"Pardos Enterados: Unearthing Black Papantla in the Eighteenth Century"

In 1787 Antonio Alcedo published his Diccionario Geographico-Histórico de las Indias Occidentales o America. This work details a variety of information on population centers throughout North and South America. For the town of Papantla, Veracruz, Alcedo recorded 15 families of Spaniards, 535 families of “indios Mexicanos,” and 200 pardos, divided into two companies of militia.¹ Two centuries later Peter Gerhard offered population figures for the same period in what has become the standard historical geography for colonial New Spain. Gerhard’s numbers for Papantla were considerably higher than Alcedo’s: 2,269 native tributaries and 215 Spanish families in 1795. Gerhard gave no specific figures, however, for Afro-Mexicans in the area, stating only that, “other non-indians (mostly mulattoes) settled there and elsewhere on cattle ranches.”² Yet, as we shall soon see, the numbers of Afro-Mexicans were in fact high. Also, as suggested by Alcedo’s initial findings, the military connection proved important for structuring the lives of the resident black population in the area.

This article seeks to understand the social and demographic contours of a Mexican rural town by examining the burial records of the local parish and by taking into account the value of militia inflected records. With these as yet undeveloped materials it is possible to create a more accurate representation of ethnicity in this Mexican town. Over the past several years, important strides have been made in Afro-Mexican historiography, and in Mexican social history in general.³ Mexicanists are now paying greater attention to a broader view of race and ethnicity that encompasses peoples of African origin and their multi-hued offspring. But increased and careful attention to the nexus between the institution of the colonial military and pardo, mulato, and moreno service, may even offer additional clues to those scholars tackling broader social questions that do not necessarily concentrate on African diasporic issues. This article presents some preliminary field results from an on-going project on Papantla, inviting historians to adopt a more sensitive perspective as to the meanings of race and military service in the structuring of colonial hierarchy, and in understanding how the daily affairs of rural life were operationalized and mediated. By examining data from local parish records and using qualitative materials from regional and national archives, this article begins the slow process of recovering the history of Papantla’s black population, by paying close attention to a demographic context that included close relations with natives and Spaniards.

The Bodies: Papantla’s Demographic Landscape

In determining the dimensions of regional populations, parish records prove particularly useful and illustrative. The principal data set used for this article includes five years of burial records from Papantla parish, from 1770 through 1775.⁴ These records often included the names of parents or other survivors. Document damage prevents a complete reconstruction of demographic information; however, 1,579 individuals have been successfully identified in this sample, of which 1,215 have clearly noted racial designations (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Racial Breakdown of Burials in Papantla, 1700–1775

As evidenced in the burials above, the black population of Papantla substantially outnumbered that of the Spanish. Officially, pardos constituted a population whose racial/ethnic mix was derived from African and native ancestries, whereas mulatos comprised a mixture of African and Spanish heritages. For the purposes of this article, the pardo and mulato populations have not been finely subdivided into discrete categories, since the aim here is to establish the rough boundaries of the African based population in the area. Overall, the ratio of natives to Afro-Papantecos to Spaniards was approximately 81:11:1. This figure is consistent with Matthew Restall’s finding of 12.4% of Yucatan’s population being Afro-Mexican in 1791, and is not far off the 10% estimate for the Afro-Mexican population in the colony of New Spain as a whole (1793).⁵

Of course, grouping Papantla residents into only three racial categories simplifies the complex racial spectrum envisioned by the sistema de castas (caste system), which provided for at least fifty different racial groupings in...