Negrito a lo que tu amo te manda (Little black boy, [always] obey your master). As a child, Jacinto Ventura de Molina learned this maxim from his mother. Several decades later, he recalled it as the moral compass that guided his extraordinary career. Jacinto grew up as a free person of color in the household of Joseph de Molina, a Spanish officer assigned to the frontiers of the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in today’s Uruguay. Both of his parents were Africans and served in de Molina’s household, his father as a slave and his mother as a freedwoman. After the simultaneous deaths of his father and his patron in 1782, Jacinto moved to Buenos Aires, where he set up shop as a cobbler. In 1799, Jacinto, already married to a freedwoman, moved to Montevideo, where he established his definitive residence. During the revolution of independence, Molina embraced...

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