“Sea Notorio”: Testamentary Autobiographies of Africans and the Archives on Slavery and Emancipation in Argentina

This article proposes expanding the definition of autobiography to include testaments dictated by Africans to notaries in Buenos Aires between 1810 and 1853. Drawing on theorizations of mediation as inherent to subaltern writing, I analyze approximately 150 testaments as a precious corpus of slave narratives, illuminating African origins and memories, strategies of family reconstruction through marriage and godparentage, networks of mutual aid and emancipation, patterns of property accumulation, and expressions of religious devotion. These mediated texts reveal daily lives, how enslaved and freed Africans navigated the independence revolutions, negotiated care in old age, and built resilient kinship networks despite systematic family separation. By recovering these voices, the article contributes to constructing an archive of African perspectives in Argentina, a country whose national narrative of European ascendance and democratic mestizaje has systematically erased how nearly 200,000 forcibly trafficked Africans shaped Rioplatense societies.