‘Mulato entre negros’(y blancos) : Writing, Race, the Antislavery Question, and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía

This article studies the inscription of a mulato racial persona in Juan Francisco Manzano’s slave autobiography. It highlights both the strategic need for the writer to please his immediate and distant benefactors, and the broader assimilationist pressures of colonial Latin America, as determinants in Manzano’s negotiation of race in his memoir. Manzano’s autobiography and his freedom are intimately tied in with the canonization of Cuban antislavery literature, and the iconization of Domingo del Monte, nineteenth‐century patrician and man of letters. The paper questions the abolitionist altruism attributed to del Monte by a generally laudatory critical tradition.