Housing the King’s Enslaved Workers in the Spanish Caribbean

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

The structure of the article is correct. First, a general introduction to the subject of the article. Then the situation of enslaved workers was presented in various aspects. Quantitative data has been provided to show the scale of the problem. The living conditions of enslaved workers were described. This part is essential to understand the situation of the workers at that time. The most valuable part is the one analyzing the housing conditions of enslaved workers. The analysis of archival materials yielded valuable information about housing buildings inhabited by enslaved workers. Expands current knowledge of known aspects of life in the Spanish Caribbean. Despite the positive assessment of this part, there are a few technical shortcomings that should be noted. Thanks to their improvement, these parts of the article would be more understandable.

The article is valuable. It touches on little-known aspects regarding the housing conditions of enslaved workers and their participation in the creation of construction infrastructure in former Spanish colonies. Generally, it expands historical knowledge in previously little-known areas.

Comments:

1) Fig. 2 - the drawing should be oriented in accordance with the historical layout. The drawing in the publication is upside down. The rectangle marking the section for enslaved workers is probably not quite properly positioned, it should be moved.

2) Fig. 2, 3 and 5 - the drawings contain original descriptions in Spanish. For a good relationship between the text and the drawings, descriptions in English should be added (can be limited to the buildings and rooms analyzed in the article).

Author Response

Dear reviewer, first of all thank you very much for your kind words about my humble paper. I really appreciate your work with it, and for this reason, I have taken all your recommendations. Due to character limits, and the recommendations of other reviewers, I had limited the descriptions of the included figures but I think I got your idea. Thank you very much. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments on “Housing the King’s Enslaved Workers in the Spanish Caribbean” for inclusion in the

Special Issue on Race and Architecture in the Iberian World, c. 1500-1800s

 

general qualities

This article is an important contribution to appreciating the relevance of fresh approaches to architectural history for efforts to rethink roots of processes of globalisation, to de-centre (de-colonialise) the humanities, and to bring new light to light to the diversity of ways in which human creativity has enabled people to cope and produce new areas of freedom under deeply horrifying conditions.

 

The study introduces an original approach to the broader topics of the Special Issue, highlighting the very direct bearing that micro-historical studies can make to wider questions about the importance of human agency to local creative interventions, which can and have had  impacts on the very scales on which histories (in particular – hitherto invisible subaltern histories) are forged and sustained. The article is extremely well researched and structured. It excels in clarity of exposition, a high degree of critical reflexivity, and novel insights of the uncanny nature of hitherto invisible histories.

 

Suggested areas of improvement:

There is no doubt that the article attends with sophistication throughout to impacts of cultural constructions of “race” – it may be especially valuable likewise for its excellent approach to the creative agency of enslaved people and the extent to which their architectural achievements resist subordination. This make the article an important contribution to resources for addressing broader tasks of de-centring – de-colonialising architectural histories.  The terms “wondrous” and “resonant” (Greenblatt 1991) may be useful for the article's purposes. The enslaved people’s achievements are jointly wondrous and resonant – they raise questions, which cannot be addressed without such further investigations as that offered by the article.

 

The presentation is excellent – with brilliant use of illustrations throughout. The conclusions is at once concise and illuminating. Could it say something about contributions the project’s finding can make to resources available to those seeking to de-centre research and teaching in the humanities? In addition:  could the title of the article bring its findings into sharper relief – for instance: “the freedom of enslaved people’s creative agency  in the making of …. “

 

Some suggestions of publications of possible interest include:

 

·         Cassella, Eleanor Conlin 2007. The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

·         Davis, Natalie Zemon 2011. Decentring History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World. History and Theory  50 (2): 188-202

·         Dilley, R. and Kirch, T.G. (ed.) (2010) Regimes of Ignorance: anthropological perspectives on the production and re-production of non-knowledge. Oxford: Berghan Publishers.

·         Greenblatt, Stephen 1990. Resonance and Wonder. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43 (4): 11-34

·         Rosaldo, R. (1989) Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge.

 

And especially: Schiebinger, Londa 1998. Lost Knowledge, Bodies of Ignorance,and the Poverty of Taxonomy as Illustrated by the Curious Fate of EIos Pavonis, an Abortifacient, in Caroline Jones and Peter Galison (eds.) Picturing Science and Producing Art. London: Routledge, pp. 125-144.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, first of all thank you very much for your kind words about my humble paper. I really appreciate your work with it, and for this reason, I have taken all your recommendations. Due to character limits, and the recommendations of other reviewers, I had limited the discussion about Greenblatt and other references you recommended to a single initial paragraph, but I think I got your idea. Thank you very much. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The document presented, in general terms, is very correct but needs a series of corrections listed below: At the form level, several errors have been detected, they are listed by lines:

43, 92, 108, 213: In each of these lines there is a double space between words.

102: In the bar diagram in Figure 1, the legend overlaps with the color and name of the different Caribbean ports over the years, which prevents its correct visualization.

175: In the bibliographic note, the first surname of the author “Pérez” must be added.

214: In the bibliographic citation of this line the space is missing after the colon.

255: Figure 2 is placed upside down and the black box that indicates the galley or prisoner's barracks is off-center and has contour lines that are too thick that do not allow the rest of the plan to be clearly seen, in addition to not being able to read the text that appears on the map. Small arrows can also be used to indicate their clear location.

443: The letter “y” located between “military” and “en” must be eliminated, as it is not part of the original title of this publication. You must also change the capital “S” in the word “society” to lowercase “s.”

445: The uppercase “S” in the word “system” must be changed to lowercase “s.”

472: The quotation marks (”) that appear after the word Indias must be eliminated.

At the content level, some aspects of the article mentioned below could be improved:

1: The introduction is correct and it clearly states the objectives of the work, the sources of information and the methodology used, however we have found a discrepant aspect. In point 3 referring to the objectives (line 55), an allusion is made to the role of enslaved women among the slaves and forced laborers who contributed to the construction of fortifications in the Spanish Caribbean. This objective has no reason to exist because, as the author/s states in their conclusions, “Unfortunately, nothing is said about women's roles or experiences, apart from occasional references to their number” and its appearance in the article is testimonial and irrelevant to its development. , while limiting itself to the simple mention of their number as opposed to the men.

2: The central body of the article, and actually its main topic, is point 2 where attention is paid to the number of slave or forced workers employed in the construction of some of the main fortifications of the Spanish Caribbean. The diagram that accompanies the section is very illustrative of the fluctuation in the number of slaves used in the construction of fortifications over a period of time of almost two and a half centuries. However, we believe that it is strictly necessary that in the figure caption of this graph (line 103) the primary (archive) or secondary (researchers who have made calculations on their number) sources from which all the data have been extracted are specified. (number of slaves) that have been used to prepare the diagram, and that appear scattered throughout the text. In this way, the reader is prevented from being forced to carry out an exercise of faith by accepting figures that, although real, do not know where they come from in their entirety. It is recommended, due to space limits, to create a DMP with a direct link to the article.

The text also indicates numbers of slaves that are not later reflected in the graph, such as the 326 in Havana (line 223). Regarding the slaves who worked in the fortifications of Havana, the article by: Venegas, H. M.; Casas, J. J. and Martínez, J. D. (2016): “Fortificaciones de La Habana y esclavos indios novohispanos (1763 a 1821)”. In Venegas, H. M.; Correa, A.; Acosta, A.; Valdés, C. M. and Hernández, J. J. (coords.): La región, una y múltiple: teoría y praxis historiográfica. El noreste de México, T.I. Edufpi, Teresina: 167-185.

3: In section 3, dedicated to the homes of slaves and forced laborers used in the construction of fortifications, reference is made to the materials used for the construction of their houses in Havana (lines 234-241). At no point is any reference made, and this is inexplicable, to the typical house of the natives of the Caribbean islands since the 16th century (line 243 “small shacks”), known as “bohío”, and which are behind the origin of these constructions that are cited in the text. About the Cuban bohío, including galleys in the marble quarries, see: Cuevas Toraya, J. (2001): 500 años de construcciones en Cuba, Chavín servicio gráficos e editoriales, La Havana. Soraluce Blond, J. R. (2003): “El bohío cubano: arquitecturas de cubierta vegetal en el Caribe”. El Pajar. Cuaderno de Etnografía Canaria, II Época, 14 abril: 144- 147. Prieto Vicioso, E. (2008): “Arquitectura indígena en la Española”, Clio  175: 113-150. Adán Castaños, Y. Y. (2021): “Construcciones palafíticas en Cuba”. En Adán Castaños, Y. Y. (coord.): Contrapunteo: El camino del patrimonio cultural en la Mayor de las Antillas. Acer-Vos, 19, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla: 51-72.

When talking about the appearance of the galley or barracks, there is no direct relationship between it and the increase in slave and forced labor, which is the reason why this type of buildings had to be built (lines 242-251) . On the large number of slaves or forced laborers and the creation of galleys see: Pineda Alillo, J. (2014): Esclavos de origen africano en las haciendas jesuitas del Colegio de Tepotzotlán y de la Hacienda de Xochimancas del Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo, siglo XVII. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México -Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán, México: 92 y n. 101.

Regarding the possible existence of a galley in Veracruz (lines 260-265) in the plan (Figure 3), it can be clearly read that this structure was intended to house the spars, read wood, for the construction of ships. Its location next to the sea and the shipyard seems to corroborate its function as a shipyard and not as a slave barracks. The latter is a difficult hypothesis to prove. Just because a building has a similar floor plan to another does not mean that it performs that same function. In addition, this building has four entrances that distinguish it from the galleys that only had one for the control of the workers. Another thing is that this building could be reused later to house slave or forced workers, although this information would have to appear in some documentation.

Regarding the so-called “casitas” (lines 281-284), it must be noted that their division and composition, with a single door and window, responds again to the image of the Cuban bohío; the materials with which they were built also support this idea. So the Cuban slaves continued to live in their typical homes, where only the vegetation cover was replaced with tiles to make the construction more resistant and durable over time, from which it follows that the work was going to last for a long time. Regarding the term "cuges" it refers to sticks or wooden slats, surely to create the walls and roofs of the "casitas", and which is normally related to the sticks from which  dumbbells were hung tobacco leaves for drying for storage in Cuba.  See in this regard: (https://www.rae.es/tdhle/cuge). About its use in construction see: Cruz Freire, P. (2013): “El gobernador Esteban Olóriz y el proyecto de reforma para el castillo del Morro de Santiago de Cuba (1767-1771). Revista de la CECEL, 13: 139-150 (specifically p. 146 n.22). It is assumed, and the author(s) do not mention this, that the slaves or forced laborers were the same ones who built their own homes or barracks with the ethnic and ideological implications that this entails.

Regarding the fact that these spaces were not similar to those of the African slaves from Santo Domingo and Guatemala who lived in separate homes (lines 305-309), we do not agree. What can be deduced is that Spanish engineers designed attached or battery constructions of the typical Cuban “bohíos” constructions with the very intention of controlling and establishing, in a small space, the slave workers, but who continued to live in their vernacular homes. and they continued to carry out their domestic practices (on the barracks as spaces of freedom see: Laviña, J. (2005): “Esclavitud y rebeldía en América”. Laviña, J. (ed.): “Esclavos rebeldes y cimarrones”. pp. 8-68. In (https://www.larramendi.es/es/consulta/registro.do?id=1146). Additionally, on line 307, the bibliographic reference on the African peoples of Santo Domingo and Guatemala who lived in this type of housing must be added.

Lines 344-345, regarding the non-use of the aforementioned materials, has to be related to the intention of the Spanish authority to create much more durable constructions, which indicates that the work to be carried out by the slaves would take a long time.

4: Section 4 is one of the most interesting since it shows the transmission of technical knowledge between Europeans and indigenous people and how the latter assimilated and acquired it, being highly valued by engineers. More emphasis should also be placed on the racism, shown by the authorities, regarding this type of workers who do not want to be equated, socially, with Europeans. About indigenous people carrying out constructive work see: Moya Olmedo, M. P. (2013): “Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado: La construcción de Nueva España en el siglo XVI”. En Huerta, S. y López Ulloa, F. (eds.): Actas del Octavo Congreso Nacional de Historia de la Construcción (Madrid, 9-12 de octubre de 2013). Instituto Juan de Herrera, Madrid: 747-756. (Especially the illustrations).

Comments for author File: Comments.zip

Author Response

Dear reviewer, first of all thank you very much for your kind words about my humble paper. I really appreciate your detailed work with it, and for this reason, I have taken all your recommendations. Due to character limits, and the recommendations of other reviewers, I had limited the impact of some of your recommendations but in general I trust I got your idea.

More specifically, I tried to find all errors and modify them. I agree with you that old objective 3 had no sense and was removed. I tried to give more information about the sources of the diagram, including some very steemed references. I completely agree that a little reflection about bohios was required, and was included, something similar with other haciendas. I tried to improved my explanation on Veracruz and Santo Domingo-Guatemala, because I understood your interpretation which was not exactly what I wanted to show. 

Thank you very much. 

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In general terms the work has been exponentially improved. There are always diverse points of view regarding the topics, in this case buildings, analyzed by researchers, with which one can more or less agree, but here it depends on the vision of the author(s) themselves. We would have delved deeper into some ideological and social issues related to the so-called "galeras", as well as the relationship between the construction of these buildings and the increase in slave labor, but we are also aware of the space limitations of the publication and that not all topics can be addressed. That said, we believe the article can be published in its current form. Thanking its author(s) for having corrected those concepts that were pointed out by us.