Trabajo no libre para jóvenes libres. El sistema de aprendices escriturados (La Habana, 1834-1857)

Imilcy Balboa Navarro

doi:10.70794/hs.117930

Authors

Imilcy Balboa Navarro Universitat Jaume I https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9817-0398

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70794/hs.117930

Keywords:

Cuba, slavery, indentured apprentices, racialization, control

Abstract

In 19th-century Cuba, the sugar production system, based on enslaved labor as the foundation of the island’s economy, permeated society as a whole and shaped the social structure. The use of ethnicity or ‘color’ as a variable in the productive hierarchy led to the devaluation of agricultural labor and also restricted the expansion of the free labor market. This study examines the construction of the free labor market in urban areas, where not only position in the productive hierarchy but also ‘color’ played a role and where the fight against vagrancy was used as a pretext to reorganize the urban labor market under two premises: the control of so-called free people ‘of color,’ and their subsequent confinement to trades where they could not compete with whites. The reorganization of labor materialized in the system of indentured apprentices, where ‘color’ and coercion went hand in hand.

Author Biography

Imilcy Balboa Navarro, Universitat Jaume I

Professor of Contemporary History at Jaume I University. Member of the Comparative Social History Group and the UNESCO Chair on Slavery and Afro-Descendants. She is the author of several books, including Los brazos necesarios. Inmigración, colonización y trabajo libre en Cuba, 1878-1898 (2000), La protesta rural en Cuba. Resistencia cotidiana, bandolerismo y revolución, 1878-1902 (2003) and De los dominios del rey al imperio de la propiedad privada. Estructura y tenencia de la tierra en Cuba (siglos XVI-XIX) (2013). Editor of La reinvención colonial de Cuba (2012) and co-editor of La excepción americana. Cuba en el ocaso del imperio continental (2006), Gente de color entre esclavos (2019), and Esclavitud y legado afrodescendiente en el trópico (2020).