EVENT DETAILS

De Piezas de Indias a Pesos de a Ocho: Notes on Slavery in the Potosi Mint in the Seventeenth Century

Guest lecture by Kris Lane of Tulane University, free and open to the public.

Presented by the UCI Department of History, the UC-Cuba Academic Initiative, and the Latin American Minor.

Historians have long focused on indigenous life and labor in the great silver mining town of Potosi, perched high in the Bolivian Andes, but few have examined the lives of enslaved and free people of African descent. Indeed, they are all but forgotten. Perhaps the largest single employer of enslaved Africans in the seventeenth century was the Potosi mint, or Casa Real de la Moneda, founded by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1575. Based on a close reading of documents housed in the mint archives, Lane will shed light on the labor and everyday travails of enslaved mint workers in an era of voluminous production and extraordinary violence. It finds them very much connected to the city despite permanent enclosure in a prison-like blockhouse.