African American History in New Mexico: Portraits from Five Hundred Years

3: Africans and Discrimination in Colonial New Mexico: Don Pedro Bautista Pino’s Startling Statements of 1812 in Perspective

49 3 Africans and Discrimination in Colonial New Mexico Don Pedro Bautista Pino’s Startling Statements of 1812 in Perspective jim f. heath and frederick m. nunn • • • In 1810 don Pedro Bautista Pino, an influential New Mexico resident , was elected to the Spanish Cortes. Convoked in that same year, the Cortes had granted representation to Spain’s overseas colonies in an attempt to rally imperial support against Napoleon’s threat to the Spanish throne.1 The trip from isolated New Mexico, located on the northern frontier of New Spain, to Cadiz, where the Cortes was in session , was not an easy one, and don Pedro did not arrive until August 1812. But he considered the opportunity to represent his province at the assembly to be worth the hardship of the long journey. Soon after his arrival at Cadiz, Pino presented an informe to the Cortes that reflected his proud enthusiasm for his homeland and its people.2 Describing conditions in New Mexico, he stressed the need for government assistance to ease the high transportation costs that hampered development of the potentially rich resources of the province, the urgency of land reform, and the neglect of the area by the church.3 Despite such problems, Pino assured the parliament of New Mexico’s loyalty to Spain. Curiously, he placed heavy emphasis upon the purity of blood among the citizens of his homeland, insisting that there was no known caste of people of African origin. “My province,” he declared, “is probably the only one in Spanish America 50 jim f. heath and frederick m. nunn that enjoys this distinction. Spaniards and pure-blooded Indians (who are hardly different from us) make up the total population of 40,000 inhabitants.”4 Given the pervasive revolutionary tendencies that existed in much of Mexico at the time, don Pedro’s proclamation of fealty to Spain was undoubtedly received with pleasure by the Cortes. His advocacy of reform placed him in the mainstream of Creole progressivism, but his flat denial of Negro blood in his home province may have struck his listeners as both remarkable and questionable. The extent of Negro blood in Spanish America was well known to all delegates, having been a matter of serious debate in deliberations in 1810–1811 over representation for the American provinces in the Cortes. The population of Spanish America and the Philippine Islands exceeded that of peninsular Spain by over 50 percent, and the peninsular delegates had no intention of losing control of the Cortes to the overseas imperial kingdoms. So in 1811 the peninsular delegates succeeded in having the Cortes adopt a formula that—in effect—deliberately excluded colored castes from the population figures used to determine representation.5 American delegates to the Cortes protested this tactic as depriving the provinces of their fair share of members. Many provincial spokesmen argued that the discriminatory action against the colored castes was not justified, citing the many talented and capable citizens of mixed blood in the New World. But it is also true that at least part of the upper-class American Creoles (pure-blood Europeans born in America), growing increasingly resentful of the colored castes’ pretensions to equality, supported the peninsular delegates’ plan to exclude the castes from the basis of representation.6 Negro slaves arrived in Mexico proper with Hernán Cortés as early as 1519, but the question of their being an important element in society did not arise for some years. Viceroy Luis de Velasco, who succeeded Antonio de Mendoza in that post in 1551, was the first official we know of who made more than a cursory reference to Negroes in that part of Spain’s New World empire. In 1553 Velasco urged the king to “command that so many licenses to import slaves not be granted, because in New Spain there are more than 20,000 Negroes, a number still increasing.”7 Nevertheless, during the three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico, over two hundred thousand Negro slaves were brought to New Spain. The overwhelming majority of this number Africans and Discrimination in Colonial New Mexico 51 diluted their blood by unions with aborigines and whites, thus creating the mixture of bloods that forms the biological basis of Mexican nationality.8 Historians generally accept the conclusion that Negro slaves in the Latin American countries fared better than their brothers in the English colonies and the United States. According to this...