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RACE AND THE NEW WORLD

THE Old World, as was shown in Volume One, is a vast and intricate patchwork of “races” which came about as the result of the mating of Negro and Caucasian acting together with climate for probably hundreds of thousands of years. But great as this miscegenation was it is excelled by the New World, where we had the entrance of a third element entirely new to civilized man: The Indian.

To the New World came almost every variety of mankind from Europe, Asia, Africa and the South Seas. These, uniting with the Indian, or other varieties that had sprung up in the New World, produced hundreds of other sub-varieties hitherto unknown—varieties which are to be found today from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, and whose “blood” like the air we breathe has been penetrating even into the most undreamed of places until when we say “American” we say nearly always “mixed blood.”

To find anything approaching a “pure” race in the New World now one must go among the most primitive Indians in the wilds of Peru, Bolivia, and the Amazon. That the peoples of the two Americas are hybrid is a great undeniable fact. If we use the phraseology of the superior Nordic we can call them “mongrel.”

This mixing of “races” is true of Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America alike but particularly so of Latin America. What Simón Bolívar, liberator of five South American countries, and one of the most colossal figures of history, said of Venezuela is true of all that region south of the Rio Grande. He said, “We must face the fact that our race is not European; it is rather a composite of Africa and America than an emanation of Europe for Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood; its institutions and character. It is impossible to determine exactly to what human family we belong. Most of the Indians were annihilated; the European has been mixed with the Indian and the African. We were all born of the bosom of the same mother but our fathers differing in origin and blood are foreigners and we all differ visibly in color of skin.”¹

“Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood.” Significant words! Words to be remembered whenever we think of the earliest settlers of the New World. Bolivar, in addition to his wide knowledge of Spanish history, had lived in Spain; had seen the racial composition of its people, and was the descendant himself, of a noble Spanish family. We shall presently quote other writers of Bolivar’s time to the same effect. In other words, the discoverers and the earliest trail-blazers of the New World were already mixed—a people which were largely mulatto, if you will—on their arrival in 1492.

Of course, the people in the northern part of the Peninsula, were “unmixed” white, being largely of Teutonic stock, but in the southern portion they had been mixed Caucasian and Negro from time immemorial.² In fact, this region was only geographically European. Several writers have said that Europe began only at the Pyrenees.

This mixed strain was particularly evident in the Portuguese, who, next to the Spaniards, were the pioneers in the New World. Indeed, it is the Portuguese, who with the Moors, Venetians, Genoese and other “mongrels” of the Mediterranean, were the pioneers in the world travel and exploration that led up to Columbus. It was the Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 that inspired Columbus to seek a western route to India, and which, in turn, brought about the discovery of America. The Nordics, with the exception of occasional travelers, like Sir John Mandeville, did not come on the scene until nearly a century later under Elizabeth of England.

So mixed were the Portuguese that in 1492 there was already a Negro strain in its royal family. The same was true in less degree of the Spanish royal family. As for Italy, it had not only once been overrun by the Moors, but Negro slaves in great numbers had been brought in, principally between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries by the Venetians.³ The Pisanos and Genoese also imported a considerable number from Nubia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Morocco, and sold them to the noble families, who used them as servants, grooms, and favorites, and even amalgamated with them. So little was the prejudice against color in Europe that in the sixteenth century the son of a Negro female slave, or servant, rose to be head of the most distinguished royal family of the time.⁴

This may be considered extraordinary now but it was not so then. The southern Europeans had been accustomed for centuries to having dark-skinned men among their rulers, in fact, whole series of them. As Roy Nash says, “Many North Americans profess horror at the marriage of white and colored types, which is so common in South America. Mark well, then, that the first contact of the Portuguese and Spaniards with a dark-skinned people was the contact of the conquered with the brown-skinned conquerors. And the darker man was the more cultured, the more learned, the more artistic. He lived in the castles and towns. He was the rich man and the Portuguese became serfs upon his land. Under such conditions it would be deemed an honor for the white to mate or marry with the governing class, the brown man, instead of the reverse. Nor was it only the Portuguese peasantry whose blood mingled with the Moors. Alphonso VI, who united Castille and Leon and Galicia in 1073, to cite but one of many instances of marriages between Christian and Arab nobles, chose a Moorish princess, the daughter of the Emir of Seville, to be the mother of his son, Sancho.”⁵

Centuries after Columbus, there continued to be much Negro strain in the Latin peoples. G. W. Bridges, writing in Bolivar’s time, says, “There can be no doubt that the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Neapolitans are highly tinged with Negro blood.”⁶ In 1856, a white American visitor to Puerto Rico testifies similarly to the Negro strain in the Spanish emigrants to that island. He says, “Spaniards, generally indulge in the belief, or at least feign to do so, that Creoles are mulattoes and allege with wonderful assurance that by the mere fact of being born in Spain, every Penninsular (Spaniard) is a white. In many cases, however, the evidence of the senses is opposed to this assertion, as the complexion of the greatest part of them is nearer that of the Negroes than of white people. And there are, besides, well-grounded reasons for believing that much African blood flows in their veins, though there are many families that are evidently white, as is also the case in Cuba. One of the armies that invaded Spain in the eighth century was formed of four thousand Negroes from Ethiopia who were never known to have left the country. What must now be the number of the descendants of these Negroes after the lapse of eleven centuries. In fact by their features, by the quality of their hair, the origin of many Spaniards can be confidently traced to the African race. Nevertheless in some provinces of the Peninsula (that is, Spain), they style themselves not only pure whites, but noblemen, also.”⁷

This writer barely approaches the number of Negroes that were brought into the Iberian Peninsula. The figure is nearer four million. Unmixed Negroes were coming into Spain from the third century under Hannibal until 1773 when Negro slavery was abolished in Portugal, or a period of more than two thousand years.

What was true of the early Spaniards in the New World was even more so of the Portuguese. An English visitor to Rio de Janeiro, in 1845, says the numbers of the Portuguese he saw there were of “nearly as dark a hue”⁸ as the mulattoes.

TYPE OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

II. Mongoyo-Camacan Indian woman of Brazil. Negro and Mongolian strain apparent.

(Koch Grunberg)

Since then, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians even of the nineteenth century, had so much visible Negro strain, it is reasonable to suppose that among the first explorers and colonizers of the New World there must have been many individuals of Negro descent, although there is little mention of them as such. The reason is that mulattoes were regarded as white. When a European said, and still says, “Negro” he means an unmixed black man.

For instance, on Columbus’ Third Voyage, only one Negro, Diego,⁹ is mentioned, and in the list of “noblemen and gentlemen of quality” who accompanied Balboa to the Pacific only one Negro, Nuflo de Olano,¹⁰ is named, but that does not mean that there were not other near-blacks on those voyages. Also, Pietro Alonzo, the pilot of Columbus’ flagship on the First Voyage, is mentioned in “The Libretto,” the original account of the voyage, which was published in 1521, four times as a “Negro.” Samuel Byrd Thatcher,¹¹ an authority on Columbus, says, however, that “Alonzo il Nigro,” was a misprint in the Venetian and ought to have read “Alonzo il Nigno.” Thus the dispute hinges on whether an “n” or a “g” was meant. That Thacher, also, is in error is not impossible.

It is not improbable, either, that Columbus was of mixed blood. His complexion was olive; his cheek-bones were high, and his lips, as seen in the Yanez portrait, were of the full Negroid kind.¹² This portrait, the oldest of all, was thought the most characteristic of him by his heir, the Duke of Veragua.

The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World in 1492 started at once the miscegenation of these fair and these dark-skinned Europeans with the Indians. Absolutely no white women came with the first Spaniards and Portuguese. It was nearly a century and a half before they began to arrive in any appreciable number. It is true that in 1526, white Christian slaves were brought to Puerto Rico and other colonies as wives for the white men, but this importation soon ceased because of the inability of the European woman to stand the environment. Thus, it may be said in the most positive manner that the first mothers of persons of European ancestry born in the New World—the creoles—were Indian. This is perhaps wholly true, also, of the mothers of those of African descent.

The pattern of race-mixing for all the Latin-American colonies from Colorado to Argentina was: First, mixing of white men, some of whom had a Negro strain, with Indian women. The offspring of these were called mestizoes, or mixtures; in Brazil, mamelucos. Incoming Europeans of the next generation took the mestizo girls as wives or concubines, producing offspring that was one-fourth Indian, and so on as the years passed, until sometimes the Indian strain was visible only to the experienced eye.

Another mixed type arose, also, when male Negro slaves arrived in 1502. Taking Indian mates the Negroes produced the zambo; in Brazil, the cafuso, an almost black type with high, upstanding frizzly hair. A third mixture came in with the arrival of the Negro woman, who mixing with the white man, produced the mulato, a blend with which the Spaniard had been long familiar. Then the three mixed types, mestizo, zambo, mulatto, began mixing among themselves, and these mixtures and their offspring with the whites, until there came to be distinguished fifty-five varieties from the original mating of Caucasian, Indian, and Negro.

Those in whose veins ran all three mixtures were known as pardos but as time went the amalgamation became so general that it was often impossible to tell a pardo from a mestizo, or a mulatto from a mestizo. Numbers of mulattoes and mestizoes, in time, came to be indistinguishable from a southern European, too. Thus the student of race-mixing in Latin America though he will hear much about the different varieties can safely avoid pursuing them into their intricacies, because the Latin American, whether he be of Negro or Indian ancestry, if too dark to pass for white will usually claim Indian ancestry.

There are several reasons for this: In claiming Indian ancestry one could always boast that he was the descendant of an Inca or a great chief, and thus be not actually one of the common herd, even though living among the herd. Aristocratic birth counted for far more in those days than now. It was so much believed that all good things came out of kingship and noble birth that even when a black man had gifts that placed him above other blacks, it was said that he was the son of an African king.

It will be interesting to note, however, that at first contact, Indian ancestry was the most despised of all, and Indian civilization considered so much idolatrous trash. The early Spaniards regarded the Indians as just one tiny step above the beast. They called them gente sin razon, people without the power to reason. When, however, the Indian had been exterminated, or reduced to helplessness, there came a tendency to idealize him, as one does any other nearly extinct species, as say his contemporary, the buffalo, for the same is also true of Anglo-Saxon America.

Another curious fact about this boasting of Indian ancestry is that in those South American lands in which Indians are still in the majority, the unmixed Indian is still regarded as the lowest element.

In the case of the mestizo, he, also, like the mulatto, looked down upon his mother’s stock. His aspiration was to be one of the dominant class, which was white, even as the humbler white had aspirations to be a nobleman. The Spaniard in the New World, and even more so his offspring born there, had such great pretensions to being a caballero, or nobleman, that Bishop Damon de Haro of Puerto Rico wrote satirically of his mixed blood Indian and Negro flock a century and a half ago, “He who is not descended from the House of Austria is related to the Dauphin of France or Charlemagne.”¹³

INDIANS WITH NEGRO STRAIN.

III. The Negro Strain apparent in these Brazilian Indians might have ante-dated Columbus. (See Appendix I to IX, Part I, Sex and Race in the Old World.) (Koch-Grunberg.)

The pride of the mestizo and the belief in his supposed superiority over the mulatto lay chiefly in the fact that his hair was straight like that of the European. In color, he was often as dark, however, because the Indian of the tropical belt of the New World was as dark as the West Coast African, and especially the Bantu.

The mestizo and the mulatto, as we shall see, tried to escape the stigma attached to Negro ancestry in ways that will sound strange, if not laughable to a North American, white or black. South of the Rio Grande there still exists a tremendous complex on this matter of color. That brings us to another reason for the supposed social superiority of Indian strain over Negro one: namely, the Negro was useful; he was a worker. Since the Spaniard, by sheer reason of the fact that he had been born in Spain, even though he had been of the scum there, was placed in the aristocratic rank when he came to the New World, and since the aristocrat who soils his hand with labor is no longer one, it followed that that element of the population whose hands were the most soiled belonged automatically to the lowest caste. This was the unmixed Negro as the Indian preferred extermination to labor, a trait that was ingrained in the Indian. For centuries, he had done the hunting and the fishing while the women did the common work. Thus because the Indian was not a worker, and some of his people were kings and chiefs—the Negroes also had kings and chiefs but they were on the other side of the water—the Indian in time came to be regarded, theoretically at least, as being of a caste above the Negro. As regards the mulatto and the mestizo, their parents, the whites, usually gave them the less laborious tasks. Moreover, it was extremely profitable for the whites to create a caste, or castes, as buffers between them and the masses of the unmixed Negroes and unmixed Indians.

The superiority in caste accorded to the individual of mixed white and Indian blood was emphatically not due to the oft-repeated statement that the Indian was not a slave while the Negro was. Indian slavery in the New World was the most grievous, the most cruel in all history. It was worse than that of the Helots of Sparta. Las Casas’ history of the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards is without a doubt the most horrifying document of human atrocities ever written, exceeding even that of the Spanish Inquisition.¹⁴

MORE PROOF OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS.

IV. Left: Negro idol from British Columbia. Most ancient race yet discovered in North America (Illustrated London News). Right: One of several colossal prehistoric Negro heads discovered in La Venta, Mexico, in 1925. (National Geographic.) See also Appendices I to IX, Part I, Sex and Race in the Old World.

The highest caste, as was said, was the Peninsulars, or those of Old World birth. And here another contradiction. Some of these Peninsulars were mulattoes but because of their birth they ranked with the “pure” whites and looked down not only upon the mestizo and the mulatto but on the unmixed white man who happened to be born in the New World. This caste system is simply untranslatable in terms of the North American color caste. The simple fact is that while color was important, rank was higher; and rank did not necessarily depend upon color.

So high did Old World birth take precedence over New World one, that many a Spanish and Portuguese father looked down upon his own creole son, even when he was unmixed white, simply because he had been born in America. Stevenson said, “All Spaniards in America fancied themselves to belong to a race of beings far superior to those among whom they resided. I have frequently heard them say that they should love their children with greater ardor if they had been born in Europe.”¹⁵

Something of this scorn was also felt by the Englishman for the native white Virginian or New Yorker. Indeed, it was not until the first World War that the average Englishman began to yield his inherited contempt for the American. Many still entertain it. In fact, it was this contempt and lack of sympathy, which, in its last analysis, led to the revolt of nearly all of the American colonies, especially the Latin American ones. The Peninsular, even when he was a mulatto, arrogated to himself a status over a white creole that bears a close resemblance to that of a haughty Virginia planter over a mulatto. Calderon, a Peruvian, says, “The idealistic temperament of the Latin American, his pretension to a high civilization and to the status of the caballero, creates a natural yearning for a white skin.”

And while we are on this subject we may add, by way of trying to establish a more correct idea of racial values than those now in vogue, that the belief that it was the Negro who was submissive¹⁶ and the Indian who was rebellious, is decidedly the reverse. There were, of course, certain very warlike Indians and most stubborn fighters, like some of the tribes of Mexico, Peru, and Chile, but it was the Negroes, who everywhere, revolted most against ill-treatment. Latin America and British West Indian history is studded with Negro revolt.

As Parkes says, “Negroes had more physical strength—and also more aggressiveness—than Indians… . The Spaniards were more afraid of Negro rebellions than of risings among the Indians.” He adds that in the “areas of Mexico where the Negroes were most numerous—Morelos and Vera Cruz—have in modern times been the areas where peasant movements have been most aggressive. This has sometimes been attributed to the influences of Negro blood.”¹⁷ The first people in the New World to win their independence were Negroes—the Djukas of Surinam from the Dutch in 1761. The first people of Latin America to win their freedom also were Negroes—the Haitians in 1804.

TYPES OF FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN-AMERICA.

V. Newly arrived slave women. (Stedman.)

But although the Negro stood for little nonsense—in Spain and Portugal he had got along well because he had been on the whole well treated—the Spaniard found it impossible to get along without him, and brought him in such numbers to the colonies that Menendez de Aviles wrote in 1561, “In the island of Puerto Rico there are above fifteen hundred Negroes and less than five hundred Spaniards, and in Hispaniola there may be two thousand Spaniards and there are over thirty thousand Negroes… . The same is the case in the island of Cuba and in Vera Cruz, Puerto de Cavallos, which is in Honduras and in Nombre de Dios, Carthagena, Santa Maria, and the coast of Venezuela where are twenty Negroes to one white man, and with the lapse of time they will increase to a great many more.”¹⁸ Already in 1522, or only thirty years after the coming of Columbus, there had been a Negro revolt in Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo. On Christmas Day of that year, while Diego Columbus, son of the navigator, and governor of the colony and his friends, were enjoying themselves the Negroes arose and killed and wounded twenty-four whites.¹⁹ Diego Columbus saved his life only by flight.

With this increased importation of blacks came more black women and the Spaniards, finding them more serviceable and nearer the European psychology than the Indian, took them so generally as concubines that mulattoes rapidly increased in all the colonies from Florida to Argentina. And with the advent of the mulatto girls, there came such a zest for cohabiting with them that there arose a proverb, “Branca para casar, mulata para f…, negra para trabaljar.” (White woman for marriage, mulatto woman for sexual pleasure, black woman for work).²⁰ Gilberto Freyre quotes this for Brazil but it was true of all Latin America and even of the southern United States.

Miscegenation became so free and unrestricted in all the colonies, including the French and English ones, that in time there arose a variety of colors, and combinations of colors that excelled even ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece.

This race-mixing was of so nearly the same pattern in all the Latin American lands that it will not be necessary to consider each country separately. We shall, therefore, take up in this volume only those in which it was most as Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Hispaniola (now the republics of Haiti and San Domingo), and Mexico. Only the highlights in others as Colombia, Panama, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Cuba, and Puerto Rico need be given. As for the French and Spanish colonies in the Louisiana territory they will be discussed in the section on the United States.

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¹ Blanco Fombona, R. Simon Bolivar: Discursos y proclamas, p. 47. 1913.

² Rogers, J. A., Sex and Race in the Old World, pp. 151-168. 1941.

³ Saco, J. A., Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos mas remotos, etc., Vol. 3, pp. 185, 197-8. 1877.

⁴ Rogers, J. A., Sex and Race, p. 163. 1941.

⁵ Nash, R., Conquest of Brazil, p. 37. 1926.

⁶ Bridges, G. W., History of Jamaica, Vol. 2, p. 399. 1828.

⁷ Philalathes, P., Yankee Travels Through Cuba, pp. 319-20. 1856.

⁸ Gardner, G. Travels in the Interior of Brazil, pp. 4-15. 1846.

⁹ Navarette, M. J., Viajes de Cristobal Colon, p. 322. 1922.

¹⁰ Oviedo., Historia general y natural de indias, Vol. 3, p. 12. 1853.

¹¹ Thacher, S. B., Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2, pp. 455, 479, 503. 1903.

¹² Winsor, J., Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2, p. 72. 1886.

¹³ Quoted by Van Middledyk in History of Porto Rico, p. 204. 1903. See also Schurz, W. L., Latin America, p. 70. 1941.

¹⁴ See Appendix to Chapter One, p. 398.

¹⁵ Stevenson, W. B., Twenty Years Residence in South America, pp. 293-4. 1825.

¹⁶ See Appendix to Chapter One.

¹⁷ Parks, H. M., A History of Mexico, p. 95. 1938.

¹⁸ Quoted by Lowery W., The Spanish Settlements, pp. 14-15. 1905.

¹⁹ Oviedo, Historia general, etc., Vol. 1, p. 108 (Chap. 4).

²⁰ The Turkish equivalent of this, as quoted by Volney, is, “A white woman to please the eye; and an Egyptian and a black one for sexual pleasure.” The Orientals make less distinction between mulattoes and blacks than Europeans.