Guillaume Candela (Cardiff) Recovering Hidden Histories: Reconstructing trajectories and experiences of racialised and enslaved individuals in colonial Paraguay
| Dates: | 7 October 2026 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Guillaume Candela |
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This talk is part of the seminar series of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Wed 7 Oct 2026, 5pm (UK time). This event will be in person, in Samuel Alexander Building, room A202. It can be followed online here: https://tinyurl.com/yzm5d7k2
Abstract: Slavery and forced labour were the principal motor of Spanish colonisation, and frontiers like colonial Paraguay were no exception. This paper reconstructs the lives of racialised individuals enslaved in colonial settings such as sugar, cotton, and mate plantations and domestic servitude. In colonial Paraguay, Indigenous women with lighter skin were valued at higher prices; African and Afro-Paraguayans were deported from Africa to Paraguay and enslaved throughout the territory. My recent work on cuñadazgo revises the term Cuñado, brother-in-law, long read as kinship, in fact named an enslaver or master. These cases unsettle the ultranationalist account of Paraguayan identity as born of an Indigenous mother and a Spanish father. Cross-sourcing the National and Religious Paraguayan archives helped me to uncover the experiences of children of African–Indigenous unions. My presentation will also argue that African people are at the origin of mestizaje in Paraguay. The talk closes with my recent experience of what happens when these histories return to descendant communities in Paraguay.
Guillaume Candela is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social & Spatial Sciences at Cardiff University and affiliated to the Centre de Recherches Sur Les Mondes Américains (EHESS, Paris). He holds a Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) Development Award for the project « Recovering Hidden Histories: Adapting Handwritten Text Recognition for Colonial Paraguayan Archives ». His research combines colonial Latin American History, Spanish palaeography with Digital Methods to study early colonial Paraguay, Indigenous, African and Afro-Paraguayan history, and the systems of slavery and forced labour that shaped the region between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has taught and conducted research at universities in six countries, and is the author of two books and of more than twenty articles and book chapters about colonial Paraguay, Indigenous and Afro-Paraguayan History, Slavery, and Decolonizing Archives published in Spanish, French and English in Paraguay, Chile, Colombia, Spain, France, Argentina, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. He was previously Senior Research Associate on the Native Bound-Unbound Archive of Indigenous Slavery Andrew Mellon Project (2022–2024) and CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation at the John Carter Brown Library (2019–2020). He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Sorbonne University.
Speaker
Guillaume Candela
Role: Honorary Research Fellow
Organisation: University of Cardiff
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A202
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
