Haitian children carry sugarcane across a field in Port-au-Prince, 2010.
FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, ALMOST ALL Europeans were found in Europe. Few Africans existed outside Africa. Nearly all Asians lived in Asia. Columbus’s voyages launched a reshuffling of Homo sapiens, the human part of the Columbian Exchange. People shot around the world like dice flung on a gaming table. Europeans became the majority in Argentina and Australia. Africans were found from South America to Seattle. Chinatowns sprang up all over the globe.
This worldwide reshuffling of the human species was dominated by the African slave trade. For a long time, the scale of slavery in the Americas was not fully grasped. According to a 2009 estimate, based on an international study of more than thirty-five thousand separate slave voyages, 11.7 million captives left Africa for the Americas between 1500 and 1840. In that same period, perhaps 3.4 Europeans immigrated to the Americas. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip.
These figures mean that the common picture of American history is wrong.
Generations of textbooks presented American history as Europeans moving into a lightly settled hemisphere. In fact, the hemisphere was full of tens of millions of indigenous peoples. Most of the movement into the hemisphere was by Africans, who soon became the majority population in almost every place that wasn’t controlled by Indians. As one researcher of the slave trade has written, “America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century.”
In the three centuries after Columbus’s voyages, migrants from across the Atlantic came to the Americas. They built new cities and filled them with houses, churches, taverns, stables, and more. They cleared forests, planted fields, laid out roads, and tended horses, cattle, and sheep—animals that had not walked the Americas before. They reworked the American landscape, creating a new world that was an ecological and cultural mix.
This great transformation was a turning point in the history of our species. It was carried out largely by African hands. The crowds thronging the streets in the new cities were mainly African. The farmers growing wheat and rice in the new farms were mainly African. The men and women on boats and in mills and gardens and plantations were mainly African.
An even larger wave of migration arrived from Europe in the nineteenth century, changing the demographic balance of the Americas once again. Europeans and their descendants became the majority in most of the hemisphere. Surrounded by people like them, they did not often realize they were following trails that had been set for more than three hundred years by Africans.
The human Columbian Exchange broke the geographic barriers that had largely kept Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Americans apart for so long. The Atlantic slave trade was the first wave of that human exchange, and the force that drove it was sugar.
Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea, north of Australia, about ten thousand years ago. About half the plant, by weight, consists of sucrose, a sweet, grainy substance known as table sugar or cane sugar. Scientists debate among themselves whether sucrose is actually addictive or people just act like it is. Either way, it has been an amazingly powerful force in human affairs. Unlike a taste for salt or spice, a sweet tooth seems to be present in every culture and every part of the world.
From its home in New Guinea, sugar spread north and west, into China and India. By AD 800 the Islamic peoples of the Middle East were irrigating sugarcane plantations in what is now Lebanon and Israel. Europeans encountered sugarcane when they conquered that region in 1096, during the First Crusade.
At the time, sugar was quite rare in Europe. Like Asian spices such as ginger and pepper, it was found only in the kitchens of a few princes and nobles. The crusaders began exporting sugar to Europe, feeding an appetite for sweetness. Sugarcane plantations appeared in the few parts of southern Europe that were warm and wet enough. Before long, Portugal and Spain were growing cane in the Canaries, Cape Verde, and Madeira—tropical islands in the Atlantic near the coast of Africa. (Portugal also planted some sugarcane in the Azores Islands off its own coast, but the yields were disappointing because the climate was too cold.)
Sugar boomed, but plantation owners on the island colonies needed labor to slash cane, boil down the juice into sugar, and pack and load the finished product. For this they turned to slaves.
Slavery had existed in Portugal and Spain at least since the time of the ancient Romans, but the nature of slavery on the sugarcane plantations was different. At first the labor force was drawn from convicts, the local native population, and prisoners of war, but when sugarcane growers began buying large numbers of captive Africans, plantation slavery was born.
In the 1560s and 1570s, a flood of sugar from big new plantations in the Americas swept away the competition from the Atlantic islands. As early as 1523, Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, had begun growing cane on his huge estate south of Mexico City. Plantation owners in the Americas faced the same need for labor. In Spain’s American colonies, the labor question was tied to the question of how the Indians should be treated.
The official position of the Spanish crown and the Roman Catholic Church was that conquering the Indians was acceptable if it was done with the goal of making them into Christians. The Spaniards who actually went to the new colonies in the Americas, though, were more interested in Indian labor than in Indian souls.
The Crown found itself in a dilemma. On one hand, the justification for conquest was that the Indians were to be converted to Christianity, which was not likely to happen if large numbers of them were enslaved. On the other hand, the colonies were also supposed to contribute to the glory and wealth of Spain, and for that they needed a labor force. The solution was the encomienda system, which was introduced in 1503 and later modified several times. Under this system, individual Spanish conquistadors became the guardians or trustees of Indian groups, promising to ensure their safety, freedom, and religious instruction. The Indians paid for this Spanish “security” with their labor.
The encomienda system was supposed to limit the demands that the conquistadors could make on the Indians, which would make the Indians less likely to revolt against Spanish rule. It didn’t work. Both the Indians and the conquistadors disliked the system. Under the law, the Indians were still free people, with their towns and villages governed by their own leaders. In reality, the leaders had little power and the Indians were often treated as slaves. They were not officially enslaved, but they were not truly free.
Cortés may have had more unfree Indians (more than twenty thousand of them) than anyone else in the world. Many labored on his estate’s sugarcane plantations. In 1542 the Spanish Crown officially banned enslavement of Indians, and the trend was clear. Although there were loopholes in the new law, it was going to become harder for Spanish conquistadors and colonists to force Indians to work for them. A few weeks after the new antislavery law was announced, Cortés made a deal with an Italian merchant to buy five hundred Africans whom he could legally own and force to work. When the first hundred captives were delivered two years later, the Atlantic slave trade had arrived.
Africans had been trickling into the Americas almost as long as Europeans had been. Remains found in the cemetery of Columbus’s colony La Isabela suggest that some of the settlers there were of African descent. Once Africans were brought to Hispaniola to work on sugarcane plantations, escaped slaves became a serious problem for the Spanish colony. Hidden by the forest, these roaming Africans made it their business to wreck the sugar industry that had enchained them.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the center of the Spanish sugar industry shifted to mainland Mexico. Sugar production soared. No longer were Africans slipped into the Americas by the handful. The rise of plantation agriculture in Mexico and in Portugal’s Brazilian colony opened the floodgates. Between 1550 and 1650, slave ships ferried across about six hundred fifty thousand Africans to Spanish and Portuguese America. In those places, African immigrants outnumbered European immigrants by more than two to one—with results the Europeans never expected.
Africans walked with the Spanish conquistadors, sometimes as soldiers, sometimes as servants or slaves. They poured by the thousands into Peru and Ecuador, along with the Spanish conquerors of the Inka. Some Africans joined Indian groups and even took part in attacks on their former masters. Others, even enslaved Africans, won success on the battlefield and acquired their own estates and Indian slaves.
By the seventeenth century, Africans were everywhere in Spanish America. They were a major part of the mixed society that was taking shape in the Western Hemisphere as a result of the human Columbian Exchange. As you will see in the next chapter, Africans found allies and formed societies outside the limits set by their European masters.
THE STORY OF A MAN GENERALLY KNOWN AS Esteban shows how the Columbian Exchange moved people and cultures around the globe. He was born in Morocco, in North Africa, and spoke Arabic. Most likely he was one of many people from his region in the sixteenth century who fled to Spain and accepted Christianity to escape drought and civil war in their homelands. In Spain he was bought as a slave by a Spaniard who joined an expedition to the Americas led by an ambitious duke named Pánfilo de Narváez. The expedition consisted of more than four hundred men. An unknown number of them were African. One of these was Esteban.
The expedition landed in Florida in 1528. The group hoped to find gold but instead met one catastrophe after another. Narváez vanished at sea. Indians, disease, accident, and starvation picked off the rest, until only four were left. Esteban and his owner were two of them.
The little band headed west toward Mexico, eating spiders and ant eggs to survive, periodically enslaved, tortured, and humiliated by Indians. As they passed from one native realm to the next, the Indians came to believe that these wandering strangers had healing powers, and Esteban and the Spaniards encouraged this belief. Esteban was the scout who contacted each new culture as the group walked for thousands of miles across what is now the Southwest of the United States and into northern Mexico. In some ways he had become the leader of the group.
Eight years after leaving Spain, the four survivors of the Narváez expedition entered Mexico City. The three Spaniards were celebrated as heroes. Esteban was enslaved again and sold to a new owner, who sent him north with another expedition, this time to search for mythical cities of gold.
Esteban never returned from that journey. According to the Spanish account, he was captured by Indians in the mountains on the Arizona–New Mexico border, and then killed when he tried to escape. The Zuni people of the region tell different stories. In one version told to me, the Indians welcomed Esteban. He was like no other man they had ever seen, and they believed his spirit held great knowledge. So they cut off his lower legs so he could never leave and kept him alive and honored, but unable to walk, for many years.
Esteban’s true fate may never be known for sure. Along with many others, he was swept from one world to the next, like a cork on a current of water, by the swirling tides of the Columbian Exchange and the harsh realities of slavery.
The intimate mingling of Europeans and Indians in the Americas began in 1493, at Columbus’s ill-fated colony of La Isabela. Most of the Spaniards on the expedition were young, single men. A census from 1514 shows that only a third of them were married—and most were married to women of the Taino people. A few years later, Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, fathered several children with native women. One of them was a daughter of Motecuhzoma, the famous “Montezuma” who was held captive by Cortés and killed in 1520 during the battle to drive the Spanish out of Mexico City.
Cortés did not hide his half-Indian, illegitimate children. In fact, he arranged a marriage for one of his daughters and ensured that his half-Indian son would be recognized as a full member of Spanish society, even including him in his will. (Cortés’s oldest legitimate son and his half-Indian son battled in court for years over Cortés’s estate—they fought over the ownership of Indian slaves.)
The Spanish Crown encouraged pairings between Spaniards and Indians, although they believed that such pairings should lead to Christian marriages. Some elite Indians also saw that they could reinforce their status by marrying their daughters to Spaniards in Christian ceremonies. For many Spanish men, though, a Taino ceremony was more useful than a Christian one. By marrying a native woman, a low-ranking Spaniard could gain access to the goods and workers that the high-ranking Indians controlled.
A hybrid society came into existence, first in the Caribbean and then everywhere else in the Americas. The mixing began at the top, with the commanders of the conquistadors. Marrying into noble or elite families was a way for the conquerors to justify or reinforce their rule over the peoples they had conquered. The mixed-blood offspring of conquistadors such as Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of the Inka Empire, became some of the most powerful citizens in the new colonies.
At first, few of the hybrid children had African blood. This changed as plantation slavery spread. The percentage of the total American population that was African rose, as did the number of Afro-Indians, Afro-Europeans, and Afro-Euro-Indians. By 1570 there were three times as many Africans as Europeans in Mexico and twice as many people of mixed parentage. Seventy years later there were still three times as many Africans as Europeans, but twenty-three times as many mixed people. Most of these were free Afro-Europeans.
Europeans of the sixteenth century did not have the same ideas about “race” as later generations. They did not see themselves as being different from Africans or Indians on a biological level. They did worry, however, about moral differences. Many Spaniards believed that people passed on to their children their own ideas and moral characters, and that these features were fixed and unchangeable. For example, a mother who was born Jewish or Muslim would somehow pass the essence of being Jewish or Muslim to her children, even if she never exposed them to the religion.
The Indians of the Americas were not seen at first as a threat of this sort. Unlike Muslims or Jews, who had supposedly rejected Christianity, Indians had never heard of Christ and so had not had the opportunity to reject the Gospel. Over time, though, it became clear that many Indians were resisting full Christianization. As a result, Europeans became suspicious of the whole class of Indians. By the second half of the sixteenth century, European elites in Spanish America started to fear that mixed-blood relationships were leading to a kind of moral contamination of the colonists’ bloodlines. The earlier, freewheeling attitude toward mixed-blood relationships and people became stricter.
Spanish governments started passing laws that limited the rights of mixed people in the colonies, such as forbidding them to carry weapons, become priests, or practice certain trades. Dozens of new rules targeted Africans and Indians as well as mixed people. Men and women with African blood, for example, could not be seen in the streets after 8:00 p.m., and they could not gather in groups of more than four in public places. Women of mixed native and European blood could not wear Indian clothing. Afro-European women could not wear Spanish-style jewelry. A Spanish butcher who cheated his customers received a fine. An Indian butcher who did the same thing received a hundred lashes with a whip.
As the restrictions increased, so did colonists’ fear of the people they were restricting. Some worried that Africans and Indians were secretly plotting to attack Christians. An elaborate system called casta arose to classify people by their moral and spiritual worth, based on their descent. Each group was thought to have a basic, unchanging moral nature. A mulatto (Afro-European) was different from a mestizo (Indo-European), and both were different from a zambo (Afro-Indian). The children of various combinations also had their own labels, such as coyote, wolf, white-spotted, or suspended-in-air.
The casta system did not work quite as the government intended. Instead of being confined to their social slots, people used the categories as tools to better their conditions. They searched for the identity that best suited them. For example, when one half-Indian son of a conquistador married a native noblewoman, their son should have been classified as a coyote in the casta system. Instead he was declared to be an Indian and became a governor. Meanwhile, other Indians claimed to be Africans, because slaves paid fewer taxes, and the Indians didn’t see why they should pay them, either. Local officials who were supposed to police the casta categories were short of cash, so they sold people whatever identities they wanted.
The laws against Indian slavery made things even more complicated. Under Spanish law, children inherited the status of their mothers. In theory, this meant that the children of Indian women could not be enslaved, no matter who their father was. African men sought out non-African spouses so that their children would not become slaves. Colonial authorities tried to enslave Afro-European and Afro-Indian children anyway, but many of them simply moved away and told their new neighbors that they were Spaniards or Indians.
The population of Mexico became increasingly blended over time. By the end of the eighteenth century, “pure” Africans were disappearing. Disease and intermarriage were reducing the number of “pure” Indians at a rapid rate. Even the remaining “pure” Spaniards (a tiny group that in Mexico City made up only 5 percent of the population) were marrying outside their category so fast that soon they would no longer exist. Yet even as it became more difficult to see the differences among people, colonial authorities tried ever harder to keep them separate.
Anxiety over ethnic and racial identity is reflected in a special kind of art produced in Spain’s American colonies: casta paintings. These sets of images, usually sixteen to a set, illustrate the different categories of people recognized by the casta system. Each image is labeled: “From Black Man and Indian Woman, Wolf” or “From Mulatto Man and Mestiza Woman, Wolf-Suspended-in-Air.” For all their care to show the casta categories, however, the paintings fail to show one group that was present in Spanish America.
SOMETIME AFTER 1500 A YOUNG WEST AFRICAN man arrived in Portugal, possibly as a slave, possibly as a representative of a family that wanted to sell slaves to Europeans. Either way, he changed course and crossed the border into Spain. A hint of his personality comes through in the Spanish name he chose for himself: Juan Garrido, which means, roughly, Johnny Good-Looking.
Garrido crossed the Atlantic early in the sixteenth century as a conquistador. He accompanied the Spanish takeover of the island of Puerto Rico and Ponce de Léon’s useless quest for the Fountain of Youth. When Cortés conquered the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec Empire of Mexico was known), Garrido was at his side. Afterward, at the request of Cortés, Garrido built a chapel to the memory of Spaniards who had been sacrificed in bloody Aztec rituals. Garrido’s biggest contribution, though, came after Cortés found three grains of wheat in a sack of rice. The conqueror asked Garrido to plant them in a plot next to the chapel.
Not only were the Spanish eager for wheat from which they could make beer and bread, but the church needed bread in order to celebrate Mass properly. All earlier attempts to grow wheat in Hispaniola had failed in the island’s hot, humid climate. Two of Garrido’s grains, however, sprouted. From them came more grains, and, as a Spanish historian wrote in 1552, “little by little there was boundless wheat.”
Garrido’s wheat was greeted with joy. In a strange land, it was a taste of home. Soon golden wheat waved in the breeze across central Mexico, replacing corn and forest. Garrido’s wheat may even have traveled north into Texas and up the Mississippi. If this is true, much of the wheat that turned the American Midwest into an agricultural powerhouse in the nineteenth century came from an African conquistador’s roadside chapel in Mexico City.
In planting the wheat, Garrido helped make the Columbian Exchange happen. At the same time, he was part of the exchange, as were Cortés and the other foreigners. Garrido lived with his family in the center of busy, crowded, multiethnic and multicultural Mexico City. An African turned European turned American, he is a symbol of that city of exiles and travelers.
No trace of Garrido’s life after 1538 has been found. He probably died in the next decade, forgotten in the hubbub and tumult of the New World he had helped to create.
Asians came to the Americas, too. They came by means of the galleon trade that carried silver across the Pacific to Asia and Chinese goods back across the Pacific to Mexico, as described in chapter 5. One historian estimates that fifty to a hundred thousand Asians arrived in Spanish America as servants, slaves, or sailors who worked on the long Pacific voyages that set sail from Manila in the Philippines. As many as 60 to 80 percent of the galleons’ crews may have been Asian. Many never went back to Manila. Over the decades, thousands of sailors jumped ship in the Americas, taking jobs in shipyards or building forts and other public works.
Sometimes Asian sailors worked alongside Asian slaves from India, Malaysia, Borneo, and other countries of Southeast Asia. Although Manila banned Asian slavery in 1672, the ban was not very effective. Almost a century later, Mexican authorities forced a religious group from Manila to get rid of twenty Asian servants who were being treated too much like slaves.
Known by the Spaniards as chinos, Asian migrants spread slowly throughout Mexico. Among them were Japanese samurai who had been stranded outside their homeland when Japan closed its borders in the 1630s. The Spanish authorities allowed the samurai to use their traditional weapons to protect silver shipments along the highway from Mexico City to the ports. The results were so encouraging that the authorities began drafting mixed-race people into the militias. By the eighteenth century, Afro-Indo-Asian units were protecting mail deliveries, patrolling for bandits, and driving off attacking British ships. When the British admiral-pirate George Anson invaded western Mexico in 1741, the multicultural force played a major role in his defeat.
The Mexican city of Puebla had a tight-knit Asian community. Its members may have contributed to one of the city’s most important industries: ceramics, especially fake Chinese pottery. The Asian community in Mexico City was larger. The first real Chinatown in the Americas, it was centered on an outdoor Asian marketplace in a big plaza in the middle of town. Chinese tailors, shoemakers, butchers, musicians, and goldsmiths competed with African, Indian, and Spanish shopkeepers for business.
In the 1630s, a rivalry developed between Spanish barbers and Chinese barbers. In those days a barber did not just cut hair but also performed dental surgery. The Chinese barbers had an advantage, because Chinese dentistry was the most advanced in the world. Wealthy customers flocked to their stands. At the urging of Spanish barbers, the city council tried several times to ban Chinese barbers from the city center, but the bans failed—perhaps because influential customers did not want to travel far to have their hair cut and their teeth cleaned.
Mexico City in the sixteenth century was a giddy buzz and snarl of African slaves, Asian shopkeepers, Indian farmers and laborers, and European priests, soldiers, and second-level aristocrats. Its multitude of ethnic groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas made it the world’s first truly global city. It was the place where East met West under an African and Indian gaze. Its inhabitants were ashamed of the genetic mix yet proud of their city’s worldly culture. In Grandeza Mexicana, a two-hundred-page love letter to his home, poet Bernardo de Balbuena wrote of Mexico City:
Spain is joined with China, Italy with Japan, and finally an entire world in trade and order.
Think of Mexico City as the first twenty-firstcentury city, the forerunner to today’s modern, globalized megacities. It may seem foolish to use terms such as modern and globalized to describe a city with no mass communication, or a time when shipping goods from one place to the next took months or years. Even today, though, billions of people on our networked planet have no telephones. Even today the reach of goods and services from high-technology places such as Japan, Europe, and the United States is limited. Modernity is a patchy thing, a matter of shifting light and dark upon the globe. Mexico City was one of the spots it touched first.