Peru

Source:

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

Peru

Country in South America, bounded on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil and Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean.

Peru has long been known for the powerful and sophisticated civilization of the Incas, who built their cities high in the mineral-rich Andes Mountains. It is also famous for the Spanish conquistadores who vanquished the enormous Inca Empire in a matter of months, and for the thousands of tons of gold and silver that Spain extracted from the region over the next several centuries. Less well known is that the conquest, the extraction, and indeed much of contemporary Peruvian culture was the result of the labor and input of African slaves and their descendants.

Blacks in the Conquest and Colonial Peru

Indigenous peoples, originally migrants from North and Central America, have lived in Peru since at least the ninth millennium B.C.E. As early as 1200 C.E., a Quechua-speaking people known as the Inca began subduing their neighbors, eventually controlling the entire region of the Andes, some 3,000 kilometers (2,000 miles) in length.

In 1524 the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro, in the company of Diego de Almagro, entered Ecuador and Peru searching for the Inca Empire, where there were rumored gold and silver deposits. African slaves were among the members of the earliest such expeditions, serving as both sailors and soldiers. When the Spanish established contact with Indian groups, they assigned some of the slaves the duty of interpreting, based on the dubious belief that Africans, being “primitive” themselves, would better understand the Indians.

Peru

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When Pizarro captured and executed the Inca leader Atahualpa in 1532, and when he defeated and plundered the Inca stronghold of Cuzco the following year, African soldiers were among his ranks. Perhaps the most notable of the early black conquistadores of Peru was a slave named Juan Valiente. In 1534 Valiente obtained permission from his owner to join Pedro de Alvarado's army on its passage from Guatemala to Peru. Valiente fought fiercely in Peru in 1535 against the remnants of the Incas, then moved on to Chile, where he gained fame for his fighting against the Araucanian Indians. In the mid-1540s he was rewarded with an estate near Santiago and received an encomienda, a group of tribute-paying Indians—probably the first instance in which an African was given an encomienda. Valiente remained, nonetheless, a slave. While negotiations for his freedom were pending with his master (who wanted Valiente returned, along with all the property he had amassed), Valiente was killed by Araucanians at Tucapel.

The wealth of Peru's gold and silver lodes, tucked high in the Andes Mountains, matched the expectations of the Spaniards. In the early years of the colonies, however, the Spaniards used Indians as the main workers of the deep-shaft mines. Not only was Indian labor abundant (originally, at least), but the Spaniards also believed that Africans were ill suited to the cold alpine climate and the dank mines.

Instead, the life of the early Afro-Peruvian slave revolved around the coastal capital of Lima (founded by Pizarro in 1535) and former Inca cities like Cuzco, which were being transformed into Hispanic cities. Afro-Peruvians performed much of the land clearing, road building, and construction to erect these cities. In Lima, slaves were also prominent among the dockworkers and mule drivers who greased the gears of the rapidly growing export of gold and silver and import of food and other goods. Female slaves also performed highly valued domestic tasks like cooking and laundering.

In order to become less dependent on imported food, Peruvian settlers fanned out across the narrow coastal plain and settled at the few well-watered sites. There they established plantations on land cleared and worked by slaves. (Indians were used initially, but most of the coastal Indians had fled to the mountains or had been killed by disease and warfare.) For the most part the crops grown were for the internal use of the colony; little was exported. In some places, cotton production created a viable textile industry in Lima, where slaves worked in the factories. Later, enough sugarcane was grown to export it to Europe. Most haciendas were small, their size dictated by the sparseness of the land. Thus, even the largest of the farms had only a few dozen workers.

The slave trade itself was a costly endeavor since slaves had to journey on a several-month voyage from Africa to the Americas (usually Panama). They then traveled overland for several weeks to the Pacific Ocean and were further transported by boat to Lima; many died en route. Slaves were valued for their physical labor. In addition, many of the arriving slaves had worked farms in African climates not unlike that of Peru. Thus they contributed precious expertise about growing crops in a dry land. Other slaves, skilled in crafts and metals before their capture, would continue to work in artisan trades as slaves, in both the city and the country.

By the end of the sixteenth century Peru also had a substantial number of free blacks. Perhaps one-fourth to one-third of Afro-Peruvians had bought their freedom under Spanish laws, had arrived free, or had been granted their freedom for fighting in the conquest with Pizarro. Most of the free blacks, known as libertos, shunned the agricultural regions for the cities, particularly Lima, where they worked as low- to mid-wage laborers, maids, and the like. Their actions were rigidly circumscribed: in 1577, for example, the viceroy of Peru banned any black person from owning a weapon. Throughout colonial times blacks were barred as a matter of course from many of the skilled trades.

Although Spanish law allowed any slave to buy his or her freedom, slaves' activities were closely monitored. According to historian Frederick Bowser, the vast majority of slaves who were manumitted between 1580 and 1650 in Lima were women and children, particularly female children—considered the least valuable slaves. Only 4 percent of slaves freed in Lima during that time period were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five—for a master, the most profitable years of a slave's life. Apparently slaveholders had informal means of keeping their most valuable slaves closely tethered. It is little wonder, then, that when a male liberto obtained his freedom he often elected to join the comparatively egalitarian Spanish colonial army in Peru, or left Peru altogether to enlist in another colony's military. At the turn of the sixteenth century black slaves and libertos made up perhaps 10 percent of Peru's population. In the Andes, African slaves and libertos were probably equal in number to Spaniards until as late as 1640.

Despite the high cost of slaves, demand for imports grew well into the seventeenth century. Occasionally, a few African slaves were bought and/or captured by Indians. With greater frequency, Spanish colonists sent incoming African slaves to work alongside Incas in the gold- and silver-mining gangs of the Andes. In the deep-shaft mines, brutal labor, poor ventilation, and cave-ins conspired to keep the life of a worker short and the demand for slaves high.

The demand for slave labor prompted colonists to circumvent Spain's rigid control of the lucrative slave trade, which it monitored in order to tax. Typically, Spain granted the rights to its slave trade to a particular company or companies and forbade Spanish colonists from trading with anyone else. For example, from 1701 to 1713 several French companies held the asiento (the right to the slave trade) for Spanish America. During this time, France exported several thousand blacks to Peru from their stations along Africa's Congo River—a long voyage with a high cost. If a buyer was willing to deal with smugglers, slaves could be obtained more cheaply from Portuguese Brazil or the British and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Spain reluctantly acknowledged its lack of control over the trade in 1740, when it allowed privileged Peruvian colonists to buy licencias (licenses), with which they could buy as many slaves as they wanted from any nation not at war with Spain. The licencia system lasted half a century but did little to curb smuggling. After 1795 Spain abandoned the system and allowed any Spanish colonist to buy as many slaves as he wanted from any source not at war with Spain.

Cultural Survival and Resistance

Much of the African slaves' cultural and linguistic heritage was lost as a result of the long distance they were forced to travel and the length of time they sometimes spent in other colonies before arriving in Peru. Nonetheless, many slaves kept the drum-saturated music of their homelands alive, which over the centuries they blended with the string-influenced music of the Spanish colonists. African forms of cooking were also preserved, since preparing food was a task that slaves working as domestics often performed both en route and upon arrival in Spanish America.

As most Afro-Peruvians were converted to Catholicism, African religious customs merged with Christianity. The most prominent example of this syncretism surviving today is the ceremony of El Señor de los Milagros, an annual march through the streets of Lima celebrated by tens of thousands. The ceremony originated in the mid-seventeenth century, when blacks, primarily from Angola, organized in cofradías, societies of mutual support. Here, they recalled songs of their homeland and applied them to the Catholic reverence for saints and images, as well as to the belief in Christ as a redeemer who would someday free the righteous. The cofradías thus helped to create a ritual and faith that simultaneously preserved African heritage, upheld Hispanic values, and espoused bold ideas of liberation.

Afro-Peruvians rebelled against Spanish oppression in sporadic outbreaks as early as the 1540s. One of the larger revolts took place when the English buccaneer Sir Francis Drake attacked the city of Lima in 1578. Ultimately Drake released the city, and the Afro-Peruvian revolt, like most such rebellions, was quickly put down.

In some instances, however, slaves fled their masters and established palenques—remote villages where they were relatively free from harassment. One of the longest enduring palenques was Huachipa, which was established in the central coastal region in the early 1700s under the direction of a slave known as Francisco Congo, also known as Chavelilla. Few records survive about Congo's rule of Huachipa, but he appears to have steered the settlement through a prosperous period of farming, ranching, and occasional raiding. In 1763 and 1764 another group of cimarrones (escaped slaves) in the Carabayllo Valley near Lima leveled such a series of attacks against travelers that the colonial government mounted a punitive expedition against the fugitives. A large force under the command of Pablo Sáenz de Bustamonte, including sixty soldiers from the viceroy's personal guard, dealt a decisive blow to the cimarrones in 1764. The accused ringleaders were executed, the rest beaten and reduced to slavery once again.

Free blacks also exerted autonomy when their limited rights were threatened. In 1779 the government tried to levy a special tax on libertos in order to replenish the ailing treasury. Most complied, but libertos in the northern coastal town of Lambayeque refused. The colonial government apparently intended to punish the resisting libertos, but at roughly the same time Indians under Tupac Amarú began a massive rebellion against the government's oppression of Indians. It was one of the most far-reaching and influential uprisings in the history of colonial Spanish America, but the rebellion was ultimately crushed and Tupac Amarú executed in 1780. The insurgent Indians were joined by many blacks, the most powerful of whom were under the leadership of Juan Santos Atahualpa. The Africans added the liberation of slaves to the demands of the Indians—the first insurrection to include such a demand. Peru's outnumbered Spaniards, badly frightened and in need of black and mulatto allies, allowed the libertos in Lambayeque their tax revolt, and did not retaliate. Even after the defeat of Tupac Amarú, the Spaniards made little attempt to enforce the liberto tax. Eventually the colonial government was forced to enact several of the reforms Tupac Amarú had demanded, though freeing slaves was not among these. Still, Lambayeque remains one of the few instances of Afro-Peruvian triumph over the Spanish colonial regime.

Independent Peru

By the late eighteenth century a reform movement with several factions had evolved in Spanish America generally and in Peru in particular. One such movement advocated an end to black slavery; another, more prominent, camp advocated an end to Spanish rule. Eventually the two merged, albeit somewhat uncomfortably. At the time that Simón Bolívar began his war of liberation against Spain in Venezuela, Peru had an estimated 90,000 African slaves. In his first two attempts to liberate Venezuela and Colombia, Bolívar rejected the use of black soldiers. However, by 1819, he began to enlist black troops and defeated Spanish troops in Venezuela and Colombia. His success sparked similar revolts in South America. In 1821 Argentine José de San Martín followed Bolívar's example, drafting blacks, mulattoes, and whites, and seized Lima.

In the rebel armies, blacks were generally segregated from whites into their own regiments and battalions. Often these troops were among the worst supplied and worst fed of all soldiers, yet they were required to undertake some of the most dangerous fighting. The South American wars of independence reached a peak in 1824, when rebel forces under Antonio José de Sucre met Loyalists at Ayacucho and Junín in the mineral-rich region of south central Peru. There, the Husare del Peru, a battalion of libertos, slaves, and mestizos, was largely responsible for the decisive rebel victories that secured the liberation of Peru from Spain.

In 1821, during San Martín's brief rule of war-torn Peru, he emancipated children born to slaves after July 28, 1821. Later that year he freed slaves owned by Loyalists, promised emancipation to slaves who fought honorably in the rebel army, and forbade the importation of slaves in the future. It took several years, however—until 1828—before these freedoms were affirmed by a new constitution. Still, all slaves who were born before July 28, 1821, and all who belonged to rebel sympathizers, were still in bondage.

Matters would worsen before they got better for Peru's remaining slaves, as the country dissolved into civil war in the late 1820s. From then until the mid-1830s a string of short-lived dictators tried to ingratiate themselves with wealthy slaveholders by allowing many abuses against free and enslaved blacks—many libertos experienced conditions that were little better than the slavery from which they had been freed. Such abuses culminated in 1835, when General Felipe Salavery declared that Peru was once again open to the slave trade, and in 1839, when Agustín Gamarra took over the country and signed a law that re-enslaved all libertos for the next half century.

In 1848 slaves on plantations near the northern coastal city of Trujillo staged a widespread revolt. They quickly captured the plantations, retaliated against their masters, and proceeded to march on Trujillo. There, with the help of urban slaves, the insurgents stormed the city, attacked many slaveholders, and held others hostage. When it soon became clear the revolt could not be sustained—Peruvian forces laid siege to and eventually took the city—the slaves killed a good number of the hostages. The revolt unnerved much of Peru, but slavery continued, with between 15,000 and 20,000 in servitude.

Emancipation and Beyond

In 1854 Peru fell into another period of civil war. In order to bolster his muster of troops, President José Rufino Echenique declared that all slaves who joined his army for two years would be freed after the fighting. Not to be outdone, Echenique's rival, Ramón Castilla, declared in December 1854 that all slavery was officially abolished—assuming that he and his army (many of whom he expected would be slaves) could seize power. Many slaves joined Castilla, and by January 1855 he was victorious. True to his word, Castilla ended slavery at last. To mollify Peru's powerful former slaveholders, Castilla's government paid them partial compensation for their loss. Slaves received no compensation for their years of servitude.

After the slaves' emancipation, many fled the coastal plantations and Andean mines for the cities. Former slaveholders were thus left with a labor shortage in both the fields and the mines, a problem they solved by importing massive numbers of workers from East Asia. The indentured laborers, mostly Chinese, were treated as slaves in all but name. Some of the former Afro-Peruvian slaves found work overseeing the Asians. The government and others also employed free blacks to quell the not infrequent riots by maltreated Asians. By 1875 Peru's blacks were surpassed in number by perhaps 80,000 Asians. The increased competition from Asians and Indians (many of whom moved from the highlands to the coastal regions in the late 1800s) made it extremely difficult for Afro-Peruvians to find work.

At the turn of the twentieth century and for decades to follow, many Afro-Peruvians remained in poverty, and most of those lived in urban slums—primarily in Lima. By day, those who could find jobs worked as domestic servants, bus drivers, textile laborers, and construction workers; few of these jobs offered hope of advancement. By night, Afro-Peruvians returned home to neighborhoods severely lacking sanitation. Several families often shared a single water faucet, and houses were extremely overcrowded and poorly built. The situation was little better for the fewer Afro-Peruvians who remained in the countryside and in the mountains and worked the same fields and mines their ancestors had worked as slaves.

Because discrimination was persistent throughout Peru, many Afro-Peruvians denied their African ancestry when they could. Afro-Peruvians commonly aspired for their children to marry lighter-skinned people. Still, the influence of Afro-Peruvian culture extended from music to cooking to sports.

After World War II, Peru underwent a gradual but disruptive change from rule by a privileged oligarchy to rule by a more representative democracy, though military leaders still held power. This change yielded new opportunities in schooling and health for the poor and, simultaneously, a massive rural-to-urban migration. These two factors made Peruvian cities vibrant centers of black culture. African dance and theater groups were founded, Afro-Peruvian literature was more widely disseminated, and racial discrimination against blacks and other minorities eased somewhat by the 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during this time, Afro-Peruvians formed several groups to agitate for political reforms to help blacks. Perhaps the most important of these were the Movimiento Negro Francisco Congo (Francisco Congo Black Movement) and the Asociación pro Derechos Humanos del Negro (Association for Black Human Rights).

In the 1970s several private groups supporting Afro-Peruvian advancement came together briefly around the Cultural Association of Black Peruvian Youth. The association taught Afro-Peruvian children about their heritage and encouraged education and political organization of their communities. Although it ultimately splintered, several factions of the movement continued their work in the 1980s and 1990s, contributing to a greater awareness of black history and culture in Peru. For example, Lima's Afro-Peruvian Research Institute continues to serve as a resource for black studies in Peru. In 1992 singer Susana Baca and her husband Ricardo Pereira founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo to celebrate Afro-Peruvian culture. The center collects oral histories of Afro-Peruvians as well as providing books and other materials for students and researchers interested in studying Afro-Peruvian history and culture.

Politically, Peru has made some progress in improving the social standing and treatment of black Peruvians. In 2000 the government made racial discrimination a crime. Anyone convicted under the law must perform at least sixty days of community service and is barred from holding public office for three years. In addition, several members of Peru's congress are black. Some branches of the military, however, still refrain from promoting blacks to the officer corps, and discriminatory practices remain in many areas of employment and social life. As of the early twenty-first century, however, Afro-Peruvians had yet to coalesce behind one or more political parties that would promote an agenda to help blacks—thus leaving a significant challenge for future generations of Afro-Peruvians.

See also Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean; Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Colonial Rule; Mining in Latin America and the Caribbean; Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean; Slave Laws in Colonial Spanish America; Slave Rebellions in Colonial Spanish America; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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