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WORK TITLE: From Shipmates to Soldiers
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http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6057 * http://www.aaihs.org/forging-black-identities-in-slavery-and-freedom-an-interview-with-alex-borucki/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 7, 1976.
EDUCATION:Universidad de la República in Uruguay, undergraduate degree; Emory University, Ph.D., 2011.
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CAREER
Historian, educator, writer, and editor. University of California, Irvine, associate professor of history.
WRITINGS
Contributor to professional journals, including American Historical Review, Boletín de Historia Económica, Colonial Latin American Review, Gestos, Hispanic American Historical Review, História Unisinos, Itinerario, and Slavery and Abolition.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Alex Borucki came from Uruguay to the United States in 2005 to complete his graduate studies. Borucki is primarily interested in African diaspora, the Early Modern Atlantic world, and Colonial Latin America. In his book titled, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata, Borucki discusses identity formation among Africans and their descendants during the transitional eras of the late-colonial eighteenth century and the subsequent independence-era in the early nineteenth century. The Rio de la Plata is a river and region that separates Uruguay and Argentina on the southeastern coast of South America and is considered the widest estuary in the world. The region, which is composed of present-day Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, has a long history of slave trading and slavery.
Borucki focuses primarily on the lives of Africans and their descendants in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is concerned with how African slaves used common experiences, from their time on slave ships to their experiences as soldiers in black militias during the colonial independence era, to form their social identities. Boric notes that social networks, such as Catholic black lay brotherhoods, also helped form these identities. From the 1770s to 1810 Buenos Aires and Montevideo were the hubs for the slave trade, providing slaves to both the cities and the surrounding countryside. The internal slave trade went from Santiago Chile to Lima, Peru.
“What distinguishes my work from others in the context of slavery or the African experience in colonial Latin America is that you generally see a book on black confraternities, and everything is related to the experience of Catholicism and social networks within the confraternities,” Borucki noted in an interview with Black Perspectives Web site contributor Reena Goldthree, adding: “Likewise, you will have a separate book on free black militias or a book totally focused on cabildos. In my book, I tried to track how these different sets of experiences among the free and enslaved black population … were lived in connection to each other.”
While providing a new perspective on the thousands of Africans who were bought as slaves to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Borucki draws much from the work of Jacinto Ventura de Molina (766-1841), a writer of history and religious philosophy who kept a record of his time. In the process, Borucki links specific regions of Africa to the region and also shows blacks ties to the broader society in which they found themselves living. Boric begins From Shipmates to Soldiers with a introduction focusing on history of the area and discusses the book’s major themes.
The book’s first chapter focuses on the black populations’ growth in the region from 1777 to 1839, which were the peak years of the slave trade. Overall, according to Borucki 70,000 Africans were brought to the region to serve as slaves. Boric goes in the next chapter to discuss the bonds made during slave ship passages, which later served as the basis for social networks from Black militias to confraternities. Boric also discusses the tambo, a public ritual whose origins were West Central African funeral practices. Another chapter revolves around the revolutionalearly independence era that saw militias form with black soldiers fighting in alignment with various factions that best came in line with their own goals. Borucki next explores the Candombe, which were performances of African-based music and dance. Borucki devotes the book’s final chapter to a recounting of the life and work of Ventura de Molina, relating how this man of letters, whose parents were brought to the region as slaves, identified with the wider black identity of the region.
From Shipmates to Soldiers “presents a sophisticated model for examining the history of the region before and after independence,” wrote J. M. Rosenthal in a review for Choice. Writing for the Journal of Histories and Cultures, Elizabeth Libero remarked: “Borucki has made a significant contribution to identity studies, encouraging all of us to continue the dialogue.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, J.M. Rosenthal, review of From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata, p. 1218.
Journal of History and Cultures, January, 2017, Elizabeth Libero, review of From Shipmates to Soldiers, pp. 53-54.
ONLINE
Black Perspectives, http://www.aaihs.org/ (September 2, 2016), Reena Goldthree, “Forging Black Identities in Slavery and Freedom: An Interview with Alex Borucki.”
University of California Irvine Web site, http://www.faculty.uci.edu/ (March 16, 2017), author faculty profile.*
LC control no.: n 2005203690
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rda
Personal name heading:
Borucki, Alex
Birth date: 19760807
Found in: Borucki, Alex. Esclavitud y trabajo, 2004: t.p. (Alex
Borucki)
From shipmates to soldiers, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Alex Borucki)
data view (b. Aug. 7, 1976)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Alex Borucki
Associate Professor, History
School of Humanities
Ph.D., Emory University, 2011
Phone: (949) 824-6521
Email: aborucki@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
349 Krieger Hall
Mail Code: 3275
Irvine, CA 92697
picture of Alex Borucki
Research
Interests African Diaspora, Early Modern Atlantic World, Colonial Latin America
URLs Alex Borucki on academia.edu
Liberated Africans and Digital Humanities conference
Research
Abstract My book, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata focuses on the impact of mutual experiences and social networks on identity formation among Africans and their descendants. This work casts new light on the thousands of Africans who arrived in Montevideo and Buenos Aires at the peak of the slave trade. In addition, it gives center stage to a single black writer who left a comprehensive record of this time: Jacinto Ventura de Molina (1766-1841). I argue that black identities emerged from shared slave routes, the reshaping of ethnic boundaries, and participation in organizations ranging from Catholic brotherhoods to colonial militias. I explore experiences that bonded free blacks and slaves to each other and to the larger societies in which they found themselves. The slave trade, Catholic black lay brotherhoods, African-based associations, and black military service were crucial and overlapping fields of experience. While previous historiography has focused on one or another of these fields at a time, I show how individuals operated across these interconnected organizations.
My work on Jacinto Ventura de Molina, a free black who lived in early nineteenth-century Montevideo, exemplifies my commitment to interdisciplinary research in the Black Atlantic. In 2006, William Acree (Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis) and I set out to publish a selection of Molina’s manuscripts. We edited these writings from both historical and literary perspectives. The result was a volume published in two editions, one in Montevideo and the other in Madrid.
I enjoy working alongside scholars of Africa, Europe, and the Americas in collective historical endeavors such as Voyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and The African Origins Project. My role as a contributor to these international datasets has enlarged my understanding of working collaboratively with scholars from different generations, areas studies, and interests. A sample of this international scholarship can be seen in the Liberated Africans and Digital Humanities conference that took place in UC Irvine on October 1-2, 2013.
My next book project is entitled Slaves, Silver and Atlantic Empires: The Slave Trade to Spanish South America, 1670-1812. I plan to study the connections between slave arrivals in Spanish South America and the remittances of silver from this region to the Atlantic world. In the process, I will analyze how Spanish imperial expansion intertwined with the slave trade. My new objects of inquiry are the Atlantic empires in the era of Atlantic slaving and the people caught up in these historical forces.
Publications From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2015, 306 pp.
Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana, 1829-1853. Montevideo: Biblioteca Nacional, 2009, 218 pp.
"Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America." American Historical Review, 120, 2 (April 2015), 433-461, in co-authorship with David Eltis and David Wheat
Esclavitud y trabajo. Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya, 1835-1855. Montevideo: Pulmón, 2004 and 2009, 320 pp. [Co-authorship with Karla Chagas and Natalia Stalla]
Los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Verbuet, 2010, 286 pp. [selection of writings of Jacinto Ventura de Molina co-edited with William Acree, introduced by George Reid Andrews].
“Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808-1862,”History in Africa (2013): 1-27, in co-authorship with Richard Anderson, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich, Olatunji Ojo
"Trans-imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526-1811," Itinerario, 36, 2 (2012): 29-54.
“Shipmate Networks and Black Identities in the Marriage Files of Montevideo, 1768-1803,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 93, 2 (2013): 205-238.
"The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata. Trans-imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare, 1777-1812," Colonial Latin American Review 20, 1 (April 2011): 81-107.
“The ‘African Colonists’ of Montevideo. New Light on the Illegal Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro and the Río de la Plata (1830-1842),” Slavery and Abolition 30, 3 (Sept. 2009): 427-444.
"Tensiones raciales en el juego de la representación. Actores afro en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana (1830-1840)," Gestos 21, 42 (Nov. 2006): 33-56.
"Entre el aporte a la identidad nacional y la reivindicación de las minorías. Apuntes sobre los Afrodescendientes y la esclavitud en la historiografía uruguaya," História Unisinos 10, 3 (Sept.-Dec. 2006): 310-320.
"¿Es posible integrar la esclavitud al relato de la historia económica uruguaya?," Boletín de Historia Económica 3, 4 (Oct. 2005): 42-51.
Link to this profile http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6057
Last updated 07/04/2016
Forging Black Identities in Slavery and Freedom: An Interview with Alex Borucki
By Reena Goldthree September 2, 2016 1
Alex Borucki headshotThis month, I interviewed Alex Borucki about his new book, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Reconstructing the social networks of Africans and their descendants in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Borucki reveals how enslaved and free black people forged new relationships and identities through the shared experiences of the Middle Passage, serving in colonial militias, and participating in urban associations. He situates the emergence of black social life in Montevideo and Buenos Aires in the context of the transatlantic and inter-American slave trades as well as the shifting political environment in the Río de la Plata from the colonial period to the early independence era. This post is part of an ongoing series of interviews with authors of new books in the field of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean history.
Dr. Alex Borucki is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Irvine. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay and holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University. He is the author of Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana, 1829-1853 (2009) and the co-author of Esclavitud y trabajo: Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya, 1835-1855 (2004). His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Slavery & Abolition, Itinerario, and Colonial Latin American Review. He is the co-PI, along with Dr. Gregory O’Malley, of the NEH-funded project, “Final Passages: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database.” For the 2016-17 academic year, he has received the NEH John Carter Brown Fellowship to support archival research for his next book, Slaves, Silver, and Atlantic Empires: The Slave Trade to Spanish South America, 1660-1810.
***
Book CoverReena Goldthree (RG): From Shipmates to Soldiers reconstructs the social worlds of Africans and their descendants in the Río de la Plata region of South America (present-day Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) from the colonial period to the early independence era. Despite the region’s role in the slave trade, the Río de la Plata has not figured prominently in studies of New World slavery and is often overlooked in histories of the African Diaspora. What led you to this topic? What new insights can we gain by studying the Río de la Plata?
Borucki: I am actually from the Río de la Plata and I completed my pre-Ph.D. education in Uruguay. Before moving to the United States, I published a couple of books on slavery in the Río de la Plata during the early 19th century.
When I came to the United States in 2005 to do my PhD, I wanted to study slave resistance. However, I realized that “resistance” had been the big word in slavery studies for the past fifteen years. Therefore, I felt that I was simply reinventing the wheel. By doing new archival research in both Montevideo and Buenos Aires, I realized that the same group of black leaders appeared in sources about Catholic confraternities and free black militias. That led me to revamp my entire perspective on resistance in order to see how social networks from one specific aspect of the black experience overlapped with other aspects and how these social networks shaped identities. I began to examine how shared experiences shaped how Africans and their descendants thought about themselves as part of a collectivity.
What distinguishes my work from others in the context of slavery or the African experience in colonial Latin America is that you generally see a book on black confraternities, and everything is related to the experience of Catholicism and social networks within the confraternities. Likewise, you will have a separate book on free black militias or a book totally focused on cabildos. In my book, I tried to track how these different sets of experiences among the free and enslaved black population—in confraternities, militias, and other groups—were lived in connection to each other. People are complex today and we have to treat people as complex in the past as well. Also, I wanted to trace how the connected arenas of the black experience transition and change during the wars of independence in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
RG: While the first enslaved Africans were transported to the Río de la Plata in the 1580s, you note that most enslaved Africans arrived between 1777 and 1812. During this period, appropriately 70,000 captives were transported to the region, with most disembarking in the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Can you explain how the transatlantic and inter-American slave trades shaped the demographics of the black population in the Río de la Plata?
Borucki: After completing my dissertation, I published an article in the American Historical Review on the slave trade to Spanish America along with David Eltis and David Wheat. We discovered that some two million enslaved Africans arrived in Spanish America during the era of slave trade. Half of those two million captives—approximately one million people—were transported by Spanish slave traders, mostly to Cuba. Another half a million were transported by other foreign slave traders, such as the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese directly from Africa to various places in the Spanish Americas. And the remaining half million came from other colonies through a trans-imperial, inter-American slave trade, mainly from the British Caribbean to the Spanish colonies, from the Dutch Caribbean to modern-day Colombia and Venezuela, and from Brazil to the Río de la Plata.
El Telegrafo de Linea, Montevideo, December 8, 1844
El Telegrafo de Linea, Montevideo, December 8, 1844
The slave trade from Brazil to the Río de la Plata began with the foundation of Buenos Aires in 1580 and continued until the 1830s. It was 250 years of almost continuous slave trading across imperial borders between Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay. In early colonial Buenos Aires, from 1580 to 1640, 60% or 70% of the value of the city’s imports came from the traffic in enslaved Africans. In the late colonial period, from the 1770s to 1810, Buenos Aires and Montevideo not only provided enslaved people to the cities, but also to all the countryside and to an internal slave trade that stretched to Santiago, Chile and Lima, Peru.
The Spanish Río de la Plata was deeply connected to the Portuguese Atlantic and it was from that that some merchants from Montevideo and Buenos Aires launched their own trans-Atlantic slave trade going to Mozambique. Because the slave trade to the Río de la Plata involved traders from several nations, you have Africans coming to the region from very different areas of Africa. Like in Cuba, you have slave traders bringing captives from across the African continent—from Senegal all the way to Mozambique—to the Río de la Plata.
RG: You use Catholic Church marriage files to explore the social networks African captives forged during their journeys to the Río de la Plata. How did shipmate ties contribute to the formation of black identities in the region?
Borucki: There is an entire historiographical debate in the literature on slavery and slave cultures about shipmate bonds. In the historical record, you see these shipmate ties expressed in different languages: in English as “shipmates,” in Spanish in Cuba as “carabelas,” and in Brazilian Portuguese as “malungo” which originated from West Central African languages.
Free and enslaved African men, when they needed someone who they could trust to provide an account about their lives, sought out people who they knew from their past, either from a slave trade port or from the slave ship. Importantly, the slave ship was a deeply gendered space, where men shared a space with other men, and women shared a space with other women. This is how shipmate ties originated.
Men who wanted to marry in the Catholic Church first had to prove that they were single. They needed to provide witnesses to confirm that they were single, and most commonly, Africans provided witnesses who had been with them either in previous slave trade ports or who had come with them on the same slave ship. Also, it was not uncommon for enslaved Africans to encounter a family member or someone who they knew, either from Africa or from Brazil, in Montevideo because of the established slave trading routes. Frequently, the same slave trader connected one port in Africa with one port in the Americas.
RG: You argue that collective organizations—such as colonial militias, Catholic confraternities, and African-based associations—provided valuable social spaces and leadership opportunities for Africans and their descendants, particularly for men. These organizations also fostered the development of new shared black identities in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. How did gender shape the process of ethnogenesis in these groups?
Borucki: These organizations created collective identities beyond the casta system, the race thinking of the colonial era that predated the modern conceptions of racial difference. It’s from these organizations that you see both centripetal forces, forces that divide groups along different emerging leadership, but you also find centrifugal forces that put people together from the bottom up. For example, you see that some of the leaders of the African-based associations attempted to create large celebrations around the Day of Kings and tried to put themselves as the leaders of all the African associations of Montevideo. Or, you see that black letrados like Jacinto Ventura de Molina tried to carve a better place for themselves and the community within the limits of accommodation. They tested how far they could go within the deeply unequal colonial system.
These black males leaders also tried to unite their communities by using new language. In the colonial documents, some leaders used new labels such as “the Ethiopians and their descendants” or “the Black People.” The term “Ethiopian descendants” came from biblical language in which “Ethiopian” meant African. We know that Caribbean radicals of the mid to late 19th century used similar language, but I also found it in the Catholic setting of the Río de la Plata.
In terms of women, I have some evidence that women in black confraternities had their own branches. I have found evidence that some African-based associations in Montevideo in the 1830s and in Buenos Aires in the 1860s had queens. Unfortunately, I don’t have evidence of African women interacting with colonial officials or with national authorities following independence. The Catholic Church and the Spanish regime—and later, the leaders of the independent republics—only recognized men as valid go-betweens.
RG: In the final chapter of the book, you explore the remarkable life of Jacinto Ventura de Molina (1766-1841), an educated free black letrado and militia officer in Montevideo. As you note, Molina maintained ties with white elite patrons as well as participated in Montevideo’s African social networks. How was Molina able to navigate his role as a “mediator for black communities” while also participating in Montevideo’s white-dominated lettered world?
Jacinto Ventura de Molina
Jacinto Ventura de Molina
Borucki: Jacinto Ventura de Molina was exceptional, but he was not unique. What is unique is that his manuscripts have survived and that they are housed in a national library. There were different capacities, abilities, and degrees of engagement by both enslaved and free black people with the lettered culture of colonial Latin America. When you comb through the archive, you discover that there were enslaved people who could write or who could read but could not write, and sometimes you find enslaved individuals who could not read or write but found someone to write petitions for them.
Those who were not literate sought out people who could write on their behalf. They frequently turned to friends or asked members of groups like the confraternities, the militias, or the African “nations.” In the case of the militias, most captains were literate. They could read, or at least write in some capacity. Molina was a lieutenant of a free black militia and he recounts that the inspector general for the militias actually asked him to teach some of his fellow militiamen how to read. It is remarkable that a white professional military officer told a free black man in the 1790s to teach fellow black militiamen to read. That rung all the wrong bells for the colonial regime.
[Molina’s life] is a very contradictory story full of what historian Leo Spitzer called “the predicament of marginality,” the condition of people from subaltern classes who try to appropriate all of the trappings of the dominant culture, but still face new forms of marginalization despite their efforts. Molina was a loyalist and a staunch defender of Spanish colonialism. That’s probably how he became very close with some of the white elites in Montevideo who were also defenders of Spanish colonialism. Perhaps these very conservative white elites in Montevideo saw in Molina something that they shared, like the nostalgia for the old colonial regime. However, even in that setting, Molina tried to forge new places for Africans and their descendants. I found him writing for other people, being a ghostwriter for free black people defending themselves or trying to get freedom for their enslaved wives. In that way, he embodied the “predicament of marginality,” trying to go beyond what was expected for him as a black man in Montevideo and being very proud of his investment in European written culture.
Alex Borucki is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana (1829-1853) and coauthor of Esclavitud y trabajo: Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya, 1835-1855, both published in Uruguay.
Borucki, Alex. From shipmates to soldiers: emerging black identities in the Rio de la Plata
J.M. Rosenthal
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1218.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Borucki, Alex. From shipmates to soldiers: emerging black identities in the Rio de la Plata. New Mexico, 2015. 306p bibl index afp ISBN 9780826351807 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780826351791 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3634
F2799
2015-1992 CIP
This study of Africans and people of African descent in Rio de la Plata in the 18th and 19th centuries bridges eras, covering the late-colonial 18th century, the independence-era 19th century, and national boundaries. This sweeping survey of black life is grounded in the legal and institutional specifics of Montevideo, Buenos Aires, the Portuguese city of Colonia, and, to a lesser extent, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on archival work in six countries, historian Borucki (Univ. of California, Irvine) presents new information on hemispheric trends by documenting their patterns in this region: the specifics of the Atlantic slave trade and secondary intra-American trade in these port cities; marriage practices among the black population of Rio de la Plata; the roles of lay brotherhoods, militias, and the harder-to-document African nations in urban life; public celebrations; and the story of Jacinto Ventura de Molina, a notable black writer and public figure. The work places this international, urban Rio de la Plata in the developing historiography of Afro-Latin America and presents a sophisticated model for examining the history of the region before and after independence and extending the pioneering work of George Reid Andrews. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. M. Rosenthal, Western Connecticut State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rosenthal, J.M. "Borucki, Alex. From shipmates to soldiers: emerging black identities in the Rio de la Plata." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1218+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661765&it=r&asid=35b3bec8db95c764cc7af0f52b241449. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661765
Journal of History and Cultures (7) 2017: 53 - 54 ISSN 2051 – 221X
From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Rio de la Plata by Alex Borucki, University of New Mexico Press, 2015, 320 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8263-5180-7, Paperback, $29.99
Elizabeth Libero University of Portsmouth
What did it mean to be Black in revolutionary Uruguay? The question increases in complexity if we think of communal identity as a dynamic process rather than as a fixed state. This moving target requires the scholar of identity to simultaneously extricate its various elements and track those elements’ reactions. Alex Borucki offers just such a distillation in From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata.
Borucki presents identity as the product of several different shared experiences, arguing that Africans and their descendants found commonalities in the endurance of slave voyages, service in militias, and participation in urban associations. These common experiences encouraged individuals in the Río de la Plata region (encompassing much of present-day Uruguay and northern Argentina) to consider themselves part of a community with shared values and interests. While earlier scholars have generated a lively debate over the relative impact of African origins versus conditions in the Americas, Borucki aims to show their interconnection. The fusion of these different experiences along with a great deal of regional movement generated new possibilities for self-understanding.
Borucki deftly weaves together demographic data, legal documents, visual images, and memoirs. After an introduction to the history of the area and the themes of the book, Borucki’s first chapter describes the foundation of the Black population of the Río de la Plata between 1777 and 1839. Quantitative data shows that during these peak years of the slave trade at least 70,000 people were forcibly brought into the region. The sheer volume supports the argument that the bulk of the Black populace in the region shared the experience of slave voyages. Chapter Two, “Shipmate Networks and African Identities, 1760-1810” builds upon this, using marriage-witness statements to contend that the bonds developed in slave passages endured. Such friendships became the foundation for the new networks of Black militias, confraternities, and tambos described in the following chapter. Borucki strikes a fine balance by highlighting the agency of Black leaders and associations while also showing the confines within Spanish rule. Associations often re-worked existing structures of power to achieve their own goals: using approved militias and confraternities to petition legal authorities, phrased in the rhetoric of Catholicism and loyalty to the crown. The tambo was a public ritual, meeting, and meeting- place, derived originally from West Central African funeral practices. Borucki suggests that while Black colonial militias were dominated by freemen, and the tambos, by enslaved Africans, confraternities (such as the Catholic brotherhood of St. Balthazar) allowed people from both groups to intermingle and form new networks.
The fourth chapter examines militias in the revolutionary/early independence period, arguing that black soldiers fought in those factions most aligned with their own interests. By the 1830s Black men composed much of the Uruguayan infantry. The following chapter examines “African-Based Associations, Candombe, and the Day of Kings, 1830-1860”. Candombe, a successor of the tambo, referred to performances of music and dance of African origin. The largest candombes were performed on the Day
Elizabeth C. Libero is a PhD Candidate at the University of Portsmouth. Her research examines the activities of Britain’s Royal Navy in the South Atlantic during the Napoleonic Wars. Elizabeth can be contacted at: elizabethlibero@gmail.com.
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Elizabeth Libero: From Shipmates to Soldiers
of Kings, a Carnivalesque Catholic devotion. The Day of Kings became a site for the assertion of a Black Uruguayan identity; for instance, many participants wore military uniforms.
The final chapter discusses “Jacinto Ventura de Molina, a Black Letrado of Montevideo, 1766-1841”. He was exceptional, deriving considerable social mobility from his status as a letrado or man of letters. Yet his life also echoes the shared experiences that made for a wider Black identity in Río de la Plata. Molina’s parents endured slave voyages. Molina himself served as a lieutenant during the British invasions and he wrote appeals and petitions for confraternities. His writings voiced a Black identity founded upon combined African, Atlantic, and Platense experiences. Borucki’s case study of Molina crystallizes the developments catalogued in the rest of the book, making for an especially engaging culmination.
This mixing of historical strategies is the greatest strength of the monograph. Borucki seamlessly integrates big data and personal stories, approaching the issue of identity from both macro and micro positions. This makes for a fresh perspective on the important but under-studied issue of Black identity in a region that would later come to be seen as essentially White. As part of the University of New Mexico Press Diálogos Series, From Shipmates to Soldiers succeeds in provoking further discussion. The nature of the sources largely restricts the analysis to the activities of men; hopefully future research may incorporate women more fully into the story of Black identity in Río de la Plata. Also, this inquiry focuses on urban centres, particularly Montevideo. It may be productive to test Borucki’s thesis in the context of smaller towns and rural areas. Such a study might further advance the question Borucki briefly considers in his conclusion: how Black contributions to the nation became erased in official history and popular memory.
From Shipmates to Soldiers will interest a variety of specialists including scholars of Black history, military history, South America, nationalism, and Atlantic studies. More broadly, Borucki has made a significant contribution to identity studies, encouraging all of us to continue the dialogue.
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