1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (55 page)

Despite the ban, the government kept approving applications for
chino
barbershops in the Playa Mayor—perhaps, one is tempted to speculate, because influential customers didn’t want to have to travel long distances to have their hair cut and their teeth cleaned. European businesses again complained about the competition. In 1650 the government created a barbershop czar, empowered to extract hefty fines from bootleg hair salons. The post was ineffective: Chinese barbers proliferated by the score. An especially zealous Spanish barber won the czarship in 1670. Slack, whose account I am following here, found no indication of success.

The city’s raucous mix of peoples was nowhere better expressed than its festivals, such as the Easter processions. Organized by the lay religious groups called confraternities, they were ostensibly intended as public acts of penitence but functioned as ethnically based civic associations. Asians helped found the Confraternity of the Holy Christ in the mid-sixteenth century; aligned with the Franciscans, its members were allowed to construct a chapel in the monastery and decorate it with imported ivory gewgaws. The Italian traveler Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri watched them march in an Easter parade in Mexico City in April 1697. Carrying statues and torches, three costumed confraternities went out from city hall that day: the brotherhood of the Holy Trinity, the Jesuits of the Church of San Gregorio, and the Franciscans. The march of the Franciscans, Gemelli Careri noted, was called “the Procession of the Chinese,” because the marchers were all from the Philippines. Each procession, he wrote, was walked with

a company of soldiers … on horseback, and was preceded by mournful horn-players. When the procession came to the royal palace, the Chinese and the [Franciscans] fought to be at the head of the line; they beat each other over the shoulders with clubs, and with their Crosses; and many were wounded.

The big Chinese population reflected the city’s status as the clearinghouse for information about the East. In 1585 Juan González de Mendoza, a Dominican there, compiled sources from the galleon trade into a
History of the Most Notable Things, Rituals and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China.
Published in dozens of editions in many languages, it became the standard text on China for educated Europeans. Not only did the China trade fascinate Mexico City’s civil government, it preoccupied many of the clerics in the city cathedrals, who begged their superiors for the chance to get on a galleon and save Chinese souls. Much of their fascination was fueled by a miscalculation—they believed Mexico to be much closer to China than it actually is. (In fact, as the Canadian historian Luke Clossey has pointed out, Beijing is closer to Rome than Mexico City.) The Dominican Martín de Valencia spent months on Mexico’s west coast waiting for Cortés’s ships to take him to China on the conqueror’s failed expedition to the Pacific. The ships never appeared. Lying on his deathbed in Mexico City, Valencia said, “I have been cheated of my desire.”

Scuffling in the streets, struggling to pull strings in the government, uneasily cooperating in the military, Mexico City’s multitude of poorly defined ethnic groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas made it the world’s first truly global city—the Homogenocene for
Homo sapiens.
A showpiece for the human branch of the Columbian Exchange, it was the place where East met West under an African and Indian gaze. Its inhabitants were ashamed of the genetic mix even as they were proud of their cosmopolitan culture, perhaps none more so than the poet Bernardo de Balbuena, whose
Grandeza Mexicana
is a two-hundred-page love letter to his adopted home. “In thee,” he wrote, addressing Mexico City,

Spain is joined with China,

Italy with Japan, and finally

an entire world in trade and order.

In thee, we enjoy the best of the treasures

of the West; in thee, the cream

of all luster created in the East.

Balbuena wrote his panegyric while the city he extolled was under water. Cortés’s siege wrecked the intricate network of dikes and baffles that kept the island from flooding every spring; now the city was inundated for months at a time. (Repairing the damage took almost four centuries and in some ways left the city worse off than before.) Balbuena seemed not to mind. It was evidently worth the inconvenience of wading through the flood to live in an urban dream of chanting religious processions, swishing silk dresses, groaning carriages of silver and gold, and great clanging church bells, a city where people drifted in canoes down canals lined with flowers as sunlight gleamed from the mountains. But it was both more and less than that. Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood—to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today’s modern, globalized megalopolises.

It may seem foolish to use terms like
modern
and
globalized
to describe a time and place in which there were no means of mass communication and most people had no way of buying goods or services from overseas. But even today billions of people on our networked planet have no telephones. Even today the reach of goods and services from high-tech places like the United States, Europe, and Japan is limited. Modernity is a patchy thing, a matter of shifting light and dark upon the globe. Here was one of the spots where it touched first.

¹
This direst instance of the Columbian Exchange is often said to have been introduced in the body of an African slave named Francisco de Eguía or Baguía. Other reports contend that the carriers were Cuban Indians brought as auxiliaries by the Spaniards. Restall suspects that “granting the role of patient zero” to Africans or Indians is “classic Spanish scapegoating.” So horrific was the epidemic, he suggests, that Spaniards did not want to be seen as the cause.

²
New England was an exception, but it was only a small fraction of English migration—the colonies to its south were much bigger. Until the end of the eighteenth century, African slaves outnumbered Europeans in England’s American holdings by about two to one.

³
“Motecuhzoma” is the most common scholarly Romanization of the emperor’s name today. At the time, Spaniards usually called him “Moctezuma,” which became the name of his grandchildren.

⁴
Such mingled relationships were not restricted to Spanish and Portuguese America. As time passed, the Princeton historian Linda Colley has written, Britain “evolved a more hybrid construction of its empire” as a balance of different, rapidly mixing groups. The conception was embraced by some early U.S. leaders, including President Thomas Jefferson, who argued that Europeans and Indians should “meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” A classic example of this mixing was Sam Houston, first president of Texas and later its governor, who ran away from his childhood home and was adopted by a Cherokee family. He returned to the society of his birth and launched a violent, alcohol-fueled political career. At thirty-six, his marriage having ended, he returned to the Cherokee, married a half-Cherokee woman, became the Cherokee ambassador to Washington, and took to wearing native garb. Angered by his constant drinking, the Cherokee ejected him from his job and threw him out of the group. Houston became president of Texas after it seceded from Mexico. In office, he tried to forge an alliance with local Cherokees to invade northern Mexico and create a bicultural state. Jefferson, too, helped create a mixed society. As demonstrated by DNA tests in 1998, he was the likely father of one or more children by his part-African slave, Sally Hemings, who may have been his wife’s half sister. Jefferson freed all six of Hemings’s children—the only slaves he emancipated—and three went on as adults to live as “whites.”

⁵
Spaniards weren’t alone in this preoccupation. The eighteenth-century French polymath Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry tried to split Haiti’s jumbled population into 128 minutely differentiated groups (“the twelve combinations of Mulatto range from 56 to 70 parts white”).

⁶
Not all went to Mexico. A census of Lima, Peru, in 1613 found 114 Asians living there, almost half of them women. Presumably the actual tally was bigger, because Asians would have tried to avoid the census takers. Many were “ruff openers” (
abridores de cuellos
), fixing the mechanisms on the stiff ruffs wealthy men then wore about their necks.

9
Forest of Fugitives

IN CALABAR

Christian de Jesus Santana could see the secret city from his window. Known as Calabar, it was at the edge of Salvador da Bahia, in northeast Brazil, on the inland side of a ridge that paralleled the coastline. On the shore side of the ridge, invisible from Calabar, was the great Bay of All Saints, the second-biggest slave harbor in the world, the first glimpse of the Americas for more than 1.5 million captive Africans. The slaves were supposed to spend the rest of their days in Brazil’s sugar plantations and mills. Most did, but countless thousands escaped their bondage, and many of these established fugitive communities—
quilombos,
as Brazilians called them—in the nation’s forests. Almost always they were joined by Indians, who were also targeted by European slavers. Protected by steep terrain, thickly packed trees, treacherous rivers, and lethal booby traps, these illicit hybrid settlements endured for decades, even centuries. The great majority were small, but some grew to amazing size. Calabar, where Christian grew up, swelled to as many as twenty thousand inhabitants. (The name Calabar comes from a slave port in what is now Nigeria.) A few miles away, another Salvador
quilombo,
Liberdade (Liberty), today has a population of 600,000 and is said to be the biggest Afro-American community in the Western Hemisphere.

Good records do not exist, but Calabar and Liberdade were certainly going concerns by 1650. In Liberdade I met a local historian who told me the city actually originated decades earlier, when slaves had escaped from Salvador down a native path in the forest. The Bay of All Saints is bordered by high, forested bluffs; escapees climbed the bluffs and took over land on the other side, creating a ring of encampments between the colonial port and the indigenous interior. Sometimes their homes were just a few hundred yards away from European farms as the crow flies, but the forest and hills were impenetrable enough to conceal their location. The Portuguese constantly hunted the runaways, but they also traded with them—Calabar’s residents, four miles from the center of Salvador, exchanged dried fish, manioc (cassava), rice, and palm oil for knives, guns, and cloth. In 1888 Brazil finally abolished slavery, yet life in its
quilombos
showed little improvement. They were still regarded as illegal squatters’ settlements. But the government was too weak to do much about them.

In the 1950s and 1960s Salvador grew enormously. Urban pseudopods reached over the ridges, engulfing Calabar, Liberdade, and half a dozen other
quilombos.
But these fugitive settlements never fully became part of the city—nobody had legal title to the land. Few roads entered Calabar. Sewer lines were routed around its borders. People had to steal electric power with jury-rigged hookups. By 1985, when Christian was born, the former hideaway was completely surrounded by high-rise apartments.

When I met Christian, he was kind enough to take Susanna Hecht—the UCLA geographer, who was generously sharing her linguistic and historical expertise—and me around his childhood home. The entry was a narrow, unmarked stairway. Bootleg electrical connections made snarls of wire along the walls. Houses staggered up the ridge, linked by crumbling concrete paths. There were almost no cars. At the bottom of the hill the streets were crowded with promenading people and music was in the air as in other Salvadoran neighborhoods. Teenagers in white clothing were practicing capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian dance that is also a martial art. Banners touting neighborhood programs hung over the street. Here and there new streetlights gleamed. It was a living community, or so it seemed to me, a city within a city.

Tucked behind a wall of high-rise apartments in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Salvador, Brazil, the hidden city of Calabar was founded four centuries ago by escaped slaves and still is only weakly attached to the larger urban complex. (
Photo credit 9.3
)

Calabar and Liberdade are not unique. Thousands of fugitive communities dotted Brazil, much of the rest of South America, most of the Caribbean and Central America, and even parts of North America—more than fifty existed in the United States. Some covered huge areas and fought colonial governments for decades. Others hid in wet forests in the lower Amazon, central Mexico, and the U.S. Southeast. All were scrambling to create free domains for themselves—“inventing liberty,” in the phrase of the Brazilian historian João José Reis. They have been called by a host of names:
quilombos,
yes, but also
mocambos, palenques,
and
cumbes.
In English they are usually called “maroon” communities—the term apparently comes, poignantly, from
símaran,
the Taino word for the flight of an arrow.

American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are only now beginning to unravel.

Even when schoolbooks do acknowledge the hemisphere’s majority populations, they are all too often portrayed solely as helpless victims of European expansion: Indians melting away before the colonists’ onslaught, Africans chained in plantations, working under the lash. In both roles, they have little volition of their own—no
agency,
as social scientists say. To be sure, slavery forced millions of Africans and Indians into lives of misery and pain. Often those lives were short: a third to a half of Brazil’s slaves died within four to five years. More still died on the journey within Africa to the slave port, and on the passage across the Atlantic. Yet people always seek ways to exert their will, even in the most terrible circumstances. Africans and Indians fought with each other, claimed to be each other, and allied together for common goals, sometimes all at the same time. Whatever their tactics, the goal was constant: freedom.

More often than is commonly realized they won it. Slaves vanished from the ken of their masters by the tens or even hundreds of thousands in Brazil, Peru, and the Caribbean. Spain recognized autonomous maroon communities in Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Mexico and used them as buffers against its adversaries. In Suriname, “Bush Negros” fought a century-long war with the proud Dutch colonial government and in 1762 pushed it into a humiliating peace treaty—the European negotiators, following African custom, had to endorse the pact by drinking their own blood. A maroon-Indian alliance in Florida forced the U.S. government after two wars to grant liberty to its population of escaped slaves. It was the only time that Washington freed a class of slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation (to save face, the government called the pact a “capitulation”). Most important, slaves in Haiti created an entire maroon nation by driving out the French in 1804—a revolution that terrified slave owners across Europe and the Americas.

These struggles are not confined to the past. African populations in Colombia, Central America, and Mexico are increasingly climbing out of the shadows and demanding an end to discrimination. In the United States the descendants of maroons are at the center of legal battles from Florida to California. The greatest impact may be in Brazil, though, where recent laws have given maroon communities a key role in determining the future of Amazonia.

AFRICANS IN CHARGE

Back in Africa, or so the tale goes, Aqualtune was a princess and a general. It is said that she ruled one of the Imbangala states that rose in central Angola as the previously dominant Kingdom of Kongo declined. In about 1605, according to the story, she was captured in a battle against the Kongolese and sold with other POWs to Portuguese slavers. On the passage across she was raped and impregnated. Aqualtune landed in the sugar port of Recife, at the tip of Brazil’s “bulge” into the Atlantic. A military strategist, she naturally began to plan an escape. Within months she was in the hinterland with about forty of her troops. Twenty-five miles from the coast, a series of abrupt basaltic extrusions dominates the plain like a line of watchtowers. Their sheer, cliff-like walls reach hundreds of feet up to flat summits with dizzying views of the surrounding plain. One of these tall hills was the Serra da Barriga—Potbelly Hill. On its peak was a pool of cool water, sheltered by trees, perhaps fifty yards across, with an indigenous community around it. Here Aqualtune founded Palmares.

Today Aqualtune’s peak is a national park. A plaque by the pond proudly recounts her story—doubtless to the distress of historians, because nobody knows how much of it is true. What is known is that thirty thousand or more Africans fled to the Serra da Barriga and the nearby hills in the 1620s and 1630s, taking advantage of the disorder caused when the Dutch attacked and occupied the Portuguese coastal sugar towns during that time. Free of European control, the escapees built up as many as twenty tightly knit settlements centered on the Serra da Barriga, a haven for African, native, and European runaways. At its height in the 1650s, according to the Harvard historian John K. Thornton, the maroon state of Palmares “ruled over a vast area in the coastal mountains of Brazil, constituting a rival power unlike any other group outside Europe.” It had close to as many inhabitants at the time as all of English North America. It was as if an African army had been scooped up and deposited in the Americas to control an area of more than ten thousand square miles.

Palmares’s capital was Macaco, Aqualtune’s springside resting place. Spread along a wide street half a mile long, it had a church, a council house, four small-scale iron foundries, and several hundred homes, the whole surrounded by irrigated fields. The head of state was Aqualtune’s son, Ganga Zumba, who lived in what one European visitor described as a “palace,” complete with an entourage of flattering courtiers. Other members of the royal family ruled other villages. Ganga Zumba may have been a title, rather than a name;
nganga a nzumbi
was a priestly rank in many Angolan societies. In any case, the visitor reported, he was treated with the deference due a king. His subjects had to approach him on their knees, clapping their hands in an African gesture of obeisance.

Knowing that his people were always subject to attack, Ganga Zumba organized the towns more like military camps than farming villages—strict discipline, constant guard duty, frequent drill sessions. Each major settlement was ringed by a double-walled wooden palisade with high walkways along the top and watchtowers at the corners. In turn the palisades were surrounded by protective snarls of timber, hidden deadfalls, pits lined with poisoned stakes, and fields of caltrops (antipersonnel weapons made from iron spikes welded together in such a way that one always points upward, ready to injure anyone who steps on it). Every single person who had fled slavery to live there had risked life and limb for liberty in a way that is difficult to imagine today. Palmares fairly bristled with determination to maintain command over its own destiny.