Indian Slavery, or Captives of Conquest

For all interested in learning about the origins of enslaved indigenous peoples in the Spanish circum-Caribbean, Woodruff Stone's Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean is an enlightening read. Captives of Conquest demonstrates how central Indian labor and the commodification of their very lives was to the process of Spanish colonial expansion from 1492-1550. It also highlights how the Caribbean laid the foundations for Spanish America through the role of slave raiding, slave auxiliaries, and slave trading for Spanish exploration and travel to new parts of the Americas. The often weak authority of the Spanish Crown and the evolving discourse on Indian rights, labor regimes, and "race" can be seen in the pivotal half-century or so in which hundreds of thousands of Indians were, voluntarily or involuntarily, participants in the creation of European colonialism in the western hemisphere. 

Our interest in reading this work was mainly with regard to the degree or extent foreign Indian slaves intermarried and interacted with local indigenous populations of the Caribbean and the increasingly important African population of the Greater Antilles. Citing various colonial records on the trade in Indians from Tierra Firme, Mexico, Brazil, Central America, Florida, and beyond, Woodruff Stone presents clear evidence for a vast scale of slave trading that brought more Indians to Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. Thus, despite the dwindling local indigenous population in Hispaniola or Puerto Rico, the slave trade of Indians from throughout the circum-Caribbean introduced thousands more. Their labor was essential for Spanish sugar plantations, gold mining, and domestic service, especially since African slaves were more expensive. Despite their numerical significance, high mortality rates and the lack of sufficient records (after all, many Indians were victims of illegal Spanish slave raids, including against allies of the Spanish in Venezuela), they continued to be important ever after 1542. Indeed, this proves that some of the colonial reports of Hispaniola or Puerto Rico lacking Indian populations after 1550 were partly inspired by officials eager to hide their continued enslavement of indigenous peoples. 

Drawing on pre-contact Caribbean mobility, trade, and cultural networks, Captives of Conquest establishes that the indigenes of the region had long-established connections. However, it appears that the rapid influx of thousands of foreign Indians from places as disparate as Florida and Mexico or the Yucatan and the interior of Venezuela may have further weakened Taino caciques. If local caciques, whose authority was already eroded by the repartimiento of 1514 on Hispaniola and rapid population declines and dislocations caused by the Spanish, were also losing authority because of the introduction of thousands of foreign Indians, then we are inclined to think locals had to reconceive local political and social traditions. Even if foreign Indians were slaves and locals part of an encomienda system, in practice the distinction between a free and an enslaved Indian might not have meant much. Thus, we are inclined to think foreign Indians who survived may have joined local Indian communities and helped create new identities. Evidence of this can be seen in Yucatecan and Taino marriages in colonial Cuba. According to Captives of Conquest, some of these populations also intermarried with Africans, thereby adding more cultural diversity. 

Our guess is that Puerto Rico experienced something similar as local Indians intermarried or formed new communities with those from the Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, Yucatan, and Tierra Firme. Perhaps this may explain why the cacique of Mona, for instance, was a native of Tierra Firme living in San German during the 1590s. If non-local Indians could rise to positions of authority, and the Taino were always mobile and engaged in long-distance trade, perhaps foreign Indians were more assimilable than we can detect from the Spanish accounts. Thus, perhaps the enslaved Indians enumerated in the de Lando census of 1530, who already outnumbered "free" Indians in Puerto Rico, may have included people who adopted local Indian practices or joined their communities. Or later did so, possibly contributing to the maintenance of Indian communities and practices that were later adopted by all the free peasantry of the island.

Sara Johnson's Fear of French Negroes

 

 Fear of French Negroes, which places the Haitian Revolution in a broader circum-Caribbean transcolonial context, intriguingly examines the repercussions, parallels, and ramifications of the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean world through the simultaneous use of canines for torture and war against black bodies (Second Maroon War in Jamaica, last days of Saint Domingue, the Seminole Wars between the US and Seminoles and their African-American/black allies in Florida, and the Spanish/Cuban chasseurs, dog-trainers who turned the canines into beasts craving black bodies), the effects of Haitian rule in Santo Domingo/Dominican Republic and possible transcultural, transcolonial links in popular religion) black privateers in the Gulf of Mexico in the early decades of the 19th century, music, and black newspapers from Haiti, France, and the US North. I have yet to read such an analysis of the Haitian Revolution in this broader context with visual and literary sourcs since Modernity Disawoved, and though it definitely has its weaknesses, provides as fresh look at trasncolonial black collaborations, contact, and, as she suggests in the final chapter, a nascent Pan-Africanist or pan-Black Atlantic consciousness in the newspapers of free blacks in the 1830s and 1840s, from the US,  to Haiti and France.

She often suggests things with her interpretations that she can't prove so that weakens her book, but overall she makes some interesting points. Her chapter on the Haitian unification of Hispaniola in the 19th century was interesting, though weakened in parts by her perhaps overly imaginative wishful thinking. But I think she mostly acknowledges her weaknesses in terms of stating some of her claims as probabilities rather than 'pure' fact. And yes, her approach is interesting. It reminds me of Sibyl Fischer's Modernity Disavowed, which likewise used literary and art sources for examining the impact of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Moreover, her analysis of a possible Haitian/Saint-Dominguan role in the proliferation of the cinquillo rhythm found throughout circum-Caribbean music is powerful, although many of those societies she describes in New Orleans, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico could have arose from enslaved Africans imported over the centuries. Nevertheless, the "French Negro" influence on some forms of bomba in Puerto Rico and the tumba francesa of eastern Cuba are undeniable, and the role of Saint-Dominguan refugees, immigrants, settlers, free people of color, bonded persons, and white French colons considered harbingers of culture, had a tremendous impact on the Americas in the Age of Revolution. As she indicates in the chapter on black privateers operating with the Lafitte brothers, such as the Saint Dominguan gens du couleur, Joseph Savary, who aided in the former's slave smuggling operations and other nefarious deeds, reveals the often contradictory impact of French republicanism, Haitian abolitionism, and race relations in the Americas. Likewise, Petion's republic in the southern half of Haiti in the 1810s lending aid and refuge for Venezuelan and Colombian nationalist liberators was contradictory in terms of the maintenace of racial slavery in the soon to be free Latin American state of Gran Colombia as well. Thus, as Johnson indicates, there is no romanticized, ahistorical theme of black solidarity always being for the interests of ALL people of African descent, since many fought for slavers, slave regimes, and  colonial and postcolonial governments that did not, ultimately, challenge the status quo.

All in all, an interesting analysis, with the chapter entitled Une et indivisible, a reference to Toussaint's Constititution on the indivisibility of Hispaniola, will hopefully lead to future fresh takes on Haitian-Dominican relations in the first half of the 19th century, as the career of Jose Campos Tavares complicates the notion of "Haitian invaders." Perhaps more historical digging and linguistic investigations into the lives of former slaves and the masses of free people of color in Spanish Santo Domingo will, one day, be better known, so we can compare white elite constructs of Haitian rule in Hispaniola to those of the common people, who, as Johnson suggests, were at least initially pro-Haitian, perhaps a majority being so. Furthermore, as Johnson indicates in the chapter as well as in a separate article published in the Journal of Haitian Studies, the long existence of a porous colonial and national border as well as the Spanish-speaking east's long history of African slavery, many parallels and influences can be seen in popular religion, such as Vodou, music, and literary sources derived from 19th century Dominican poetry and rural discouse. Though nothing ground-breaking perhaps, and occasionally weakened by a lack of direct sources that, to paraphrase Spivak, leaves the subaltern unable to speak, Johnson's text is a call for further work by historians, musicologists, linguists, and specialists in Atlantic Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, French Studies, and African Diasporic Studies to do additional research. Her final chapter on free black newspapers in the circum-Caribbean and the US and France also shed new light on earlier periods of transnation, transcolonial solidarity and 'blackness,' with suggestive ramifications for theorists of the Black Atlantic. Her newspaper sources even indicate 'black' writers in Haiti, the US, and, a Martinican established in France, alluded to each other's work, wrote about black literary figures and intellectuals in other parts of the hemisphere, and, in one case, even conceived of a Caribbean federation! This leaves one asking, why have so few studies been conducted regarding Petion and Bolivar, or deeper research into Haitian unification of Hispaniola, or the links that Saint Dominguan exiles and refugees maintained with their homeland? Putting that into consideration, Johnson's text is important scholarly work that will, one hopes, lead to additional studies on how the "fear of French Negroes" and their alleged radicalism shaped the Atlantic world.