Patchwork Freedoms

by Adriana Chira

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

Genres: History, Latin American History, Nonfiction

334 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2022

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads)]

Patchwork Freedoms study the enslaved people’s path to freedom in Santiago de Cuba's region using the legal framework of the area. The Afro-descendant peasants reshaped their current colonial systems through local customs and manumission practices. It tells the peasants’ story as a century of localism and custom, not just liberalism and mobility.

While previous findings have shown popular racial ideologies were regionally specific, Chira shows the ideologies were distinct because they were rooted in the local legal customs of manumission.

Using Santiago as a case study has led Chira to conclude that local customs matter a great deal in cases where the larger legal law was unclear. Looking at Santiago illuminates black freedom and black experiences beyond Cuba’s plantations and port cities.

Focusing on the making of communities through kinship, godparents, labour, and economic exchanges, the text shows how deeply community mattered for customs and manumission. The custom-based freedom, as stated by Chira, is contextual, localized, variable, and subjective as it was built out of positive law and community. Through the examples of legal cases, it is clear there are legal meanings in the mundane.

Breaking her argument down into six chapters, Chira covers the historical origins of the free population of colour in Santiago; marronage and peasantry of colour’s anti-plantation politics; how people of colour inserted themselves into custom-based politics of social control; hard questions enslaved and enslavers brought to their local courts; hierarchies among people of colour that resulted from manumission; and politics of custom in the broader struggle for liberal emancipation in Cuba.

The correlations made in the text show the civil status and specific behaviour associated with freedom informed colour status. Customs influenced the free population's ability to gain power and certain social status.

I enjoyed Chira’s note at the beginning of the text on language and region. Her explanation and a reminder of using “enslavement” instead of “slavery” to show that slavery was an active process is essential for the reader. Chira’s note in the introduction also impressed me. By explaining that legal testimonies of enslaved people do not free us from the epistemological violence and erasure of voices of enslaved people that archives of slavery were designed to inflict. She is correct to say that we cannot know and will never know the enslaved people’s full subjectivities by reading these records. It is an important reminder.

[Andre Aguiar]

In Patchwork Freedoms, Adriana Chira explores Black freedom through the particular case of Santiago de Cuba, by emphasizing how Black rural communities forged their own paths to emancipation through local legal frameworks, customs, and manumission processes and relationships. She argues that these paths to freedom in Santiago were rooted in local historical social constructions, grounded in custom-centered community justice, tied to particularities of that place–often marginal in plantation endeavors–that contrasted with those in other parts of Cuba, such as Havana. She asserts that African descendants defined manumission freedom through “mundane social practices” (4) and that Santiago’s case shows that “racial ideologies were regionally specific, […], rooted in local legal customs of manumission” (11). To analyze freedom dynamics, Chira emphasizes approaching Cuba beyond the plantations and how liberal-abolitionist ideas and customs evolved in parallel but differed, especially when compared with local realities, which could sharply differ from legal codes.

By leveraging pre-liberal colonial legal frameworks and local custom through litigation, self-purchase, and communal social ties (patronage ties), rather than modern liberal-abolitionist ideologies, she claims that Satiago’s Afro-descendant rural peasantries gradually eroded the institution of slavery from within. Chira contends that this was a less clear political revolution grounded in custom-centered community justice, emerging from the gaps in written law, but that resulted in a social and legal foundation for emancipation and Cuba’s independence movement long before the outbreak of the war in the late 19th Century.

Chira traces the origins of the free population of color in Santiago, connected with the Cobreros, who combined escapes (maroonage) with legal means to escape authorities, often leading to certain collaborations with local authorities and planters. By the end of the 18th Century, they “lived in a state of semi-freedom” (45) and could pursue manumission, offering customary models of freedom in Santiago. She emphasizes that Santiago’s enslaved and free people of African descent could draw inspiration from liberalism, especially to exploit “the local elites’ fear of it,” but they were more successful in exploiting “long-established colonial frameworks.”

Liberalism is presented in her book primarily as a top-down project of the colonial state and the planter elites. Figures like José Antonio Saco (chapter 5) are presented as promoters of liberal reforms, but with the intention to protect the interests of white property and whitening the island rather than for racial justice, which actually contrasted with the customary rights that Afro-descendent peasants had enjoyed and spent centuries securing in Santiago–that offered for people of color an “expiration date on slave status” (137). Thus, liberal discussion in Cuba is framed not as a fight for universal freedom, but as a complex effort by creole elites to secure political power.

Ultimately, patchwork is a term Chira uses to describe a racial landscape fragmented, inconsistent, and highly dependent on local circumstances, rather than a unified law or ideology. The existing venues for freedom were irregular, precarious, and highly dependent on oral agreements, kinship, and patronage ties, a reality that could impose burdens on the manumitted even after they were freed. By focusing on the specific case of Santiago de Cuba, Chira sought to demonstrate that what appeared to be a disorganized "patchwork" of local customs was, in fact, a bottom-up political revolution that must be accounted for to understand freedom in the Atlantic world.

[AirSign]

I am new to Good Reads and I don't really like writing reviews for books because it feels too much like writing reviews for ordinary goods, and I think that books are special. yet, I have been reading reviews by other people, and have come to really appreciate them. Here is a review of a book that I simply can't get over. I have been trying really hard to figure out why I like this book so much over the past few weeks; I feel that I have other reasons besides having family who was born and immigrated to the US from Guantanamo. There are no in-your-face grandiose arguments here, even though it flows nicely and the author is clearly extremely intelligent (there are a lot of really cute turns of phrases and smart interpretations). The book grows slowly on you, as does the space that she is describing. You just can't forget the space this book is about; the author makes you part of it. There is something really humble about the author, and it feels totally the right way of writing about the world in this book, far from centers of pwoer. This book makes me feel that my belief in humbleness is not just mine.

[Tera Jackson]

This will take your breath away. It is a book written from the heart, while also being well researched and very clearly argued. I could not put it down. Excellent work all around.

[Katie]

Compelling thesis but suffers from some of the problems of the current fads in history writing.

[LA]

Contest entry SECOLAS Thomas Book Award, 2022-23