The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre

This book tells the story of peasants and miners in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cuba, officially enslaved to the king of Spain, whose local patroness was a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. Through reconstructing its history, this book reveals that in Cuba's eastern regions, slavery to the King became highly ambiguous, evolving into forms of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political, and economic sources, the author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the King, and the royal slaves as the slaves imagined and negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier society. As they produced social memory and appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within the structures and strictures of Spain's colonial world.

“"This outstanding history of colonial El Cobre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explores the ways that royal slaves negotiated their condition, and the way that popular religion, focused on Our Lady of Charity, underwrote their efforts." ”

"This is an outstanding, highly original piece of work that should appeal to a very wide audience, given the great variety of themes the author discusses: slavery, freedom, legality, status, gender roles, authority, marginality, religion, social structure, colonial society, Cuban history, Caribbean history, and early Spanish colonial history." - Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University "This fascinating book treats issues of broad, interdisciplinary significance in original and stimulating ways, lending historical depth and concreteness to problems that are often pursued too abstractly. This is the best sort of history, one that will have an impact on the historical study of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as on the fields of anthropology and cultural studies." - Ana Maria Alonso, University of Arizona "This is an excellent example of just how sophisticated scholarship on early Cuban history has become... The book looks at a host of subjects: eastern Cuba (too often neglected by scholars); religious history through the emergence of the shrine of Our Lady of Charity; rural economic activity in a non-sugar-producing area; and the institution of Spanish slavery. Diaz's book will be a reference point for future studies in all these areas... Professional historians will appreciate how Diaz extracts social and narrative history from a variety of disjointed and fragmentary materials... The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre provides its readers with surprises and puzzles at almost every turn." - History: Reviews of New Books "Maria Elena Diaz's The Virgin, the King and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre examines a fascinating and little known episode of Cuban and Afro-Latin American history...In the process of telling this remarkable story, Diaz offers rich asides on the

María Elena Díaz is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"This is an outstanding, highly original piece of work that should appeal to a very wide audience, given the great variety of themes the author discusses: slavery, freedom, legality, status, gender roles, authority, marginality, religion, social structure, colonial society, Cuban history, Caribbean history, and early Spanish colonial history."-Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University "This fascinating book treats issues of broad, interdisciplinary significance in original and stimulating ways, lending historical depth and concreteness to problems that are often pursued too abstractly. This is the best sort of history, one that will have an impact on the historical study of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as on the fields of anthropology and cultural studies."-Ana Mara Alonso, University of Arizona

This book tells the extraordinary story of a village of peasants and miners in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba who were slaves belonging to the king of Spain and whose local patroness was a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. In reconstructing this history, the book reveals that in Cuba's eastern region, slavery to the King became a very ambiguous form of slavery that evolved into forms of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World. The author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the King, and the royal slaves as the enslaved villagers imagined and negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier society. In the process, she examines several dimensions of the royal slaves' daily and imaginary lives. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political, and economic sources, this book presents a multisided history of enslaved people as they remade colonial spaces and turned them into a new homeland in El Cobre. As they produced social memory and appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within the structures and strictures of Spain's colonial world.

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