Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Ironically, the biggest racial category created by the Spanish imperial presence had no wish to claim an identity of its own. The mestizos were a consequence of the inevitable union between Spaniards, who seldom brought their own women with them, and the native women of the empire (see Chapter 6). In the Philippines the shortage of European women contributed to a high degree of race mixture. The same situation prevailed in New Mexico, where the Spaniards who did not bring families over were obliged to marry women of non-Spanish origin. The result was that mestizos played a role that was far more positive than the pure Spaniards would have wished, and facilitated contact between Spanish and indigenous cultures. As we know from the experience of colonial societies in the twentieth century, persons of mixed race are always in an uncomfortable position because they fall between two worlds. In sixteenth-century America, mestizos were normally classified as belonging to the republic of Spaniards,75 even though they were gradually excluded from most positions of status in colonial society. In the mid-sixteenth century they took part in all the important Spanish-led expeditions, and played a distinctive role in the foundation of the towns of the New World. The leading authority on the subject has no doubt in affirming that ‘the colonization work done by Spain would not have been possible without the mestizos’.76

  In a law of 1514 King Ferdinand had given his full approval to the intermarriage of Indians and Spaniards: nothing, he insisted, ‘should impede marriage between Indians and Spaniards, and all should have complete liberty to marry whomever they please’.77 From the time of Hernando Cortés, whose children by the Indian Doña Marina were accepted into the colonial nobility, there was no dishonour in intermarriage between racial élites. ‘Though over there you may think it shameful that I have married an Indian woman,’ a merchant of Mexico wrote to his family in 1571, ‘here it is by no means despised because the Indians are a highly respected people.’78 Those of élite origin might certainly have been as fortunate as the merchant claimed, but in general the rapid growth of the mestizo sector created problems and provoked active discrimination. People of mixed race in Mexico could not after 1549 inherit encomiendas, nor could they enter the priesthood, and from 1576 they were barred from public office.79 In 1588 Philip II, possibly under pressure from José de Acosta, decreed that mestizos could become priests, but little progress was made in implementing the decree. Despite the barriers put in their way, however, mestizos came to play a profoundly important role in colonial society.

  After Spaniards, the most notable immigrant presence was that of Africans. By 1650, as we have seen, there were more Africans than Spaniards in the New World. At the end of the colonial period, they still had an enormous role to play though there is no reliable information about their numbers. In Lima in 179 5, free blacks with slaves made up forty-five per cent of the city's total population. Though they had been brought in simply to work and serve, Africans transformed the society and economy of vast tracts of America, and firmly implanted their race and culture wherever they went.80 Parallel to the minority identity being created by the élites, therefore, there began to grow up another minority identity that never became fully Hispanized and that profoundly transformed the culture of the continent. Through their fundamental contribution to virtually every aspect of activity and production, the Africans helped to guarantee the survival of Spanish colonialism.81 At the same time they not only managed to preserve elements of their culture, but began to evolve a distinctive identity based on their circumstances in the New World.

  Africans came from different areas of their own continent, and were bundled together indiscriminately in the distribution of slaves through the New World. They often lost contact with their origins, and had to find new bearings for themselves. The seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval, one of the few Spaniards to be seriously concerned with the culture of Africans, managed to identify over thirty nations of Africa from which the slaves in Cartagena came. This complexity was clearly a challenge to clergy who wished to understand the languages and concepts of neophytes. Depending on their work situation, Africans frequently managed to overcome the formidable cultural difficulties. An Italian visitor to Hispaniola reported in 1540 that they were divided into national groups, each with an appointed leader.82 Evidence from later decades, all over Spanish America, indicates that Africans succeeded to some degree in preserving their national grouping, and with it their languages. Where there was no possibility of a common speech, they evolved a lingua franca or pidgin that bore a resemblance to the principal languages among them, and that clergy like Sandoval tried to learn.83 Sometimes the national grouping would operate under cover of the religious confraternities to which blacks frequently belonged, and to which they contributed distinctively with their music and dances. Seventeenth-century visitors to Caribbean estates testified that they heard slaves singing, in their own language, songs of the West African coast.

  Inevitably, however, Africans had to adapt what they preserved and mould it to the necessities of the New World. Many of them, if we go by the evidence of those who took part in rebellions and fled to the mountains, wholly rejected the repressive civilization of the Spaniards. Settled communities of runaway Africans (cimarrones) could be found all over the Caribbean, and from as early as 1513 in the Panama area, where survivors from the wreck of a slave-ship made it ashore.84 In a continent as vast as America, it was easy to hide in the mountains and build up an autonomous community. Even in Hispaniola in the 1520s, the mountains were host to groups of escaped slaves. It was estimated in 1545 that the island had over seven thousand cimarrons. Wherever possible, the runaways collaborated with foreigners who penetrated Spanish territory. On the other hand, from an early period the runaway blacks in the Caribbean were often captured and enslaved by the warlike island tribes, the Caribs.85 Africans therefore had good reason to distance themselves both from Spaniards and from the native Americans.

  Spaniards of course feared the possibility of rebellions by the very numerous black community. In 1537 in Mexico the viceroy reported the preparation of a rebellion by the blacks (at that date around twenty thousand in number) in league with the Indians of Mexico and Tlatelolco.86 Black risings can be identified for instance in 1538 in Cuba, in 1546 in Hispaniola, in 1552 in Venezuela, in 1555 near Panama. Judging by the accounts, it appears that blacks of differing ethnic origin joined together to pursue common aims and live together in a new environment. Their varying roots consequently merged into a shared background inspiration, an ‘Africa’ to which they would never return but which took on the lineaments of a home. Perhaps the most remarkable of the black cimarron movements was the one active in the mountains near Veracruz in 1609, led by a first-generation Congolese called Yanga, who appears to have been of royal origin and in fact proclaimed his settlement of over five hundred Africans to be a free territory and demanded official recognition from the viceroy. ‘They had withdrawn to that place’, they announced, ‘to free themselves from the cruelty of the Spaniards, who unjustly wished to deprive them of their liberty.’87 The Spaniards were unable to destroy the settlement and eventually in 1618 recognized the autonomy of the black village of ‘San Lorenzo of the Blacks’.88 Similar settlements of cimarrons came into existence in various parts of America, notably in Venezuela during the seventeenth century.89

  Other blacks, by contrast, who lived within a more congenial environment, became more Hispanized and merged themselves into the Hispanic world. Their religious roots in Africa had accepted the duality of the universe and the existence of an after-life, so they accepted the forms of Christianity without problems.90 Many, we should also remember, had been Christians in Africa or in Spanish territory even before arriving in the Americas. Black Christianity as it evolved in the New World became a vital feature of the black identity, because it combined the culture, beliefs and languages of the places of origin with the context and aspirations of the places of domicile. The nature of some of the practices inevitably led to conflict with the religiou
s authorities, as we can see through the cases prosecuted by the Inquisition in America, which help us to obtain a remarkable picture of Afro-American beliefs and practices. The inquisitors in America interpreted the chants, spells, rites and dances of the Afro-Americans as crafts of the devil, but the black witnesses who gave testimony reveal clearly that woven into the neo-Christian practices of the New World were strong echoes of the religion of Africa. In seventeenth-century Mexico a slave described how a diviner spoke ‘through the chest’:

  Many times this black, Domingo, spoke with some objects and dolls, one dressed as a man, the other as a woman, and the objects spoke with him in everybody's hearing; and we heard them speak in Spanish and in a Congolese language, and they danced the dances of the two nations and sang in the two languages clearly and distinctly, and everyone heard and understood, and later they both asked for food.91

  Frequently deprived by their masters of any real contact with the official Church and its clergy, scattered in small mixed communities of diverse origin across the entire expanse of the New World, blacks both slave and free conserved what they could of their culture and by this means attempted to give themselves protection against their savage new environment. Millions of black subjects under Spanish rule shared this culture, during the entire period of duration of the empire. It is therefore timely to emphasize the reality of the black identity, as well as its crucial contribution to the culture and society of the colonies. The contribution may appear small, simply because it suffered active persecution and discrimination. Blacks were marginalized and excluded; they were welcomed as Christians but forbidden to take holy orders. Yet with the passage of time their role was slowly recognized. In Costa Rica in 163 5, a black woman (mulata) initiated the devotion to the black image of the Virgin Mary that was later adopted as the patroness of the country.92 Not until 1962, however, with the canonization of the eighteenth-century Peruvian mulatto Martin de Porres, did the official Church attempt to make amends for its indifference to the black race in Latin America.

  Despite the extensive sufferings of the blacks, as in Europe they could attain some measure of freedom and enjoy its benefits. There were three official methods of being legally liberated: a slave could be given a letter of ‘manumission’, a formal document granted by his master; he could purchase his own freedom; or a third party could buy his freedom.93 In practice, an almost insignificant proportion of blacks managed to free themselves through these formal processes. Blacks might win the aid of the clergy, as in the well-documented case of the Catalan Jesuit Peter Claver, who spent his active life helping black slaves in Cartagena; but the aid was not designed to free them. The occasional protests of clergy against the practice of slavery, such as that in 15 60 by the archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar, were never pressed seriously and can be written off as unimportant.

  In the long run, blacks had to make their own protracted and agonizing route towards liberty. They worked hard and became rich, like the black farmer whom Thomas Gage met in Guatemala in the 1630s, ‘who is held to be very rich, and gives good entertainment to travellers who pass that way. He is rich in cattle, sheep and goats, and from his farm stores [supplies] Guatemala and the people thereabout with the best cheese of all that country.’94 By the seventeenth century the blacks in New Spain who were for all practical purposes free (though not necessarily so in strictly legal terms) may have represented as much as one third of the entire black population.95 They worked in the cities as domestic servants and in the minor professions, but also as independent tradesmen. In the countryside they formed essential labour on the great ranches, where they were pioneer ‘cowboys’ (vaqueros) in charge of the herds of cattle. Organized in gangs, they were regarded with fear by the local population. The inhabitants of Zacatecas said of them, ‘their presence is an evil, but their absence is a much greater one’.96

  The defence of Spanish America outside the major cities was normally in the hands of its non-white citizens. Chagres, the principal barrier to any attack directed against Panama from the Caribbean, was in the 1740s defended by around a hundred men, ‘mostly blacks, mulattos and other coloured’. In Panama, ‘the militia in the town is made up mostly of mulattos and coloureds’. Even the two or three ships that constituted the Pacific defence squadron, based in Callao, were heavily black in composition. ‘It is normal to see on board a ship’, reported the officials Juan and Ulloa early in the eighteenth century, ‘a Creole sergeant, an Indian quartermaster, a mestizo guard, and a mulatto carpenter or a black shipwright.’97

  The Spaniards of Spain had long since ceased to have a serious military role in a continent run by its Creole white élite and the immense coloured and mixed population. There was no point in sending out Spanish soldiers, for they deserted as soon as they arrived98 and vanished into the vastness of America. The only defence solution suggested by Juan and Ulloa was that the government round up every year several hundreds of workless mestizos, transport them to Spain, train them there as soldiers and then send them back to defend America. It was not an unreasonable idea, which would have tackled the permanent problem of a tiny country like Spain trying to run an empire when it had no available military forces. Slowly, and despite the great civil disadvantages they had to endure, the blacks who helped to build and defend America worked their way towards establishing their place in the colonial world.

  The indigenous population of America occupied a peculiarly ambiguous place in the Spanish scheme of things. Even while the colonial regime destroyed their villages and culture, the government made efforts to protect them. They were deemed, as we have seen, to be part of a separate Indian society, yet they were also meant to be Hispanized, according to the 1573 Ordinance. While the ruling élite in Spanish America continued to debate about where its loyalties lay, the vast mass of the native population, confused by the disappearance of its previous environment and economy, managed to cling on to vestiges of traditional culture.

  A high proportion of natives in America and the Philippines lived outside the confines of the empire, in areas that the Spaniards never penetrated or were unable to settle. They were not directly affected by colonial administration, though they obviously suffered the impact of epidemics and other changes. All other natives, both those on the frontier and those within the range of the empire, were irrevocably affected by the Spanish presence, directly or indirectly. Trade was a fundamental influence. Indians picked up trinkets, tools, foods, and animals that had an impact on their daily lives. Less significantly, they borrowed items of clothing (such as hats) and of language. These changes did not necessarily undermine their culture, and in some measure helped them to survive in a world where the Spanish presence could not be ignored. Even while the Indians rejected the society of the Spaniards, they both accepted it as a reference point and imitated it. In parts of northern Peru the curacas, in order to emphasize their superiority over their fellow Indians, dressed entirely in the Spanish style, in Spanish hats, stockings, shoes.99 Though historians have with good reason devoted great attention to the themes of depopulation and the destruction of indigenous culture, only more recently have they emphasized that adaptation and survival were also a fundamental aspect of life in post-conquest territories.

  Epidemics, for example, did not always destroy. Natives of inland regions seem to have been less affected by the disastrous fall in population brought about by contact with the outsider. In Peru in 1620, the coastal areas that were the worst affected had only twelve per cent of the Indian population; the substantial remainder that lived inland was more likely to have survived. As the demographic situation stabilized towards the eighteenth century, native culture began to regain confidence and to claim its own identity outside the structure of colonial society. It was, in some areas, a favourable situation. In central Mexico (Oaxaca and Meztitlan) Indians still retained a good proportion of the land; by the end of the eighteenth century communal Indians (de pueblo) far outnumbered Indians who depended on the Spanish hacienda system.100
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br />   In the process of surviving, the natives retained essential aspects of their identity. Away from the Spanish-dominated cities they were able to develop a parallel society without overt conflict. It was not necessary to reject or rebel against Spanish society; indeed very many natives absorbed Spanish religion and customs without problems. The Nahuas, for example, had never used a clear naming system. In referring to themselves in the early sixteenth century they – or at least those of central Mexico – normally used the phrase ‘nican titlaca’, ‘we people here’.101 They very quickly took to the Spanish naming system, and by mid-century had adopted it completely. Living at the very heart of the Spanish system, the Nahuas adopted aspects of Spanish culture that could be reconciled with their own, but at the same time preserved their parallel existence and ignored colonial society.102 At one and the same time, therefore, the post-colonial Nahua people functioned within the imperial system but continued to preserve the framework of their own identity.

  Throughout the New World there were others who maintained their identity on the fringes of the system. Very many surviving native populations were not integrated into the empire, did not speak its language and did not accept its culture. This was almost normal in frontier areas. Among the western Pueblo people on the New Spain frontier, the Hopi tribes were an outstanding example.103 The missionary programme in their towns began in 1629, and like their neighbours they accepted the Spaniards passively for decades. They gave their support to the Pueblo revolt in 1680 but in like manner accepted the reimposition of Spanish control. From about 1700, finally, the majority of the Hopis refused to accept the missions and reverted exclusively to their own cultural ways, continuing in this manner until the end of Spanish rule.