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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers (56th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - May 2006 |
In the countryside, life for the Indian was a different history. Separated from Spaniards, criollos, and mestizos, he lived in Indian pueblos, kept the nuclear family together, usually three generations of it, and preserved his language, one of over four hundred, if one includes dialects. While the major groups like the Aztecs lost their group identity, marginal ones did not. Maya, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs, to name three, remained cultural and linguistic units and never forgot to think of themselves as a people. When native kinships ties broke down, the Indian adopted the Spanish compadrazgo, the custom of the godfather, which helped keep alive the nuclear family. Spanish prejudice and discrimination, oddly, helped preserve Indian culture. After all, if there were no incentives to change, why do so? Why adopt European culture if it would not improve one’s economic lot? Indians in the pueblos, therefore, rarely learned to speak Spanish or adopted European customs. Corn, beans, squash, and chili made up their diet, just as in pre-Hispanic days. The lucky tilled their communal plots and land and worked, when occasion demanded, on the lands of the hacendado neighbor. The priest who visited on certain days to confer the sacraments, an occasional royal official, and the mayordomo of the hacendado were the contacts with the outside world. On Catholicism, which Indians embraced, they conferred a peculiar imprint, molding it to their manner of thinking.
Cortés also introduced the first African slaves to New Spain. Most of them were of the Islamic faith, hailing from the western Sudan, the Congo, and the Gulf of Guinea. Spanish slavery had antecedents harking back to the eighth century, when Christians and Moors enslaved their captives in the interminable wars they waged against one another. The practice endured throughout the Middle Ages, reaching its apogee during the early part of the fifteenth century, when the cities of Aragón and Cataluña prospered from the slave trade. The Spaniards had first enslaved the Indian, at times placing him in chains, as had Nuño de Guzmán in Nueva Galicia. In the Pánuco region of the Gulf of Mexico, they sold into slavery 15,000 Indians, shipping them to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Spaniards held as many as 200,000 Indian slaves in 1542, the date of the New Laws, which theoretically, abolished slavery.
With the decline of the Indian population, Africans were imported for labor. By 1650, about 120,000 of them were in New Spain, and maybe 130,000 more by the close of the colonial years. Yet, at most, they were but 2 percent of the population. Because African men outnumbered their women by two to one, many of them took Indians for their wives. Their offspring were labeled zambos; they, as well as the mulattoes, the children of Spanish fathers and African mothers, exceeded Africans eventually. By the end of the colony, mulattoes and diverse African castas formed 10 percent of the total population, most of them free.
Originally imported for labor on the sugar plantations and mines, most Africans, and later mulattoes, with exceptions such as those in the fertile valley of Zamora, in Michoacán, made their homes along the tropical coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific south from Acapulco, where sugar plantations prospered. Their cane was planted and cut by African slaves. But Africans also worked in the mines of Zacatecas and in the obrajes of the cities. In 1621, to document, five hundred African slaves, and an equal number of free Africans and mulattoes, lived in Guadalajara. Slavery, for all that, proved a poor substitute for Indian labor; by the close of the colonial period, there were just six thousand slaves in New Spain, a far cry from their numbers in English North America.
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Panoramic view of San Cristóbal de las Casa
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Zinancantan, Chiapas. The center of the village
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Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website. |
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