Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical Research
on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba
on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba
The Catholic Church mandated the baptism of African slaves in the fifteenth century and extended this requirement across the Catholic Americas. Baptismal records thus became the longest, and most uniform, serial data available for the history of Africans in the Americas, beginning in the 15th century and continuing through almost the end of the 19th century. Once baptized, Africans and their descendants were also eligible for the sacraments of marriage and Christian burial. Through membership in the Catholic Church, Africans and their descendants also generated a host of other religious records such as confirmations, petitions to wed, wills, and even, on occasion, divorce actions. In the Iberian colonies, Africans joined church brotherhoods organized along ethnic lines, through which they recorded not only ceremonial and religious aspects of their lives, but also their social, political, and economic networks.
These ecclesiastical sources are the longest, and most uniform, serial data available for the history of Africans in the Americas, beginning in the 15th century and continuing through almost the end of the 19th century, and many are in perilous condition. Most are held in religious archives or local churches, at risk from climate, bug infestation, and other damage. Too often, lay persons or parish priests are their only guardians, and most of these well-meaning individuals are unaware of the historic significance of the documents they manage, or how fragile they are. Sadly, there are few resources available in Cuba or Brazil for preserving these treasures and if not captured quickly, some may be lost forever. The dispersed nature of the records also makes them difficult for scholars to access, especially those scholars whose countries can offer little research support. Most have never been seen by scholars and if not captured quickly, will never be seen.
Each of the countries whose African history we are tracking still struggles with the legacy of slavery and its political, economic, and social consequences. There is great scholarly and popular interest in African history and heritage in these countries and each modern nation must respond to this interest in defining national identities in multi-cultural societies. The modern nations of the sending areas of West and West Central Africa are equally interested in the discoveries this project is generating.
Project collaborators Jane Landers, Mariza Soares, and Paul Lovejoy combine language and paleographic skills, field expertise, and extensive experience in the historical sources for Africa and the Americas. Through the auspices of Vanderbilt University's Jean and Alexander Heard Library and the Tubman Resource Centre, the project has the support of an impressive and innovative technical infrastructure prepared to support this research and to make it widely available to international scholars. The Vanderbilt Library is committed to the permanent preservation of these valuable records and materials collected from Cuba can now be accessed at http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/esss.pl
The ESSS project is producing and disseminating important new research in the humanities while establishing international facilities and collaborations designed to continue the research beyond the life of the project. As part of that effort, the project has incorporated and trained undergraduate and graduate students from the United States, Brazil, and Canada, many of whom are using the project data, and the databases they are creating from it, in their these and dissertations.
Project Administration at Vanderbilt University
The ESSS project is directed by Jane Landers and is administered at Vanderbilt University, home of the nation’s earliest center for Brazilian Studies, now the Center for Latin American & Iberian Studies, and the host of the Brazilian Studies Association www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/LAS .
The Vanderbilt University Library has provided significant assistance to the project. Marshall Breeding, the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, has created an interface for accessing the page images for the Cuban and Spanish borderlands materials digitized in Year I of our project and he is incorporating additional Cuban materials as they are digitized. The metadata structure and interface for the materials digitized in Cuba can be viewed at http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/esss.pl and additional materials are being added as ready.
This Web-based interface allows scholars to browse through the materials by Parish, Archive, series, and volume and to view each of the page images. The interface also includes the ability for scholars who work with the material to save and make available to others any research notes, annotations, transcription, or categorization that they perform on any page of material in the collection. This interface can be made available in a read-only mode to all users on the Web. Registered researchers are able to save transcriptions, notes, and annotations in the datatbase for the benefit of other researchers. All the information entered by researchers will be searchable. Breeding has produced metadata to describe the items within the collection that serve as the basis for the interface. The exif (Exchangeable Image File Format) data has also been preserved for each digital image.
The Vanderbilt Library is ensuring the preservation of the files by storing them on network servers with multiple layers of protection against hardware failure or human error. The servers that hold the images use a RAID-5 configuration to ensure that data will not be lost even in the event of the failure of a disk drive. The files have been copied onto backup tapes and stored off-site at the library’s remote storage facility to guard against catastrophic events on campus. The library will treat these materials as other important digital library collections, migrating the content forward through changes in technologies and file formats. York University is also storing and migrating forward all the materials so far digitized and teams have also deposited CDROMs of all materials with the Cuban and Brazilian churches in which we work.
Project Collaborators
Project collaborator Mariza Soares, of the Universidade Federal Fluminense, directs the Brazilian portion of this project and maintains satellite offices at the Universidade Federal Fluminense office of LABHOI, at the Archive of the Diocese of Nova Iguaçu, and in offices donated by the Diocese of Niteroí and the Diocese of Petropolis. Her project website may be viewed at http://www.historia.uff.br/curias/,
Paul E. Lovejoy supports the technical needs of both the Cuban and Brazil components through the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre for the African Diaspora at York University. http://www.yorku.ca/nhp/ . The Tubman Resource Centre also contributes to the wide dissemination of project research through its web page, its international network of scholars, and its international conferences. The many international conferences Lovejoy organizes at the Tubman Centre have provided a venue for project collaborators to share their findings with Diaspora scholars from around the world, thus alerting them to the project and its’ potential.
