Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora

4. Between the Cross and the Sword: Religious Conquest and Maroon Legitimacy in Colonial Esmeraldas

4 Between the Cross and the Sword Religious Conquest and Maroon Legitimacy in Colonial Esmeraldas charles beatty-medina It has repeatedly been remarked that the beginning of African slavery in Spanish America brought with it the earliest rejection of slave life. Revolt, rebellion, and escape, along with myriad other forms of resistance, emerged in Spain’s colonies in the 1500s. Among these, perhaps the most successful (and longest lasting) was escape followed by the formation of maroon societies. Colonies across Spanish America—in Panama, Santo Domingo, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru—witnessed the formation of communities (and sometimes roaming bands) of escaped slaves. In many cases they were short lived, but others, such as the maroons of Esmeraldas, managed to maintain their independence for longer periods of time. Unlike other maroon societies , the Esmeraldas maroons began independent life as runaways and as castaways. Their escape resulted from shipwrecks on the coast of Ecuador in a region where ships frequently ran aground. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Esmeraldas contained few (and often sporadic) Spanish settlements. As a result, the maroons enjoyed extensive interactions with the region’s native population. A combination of conflict and cooperation at the initial meeting between the maroons and local native communities in the mid-sixteenth century evolved into political and social alliances as well as territorial competition in the region. The charter group of Africans that landed in 1550 numbered approximately twenty-five. They intermarried with native people, produced a mixed-race progeny, and began participating in regional warfare. By the second generation, the maroons were fully fluent in local languages and customs; so much so that in 1600, the Spanish referred to them as caciques, or local lords, and colonial administrators legitimized their rule. The union of Africans and natives thus gave birth to a new ethnic entity called mulatos. Later they would be known by one of the casta labels for the offspring of African and Indian unions: zambos. Although it might not seem to be the case, understanding how missionizing and religious conversion was viewed among maroon societies in early colonial Spanish America is critical for understanding the politics of African resistance in the Iberian Atlantic world. While missionizing among native peoples provided the moral underpinnings of conquest in the sixteenth century , it also proved to be an important tool of pacification among Africans who escaped slavery and made their home on the demographically devastated landscape of the post-conquest period.1 As Joan Bristol’s chapter in this volume makes clear, perceptions of Christian practice among communities of African descent acquired importance in the colonial context. In Ecuador, Santo Domingo, Mexico, and Panama, legitimizing and non-violently “pacifying ” maroon societies depended largely on their acceptance of Spanish Catholicism . Moreover, Christianization often turned on the relationships that maroons formed with Catholic clerics—and at times with secular authorities as well. While Spanish cultural hegemony worked to inculcate religious submission, some individuals of African descent transformed Christianization into a political tool of subaltern agency.2 Maroons, like other Africans throughout Spanish America, quickly learned that Catholicism was the essential condition of political legitimation. Yet the adoption of Christianity did not preclude maroon agency or interrupt the development and evolution of local practices that observed religious traditions of both African and indigenous American origin. This chapter examines Afro-Amerindian maroon communities on the coast of early colonial Ecuador to understand how Christianization became an indispensable tool for Afro-Amerindian rebels seeking legitimation and continued autonomy on the frontiers of Spain’s empire and within an African diasporic world. While an Afro-Christian diasporic identity may have been in its formative stage during the sixteenth century, transfers of knowledge between the old world and the new were readily apparent in European interactions with maroons on the Esmeraldas coast. This case study of the maroons of colonial Ecuador will allow us to see in three acts, or phases, how clerical intervention and the discourse of 96 . charles beatty-medina Christian conversion shaped colonization over time: ultimately yielding a modus vivendi between rebel African slaves and Spanish colonial authorities. My analysis begins with a vignette from the end of the period I examine—the four decades from 1577 to 1617. On December 18, 1605, in the coastal town of San Mateo in colonial Quito, Fray Hernando de Hincapie, a Mercedarian missionary, provided sworn testimony against his congregation, the mulatos of Esmeraldas—descendants of African fugitives...