Exploring the emergence of African slavery in the Kingdom of Quito, this dissertation argues that Quito was not only typical of large Spanish American slave societies, was in many respects the quintessential Spanish American slave society. Similar to New Spain and Peru, in Quito, African slavery emerged first within the urban center of Quito, and extended almost immediately to the kingdom’s rural periphery. A region dominated by a strong indigenous presence, the areas of modern-day Ecuador and southern Colombia were thought, until now, not to possess significant numbers of African-descended slave laborers. Nevertheless, the region was marked by slavery and possessed three principal slaveholding regions – Popayán, the north-central highlands, and the district of Guayaquil. Similar to other Spanish American slave societies, throughout Quito, Afro-Creole slave laborers commingled always with diverse racial and ethnic pools of coerced laborers. Although African slavery represented only one of several ways Spaniards chose to divide labor in the kingdom, enslaved Africans and their Afro-Creole descendants formed the critical quadrant of Quito’s work sector. Without them Spaniards would not have been able exploit the region’s natural resources on the scale witnessed over the course of the colonial era, as Andeans represented a highly visible, yet unstable labor source. Elites employed slave laborers as bodyguards, auxiliaries in conquest campaigns, and as a mobile supplemental labor force when Andeans proved unavailable due to death, migration, and resistance. Nevertheless, the role of the enslaved was not always auxiliary. From the earliest moments of the colony’s history, enslaved rebels and fugitives helped to order and reorder the colonial regime. Through flight, rebellion, and violent confrontation, the enslaved forced slaveholders into an array of arrangements, creating, at times, a context of fear that even judicial officials could not afford to ignore. The crown and its American surrogates responded to early colonial anxieties over slave flight and rebellion through a series of pragmatic ordinances and control measures, meeting out harsh punishments to incorrigible rebels and fugitives while maintaining a juridical space for slave laborers who complied with social norms and comported themselves as subjects of the Spanish King. Intended as a first attempt at providing the field with a comprehensive analysis slavery and slave life in the North Andes, this work looks comparatively at the realities of bondage in two of Quito’s three principal slaveholding regions – Popayán and Quito, while exploring Quito’s unique context for African and Afro-Creole identity formation. Unlike late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Mexico City, eighteenth-century Louisiana, and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina, all of which held ethnically diverse slave populations, Quito’s enslaved population did not feature sizable clusters of any one or two African ethnic groups that might have allowed for endogamous unions or the formation of communities based upon ethnic or socio-linguistic affinities. Consequently, the socio-cultural matrix was always polyethnic and polycultural. Thus, African-descended people in Quito engaged in at least two inter-related, ethnogenic processes occurring simultaneously. There, formerly discrete peoples from the interior of the Upper Guinea Coast, the Lower Guinea and West Central Africa were not only brought into contact with others from within their “culture zones,” but were also connected to individuals who fell outside of their culture zones. Arrival in the North Andes, then, precipitated two additional processes that ran concurrently with the previous two – intermarriage with Andeans and Afro-criollos (people of African descent born within the empire, both in Iberia and the Americas), and unions with the offspring of those unions and with Europeans; that is, the spawning and engagement of the so-called “castas” (e.g., pardos, mulattos, zambos, mestizos, morenos, etc). Ultimately, this study suggests that returning to the world that work, geography, and demography made is not only necessary, but also essential to understanding identity formation within the African Diaspora. Engaging those seemingly marginal Spanish American slave societies is fundamental to a greater understanding of black life and the formation of creole consciousness throughout the Americas.