Leo J. Garofalo
Abstract: From the 1470s forward, Afro-Iberians constituted a European chapter in the African diaspora. Both free and enslaved, Afro-Iberians labored in homes, artisans’ workshops, markets, and in shipping and soldiering. With a heritage reaching south of the Sahara, these black Europeans participated in the Catholic Church and the conquest and colonization of the Americas.
Keywords: Black Europeans, Catholic Church, diaspora, Spanish empire, sailor, soldiers
AN ACTOR AND A SOLDIER, and considered a mulatto by all who knew him in Spain and the Americas, Diego Suárez was born in 1548 and grew up in the mid-sixteenth-century metropolis of Seville, in southern Iberia. Even before taking up soldiering in Spanish America, Suárez had bolstered his status around town by dressing as a soldier. In fact, his extensive acting wardrobe proved an important asset when he decided to sail to the Americas as a soldier to help protect Spanish shipping against the British, Dutch, and French pirates and privateers infesting the Atlantic and Caribbean. By all accounts, he simply dressed as a soldier, strapped on a sword, and appeared at the Board of Trade—the customs house that controlled travel and commerce to the Americas. He easily gained permission for passage to the Indies. In theory, legal restrictions limited Afro-Iberians’ access to both weapons and travel to the Americas. However, Suárez saw himself as a loyal Crown subject and a pious Catholic with both a right to travel to the Americas and Africa and an obligation to defend Spain’s interests and faith, with his sword if necessary. The officials of the Board of Trade agreed, and they gave him and many other Afro-Iberians permission to travel and serve the Crown.
In sixteenth-century Seville, Suárez lived with his mother, Barbola Hernandez. They occupied a house near the Straw Market in the Iglesia Mayor neighborhood, surrounded by hat makers, shopkeepers, and wine sellers who worked in that area. The people in the neighborhood knew his mother well because she sold them traditional Spanish sweets. As an adult in Seville, Suárez made a name for himself first as a man with a profession and second as an active Christian: he acted in plays, and he raised money for the church institutions in Seville. After multiple voyages to Mexico and Peru, Suárez died in 1589, far from that European home, without access even to a scribe or priest at the moment of his death. He died in a farming valley in Spain’s Peruvian viceroyalty, with his trunk still containing scripts for plays, a sword, and a half-full alms-collection box for a Seville brotherhood.
By the time Suarez was acting on the stage in southern Spain in the 1570s and 1580s, the sales in Iberia of people taken from western and central Africa had been going on for a hundred years. Lisbon was Europe’s largest slave market, and people were brought by land from Lisbon and Lagos in Portugal for resale in southern Spain. This enslavement of people from western and central Africa and their dispersal throughout the Atlantic world constitutes one of the earliest and longest-lasting European interactions with Africa. This early chapter in the diaspora illuminates the complexities of global Africa. Diplomatic, religious, commercial, and military exchanges long linked Portugal and the Kingdom of Kongo and other polities. In short, interactions between Iberians and people from south of the Sahara have a long and complex history stretching back to at least the 1400s.
Scholars tend to recognize the presence and importance of enslaved and free people from western and central Africa in forming Europe’s American colonies from the 1500s forward. However, the collective and individual acts of incorporation, resistance, and movement of Africans in Europe also shaped southern Iberian society. And these Afro-Iberians influenced Portugal’s and Spain’s imperial projects in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Despite their importance, black Europeans and their claims to community and belonging often remain unrecognized in descriptions of global Africa. Afro-Iberians offer another of the many stories of diaspora. Often their stories involved multiple displacements.
One way to visualize more of global Africa is to examine these Afro-Iberians and their experiences at the local level, where opportunities to negotiate status, privileges, and obligations frequently appeared. In the 1400s-1600s, a population of people with origins from south of the Sahara became integral parts of southern Iberia’s urban society. Many Afro-Iberians came directly from Africa. Other Afro-Iberians were born in Portugal or Spain, or on the Atlantic island colonies of Spain and Portugal (the Canaries, São Tomé, and Cape Verde). In some cases, Afro-Iberians’ origins were unclear or purposefully hidden. In most cases, early modern Afro-Iberians identified as much with Iberian places of origin (and Iberian or Afro-Iberian practices and institutions) as with African ethnic identities or slave-trade labels—or even more. The display or negotiation of these origins or identities occurred through both everyday and exceptional acts throughout the Atlantic world of the 1500s and 1600s.
Within the movement of people and ideas that linked Afro-Iberians to Africa, Europe, and the Americas, certain institutions and practices stand out as potential sites for identity affirmation or formation. They provided opportunities for people to define their relationship to the state, religion, and even notions of nation. Particularly revealing are Afro-Iberian membership in religious confraternities or brotherhoods and other claims to Christian status or royal service. Laypeople organized confraternities to express devotion through saints’ feast-day celebrations, care for the bodies and souls of the deceased, and carrying out charitable acts. In acts of self-definition, Afro-Iberians used religious confraternities, service to the Crown, and legal arguments to prove their freedom from the “taint of Muslim or Jewish practice.” These acts of affirmation before religious and secular authorities brought opportunities to travel within the Spanish empire and the benefits of Crown service to Afro-Iberians.
Diego Suárez offers an illustrative case of Afro-Iberian movement through the early Ibero-Atlantic world. He shows the possibilities of mobility—in particular, how participation in the church helped both travel and social status. Born in 1548 in Seville, Suárez lived with his mother in a neighborhood of artisans and people engaged in petty commerce. Everyone knew Barbola Hernandez because they bought her turrones (a sweet made from honey and almonds). In particular, they noted her death and her burial in the Church of San Francisco accompanied by the brothers of the San Buenaventura Brotherhood. The family association with San Buenaventura proved strong. When Suárez’s detractors tried to establish that his mother’s burial by the brotherhood was a charitable act performed for a destitute woman, others testified to the contrary. Evidence entered the court record of a long history of monetary contributions to the church. The Suárez family members identified closely and successfully with an image of themselves as faithful and active Christians, and unabashedly claimed the privileges that came with that religious participation.
Suárez’s stage acting gained him recognition and admiration that far exceeded his mother’s renown in the neighborhood. Among the men and women in Seville who testified in support of honoring the will he dictated on his deathbed in Peru, most had attended plays in which he acted. Despite the standard prohibitions against Afro-Iberians’ possession of offensive weapons and a ban on licenses for them to travel abroad, Suárez’s actions demonstrate that Afro-Iberian community members considered themselves Crown subjects. As such, they demanded the right to travel and embraced the obligation to defend Spain. Local royal officials shared this view of Afro-Iberians. Furthermore, the need to complete crews and defend the slaving and trading ventures setting forth from Seville, Cádiz, and Sanlúcar de Barrameda—not to mention many Portuguese ports—meant exceptions were frequently made to the rules limiting Afro-Iberians’ movement to the Americas.
1548—Born in Seville
1570s-80s—Worked as a stage actor in Seville and elsewhere
1584 [?]—Began sailing between Spain and the Americas
1586—Last embarked with the fleet in Seville headed to the Americas
1587—Mention of Suárez’s absence and replacement in ship’s log
1588?—Death of Suarez’s mother, Barbola Hernandez, in Seville
1589—Suárez’s death in Vitor Valley, Peru
1590–1601—Legal battle over Suárez’s property and legal status
A significant seafaring and soldiering population developed among Andalusia’s male Afro-Iberians. From the fifteenth century forward, they moved back and forth between the Americas and Spain, and western Africa and Spain. They worked as soldiers, gunners, mariners, common sailors, and cabin boys. At least one reached the level of a highly skilled pilot. Both enslaved and free Afro-Iberian men can be found working in these capacities. As with all sailors and soldiers sent to defend the ships and slaving expeditions, but particularly in the case of Afro-Iberians, Crown law insisted that these people be returned to Spain and not remain in the Americas without a specific license for immigration. In practice, many like Diego Suárez remained or partially settled in American ports and their hinterlands. These black European sailors and soldiers became traders and engaged in petty commerce or even agricultural work in order to survive until the fleet returned to Spain.
Although Suárez added sailing to the Indies as his second profession and made multiple voyages to the Americas as a soldier, he also continued to work as an actor in Mexico and Peru. In fact, he was still carrying scripts of plays with him when he died. Acting and soldiering supported Suárez economically, and his local social standing depended on these professions and his religious activities.
Participation in a confraternity reinforced Suárez’s identification with an artisan sector that placed him well above his father’s manual-laborer status (a marketplace porter) and his mother’s position selling sweets. Suárez and the artisans who counted themselves among his friends and neighbors favored two confraternities under Franciscan tutelage in Seville: San Buenaventura, and Souls of Purgatory. Confraternity activities became another link that bound them together as men who practiced diverse professions in Seville. The intensity of the struggle over his legacy opens an unusual window into his religious attachments and bequests, the way he constructed his status and identity, and how these identifiers traveled with him to the Americas. Suárez’s religious acts represented an important part of his formal relationship with the church. In Seville, Suárez enjoyed a close connection to the brotherhoods of San Buenaventura and Souls of Purgatory. When he embarked on his final trip to the Americas in 1586, Suárez packed all of his possessions, including an alms-collection box for Seville’s San Buenaventura Brotherhood. In 1589, the collection box contained 34 pesos raised in Peru. Each brotherhood that he named received approximately 398 pesos from his estate. Even when he was displaced to the Americas, Suárez’s strongest attachments were to confraternities associated with artisans and his home neighborhood in Seville.
In Peru, those who witnessed his death knew him as an actor, a mulatto, and a pious man. Suárez had also established links with the local church, although perhaps not as strong as those in Seville. Perhaps he had resettled in Arequipa. He designated money for specific Masses in Arequipa’s Mercedarian, Franciscan, and Dominican monasteries and in the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena. He requested that money be donated for the construction of Arequipa’s cathedral. He asked to be dressed in a Franciscan habit and buried in the city’s Franciscan monastery. In short, confraternity membership and participation and donations to prominent church institutions where he lived or worked proved to be an important part of Suárez’s identity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Despite the strong presence of confraternities organized for and in some cases by Afro-Iberians and Africans in Seville and Peru, Suárez chose not to identify with them. Founded to help sustain the slaves and other blacks receiving treatment in Seville’s hospital for blacks, the Brotherhood de Los Angeles (later de la Presentación or, popularly, de los Negros) won considerable prestige as the city’s oldest confraternity (and enjoyed the right to certain privileged positions in processions). However, it was just one of several brotherhoods specifically serving Seville’s black population, with the goals of instructing newly arrived and converted slaves in Christian practice, providing charity for the destitute among the slave and free black community, and providing a place of supervised congregation and identification with the established social order in the city. In the Andes, and especially in places with large black populations like Lima and certain agricultural valleys with black plantation laborers, specifically black confraternities were organized. Lima, in fact, boasted fifteen, and the archbishop in 1619 praised the mixed-race and black Brotherhood of Nuestra Señora de los Reyes. It was a “confraternity with much luster and ornaments and it is one of the best and best financed in this city thanks to the care of the morenos [blacks].” The size and importance of Lima’s African-descent population also allowed for the formation of confraternities linked directly to African ethnic groups or slave-trade groupings, or to the higher social status of the American-born creoles or the mixed-race status of mulattos. The official ecclesiastical inspections carried out in Peru during this time period also noted black religious brotherhoods in the rural agricultural areas using black slaves and wage laborers. Specific African origin (or distance from that origin) and level of Christian practice thus became important markers of individual and group identity in both Seville and Lima. Although Diego Suárez chose not to identify directly with black confraternities on either side of the Atlantic, the Christian status and geographical origin of his family did become an important topic of debate when it came time to distribute his bequests.
The complex origins and identities of Seville’s Afro-Iberians, even after death, appear in competing claims over inheritances. The effort to determine if Suárez’s mother was still alive, or at least alive when he dictated his will, generated two new claims to his money. As was typical in such cases over the property of the deceased, the town crier circulated in Seville, announcing both Suárez’s death and the court’s search for any heirs. Because his mother had apparently died, the Franciscan monastery in Seville claimed the right to distribute the money according to the terms of Suárez’s will. In addition, after hearing of the case, the owner of Suárez’s enslaved nephew and a bailiff of the Board of Trade each submitted petitions that challenged the Franciscan confraternities’ rights to the dead man’s money. Both new petitioners based their arguments on genealogical descent and the special religious and legal standing of people of African origins. The slave owner’s petitions first appeared to attempt to hide the heir’s status as a slave, although it openly embraced parentage with the deceased mulatto Suárez and his mother. The petition is written in the first person, in the name of the nephew, Geronimo Castro, identifying him as a householder of Seville. The petition argued that Castro was the only surviving heir of this family of Seville mulattos. Only when pressed by the opposing sides to appear in court and submit witnesses did Castro’s bondage come out, forcing the owner to make clear his intention to take Suárez’s possessions as his own. (After all, he reasoned, he owned the heir, Castro.) However, the slave owner’s attempt foundered on two counts: the argument that bondsmen lacked legal right to property or inheritance, and the owner’s failure to produce witnesses to bolster his case.
The bailiff’s suit proved more serious. If it had prevailed, not only would Suárez’s bequests have been ignored, but his family would also have been legally barred from travel and office, and they would have been marked as religiously suspect. Apparently a status worse than negro [black] or mulatto existed in the eyes of the judges and local opinion: being of Jewish or Muslim heritage. The bailiff alleged that Barbola Hernandez was a Berberisca—a Muslim woman captured and enslaved in North Africa. Consequently, Suárez, regardless of his current Christian status, was of Muslim origin and thus barred from travel to the Americas. According to the 1560 Royal Decree, his property could be confiscated and donated to the Mercedarians to use to buy the freedom of Christian captives. Of course, a quarter of the property seized would go to the bailiff as the denouncer of this infraction! The witnesses the bailiff called forth gave different accounts of the family’s origin: the mother was a Berberisca because she spoke Spanish with an accent, as people who speak “Arabiago” do; her face was branded; she was a Moorish woman either from Granada in Spain or North Africa; she was an Iberian convert from Islam; her son had marks on his face such as North Africans have; they were simply mulattos. Obviously there was some confusion as to where the family came from and what ethnic markers might help determine its origin. Slaves and their descendants populated Seville, and they hailed not only from sub-Saharan Africa, but also from Granada and North Africa. This alleged connection to Muslim or former Muslim populations posed a threat to the mulatto family even after death. For Spaniards, a status more damning than negro or mulatto and even more indelible than “slave” could mark a family.
To counter such charges, Afro-Iberians and their advocates successfully asserted “Old Christian” status. Again the Suárez case proves instructive. The lawyer Diego Vazquez vigorously denied the claim that Suárez was a Moor or an Iberian convert from Islam. He defended the Franciscan monastery’s interests in obliging the Board of Trade to honor Suárez’s will and donate his money to the family’s confraternities and a Franciscan charity for prisoners of the city’s public jail. The lawyer argued that Suárez was known as an “Old Christian and an honorable man.” He further stated that accusations to the contrary were malicious. In fact, Afro-Iberian claims of “Old Christian” status proved quite common in the effort to secure the religious and genealogical standing needed to travel legally to the Americas. Often petitioners for passengers’ licenses presented documents in which they openly acknowledged parents or grandparents born in Senegambia or Angola and brought as slaves to Spain or Portugal. Nevertheless, the petitioners in many other cases go on to emphatically state that they themselves are not from the prohibited categories of foreigners, heretics, “New Christians,” or “those newly converted to the faith.” Their petitions use the label “Old Christian” just as in Suárez’s case. Therefore, Afro-Iberians pushed successfully, at least before Andalusia’s Crown courts, to establish new claims to full membership in the Catholic Church. They strove to appropriate the rights, privileges, and protection of an “Old Christian” identity at the same time that they suffered the marginalization and stigma of slavery and African origin.
This brings us back to the mulatto soldier and actor Diego Suárez, who successfully invested time and money in building a strong Christian identity that included confraternity membership, donations to the church and charities, and the collecting of alms. Diego Suárez’s identity spanned the Atlantic and even earned his family “Old Christian” legal status before Seville’s royal court. The dynamism evident in the Afro-Iberian cases suggests that Afro-Iberians played key roles in shaping their local identities and the transfer of these identities to the Americas and back.
Diego Suárez represents the reality that faced many of the Afro-Iberians both in southern Iberia and traveling as free individuals to and from the Americas. Participation in confraternities was an important part of life for many. Membership could help them associate with ethnic kin or people of similar occupational status or both. Of course, not all Afro-Iberians or Afro-Peruvians participating in confraternities chose to emphasize links to African descent. These confraternity associations could take on real significance in confraternity members’ lives, leading them to retain and renew those obligations even after they had moved to other continents and lost touch with family members and friends. As in Suárez’s case, effective claims to Christian identity and the emerging ideas of popular and legal ethno-racial categories developed within the ample and diverse Afro-Iberian population and spread throughout the early Spanish Atlantic world. It is clear from these cases that in some contexts Afro-Iberians were “Old Christians” and that confraternity membership and donations to the church played an important role in establishing and renewing Afro-Iberians’ familial and individual status and ethnic and social identities. It is also clear that the diverse black African presence in Spain today is not solely a recent phenomenon. Debates about belonging, rights, and obligations have deep roots in southern Iberia.
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Garofalo, Leo J. “Afro-Iberian Sailors, Soldiers, Traders, and Thieves on the Spanish Main.” In Documenting Latin America, edited by Erin O’Connor and Leo J. Garofalo. Vol. 1, Gender, Race, and Empire, 25–34. New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2010.
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LEO GAROFALO is an Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College. His research draws attention to the central roles of Native Andeans and Afro-Peruvians in colonial cities. Currently he is exploring the Afro-Iberian roots of Andean witchcraft and the Atlantic and European routes of the West African diaspora in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes. Professor Garofalo coedited, with Kathryn Joy McKnight, Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early-Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (Hackett, 2009); with Paulo Drinot, Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Ensayos de historia peruana (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005); and, with Erin O’Connor, Documenting Latin America, 2 vols. (Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2010).