Introducing the "New" African Diasporic Military History in Latin America

Colonialism and the maintenance of empire require mechanisms of force that compel compliance to ruling regimes. Some of these are legal mechanisms, enforced and interpreted by a combination of high-level bureaucrats, mid-level functionaries and lawyers, as well as low-level policemen and magistrates. Others are cultural mechanisms, whose enforcers and agents have often been members of the church or cultural institutions. The military provides yet another force of imperial and colonial compliance. While the military has been traditionally viewed as a force that extends borders and defends an empire from outside threats, its soldiers convey equally important messages to an empire’s own constituents—messages that facilitate hegemony. Stationed at key geo-political centers and dressed in uniform, the military’s soldiers can be interpreted as the physical embodiment, or symbolic representation of colony, empire, and nation. Battalions and regiments can translate easily into imperial solidarity and coherence, suggesting to civilian onlookers a singularity of imperial mission and colonial purpose. Consequently, given both symbolic overtones of duty and the real military tasks at hand, European colonial authorities very much preferred that their forces be drawn as exclusively as possible from the ranks of Europeans. This white male military was to be emblematic of the ideal imperial somatic type. The crown also attempted to limit the military’s fraternization and marriage with colonists, so as to keep the forces free from the mire of local politics, focused on its imperial mission, and free to do the bidding of the king at whatever cost.¹

Below the regular army stood the colonial militias. Being part-time soldiers, more flexibility was allowed in their composition. Rather than striving for European purity, creoles born in the New World were granted entry as early as the sixteenth century. While whites represented a cherished premium, colonial demographic realities quickly dictated that other races would have to be included if any semblance of military readiness was to be maintained. In the Spanish kingdom, especially along the critical coastal areas of Veracruz and Cartagena, as well as in places like Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, forces of free-blacks became invaluable to colonial defense schemes, particularly in light of the rampant yellow fever that consumed European regulars. In the urban and semi-urban areas of the colonial interior, such as central Mexico, blacks also came to serve. Some were separated into units of mulattos and morenos (blacks), while others stood side by side with mestizos and whites. Along the frontiers, even indigenous populations were recruited for duty, despite legislation that expressly prohibited the arming of natives. In short, the constellation of militia forces that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the racial collage that became the Spanish colonial world, and despite a sketchy record of duty, the militias became important forces in transmitting notions of martial spirit into broad spectrums of the colonial population. Throughout the Atlantic world, and especially in those places where people of African descent were numerous, similar situations were found. Since people of color were often easier to coerce, and also lacked alternative means of gaining social status and wealth, they were often represented disproportionately in militia forces in the Americas. Unequivocally, the militias bolstered the links of fealty, creating a tight (albeit sometimes illusory) identification between lowly colonists and the highest rungs of colonial authority. At the same time, as provincial institutions, the militias quickly became enmeshed in local politics. For many, therefore, militia duty became an expression of what it meant to be a colonial “citizen” in the Latin American domain—involving an intricate attachment to overarching colonial enterprises in ways that meandered through the everyday realities of living in provincial worlds, steeped in daily affairs that could (and frequently did) contradict the goals of colonialism itself.

That blacks would be called to serve in military forces is emblematic of the multiple ironies associated with colonial power and its military manifestations. Despite accompanying Spaniards in the earliest military efforts of conquest in the New World, blacks were quickly forbidden from even carrying weapons in the Spanish colonial laws of the sixteenth century...