The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.

The cobreros entered the Age of Revolutions in 1780 in a calamitous position but emerged in 1800 in a stronger one with an edict recognizing their freedom and their pueblo. Although they retained their formal civil freedom, the limited political freedoms they obtained were eroded during the first decades of the nineteenth century given wider colonial and global changes. Yet the cobreros continued using the courts invoking the Freedom Edict of 1800, but how the local identity of natives of El Cobre continued to be mobilized or how it changed in subsequent generations with the arrival of other settlers and the globalization of El Cobre remains uncertain. After summarizing the main findings and arguments of the study, the book concludes with a reflection on the significance of the category of local nativeness for racial colonial subjects and the political uses and rights claimed for this category in changing historical contexts in the past and its reemergence in various Latin American nations in the twenty-first century.