The rest of the document follows the standard formula: place, date, seller’s name, buyer’s name. Then came details about the enslaved. Name, age, origin, health, and terms of purchase. Finally, the contract ended with the names of witnesses and the scribe’s name and signatures.

On their own, the names of the enslaved often tell the reader little. With few exceptions they are simply Iberian first names like Manuel, Fernando, Antonio, Gaspar, etc. They often did not have surnames. In the featured document, Juan is not given a surname and is simply referred to as casta malabar, a convenient reference to South Asian descent that excluded him from any rights as the King’s indio vassal.⁵ He is also said to have been a criollo of the household of Don Antonio Bolaca, another resident of their town. The word criollo here did not signal Spanish descent as it did during the nineteenth century. Instead, it referred simply to local birth despite foreign origins and regularly showed up in formulations such as negro criollo alongside assertions of enslavement in colonial documentation on both sides of the Pacific.⁶ In the same way, Pedro Murillo Velarde’s description of Manila as a Jerusalem of many nations listed “Ilocos, Pangasinanes, and Cagayanes, [and] there are criollos or morenos who are negros with curly hair, born in that land, [and] there are many cafres, and other negros of Angola, Congo, and of Africa.”⁷ That said, because the term criollo’s point of reference in this exhibit’s featured deed of sale may have been the house of Don Antonio Bolaca, its use may additionally have been a way to signal the legitimacy of Juan’s enslavement by communicating that he had been born into slavery in the same town and, moreover, in the space of an indigenous elite’s home. And thus, he did not need the additional paperwork proving his purchase from Indian Ocean traders despite his alleged South Asian ancestry.

In many ways, Juan’s paper personage rested not on himself, but on the slave owning class who served as buyers, sellers, and witnesses of the transaction happening around him. These elite individuals, for example, had surnames. Even the section on Juan’s health that promises to tell the modern reader about his well-being actually says very little. Without exception, deeds of sale containing this section stated that there were no defects detected. And in one case, a deed of sale went on to say that if no defects were declared within three months, then the buyer forfeited any opportunity to contest the sale. This section thus seems to have been meant more to free the slaveowner of liability than to describe the enslaved’s condition.

Typically, buyers’ deeds of sale are interesting when they appear in succession, providing historians intermittent snippets into the biographies of the enslaved. At the same time, with successive contracts, we are able to look into commercial practices such as auctions and catch a glimpse into patterns of buying and selling. These practices come together too to help the modern reader map the sites of enslavement’s repeated rearticulation: sites of capture; of childbirth; of homes, fortresses, auctions, and the offices of notaries. In other words, they identify different colonial venues wherein status was created or reproduced in paper with the cumulative effect of affixing one’s status as property. Misfiled, Juan’s deed of sale was cut adrift from this trajectory. All we know is on the second Sunday of Lent 1673, in the office of a colonial notary, Juan transferred from the succession of indigenous men who had claimed his ownership since his birth, into the hands of the Spanish priest of the parish in which he had grown up.