Maroon Women in Colonial Spanish America: Case Studies in the Circum-Caribbean from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries

With rare exceptions, women have remained largely invisible in the literature about maroons. The generalized maroon experience—a daring and dangerous escape from closely supervised plantations, followed by a harrowing chase by slave catchers and dogs through rough forests and swamps inhabited by dangerous creatures—is most often depicted as a male endeavor, as in the case of war. The virtual absence of women in either the written or iconographic record is due in part to the traditional male bias in history and in part to the lack of sources for women’s history in general, particularly in more remote times. The historical neglect of maroon women is, however, also due in great part to the real sexual imbalance of maroon communities: more men than women became runaways. Many slave women did flee, however, and at least some of them survived to establish new and free lives in the hinterland. This essay examines the experiences of women of African descent who successfully escaped slavery and participated in the establishment of maroon communities in colonial Spanish America from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, using case studies of Hispaniola (the modern-day Dominican Republic), Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, and Spanish Florida.