AFRO-ECUADORIAN HISTORY

María Chiquinquira was born in the 18th century in Guayas, a province on Ecuador’s southern coast. Her mother, María Antonia, was a slave for Alfonso Cepeda, but he abandoned her when she got sick with leprosy. After her mother died, María and her brother were raised by an indigenous woman, but later reclaimed by the Cepeda family. After the head of the family died, they were assigned to his brother Alfonso, a priest. After María got married to a free Black man, she started working on her own, but paying a daily fee to her owner. With her husband she had one daughter, who was summoned to work for Alfonso´s blind sister. María does not want her daughter to share her fate of being a slave, so she begs the priest not to take her daughter. He shows no mercy.

Thus begins María’s long fight for freedom. As colonial law stated that a slave who was abandoned by their owner was automatically freed through manumission, María argued that she was born free because her mother was abandoned. She used the system (which also stated that liberty or slavery is inherited from the mother) to fight against the system. She lost a court case, won another, started living as a free woman, lost another case, thought of a new strategy. Finally she appealed to the highest court of the Real Audiencia of Quito. But we will never know how the court would have ruled, because one day all documents mysteriously disappeared.

Find out more about Ecuador’s history in our blog posts.