1. Introduction

The study of the presence of Africans and their descendants in the Spanish- American territories, is a subject widely discussed.¹ Thanks to this research trend, it has been possible to problematize from an anthropological perspective two central subjects: the contribution of African components to the current Latin American social fabric,² and the vindication of a social identity.³ It should be mentioned that these processes have not developed homogeneously.⁴ Thus, although the introduction of African population shares general features throughout the continent, each Spanish administrative division developed characteristics of its own, which manifested a continuum once the South American independence processes during the 19th century were completed.⁵

This correlates with the historiographic development of the subject in Chile. Although the classic studies from the early twentieth century⁶ are a precedent, it only has become a robust line of research in the last three decades. Thus, there are several recent studies on the presence of Africans and Afrodescendants in areas of formerly colonial Chile.⁷

Before moving on, it is important to mention that throughout the history of Chile it has been stated that the presence of Afro-descendants was scarce. Among the reasons for this⁸ are low adaptability to cold weather in different areas of Chile, the high economic value that the acquisition of an enslaved person meant and low resistance to diseases.

However, the historical presence of Africans and their descendants is not as meager as it has been exposed. This is evident in various colonial documents, where it can be acknowledged that they had reached Chile mostly but not only as enslaved, but also as free men and free women and soldiers.⁹

Despite the aforementioned, we have noticed that there is no compilation that accounts for this presence in Concepción and its surroundings, an area that is of interest due to its geopolitical role during the Colony.¹⁰

As has happened in different parts of Chile, this absence of critical historic review has built the embedded myth that in Concepción never existed an Afrodescendant population who left sociocultural testimony. An example of this is the statement by Fernando Campos Harriet in his Historia de Concepción:¹¹ “Este grupo no prosperó en Concepción por razón del clima. La sociedad penquista no tiene sangre negra en ninguno de sus estratos. (...) Como no fue integrante racial en Concepción, no nos detenemos más en esta clase”. Thus, the myth turns into a (lack of) knowledge. Then, this misunderstanding is passed down from generation to generation, renewing and sustaining the permanent and diverse processes of invisibilization of these social agents.

Accordingly, this research seeks to carry out a systematic compilation of the mentions about Afro-descendants during colonial times in this study area. These antecedents will allow us to reflect on the implication of the presence of Afro-descendants in the area, on their relevance and the reason for their historical invisibility.

2. The construction of the social imaginary of the Afro-descendant presence in Concepción in history and oral tradition

The construction of the history of the Africans and their descendants in Concepción does not escape the general overview of the discipline in Chile. In fact, the main studies of local history during the period of Hispanic domination almost does not account for the presence of Afro-descendants.¹² The same can be seen in the history of the main modern cities around Concepción.¹³

The only exception to this, correspond to two specific cases: the first, refers to Juan Valiente, a enslaved man who, seeking his freedom, enlisted as a soldier in Pedro de Valdivia’s expedition, arriving with the conqueror to Concepción at the time of its foundation, transforming itself into encomendero and neighbor of the city, soon to die in the Battle of Tucapel (1553) along with Pedro de Valdivia.¹⁴

The second case corresponds to an almost accidental passage through the area of a group of unfortunate enslaved Africans: The Trial Mutineers.¹⁵ These were a group of Africans, who, at the beginning of the 19th century, were embarked from Valparaíso on the frigate Trial, to be sold in Lima. However, they rebelled and managed to take over the ship, demanding to return to Senegal, their country of origin. Through deceit, they were transported near Santa María Island, where they were captured and taken to Talcahuano and later to Concepción. Here, the leaders were sentenced to death, and their remains were thrown into a lagoon near the city, which became widely known as the Laguna de los Negros.

Before moving on, we must add the data from the oral tradition about the legend of the Laguna Turbia.¹⁶ It tells the story of two lovers who during the colonial period were caught committing adultery and sentenced to death by immersion in the aforementioned body of water. For this, they were tied inside a sack and then thrown into the lagoon by two enslaved Afrodescendants.

As can be seen, the local history and oral traditions of Concepción only include these cases. This has led to the mistaken belief that the presence of Africans and their descendants was low and had no major impact on the local population and identity.¹⁷ This idea has been installed for several generations that continue ensuring that this presence was not significant, based on the argument of how expensive it was to acquire a enslaved person, as well as that the cold weather annihilated the few enslaved who inhabited the area.¹⁸ As a result, the mechanism of historical construction of the past locally produced and reproduced was exempt from the Afro-descendant presence, except in mentions of an anecdotal nature or that have been folklorized, this in line with the previously mentioned invisibility processes.¹⁹ Grubbesscich²⁰ proposes that after Chilean independence, the African and Afro-descendant population of southern Chile carried out two processes: the first, related to migration to northern territories, and the second, related to the practice of exogamous marriage, preferably with indigenous people. Consequently, everything previously described has led to postulate that the presence of Africans and their descendants was low and without major impact on the population and identity configuration of the region.²¹

3. Methods

The temporal margins of this study comprehend from the departure of Pedro de Valdivia from Santiago in 1550 to establish Concepción, until the Batalla de la Alameda in 1820. We consider this period since the bibliographic sources account the processes by which the Spanish incorporated the African population into the area, under norms and dynamics that lasted until independence and the permanent abolition of slavery in 1823.²²

We present our results considering the centuries covered by these temporal margins, since this would allow us a better understanding of the reality about the presence of Africans and their descendants at different historical moments. In order to provide a broad context, we consider the current regions of Biobío and Ñuble as our territory of interest. This is due not only to the geographical proximity, but also to the situation of administrative, economic and religious dependency of these territories to Concepción between the aforementioned centuries.

Is noteworthy that we use the word Afro-descendant, which we recognize as a neologism that does not find a correlation between the historical archives and whose definition is complex.²³ Despite this, we believe it is necessary to use this concept since it corresponds to a process of self-identification, based on the attempt to vindicate a historical past that is often invisible and defined by social practices based on racism.²⁴ Now, while we recognize the value and importance of self-denomination, which considers as Afro-descendant any individual who has at least one ancestor whose birth was in Sub-Saharan Africa regardless of the generational distance,²⁵ for this research we consider descendants up to a third generation, considering that many times the historical records do not provide much detail about ancestries. So, for our compilation we included African and/or descendants within this category, whether in the category of enslaved or free man/woman. Within this last concept we include those trafficked directly from Africa, as well as those who were traded in continental, national and local slave markets.

Regarding the term “slave” which has been used in primary sources and in previous historic research, we decided to use the term “enslaved” instead. We perceive that “enslaved” has a semantic load, which visibilizes the violence implied in the enslaver-enslaved dynamic and defines the former ones as the culprit of the slavery status of the lasts.²⁶ Adding up, this vocabulary choice considers the dynamism in the mentioned state, visibilizing it is not an inherent condition of enslaved people; therefore, we aim to present slavery as the asymmetrical cultural phenomenon that it was.

This approach on the Afro-descendant presence in Concepción was constructed based on a review of mentions in primary and secondary sources. By mentions we refer to terms found in the reviewed sources that explicitly indicate one or more individuals using the following categories: “African”, “black”, “slave”, “cimarrón”, “African slave”, “Horro”, “bozal”, “ladino”, “cuarterón”, “zambo”, “mulato/a” and “mulatilla”. All these terms were determined as those indicative of Afro-descendants on the bibliographic review.²⁷ If the term “slave” appeared without any other identifier, it was excluded, while if ethnic and contextual identifiers appeared, these mentions were considered. Later, tables were made for each century contemplated in this research, indicating the categories aforementioned, place or locality, chronological registration, textual citation in Spanish and the revised source.

The reviewed primary sources were of administrative, ecclesiastical and military nature. Among them, we can highlight the Acts of the Royal Audience of Concepción,²⁸ Acts of the Concepción Cabildo,²⁹ Acts of the Concepción Synod,³⁰ the 1813 Census,³¹ chronicles of the 16th and 17th centuries³² and the Acts of the Junta de Beneficencia de Concepción.³³ Also, we included as a primary source a review of the database hosted on the FamilySearch website.³⁴ We included these documents since we believe in the pervasive presence of Afro-descendants in several areas of colonial society and culture. As secondary sources, studies that reviewed or reproduced judicial files, parish records, and the National Historical Archive of Chile, were used. It is necessary to emphasize that it is not the objective of this compilation exercise to inquire about the reliability and/or veracity of the records and mentions, since it is only a first approximation, which we hope will allow us to carry out more in-depth analysis soon.

As we have said, in the first place, we will present in an exhaustive and linear form the data referring to the presence of Africans and their descendants. Then, we will contrast this with both Chilean and hispanic-american contexts. This will allow us to debate, discuss and complement the discourses of invisibilization and lack of historical agency that has been built around the so-called absence of Africans and their descendants in Concepción.

4. Historical records of the presence of Africans and their descendants in Concepción

5. Discussion and conclusions

After this review, we can establish three lines of discussion regarding the presence of Afro-descendants in Concepción. The first of them refers to the continuous mentions in the historical sources. In this regard, during the 16th century their number was important, and then almost disappeared from the records in the 17th century. They became regularly present again in 18th and 19th century sources.

It must be established that fluctuation of enslavement in Concepción is just a reflection of the national reality. In fact, it is worth mentioning how the arrival of the enslaved to Chile occurred between the 16th and 19th centuries, to understand how their presence in the country came to be.

At the beginning of the Conquest, two trade routes by which enslaved Afrodescendants arrived in Chile have been identified. Both were monopolized and controlled by Portuguese enslavers, trafficking people from Western Africa.⁸⁸ The first of these was the Pacific route, which connected Panama-Philippines- Lima, the latter being the port from which Chile was integrated and from which the kingdom received its enslaved. This route was maintained until the end of the 16th century. The second route was the so-called Continental, which was also controlled by Portuguese enslavers installed in Brazil, from where the enslaved passed to Buenos Aires, to then cross the Andes and reach Chile. This route replaced the previous one, remaining until the first half of the 17th century.

Added to these routes is the fact that nobles (both bureaucratic and military) and clergymen were allowed to move their enslaved ones with them when requesting permission to enter Chile. In this way, many of the enslaved who arrived during the 16th century did not do it by a formal route but entered following their enslavers to the south of the New World. The latter seems to be the main way in which many of the enslaved historically registered during this time came to Concepción.⁸⁹

During the 17th century, two events occurred at a national and even continental level that affected the arrival of the enslaved in Chile. The first of these refers to the fact that the local economy was sustained mainly by the encomienda system, which meant a drop in the arrival of enslaved.⁹⁰

The second is the fact that the Portuguese left the slave trade since their disputes with Spain. This reduced the arrival of enslaved people to Chile and to the Americas. Human trafficking did not resume until the end of this century by the Portuguese, although with much less strength than in previous years. Additionally, French traffickers will be added, to supply the demand for African labor to the New World.⁹¹

As can be seen, the decrease in the number of Afro-descendants in Concepción at this time is not a phenomenon that should be considered isolated. On the contrary, it responded to a continental circumstance of reduction of human trafficking and not to the traditional arguments that explained this absence, such as the low adaptability to cold.

With the dawn of the 18th century, the arrival of the enslaved was revitalized throughout South America, because of the entry of English human traffickers since 1713.⁹² Hence, the English Seat of Buenos Aires, became the main supplier of enslaved to Chile, following and formalizing the old Continental route and adding a route through the Magellan Strait.⁹³ Both routes continued until the 19th century. Considering this, we can once again observe a similarity between these data and what happened in Concepción, where an increase in the presence of Afro-descendants compared to the previous century can be seen.

It must be remembered what has been mentioned by Cussen et al.,⁹⁴ concerning the price of enslaved people. Regarding this, it is important to recall the increased number of enslaved females who arrived in Chile during the 18th century, despite their higher price compared with enslaved males. Then, it is believed that the statement that enslaved were not present in Chile due to their costs, does not seem to have any historical support, at least during the 18th century. However, what in fact seems like consistent is that the possession of enslaved female Afro-descendants has been identified as restricted to the sphere of domestic service, which became a symbol of aristocracy.

Before moving on, we must mention an important event that also occurred at the imperial level and that was also present in Concepción and surrounding areas: the promulgation of the Laws of the Indies in 1680.⁹⁵ In them, the rights held by the enslaved were established. It should be remembered that the possession of enslaved people before the enactment of this law was regulated by the Seven Parties of Alfonso X.⁹⁶ However, enslaved people now had the possibility of having a formal defender to ensure their rights, in the person of the Defender of the Poor, an official of the Royal Audience. Furthermore, during the 18th century, we see numerous judicial cases of enslaved demanding justice against abuses committed by their enslavers.⁹⁷ Although these were concentrated in Santiago, the sources reviewed show that these processes also occurred in Concepción, Chillán and Los Angeles.

According to Gonzalez Undurraga,⁹⁸ this legal spaces defined the agency of enslaved people and enslavers articulating a judicial context, which is moved from the metropoli to the american colonial territories.⁹⁹ In the first term, it can be acknowledged that there are many court cases regarding defense for enslaved people against the Spanish, which evidences the possibility of acquiring freedom as well as their quality of subjects of law. In the second term, some enslavers viewed enslaved people as property, which meant that they didn’t possess any kind of rights. This view acknowledged enslaved people's behavior as damage to their owner’s interests. From the perspective of enslaved people, they perceived themselves as subjected bodies (a term that will be discussed later on), but with a social agency, which found its expression in the longing for freedom and civil rights. Finally, the idea of a “good slave”¹⁰⁰ can be observed, whose rights are always violated by abusive enslavers, which only aims to damage the enslaved individual, which had as their only asset to offer their own bodies.

These agencies are evidenced in Gonzalez Undurraga’s exhaustive¹⁰¹ revision of legal history during colonial times in Chile, mainly in Santiago, but which also can be found in the legal history of other American viceroyalties. As a consequence, it can be said that enslaver-enslaved relationships were diverse, but always disputing the cross-perceptions of both parties and the often ambiguous legal matters regulating their relationship. Therefore, enslaved bodies alternate between a subject and an object without a distinctive difference between the two, configuring a liminal space and changing status in which enslaved people are and develop. This became a place of resistance and insubordination dictated by the body and its agency.¹⁰²

In Concepción this can be seen in Juan Valiente and his search for fame, fortune and freedom for him and his offspring,¹⁰³ as well as in those individuals which actively participated in the Ejército Libertador. Similarly, in nonreligious and religious defenders of enslaved people rights, we can mention enslavers that testify in court in favor of their enslaved, acknowledging their limited social rights, as well as enslavers being accused of ill-treatment by their enslaved. Enslaved men and women searching for justice not only represented themselves, but their offspring as well, searching for social recognition and the possibility of freedom.

Going back to our lines of discussion regarding the presence of Afrodescendants in Concepción, the second one refers to the labors performed by enslaved Afro-descendants in Concepción. During the 16th century, many of them served as part of the army, being able to access, in the case of freedmen, important positions in the military elite. This phenomenon continued during the 17th century, until it almost disappeared during the 18th century, and reappeared strongly during the independence process of the 19th century, although on the Patriotic side.

Another situation that we can observe in this review, is that enslaved Africans and their descendants were used mainly in domestic and agricultural service tasks, mostly linked to wealthy neighbors and to religious orders. This is consistent with what was stated about the fact that acquiring enslaved Africans was a privilege that only a small group could access.

In addition, the situation of Afro-descendant women should be analyzed. As can be seen from our review, only those freed and married to conquerors were able to access better living conditions. We can account for this situation only in the early moments of colonial times. For the rest, the fact of serving in agricultural and domestic tasks seems to remain constant, which made them vulnerable to ill-treatment by their enslavers.

Considering all of the above, we can then establish that, unlike what has been suggested in traditional local historiography, the presence of Afrodescendants in Concepción and its surrounding areas does not seem to be so anecdotal since they were a constant population for almost 300 years. Although the cases are mainly concentrated in Concepción, which is to be expected since it is and was the main city, the truth is that we can register their presence in a vast nearby territory (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Map of Concepción and surrounding areas. 

Faced with all this evidence, our third line of discussion regarding Afrodescendants in Concepción seems more relevant, which has to do with the reasons why their presence has been underestimated, not only from formal historical records but also from local imaginaries. In this regard, we believe that this is due to two main reasons. The first of them has to do with the fact that despite the existence of data that registers Afro-descendants on a daily basis in the area until the 19th century, their presence has been relativized. In this regard, we must also seek the answer in national processes that marked the construction of the history of Chile, to which the local Concepción history did not elude.

In this sense and in a rather theoretical frame identified post hoc, the Chilean colonial society could be understood as a caste society marked by linguistic, geographical, religious and biological components. Thus, blood, lineage and inherited characteristics, all of them socially constructed, defined the “quality” of people and their location in the social stratification. All the above was defined by the concept of “race,” which ultimately determined their position and attributes in colonial society.¹⁰⁴ To this social categorization, another relevant factor must be added: gender. Women were a group whose bodies and relationships were determined by their condition. For example, the African feminine body was reduced to their potential for maternity and subjugated to the political-economic interests of (re)production of enslaved bodies.¹⁰⁵ This articulation of the social fabric had its origins in the conceptualizations of European castes.¹⁰⁶ In the case of Chile, this allowed the development of a racialized, segregated society and an identification/estrangement towards different ethnic groups according to the previously mentioned characteristics. It is worth mentioning, that although the above was primarily due to socially constructed body/blood characteristics, this could be modified by legal/ religious means (for example, through marriage).¹⁰⁷ These widely disseminated narratives during the colonial period were perpetuated over time and influenced subsequent historical construction and interpretations.

It must be taken into consideration the fact that the writing of the “Official History of Chile” had exponents,¹⁰⁸ who carried out a process known today as “symbolic whitening”.¹⁰⁹ This refers to the systematic and institutionalized eradication of all population components that departed from the stereotype of the “modern civilized European white man”, an icon of cultural evolutionism that permeated different social sciences (and from there, the republican society) during the 19th century. Clearly, this condition was not fulfilled by enslaved Africans, whose mere mention was seen as an existential contrast to the aforementioned imaginary of national identity.

During this century, racialism was developed in political, social and historical discourses, based on apparently “objective” perspectives provided by biology studies, raising “race” as the central axis. Thus, the concept of “race,” which originally obeyed scientific, biological and aesthetic elements, began permeating other areas such as politics, linking itself with nationalist discourses and defining its relationship with the concept of “nation” as a synonym of “race”.¹¹⁰

This was the task of the country's intellectual elite during the 19th century, a social group that built the History of Chile based on the idea of progress driven by traditional positivism, where the idea of the white, modern, saxon man emerged as the dominant group and as the only subjects with historical agency.¹¹¹ They not only legitimized its position on the rest of the population, making a history based on their version of the events but also built constant feedback that helped them keep and perpetuated their privileges. The positivist context in which this historiography developed, allowed national history to generate a hegemonic identity that departs from the native inhabitants of Chile and any other cultural background present at the time. Therefore, the existing minority groups were left aside. On the one hand, they were not part of this select group in charge of writing history and, on the other, their incorporation into history went against the principles that this reduced group sought to develop and reproduce.

After the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), the construction of the Chilean nation was defined based on these ideas around the concept of “race,” privileging those mestizo people over minorities since they presented a history linked -although imperfectly- to the European imaginary. The aforementioned was valid for the offspring of Europeans and Indigenous since this type of union indicated the possibility to “validate” this new “breed” as mestizos, a caste with at least a European component and a percentage of “blood” from a population who was never legally enslaved. On the other hand, the offspring of Europeans and Afro-descendants had other labels (such as “mulatto”, “moor,” among others), which meant that they were not at the same level.¹¹² The foregoing allows us to understand that the mestizos were the only present in the racial-national imaginary of the 19th century and later, explaining the process of racial-cultural assimilation from historical symbolic whitening.

Our second reason to explain the disappearance of Afro-descendants from the historical and social construction of Concepción, must do with what Mellafe¹¹³ stated. He indicates that after the abolition of slavery, many of the Africans and Afro-descendants who lived in Concepción moved to areas with less hostile weather and geopolitical conditions. An example of this is found in the marriage records of Valparaíso already mentioned.¹¹⁴ To this we add what was indicated by Grubessich,¹¹⁵ who states that the abolition of slavery produced a decrease in endogamy that many Afro-descendants would have maintained (by option or imposition) during the colonial period, producing a greater number of exogamous marriages, preferably with people of indigenous descent. For this author, the reason for the search for exogamy would have been aimed for social recognition and participation by Afro-descendants. Again, this correlates with the search for acceptance and social participation through a kinship mechanism, which allowed descendants to go phenotypically unnoticed.

It is our belief that a mixture of both factors exposed above contributed to the disappearance of the image of Afro-descendants as part of the Penquista society between the 16th and 19th centuries, despite the much historical data showing a clear presence in Concepción and surrounding areas. Undoubtedly, the data presented in this study only correspond to a part of the history of the Africans forcibly brought to Concepción, and of their descendants born in the city.

Summarizing, we can say that the “facts” which encourage the belief that the number of Afro-descendants in the current Biobío and Ñuble areas was low and had no impact on the social conformation of their populations¹¹⁶ lack a basis in historical reality. It must be remembered that, as Valenzuela¹¹⁷ has stated, Chilean society rose within a framework of marginality, within the South American colonial reality, a fact that also had repercussions in the slave trade.¹¹⁸ In this regard, we must consider that given the distance from Santiago, the geopolitical tensions with the Mapuche and recurrent natural disasters, transformed Concepción and its surrounding areas into a peripheral zone within this already marginalized reality. Despite this, the processes of arrival and ownership of Afro-descendants in the area did not vary considerably with respect to those experienced at the national level, the main factor of difference being the demographic and spatial scale.

Finally, it is necessary to state that we do not attempt with this research to lead this subject to a closure. On the contrary, we believe it is essential to review other and more unpublished primary sources, to broaden the discussions, being able to position it and contrast it with other topics, such as indigenous slavery in southern Chile and the presence of enslaved Africans on a continental level. As indicated above, we believe it is necessary to enrich this research by reviewing the reliability of the collected mentions; even so, we consider that this unpublished compilation provides fertile ground for, in future research, to problematize the phenomenon of Afro-descendants in Concepción.

Acknowledgments

The authors pledge their gratitude to the Museum of the History of Penco, for being the first institution that allowed us to present our first scopes on the presence of Afro-descendants in Concepción. To the Afrocoquimbo team, especially Monserrat Arre, for their collaborative spirit and encouragement to finish this research. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal's editorial team, whose comments and observations helped enrich our article.

Fuentes editadas

Actas de la Junta de Beneficencia de Concepción, 1680-1812. Fondo 002-AJBC. Archivo Luis David Cruz Ocampo, Biblioteca Central Universidad de Concepción, Chile. http://archivoluisdavidcruzocampo.udec.cl/index.php/ Actas-de-Beneficencia-de-Concepción.

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Medina, José Toribio, Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de Chile. Desde el Viaje de Magallanes hasta la Batalla del Maipo. 1515-1818. Tomo 22: Proceso de Villagra, Santiago, Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1900.

Medina, José Toribio, Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de Chile. Desde el Viaje de Magallanes hasta la Batalla del Maipo. 1515-1818, tomo 27: Informaciones de Servicios V, Santiago, Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1901.

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