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Useful Enemies: Seventeenth-Century Piracy and the Riseof Pardo Militias in Spanish Central America
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:2 | © 2004 Paul Lokken
Useful Enemies: Seventeenth-Century Piracy and the
Rise of Pardo Militias in Spanish Central America
Paul Lokken
The seventeenth century was a pivotal moment in the
history of enslaved African migrants and their
descendants in those areas of colonial Spanish America
characterized by the presence of dense indigenous
populations. The initial decades of the century saw slave
imports from Africa into imperial Spain's key
Mesoamerican and central Andean realms reach their
all-time peak. They then fell off precipitously after 1640
owing to a gradual reversal in the disastrous,
century-long decline of local native populations, the
steady expansion of an alternative labor pool made up of
free people of plural origins, and the empire's
geopolitical and economic setbacks.1 These same
developments produced circumstances under which
many descendants of earlier African migrants foundthemselves able, to an unusual extent, to reshape their
social identity to their own benefit. Most important in the
creation of these circumstances was the fact that imperial
officials, alarmed by repeated assaults on Spain's various
American possessions by freebooters linked to rival
European powers and reluctant to supplement the ranks
of local Spanish defenders by arming indigenous
majorities, turned increasingly for military support in
places like New Spain, Peru, and the Central American
Audiencia of Guatemala to a small but growing free
minority of African origins.2
1.
When the seventeenth century opened, the defense of
Spanish America, outside of a few key ports, was based,
at least officially, either on forces made up of
encomenderos--Spanish holders of grants of labor and
tribute from indigenous communities whose duties
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included the maintenance of a horse and set of arms--or,
increasingly, on local militias drawn from the Spanish
population as a whole.3 Although people of African
origins, both free and enslaved, had played an auxiliary
role in such forces ever since the Spanish invasions,
persons defined as black, mulatto, or in any other way by
African origins were formally excluded from militiamembership. In fact, as late as 1663 they were
technically forbidden to carry weapons at all.4 Already
by that date, however, regular militia units of gente
parda5 had begun to form a major bulwark of coastal
defense in much of Spanish America, and some were
seizing upon the opportunities made available as a result
of their military usefulness to secure relief from an
alternative tribute known as the laborío, owed to the
Crown by free people of African origins since the 1570s.
Black and mulatto participants in the 1624 defense of Lima against Dutch enemies won at least a temporary
exemption from the tribute as early as 1631, and similar
relief was soon being demanded, and eventually granted,
in both New Spain and the Audiencia of Guatemala.
These tribute exemptions were among the most
important of the "political rewards" that Kris Lane has
called the "principal fringe benefit" accruing to
"low-born individuals" in Spain's American realms
during the course of the empire's long war against
piracy.6
The process by which colonial subjects of African
origins came to participate formally in organized militias
in the Audiencia of Guatemala during the seventeenth
century has received little attention.7 Indeed, the
experience in general of Africans and their descendants
in colonial Central America has languished in the more
obscure corners of both scholarly and popular historical
consciousness until quite recently.8 While this article
does not directly address this more general experience at
any length, the aspect of that experience on which itfocuses--the rise of pardo militias--was crucial in
shaping the subsequent history of people of African
descent in the isthmus. Examining the origins and
development of the strange alliance that made Spain's
enemies accomplices to the renegotiation of social
boundaries by colonial Central Americans of African
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origins is indispensable to the scholarly reassessment
currently underway of Central America's place in the
history of the African diaspora.9
Origins of a Strange Alliance
Sometime around 1650, Captain Cristóbal deLorenzana, a resident of Santiago de Guatemala, capital
of Spanish Central America and now the Guatemalan
town of Antigua, wrote a letter to the Spanish Crown
warning that an expanding population of "blacks and
mulattos" posed an imminent threat to Spain's rule in the
Indies. Lorenzana claimed that people of African origins
outnumbered Spaniards in the colonies by more than ten
to one, and, even more troubling, thrived in American
climes in which, lamentably, the imperial homeland's
overseas progeny experienced quite the opposite
phenomenon: degeneration. Proceeding in this vein of pre-Enlightenment "racial" speculation, he suggested
that mulattos, as the children, respectively, of Spanish
men of "hot and moist" and black women of "cold and
dry" constitutions, emerged from the womb strong
enough to "take on a bull." "Good infantrymen and
better cavalrymen," these titans of mixed origins were
"made for the bush and countryside."10
4.
According to Lorenzana, the nature of the problem
that people of African origins posed in Spain's American
realms was stark. "It would be more difficult to quell any
disturbance begun by the blacks and mulattos," he
warned, "than it was to conquer those kingdoms" in the
first place. He claimed to know from experience, for
example, that within two years of arrival in the Indies
"no Spaniard is capable of marching two leagues with an
harquebus on his shoulders." As a consequence,
militarily ineffectual Spanish colonists earned nothing
but contempt from "valiant" fighters of African
origins.11 It was too late, he added, to address the
problem by banning further imports of slaves, as thenumber of Africans and their descendants already
residing in the Americas was more than sufficient to
represent a grave danger. What, then, was to be done?
Given, Lorenzana said, that "in the kingdoms of the
Indies all Spaniards enjoy the privileges of nobility," free
blacks and mulattos there should be made equivalent in
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legal status to the pecheros, or commoners, of Castile.
Furthermore, and crucially, they should be admitted into
fully integrated militia units "without their color
bringing scorn upon them."12
This proposal is perhaps remarkable not so much for
its apparent audacity in the face of a colonial legalsystem that generally sought to distinguish rigorously
between Spaniards and presumably inferior peoples of
non-European origins, but rather because the distance
between the measures it called for and what was already
beginning to emerge as ordinary colonial practice in
places like Central America was not all that great.
Whatever Spaniards' notions in theory concerning the
inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the military
potential of the latter had long been both feared and
exploited. Slaves of African origins, for example, were
frequently armed by well-off masters for reasons of bothstatus and personal protection, in spite of frequent
prohibitions targeting the practice by authorities
concerned about the possibility of slave rebellions. This
ambivalence in Spanish attitudes about and behavior
toward people of African descent had existed ever since
Africans, slaves or not, had served as valued auxiliaries
in the subjugation and subsequent repression of the vast
indigenous populations of New Spain, Guatemala, and
Peru.13
6.
It is not known precisely when fighters of African
origins were first employed as defenders of the Central
American coastline against foreign attacks, which began
as early as the 1540s. There is little reason to suppose,
however, that the participation of fourteen "mulattos and
blacks, freedmen as well as slaves" in driving off the
French marauders who burned the key Honduran port of
Puerto de Caballos in 1595 was unprecedented. The
identities of those defenders was recorded merely
because they received a monetary reward for their
efforts, ironic in light of the Crown's regularproscriptions against placing weapons in the hands of
such individuals.14
7.
Such contradictions only grew more acute as
awareness of the weaknesses in Spanish defenses
intensified, owing in part to the apparent confirmation of
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peninsular prejudice concerning the military reliability
of American-born Spaniards. When Dutch corsairs sailed
into Amatique Bay in 1607 and attacked a recently
constructed and supposedly more defensible port at
Santo Tomás de Castilla, the encomenderos sent to its
aid complained bitterly about the expenses they were
forced to incur, an indication no doubt of their growingunwillingness to shoulder the military burdens
traditionally assigned to them. Whatever the new port's
natural advantages over the more exposed Honduran
outlets at Puerto de Caballos and Trujillo, it would
clearly be no more effective if not properly garrisoned.
Challenged by the persistent inadequacy of Caribbean
defenses, royal officials in Santiago moved to authorize
the arming of black and mulatto residents in coastal
areas in 1612. Not surprisingly, a protest was launched
almost immediately by Santiago's cabildo, or city
council, a body beholden in substantial measure to thevery same encomenderos who wished to avoid bearing
the costs of defense themselves.15
The cabildo's apparent hypocrisy is easier to
understand when the specific circumstances under which
its members received this clearly unpalatable news are
considered. First of all, during the initial years of the
seventeenth century royal investigators had attributed a
wave of illicit cattle slaughter along the Pacific coast of
present-day Guatemala mostly to the black and mulatto
vaqueros, both free and enslaved, who dominated the
local ranching population. The Crown, in response, went
so far as to issue a decree in 1605 that explicitly barred
persons of African origins from riding horses at all. As
was usual in such cases, the decree had little real
impact.16
9.
A second set of disturbing circumstances arose in
1609, when the residents of the capital were witness to
ongoing feuding in the streets between armed and
apparently fearless gangs of slaves from two rivalhouseholds, who were said to respect no Spaniards other
than their powerful masters.17 At the same time, there
was rising concern over the activities of a community of
escaped slaves that had established itself around 1603 in
a remote Pacific coast area of Zapotitlán, in the modern
Guatemalan department of Retalhuleu, which was only
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finally destroyed in the fall of 1611 after the failure of at
least two earlier expeditions. Similar settlements still
existed in the vicinity of the Golfo Dulce (now Lake
Izabal), a key trading outlet to the Caribbean.18
Finally,
news of a major, aborted slave conspiracy in Mexico
City reached Guatemala in the spring of 1612,
confirming the worst fears of the local Spanishpopulation.19
In light of these troublesome developments the steady
expansion in the numbers of people of African origins in
Guatemala began to raise such alarm in Santiago that the
cabildo decided to request an immediate halt to further
importation of slaves, just three years after it had asked
for an allotment of two thousand.20
Clearly, the local
Spanish population was suddenly terrified of people
whose labor its members had previously coveted. Thefact that some individuals of African origins, slaves as
well as freedmen, had proven themselves loyal against
not only northern European interlopers but also maroons
of African descent, whose potential for allying with
foreign invaders was considered to be particularly
worrisome, was no doubt viewed as irrelevant to their
calculations.
11.
The fears that came to a head in 1612, though, could
not override the imperatives of imperial defense for long.
Indeed, in that very year militia units of color were beingformalized in Mexico City even as thirty-five slaves
accused of conspiracy were being hanged.21 No similar
development appears to have taken place in Central
America until the 1640s, but people of African origins
there continued occasionally to participate on an ad hoc
basis in military actions. After enemy ships were sighted
in the Gulf of Fonseca in 1615, for example, Captain
Lucas García Serrano of the Salvadoran city of San
Miguel claimed to have led a force of some thirty
Spaniards, three hundred Indian bowmen, and one
hundred and fifty "blacks, mulattos, and mestizos" to
defend the Pacific port of Amapala.22 In April 1618,
meanwhile, five sword-bearing slaves served among
fifty-six men who were hastily dispatched from Santiago
and the eastern Guatemalan districts of Chiquimula and
Acasaguastlán to the Golfo Dulce in response to a report
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that several alien vessels were cruising in its waters.23
Hostile activity by Spain's European rivals along the
coasts of Central America seems to have dropped off
sharply during the 1620s. The maroon bands that
continued to operate from uplands near the Golfo Dulce
emerged instead as the most important defense concernfor Audiencia officials between roughly 1617 and 1632.
At least three expeditions were sent out during that
fifteen-year period to eliminate the danger posed by
escaped slaves and secure the trade route to the Gulf.
None achieved lasting success.24
The persistent maroon
threat does not seem to have prompted any consideration
of militia expansion, however; in fact, it may have
ensured that any notion of formally arming
non-Spaniards remained anathema to officials like don
Alvaro de Quiñones y Osorio, Marquis of Lorenzana and
President of the Audiencia from 1634 to 1642. When the
marquis expressed his concern about the shortage of
weaponry available to the Spanish residents of the
Audiencia in a 1638 letter to the Crown, for example, he
focused attention not on any foreign threat but rather on
the internal danger posed in the first place by the
indigenous majority and in the second by the "great
number of skilled blacks and mulattos [who were]
discontented with their status."25
13.
Circumstances soon changed, however. Signs that anew and perhaps more serious bout of conflict with
foreign invaders lay ahead for the Audiencia were
appearing already in 1631, when English colonists
attempted a settlement on the island of Providence off
the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, and established relations
shortly thereafter with indigenous groups on the
mainland who had long resisted Spanish control.26
Then,
in 1633, several ships belonging to the Dutch West India
Company briefly assaulted and occupied Trujillo.27
At
the same time, Spain was entering a prolonged period of crisis and war in Europe itself. Its renewed efforts to
subdue the rebellious and powerful Dutch provinces,
long determined to win formal recognition for an
independence they had enjoyed in all but name since the
late sixteenth century, eventually contributed to military
disaster, with one consequence being the loss of control
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over Portugal in 1640 after sixty years of Madrid's rule
there.28
It was in this context that foreign attacks on the
Caribbean coast of Spanish Central America picked up
again with a vengeance. In May 1640, the Marquis of
Lorenzana himself was forced to set off from Santiagowith some 400 men in the direction of the Golfo Dulce,
after enemy attackers seized goods awaiting transit there
and left several people dead, including a friar. It is not
clear if the President, whose entourage apparently made
it no farther in any case than a village a few miles
northeast of the capital, was forced to raise troops in this
instance from among the non-Spaniards he had earlier
reported to be so threatening. His successor, however,
soon had few other choices.29
The Emergence of Formal Pardo Militias in CentralAmerica
15.
On assuming the presidency of the Audiencia of
Guatemala early in 1642, don Diego de Avendaño
almost immediately ordered that lists be drawn up of "all
the Spanish people, blacks, mulattos, and mestizos"
living in the various districts that lay between the capital
and the Honduran port of Trujillo. This order came in
direct response to a series of devastating attacks that had
occurred in the region of the Caribbean coast lying
between Trujillo and the Golfo Dulce during the
previous few months.30 Further depredations along the
same area of the coast the following year prompted the
new President to request a survey for purposes of militia
enlistment of "all the Spaniards, mestizos, blacks and
free mulattos" in the entire Audiencia. Meanwhile,
troops were to be dispatched as soon as possible to the
troubled region from the Honduran districts of
Comayagua and Tegucigalpa; from Acasaguastlán,
Chiquimula, and Verapaz, the Guatemalan districts that
lay closest to the Golfo Dulce; and from the moredensely populated territory of San Salvador and San
Miguel, south along the Pacific coast.31
16.
An assortment of English, French, and Dutch
privateers were involved in the attacks suffered on
Avendaño's watch. The most notorious of the
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Audiencia's seaborne enemies during this period,
however, was "Dieguillo el Mulato," ex-slave of a
Spaniard who had escaped from Havana in 1629, allied
with the Dutch, and established himself as a leading
scourge of Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. He briefly
seized the vessel carrying Thomas Gage, the infamous
English traveler and ex-Dominican friar, back to Europein 1637. By the early 1640s, in league now with the
French privateer "Juan Garab!" (or Jean Gareabuc), he
was cruising into the Golfo Dulce seemingly at will in
search of plunder.32 It was English marauders, though,
who provided the most spectacular example of wanton
destruction of a Central American port at this time. In
July of 1643 more than a thousand of them arrived at
Trujillo in sixteen ships and thoroughly pillaged the
long-suffering community.33 In the face of these
assaults, need quickly overwhelmed fear, and Audienciaofficials undertook to arm non-Spaniards in large
numbers.
A clear reference to a militia unit of color formally
constituted as such appears in a 1644 document
produced in Santiago. When enemy ships were
(mistakenly) sighted off the Pacific coast of Zapotitlán
on January 3 of that year, Avendaño dispatched two
militia units from the capital to the coast, "one of
mulattos and the other of cavalrymen and in total around
five hundred men."34 Few other similarly specificreferences to the existence of such companies during the
1640s have come to light, but it is reasonable to assume
on the basis of the calls for enlistment that they were not
only created, but remained active, as the enemy attacks
that made them vital persisted throughout the decade.
Dieguillo and his European counterparts continued to
launch periodic assaults on Trujillo, Santo Tomás de
Castilla, and trading posts in the Golfo Dulce from bases
established on the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras,
despite the removal by Spanish forces of a short-lived
English colony from the island of Roatán in 1642 and
several subsequent efforts to relocate the indigenous
inhabitants of that island and Guanaja to the mainland,
lest they provide assistance to the Audiencia's
enemies.35
Spain's enemies were not deterred, and if
anything, they expanded the geographical range of their
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activities along the coast.36
By the time Cristóbal de Lorenzana wrote the
proposal to the Crown (cited above), the foreign threat
was already beginning to make black and mulatto
militiamen crucial to the defense of Central America. At
least two companies of color were organized in andaround Cartago in Costa Rica during the early 1650s,
and by 1658 the Audiencia was proposing to incorporate
free blacks and mulattos into a cavalry company in
response to recent sightings of enemy ships along the
Pacific coast of Guatemala.37
Fifteen years later, there
were no fewer than sixteen pardo companies explicitly
defined as such in the Audiencia, with some one
thousand seven hundred and fifteen members
representing approximately twenty percent of total
militia strength in the isthmus. Six of those companies
were located in the territory of modern Guatemala, four
in Nicaragua, two each in Honduras and El Salvador,
and one each in Costa Rica and the present-day Mexican
state of Chiapas.38
19.
Many of the other companies listed in the militia
survey of 1673 were identified explicitly as Spanish, and
one as indigenous, but roughly one-third of all the units,
cavalry companies in the main, were not defined by the
origins of members at all. This raises the possibility that
segregation was not practiced very rigidly in units whosemembers needed to possess difficult-to-acquire skills,
thus opening the ranks of some Spanish companies to,
for example, ranch-hands of African origins. Other
evidence makes clear, however, that distinctions were
drawn wherever possible between militiamen identified
by African origins, who, it should be remembered, owed
the laborío tribute, and both Spaniards and mestizos,
who did not. For example, while the 1673 list noted the
presence of just one infantry company of three hundred
and thirteen men of undefined origins in the Guatemalan
Pacific coast district of Guazacapán, the administrator of that district informed the Crown a decade later that the
territory held three militia companies, "one of Spaniards
and mestizos" with some one hundred and fifty
members, "and the other two of mulattos and gente
parda" with two hundred and fifty more.39 The
continuing relevance of Spanish efforts to sustain
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classification on the basis of African descent as a key
tool for facilitating legal and social discrimination is
underscored by the fact that at least one man brought up
on charges of failing to pay the tribute in Santiago
"proved" he was mestizo rather than mulatto by
appealing to his sixteen-year record of service in a
Spanish militia unit.40
Already, though, the seemingly relentless foreign
assaults that had in large measure prompted the
formalization of pardo militia units in the Audiencia in
the first place was now providing the members of those
units with ammunition to challenge the tribute burden
that clearly marked them as inferior to their fellow
militiamen. The sacking of Granada by a combined force
of Englishmen and Zambos-Miskitos in 1665 and again
in 1670, for example, enabled the pardo militia units of
Nicaragua to secure tribute relief. News of thatexemption moved Costa Rican units to demand similar
concessions in 1672, and companies all over the isthmus
pressed for relief over the next couple of decades.41
Nicaraguan units evidently continued to lead the way in
obtaining or renewing exemptions from tribute,
fortuitously assisted yet again by foreign "allies" who
conveniently returned to loot not only Granada, but also
Realejo, León, and several mining communities in
Nueva Segovia during a new wave of assaults between
1685 and 1689.42 The "favoritism" shown theNicaraguan militiamen never went unchallenged,
however, as companies elsewhere were quick to exploit
it for purposes of securing their own exemptions. In a
1697 petition, members of Chiquimula's pardo cavalry
unit complained that their counterparts in Granada had
been granted tribute relief for "less work" than they
themselves had performed in defending the Golfo Dulce
from foreign attack. Even worse, the Granadans were
allotted horses, which the cavalrymen from Chiquimula
provided at their own expense.
43
21.
One might ask why Audiencia officials did not move
to undercut the growing power of pardo militiamen by
drawing more extensively on an alternative source of
manpower, the indigenous majority, for military
assistance against foreign attacks. After all, Spaniards
had employed indigenous allies whenever possible
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during their invasion of the Americas, and military
expeditions such as the one led by Lucas García Serrano
to defend the Salvadoran coast in 1615 frequently
included auxiliary contingents of "Indian bowmen." As
noted above, there was even a company identified as
indigenous, from Chiapas, listed in the 1673 militia
survey. The designation of its members as "indiosprincipales," or community leaders, provides us with one
indication of its unusual status, however, and another is
the fact that there were no other similar units. The
Spanish simply could not arm the indigenous peoples of
Central America in large numbers because the survival
of colonial society depended primarily upon their
rigorous subjugation. It was precisely because not only
foreigners but also the native inhabitants of the isthmus
were a constant threat to the colonial order that a
heretofore "dangerous" minority of African origins could
be brought into militias in support of Spanish rule, andtheir members acquire a modicum of social leverage as a
result of their usefulness to the authorities. Cristóbal de
Lorenzana's praise for mulattos, then, must be seen in
the light of his contempt for the indigenous people on
whose labor the colonial order was built in much of
Central America, people whom he characterized, as
might be expected under the circumstances, as docile,
slow-witted, and "incapable of reason."44 Contempt, of
course, generally goes hand in hand with fear, and both
are evident in Audiencia President Diego de Avendaño'sflat rejection in 1644 of any notion that the 14,000
tributaries living around Santiago might be armed in
response to the foreign threat off the coast, "despite the
fact that they are very domestic."45
Thus, while the unfolding of that foreign threat over
the course of the seventeenth century seems largely to
have determined the timing of both the formalization of
pardo militia units in Central America and the efforts of
militiamen in those units to throw off their tribute
burden, it was the nature and history of colonial societyin the isthmus that caused Spaniards to turn to previously
suspect people of African origins for military assistance
in the first place. Aside from the obvious role that
non-Indian militiamen could play in ensuring control
over the indigenous inhabitants of the major population
centers, there were in fact still numerous pockets of
23.
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"unpacified" indigenous peoples in the late seventeenth
century, and bodies were needed to staff the numerous
expeditions sent out against them. In raising companies
of pardo militiamen in Cartago and Esparza during the
1650s and 1660s, for example, the governors of Costa
Rica gave as one justification the imperative of
"reducing" the hostile native inhabitants of Talamanca.46
Employment could be found for militia units created in
response to foreign attacks, in other words, even when
all was quiet along the coast.
None of this should suggest that Spaniards welcomed
the incorporation of free people of African origins into a
social realm from which they had previously been
formally excluded. While it had long been clear, for
example, that the black and mulatto vaqueros of Central
America were highly skilled horsemen, as long as
Spaniards had no good reason to do so they were notabout to alter the convention that officially reserved the
use of horses to themselves, especially for military
purposes. The acceptance of pardo cavalry units by the
colonial regime thus reveals the extent to which the
defense crises of the seventeenth century shook the
boundaries of the colonial order in Central America,
threatening key aspects of the established social
hierarchy. Even though that social hierarchy was
probably shored up in the long run by the developments
examined here, many Spaniards at the time clearly found
them disturbing. That concern is well illustrated in an
order sent out by Audiencia President Fernando
Francisco de Escovedo in response to news of an enemy
incursion into the Golfo Dulce in 1676. In the order,
Escovedo told the administrator of the district of
Acasaguastlán to send fifty men to the gulf as quickly as
possible, adding "if they are pardos and Spaniards send
them with officers of their own colors, the pardo officer
to obey the Spaniards even if [they are] much lesser in
number."47
The Audiencia President evidently imagined
that there might be some confusion over who shouldcommand in the absence of such a directive, or, worse,
the likelihood of insubordinate behavior on the part of
the "inferior" officer without firm instructions to the
contrary. Indeed, his belief that such an order was
necessary at all indicates clearly the extent to which
Spanish Central America's experience with piracy in the
24.
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seventeenth century opened up opportunities for social
mobility via militia service to the free descendants of
enslaved African migrants.
Endnotes
1 On estimates that some 268,200 Africans arrived in
Spanish America between 1595 and 1640, see Enriqueta
Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos:
los asientos portugueses (Seville: Escuela de Estudios
Hispano-Americanos, 1977), 197-211; David Eltis,
!The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave
Trade: A Reassessment', William and Mary Quarterly,
3d. series, 58:1 (2001), 24, 45. On the drastic decline of
imports thereafter, see Archivo General de Centro
América (hereafter AGCA), A1.23, leg[ajo].1517,ex[pediente].10072, fol[io]s.108-108v (1646); AGCA,
A1.23, leg.2197, ex.15751, fol.97 (1664); AGCA,
A1.23, leg.2199, ex.15755, fol.50 (1670); Christopher H.
Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste,
and the Colonial Experience (Norman, Okla.: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1994)! 86; Eltis, "Volume and
Structure", 45. On the decline and recovery of
indigenous populations and the contentious date of 1650
or thereabouts as the low point, see Noble David Cook,
Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest,
1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998); W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz,
Demografía e imperio: guía para la historia de la
población de la América Central Española, 1500-1821,
trans. Guisela Asensio Lueg (Guatemala: Editorial
Universitaria, 2000), 10-11; William R. Fowler, Jr.,
"Escuintla y Guazacapán," in Dominación española,
desde la Conquista hasta 1700, ed. Ernesto Chinchilla
Aguilar, vol. 2 in Historia General de Guatemala, ed.
Jorge Luján Muñoz (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos
del País, 1994), 2:592, 594; Adrian J. Pearce, "The
Peruvian Population Census of 1725-1740," Latin
American Research Review 36:3 (2001):69-104, esp.
100. On Spain's imperial troubles in the seventeenth
century, see J.H. Elliott, Spain and its World, 1500-1700:
Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), 114-136.
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2 For a recent work on the Spanish American experience
of piracy, see Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy
in the Americas, 1500-1750 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, 1998). The Audiencia of Guatemala, technically
part of the viceroyalty of New Spain but largely
independent from Mexico City in administrative matters,
stretched from the modern Mexican state of Chiapasthrough present-day Costa Rica.
3 Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The
Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 11-12, Stephen Webre,
"Las compañías de milicia y la defensa del istmo
centroamericano en el siglo XVII: el alistamiento
general de 1673," Mesoamérica 14 (1987): 512-513.
4 Libro 7, Título 5, Leyes 14-18, in Recopilación de
leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, 4 vols. (Madrid:Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1973), 2:287-287v;
AGCA, A1.23, leg.1519, ex.10074, fols.108-108v
(1663).
5 The term literally meant "brown-skinned people."
Pardo generally appears in colonial Central American
documents as a synonym for the more explicitly
pejorative mulato. Both were applied to individuals of
African and indigenous as well as those of African and
Spanish origins (or all three combined). Zambo was
rarely used.
6 Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 22. On the origins of the
laborío, see Libro 7, Título 5, Leyes 1, 3, in
Recopilación, 2:285-285v; Lutz, Santiago, 253-254. For
examples of laborío collection in Mexico and what is
now El Salvador during the seventeenth century, see
AGCA, A3.16, leg.1600, ex.26377 (1644); Vinson,
Bearing Arms, 140. On early tribute exemptions, see
Vinson, Bearing Arms, 29, 143-146; Frederick P.
Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 306; RonaldEscobedo Mansilla, "El tributo de los zambaigos, negros
y mulatos libres en el virreinato peruano," in Revista de
Indias 41:163-164 (1981):50-52; Rina Cáceres, Negros,
mulatos, esclavos y libertos en la Costa Rica del siglo
XVII , Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia
Pub. No. 518 (México, D.F.: Instituto Panamericano de
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Geografía e Historia, 2000), 101-102; Paul Lokken,
"Undoing Racial Hierarchy: Mulatos and Militia Service
in Colonial Guatemala," SECOLAS Annals 31 (1999):
30-32.
7 Crucial exceptions include Webre, "Las milicias," esp.
513, 518; Cáceres, Negros, esp. 98-105; and Germán J.
Romero Vargas, "La población de origen africano en
Nicaragua," in Presencia africana en Centroamérica, ed.
Luz María Martínez Montiel (México: Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993), 151-198, esp.
165-169. A useful article that focuses on the period of
militia reorganization in the mid-eighteenth century is
Salvador Montoya, "Milicias negras y mulatas en el
reino de Guatemala (siglo XVIII)," Caravelle 49 (1987):
93-104.
8 Among the most significant works to have addressedthis inattention to date are Lutz, Santiago; Cáceres,
Negros; and Romero Vargas, "La población."
9 See, for example, the website for the international
conference "Between Race and Place: Blacks and
Blackness in Central America and the Mainland
Caribbean," Tulane University, November 12-13, 2004,
at http://www.tulane.edu/~jwolfe/rp/index.html.
10 "Copia del memorial de abisso que el capitán
Cristóbal de Lorenzana, vezino de la ciudad de Santiagode Guatemala, dio a Su Majestad para reparo de las
turbaciones que los rreynos de las yndias pueden tener
en lo benidero, ocasionadas por los negros y mulatos que
ay en ellas. (s.a.1650?)," Biblioteca Nacional de España:
mss/3047, fol.137-142, transcribed in Héctor M. Leyva,
Documentos Coloniales de Honduras (Tegucigalpa:
Centro de Publicaciones Obispado de Choluteca, Centro
de Estudios Históricos y Sociales para el Desarrollo de
Honduras, 1991), 115. Lorenzana's view of "mixed"
origins was directly contrary to the one that emerged
later with the rise of post-Enlightenment scientificracism in the nineteenth century, but no less determinist
in its assumptions. For a provocative take on the
significance of Iberian thinking about human difference,
see James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American
Racist Thought," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d.
series, 54:1 (1997): 143-166.
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11 According to Lorenzana, a popular saying among
people of African origins was "Español para María y
negro para fuerça." See "Copia del memorial de abisso,"
in Leyva, Documentos, 118.
12 "Copia del memorial de abisso," in Leyva,
Documentos, 115-116, 123.
13 For orders banning the arming of slaves in 1612 and
1628, see Colección de documentos para la historia de
la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810, 3
vols., ed. Richard Konetzke (Madrid: Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953, 2(1):182-183, 317.
See also Vinson, Bearing Arms, 15-16; James Lockhart,
Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Social History, 2d. ed.
(Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994),
194-195; Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and
Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala(Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2003), 112,
121; Peter M. Voelz, Slave and Soldier: The Military
Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas, Studies in
African American History and Culture (New York:
Garland, 1993), 11-14.
14 Colección de documentos inéditos de ultramar, 2d.
series, vol. 17 (Madrid: Tipografía de la "Rev. de
Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos", 1925), 235-238. On
early French and English assaults, including Francis
Drake's, see Pedro Pérez Valenzuela, Historias dePiratas, 2d. ed. (Guatemala: EDUCA, 1977), 18-22; J.
Joaquín Pardo, Efemérides para escribir la historia de la
muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Santiago de los
Caballeros del reino de Guatemala (Guatemala:
Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1944), 29-30; Troy S.
Floyd, The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967),
14; Peter Gerhard, Pirates of the Pacific, 1575-1742
(originally published as Pirates on the West Coast of
New Spain, 1575-1742) (Lincoln, Neb.: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990), 57-96; Kenneth R. Andrews, The
Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530-1630 (New
Haven.: Yale University Press, 1978), 165-166; Horacio
Cabezas Carcache, "La piratería en la Capitanía General
de Guatemala", in Historia General de Guatemala,
2:471-472. For excellent maps on the history of piracy in
Central America, with a succinct accompanying
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narrative, see Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli,
Historical Atlas of Central America, John V. Cotter,
cartographer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2003), 134-135.
15 Cabezas, "La piratería," 474; Pardo, Efemérides, 41;
Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias
Occidentales y particular de la gobernación de Chiapa y
Guatemala, vol. 2, ed. Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María,
Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 189 (Madrid: Ediciones
Atlas, 1966), 462-463; José Milla, Historia de la
América Central, 2 vols., 5th. ed., Colección "Juan
Chapín," Obras completas de Salomé Jil (José Milla)
11-12 (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1976), 2:
300-302; Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America:
A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973), 156-158; Pedro
Pérez Valenzuela, Santo Tomás de Castilla: Apuntes para la historia de las colonizaciones en la costa
atlántica (Guatemala: n.p., 1956), 13-21.
16 AGCA, A1.23, leg.4588, ex.39541 (1599); A1.43,
leg.4820, ex.41525 (1601); A1.15, leg.4092, ex.32461
(1605); A1.23, leg.1514, fols.77-77v (1605); A1.15,
leg.4092, ex.32462 (1607); don Manuel de Ungría Girón
to the Spanish Crown, 20 March 1605, Archivo General
de Indias (hereafter AGI), Audiencia de Guatemala, 12,
R(oll).2, N(umber).12 (reference to digitalized format).
17 AGCA, A1.15, leg.4093, ex.32467 (1609).
18 Autos del servicio que hizo el capitán Juan Ruiz de
Avilés a su costa y minción de la conquista y
pacificación de los negros alzados que estaban en la
barra y montañas de Tulate, 1611-1626, AGI, Audiencia
de Guatemala, 67; Audiencia President Diego de
Avendaño to the Crown, 7 July 1642, AGI, Guatemala
16, R.3, N.19, Im(age).6.
19 David M. Davidson, "Negro Slave Control andResistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650," Hispanic
American Historical Review 46:3 (1966): 250-251; Colin
A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico,
1570-1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1976), 135-140.
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20 Don Carlos Vázquez de Coronado to the Crown, 19
May 1609, AGI, Guatemala, 42, N.12; Pardo,
Efemérides, 41. The petition to halt imports, ignored,
was repeated without visible effect in 1617 and 1620, as
at least 10 ships brought human cargo from West Central
Africa in particular to Central American ports between
1613 and 1628 alone. See AGCA, A3.5, leg.67, ex.1291(1613); A1.20, leg.4553, ex.38611 (1614); A1.56,
leg.5356, ex.45251 (1622); Pardo, Efemérides, 43, 45;
Lutz, Santiago, 85.
21Vinson, Bearing Arms, 17; Palmer, Slaves of the White
God , 140.
22 Petition of Capitán Lucas García Serrano, 18 May
1615, in Libro de los Pareceres de la Real Audiencia de
Guatemala, 1571-1655, ed. Carlos Alfonso
Alvarez-Lobos Villatoro and Ricardo Toledo Palomo(Guatemala: Academia de Geografía e Historia de
Guatemala, 1996) 99-100.
23 Testimonio de los autos hechos por el Licenciado
[Juan] Maldonado de Paz [oidor] sobre la defensa del
Golfo, 1618, in AGI, Guatemala, 14, R.3, N.47, Ims.
27-51, esp. Im. 32.
24 Audiencia President Conde de la Gomera to the
Crown, 20 July 1618, AGI Guatemala 14, R.1, N.17;
Crown to Audiencia President Diego de Acuña, 8December 1632, AGCA, A1.23, leg.1516, ex.10071,
fol.57; Liquidación hecha de la cantidad que se gastó en
la reducción de los negros cimarrones del Golfo Dulce,
AGCA, A1.12, leg.4060, ex.31537 (1646); Libro de los
Pareceres, 236-237; Francisco de Paula García Peláez,
Memorias para la historia del antiguo reino de
Guatemala, ed. Francis Gall, 3 vols., 3d. ed., Biblioteca
!Goathemala' 21-23 (Guatemala: Sociedad de
Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1968-1973), 2:28.
25 Quiñones y Osorio to the Crown, 26 May 1638, AGI,Guatemala 15, R.17, N.99.
26 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle, 17-23; Germán
Romero Vargas, Las sociedades del Atlántico de
Nicaragua en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Managua: Fondo
de Promoción Cultural, Banco Nicarag!ense, 1995),
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19-25.
27 Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean
and on the Wild Coast, 1580-1680 (Gainesville, Fla.:
University of Florida Press, 1971), 225-226.
28 J.H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The
Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), 457-599.
29 Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la Provincia de San
Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la Orden de
Predicadores, 5 vols., 3d. ed. (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas:
Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Chiapas,
1999), 2 (Libro 4), 186; Cabezas, "La piratería," 474.
30 Avendaño to the Crown, 11 April 1642, in Avendaño
to the Crown, 6 August 1644, AGI, Guatemala, 16, R.5,
N.37\1, Ims. 40-41; Avendaño to the Crown,7 July 1642,
AGI, Guatemala, 16, R.3, N.19, Ims.1-4.
31 Avendaño to the Crown, 1 October 1643, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.4, N.27, Ims.1-2.
32 Avendaño to the Crown, 7 July 1642, AGI,
Guatemala 16, R.3, N.19, Ims.1-4; Ximénez, Historia, 3
(Libro 5), 70; "Copia del memorial de abisso," in Leyva,
Documentos, 119; Pérez Valenzuela, Historias de
Piratas, 58-62; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 71; Thomas
Gage, Travels in the New World , ed. J. Eric Thompson
(Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958),
315-317. Dieguillo evidently sought to reconcile with
Spain in 1638, but to no avail. See Jane Landers, Black
Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Il.: University of
Illinois Press, 1999), 20-21.
33 Avendaño to the Crown, 1 October 1643, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.4, N.27, Ims.4-6; Petition of Antonio
Justiniano Chavarri, 17 June 1651, AGI, Guatemala, 17,
R.4, N.48; Francisco Vázquez, Crónica de la Provinciadel Santísimo Nombre de Jes! s de Guatemala de la
Orden de Nuestro Seráfico Padre San Francisco en el
Reino de la Nueva España, 4 vols., 2d. ed., Biblioteca
"Goathemala" 14-17 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía
e Historia, 1937), 4:275-279; Floyd, Anglo-Spanish
Struggle, 23-24.
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34 Avendaño to the Crown, 10 March 1644, in
Avendaño to the Crown, 6 August 1644, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.5, N.37\1, Ims. 23-27.
35 Avendaño to the Crown, 7 July 1642, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.3, N.19, Im.3; Avendaño to the Crown,
1 October 1643, AGI, Guatemala, 16, R.4, N.27,
Ims.2-3; Avendaño to the Crown, 25 March 1644, in
Avendaño to the Crown, 6 August 1644, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.5, N.37\1, Ims. 28-33; Avendaño to the
Crown, 17 March 1648, AGI, Guatemala, 17, R.1, N.4;
Report of Pedro Vázquez de Velasco, Fiscal of the
Audiencia, 17 March 1648, AGI, Guatemala, 17, R.1,
N.5; "Carta a S.M. del Gobernador de Honduras sobre
haber desalojado las islas de Guanaxa, Maça y Roatán
por temor a los enemigos corsarios, 1 de Septiembre
1642," in Leyva, Documentos, 113-114; Floyd, Anglo-
Spanish Struggle, 18, 24.
36 Avendaño to the Crown, 17 March 1648, AGI,
Guatemala, 17, R.1, N.4\1, Ims. 4r-4v; Avendaño to the
Crown, 24 February 1649, AGI, Guatemala 17, R.2,
N.13.
37 Audiencia of Guatemala to the Crown, 27 October
1658, AGI, Guatemala, 20, R.2, N.9\2, Im.34; Cáceres,
Negros, 100.
38 Webre, "Las compañías de milicia," 516-518,525-529.
39 Razón de las ciudades, villas y lugares, vecindarios y
tributarios de que se componen las Provincias del
Distrito de este Audiencia , 1682, AGI, Contaduría 815,
fol.32v.
40 AGCA, A2.5-1, leg.295, ex.6534 (1700). See also
Vinson, Bearing Arms, 93-94.
41 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle, 30-33; Cáceres, Negros, 101-102; Lokken, "Undoing Racial Hierarchy,"
30-32; José Antonio Fernández M., "La población
afroamericana libre en la Centroamérica colonial," in
Rutas de la esclavitud en ! frica y América Latina,
comp. Rina Cáceres (San José: Editorial de la
Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), 332; Aharon
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Arguedas, "Las milicias de El Salvador colonial," in
Mestizaje, poder y sociedad: ensayos de la historia
colonial de las provincias de San Salvador y Sonsonate,
ed. Ana Margarita Gómez and Sajid Alfredo Herrera
(San Salvador: FLACSO, 2003), 135.
42 Floyd, Anglo-Spanish Struggle, 37; William Dampier,
A New Voyage Round the World: The Journal of an
English Buccaneer, foreword by Giles Milton (London:
Hummingbird Press, 1998), 114-118.
43 AGCA, A2.5-1, leg.295, ex.6538 (1717), fols.14v-15.
44 "Copia del memorial de abisso," in Leyva,
Documentos, 116.
45 Avendaño to the Crown, 10 March 1644, in
Avendaño to the Crown, 6 August 1644, AGI,
Guatemala, 16, R.5, N.37\1, Ims. 23-27.
46 Cáceres, Negros, 100-104.
47 Escovedo to the Crown, 24 October 1676, in
Escovedo to the Crown, 16 November 1676, AGI,
Guatemala, 25, R.1, N.19\3, Ims. 4-5.
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