Indigenous Diaspora, Bondage, and Freedom in Colonial Cuba

2019 ◽  
pp. 816-839
Author(s):  
Jason M. Yaremko
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Intercultural Development ◽  
Massive Influx ◽  
The Caribbean

From the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, thousands of indigenous peoples from a spectrum of cultures embarked, voluntarily and involuntarily, on journeys from their homelands in the continental Americas to the Caribbean: as traders, refugees, immigrants, laborers, and as slaves. Cuba became the principal destination for a massive influx of indigenous peoples from New Spain and, later, the independent republic of Mexico. This chapter explores the fluid, multidimensional dynamic of diasporic indigenous peoples in their attempts to negotiate an existence in a territory to which they were forcibly relocated. It examines the historical, social, political, and intercultural development of forced indigenous labor in Cuba along with the complex and nuanced ways in which freedom and bondage overlapped. It investigates contending spheres of power encompassing states, settler populations, and indigenous and other subaltern peoples to discuss the implications of this Caribbean borderlands dynamic in the context of transitional zones and transculturation.

Los Indios de Campeche

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason M. Yaremko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Oral Evidence

From the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, thousands of indigenous peoples from a spectrum of cultures embarked, voluntarily and involuntarily, on journeys from their homelands in a number of regions in the continental Americas to the European colonies of the Circum-Caribbean. They came as refugees, slaves, diplomats, and traders, and also as indentured laborers and as immigrants. Among the earliest arrivals were the Mayas of Yucatan in the largest island colony in the Caribbean, Cuba. In the course of the next four centuries, Cuba would become the principal destination for what was probably the largest influx of indigenous peoples - especially Mayas, Chichimecas, and other Mesoamerican peoples - from the mainland colonies of New Spain in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and then from the independent republic of Mexico in the nineteenth century. Through the analysis of historical, anthropological, archaeological, and oral evidence, this chapter examines the varied forms of migration, existence, struggles, adaptation, negotiation, and persistence of various Mayan individuals, groups and communities in colonial Cuba, toward an understanding of the dynamic and implications of this indigenous diaspora in the Caribbean. Amerindian passages to Cuba predated the other (African; Chinese) diasporas, eventually intersecting with them through transculturation.

The Obraje in the Late Méxican Colony

1967 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Greenleaf
Keyword(s):  
Human Resources ◽  
Economic System ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Labor Policies ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Textile Factory

One of the most important native industries in New Spain, allowed to flourish because of its rational necessity, and given exemptions from restrictive mercantile prohibitions was the obraje, or colonial textile factory. This institution had its origins in the tribute and labor policies of the quasi-feudal economic system imposed by the Spaniard in the decades after the conquests in the Caribbean and on the American mainland. For almost three hundred years clerics and humanitarians protested, viceroys raged, monarchs threatened, a plethora of regulations was issued, inspections were conducted, trials held, fines levied, obrajes were closed, and yet the obraje as an institution survived, and the inhuman conditions of the worker remained unchanged. While the Mexican encomienda system was being shorn of its abuses and gradually deemphasized by the crown, and while the repartimiento system of forced labor for wages was subordinated to a policy of conservation of human resources in the face of a shortage of Indian labor, the Mexican colony was becoming each decade more dependent on the locally-produced textiles, especially the commercial, non-luxury fabrics in everyday use. These were produced in the obrajes.

scholarly journals Punishing the sea wolf: corsairs and cannibals in the early modern Caribbean

2003 ◽  
Vol 77 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 201-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris Lane
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Similar Image ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Western European ◽  
Western Law ◽  
Semantic Linkage

Looks at how Western law was interpreted and applied to perceived cannibals and corsairs in the Spanish Caribbean in the 16th and 17th c., by Spanish jurists in the period, and at the development of the cannibal and corsair image in Spanish culture. Author outlines the convergence of terms suggesting a growing semantic linkage between certain indigenous peoples, specially the famed "Carib cannibals", and foreign, mostly Western European, corsairs poaching on Spanish wealth. He describes how of the Caribs, said to be cannibals, involved in piracy, an image was constructed of not only cannibals, but also greedy criminals, or rebelers against Catholicism, in order to (legally) justify punishments or wars against them, and thus Spanish rule. He then discusses how of French, British, and other corsairs in the Caribbean involved in piracy against the Spanish, an in some ways similar image was painted of fanatical canine types ruled by appetites, and also of anti-Catholic heretics and criminals, in order to justify punishments as well as the Spanish claim on rule of the Caribbean.

Review Article: On the Personal Service of the Indians in Central America

1981 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-377
Author(s):  
Silvio Zavala
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Intermediate Region ◽  
Entire Region ◽  
Personal Service ◽  
Good Book ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
The Caribbean

William L. Sherman has written a good book on the personal service of the Indians, a theme so important in the society of Spanish America but here limited to Central America.Series of studies exist on this topic for the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru but Central America, the intermediate region, has received only sporadic attention. Now it receives an impressive and more complete study, based on documents from the archives of Central America and Spain: actas de cabildo, letters, official depositions, law suits, juicios de residencia and notarial registers. Both the old and modern bibliography is cited, with some omissions.In his volume, Professor Sherman includes all the distinct institutional forms of Indian labor. The first is Indian slavery either as the result of war or barter. This section enlarges our understanding of that topic for the entire region. Of special interest is the trade in Honduran Indians to the Antilles and those of Nicaragua to Panama and Peru. The Peruvian sources consulted are limited. In this connection, he recalls (p. 387, note 11), even though the matter does not concern Central America, the exportation of the Indians from the Province of Panuco in New Spain to the Spanish Islander of the Caribbean.

Pearls and a Political Ecology of Empire, 1498–1541

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-77
Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Caribbean Basin ◽  
West Africans ◽  
Pearl Fishing ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Political Economy

This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.

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