Slavery in colonial Spanish America

Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties included the enslavement, forced labor and peonage of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians from the late 15th to late 19th century, and its aftereffects in the 20th and 21st centuries. The economic and social institution of slavery existed throughout the Spanish Empire, including Spain itself. Initially, indigenous people were subjected to the encomienda system until the 1543 New Laws that prohibited it. This was replaced with the repartimiento system. Africans were also transported to the Americas for their labor under the race-based system of chattel slavery. Later, Southeast Asian people were brought to the Americas under forms of indenture and peonage to provide cheap labor to replace enslaved Africans.Seijas, Tatiana.''Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2014.

People had been enslaved in what is now Spain since the times of the Roman Empire. Conquistadors were awarded with indigenous forced labor and tribute for participating in the conquest of Americas, known as encomiendas. Following the collapse of indigenous populations in the Americas, the Spanish restricted the forced labor of Native Americans with the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and the New Laws of 1542. 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. As the Crown barred Spaniards from directly participating in the Atlantic slave trade, the right to export slaves (the Asiento de Negros) was a major foreign policy objective of other European powers, sparking numerous European wars such as the War of Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins' Ear. Spanish colonies ultimately received around 22% of all the Africans delivered to American shores. 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.Ferrer, Ada. ''Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898''. The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. p 18.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when most nations in the Americas abolished chattel slavery, Cuba and Puerto Rico – the last two remaining Spanish American colonies – were among the last in the region, followed only by Brazil. 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). The first open Black rebellion occurred in Spanish labour camps (plantations) in 1521. Resistance, particularly to the forced labor of indigenous people, also came from Spanish religious and legal ranks. Resistance to indigenous captivity in the Spanish colonies produced the first modern debates over the legitimacy of slavery. The struggle against slavery in the Spanish American colonies left a notable tradition of opposition that set the stage for conversations about human rights.
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.

Background

Slavery in Spain traces back to the times of the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans. Slavery was cross-cultural and multi-ethnic, and had an important role in the development of European economies such as Spain. The Romans extensively utilized slaves according to the Code of Justinian. Following the rise of Christianity, Christians were in theory barred from enslaving their fellow Christians, but the practice persisted. With the rise of Islam, and the conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, slavery declined in the remaining Christian kingdoms of Iberia.

At the formation of Al-Andalus, Muslims were prohibited from enslaving other Muslims, but non-Muslim Spanish and Eastern European slaves were traded by Muslims and local Jewish merchants. Mozarabs and Jews were allowed to remain and retain their slaves if they paid a head tax for themselves and half-value for the slaves, but non-Muslims were prohibited from holding Muslim slaves. If one of their slaves converted to Islam, they were required to sell the slave to a Muslim. Mozarabs were later, by the 9th and 10th centuries, permitted to purchase new non-Muslim slaves via the peninsula's established slave trade.

During the reconquista, Christian Spain sought to retake territory lost to Muslims, leading to changing norms regarding slavery. Though enslavement of Christians was originally permitted, the Christian kingdoms gradually ceased this practice between the 8th and 11th centuries, limiting their pool of slaves to Al-Andalusian Muslims. The enslavement of conquered Muslims was supposedly justified on the basis of conversion and acculturation, but Muslim captives were often offered back to their families and communities for cash payments (''rescate''). The thirteenth-century code of law, the '' Siete Partidas'' of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–1284), specified slaves' good treatment by their masters, and who could be enslaved: those who were captured in just war; offspring of an enslaved mother; those who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery. This was generally domestic slavery and was a temporary condition for members of outgroups. 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."

As the Spanish (Castilians) and Portuguese expanded overseas, they conquered and occupied Atlantic islands off the north coast of Africa—including the Canary Islands, São Tomé and Madeira—where they introduced sugar plantations.Blackburn, ''The Making of New World Slavery'', pp. 62-63, 81-82. In the Canary Islands, the Spanish practised the encomienda system, a type of forced labor modelled on the reconquista practice of awarding Muslim laborers to Christian victors.Lockhart and Schwartz, ''Early Latin America'', pp. 21-22. The Spanish treated the Canarian natives, known as the Guanches, as pagans, but several attempts were made by the Catholic Church to prevent their enslavement and defend the freedom of evangelized Canarians. Despite this, the Guanches' population precipitously declined as a result of encomienda.

Under Castilian control, in the period from 1498 (when the Catholic Kings ordered the freedom of the Guanches) until 1520 (when the last Guanches were freed), Guanche encomienda was replaced by African chattel slavery. Castilians traded a variety of European goods—including firearms and horses—for slaves from West Africa, where the existing slave trade had begun to shift to the coast to meet European demand. In these colonies off the coast of Africa, the Spanish engaged in sugar cane production following the model of Mediterranean production. The sugar complex consisted of slave labor for cultivation and processing, with the sugar mill (''ingenio'') and equipment established with significant investor capital. When plantation slavery was established in Spanish America and Brazil, they replicated the elements of the complex in the New World on a much larger scale. In the Spanish colonies of the New World, the encomienda system would also be revived to enslave indigenous peoples. This system became much more widespread following the Spanish contact and conquests in Mexico and Peru, but the precedents had been set prior to 1492, in the Canary Islands.

Indigenous slavery

Following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, European enslavement of Indigenous Americans began with the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean. Initially, slavery represented a means by which the conquistadors mobilized native labor, with disastrous effects on the population. A group of about 24 Taíno people were abducted and forced to accompany Columbus on his 1494 return voyage to Spain. Unlike the Portuguese Crown's support for the slave trade in Africa, '' los Reyes Católicos'' () opposed the enslavement of the native peoples in the newly conquered lands on religious grounds, so when Columbus returned with indigenous slaves, they ordered the survivors to be returned to their homelands. By 1499, Spanish settlers on Hispaniola had discovered gold in the Cordillera Central. This created a demand for large amounts of cheap labor, and an estimated 400,000 Taíno people from across the island were soon enslaved to work in gold mines.

In 1500, the Catholic Monarchs issued a decree that specifically forbade the enslavement of indigenous people, but they allowed three exceptions which were freely abused by colonial Spanish authorities: slaves taken in "just wars"; those purchased from other indigenous people; or those from groups alleged to practice cannibalism (such as the Kalinago).Noble, David Cook. "Nicolás de Ovando" in ''Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture'', vol.4, p. 254. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996. 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. The escapees were later rounded up and enslaved. In 1508, Juan Ponce de León and the Spaniards arrived on the island of Borikén (Puerto Rico), and enslaved Taíno tribes on the island, forcing them to work in the gold mines and in the construction of forts. In 1511, the Taíno in Puerto Rico allied with the Kalinago to resist the enslavement and abuse by Ponce de Léon, triggering the Spanish–Taíno War of San Juan–Borikén.

Members of the Spanish religious and legal professions were especially vocal in opposing the enslavement of native peoples. The first speech in the Americas for the universality of human rights and against the abuses of slavery was given on Hispaniola, a mere nineteen years after the first contact. Resistance to indigenous captivity in the Spanish colonies produced the first modern debates over the legitimacy of slavery. 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. In New Spain, succeeding governors were appointed and recalled, often because of stories about their treatment of native populations. The Spanish colonists, fearing the loss of their labour force, complained to the courts that they needed manpower. As an alternative, Las Casas suggested the importation and use of African slaves. In 1517, the Spanish Crown permitted its subjects to import twelve slaves each, thereby marking the official beginning of the slave trade on the colonies.

Encomienda system

Despite religious objections, forced labor continued and was ultimately institutionalized as the encomienda system during the first decade of the 16th century.Ida Altman, et al., ''The Early History of Greater Mexico,'' Pearson, 2003, p. 47 This system was established on the island of Hispaniola by Nicolás de Ovando, the third governor of the Spanish colony, in 1502. Under encomienda, the Crown granted conquistadors the right to extract labour and tribute from non-Christian indigenous people who were under Spanish rule. Some women and some indigenous elites—such as Maria Jaramillo, the daughter of Marina and conqueror Juan Jaramillo—were also owners of such contracts (or ''encomenderos'').Robert Himmerich y Valencia, ''The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555'', Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991 p. 178 The Caribbean system was based on similar grants given during the Reconquista in Spain.

By 1508, the original Taíno population of 400,000 or more had been reduced to around 60,000. Spanish slave-raiding parties travelled across the Caribbean and "carried off entire populations" to work their colonies. Although disease is often cited as the cause of this population decline, the first recorded smallpox outbreak in the New World was not until 1518. 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. He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria". By 1521, the islands of the northern Caribbean were largely depopulated. Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) campaigned for protections of the indigenous population, especially crown limits on the exploitation of the encomienda, helping to bring about the 1542 New Laws which would replace encomienda with repartimiento.Gunst, Laurie. "Bartolomé de las Casas and the Question of Negro Slavery in the Early Spanish Indies." PhD dissertation, Harvard University 1982.Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, ''Bartolome de las Casas in History. Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work'' Northern Illinois University Slavery Press, 1971.

In New Spain, the collapse of indigenous populations from conquest and disease led to a shift from the encomienda system to ''pueblos de indios''. The encomienda system no longer made economic sense as there were not enough Amerindians remaining. This shift consolidated labor in a process known as ''reducciones'', and replaced encomienda with "two parallel yet separate 'republics'": the ''república de españoles'' "included Spaniards, who lived in Spanish cities and obeyed Spanish law"; and the ''república de indios'' "included natives, who resided in native communities, where native law and native authorities (as long as they did not contradict Spanish norms) prevailed". The Amerindians who lived in the ''pueblos de indios'' had ownership over their land, but, because they were deemed subjects of the Spanish Crown, they also had to pay tribute.

In most of the Spanish domains acquired in the 16th century, the encomienda phenomenon lasted only a few decades. In Peru and New Spain, the encomienda institution lasted much longer. In Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile, where the abuse of encomienda had led to the Huilliche uprising of 1712, the encomienda was only abolished in 1782. In the rest of Chile it was abolished in 1789, and in the whole Spanish empire in 1791.

Repartimiento system

After passage of the New Laws in 1542, also known as the ''New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians'', the Spanish greatly restricted the power of the encomienda system, which had allowed abuse by holders of the labor grants (''encomenderos''), and officially abolished the enslavement of the native population except in certain circumstances. The encomienda system was replaced by the repartimiento system. 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. The replacement of encomienda with repartimiento caused considerable anger among the conquistadors, who had expected to hold their grants to hold indigenous slaves in perpetuity.

The repartimiento system was not considered slavery—since the worker was not owned outright, was free in various respects other than in the dispensation of their labor, and the work was intermittent—but it created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of the 16th century Viceroyalty of Peru under the draft labor system known as ''mita'', which was partially influenced by a similar draft labor system the Inca used also called ''mit'a''. The repartimiento system allocated a number of Native workers to the Crown who were then assigned to work for Spanish settlers for a set period of time, usually several weeks, through a local Crown official. This was intended to reduce the abuses associated with encomienda.

In practice, the process was overseen by a conquistador, or later a Spanish settler or official, and applications for laborers were submitted to a district magistrate or special judge. Legally, these systems were not allowed to interfere with the Amerindians' own survival, with only 7-10% of the indigenous adult male population allowed to be assigned at any time. The Amerindians were paid wages, which they could then use to pay tribute to the Crown. Native men, working around three to four weeks a year, could also be allocated to public works such as harvests, mines, and infrastructure. Mining, specifically, was a concern for the Crown as well as the Peruvian viceroy. 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.

Enslavement of rebels

Despite the abolition of the encomienda system, indigenous people who rebelled against the Spanish could still be enslaved. Following the Mixtón War (1540–42) in northwest Mexico, many indigenous slaves were captured and relocated. The statutes of 1573, within the "Ordinances Concerning Discoveries", forbade unauthorized operations against independent Indian peoples. It required appointment of a ''protector de indios'', an ecclesiastical representative who acted as the protector of the Indians and represented them in formal litigation.

Reinstatement of slavery for Mapuche rebels

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). An estimate by Alonso González de Nájera put the toll at 3000 Spanish settlers killed and 500 Spanish women taken into captivity by Mapuche. In retaliation, the proscription against enslaving Indians captured in war was lifted by Philip in 1608. Spanish settlers in Chiloé Archipelago abused the decree to launch slave raids against groups such as the Chono people of northwestern Patagonia, who had never been under Spanish rule and never rebelled. The Real Audiencia of Santiago said in the 1650s that Mapuche slavery was one of the reasons for the constant state of war between the Spanish and the Mapuche. Enslavement of Mapuches "caught in war" was abolished in 1683 after decades of legal attempts by the Spanish Crown to suppress it.

Indigenous slaves in Spanish Florida

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. In Spanish Florida, slave labor was initially obtained largely by trading with neighboring tribes, such as the Yamasee. This trade in slaves was new: prior to the arrival of Europeans, tribes in eastern North America did not view slaves as commodities that could be bought and sold freely. Anthropologist David Graeber suggests that debt and the threat of violence made this sort of transformation of human beings into commodities possible. Tribes like the Yamasee raided for slaves in order to pay back the debt they owed to European traders for finished goods. This in turn created a demand for guns and ammunition, which further indebted the slave-raiding tribes and created a vicious cycle. The export of slaves to European colonies (and the high death rates there) created an unprecedented population drain. Slave-raiding also led to constant wars between tribes, and eventually destroyed or threatened to destroy most peoples in the vicinity of the colonies.

Black slavery

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. Europeans believed that Africans had developed immunities to European diseases, and would not be as susceptible to illness as the Native Americans because they had not been exposed to the pathogens yet.

With the increased dependency on enslaved Africans and with the Spanish crown opposed to the enslavement of indigenous people, except in the case of rebellion, slavery became associated with race and racial hierarchy, with Europeans hardening their concepts of racial ideologies. 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. In Spanish America, purity of blood came to mean a person free of any African ancestry.

In the vocabulary of the time, each enslaved African who arrived at the Americas was called " Pieza de Indias" (en: a piece of the Indies). The crown issued licenses or " asientos" to merchants, regulating the trade in slaves. During the 16th century, the Spanish colonies were the most important customers of the Atlantic slave trade, purchasing thousands of slaves directly from the Portuguese, but other European nations soon dwarfed these numbers when their demand for enslaved workers began to drive the slave market to unprecedented levels.

Black slavery in the early colonial period

In 1501, Spanish colonists began importing enslaved Africans from the Iberian Peninsula to their Santo Domingo colony on the island of Hispaniola. These first Africans, who had been enslaved in Europe before crossing the Atlantic, may have spoken Spanish and perhaps were even Christians. About 17 of them started in the copper mines, and about a hundred were sent to extract gold. As Old World diseases decimated Caribbean indigenous populations in the first decades of the 1500s, enslaved Africans (''bozales'') gradually replaced their labor, but they also mingled and joined with indigenous groups in flights to freedom, creating mixed-race maroon communities in all the islands where Europeans had established chattel slavery.

In 1524, the Spanish began to import African slaves to what is now the country of Honduras—about half of them coming from other colonies such as from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, as well as directly from African regions such as Senegambia and Central Africa.

In Spanish Florida and farther north, the first African slaves arrived in 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast. They rebelled and lived with indigenous people, destroying the colony in less than two months.
More slaves arrived in Florida in 1539 with Hernando de Soto, and in 1565 with the founding of St. Augustine, Florida. Slaves escaping to Florida from the colony of Georgia were offered their freedom by Carlos II's proclamation November 7, 1693, on condition of converting to Catholicism,
and it became a place of refuge for slaves fleeing the Thirteen Colonies.

By 1570, the colonists in Puerto Rico found the gold mines were depleted, relegating the island to a garrison for passing ships. The cultivation of crops such as tobacco, cotton, cocoa, and ginger became increasingly important to the economy. With rising demand for sugar on the international market, major planters increased their labour-intensive cultivation and processing of sugar cane. Sugar plantations supplanted mining as Puerto Rico's main industry and kept demand high for African slavery.

Black slavery in the late colonial period

The population of slaves in Cuba received a large boost when the British captured Havana during the Seven Years' War, and imported 10,000 slaves from their other colonies in the West Indies to work on newly established agricultural plantations. These slaves were left behind when the British returned Havana to the Spanish as part of the Treaty of Paris (1763), and form a significant part of the Afro-Cuban population today.

Cuba developed two distinct but interrelated sources of sugar production using enslaved labor, which converged at the end of the eighteenth century. The first of these sectors was urban and was directed in large measure by the needs of the Spanish colonial state, reaching its height in the 1760s. As a result, Thomas Kitchin reported in 1778 that "about 52,000 slaves" were being brought from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans, with approximately 4,000 being brought by the Spanish. The second sector, which flourished after 1790, was rural and was directed by private planters involved in the production of export agricultural commodities. 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.

After 1784, Spain provided five ways by which slaves could obtain freedom. 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. The decree granted its subjects the right to purchase slaves and to participate in the slave trade in the Caribbean. Later that year a new slave code, known as ''El Código Negro'' (The Black Code), was introduced. Under "El Código Negro", a slave could buy his freedom, in the event that his master was willing to sell, by paying the price sought in installments. 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. For the freedom of their newborn child, not yet baptized, they paid half the going price for a baptized child. Many of these freedmen started settlements in the areas which became known as Cangrejos ( Santurce), Carolina, Canóvanas, Loíza, and Luquillo. Some became slave owners themselves. Despite these paths to freedom, from 1790 onwards, the number of slaves more than doubled in Puerto Rico as a result of the dramatic expansion of the sugar industry in the island.

The Spanish colonies in the Caribbean were among the last to abolish slavery. While the British abolished slavery by 1833, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873.

Conditions for black slaves

Enslaved Africans were sent to work in the gold mines, or in the island's ginger and sugar fields. To maintain the slave workforce despite the high number of deaths, new slaves were imported regularly from Africa. Across the Americas, some 70% of slaves worked on sugar plantations and related industries. The slaves who worked on sugar plantations and in sugar mills were subject to some of the harshest conditions. The field work was rigorous manual labour which the slaves began at an early age. The work days lasted between 16 and 21 hours a day during harvest and processing, including cultivating and cutting the crops, hauling wagons, and processing sugarcane with dangerous machinery. On these plantations, slaves were locked into cramped barracoons, referred to by scholars as "sugar prisons", where they got as little as three to four hours of sleep per night. According to one former slave, the conditions in the barracoons were harsh, highly unsanitary, extremely hot, and unventilated. Others were given more space—allowed to live, for instance, with their families in huts, with a small patch of earth for farming, on their masters' lands—but were still subjected to harsh treatment. The slaves had little choice but to adapt. Many converted to Christianity and were given their masters' surnames.

Rebellion and escape were severely punished, but many Africans attempted to flee their enslavement anyway, sometimes killing themselves when no other options remained.Hoonhout, B. and Mareite, T. (2018) "Freedom at the fringes? Slave flight and empire-building in the early modern Spanish borderlands of Essequibo–Venezuela and Louisiana–Texas", ''Slavery & Abolition'', 40(1), pp. 61–86. doi: 10.1080/0144039X.2018.1447806.Smith, Sabrina. "Slavery and the African Diaspora in Spanish America." ''Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History''. 17 Apr. 2024; Accessed 6 Feb. 2025

Hanging was a common punishment for rebellion. For example, in Mexico City in 1537, a number of blacks were accused of rebellion and executed in the main plaza (''zócalo'') by hanging. African slaves were also legally branded with a hot iron on the forehead, which prevented their escape, "theft", or any lawsuits which might challenge their captivity. The colonists continued this branding practice for more than 250 years. Those slaves who escaped to freedom often formed autonomous communities with local indigenous groups, known as Maroons.

Both women and men were subject to the punishments of violence and humiliating abuse. 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. Montejo said this sometimes caused miscarriages. Women and girls were also subject to sexual abuse, since most colonists arriving in the New World were men and there was a shortage of women.

Cuba's slavery system was gendered in a way that some duties were performed only by male slaves, some only by female slaves. Female slaves in Havana

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