This essay engages the making of black identities under colonial Spanish American slavery, thereby confronting a set of questions related to the meaning and representation of blackness, still a reigning concern of my intellectual generation though many believe it belongs to the past.1 Recent North American invocations of identities being hybrid, performed, situational, contingent, context-specific, fluid, or oppositional have transformed studies of race and slavery in the Anglophone world while similar efforts in Latin America alongside attempts to engage the contemporary Afro – Latin American condition have done little to change the hegemonic representation of the slave past and racial present.2 Indeed, the persistence with which contemporary Afro – Latin American experiences — despite attempts to grapple with the social dynamic of mestizaje — continue to be based on a monolithic past reflects a preconfigured historical imagination especially with regard to the foundational category, slavery. At its most elemental level, this structuring associates, then and now, specific people and places with the institution of slavery.3
