Alonso de Sandoval, S.J. y la esclavitud: análisis de su obra De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute

Abstract

This research proposes an ethical reading of the work "De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute" (Sandoval: 1956), which aims to make known the process of black evangelization that was proposed by Father Alonso de Sandoval S.J., and which permeated the process of enslavement that took place in Cartagena de Indias. In this way, the slave who was initially considered an object, ceased to be one and became a vulnerable body that demands its needs to be supplied. For this reason, in the work the initial objective, evangelization, became a pretext that showed the slave as a victim, an action that led the Jesuit to denounce, without pretension, the difficulties, aggressions, methods of domination and strategies of evangelization that were presented at the time and that generated in his work tensions and discontent that allowed the slave to emerge as a protagonist. Therefore, the research initially starts from the original concept of the slave established in Europe before the discovery of the "New Continent" and places the Ethiopian in America, specifically in Cartagena de Indias, as an object lacking needs and therefore memory. Thus, from the testimony of an active agent of the slave machine, three indispensable states were identified that questioned the humanity of the Ethiopian and transformed his condition from a creature to an evangelized slave. In this order of ideas, the slave as a silenced victim filtered in the Jesuit his voice that through the voice of Sandoval became known and became a crack, an echo that resonates, that tells his story as a perspective of otherness that poses an ethical commitment and demands justice.