Transcript
What She Is
August 1594
In August 1594, the Inquisition, the Catholic Church's court in Mexico City, questioned a woman accused of witchcraft. The court's prosecutor described her before he asked what she had done.
Fiscal · excerpt from the record Margarita de Sossa, black, native of the city of Oporto… of approximately fifty-eight years of age.
A witness named Francisco Gallardo, from Puebla in Mexico, had described her differently.
Gallardo · earlier testimony, Puebla Portuguese and mulata, who is not entirely black… and with some letters on her face.
The letters on her face were a brand from her years in slavery, but by 1594 Margarita had bought her freedom. One record called her black and the other mulata, and in Spain's empire that difference mattered.
A person's ancestry shaped what work they owed and how the law treated them. Spain's colonial order had its roots on Hispaniola, an island in the Caribbean, where in 1503 the Crown ordered Native people to work for settlers.
As Free Persons
1503–1518
In 1503, Spain's colony on Hispaniola depended on gold, and the settlers wanted the Taíno, the island's Native people, to dig it.
In the Cibao, the gold country of northern Hispaniola, Taíno women washed river sand in wooden pans while the men dug and carried.
That December, Queen Isabella sent the governor of Hispaniola an order about the Taíno:
Royal order · adapted extract Have them work on buildings, in mines, and in fields; pay them for each day's work.
Royal order · our translation As free persons, as they are, and not as serfs.
The queen called the Taíno free, and in the same order she told the governor to compel them to work.
The governor, Nicolás de Ovando, divided the Taíno among the settlers through a system called encomienda. A settler received a Native community's labor and tribute, payments in goods such as cotton or food, but not its land. In return, the law required him to protect the people and teach them Christianity.
Encomienda workers dug gold and planted the settlers' fields, and the settlers kept the men at the mines for months at a time. With the men away, Taíno families could not keep up their gardens, and hunger and disease spread.
Spanish officials counted the Taíno under their control. Move through the counts to see what happened before smallpox arrived in 1518. Before smallpox ever arrived, the count had fallen by more than half. Overwork, hunger, violence and other diseases killed people. Fewer births and flight also reduced the counts. When smallpox came, it killed many of the survivors, and epidemics went on to kill millions across the Americas.
The Remedy
1502–1526
As the Taíno died, the settlers still wanted gold, and now sugar too, so they needed new workers. On sugar islands off Africa, like Madeira and São Tomé, Portugal had already made sugar pay with enslaved African workers.
Enslaved Africans had reached Hispaniola by 1502, and in 1510 King Ferdinand approved sending more to the gold mines, explaining:
Ferdinand · translated letter excerpt …because it is said that the Indians find it very hard to break the rocks where that gold is found.
In 1516, Bartolomé de las Casas, a priest who had given up his own Taíno workers, offered Spain's rulers a remedy. To spare the Taíno, he proposed letting settlers bring in more enslaved Africans.
In his history of the Indies, finished about 1561, Las Casas regretted that advice and wrote:
Las Casas · his history, translated The captivity of the Blacks is as unjust as that of the Indians.
In 1518, Alonso de Zuazo, a royal judge on Hispaniola, wrote to the king to ask for more enslaved Africans, and he claimed:
Zuazo · letter to the Crown, translated excerpt There are blacks that do in a day one hundred and forty montones…
He said the strongest Native worker made only twelve of these cassava mounds, a comparison meant to persuade the king.
That August, King Charles gave one of his councillors a license to send enslaved Africans to the colonies:
Secretary · license excerpt Four thousand negro slaves both male and female, provided they be Christians.
Spain controlled the trade to its colonies with licenses and contracts called asientos, and the Crown took a tax on each enslaved person imported.
Sort these claims about the slave trade by whether the evidence supports them. Some West African rulers and merchants sold war captives to European traders, who shipped them to plantations and mines in the Americas.
In 1526, Afonso, the Christian king of Kongo in West Central Africa, wrote to Portugal's king:
Afonso · translated letter excerpt …merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives…
Afonso I · letter of 6 July 1526 It is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them.
But Afonso held slaves himself, and sold war captives.
Before the trade ended in the 1800s, traders forced between 10 and 15 million Africans across the Atlantic, on a voyage called the Middle Passage. Traders chained the captives below deck for weeks, and across the whole trade, 10 to 15 percent of them died at sea.
On Hispaniola, sugar plantations put large gangs of enslaved Africans to work growing and crushing cane, a crop raised to sell in Europe. Taíno workers still served the settlers too, so African slavery grew alongside Native labor instead of replacing it.
Enslaved Africans resisted every day, by slowing their work, breaking tools and keeping their own music and religion alive. At Christmas in 1521, enslaved Africans rose up on a sugar plantation on Hispaniola.
Spanish troops put down the revolt, but some runaways escaped into the Bahoruco mountains in the island's southwest.
Enriquillo's Peace
1519–1533
Around 1519, a Taíno leader named Enriquillo took a complaint to Spanish officials at San Juan de la Maguana, a town on Hispaniola.
Las Casas later wrote that the settler who held Enriquillo's people in encomienda had taken his mare and tried to assault his wife.
A local officer threatened him, and the high court in Santo Domingo, the colony's capital, sent him back to that same officer.
Enriquillo gave up on the courts and led his people into the Bahoruco mountains to resist. For fourteen years, Spanish soldiers hunted them there and failed to defeat them.
In 1533, Spain sent an officer with a letter from King Charles offering peace, and Enriquillo accepted.
His people could live free, in a settlement of their own.
In return, Enriquillo agreed to bring in the island's other rebels and to capture runaway Africans for the Spanish. The judges promised four linen shirts for every Black runaway brought in.
Enriquillo's resistance had freed his people, and the peace now made them help keep Africans enslaved.
Silver
1521–c. 1615
Hernán Cortés had conquered the Mexica Empire in Mexico in 1521, and by 1533 Francisco Pizarro had conquered the Inca Empire in Peru. In Mexico City, Native masons built a cathedral on the ruins of the Mexica capital, and Native towns owed the settlers tribute and labor.
In 1545 and 1546, Spaniards found huge silver deposits at Potosí, in the Andes of today's Bolivia, and at Zacatecas, in northern Mexico. Treasure fleets carried the silver to Spain, and it made Spain the richest and most powerful kingdom in Europe. Spain's success pushed rival kingdoms, like England and France, to look for American riches of their own.
In the northern mines, hired Indigenous workers labored alongside enslaved Africans.
In central Mexico, Native towns had to send men out to work in turns, on Spanish farms and building sites. Spaniards called this rotating labor draft the repartimiento.
The New Laws of 1542 tried to curb encomienda, but they did not end it everywhere.
In 1550, a Dominican friar, Domingo de Santo Tomás, warned the king's council about the new mines at Potosí:
Santo Tomás · translated letter excerpt …there was discovered a mouth of hell, into which have entered…a great quantity of people…
In the 1570s, Spain's governor in Peru, Francisco de Toledo, turned an old Inca labor draft, the mita, toward the silver mines. Highland towns had to send a share of their men to Potosí each year, and Native leaders called kurakas had to deliver them.
In 1582, twenty-four kurakas from Charcas, the highlands around Potosí, wrote to the king that Toledo had drafted their peoples and spared others:
The lords of Charcas · their 1582 memorial, translated … for the working of the mines and mills in the town of Potosí … we have received notorious grievance and harm.
Put yourself in the place of a kuraka around 1600, when the draft demanded more men than many towns had left, and choose. Every choice cost the town, because officials jailed kurakas who came up short, and silver payments drained the community. Deaths and flight could leave fewer people carrying the old quota.
Around 1615, an Andean nobleman, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, looked back on these abuses in a long appeal to King Philip the Third.
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala They make them work day and night, and they are not paid.
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala Castile is Castile because of the Indians.
By Castile he meant Spain, and his point was that Native workers had dug the silver that made Spain rich.
Silver coins like the ones Margarita saved in Puebla came from the mines of New Spain, Spain's colony in Mexico.
Her Own Hands
c. 1536–1594
Margarita was born in Oporto, Portugal, around 1536, and she was enslaved from childhood, first in Portugal and then in Seville, Spain. Around 1570, her owner in Seville sent her across the Atlantic to New Spain. She ended up in Puebla, a young city on the road from the port of Veracruz to Mexico City.
Spain ranked everyone in its colonies by ancestry, and a person's rank shaped what work they owed, their rights and their punishments. Most Spanish migrants were men, and many had children with Native and African women, sometimes by force.
In this caste system, Spaniards stood at the top and Native and African people at the bottom, with people of mixed ancestry in between. Usually, mestizos had Spanish and Native parents, and mulatos had Spanish and African parents. In practice, labels shifted with money, witnesses and who was writing, so one record called Margarita black and another mulata.
In 1536, decades before Margarita came, Puebla's council set penalties for men who harmed Native women at the market. Choose what you think it ordered. The text prescribed a fine for the Spaniard; fifty lashes for the enslaved man if his owner refused payment. The two men differed in ancestry and in legal status, and the law threatened only the enslaved man with the whip.
In Puebla, a priest at the cathedral bought Margarita and later sold her, and in a 1594 letter he explained why:
Canon · translated letter excerpt …because she spoke too much and used bad language… even though she was a good servant.
One of her owners let her hire herself out as a healer. She paid him a share of what she earned, and saved the rest. She was still enslaved, but some owners would sell people their freedom, and she meant to buy hers.
She married a shoemaker, Antonio Álvarez, and she bought her own freedom, as she later told a court:
Margarita · translated testimony The money with which I liberated myself was from my work and sweat and not that of my husband.
Then, as a free woman, Margarita bought an enslaved woman of her own. The records do not give that woman's name, and they do not say whether she ever became free.
In July 1594, after people in Puebla accused her of witchcraft, the Inquisition locked Margarita in its secret jail in Mexico City. Some of the same people had accused her before, so she asked the judges to send for the records of that earlier case.
The File
August–September 1594
Take her place before the judges, and make them look at the earlier case.
The judges sent to Puebla for the record of the earlier case against her.
Then a cathedral canon who had once owned Margarita, and who now worked for the Inquisition in Puebla, wrote to the court:
The canon · letter voiced in reconstruction It was a false testimony, and that is what I declared in the court case.
The earlier case showed Gallardo's hostility, and the judges let her out on bond while the case continued.
She had bought her freedom years before, and on September 26, 1594, the judges let her go home to Puebla, unless new evidence turned up.
Whose Hands
1600
In 1600, a free woman named Isabel de Olvera stood before a judge in Querétaro, in central Mexico, ready to travel north. Her father was African and her mother Native, and she wanted it on record that she was free and unmarried.
Isabel · translated affidavit excerpt …I may be annoyed by some individuals, since I am a mulatto… I demand justice.
Her papers called her a mulata even though neither of her parents was Spanish, a sign of how loosely officials used the labels.
She was headed for New Mexico, where Spanish colonists claimed the Pueblos' tribute through encomienda. Spain had founded that colony in 1598 among the Pueblo peoples of the upper Rio Grande, and settlers took corn and cotton blankets as tribute. The system that began on Hispaniola had reached what is now the United States.
In Margarita's lifetime, Spain's labor system had spread from the Caribbean islands to the silver mines of Mexico and Peru. Encomienda and labor drafts forced Native people to farm and mine for Spaniards. As disease and overwork killed millions of Native people, Spain brought in more enslaved Africans to work beside them. The caste system ranked everyone by ancestry, with Spaniards at the top and Native and African people at the bottom. Rebels like Enriquillo and free women like Margarita secured their own freedom, but the colonial system continued.
In 1550, some Spaniards argued before the emperor's judges over whether the conquest and its labor system were just.