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Social geographies, the practice of marronage and the archaeology of absence in colonial Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2017

Adela Amaral
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Abstract

Drawing from colonial documents and archaeological evidence, this article challenges our conceptions of the Maroon colonial social category. The article focuses on Maroon testimonies recorded by colonial officials and the archaeological record of a Maroon group that settled Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa, from 18th-century Spanish colonial Mexico. By reconstructing how Maroons practised and altered Spanish colonial social and geographic landscapes, this article demonstrates that Maroons were not constrained to the ‘inaccessible’ areas that colonial officials attached them to and that present-day studies of Maroons have habituated. Amapa's absent archaeological record and the complaints waged against the Maroons concerning the absence of civility in the newly established town also challenge straightforward notions of Maroons and space.

Keywords

Maroonsmarronagespatial practiceabsencereduccióncolonialismMexico
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , December 2017 , pp. 207 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

References

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Las Leyes de RecopilaciónGoogle Scholar
Archivo Histórico de Córdoba, Córdoba, Veracruz (AHC)Google Scholar
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Allen, S.J., 1998: A ‘cultural mosaic’ at Palmares? Grappling with the historical archaeology of a seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo, in Funari, P.P.A. (ed.), Cultura material e arqueología histórica, Brasil, 141–78.Google Scholar
Ardener, E., 1989: The voice of prophecy and other essays (ed. Chapman, M.), New York.Google Scholar
Arrom, J.J., and Garcia Arévalo, M.A., 1986: Cimarrón, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana.Google Scholar
Bailey, D.W., 2007: The anti-rhetorical power of representational absence. Incomplete figurines from the Balkan Neolithic, in Renfrew, C. and Morley, I. (eds), Image and imagination, Cambridge, 117–26.Google Scholar
Baram, U., 2012: Cosmopolitan meanings of old Spanish fields. Historical archaeology of a Maroon community in southwest Florida, Historical archaeology 46 (1), 102–22.Google Scholar
Bilby, K.M., 2005: True-born Maroons, Gainesville.Google Scholar
Campbell, M.C., 1990: The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796, Trenton, NJ.Google Scholar
Card, J.J., 2013: Introduction, in Card (ed.), The archaeology of hybrid material culture, Carbondale, IL, 1–21.Google Scholar
Carroll, P. J., 1977: Mandinga. The evolution of a Mexican runaway slave community, 1735–1827, Comparative studies in society and history 19 (4), 488–505.Google Scholar
Chowdhury, A., 2014: Maroon archaeological research in Mauritius and its possible implications in a global context, in Wilson, L.M. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 255–75.Google Scholar
Coronil, F., 1996: Beyond occidentalism. Toward nonimperial geohistorical categories, Cultural anthropology 11 (1), 51–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corro Ramos, O., 1951: Los cimarrones en veracruz y la fundación de amapa, Veracruz.Google Scholar
Covarrubias Orozco, S., 1611: Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española, Madrid.Google Scholar
Cronan, W. (ed.), 1996: Uncommon ground. Rethinking the human place in nature, New York.Google Scholar
Cummins, T., 2002: Forms of Andean colonial towns, free will and marriage, in Lyons, C. and Papadopoulos, J. (eds), The archaeology of colonialism, Los Angeles, 199–240.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., 2006: The burden of Louis Congo and the evolution of savagery in colonial Louisiana, in Pierce, S. and Rao, A. (eds), Discipline and the other body. Correction, corporeality, colonialism, Durham, NC, 61–89.Google Scholar
Deagan, K., and Landers, J., 1999: Fort Mose. Earliest free African-American town in the United States, in Singleton, T. (ed.), I, too am America. Archaeological studies of African American life, Charlottesville, 261–82.Google Scholar
Deschamps Chapeaux, P., 1983: Los cimarrones urbanos, La Habana.Google Scholar
dos Santos Gomes, F., 2002: A ‘safe haven’. Runaway slaves, Mocambos, and borders in colonial Amazonia, Brazil, Hispanic American historical review 82 (3), 469–98.Google Scholar
Fellows, K.R., and Delle, D.A., 2015: Marronage and the dialectics of spatial sovereignty in colonial Jamaica, in Funari, P.P.A. and Orser, C.E. (eds), Current perpectives on the archaeology of African slavery in Latin America, New York, 117–32.Google Scholar
Ferreira, L.M., 2015: A global perspective on Maroon archaeology in Brazil, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 375–90.Google Scholar
Fowels, S., 2010: People without things, in Bille, M., Hastrup, F. and Sørensen, T.F. (eds), An anthropology of absence. Materializations of transcendence and loss, New York, 23–41.Google Scholar
Fuery, P., 1995: The theory of absence. Subjectivity, signification, and desire, Westport, CT.Google Scholar
Gell, A., 1998: Art and agency. An anthropological theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Gordillo, G., 2013: The void. Invisible ruins on the edge of empire, in Stoler, A.L. (ed.), Imperial debris. On ruins and ruination, Durham, NC, 227–51.Google Scholar
Hale, J., 1994: The civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, New York.Google Scholar
Handler, J.S., 1997: Escaping slavery in a Caribbean plantation society. Marronage in Barbados, 1650s–1830s, New West Indian guide 71 (3–4), 183–225.Google Scholar
Hanks, W.F., 2010: Converting words. Maya in the age of the cross, Berkeley and Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Heuman, G. (ed.), 1986: Out of the house of bondage. Runaways, resistance and marronage in Africa and the New World, London.Google Scholar
Holston, J., 2008: Insurgent citizenship. Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Howard, R. 2002: Black Seminoles in the Bahamas, Gainesville.Google Scholar
Kagan, R.L., 2000: Urban images of the Hispanic world 1493–1793, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Kinsbruner, J., 2005: The colonial Spanish American city. Urban life in the age of Atlantic capitalism, Austin.Google Scholar
Kusimba, C.M., 2015: Maroon archaeological research in Mauritius and its possible implications in a global context, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 230–54.Google Scholar
La Rosa Corzo, G., 2005: Subsistence of Cimarrones. An archaeological study, in Curet, L.A., Dawdy, S.L. and La Rosa Corzo, G. (eds), Dialogues in Cuban archaeology, Tuscaloosa, 163–80.Google Scholar
La Rosa Corzo, G., and González, M.T., 2004: Cazadores de Esclavos. Diarios, La Habana.Google Scholar
Lockley, T.J., 2009: Maroon communities in South Carolina. A documentary record, Columbia, SC.Google Scholar
Low, S.M., 1993: Cultural meaning of the plaza. The history of the Spanish-American gridplan-plaza design, in Rotengberg, R. and McDonogh, G. (eds), The cultural meaning of urban space, Westport, CT, 75–94.Google Scholar
Marshall, L.W., 2015: Marronage and the politics of memory. Fugitive slaves, interaction, and integration in nineteenth-century Kenya, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 276–99.Google Scholar
Morse, R.M., 1975: A framework for Latin American urban history, in Hardoy, J.E. (ed.), Urbanization in Latin America. Approaches and issues, Garden City, NY, 57–108.Google Scholar
Naveda Chàvez-Hita, A., 1987: Esclavos negros en las haciendas azucareras de Córdoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830, Xalapa.Google Scholar
Naveda Chàvez-Hita, A., 2001: De San Lorenzo de los negros a los morenos de Amapa. Cimarrones veracruzanos, 1609–1735, in Cáceres, R. (ed.), Rutas de la Esclavitud en África y América Latina, Costa Rica, 157–74.Google Scholar
Ngwenyama, C.N., 2007: Material beginnings of the Saramaka Maroons. An archaeological investigation, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, Department of Anthropology.Google Scholar
Norton, H.K., and Espenshade, C.T., 2007: The challenge in locating Maroon refuge sites at Maroon Ridge, St. Croix, Journal of Caribbean archaeology 7, 1–17.Google Scholar
Orser, C.E., and Funari, P.P.A., 2001: Archaeology and slave resistance and rebellion, World archaeology 33 (1), 61–72.Google Scholar
Pereira, J., 1994: Maroon heritage in Mexico, in Agorsah, E.K. (ed.), Maroon heritage. Archaeological, ethnographic and historical perspectives, Barbados, 94–108.Google Scholar
Pérez, B.E., 2000: The journey to freedom. Maroon forebears in southern Venezuela, Ethnohistory 47 (3–4), 611–34.Google Scholar
Pike, R., 2007: The Cimarrones of sixteenth-century Panama, The Americas 64 (2), 243–66.Google Scholar
Price, R., 1983: First-time. The historical vision of an Afro-American people, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Price, R. (ed.), 1996: Maroon societies. Rebel slave communities in the Americas, 3rd edn, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Proctor, N.T., 2010: Damned notions of liberty. Slavery, culture, and power in colonial Mexico, 1640–1769, Albuquerque.Google Scholar
Roberts, N., 2015: Freedom as Marronage, Chicago.Google Scholar
Sayers, D.O., 2014: A desolate place for a defiant people. The archaeology of Maroons, indigenous Americans, and enslaved laborers in the great dismal swamp, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Sayers, D.O., Burke, P.B. and Henry, A.A., 2007: The political economy of exile in the great dismal swamp, International journal of historical archaeology 11 (1), 60–97.Google Scholar
Smith, F.H., 2008: The archaeology of alcohol and drinking, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R., 1995: Silencing the past. Power and the production of history, Boston.Google Scholar
Thompson, A., 2006: Flight to freedom, Kingston.Google Scholar
Villa-Flores, J., 2002: “To lose one's soul”. Blasphemy and slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669, Hispanic American historical review 82 (3), 435–68.Google Scholar
Weik, T.M., 1997: The archaeology of Maroon societies in the Americas. Resistance, cultural continuity and transformation in the African diaspora, Historical archaeology 31 (2), 81–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weik, T.M., 2012: The archaeology of antislavery resistance, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (AGN)Google Scholar
Las Leyes de RecopilaciónGoogle Scholar
Archivo Histórico de Córdoba, Córdoba, Veracruz (AHC)Google Scholar
Agorsah, E.K. (ed.), 1994: Maroon heritage. Archaeological, ethnographic and historical perspectives, Barbados.Google Scholar
Agorsah, E.K., 2007: Scars of brutality. Archaeology of the Maroons in the Caribbean, in Ogundiran, A. and Falola, T. (eds), Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African diaspora, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Allen, S.J., 1998: A ‘cultural mosaic’ at Palmares? Grappling with the historical archaeology of a seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo, in Funari, P.P.A. (ed.), Cultura material e arqueología histórica, Brasil, 141–78.Google Scholar
Ardener, E., 1989: The voice of prophecy and other essays (ed. Chapman, M.), New York.Google Scholar
Arrom, J.J., and Garcia Arévalo, M.A., 1986: Cimarrón, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana.Google Scholar
Bailey, D.W., 2007: The anti-rhetorical power of representational absence. Incomplete figurines from the Balkan Neolithic, in Renfrew, C. and Morley, I. (eds), Image and imagination, Cambridge, 117–26.Google Scholar
Baram, U., 2012: Cosmopolitan meanings of old Spanish fields. Historical archaeology of a Maroon community in southwest Florida, Historical archaeology 46 (1), 102–22.Google Scholar
Bilby, K.M., 2005: True-born Maroons, Gainesville.Google Scholar
Campbell, M.C., 1990: The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796, Trenton, NJ.Google Scholar
Card, J.J., 2013: Introduction, in Card (ed.), The archaeology of hybrid material culture, Carbondale, IL, 1–21.Google Scholar
Carroll, P. J., 1977: Mandinga. The evolution of a Mexican runaway slave community, 1735–1827, Comparative studies in society and history 19 (4), 488–505.Google Scholar
Chowdhury, A., 2014: Maroon archaeological research in Mauritius and its possible implications in a global context, in Wilson, L.M. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 255–75.Google Scholar
Coronil, F., 1996: Beyond occidentalism. Toward nonimperial geohistorical categories, Cultural anthropology 11 (1), 51–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corro Ramos, O., 1951: Los cimarrones en veracruz y la fundación de amapa, Veracruz.Google Scholar
Covarrubias Orozco, S., 1611: Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española, Madrid.Google Scholar
Cronan, W. (ed.), 1996: Uncommon ground. Rethinking the human place in nature, New York.Google Scholar
Cummins, T., 2002: Forms of Andean colonial towns, free will and marriage, in Lyons, C. and Papadopoulos, J. (eds), The archaeology of colonialism, Los Angeles, 199–240.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., 2006: The burden of Louis Congo and the evolution of savagery in colonial Louisiana, in Pierce, S. and Rao, A. (eds), Discipline and the other body. Correction, corporeality, colonialism, Durham, NC, 61–89.Google Scholar
Deagan, K., and Landers, J., 1999: Fort Mose. Earliest free African-American town in the United States, in Singleton, T. (ed.), I, too am America. Archaeological studies of African American life, Charlottesville, 261–82.Google Scholar
Deschamps Chapeaux, P., 1983: Los cimarrones urbanos, La Habana.Google Scholar
dos Santos Gomes, F., 2002: A ‘safe haven’. Runaway slaves, Mocambos, and borders in colonial Amazonia, Brazil, Hispanic American historical review 82 (3), 469–98.Google Scholar
Fellows, K.R., and Delle, D.A., 2015: Marronage and the dialectics of spatial sovereignty in colonial Jamaica, in Funari, P.P.A. and Orser, C.E. (eds), Current perpectives on the archaeology of African slavery in Latin America, New York, 117–32.Google Scholar
Ferreira, L.M., 2015: A global perspective on Maroon archaeology in Brazil, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 375–90.Google Scholar
Fowels, S., 2010: People without things, in Bille, M., Hastrup, F. and Sørensen, T.F. (eds), An anthropology of absence. Materializations of transcendence and loss, New York, 23–41.Google Scholar
Fuery, P., 1995: The theory of absence. Subjectivity, signification, and desire, Westport, CT.Google Scholar
Gell, A., 1998: Art and agency. An anthropological theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Gordillo, G., 2013: The void. Invisible ruins on the edge of empire, in Stoler, A.L. (ed.), Imperial debris. On ruins and ruination, Durham, NC, 227–51.Google Scholar
Hale, J., 1994: The civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, New York.Google Scholar
Handler, J.S., 1997: Escaping slavery in a Caribbean plantation society. Marronage in Barbados, 1650s–1830s, New West Indian guide 71 (3–4), 183–225.Google Scholar
Hanks, W.F., 2010: Converting words. Maya in the age of the cross, Berkeley and Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Heuman, G. (ed.), 1986: Out of the house of bondage. Runaways, resistance and marronage in Africa and the New World, London.Google Scholar
Holston, J., 2008: Insurgent citizenship. Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Howard, R. 2002: Black Seminoles in the Bahamas, Gainesville.Google Scholar
Kagan, R.L., 2000: Urban images of the Hispanic world 1493–1793, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Kinsbruner, J., 2005: The colonial Spanish American city. Urban life in the age of Atlantic capitalism, Austin.Google Scholar
Kusimba, C.M., 2015: Maroon archaeological research in Mauritius and its possible implications in a global context, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 230–54.Google Scholar
La Rosa Corzo, G., 2005: Subsistence of Cimarrones. An archaeological study, in Curet, L.A., Dawdy, S.L. and La Rosa Corzo, G. (eds), Dialogues in Cuban archaeology, Tuscaloosa, 163–80.Google Scholar
La Rosa Corzo, G., and González, M.T., 2004: Cazadores de Esclavos. Diarios, La Habana.Google Scholar
Lockley, T.J., 2009: Maroon communities in South Carolina. A documentary record, Columbia, SC.Google Scholar
Low, S.M., 1993: Cultural meaning of the plaza. The history of the Spanish-American gridplan-plaza design, in Rotengberg, R. and McDonogh, G. (eds), The cultural meaning of urban space, Westport, CT, 75–94.Google Scholar
Marshall, L.W., 2015: Marronage and the politics of memory. Fugitive slaves, interaction, and integration in nineteenth-century Kenya, in Marshall, L.W. (ed.), The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 276–99.Google Scholar
Morse, R.M., 1975: A framework for Latin American urban history, in Hardoy, J.E. (ed.), Urbanization in Latin America. Approaches and issues, Garden City, NY, 57–108.Google Scholar
Naveda Chàvez-Hita, A., 1987: Esclavos negros en las haciendas azucareras de Córdoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830, Xalapa.Google Scholar
Naveda Chàvez-Hita, A., 2001: De San Lorenzo de los negros a los morenos de Amapa. Cimarrones veracruzanos, 1609–1735, in Cáceres, R. (ed.), Rutas de la Esclavitud en África y América Latina, Costa Rica, 157–74.Google Scholar
Ngwenyama, C.N., 2007: Material beginnings of the Saramaka Maroons. An archaeological investigation, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, Department of Anthropology.Google Scholar
Norton, H.K., and Espenshade, C.T., 2007: The challenge in locating Maroon refuge sites at Maroon Ridge, St. Croix, Journal of Caribbean archaeology 7, 1–17.Google Scholar
Orser, C.E., and Funari, P.P.A., 2001: Archaeology and slave resistance and rebellion, World archaeology 33 (1), 61–72.Google Scholar
Pereira, J., 1994: Maroon heritage in Mexico, in Agorsah, E.K. (ed.), Maroon heritage. Archaeological, ethnographic and historical perspectives, Barbados, 94–108.Google Scholar
Pérez, B.E., 2000: The journey to freedom. Maroon forebears in southern Venezuela, Ethnohistory 47 (3–4), 611–34.Google Scholar
Pike, R., 2007: The Cimarrones of sixteenth-century Panama, The Americas 64 (2), 243–66.Google Scholar
Price, R., 1983: First-time. The historical vision of an Afro-American people, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Price, R. (ed.), 1996: Maroon societies. Rebel slave communities in the Americas, 3rd edn, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Proctor, N.T., 2010: Damned notions of liberty. Slavery, culture, and power in colonial Mexico, 1640–1769, Albuquerque.Google Scholar
Roberts, N., 2015: Freedom as Marronage, Chicago.Google Scholar
Sayers, D.O., 2014: A desolate place for a defiant people. The archaeology of Maroons, indigenous Americans, and enslaved laborers in the great dismal swamp, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Sayers, D.O., Burke, P.B. and Henry, A.A., 2007: The political economy of exile in the great dismal swamp, International journal of historical archaeology 11 (1), 60–97.Google Scholar
Smith, F.H., 2008: The archaeology of alcohol and drinking, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R., 1995: Silencing the past. Power and the production of history, Boston.Google Scholar
Thompson, A., 2006: Flight to freedom, Kingston.Google Scholar
Villa-Flores, J., 2002: “To lose one's soul”. Blasphemy and slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669, Hispanic American historical review 82 (3), 435–68.Google Scholar
Weik, T.M., 1997: The archaeology of Maroon societies in the Americas. Resistance, cultural continuity and transformation in the African diaspora, Historical archaeology 31 (2), 81–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weik, T.M., 2012: The archaeology of antislavery resistance, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar