Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650

Abstract

NzEGRO resistance to enslavement was an integral feature of the history of African slavery in the Americas. Studies in the past few decades in the United States and Latin America have successfully refuted if not entirely erased the once accepted notions of Negro docility and acquieseence in slavery.' These works have provided a most convincing panorama of slave mutinies,insurrections, clandestine conspiracies, and individual escapes. Repeated evidence of more subtle forms of resistance-for example, suicide and voluntary abortion and infanticide-reveals further the determined refusal of many slaves to accept their position, and their reluctance to bear children in slavery.2 Such resistance occurred in varying degrees wherever Europeans established Negro slavery in the New World, primarily in the southern United States, the Antilles, the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Central and South America, and northeastern Brazil. Although most studies have been restricted to these regions, there is a considerable body of evidence to indicate that Negro slave resistance was also present in colonial Mexico. Recently, and primarily through the efforts of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, we have gained substantial information concerning the number and role of Africans in Mexico.3 It is now fairly certain that in