The Black Armies of the South: A Historical Reconstruction of The Mexican War of Manumission and Independence (1810-1821)

[Nagó, sent by the Oricha of war, tells Morelos] “You have been chosen to return dignity to the oppressed Indians and Blacks, to their mestizo descendants, half-breeds and Mulattoes. You will unite all with your shouts, with your horse, and your sword. Changó’s waterspout, you will open the breach through which runs the river of the insurgents against oppression.”
Manuel Zapata Olivella

Morelos’ army was formed by the [Hermenegildo] Galeana, [Mariano] Matamoros and [Nicolás] Bravo brigades [….] Most of the soldiers were Southern Blacks and Mulattoes.
Uvaldo Vargas Martínez

The disciplined Mexican rebel Armies of the South, formed and led by the Afro-Mexican Catholic priest José María Morelos y Pavón and his cadre, were mainly composed of people identified as “Negros” (Blacks) or “Castas” (African offspring) by the Spanish colonial pigmentocracy. At their peek, the Black Armies of the South were 1,000 trained infantry and a little over 4,000 cavalry. The majority of soldiers were Blacks and Mulattoes from the South….(Vargas 56). Morelos and the main columns of the Armies of the South withstood a seventy-two-day siege in Cuautla (from February 19 to May 12, 1812) by the Viceregal Central Army of New Spain: eight thousand men under the command of Spanish General Felix María Calleja del Rey. Paradoxically, Morelos’ fame as “the supreme general of the insurgency” grew because of the heroic resistance in Cuautla (Vargas 75). Well documented and recognized is, “the heroic defense of Cuautla lifted the spirits of the independence supporters […] and filled the spirits of all Mexicans, even in Mexico City” (Vargas 75). The fundamental role of the Black Armies of the South in achieving manumission, independence and the forming of the new Nation is recognized, however their color has been erased from the national memory.
The Black Armies of the South were crucial in dismantling the three-hundred-year Spanish enslaving and racist structure. The Black or African-Mexican fundamental contributions to the building and establishing of the Nation must be taught and understood to help eradicate the colonial racism that still lingers surreptitiously and openly in various regions, institutions, and social sectors of Mexico, and beyond. The Black accomplishments need to be re-injected into the Mexican national memory in full color in order to assist to end the massive Black endo-phobia that affects, and disenfranchises, a considerable number of Mexicans. Public and private school textbooks should speak louder of the African and Afrodescendant Ancestors of Mexico and their deeds. Mexican children ought to learn that a major portion of the mothers and fathers of the Mexican nation, our Ancestors, were considered “Black” and therefore inferior by the Europeans. And, that this form of violence was confronted and defeated by the Ancestors who rallied under a black flag and ribbons of sky blue and white signaling their devotion to Guadalupe/Yemayá, the Black Madonna of Mexico.
In addition to our First Nations and Asian roots, recognizing our African-ness will assist us to develop stronger global relations with the people of Africa and the African Diaspora in other places of the Americas and the planet. Moreover, the present historical reconstruction destroys the official myth that Blacks during the Colonial Period (1519-1821) were few and disappeared by integration.
This work traces the emergence of the Black Armies of the South from the moment Morelos leaves his church in the hot lands of Carácuaro, Michoacán with twenty-five “dark and humble men” to the siege of Cuautla in 1812, where he and the major portion of the Black Armies of the South were trapped by the 8,000-men Viceregal Army of the Center. The Black Armies of the South and the consequences of their struggles as an integral part of the independent Mexican national life will be discussed after a brief historical profile of the population of colonial Mexico from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in order to contextualize the problem and to enable us to see that in nineteenth-century Mexico, just as today, there was an important Black presence.
The population of New Spain in 1779, thirty-one years before the armed phase of the Mexican independence-manumission movement started, is reported at 4,500,000 (Abad y Queipo 61). At least six-tenths, or 2,700,000 were classified as “Castas” (the progeny of African, First Nations, Asian and European relations). In the eve of the struggle, the population of New Spain had grown to over six million (Aguirre, La población 233).
Further confusion regarding the make-up of the colonial population was caused by the particular population distribution presented by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. Nevertheless, the 1810 Noriega census cited by Aguirre divides the 6,147,355 population of New Spain at the start of the war of independence from Spain thus: 1,338,706 “Castas,” and 10,000 Blacks; 3,676,282 “Indians;” 1,107,367 “Criollos;” and 15,000 Europeans (La población 232). Among the “Castas,” 500,000 are noted as “Mulattoes.” For the purpose of this work, the 500,000 mulattoes and 10,000 blacks are sufficient to document a substantial Black presence in nineteenth-century Mexico. However, being that Mulattoes were the offspring of the relations between, “español y negra” (Spanish male and Black woman), where were the offspring of Black males and First Nations women accounted for? What was their population at the time?
The Trans-Atlantic male/female ratio of the enslaved Africans taken to New Spain starting in the sixteenth century was 2:1. The 500,000 Mulattoes of the census above theoretically were the children of Spanish males and African women because at the time “Mulatto” signified this. Due to the availability of reproductive-age African males and First Nations women, it is believed that relations between African males and First Nations women prevailed. This is deduced, in part, given the incessant Royal Spanish edicts prohibiting African-First Nations relations. The children of African males and First Nations women remained with their mothers and grew up as First Nations: Nahua, Mixtec, Maya, etc. Outside of the First Nations reservations, they were labeled as “Mulatto-Pardos.” Aguirre reports,
The Mulatto-Pardo was the product of the mix between the Black male with the Indian woman. Mulatto-Pardos were the most abundant in New Spain and the color of their skin produced the most varied and curious naming. [….] In general terms, we can assert that they were called Cochos en Michoacán, Cambujos in Oaxaca, Chinos in Puebla, Jarochos in Veracruz, Loros in Chiapas and Zambos in Guerrero; just to mention the most common. (La población 169)
Blacks and their offspring were to be found all over the Colony. According to William B. Taylor, “At the end of the eighteenth century, 381,941 free Negroes and mulattoes, many of whom were descendants of slaves who had grasped freedom by deserting their masters, were identified in a wide area of the highlands as well as the coastal regions of central Mexico” (440). From the tax reports of the Mexican National Archives, he cites the following Black distribution: Mexico 46,813; Puebla 11,304; Veracruz 5,849; Oaxaca 16,767; Potosi 49,140; Arispe 10,070; Valladolid 48,768; Guanajuato 42,868; Guadalajara 63,009; Zacatecas 58,317; Merida 29,033 (440, n4.). These numbers are dramatic when considering that the reported European Spanish population of New Spain in 1810 was 15,000.
While some Africans arrived as free men from the onset of the Spanish venture, they were the exception. One such case is Juan Garrido, the “Black Conquistador” who planted the first wheat grains in Mexico City, and who had a wife and children and a job as guardian of the city’s water supply; but never held a significant position. Throughout the Colonial Period in Mexico, some African offspring were freed by being born of free wombs (First Nations mainly); their Spanish fathers buying their freedom; or their masters. Regardless of their free/slave status, Blacks were barred from administrative positions and assigned and performed the most labor-intensive occupations.
In the eve of the war of 1810-1821, most Blacks in New Spain were agriculturalists, cowboys, miners, muleteers, port-dock workers, laborers, construction workers, militias, butchers, cooks, bakers, shoe makers, carpenters, tailors, weavers, candy makers, fruit and nut-candy vendors, enchilada makers and aguas frescas vendors, fruit and vegetable merchants, tobacco traffickers, banditos, etc. They lived in ports, urban centers, villages, mining towns, plantations, or on the road. Aguirre notes that,
by 1793, the contradictions of the Spanish economy became obvious where they would “destroy harvests or let them rot in the granaries for lack of markets, while the population of shifters, continuously increasing, was kept on the brink of starvation. The Colonial government was constantly preoccupied with the behavior of numerous shifters, mainly Afro-Mexican. The government was incapable of solving its own desperate situation. On the one hand, it greatly feared the Afro-Mexicans. On the other, the government believed that increasing the oppression (that it had been exercising since a while back) would lessen the danger. (La población 232)
The Insurgents, but in particular the Black Armies of the South, drew their strength from the populations mentioned above.
Word from Josefa Ortíz de Domínguez got to Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the erudite criollo Catholic priest of Dolores, Guanajuato, that their planned conspiracy had been discovered. This forced Hidalgo to issue a call to arms during an unscheduled early mass on 16 September 1810. Thereafter, Hidalgo and six-hundred-freedom-fighters, most of the men from Dolores, poorly armed and clad, unruly and undisciplined “Castas” and “Indians,” began their march toward Mexico City. In the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as seen by the symbol of their flag (the Black Madonna mother of the Americas), these first Mexican nationals were determined to obtain freedom and equality under the law.
Hidalgo and his men marched through San Miguel and Celaya. Then on 28 September, they arrived in Guanajuato, one of the most important mining towns of New Spain (others were Zacatecas, Pachuca, Taxco, Real del Catorce, and San Luis Potosi). By that time, Hidalgo’s army had grown to 30,000. They apprehended and slaughtered four hundred Spanish and wealthy Criollos (most of the European and Euro-descendant men of the town who had barricaded themselves inside of the fortified public granary). “Word of the horrors of Guanajuato soon spread throughout Mexico. The authorities in Mexico City quickly realized that they had a major uprising on their hands and began organizing its defense, which would clash with Hidalgo again on Monte de las Cruces.”
On October 30, 1810, Hidalgo and Ignacio Allende’s forces, which had swelled to 80,000 clashed with a Spanish force led by General Torcuato Trujillo. Trujillo had one thousand foot soldiers and 400 cavalry. The rebel army overwhelmed the Spaniards and captured their two cannons. Hidalgo, against Allende’s counsel, decided to retreat and not attack Mexico City. The reasons, speculated by historians, are many. Among them, is that Hidalgo feared General Calleja’s well-armed army of four thousand veterans; or that he wanted to spare the population of Mexico City from the mob. Perhaps, Hidalgo feared for the thousands of Spanish/Criollo lives. Hidalgo was an educated man; he read French and surely knew of the fate of the European French in Haiti a few years earlier. After all, Hidalgo’s previous campaigns pointed in that direction. Historians generally agree however, that Hidalgo and Allende’s troops could have easily taken Mexico City.
General Calleja del Rey caught up with the Insurgent army in the entrance of Guadalajara, January 17, 1811. The explosion of a rebel munitions wagon sent Hidalgo’s army into disarray. Hidalgo and Allende fled toward the United States. Hidalgo traveled as Allende’s prisoner. The disputes they had had regarding how to conduct a war had climaxed (Hidalgo was a priest and Allende was a trained warrior).
In the north, they were betrayed by local insurrection leader Ignacio Elizondo and captured. In short order, they were given to Spanish authorities and sent to the city of Chihuahua to stand trial. Also captured were insurgent leaders Juan Aldama, Mariano Abasolo and Mariano Jiménez, men who had been involved in the conspiracy since the start. (Minster)
Hidalgo was executed 30 July 1811. “The heads of Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama and Jiménez were preserved and hung from the four corners of the granary of Guanajuato as a warning to those who would follow in their footsteps.”
Nine months earlier, on October 20, 1810, Hidalgo had met with Morelos in Indaparapeo, Michoacán. During that meeting, Hidalgo entrusted Morelos with recruiting people from the South. Two days later, Morelos left Curácuaro on October 22, 1810, with twenty-five men for the first of four campaigns. Following Hidalgo’s and his cadre’s capture and execution, Morelos rose to become the supreme Insurgent commander. As supreme commander for three years, he led 36 important battles “almost always fighting against the most distinguished Royalist commanders,” accumulating 25 victories. During his four campaigns, beyond “grave political worries,” Morelos and the Black Armies of the South caused the Spanish viceregal government loses of forty million pesos (Vargas 31).
According to one of Morelos’ top biographers, Mexican historian Uvaldo Vargas Martínez (1913-1972), fundamental to note is that Morelos was the first Insurgent chief that truly organized the units of the freedom army. He provided them with “a true military character with a group of generals […] and competent officers.” In addition, he made gradual efforts to provide the men with adequate training, uniforms and weaponry (32). The Black Armies of the South emerged in contrast to Hidalgo’s disorganized and undisciplined mob. What has been obscured, as mentioned earlier, is that the troops of the Armies of the South were mainly Blacks.
The Black Armies of the South operated primarily in four zones: Valley of the Balsas River; Oaxaca Valley; Austral Slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Pacific Coast; and the region from the Gulf of Mexico slopes to the valleys, waterfalls and buttresses of the Eastern Sierra Madre. At the time, most of New Spain’s small villages were practically defenseless. Ben Vinson, III cites that “in many of the central coastal lowlands the Black population was greater than the white at a ratio of 10:1” (“Los milicianos” 96).
In the hot lands, there were small groups of undisciplined Royalist militias in some villages of relative importance and small contingents in important towns, cities or ports. The Royalists militia companies in some of these towns were formed by groups that seldom met for military instruction, “weapons were stored in the captains’ houses and the majority of officers resided in the capitals or major towns. They held these jobs for prestige and had never met their soldiers” (Vargas 34).
Vinson, in his now classic work, Bearing Arms for his Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico reports of the Black presence, including that of free-Colored militias. A closer reading, for the purpose of this work, exhibits the Black presence in various villages and towns of the route taken by Morelos during his first campaign. According to Vinson, along the Pacific Coast, over one thousand Colored militia families in the province of Zacatula (Zihuatanejo, Ixtapa, Papanoa, and Petacalco) were petitioning for lands (101). As royal census recorder, Joseph Antonio de Villa Señor y Sánchez, in 1745 (7), informed that Acapulco had a population of “four hundred families of Chinos, Mulattoes and Blacks” (“Chinos” in this context is short for “co-chinos” “pigs”); or about sixteen hundred “casta” people. During the Colonial Period, given the deadliness of the hot lands, Spaniards and Criollos lived mainly in fortified towns in temperate climates.
During their first campaign, the Black Armies of the South began to take shape to become the fighting force whose bellicose actions were crucial for the end of slavery, gaining independence from Spain and the emergence of Mexico as a nation. By November 13, 1810, the Black Armies of the South that attacked Acapulco had grown to 2,000. The majority of said men lacked proper weaponry; but their good will and disciplined obedience to Morelos and cadre, “made up for the evident deficiencies” (Vargas 37).
With the Burbon military reforms of 1762 and 1793, the colonial Black militias’ structure and their system of privileges changed (Vinson, “Los milicianos” 106). Many units throughout New Spain were disbanded and these soldiers and their relatives were stripped of all privileges. In southern New Spain, there were disgruntled Black and Afrodescendants who possessed military training, who new the roads of New Spain, were excellent horse riders, and became convinced that the time was ripe for the Insurgent cause. The Insurgents envisioned a nation where all people, regardless of ethnic background, would be full citizens with equal rights under the law.
The first campaign lasted from October 22, 1810 until August 16, 1811, when the Armies of the South captured Chilapa and four hundred rifles and four cannons. They marched from Cuarácuaro through Zacatula, Patatlán, San Luis, Tecpan, Coyuca, Veladero, Acapulco, El Marqués, Tres palos, La Brea, Chichihualco, Chilpancingo, Tixtla, and Chilapa. In Chilapa, the Armies of the South stayed for three months to train and be better clad.
Mid-November 1811, The Black Armies of the South initiated their Second Campaign. Following the battle of Chiautla and Izúcar, instead of going to Puebla, as expected by the Royalists, they retreated to take Cuautla to ensure that all the south lands were under Insurgent control. Cuautla is located in the center of the hot lands of the current state of Morelos and its region. From the start of the Colonial period, Cuautla was the site of sugar cane plantations whose labor force included enslaved Africans and their offspring up to the time of the war of manumission and independence in the nineteenth century. According to a 1793 census, 5,215 Mulatto-Pardos; 1,539 mestizos; 462 Criollos; and 1,324 Spanish formed Cuautla’s population (Aguirre, La población 226).
Nineteen years after said census, from February 19 to May 12, 1812, in Cuautla, the Black Armies of the South of about 8,000 “Blacks, Indians and Mulattoes” (Vargas 63) withstood a heroic seventy-two day siege known as the Siege of Cuautla. Narciso Mendoza, a 12 year-old child of Los Emulantes, distinguished himself during the first battles of Cuautla and became known as the “Gunner Child” (Vargas 60). The Emulantes were a group of “Black, Mulatto and Indian” youth collaborators formed by Morelos in Cuautla. Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, Morelos’ son, was in charge of Los Emulantes.
The Black Armies of the South broke the siege. The Insurgents had planned to march quietly out of Cuautla during the wee hours of the morning. The plan was discovered and the Insurgents were attacked furiously. Cuautla’s inhabitants, who were trying to abandon Cuautla with the Insurgents, suffered the worst. “The town’s people received the fury of the Royal Cavalry who decapitated everyone found in their way” (Vargas 71). The Black Armies of the South were decimated and Gabriel de Yermo, owner of various sugar and cattle haciendas, captured Nicolas Bravo, a top Insurgent commander. Cuautla was “savagely ransacked” (Vargas 72) and burned to the ground by the Royalist Army. This behavior reveals, in part, the source of hatred underlying the savagery of the post siege acts of the Spanish soldiers and their lackeys; the majority of the population of Cuautla, as well as the Insurgent Armies of the South, in the eyes of the Spanish Royal Army were balking Blacks.
Paradoxically, the Black Armies of the South acquired fame from their heroic resistance. Their saga uplifted the spirit of Mexicans (Castas) throughout the land and sent major liberation and equality shock-waves throughout the Spanish realm. Jorge Gurría Lacroix recounts that Calleja expressed:
If the tenacity and activity of Cuautla’s defenders were morally directed towards a just cause, some day they would deserve a distinguished place in history. Harassed by our troops and afflicted by need, they manifest enthusiasm at all times. They bury their dead with carnavalesque dances and drunkenness. When they return from their frequent escapades, successful or not, they impose the death penalty on anyone who may speak of misfortunes or defeat.
Calleja’s statement, the Saint Inquisition’s trials and the Cadiz Constitution (1812) as explained hereafter, are windows into the history of the nineteenth-century-Catholic-Spanish-noble-male-patriarchal mentality. Among the Spanish of the time, history making was the exclusive province of European males. Calleja viewed the freedom and equality cause of the Mexicans (whom he saw as Colored) as immoral and unjust; therefore, undeserving of a place in history. Calleja, among others, could not relate to the Ancestral spirits of Chango and Huchilopostli, major symbols of resistance against the enslavers. The rumba spirit of the burial rituals that accompanied the Black Armies of the South produced scorn in Calleja. The future Viceroy of New Spain lacked the vision to perceive that Mexicans were protected by Guadalupe-Yemayá, a Black Madonna; and that at all costs, they were determined to recover from the Spanish and their institutions the right to chart their own destiny.
The black flags adopted by the Black Armies of the South signal Black rebellion against the established “white” order that was based on a make-believe pigmentocracy. The sky-blue and white colors of the ribbons which symbolized the peoples’ devotion to the Guadalupe Virgen –La Virgen Morena, interpreted with the light of the Ancestors, cited by Manuel Zapata Olivella in his novel Chango el gran putas, brings to mind Yemayá, the Ocean Mother and mother of all Orishas. As an archetype of maternity, invoked through the ribbons at the time of the birth of the new nation, this view becomes relevant. Yemayá is associated with the number seven. Mexicans recognize Seven African Powers.
From the sixteenth century onward, a number of Saint Inquisition actions throughout New Spain against Africans and their offspring for “witchcraft,” “divination,” and “superstition,” among others, is well documented (Aguirre, Medicina 333-376). Many of these trials occurred in the area currently known as the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Guerrero, México, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz, and is also the region where the majority of the troops of the Black Armies of the South were recruited. These persecuted practices were part of the Afro-Mexican world visions; similar practices elsewhere in the Americas are: Santería, Candombe, Candomblé, etc. Divination is at the center of such religious practices. Orula, one of the Seven African Powers recognized in Mexico, is the God of divination. The others are: Ochún, Yemayá, Obatala, Ogum, Elegua and Changó. The Spanish and their lackeys consider all of the above heresy and a thing of the Devil.
The nineteenth-century-Spanish-racism against Blacks and Pardos is also documented in the Constitution of Cadiz (1812),
Afrodescendants were excluded [i.e. the so-called “Castas,”] from the category of Spanish citizens (Article 22), so that the “base of representation” for Peninsular Spain would surpass that of American Spain [the Spanish colonies throughout the Americas]. According to the demographic knowledge of the epoch, it was calculated that [Spanish] America had a population of 15 to 16 million inhabitants while Spain had no more than 10 million. However, discounting the disloyal Indians and Castas from the electoral base, the peninsular numerical superiority in comparison to America would be manifest. The discriminatory character of this measure exposes white racism toward Blacks and Pardos. (Tateishi 11).
The Afrodescendants throughout the Spanish Americas, including New Spain, reacted in concert to the centuries-old-white-Spanish-pigmentocratic-rule. The Black Armies of the South began gathering in Curácuaro, Michoacán, October 22, 1810 (Vargas 31). There, twenty-five braves rallied with Morelos as commander. They were committed to the end, to the just cause of manumission, independence and equal rights for all, without exception. August 10, 1812, in Tehuacán, Puebla, Morelos became the de facto Supreme Commander of the Insurgents and the Black Armies of the South, the central force of the Insurgency. This would remain until 5 November 1815, when he was captured in Tezmalaca. Morelos was executed 22 December 1815, in San Cristobal Ecatepec, today State of Mexico.
To continue their fight, the Black Armies of the South adopted guerrilla-style warfare. Some of the commanders retired, but others such as Vicente “el negro” Guerrero with Black-Indian-Black contingents, kept the fight alive in the mountains of Southern Mexico and in the Spanish Colonial supply routes between Mexico City-Acapulco and Mexico City-Veracruz during the “Period of Resistance” until 1821. Guerrero became commander of the Insurgency and the leader who signed the treaty with Agustin de Iturbide that consummated the independence from Spain. The crucial role the Black Armies of the South played in the wars to: end slavery; gain independence from Spain; and enable the emergence of Mexico as a nation is hereby claimed.
Official historians have forged a narrative that “discolors” the history of the Mexican Nation. With the racial miscegenation myth-turned-ideology, Criollos whitened Mexico’s national history according to their interests. By calling the Mexican population “mestizos,”—instead of Castas-- Criollos dealt a master-hand to manipulate the national memory. Criollos and their lackeys re-invented the Mexican “casta” population as “mestizos.” In this manner, they veiled the three-hundred-years of Spanish pigmentocratic rule and Africanization of New Spain. Criollos obscured the deep-rooted torrent of African experiences and memories that created and nurtured, in a crucial way, the Mexican Spirit. Criollos obscured the deeds and zagas of the Black-Indians who constructed Mexico outside the walls of the rulers’ towns and villages.
During the colonial epoch, just as now, the majority of the population of New Spain, including Africans and African offspring inhabited the Central and Southern regions of the land. “Free” Afrodescendants (Pardos, Mulattoes, Coyotes, Lobos, etc.) heavily populated the areas where the Black Armies of the South emerged. Afrodescendants provided the colonial labor force that fueled the Colony for centuries. In the eighteenth century, they formed a major portion of the mass of vagrants that began to shake the colonial stability. As a result, during the Colonial Epoch, Black-offspring, or Afro-Mexicans, were recruited to man the militias of Pardos and Mulattoes who defended Spanish interests. Many Blacks and First Nations fought against the Insurgents; others stayed aloof.
Spanish Vasque plantation owner Gabriel de Yermo, the leader of the Spanish party against the Insurgency, led hundreds of Blacks he had “freed” from his estates against the Insurgents. These newly freed Blacks were now free to defend Yermo’s interests against fellow Afrodescendants. After all, among other estates, he owned the Hacienda de San Gabriel, the biggest sugar plantation of the time and held the monopoly of beef and aguardiente (sugarcane rum) supplies for Mexico City.
The crucial role of the Afro-Mexican Insurgents is “discolored” in the Mexican official national history. In the nineteenth century, all who were not Spanish, Criollos or First Nations, began to be called “mestizos” to supposedly dismantle the Spanish pigmentocracy, i.e. the Willy Lynch ideology was applied in reverse. Thus, Mexicans (the Pardo-Mulatto offspring of Africans, First Nations, Asians and European relations born in the Americas) began to be referred to as “mestizos” in the national discourse. Nevertheless, they were (and still are) not in the same social or ethnic footing as European Spanish. In addition, Criollos and their lackeys usurped the hard-fought name “Mexican” and with it justified themselves as the natural inheritors and rulers of the new Nation. This same European psychological technology was exported to other places of the Americas where the African pride and deeds have been blatantly denigrated, obscured, erased, etc.
Mexicans of today descend from New Spain’s colonial populations, and a few recent migrations from other lands, but few Mexicans know and proudly recognize our African heritage. This, in a crucial way, is the product of the Spanish and Criollo systematic stigmatization of all that is African in Mexico and beyond. The loss of the Mexican African memory has to do, among other issues, with an education system that eludes the proper mention of the African legacies. Such as the role the Mexican Pardos/Mulattoes, who embodied the major part of the Black Armies of the South, played to obtain Mexican freedom from enslavement, Mexican independence from Spain, and the Mexican emergence as the republic of the United Mexican States in 1821. The above history, narrated with its full colors, is mandatory to truncate the pigmentocratic colonial mentality that still rules over many Mexican minds—of people who are far from white-- against the descendants of the Black-Indians who made possible the birth of the nation nearly two hundred years ago.


Appendix

Mexican patriot, b. at Valladolid (now called Morelia in his honor), Mexico, on 30 September 1765; shot at San Cristóbal Ecatepec on 22 December 1815. His father died while he was still a youth, and, being left destitute, he worked for some time as a muleteer, until he succeeded in obtaining admission, as an extern, to the College of San Nicolas at Valladolid, the rector of which institution was at that time the reverend Don Miguel Hidalgo. Having been ordained priest, he was appointed parish priest of Carácuaro and Nucupétaro in Michoacan. When Hidalgo left Valladolid for Mexico City, after uttering his Grito de Dolores, Morelos offered himself to him at Charo, and Hidalgo commissioned him to raise troops for the cause of Independence on the southern coast, and to get possession of the port of Acapulco. Returning to his parish, he collected a few ill-armed men, marched towards Zacatula, and, following the coast, reached Acapulco with some 3000 men whom he had recruited on the way and supplied with arms taken from the royalists. After defeating Paris, who had come from Oaxaca with the object of relieving Acapulco, he left part of his forces to continue the siege and made for Chilpancingo. Forming a junction there with the brothers Galiana and Bravo, he marched to Chilapa and captured that town. As the viceroy, Venegas, was keeping all the colonial troops occupied with the siege of Zitacuaro, Morelos, who had been joined at Jantetelco by his fellow-priest Mariano Matamoros-thenceforward his right hand in almost every enterprise-organized four armies, which he distributed in various parts of Mexico. But the easy surrender of Zitacuaro to Calleja, and the approach of that commander with all his forces, placed Morelos, with some 4000 men, in the situation of being besieged at Cuautla by 8000 of the best troops of the viceroyalty. With indomitable courage, fighting day after day, Morelos held out for seventy-three days, until at last he succeeded in breaking away with all that remained of his army. He then passed over to Huajuapan, from thence to Orizaba and so on to Oaxaca, capturing all those places, and defeating every body of troops that encountered him.
On 14 September, 1813, the first Independent Congress assembled at Chilpancingo and there passed the decree: "That dependence upon the Spanish Throne has ceased forever and been dissolved. That the said Congress neither professes nor recognizes any religion but the Catholic, nor will it permit or tolerate the practice, public or private, of any other; that it will protect with all its power, and will watch over, the purity of the Faith and its dogmas and the maintenance of the regular bodies". From Chilpancingo he turned towards his native Valladolid, which was then held by the royalist leaders Iturbide and Llano; driven back there he moved on Chupio. At Puruarán his brave companion Matamoros was captured, and was shot at Valladolid, 3 February, 1814. These reverses were followed by the recapture of Oaxaca by the royalist troops. The independent Congress of Chilpancingo had removed to Apatzingan, where it promulgated the Constitution of 22 October, 1814. Then it determined to remove again from Apatzingan to Tehuacán, Morelos accompanied it to protect it, and engaged in the Battle of Tesmalaca, where he was made prisoner.
Having been taken to Mexico City, on 22 November, 1815, proceedings were instituted against him by both the military and the ecclesiastical tribunal, and an advocate was appointed for him. The principal charges against him were: (1) Having committed the crime of treason, failing in his fealty to the king, by promoting independence and causing it to be proclaimed in the Congress assembled at Chilpancingo. Morelos answered to this that, as there was no king in Spain (Ferdinand VII having been taken to France, a prisoner), he could not have been false to the king; and that, as to the declaration of independence, of the said Congress, he had concurred in it by his vote because he believed that the king would not return from France and that, even if he should return, he had rendered himself unworthy of fealty by handing over Spain and its colonies to France like a flock of sheep. (2) Having ordered a number of prisoners to be shot. He declared that he had done this in obedience to orders sent first by the Junta at Zitacuaro and then by the congress at Chilpancingo, by way of reprisals, moreover, because the viceregal Government had not accepted the exchange of prisoners proposed instead of General Matamoros. (3) Having ignored excommunication fulminated against him and the Independents by the bishops and the Inquisition. He declared that he had not considered these excommunications valid, believing that they could not be imposed upon an independent nation, such as the insurgents must be considered to constitute, so long as they (the sentences) were not those of a pope or an oecumenical council. (4) Having celebrated Mass during the time of the Revolution. He denied this, since he had regarded himself as under irregularity from the time when blood began to be shed in the territory under his command.
The case having been concluded in the military tribunal that court requested of the ecclesiastical tribunal the degradation and surrender of the condemned priest, in accordance with the formalities prescribed by the canons; the ecclesiastical tribunal granted both requests, and communicated its decision to the viceroy. It was at this point that the tribunal of the Inquisition intervened, requesting the viceroy, Calleja (who had succeeded Venegas) to delay execution of the sentence four days, and citing Morelos to a public auto de fe on 27 November. On that occasion, with all the formalities proper to such proceedings, twenty-three charges were preferred against him: the Inquisitors added to the charges brought at the former trial others which they believed themselves competent to try, as implying, according to them, suspicions of heresy. These were: (1) Having received Communion in spite of the excommunications which he had incurred. Morelos answered that he had communicated because he did not believe the excommunications valid. (2) Not reciting the Divine Office while he was in prison. He declared that he could not recite it in the dungeon for want of light. (3) Having been lax in his conduct. This he granted, but denied that scandal had been given, since it was not publicly known that he had begotten children. (4) Having sent his son to the United States to be educated in Protestant principles. He declared that, so far from wishing the son whom he had sent to the United States—as he could not place him in any institution within the kingdom—to be brought up in the doctrines of the Reformation, he had directed him to be placed in a college where he would not run that risk. In spite of these arguments, the tribunal decided: "that the priest Don José Morelos was a formal negative heretic, a favourer of heretics, a persecutor and disturber of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, a profaner of the holy sacraments, a traitor to God, the king, and the pope, and as such was declared forever irregular, deposed from all offices and benefices, and condemned to be present at his auto in the garb of a penitent, with collarless cassock and a green candle, to make a general confession and a spiritual retreat; and that, in the unexpected and very remote case of his life being spared, he was condemned for the remainder of it to confinement in Africa at the disposition of the inquisitor general, with the obligation of reciting every Friday in the year the penitential psalms and the rosary of the Blessed Virgin, and to have his sambenito (penitential inscription) placed in the cathedral church of Mexico as that of a reconciled formal heretic".
It was one of the decrees of the Inquisition which have done most to damage the reputation of that tribunal in New Spain. The proceedings lacked the legality and judicial correctness which should have marked them. Morelos was out of the jurisdiction of the Inquisition both as an Indian and as having been already tried and condemned by another, competent, tribunal; nor was there any reason in condemning him for charges to which he had made satisfactory replies. It may be that the tribunal, re-established in New Spain only a little more than one year before this, and carried away by an indiscreet zeal, was unwilling to miss the opportunity presented by so famous a case to ingratiate itself with the Government and call attention to its activity.
Morelos, degraded in pursuance of his sentence, according to the ritual provided by the Church in such cases, was transferred from the prison of the Inquisition to the citadel of Mexico and put in irons. On 22 December he was taken from the city to San Cristobal Ecatepec, where he was shot. As a guerilla leader, Morelos must occupy a prominent place among those who struggled and died for Mexican independence. He appeared at the moment when the first great army of the Independents had been routed at the Bridge of Calderon, and when its first leaders were being executed at Chihuahua, and he achieved his first successes in the rugged mountains of the south. He began his campaigns without materials of war of any kind, expecting to take what he needed from the enemy, and no one ever used the resources of war better than he did, for the extension of the national territory. Profoundly astute and reserved, he confided his plans not even to those of his lieutenants for whom he felt the most affectionate regard. The stamps of genius is discernible in the astonishing sagacity with which he handled the most difficult problems of government, and in multiplied instances of his rapid and unerring insight into actual conditions. When, after the ill-starred campaign of Valladolid, the hour of adversity came upon him, he faced disaster as serenely as he had previously accepted good fortune, and, in that famous retreat upon Tehuacan, deliberately gave his own life to save the lives o
his associates in the Independent Government.


Bibliography


Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. Medicina y Magia: el proceso de aculturación en la estructura colonial. México, D. F.: Fondo, 1992.
_____. La población negra de México. Estudio etnohistórico. México, D.F.: Fondo, 1972 (1st ed. 1946).


CRUZ BARNEY, Óscar. “LAS MILICIAS EN LA NUEVA ESPAÑA: LA OBRA DEL SEGUNDO CONDE DE REVILLAGIGEDO (1789-1794).”

http://www.ejournal.unam.mx/ehn/ehn34/EHN003400004.pdf 1-16-2011

Hernández Cuevas, Marco Polo. África en el Carnaval Mexicano. México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2005.


Taylor, William B. “The Foundation of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los morenos de Amapa.” The Americas. Vol. 26 No 4 (April, 1970): 439-446.

The Mexican Colonial Term “Chino” Is a Referent of Afrodescendant

“The descendants of negroes and Indian women bear at Mexico, Lima and even at the Havannah the strange name of chino [….]”
Alexander von Humboldt

Apparently unaware of the existence of at least three Spanish language homonyms of “chino” with different significations, times and places of origin, there is a considerable research corpus inaccurately translating as “Chinese” the colonial name “chino,” found in Mexican colonial documents from the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the most part, those “chinos” are Afro-Mexicans. “Chino” in New Spain archival records is a referent to people of African heritage whose lineage was perceived by the Spanish as tainted by African blood and therefore they were nicknamed “chino” comparing them to “dirty pigs.” Although the animal connotation has disappeared, the Afro implication of the term has survived until present. The homonym “chino,” meaning Chinese, arose in the nineteenth century in Manila, Philippines as a synonym of Sangley, the name given to Chinese merchants up to that time.
The distortion appears to have originated with Alexander von Humboldt during his visit to New Spain in 1800. Although von Humboldt understood the meaning of the term “chino” as applied in Mexico at the time, he failed to realize that he was dealing with homonyms of “chino” when he mentioned that it was “strange” to call Afrodescendants “Chinese.” In the end, von Humboldt reported that “chino” in Mexico referred to the offspring of Blacks and “Indian women” [First Nations herein after], (184). John Black (1783-1855) translated von Humboldt’s essay from French to English for the 1811 publication. While applying the term “Chinese” to Afrodescendants made no sense, John Black overlooked the problem as he translated, “On the coasts of Caraccas, and, as appears from the laws, even in New Spain, they [meaning “chinos”] are called zambos. This last denomination is now principally limited to the descendants of a negro and a female mulatto, or a negro and a Chinese female” (von Humboldt, 184) (emphasis added). John Black mistranslated “chino” as “Chinese” and “china” as “Chinese female” which in context were referents of male and female African offspring. To avoid misinterpretations, John Black should have translated “china” as “china female” and not “Chinese female.” Magnus Morner cites von Humboldt where he states, “The offspring of Indian and Negro were called chinos in both Mexico and Peru” (59 n.22). Von Humboldt was an observer in situ as he traveled in the American Spanish colonies from 1799 to 1804.
Within context, it is clear that von Humboldt is reporting on the mixes of Blacks, First Nations and Europeans,
“The casts of Indian and African blood preserve the odour peculiar to the cutaneous transpiration of those two primitive races. The Peruvian Indians […] have formed three words to express the odour of the European, the Indian American and the negro […] Moreover, the mixtures in which the color of the children becomes deeper than that of the mother, are called salta-atrás, or back-leaps ” (184).
The Americana: A Universal Reference Library, in the section entitled “Mexico: History and Modern Development” reports in 1912,
In 1827 the British Minister to Mexico divided the population into seven classes: (1.) Old Spanish or Gachupines. (2.) Creoles or Mixed whites of pure European race, born in America and regarded as natives. (3.) Indians or indigenous copper colored races. (4) Mestizos or mixed whites and Indians gradually merging into Creoles. (5.) Mulattoes or descendants of whites and negroes. (6.) Zambos or Chinos, descendants of negroes and Indians. (7.) African negroes, either manumitted or slaves. The first and last three classes he claimed to be pure and to have “given rise, in their various combinations” to the fourth class, which in turn was subdivided many times. (Beach 12-13) (emphasis added)
The same source explains that in 1900 Mexico had a foreign born population of 57,507 of which: “2,565 were Germans; 278 Arabs; 234 Austro-Hungarians; 140 Canadians; 2,721 Cubans; 2,834 Chinese; 16,258 Spaniards; 3,976 French; 3,325 Greeks; 5,804 Guatemalans; 2,845, English; 2,564 Italians; 15,265 North Americans; 391 Turks” (Beach 12)(emphasis added).
The misguided research mentioned at the onset, disregards New Spain’s meaning of “chino” as a referent of African-First Nations offspring. Said work ignores that the Spanish tagged as “chinos” the enslaved people who arrived in Mexico through Acapulco, including Africans, given their perceived “impure” lineage. Instead, those studies have applied “chino” as meaning “Chinese” indiscriminately to all non-European people who arrived in New Spain via Manila. With this light, the suggestion that 40,000 to 100,000 Chinese arrived in New Spain during the colonial period, besides being a physical impossibility is founded on a mistranslation.
A case in point is “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image” (herein after referred to as “The Chinos in New Spain”) published in the Journal of World History, Volume 20, Number 1 (2009): 35 to 67. “The Chinos in New Spain” seeks to obtain recognition of the “Chinese” roots of Mexico. The essay’s main thesis is that during the almost 250 years (1571-1815) of the Philippine-Acapulco trade, Spanish galleons transported the,
“first wave” of transpacific Asian migration, [composed of] travelers from Cathay, Cipango (Japan), the Philippines, various kingdoms in Southeast Asia, and India [who] were known collectively in New Spain as chinos (Chinese) or indios chinos (Chinese Indians), as the word chino/china became synonymous with Asia. (35)
“The Chinos in New Spain” and like research, if left unchallenged, would erase a major portion of African Mexican archival history from the national memory and lead to further misinterpretation of Mexican historical data. Paradoxically, “The Chinos in New Spain” cites La población negra de México (The Black Population of Mexico) by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán to support its premise. Notably, La población has a full paragraph dedicated to explaining that the name “Chino” in Colonial Puebla, Mexico was a referent to the offspring of a Black male and a First Nations woman; and that “circa the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mulatto and Chino were synonyms” in that region (Aguirre 179). La población also quotes nineteenth-century Colonial Casta documents where: “Chino” is a referent to the offspring of a “Morisco” and a “Spanish woman” (Aguirre 177); Morisco is the offspring of a Spanish male and a Mulatto woman (Aguirre 175); and that “china, lépera [foul mouthed woman] or prostitute meant the same thing” (Aguirre 179).
The present analysis exposes that Tagalogs, Japanese, South East Asians, Hindi and Africans who arrived through Acapulco were perceived as colored, non-Christians or dirty pigs therefore subject to enslavement. It is stipulated that (long before China was called China and its people Chinese) there were “Slaves from the Great China taken to Mexico” but they were “scarce; as generally were all slaves from the Portuguese India” (Aguirre, La población 148). Much higher costs of transportation seem to have been the main obstacle.
To disentangle the confusion of the linguistic problem outlined above, the present work will track the distinct etymologies of “chino” meaning curly-haired African-First Nations offspring or dirty-blooded-cochino (pig); and of “chino” as Chinese. The objective is to show that the name chino as referent of Afrodescendant, derives from “chino” a synonym of “pig” and/ or through aphaeresis from “co-chino” used often as “chino cochino” meaning “dirty pig.” The imaginary dirtiness is a referent to the African bloodline or ancestry of a non-white person.
Conversely, it will be shown that another homonym of “chino” that emerged in nineteenth-century Philippines arose as a synonym of Sangley, the Tagalog name of the merchants from Cathay (the Middle Kingdom). Based upon the foregoing, three findings will be exposed. First, that the term “chino” in Mexican colonial documents is not a referent of Chinese, but to Afro-Mexicans. Second, that the word “chino” meaning Chinese, which emerged in nineteenth-century Philippines, applies to the Sangley exclusively. Third, that the ethnically diverse people who entered Mexico via Acapulco were called “chinos” meaning that they were perceived as people with tainted blood, just as African-Mexican chinos cochinos were.
Preceding that, the history of the Spanish arrival to Mexico in 1519, the catastrophic decline of the original inhabitants, the transatlantic trade of Africans brought to Mexico up to 1570, the establishment of a “racial” classification system, and the commencement of the Manila–Acapulco–Manila commerce and slave trade in 1571 will be reviewed concisely. To conclude, “The Chinos in New Spain,” will be read critically from a multidisciplinary perspective. It is noted that, even if inadvertently, the archival research work of “The Chinos in New Spain” contributes to African Mexican studies.
The Spanish colonization of the lands occupied by Mexico and much of the United States South West and Central South started in 1519. The Spanish christened these territories as “New Spain.” As many as 50,000,000 First Nations people inhabited those lands at the time of contact. By 1570, their number was reduced to 3,336,860 and to 1, 269,607 by 1646. The Spanish, to penetrate the land, started to bring Africans across the Atlantic immediately after 1519. It is reported that by 1570, there were 20,559 Africans; and 6,464 Spanish (Aguirre 198). By 1571, the Spanish established a shipping line across the Pacific between Acapulco and Manila, in the Philippine Archipelago. For the next 244 years one to two ships sailed regularly, although not always annually: “At times [ships] got lost or were unable to go back given the storms, shipwrecks or Hollandaise harassment” (Ollé 41). Diverse Asian and African people entered that port, many enslaved (Aguirre 49-52).
In accordance to the social structure and ideology on race they had developed in Spain, the Spaniards established in Mexico, and elsewhere in their colonies, a social pyramid or pigmentocracy based upon the amount of the perceived whiteness or blackness of a person. Peninsular Spanish who saw themselves as “pure-white-blooded” positioned themselves at the top. To keep under control and in their place all people they invented as non-white, various “racial” labels were forged along the lines of the so-called miscegenation occurring in Mexico. One of such “distinctions” was the tag “Chino.” In the Spanish American colonies, including New Spain, “chino” meaning “pig” was a referent to the African-First Nations’ offspring. This “chino” voice emerged independently and earlier than its homonym “chino” for Chinese. Chino meaning Chinese developed in the Philippines in the nineteenth century as a new name for the Sangley merchants; more regarding this will follow later. Sangley was the Tagalog name applied to Middle Kingdom or Cathay merchants (“Middle Kingdom” and “Cathay” are earlier names referring to the area later called China).
According to María Luisa Herrera Casasús,
The Spanish China Ship or Galleon, —that from the end of the sixteenth century, until the beginning of the nineteenth, traveled periodically from Manila in the Philippine Islands to Acapulco in [New Spain’s] Pacific Coasts—transported slaves from West Africa, India, Malacca, China and other Asian countries. African and Asian enslaved who entered [New Spain] via the Pacific, were commonly nicked named “Chinos.” (467)
In this same historical line Aguirre elucidates,
Soon after Manila was conquered [by the Spaniards], enslaved people from the West began to arrive in New Spain. General López de Legazpi sent some, who were the property of his heirs until the early seventeenth century. These slaves obtained their freedom afterward and founded a borough in the small port [of Acapulco]. They called themselves Philippine Indians, but among them, there were many Mulattoes. This allows one to suppose that they were not only natives from the [Philippine] Archipelago, but from many other places of the West (50). They were called “Chinos, even though they were not exactly—in effect in the majority of the cases—as it will be seen of the Mongolian race (144). Almost all Philippine slaves came under individual contracts between the slave’s owner and a sailor of the ship. The sailor would take the slave to New Spain under his care, responsible to give him food and water, and upon arrival to the port to sell the slave at the best possible price, taking for himself, as commission, a third of the slave’s value (52)
The individual contracts, the size and number of ships, the number of trips made, and the Spanish archives allow one to project the number of enslaved people who entered New Spain through the Pacific. Hugh Thomas expounds,
Many captives were also obtained from Madagascar “a vast Island abounding with slaves” in the words of William Beckford, lord major of London. In the seventeenth century, these were sometimes shipped eastward, via Manila across the Pacific to Acapulco, where they were sold as “chinos.” (369)
Thomas cautions that these Madagascar “chinos” should not “be confused with the small number of Chinese and Filipinos, also known as chinos, who after the opening up of the Pacific by Miguel de Legazpi in 1564-65, were carried to Mexico in the Manila galleons” (369 note) (emphasis added). In Manila, the indigenous Tagalogs had traded long before the Spanish arrival with people from Cathay (that was China’s name at the time). As mentioned, the Tagalogs referred to those merchants they traded with as Sangleys. The Spaniards adopted the term Sangley in the sixteenth century and used it until the nineteenth century when the term Chino (translated as Chinese in English) emerged to replace Sangley.
Benedict Anderson explains, “Only very slowly the Sangley turned into ‘Chinese’—until the word disappeared in the early nineteenth century to make way for a VOC-style chino” (168). Caroline Sy Hau affirms that by Jose Rizal’s (1861-1896) time “chino replaced Sangley in bureaucratic usage” (141). Thus, the homonym “chino” connoting Chinese did not emerge until the nineteenth century. During prior centuries, the Africans, Hindi, Southeast Asians, Filipinos, Negritos, Sangley, etc. who entered New Spain via Acapulco were labeled “chinos” meaning “pigs” and had no reference to China, Cathay, Philippines or Asia.
As the above mentioned were not Christian, European, and lacked a noble lineage, Spaniards perceived them as savages, bad, despicable, treacherous, vicious, etc. They were an inferior Other (la brosa, los de abajo, la chinaca, la morenada, etc.). Sangleys lived outside the city walls of Manila. They were periodically exterminated by the Spaniards to quell revolts just as had been done to the: Jewish and Moriscos populations in Spain; and First Nations, Africans, and their offspring in the Americas.
In addition to lumping all transpacific arrivals to New Spain as Chinese, “The Chinos in New Spain” ignores Southeast Asia and Philippine diversity and diminishes to a “small number” the Africans from “Mozambique, Guinea and Cabo Verde” among them (41). The African Malagasy and “Negritos” presence throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Archipelagoes is bypassed. Much of the theory supporting “The Chinos in New Spain…” comes from Race, Class and Politics in Mexico 1610-1670 by Jonathan I. Israel. Race, Class and Politics in Mexico misinterprets that the voice chino found in colonial documents means “pig.” Roberto Gómez Ciriza the translator makes no clarifications to the Spanish language readers. Afro-Mexican chinos thus are lost in translation.
A parallel misreading is present in Africans in Colonial Mexico (120-21). Herman Bennett mentions, “The increasing presence of chinos in the archival records indicates that Mexico’s chino population experienced growth in the first half of the seventeenth century;” he notes also a Chino “proclivity for partners of African descent” (121). That Bennett does not translate the term, rather uses it in its Spanish form denotes his uneasiness. However, the last part of the sentence quoted above reveals that he does not see Mexican chinos as Afrodescendants i.e. he would not state that chinos (meaning Afrodescendants) have a “proclivity for partners of African descent.” Bennett may have assumed this because mentioned in the archival documents is: some of the people had met in Philippines during childhood or that they had arrived in Mexico via the Manila Galleon. Nevertheless, Philippine people were not Chinese then or now.
The Tagalogs from the Philippines were known as Philippine Indians and not Chinese. The term “Chino” was applied to the diverse people who entered New Spain via Acapulco (including Africans), because they were perceived as “cochinos,” or people of tainted lineage, just as the offspring of Africans and First Nations were viewed in the same place and time.
In the 1950 Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado dictionary, there are two entries for “chino.” In the first instance, chino/china means Chinese man or woman. The second chino/china is an American adjective and substantive that given the country has diverse meanings. In some countries the child of a Mulatto man and a Black woman is called “chino;” in others, “chino” is applied to the children of “Indian and Zambo; in Colombia chino means young man, ass; in Salvador chino signifies bold headed or foul mouthed; in Cost Rica, chino refers to a furious or arrogant person; in Chile a person of the lower classes is called “chino/china;” in Cuba, Mexico and Colombia “chino” is a term of endearment. These three countries have a considerable population of Afrodecendant chinos.
As mentioned, the term “Chino” in New Spain was a synonym of “pig.” It linked this casta with an animal, just as did Mulatto (Mule), Coyote, Lobo (wolf), and Cimarron (wild horse), among others. According to the Diccionario de la lengua española, Cochino derives from “cocho” which comes from “coch” (sound to call pigs) and two of its pertinent meanings are: a very dirty and untidy man; and a lewd man lacking manners. The first entry for “chino” in the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos (Brief Dictionary of Mexican Terms) presents “chino” as the masculine voice for a curl of hair; and “chino” and “china” as masculine and feminine adjectives that refer to curly hair. The Nahuatl term “cuculuste” meaning “curly hair” provides another piece of the puzzle.
Deborah E. Kanter in “Their Hair was Curly,” in addition to historicizing First Nations-African relations and the birth of Mexican Red-Black people elucidates, “Given this shared blood, physical differences between Afro-Mexicans and Indians were not always obvious. Sometimes a person’s ‘true’ race could be determined only by searching for a grand parent in a dusty old parish register or by a recollection of telltale curly hair” (165). “The native population, so devastated in the first centuries of colonial rule, had recovered and was growing after 1700 [….] As a result competition over land, even house sites, became endemic [….] Individuals who could not deny their mix heritage face dispossession, even expulsion from the pueblos” (171). Although she makes no mention, Kanter’s work allows one to see the relation between the Nahuatl term “cuculuste” and “pelo chino” meaning curly hair.
Norma Angélica Castillo Palma and Susan Kellog in “Conflict and Cohabitation Between Afro-Mexicans and Nahuas in Central Mexico” explain further, “In Puebla, Tlaxcala and Veracruz, a chino or china was an individual of both indigenous and African descent, with the term referring to an individual of African heritage mixed with mestizo or indigenous heritage. In Guerrero such individuals were termed cambujos” (135 n. 22).
Those interpretations above and the white aesthetic mentality underlying the name “chino,” within the context of New Spain, are further illustrated by the terms “Jarocho,” and “Cocho.” Jarocho was applied in the Veracruz region of New Spain to the African-First Nations offspring and “Cocho” was applied to the same in Michoacán. Aguirre expounds,
The Mulatto-Pardo was the product of the mix between the Black male with the Indian woman. Mulatto-Pardos were the most abundant in New Spain and the color of their skin produced the most varied and curious naming. [….] In general terms, we can assert that they were called Cochos en Michoacán, Cambujos in Oaxaca, Chinos in Puebla, Jarochos in Veracruz, Loros in Chiapas and Zambos in Guerrero; just to mention the most common. (169) (emphasis added)
Thus, Cocho, Cambujo, Chino, Jarocho, and Loro were synonyms and referents to people perceived as dirty, due to their African-First Nations lineage.
Beyond the Mexican colonial and current connotation of “chino” meaning “curly hair,” the link of the word “chino” with pig (cochino) is lodged in the history of Spanish medieval mentality. The term Morisco was forged in Spain in the late fifteenth century as a referent to the defeated Black Moors who converted to Catholicism to avoid expulsion. The Moriscos, just as the converted Jewish, who were suspected of practicing their original faiths, were called marranos, meaning dirty pigs. “Cochino” is a synonym of pig and dirty. Moriscos “were forbidden to wear their customary clothes, and were expressly prohibited from taking baths. Bathing was presumed to be prima facie evidence of apostasy. The phrase ‘the accused was known to take baths…’ is a common one in the records of the Inquisition” (Crow 149).
Antonia Ibarra Lario shows that “chino” is a synonym of pig in the speech of Lorca and its surrounding area in Andalusia. According to the Diccionario de la lengua española, the voice “china” signifies a small stone sometimes round. It is informed that the word derived from the child voice “chin,” an interjection used to call pigs. Cochino, as discussed earlier, derives from “cocho” which comes from “coch” (sound to call pigs) and two of its pertinent meanings are: a very dirty and untidy man; and a lewd man lacking manners. Thus, the voices “chin” and “coch” are both pig calls. Inverted and juxtaposed these pig calls produce the voice “coch-chin.” With the addition of a final “a” or “o” the word signals a feminine or masculine gender. The result is, coch-chin-a/ coch-chin-o. The loss of one of the two “ch” sounds is a matter of economy, the meaning is unaffected by the elimination of one, thus the terms cochina/cochino emerge.
The statutes regarding “Limpieza de sangre” (blood purity) appeared in isolated manner in Spain in the fifteenth century. Henceforth, in the sixteenth century, they were validated when all religious, military and civil congregations adopted them. It can be said that they are policies that barred Jewish who had converted to Christianity and their descendants from diverse posts in the Church, universities, military, guilds and civil institutions. Later, the statutes were extended to the Moors, Protestants and people tried by the Saint Inquisition. (Chami)
The conversos (people who converted to Christianity) were the Jewish in Spain who adopted Christianity by force in the fourteenth century; or those who had adopted it instead of being banished from Spain in the fifteenth by order of the Catholic King and Queen. Moriscos were those Moors who had converted to Christianity.“These statutes of blood purity are race statutes as they depend on the origin and heritage of a person, and not on a crime or fault. The crime is to belong to the ‘Caste of New Jewish’ or Moriscos” (Chami). Converted Jewish and Moriscos suspected of practicing Judaism and Islamism secretly were called marranos (pigs).
Those lineage statutes were transferred to the Spanish colonies including New Spain and applied with unprecedented rigor to the Castas, in particular Afrodescendants. The meaning behind the names Jarocho, Cocho and Chino in New Spain, all synonyms of “pig,” reveals a direct link to the above mentality. Spaniards forged white supremacy. They believed they were the latest product in a chain of evolution. That Spaniards saw Afro-Mexicans as inferior, comparable to animals, becomes clear in the following quote “Especially in central Mexico, peasant rebels insulted district officials in the same terms that Spaniards had heaped upon them—“dog,” “nigger,” and “pig” (Taylor 117).
As mentioned earlier, several ethnic groups tagged as “chinos” (pigs) entered New Spain via Acapulco, among them an unknown number of Sangleys, Southeast Asians, Hindi and Africans, among others. Still, “The Chinos in New Spain..,” fallaciously takes the voice chino as meaning “Chinese” and applies it to all and sundry. “The Chinos in New Spain…” bypasses the etymology of the term and completely misses its primary meaning of “chino cochino” (pig) as applied in New Spain and in various places of the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century. The term has preserved up to present its original reference to Afrodescendants in Mexico (chino) and Peru (cholo-chino). This is documented in any accredited Spanish language dictionary.
“The Chinos in New Spain…” asserts that the image of the chino is distorted in the colonial casta paintings, because there is no Chinese image recorded. La pintura de castas: representaciones raciales en el Mexico del siglo XVIII (simultaneously published as: Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, in 2004) by Ilona Katzew reports: “Chino cambujo” is the offspring of an “Indian male and Black female” (Casta Painting 108 circa 1761); “China cambuja” is the daughter of a “Black male and an Indian female” (Casta Painting 112, circa 1763); the mix between “Barcina” and an “Indian” male produces “china” (Casta Painting 156 circa 1770-1780). Noticeably, there is no image of an Asian component. The casta paintings have guided much of the research regarding colonial Mexico. In addition to the casta paintings, von Humboldt, and the current use of the term in Mexico, various reputable dictionaries confirm the connotation of chino as a referent to African offspring.
“The Chinos in New Spain…” declares that “During the two and a half centuries of contact between the Philippines and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, a minimum of 40,000 to 60,000 Asian immigrants would set foot in the ‘City of Kings,’ while a figure double that amount (100,000) would be within the bounds of probability” (37). In footnote 3, “The Chinos in New Spain…” cites that “Jonathan Israel contends that 6,000 Asian slaves were arriving [to Acapulco from Philippines] each decade of the early 1600s.” According to such figures, 600 slaves would have entered Acapulco annually.
The Manila galleon was supposed to leave Manila and arrive in Acapulco annually, although they did not arrive every year: many were lost, others succumbed to the weather, mutiny, or to pirates. Peter Gerhard, for the 214-year period between 1566 and 1784 mentions 148 recorded sailings from Acapulco (40 n. 34). To transport 600 slaves, and the food and water required for each individual’s survival (850 kg), it would have required a displacement of around 600 tons. In the light that one to two 300-ton galleons traveled during the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth, of the Manila-Acapulco route, arithmetic would expose the impossibility of transporting that number of slaves even if the ships were used exclusively as slave transports, which was not the reported case.
To transport forty thousand individuals enslaved over 244 years the following is reveled: 40,000 divided by 244 (years of trade) equals 163 slaves per year: 163 times 850 Kg of food and water per person equals 138 tons, slightly under half the 300 ton weight capacity of the first Manila Galleons. Keep in mind that slave contracts were handled on an individual basis (Aguirre 51). This would mean an additional 163 people to care for the enslaved and an additional 138 tons of food and water supplies. Even where the Manila Galleons were built to displaced up to 1200 tons of cargo by the seventeenth century, it is hard to conceive that that was the case where the Atlantic enslavers kept a watchful eye to protect a line of business they considered theirs. Precious stones, silk, cinnamon, etc. did not need water and food, could not revolt and were the declared main business of the Manila-Acapulco route.
At the beginning of the Manila-Acapulco carrera (route) small vessels of two to three hundred tons were used. Aguirre recounts,
toward the end of the sixteenth century a galleon laden with slaves and merchandise began to depart [Manila] toward New Spain; it unloaded its cargo in Acapulco and returned with Mexican silver, a metal appreciated by the Sangley. Later, 26 August 1633, the number of galleons was increased to four and then reduced again to one with larger cargo capacity of 600 to 800 tons. (50)
According to Cindy Vallar,
Spain eventually built much larger, more elaborate galleons with the combined purpose of carrying cargo and soldiers. More than two thousand trees--pine, cedar, oak, and mahogany--were required to build the largest of these, some of which became the warships that guarded the flota, or fleet, of vessels bound for Spain from the New World with holds laden with riches. A typical galleon weighed five hundred tons, but the largest were 1,200 tons. The high superstructure, which clearly identified a Spanish galleon, made the ship clumsy and slow. While larger […], life aboard the galleon was no better for mariners than previously designed ships. Wealthy or influential passengers plus their servants could put the total number of people aboard a galleon at two hundred soldiers and sailors and up to fifty civilians, which made for very cramped quarters.
Another source reports:
On September 20, 1638, the Nuestra Senora de la Concepción, a Spanish galleon plying the lucrative trade route between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco, foundered in bad weather and was hurled onto a reef. Most of the 400 people on board perished, and her precious cargo from the Orient spilled into the sea.
At the southernmost point of Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands (200 miles north of Guam), one of the grand Spanish merchant ships [foundered]-- loaded with Chinese silks/rugs, porcelain, ivory, cotton from India, ivory from Cambodia, camphor from Borneo, cinnamon and pepper and clove from the Spice Islands, band precious jewels from Burma, Ceylon, and Siam. (Spanish Galleon Trade)
Aguirre mentions that on occasion slaver ships entered Acapulco (52); and there are accounts of whole crews jumping ship in Acapulco. This is possible, but it is unlikely that this was the case with every trip and this cannot support the number of Chinese asserted as entering Mexico. Who were the crewmembers? Were all the crewmembers Tagalog or Sengley? How were the Tagalog called during the various centuries before Spanish bureaucrats adopted the name “chino,” to replace Sangley? Would the Spanish and the populations at large trust that many Sangleys in New Spain given their known rebelliousness? According to Thomas
In New Spain (Mexico) the scarcity of slaves from Africa did for a time lead colonists to use the Philippines as a source for a few workers: the Manila galloons which made their regular journeys across the Pacific from Manila to Acapulco after 1565 rarely failed to bring one or two slaves. (137)
“The Chinos in New Spain…” by mistranslating the Mexican term “Chino” as “Chinese” finds Chinese Catholic brotherhoods, Chinese militias, and Chinese generals of the Mexican Insurgent movement. Manel Ollé informs that soon after the Spanish conquest of the Archipelago, they named it “Philippines,” the Chinese merchants who came to Manila were identified in Spanish sources as “Sangleys” or “Sangleyes.” The Spanish authorities in Manila attempted to establish a quota for the accepted Sangley merchants; as the numbers swelled, the Spanish carried out a sort of “‘ethnic cleansing’ in which the Spanish of Manila executed in total many tens of thousands of [Sangleys] throughout the seventeenth century, as a response to rebellions, [and] indications of conspiracies” (43).
The first Sangley rebellions were related to their “quasi” forced recruitment for the diverse “pacifying” campaigns of the Philippine Islands. A case is cited where a crew made of 250 Sangley rebelled on board a Spanish “pacifying” ship and killed all Spaniards including “Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas” (Ollé 44). “The recurring uprisings in protest and the ensuing summary repressions and exterminations with tens of thousands of dead Sangleys in each case, respond to precise historical circumstances” (Ollé 44-45). A few hundred armed Spaniards lived inside the city walls under constant fear that the Sangleys would overpower them. Henry Kamen cites, “The Spanish governor in 1768 calculated that there had been fourteen sanguinary [Sangley] insurrections since the funding of the colony, perhaps the most serious of them in 1603 when the [Sangley] killed nearly half of the Spanish population” (220).
Some 30,000 Sangley, who provided the Spaniards’ livelihood, inhabited outside the walls and in the towns surrounding the area. Thus, the question must be asked, would the few Spaniards who commanded the Manila Galleons risk navigating months with hundreds of Sangleys (who were well versed in the Spanish mentality) in the long lonely journey across the Pacific? Would the Spanish authorities in New Spain allow such a large migration of rebellious Sangley? How about the cultural endowments that such a sizable population of Sangley/Chinese would have brought along? Where is it?
Another claim of “The Chinos in New Spain…” is that in New Spain there were companies of Chinese militias (52). The essay positions these supposedly Chinese militias in the hot lands of Mexico and asserts that “Ethnically speaking they were mostly Tagal, Pampangan, or mestizos de Sangley who came over in the China ships in the eighteenth century as sailors, and included offspring from several generations of interracial unions” (52). According to the Spanish census of 1745, Acapulco has a population “of around four hundred families of chinos, mulattos and blacks” (Villaseñor 171). These Acapulco Chinos appear in the first position of importance signaling that they were the largest portion of the population. The chinos of the hot lands were acclimatized cuculustes or curly-haired people who had been there for generations. Where are the Sangley legacies of Acapulco, Atoya, or Coyuca towns? Nonetheless, the cultures of the South Pacific regions of Mexico, as in other places, reveal a rich African-First Nations heritage in the food, music, dance and world visions, among others.
Regarding religious brotherhoods or Cofradias, “The Chinos in New Spain…” cites the Italian traveler Gemelli Carreri as the source for identifying a Mexico City Cofradía de Chinos “through that which is called the procession of the Chinese, because those going out were Indians of the Philippines” (53). The zealous Catholic Church allowed this type of organization among Catholic orders who oversaw Casta Confraternities of Blacks, Mulattoes, Pardos, Zambos, Chinos, and Mestizos. Keeping in mind that the Spaniards did not exchange with other Middle Kingdom people, except the Sangley and the Sangley were systematically exterminated, when and where did the Sangley learn to trust the Spanish enough to convert to Catholicism by tens of thousands?
On the other hand, the Spanish never trusted the Moors, Jewish, First Nations, Blacks and Black offspring as true converts to Catholicism; this is lodged in the Spanish language spoken of earlier. Why would the Spanish view the Sangley differently and trust them in groups of several hundred across the Pacific ocean right into the heart of Spanish New Spain’s urban centers, mines, plantations, roads, transportation, homes, among others? Where are the Sangley Cowboys of Mexico, what do they sing and eat? Julio Cesar de Tavares in another context that applies elucidates, “there will never be a [cultural] space absolutely shielded and able to conceal the flow of the characteristics and parts of a civilization” (Tavares 85). The traveler Carreri cited in “The Chinos in New Spain…” mentions Philippine Indians and not Sangley. This begs the question, how can the confraternity be Chinese?
Although Tagalog, Malay, Javanese, Papuans, Timorous, Mozambique-ans, etc. entered Mexico, at the end of the day they were “scarce” (Aguirre 143-48) (Thomas 369 note). Otherwise, the cultures of the regions would show a Chinese influence of a sort. The lands, histories and cultures that “The Chinos in New Spain…” is usurping—even if unintentionally, belongs to the Black and their Diaspora offspring also known as Chinacos, Cochos, Jarochos, Boshitos, Chocos, Campechanos, Cambujos, Lobos, Coyotes, Loros, Mulatos, Prietos, Pintos, Pardos, Chilangos, Pelados, Costeñeos, etc. The Black female partners are known as “China Poblana,” “China Tehuana,” “China Jarocha,” “China Tapatía,” etc. During the Manumission war of 1810-1821, the Charro of today was known as Chinaco, which evolved from the term chino (pig). In Mexico, the Chinaco was the Insurgent soldier, who formed the Black Armies of the South. His female partner is known as the “China.”
The Chinacos came from all over the country as seen in the places in Map 1 of the “The Chinos in New Spain…” entitled “Chino Demographic Distribution in New Spain, 1590-1815.” The Chinacos, under the leadership of José María Morelos y Pavón, formed the Black Armies of the South who were instrumental in obtaining manumission and Independence from Spain. The Chinacos played a fundamental role in building the Mexican nation and its ethos. This is being reconstructed partially in upcoming studies and another portion has been documented in works and cultural texts previously analyzed.
“The Chinos in New Spain…” lacks the foundations necessary to demand sharing a cultural and physical space that was hard-won by the Children of Chango and Yemaya: the zamba rumberos who learned the pulse of the lands of Anahuac and its life forms. We are talking about the people who worked the land and fertilized it with their blood, sweat and tears. Those Chinos Cochinos, not Chinese but African and their descendants, produced Mexico and the rainbow of African-based identities, including those mentioned in this study.
There were Philippines, Sangleyes, Japanese, Tamils, Hindi, Malays, Cebuans, Negritos, Kefirs, Bantus, Malagasy, etc. who entered New Spain via Acapulco during the 244 years of the Acapulco-Manila trade. Upon arrival, as a whole, everybody as a unit entered as “chinos” meaning non-white. Archival documents refer to Tagalogs and others from the Philippine Archipelago as Indios Filipinos. If Filipinos Tagalogs were the majority of Asians who arrived in New Spain during the period 1571-1815 and not Sangley, then “Chino” meaning Chinese cannot apply to Indios Filipinos. It must also be understood that the homonym Chino meaning Chinese that developed in the nineteenth century Philippines applies only to the Sangley and therefore is not a referent to the Indios Filipinos, other Asians or the Mexican Chinos of African descent.
Up to the nineteenth century, “Chino” in New Spain was a Spanish-invented label to refer to those with tainted non-white lineages. Said people included a small number of diverse populations from areas today called China, the Philippines and other areas of Asia. However, it had no association specifically with the idea of being of Asian descent. Africans who entered via that route were called “chinos” as well. Starting in the nineteenth century, a new connotation or homonym of the term “Chino” began to be used to refer to Chinese people and their offspring. Thus, the term “Chino” in the Mexican colonial archives is mainly a referent to African-First Nations offspring.
The Mexico City “Chinese ghetto” of San Juan reported in “The Chinos in New Spain…” (43) is located in the area of San Juan market next to the Alameda central park. There are various Chinese restaurants and businesses sprinkled within a few blocks; whether Chinese merchants have occupied this area since colonial times or if it is a newer development connected to post-Colonial Chinese migrations needs to be documented. The Chinaca (Chinacos and Chinas as a group) however, is preponderant in San Juan and all surrounding barrios: Tepito, Lagunilla, Peralvillo, Centro, Viaducto, Doctores, Guerrero, San Simon, and Morelos, among others. Throughout various areas of the Mexico City, there are various “cafés de chinos,” Chinese cafes.
The diverse Asian, including Chinese, immigration to New Spain requires and deserves further study. During the period 1521 and 1594, 36,000 slaves arrived in Mexico (Cope 13). “The vast majority of these slaves were Africans” although “parish records reveal the existence of a few enslaved Filipinos (called chinos) and Chichimecs (Indians from Northern New Spain captured during wars)” (Cope 174 n.27). Filipinos negotiated their new environment by relating to Afrodescendants. Filipinos appear in some colonial documents as Chinos Filipinos, this refers to their less than pure lineage, just as is the case of Afromexican Chinos. “The Chinos in New Spain…,” as are others, is based on the “Chino” mistranslation in von Humboldt and various works that have followed suit. The vitiated circle of misunderstanding needs to be broken. This will open the door for renewed research in the area of Mexican Asian Studies and a robust dialogue with African Mexican Studies.


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Appendix


Chinas Tehuanas
http://www.pbase.com/annmurdy/image/120929851