The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute is pleased to host a panel discussion on the enslavement and experiences of Black Africans in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, particularly in La Española and Puerto Rico, two of the earliest colonies. This event will feature with in-person and virtual distinguished speakers. Attendance to the event is possible in-person or virtually.

Following the launch of the volume Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico (SUNY Press, Afro-Latinx Futures series, 2024), edited by Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel, the panel will gather several of the contributors to the book, who will share conclusions and insights from their research. The presentations in the panel and the related contributions in the edited volume Transatlantic Bondage discuss topics such as the development and application of slavery laws, disobedience and its consequences, migration, gender, family, lifestyle, and community building among the free Black population and white allies.

Panel moderated in-person by:

 
Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor in the Department of History, Howard University; author of author of Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Featured speakers (either in-person or virtually) include:

Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, where she teaches Dominican history and the history of Latinos in the U.S. Her research focuses on gender-based violence since the colonial period and free and enslaved black women in Santo Domingo during the 16th-18th centuries.
 

Dr. Jorge L. Chinea, Academic Director, Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Wayne State University, a specialist in colonial Latin American history and the author of Race and Labor in the Hispanic Caribbean: The West Indian Worker Experience in Puerto Rico, 1800-1850 (University Press of Florida, 2005).
 

Dr. Jacqueline Jimenez Polanco, Associate Professor of Sociology, Bronx Community College, CUNY, author of Dominican American Politics: Immigrants, Activists, and Politicians (Routledge, 2024), Dominican Politics in the Twenty First Century: Continuity and Change (ed.; Routledge, 2023), and Divagaciones II: An Anthology by Dominican Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Women (ind., 2023)

Anthony R. Stevens-Acevedo, community activist and independent researcher, former Assistant Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, author of The Santo Domingo Slave Revolt of 1521 and the Slave Laws of 1522: Black Slavery and Black Resistance in the Early Colonial Americas (CUNY DSI, 2019).

Dr. Richard L. Turits, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, History, and Latin American Studies, William & Mary, author of Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), written with Laurent Dubois, and Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford University Press, 2003)

For over a decade, CUNY DSI has been at the forefront of the scholarship on 15th and 16th-centuries La Española and the history of the earliest rebellions of African Black enslaved people in the Americas. Previous initiatives in this research program include the creation of the first online and interactive Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool in 2013 and the launch of the academic and educational digital platform “First Blacks in the Americas,” a bilingual English-Spanish website featuring the story of the earliest Black African population of the Americas through archival manuscripts, in 2016.

The volume Transatlantic Bondage stems from that research, capturing in various chapters the presentations made by featured speakers in the symposium “Colonial Slave Legislations and Slavery in the Americas," organized by CUNY DSI in collaboration with the Black Studies Program at the City College of New York and Harvard Afro-Latin American Studies Research Institute at the Hutchings Center, on October 17, 2014. Participants included scholars from across the United States and Spain.