Bozales, Ladinos, Chalonas y Lenguas: The Black Interpreters of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Spanish America

• In Event: Historicizing the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America

Abstract

This paper tells the story of the enslaved black interpreters who worked for the Jesuit order in the Caribbean port of Cartagena de Indias in the first half of the seventeenth century. Born in distinct regions of Western Africa and taken as captive laborers to Cartagena at different ages, this diverse group of interpreters assumed a wide variety of tasks that are typically overlooked in scholarship of the African diaspora in Spanish America. The Jesuits’ black interpreters not only helped shape the religious personae of the black captives passing through the Caribbean port in the hundreds and sometimes thousands every year during this period by facilitating their Christian conversions, but they also played roles in fashioning black testimonies in Inquisiton cases and criminal trials in Cartagena and its surrounding areas. This paper will consider printed and manuscript sources that describe the interpreters’ African backgrounds and experiences of the Middle Passage, and their lives and labor upon arrival in Spanish America. Analyzing the influence exercised by these black intepreters on the composition of texts about black men and women during this period promises to enrich Latin American studies scholarship on the history of race, the history of the African diaspora, and the roles of intermediaries in fashioning Latin American colonial societies and cultural productions.

Author

• Larissa Brewer García, Princeton University