The prologue dwells on the ambigous status of enslaved Africans and their offspring in the Spanish Indies and the early Spanish American republics. Since there existed no consistent theory or justification of slavery, who exactly slaves were before the law remained a puzzle. The revolutionaries who achieved emancipation from Spain chose the concept of “captive” to frame their gradual, limited emancipation approach. Regarding slaves as Christian captives crying for deliverance and spiritual redemption rather than as individuals denied access to citizenship, this approach left slaves in a legal limbo. The redemption of captives was a spiritual commitment with no single beginning or clearly identifiable end. It was an ongoing, gradual process rather than a sudden change. By reading litigation as a sphere of politics, however, we know that slaves struggled (conceptually and legally) to propose alternatives to continuing captivity. In this process, often times slaves and their free descendants stood at the forefront of legal change. Their vital and complicated engagements with magistrates and legislators reframed, expanded, refined and even defined citizenship for entire nations.