Race mixing was so thorough in Venezuela that today, except in a few spots, near the coast, a native Venezuelan unmixed black is a rarity. Of course, with the abolition of slavery, black immigration ceased, while a white one went on. The color of the present native population ranges from dark mulatto to octoroon with evidences of Indian ancestry in hair and certain tints of complexion.
The late Juan Vincente Gomez, dictator, and the most talked of Venezuelan of our times, was of mixed blood, being what was known as a cholo. One of his blood relatives, who came to the United States about 1922, lived in Harlem and was treated otherwise as a colored American. Gomez was one of the world’s wealthiest men, Venezuela being very rich in oil. His fortune was estimated at $200,000,000.
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1 Pons, F., Travels in South America, Vol. 1, p. 162. 1807.
2 Pons, Vol. 1, p. 176.
4 Pons, Vol. 2, p. 180. 1807.
5 Pons, Vol. 1, pp. 175-76.
6 Gil Fortoul, J., Historia Constitucional de Venezuela, Vol. 1, pp. 57-8. 1907.
7 Clinton, D. J., Bolivar: Man of Glory, p. 329. 1939.
8 Lemly, H. R., Bolivar, pp. 142-3. 1923.
Biographie Universelle, Vol. 40, p. 390. (see Sucre).
Ybarra, T. R., Bolivar, pp. 135-6. 1929.
Ferguson, E., Venezuela, p. 37. 1939.
9 Clinton, D. J., Gomez, Tyrant of the Andes, pp. 22-3. 1936.
10 Rojas, A., Estudios Historicos, Vol. 3, pp. 53-73. 1927.
11 Clinton, D. J., p. 24. 1938.
12 Curtis, W. E., Venezuela, p. 123. 1902.
13 Curtis, W. E., pp. 156-59.
Chapter Three
BRAZIL
OF all the Latin American lands, Brazil has had the greatest and most thorough miscegenation. This began about 1500 entirely with Indian women. The heat, the deadly insects, the fever, and the savage warfare made the region quite unfit for European women.
The Indians with whom the Portuguese amalgamated had, it seems clear, a Negro strain. Negro and Negro-Indian peoples, without a doubt, had been living in the tropical belt of the New World ages before the coming of Columbus. Pigafetti who made the first voyage around the world with Magellan and touched southern Brazil in 1519, or nineteen years before the arrival of the African Negro as a slave, says that the inhabitants of southern Brazil had “short and woolly hair,”1 a characteristic of Negroid peoples.
The offspring of the Portuguese and the Indians were called mamelucos and with the females of these the incoming Portuguese of the next generation intermarried. In 1538, came the Negroes from Africa, and with these the Portuguese, who were already used to Negro concubines in Europe, intermixed freely.
The Negroes came from regions as far away as Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and Malaya. The great majority came from the African west coast, which was only 1600 miles away, and were principally Yimbas, Dahomeyans, Hausas, Tapas, Mandingoes, Angolas and Minas. Certain of them as the Hausas were Mohammedans, and were skilled artists and weavers, and for that time, good farmers, and iron-workers.
The most eagerly sought of the black women were the Minas, who were tall, with frizzly hair, velvety skins, full bosoms, and walked with the rhythm and verve of primitive Africa. Slave hunters were given special orders to capture them, and when they arrived in Bahia, then the capital of Brazil, there was keen bidding for them by the richer colonists, who installed them in many a Casa Grande, where they became the mothers of the future masters and mistresses of the plantations.
Since the Portuguese were already mixed, they were particularly liberal in the matter of race. Concubinage was common and the only bar to free marriage between white and mulatto was not race, but European birth. The man born in Portugal, or Filho de Reino—Son of the Kingdom—considered himself far superior to the creole, or the one born in the colony. Was he not belonging to a culture that was infinitely superior to wild and primitive Brazil? It was not a question of color at all because a mulatto born in Portugal, by sheer virtue of his birth there considered himself, and was so regarded, as superior to even an unmixed white who had been born in the New World. Writing as late as 1830, Debret says that the Portuguese-born “disdained to admit a difference of color in the native-born Brazilian and regarded the white native-born Brazilian as a mulatto.”2 In 1850, so serious was this that the white creoles rose in revolt.
Favored by its proximity to the African coast, the slave-trade of Brazil increased to such extent that the Negroes quickly outnumbered the whites. In two years alone, 1583-1585, 14,000 Negroes were brought in.
In less than a century, the Negroes had become so numerous that they provided the balance of power, whereby the Portuguese were able to defeat their Dutch neighbors, who had swarmed into the country from the West Indies, Guiana, and Holland. Led by the renowned Henri Dias, a full-blooded black,3 the Negroes defeated Prince Maurice of Nassau, and broke the power of the Dutch in Brazil, which in turn had its repercussions in New Netherland, now New York. In this war, some of the blacks reached the rank of Captam-Mor, a title formerly reserved for the upper class.
The power of the Negroes in Northern Brazil, especially the warlike Hausas, grew so great that breaking away from the whites they founded republics of their own some of which lasted for fifty years, and of which the most noted was Palmares founded in 1673.4 Since this region is rich in gold and diamonds, and produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, and still later much seringa, or rubber, some of the Negroes grew wealthy and powerful, having vast plantations with hundreds of Negro and Indian slaves.
The daughters of these rich Negroes were eagerly sought in marriage by incoming Europeans—Portuguese, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Hollanders, and Germans. Richest of these Negro, zambo, and mulatto people were those in the province of Ceara, who were the founders of the great seringa, or rubber industry. As Bruce says, “The Cearenses, a blending of the mame-lukes with the mulattoes, have given Brazil her great seringa industry. It was the people from Ceara who penetrated the forests of the Amazon and gave the world its first seringa supply. It is the Cearenses and their neighbors, the Paraenses, that work these seringaes today.5
The Negroes continued to increase until in 1768 in Bahia, they outnumbered the whites seventeen to one, and spreading north and southeast of this province they soon formed the principal population of the states of Parahyba, Pernambuco, Ceara, Minaes Geraes, and Rio de Janeiro. In 1830, according to Walsh, the mulattoes and other mixed-bloods of Brazil alone numbered 2,500,000 as against 850,000 whites.
XIII. Rich Brazilian mulatto woman (third from left) with daughter (Second from left), leaving for the country with her maid (fourth from left) and her servants. (Debret).
In 1825, the population of Rio de Janeiro was estimated at 135,000 of which 105,000 were blacks; 25,000 white or near-white; 4,000 foreigners; and the remaining 1,000 gypsies, Indians, and caboclos (mixed Indian and white). In 1828, Rio de Janeiro alone imported 45,000 blacks and when the foreign-slave trade neared its abolition in 1860, the rush to bring them in increased. Walsh, who visited Rio de Janeiro in the 1820’s says, “My eye really was so familiarized to black visages that the occurrence of a white face on the streets in some parts of the town struck me as a novelty.”6
Mathison, writing in 1821, says that the first thing that struck his eye in Brazil was the preponderance of Negroes. There was at the time, he says, 600,000 mulattoes, free blacks, and other mixed bloods; 1,800,000 slaves; and 500,000 Indians. As regards the social status of the mixed bloods,