This book tells the extraordinary story of a village of peasants and
miners in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba who were slaves
belonging to the king of Spain and whose local patroness was a
miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. In reconstructing
this history, the book reveals that in Cuba's eastern region, slavery to
the King became a very ambiguous form of slavery that evolved into forms
of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World.
The author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the
King, and the royal slaves as the enslaved villagers imagined and
negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier
society. In the process, she examines several dimensions of the royal
slaves' daily and imaginary lives. Drawing on a range of cultural,
social, political, and economic sources, this book presents a multisided
history of enslaved people as they remade colonial spaces and turned
them into a new homeland in El Cobre. As they produced social memory and
appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of
Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within
the structures and strictures of Spain's colonial world.