appropriation of those narrow fissures in the rigid racial system that was the theoretical standard. From early on, Africans, Europeans, indigenous peoples and their descendants created a type of tropical Babylon in Cartagena, developing distinct geographical spaces along the coast and in the city and port that can be mapped out ethnically and culturally.
|
|---|