"I am your servant, not your slave." Jane Landers was five or six years old when she heard that phrase. It was said to her by Inés, her Afro-Dominican caregiver, while giving her a bath in the diplomatic house in Santo Domingo, where Landers' father served as a U.S. naval officer. The girl did not understand the word, but she grasped the tone. Another night, scared by a book, she went to climb into Inés' bed. "And aren't you afraid that the color will imprint on you?," she said. Landers remembers those two phrases as the moment when race ceased to be a concept and became an experience. Decades later, when she returned to the island and searched for her to thank her, her mother did not remember Inés' last name. "That was diplomacy," Landers says with a resigned smile. "Employees moved from one family to another."
The girl from Santo Domingo became the historian who has changed what we know about Africans in Spanish America. Jane Landers (Pittsburgh, 1947), Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Guggenheim fellow, and member of the International Scientific Committee of UNESCO for the Routes of Enslaved Peoples, directs the world's largest digital archive on slave societies: the Slave Societies Digital Archive, which houses nearly 780,000 images of documents, some from the 16th century, from Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Angola, Cape Verde, and Spanish Florida.
We meet her in Madrid, where she has traveled to participate in the III Conference Hispanoamerica, a shared future, organized by the Rafael del Pino Foundation, López-li Films, and the United by History Foundation on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States and the premiere of We the Hispanics, the documentary by José Luis López-Linares in which Landers participates as an expert. The title of her presentation attests to a question to be resolved: Why did Africans defend Spanish America against British colonization?
But before taking the stage, Landers sits down with us and unfolds, with the slow cadence of someone who has been explaining the same thing for 40 years to people hearing it for the first time, the story that underpins her entire career: that of the first underground railroad in the Americas, which did not go north like the famous one in the Civil War, but south.
It all began, as so often in the history of science, by accident. Landers had entered the University of Florida to do a Ph.D. on Brazil. Previously, she worked as a social worker in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. "I stumbled upon those documents by chance for a course," she recalls. "They documented cases of slaves fleeing during the American Revolution to Spanish Florida." The question she asked herself then ended up shaping her entire work: "Why? Where does that policy of allowing slaves in and granting them freedom, turning the territory into a sanctuary, begin?."
She traced back to the 17th century and found a clandestine migratory flow that had been operating for decades. Since at least 1687, slaves from the British plantations in Carolina were fleeing to Spanish Florida, sometimes with the help of the Yamasee and Creek tribes. The Spanish governors received them and consulted the king on what to do with them. In 1693, Charles II issued a royal decree granting freedom to all fugitives from Protestant colonies who converted to Catholicism. A century before the underground railroad that would take slaves from the south to the north, this clandestine route to the south, to Catholic Florida, already existed.
In 1738, Governor Manuel de Montiano founded a settlement for these fugitives called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, about three kilometers north of St. Augustine. The first legally constituted town of free black people in what is now the United States. Landers discovered it in the archives. The archaeologist Kathleen Deagan, her teacher and collaborator, physically located it with the help of NASA images. In May 2025, after four decades of research, the fort's reconstruction was inaugurated. "Seeing it impressed me a lot," admits Landers. "Documents are usually very declarative and lack the flavor of the moment. Archaeology and art allow us to expand history."
The obvious question is why Spain did this. Landers' answer combines medieval law, Catholic theology, and military calculation. "The English considered blacks as property," she explains. "For them, they had no humanity, no rights, no families; they were pure merchandise and could be killed almost without punishment. The Spanish had a different medieval-based system." This system was based on the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Wise, the 13th-century legal code that regulated slavery throughout the Spanish American empire. Under the Roman law that the Partidas collected, anyone could be enslaved for crimes, debts, or capture in a just war.
"I have found cases of enslaved Spaniards, Germans, and even Gypsies," Landers points out. But slavery was a legal, mutable condition and not racial: one could enter it for various reasons and also exit. "Your owner could grant you freedom, the State could grant it to you, and you could even buy it by working on free days or Catholic holidays, thanks to a Roman legal concept called peculium."
Additionally, the Catholic Church required all slaves to be baptized, incorporating them into the Christian community and generating parish records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. These records are now the basis of Landers' archive. "The Protestants, until the late 18th century, did not initiate religious contact with slaves," she observes. It is the Catholic records that allow the reconstruction of individual lives that would otherwise have been lost.
Landers acknowledges the objection before it is raised. "I always say that the system was more fluid, but Spain had a clear political and military motivation for opening the door to slaves. There was a strategic utility." Who had more reasons to fight fiercely against the English than the slaves fleeing from them? They were motivated like few others. "In a way, Spain was acquiring soldiers to defend its territories."
The embodiment of this thesis has a name: Francisco Menéndez, an African probably born in the Gambia region around 1700, enslaved at a young age and taken to Carolina, who escaped to Florida during the Yamasee War (1715-17). The documents that Landers has recovered throughout almost her entire career show a man who spoke four languages, was appointed captain of the black militia of St. Augustine, led the counterattack in the battle of Bloody Mose in 1740 (where 75 British soldiers died), was captured, sold as a slave in the Bahamas, regained freedom, returned to Mosé, and in 1763, when England took control of Florida, evacuated his entire community to Cuba. He entered and exited slavery several times. He wrote to the king of Spain in Spanish claiming recognition for his military services.
"I have followed him documentarily for almost my entire career," Landers says. "I believe he returned to Havana, and I am following his trail there." We ask her if she thinks Menéndez would recognize himself in what she has written about him. "Yes, I do. I know everything about his family, his wife, his children, and his lands." She says this with the certainty of someone who has spent more time with an 18th-century dead man than with many living in the 21st century. "It's a movie-like story," she concludes.
The Slave Societies Digital Archive was founded in 2003 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and now contains documents from 109 archives in nine countries. The fieldwork to build it has taken Landers and his teams of Vanderbilt students to church basements in Havana, Mompox, Quibdó, Niterói, Cape Verde, and Benin. On their last mission to Mompox, in March 2025, they digitized 4,358 pages of baptismal, marriage, and death records.
Conditions are often precarious. "A student once joked in Cuba, calling us Guerrilla Preservation," Landers laughs, "because we were working like guerrillas under difficult conditions." In Quibdó, in the Chocó region of Colombia, their equipment was stolen. Shortly after they left, a battle erupted between the army and the FARC in the surrounding jungle.
A recent discovery particularly moved her. "In Niterói, just outside Rio de Janeiro, we found documents from a large Franciscan and Dominican mission called Santo Antônio de Sá. The mission was a famous archaeological site in ruins, but no one in all of Brazil knew that the documentary records of that place still existed. It turned out that a friar had kept them, preserved them, and brought them to Rio. Rescuing that was wonderful."
Now, artificial intelligence is accelerating the transcription of paleographic documents that previously required years of specialized training. But Landers puts limits on her enthusiasm: "If I don't take my team to the physical archives to make the copies, there's nothing the AI can read. The fieldwork is vital."
Landers is 79 years old. The question of the institutional legacy has already been answered: in 2024, the Vanderbilt Library gave the archive a permanent home and hired Daniel Genkins, a former doctoral student of hers, as digital curator. "Now I see the future with optimism." We host the documents free of charge so that anyone in the world can consult them."
And what is the lesson for Spain, which this year celebrates the 250th anniversary of American independence with renewed interest in its legacy in the Americas? Landers avoids a celebratory tone, but offers a fact worth remembering: "When analyzing the Spanish system historically, one can see that it offered more guarantees than the Anglo-Saxon one. If someone from the lower classes suffered abuse, they had a legal voice. They could go to a clergyman or a governor to give their official testimony, and if they didn't speak the language, an interpreter was provided." A framework of rights that the English colonies would take generations to conceive.
Inés, the caretaker who distinguished between servant and slave, probably didn't know this. But the distinction she taught a girl in Santo Domingo had a long history.