13. The Canary Effect

SEVILLE’S HISTORICAL CENTER CONCENTRATES the pillars of Spain’s Renaissance society in a remarkably succinct manner. In ten minutes, one can stroll from the Andalusian capital’s cathedral—the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world—to its sprawling Real Alcázar, or royal palace—where Christopher Columbus negotiated the terms of his voyage to the “Indies” with Spain’s Catholic monarchs.

Wedged between them is a beautiful Renaissance building, built in the sixteenth century with one objective: to get merchants out of the cathedral, where they had the bad habit of doing business. From merchants’ exchange, the building’s function evolved over the centuries of Spain’s colonial empire until 1785, when it acquired its permanent vocation as the Archivo de Indias (Archive of the Indies).

Today the archive houses every official document handled by Spain’s colonial bureaucracy during the conquest and settlement of the Americas. Scholars and history buffs can plow through forty-three thousand volumes containing eighty million pages and eight thousand drawings and maps, enough documents to cover more than five miles of shelves. There is everything from Miguel de Cervantes’s application for a job in the Indies (he was turned down) to the deeds from settlements in Upper California and account books for the quinto real (royal fifth), a 20 percent tax the Crown collected on all precious metals that arrived from the New World.

In the archives, a researcher with a knack for deciphering sixteenth-century handwriting and decoding seventeenth-century red tape would be able to learn almost anything about how the Spanish settled the New World. The Archivo de Indias contains names of treasure ships sunk in the last decade of the sixteenth century, descriptions of diving techniques used to recover their treasures, Columbus’s journal notes from his fourth voyage, details from the first sighting of the Galápagos islands, notes on the languages spoken on any Philippines island, and all the native words that appeared in the correspondence between Spain and the New World.

In the 1960s, Peter Boyd-Bowman, a linguist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, decided to plunge into the archive in the hopes of answering a question that had been nagging linguists for decades: Why exactly does American Spanish have such a strong Andalusian flavor?

Spain’s Casa de Contratación (House of Trade, which controlled all commercial activities overseas) kept good records, because the Spanish Inquisition demanded that all Spanish settlers be bona fide Catholics, not Jews, Muslims, or Protestants. Boyd-Bowman was the first to compile statistics, taken from the libros de pasajeros (passenger lists), about the profession and place of birth of passengers.

The raw numbers Boyd-Bowman compiled seemed to verify what linguists had assumed all along, that most New World settlers came from southern Spain, particularly Andalusia and Extremadura. According to the records, there were sixty-four thousand Spanish settlers from 1499 to 1579 and more than half the registered settlers in the first eighty years of colonization came from the south of Spain. The proportion of southern Spanish among the conquistadores was roughly the same: Cortés, Hernando de Soto (who explored North America), Vasco Núñez de Balboa (who discovered the Pacific), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (who made a land journey to the interior of the continent) all came from the south.

On further inspection, Boyd-Bowman concluded that the number of Spanish settlers who traveled to the New World was probably four times higher than what the official statistics said, since many clandestine or illegal immigrants were smuggled to the New World on Spanish or foreign ships.

Indeed, compared to all other European colonial powers at the time, Spaniards immigrated massively to the Americas. It is estimated that a quarter of a million Spaniards went to the New World in the sixteenth century, and another half million in the next, for a total of 750,000. By the end of the seventeenth century, Spain had sent seventy-five times more people to the New World than France did, even though France’s population was four times Spain’s. England’s performance also paled in comparison to Spain’s—150,000 colonists to the thirteen colonies. What’s more, Spain continued to send even more settlers and immigrants to the Americas throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Columbus’s discovery set into motion a migration in numbers and proportions that had not been seen since Roman times. Where language was concerned, the migrations produced the same result as those of Rome, but on a bigger scale: Spanish became the language of a continent. (As in the case of Latin, subsequent events would push and pull the language in different directions. For Spanish, these would be the forced migrations from both Africa and Europe, and the reorganization of the entire New World economy.)

The transportation system Spanish settlers used to travel to the New World also reinforced the Andalusian influence in the Americas. No matter where the settlers came from, they all departed from the port of Seville. They were steeped in the Andalusian accent for at least three months, sometimes up to a year, while waiting for a ship. The ship’s first stop was the Canaries, where the speech was heavily Andalusian, then settlers spent five to twelve weeks sailing with Andalusian sailors. When they arrived in Havana, the accent was Andalusian again, and they usually spent at least several weeks there before shipping elsewhere.

Centuries later, Latin American Spanish has retained distinct Andalusian features. The main one is so well known in Spanish that it has its own name—seseo. This refers to the Andalusian pronounciation of c and z as s rather than as th. In central and northern Spain, Zaragoza is pronounced “Tharagotha” instead of “Saragosa,” as it’s pronounced in the Americas.

The yeísmo is another prominent Andalusian feature of Latin American Spanish. This is the habit of pronouncing the letter ll like the y in yo-yo. In places where speakers use yeísmo, halla (I find) sounds like haya (I had). The yeísmo is the norm in the Americas, except in Colombia and some parts of South America. It is also used in many parts of Spain. Elsewhere, ll is pronounced as soft j, rendered by zh in English, which is pronounced like s in “measure.”

(No one knows exactly why the seseo or the yeísmo appeared in Spain. Linguists have determined that over the course of the sixteenth century, they came to characterize more or less regional accents that separated Andalusia from the north of Spain. Some linguists think that they have their origin in the Mozarabic dialect widely spoken throughout the south of Spain, but it’s difficult to determine because this dialect vanished after the Reconquista.)

Yet, since the Spanish spoken in Spain was still changing at the outset of colonization, it doesn’t really make sense to talk of the “Andalusian influence” on American Spanish. For example, the voseo—the name for the practice, common in Central America, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, of addressing people vos rather tú—completely disappeared from Spain during this period, replaced by tú, a practice called tuteo.

Nor was Andalusian Spanish in any way transplanted intact to the colonies. On the contrary, continuous waves of immigrants brought their idiosyncrasies and continued to influence the language in the New World. It took centuries for New World cities to grow enough to be able to absorb newly arrived immigrants without being linguistically influenced by them in turn. Even by the eighteenth century, only Havana, Mexico, and Lima had more than 50,000 inhabitants: Buenos Aires had only 20,000; Caracas had 19,000; Quito had 25,000; Santiago de Chile, 28,000; and Montevideo, 10,000. If 5,000 or 10,000 people passed through these cities every decade—entirely possible because they were main ports of entry serving vast provinces—it was enough to profoundly affect the local way of speaking.

Some linguists have theorized that there are actually two types of Spanish in the Americas: “lowland” Spanish (near the coastline) influenced by Andalusia, and “highland” Spanish (in the mountains) influenced by the Madrid Standard spoken by colonial authorities. According to this theory, lowland speakers (in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, coastal Venezuela, and Colombia) swallow the s: estás (you are) comes out as ehtah. But other linguists have found so many exceptions that they believe this generalization is meaningless.

At any rate, the huge scale of Spanish migration explains why the influence of native languages on Spanish is relatively shallow, accounting for less than 1 percent of the vocabulary in General Spanish today. In the sixteenth century, writers vacillated between calling peppers the Taíno ají or the Nahuatl chili. By the next century, they were using the European word pimiento—even if pepper aficionados still distinguish among ají, chili, and dozens of other types like jalapeño and pasilla. Many more Americanisms followed the same path to obscurity. Chroniclers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries spoke of the Taíno alcabuco (mountain), but their successors switched back to monte.

Most settlers arrived after native populations had already been wiped out by slaughter or epidemics. In the Caribbean islands, native cultures were nearly extinct fifty years after Columbus. Many nativisms died with their speakers. In the islands, the early Spanish colonists called the new type of fowl they discovered guanaxa (turkey, from Carib). The word was abandoned for the Castilian pavo (peacock), in spite of the scant resemblance between the two birds. Some words disappeared from standard Spanish but remained in use as regionalisms: Cubans still say guanajo (turkey) while Mexicans prefer guajolote.

Some local terms were adopted quite late, perhaps because it just took time for colonists to realize they really were facing new realities. Sabana (savannah) and puma replaced the Castilian llanura and tigre. By 1550, after enduring a great many tormentas (thunderstorms) and temporales (heavy rainfalls), colonists realized that the Taíno huracán was something altogether different and deserved its own name.

Oddly, a number of nativisms that disappeared from Spanish usage remained common in other European languages, like caiman and buccaneer in English. French also retained a number: pirogue (dugout, from Carib piragua), caoutchouc (rubber, from Quechua caucho), ananas (pineapple, from Tupí-Guaraní), and maringouin (mosquito, from Tupí-Guaraní).

Like the explorers before them, migrants to the Americas invented new vocabulary to describe the novelties they encountered. The process started in ports, where travelers, mostly from Spain’s cities, saw their first ship—a caravel in the early years, or by the middle of the sixteenth century a galeón (galleon). This new type of ship was designed to transport huge cargoes of supplies while defending itself against pirates or privateers. The galleon was typically five times larger than the caravel. The so-called Manila Galleon, which sailed the route between Manila and Acapulco, was twenty times bigger than a caravel.

Most galleons traveled in mandatory flotas de Indias (the so-called Spanish treasure fleets consisting of seventeen ships). These were necessary for self-protection. The English, French, and Dutch during the sixteenth century carried out a policy of looting. There was an entire subculture of filibusteros (freebooters, or pirates of the West Indies), corsarios (privateers, acting under license of their government), and bucaneros who carried out the various forms of piracy. Piracy and looting was a big business at a time when one hundred ships brought back a total of two hundred thousand pounds of silver per year. El Draque—the Spanish nickname for Sir Francis Drake—set the record in 1579 when he returned with enough silver and gold to match half of the English queen’s annual income.

These high stakes are perhaps the reason the Spanish put a lot of energy into solving problems particular to the colonies or to naval affairs. The Spanish soldier, painter, musician, and inventor Jerónomio de Ayanz y Beaumont made history in 1604 when he patented a steam-powered pump to drain mines 150 years before the Industrial Revolution. As manager of the empire’s 550 mines, this genius of logistics had forty-eight other patents for various inventions, including a new design for a compass, pumps to drain sunken ships, high-precision scales “that could weigh the leg of a fly,” an arch structure for dams, and even a diving suit. Another contemporary, Blasco de Garay, introduced the paddle wheel (to replicate oars) and tested many diving apparatuses including techniques for generating light underwater and desalinating seawater.

But another development in this period did nothing less than completely reconfigure the society and physical geography of the entire Caribbean: that was sugar, which Columbus introduced in Hispaniola on his second voyage in 1493. The prototype sugar plantation was developed by the Portuguese on the island of Madeira in the first half of the fifteenth century. It quickly turned into the world’s first global commodity.

The development of the plantation system had a tremendous impact on the Americas, transforming entire economies and even the ecology of some islands. Ingenios (sugar mills) were built and run by mayordomos (superindendents); mandadores (administrators) gave orders to tacheros (workers) who ran the tacho (sugar evaporator); and markets had to be found for the different types of sugar: rubio, moreno, or negro (light brown, dark brown, or raw sugar). (Following the same route as sugar, coffee and bananas built on the same basic plantation structure supplanted sugar as main exports of the Caribbean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.)

But growing sugar required more labor than the islands’ dwindling native population could supply. In 1513, the Spanish established a triangular trade with Africa that brought millions of slaves to the Caribbean. By 1575, Cuba alone had ten thousand African slaves. By the time the last shipload of slaves arrived in Havana in 1870, three million of the fifteen million African slaves who had been traded across the Atlantic had come to a Spanish colony.

Slave masters in the period also developed a baffling series of names to describe racial subcategories, starting with negros and mulatos, and splintering into tercerón (one-third black), cuarterón (quadroon), quinterón (one-fifth black), zambo (native father and African mother), chino (the opposite), and pardo (mixing all races).

African slaves had a phenomenal impact on music in the Americas. According to the artist and professor Michael D. Harris, West African slaves brought to the Americas timbales and bongos, the call-and-response melodic form ostinato (a motif that is persistently repeated) and, more important, rhythm. In “Art of the African Diaspora,” Harris writes, “West Africa, along with Southeast Asia, has the most complex rhythmic structure of traditional music found anywhere in the world. Everywhere African and European music styles mixed, the results were similar.” In Brazil this mélange spawned samba; in Haiti, mereng, in Cuba, habanera, and in the southern United States, blues and tap dancing.

Africanisms seeped into the Spanish language, but few endured. The most famous are bongó, samba, mambo, conga (a drum and an dance), and ñame (yam)—all of which entered other languages as well. However, Africanisms are much more present in the regional Spanish spoken by Cubans and Puerto Ricans—there are 131 Africanisms in Puerto Rican Spanish alone.

Some Africanisms have acquired a multiplicity of meanings depending on the country where they are used. Congo is a good example. In northern Colombia, congo refers to a dance and dance partners. It describes yet another type of dance in Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. In Paraguay, congo is either a carnival dance or the dancer. In Venezuela, it’s a type of pig; in Guatemala, a wasp. In Costa Rica and Nicaragua, it refers to a monkey. To a Puerto Rican alone, it may mean a black man, a fetish, a tobacco leaf, and a banana. As an adjective, Argentines use it in reference to a rooster. Venezuelans use it to qualify a person who is small and fat. To young Puerto Ricans, it means “praiseworthy,” while Paraguayans use it to describe someone who is easy to take advantage of.

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Julie grew up in a small town in southern Ontario next door to a Dutch family who originated from Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. During her childhood, she occasionally heard snippets of a language that sounded to her a bit like Spanish coming from next door. In fact, this “Spanish” was Papiamentu, a Creole language.

Spoken by most inhabitants of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonnaire, Papiamentu is possibly Spanish based, and possibly Portuguese based. But it is hard to determine because sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese were very close anyway. Papimentu mixes Portuguese and Spanish interspersed with Dutch, English, and Italian. Its name comes from the Portuguese papear (to chat, to talk), but no one knows for sure where the language originated. It might have grown out of the Portuguese-African pidgin used in slave trading posts on the west coast of Africa, but it also could have originated in the Judeo-Portuguese or Judeo-Spanish spoken by the Sephardic plantation owners throughout the Dutch colonial empire. The Papiamentu words danki (thank you) and djus (juice) have no relation to Spanish or Portuguese. However, the Papiamentu bon dia (good day) is a lot closer to the Portuguese bom dia than the Spanish buenos días, while pan (bread) is identical to Spanish. And as for the typical Papiamentu question Kon ta bai? (How are you?), it looks like a mix of Portuguese (Como vais?) and Spanish (¿Cómo te va?).

Oddly, even though Africanisms entered the Spanish in the colonies, this never produced Spanish-based Creoles on a large scale, like it did in French-speaking Caribbean colonies. Spanish Creoles exist in small pockets, but they are far less numerous than even English, Dutch, and Portuguese Creoles. One reason may be that Spanish colonies introduced African slaves much more progressively, and spread them over a greater number of colonies, than did the English or, above all, the French. On the Spanish side of the island of Hispaniola, slaves were only slightly more numerous than the colonists, whereas on the French side—today’s Haiti—there were almost twenty-five times more slaves, a total of seven hundred thousand among thirty thousand Europeans.

The Spanish colonial reality created a geographic vocabulary that is still integral to the worldview of most Spanish speakers. América designates the entire continent, not just the United States. The word is never used in the plural (this was a British custom; they created the category to distinguish Spanish colonies from the thirteen colonies, which was America to them). Consequently, Americano designated any colonial living in America. As Americans gained influence throughout the nineteenth century, the Spanish began speaking of “Hispano-America” but Americano remains common. Citizens of the United States are Estadounidenses (United Statesians). Mexicans call the Rio Grande the río Bravo or río Bravo del Norte. The Gulf of California is el mar de Cortés (the Sea of Cortés). And the Mexican continuation of the Rockies is the Sierra Madre.

The Spanish colonial empire spawned a myriad of new titles and labels for the social, political, and racial structures that it was built on. Like the racial categories of the Caribbean, these terms were sometimes disconcertingly specialized. In 1587, in Cartagena de la Indias, Colombia, the writer Miguel Hidalgo used the word indiano for the first time. He wasn’t referring to natives (indios) but to Spanish who had returned from the West Indies after making their fortune in the New World, a special type of nuevo rico (nouveau riche).

The Spanish who remained in the New World had two names: peninsulares (born in the peninsula) and criollo (Creole, born in the colony). This latter word comes from the Portuguese crioulo, originally referring to a slave born in the house of his master. While it retained this specialized meaning in Spanish slaving, it also came to describe any Spaniard born outside Spain.

But the criollos were quickly outnumbered by an entirely new social group: the mestizos (mixed race). It was the mestizos who turned Spanish into a native language of the Americas.

Mestizos were the product of a simple fact: Spain sent few women to the New World before 1600. Until 1519, less than 5 percent of migrants were women. In 1542, Mexico had 2,335 españoles puros (pure Spanish), but only 217 of them were women. The proportion of women didn’t jump until 1560, when it reached about 28.5 percent of settlers. The number of male and female colonists did not become equal for two centuries.

So for at least three generations, Spanish men took mostly native women as wives, mistresses, concubines, or victims. Cortés, Pizarro, Almagro, Pedro de Alvarado, Belalcázar, Garcilaso de la Vega all set the example. Francisco de Aguirre, who was involved in the conquest of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, boasted fifty mestizo children. By 1650, half of Mexico City’s population was mestizo. This process of mestizaje (miscegenation) was characteristic of Spanish colonialism and very different from what went on in English colonies. Although it was initially discouraged, the Spanish Crown approved of it as early as 1503 when it figured out it was an efficient tool for converting natives, Hispanicizing them, and getting colonists to settle down.

This enthusiasm for the Nueva Raza (new race) is distinctive to Spanish colonialism. Yet at the same time, Spanish colonial society was characterized by widespread racial oppression, which materialized in a system of castas (castes) that assigned ranks to all ethnic groups. Mestizos had higher status than Indians, something like a free person of color in the American Old South. And above them were the criollos, who were one step below peninsulares.

Mestizos made important intellectual contributions to early colonial Spain. Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a mestizo writer famous for his histories of the Toltecs and of the Chichimecas, became governor of Texcoco in 1612 and Tlalmanalco the next year. On the other hand, Garcilaso de la Vega, a distinguished Peruvian mestizo writer who produced the first account of the history of Peru before Pizarro, ended up seeking political refuge in Spain but was forbidden to marry there on the basis that, as a mestizo, he was gente sin razón (a person without reason).

The etymology of Spanish vocabulary illustrates the inhumanity of the Spanish caste system. Mestizo, like mulato, comes from the horse trade. Mulato can be traced back to mulo (mule), and mestizo, from mezclan, means mixed as opposed to purebred. The son or daughter of a mestizo and a Spanish woman was called a castizo (meaning a very prolific animal). A chamizo was the son of a castizo and a mestiza. A cholo or coyote was the child of a mestizo and an Indian. The level of detail in this system of categories is dehumanizing. A Spanish and a mulato produced a morisco even if they had no relations with Moors, and a mulato with a native begat a zambo. Other terms, such as lobo (wolf), chino (Chinese), cambujo, albarazado, zambazo, and jíbaro, described further combinations of Spanish, mulatos, and natives … and the list goes on. Some of those old colonial terms have currency today: a cholo now describes a Chicano gangster in the Los Angeles area. Jíbaro refers to a Puerto Rican peasant.

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The mestizos, and more generally the process of mestizaje, accelerated Hispanicization in the New World. Contrary to the rest of the population, who spoke only native languages, most mestizos were at least partly bilingual. By 1650, they accounted for a quarter of Mexico’s population of 1.5 million and half of the population of the capital city. As their numbers grew, the proportion of Spanish speakers grew too.

The other thing the mestizos did was weaken the encomienda system.

The encomienda (estate) was introduced in Hispaniola in 1503 and became the basic land-grant scheme for all the Americas for the rest of the sixteenth century. The word derives from the verb encomendar (to trust or entrust). Designated encomenderos were given a chunk of land and full rights to exploit natives to work it and to administer justice. They could do anything they wanted with the land—ranch, farm, mine, cut lumber, or grow sugar. Most encomenderos were conquistadores or Aztec or Inca notables. La Malinche and the daughters of Moctezuma were granted large encomiendas. In return, the encomenderos were obliged to provide natives with protection, justice, and religious instruction—none of which were distributed generously.

The encomienda had a disastrous effect on the native populations of the Americas: millions of people were forcibly displaced to work on them and were decimated by disease in the process. By the time the Spanish Crown passed a set of better laws to protect natives, in 1542, the encomienda system was beginning to crack. The church was horrified by the conditions of quasi slavery natives were subjected to. Eventually, encomenderos had trouble finding workers, since their system was killing off the Indian population.

Ultimately, by encouraging more mixed marriages, the system defeated itself. The labor rules of the encomienda system applied only to natives, excluding mestizos, who were considered a different “race.” To spare their children from this punishing regime, natives sought mixed-race unions.

Spain saw the writing on the wall, so to exploit the growing mestizo population, it invented a new labor system. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the encomiendas morphed into the nominally more acceptable hacienda (derived from the verb hacer, to make) system. The main difference was that the patrón or hacendado was the owner of the estate, not just the grantee. Technically, the people working for him were wageworkers, not forced labor, but the difference was mostly semantic since most people had no other possibility for employment. Haciendas began to spread throughout Spain’s colonies, side by side with the estancias (ranches) of the plains of the río de la Plata, and the smaller versions of them, fincas, in Central America and the Caribbean.

The slow collapse of the encomienda system was not just the result of economics. It also happened because the Spanish Church was competing with the Crown for the loyalty of Native Americans. And this race for the natives’ souls would shape the spread of Spanish in the New World.