Frank Trey Proctor III
Abstract: Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans lived and labored in the colony of New Spain (colonial Mexico), particularly in urban centers like Mexico City, in the mid–seventeenth century. This article employs marriage records for such Africans to introduce the contours of their experiences in this early urban form of slavery and to explore how the enslaved began to construct new identities and communities within slavery based on their regionally specific African origins.
Keywords: Mexico City, slavery, marriage, African diaspora, West Central Africa
PRIOR TO 1650, Mexico was home to the second-largest population of enslaved Africans in the Americas, exceeded only by Brazil. Nearly 175,000 Africans had been imported into colonial Mexico. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans and their descendants toiled in such colonial industries as sugar and woolen textiles as well as in urban contexts like Mexico City. Well before the “sugar revolution” in Barbados in the 1640s, the transition to African slavery in the Chesapeake in the 1670s, and the explosion of sugar production in the Caribbean, the slave trade into Mexico dwarfed the approximately one hundred slaves imported into Virginia by 1650.
As a result, Mexico City was home to one of the largest populations of displaced Africans in the Americas before 1650. Urban slavery, in particular, was a very important manifestation of early Atlantic African slavery. Population figures for Mexico City, and particularly for slaves, are exceedingly scarce. An estimate from 1572 indicates that as many as 8,000 Afro-descended slaves lived in Mexico City alongside 8,000 Spanish heads of household. An observer from 1612 suggests that as many as 50,000 Afro-descended peoples, predominantly African slaves, lived in Mexico City alongside 15,000 Spaniards and 80,000 Indians. Importantly, following on the heels of a significant (purported) slave rebellion that rocked Mexico City in 1611, culminating in the execution of 35 accused black and mulatto rebels, these numbers may well be exaggerated to highlight the perceived threat posed by Africans and their descendants. Conversely, a modern scholar suggests that as many as 19,000 Africans and 43,000 Afro-descended peoples resided in the archbishopric of Mexico, which included Mexico City, in 1646, compared with just over 102,000 persons of European descent. In either case, Africans and their descendants made up a sizable portion of the population of Mexico City before 1650.
Whatever images “American slavery” conjures in our minds, the world that many enslaved Africans inhabited in Mexico is likely not it. The term “slavery” generally evokes images of the nineteenth-century rural slavery like the cotton kingdom institution in the US South so vividly portrayed in the motion picture Twelve Years as Slave or sugar-plantation slavery throughout the Caribbean and Brazil. Those visions focus on the height of African slavery in the Americas, but the institution had a nearly four-hundred-year history before abolition. The expansion of African slavery in Mexico took place much earlier, and the urban form of slavery that many enslaved Africans experienced in early colonial Latin America differed in myriad ways from rural plantation slavery.
Enslaved Africans in Spanish America operated within a very different judicial and religious framework than seen in the nineteenth-century rural contexts of the US South. As Catholics, for example, enslaved people in Spanish America (all had been forcibly converted) could officially marry in the Church, whereas they were expressly forbidden to do so in the US South. The Spanish state even provided limited protections for those unions.
Different, however, should not be confused with kinder, gentler, or more humane. This was racialized slavery with all the physical, emotional, psychological, and cultural violence that nineteenth-century plantation slavery entailed. Enslaved Africans had been kidnapped, ripped from their families and communities, forced across the Atlantic Ocean in the hold of a slave ship, only to find themselves defined as property and sold to the highest bidder. We rightly see this as a profoundly isolating, desperate, heart-wrenching reality. Every step in the process served to further remove the enslaved from his or her family, community, home, and, some would say, very sense of self. But in the wake of all this destruction and desolation, the enslaved began to create new connections, new relationships, and new communities—and that is the story that interests us here.
In January 1640, two enslaved Africans named Pedro Sánchez and Mariana (who, like many enslaved people, had no official listed surname) appeared at the Metropolitan Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City to apply for a wedding license. They brought Juan de la Cruz and Ana María, also enslaved Africans, to witness their union. All four claimed to hail from the “land of Angola,” meaning that they had been born in Africa and brought forcefully to Mexico via the infamous Middle Passage. In a similar example from August 1648, Manuel, an enslaved Malemba, and Juana, an enslaved Angola, sought to marry, with two enslaved Congos, Manuel de Santiago and Domingo, as their witnesses (the terms “Malemba,” “Angola,” and “Congo” are explained below). These eight individuals were among the thousands of enslaved Africans living, laboring, and seeking to create new families and communities in Mexico City.
Clues left by Africans in their wedding applications provide traces of the social worlds they inhabited. For example, there are hints that suggest that the foundation of the communities that individual Africans created in Mexico sometimes began in Africa or during the Middle Passage. In the 1630s, pairs of siblings, enslaved in Africa and transported to New Spain together, appear in the sources. For example, Pedro, a Congo, testified that he and his brother Manuel had been captured in Africa and sent to Mexico in 1626, where they were promptly separated when purchased by different owners. Manuel remained in Veracruz, while Pedro’s owner took him to Mexico City. These brothers, who had likely relied quite heavily on each other to survive the horrors of their capture, forced march to the African coast, and the Middle Passage, probably had no idea what happened to each other after their separation, fearing the worst. After four years, however, the brothers were reunited in Mexico City when Manuel’s master moved him there. We can only imagine just how significant this reunion was, and how other Africans would have sought out such connections in the absence of real kinship ties.
Tantalizing, but scarce, evidence indicates that the foundations of the nascent communities created by Africans in slavery were actually formed by strangers during the Middle Passage. For example, Pedro and Christina de la Cruz became acquainted with Francisco, a witness to their wedding, in 1646, when they left Africa onboard the same slave ship. Francisco’s testimony suggests that they became acquainted after their capture in Africa. We can only image just how significant those connections made during the Middle Passage were. Amazingly, despite the fact that the three shipmates had different masters, they were able to maintain those bonds of comradeship forged onboard a slave ship in the streets of Mexico City. Similarly, the couple Antonio and María de la Cruz, and their wedding witnesses, had all four made the Middle Passage together. The importance of such “shipmates” as pillars of nascent slave communities in the Americas cannot be overstated.
Many enslaved peoples were likely not so fortunate as to be able to rely on family from Africa or even shipmates in their search for camaraderie and support in colonial Mexico. For those Africans, however, wedding applications allow us to begin to envision the relationships they formed and the communities they created. For example, the bride, groom, and their witnesses rarely had the same owner, and thus they were making these connections with other Africans outside the confines of their masters’ households. This reality highlights that these unions were likely initiated by the enslaved themselves, and not forced upon them by their owners, and that the enslaved enjoyed a modicum of physical mobility throughout the urban landscape of Mexico City, allowing them to interact with each other.
These relationships were also deep and long lasting. Pedro and Mariana’s witnesses testified that they had been friends with either the bride or groom for at least twelve years in Mexico City before they married. Similarly, the average age of wedding witnesses was approximately forty years, indicating that they had likely been in Mexico for some time because most had been enslaved in Africa as adolescents and young adults. Numerous African-born enslaved people appeared as witnesses for multiple couples, suggesting a developing slave community. At the extreme, Pedro García, a forty-year-old enslaved Angola, officially witnessed at least twelve marriages between 1631 and 1634, highlighting his connections with at least thirty other enslaved Africans. Within the developing networks created by Africans in Mexico City, men like Pedro García may well have been recognized as community leaders or “elders.”
Many were domestic servants, day laborers, and marketers who likely interacted in the major markets and storefronts throughout the cityscape. A major site of these interactions may have been the large open-air market that operated in the plaza of the very cathedral where our protagonists married. The plaza, memorialized by the painter Cristóbal del Villalpando in his 1695 painting View of the Plaza Mayor (Vista del Zócalo), still exists, as does the Metropolitan Cathedral.
Now that we have established that these marriages seem to have been emanating out of an established and dynamic slave community, we can turn our attention to the contours of identity within it. To do so we can focus on the racial or ethnic labels that slaves self-applied to describe themselves. Among enslaved people who married in the 1640s, nearly three in four described themselves as originating from Africa. Conversely, just over one in four were creole (criollo) or American born. These two groups exhibited very different marriage patterns, with very little intermarriage between the two. Africans married Africans, and creoles tended to marry other creoles. Based on this information, we may not be able to speak of a single “slave” community in Mexico City grounded in shared blackness or Africanity.
Reality, it turns out, was even more complicated than saying “Africans married Africans” might suggest. The enslaved members of these wedding parties did not define themselves as Africans as such. No such identity existed then. Rather, they self-identified as Angola, Biafara, Terranova, Mozambique, and so forth—some of the many monikers used by slaves and slavers to mark important differences among enslaved sub-Saharan Africans in the Americas. For masters and slavers, these terms referred to general regions along the African coast where they purchased captives. The question under consideration here, however, is whether such terms could be more than just an indicator of point of origin when self-applied by Africans themselves.
Terms like “Congo” and “Angola” did not refer to shared identities as recognized in Africa. Rather, they were created in the diaspora, and the slaves who claimed them in the diaspora imbued them with specific meanings. Historian James Sweet demonstrates this reality in his study of a single African slave, Domingos Álvares, in the Portuguese Atlantic. Álvares described himself as originating from the town of Naogon (in present-day Benin), but other enslaved peoples from that region described him as a Cobû—a larger ethnic group that encompassed the residents of Naogon and neighboring villages. In Portuguese America, however, Álvares came to be identified (and self-identified) as a Mina, which referred to the West African slaving region that consists of modern Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Once he was ripped from his local African context and thrust into the diaspora, the term “Mina,” which had no meaning for him in Africa, came to describe the important connections that he made with other people with common regional origins from within Africa (and distinguished him from those enslaved peoples from other regions of Africa). Most colonial Spanish-American records do not include such detailed information on enslaved Africans. But examining whom Africans married and who served as their wedding witnesses suggests that these self-applied ethnonyms had particular meanings for enslaved Africans in the diaspora.
The question becomes, on some level, With whom did Africans interact intimately, and why? We can imagine a newly arrived African slave on the streets of Mexico City. Having just survived the harrowing Middle Passage, the horror of the slave market in Veracruz, and being torn away from whatever relationships he/she formed with other slaves during the Atlantic crossing, knowing little or no Spanish (or even Portuguese), these slaves likely gravitated toward other Africans with whom they could communicate minimally. The linguistic and cultural complexity of Atlantic Africa made this no small feat. These linguistic ties would have been derived from being drawn from neighboring regions in Africa, or more specifically from within the major language groupings that seem to overlay the general slaving regions there. Within the cacophony of European, indigenous, and African languages spoken in Mexico City, the recognition of individuals with whom a newly arrived slave could communicate must have been a balm of sorts. That initial pull toward people who our imagined slave could understand would likely result in his or her continued integration into a larger group of Africans whose linguistic and cultural heritages were similar enough to his or her own to be mutually intelligible.
As a result, multiple and often overlapping and intersecting communities were under constant (re)creation by enslaved Africans in Mexico City. And thus, ethnonyms like “Angola,” “Congo,” “Terranova,” and the like potentially marked African diasporic identities. The foundations of these identities were not fully intact African ethnicities (articulated at the village or lineage level). Nor were they Pan-African (i.e., shared by all Africans) or race-based (i.e., shared by everyone of African descent) identities. Rather, they were spontaneously articulated in the diaspora by the enslaved, who would not have identified as having common origins in Africa, but who were creating new identities and communities based upon shared regionally specific cultural beliefs and practices from Africa. Those identities became identified by terms such as “Angola” and “Congo” because such terms marked distinctions between “us” and “them” that had resonance for the enslaved in this particular historical and geographic context.
The “Angola” group represented a sizable majority of slaves who married in Mexico City (nearly eight in ten Africans in marriage applications) before 1650. Angolas chose to marry other Angolas in a great majority of cases. While the term “Angola” clearly obscures the village-level and regional identities of people in Africa (like Naogon and Cobû for Domingos Álvares), it seems to have reflected some sense of potential connection among those slaves who claimed it.
It is actually among the smaller African groups that we can more clearly see how these ethnonyms may have reflected a sense of commonality among slaves who claimed them. Among self-identified Terranovas (Yoruba speakers from modern Nigeria), a majority selected spouses with the same ethnonym. The significance of this pattern is clear when we consider that Angolas outnumbered Terranovas nearly fifteen to one in Mexico City before 1650. Additionally, those Terranovas who did not marry another Terranova often had at least one Terranova witness in their wedding party. For example, when Maria sought to marry Cristóbal, an enslaved Angola, she presented another Terranova also named Maria as her witness. These two women had known each other for over ten years in Mexico at this point. Even as the bride Maria chose to marry someone who claimed a different ethnonym, she still demonstrated a strong, long-lasting connection to at least one other person with whom she shared common African origins. This same general pattern is true for most West African groups in Mexico City, who tended to marry other slaves and/or present wedding witnesses who claimed the same ethnonym.
The preceding discussion has operated on the assumption that if these ethnonyms had significance in the Atlantic World, they were mutually exclusive. However, there are patterns within marriages wherein the enslaved participants claimed different ethnonyms that also suggest the construction of regionally specific African diasporic identities. Let’s reconsider the marriage of Manuel, a Malemba, and Juana, an Angola, and their two Congo witnesses introduced above. How does this example of four slaves claiming three different ethnonyms fit within the African diasporic identity argument?
The ethnonyms “Angola,” “Congo,” and “Malemba” from this example all referred to West Central African origins. If we turn our attention to that region in the first half of the seventeenth century, we can see that these terms should not necessarily be treated as mutually exclusive. Historian Jan Vansina, in his seminal Paths in the Rainforests, charts how West Central Africa came to be populated by a single linguistic family—the Western Bantu—over the last two millennia BC. Subsequently, these peoples with a common ancestry developed distinct local traditions and dialects over time. Thus, in Africa the peoples who inhabited these regions would not have identified themselves as having a common ethnicity. Yet within the areas most involved in the slave trade, West Central Africans spoke two languages—Kikongo and Kimbundu—that were as linguistically similar as Spanish and Portuguese. Similarly, scholars argue that precolonial West Central Africans shared a single overarching cultural and political tradition before they arrived in the Americas. In other words, the languages, cultures, and societies of the area constituted a single unit when compared with the outside even if Western Bantu speakers failed to recognize it as such in Africa.
Furthermore, the region from which captives were taken in Central Africa before 1650 focused on a fairly small geographic area between the Zaire and Kwanza Rivers, extending perhaps two hundred kilometers inland and falling under the political control of the Kingdom of Kongo; on the expanding Portuguese colony of Angola; and on those regions’ interior borderlands. From the perspective of slaver traders and masters, terms like “Angola,” “Congo,” and “Malemba” referred to general areas. The majority of slaves shipped from the port of Luanda were called “Angola” by Portuguese slave traders even if they originated in the territories once controlled by the Mbundu peoples (Kimbundu speakers) around Luanda, or were Ovimbundu, Imbangala, or Congo (subdivisions within the Western Bantu language group). “Congo” slaves originated in or near the areas controlled by the Kingdom of Kongo, a powerful African principality between the Kwanza River and the Zaire River to the north. Many, but not all, of these slaves were likely Kikongo speakers and/or subjects of Kongo, but again it would be a mistake to assume heterogeneity. “Malemba,” the third ethnonym in our example, referred to a principality formed along the eastern edge of the Portuguese colony of Angola that was populated, in part, by refugees from Kongo and Angola. Other West Central African ethnonyms used in Mexico City included “Anchico,” “Matamba,” and “Banguela.” The peoples who inhabited the relatively small region encompassed by these six ethnonyms had a long history of political, economic, and cultural interaction before the initiation of the Atlantic slave trade. Thus, the great majority of slaves drawn from West Central Africa shared common cultural and linguistic heritages and had long-lasting connections in Africa that could have facilitated the generation of new ethnicities within the diaspora—identities that might not have been contained to a single ethnonym.
Such descriptions of the cultural unity of West Central Africa before 1650 suggest that unions between slaves originating from that region, regardless of ethnic appellation, could be treated as ethnically endogamous and reflecting the construction of a broader African diasporic identity in Mexico City grounded in common West Central African origins. For example, the minority Congo slaves (outnumbered ten to one by Angolas) tended to marry other Congos and Angolas at approximately the same rate. Based on the discussion above, it seems plausible that those unions could be treated as endogamous—that the differences between Angola and Congo were important enough to name, but not so great as to make them mutually exclusive in the specific context of seventeenth-century Mexico City.
The distinctions between “Angolas” and “Congos” in the minds of slaves is impossible to know. They might have been geographic, or linguistic (Kikongo versus Kimbundu), or they might have been cultural, in that Congo identity might have recognized the deeper associations with Christianity in the regions dominated by the Kingdom of Kongo. The rulers of Kongo converted to Christianity in 1491, initiating the spread of an Africanized Christianity among their subjects. We should never assume mutual exclusivity or inclusivity, but based on the cases like Manuel and Juana’s particular marriage, it seems reasonable to conclude that in particular times and places the union of two slaves with different ethnonyms might suggest a collective diasporic identity uncontainable with a single ethnonym but still not so broad as to be understood as based in shared blackness or Africanity.
If we return to the marriages of Pedro Sánchez and Mariana and of Manuel and Juana described above, these mundane acts invite us to contemplate the significance of Mexico in the broader history of early Atlantic slavery; the lives and experiences of enslaved Africans in Mexico; and their ability to construct communities and identities under unspeakably harsh conditions. Ripped from their homes in Africa, these enslaved peoples would find potential spouses, and long-lasting friendships, in the streets of Mexico City and begin the process of (re)constructing their social worlds. That they claimed provenance from Angola, Congo, or Malemba tells us that while they originated from the same slaving region in Africa, it wasn’t until they were in the diaspora that they could think of each other as being connected in any meaningful way. These slaves were a small portion of the thousands of enslaved Africans in Mexico City at this time, all of whom, I would like to believe, were seeking out similar sorts of connections.
Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
O’Toole, Rachel. Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2012.
Proctor, Frank T., III. “Damned Notions of Liberty”: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Sweet, James H. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Vinson, Ben, III, and Matthew Restall, eds. Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
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FRANK TREY PROCTOR, III, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Denison University, writes on the lived experience of slaves of African descent and master–slave relations in Spanish America. His first book, “Damned Notions of Liberty”: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (University of New Mexico Press, 2010), explores master–slave relations in Mexico. He has published articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Americas and a chapter in the edited volume Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).