The Archives of Virtual Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Nineteenth-century Mexico was one of the first and most radical abolitionist nations in the Americas, where elites constructed a national identity grounded on racial inclusion and antislavery. Nevertheless, throughout this period, various forms of forced labor and racial subjugation flourished in Mexico’s borderland regions of Texas, Yucatán, and Chiapas. These practices of bondage, indenture, and peonage were legally ambiguous, yet practically difficult to distinguish from slavery. While scholars have mentioned in passing many of the documents that attested to this traffic, none have given an in-depth analysis of the documents that attest to these forms of subjugation. Many of these documents are contracts that employers used to maintain a pretense of “free labor” relations, including simulating the workers’ consent. This summer project has focused on digitizing and transcribing these documents and adding metadata using optical character recognition (OCR) software through Transkribus. Publicly available AI transcription models on Transkribus were trained on handwritten documents date to 15th and 16th-century Spain. I have dedicated most of my time to training an AI language model on 19th-century documents in Spanish from archives in the Mexico, the U.S., Guatemala, and Spain. I have then used this model to then transcribe hundreds of pages of archival documents related to the trafficking of laborers across Mexico’s borders and make them fully searchable. This work will make these documents more publicly accessible and easy to use for other scholars interested in indenture on Mexico’s borderlands.
This project was funded through the 2023 NYU DH Graduate Student Fellowship Program! We hope you'll browse other projects funded through this initiative.
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