Blacks in Latin America

Article Outline

Introduction; Early Immigration and Slavery; Emancipation; Black Society after Emancipation; Culture; Politics

Introduction

Blacks in Latin America, a history of blacks in the various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Latin American and Caribbean regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants. African immigration to the Americas may have begun before European exploration of the region. Blacks sailed with Christopher Columbus even on his first voyage in 1492, and the earliest Spanish and Portuguese explorers were likewise accompanied by black Africans who had been born and reared in Iberia. In the following four centuries millions of immigrants from Africa were brought to the New World as slaves. Today, their descendants form significant ethnic minorities in several Latin American countries, and they are the dominant element in many of the Caribbean nations. Over the centuries, black people have added their original contributions to the cultural mix of their respective societies and thus exerted a profound influence on all facets of life in Latin America. See also Atlantic Slave Trade.

Early Immigration and Slavery

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Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were natives of Spain and Portugal—men such as Pedro Alonso Niño, a navigator who accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and the black colonists who helped Nicolás de Ovando form the first Spanish settlement on Hispaniola in 1502. The name of Nuflo de Olano appears in the records as that of a black slave present when Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Other blacks served with Hernán Cortés when he conquered Mexico and with Francisco Pizarro when he marched into Peru.

Iberian Blacks

Estebanico, one of the survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’s unfortunate expedition to Florida in 1527, was a black. With three companions, he spent eight years traveling overland to Mexico City, learning several Native American languages in the process. Later, while exploring what is now New Mexico, he lost his life in a dispute with the Zuni.

Juan Valiente, another black, led Spaniards in a series of battles against the Araucanian people of Chile between 1540 and 1546. Although Valiente was a slave, he was rewarded with an estate near Santiago and control of several Native American villages.

Beginning of the African Slave Trade

By 1518 the demand for slaves in the Spanish New World (see Spanish Empire) was so great that King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct transport of slaves from Africa to the American colonies. The slave trade was controlled by the Crown, which sold the right to import slaves (asiento) to entrepreneurs.

By the 1530s, the Portuguese were also using African slaves in Brazil. From then until the abolition of the slave trade in 1870, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas: about 47 percent of them to the Caribbean islands and the Guianas; 38 percent to Brazil; and 6 percent to mainland Spanish America. About 4.5 percent went to North America, roughly the same proportion that went to Europe.

The greatest proportion of these slaves worked on plantations producing sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and rice in the tropical lowlands of northeastern Brazil and in the Caribbean islands. Most of them came from the sub-Saharan states of West and Central Africa, but by the late 18th century the supply zone extended to southern and East Africa as well.

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Blacks in Latin America

Introduction

Early Immigration and Slavery

Iberian Blacks

Beginning of the African Slave Trade