Patchwork Freedoms study the enslaved people’s path to freedom in Santiago de Cuba's region using the legal framework of the area. The Afro-descendant peasants reshaped their current colonial systems through local customs and manumission practices. It tells the peasants’ story as a century of localism and custom, not just liberalism and mobility.

While previous findings have shown popular racial ideologies were regionally specific, Chira shows the ideologies were distinct because they were rooted in the local legal customs of manumission.

Using Santiago as a case study has led Chira to conclude that local customs matter a great deal in cases where the larger legal law was unclear. Looking at Santiago illuminates black freedom and black experiences beyond Cuba’s plantations and port cities.

Focusing on the making of communities through kinship, godparents, labour, and economic exchanges, the text shows how deeply community mattered for customs and manumission. The custom-based freedom, as stated by Chira, is contextual, localized, variable, and subjective as it was built out of positive law and community. Through the examples of legal cases, it is clear there are legal meanings in the mundane.

Breaking her argument down into six chapters, Chira covers the historical origins of the free population of colour in Santiago; marronage and peasantry of colour’s anti-plantation politics; how people of colour inserted themselves into custom-based politics of social control; hard questions enslaved and enslavers brought to their local courts; hierarchies among people of colour that resulted from manumission; and politics of custom in the broader struggle for liberal emancipation in Cuba.

The correlations made in the text show the civil status and specific behaviour associated with freedom informed colour status. Customs influenced the free population's ability to gain power and certain social status.

I enjoyed Chira’s note at the beginning of the text on language and region. Her explanation and a reminder of using “enslavement” instead of “slavery” to show that slavery was an active process is essential for the reader. Chira’s note in the introduction also impressed me. By explaining that legal testimonies of enslaved people do not free us from the epistemological violence and erasure of voices of enslaved people that archives of slavery were designed to inflict. She is correct to say that we cannot know and will never know the enslaved people’s full subjectivities by reading these records. It is an important reminder.