African
Experiences in Latin America: Land, Amerindians, and Slavery
The Europeans didn't want Amerindian land—Africans did, and
Amerindians shaped African slavery.
No statement in Latin American Historical Studies contains more
shock value—or hidden truths—than this, so with this begins the
discussion. To slice through the confusing and often contradictory
muddle of Spanish cultural prejudice requires a cutting statement,
for the question--what created the hybrid cultures
of modern Latin America--bears a thick skin. The secret to
understanding begins with land. Cultural hybridization depended
largely on European intentions towards land because those intentions
affected the way Europeans saw Amerindian peoples. That vision
affected European treatment of Africans, resulting in the brutal and
unique slavery system that remains the most important non-human factor
responsible for the success of African culture in
Latin America. Amerindians also directly affected African cultural
survival through interactions both during slavery and conquest.
Spanish
nonchalance towards land affected treatment of Amerindians,
ultimately altering the treatment of Africans. The Spanish explorers
wanted wealth that they depended on the Spanish crown to legitimize,
and the Spanish crown wanted to expand its empire: this required the
addition of new citizens, not an influx of land. The encomienda
system and the later repartimiento system both focused on the
exploitation of the people, not the land, which the Spaniards
depended on the Amerindian people to operate. In the encomiendo,
each encomendero received a grant for certain kinship groups of
people or ayllus;
in the repartimiento the colonist received a set number of healthy
males or “tributaries”, and their immediate families.
Because the Spaniards wanted people to rule, not a place to use,
they depended heavily on native institutions. The mita labor system
in Peru, for example, came originally from the conquered Incan
empire.
Similarly, when in contact with settled agricultural peoples, the
Portuguese “created a fiscal system based on villages of
'surrendered' or conquered Native Americans.”
Thus, while Amerindians received awful treatment as second-class
citizens, they were not legally slaves. From the very beginnings of
the conquest, when Cortez's men gazed down at Tenochtitlan, they
lauded its technological developments as evidence that these people
could belong in the Spanish empire.
Unlike the European settler families of North America, the single
(or effectively single) male conquistadors did not need to displace
all the Amerindians for land.
This
view of Amerindian peoples as people, so necessary to the expansion
of the Crown's power, added fuel to the continual struggles between
the Crown, the Church, and settlers. Each of the three groups of
elites, as they tried to expand their power, would accuse the other
two of mistreating the Amerindian peoples.
The Church, compelled by the desire to establish the new perfect
church in the New World, had priests such as Bartolomeo de las Casas
and Lorenzo de Bienvenida
who claimed that innocent Amerindians suffered at settlers' hands.
The State and settlers struggled against the church in the Yucatan to
limit the power of Inquisitorial priests.
Finally, the State restricted how the settlers could exploit the
Amerindians under their jurisdiction, requiring separate settlements
and fair wages of some kind.
Without Amerindians, the church could not find new converts, the
State had no one to rule and the settlers had no source of income,
so all three groups found humane treatment of Amerindians to their
advantage. These continual struggles gave the Amerindians the
opportunity to pit the three sides against each other, and Spanish
dependence on native peoples and their institutions allowed
Amerindians to hold on to their culture.
Thus
the Spanish desire to rule people, not land, made Amerindian slavery
difficult and finally illegal, opening the door to African slavery.
Africans had higher resistance to European diseases because of early
livestock domestication on the African continent, they usually had
useful “modern” skill sets for agriculture and iron trade, their
unfamiliarity with the landscape kept them near or at least
moderately dependent on settlements, and, unlike the Amerindians,
they had not had rigorous Christianization and the church would not
defend them.
Most importantly, they came from outside Latin America: they did not
need to have rights like the original inhabitants of the land did in
order to maintain the illusion of an empire. African slavery took a
particularly strong foothold in New World areas populated by
migratory tribes such as the chichimec. These tribes not have highly
controlling social institutions and political institutions such as
those of the Incas or Aztecs upon which the conquistadors so
rigorously depended, and in many places, the nomadic militant
lifestyles of these people groups made them accustomed to fighting
and living in impassable areas, rendering them difficult to subdue.
Hence, in these areas African slavery posed an especially enticing
alternative from the point of view of colonialists, and the nations
in South America with the highest black proportions of the population
today include Brazil and Haiti, whose native populations either did
not exist or simply disappeared into the interior. The vacuum for
mass labor created by Amerindian rights thus birthed the unique
African plantation slavery.
The
unique style of plantation slavery in South America in name actively
opposed the survival of African culture, but inadvertently forced its
survival through two land-related phenomena: the long life of the
slave trade, the Catholic tradition of a Sunday. These remain
unintentional factors, of course, for certainly no one in Brazil or
Haiti wanted an influx of African culture: Latin American masters
made a deliberate effort to split up different linguistic and ethnic
groups in order to prevent rebellions.
Yet because European ignorance of African languages and cultures
diminished their ability to differentiate between them, cultural
dilution did not really succeed: one African leader found and bought
back his entire tribe.
Additionally, no matter how one mixed the tribes, most of the people
in one ship would at least come from the same trade network or
geographical area, and Thornton argues that within that network
ethnic diversity did not play such a dividing role as one might
imagine.
Despite their failure, slavery's intentional agents certainly tried
to eliminate or at least limit African culture, if not through
relocation and dilution, then through overwork.
Overwork
and other elements of brutality resulted from the late abolition of
the slave trade in South America, specifically in Brazil. First of
all, the longevity of the slave trade in Brazil made brutality more
economically feasible; in Brazil plantation owners made the
calculations that working slaves to death and shipping in more would
cost less than trying to care for and breed them. The life expectancy
on sugar plantations remained at 23 years, with 88% mortality on some
coffee plantations.
In North America, on the other hand, once the slave trade became
abolished, plantation owners had to ensure slave health remained at
least sufficient for breeding. Brutality drives people to extremes;
when escape provides more hazards than slavery, slaves tend to remain
slaves, but when, as in Brazil, the dangers of escape no longer
outweigh the dangers of slavery, flight becomes more feasible. The
extra brutality of the slave trade encouraged more aggressive
resistance, making slaves more prone to cling to their own culture or
even to found new societies based on their own norms.
Furthermore,
because the slave trade lasted such a long time Brazillians could
predominantly import male slaves.
Thus the inherent uselessness plantation owners associated with older
slaves, children and even women allowed for inflated rates of
manumission
as compared to the North American experience in which masters needed
women, the elderly, and especially children to continue the slave
line and maintain slave dependency. Additionally, these single male
slaves had few ties to the plantation and could more easily flee from
slavery or bargain for more land without too much to lose, whereas in
North America, family ties would keep slaves dependent on their
masters for several generations, diluting their cultural heritage
with slave life.
The
longevity of the slave trade also accidentally encouraged runaways
because of the frequency with which new Africans arrived. Throughout
the New World, African-born slaves tended to run away more
frequently,
so in Latin America, where most slaves came from import, instances of
runaways remained common enough to promote the establishment of
actual runaway communities, something unheard of in the US.
The threat of running away to a slave or even Amerindian community
thus became so significant that slaves even began to have the power
to negotiate their treatment.
This power, also unheard of in North America, contributed to the
sense of self-sufficiency that gave Africans a firm grip on their
cultural pride.
This essential self-sufficiency also arose in
Latin America, especially in Brazil, because the economic
calculations made possible by the continuation of the slave trade
convinced masters not to provide basic necessities for their
laborers. Instead of providing them with food or clothing, masters
found it cheaper to provide slaves with a plot of land. This plot of
land, and its expansion, often stood at the top of the slaves' lists
of demands from their masters,
and its cultivation allowed slaves to maintain a sense of
self-sufficiency. Interestingly, one notes that in modern Venezuela,
where during the colonial period owners provided for their slaves'
every need, African culture does not play as large a role as it does
now in Brazil, where colonial slaves only received that all-important
plot of land. As Thornton points out, providing for most or all of
the slaves' necessities leaves them “deprived of all sense of
self-sufficiency and community feeling.”
On their land, Africans grew African crops such as rice, and their
experience with agriculture caused them to so excel that some local
economies actually depended heavily on the surplus sold by African
slaves for survival.
That land helped maintain African culture in three ways, then: it
maintained that sense of self-sufficiency that strengthens cultural
pride, it gave them a space to practice their African heritage, and
it made the local freed people dependent on them, forcing them to at
least practically accept the value in an African lifestyle. The same
land that in the minds of the original conquistadors had little value
compared to the riches produced by Amerindian peoples had infinite
value to the Africans, and it became theirs because of the longevity
of the slave trade.
Catholic
intervention, or the lack thereof, similarly provided Africans with a
space to celebrate their culture. While masters rarely brought
priests onto the plantation and made little effort to give religious
instruction to their slaves, they did not try to halt or limit
religious expansion as they did in North America.
Whereas in North America church organization came under suspicion
because of the solidarity it provided, and ultimately reading the
Bible became illegal for a slave,
in Latin America lay brotherhoods dedicated to particular saints
merged with new nations that had elections of kings and queens in
public.
Priests would even help to organize these brotherhoods of Africans
to ease their transition to Christianity, and the Africans would then
worship in their own native languages.
Language, so crucial to the maintenance of African culture, was not
the only cultural artifact to find refuge in the Catholic church.
These organizations also presented slaves with the opportunity to
practice their material culture in aesthetic expressions such as
pottery or decorative textile and to worship with African dances and
music.
In this way the power of the church--and the ingenuity of the African
slaves who used it--sheltered African culture.
Catholicism
also furthered African culture through the practice of the Sabbath.
The church had enough control over Latin American society to prevent
anyone from working their slaves on Sunday, and of course the many
slaves owned by the church could not work either.
This Sunday off gave slaves the opportunity to work on their
all-important land, and while eking out an existence posed nearly
insurmountable difficulty, some Africans even earned enough from
their fields to buy their own freedom. The Sunday off also set a
precedent for Africans to request additional days off, such as Friday
and Saturday.
While
the ultimate responsibility for the longevity of African culture goes
to the perseverence of the Africans themselves, these two fundamental
attributes of plantation slavery—the longevity of the slave trade
and the Catholic intervention—played a heavy role in seeping
African culture into Latin America today. However, Amerindians did
not only affect Africans by creating the slave-labor-vacuum into
which Africans fell. Their struggles to maintain their own cultural
heritage sometimes competed with African subsistence, as sometimes
Amerindians would enslave Africans or use them as bargaining chips to
gain freedoms from conquistadors. On the other hand, sometimes
Amerindians directly helped Africans establish their own communities.
As mentioned before, Africans could flee to Amerindian communities,
creating a unique opportunity for cultural blending that surely
contributed to the mindset with which modern Latin Americans view
their mixed heritage. Thornton describes Amerindian relations with
Africans thusly:
“Runaways
seeking aid in the native societies did not always find a good
reception. Native American attitudes towards helping runaway slaves
depended on many factors, including the structures of the Native
American societies themselves, their relations with the Europeans,
and the goals of their leaders. Sometimes these converged to help
runaways; sometimes they contributed to the destruction of runaway
communities or to runaways being returned to their masters.”
European attitudes towards Amerindians, then, were not
alone in shaping how African culture would survive in the New World:
Amerindian attitudes towards Africans also played a significant role.
Those
Amerindian attitudes had some root in the African role in the
conquest. A 1539 play pitted African actors, led by a black king and
queen, against Amerindian actors representing primitive wildmen. As
Matthew Restall explains, certainly this would have reminded
Amerindians of African roles in the conquest, and would have fired up
African pride at the often over-looked military prowess of real-life
dark-skinned conquistadors. Significantly, the play also would have
hearkened back to the rebel black king executed in Mexico city only a
few years earlier.
Because many Amerindian groups supported the European conquest
against other groups, some Amerindians at least would have seen black
rebels as disrupting a desirable status quo. Amerindians viewed
Africans sometimes as allies against Europeans and sometimes as
conquistadors, but always as foreigners. Amerindians who lived as
second-class citizens after the Toledo reforms would most likely have
resented zealous black conquistadors such as Juan Valiente just like
they resented any other conquistador; his rise to encomendero
despite enslavement by Europeans would not likely have elicited much
sympathy from them. The rare black encomendero would not have been
the only bad memory Amerindians had of black conquest: early European
expeditions only included dozens of Africans, but later conquests
featured entire armies of American-born African soldiers, trained by
Europeans to put down Amerindian revolts and to conquer new
territories.
The
Amerindians opposing Europeans would never have forgotten the
hundreds of Africans bearing down on them alongside sometimes merely
dozens of whites. Small wonder, then, that Amerindians did not always
view Africans as allies against European infarction.
The
African role in the conquest shaped opportunities for later African
slaves by helping to create a mixed society in which runaways could
hide and creoles could bargain. Because the conquistador mercenary
armies made up of unmarried or effectively single men often resulted
in sexual alliances, forced or un-forced with Amerindians and slaves,
the average Latin American did not look European, but rather mixed
African or mixed Amerindian. By contrast, North America became
largely settled, with the exception of colonies like Virginia, by
migrating families or groups that had little interest in forming such
liaisons, resulting in a very different demarcation of race later on
in the history of slavery. A person classified as black in North
America could in that day easily find herself labelled white in
Brazil.
This does not mean that Brazil had a more benign system of slavery
than the US, or less racism; merely that racism became differently
defined, because of the conquest, so that an escaped slave or
manumitted African could more easily blend into society
and maintain their cultural practices.
Europeans did not want Amerindian land, but Africans
did. The shocking statement still stands, then, not to claim that
Africans sailed over to take Amerindian lands, but to explain how
Europeans' desire to control Amerindian peoples, not land, caused a
slave-labor vacuum that brought African slavery, marked by late
abolition of the slave trade and heavy church involvement, into the
forefront of Latin American society. African culture survived in
large part because of land, which slaves bargained dearly for, and
Amerindian interactions sometimes helped and sometimes inhibited the
progression of African culture in Latin America, in part influenced
by the legacy of African involvement in the conquest. The tendency
to focus on European-African or European-Amerindian interactions
downplays the important effects Amerindians and Africans had on each
other, and in order to understand modern Latin American culture all
the variables must lay out on the table. The analysis of
Amerindian-African interactions shows how actively both parties
shaped modern Latin American culture and demonstrates that involved
actors, not passive survivors of European conquest, claim
responsibility for history. History, like life, requires more than
survival victims; it requires protagonists.
