Mexico

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Mexico

Republic of North America sharing borders with the United States, Guatemala, and Belize and home to a significant African population since colonial times.

Mexico prides itself on being a nation of mestizos, people of Indian and European descent. This intermixing is said to reflect Mexico's ethnic harmony and its so-called “cosmic race.” Too often, however, these homogenizing beliefs call upon the nation's ethnic minorities to assimilate into a dominant culture and obscure the social and political marginalization that they continue to face. Furthermore, the existence of Afro-Mexicans is often denied by an image of the nation as principally a mixture of European and Indian. In fact, Afro-Mexicans have played an important role in Mexican history and remain as a significant though often overlooked minority.

Origins and Early Slavery

The African presence in what is today known as Mexico dates to the first of the Spanish incursions in the New World. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés came ashore in the area of Veracruz in 1519, a free black man named Juan Garrido was with him. Garrido may have participated in the conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán and was a known participant in several expeditions in other parts of New Spain after Cortés toppled Tenochtitlán. He is also said to have been the first person to farm wheat in Mexico. Free blacks, however, were uncommon in early Mexico; more common were the several African slaves who also accompanied Cortés and his invading army. Little is known about what role these slaves played in the conquest and immediate postconquest periods.

As Spanish settlers arrived in Mexico in the mid-1500s, they relied heavily on indigenous peoples for labor in mines and on plantations; however, even then settlers supplemented the labor base with a small but steady stream of African slaves. In the first sixty years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, between 30,000 and 40,000 slaves arrived in Mexico. Some of these were Hispanicized slaves, Africans who had been enslaved in Spain for some time before arriving in the New World. Most were imported directly from Africa. Regardless of origin, the slaves were mostly male: typically three men were imported for every woman because they were seen as better suited for work in the mines. This ratio forced many enslaved African men to seek Amerindian mates, beginning a process of mestizaje (racial mixing) that would continue throughout Afro-Mexican history. Such intermixing had further implications. Since under Spanish law freedom followed the mother's line, the children of an enslaved man and a free woman would be freeborn. Thus if the slave population was to grow, the Spaniards would fuel it with infusions of slaves from Africa instead of with reproduction in Mexico.

In 1763 Miguel Cabrera painted a series of sixteen canvases illustrating the results of intermarriage between ethnic groups. This painting shows the offspring of a black and an Indian—a China cambuja.

Oronoz

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By the late 1500s European settlement in Mexico had grown rapidly and with it, commerce and the demand for slave labor. Vast stores of copper and silver had been discovered; large ranches had been carved from the land; a nascent Sugar industry was flowering; textile works were established; and fisheries were being exploited. Inexpensive labor was essential to maintaining the incredible profitability of these ventures. Although Mexico's indigenous groups were the original draftees for this labor, abysmal conditions, more general mistreatment at the hands of their Spanish overlords, and sweeping European diseases had decimated their ranks by the late 1500s. Many Spanish reformers, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, argued against the harsh treatment of the indigenous peoples and suggested that Africans be imported. The reformers' logic seemed to be that Africans had already proven themselves in Spain and elsewhere to be better adapted to European disease and labor. Businessmen in New Spain heartily agreed, throwing in their (dubious) opinion that a single African laborer could do the work of three or four indigenous people. Before the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish Crown made the enslavement of indigenous people illegal but allowed African enslavement and importation to continue. Africans thus became all the more important to business in New Spain.

Peak and Decline of Slavery

The Mexican slave trade, both the domestic trade and the importation of new slaves, reached its peak between 1580 and 1640, when imports from Africa averaged better than 1,000 slaves a year, and two out of every three slaves bound for Spanish America were destined for Mexico. Most of the slaves arrived at the port of Veracruz, on Mexico's Caribbean coast. From there they were sent to Mexico City and points beyond, although many were kept in the vicinity of Veracruz to work the fisheries and ports. It is estimated that by the mid-1600s Afro-Mexicans, enslaved and free, totaled slightly fewer than 150,000. Historian Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has estimated that in the 1500s and 1600s Afro-Mexicans outnumbered whites two to one, but natives outnumbered blacks and whites combined thirty to one.

By the early 1700s the Afro-Mexican population began to decline, partly because of Spanish reforms that limited (but certainly did not halt) the slave trade. A large number of Afro-Mexicans also succumbed to foreign diseases; although more resistant to most illnesses than Amerindians, Africans were nonetheless vulnerable to yellow fever, syphilis, and tuberculosis. It was also not uncommon for slaves to be worked to death, as their native predecessors had been.

Mexico

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A more subtle but perhaps more pervasive cause of decline was the Spanish preference for light skin. In Mexico, as elsewhere in the Spanish Empire, social status was tightly linked with skin color: the lighter the better. Thus an Afro-Mexican improved his or her social status by taking a lighter-skinned partner, preferably a white, but lacking that, a mestizo (of indigenous and European descent) or Indian. The children of such a union, typically lighter-skinned than their Afro-Mexican parent, were thus assured of a marginally better social caste than the darker-skinned parent. The Spanish custom of importing few African women only accelerated the process by which Africans mixed with Amerindians. Moreover, because the few women slaves who were imported typically worked as domestic servants in Spanish households, they often were taken as concubines by their masters—leading to a further “lightening” of the race and diminishing the number of potential Afro-Mexican couples.

Black Life, Black Resistance

Afro-Mexicans, whether slave or free, were subject to the harsh rigidity of the Mexican caste system, in which they were the lowest rung. Blacks had no right to attend school; were barred from some orders of the Roman Catholic Church; could not travel on their own at certain times of day; could not carry weapons; and in some cases were forbidden to marry and raise a family. Punishment for violating these and similar laws often took a dreadful corporal form: the severing of a hand, foot, or ear; having hot wax or fat dripped onto their skin; or for men, castration.

Life in bondage, of course, had additional cruelties. Slaves could be bought and sold at will. On arrival in Mexico or on being sold to a new owner, slaves were stripped of their names and given names identifying them as belonging to their masters. Slaves were also typically branded for identification and sometimes as punishment. They were also denied their religion and baptized as Christians.

From the earliest parts of the colonial era, Afro-Mexicans rebelled against these and other indignities. In the mid-1530s a group of slaves in the area of Mexico City revolted. After a brief period of fighting, they were caught and beheaded, and their heads were displayed in a public plaza as a warning to others. Escape was a more common form of resistance. Aided by the rugged and often little-explored geography of Mexico, escaped slaves often banded together and formed communities called palenques. Most of the palenques quickly succumbed to colonial attacks, but some survived, and a few plagued Spaniards by periodically raiding colonial settlements. One of the most successful palenques was established in the late 1500s inland from Veracruz. Under the leadership of an Afro-Mexican runaway named Yanga, the palenqueros rebuffed all Spanish attacks and were so persistent in their counterattacks that Spanish officials signed a truce with them in 1612. The palenque was thereafter a free settlement, and today it is the town of Yanga.

In the early and mid-1700s, also in the region inland of Veracruz, slaves working the profitable Atlantic sugar mills revolted, prompting further rebel activity. When colonial officials could not contain the outbreaks, negotiations followed; in return for helping Spain in its battles against Great Britain, the Afro-Mexicans were given their freedom. Similar uprisings, and with them the creation of palenques, occurred around the Pacific ports of Acapulco and Huatulco. Because Spanish settlement was lighter on the Pacific coast, many of these African communities lasted longer than their Atlantic counterparts. With time the mostly male palenqueros intermingled with nearby Amerindian women, and the communities began to grow with a mixed-race population.

Slaves also found a small measure of protection in Spanish laws requiring the humane treatment of slaves. For example, although harsh punishments could be meted out for crimes—even trivial crimes—the law required that punishment be linked to a particular crime; cruelty for cruelty's sake was forbidden. Spanish law also preserved the right to marriage in most instances. Perhaps more important, slaves were given several routes to freedom through the Siete Partidas, the Spanish legal code dating from medieval times that governed not only enslaved blacks but also enslaved Jews, Arabs, and others in the Iberian Peninsula. Slaves could buy their own freedom, usually through installments at an agreed-upon price. If the slaveholder later tried to change the price or disputed that payments were made, there was at least the possibility for the slave to take legal recourse against his or her owner. Freedom could also be bought for a slave by another party. And slaveholders were allowed to free their slaves more or less at will. Still, just because a good offer was made for a slave's freedom, the slaveholder was not obliged to sell. As long as a slaveholder wanted to keep a slave, he could do so. Moreover, many progressive elements of the Siete Partidas were simply ignored or amended in New Spain. For example, in the Old World slaves who married freed people were given their freedom; however, because in the New World so many African slaves married (free) Amerindians, as early as the 1520s local officials got rid of this route to freedom.

Independence and Emancipation

By the end of the 1700s, much to the despair of the Spanish state, the races of New Spain had become intermixed. A complex system of caste distinctions based on skin color had evolved alongside this intermixing, and much of it was codified in law, such as prohibitions against marriage between castes. As with most caste systems, far more people occupied the lower rungs of the Mexican system than the upper, and by the late 1700s and early 1800s several elites began to give voice to the discrimination inflicted on the mass of people. Two of the most prominent such spokesmen were José María Morelos y Pavón and Miguel Hidalgo, a pair of vocal priests who called on colonial leaders in the early 1800s to end the caste system and, along with it, slavery. Their cries went unheeded, but anger over the caste system and, more generally, colonialism had reached such a point that revolution was now almost inevitable.

In 1810 Hidalgo led the rebellion that prompted Spain to accede to Mexican demands for independence in 1821. Many historians believe that a troop of Afro-Mexicans under Hidalgo, the Batallón de los Morenos, began the revolution. Among the revolution's other early leaders was Vicente Guerrero, a Mexican of partial African descent who was known as El Negro Guerrero and, for his calls to end caste and slavery, “the people's champion.” Guerrero played a key role in rallying nonwhites to revolt and would later become Mexico's second president. It was also Guerrero who, in 1829, officially abolished slavery.

Mexico's new leaders hoped that the country's citizens would think of themselves not as blacks or Indians or mestizos but rather as Mexicans. To this end, they banned racial discrimination and forbade the church to classify parishioners on the basis of race. They also eliminated questions about race from the national census. This development had some unfortunate consequences. For example, the mere presence of blacks in Mexico has often been denied in the last century and a half, and studies of Afro-Mexican life languished until the mid-1900s. Because of the ban on racial determination in the census, even the number of Afro-Mexicans is unknown. (The last official count was in 1810, when Afro-Mexicans made up slightly more than 10 percent of the population.)

Contemporary Afro-Mexicans

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the process of miscegenation continued steadily. Officials and intellectuals even used the phrase mejorar la raza (to improve the race), which in practice meant diluting the Afro-Mexican gene pool with the lighter-skinned Amerindian gene pool in order to create a lighter race. Almost never did mejorar la raza mean “tainting” the white race with African blood. The ideology of Whitening also penetrated what used to be the lower castes—that is, among the darker-skinned Amerindians and mestizos—who were often prejudiced against marrying someone of even darker skin.

Still, gradual miscegenation had caused Afro-Mexicans to dwindle to slightly more than 5 percent of the population in 1950, by one estimate. By 1995 another estimate judged Afro-Mexicans at 0.5 percent or just under 500,000 of Mexico's almost 100 million people. Other estimates place the figure in 1995 as high as 4 or 5 percent or up to five million Afro-Mexicans. The number of Mexicans with at least some degree of African ancestry is almost certainly much higher.

Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, interest in Afro-Mexicans slowly revived, urged largely by the pioneering studies of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. Beltrán's work in turn gave impetus to recognition of Afro-Mexicans by the government, which in 1991 gave its support to a project called Nuestra Tercera Raíz (Our Third Root), intended to further the study of Afro-Mexicans. Today the largest Afro-Mexican settlements are in the Pacific region known as Costa Chica, where escaped slaves from Acapulco and Huatulco established palenques. Other black settlements are near Veracruz and, to a lesser degree, in the northern desert states of Coahuila, Zacatecas, and Sinaola and in the southern Yucatán and Quintana Roo. The Afro-Mexican population in Coahuila is supplemented by the descendants of escaped North American slaves who intermarried with Seminole Indians.

See also Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Complexities of Ethnic and Racial Terminology in Latin America and the Caribbean; Horse, John; Latin America and the Caribbean, Blacks in; Latin America, Blacks and Indians in: An Interpretation; Maroonage in the Americas; Mining in Latin America and the Caribbean; Punishment of Slaves in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Seminole Wars; Slave Laws in Colonial Spanish America; Slave Rebellions in Latin America and the Caribbean; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade; Transculturation, Mestizaje, and the Cosmic Race: An Interpretation.

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