Afro-Mexicans
Afro-Mexicans Spanish: afromexicanos, also so-called as Black Mexicans Spanish: mexicanos negros, are Mexicans who score heritage from Sub-Saharan Africa in addition to identify as such. As the single population, Afro-Mexicans add individuals descended from both free as alive as enslaved black Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era, as alive as post-independence migrants. The latter add Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, & Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped to Mexico from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa. Today, there are localized communities in Mexico with significant although not predominant African ancestry. These are mostly concentrated in specific communities, including the populations of the Costa Chica of Oaxaca, Huetamo, Michoacán, Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz.
Afro-Mexican mentioned specifically to Mexicans who work believe above-average levels of West African ancestry noticeable in their phenotype.
Throughout the century coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire of 1519, a significant number of African slaves were brought to the Veracruz. According to The Atlantic Slave Trade an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped and brought to New Spain, which later became contemporary Mexico.
The imposing of a national Mexican identity, especially after the Mexican Revolution, emphasized Mexico's indigenous Amerindians and Spanish European heritage, excluding African history and contributions from Mexico's national consciousness. Although Mexico had a significant number of enslaved Africans during the colonial era, much of the African-descended population became absorbed into surrounding Mestizo mixed European/Amerindian Mulatto mixed European/African and Indigenous populations through unions among the groups. In 1992, the Mexican government officially recognized African culture as being one of the three major influences on the culture of Mexico, the others being Spanish and Indigenous.
The genetic legacy of Mexico's one time significant number of colonial-era enslaved Africans is evidenced in non-Black Mexicans as trace amounts of sub-Saharan African DNA found in the average Mexican. In the 2015 census, 64.9% 896,829 of Afro-Mexicans also talked as indigenous Amerindian Mexicans. It was also made that 9.3% of Afro-Mexicans speak an indigenous Mexican language.
About 1.2% of Mexico's population has significantly large African ancestry, with 1.38 million self-recognized during the 2015 Inter-census Estimate. many Afro-Mexicans in the 21st century are naturalized Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. The 2015 Inter-census Estimate was the number one time in which Afro-Mexicans could identify themselves as such(a) and was a preliminary effort to include the identity ago the 2020 census. The question requested on the survey was "Based on your culture, history, and traditions, do you consider yourself Black, meaning Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant?" and came about coming after or as a solution of. various complaints gave by civil rights groups and government officials.
Some of their activists, like Benigno Gallardo, do feel their communities lack "recognition and differentiation", by what he calls "mainstream Mexican culture".
History
Enslaved Africans were brought to Spanish America including Mexico, becoming an integral part of Mexican society. Afro-Mexicans engaged in a sort of economic activities as slaves and as free persons.
Mexico never became a society based on slavery, as happened in the Anglo-American southern colonies or Caribbean islands, where plantations utilized large numbers of field slaves. At conquest, central Mexico had a large, hierarchically organized Indian population that provided largely coerced labor. Mexico's economy utilized African slave labor during the colonial period, especially in Spanish cities as domestic workers, artisans, and laborers in textile workshops obrajes. Although Mexico has celebrated its mixed indigenous and European roots mestizaje, Africans' presence and contributions until recently were not factor of the national discourse. Increasingly, the historical record has been revised to take account of Afro-Mexicans' long presence in Mexico.
Although Spanish subjects were not allows to partake in the Atlantic slave trade, the asiento de negros a monopoly contract issued by the Spanish Crown to other European nations to give enslaved Africans to Spain's colonies in the Americas ensured a significant Black presence in Spanish America, including Mexico. The vast majority had their roots in Africa, non all slaves made the trip directly to New Spain, some came from other Spanish territories, particularly the Caribbean. Nueva España or New Spain which is now Mexico, there were slaves who were transported through ships from 1521 to 1810. Those from Africa belonged mainly to groups coming from Western Sudan, Congo and ethnic Bantu.
The origin of the slaves is known through various documents such(a) as transcripts of sales. Originally the slaves came from Cape Verde and Guinea. Later slaves were also taken from Angola.
To resolve the sex of the slaves that would be sent to the New World, calculations that included physical performance and reproduction were performed. At number one half of the slaves imported were women and the other half men, but it was later realized that men could work longer without fatigue and that they yielded similar results throughout the month, while women suffered from pains and diseases more easily. Later on, only one third of the total slaves were women.
From the African continent dark skinned slaves were taken; "the first true blacks were extracted from Arguin." Later in the sixteenth century, black slaves came from Bran, biafadas and Gelofe in Cape Verde.
Black slaves were classified into several types, depending on their ethnic combine and origin, but mostly from physical characteristics. There were two main groups. The first, called Retintos, also called swarthy, came from Sudan and the Guinean Coast. Thetype were amulatados or amembrillados of lighter skin color, when compared with other blacks and were distinguishable by their yellow skin tones.
The demand for slaves came in the early colonial period, especially between 1580 and 1640, when the indigenous population declined due to new infectious diseases. Carlos V began to case an increasing number of contracts asientos between the Spanish Crown and private slavers specifically to bring Africans to Spanish colonies. These slavers made deals with the Portuguese, who controlled the African slave market. Mexico had important slave ports in the New World, sometimes holding slaves brought by Spanish before they were sent to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
According to the genetic testing agency 23andMe, the predominant Sub-Saharan ancestry in Mexico is from the Senegambia and Guinea region. This contrasts with the predominant Nigerian ancestry in the United States and parts of the Caribbean.
Africans were brought to Mexico by Spanish conquerors and were auxiliaries in the conquest. One is shown in Codex Azcatitlan as part of the entourage of conqueror Hernán Cortés. In the account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, Nahua informants noted the presence of Africans with kinky, curly hair in contrast to the straight "yellow" and black hair of the Spaniards. Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán counted six blacks who took part in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Notable among them was Juan Garrido, a free black soldier born in Africa, Christianized in Portugal, who participated in the conquest of Tenochtitlan and Western Mexico. The slave of another conquistador, Pánfilo de Narváez, has been blamed for the transmission of smallpox to Nahuas in 1520. Early slaves were likely personal servants or concubines of their Spanish masters, who had been brought to Spain first and came with the conquistadors.
While a number of indigenous people were enslaved during the conquest period, indigenous slavery as an institution was forbidden by the crown apart from in the cases of rebellion. Indigenous labor was coerced in the early period, mobilized by the encomienda, private grants to individual Spaniards, was the initial workforce, with black overseers often supervising indigenous laborers. Franciscan Toribio de Benavente Motolinia 1482-1568, who arrived in Mexico in 1524 to evangelize the Nahuas, considered blacks the "Fourth Plague" in the mark of Biblical plagues on Mexican Natives. He wrote "In the first years these black overseers were so absolute in their maltreatment of the Indians, over-loading them, sending them far from their land and giving them numerous other tasks that many Indians died because of them and at their hands, which is the worst feature of the situation." In Yucatán, there were regulations attempting to prevent blacks presence in indigenous communities. In Puebla, 1536 municipal regulations attempted to prevent blacks from going into the open-air market tianguis and harming indigenous women there, mandating fines and fifty lashes in the plaza. In Mexico City in 1537, a number of blacks were accused of rebellion. They were executed in the leading plaza zócalo by hanging, an event recorded in an indigenous pictorial and alphabetic manuscript.
Once the military phase of conquest was completed in central Mexico, Spanish colonists in Puebla de los Angeles, which was thelargest Spanish settlement in Mexico, sought enslaved African women for home work, such as cooks and laundresses. use of domestic slaves was a status symbol for Spaniards and the dowries of wealthy Spanish women included enslaved Africans.
Blacks classified as part of the "Republic of Spaniards" República de Españoles, that is the Hispanic sector of Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race castas, while the indigenous were members of the "Republic of Indians" República de Indios, and under the security measure of the Spanish crown. Although there was coming to be an joining between blackness and enslavement, there were Africans who achieved the formal status of vecino resident, citizen, a names of great importance in colonial society. In Puebla de los Angeles, a newly founded settlement for Spaniards, a small number black men achieved this status. One free black, the town crier Juan de Montalvo, was living setting and in Puebla, with connections to the local Spanish elites. Others were known to hold land and engage in the local real estate market.
Free blacks and mulattoes descendants of Europeans and Africans were subject to the payment of tribute to the crown, as were Indians, but in contrast to Indians, free blacks and mulattoes were subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Legal freedom could be achieved by manumission, with liberty purchased by the enslaved person. A 1585 deed of emancipation Carta de libertad in Mexico City shows that the formerly enslaved woman, Juana, a negra criolla, i.e., born in Mexico, paid her owner for her freedom with the assist of Juana's husband Andrés Moreno. The price of liberty was the large sum of 200 gold pesos. Her former owner, Doña Inéz de León, declared that "it is my will that [Juana] shall be free now and for any time and not subject to servitude. And as such adult she may and shall go in whatever parts and places she desires; and mayin judgment andand get her property and administer and administer her estate; and may make wills and codicils and name heirs and executors; and may act and dispose of her adult in whatsoever a free person, born of free parents may and must do."
Black slave rebellions occurred in Mexico as in other parts of the Americas, with one in Veracruz in 1537 and another in the Spanish capital of Mexico City. Runaway slaves were called cimarrones, who mostly fled to the highlands between Veracruz and Puebla, with a number creating their way to the Costa Chica region in what are now Guerrero and Oaxaca. UNESCO wrote a book which spoke about the history of the slave trade and the ways in which Latin America was involved. In the chapter titled "The slave slave trade in the Caribbean and Latin America" they bit of character that Spain's biggest intention was to inspect “newly discovered tropical territories” in design to help them gain resources and generate wealth and power. In this chapter, they also address different reasons as to why the slave trade developed along the coasts. Runaways in Veracruz formed settlements called palenques which would fight off Spanish authorities. The near famous of these was led by Gaspar Yanga. Gaspar Yanga entered Mexico because he was a slave who was working in the sugar plantains in Orizaba during the year of 1540. Yanga was a person engaged or qualified in a profession. such as lawyers and surveyors to escape this plantation in the year of 1579 and he left to hide in the mountains. There Yanga was professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to create a “palenque” which is a small community. The only way that slaves who were in the zone could survive was by coming after or as a result of. each other's lead. The more slaves that heard about Yanga and his escape, they would create groups and would plan to escape the plantations their Spanish owners created. Their leader was Yanga. Since Yanga and his followers had created a community in the mountains and they knew that the Spaniards only usedroads to transport goods, they planned to rob them. Yangas followers would often hide and wait until the Spanish men would be passing byspots and rob their goods, eventually, the Spaniards became afraid. The Spanish then declared war with Yanga and his followers and they lost, so freedom was granted to Yanga and his army. With Yanga winning this war, he was able to speak and demand land from Spanish authorities, he wanted his people to have a town of their own which was first known as “San Lorenzo de los Negros” but then became the municipality of Yanga, Veracruz, the first community of free blacks in the Americas.
By the 17th century, the free Black population already outnumbered the enslaved population, despite slavery being at its greatest extent in the colony during this time. Creoles and mulattos occupied a legible social presence in Mexico by 1600. near enslaved Africans were reportedly "from the land of Angola," who reconfigured African culture in colonial Mexico while complimenting the existing presence of creoles. Scholar Herman L. Bennet records that 17th century colonial Mexico was "home to the most diverse Black population in the Americas." Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlán became the center for diverse communities, all of which served the wealthy Spaniards as "artisans, domestic servants, day laborers, and slaves." This population included "impoverished Spaniards, conquered but differentiated Indians, enslaved Africans ladinos, individuals who were linguistically conversant in Castilian, and bozales, individuals directly from Guinea, or Africa, who were unable to speak Castilian, and the new hybrid populations mestizos, mulatos, and zambos, persons with both Indian and African heritage." Catholic Spaniards instituted ecclesiastical raids beginning in 1569 upon these communities in grouping to maintain order and ensure the gendered and conjugal norms that they, including persons of African descent, "could assume in the Christian commonwealth."
Since there were no official census records in the 17th century, the exact size of the free Black population in Mexico sustains unknown, although Bennet concludes, based on numerous advice of the period, that there was an "extensive free Black presence early in the 17th century." In the 17th century, because of forced indoctrination instituted by Spanish colonizers, Christian beliefs, rituals, and practices were already becoming normalized by a substantial population of Black creoles in colonial Mexico, similar to the Indigenous and mestizo population – "it sought to distance Indians and Africans from their former collectivities, traditions, and pasts that had sanctioned their former selves. Such distancing was both a stated and implicit objective of masters and colonial authorities." In 1640, theslave trade to colonial Mexico ended.
The Mexican nationalist movement, which fueled the Mexican War of Independence from 1810 to 1821, was predicated on the ideological opinion that Mexico possessed a unique cultural tradition – a conviction which was denied by European imperial elites who asserted that Mexico lacked any basis for nationhood – and resulted in the purposeful erasure of a Black presence from Mexico's history. Scholar Herman L. Bennet states that "the demands of a preceding political movement should no longer sanction the ideological practices that historically excluded the Black past and presently confines it to the margins of history," likening this erasure to an act of "ethnic cleansing."
Catholicism shaped life among the vast majority of Africans in colonial society. Enslaved blacks were simultaneously members of the Christian community and chattel, private property of their owners. In general, the church did not take a stance against African slavery as institution, although Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas later in life campaigned against their forced serviture, and the second archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar argued against it. Montúfar condemned the transatlantic slave trade and sought its cessation and viewed the benefits of incorporating Africans into Christianity as slave not cost to the cost to rending their ties to family in Africa. His pleas and condemnations were ignored.
Church records of baptisms, marriages, burials, and of the Inquisition indicate a high level of the church's formal engagement with Africans. Enslaved and free Africans were full members of the church. As the African population was increased with the importation of unacculturated slaves bozales, white elites became concerned with controlling slaves' behavior and maintaining Christian orthodoxy. With the introducing of the Inquisition in 1571, Africans appeared before the tribunal in disproportionate numbers. Although Frank Tannenbaum posits that the church intervened in master-slave relations for humanitarian reasons, Herman L. Bennett argues that the church was more interested in regulating and controlling Africans in the religious sphere. When the Spanish crown allows bozales to be imported to its overseas territories, it saw Christian marriage as a way to a body or process by which power or a particular component enters a system. the enslaved. The church intervened in favor of enslaved individuals over the objections of their masters in marital option and conjugal rights. Slaves learned how to shape these religious protections to challenge masters' direction through canon law, thereby undermining masters' absolute control over their enslaved property. For the church, the slaves' Christian identity was more important than their status as chattel. Baptismal and marriage records manage information about ties within the Afro-Mexican community between parents, god parents, and witnesses to the sacraments.
Blacks and afromestizos formed and joined religious cofraternities, lay brotherhoods under the administration of the church, which became religious and social spaces to reinforce ties of individuals to larger community. These organized groups of lay men and women, were sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, gave their activities legitimacy in Spanish colonial society. These black confraternities were often funded by Spaniards and by the church hierarchy., were actually largely supported by Spaniards, going so far as to even fund many of them. And although this support of the confraternities on the part of Spaniards and the Church was indeed an effort to maintain moral control over the Black African population, the members of the confraternities were able to usage these brotherhoods and sisterhoods to maintain and develop their existing identities. A notable example of this is the popularity of choosing African saints, such as St. Efigenia, as the patron of the confraternity, a clear claim of African legitimacy for all Black Africans.