From the very onset of Spanish activity in the Americas, Africans were present both as voluntary expeditionaries and as involuntary colonists. Likewise from the onset, the roles played by people of African descent can be placed in three overlapping categories.
The category that would soon include the majority of Blacks in colonial Spanish America was that of the mass slave--that is, slaves shipped en masse to the colonies and forced to work in labor gangs in various industries but most typically on sugar plantations. Beginning as early as 1505, enslaved men and women were imported in increasingly large numbers to the Spanish colonies, at first from the Iberian kingdoms but soon directly from Africa. King Ferdinand authorized in the first months of 1510 the transportation to Hispaniola of 250 African slaves; thus formally began the trans-Atlantic expansion of a slave trade that would last into the nineteenth century and bring millions of Africans in chains to European colonies in the Americas. That trade is not the immediate topic of this article, but it does provide the broader context to the phenomenon of black conquistadors in Spanish America.
The second category of Spanish American Blacks was that of the unarmed auxiliary. These were men and women who were born either in [End Page 173] [Begin Page 175] West Africa or in the Iberian kingdoms, more likely the latter in the early decades after Spaniards first crossed the Atlantic.
They were servants or slaves--though they were more typically the latter and were less likely to acquire their freedom in the Americas than armed auxiliaries, even if the militarized environment of the early conquest years often blurred the line between the armed and unarmed.
The experience of black auxiliaries was markedly different from that of mass slaves for these reasons and because they functioned as individuals, alone or in small groups, as personal dependents or agents of their Spanish masters. Although the condition of slavery was certainly never tolerable, nor is there evidence that any slaves in the Spanish world perceived it as such under any circumstances, some slaves in this category were granted considerable responsibility and relative freedom of movement.
| the armed auxiliary of African descent. |
|
The third category, and the focus of this article, is that of the armed auxiliary of African descent. These were men ranging from African-born slaves to Iberian-born free men of mixed racial ancestry (although black women were among the first Africans in the Americas, I have found no evidence of any playing armed roles) .
The enslaved acquired their freedom soon after they began fighting alongside Spaniards, if not before; very few black conquistadors seem to have remained slaves after their participation in the Conquest.
Such men tended to hold predictable posts during and after the Conquest and to become part of early colonial life in certain ways; they are few in number but their lives sufficiently conform to certain patterns for analytical generalizations to be made about them. Nor did the phenomenon of the black conquistador end with the initial series of Spanish conquests; as argued later in this article, it survived in various forms throughout the colonial period and remained an important part of the black experience in Spanish America.
|
