"Servile Freedom": Juridical Uncertainty and Legal Creativity on the Road to Emancipation (1789-1824)

By studying the life of Jose Maria Martinez and his "servile freedom" concept, this ar-ticle presents a variation on the theme of the legal uncertainty of slavery in freedom strategies. It posits that slavery was never clearly defined from a juridical standpoint, arguing that slaves recognized this ambiguity when explaining how and why they could achieve emancipation. Selectively using the laws of Castile, of the Indies, and ofthe revolutionarystates, some slaveselaborated languages accepted in the judicial forum to tell that their servile personal status came from a relationship of power, ra-therthan from a coherent doctrine. The presence of this legal creativity, as a strategy to achieve freedom, suggests that the judicial sphere was an arena for the politics of emancipation.