Chirino, José Leonardo (?–1796)

José Leonardo Chirino (d. 10 December 1796), leader of the 1795 slave uprising in Coro, Venezuela. Chirino was a zambo, the freeborn son of a male slave and an Indian woman. He worked for a rich Coro trader named José Tellería, whom Chirino had accompanied on one of his commercial ventures to Haiti. While there, Chirino became aware of the early black and mulatto insurrectionary movements. In 1795, he and fellow conspirator José Caridad González, an African slave who had fled Curaçao for Coro, instigated an uprising of blacks in which they favored the establishment of a republic based on French law and proclaiming social equality and the abolition of privileges. Chirino was pursued, imprisoned, and condemned to death by hanging. He was executed in the central plaza of Caracas. His head was hung in a cage at the door of the city, and his severed hands were displayed in two towns in the area of Falcón.

See alsoSlave Revolts: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pedro Manuel Arcaya, Insurrección de los negros de la serranía de Coro (1949).

Additional Bibliography

Ramos Guédez, José Marcial. Bibliografía y hemerografía sobre la insurrección de José Leonardo Chirino en la serranía de Coro, 1795–1995. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1996.

Rodríguez, Luis Cipriano. José Leonardo Chirino y la insurrección de la Serranía de Coro de 1795: Insurrección de libertad o rebelión de independencia: Memoria del simposio realizado en Mérida los días 16 y 17 de noviembre de 1995. Mérida: Universidad de Los Andes: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1996.

Wright, Winthrop R. Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

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