We Have Not Been Tributaries: Peru’s Black Community, Historical Memory, and Resistance

In 1627, a group of mulato militiamen in Lima, Peru, petitioned the king of Spain that, in exchange for their brave and loyal service, he should relieve them of the tribute taxes that free descendants of Africans were expected to pay. The king granted this exemption to the veterans and their families. Yet this fairly narrow exemption was interpreted much more broadly as a perpetual relief from tribute taxes for all descendants of Africans in the entire viceroyalty of Peru. I argue that the Black community in Peru used widely available legal knowledge to plausibly reason that the exemption applied to them all, and they spread the news about it orally so that the entire population could benefit. On this basis, they successfully halted the reimposition of the tribute during the rebellion of Lambayeque in 1779, in a moment when armed resistance against royal authority was a particularly dangerous and fraught endeavor. They also used these arguments to try to resist their exclusion from citizenship rights in the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812.