Slavery in Colonial Mexico

Slavery in Mexico by Shep Lenchek, published on 1 Jan. 2001:  According to the reports of the first Europeans to visit the New World, slavery was almost universal in what is now Mexico and Central America. Theoretically, with the arrival of Europeans, that should have changed.

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, while granting Spain the right to colonize the New World, mandated that the indigenous people be converted to Catholicism and prohibited their enslavement. However, he added a "catch 22" by going on to say that those who did not accept Christianity or reverted to their old religion, should be punished and could be enslaved. More positively, in 1500, Queen Isabella of Spain had expressly ordered, "all the Indians of the Spaniards were to be free from slavery." This order had no ifs or buts. When she died in 1504, her will instructed her successors to continue these policies.

Thus, when in 1519 Cortes and the Conquistadors invaded Mexico, both Spanish and Papal Law seemingly protected the Indians from enslavement. It is not surprising that Cortes, whose very invasion of Mexico was an illegal rebellion against the order of his superior, the Governor of Cuba, ignored the order of the Queen, and used the aforementioned "catch 22" to remain in compliance with the Papal order. As they moved toward Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards went through the motions of converting the Indians but offered them no religious instruction. The erection of a Cross, a speech outlining the virtues of Christianity by La Malinche and the destruction of the local idols was the standard procedure.

It was not until 1524, after the Aztecs had been conquered and enslaved, that 10 Franciscan Priests and 2 lay brothers arrived. Now, real religious instruction was offered to the Indians. In 1526, 12 Dominicans followed them. The first Jesuits who ultimately were to carry the main burden of religious instruction, did not arrive until 1572. Thus, in 1521 when Cortes gave his followers vast tracts of land called encomiendas, all indigenous people living within the boundaries of these land grants were bound to the land as slaves. Simply baptized, without follow up, it was easy to claim they had reverted to the worship of their old Gods. Thus the ecomienderos could claim they were in compliance with the second part of the Pope's directive. Recognized by the Spanish Crown as the military governor of New Spain, largely unsupervised, Cortes ran Nueva Espagna until 1526.

The first person to challenge this illegal enslavement was Father Bartoleme de las Casas. Long an opponent of slavery, he had fought against, it in both Santo Domingo and Cuba with little success, before coming to Mexico. Ironically, his proposed solution to enslavement of indigenous people was to import black slaves from Africa. Some effort was made to do this but the Portuguese who controlled the slave trade charged high prices and the number of black slaves available was not sufficient to meet the needs of the colony. Records indicate that about 6000 African slaves reached Mexico.

Those who did arrive remained largely in the Vera Cruz area and worked mostly in the sugar cane fields and factories. Perhaps this indicates that the Indians who lived near Vera Cruz, the first permanent Spanish settlement, had indeed received religious instruction in addition to baptism. Returning to Spain, in 1542 de Las Casas persuaded Emperor Charles V to promulgate "New Laws" that once again outlawed slavery. Returning to Santo Domingo, he was unable to gain acceptance for these laws. Appointed Bishop of Chiapas, he returned to Mexico. Here too, he met with no success.

Actually, the economy of Nueva Espagna depended almost entirely on slave labor. Agriculture and mining were labor intensive and need young, strong bodies. The recruiting of young male immigrants in Spain was impossible. The country was involved in European wars and the Army took all the able bodied young men who might have been willing to seek their fortune in the new world. After 1535 when the first Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza had restored order to the Colony, some immigration started. The first to come in any number were "Conversos." Forcibly baptized Jews, they were mostly doctors, lawyers, teachers and business men who were fleeing the Inquisition. They brought much need skills but did not replace slaves.

Map of the Vice-royalty of New Spain

In the final analysis, while Bartoleme de las Casas failed to end slavery, he was the first voice within the Church to speak out against it and set a precedent that it was the duty of the Church to protect the Indians. Due to his influence, Juan de Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico who arrived in 1528 proclaimed himself as "Protector of the Indians. " He had recognized the impossibility of ending slavery. His approach was to attempt to regulate it. Cortes had gone back to Spain. An Audiencia, a court, dominated by Nuneo de Guzman, a bitter enemy of Cortes, was running the colony. He had launched a program of extortion and enslavement against the Indians. Spaniards who remained loyal to Cortes were also persecuted. It was not until Cortes returned to the colony in 1530, that Guzman was ousted and a second Audiencia took over. With this new Court in place, the treatment of the Indians improved although slavery was still their lot. Now, Archbishop Zumarraga and Vasco de Quiroga who he had appointed Bishop of Michoacan, brought churches, schools and hospitals to the indigenous people both enslaved on ecomiendas, the original land grants made to the Conquistadors and those still free and living in their own villages.

It was the new Viceroy who actually did the most for the indigenous people. While he recognized the impossibility of abolishing existing slavery, he set some standards for their treatment. No Indian, slave or otherwise could be forced to carry a load of more than 100 lbs. To protect the supposedly "free" Indians employed in the mines, government officials were appointed to collect and distribute their wages. In some cases a local priest performed this duty.

The system set up by the new colonial government to run the colony was based on strong municipal governments. Like other cities, native municipalities were also recognized as semi-autonomous units, with Indian officials handling local matters under the supervision of appointed Spaniards. Soon, the descendants of the original Conquistadors began to demand the same kind of land-grants received by their parents. To protect the remaining Indian villages from their encroachment, the Viceroy now set up the Ejido system. It granted title to land to a tribe, a village, a clan or even an extended family. The land was designated to be used solely for agriculture. It could not be divided and sold by individual Ejidoistas. This protection lasted until 1856, long after Mexico gained it's Independence from Spain. Ironically, it was the Liberal Party, headed by Benito Juarez, himself an Indian, that destroyed the system. There can be little doubt that it was this system that slowed down the enslavement of the Indians.

Under the Viceroys, "forced labor" to build roads, rather than slavery became the lot of the "free" indigenous people. In a sense, it was a form of tribute exacted by the Colonial Government in lieu of cash payment of taxes. Due to epidemics of smallpox, first in 1520 and again in 1545, 1576 and 1629, by 1630 the Indian population had shrunk to less than 800,000 from an estimated 10 to 12 million in the days before the Conquest. The majority of those who died were slaves who were in close contact with Europeans. The survival rate of those who lived in Indian villages or on Ejidos was much higher. A change from raising crops to raising cattle, much less labor intensive, also slowed the need for slaves. Now the Indian population grew rapidly. While population figures are not wholly reliable, in 1650 Mexico's total population was recorded at about 1.7 million. 1.3 million were Indians.

Now government controlled labor drafts called repartimientos, rather than slaves, provided workers to the Spanish-owned estates and mines at salaries set by the government. While the Plan of Iguala, proposed by Augustin de Iturbe in 1820 had abolished slavery, it was not until 1824 that a Constitution was adopted that actually freed them. Even so, it was not until 1829 that the last slaves were freed. Slavery did survive in the part of Mexico that is now Texas. Indeed, Mexican efforts to free slaves played an important role in the formation of the Republic of Texas. It was largely fueled by the desire of " Gringo" slave owners to retain their chattels.

Slavery in Colonial Mexico was quite different from that in the American South. The bulk of those enslaved remained on the land where they were born. There was no large scale buying and selling of Indian slaves. Even the blacks imported from Africa, like the Indians, were incorporated into the encomiendo system that bound them and their descendants to a particular plantation or hacienda. Over 75 percent of modern Mexico's population, have at least one Indian or Mulatto ancestor. The vast majority of them were slaves. Ironically, it is the Indians, never enslaved, who retreated into largely inaccessible mountain and jungle areas, that today make up the most destitute and deprived population in modern Mexico.  (source: mexconnect.com)

Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Afro-Indian President

The Berkeley Daily Planet article, "Mexico’s First Black President," by Ted Vincent, on 18 February 2009:

Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s first black president

Barak Obama admires Abraham Lincoln. Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s first black president, was his nation’s Lincoln. In 1829 he issued Mexico’s slavery abolition decree (which led a few years later to Texas slave holders taking Texas out of Mexico).

Obama and Lincoln are known for building coalitions. Guerrero built one when he was commander-in-chief of the Mexican army during the last three years of Mexico’s exhaustive 1810-1821 war for independence from Spain. Key actions by Guerrero to end the war were his spread of letters to Mexican officers who had been hired to fight for Spain. He convinced many that opportunity awaited if they switched sides. His subsequent team of rivals brought victory and made Guerrero Mexico’s Washington as well as Lincoln—he also created the basic design for the flag.

After the war Guerrero had to be personable to win over influential Mexicans who looked with disdain upon him for having Afro-Indio roots and for being a mule driver by trade—the occupation of his father and uncles. In those years muleteers were very plentiful in Mexico, thanks in part to Spain’s reluctance to pay to create roads for carts and carriages. A history of the drivers describes them being considered unpleasant rowdies by the well-to-do, but welcomed in rural villages for bringing the news of the day, latest songs and the latest jokes about authority figures. Mule trains often convoyed contraband. From this profession came many a fighter for Mexico in the war with Spain.

Guerrero was a descendant of the roughly 250,000 enslaved Africans brought to Mexico during colonial times. Part indigenous, he was raised in an Indio barrio in the mountain town of Tixtla in the state that carries his name. During the 1810 war his knowledge of native languages helped the future president rise in rank. In villages he organized the community for the war effort, often using a speech in which he praised the Indio political system of elected councils and chiefs, while asking for allegiance to the fight for “the bigger democracy” at the state level.

During his presidency, Guerrero’s penchant for telling jokes and sprinkling his speech with native words annoyed members of the refined social elite. But for a time he had to be tolerated. Guerrero came out of the war with an immense following, notable for the Indios he had recruited into the fight. In 1828 he and a brilliant but consumptive cocaine addict, Ignacio Esteva, created the first “People’s Party” in Mexico and its followers put Guerrero in the presidency in April 1829.

President Guerrero was known for eloquence, as displayed in his first speech to congress, “If we succeed in spreading the guarantees of the individual, if equality before the law destroys the efforts of power and gold, if the highest title between us is that of citizen, if the rewards we bestow are exclusively for talent and virtue, we have a republic, and she will be conserved by the universal suffrage of a people solid, free and happy.”

Guerrero wanted his presidency to reflect the broad coalition built during the 1810 war. He allowed political centrists and conservatives to dominate his cabinet, and he accepted as Vice President Anastacio Bustamante who had spent most of the independence war in the uniform of Spain. Left-wing supporters of Guerrero criticized the president’s cabinet and other choices, and in the manner that Barak Obama has questioning friends who are more racially oriented than he, so too did Guerrero have his. One was Isidorio Montesdeoca, an Afro-Filipino campesino who became a general under Guerrero during the independence war. He called Guerrero’s references to racial equality achieved by asking everyone be judged by his or her “merits and virtues,” wishful thinking in a country where many powerful people didn’t believe blacks or Indios had merits and virtues. Moreover, argued Guerrero’s critics from the left, congress had made it near impossible to organize against racial injustice through their passage of Law No. 310 that, though ostensibly in the spirit of equality, prohibited mention of anyone’s race in any public document or in the records of the parish church. One consequence of this law has been that knowledge of the racial attitude of the elite toward Guerrero’s African roots are relegated to private letters and anonymous pamphlets against “the black,” and many a modern history identifies him merely as of “peasant”or “laboring-class” background.

The political coalition Guerrero built fractured six months into his office, not from abandonment by the left, but by the right. His abolition of slavery, his promotion of a wider suffrage and his imposition of a stiff progressive tax code cost him most of his few upper-class supporters—including two cabinet members. In 1830 the conservatives rebelled, and led by Vice President Bustamante, they drove Guerrero from the capital. Most of the president’s progressive legislation was rescinded, but not the abolition of slavery, which had wide public support.

In a subsequent civil war Guerrero was captured and assassinated by Bustamante hirelings, who included an Italian sea captain who kidnapped the president in Acapulco harbor and delivered him to a Cuban mercenary in Huatulco, who passed him to the son of a Spaniard who had been a general for Spain in the independence war. At a mock trial in Oaxaca the first judge resigned during the opening day, claiming illness. Bustamante ordered execution but feared an uprising if it happened in the city of Oaxaca. Guerrero was taken to a small town, where the mayor had fled and the priest who was scheduled to conduct the last rights was also missing. In last words to the firing squad, Guerrero said that whatever he had done, it was in the interest of Mexico.

The execution infuriated many, including moderates, and Bustamante had to make peace with Guerrero’s lieutenants, who controlled the Pacific region from Puerto Vallarta down past Acapulco to the black town of Cuijinicuilapa. An unusual political accord granted the Guerreroistas autonomy on condition they never attack the capital. Over the years the close aide of Guerrero, the Afro-Acapulcan Juan Alvarez wrote and spread many diatribes against the elite, some of which are still in print today. In 1855 Alvarez broke the peace pact, marched on Mexico City, overthrew dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and became Mexico’s second black president. He included in his cabinet Benito Juarez, the pure-Zapotecan lawyer, who in his youth had campaigned for the election of Guerrero, and who later served twelve years as president and champion of liberal causes.

Guerrero’s one offspring, Dolores, trained her children in the politics of her father, with whom she had been close. Her sons, Vicente and Carlos, became state governors under Juarez, son Jose a general and daughter Javiera, though prohibited from holding office, was significant enough behind the scenes to warrant a large statue. Generations of politicians and intellectuals poured from the family, including today’s prominent journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio. His writings include a 1987 anthology of his articles condemning the U.S. funding of the Contras against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Today, the National Museum of History in Chapultepec Park honors only one family with its genealogical tree depicted on a wall, the family begun by Vicente Guerrero and his wife Guadalupe Hernandez.

Two other presidents of Mexico had known African heritage: Juan Almonte fought in the independence war and at the Alamo on the Mexican side. He turned conservative and his brief term as president is considered a bad one for the nation. Lazaro Cardenas was a key figure in the 1910 revolution. As president nationalized oil and issued sweeping land reform. A popular biography notes in the opening paragraph that his grandfather was “a mulato.”

The original of Guerrero’s address to congress reads, “If we succeed in protecting the rights of the individual, if equality under the law destroys the forces of power and money, if the primary title we use amongst ourselves is that of ‘citizen,’ if rewards are given exclusively for talent and virtue, then we have a republic, and it will be preserved through the universal suffrage of a solidly free and content people.”

Ted Vincent is author of The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero: Mexico’s First Black Indian President, published by University Press of Florida in 2001.

Conquistadors Destroyer of Civilizations

Hernan Cortes and Dona Maria

1517-1519: First Contact

In the decade before the Spanish arrived in Mexico, Aztec Emperor Montezuma II and his people were filled with a sense of foreboding. A series of evil omens had foretold of calamities to come. A fiery comet crossed the sky. The temple of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, burst into flames. The Lake of Mexico boiled and rose, flooding into houses. A weeping woman passed by in the middle of the night, crying "My children, we must flee far away from this city!" Fishermen discovered a bird that wore a strange mirror in the crown of its head. Montezuma looked into the mirror and saw a distant plain, with people making war against each other and riding on the backs of animals resembling deer.

An agitated Montezuma demanded that his soothsayers explain the meaning of these dire signs and was told that they prophesied the destruction of his kingdom. In fact, Montezuma had reason to be fearful - the Spanish had settled in Hispaniola and Cuba and were making their way toward his empire.

The Spanish had made several expeditions to the nearby Yucatan in 1517 and had returned with wonderous tales of a high-cultured Mayan civilization and gold riches. The news of these discoveries made an electrifying impression on the Spanish colonists in Cuba. Among these was Hernán Cortés, Chief Magistrate of Santiago. The Spanish governor of Cuba, Diego de Velásquez, told Cortés that he would provide two or three ships if Cortés would find the rest of the money, and lead the army. Cortés agreed and on October 23, 1518, Velásquez appointed him "captain-general" of a new expedition to the Yucatan.

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Mexico's Sambo: Memin

Mexico’s Race Problem

And the real story behind Fox’s faux pasClaudio Lomnitz

In a speech to a binational agribusiness audience this past May, Mexican President Vicente Fox complained about growing American barriers to Mexican immigration. Faced with an anti-immigrant vigilante movement, a forbidding wall raised on the Arizona border, and a Real ID program that denies Mexican illegals a driver’s license, a bank account, and legal identification, Fox confidently told his audience that “una solución win-win” was possible. After all, he said, Mexican immigrants are doing the jobs that “not even blacks are willing to do.”

Fox’s statement caused a political storm in the United States. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mexico and met with Fox. So did Al Sharpton. Both demanded explanations and apologies. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, expressed concern to his Mexican counterpart, and the White House issued a formal complaint. Mexican-American and African-American organizations decried the statement; African-American businessmen considered boycotting tourism to Mexico. The story was picked up by all the major American media—The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CNN—and it caused an even bigger storm in Mexico: when the United States catches a cold, Mexico gets pneumonia.

Memín was described by his creator, Yolanda Vargas Dulché, as un chiquitín negrito de ojos enormes y muy chistoso – “a very funny little negrito with enormous eyes.” Although she drew the comic between 1945 and 1952, the series has been perpetually reprinted, and beloved, to this day. In 2005, when the Mexican Postal Service printed stamps in honor of Memín Pinguín, they sold out within a matter of hours. Various U.S. politicians, including Jesse Jackson, complained, ensuring the historical place of the stamps as collectors’ items. (Source: David Lido, Mostly Mexico City)

The ruckus completely overshadowed the original subject of debate; Mexican racism replaced immigration as the issue of the day. Then, just when the scandal had finally subsided, a new conflict broke out around a set of five Mexican postage stamps issued as part of a commemorative celebration of Mexico’s comic books. The stamps, which featured a cartoon character named Memín Pinguín, raised the accusation of Mexican racism once again.

Memín was created in the 1940s by Yolanda Vargas Dulché, an exuberant sentimentalist and blockbuster photo-novella writer. In a country in which newspaper runs rarely exceed 100,000, reprints of Memín still sell 125,000 copies a week. Memín has black skin, thick lips, a flat nose, and eyes like saucers. He lives alone with his mother, doña Eufrosina, an Aunt Jemima–like washerwoman who speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent. Memín, who was named after Vargas Dulché’s boyfriend, and later husband, Guillermo (“Memo”) de la Parra, loves his “Ma’ Linda,” who spoils him adoringly, though she does not spare the rod (her famous palo con clavo—board with a nail). Doña Eufrosina is, in any case, honest and clean, a dignified representative of the “working poor.”

Memín is the only black kid in a gang of four boys, all of whom attend the Benito Juárez public school in Mexico City. They are a multi-class group from the unmarked (i.e.,mestizo, or mixed-blood) portion of Mexico’s racial and class spectrum, with the exception of Ricardito, who is blond and rich, but (predictably) has unhappy family circumstances. Memín often provides comic relief in ways that are reminiscent of blackface minstrel theater (a well-developed genre in Cuba, where Yolanda Vargas Dulché first conceived of the Memín character, but with precedents in Mexico’s popular puppet theater of the 19th century).

The gang’s core characteristic is its absolute internal loyalty. When the gang travels to Texas to play soccer, for example, Memín’s friends defend him with indignation when he is subjected to Jim Crow laws and personal insults. The boys go on to win their game and triumphantly return to Mexico.

American reactions to Memín in June after the stamps had been released were not informed by the comic book’s plotline, which is of course virtually unknown in this country, but rested entirely on Memín’s image, which is deeply familiar to Americans. Inspired by the cartoon character Ebony White, from Will Eisner’s 1940s comic strip The Spirit, the Memín drawing is a variation of the Little Black Sambo theme.

The White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, condemned the Memín stamps, stating imperiously that such images “have no place in today’s world.” Jesse Jackson, who had just accepted a tortured and ambiguous apology from Fox for his May statement, saw the stamps as a deliberate insult. The African-American community agreed, and the question of Mexican racism against blacks again undermined the Mexican government’s ability to claim the moral high ground in immigration debates.

The Mexican public was caught by surprise in a storm that the Mexican press quickly dubbed “The Memíngate Affair.” Mexican racial attitudes had suddenly emerged as a factor in bilateral relations with the United States. How exactly had this happened? At what point did Mexicans start to be thought of as racist?

After all, Memín Pinguín is not the only comic book of the mid-20th century that was both wildly popular and racist, and that continues to be reissued and avidly consumed. Tintin, the character created by the Belgian Hergé, is a French journalist who, together with his lily-white dog Milú, goes around the globe straightening things out and protecting the feeble colonial races—Bedouins, Congolese, Chinese, Peruvian Indians—from their exploiters and from themselves.

Asterix and Obelix, a Gallic-nationalist duo, also have their racist moments and are nonetheless widely adored. They even have a theme park in France.

And the United States’s own Speedy Gonzalez has been massively popular. Speedy (“Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!”) is a fast mouse in a town of drawling and anemiccompadres and beautiful mouse señoritas. Like Memín, Speedy fools and tricks arbitrary authority (in the form of a cat), while domesticating and reproducing prejudices about Mexicans.

With these images in mind, Mexican response to the Memín affair ranged from surprise to indignation: ethnic caricatures are a standard and relatively innocent form of entertainment, they claimed, and in any case, the United States should not cast stones from its glass house. At least in Memín the black kid is the hero; at least he has a lovable mother; at least he goes to the same public school as Ricardito.

But the roots of the dispute run deeper than American hypocrisy and Mexico’s refusal to inspect its own racism. The Memín affair reflects decades of profound and unacknowledged changes in the relations between the United States and Mexico.

Until the 1980s, Latin America, and especially its two great mestizo countries, Mexico and Brazil, claimed moral superiority to the United States on race relations. In the case of Mexico, their superiority was predicated, first, on Mexico’s early abolition of slavery in 1829, shortly after its independence. Because Mexico later went to war with the United States, and the United States has been a constant source of nationalist anxiety, Mexican superiority on race issues became an explicit theme of public discussion from the mid-19th century forward. Moreover, anxieties about annexation by the United States, which were a constant through the 19th and early 20th centuries, were fueled by American discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in American territory. In short, the experience of discrimination in the United States has helped to sustain Mexican nationalism for a century and a half. (source: Boston Review, Nov./Dec. 2005, byClaudio Lomnitz. )

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Memin Pinguin: The Structural Violence of an Image, Afro Mexicans

Mexicans have 3% to 8% African blood when averaged out among all Mexicans, and 50% to 80% in places like Costa Chica in Mexico. At one point 33% of Mexico was inhabited by African slaves, over time most mixed in the the population. Most people consider themselves to be Mestizo (White and Native only) but genetically, most Mexicans are a combination of Amerindian, African, and European, in different degrees. Most Afro-Mexicans are only considered Negro when they have very dark skin, however the brown/lighter ones are considered to be Mestizo mainly because Mulatto/Negro has a negative stigma attached to it. Memin Pinguin is a great example if this stigma. In addition a significant amount of slaves were originated from Cuba, the Memin Pinguin character is also based on a Afro-Cuban character.