Slavery in colonial Spanish America
[9][10] Instead, the Spanish increasingly utilized enslaved people from West and Central Africa for labor on commercial plantations, as well as urban slavery in households, religious institutions, textile workshops (obrajes), and other venues.
[13][14] Towards the end of the Atlantic slave trade, Asian migrant workers (chinos and coolies) in colonial Mexico and Cuba were subjected to peonage and harsh labor under exploitative contracts of indenture.
[a] Enslaved people challenged their captivity in ways that ranged from introducing non-European elements into Christianity (syncretism) to mounting alternative societies outside the plantation system (Maroons).
[b][19][20] The struggle against slavery in the Spanish American colonies left a notable tradition of opposition that set the stage for conversations about human rights.
[21] The first speech in the Americas for the universality of human rights and against the abuses of slavery was given on Hispaniola by Antonio de Montesinos, a mere nineteen years after the Columbus' first voyage.
[26] The Siete Partidas described slavery as "the basest and most wretched condition into which anyone could fall because man, who is the freest noble of all God's creatures, becomes thereby in the power of another, who can do with him what he wishes as with any property, whether living or dead.
[34][39]: 553–554 In 1503, 80 caciques (Taíno tribal leaders) were burned alive and the remaining adults and children were killed at the Jaragua massacre, purportedly to prevent a rebellion.
Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, publicized the conditions of indigenous Americans and lobbied Charles V to guarantee their rights.
[53] Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis suggests that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.
[66][67][68] With the repartimiento system, the Spanish Crown aimed to remove control of the indigenous population, now considered its subjects, from the hands of the encomenderos, who had become a politically influential and wealthy class.
While there were attempts to guard against overwork, abuses of power and high quotas set by mine owners continued, leading to both depopulation and the system of indigenous men buying themselves out of the labor draft by paying their own curacas or employers.
[76][77] King Philip III inherited a difficult situation in colonial Chile, where the Arauco War raged and the local Mapuche succeeded in razing seven Spanish cities (1598–1604).
[80] The new international market for products like tobacco, sugar, and raw materials incentivized the creation of extraction- and plantation-based economies in eastern North America.
[f][83]: 176–179, 204–205 [85][86][88] When Spain first enslaved Native Americans on Hispaniola, and then replaced them with captive Africans, it established slave labor as the basis for colonial sugar production.
These were buttressed by prior ideologies of differentiation as that of the limpieza de sangre (en: purity of blood), which in Spain referred to individuals without the perceived taint of Jewish or Muslim ancestry.
After 1763, the scale and urgency of defense projects led the state to deploy many of its enslaved workers in ways that foreshadowed the intense work regimes on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century.
Another important group of workers enslaved by the Spanish colonial state in the late eighteenth century were the king's laborers, who worked on the city's fortifications.
[101] Five years later, the Spanish Crown issued the "Royal Decree of Graces of 1789", which set new rules related to the slave trade and added restrictions to the granting of freedman status.
Slaves were allowed to earn money during their spare time by working as shoemakers, cleaning clothes, or selling the produce they grew on their own plots of land.
According to Esteban Montejo—a survivor of slavery who was interviewed by Miguel Barnet for his 1966 testimonial narrative Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave)—women were punished, such as by whippings, even when pregnant.
Female slaves in Havana from the 16th century onwards performed duties such as operating the town taverns, eating houses, and lodges, as well as being laundresses and domestic labourers and servants.
Another contested issue was the work hours that were restricted "from sunrise to sunset"; plantation owners responded by explaining that cutting and processing of cane needed 20-hour days during the harvest season.
The enslaved African Francisco Menéndez escaped from South Carolina and traveled to St. Augustine, Florida,[117] where he became the leader of the settlers at Mose and commander of the black militia company there from 1726 until sometime after 1742.
In 1771, Governor of Florida John Moultrie wrote to the Board of Trade, "It has been a practice for a good while past, for negroes to run away from their Masters, and get into the Indian towns, from whence it proved very difficult to get them back.
"[120] When colonial officials asked the Native Americans to return the fugitive slaves, they replied that they had "merely given hungry people food, and invited the slaveholders to catch the runaways themselves".
In the treaty of September 23, 1817, with Great Britain, the Spanish Crown said that "having never lost sight of a matter so interesting to him and being desirous of hastening the moment of its attainment, he has determined to co-operate with His Britannic Majesty in adopting the cause of humanity".
[131][132] On March 22, 1873, slavery was legally abolished in Puerto Rico but slaves were not emancipated; they had to buy their own freedom, at whatever price was set by their last masters.
The enganchador would act as a negotiator and manager for his cuadrillas, obtaining salary advances from planters, issuing tools, arranging food and accommodation, and assuming responsibility for the workers' behavior and performance.
[6][159] By 1874—after reports of abuse had become widespread—rising international pressure from China, America and the UK meant that the Portuguese closed their trade in coolies from Macao, shutting off a key source of indentured workers for Cuba and Peru.
As a result, the coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's first Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.
