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Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Matthew Restall
Matthew Restall*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania
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Extract

“I, Juan Garrido, black resident [de color negro vecino] of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king [a perpetuad rey], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives [repartimiento de indios] or anything else. As I am married and a resident of this city, where I have always lived; and also as I went with the Marqués del Valle to discover the islands which are in that part of the southern sea [the Pacific] where there was much hunger and privation; and also as I went to discover and pacify the islands of San Juan de Buriquén de Puerto Rico; and also as I went on the pacification and conquest of the island of Cuba with the adelantado Diego Velázquez; in all these ways for thirty years have I served and continue to serve Your Majesty—for these reasons stated above do I petition Your Mercy. And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow maize here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 57 , Issue 2: The African Experience in Early Spanish America , October 2000 , pp. 171 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2000

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Patrick Carroll, Jane Landers, and Kris Lane for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

1 The opening of Juan Garrido’s probanza (petitionary proof of merit) of September 27, 1538; Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), México 204, f. 1; there is also a facsimile of this first page, and a transcription of the whole document, in Alegría, Ricardo E., Juan Garrido, el Conquistador Negro en las Antillas, Florida, México y California, c. 1503–1540 (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y El Caribe, 1990), pp. 6, 127–38.Google Scholar

2 Gerhard, Peter, “A Black Conquistador in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 58:3 (August 1978), pp. 451–59;CrossRefGoogle Scholar partially reprinted in Hanke, Lewis and Rausch, Jane M., eds., People and Issues in Latin American History: The Colonial Experience (New York: Marcus Wiener, 1993), pp. 189–92,Google Scholar and in Davis, Darién J., ed., Slavery and Beyond: the African impact on Latin America and the Caribbean (Wilmington: SR Books, 1995), pp. 1–9.Google Scholar Gerhard was apparently not aware of Garrido’s probanza in the AGI. A note on terminology: here, as in the introduction to this special issue, I use “black” broadly to mean “of African descent” (as Spaniards and blacks in Spanish America often did); and “African” to refer to those known—or very likely—to have been born in Africa; the mixed-race terms “mulatto” and “pardo” me. used synonymously and where individuals are identified as such in the historical record.

3 As Voelz, Peter M. has observed, similarly in the context of armed Africans in the New World (Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas [New York: Garland, 1993], pp. 39),Google Scholar although note that for at least a century scholars have shown interest in pieces of the puzzle—see, for example, Wright, R. R., “Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers,” American Anthropologist 4:2 (1902), pp. 217–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Although scholars are increasingly aware of black roles and their conspicuous absence from the historical record, the current boom in the publication of English-language editions of Conquest accounts, which devote little or no attention to black participation, is likely to help perpetuate the problem—see, for example, Restall, Matthew, Maya Conquistador (Boston: Beacon, 1998);Google Scholar de León, Pedro de Cieza, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, Cook, Alexandra Parma and Cook, Noble David, eds. and trans. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998);Google Scholar Schwartz, Stuart, Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Bedford, 2000);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the several editions of Cortés ‘letters that are now in print.

5 A phrase I borrow from Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 269.Google Scholar The immediate involvement of Africans in Spanish endeavors in the Americas is rooted in the incorporation of free and enslaved blacks and mulattos into Iberian societies long before 1492; Pike, Ruth, “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47:3 (1967), pp. 344–59;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Phillips, William D., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1985), pp. 138–63;Google Scholar Klein, Herbert S., African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 1–20;Google Scholar Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 25–86;Google Scholar Landers, Jane, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

6 On royal licenses or asientos and the accompanying trade in the early-sixteenth century, see Bowser, Frederick P., The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 4–5;Google Scholar Palmer, Colin A., Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 7–13;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Beltrán, Gonzalo Aguirre, La Población Negra de México: Estudio etnohistórico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989 [1st ed., 1946]), pp. 17–19, 33-80;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, pp. 92–104;Google Scholar for examples of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century asientos de negros published in facsimile, see Marley, David, ed., Reales asientos y licencias para la introducción de esclavos negros a la América Española (1675-1789) (Windsor, Ontario: Rolston-Bain, 1985).Google Scholar

7 Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 92 Google Scholar (citing royal edicts in AGI, Indiferente General 418, 1, 2, fs. 98 and 104v).

8 Of these between 75,000 and 120,000 Africans were brought to Spanish America by 1600 (estimates vary). There is of course a vast literature on the slave trade but most of it focuses on North America and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, rather than Spanish America (of many examples a notable and recent one is Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ., 1998]).Google Scholar For a general, albeit detailed, study of the slave trade which devotes considerable attention to the Iberian world, see Thomas, Slave Trade; a briefer such survey is Klein, Herbert S., The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999);Google Scholar one that is more Africa-oriented is Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, 2nd ed.);CrossRefGoogle Scholar for general studies focused less on the trans-Atlantic trade and more on black slaves in the Iberian world, see Mellafe, Rolando, Negro Slavery in Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975),Google Scholar and Klein, African Slavery. For regional studies, see the various works cited below.

9 Thomas, , Slave Trade, pp. 87–91;Google Scholar Alegría, , Garrido, p. 17.Google Scholar

10 AGI, México, 204, fs.l, 2; Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, pp. 16–17;Google Scholar de Tudela, Juan Pérez, Las Armadas de Indias y los Orígenes de la Política de Colonización (1492–1505) (Madrid: Instituto Oviedo, 1956), pp. 222, 228–29;Google Scholar Wright, , “Negro Companions,” p. 219;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, pp. 91, 95.Google Scholar

11 Letter quoted in Alegría, , Garrido, p. 49.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Saignes, Miguel Acosta, Vida de los esclavos negros en Venezuela (Caracas: Hesperides, 1967), pp. 181–99;Google Scholar Meléndez, Carlos and Duncan, Quince, El Negro en Costa Rica (San José: Edi torial Costa Rica, 1972), pp. 24–43;Google Scholar Bowser, African Slave; Brockington, Lolita Gutiérrez, The Leverage of Labor: Managing the Cortés Haciendas in Tehuantepec, 1588–1688 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press., 1993);Google Scholar Bennett, Herman L., “Lovers, Family and Friends: The Formation of Afro-Mexico, 1580–1810” (PhD dissertation, Duke Univ., 1993);Google Scholar Lockhart, James, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 1994), pp. 193–224;Google Scholar Carroll, Patrick J., Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1991), pp. 61–68;Google Scholar Few, Martha, “Mujeres de Mal Vivir: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, 1650–1750” (PhD dissertation, Univ. of Arizona, 1997), pp. 36–69, passim;Google Scholar Herrera, Robinson, “The People of Santiago: Early Colonial Guatemala, 1538–1587” (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1997), pp. 254–318;Google Scholar Hanger, Kimberly S., Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997);CrossRefGoogle Scholar von Mentz, Brígida, Trabajo, sujeción y libertad en el centro de la Nueva España: esclavos, aprendices, campesinos y operarios manufactureros, siglos XVI a XVIII (Mexico City: CIESAS and Porrúa, 1999);Google Scholar Landers, Black Society.

13 Wright, , “Negro Companions,” pp. 221–22,Google Scholar citing official correspondence in documents collected in the nineteenth century by Gayangos and Bergenroth that I have not been able to locate.

14 Durán, Fray Diego, The History of the Indies of New Spain, Heyden, Doris, ed. (Norman, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994), pp. 510, 563.Google Scholar The granting of the role of patient zero to a black man strikes me as classic Spanish scapegoating. Eguía is likewise blamed for introducing smallpox—and measles to boot—in the sixteenth-century biography by de Gomara, Francisco López, Cortés, the Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), pp. 204–5, 238, 397.Google Scholar The story even appears in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (see Cook, Noble David, Born to Die: Disease and the New World Conquest, 1492–1650 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998], p. 68;Google Scholar Cook also cites Gómara). Other sources, including a relación of 1520 by the oidor in Santo Domingo, state that indigenous Cubans carried smallpox to Mexico on Narváez’s ships; see Cook, , Born to Die, pp. 63–65.Google Scholar

15 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 19,Google Scholar who gives no citation but his source is presumably Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas ’Historia general (III, X, 13, p. 488), cited in this context by Alegría, Garrido, p. 117, who suggests that Herrera may have mistakenly dubbed Juan Garrido with his master’s surname.

16 This is from the Spanish text—“venia algunos negros entre ellos, que tenia los cabellos crespos, y prietos”; the Nahuatl text ambiguously includes in its description of the hair of the invaders the remark that some had “tightly curled [hair]”—ocolochtic; Lockhart, James, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), pp. 80–81.Google Scholar

17 The early date of these visual sources is significant (the early-1560s for Durán; c.1572 for the codex), for a century later, in a visual representation of the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma that is far more detailed than any such painting from the sixteenth century, the token black servant is missing and the role of blacks apparently (or conveniently) forgotten: “The Encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma,” attributed to the Mexican Juan Correa, oil on canvas on a biombo (folding screen) of 8’2” by 19’8”, painted c. 1645-50 (reproduced in color in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries [New York: Metropol- itan Museum of Art, 1990], pp. 422–23).

18 Good examples, because they are detailed first-hand accounts of a series of conquests in which blacks are almost entirely absent (despite evidence to the contrary in other sources), are del Castillo, Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain (Penguin, 1963) (e.g. p. 55);Google Scholar Cortés, Hernán, Letters from Mexico, Pagden, Anthony, ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986);Google Scholar and Cieza de León, Discovery (examples cited below). Other accounts tend to be similarly dismissive; see, for example, Durán, , History, pp. 510, 563.Google Scholar Likewise the 1,385 probanzas of conquistadors and their relatives summarized in de Icaza, Francisco A., Diccionario autobiográfico de conquistadores y pobladores de Nueva España (Madrid: Biblioteca de Facsimiles Mexicanos, 1923,Google Scholar 2 vols.), ignore black roles save for a few passing comments (e.g. I, p. 129; see note 22 below).

19 Díaz, , Conquest, p. 55.Google Scholar

20 As observed by Gerhard, , “Black Conquistador,” p. 453.Google Scholar Díaz, quote in Conquest, p. 55 Google Scholar (which edition I have followed in my quotes here and above save for changing “Negro” to “black”). A similar rationale—that any nameless black coming to Mexico in 1519–21 must be Garrido—underlay the suggestion by another historian that Garrido arrived with Narváez; see Table 1 and Gerhard, , “Black Conquistador,” p. 453.Google Scholar

21 Gerhard, , “Black Conquistador,” p. 456.Google Scholar

22 “[D]os cavallos y un moço y dos negros”; her probanza, as in Icaza, Diccionario, I, p. 129.

23 On Garrido, see Table 2; on the Conquests in the west, see Warren, J. Benedict, The Conquest of Michoacán (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985);Google Scholar Krippner-Martínez, James, “The Politics of Conquest: An Interpretation of the Relación de Michoacán,” The Americas 47:2 (October 1990), pp. 177–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 AGI, México 2999, 2, f. 180 (also in Konetzke, Richard, ed., Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493—1810 [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Superiores, 1953], I, pp. 511–12).Google Scholar

25 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, pp. 19–20, 22.Google Scholar

26 Wright, , “Negro Companions,” p. 220.Google Scholar There were also African interpreters in Hispaniola’s Taino wars (Jane Landers, personal communication).

27 AGI, México 2999, 2, f. 180. An ecclesiastical report written around 1550 put the Spanish population of Mérida at 190 and the black population at 150 (British Library, Rare Manuscript Room, MS 17, 569: f. 181); within twenty years the latter had doubled, by one estimate ( Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, pp. 209–10).Google Scholar

28 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 20;Google Scholar Lutz, Christopher, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994), pp. 7, 83;Google Scholar Herrera, , “People of Santiago”, pp. 254, 261;Google Scholar “‘Porque no sabemos firmar’: Black Slaves in Early Guatemala,” The Americas, this issue.

29 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 20.Google Scholar

30 Cook, , Bom to Die, p. 159;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

31 de Vaca, Alvar Núñez Cabeza, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America (New York: Collier, 1961);Google Scholar Adorno, Rolena and Pautz, Patrick Charles, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narváez (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 3 vols., 2000), v. 1; v. 2, pp. 414–22.Google Scholar

32 Wright, , “Negro Companions,” pp. 221–28;Google Scholar Knaut, Andrew L., The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1995), p. 20.Google Scholar

33 Gerhard, , “Black Conquistador,” p. 458.Google Scholar

34 Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 103.Google Scholar

35 Menéndez de Avilés had the standard adelantado license for five hundred, but as is often the case with such licenses, the extent to which the license was filled is not apparent. Cook, , Born to Die, pp. 116–19;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 103;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, p. 12–15.Google Scholar

36 Meléndez, and Duncan, , Negro en Costa Rica, p. 24;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 95.Google Scholar

37 Meléndez, and Duncan, , Negro en Costa Rica, pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

38 Herrera, , “People of Santiago,” p. 254; “Black Slaves.”Google Scholar

39 de León, Cieza, Discovery, pp. 311, 333, 336.Google Scholar

40 Bowser, , African Slave, p. 5;Google Scholar Lockhart, James, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1972), p. 447;Google Scholar quoted phrase by Cook and Cook in de León, Cieza, Discovery, p. 111 n 12.Google Scholar

41 Lockhart, , Cajamarca, pp. 36, 96–102, 380, 421, 447.Google Scholar

42 de León, Cieza, Discovery, pp. 68,Google ScholarPubMed 109, 116, 305, 310, 311, 327, 332, 333, 336, 429, 430, 465 (Peru); 433, 434, 437, 438, 439, 442. The chronicle runs to 430 pages in English translation.

43 de León, Cieza, Discovery, pp. 242, 243, 290.Google Scholar

44 de León, Cieza, Discovery, pp. 310 (quote), 68, 109, 305, 465.Google Scholar

45 Bowser, , African Slave, p. 5.Google Scholar

46 Lockhart, , Spanish Peru, p. 193.Google Scholar

47 Bowser, , African Slave, p. 7;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 103;Google Scholar Himmerich, Robert y Valencia, , “The 1536 Siege of Cuzco: An Analysis of Inca and Spanish Warfare,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7:4 (Fall 1998), pp. 387–418.Google Scholar

48 Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

49 Bowser, , African Slave, p. 11.Google Scholar

50 Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

51 de Espinosa, Antonio Vázquez, Compendium and Description of the West Indies (c.1620), trans. Clark, Charles Upson (Washington: Smithsonian, 1942), pp. 743–44;Google Scholar Sater, William F. , “The Black Experience in Chile,” in Toplin, Robert Brent, ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), p. 16–17.Google Scholar

52 The Introduction by Cook and Cook in de León, Cieza, Discovery, p. 8;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, pp. 96, 102;Google Scholar Avellaneda, José Ignacio, The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995), p. 63–66.Google Scholar

53 de Oviedo, José y Baños, , Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela [1723] (Caracas, 1967; facsimile reprint of 1824 edition), p. 347, 390, 394, 438–39;Google Scholar The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela, trans. Varner, Jeannette Johnson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 152, 171, 173, 193.Google Scholar

54 Juan Valiente died a slave, technically speaking, but not through want of trying to buy his manumission papers or through efforts by his owner to sell him his freedom; the barriers were essentially logistical, and for most of his last two decades of life Valiente seems to have acted and been treated as a free man (see Table 4).

55 Lockhart, , Cajamarca, p. 26.Google Scholar

56 Avellaneda, , Conquerors of the New Kingdom, p. 62.Google Scholar

57 Boyd-Bowman, Peter, “Negro Slaves in Early Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 26:2, (October 1969), p. 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Baptism books in the Archivo Histórico de la Diócesis de Campeche, Campeche (hereafter AHDC), libros 1–38, 146–53, 161–73, 201–15; and in the Archivo del Arzobispado de Yucatán, Mérida (hereafter AAY), primarily the libros de bautismos from María parish, Jesús; Hunt, Marta Espejo-Ponce, “Colonial Yucatan: Town and Region in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD dissertation, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1974), p. 530;Google Scholar Boyd-Bowman, , “Negro Slaves,” p. 138–50;Google Scholar Lockhart, , Spanish Peru, pp. 193–224;Google Scholar Mellafe, Rolando, La introducción de la esclavitud negra en Chile: Tráfico y rutas (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1984, 2nd ed.);Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 116–23,Google Scholar Appendix 9.

59 Gerhard, , “Black Conquistador,” pp. 457–58;Google Scholar AGI, México 2999, 2, f. 180; Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 22.Google Scholar

60 My gloss of the Spanish original quoted in Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 20.Google Scholar Cerrato is best known as the 1548–55 president of the Audiencia of Guatemala (see Lutz, Santiago, 16–18 and his references). Another way to profit from the mainland demand for slaves was to steal them in Spain and sell them in Mexico—as one case example shows ( Herrera, , “People of Santiago,” pp. 261–62).Google Scholar

61 Lockhart, , Cajamarca, p. 380.Google Scholar

62 Lockhart, , Cajamarca, p. 384;Google Scholar Lane, Kris, “Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayán,” The Americas, this issue, p. 231.Google Scholar

63 Cook and Cook in de León, Cieza, Discovery, p. 248;Google Scholar Lockhart, , Cajamarca, pp. 380–84;Google Scholar Lane, “Captivity,” this issue.

64 AGI, México 2999, 2, f. 180; see the sources to Table 2.

65 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, p. 19.Google Scholar

66 On the occupations of blacks in Spanish America, enslaved and free, during the colonial period, see Boyd-Bowman, , “Slaves,” p. 146;Google Scholar Mellafe, , Negro Slavery, pp. 85–99;Google Scholar Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 88–146;Google Scholar Lockhart, , Spanish Peru, pp. 204–22;Google Scholar Repetto, Francisco Fernández and Sierra, Genny Negroe, Una población perdida en la memoria: los negros de Yucatán (Mérida: Univ. Autónoma de Yucatán, 1995), pp. 49–57;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 87–106;Google Scholar also see the other four articles that follow in this issue. Without systematically surveying this literature, my impression from it, combined with a preliminary reading of archival items relating to Yucatan, is that while Spanish American blacks were involved in a vast variety of economic activities, they were concentrated in six areas: industries related to transportation, such as shipping and the mule-train business; mining; farming and rural enterprise, especially cattle ranching and animal husbandry; service-industry artisanry, especially tailoring and shoemaking; domestic service; and the militia (as discussed below).

67 Herrera, , “People of Santiago,” p. 254;Google Scholar “Black Slaves,” this issue.

68 AGI, México 2999, 2, f. 180.

69 Sater, , “Black Experience,” p .17.Google Scholar

70 Bowser, , African Slave, p. 7;Google Scholar Thomas, , Slave Trade, p. 103.Google Scholar

71 According to Cieza de León’s sixteenth-century account, during a battle near the coast south of Panama, “Indians advanced against [Almagro], and if it were not for a black slave, they would have killed him” (Discovery, p. 68). Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 3–4,Google Scholar mentions the incident but does not make specific his source. On the Chilean examples, see Sater, , “Black Experience”, p. 16.Google Scholar

72 Rout, Leslie B. Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 13–17;Google Scholar Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 15–18, 23–43;Google Scholar Voelz, , Slave and Soldier, p.11.Google Scholar

73 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, pp. 180–94;Google Scholar Cowley, Malcolm and Mannix, Daniel P., “Middle Passages,” American Heritage 13:2 (February 1962);Google Scholar Thompson, Vincent Bakeptu, The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas, 1441–1900 (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 85–127;Google Scholar Voelz, , Slave and Soldier, pp. 289–301;Google Scholar Thornton, , Africa and Africans, pp. 98–116.Google Scholar

74 Beltrán, Aguirre, Población Negra, pp. 113, 160;Google Scholar Bowser, , African Slave, p. 148;Google Scholar Diouf, , Servants of Allah, pp. 145–49 (quote on p. 146).Google Scholar

75 “Destos son los Gilosos muy guerreros / Con vana presuncion de caballeros”; Diouf, , Servants of Allah, p. 148, translation hers.Google Scholar

76 de Espinosa, Vásquez, Compendium, pp. 743–44.Google Scholar

77 Although there is some indication that Africans received encomiendas in early Hispaniola (Lynne Guitar, personal communication), so it is possible that there were some others at very early conquest stages or in fringe regions.

78 The acquisition of traza plots by blacks was a phenomenon restricted to immediate post-Conquest years or to frontier regions where aspects of Conquest society lingered; hence the similar granting of an intra-traza plot to a freed black, Tomé Vásquez, in Santiago (Chile) in 1559 (Wright, “Negro Companions,” p. 220).

79 See sources to Table 3; on Spanish intentions, as asserted here, see the letters in Lockhart, James and Otte, Enrique, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies: The Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).Google Scholar

80 Lockhart, , Cajamarca, p. 51.Google Scholar

81 Jones, Grant D., The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 37 (citing the account by Bernal Díaz del Castillo; see Díaz, Conquest).Google Scholar

82 Notarial and parish records from Yucatan indicate that in the last century and a half of colonial rule black slaves were born either in Africa or in the British Empire, typically Belize or Jamaica, while free blacks and mulattos tended to be born in Yucatan or in Spanish or British Caribbean colonies (AAY; AHDC; Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, Mérida [hereafter AGE Y]; Archivo Notarial del Estado de Yucatán, Mérida; various sources in AGI and in Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City [hereafter AGN]; my book manuscript-in-progress on Black Yucatan). The term “pardo” was used variously in Spanish America; most commonly it was a synonym for Spanish-African “mulatto,” as was the Yucatec case, but it could also refer to someone of “Indian”-African descent.

83 Jones, , Conquest, pp. 144, 229, 259, 260, 267, 467.Google Scholar

84 Ojeda, Jorge Victoria, Mérida de Yucatán de las Indias: Piratería y estrategia defensiva (Mérida, Yuc: Ayuntamiento de Mérida, 1995);Google Scholar Landers, Jane, “Africans in the Spanish Colonies,” Historical Archaeology 31:1 (1997), pp. 89–90;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lane, Kris E., Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 49–53.Google Scholar

85 Ojeda, Victoria, Mérida, pp. 49–53;Google Scholar Lane, , Pillaging the Empire, pp. 69, 107, 126, 167;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 22–28;Google Scholar documents displayed in the exhibit on colonial defense in Campeche’s Puerta de la Tierra museum. On the 1673 estimate: Webre, Stephen, “Las compañías de milicia y la defensa del istmo centroamericano en el siglo XVII: el alistamiento general de 1673,” in Mesoamérica 14 (1987);Google Scholar this list clearly records 1,715 black militiamen, with ambiguities of racial classification suggesting that as many as 3,000 of the militia troops (in a region stretching from Chiapas to Costa Rica) were of some African descent (pp. 518, 525–29).

86 Klein, Herbert S., “The Free Colored Militia of Cuba, 1568–1868,” Caribbean Studies 6:2 (1966), pp. 17–27;Google Scholar Kuethe, Allan J., “The Status of the Free Pardo in the Disciplined Militia of New Granada,” Journal of Negro History 56:2 (April 1971), pp. 105–17;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Campbell, Leon G., “The Changing Racial and Administrative Structure of the Peruvian Military under the Late Bourbons,” The Americas 32 (1975), pp. 117–35;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Archer, Christon, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1977);Google Scholar Sánchez, Joseph P., “African Freedmen and the Fuero Militar. A Historical Overview of Pardo and Moreno Militiamen in the Late Spanish Empire,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 3:2 (1994), pp. 165–84;Google Scholar Hanger, , Bounded Lives, pp. 109–35;Google Scholar Vinson, Ben III, “Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico” (PhD dissertation, Columbia Univ., 1998), pp. 13–90;Google Scholar “Race and Badge: Free-Colored Soldiers in the Colonial Mexican Militia,” The Americas 56:4 (April 2000), pp. 471–96.

87 Vinson, , “Bearing Arms,” pp. 466, 468, 470;Google Scholar “Race and Badge,” pp. 490–95; Rubio Mañé, J. Ignacio, Archivo de la Historia de Yucatán, Campeche, y Tabasco (Mexico City, 1942, 2 vols.), I, pp. 207–47;Google Scholar AGN, Reales Cedulas (Originales) 164, 245/f.392 (edict of 1796 on expanding Yucatan’s pardo militias). For studies of the parallel use of black forces by the British in the Caribbean, see Buckley, Roger Norman, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979);Google Scholar and Voelz, Slave and Soldier.

88 Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 7, 103, 150–54, 176–78, 282–87;Google Scholar Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 60–64;Google Scholar Bateman, Rebecca B., “Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37:1 (Winter 1990), pp. 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (reprinted in Davis, , Slavery and Beyond, pp. 29–54);Google Scholar Horn, Rebecca, Postconquest Coyoacan: Nahua-Spanish Relations in Central Mexico, 1519–1650 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 78–79, 184, 205;Google Scholar my unpublished book manuscript, cited here as Black Yucatan, includes detailed discussion of black-Maya relations, the most important archival sources of which include AGEY, Colonial, Criminal, 1; 2; and 3; AGI, México, 3042; AGN, Inquisición, 125, 69; 1131,2; 1164; 1187, 2; and the marriage records in AAY and AHDC. Also relevant is Forbes, Jack D., Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-black Peoples (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993).Google Scholar I am currently compiling an edited volume on African-native American relations in colonial Latin America, to be published in a couple of years in the University of New Mexico Press Diálogos series.

89 Wright, , “Negro Companions,” p. 221;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

90 Landers, , “Africans,” p. 85;Google Scholar personal communication; Deive, Carlos Esteban, La Española y la esclavitud del indio (Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, 1995).Google Scholar

91 Davidson, David M., “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46:1 (February 1966), p. 243;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bowser, , African Slave, p. 148;Google Scholar Israel, J. I., Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 67.Google Scholar

92 Love, Edgar F., “Negro Resistance to Spanish Rule in Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Negro History 52:2 (April 1967), pp. 98–99;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Israel, , Race, Class, pp. 67–75;Google Scholar Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 138–40.Google Scholar

93 Landers, , “Africans,” p. 89.Google Scholar

94 AGI, México 360; AGN, Reales Cedulas (Originales) 2, 1, 23/f.40 (source of quote); this second Diego “el Mulato” may have been the same individual as the first, as Landers (“Africans,” p. 89) and Lane (Pillaging the Empire, p. 71) suggest.

95 Lane, , Pillaging the Empire, p. 123.Google Scholar

96 Lane, , Pillaging the Empire, pp. 71, 123, 200.Google Scholar

97 Jones, Grant D., Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 226–27.Google Scholar

98 Israel, , Race, Class, pp. 68–69;Google Scholar Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 128–31;Google Scholar Landers, , “Africans,” p. 86.Google Scholar

99 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control”; Love, “Negro Resistance”; Borrego Pla, María del Carmen, Palenques de Negros en Cartagena de Indias a Fines del Siglo XVII (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1973);Google Scholar Carroll, Patrick J., “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave Community: 1735–1827,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19:4 (October 1977), pp. 488–505;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Price, Richard, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979, 2nd ed. rev.);Google Scholar Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 187–221;Google Scholar Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 119–44;Google Scholar Arrom, José and García Arévalo, Manuel A., Cimarrón (Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, 1986);Google Scholar Klein, , African Slavery, pp. 196–208;Google Scholar Richard, and Price, Sally, eds., Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992);Google Scholar Diouf, , Servants of Allah, pp. 145–50;Google Scholar Landers, , Black Society, pp. 13–16, 79–80.Google Scholar

100 Oviedo, y Baños, , Historia, pp. 214–19,Google Scholar 278 (on Bayano, who was eventually captured by the conquistador Pedro de Ursúa in 1560 and died shortly afterwards as a prisoner in Seville; Oviedo y Baños, Conquest, p. 122); Israel, , Race, Class, p. 69;Google Scholar Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 128–30;Google Scholar Diouf, , Servants of Allah, p. 147.Google Scholar

101 Oviedo, y Baños, , Historia, pp. 214–19;Google Scholar Conquest, pp. 96–98. Compare the creation of King Miguel’s court with a similar creation under a black King Martín in Mexico City in 1608; Palmer, , Slaves, pp. 135–36.Google Scholar

102 Voelz, , Slave and Soldier, pp. 331–52Google Scholar lists and cites over twenty examples of armed blacks used against escaped slaves and maroons in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish America (with dozens of additional examples from the later period, mostly from non-Spanish colonies); he also lists examples of black troops used against black rebels and of blacks as soldiers on opposing sides of conflict (mostly late colonial and mostly from non-Spanish colonies in the Americas). The slave-hunting organizations in which blacks may have been majority participants by late colonial times were called rancheadores in Cuba, buscadores in Santo Domingo, and cuadrilleros in Peru (ibid., p. 337; Bowser, , African Slave, pp. 105–6, 199–212).Google Scholar See Carroll, , “Mandinga,” pp. 499–503 for a Mexican example.Google Scholar

103 Letter quoted in Palmer, , Slaves, p. 129.Google Scholar

104 Vinson, , “Race and Badge” (quoted phrase, p. 473); “Bearing Arms.”Google Scholar

105 For a discussion of this encounter and its results, see Carroll, Patrick J., “Los mexicanos negros, el mestizaje y los fundamentos olvidados de la ‘raza cósmica’: una perspectiva regional,” Historia Mexicana 44:3 (1995), pp. 403–38 (tables in 45:1).Google Scholar The phenomenon of imitation resulting in the creation not of a copy but something new, which I have tried to present in straightforward terms here, is also discussed in the language of what Taussig, Michael calls Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar