Slavery in Spanish America encompassed varied colonial systems across the Caribbean and mainland Americas. Enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in mines, ranches, ports, cities, households, workshops, fortifications, and plantations. Their legal status existed alongside Indigenous tribute and draft labor, free Black and mixed-status communities, and locally distinct caste and manumission practices, so the region cannot be reduced to a single plantation model.

The scale of the Atlantic trade to Spanish America depends on what is counted. The SlaveVoyages database records about 1.5 million direct disembarkations from Africa, while research by Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat estimates about 2.1 million arrivals after accounting for captives first landed elsewhere in the Americas and then resold or re-exported to Spanish territories. This redistribution connected ports such as Cartagena, Veracruz, Havana, and Buenos Aires to inland mining, agricultural, urban, and household labor markets.

Abolition was also regionally uneven. Independence wars, military service, free-womb laws, and republican reforms ended slavery in many mainland states during the first half of the nineteenth century. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule longer: slavery ended in Puerto Rico in 1873, while Cuba's gradual abolition and patronato transition concluded in 1886. These legal changes did not immediately remove racial hierarchy or coercive labor arrangements.

References

SlaveVoyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, "Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America", American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015), pp. 433–461.

Thomas Maciejewski, The History of Slavery, manuscript, claim matrix, and source research notes, 2026.