Africa in the Americas: Blacks in Mexico

essay by

Patrick J. Carroll

            Africans were concentrated in four core areas of Hispana-America during the early colonial period. The Caribbean islands constituted the first zone. There blacks mined gold and grew sugar.  Panama was a second area of penetration. The Isthmus served as a land bridge linking Pacific and Atlantic trade, and African slaves moved commerce across Panama from the early sixteenth century onward. New Granada, or present day Colombia and upper Ecuador, was a third area of black concentration. There blacks mined the richest gold deposits in all of Spanish America.  Peru and Mexico represented the Fourth zone heavily populated by Africans. Their silver mining economies employed some Africans, but, more importantly, silver profits provided the necessary capital to found other industries that relied heavily upon slave labor, such as sugar culture and urban textiles. The black experience in Mexico, or New Spain, ultimately proved more significant than in Peru, because Mexico, as the wealthiest colony in the hemisphere in terms of markets, subjects, and productivity, set precedents for the institution of slavery throughout Spanish America. For that reason the history of blacks in New Spain deserves greater attention. Between 1521 and 1639, Mexico received as many as half the bond persons shipped to the Western Hemisphere.

            At the same time that Mexico’s colonial economy grew, its native population shrank. When Hernando Cortés landed near Veracruz, perhaps as many as twenty-five million natives lived in Mexico; by 1610 their numbers had dwindled to less than a million. Spaniards, remembering the depopulation of the Caribbean islands a half-century earlier, feared the same occurrence in Mexico. Old World diseases caused most of the deaths, but whites attributed the decline to overwork and mistreatment of the Indians.  As a result, Spaniards introduced African slavery into the area to relieve apparent labor stress on native Mexicans.

            During the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, when Spanish and Portuguese colonists were experimenting with work systems to support their growing economies, several of the largest west African nations locked in warfare that produced tens of thousands of captives for the slave markets of the New World. Portugal pioneered European trade with West African nations. By the time Columbus discovered America, Portugal had already established an efficient trade network with some of the largest and most powerful of the West African states—and one of the items that Portuguese merchants imported was slaves. When American markets developed for this commodity or “pieces of the Indies,” as the slaves were called, Portugal stepped in as the logical supplier. In 1580 the Spanish and Portuguese crowns united. Now with access to the Portuguese slave trade machinery, Spain put that engine to good use in supplying the labor needs of rich new colonies like Mexico.

            Once in New Spain, Africans and their descendants helped to shape, and were in turn shaped by, the emerging colonial society.  hey made two crucial contributions to the economic development of the colony. First, they supplemented—and sometimes supplanted—a dwindling native labor supply at a critical point in the colony’s economy. In cities and towns increasing numbers of black slaves took up positions as domestic servants alongside Indian helpers. Spaniards staffed small urban textile factories called obrajes with blacks and Indians. Urban craftsmen imported African slaves and made them permanent apprentices, while assigning native Mexicans less skilled tasks. Architects and engineers also depended on black slaves to perform skilled menial tasks and drafts of less permanent Indian laborers to complete less skilled ones.

            In the countryside black slaves took up positions as skilled workers and livestock husbandmen on plantations and haciendas that sprang up in many parts of the viceroyalty. They served as blacksmiths, carpenters, and field labor bosses. Some Indians, too, lived on the estates, but a majority of native workers continued to reside in their own villages. On sugar plantations blacks worked in the oppressively hot and demanding refining houses where temperatures normally topped one hundred degrees and a mistake could cause loss of product, limb, and life. After 1550 Indians could not legally engage in refining tasks; whites feared that the harsh working conditions would raise Indian death rates.  Finally, black slaves significantly contributed to the skilled labor force within the Mexican mining industry, especially in the refining process.

            Africans became involved in a web of socio-economic relationships that led to a second, more negative, development within the colonial society. Whites had to control vast numbers of blacks and Indians in colonies thousands of miles away from the mother country at a time when such distances translated into months of travel. For this reason Spaniards needed American mechanisms to maintain order among subordinate peoples. A New World variant of the European feudal system developed, a sistema de las castas, where caste became synonymous with race. By dividing blacks, whites, and Indians on the basis of their skin color, and then using these divisions to rank groups within the society, white Spaniards effectively controlled Indians and blacks. Whites had conquered Indians and enslaved Africans. All three groups came to accept the Spaniards’ elevated position of power as the natural order of things. On the basis of this circular reasoning, white Europeans in Mexico strengthened and solidified an older concept of social control that was then transferred all over the Americas. Mexico maintained the most extreme application of this logic, an association that first emerged in the Caribbean, the idea of identifying slavery with one race, blacks. 

            By 1630 whites in Mexico realized that the Indian population would not die off. This discouraged the continued importation of expensive Africans, and Mexico quietly retreated from the Atlantic slave trade.

            As slaves, Africans occupied an inferior social position vis-à-vis whites, but as expensive skilled laborers in the workplace, they enjoyed status over large numbers of transient Indian workers with whom they were in contact. This afforded blacks the opportunity to interact not only with the dominant white but the subordinate (to blacks) Indian population as well. Black males especially took advantage of the social opportunities their labor status afforded them. A high level of miscegenation, or race mixture, occurred as blacks mixed not only with whites but with more numerous and available Indians.  Children from the latter unions followed the station of their Indian mothers and enjoyed freedom from slavery under Spanish law, a fact that gave black males added incentive to seek these matches.

            Extraordinary consequences arose from Afro-Mexicans’ some what intermediate social position between whites and Indians. With one foot chained in the Spanish world as slaves, and the other striding into the Indian world as co-workers, blacks inevitably provided a link between the Iberian and native communities. In this capacity they played an early role in the racial and cultural amalgamation of Mexican society; they helped lay the foundations of what later scholars labeled mestizaje. This racial and cultural amalgamation eventually blurred color and ethnic lines. By 1900, after four hundred years of racial miscegenation with whites, Indians, and racial hybrids that resulted, and after nearly three hundred years of cultural isolation from Africa, Afro-Mexicans had become physically and culturally indistinguishable from the rest of the nation population. They had ceased being Afro-Mexicans and become Mexicans.

            The presence of blacks in Mexico had a significant effect on life throughout the Americas. On the negative side the Mexican market for slaves during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided critical incentive for the institutionalization of the Atlantic slave trade. Successful implementation of Africa slave labor in New Spain encouraged its use elsewhere. The Caribbean precedent of identifying slavery with the black race alone received critical legitimization within the exemplary Mexican setting.

            More positively, Afro-Mexicans contributed essential labor to the colonial Mexican economy just as it boomed. Wealth produced in New Spain attracted European settlement in other parts of the Americas. This, in turn, greatly accelerated New World development.

            Blacks’ social resistance to racist and cultural barriers created hybrid racial and ethnic ties between Spaniards and Indians. The resulting racial and cultural mix laid the foundations for modern Mexican society. Other areas of Spanish America built on this Mexican precedent, and many forged their national societies in the same manner. In all these ways, Mexico, as the first setting where whites, blacks, and Indians came together in large numbers, provided much of the blue print for the building of modern Latin America and, to a lesser degree, North America. Columbus discovered the New World in 1492.  African-Americans helped to develop and implement this American model.

Recommended Readings

Bastide, Roger. African Civilizations in the New World. Trans. Peter Green. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971.

Describes holdover aspects of African heritage and their influence on culture  in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese American.

Carroll, Patrick J. Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development, 1570-1830. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1991.

Looks at regional development during the colonial period from the perspective of the Afro-Veracruzano population.

Curtin, Phillip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin  Press, 1969.

The most important attempt to count the number of Africans forcibly transported to each part of the New World.

Graham, Richard, ed. The Idea of Race in Latin America. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990.

Thoughtful essays describing and analyzing the renewed importance of race in the lives of modern Latin Americans.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999.

Surveys 400 years of the Atlantic slave-trade, covering the West and East African experience, as well as the Americas, details current scholarly knowledge of the slave trade and compares this knowledge to popular beliefs.

Morner, Magnus, ed. Race and Class in Latin America. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970.

A short but good traditional description of the colonial caste system in Latin America.

Palmer, Colin. Slaves of the White God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975.

A good general overview of the black slave experience in New Spain when the African presence there was strongest.

Price, Richard. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996.

An outstanding collection of primary source documents on maroon societies (groups of escaped slaves) throughout the Americas.

Rout, Leslie, Jr. African Experience in Spanish America. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976.

Traces the rise and fall of African slavery to emancipation, with a brief sketch of the slave experience in each country.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998.

Focuses on the causes and consequences of the slave trade in Africa, Europe, and the New World.