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Emancipation is a tricky word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it denotes the lifting of “restraints imposed by superior physical force or legal obligation.” In Roman law emancipation referred to the freeing of women or children from the patria potestas—the father’s power. In English civil law, Catholics were enfranchised by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Slaves in the United States were manumitted in 1863, with the terms set forth in Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Emancipation Proclamation.” (Although emancipation and manumission are now used synonymously, in ancient Rome, manumission referred specifically to slaves or servants, emancipation to family members.) Figuratively, the word has been extended to mean liberation from “intellectual, moral, or spiritual fetters.” Here the issue is not so much action by an external agency, as it is an internal matter, a change in consciousness. For the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer writing in the early nineteenth century, for example, Jewish emancipation (citizenship) could come only when Jews renounced (freed themselves from) Judaism as a public identity. Religion was antithetical to the putative universalism of the secular state, and for that reason, he added, the state must also renounce Christianity. Citizenship required a prior refusal of the particularistic obligations religion imposed; emancipation from particular obligation was a prerequisite for admission to the universalist community of the state. In either definition, to be emancipated is to get out from under, to be able

Acknowledgments ix Introduction. A Case for Rethinking Resistance / John Gledhill 1 Part One: Resistance and the Creation of New Worlds 21 1. Rethinking Amerindian Resistance and Persistence in Colonial Portuguese America / John Monteiro 25 2. Rituals of Defiance: Past Resistance, Present Ambiguity / FelipeCastro Gutierrez 44 3. Indian Resistances to the Rebellion of 1712 in Chiapas / Juan Pedro Viqueira 63 4. The "Commander of All Forests" against the "Jacobins" of Brazil: The Cabanada, 1832-1835 / Marcus J. M. de Carvalho 81 5. A "Great Arch" Descending: Manumission Rates, Subaltern Social Mobility, and the Identities of Enslaved, Freeborn, and Freed Blacks in Southeastern Brazil, 1791-1888 / Robert W. Slenes 100 Part Two: Resisting through Religion and for Religion 119 6. Millenarianism, Hegemony, and Resistance in Brazil / Patricia R. Pessar 123 7. Where Does Resistance Hide in Contemporary Candomble? / Luis Nicolau Pares 144 8. Catholic Resistances in Revolutionary Mexico during the Religious Conflict / Jean Meyer 165 9. Gender, Resistance, and Mexico's Church-State Conflict / Patience A. Schell 184 Part Three: Rethinking Resistance in a Changing World 205 10. Tracing Resistance: Community and Ethnicity in a Peasant Organization / Margarita Zarate 221 11. Resistance, Factionalism, and Ethnogenesis in Southern Jalisco / Guillermo de la Pena 230 12. The Transhistorical, Juridical-Formal, and Post-Utopian Quilombo / Ilka Boaventura Leite 250 13. From Resistance Avenue to the Plaza of Decisions: New Urban Actors in Salvador, Bahia / Maria Gabriela Hita 269 14. Contestation in the Courts: The Amparo as a Form of Resistance to the Cancellation of Agrarian Reform in Mexico / Helga Baitenmann 289 15. Beyond Resistance: Raising Utopias from the Dead in Mexico City and Oaxaca / Matthew Gutmann 305 Conclusion. Rethinking Histories of Resistance in Brazil and Mexico / Alan Knight 325 Bibliography 355 About the Contributors 389 Index 391

R A N CIS C O, an African-born slave living in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, obtained his carta de alforria (letter of liberty) on May 14, 1852. His African origin or "nation" (naSao) was Nago. For his own freedom, Francisco paid the equivalent of seven hundred thousand reis (seven hundred milreis), the price his owner had paid to his former owner. But Francisco did not pay cash; rather he purchased his freedom by substituting another male slave called Joao whom he, Francisco, owned. Joao was also Nago and subsequently took Francisco's place working on a small boat known as an alvarenga, a lighter that ferried goods between ship and shore.' Francisco's letter of liberty does not tell how he accumulated enough money to purchase Joao, or how Francisco had come to own his own slave, albeit temporarily, presumably with the permission of his owner. All it reveals is that Francisco, employed in an urban occupation, possibly for many years, negotiated with his owner to arrive at a mutually agreeable price for Joao, a price equivalent to what the owner was demanding for

In February, 1816, Bolivar and Alexandre Petion agreed to a. strange barter. The mulatto president-dictator of the world's first Negro republic exchanged several thousand muskets, gunpowder, ball and flint, a printing press, and provisions for Bolivar's promise that if he should be successful in his attempt to liberate Venezuela lie would free all slaves there and in every other land where his banners might fly.' In June, 1816, the Liberator issued his first proclamation of emancipation; in July came another, followed by a third in 1818.2 These actions were in part incorporated, along with a system of manumission, in the law of 1821. But a. persistent and obstinate reluctance to accept the law, coupled with a desire to escape the taxation devices established to repay the slave-owner, forced the issuing of further decrees in 1822, 1823, 1827, and 1828. Owing to a conflict between pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups, the laws providing for manumission were not fully enforced. Bolivar 's initial action concerning liberation stemmed from his having given his word, from his desire to attract supporters, and from his conviction that slavery was a social evil. In 1815 he had written that the master-slave relationship of the colonial era was of such benefit to the Negro that no difference in color could alter the reciprocal fraternal relations of the races of Spanish America; yet he admitted