CONCLUSION

The interpretation that slavery in Mexico basically ended during the course of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is more compelling than those that focus on the bang of abolition in the 1820s. While abolition might have been a progressive consequence of the independence movement, it was not particularly significant socially, for there were very few slaves remaining in the country to be freed. The view that abolition was a conspiracy against Anglos in Texas is clearly wrong; not only does it interpret the social history of slavery in Mexico, it consciously overlooks the details of abolition in 1829, for Mexico excluded from its provisions.

By the 1820s slavery in Mexico had long been moribund. Its decline can be traced to the appearance of alternative sources of laborer, the increasing difficulty of obtaining slaves from Africa and the introduction of wage labor, which made the supply of workers more elastic. It was also due to the actions of slaves themselves, who in the urban settings where most resided, were able to exert influence over masters and mistresses, sometimes by convincing them that liberation was a reasonable exchange for many years of faithful and loyal service. Slaves also resisted their condition by escaping, an option increasingly feasible in the ethnically diverse cities of Mexico, where there were thousands of free blacks and mulattoes among whom they could live, work and shed their identities as slaves. It was these free mulattoes, not Indians or mestizos, who initially replaced mulatto slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The eighteenth century was the era of the mulatto slave in Mexico and the final period of the decline of slavery in the colony. The fact that most slaves of the era were mulattos itself hastened the decline of the institution. Mulattos in urban Mexico were worth less as investments and lacked the distinct cultural and physical characteristics that readily separated African-born and African-descent slaves from the others. They worked in places where they could learn the Spanish language, the local terrain and the customs of the people with whom they associated at work, in public and in their homes. Their cultural cohesiveness was further weakened by decisions of the Spanish Crown to destroy their distinct institutions, including the cofradias that were created specifically for people of African descent, and by the practical cessation of the slave trade, which no longer offered them constant cultural renewal. Since the overwhelming majority of mulattos in colonial Mexico were free, unlike blacks, those mulattos who escaped frequently could pass as free individuals without suspicion. Furthermore, when they did escape, their masters had fewer incentives and less interest in pursuing them. While they tended to lose their distinct physical and cultural characteristics, the free mulattos of colonial Mexico would not achieve significant upward social mobility, but would continue to perform the same occupational tasks as their enslaved ancestors.