“In the Hope that the Jesuit Priests Will Return”: The Slaves of the Expelled Jesuits under the Secular Management of the Temporalities (Buenos Aires, 1767-1775) ¹

ABSTRACT

Around the year 1767 more than 4,500 African-American slaves lived and worked on the properties that comprised the vast patrimony seized from the Society of Jesus on the Río de la Plata. The fragile balance of the Jesuits slave system was evidenced by the investigations on the management of temporalities, pointing out the failure of the Juntas in the maintenance/control of forced labor. However, in the case of Bue­nos Aires, only the sale of the kidnapped slaves in their condition of “movable property” has been studied. Our work proposes to reconstruct the decisions taken by the secular administration of Buenos Aires in relation to the treatment of this population and to infer the responses that the slaves themselves made to them in the context of post-expulsion uncertainty.

Keywords:
slaves; Jesuits; temporalities; Buenos Aires, 18th century