Creole Women and Human Trafficking: The Case of Manuela Xiqués

An analysis of the dual biographies, economic and domestic, of Manuela Xiqués an enslaver from nineteenth-century Cuba and Spain deepens our understanding of the role of European and Creole women in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. This talk foregrounds the role of literature, namely family biography, as a locus of the processes of rewriting the nature of colonialism and of refashioning the Cuban origins of a prominent Catalan family. The family manuscript guides implied readers about how to feel about the past, rather than inform about the facts of how the family amassed slave money. The private, domestic biography becomes, then, a principal technology for fomenting the oblivion that characterizes contemporary Spanish perspectives on its role in nineteenth-century trafficking to and enslavement in Cuba.

Lisa Surwillo is Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford Univeristy. She is the author of The Stages of Property and Monsters by Trade. She writes and teaches on modern Spain and its empire.