Making Malambo: Black Collective Action in Early Spanish America | Part II
Grants to Support Faculty Fellows' Research
Making Malambo is a unique study of a free Afro-Panamanian community that challenged their monarch’s recent tax imposition in the 1580s and won. They did so through a series of largely unsuccessful individual petitions followed by a massive collective effort that represented their political and military accomplishments, the latter of which was attested by a group of Spanish witnesses. The project examines these petitions through a series of microhistories intended to lay out the history of free Black life in the late sixteenth century greater Caribbean, including gender relations, coerced labor, military participation, and political activism. In line with Kellogg's interest in democratization, tt articulates the political aspirations of a community often characterized as unvoiced.
