Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
slaves in Buenos Aires and Córdoba had relatively greater freedom to
mingle on the streets and formed associations among themselves based
on their many different African languages and origins. On Sundays,
urban slaves attended their own Catholic services, which they enliv-
ened with the songs and dances of Africa.
As elsewhere in the Americas, the slaves of Argentina did not repro-
duce in large numbers, so maintaining a slave workforce depended on
continued imports of Africans. Men normally outnumbered women
in the African slave trade by a ratio of three to one. The genders were
separated when the newly imported slaves arrived at the slave markets:
Male slaves were purchased predominantly for rural labor and the
females for urban household duties. Spanish householders regarded
outside male slaves with suspicion and kept their young female slaves
secluded and off the public streets, although older, trusted female slaves
walked the streets selling sweetmeats and hawking wares for their own-
ers. The female household slaves were much more likely to fall prey to
the sexual attentions of Spanish men than to enjoy freedom of choice
from among African males outside the house. On the other hand, male
slaves on rural estates had relatively free association with indigenous
women and women of mixed race.
These conditions in Argentina fostered racial mixing, which resulted
eventually in a free working class of mixed Spanish, African, and Indian
heritage. A child fathered by a male slave but born to an Indian or to
a mestizo mother was considered free. Mulatto children born to slave
mothers served in slavery, but their familiarity with Hispanic customs
and idiomatic Spanish usually gave them greater opportunity for manu-
mission or for running away and hiding within the free, racially mixed
urban populations. “This month a mulatto slave named Francisco
Antonio has escaped,” reported one majordomo in 1799. “Despite my
writing to the
alcaldes
of [several communities in the Banda Oriental],
there has been no news about him” (Salvatore and Brown 1989, 744).
Therefore, generation upon generation of newly arrived African slaves
contributed to the process of racial mixture among the Argentine work-
ing classes.
Corruption and Tax Evasion
Freight rates inhibited much interprovincial trade in the Río de la Plata,
to be sure. Cart trains traversed the 1,450-mile route between Buenos
Aires and Jujuy in about three months' time. Riverboats on the Paraná
were small, had to sail laboriously upriver, and could move in both
