Caught between Rivals: The Spanish-African Maroon Competition for Captive Indian Labor in the Region of Esmeraldas during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

In 1586, the royal audiencia of Quito received a letter from a fugitive African slave written with the aid of an itinerant Spanish missionary.² The judges were dismayed by what they read. The African, Alonso de Illescas, head of one of the maroon communities that had been flourishing on the coast of Esmeraldas since 1553, petitioned the court with a proposition and a veiled threat. The proposal implored the judges to honor an earlier promise giving Illescas political authority over Esmeraldas, the coastal province comprising the maroons' homeland, and to desist in their plans to establish Spanish settlers in the region. In exchange, the maroons would gather and surrender hundreds of bellicose "Campaz" natives and deliver them "to the service of God and his majesty."³ If the court rejected their terms, they would renege on their offer to "do everything possible so as to procure and pacify all of the natives of this province."⁴ In addition, they would not assist the settlers nor aid them in capturing the Campazes. Importantly, for the administrators to honor their previous promise would amount to Spanish legitimation of the Africans' presence and their dominance over native communities, a concession that Spanish imperial policy would not allow.⁵ Colonial authorities were aware that their original offer contradicted Spanish ordinance, but on their side of the Atlantic divide a more critical set of goals outstripped the crown's. They were duty bound to obey the laws of the Indies that forbade the intermingling of natives and Africans but did not enforce the removal of Africans from native communities in Esmeraldas.⁶

This short vignette provides only a glimpse of the tensions and conflicts between fugitive African slave communities, Spanish colonial authorities, and the elite of Quito. However, it exemplifies the complexity of marronage in sixteenth century Spanish America. Here African slaves were empowered to subdue native people while declaring their desire to serve the crown. Spanish authority was limited, indeed stymied, by maroon independence. Missionaries gave aid to "the enemy," turning their backs on the colonial administration and the specter of violent subjugation. Strikingly, similar terms of engagement materialized in other parts of the Spanish Empire. Recent works by Jane Landers, Patrick Caroll, Kathryn McKnight, Matthew Restall, and others demonstrate the multipositionality of Africans in resistance and the diversity of their relationships with colonial authorities, Spanish settlers, and native communities.⁷ Indeed, long-term maroon survival relied on skillful negotiation and exploiting divisions within colonial society. While military resistance remained central to maroon independence, continuity also depended on legitimation by colonial authorities.

Historians of colonial Ecuador have done much to trace the Esmeraldeños's story. Earlier works, including those of Frederico González Suárez, José Rumazo González, and John Leddy Phelan sidelined the African dimensions of the saga to focus instead on the question of regional development, while later studies including José Alcina Franch, Adam Szaszdi, Frank Salomon, Kris Lane, and Rocio Rueda Novoa, have brought the African element into focus and provided a rich view of life along the Esmeraldas coast.⁸ Where this article parts from earlier analyses is in examining marronage as a set of long-term strategies and activities reaching far beyond the act of escaping enslavement. Flight was only the first, if essential, step in a process with many possible outcomes. The maroons of Esmeraldas used numerous approaches: collaborative, competitive, and even predatory in their effort to thrive under adversarial and hostile conditions. Rather than imagining the arc of marronage as a predictable curve moving from initial conflict and aggression, to either destruction or eventual incorporation, Esmeraldas demonstrates that marronage involved a dynamic, often changing set of relationships. Collaboration and conflict were...