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This article examines several court cases in which slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico litigated to gain their liberty. Revisiting the Tannenbaum thesis regarding slave moral and legality personality, the article seeks to understand how litigation actually worked and what effects it can be seen to have had in individual slaves' lives. Historians have often referred to the outcomes of legal proceedings, or used court records as libraries of historical detail about the lives of plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses. Less commonly have such documents been read as contingent legal processes driven by procedure and by the decisions and actions of participants. By careful attention to the specifically legal aspects of cases before three different Mexico City tribunals, the chapter proposes a methodological approach that sees outcomes explicitly in terms of the tortuous procedural paths that led to them. The bulk of the article involves a series of close readings of cases in which slave litigants succeeded, fail...

As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, from fin-de-siecle scientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond. The complexities of Brazilian race have not always been in the forefront of these debates. For much of the period up to the 1970s, scholars focused on debunking Brazil's vaunted myth of racial democracy-the national ideology claiming Brazil to be free of racial prejudice (Costa 1985). The effort was roundly successful. From this literature, we learned not only how wide a gap there has been between the ideal of racial democracy and the reality of racial and color prejudice in Brazil, but also the role elites have played in manipulating the myth to defuse racial and other social tensions (Hanchard 1994). Recently, some scholars have suggested that it is high time to look beyond the debunking agenda and take up once again the complexities of the Brazilian situation. Anthropologists have led the way, seeking to reveal "the range of contemporary understandings" of racial democracy and to explain something of its persistence as a tangible "dream" in the face of ongoing discrimination and prejudice in everyday Brazilian life (Sheriff 2001:8). This turn opens out to broad questions regarding the conceptualization of race in the Brazilian context. The central issue is how to understand what might be thought of as Brazil's distinctive cultural option with regard to race. According to anthropologist Peter Fry, the United States has "opted definitively for the particularism of the races," the presumed naturalness and fixity of racial identities. In Brazil, by contrast, a sense of unity that transcends race, what Fry calls "universalism," remains a vibrant part of everyday life. Failure to acknowledge the distinction, argues Fry, has often led scholars-especially, though not exclusively North Americans-to a careless use of language. Terms and expressions such as "nonwhites," "whites," "blacks," "African Brazilians," "racial groups," and many others, says Fry, are not analytically neutral. They are, rather, "carriers of value in the context of North American 'racial politics.'"