II.

Early Immigration and Slavery

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.

A.

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.

Between 1502 and 1518, Spain shipped out hundreds of Spanish-born Africans, called Ladinos, to work as laborers, especially in the mines. Opponents of their enslavement cited their weak Christian faith and their penchant for escaping to the mountains or joining the Native Americans in revolt. Proponents declared that the rapid diminution of the Native American population required a consistent supply of reliable workhands. Free Spaniards were reluctant to do manual labor or to remain settled (especially after the discovery of gold on the mainland), and only slave labor could assure the economic viability of the colonies.

B.

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.

C.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery in the Americas was generally harsh, but it varied from time to time and place to place. The Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations required a consistently high supply of labor for centuries. In other areas—the frontiers of southern Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia—slavery was relatively unimportant to the economy.

To tame the wilderness, build cities, establish plantations, and exploit mineral wealth, the Europeans needed more laborers than they could recruit from among their own metropolitan masses. In the early 16th century, the Spanish tried unsuccessfully to subjugate and enslave the native populations of the West Indies. Slavery was considered the most desirable system of labor organization because it allowed the master almost absolute control over the life and productivity of the laborer. The rapid disintegration of local indigenous societies and the subsequent decimation of the native peoples by warfare and European diseases severely exacerbated the labor situation, increasing the demand for imported workers.

African slaves constituted the highest proportion of laborers on the islands and around the Caribbean lowlands where the native population had died. The same was true in the northeastern coastlands of Brazil—especially the rich agricultural area called the Reconcavo, where the seminomadic Tupinambá and Tupiniquim peoples resisted effective control by the Portuguese—and in some of the Leeward Islands such as Guadeloupe and Dominica, where the Caribs waged a determined resistance to their expulsion and enslavement. In areas of previously dense populations, such as parts of central Mexico or the highlands of Peru, a sufficient number of the Native American inhabitants survived to satisfy a major part of the labor demands of the new colonists. In such cases African slaves supplemented coerced Native American labor.

D.

Volume of Immigration

In Mexico (then called New Spain), the principal economic activity for the colonists in the early colonial period was mining. African slaves were imported to counteract the precipitate decline in the Native American populations. When the indigenous inhabitants recovered sufficiently to provide the required labor, the demand for expensive African slaves diminished. Between 1519 and 1650, Mexico imported about 120,000 African slaves, or slightly fewer than 1000 per year. From 1650 to 1810, Mexico received an additional 80,000 Africans, a rate of merely 500 slaves per year. Indeed, Mexican slave owners bought no more than 50,000 slaves during the entire 18th century, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its highest. Chile imported about 6,000, about one-third of whom arrived before 1615; most were utilized in agriculture around Santiago. Argentina (mainly Buenos Aires) and Bolivia (mainly the mining areas around Charcas) brought in about 100,000 Africans. Import figures to all these areas were low compared with those for Brazil and the West Indies.

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean the slave population declined at the astonishing rate of 2 to 4 percent a year; thus, by the time slavery was abolished, the overall slave population in many places was far less than the total number of slaves imported. The British colony of Jamaica, for example, imported more than 600,000 slaves during the 18th century; yet, in 1838, the slave population numbered little more than 300,000. The French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) imported more than 800,000 Africans during the 18th century, but had only 480,000 slaves in 1790, on the eve of the Haitian Slave Revolt. Between 1810 and 1870, the Spanish colony of Cuba acquired about 600,000 slaves; in 1880, however, the Cubans had only 200,000 slaves and an entire Afro-Cuban population of 450,000. Altogether, the 4.7 million Africans imported to the Caribbean over the centuries had diminished to about 2 million in 1880.

E.

Blacks in Colonial Society

In Latin America society was, in general, a three-tiered structure of castes, subdivided into classes. At the top were the Europeans; in the middle were the free nonwhites; and at the bottom were slaves and Native Americans. Each caste had its own set of legal rights and social privileges, which varied from place to place. In the sugar-producing areas and other plantation-based economic units of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the lowlands of Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, the rights of slaves as well as free persons of color tended to be legally circumscribed. The greater the demand for labor, the more severe the coercion and discrimination exercised against the African sector of the population. In the coffee, cattle, and fishing areas of southern Brazil, Puerto Rico, eastern Cuba, the interior of Argentina, and Venezuela, social mobility tended to be greater and internal class and caste distinctions more relaxed and less formal. In the towns and cities Africans filled occupational roles just as did other free members of society, although they tended to be concentrated in the more menial and unskilled tasks.

The majority of the black population in Latin America and the Caribbean spent their lives in domestic service or as agricultural laborers. About 20 percent—both slave and free—were sailors, artisans, nursemaids, wet nurses, merchants, small shopkeepers, mining or sugar experts, or itinerant street vendors. Slavery was never only a form of labor organization or only an economic enterprise. It was a socioeconomic complex held together by law and custom. Regardless of their conditions, their hopes for freedom were strong, and slaves often revolted.