ABSTRACT
From a look almost always exterior, documental historiography has exhaustively studied all kinds of procedures of the sale, punishment, confinement and repression of slaves that lived in Nueva Galicia during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, little has been said about ‘other relations of power’ filtered from the voices of the slaves themselves. In this work, I will analyze some of the slaves’ voices, through the old notion of Parrhesia , revisited by Foucault ( Discurso y verdad 22) in order to show that despite the confinement, the punishment, and a severe confiscatory power, some slaves were also able to publicly wield their own arguments of persuasion and negotiation to obtain minimal rights in favor of themselves. I will also demonstrate that in the slaves’ written demands, apart from showing deplorable living conditions, other non-explicit substrates emerge, which reveal symbolic representations of territories in dispute such as memory, time, space, and rights. Even this symbolic dispute descends to the territory of the enslaved bodies, constantly transformed in receptacles of a power that were not always manifested in a raw sense, through beatings, punishments, confinement, and spoliation.
