Duguid gives the following instance of miscegenation from Bolivia, “After a while I came to a clearing in the forest. A small wood shack nestled under the shadow of the trees and two figures were seated in the doorway. As I rode up a gigantic Negro with curly hair rose and saluted me. There was a white woman by his side and I thought he was probably her servant. The man spoke nothing but Portuguese but the lady was an Austrian and spoke French so I was able to gather some information as to their manner of life. It seemed that they had been married for ten years and had settled in this forest some year or so back and had cleared a large patch on which they were growing manioc, a long-rooted vegetable that looks like a parsnip and tastes like a potato. Let me say at once that in civilization the sight of a black man and a white woman in close companionship moves me to a nausea that is almost physical. But somehow in this far place it was different. To begin with they were friends; it was evident from the tenderness of his expression when she asked him for a glass of water. Their attitude toward each other was a tried and intimate fellowship of two people who laugh at the same jokes and have learned to sympathize with each other’s failings. Moreover they had wrenched a joint living in the very teeth of Green Hell, and were perfectly happy enjoying the fruits together.”11
___________
1 Stevenson, W. B., Twenty Years Residence in South America, p. 309. 1825.
2 Beals, C., Fire on the Andes, pp. 87, 152-3, 180, 367, 386. 1934.
3 Enock, R., Ecuador, p. 236. 1914.
4 Frank, W., America Hispana, p. 132. 1931.
5 Peter Martyr, First Book of the Third Decade. (Trans. Richard Eden), p. 139. 1885.
6 Aguado, P., Historia de Venezuela, Vol. 2, pp. 99-131. 1915.
7 Encicl. Illustrada Espanol, Vol. 11, p. 1325. 192—.
8 Inman, S., Latin America, p. 46. 1937.
9 Beals, C., America South, p. 186. 1937.
10 Sanchez, L, A., Historia de la Literatura Americana, p. 461. 1940.
11 Duguid, J., Green Hell, p. 121. 1931.
Chapter Six
MEXICO
MISCEGENATION in Mexico differs from other Latin American lands in that most of it seems to have been between the Indian and the Negro. Apparently, the Mexican Indian has been more mixed with Negro than any other group of American aborigines save those of the United States.
There were a considerable number of Negroes at the start. Two hundred of them accompanied Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico in 1519, one of whom, Juan Garrido, was the first to sow and to reap wheat in the New World.1 Other Negroes accompanied De Narvaez, the rival of Cortez the same year.
The Negroes were imported in such numbers that in 1535, or only sixteen years after the conquest, they outnumbered the Spaniards. Priestley says, “Their number was already great enough to be hazardous, there being more Negroes, not counting mulattoes than there were Spaniards in New Spain (Mexico) by the middle of the century.
“Practically every bishopric in New Spain contained more blacks than whites before 1575. In agriculture, Negro labor was of greater utility than that of the Indian. The black man could perform in a day six times as much work as an Indian, and did not suffer from punishment or privation as did the more delicately constituted native.”2
The Negroes continued to arrive until by the end of the same century the slaves alone, according to figures from the Archives of the Indies in Seville, outnumbered the whites and the near-whites, who totalled 17,711 as against 18,569 Negroes.3 This latter figure did not include the free blacks, the mulattoes, and the runaway slaves, whose percentage was large. In Mexico City, itself, the Negro element outnumbered the white and near-white.
The Negro slave and the Indian—who had been reduced to slavery also—made common cause. In 1537 both plotted to capture Mexico City, but one of their number gave the plot away and twenty-four were hanged and quartered.4 Other revolts in 1669 and 1735 were more successful. One led by Yanga, a Negro slave, in Vera Cruz, being especially so. Yanga not only killed many of the white and near-white overlords, but founded a kingdom of his own, which he called Lorenzo.
MIXED PEOPLES OF MEXICO.
XXII. Upper left. Negro-Indian-White woman. The remainder: Zambos, or mixed Indian end Negro. (Charcoal study by Goytia.)
MEXICAN MIXED-BLOODS.
XXIII. Negro-Indian woman. (Charcoal by Goytia.)
There seems to have been a great sexual affinity, too, between the Mexican Indian and the Negro. Bancroft says, “Marriages between Negro men and Indian women were common, the latter preferring Negroes to Indians, and the Negro males being more fond of the Indian women.”5
The Spaniards also had many children by the Indian women. In fact for the next two centuries almost the only feminine company available to the white men were Indians, Negroes, and mixed blood women. White women were always scarce in Mexico. As late as 1803, they constituted less than ten per cent of the total white population. Cortez, himself, took an Indian wife, Marina.
One reason why Negro-Indian matches were popular was that the offspring of such unions were born free. But there were so many of these chinos, as the children were called, that the viceroy asked the king to issue a decree making them slaves. This was denied by the Pope, with whom rested final sanction. The children were called chinos, probably because the mixture accentuated the Mongolian strain which the Indian is said to have.
Von Humboldt, the great naturalist, who travelled much in Mexico in the 1810’s, says that the Indian women preferred the Negro men because the blacks were livelier than their own men. “There exists,” he says, “no contrast more striking than that of the impetuous vivacity of the Negro of the Congo and the apparent phlegm of the coppery Indian. It is especially because of this contrast that the Indian women preferred the Negro not only to the men of their own race but even to the Europeans.”6 As regards the mixed bloods, he says, “One would say that the mixture of the European and the Negro everywhere produces a race of men, more active and more assiduous than the mixture of the white and the Mexican Indian.”
Other travelers of the period noted this difference between the Indian and the Negro, too. Coleridge said, “The amazing contrast between these Indians and the Negro powerfully arrested my attention. Their complexions do not differ so much as their minds and dispositions. In the first, life stagnates; in the last it is tremulous with irritability. The Negroes cannot be silent and they talk in spite of themselves. Every passion acts upon them with strange intensity. Their anger is sudden and furious; their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity, audacious. It is even said that the slaves despise the Indians, and I think it very probable; they are very decidedly inferior as human beings.” The Negroes, he added, welcomed life and adventure while the Indians “shrunk before the approach of other nations as if it were by instinct.”7
MEXICAN MIXED-BLOODS.