Cimarrones de Panamá: La forja de una identidad afroamericana en el siglo XVI

Abstract

Jean-Pierre Tardieu builds on several generations of Panamanian scholarship, such as that of Armando Fortune, María del Carmen Borrego Plá, and Luis Diez Castillo, to offer readers the most thorough study to date of sixteenth-century maroon community formation anywhere in the Americas. He begins with the standard narrative of Spaniards caught between their desire for African laborers and the territory’s ability to conceal runaways. The Castilla de Oro’s unique economic geography, with the key ports of Nombre de Dios and Panamá situated on opposite sides of the isthmus’s unsettled and difficult-to-traverse interior, facilitated cimarrón disruption of valuable convoys of Peruvian silver, regional gold, and metropolitan goods. The fact that slaves were the majority population only exacerbated the situation. The novelty of Tardieu’s study is in analyzing the reality of negotiation in tandem with the common discussion of maroon resistance. He details the conditions that forced the contending parties to the bargaining table. The meaning of autonomy was as varied for runaways as were European positions on controlling them. The crown, the Consejo de Indias, the Real Hacienda, local cabildos, clerics, merchants, and individual slave owners brought different philosophies and strategies to bear in addressing the cimarrón challenge.Despite the persistent colonist requests for military intervention, metropolitan administrators initially were slow to act and proposed alternatives to the prohibitive costs, high European death rates, and frequent ineffectiveness of such intervention. In observing the colony from abroad, the early crown response contended that modification to owner behavior would be the most cost-effective strategy for ameliorating conditions for the enslaved and limiting their flight. However, peninsular officials from the Real Hacienda sought more aggressive approaches. And local cabildos organized and paid for their slave-catching expeditions. By contrast, more conciliatory clerical involvement was also key in the process of understanding cimarrón behaviors and in attempting to negotiate their eventual inclusion into the imperial system.Tardieu highlights several moments of either maroon capture or negotiated settlement. One such event was the 1555 destruction of the community led by the legendary hero Bayano. Tardieu explicitly addresses the surrounding mythology. It is noteworthy that the captors could not overtake the community by force but delayed for months to disingenuously build cimarrón trust before luring their victims into a trap. Here Tardieu also demonstrates the willingness with which this particular group of runaways sought to reposition themselves as free associates of Spanish forces. Tardieu then interprets their naivete and legitimate desire for integration into a grander military system to compare Bayano’s imprisoned fate with that of Saint Domingue’s Toussaint Louverture.Tardieu more provocatively considers the internal political and ideological structures of the maroon domain. He notes a complex governmental hierarchy that allowed for the diffused control of an extensive territory. Tardieu also describes the development of a “religion naciónal que adoptó por mimetismo los ritos y la liturgia cristiana” (p. 98). This view is inconsistent with generations of scholarship indicating the intentional selectiveness that usually accompanied the syncretism of African and Catholic practices. Tardieu’s heavy reliance on the late sixteenth-century regional history of Fray Pedro de Aguado for this interpretation requires some caution, as Aguado was not a direct observer of the community and wrote with the cultural limitations of his period.The famous Drake raids of 1572 and 1573 taught both peninsular and local authorities that cimarrón alliances with foreign privateers were not only financially costly but also threatened imperial integrity and required immediate redress. Tardieu outlines the changing course of Spanish imperial responses over this period, from local military confrontation, to royal offers of amnesty and community recognition, and to a massive regional military action. Tardieu attributes the final selection of peace to the astuteness of maroon leaders. These seasoned soldiers accepted the futility of endless wars and acquiesced to the Spanish resettlement plans. In providing demographic details about these settlements, Tardieu moves beyond flat images of cimarrones to provide a valuably nuanced picture of early free black community formation.