I am re-reading Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana because I loved it so much the first time, and because I wanted to revisit the passages on race.
“What are you?” is a question I actually get asked fairly regularly. Meaning “Are you white?” I don’t really know how to answer that (in part because I am adopted and didn’t know my birth family’s background until recently). The simplest response is that I’m a fair-skinned Colombian, but I’ve never been quite sure what that even means. If 23&Me is to be believed, I am about 46 percent Southern European, 33 percent Native American, and 14 percent West and Central African. That’s the entire history of my motherland — centuries of conquest and uprising and suppression and liberation — dancing in my blood and bones.
Here’s Arana laying out the mechanics of that saga (this all comes from chapter one).
Spanish colonizers started by enslaving Native Americans:
Alongside this march of history, however, was the steady hardening of a racial hierarchy that would define South America into the modern age. It had begun when Christopher Columbus’s men had landed on Hispaniola, and imposed their will over the Taíno people. At first, Queen Isabel and the Church roundly censured the capture and massacre of Indians. Columbus’s men had committed harrowing atrocities, burning and destroying whole tribal villages, abducting natives as slaves, unleashing murderous plagues of syphilis and smallpox on the population. The priests who accompanied the crown’s “civilizing missions” made a point of recording it all. As a result, the state tried to take a strong stance against any kind of institutionalized violence. It introduced a system of encomiendas, in which Spanish soldiers were assigned allotments of Indians and, in exchange for the task of instructing them in the Christian faith, were given the right to put them to work on the land or in the mines.
The soldiers were often harsh and corrupt, killing natives who did not comply with their brutal demands, and, eventually, the system of encomiendas had to be abolished. But the notion of encouraging soldiers to work the land rather than live from plunder opened the way for a new era of plantation life. Throughout, the state had a hard time enforcing laws that prohibited slavery. Even the queen had to agree that without the use of physical force, the Indians would refuse to work and the mines so necessary to Spain’s economy would cease to function. There could be no gold, no silver, no sugar, without the systematic subjugation of American Indians. In 1503, a mere decade after Columbus stepped foot in America, the queen hedged on her initial disapprobation of slavery and decreed:
“Forasmuch as my Lord the King and Myself have ordered that the Indians living on the island of Hispaniola be considered free and not subject to slavery . . . I order you, Our Governor . . . to compel the Indians to cooperate with the Christian settlers on the said island, to work on their buildings, to mine and collect gold and other metals, and to work on their farms and crop fields.”
In other words, killing was a Christian sin and genocide would not be tolerated, but “compelling” rebellious natives was a necessary evil. The Spanish colonizers understood the tacit approval in this. Despite the official condemnation of slavery, the state had conceded it would turn a blind eye. Indians continued to be a commodity to be owned and traded. And though Spanish sailors and Indian women had propagated freely from the start, a psychology of superiority and inferiority was established. It was best to be Spanish—unfortunate to be indigenous—in the New World that Europe had made.
From there, they imported enslaved Africans:
The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas took issue with all this, especially the moral dithering about slaves. A former slave owner who had undergone an emphatic change of heart, he fumed about the brutalities Spaniards had visited on the Taíno people and the boatloads of indigenous slaves that Columbus was transporting regularly to Spain. “Slaves are the primary source of income for the Admiral,” Las Casas wrote of Columbus. Finally, in an impassioned plea to Charles V, he argued that institutionalized barbarism had cruelly decimated the Indian population: “Spaniards are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples.” In Hispaniola, they had reduced three million people to “a population of barely two hundred”; on the mainland of South America, they had stolen more than a million castellanos of gold and killed some 800,000 souls. A “Deep, Bloody American Tragedy” he called it, “choakt up with Indian Blood and Gore.”
To mitigate the damage—to prevent the depletion of these “humble, patient, and peaceable natives”—he advocated that Spain begin the importation of African slaves. Eventually, Las Casas was to see the hypocrisy of that proposal, but not before the colonies had swung into a lively commerce. By the time Simón de Bolívar had made his children and grandchildren indisputably the richest landowning aristocrats of Caracas, there were ten thousand African slaves working the fields and plantations of Venezuela. The Indians, less able to toil in the sun, too easily affected by heat prostration, were sent off to work in the mines.
Then they established a brutal racial caste system, to prevent the lower classes from ascending, and to keep them from collaborating on rebellion:
As soon as the crown was able to impose some semblance of control, it moved to enforce strict divisions between the races. A ruthlessly observed system of racial dominance was put in place. At the top were the Spanish-born, crown-appointed overseers, such as Simón de Bolívar; below them, the Creoles—whites, born in the colonies—such as de Bolívar’s own son. After that came the pardos, an ever burgeoning mixed-race population that was either mestizo, part-white, part-Indian; or mulatto, a mixture of white and black; or sambo, a combination of black and Indian. As in most slave societies, labels were fashioned for every possible skin color: quadroons, quintroons, octoroons, moriscos, coyotes, chamisos, gíbaros, and so on.
For each birth, a church registry would meticulously record the race, for there were concrete ramifications for the color of a child’s skin. If he were Indian, he would be subject to the Spanish tribute, a tax imposed by the crown; if he were unable to pay, he was forced to meet his debt through hard labor. Indians were also subject to the mita, a period of compulsory toil in the mines or fields. Many of them didn’t survive it. Chained, herded in gangs, separated from their families, those serving the mita would often be shipped great distances to satisfy the viceroy’s demands. Indians were also forced to buy goods according to laws of repartimiento. The governors would sell them food and supplies and expect them to pay with gold or silver. Often, the result was a disgraceful trafficking of sick mules, spoiled food, or faulty goods, sold at double or triple the normal prices. Sometimes these commodities were absolutely useless: Indian men who had no facial hair were made to buy razors. Women who wore tribal wraps were forced to buy silk stockings. The proceeds were gathered dutifully and sent off to the royal coffers in Madrid.
For blacks, life in Spanish America was equally punishing. Severed from family, country, language, they were brought as fishermen, pearl divers, cacao and sugar field workers. They were Bantu from Angola and the Congo, Mandingo from the Gold Coast. In the course of a little more than two hundred years, an estimated one million slaves were sold into South America by the Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Uniformly disdained as the lowest rung in the human hierarchy, they nevertheless left an indelible imprint on the culture. They worked their way from field hands to skilled craftsmen, from house slaves to beloved nursemaids, but it wasn’t until after Bolívar’s revolution that they were released into the mainstream of possibility.
None of those efforts were enough to prevent racial mixing:
For all of Spain’s attempts to retain absolute control of its colonies, it could not prevent the interracial mixing that was inevitable in a world forged by male conquistadors. The crown quickly—and by necessity—took the attitude that marriage between races was acceptable, as long as Spanish men could persuade non-Spanish women to be baptized Christians. In truth, the Spaniards were hardly racially “pure” Europeans. After centuries of tumultuous history, the bloodline contained traces of Arab, Phoenician, African, Roman, Basque, Greek, Ligurian, Celt, German, Balkan, and Jew. But once they began mixing with Indians and blacks in the Americas, a cosmic race representative of all continents began to emerge.
When Simón de Bolívar, the Spanish overlord, arrived in Venezuela in the late 1500s, the population counted 5,000 Spaniards, 10,000 Africans, and 350,000 native Indians in the country. Two hundred years later, when the Liberator was born, according to anthropologist Alexander von Humboldt, Venezuela had 800,000 inhabitants, of whom more than half were mestizo or mulatto. Today, more than two thirds of all Latin Americans are mixed-race. Nowhere else on earth has a civilization of such ethnic complexity been wrought in such a short span of time.
Of course, Arana is referring to Venezuela, here. But the story was much the same in Colombia. And by the time we get to true revolution, we are talking about all six countries that Bolivar liberated from Spanish rule.