The Other Slavery (10 page)

The basic justification of slavery invoked by theologians and officials was that Indians like Gaspar were better off in Christian homes than in their own state of
naturaleza,
or nature, a term that conjured up images of barbarity and heathenism. Even as an exploited underclass, the argument went, slaves had the opportunity to save their souls and acquire the rudiments of civilization. Indians did become Europeanized during their long years of bondage in the Old World, but this acquisition of Western culture came at a tremendous cost. Gaspar’s story leaves no doubt that even the most well-intentioned masters participated in a system that produced degradation, exploitation, and bitter resentment.
¹⁴

The story of María, an Indian woman from Mexico City, reveals that women faced a different set of circumstances. María had a relationship
with a Spanish merchant of clothes and jewels named Juan Marquez. Although we have few details about their life together in Mexico City, it is certain that they were not married. Years later María’s brother Pedro testified simply that Marquez “had a carnal relationship with my sister. And from this relationship they had three children, two girls and one boy.” Regardless of the precise nature of the relationship, Juan Marquez regarded María as his partner and recognized their three mestizo children—Catalina, Luisa, and Juan—as his own. They lived in Mexico for some years before moving to Spain, where they settled in Ciudad Rodrigo, a small town in Old Castile with an imposing castle, a cathedral, and a massive outer wall. María’s brother Pedro, by all accounts a very resourceful man, came along as well.
¹⁵

In one sense, Juan Marquez defied the social conventions of a small Spanish town by establishing a household with five Mexican Indians. But in another respect, these Natives fit into the preexisting social grid. María was perceived as Juan Marquez’s concubine and the children as
criados
(children who were not members of the family but were raised in a household and given room and board in exchange for doing menial jobs). Pedro’s status must have been the most difficult to pin down. The people of Ciudad Rodrigo were familiar with African and Indian slaves, who could usually be identified by the brands on their faces. Yet Pedro had no visible brand. And when curious neighbors would ask if the Indian man was a slave, Juan Marquez would reply emphatically that Pedro “was not his slave or anyone else’s but a free man.” Most Spaniards familiar with the Marquez household knew that Pedro and María were not “wild,” or nomadic, Indians caught in raids and sold in slave markets in the Caribbean, but rather “city” Indians who had always been free.

The Indians’ situation in Ciudad Rodrigo deteriorated steadily. First, Juan Marquez decided to take a Spanish wife. Marriage to a European was more appropriate for a successful merchant. He married an assertive woman named Isabel de Herrera. Her arrival in the Marquez household reduced María’s status to that of a concubine/servant and drastically reconfigured the lines of authority. When Isabel de Herrera was later asked in court if “during the time she had lived and spoken with Juan Marquez, her husband, she had ever heard that María and the children were free,”
she said no. From her testimony, one can also gather that there was no love lost between Isabel and María. Relations between wives and live-in concubines were normally contentious throughout the Mediterranean world, and this was no exception. Although Isabel de Herrera was keen on asserting her authority over the Indians in her household, Juan Marquez continued to treat the children well and to protect their mother. When María died sometime in the early 1540s, it was up to Pedro to defend his freedom and that of his nieces and nephew.
¹⁶

The final demotion of Pedro and the children occurred when Juan Marquez fell ill during a business trip. In the throes of death, the merchant wrote his last will and testament, leaving everything to Isabel de Herrera. Marquez died a few days later, and his wife embarked on a long-contemplated reorganization of the household. She immediately sold Pedro for 10,000
maravedís
and put the children up for sale, not concerned if that meant splitting them up among separate households. Pedro fought back. Suddenly treated as a slave, he sought out a
fiscal
(attorney) and sued Isabel de Herrera to recover his freedom, stop the sale of the children, and keep the family together. Pedro’s lawsuit was successful; he recovered his freedom and obtained custody of the children. The journey of Pedro and his family from free Indians to slaves and back to free exemplifies both the uncertain status of Indians in the mid-sixteenth century and the legal options available to them.
¹⁷

Fighting for Their Freedom

For indigenous men and women who seldom stepped outside the house, the thought of initiating legal proceedings and making formal statements in front of lawyers, judges, and owners must have been daunting. Yet the demands of public appearances paled in comparison with their private ordeals. The minute the lawsuit was filed, their relationship with their master turned decidedly hostile. Since slaves had nowhere else to go, they generally continued to live under the same roof with their masters during their trials, which could last for months or even years, giving masters ample opportunities to punish, torture, or somehow make
their slaves desist. So routinely did masters beat their petitioning slaves or hide them away in rural properties beyond the arm of the law that the legal document informing them that they had been sued included a clause warning them against such retaliation. Thus Indian slaves had the chance to become free, but only at the risk of anguish and bodily harm. They also faced the very real possibility of losing in court, and in that case their efforts and suffering would have earned them nothing but their masters’ eternal hatred.

The multigenerational saga of Beatriz and her children is a good example of the workings of the Spanish legal system, as well as the incredible tenacity of both masters and slaves. Described as “a short, thin woman with a missing upper tooth,” Beatriz arrived in Spain when she was fourteen but already carrying a baby named Simón. Both were given to an up-and-coming resident of the town of Carmona named Juan Cansino as part of his wife’s dowry in 1534 and remained in his household for twenty-four years. During this time, the relationship between master and slaves evolved and became quite contentious. First, Cansino sold off Simón against Beatriz’s will after he discovered that the little boy had stolen from him. Cansino then mistreated Beatriz, who bore four more children by unidentified men. All four remained in Cansino’s house as slaves.
¹⁸

A turning point in their relationship occurred around 1556 when Beatriz’s oldest daughter, Catalina, a feisty seventeen-year-old, repeatedly tried to escape, urging the others to do the same. Juan Cansino, who had become a wealthy merchant and alderman of the town of Carmona, could not tolerate this challenge. He sent Catalina to a nearby barber, “right next to the meat shop,” who branded her on the face with a hot iron. During the trial, Cansino declared that Catalina had become incorrigible, “always trying to escape and having stolen a money purse, a silver chain, jewels, cheese, wool, wine, and whatever else she and her mother could get.” Shortly after the branding of Catalina, Beatriz and her daughter began to speak out about being
indias
(Indians) and having the right to be free. They had heard that some Indians living in the neighboring city of Seville had successfully sued for their freedom.

In the spring of 1558, after twenty-four years of service, Beatriz fled
Cansino’s house. Leaving her children behind, she made her way to Seville, where she remained for five months, meeting with lawyers and officials. With the help of the
procurador general de indios
Francisco Sarmiento, Beatriz gathered witnesses and prepared her case. When everything was ready at the end of September, Juan Cansino was summoned to Seville to answer the charges lodged against him by his slave Beatriz.

The case could not have been more straightforward. If Beatriz could prove that she had come from the Spanish Indies (meaning all of Spain’s overseas colonies, including Mexico), Cansino would have to set her free according to the provisions of the New Laws. For the same reason, Beatriz’s children would also go free. The judges were at first sympathetic when Beatriz claimed she was from Mexico. They even noted that the plaintiff had “every appearance of someone from the Indies.” But when they asked Beatriz if she could speak the Mexican language (Nahuatl), she said that she could not. Beatriz and Sarmiento presented their witnesses, all of whom lived in the immediate neighborhood of Juan Cansino’s household: a widow from just up the street, the butcher’s wife, a shoemaker named Diego Gómez. They all affirmed that Beatriz spoke “a strange tongue” and declared that she was an Indian from Mexico. Beatriz’s star witness was a blind Indian named Juan Vázquez who claimed to have known Beatriz for thirteen years. His testimony, almost poetic, has come down to us, recorded in the third person: “Even though this witness could not see the said Beatriz, he knew it was her because of the words they have exchanged . . . and the witness believes that she is a native from Malacata because he is from New Spain and understands the tongue of Malacata and it is the same that Beatriz speaks, and he has never heard anything contrary to this.”
¹⁹

Indians taken to Spain when they were very young often could not speak Native languages or remember much about their homelands. So slave owners’ most common strategy consisted of asserting that their slaves had not come from the Spanish Indies but from the
Portuguese
Indies (Portuguese colonies)—Brazil, northern and western Africa, and parts of Asia—where the enslavement of Natives was legal. Juan Cansino took precisely this tack. He declared that “he had always believed
Beatriz to be an
alarabe
[Arab from northern or western Africa] because she often said that she was the daughter of a Moor.” Cansino’s cunning lawyer went on to subject Beatriz to a battery of leading questions: What types of fabrics existed in her homeland? Had she seen camels, elephants, tigers, or lions? Were there spices such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon, or cloves? His obvious intention was to exploit Beatriz’s gullibility and lack of knowledge. Cansino’s lawyer also seized on the assertion that Beatriz was from “Malacata.” He demonstrated that no such place existed in the Americas but posited that in all likelihood, the witness was referring to the Malagueta Coast of Africa, where the famous malagueta pepper came from. Cansino’s lawyer called several witnesses, including a mariner from Lisbon, Luis Calaforte, who, after swearing in front of a crucifix, stated that he had sailed many times the coast of Africa and was entirely certain that Malagueta was a stretch of coast below São Tomé in the Portuguese Indies.

Meanwhile, Beatriz and Juan Vázquez insisted that she came from “Malacata” in New Spain (Mexico), while other witnesses pointed to other places. A woman named Catalina Hernández, who claimed to be Beatriz’s cousin, testified that “from her father’s side Beatriz was from Margarita [which she maintained was close to Lima, Peru] and from her mother’s side she was from Puerto Rico, such that from both sides she comes from His Majesty’s Indies.” Sarmiento called a witness named Francisco de Vega, who had traveled widely in the New World and had encountered many slaves from the Portuguese Indies. He cautiously expressed the opinion that Beatriz “struck him as someone from the Spanish Indies.” With these divergent and lukewarm testimonies, it was impossible for Beatriz to win her case. We can only imagine what the consequences for her were when she was returned to Cansino.

But the fight was not over. Thirteen years after the first trial, in 1572, Beatriz’s oldest daughter, Catalina, sued Cansino again. By then Beatriz had died a slave, Catalina was in her early thirties and had a ten-year-old daughter of her own, and Juan Cansino was an elderly patriarch and slave owner. His son Fernando Cansino had taken over as alderman of Carmona.

Through all the years, Catalina’s feistiness had remained intact. During the spring of 1572, she spoke with lawyers and officials, including Francisco Sarmiento, who was still
procurador general de indios.
Catalina told them that her mother had been “a woman with little understanding who got drunk on most days”—in other words, who was too addled to prepare a good case. This time, Catalina left nothing to chance. She assembled a long list of witnesses and made sure that their testimonies were consistent. They all declared that Beatriz had come from Mexico, and therefore her children and grandchildren had to go free immediately.

On this occasion, Cansino’s strategy consisted of questioning Catalina’s witnesses’ credibility. The witnesses included Africans, Indians, and some impoverished residents of Carmona, but no Spaniards from Old Christian families. (Purity of blood was a major concern at this time. “Old Christians” referred to Spaniards who had not intermarried with Muslims or Indians.) One of these witnesses was a former slave named Isabel Navarra, who was immediately discounted by Cansino’s side as “a person belonging to a lowly race with no fixed opinions and who is untrustworthy because she is a
morisca
who descends from Moors.” Another witness was an Indian and former slave from Mexico named Mariana, who was immediately dismissed by the slave-owning side: “She is an Indian and as such would lie in order to favor Catalina, and, as an Indian, she is a lowly person with no fixed opinions and to whom one should not give credit.” When Fernando Cansino learned that these two were going to testify on Catalina’s behalf, he “confronted and insulted them” and used threats to dissuade them from testifying. Both sides fought tenaciously, but more than forty years after Beatriz’s arrival in Spain, the witnesses’ memories were fading and the information about Beatriz’s origins had been mostly lost. The judges found that “Francisco Sarmiento, on behalf of the said Indians, could not prove his demand and intention.” The final verdict reads, “We therefore must absolve Juan Cansino Aragonés . . . admonishing him to treat his slaves well.” Under this ruling, Catalina, her brothers and sisters, and her ten-year-old daughter would remain slaves. Within two years, however, the Council of the Indies overturned the ruling and set Catalina and her family free.