CONTESTED LEGAL GEOGRAPHIES: WOMEN’S CLAIMS TO RIGHTS AMIDST EMANCIPATION IN HAVANA AND SANTIAGO (1880-1886)

This dissertation, titled Contested Legal Geographies: Women’s Claims to Rights Amidst Emancipation in Havana and Santiago (1880–1886), investigates how patrocinadas—women subjected to Cuba’s forced apprenticeship (patronato) system following the formal abolition of slavery in 1880—used legal action and spatial mobility as interconnected tools for negotiation and contestation. Drawing on approximately 2,000 judicial cases from the Juntas de Patronato in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the study employs a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of petition patterns with qualitative examination of legal procedures, actors, and women’s mobility. It reconstructs claims for back wages, freedom of movement, and legal recognition of status, showing that these petitions were not merely a middle ground between flight and revolt, but a conscious use of legal norms and institutional frameworks to contest the rearticulation of coercion after emancipation. Adopting a social legal history and gendered perspective, the research highlights both the procedural frameworks—such as timelines, burdens of proof, jurisdictional limits—that shaped access to justice, and the ways women navigated and sometimes subverted them to create spaces of negotiation. The comparative analysis between Havana and Santiago reveals significant local differences in modes of control and opportunities for contestation, rooted in variations in economic structures, demography, and administration. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the patronato should not be viewed as a residual appendage of slavery, but as a laboratory for reorganizing racialized coercion and citizenship in Spain’s last slaveholding colony in the Atlantic. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on Cuba’s post-slavery transition within a broader Atlantic context.