“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

Abstract

In the first chapter of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy points out an interesting detail about Columbus's first trip to the Americas: Columbus' pilot, Pedro Nino, was also an African. The history of the Black Atlantic since then, continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship—provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory.1 This assertion emerges as part of Gilroy's challenge to nationalistic and ethnic approaches that attempt to circumscribe the history of the African diaspora to the constitution of a particular identity. Beyond the debatable characterization of Pedro Nino as African, this remark expresses a position that is as suggestive as it is challenging.2 Gilroy proposes that the beginning of the black Atlantic is contemporaneous with the beginning of the modern European colonization of the Americas in 1492. Though his analyses remain mostly committed to ideas and vocabulary that emerge in the context of the European Enlightenment (particularly, the double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois proposes as a development and challenge to a Hegelian approach to history) and focus on materials that come from the English black Atlantic, Gilroy seems to recognize here that the history of the black Atlantic covers a wider spectrum in terms of time and regions than the one that he explores in his own reflections (124–25).If the black Atlantic as a “chaotic, living, disorganic formation” (122) that overcomes the boundaries established by modern slavery begins with the so-called discovery of the Americas, it is necessary to recognize that it covers more than five centuries, at least four colonial languages along with their creole variations, and more precisely those political structures, ways of resilience, and cultural exchanges that are not articulated in terms of the emancipatory ideals of the European enlightenment. In addition, a significant number of the texts that emerge in this expanded black Atlantic, particularly those coming from the Spanish and Portuguese empires from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, were not produced from the perspectives of Africans and their descendants in the Americas but from the perspectives of their masters and/or authorities who despised, condemned, and misrecognized their search for freedom as much as their alternative forms of social organization.3 Therefore, double consciousness as a key concept for understanding the African diaspora should not be rejected but rather adjusted and combined with other concepts in order to face the challenges raised by the analysis of such texts.On the basis of her work on the African diaspora in the French Caribbean, Christine Chivallon has proposed a suggestive approach to Gilroy's ideas, emphasizing the dynamism of the African diaspora as diversity in permanent transformation that offers the possibility of a critique of modernity and, particularly, its mechanisms of objectification: “I understand that diversity as referring to the variety of collective orientations and to their interrelatedness in an open decentered community fabric.”4 Chivallon's emphasis on diversity instead of double consciousness expands Gilroy's black Atlantic in geographical and temporal terms, allowing us to explore the presence of a strong and persistent critique of modernity in texts related to African captives and their free descendants in the Americas.In that context, this article examines a document that offers an approach to a maroon community that emerged in the middle of the sixteenth century in what we know today as Esmeraldas in Ecuador. My aim is to explore the way in which Miguel Cabello Balboa's Verdadera Descripción de la Provincia de Esmeraldas (1583)—referred to hereafter as Descripción—registers the process of constitution of this community and to identify both elements of continuity and discontinuity between Cabello Balboa's book and Gilroy's reflections on the black Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges that challenges the ethnic and national paradigms of modern subjectivity (5–19).My hypothesis is that Gilroy's reflections make it possible to recognize and highlight in Cabello Balboa's Descripción a set of challenges that a group of African captives and their descendants introduced to counter discourses and practices that conceived the early Spanish colonization of the Americas as a Christian project governed by Spanish rulers and masters. However, it is necessary to recognize in Cabello Balboa's Descripción some dimensions of the constitution of subjectivity that are hardly comparable to those that underlie the strategies and discourses examined by Gilroy in his reflections on the Enlightened English black Atlantic. Therefore, I propose a transformative conversation between Cabello Balboa's Descripción and Gilroy's assertions about the processes of constitution of subjectivity in the black Atlantic.On one hand, Gilroy's reflections allow us to emphasize in Cabello Balboa's Descripción (1) the existence of early African subjectivities that are able to recover and protect their freedom through a number of strategies of organization and negotiation with Spanish authorities to the point of introducing an alternative model of territorial domination, (2) the constitution of mixed subjectivities that challenge the mechanisms of separation between African captives and indigenous people imposed by the Spanish authorities in the new territories, and (3) the appropriation and reinterpretation of hegemonic discourses of power in order to produce a locus of enunciation recognizable through Cabello Balboa's textual mediation. In a few words, Gilroy's reflections allow us to perceive the relevance of a process that transforms African captives into leaders of an African-Amerindian settlement in early Spanish America. Anticipating in many ways strategies of organization that Charles Hale has discussed in his work on current Afro-indigenous communities in Central America, this settlement emerged as a space in which freedom, land, and a narrative of resilience overcame captivity, deportation, and misrecognition.5On the other hand, Cabello Balboa's Descripción challenges Gilroy's views in that (1) the racial and national ideologies proposed by Gilroy as references in his black Atlantic are not similar to the Christian/imperial ideologies that former African captives and their descendants had to cope with during the second half of the sixteenth century in Esmeraldas in order to recover and protect their freedom and (2) the strategies of resistance exhibited by the leaders of the Afro-Amerindian community of Esmeraldas are not articulated by a Hegelian narrative of emancipation and death such as it is exposed by Gilroy (59–71) but rather in terms of a narrative of miscegenation and ambiguity that delays the dialectic confrontation as a privileged strategy of resistance.I thus develop my exposition in three parts. First, I explore the challenges that Cabello Balboa's writing introduces in our approach to the maroon community of Esmeraldas, a community that contributed significantly to the early constitution of the black Atlantic. Second, I discuss the strategies employed by this maroon community to achieve territorial autonomy, emphasizing the creation of a heterotopia that challenged the Spanish and Catholic project of a colonization of the Americas. Finally, I explore the emergence of mixed subjectivities in that heterotopia and how they were able to produce a counterdiscourse that avoided, at least for a while, the subjugation of the community to an imperial and Christian rhetoric.The inclusion of the maroon community of Esmeraldas in the spectrum of the black Atlantic entails at least one difficulty. Unlike the texts and cultural productions explored by Gilroy, most of the texts about this and other maroon communities in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Panama during the sixteenth century were not produced by their African members or even from a point of view that recognized the value of their resilience and organization as communities that challenged Spanish projects of colonization.6 Most come from colonial authorities and missionaries that attempted to subjugate them to Spanish rule, depicting them in a tone of unilateral disqualification. Instead of the “unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being, and seeing”—racial, nationalistic, and diasporic—that Gilroy proposes (127), what we find in most of the documents concerning these maroon communities are terms of judgment about what is considered as an undesired consequence of introducing more and more African captives in Spanish America.In the specific case of the maroon community of Esmeraldas, most of the texts are legal documents that authorized expeditions to go to the region, narratives written by missionaries who either accompanied or led those expeditions, and chronicles based on the information provided by these legal documents and narratives.7 However, recent scholarship has recovered two valuable texts penned by Spanish authorities on behalf of the leaders of the community. The first text is a letter addressed by the leader of the maroon community, Alonso de Illescas, to Philip II in February 1586, recognizing his authority, promising to help him pacify the indigenous population in the region, and requesting that he not send a new military expedition to Esmeraldas.8 The second is a settlement signed by Alonso de Illescas's son, Sebastian de Illescas, in October 1600, accepting Spanish and Christian rule, and promising to move the community to a new place where they can be Christianized and help the Spanish colonizers.9 In both texts, the leaders of the maroon community accept Spanish rule and give up their power in the service and the interests of the empire.As noted by Martin Lienhard in his study Disidentes, rebeldes, insurgentes, working on colonial texts written by persons in a pressure situation who appear to accede to colonial rule requires recognizing that those persons are barely expressing their points of view.10 Most of the time these texts express what the authorities want to hear in precisely the way they want to hear it. Put plainly, an asymmetry crosses them in the sense that the narrative frame imposed by the dominant group reduces, without eliminating, the possibility of expression of the oppressed group. This does not mean that the texts are valueless. They tend to carry a significant amount of information about the conflicts between the authorities and the oppressed groups. According to Lienhard, if we read these texts against the grain, we can glimpse the agency of the oppressed group beyond the unilateralism of the dominant rhetoric that frames the document.11Now, if we accept that the value of a text related to a group such as the maroon community of Esmeraldas does not lie in the fact that it expresses freely the voice of the leaders or members of the community but in the possibility that it might permit us to explore the conflict and the disruptions introduced by the agency of the African captives and their descendants in hegemonic discourses, we also have to accept that a text such as Cabello Balboa's Descripción acquires particular value as an exploration in writing of these conflicts and disruptions. It offers not only a significant amount of information about the community but a reflection on the causes of the failure of Cabello Balboa's expedition to the region.Cabello Balboa's Descripción is the earliest source of information about Esmeraldas, and it was primarily based on the information he obtained in the two expeditions he led to the region in 1577 and 1578.12 In contrast to earlier expeditions that attempted to bring this region's indigenous populations and maroon communities under the control of the Spanish crown and Catholicism through military means, his expeditions focused on diplomatically pacifying these communities as well as on finding a route between Quito and the Pacific Ocean through the Andes.13According to the Descripción, in his first expedition (July 1577–January 1578), Cabello Balboa arrived in the Esmeraldas region by traveling northward through the Pacific coast from the port of Guayaquil to the bay of San Mateo.14 Spanish authorities from Quito appointed him as their messenger to the maroon community because they believed that its leader, Alonso de Illescas, wanted to accept their rule (57–59). A few days after arriving at the bay, Cabello Balboa was able to meet with him and the other leaders of the settlement twice and to make some arrangements for their submission to imperial authorities. On behalf of these authorities, Cabello Balboa offered Illescas and his community recognition of their freedom, absolution for their sins, and territorial control over the territory of Esmeraldas, as well as proposed appointing Alonso de Illescas as governor of the region. In exchange, the community had to recognize the Spanish authorities and to establish its settlement near the bay. Though Alonso de Illescas appeared very favorable to Cabello Balboa's offer during the two meetings that they held, he did not show up to close the deal in a third meeting (65–75). After having waited for more than three weeks for the return of Illescas and the other leaders of the settlement, whose provisions he had used up, Cabello Balboa, along with the other members of the expedition, returned to Guayaquil without an agreement in hand (77–86).In his second expedition (February–September 1578), Cabello Balboa tried to take advantage of the experiences that he acquired in his first one to find a route from Quito to Esmeraldas through the Andes. He was able to advance westward to the province of Yumbos and thought that he was very close to finding the route to Esmeraldas through the mountains (87–96). However, the uprising of the indigenous community of Quijos and the attacks of English pirate Francis Drake on the Pacific coast changed the priorities of the Spanish authorities, forcing him to interrupt the expedition and to give up to any hope of resuming it later (96–105).15Disappointed by the disinterest of the colonial authorities in Quito, Cabello Balboa asked the bishop of the city for an ecclesiastical position that allowed him to secure some resources to go to Lima, capital of the viceroyalty, and make the case for the conquest of Esmeraldas before the viceroy. A legal document from the city of Trujillo, in the north of Peru, in 1583 declares that the mayor of the city has a manuscript of the Descripción and recommends that copies of the book be made to present to the authorities.16 It seems that the Descripción is a text that Cabello Balboa wrote as part of the attempt to persuade the viceroy of Peru to organize a new expedition to a region in which souls were captives in a “Babylon of abominations” (33–34, 79–80). His text offers a geographical depiction of the region and its resources, an account of the strategies used by former African captives to acquire control over territory and native populations, and a narrative of his two failed expeditions to Esmeraldas along with his own reflections about the reasons that prevented him from Christianizing these former captives and their descendants.In order to make his argument, he proposes an account of his expeditions that expresses disappointment about their failure and, particularly in the account of the first expedition, recognition of the ability of Alonso de Illescas to avoid the subjugation of his community and keep control over Esmeraldas's territory. Illescas was a captive from the island of Cape Verde, who, after living several years in Sevilla as a slave under the names Enrique and Alonso, ran away while being transported to Peru and later became the leader of the maroon community (51). Beyond rhetoric that blames Illescas and his allies (mainly indigenous groups but also a sailor from Tenerife, Gonzalo de Avila, and a former novice friar, Escobar) for their evasive and unacceptable tactics and therefore for the failure of the expedition, it is possible to recognize in Cabello Balboa's Descripción the expression of a coming crisis in the idea that the submission of African and Native American populations to Spanish rule was the only acceptable way to populate the new lands, a crisis that developed as a consequence of the emergence of African-Amerindian subjectivities that challenged such a notion.In his writing, Cabello Balboa combines experiences he acquired in his failed expeditions with his knowledge of geography, history, and theology in order to offer what he considers to be an accurate and persuasive depiction of the maroon community. In fact, at the beginning of his account of his expeditions, he emphasizes that, though he is writing about events that he witnessed, he will be extremely careful to not allow the strange and admirable nature of these events—“un no se que suelen engendrar las cosas raras y de admiración” (61) (“a certain something that rare and admirable things produce”)—to affect the accuracy of his narration of them. However, his account is undeniably committed to the point of view of Spanish authorities. In other words, he considers territorial and religious submission of the maroon community to Spanish imperial rule to be the only acceptable outcome. In that sense, Cabello Balboa is not interested in offering the point of view of the maroon community or in vindicating their demands for freedom and territorial autonomy. Indeed, most often he depicts Alonso de Illescas as a barbarous tyrant whose power is based on violence and fear, and sustained via tricks that he conceives to eliminate his adversaries and maintain his power over the indigenous population.Nevertheless, Cabello Balboa is able to register in certain passages of the Descripción the tension between his beliefs and those held by Alonso de Illescas and his community. In particular, he recognizes existence of a space between himself and the maroons that allows them to evaluate and eventually dismiss the offer of submission that he is making on behalf of the Spanish authorities. In order to explain that distance, Cabello Balboa proposes two narrative strategies in his Descripción. First, he offers an account of how Alonso de Illescas becomes a leader and is able to create a settlement out of the reach of Spanish authorities. As the narration advances, Cabello Balboa moves from a chiding tone toward a more rounded perspective, calling attention to Illescas's ability to keep his power in the region and his distance in relation to Spanish authorities. Second, he explores the relations of kinship and the alliances that Illescas establishes with the members of his community as well as other individuals, speculating about the reasons that moved Illescas to dismiss the offer of submission.The introduction of these two narrative strategies complicates Cabello Balboa's Descripción. Although it is clear that his belief in the superiority of the Spanish and Catholic points of view persists as a framework for his account, his textual reconstruction of a subjectivity that both fascinates and repels him allows us to recognize the existence of a point of view that consistently challenges that belief. In this way, the Descripción offers an early and unique account of the maroon community of Esmeraldas and the difficulties that its existence produced for the Spanish authorities.In the Descripción, Cabello Balboa emphasizes that the community is able to move around the Esmeraldas territory and, particularly, to prevent Spanish expeditions from knowing the specific location of their settlement. Speaking of Alonso de Illescas's refusal to bring him and members of his expedition to the community's settlement, Cabello Balboa complains, “Jamás el negro nos dijo donde tenía su morada, haciéndose hartero de escarmentado en su ruin compadre Escobar” (63) (“This black never told us where his dwelling was, wisely arguing that he had learnt from the previous betrayal of his disloyal fellow Escobar”). The Esmeraldas territory became not only a place where several African captives recovered their freedom but also and mostly a place where certain strategies of domination used by the Spanish colonizers during the sixteenth century were appropriated by the leaders of the community in order to protect the freedom of their members. Cabello Balboa finds this appropriation unacceptable (35, 79–80).As a way to persuade his reader that this is an accurate characterization of the situation in Esmeraldas, Cabello Balboa describes the strategies that Anton and Alonso, the leaders of the fugitive group, used to acquire control over the region and the indigenous populations that lived there. He writes in the Descripción that twenty-three African captives—seventeen men and six women—fled the ship that was carrying them from Panama from Peru in October 1553 “sin propósito ninguno de volver a la servidumbre” (48) (“with the purpose of never again returning to serfdom”). However, their desire for freedom soon meant that they had to face an unknown territory as well as native populations that did not welcome them. Though the fugitives were able to secure help from a small indigenous group at first (according to Rueda Novoa, the Niguas), getting food, lodging, and even some loyalty from them, soon they had to confront the Campas, the most bellicose group of the region.17 As a consequence of this confrontation, six Africans died along with several members of the indigenous community. The native community, taking advantage of the situation, then tried to eject the fugitives, whom they considered “importunosos huéspedes” (50) (“unwelcomed visitors”), from their settlement considering.In the face of this adverse situation, the African fugitives began to use violence to survive and to acquire control over the region. Under the leadership of Anton, they avenged the Campas's attack, terrorized the indigenous populations of the region, and killed the leaders of their adversaries' communities. According to Cabello Balboa, “Sembraron terror en toda aquella comarca” (50) (“They spread terror throughout the whole region”). This strategy worked—but at the cost of the death of several of the Africans that formed the initial group of fugitives, including their first military leader, Anton. Only seven men and three women survived this first stage of adaptation to the territory. Therefore, as a way to ensure their survival and power, the remaining group decided to decimate the hosting indigenous group “con tanta crueldad como se puede creer de gente tan desalmada y bárbara” (50) (“with such cruelty that is only believable from soulless and barbarous people”), leaving alive only the number of people they could control easily.Once the remaining African group acquired control over the community that initially hosted them, a new leader appeared: Alonso de Illescas. Cabello Balboa's depiction of Illescas shows him to be a leader who, without giving up the use of force as the main way to maintain control of the region, established kinship ties and alliances with other indigenous and African groups that inhabited Esmeraldas with the result that these groups expressed increasing respect for and loyalty to him.Comenzaron a tomar amistad con un negro de aquellos llamado Alonso, a quien los demás comenzaban a respetar, aunque mozo, tanto por ser valiente como por ser ladino e industrioso en la guerra e que ya había aprendido la lengua de aquella tierra…. A este pues comenzaron los indios a tener amor sin doblés ninguno y le dieron por mujer a una india hermosa, hija de un principal y muy emparentada, con cuyo favor de parientes, por las cautelas dignas de tal gente, vino a tener mando y señorío entre los negros e indios. (51)(The Niguas began to be friends with one of these blacks called Alonso. Several groups in the region began to respect him as well because, though he was young, he was brave, a connoisseur of the Spanish customs, industrious in the art of war, and already fluent in the language of the region…. Therefore, these indigenous people began to love him honestly and they gave him a beautiful indigenous woman as his partner. She was the daughter of an important person with powerful relatives, who, as part of their strategy to maintain their power, helped him to acquire power and dominion over black and indigenous people.) Alonso de Illescas becomes central in Cabello Balboa's account as a figure who was able to stabilize the community and therefore who stands as a person who might be able to negotiate Esmeraldas's eventual submission to Spanish rule. As a military leader, Illescas consolidated his power over the region by ambushing and killing the chief of a rival indigenous group (Cacique Chilindauli); he also probably participated in the assassination of another African leader in the region, Andres Mangache, who had arrived in the region by 1540 (51–52).18 He also resisted several Spanish expeditions that tried to capture him and even escaped from Andres Contero, whose expedition captured him in 1570, soon recovering his position as leader of the maroon community (54–56).19Cabello Balboa held two meetings with Alonso de Illescas in the bay of San Mateo, far from the settlement of the maroon community (65–75). In his account of these events, he finds unacceptable and enigmatic the elusive answers that Illescas provided each time that he requested access to the settlement and asked that it be relocated to a place easily reached by both Spanish authorities and Catholic missionaries. Most significantly, he was troubled by the way Illescas used violence, particularly over the indigenous population, to rule the region in order to satisfy his own interests.However, it is not concern for the indigenous population that primarily motivates Cabello Balboa's criticism of the strategies used by African maroons to acquire control over the region. If we examine how most of the Spanish colonizers conducted their expeditions in the New World during the sixteenth century, we can easily see that strategies used by the African leaders of Esmeraldas were not exceptional. The use of violence and fear to obtain control over the indigenous people was a persistent strategy in the early colonization of the Americas. In fact, in his Descripción Cabello Balboa briefly discusses previous military expeditions that tried to conquer the territory of Esmeraldas without expressing any particular concern about the use of violence (53–54).Cabello Balboa's concerns, then, are related less to the use of violence itself and more to who uses violence and the purpose of that use. In other words, what Cabello Balboa finds unacceptable is that African fugitives employed Spanish strategies of colonization to create a community that they kept out of reach of the Spanish and the church. The rhetoric of condemnation that runs through Cabello Balboa's account suggests that the strategies of colonization employed by the African maroons in Esmeraldas allowed the constitution of a heterotopia as Michel Foucault describes it.20 Foucault characterizes heterotopia as an alternative space that challenges the distributions and hierarchies established in regular space by appropriating strategies employed in that space but with an alternative purpose (184–85). Anton and Alonso de Illescas were slaves who had lived in Spain before they were transported to the Americas (for that reason Cabello Balboa characterizes them as ladinos). Therefore, they were probably familiar with military strategies employed by the Spanish colonizers to acquire control over territories in the New World.21 They in turn used these strategies to create a place that was out of reach and control of the Spanish authorities. This was a real space, not a utopia, created with the aim of securing freedom for African fugitives and their descendants, along with indigenous communities that tried to avoid getting trapped in the systems of serfdom imposed by Spanish colonizers. This space emerged through the use of strategies of domination that African captives had learned from the Spanish colonizers. The subversive appropriation Alonso de Illescas made of these strategies produced a counterspace that challenged, at least for a time, the expansion of the power of the Spanish authorities in the region.I believe that the constitution of this maroon heterotopia could be considered an early event in the constitution of the black Atlantic. Though Esmeraldas was not grounded in the ideals of freedom related to the nation or to abolitionism that will appear in a very decisive way at the end of the eighteenth century, it stands as an example of an early emancipatory space in an imperial context. This emancipatory space was designed to protect the fugitive Africans and their descendants rather than to constitute an independent territory that would guarantee absolute freedom for everyone. In fact, Cabello Balboa writes that Alonso de Illescas offered him some gold as a reward that he could use to buy black slaves—“Tened por bien que yo os junte entre estos mis hermanos siquiera mil pesos de oro, para que os proveais de un par de negros que tengan cuenta de mirar por vuestra persona” (67) (“Consider as a gift my brothers and I put together one thousand pesos in gold for you, and buy a couple of black slaves that will take care of you”). The idea of a former African slave, leader of a maroon community, offering gold to a Christian so that he might buy slaves might seem contradictory.However, following Navarrete Peláez, it is possible to argue that the participation of Africans in the slave trade was not an anomalous fact in the early Spanish Atlantic (46–49).22 More specifically, it is important to