Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the presence of African servants throughout the 20th century in Barcelona with the aim to put into circulation counter/memories of African experiences in Spain.

Paper long abstract:

The study of oral, written and documentary sources shows that some Spanish colonists brought Equatorial Guineans to the metropolis as servants, taking advantage of the prerogatives of colonial hierarchies given that some of them were not fully emancipated. This is a very unknown story that, however, fitted well into the colonial rhetoric that justified the civilization of Africans, although even today it has not been the object of reflection and study as the Njais Indies of Royal Netherlands were (Stoler 1989, Aalderink 2020).

My interest of this case study is greater due to its coexistence with the powerful and rich Krió Fernandino elite who, established in Barcelona, lived between Africa and Europe (Aixelà-Cabré 2023). This community traveled with their own African servants, in addition to those Spaniards they hired in Barcelona given their needs in the large mansions they bought or rented. This Fernandino community strongly questioned the Spanish race seams and maintained a certain sociability with the Catalan bourgeoisie.

This paper will analyze the contradictions that generated the coexistence of both practices, to make known an unknown historical reality of some Africans in Spain thank to these counter/memories that allow new herstories and histories emerge to decolonize the early modern past, in addition to highlighting that the racialization that classified people, enhancing or curtailing their rights by skin color, was something that, as we will see, was crossed with the variables of class and gender, giving contradictory but complementary results.