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Black Belizeans and Fugitive Mayas: Interracial Encounters on the Edge of Empire, 1750–1803

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Mark W. Lentz
Mark W. Lentz*
Affiliation:
Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah
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Extract

In 1796, the commander of die Guatemalan presidio of Peten, Jose de Galvez, together with its leading prelate and the caciques of the nearby pueblos of San Andres and San Jose, registered a formal complaint: an increasing number of runaway black slaves from Belize taking refuge there had been marrying Maya women in their villages. The officials objected to these unions, stating that they did not want “their blood mixed with these newly Christian blacks” and alleged that the asylum seekers took Maya brides in thinly disguised attempts to exploit native female labor. The cacique of San Andres, don Raimundo Chata, backed by the leading civil and ecclesiastical authorities in a rare moment of unity, advocated the removal of the escaped slaves to a site set aside for blacks on the other side of Lake Peten (see map in Figure 1). The result of this proposed policy of segregation was the creation of a “new pueblo for blacks converted to the faith.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , April 2014 , pp. 645 - 675
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Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2014

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References

The author would like to thank Susan Schroeder for her patience, sound advice, and meticulous editing. Mana Dolores de Miguel Jiménez and David Wheat deserve my gratitude for their assistance in making archival materials accessible. Matthew Restali made highly useful suggestions and generously shared two articles in press. Jon Lentz gave the final draft a much appreciated final edit. Insightful comments and suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers of The Americas helped to sharpen the focus of this article. Short-term research fellowships from the Newberry Library and the Harvard University International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World provided funding and access to archival materials in Chicago and Seville, Spain. A research stay at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History provided time for putting the final touches on this article.

1. Testimonio del Expediente del común del Peten, Archivo General de las Indias [hereafter AGI], Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 2, 1800, fol. 4v. The original text reads: “Estos negros han acostumbrado casarse con Yndias de los Pueblos y los Casiques y Justicias repugnan estos casamientos diciendo no quieren interpolar su sangre con la de los Negros recien christianos y venidos de Walis.”

2. Testimonio del Expediente del común del Peten, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. No. 3, 1800. For a discussion of the antagonism between clergymen and secular officials that characterized church-state relations in colonial Peten, see Schwartz, Norman Forest Society: A Social History of Peten, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 48–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Most disputes arose from competition between priests and government officials over Indian labor and tribute.

3. Archivo General de Centro América [hereafter AGCA], Al. 11.7, Leg. 186, Exp. 3813, 1800, fol. 1; AGCA, A1.56, Leg. 186, Exp. 3809, (1800); and Testimonio del Expediente del común del Peten, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 2, 1800, fols. 4v–5. Since Petén’s priests, including don Santiago Xavier Rebolledo of San Andrés, officiated at the marriages of bozales (African-born blacks) and Maya women, ecclesiastical complaints were more muted than those of the commander and the cacique.

4. San José and San José de los Negros, although in close proximity, were distinct pueblos.

5. Marriages between Mayas and people of African descent were not universally frowned upon, especially when they were between Hispanized Afro-Guatemalans or Afro-Yucatecan settlers. In fact, a 1744 census (padrón) lists a total of eight non-military pardo heads of households. Three of them had married women with identifiably Maya surnames. Central America, Colonial Census Records, Images, FamilySearch. https://fam-ilysearch.org (accessed October 2012), citing Guatemala Dirección General de Estadística. Central America, Colonial Census Records. Reproduction of AGCA, A.1.6, Leg. 185, Exp. 3795. While the 1744 census listed racial identities with some specificity, at least for heads of households, and includes the terms español, negro, mulatta [sic], chino, and mestizo, later unions typically lumped non-Indians together as ladinos. Marriages between ladinos and Mayas were not unheard of. The reproduction of the Libro de Matrimonios, Años 1751–1808, San Andrés y Pueblos in the same archive also lists several marriages between ladinos and “naturales” or indigenous women, in Central America.

6. “Ladino,” a term used in the margins of baptismal registers to refer to anyone acculturated into Hispanic society, was the most common and general descriptor for non-Maya brides and grooms of late eighteenth-century Petén. In contrast, don Francisco Xavier Rebolledo, priest of Petén, identified one of the first runaway slaves to take a Maya wife, Alejandro Sala, as a negro (black) bozal (African-born) native of Walix (Belize), accentuating his outsider status in unusually detailed terms in 1793. Libro de Matrimonios, Años 1751–1808, San Andrés y Pueblos, fol. 81v.

7. In the Greater Caribbean, the qualifiers “francés,” “inglés,” and “de la nación Tnglcsa™ begin to appear with much more frequency in the official correspondence of Cuba, Santo Domingo, Guatemala, and Yucatán after 1775. AGI, Audiencia de Santo Domingo 227B, R. 1, Nos. 4 and 57; AGI, Papeles de Cuba 1181, No. 85, fol. 196, April 18, 1775; and Correspondencia del Capitán general de Cuba, marqués de la Torre, AGI, Papeles de Cuba 1218, (1774) No. 630, fol. 624. Earlier, slaves were typically identified by level of acculturation, with the term “bozal” for unacculturated, African-born slaves and “criollo” for acculturated, American-born slaves who typically spoke European languages proficiently. Matthew Restali also found a sharp contrast between the terms used to describe francophone Haitians resettled in Yucatán after fighting as auxiliaries for Spain and those used in discussing slaves of domestic origin. Restali, “Crossing to Safety? Frontier Flight in Eighteenth-Century Belize and Yucatán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94:3 (August 2014, forthcoming).Google Scholar

8. Martinez, Maria Elena Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 6.Google Scholar

9. Testimonio del Expediente del común del Peten, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 2, 1800, fol. 4v.

10. See Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, Libro VI, Título XII, “De el Servicio Personal,” various, 1582–1609, for the regulations on indigenous labor, as discussed elsewhere in this article.

11. Testimonio del Expediente del común del Peten, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 3, 1800, fol. 2.

12. See Ojeda, Jorge Victoria and Alcocer, Jorge Canto San Fernando Aké: microhistoria de ima comunidad afroamericana en Yucatán (Merida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán [hereafter UADY], 2006),Google Scholar for an eighteenth-century Yucatecan example of the reliance on black mercenaries that coincided with their rigid segregation. See Landers, Jane Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 29–32,Google Scholar for the Florida settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, which served as the precedent for maintaining armed black towns at some remove for both social and strategic purposes.

13. Although the Haitian Revolution no doubt heightened fears regarding large numbers of slaves who had by their flight demonstrated a capacity for rebellion, the exchanges of letters between authorities do not mention the uprising in Saint-Domingue. In fact, Spanish authorities in Yucatán and Guatemala reacted with much more vehement opposition to the presence of francophone slaves in their midst and were much less apprehensive regarding the presence of English slaves. Blacks from the French Caribbean were geographically isolated from surrounding populations, as in the case of San Fernando Aké (see Victoria Ojeda and Canto Alcocer, San Fernando Ake) or were refused permission to disembark on either Spanish or English coasts. For an early case of a joint decision by Yucatecan and Belizean authorities to deny asylum to 213 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, see Desembarco de desterrados negros y mulatos franceses, 1792, Archivo General de Simancas [hereafter AGS], Secretaria del Despacho de Guerra, 7237, no. 52. For another instance, in which Yucatán’s intendant refused to allow the disembarkation of a group of 15 “French” slaves captured from Saint-Domingue in 1809, see Archivo General de la Nación Mexico, Civil 2152, Exp. 11 (1809) .

14. Archival sources also identified uncolonized zones as los montes or las montañas. English sources, including Lieut. James Cook, often translated the term as “wilderness.” See Restali, Matthew “Cook’s Passage: An English Spy in the Yucatán,” in “Forum: Travelers and Traveler’s Accounts in World History, Part 1,” special issue, World History Connected 10:1, Maxwell, Jane ed. (February 2013).Google Scholar

15. While the term “apostate” is a problematic description in colonial sources, it is one that distinguishes the baptized Mayas who escaped from colonial control long-term and resumed Maya religious practices from both short-term runaways who deserted in times of hardship and the unconquered and unconverted (“gentile”) Mayas. Other terms, such as “independent” or “huido” are less specific, while other labels such as “idolaters” or “barbarous Indians” are both vague and additionally offensive. The Mayas mentioned in this passage apparendy practiced Maya religious traditions, judging by the presence of clay devotional figurines (“idols”) found in their midst. Their names, which include Spanish first names, indicate that at least some of them were fugitives from conquered territories. Even in cases with little evidence of a return to pre-Columbian practices, Spanish authorities showed a preoccupation with the likelihood of runaway Mayas returning to the faith of their ancestors. In 1803, for example, the commander of the presidio of Petén, don Luis de Avella, wrote that a small band of Maya had fled “to live in el monte and apostatize from the Catholic religion.” AGCA Al, Leg. 5465, Exp. 46917, No. 2, 1803, fol. 3.

16. For a well-researched reconstruction of the pre-1697 political arrangement of Petén and Itza domination, see Jones, Grant D. The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 9–18.Google Scholar

17. For rural workplace interactions, see Brockington, Lolita Gutiérrez The Leverage of Labor: Managing the Cortés Haciendas in Tehuantepec, 1588–1688 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989).Google Scholar Cope, R. Douglas The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994),Google Scholar serves as a landmark study of urban interethnic relations. Herrera, Robinson Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003),Google Scholar provides another study of interactions of a diverse urban population. Contributors to Restali, Matthew ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005),Google Scholar cover a range of indigenous-African interactions, from Florida to Brazil and New Granada. Recent works examining Indian-African relations in the obrajes and mines of Puebla and Zacatecas include Murillo, Dana Velasco and Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel “Mine Workers and Weavers: Afro-Indigenous Labor Arrangements and Interactions in Puebla and Zacatecas, 1600–1700” in City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530–1810, Murillo, Dana Velasco, Lentz, Mark W. and Ochoa, Margarita R., eds. (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).Google Scholar Central American black-native interactions are discussed for the colonial and early national periods in contributions to Gudmundson, Lowell and Wolfe, Justin, eds., Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Piace (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Costa Chica, a Mexican region in which Afro-Mexicans established a significant presence, is described by Vinson, Ben in “The Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province in ‘Costa Chica’: Igualapa in 1791,” The Americas 57:2 (October 2000), pp. 269–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fisher, Andrew B. “Creating and Contesting Community: Indians and Afromestizos in the Late-Colonial Tierra Caliente of Guerrero, Mexico,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7:1 (Spring 2006),CrossRefGoogle Scholar examines animosity between Afromestizos and native inhabitants of Guerrero over issues of land and population pressure.

18. Archival sources from Eastern Yucatán survive in limited quantities as a result of the sacking, burning, and subsequent abandonment of many of the pueblos in the region during the Caste War. Petén, nominally conquered in 1697, remained only tenuously under Spanish control, with much of the territory surrounding Tayasal (modern-day Flores) still inhabited by Mayas who defied colonial rule.

19. A call for works that “transcend ‘national frameworks’ in both colonial Anglo-American and Spanish American historiographies,” especially based on research into the borderlands of Spanish and English colonies, is found in Gould, Eliga “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112:3 (June 2007), pp. 764–786.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Most scholars of the late post-Classic Maya agree that the Itza who ruled from Tayasal were Yucatec speakers from the north, although there is some dispute over whether the founders of the island kingdom departed Mayapan in 1451 or if their predecessors moved south earlier. For a summary of recent scholarship on the matter, see Rice, Don M. and Rice, Prudence M. “Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Maya Political Geography in Central Petén, Guatemala,” in The Postclassic to Spanish-era Transition in Mesoamerica: Archaeological Perspectives, Kepecs, Susan and Alexander, Rani T., eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), p. 145.Google Scholar

21. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, pp. 142–165, describes the worsening of colonial blacks’ “juridical-theological” status.Google Scholar

22. See Landers, Jane “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 62:3 (January 1984), pp. 296–313, for the first in-depth study of the sanctuary policy.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 298.

24. Ibid., p. 300.

25. Ibid., p. 311.

26. The policy applied only to slaves fleeing Protestant territories. Slaves fleeing Dutch territories in the Caribbean or later, the United States, were covered under this offer of sanctuary. Maroons from either French or Portuguese colonies did not have the possibility of religiously sanctioned asylum.

27. Landers Black Society in Spanish Florida, p. 60. Landers’s work serves as a starting point, but scholars must examine the application of the sanctuary policy elsewhere for variability in its application, enforcement, and abandonment. Apparently, Spain’s offer to return slaves to Caribbean English owners was put into action a year before the abrogation of the policy in Florida. Foy, Charles R. “Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How Slaves Used Northern Seaports’ Maritime Industry to Escape and Create Trans-Atlantic Identities, 1713–1783” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers, 2008), p. 55.Google Scholar David Patrick Geggus noted that the closing off of the Orinoco as a route of escape for Dutch slaves took place in 1791, a year after the 1790 agreement. Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, Geggus, and Gaspar, David Barry, eds. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), p. 22.Google Scholar

28. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” p. 300.Google Scholar

29. Real Cédula ordenando poner en libertad los esclavos de las colonias inglesas y holandeses … , AGI, Indiferente 539, lib. 12, fol. 190, reprinted in Salmoral, Manuel Lucen Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América española (1503–1886) (Alcalá de Henares, Spain: Editum, 2005), p. 215.Google Scholar

30. Real Cédula extendiendo al resto de las colonias españolas la orden de liberar los esclavos huidos de las colonias ingleses y holandesas … , AGI, Indiferente 654, reprinted in Salmoral, Regulación, p. 217.Google Scholar

31. In Yucatán, for example, the 1790 revocation of sanctuary was observed more consistently, leading to more slaves being forcibly returned to English masters. Meanwhile, in neighboring Petén the end of the policy of refuge was evidently ignored during the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. See Restali, “Crossing to Safety?” Slave communication networks, often underestimated, likely transmitted such information to enslaved Belizeans, leading to the rapid growth of San José de los Negros. Most of the demographic upsurge, in which the pueblo grew from the 32 original founders in 1795 to more than 100 persons in 1800, probably resulted from Petén’s status as the newly favored destination after many black Belizeans faced re-enslavement or a return to Belize after fleeing to Yucatán.

32. Even in Florida, re-enslavement by Spanish masters occurred. Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary,” p. 311;Google Scholar Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, p. 28.Google Scholar

33. Schwartz, Forest Society, pp. 66–67.Google Scholar

34. Restali, The Black Middle, p. 188.Google Scholar

35. Bolland, O. Nigel The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 78.Google Scholar

36. Gobernador de Yucatán sobre de varios esclavos huidos, AGI, Estado 35, no. 46(5) 1802.

37. Restali, The Black Middle, p. 190.Google Scholar

38. Gobernador de Yucatán sobre de varios esclavos huidos, AGI, Estado 35, no. 46 (1) and (5), 1802.

39. Ibid., no. 46 (3), 1802.

40. Ibid., no. 46 (5), 1802.

41. Presidente Guatemala sobre restitución negros de Walix, AGI, Estado 49, Cuad. 2, no. 74, 1800.

42. AGCA, Al.56, Leg. 186, Exp. 3809, 1800, fol. 4v. Baptisms of anglophone slaves apparently took place with little consideration of the possibility that they had already been baptized. Blacks in Jamaica, the source of many Belizean slaves, were occasionally baptized. In English colonies, especially Jamaica, however, colonists were more reluctant to baptize slaves due to the ambiguity surrounding Christian slaveholders owning converted slaves. Beasley, Nicholas M. Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp. 74–76.Google Scholar

43. AGCA, Al.56, Leg. 186, Exp. 3809, 1800, fol. 4v.

44. Calderón Quijano, José Antonio Belice, 1663(?)–1821: historia de los establecimientos británicos del Rio Valis hasta la independencia de Hispanoamérica (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1944), pp. 47–50.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., p. 73.

46. Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 49.Google Scholar

47. Matthew Restali suggests that the available documentation shows that between 300 and 400 hundred Belizean slaves fled west to Petén, north to Yucatán, and south to Omoa, though the number was likely much higher. The many incidents that do not mention flight but do describe a significant population increase, such as the rapid growth of San José de los Negros, also lend credibility to a higher estimate. Moreover, the repeated efforts of the Spanish to dislodge the English settlers in Belize, effective only in the short term (at times in the years 1730, 1737, 1747–1748, 1754–1755, and 1779–1783), likely provided slaves a chance to escape during the fighting, though such escapes were unlikely to have been recorded. See Matthew Restali, “Crossing to Safety?”

48. Expediente sobre el permiso del corte del palo de tinte, AGI, Mexico 3099, 1765, fols. 1286–1288.

49. In a letter to the governor of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny, Major J. E. Caulfield estimated that there were 120 blacks, without specifying whether they were free or slave. They outnumbered the 50 whites by more than two to one. Major Caulfield to Mr. Trelawny, August 2,1745, British Colonial Office Records [hereafter CO] 137/48, in Burdon, John Alder, ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, (London: Sifton Praed, 1931), p. 73.Google Scholar According to Matthew Restali, who has consulted both Burdon’s collection of summaries and transcriptions and the original Colonial Office documents, Burdon’s reproductions are “a useful but unreliable resource,” and should be approached with some skepticism. Restali, “Crossing to Safety?” footnote 28. Apparently, the first mention of the presence of black slaves in Belize dates from 1724. See Bolland, O. Nigel The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 49.Google Scholar

50. Melchor de Navarrete a Julián de Arriaga, October 15, 1755, AGI, Mexico 3099, reproduced in Calderón Quijano, Belice, 166 n48.

51. Enclosure in Governor Dalling to Lord George Germain, August 28, 1779, CO 137 / 75, in Burdon, ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, pp. 127–128.Google Scholar The optimistic plan counted on 100,000 Indians to bolster their numbers, demonstrating that Spanish fears of a Maya-English alliance were not completely baseless. Bolland, in The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 50,Google Scholar estimates the slave population at 3,000 for the same year.

52. Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 50.Google Scholar

53. Henderson, George An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras; being a view of its commercial and agricultural resources, soil, climate, natural history, (London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1811), p. 178.Google Scholar Although the inhabitants of the Mosquito Coast offered refuge to the English settlers when they were driven from Belize in 1779, some of them were later forced into slavery in Belize. Their enslavement occurred in spite of a 1776 law prohibiting the forced servitude of Miskito Indians.

54. Ibid., p. 85.

55. Expediente sobre el permiso del corte del palo de tinte, AGI, Mexico 3099, June 15, 1757, fol. 954. No English law prohibited its subjects from enslaving indigenous peoples, with the exception of the Miskitos (after 1776), a ban that was widely ignored.

56. Ibid., fols. 953–956.

57. Petition of Honduras Settlers to George III, reproduced in Burdon, ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, p. 111.Google Scholar Maud accompanied Lieutenant James Cook on a diplomatic mission to Mènda from Belize. Cook described Maud as “one of the most considerable bay merchants,” and Muriel Haas, of Tulane University’s Department of Middle American Research, identifies him as Belize’s chief magistrate. Cook, Remarks on a Passage from the River Balise: In the Bay of Honduras, to Merida: The Capital of the Province of Jucatan in the Spanish West Indies: A Facsimile of the Original with Perspective by Muriel Haas [1769] (New Orleans: Midameres Press, 1935), pp. 3, 50.Google Scholar

58. An Account of the Spaniards’ Landing at and Taking of St. George’s Key, October 1, 1779, CO. 137/75, reproduced in Burdon, ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, pp. 128–129.Google Scholar

59. No records suggest that these communities existed before 1816. For more information on the maroon communities, see Bolland, O. Nigel Colonialism and Resistance in Belize: Essays in Historical Sociology (Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago: University of West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 72–73 Google Scholar. The 1779 flight of 250 slaves is as plausible a point for the foundation of these two maroon communities as any. This interior region had been the site of two significant Maya towns in the late post-Classic era, Lamanai and Tipú, one of which persisted into the first decade of the eighteenth century. Lamanai’s population joined apostates in their rebellion and burned their church by 1638. Tipú’s population was forcibly relocated to Petén in 1707. Pendergast, David M. “Worlds in Collision: The Maya/Spanish Encounter in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Belize,” in The Meeting of Two Worlds: Europe and the Americas, 1492–1650, Bray, Warwick, ed. (Oxford: The British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 105–142.Google Scholar

60. Presidente Guatemala sobre restitución negros de Walix, AGI, Estado 49, no. 74, cuad. 1, fols. 1–2. Restali found no cases of slaves escaping from Yucatán to Belize. Restali, The Black Middle, p. 181.Google Scholar At least one “Spanish Negro” was present in Belize, as authorities noted his punishment for theft, but it is unclear whether or not he had fled there from Spanish authority. More likely, he had been purchased or captured by British. Transient Court, January 17, 1793, G.C.F., in Burdon, , ed. Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, p. 202.Google Scholar

61. Memorial of the Magistrates & Principal Inhabitants settled at the Bay of Honduras to Lord Hills-borough, 1769, CO 137/65, quoted in Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 50.Google Scholar

62. Burdon, , ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, citing various Colonial Office documents, pp. 114–120, 162, 201, 210, and 213.Google Scholar Complaints in this vein appeared in letters in 1767, 1768, 1769, 1771, 1773,1787,1792, 1794, and 1795. For a more detailed discussion of the diplomatic wrangling over the fates of Belizean runaways in Yucatán, see Restali, “Crossing to Safety?”

63. Presidente Guatemala sobre restitución negros de Walix, AGI, Estado, 49, no. 74, Cuad. 2, 1800.

64. Ibid., Cuad. 1, 1800.

65. Bolland, , ed., The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 75.Google Scholar Hoare to Captain Davey, May 29, 1773, Adm. 1/239, in Burdon, , ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, pp. 121–123.Google Scholar Richard Hoare, head of the English colonies, wrote that this revolt killed six whites.

66. Colonel Hunter to Governor of Yucatán, November 1790, CO 123 /13, in Burdon, , ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, p. 190.Google Scholar

67. Transient Court, June 16, 1790, G.C.F., and Summary Court, February 16, 1795 and December 11, 1795, M MAI, in Burdon, , ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, pp. 188, 213, and 215.Google Scholar

68. Field Marshal Arthur O’Neal (Arturo O’Neill), Captain Genera) of Yucatán, to the Representatives of the British Subjects at Waliz, January 9, 1796, M.L.A., in Burdon, , ed., Archives of British Honduras, vol. 1, p. 215.Google Scholar

69. Gobernador de Yucatán sobre de varios esclavos huidos, AGI, Estado 35, no. 46, 1800.

70. Sosa, Pedro Bracamonte y La conquista inconclusa de Tucatán: los mayas de la montaña, 1560–1680 (Mexico: CIESAS, 2001), p. 15.Google Scholar See also Jones, Grant D., ed., Anthropology and History in Yucatán Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).Google Scholar Spanish authorities righdy feared that Indians of el monte would inspire inhabitants of pueblos on the periphery of Spanish settlement to rebel. Unconquered Mayas were implicated in uprisings in Tipú, Sahcabchén, and Popolá. Sosa, Bracamonte y, La conquista inconclusa, p. 25.Google Scholar

71. Even so, few studies of unconquered Maya regions include the eighteenth century. See for example Bracamonte y Sosa, La conquista inconclusa; Jones, Grant D. Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989);Google Scholar Jones, The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom; and Chávez Gómez, José Manuel Intención franciscana de evangelizar entre los Mayas rebeldes (Mexico: CONACULTA, 2008).Google Scholar Works that touch briefly on the eighteenth century are Feldman, Lawrence H. Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples: Spanish Explorations of the South East Mayan Lowlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);Google Scholar and Barrera, Laura Caso Caminos de la selva: migración, comercio y resistencia. Mayas yucatecos e itzaes, siglos XVII–XIX (Mexico: Colegio de México, 2002).Google Scholar

72. José Manuel A. Chávez Gómez, La recreación del antiguo espacio politico, AGCA, Al .12.11, Leg. 186, Exp. 3803, 1764. See also “Un ciichcabal kejache y el na’aíkejach chan en el siglo XVII,” in Nuevas per-spectivas sobre la geografìa política de los mayas, Harada, Tsubasa Okoshi, Izquierdo, Ana Luisa, Williams-Beck, Lorraine Annette, eds. (Mexico: UNAM, 2006), p. 69.Google Scholar A 1754 map by Bellin, Jacques Nicolas Carte des provinces des Tabasco, Chiapa, Verapaz, Guatamala, Honduras et Yucatán (George Smathers Library’, University of Florida,Google Scholar permanent link: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF90000123/00001) shows the “Quehaches” inhabiting the same territory as they did in the late seventeenth entradas.

73. AGCA, Al.12.11, Leg. 186, 3802, No. 8, 1779; AGCA, A1.I2.11, Leg. 186, Exp. 3803, 1764.

74. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fols. 24, 40–42.

75. Ibid., p. 41.

76. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule, p. 9.Google Scholar

77. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754.

78. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, February 3, 1789, fol. 325.

79. AGCA, Al.21.7, Leg. 186, Exp. 3816, 1802.

80. Henderson, Account of the British Settlement, pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

81. AGCA, A1.I2.11, Leg. 186, Exp. 3803, fol. 30; AGCA, Al.12.11, Leg. 186, 3802, No. 8, 1779.

82. AGCA, Al, Leg. 5465, Exp. 46917, No. 2, 1803.

83. Patch, Robert M. describes “ rancho” as an unauthorized agricultural settlement in colonial Yucate-can terminology. Patch, , Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1648–1812 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 284 n23.Google Scholar

84. AGCA, Al, Leg. 5465, Exp. 46917, No. 2, 1803, fols. 1–4.

85. AGCA, Al.21.7, Leg. 186, Exp. 3816, 1802.

86. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fol. 17.

87. Ibid., fol. 10.

88. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, fols. 37v–38.

89. Ibid., fol. 41v.

90. Ibid., fol. 48.

91. Autos de los Indios de Sahcabchén, in Cartas y Expedientes de Personas Eclesiásticas, AGI, Mexico, 307, 1667–1670, 1669, fols. 3v–4.

92. Flight into el monte continued in the first half of the nineteenth century, as Rani T. Alexander and Terry Rugeley have noted in their studies of the Caste War. See Alexander, Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán: An Archaeological Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), pp. 55 and 66;Google Scholar and Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatan, 1800–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 28,43, 59, 61, and 89–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar As late as 1852, an English adventurer, Major Luke Smyth O’Connor of the First West India Regiment, wrote for rapt audiences of his travel into the interior from Belize and his encounters with “indios del monte” between Belize and Petén. O’Connor, Luke Smyth “An Exploring Ramble Among the Indios Bravos, in British Honduras,” The Living Age 34 (1852), pp. 513–517.Google Scholar

93. de Cogolludo, Diego López Historia de Yucathan (Madrid: Juan García Infanzón, 1685), pp. 477, 477,491,544, and 656.Google Scholar

94. In one proselytizing effort in 1618, the friars Juan de Orbita and Bartolomé de Fuensalida were chosen to travel to Petén Itzá because the two were experts in Yucatec Maya, which was mutually intelligible with the language spoken by Petén’s Indians. de Cogolludo, López Historia de Yucathan, p. 477.Google Scholar Cogolludo also wrote (p. 507) that, “These Ytzaex (Itza) Indians are of Yucatecan origin and originally from the land of Yucatán, and speak the same Maya language.” For a description of the evolution of various branches of the Yucatec language family, see Hofling, Charles Andrew “The Linguistic Context of the Kowoj,” in The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala, Rice, Prudence M. and Rice, Don S., eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009), pp. 70–79.Google Scholar

95. For a thorough discussion of the Quejaches in the context as the probable progenitors of the Yucatec-speaking Lacandones of Chiapas, see Rojas, Alfonso Villa Estudios etnológicos: los mayas (Mexico: UNAM, 1995), pp. 447–466.Google Scholar

96. de Avendaño y Loyola, Andrés Relación de las dos entradas que hize a la conversion de los gentiles Ttzaexy Cebadles, 1696, manuscript in Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.Google Scholar

97. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, various; AGCA, Al.11.7, Leg. 186, Exp. 3813, 1800, fols. 6–7. Caribes referred to unconquered Mayas, not Caribs from the island or coastal region. Petén’s commander, don José de Gálvez, wrote that the “caribes” inhabiting territories bordering Belize spoke the same language as those of the settlements of Lake Petén, making it clear that “carib” denoted savagery by European standards and did not refer to a distinct ethnic group.

98. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fols. 2–8v.

99. Ibid., fol. 6.

100. Ibid., fols. 2–8v.

101. “Taquebas” may be a variant spelling of “Toqueguas,” Choi speakers from the area around Eric Thompson, Zacapa. J. “Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Reports on the Choi Mayas,” American Anthropologist 40:4 (October/December 1938), p. 585.Google Scholar

102. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fol. 38.

103. Cobo gave the most detailed description of the whereabouts of the Muzules, stating that they inhabited the interior to the northwest of the Castillo del Golfo Dulce, in Boloche and Soyte.

104. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fols. 37v–38.

105. Lawrence H. Feldman hypothesizes that the Xocmoes managed to remain independent by relocating frequently. Feldman, Lost Shores, Forgotten People, pp. 33 and 221–222.Google Scholar Other scholars suggest that a remnant of Choi-speakers still populated the area. Robertson, John S., Law, Danny and Haertel, Robbie A., eds., Cholonial Ch‘olti’: The Seventeenth-Century Moran Manuscript (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), pp. 4–5;Google Scholar Thompson, “Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Reports.”

106. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799,1754, fol. 6v. Two Maya witnesses mentioned earlier, Zactan and Thesecum, stated specifically that the “Xosmoes” resided near Cahabón in the frontier region between Petén and Alta Verapaz. Their warlike reputation seems to have derived from an apparently unrecorded violent encounter attributed to the Xocmoes during the “first times of the conquest,” according to Monzabal.

107. Ibid., fol. lOv.

108. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fols. 54–56.

109. “Practically all the remaining Chols were moved to the Guatemalan highlands, the Manche area becoming what it sdii is to all intents and purposes, uninhabited forest.” Thompson, “Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Reports,” p. 593.Google Scholar

110. For a discussion of the linguistic situation in colonial Petén, see Hofling, “The Linguistic Context of the Kowoj.” Even north of Cobán, the border region between Vera Paz and Petén, at least a few captured “indios bárbaros” spoke a language mutually intelligible with the Itza. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fol. 45v.

111. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fols. 33–34v. The interpreters don Manuel Santiago Betancurt and Br. Don Sebastián Rodríguez spoke Maya as their “mother” language.

112. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, February 3, 1789, fols. 321–324, 330.

113. AGCA, Al.11.7, Leg. 186, Exp. 3813, 1800, fols. 26v–29v.

114. Bolland, O. Nigel “Colonization and Slavery in Central America,” in Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World, Lovejoy, Paul E. and Rogers, Nicholas, eds. (London: Frank Cass, 1994), p. 22.Google Scholar

115. Apparently, Merino y Ceballos had suspected the English of complicity in the earlier attack, hinting at the mutual suspicion that marked even times of peace between the two imperial powers. In 1785, 20 Indians armed with bows and arrows assaulted the watchtower of Bacalar, specifically the Vigia del Rosario, or Xulab, at 11 p.m., leaving two soldiers dead or fatally wounded. Although none of the attackers were killed, their pursuers noted that many arrows were abandoned, suggesting that at least some of the indigenous assailants were wounded. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, 1789, fols. 321, 324–235.

116. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, 1789, fols. 321–324. Attacks of this type, including the raid on the Spanish settlement, the Batería de Chac, occurred again in 1802 and 1807. Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 21.Google Scholar Merino y Ceballos noted the diplomatically delicate situation that might result from the mistaken belief on the part of the British that Yucatecan subjects had attacked them.

117. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, 1789, sub No. 1, fol. 323, and sub No. 2, fol. 324.

118. Ibid., sub No. 4, fol. 326. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Sambo” as a derivative of “Spanish zambo, applied in America and Asia to persons of various degrees of mixed African and Indian or European blood.” In New Spain, zambo referred to a person of mixed indigenous and African ancestry. See Katzew, Ilona Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 44.Google Scholar In English, however, Sambo tended to refer more broadly to any person of mixed African and indigenous or African and European ancestry. The order to pursue “sambos” and “negros” indicates that Spanish authorities suspected that either runaway slaves or their mixed offspring might have resided among the unconquered and rebel Mayas in the Belizean borderlands with Petén.

119. Expediciones contra indios, AGS, 7206, no. 49, sub. No. 1, fol. 323.

120. Ibid., fols. 327–329. In a record dated February 3, 1789, Captain don Valentín Delgado used vague terms to discuss the ritual objects, which he simply labeled “idólos de barro,” or “clay idols.” Archaeological discussions and an unusually detailed description of objects used in “idolatry” among the “Indios Bravos” along the border between Belize and Petén may offer some insight into the nature of these “idols.” Major Luke Smyth O’Connor, who recorded “An Exploring Ramble among the Indios Bravos, in British Honduras,” in 1851, provided a description of a recently used “curious bowl” in the area of the current border between Belize and Petén. He described one such object as a “curious cup, about the size of an ordinary sop-basin, made of a dark red earth, with a female face raised on one side, having, instead of ears, the twisted horns of a ram.” (Italics in original). He also wrote, based on information given to him by indigenous guides from Chichanhá, “The bowl in my possession, with the female face, is the Goddess of Honey; and when the Bravos determine to go bee-hunting, they burn incense.” O’Connor, Smyth “An Exploring Ramble among the Indios Bravos, in British Honduras,” The Living Age 34 (1852), pp. 515 and 517.Google Scholar Although dating from the mid-nineteenth century, these descriptions closely resemble Prudence M. Rice’s archaeological discussions of late Post-Classic effigy and “semi-effigy” censers discovered at Zacpetén in eastern Petén. P. M. and Rice, D.S. “Incense Burners and other Ritual Ceramics,” in The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Petén, Guatemala, Rice, Prudence M. and Rice, Don S., eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009), pp. 276–312.Google Scholar

121. For Chunab as a surname, see Roys, Ralph Loveland The Political Geography of the Yucatán Maya (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1957), p. 31.Google Scholar Copo was a common surname in frontier regions, prominent among seventeenth-century indios del monte, in the area between Hekelchakan, nominally under Spanish rule, and the Ixpimienta area, in modern northeastern Petén. See Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule, pp. 170 and 175, for more on the prevalence of “Copo.”Google Scholar

122. Pérez, Juan Pío, Ancona, Crescencio Carrillo y, Berendt, Carl Hermann and Suaste, Fabián Carrillo Diccionario de la lengua maya (Merida, Yucatán, Mexico: J. F. Molina Solis, 1877), pp. 107 and 406.Google Scholar

123. Pérez, Pío et al., Diccionario de la lengua maya, p. 396.Google Scholar

124. By their use of the language, these “caribes” were clearly Yucatec Maya. Bolland, however, asserted that these groups had their origin in the Mosquito Coast and had migrated northward with the British. Bolland, Formation of a Colonial Society, p. 22.Google Scholar

125. Pío Pérez, writing in the nineteenth century, defined the Maya word “box” not only as “negro” or “black” as an adjective, but more specifically included “Etiope” to refer to a person of African descent. Pérez, Pío Diccionario de la lengua maya, 31.Google Scholar For contemporary usage of the term, see Bricker, Victoria Eleuterio Po’ot Yah, and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot, A Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá, Yucatán (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), p. 36.Google Scholar

126. See Gamboa, Jesús Amaro and Pineda, Miguel Güémez Vocabulario de el uayeismo en la cultura de Yucatán (Merida: UADY, 1999), pp. 58 and 132–133,Google Scholar for a description of the denominator’s usage in common Yucatecan speech, not only in Yucatec Maya. See also de Charencey, Count, Hyacinthe, Vocabulaire Française Maya (Paris: Alençon, E. Renaut-de Broise, 1884), p. 61, which lists peau noir (black skin) as a translation for ekbox.Google Scholar

127. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fol. 7.

128. AGCA, Al.l, Leg. 217, Exp. 5110,1795, fol. 1. In the petition written by the cacique Chata, the initial request discussed at the beginning of the article refers to the most prevalent concerns, that the “mulatos” not be permitted to exploit the labor of Indians and that they not live among the Indians.

129. Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, Libro VI. Título XII. Ley XVI. In 1551, Carlos V prohibited any labor imposed on Indians by free or enslaved blacks, with a penalty of up to 100 lashes for violators. His son, Philip Π, reiterated the prohibition on blacks forcing Andean yanaconas to work for them in 1589. Recopilación, Libro VII, Título V, Ley VII.

130. One account of the 1750s entradas includes claims for 79 pesos in return for expenses, originally written in Maya, underscoring the Mayas’ extensive participation. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 185, Exp. 3799, 1754, fol. 12v. As late as 1808, Mayas and their ecclesiastical ally, don Domingo Fajardo, drew attention to the role of the presidio’s caciques in the ongoing efforts to capture “indios pecadores” (sinner Indians) and forcibly return them to Catholicism. AGCA, Al(6), Leg. 2151, Exp. 15510, 1808.

131. Presidente Guatemala sobre restitución negros de Walix, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 4, 1800, fol. 2.

132. AGCA, Al.56, Leg. 186, Exp. 3809, 1800, fol. 2.

133. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, pp. 30–32.Google Scholar

134. Ojeda, Victoria and Alcocer, Canto San Fernando Akè, pp. 32–35 and 87–89.Google Scholar

135. Reproduction of AGCA, Α.1.6, Leg. 185, Exp. 3795, in Central America, Colonial Census Records, Images, FamilySearch. https://familysearch.org (accessed October 2012).

136. For another example of the ambivalent reliance on former slaves, used for colonial defenses but never fully trusted, see Jane Landers’s work on the Haitian revolutionary leader Biassou and his resettlement in Florida following the defeat of the Spanish-allied faction of slave rebels. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 55–94.Google Scholar