Bound biographies: transatlantic itineraries and Black women’s mobility in the early modern Spanish Empire

This article examines the experiences of Afro-descendant women who traveled between the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries serving ecclesiastical, mercantile, and imperial administrators’ households. Afro-descendant women’s domestic service could lead from slavery to freedom, bring them closer to family members, and encompass processes of homegoing and worldmaking. The article explores the lives of Afro-descendant travelers in an early diaspora that was not part of—yet indelibly shaped by—the transatlantic slave trade. Using royal travel licenses, official chronicles, ecclesiastical documents, parochial and probate records as sources, I reconstruct these personal microhistories of travel and mobility. Inspired by the ‘biographical turn’ in Atlantic history and slavery scholarship, the article recreates the lives of those who shaped the early centuries of Iberian globalization, emigration, and a Black diaspora.