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Practicing Debt and Transforming Freedom in Colonial Peru

As part of the BCDSS' Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series, Rachel Sarah O’Toole from the University of California, Irvine, USA, gave a Lecture on How enslaved individuals in the Americas navigate the path to freedom. Focusing on Trujillo, Peru, this lecture contends that legal manumission alone did not guarantee freedom. Instead, it argues that enslaved individuals, particularly in 17th-century Trujillo, strategically combined debt and manumission agreements. Analyzing notarial records, the study shows how these individuals, following the examples of scholars like Kathryn Burns and others, used the public recording of debt to assert financial autonomy and reputational responsibility. Enslaved men positioned themselves as providers in patriarchal roles, while women used debt agreements to claim municipal subjectivity and honorable casta identities. This dual strategy was a conscious step toward freedom in a gendered context. Rachel Sarah O’Toole is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on colonial Latin America, the African Diaspora, and sex and gender. Her monograph, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru, received the 2013 Latin American Studies Association Peru Section Flora Tristán book prize. With Sherwin Bryant and Ben Vinson III, she co-edited Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (2012) and with Ivonne del Valle and Anna More, she co-edited Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (2019). She has published articles on the construction of whiteness, masculinity within slavery, African Diaspora identities, indigenous politics, and gender influences on racial constructions, and is currently completing her second monograph regarding the meanings of freedom in colonial Peru.