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• Bio: Yesenia Barragan is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers-New Brunswick and a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in the nineteenth century Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Yesenia is the author of the multi-award-winning Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge, 2021) and Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity (Zero, 2014). She is the Principal Investigator of “The Free Womb Project,” a multi-lingual digital collection of gradual emancipation laws across the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic world. Yesenia is currently completing a new book project titled A Country of Their Own: African Americans and the Promise of Antebellum Latin America, which examines Latin America as a beacon of freedom and immigration destination for free and fugitive African Americans at the height of slavery and white supremacy in the antebellum United States. She is a proud first-generation daughter of poor/working-class immigrants from Latin America and a longtime activist involved in social and racial justice movements.