In 1683 buccaneers sacked Veracruz, the leading port of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Historians of piracy know the raid well; Sierra Silva argues that what it meant for women's history and for the study of the African diaspora has never been properly situated, falling as it did in a period when Atlantic slavery was expanding.

The article follows women of African descent seized in the raid, some of them taken a second time, and carried to Saint-Domingue. Contraband proceedings, parish registers, slave law and eyewitness accounts are read closely and against one another.

Attention to displacement, and to how these women withstood it, produces a different sort of story. Some married French colonists; some became free mothers of children who belonged to Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur. Their lives, on this account, reached beyond the captivity that brought them there.