from Indochine

[Beau]

Afro-Mexican history, like Filipino-Mexican and Chinese-Mexican history, has unfortunately, been clouded by the Mexican myth of national identity that was created in the 1920s. African slaves were first brought to Mexico in 1519 with Hernando Cortez and continued to be imported thereafter because of the Spanish need for plantation laborers and the decimation of the indigenous populations from war, famine, and disease. The last estimates that I recall about Indian deaths resulting from the Conquest were between 11 and 20 million persons. The Spanish established a classification system based upon blood quantum, referred to as Metizaje from which we get the term Mestizo or ?half-breed,? that was used to group people of mixed blood. Under that system, came terms such as Octaroons, Quadroons, Chinos, etc., collectively called Las Castas that defined the individual by the amount of Indian or African blood that was mixed with European.

The Spanish Empire eventually imported some 2,500,000 African slaves, in addition to enslaving large numbers of indigenous people who survived the Conquest. The Portuguese imported many more from Africa, bringing 4,000,000 to Brazil alone to work on sugar cane plantations. When acquiring slaves from Africa proved difficult or too costly, the Spanish and Portuguese sought new population sources. Consequently, it was suggested by colonial officials that the silver mines of Potosi in Peru be worked by ?Chinese, Japanese, and Javanese from the isles of the Philippines.? In this way, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and South Asian Indians were first brought to the Americas?as the replacements for Africans.

The difference between the Spanish slavery system and its European and later, Anglo-American counterparts was that there was a legal mechanism to achieve manumission and attain freedom. Consequently, there was present in Mexico a free population of persons of African and Indian or European descent within presumably one generation after contact. At one time, their numbers in Mexico City became so great that they became a concern for the Spanish authorities and they were expelled from the capital, en masse.

The Conquest of Mexico, like all of those that followed, was an act of violence, whose intent was to accomplish the complete destruction of Indian society, its institutions, and religions. Through rape or agreement (since Indian as well as Spanish and African soldaderas accompanied the Conquistadores during the campaigns in Mexico and also fought alongside them) Mestizo offspring were produced within the first year of contact. In the decades following, there was always existent some level of mixing, whether sanctioned by the church and the Spanish Crown or otherwise. The colonization process created an intermediary class of persons who were placed above the native population but beneath the European-born colonizer. So, whether in Mexico, Brazil and South America, the Philippines, or French Indochina, a Mestizo or in French, a Metis class of persons, fathered by European men and indigenous women was always created. In the latter case, the Metis class numbered between 20,000 and 30,000 Eurasians. They were evacuated en masse from French Indochina in 1955 and resettled in the abandoned mining town of Noyant, France.

From this Mestizo class came the persons who later formed the local officials of colonial government, who collected taxes and functioned as bureaucrats and middlemen or became as some French described, ?a subclass of petty criminals and prostitutes.? They helped supply the Colonizer with raw materials that were shipped to Europe for consumption and manufacture and bought the Euro-goods that were returned to the colony. In general, this ?acculturation? process lead Mestizos, regardless of ethnicity, to come to deride their ?cousins,? who constituted native populations and native cultures, as ?backward and uncivilized? at best or at worst, as ?evil and vile.? European Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, functioned as the ideological underpinning of the Conquest of the ?New World? and of Colonization as it was applied globally. Even during the period following the American-Philippine War, the term ?unchristianized? was used by protestant American colonial officials as a synonym for ?uncivilized? and served as descriptions of local hill tribes that were published by the U.S. Government.

From its beginnings with the Portuguese in the early 1400s, chattel slavery had been sanctioned by the Catholic Church and later, by the Protestant churches , although there were courageous individuals of European and indigenous descents who fought for the rights of enslaved people, and who brought about the eventual demise of the institution in the New World four hundred years later. Its end in Mexico came in 1821, thirteen years before the end of another nefarious institution?the Mexican Inquisition?a 343-year campaign against Sephardic Jews who were forced to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism and who emigrated to the farthest reaches of the empire. Since the Philippines as a colony was administered from the seat of government in Mexico City, the Inquisition found its way to Manila and was implemented there as well.

The source of Spanish colonial income from Asia was facilitated by the Acapulco-Manila Trade and it may be noted that a scarcity of African slaves in Michoacan in 1565 prompted ?colonists to use the Philippines as a source of new workers.? Consequently, some 19,000 Filipino slaves were settled in Mexico , where they married Indian women and had children. As a twenty-first century population, however, their oral histories have lost their connection with their origins in the Philippines and many describe themselves simply as Chinos. The Filipinos settled in an area north of Acapulco and their descendents can be found there today.

Similarly, a large population of Afro-Mexicans settled in the state of Guerrero. Located in a largely rural area, their oral histories provide little information as to how they remained a distinct population, nor that they are even black or negro. Although not widely publicized, it should be noted that Frey Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who pronounced the famous Grito de Dolores and initiated the first revolt against the Spanish in 1810 was Afro-Mexican.

The establishment of Texas or Tejas, apart from an extensive mythology about how and why Anglo American Protestants created it, was to allow slavery. After the 1821 Plan de Iguala outlawed the practice, Anglo American and European settlement was encouraged by the Mexican Government. Anglo-American in-migration, legal or otherwise, however, occurred at a phenomenal rate during the following two decades, to such a degree, that by 1835, there were 35,000 non-Spanish speaking immigrants who occupied lands in Texas. Conversely, the Spanish-speaking population in that same year numbered only 3,000 individuals. This condition inadvertently set the stage for a revolt and establishment of the Anglo-American Republic in 1836 and later annexation to the United States in 1845. The Mexican-American War was an imperial conflict and was rampant with Anglo atrocities against Mexican citizens that were equal to those perpetrated three centuries earlier by the Spanish conquistadores.
During the period that followed leading up to the American Civil War, Mexico remained a destination for runaway slaves from the American South and intermarriage between former slaves and Mexicans continued. Afro-Mexicans participated in the Mexican Revolution of 1911, and several soldaderas were recorded in photographs from the period. A black surgeon joined the forces of Caranza and tended the wounded until he was murdered in the desert by Anglo-American troops in 1916. Unfortunately, following the revolution, the ideology of La Raza Cosmica was promulgated by the Partida Revolucionario Indepencia or PRI that proclaimed a new Mexican national identity, created solely from the amalgamation of Indians and Europeans. All others were excluded. Consequently, the other histories have only recently been discovered and recorded.