Regulando el fin de la esclavitud. Diálogos, innovaciones y disputas jurídicas en las nuevas repúblicas sudamericanas 1810-1830, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, (52): 149-172.

The main purpose of this work is to elucidate the moment of strong experimentationand legal innovation, regarding slavery’s regulation and its end, thatopened up in some of the Hispanic American new republics between 1810 and1830. The article reconstructs some of the legal tools and models of abolition thatwere thought and discussed by elites and used, and sometimes debated, by subalternsubjects that were part of these legal spaces in process of redefinition andconstruction. The legal tools discussed were the “free womb” laws, the patronageon freed blacks, the idea of “free soil”, the abolition of the slave trade, and immediateabolition of slavery. The article reflects on the logic of these measures as wellas on the explicit or implicit borrowings among elites that were creating a newway of relationship with the populations of African descent, the regulation of theirwork and its possibilities to access to citizenship in the new legal and politicalorders. At the same time, it argues that the letter of the law did not involve immediatechanges in the condition of the enslaved since they had to fight over itsinterpretation in order to really acquire rights and improve their lives.