Puerto Rico and Hispaniola Before and After Columbus: Indigenous and

Afro-descendent PeoplesLynn Stephen

Professor of AnthropologyDirector, Center for Latino/a and Latin

American Studies (CLLAS)

The Caribbean

Peopling of the Caribbean

Humans have lived in the Caribbean since about 4000 B.C., according to radio carbon dates.

Many, but not all archaeologists, believe that a wave of hunter-gatherers migrated northward from South America into the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico about 2000 B.C. Then, around 500 B.C. another migration took place, marked by a distinctive pottery design named Saladoid. The Saladoid peoples were horticulturalists who relied on fishing and collecting plant and marine animals.

Many archaeologists believe that for the next 300 years or so the agrarian Saladoids and early hunger-gatherers led to the complex society of the Tainos which by Columbus’ arrival would have included several million people living on the larger islands of the Greater Antilles, now know as Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.

Possible migration route for Saladoid peoples from Venezuela’s Orinoco basin.

About 1200 A.D. Hispaniola and Puerto Rico were repopulated by the Taino, Guanahatabey, Igneri, and Island Carib peoples, on what is now the island of Puerto Rico. They called themselves Borinquen.

Taino social and political organization.

When Columbus arrived, the Tainos were organized into permanent villages in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, each governed by a chief of cacique. Each contained 1,000 to 2,000 people. Villages were organized into district chiefdoms, each ruled by one of the village chiefs. Both men and women were eligible to serve as chiefs. They had special houses, clothing, insignia for their rank.

Matrilineal society--descent traced through mother's side. Inheritance passed through the female line.

Hereditary chiefdoms controlled by caciques could control up to 100 villages and thousands of people.

Taino Political Economy

The villagers were divided into two classes (nitaino and naboria) Chroniclers equated theses with nobility and commoners.

Artisans produced decorated ceramics, cotton products, ground and polished stone beads, carved shell and bone ornaments, tools of stone, and used exotic birds and feathers in their crafts.

The Classic Tainos had a sophisticated form of agriculture. They created mounded fields called conuco. In eastern Hispaniola there were also extensive irrigation systems. Cassava was the principle root crop followed by sweet potato (batata). Experienced farmers grew yuca, beans, squash, guava, pineapple, tobacco, and other crops.

Trade was facilitated by large ocean-going canoes that could carry up to 100 people and arrived at other islands in the Caribbean as well as the mainland of Central America.

Taino Cosmology

Tainos conceptualized of a multi-leveled universe in which the airy heavens floated above an earth, which itself floated on primordial waters beneath.

At the center of the terrestrial disk of the Antillean triple world was a mythic, axial tree (Siegel in Bercht 97 108) uniting earth, underworld and the heavens. The axial tree could be imagined anywhere, each settlement, chiefdom or island being the center of the universe and the center of that being the location of the symbolic axial trellis, rooted in the Underworld, passing up through the community’s central cemetery into the starry vault (Siegel in Bercht 97 108).

For Tainos caves provided access between the earth’s surface and the underworld. They have proven to be a rich source of artifacts and pictographs.

Pictograph from Jose Maria Cave in Dominican Republic

Zemis

Worship centered on deities known as zemis. Two supreme deities: Yucahu, lord of cassava and the sea, when the Tainos obtained their sustenance, and Atabey, his mother who was the goddess of fresh water and human fertility. In conjunction with his mother, Attabeira the earth goddess, Yúcahu Bagua Maórocoti as he was ceremoniously called, caused the crops to sprout, to grow, to flower, and bear fruit.

These trigonoliths (from the Spanish: trigonolitos), or three-pointer stones, found throughout the Caribbean islands are believed to be symbolic representations of Yúcahu. They seem to be abstracted anthropomorphic (and sometimes zoomorphic frog-like or crocodilian creatures) representations of sprouting plant-life. In incised and sculpted trigonoliths, their depiction of the flexed legs of toads/frogs invokes a common fertility symbol associated with the rainy season.

Atabeyra (Attabeira/Atabey/Atabex): The Earth Mother

Atabeyra, the supreme Mother Goddess, was commemorated in various art forms, most notably the monumental petroglyph at Caguana (Stevens-Arroyo 06 221-5). Atabeyra’s squatting position in this famous monolith imitates both the position women take in childbirth and the flexed position of frogs. The lesser zemis included spirits of the ancestors as well as spirits believed to live in trees, rocks, and other features of the landscapes. Pottery, temples decorated with zemis.

Zemis

Zemis were local deities or ancestral cult figures, worshipped in the form of sculptures or relief carvings by Caribbean peoples of the Taino culture. The Zemi cult was active at the end of the 15th century AD when the Spanish arrived in the Bahamas, Cuba, and other islands of the Antilles. They are first described historically by Peter Martyr, the Spanish court historian (whose works are extant), and Fray Pane, who compiled an ethography of the Taino culture during the second voyage of Columbus, but whose writings are lost, and preserved only in an Italian .

Many images of zemis are preserved in Puerto Rico and other regions of the Antilles, both as figurines and as relief carvings. They were often carved in ballcourt settings in PreColumbian Puerto Rico sites including Caguana and Tibes, where they may be seen today in situ.

Archaeologist Peter Siegel has documented the evolution of Taino ball courts and ceremonial plazas which were build by prehispanic cultures throughout Mesoamerica. Approximately 100 ball courts have been found in Puerto Rico and more on other islands.

The game was a contest of between teams of 10 to 30 people, usually but not always men. A rubber-like ball was used to score points. The outcome was used to settle conflicts between communities without armed conflict. Petroglyphs often surrounding ballcourts, suggesting they are a sacred space.

Taino ball courts

Caguana ballcourt complex

Healing and mediation

Shamans, a cross between ritual practitioners and curers, mediated between the different levels of the universe with the aid of hallucinogenic snuff made from cohoba, prepared from the beans of a species of Piptadenia tree. Shamans were important parts of community ceremonies as well as in curing individuals with illnesses. They

performed their rituals in presence of zemis.

Ritual practice

Preserved Pre–Columbian duhos (ceremonial wooden stools) from the Caribbean region are exceedingly rare because they are usually found only in dry highland caves. There are two basic types: low horizontal forms with concave seats, such as this one, and stools with long curved backrests. Scholars differ as to the function of the stools. Some believe they represented seats of authority. Others think they served as altars for votive offerings. Still others argue that the Taíno peoples used them as ceremonial trays for making cohoba, a hallucinogenic snuff prepared for shamanistic rituals. (From Library of congress, Exploringhttp://www.loc.gov/exhibits/earlyamericas/online/precontact/ the Early Americas.

Ceremonial Wooden Stool Duho. Haiti. Taíno, AD 1000–1500. Carved lignum vitae. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and

Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (54)

Photo ©Justin Kerr, Kerr Associates

First Voyage of Columbus 1492-1493

Columbus visited the island in 1493. The Taino called their Island Boriquín, Land of the Proud Lord. Columbus renamed the island San Juan de Bautista de Puerto Rico.

Colonization of Puerto Rico

a) In 1508, Juan Ponce de León and a group of 50 men arrived from Santo Domingo to colonize the land.

b) The small amount of gold that could be mined was depleted by 1530. Mines were worked with native enslaved labor. Much, but not all of the indigenous population was gone within 80 years. Some intermarried with Spanish, some fled to other islands or to the interior.

c) When gold deposits were used up, interested faded in Puerto Rico. The population of 1530 was 4,040. It didn't increase until the 1700s. In 1776, population was 80,246.

Slave Trade Routes in Africa: 8th to 15th Century

Origins of Slavery in the Americas

Before the arrival of Portuguese explorers and traders in the Sub-Saharan African coast in the early 1400s the use of slaves within many African societies was widespread. Through the north and to the east slaves were being shipped outside of Africa in steady numbers for at least some six centuries prior to the arrival of the Portuguese.

There was also a widespread internal slave trade that served the needs of local African states, primarily for domestic and social purposes.

The Portuguese began shipping slaves in 1444, primarily to Europe to serve as domestic servants.

Initially Portuguese integrated themselves into existing networks of Muslin traders—primarily along Senegal and Gambia Rivers.

The settlement of the island depot and plantation center of São Tome in Gulf of Guinea and initiation of trade relations with kingdom of Kongo after 1500 changed nature of European slave trade. The Kongolese were located along the Zaire River.

These changes occurred just as the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and the Portuguese settlement of what is now Brazil opened up the American Continent for African Slaves.

The rapid decrease in population in the Caribbean of native peoples in the first major zone of European settlement encourages experimentation with African slave labor.

1502: Juan de Córdoba of Seville becomes the first merchant to send an African slave to the New World. Córdoba, like other merchants, is permitted by the Spanish to send only one slave. Others send two or three.

1505: In Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic), the first record of sugar cane appears.

1509: Columbus’s son, Diego Cólon, becomes governor of the new Spanish empire in the Caribbean. He soon complains that Native American slaves do not work hard enough.

1510: the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World begins when King Ferdinand of Spain authorizes a shipment of 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo.

1513: Juan Ponce de Leon becomes the first European to reach the coast of what is now the United States of America (modern Florida).

1518: Charles V grants his Flemish courtier Lorenzo de Gorrevod permission to import 4000 African slaves into New Spain. Slave trade is formally escalated and thousands of slaves will be sent into the New World.

1518: Charles V grants his Flemish courtier Lorenzo de Gorrevod permission to import 4000 African slaves into New Spain. Slave trade is formally escalated and thousands of slaves will be sent into the New World. After the 1530s, many slaves are shipped directly to the American continent from Sao Tome.

America became the market for an estimated 10 million African slaves in the course of five centuries. Until the 1830s more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually. AS late as 1750 4.5 million of an estimated 6.6 people who had come to the Americas since 1492 were African slaves.

America became the market for an estimated 10 million African slaves in the course of five centuries. Until the 1830s more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually. AS late as 1750 4.5 million of an estimated 6.6 people who had come to the Americas since 1492 were African slaves.

Atlantic Slave Trade

Plantations These were large farms geared to

exports, often using foreign capital and slave labor (the first slaves were brought from Africa in 1538). They were mainly in areas where the indigenous population was soon wiped out. The first great plantation crop was sugar in northern Brazil, coastal Peru, parts of Colombia and the Caribbean. On the plantations, African slaves worked in gangs, often in the most brutal conditions , watched over by armed guards. An average plantation had between 80-100 slaves. Plantation owners were business men motivated by profit, and their farms were usually both efficient and inhumane.

) First Slaves brought to Cuba in 1512, later to rest of Caribbean. Because it was a economic backwater for much of the colonial period, Puerto Rico did not have as high a population of slaves as elsewhere in the Caribbean. Slaves didn't form a large part of the population in the 18th and 19th century.

In the mid-19th century sugar became a dominant crop in Puerto Rico. Large-scale sugar production was heavily dependent upon slave

labor, and Puerto Rico began to import more African slaves. Slaves are depicted here carrying sugarcane for processing in the rollers of a

sugarcane mill.

b) The peak of the slave population was 41,818 or 11.7 percent of the population in 1834. By 1872, the year before slavery was abolished, there were 31,635 slaves or 5.1 percent of the population, mostly working in sugar. Puerto Rico always had a high percentage of "Free Non-Whites." In 1802, for example, there were 71,578 "free non-whites" , 13,333 slaves and 78,281 whites. Thus more than half of the population was categorized as "non-white.“

c) In addition to slaves there were agregados, sometimes called "arrimados" who lived as squatters on someone else's land. Labor relations varied. In 1824, restrictions were placed on those who didn't have legal title to their land, including free peasants cultivating land that belonged to the crown. Many of these people were forced to work on sugar plantations. This population continued to grow.

Early Sugar Cane Plantation

Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, freeing 31,000 slaves, but even the freed slaves were required to serve a three year apprenticeship with their former owners, another landowner or the government. On March 22, 1873, the Spanish National Assembly finally abolished slavery in Puerto Rico. The owners were compensated with 35 million pesetas per slave, and slaves were required to continue working for three more years.

In the early 20th century investors from the United States began to play a dominant role in Puerto Rico’s sugar industry, and large businesses squeezed out independent local farmers. Many Puerto Ricans continued to work in the sugar industry as laborers but few actually owned their own sugar plantations.

Slavery in early Hispaniola

1505: first record of sugar cane being grown in the New World, in Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic).

Between 1504 and 1518 fewer than 2000 African slaves shipped to Hispaniola, most as personal servants, some working in gold mines.

By the 1530s Hispaniola’s shipments of sugar were up to two million pounds per year. This production required a large labor force which was initially composed of both Africans and indigenous peoples, as indicated by analyses of three early census (1530-1545).

Papal bull in 1537 forbid indigenous slavery.

Spanish slave ordinances from 1528, 1535, 1542, 1544 were aimed at controlling the growing slave population, keeping them from walking about unsupervised and earning money for their skills.

By 1540 Africans were the majority of the population of Hispaniola. 1543 report to the crown suggested 25-30,000 Africans on the Island and 1,200 Spaniards. The report complains of thousands of rebel Africans living in the countryside, outside of Spanish control.

African slaves processing sugar cane on Hispaniola. 1595 engraving by Theodor de Bry show harvesting the cane, a slave powered grinding mill, and boiling cane juice. Image Code: ERE-HISL011-EC234-H. Photographer: Courtesy: Everett Col. Collection: Everett Collection Inc.

Slavery and the First Black Revolution in the Americas: Haiti

By the late 17th century the Spanish settlement on Hispaniola had become increasingly unprofitable, unstable, and was consequently neglected by the Spanish. Slave labor had become a central part of life, as slaves easily outnumbered the Spanish, and sugar production was the main export from Hispaniola, but it wasn’t enough for the Spanish Crown to recoup on their investment. By 1668, without much opposition from the Spanish, the French began their occupation of the western side of Hispaniola, or what is now Haiti, and in 1697 the Ryswick peace agreement legalized the French occupation of western Hispaniola.

It is estimated that by the late 19th Century, there were about 400,000 slaves living in Saint Domingue. The immense slave population greatly outnumbered the estimated 32,000 whites and 28,000 free blacks and mulattoes living in Saint Domingue at the time. Unlike in the American colonies, free blacks and mulattoes were given higher statuses in society and they even owned about one-third of the slave population on the island.

A slave revolt broke out in the French colony in 1791, and was eventually led by a French Black man by the name of Toussaint L'ouverture. Since Spain had ceded the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, in the Treaty of Basilea, Toussaint L'Ouverture and his followers claimed the entire island. In 1804, Haitian independence was declared making the first black revolution in Latin America.

:Général Toussaint Louverture.

Adrian Castro

I” would say that place (Miami, Caribbean) and Yoruba myth and spirituality is, certainly nowadays, the cornerstone of my work. “

Cuban-Dominican poet born in Miami in 1967