When Columbus dropped anchor off the Bahamas in October 1492,
he was convinced that he had reached a landfall near the coast of
India. The goal of his expedition was, after all, to
reach the fabled Spice Islands by sailing west, and, with no
understanding that any land interposed itself between the Atlantic
shores of Europe and the eastern shores of Asia, he was certain that
the great cities and rich commodities he was seeking would soon be
found nearby. Although
three further expeditions of his own failed to locate more than
modest coastal villages of half-naked savages, it was not until seven
years after his death that his illusion was totally destroyed when
Balboa stumbled up the heights of Darién and gazed out over
the "Southern Sea".
In 1513 it became clear that Europe was not only separated
from Asia by an ocean but by two oceans and an intervening continent
as well!
Now, the Spanish faced a new challenge: how to find a strait
that led through or around the landmass of America that would take
them to their preferred destination in
Asia. By this time,
their chief base of operations in the New World had become the island
of Hispaniola, where Columbus had founded the first European city in
America at Santo Domingo.
From there, Pinzón had reached both Jamaica and the
mainland of Yucatán by 1506 and two years later Cuba had been
proven to be an island. In 1511 a ship dispatched by
Balboa from Darién (in present-day Panama) was driven by
storms onto the rocks of the Yucatán coast where most of the
survivors were either enslaved by the Maya or sacrificed to their
gods. In 1517 Francisco
Hernández de Córdova rounded Cabo Catoche at the
northeastern tip of Yucatán and entered the Gulf of Mexico,
skirting the coast as far south as Champotón where he put
ashore to fetch fresh drinking water, only to be met by a force of
Maya warriors who killed 50 of his
men. The following year
Juan de Grijalva followed much the same route but avoided
Champotón and continued charting the coast as far north as
Tamiahua, where contrary winds and current forced him
back. Thus, by the time
that Hernán Cortés started out on his voyage in 1519,
Spanish navigators had already mapped a major portion of the
Yucatán and Mexican coasts.
The Gulf coast of Mexico affords few protected anchorages of
any kind, due to the fact that it is constantly buffeted by the trade
winds blowing onshore from the
east. Not until
Cortés had reached the lee of a little island known as San
Juan de Ulúa did he go ashore to take possession of the land
in the name of the Spanish sovereign. Only sometime later did
his navigator discover that about a dozen kilometers to the north a
small river broke through the coastal sand dunes into the Gulf, so it
was here, in the shelter of the first bend of the river, that
Cortés founded the first Spanish settlement on the North
American mainland -- a town which he called "La Villa Rica de la
Veracruz", or "the Rich City of the True Cross."
After constructing a small fort to protect his toehold on the
coast, Cortés started his march inland by way of the Totonac
city of Zempoala. There he was apprised of the
fact that not only were the local Totonacs chafing at their
domination by the Aztecs but so too were the Tlaxcalans, whose city
lay on the plateau hardly 100 km (60 mi) from the Aztec capital
itself. The latter
attempted to forestall his advance into their city in several pitched
battles but without success, and so were finally obliged to welcome
him. Cortés wasted no time
in courting their favor and by the time he departed for Cholula, a
large escort of Tlaxcalan warriors accompanied
him. On approaching
Cholula, however, only his own company of Spanish soliders and his
Totonac bearers were allowed to enter the city, while his escort of
five thousand Tlaxcalans was obliged to camp outside. It soon became apparent that
an ambush was in the works, and Cortés quickly rounded up the
local chieftains and locked them in a room while he had his troops
surround and fall upon the unsuspecting warriors assembled in the
plaza. At this point the Tlaxcalans rushed in to deliver
the coup de grace, and in little more than two hours over 3000
Cholulans had been massacred.
Following this bloody encounter, the Totonacs decided to
return to the coast, no doubt fearing the vengeance of the Aztecs,
whereas, heartened by this costly blow to their enemies, about four
thousand of the Tlaxcalans opted to continue with Cortés and
his 400 men over the lofty volcanic ridge between Popocatépetl
and Ixtaccíhuatl into the basin of Mexico. Amicably received by
Montezuma and his lords, they were quartered in the old imperial
palace. Within the week, however,
Cortés had effectively turned Montezuma into a
hostage-administrator, and a short time later, when news reached
Cortés that the settlement at Veracruz had been attacked, he
charged Montezuma with having ordered the assault and completed his
denigration of the emperor by placing him in
chains.
During the next five months Cortés and his lieutenants
attempted to learn as much as they could about the size and extent of
Montezuma's domains and where its treasures of gold and silver came
from. With guides provided by Montezuma, Spanish
officers succeeded in visiting the four main mining centers of the
empire, bringing back with them not only nuggets of precious metals
but also valuable military intelligence regarding the regions through
which they passed. With this information in
hand, Cortés had Montezuma assemble all of his vassals in
Tenochtitlán and instruct them that henceforth they would owe
their allegiance and their tributes to the Spanish emperor
instead.
Once he felt he had the political situation under control,
Cortés decided the time had come to put an end to the Aztecs'
abominable religious practices. To the horror of Montezuma
and the priestly caste, he personally demolished some of the bloody
idols in the main pyramid, ordered that the temples be cleansed of
their gore, and directed that crosses and images of the Virgin and
the saints be erected in their place. These actions caused
such outrage among the Aztec leaders that they demanded that
Cortés immediately leave their country or face a popular
uprising of the people. In the face of these demands,
Cortés promised to do so as soon as he could build some
ships.
Ironically, just as this confrontation was coming to a head,
Cortés received word that Spanish ships had arrived in
Veracruz, not to bring him reinforcements, however, but instead to
arrest him for exceeding his authority in carrying out this
expedition into Mexico.
After first writing a letter of welcome to his countrymen, he
then dispatched a priest with several bags of gold to buy them
off. But leaving nothing to chance, he put his
lieutenant Alvarado in command of the garrison in Tenochtitlán
and then led about 300 of his men in a surprise attack on the Spanish
contingent on the coast, quickly defeating and capturing
them. Fast-talking,
aided and abetted by appetites whetted by gold, soon had
Cortés marching back to the plateau with unexpected
reinforcements of men, munitions, and
horses.
Alvarado, however, had nervously watched as the Aztecs
prepared for one of their major religious festivals of the year, and
believing that an insurrection was in the making, he had his men
attack the worshippers in the main plaza. After hundreds of defenseless
Aztecs had been killed, Alvarado and his men were driven back and
besieged in the palace that they shared with
Montezuma. At this
dramatic moment, Cortés and his reinforcements returned to the
capital, along with three thousand Tlaxcalan warriors. The Aztecs
made no effort to challenge their entry into the city; indeed, their
intended strategy was to let the Spanish return to their residence in
the palace and bottle them up on the island by cutting the causeways
to the mainland. Scarcely were the Spanish
back in the palace when the Aztecs launched their
attack. For about a week it was all that Cortés and
his men could do to keep the Aztecs from overrunning the palace, and,
finally in desperation, Cortés sent Montezuma out on the roof
in an attempt to quell the raging
mob. But by this time,
the hapless monarch was in so low regard amongst his subjects that he
himself became the target of their slings and arrows, and was struck
in the head by a stone.
Although the official Spanish account attributes his death to
this wound, other sources state that when his body was found, it had
been stabbed five times with a Spanish
dagger.
Once his subjects learned of the death of Montezuma, his
brother Cuitláhuac was named emperor in his place, and now
Cortés realized that the only course open to him was to leave
the city and try to get back to his allies in
Tlaxcala. But getting
his Spanish force of a thousand men and his four thousand Tlaxcalan
allies off of an island with only three causeways would be no mean
accomplishment, especially when they hoped to carry away all the gold
and jewels they had amassed during their stay as
well.
The dash for the mainland was to take place on the evening of
June 30, 1520 -- no doubt chosen because
the moon would be full and would help to light their
way. As Cortés' army started for the Tacuba
causeway, the Aztecs launched an attack from all sides --
hand-to-hand along the causeway and from hundreds of canoes aligned
beside it. Although the Spanish had prepared a portable
wooden bridge to be used in spanning the openings in the causeway,
they soon realized there was no need for it; the gaps in the roadway
were quickly filled with the corpses of soldiers, the bodies of
horses, and the jettisoned baggage the Spanish had been
carrying. The five
kilometers (3 mi) to shore was one continuous torrent of arrows,
stones, and spears, and, when the combatants came to close quarters,
to a fury of slashing obsidian swords and steel sabers as well. At least five hundred Spanish
soldiers died on the spot or were captured and later immolated on the
altars of the gods.
Probably 1000 of the Tlaxcalans also met their death that
evening, and most of the loot of gold and jewels the greed-crazed
Spaniards were carrying disappeared into the mud of the lake
bottom. All of the
cannon were also lost and only about two dozen of the horses made it
alive to shore.
Cortés himself suffered a wound in the head and was
badly cut in one hand. Small wonder that as he
staggered to safety on the mainland he collapsed beneath a tree and
wept; this was a night in history that Mexicans would forever more
refer to as La Noche Triste, or "the sad night”.
As Cortés' decimated columns straggled toward Tlaxcala
around the north edge of the lake, the Aztecs regrouped for another
attack at Otumba, but once again the Spanish triumphed by killing the
Aztec chief and putting his disorganized hordes to
rout. In the
safety of Tlaxcala, while his men recuperated from their wounds,
Cortés spent a couple of months busily planning a new
offensive to recapture the Aztec
capital. By both
military intimidation and diplomatic cajolery he first managed to
pacify the tribes to the south and east of Tenochtitlán, in
order to secure his vital supply lines to
Veracruz. At the same
time, he also directed the cutting of timber on the eastern slopes of
the mountains that he then had carried back to Tlaxcala by Indian
porters. There he had thirteen
brigantines constructed and in May 1521, they were dismantled,
carried across the mountains, and reassembled on the eastern shore of
the lake at Texcoco. Each ship measured
thirteen meters (42 ft) in length and was equipped both with sails
and oars and armed with cannons, so Cortés was confident that
the fragile little canoes of the Aztecs would be no match for the
naval force with which he would surprise
them.
His army numbered about 900 soldiers, and was divided into
three columns -- one to advance along each of the three causeways
leading into the city. And, as usual, his troops
were accompanied by thousands of bloodthirsty Tlaxcalans bent on
defeating their hated Aztec
overlords. But,
perhaps most frightening of all was an invisible "ally" which was
itself spreading rapidly through the city at the time. Even Cuitláhuac, the
emperor, had succumbed to it, so that the defense of the capital had
now fallen to Montezuma's nephew,
Cuauhtémoc. This
was smallpox that had arrived in Veracruz along with Cortés'
would-be captors and was running rampant through the native
populations who had no immunity to
it. Indeed, while
Cortés and his armies found themselves cutting down
Mesoamericans by the thousands, imported diseases like smallpox
ultimately resulted in cutting them down by the
millions.
During the eighty-day siege of Tenochtitlán the
catastrophic effects of the plague were exacerbated by both famine
and the lack of drinking water. Yet, hard-pressed as they
were, the Aztecs refused to surrender, and at the height of the
carnage both they and their Tlaxcalan enemies resorted to eating the
remains of the fallen warriors. At one juncture the Aztecs
managed to capture over sixty of the Spaniards alive and then
proceeded to offer their hearts to their war-god as Alvarado and his
men looked on helplessly from a
distance. To make
matters worse, many Tlaxcalans saw this as a sign that the Spanish
attack would fail, and promptly broke ranks and started for
home.
With every advance of his army, Cortés had the
buildings of the city razed to fill in the causeways and deny the
Aztecs cover to continue their
resistance. By the
end of the siege only a small fraction of the metropolis remained
intact, causing Cortés to later lament that he had been
obliged to destroy "the most beautiful city in the
world." The Aztec
metropolis had been reduced to a smoldering mass of rubble and
glowing embers, its streets littered with thousands of corpses, its
canals running red with blood. Cuauhtémoc ("the fallen eagle")
-- the god-king himself -- was in chains, and his empire was in
ruins. After what had been a slow and faltering journey that had
taken more than three millennia, indigenous civilization in North
America had abruptly and violently reached the end of its
road.
True, it had been an uneven struggle from the outset: a
stone-age society pitted against a metal-age
invader. But this was
not only an invader in possession of a superior technology but also
one accompanied by invisible and deadly microbes to which the natives
had no immunity.
Moreover, in what has to be one of the most dramatic
coincidences in all of human history, these unwelcome guests had
arrived on the coast of Mexico in the very year that the Aztec
calendar itself had prophesied the return of the great god-king
Quetzalcóatl, or "Feathered Serpent", paralyzing them with
fear and indecision.
Perhaps the sacred calendar proved to be the greatest irony of
all, because, according to Maya calculations, the Mesoamerican world
traced its origins to August 13, 3114 B.C., whereas the chance
capture of Cuauhtémoc took place on the afternoon of August
13, 1521, spelling not only the end of Aztec resistance but also the
passing of one world and the dawn of a new
one
Hardly had the dust settled and the embers cooled when
Cortés set about rebuilding his own capital city -- for the
colony he now named "New Spain" -- on the same
site. Laid out on a
rectangular grid pattern inherited from the Roman conquerors of
Spain, Mexico City has as its focus a great plaza -- the
Zócalo -- along whose north side a modest church first
replaced the twin pyramids of the Rain- and War-Gods and which is now
occupied by the Cathedral.
On the east side the National Palace was constructed, and on
the south, the city's Municipal Palace, or Town
Hall. Thus, the
primary political, administrative, and religious functions of both
the city and the colony remained geographically concentrated within a
stone's throw of where these same activities had been carried on
since the Aztecs founded their island abode nearly 200 years
earlier.
The site of Tenochtitlán, and now of Mexico City -- i.e.,
the actual plot of ground on which it was built -- has never been a
wholly desirable one for an urban
agglomeration. To begin
with, scooping mud out of the shallow lake bottom to form its
foundations had been no easy
task. On the other hand,
once built, the city had the advantage of being easily defended and,
as soon it had politically annexed the adjacent lakeshores, it
functioned as a "central place" to which staple foodstuffs could
easily be transported by water from the surrounding
hinterland Yet, when confronted with a prolonged siege,
such as that launched by the Spanish, the impossibility of
maintaining both adequate food and water supplies ultimately worked
to the city's disadvantage.
Moreover, as the Spanish began to build their new city on the
ruins of the old, both the withdrawal of water from the subsoil and
the crushing weight of their masonry construction began to cause new
problems as buildings started sinking into the spongy bottom of the
former lakebed. Following the advent of the industrial and
automotive revolutions, the city's site has served to exacerbate
further problems, both of access and environmental degradation. Today
air quality in the lofty mountain basin has grown so poor than Mexico
City ranks as one of the most smog-plagued cities in the world, and,
especially during the drier winter months, when climatic inversions
are common, health advisaries are issued with ever-increasing
frequency.
But, problematic as its site may be, Mexico City's
situation -- its relationship to the wider economic and political
hinterland beyond the Valley of Mexico -- remains one of unchallenged
superiority. Just as it
served as the nerve-center of empire for two centuries under the
Aztecs, so had the Valley of Mexico served as the heart of
Mesoamerican culture and culture for seven centuries under the aegis
of Teotihuacán.
Although the Toltecs, too, had recognized the centrality of
the Valley of Mexico, their attempt to build a capital near its
southern end was aborted in favor of a site closer to the desert
whence they had come, but even then they had located Tula a scant 80
km (50 mi) to the northwest.
Thus, for the better part of a millennium and a half the head
and heart of the Mesoamerican realm had lain in the Valley of Mexico,
a fact of which Cortés may not have been aware but one which
has been even more strongly reinforced in the nearly 500 years since
he drew up the plans for Mexico
City. This
critical piece of real estate continues to serve as the focal point
of the Mexican nation to this day, constituting what is no doubt the
largest single urban node on our entire planet and embracing more
than one-quarter of the country's total population.
Once Cortés had gotten the construction of Mexico City
underway, he immediately turned his attention back to the grander
Spanish design of reaching the Spice Islands. Balboa's discovery of
the "Southern Ocean" had shown that a great sea lay beyond the
American mainland to the west, so one of Cortés first
objectives was to ascertain what the relationship of that sea was to
Mexico. The lieutenants
he had sent out in the company of Montezuma's guides to locate the
sources of Aztec gold and silver also had as their mission to find
the "Southern Ocean", and at least two of the search parties had come
back with reports of its "discovery" -- one from the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec and the other from the mouth of the Río
Balsas. So, as soon as the Aztec empire had been
vanquished, Cortés immediately sent out new expeditions to the
west and southwest to construct shipyards from which maritime
explorations of the "Southern Ocean" could be
launched. At the same
time, other expeditions were dispatched toward the northeast and the
southeast in an attempt to learn if the rumored "Strait of Anian" did
in fact exist between the Atlantic and the "Southern Ocean". In the process, the conquest
of the Purépecha in the west and of the Zapotecs and highland
Maya in the south were completed, but not without considerable
brutality.
In the decades that followed, one Spanish expedition after
another was launched to map the coasts of New Spain both in the east
and in the west, while still others probed northward into the desert
interior. One of the most epic of these expeditions
was that headed by Cabeza de Vaca in 1528, who after being
shipwrecked in Florida in 1530, managed to outfit a new vessel in
which he skirted the coast of the Gulf of Mexico as far west as
Galveston Bay and then wandered through the interiors of present-day
Texas and New Mexico until finally reaching the Spanish outpost of
Culiacán in western Mexico in 1536. The half-crazed survivors of this grueling trek
brought back with them tales of rich and marvelous cities lying to
the north, prompting Vásquez de Coronado to set off in 1540 in
quest of the "Seven Cities of Cíbola" and the "Great
Quivira". Although he succeeded in
advancing a Spanish presence into the prairies of Kansas, Coronado
returned from his arduous endeavor only to report that these
marvelous cities did not in fact exist -- a reality which raised the
further possibility that perhaps the fabled "Strait of Anian" was
also a figment of the imagination. Indeed, Cabrillo's voyage up
the west coast as far as the present boundary of Oregon in 1542 also
failed to locate this elusive waterway.
However, within a year of the Aztec defeat, Magellan's crew
had returned to Spain after circumnavigating the globe, so the
possibility of reaching the Spice Islands from Mexico now appeared a
feasible undertaking. As early as 1532 Cortés' nephew,
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, made the first attempt, only to disappear
in the "Southern Ocean".
Although Ruy López de Villalobos succeeded in reaching
the Spice Islands in 1542, once there he found it impossible to
return to Mexico against the Trade Winds, and opted to continue on to
Spain by rounding Africa instead. Nonetheless, by the
time that Miguel López de Legazpi had conquered the northern
Philippines from New Spain in 1563 and had established a base at
Manila, it had been realized that the wind pattern in the Pacific was
similar to that in the Atlantic, so the easiest trajectory back to
Mexico lay northward around the Hawaiian High in the Westerly wind
belt. In fact, so much
simpler was this voyage than the long and difficult journey from
Spain around Cape Horn that it was decided that the Philippines
should be politically administered as part of New Spain, thus giving
Mexico enhanced status as a way station to the Far
East. In 1567 the first
of the so-called Manila Galleons departed for the Philippines from
Acapulco, initiating a lucrative trade in silk, spices, and
sandalwood paid for in Mexican silver. However, when the English
freebooter Thomas Cavendish captured one of the Manila galleons in
1586, Spanish efforts were redoubled to find one or more protected
anchorages on the coast of California, along which the galleons were
obliged to sail in their final approach to Acapulco. Ironically, for nearly two
hundred years their efforts were thwarted by the prevalence of fog
banks hanging over the cold waters of the California Current, and it
was not until 1776 that the great natural harbor of San Francisco was
discovered by an expedition traveling overland on horseback.
Mexico thus became not only the source of a rich supply of
gold and silver for Spain but also a key entrepot for the resources
of the Far East as well. Once landed at Acapulco, the
spices and silk were sent on pack-trains up to the capital where they
were joined by other pack-trains hauling bullion from the mines of
the northern plateau and together they then made their way down to
the port of Veracruz. Naturally only the highest
value commodities warranted the investment of so much time and effort
to transport them, but even on reaching Veracruz a long and hazardous
sea-journey still lay between the colonies of the Indies and the
coffers of the Spanish crown.
To ensure a steady flow of tribute from the mines of Mexico
and Peru, Spain had quickly established an annual trans-Atlantic
convoy system with armed men-of-war accompanying the richly laden
commercial vessels. This flota sailed
each spring from Sevilla carrying products that the Spanish crown had
forbidden its colonies to produce, such as wine, olive oil, and
various manufactured goods. Pushed along by the Trade Winds, the
flota's first port of call after the Atlantic crossing was Santo
Domingo, on the island of
Hispaniola. There the
fleet divided into two parts, one destined for the South American
colonies and the other destined for Mexico. The former stopped next at Cartagena, where goods
intended for Nueva Granada (i.e., Colombia and Venezuela) were
unloaded and then continued on to Puerto Bello in present-day
Panamá. Here commodities destined for
trans-shipment to Peru were discharged and carried by pack-train
through the jungle to Panama City where they were once more loaded
aboard ships to be forwarded to Callao, the chief port of
Peru. Awaiting the flota
in Puerto Bello, of course, were the silver and gold taken from the
Andean mines as well as specialized plant products such as balsam of
Peru (which in reality came from El Salvador), the much-prized
dyestuff, indigo, and quinine from the forests of
Ecuador. When the Peru
galleons were loaded, they sailed from Puerto Bello through the
western Caribbean to the heavily fortified port of Havana where they
awaited the return of the galleons from
Mexico.
Once they had separated from the flota in Santo Domingo, the
Mexico galleons had continued directly west to Veracruz to unload
their welcome wares from the home country and to take on their exotic
cargoes from the Far East, as well as precious metals from the mines,
hides and skins from the ranches, and cochineal, sugar, cacao,
tobacco, vanilla, and cotton from the plantations of New
Spain. The Mexico
galleons first sailed to Havana to rendezvous with the Peru galleons
and when the flota was once more assembled, they began their long
voyage home by sailing up the Florida Straits between the North
American mainland and the Bahamas. This initial leg of the
journey was the most hazardous, because English, French, and Dutch
pirates soon discovered that the confined waters of these straits
were the best place to lay in wait for the passage of the annual
fleet. Thus, the Spanish were early prompted to find a protected
anchorage along the Florida coast in which they might take refuge in
case of attack, and this search led to the founding of Saint
Augustine in 1565, the oldest city in what today is the United
States. Once clear of Cape Hatteras, the fleet sailed with
the Westerlies until it neared the coast of Galicia in northwestern
Spain (where it could seek shelter in such ports as La Coruña)
and then turned south along the Portuguese coast to
Sevilla. Because of the
great distances and the speed of the vessels involved, one round trip
a year was about all that one could expect, and, if goods were being
forwarded from the Far East, the total elapsed time between producer
and consumer could well be two years or
more.
In the decades following the conquest of the Aztecs, the
Spanish were obsessed with the search for more precious
metals. Initially their
attention was directed to the placer deposits of gold that had been
worked by the Indians.
These were primarily located in the valleys to the south and
west of the capital where rivers cut through areas of ancient igneous
and metamorphic rock.
But, as these quickly gave out, they intensified their quest
for the actual veins from which these metals had been "flushed" --
the "mother lodes" from which they had been
derived. Their discovery
of rich veins of silver at Taxco was their first great bonanza, but
not long thereafter similar veins were found at Pachuca, to the north
of the capital, as well.
Indeed, basic as their knowledge of geology was at the time,
the Spanish soon came to realize that the prospects of finding other
rich deposits of silver and gold were better in the diverse and
fragmented terrain of the open plateau than they were in the folded
limestone ridges that made up the Sierra Madre Oriental, or, for that
matter, in the monotonously uniform outpourings of lava that formed
the foundations of most of the Sierra Madre
Occidental. What through all of Mexico's pre-Columbian
history had been a marginal borderland inhabited only by nomadic
hunters and gatherers -- the "Chichimecs", or "dog-people -- now
became a "beckoning region" of some attractiveness, despite the
serious challenges it likewise posed.
The latter were both environmental and human, for the aridity
of the region meant that living off the land promised to be as
difficult for the Spaniards as it had been for the
Indians. As for the
native peoples of the region, they could scarcely have been expected
to welcome the white man into their niggardly domain to share what
little sustenance it provided, so inevitably they countered the
Spanish penetration in the only way they could -- with the force of
arms. It was during a scouting expedition led by Captain
Juan de Tolosa in 1546 that the first rich vein of silver was found
at Zacatecas, and this triggered a flood of prospectors, soldiers,
and ranchers into the northern deserts in the following
decades. New discoveries
were made at Guanajuato, San Luis Potosî, Fresnillo, Durango,
and Santa Bárbara, leading to the construction of missions,
forts, and roads into the area, as well as the establishment of farms
and haciendas to supply the mining camps with
food. To begin with, mule trains hauled in equipment,
food, and other supplies from the south and soon thereafter began
returning to the royal mint in Mexico City with ingots of silver and
gold, both for coinage in New Spain as well as for export to the
mother country. At the same time, more and more Indians were
conscripted for work in the mines, but as the ravages of disease and
mistreatment continued to exact heavy tolls, an increasing number of
African slaves were sent into the mines as well.
To begin with, the only known method of reducing silver ores
was by smelting. The ore had first to be crushed into a fine powder,
which was carried out at stamp mills. The latter were powered by
water wheels wherever streams could be harnessed but over most of the
semi-arid meseta it was more customary to use animal power instead.
Immediately adjacent to the stamp mills stood small rectangular
furnaces constructed of adobe or stone where the smelting took place.
Again, if there was an adequate source of waterpower nearby, this was
employed to drive the goatskin bellows; if not, Indian or black
slaves worked them instead. The only source of fuel for the smelters
was charcoal, which was derived from locally available stands of
acacia or oak until these were depleted, and thereafter it was hauled
from the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental where pine and oak
were both abundant. Timber for shoring up the shafts likewise came
from the same region. The chemical reagents used in the process were
lead and/or litharge (the monoxide of lead) and where these were not
found locally, they were of necessity imported for the purpose. Thus,
primitive as the early mining technology was, it nevertheless led to
a much increased level of spatial interaction between the mining
centers and their surroundings in terms of the movement of raw
materials, fuel, labor, and the means of supporting the growing nodes
of population.
The Spanish were quick to look to German miners from the Ore
Mountains of Saxony for mining "know-how" and after the middle of the
16th century the so-called patio, or amalgamation, process was introduced into the silver
mines of the meseta. This involved adding mercury, salt, and pyrite
into a watery-sludge of finely powdered silver
ores. It was then
thoroughly mixed by driving mules -- and, not infrequently, human
slaves -- through the sludge, after which it was allowed to "cure"
for an appropriate length of time. Next, the sludge was carefully
washed, leaving an amalgam of mercury and silver as a residue.
Finally, the amalgam was heated in a retort, driving off the mercury
as a vapor and allowing the residual silver to be cast into bars or
ingots. Although the patio process permitted a more complete recovery
of metal from the ore, it also required a greater volume of raw
material movement as well.
Whereas salt for the process was brought from playa lakes on
the meseta and pyrites were usually available from the tailings of
some of the nearby mines, the mercury had to be imported all the way
from Spain during the initial colonial period or from Huancavelica in
Peru after that source was discovered in 1572.
Had it not been for the revolution in agriculture and animal
husbandry that occurred in the wake of the Spanish conquest, the
development of the mining economy in New Spain would have been quite
impossible. The crops and livestock which the Spanish introduced not
only pushed the limits of the oekumene, or habitable area, of Mexico northward into the meseta
where the bulk of the mineral wealth of the colony was discovered,
but they also provided the necessary foodstuffs to support the
region's growing population and the draft animals to work the mines
and transport both the raw materials to the workings and the finished
bullion down to the coast for export.
Even though the Spanish Conquistadores and their countrymen
that followed them to the New World may have philosophically eschewed
all forms of physical labor as being beneath their dignity, it is
also true that they found the climates in most of the Indies enough
different from those of their home country as to be somewhat
oppressive. If we use
the climate of Sevilla, the port from which most of them sailed to
the New World as being representative of Andalucia -- the region of
southern Spain from which fully 40% of all Spanish emigrants to the
Indies came -- we find that its sub-tropical sub-humid climate had a
Warmth Index of 5.48 and a Moisture Index of
0.56. (The Warmth
Index is a measure of effective temperature for plant growth, values
of 8.0 or above being capable of supporting tropical plants, 4 and
above sub-tropical vegetation,
etc. A Moisture Index of
1.0 and above will support tree growth, whereas 0.5 and above will be
adequate only for grasslands or scrub forest,
etc.) All of the tropical lowlands of Mexico experience
Warmth Indices double in magnitude to that of Sevilla or greater,
whereas those of the east coast are more than twice as wet as
well. It was only in the uplands and on the plateau that
the Spanish found the more equable temperatures of their homeland,
but even there the 'seasons' were strangely
'reversed'. Whereas in
Mediterranean Spain, most of the annual precipitation falls during
the low-sun period, i.e., the winter months, in monsoon Mexico
virtually all of the annual precipitation is received during the
high-sun, or summer, rainy
season. This 'curious'
juxtaposition of seasons accounts for the fact that in most of
tropical Central and South America, where little change in
temperature is discerned at any time of the year, the Spanish
insisted on referring to the high-sun rainy season as the
'winter'.
In pre-Columbian times, when maize formed 'the staff of life'
for the indigenous peoples, high civilizations based on agriculture
were geographically limited to those areas capable of supporting the
cultivation of corn. This meant that the
northern limits of Mesoamerica were essentially set by a Moisture
Index of 0.8, beyond which maize could not be dependably sown and
harvested, and that, similarly, above elevations in excess of about
2800 meters in the region of central Mexico (rising to about 3000
meters at the latitude of Guatemala), a Warmth Index of 2.0 likewise
set the boundary for corn cultivation. This meant that, with few exceptions, all the
major cultures of Mesoamerica were to be found south of the mouth of
the Pánuco river on the east of Mexico and south of the mouth
of the Río Santiago in the west of the
country. On the
intervening plateau, it was only in the warmest and moistest
southernmost basins where sufficient food could be produced to
support such ceremonial centers as Teotihuacán, Tula, and
Tenochtitlán. Thus, had one attempted to define the geographic
center of population in pre-Columbian times, it would most likely
have been located near the junction of the boundaries between the
present-day states of Puebla, Veracruz, and
Oaxaca.
Geographically, the introduction of European (actually, Near
Eastern and Mediterranean) crops had the effect of pushing the limits
of cultivation both farther north into areas of increasingly marginal
moisture and also higher into the mountains into areas of
increasingly marginal warmth.
Moreover, through the agency of domesticated livestock, such
as cattle, sheep, and goats, the human use of grasslands and
semi-arid steppes also became possible for the first time for more
than the nomadic practices of hunting and
gathering. Indeed, it
was in the more open expanses of the northern plateau that the more
characteristically Spanish form of grazing and ranching life-style
reached its fullest development. It was the farms and ranches on the
northern frontier that fed the miners with wheat, beef and mutton:
that supplied the horses, mules, oxen, and donkeys that ran the stamp
mills and transported the supplies: and that produced the tallow from
which the candles were made that lighted the mine shafts and the
hides and skins from which were fashioned the sacks and ropes used in
the mines.
The first areas of the meseta where large-scale wheat farming
was introduced were around Atlixco in the Puebla
basin -- producing bread
grains for both Mexico City and Puebla -- and in the western basins
of Michoacán and Jalisco to supply the towns of Valladolid
(now Morelia) and Guadalajara. Sheep were introduced into the upper
slopes of the Puebla basin and Tlaxcala, as well as in the area
surrounding Querétaro farther north, eventually giving rise to
a sizable woolen textile manufacture in both Mexico City and Puebla.
As mining began on the plateau, the fertile soils of the basin known
as the Bajío were taken under cultivation as were those
surrounding Aguascalientes a short time later. However, as settlement
spread farther northward into the drier plateau, the emphasis shifted
from crops to livestock with the grassy foothills of western
Zacatecas, central Durango, and southern Chihuahua soon giving
sustenance to vast herds of cattle. Another belt of extensive grazing
stretched along the back slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental from the
vicinity of San Luis Potosí northward past Saltillo and into
Texas. In specially favored pockets around Aguascalientes, Parras,
and Saltillo as well as downstream from El Paso (i.e. Ciudad
Juárez), vineyards were also planted.
Whereas in pre-Columbian times the principal agricultural
implements were the digging stick and the coa, or hoe, a major
technological change occurred with the introduction of the
plow. The latter, of
course, was not possible without a draft animal, so its use depended
on access to oxen, horses, mules, or
donkeys. Since
this initially
ruled out most native peoples (Indians were prohibited from owning
either oxen or horses), their traditional use of the digging stick
and coa continued side by side along with the
plow. Indeed, it soon
became clear that, were it not to result in severe erosion, the plow
could only be used in relatively level terrain, so the Spanish were
quick to appropriate to themselves the more fertile alluvial lands
along watercourses for their farms, relegating the native farmers to
the stonier hillsides and uplands with poorer soils and less
dependable water supply.
Naturally, one of the consequences of this was that indigenous
yields of traditional foodstuffs fell
sharply. One of the
saving graces of such an arrangement, however, was that even on
slopes as steep as 45 degrees, the traditional milpa, or
slash-and-burn, techniques of the Indian did not expose the soil to
the torrential downpours of the summer monsoon the way the furrows of
the plow opened the soils of the Spanish-cultivated areas. Whereas
most of the mountain sides cultivated by indigenous techniques remain
in various stages of re-growth and use even today after several
millennia of repeated occupance, many of the areas expropriated by
the Spanish farmers -- including some of the best the country had to
offer -- have witnessed disastrous losses of topsoil as well as
severe gullying. One of the worst examples of this can be seen in the
upper reaches of what was Cortés' vast encomienda in the vale
of Oaxaca near the settlement of Nochixtlán where erosion has
turned the local landscape into an unusable region of dissected bad
lands.
But, just as the plow was an innovation of mixed merit, so
too, may this be said of the livestock which the Spanish brought with
them. In the open, unfenced agricultural areas of
indigenous cultivation, the trampling and foraging of cattle, sheep,
and goats did severe damage to native crops, curbing output as well.
Unfortunately, even the hillside milpas were not immune to such
unwelcome incursions.
Thus, as the native peoples were pushed onto ever more
marginal lands in an attempt to feed themselves, the Spanish seizure
of the premium areas soon had them looking for labor both to
cultivate the new plants they had introduced for their own
consumption but also to produce specialized crops for export.
Naturally, this meant that the Indians were often conscripted away
from working their own corn patches at the very time that the demands
for labor were the greatest, again resulting in decreased output of
their basic foodstuffs.
In the drier, more sparsely inhabited regions of the plateau
it was the nomadic hunters and gatherers who were challenged by the
arrival of the Spanish land use
systems. Though
far fewer in number than the sedentary Indian farmers of the
Mesoamerican core area, they quickly realized that their way of life
was in as much jeopardy as was that of the
farmer. On the other
hand, the adoption of Spanish livestock and land-use practices by the
"Chichimecs" had everything to recommend it and little to discourage
it. The rapidly proliferating herds of cattle spreading through the
grasslands provided a potential food supply far more dependable than
the meager forms of game and plant life on which they have previously
subsisted. Indeed, once in control of
some of the wild horses that roamed through the region, they gained a
mobility totally unparalleled by their forefathers, and with it, they
became a military threat which, apart from the sheer numbers of
individuals involved, provided the Spanish with some of the most
serious and protracted resistance they encountered anywhere in New
Spain.
Quite a different pattern of agricultural development took
place in the tropical lowlands of
Mexico. There, with few
exceptions, the specialization was on crops for export, such as cacao
from Soconusco and the super-humid foothills of Tabasco and Veracruz;
indigo in the Yucatán; cochineal, a red dye-stuff made from
insects that feed on the nopal cactus, originally found in such
places as Oaxaca and later introduced into Puebla and Tlaxcala; and
tobacco, the choicest varieties of which were cultivated near
Córdoba and Orizaba in the lowlands of Veracruz. Sugar cane,
grown around Cuernavaca and in Veracruz near the foothills of the
Tuxtla Mountains, was destined both for the domestic market and for
sale in the home country. In these more hot and humid regions,
imported black slaves performed much of the labor and to this day it
is in the Gulf lowlands that Negroes make their largest contribution
to the ethnic mix of Mexico.
As mining and commercial agriculture became the lifeblood of
the colony, a whole new urban hierarchy arose to serve as the foci of
its economy. Coming from an Iberian tradition of town dwelling, the
Spanish were quick to lay out new settlements as administrative,
religious, and commercial centers for the territories they
occupied. A glance at a
map showing the distribution of towns that were founded during the
colonial period clearly reveals the Spanish preference for the more
temperate areas of the meseta for agricultural purposes and their
attraction to the northern desert because of the occurrence of
minerals in that region. The few settlements that they founded in the
lowlands were almost invariably seaports. Thus, the Spanish occupance
of Mexico not only reinforced the economic, political, and
demographic importance of the plateau region but it likewise had the
effect of moving the geographic center of gravity of the country
increasingly to the north and west. Indeed, during the 16th, 17th,
and 18th centuries the Spanish obsession with gold and silver
resulted in the first large-scale penetration of "la gran
Chicimeca" -- an
occupance that only the introduction of their more advanced
technology based on Old World crops and livestock made
possible.
The increased dimensions of spatial interaction necessitated
by the development of mining, commercial agriculture, and
urbanization depended primarily on the Spanish introduction of beasts
of burden. The pre-Columbian peoples, interestingly enough, knew the
wheel, but inasmuch as there were no suitable animals to pull wheeled
vehicles within the Americas, its only use was for toys pulled by
children. Once horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen were brought in, the
situation changed dramatically, although the difficulties posed by
the terrain still precluded the use of large two-wheeled
Mediterranean-type carts everywhere but on the more level expanses of
the meseta. Indeed, the
only roads capable of being negotiated by ox-drawn carts were the
so-called "Royal Road of the Interior ", or Camino Real de la Tierra
Adentro, which led northwestward out of Mexico City to the mining
centers of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Durango, Parral, and on to El Paso
and Santa Fé, and its branches that connected across the
desert to San Luis Potosí, Saltillo, and Monterrey. Elsewhere,
most colonial traffic continued to move over the well-worn footpaths
used for centuries by the Indians. Indeed, in many parts of the
country, Indian bearers with their carrying frames and tump lines
continued to be utilized until at least the early 17th century when
they were gradually replaced by mule trains driven by black or
mulatto slaves. Because Spanish law
prohibited Indians from either owning or riding horses or mules, if
and when they could afford to buy a beast of burden, it was most
often a lowly burro.
The traumatic confrontation of two worlds that began with
Columbus' first voyage initiated a process of change that is still
going on in Latin America even after more than five centuries.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mexico where the demographic
and cultural manifestations of this process are visible at every
hand. A vibrant
indigenous society continues to assert its identity in the face of
intensifying economic, social, and political pressures. Never fully
submerged by their colonial overlords, neither have the native
peoples of Mexico ever been able to escape the terrible price of
discrimination for looking, speaking, or thinking so differently than
the Spanish who conquered them.
Though all of the European colonial powers reacted to the
native peoples and cultures of the New World with arrogant and cruel
condescension, the impact of the Spanish was especially violent and
uncompromising. At the very moment of Columbus' discovery, Spain
was emerging from a 700-year-long war against the Moors -- a
religious crusade in which no quarter was either given or
expected. A zealous bigotry nurtured against first the
Moslem and then the Jew was now directed full-force upon Aztec, Maya,
and Purépecha. A
religious intolerance backed by an authoritarian legal system which
recognized the divine rights of the Spanish monarch strongly
discouraged any deviance whatsoever from either church or
state.
At the time of the fall of Tenochtitlán, the Spanish
had already been in the New World for almost three
decades. In that time
they had had ample opportunity not only to acquaint themselves with
the lands and peoples of the Caribbean but also to formulate some
fixed notions as how "best" to deal with them. When fair-skinned, Iron Age
Europeans vanquished bronze-skinned, Stone Age aborigines, it was
easy to conclude that skin-color and stage of development must have
been inseparably linked, especially when the latter people were
totally ignorant of Jesus Christ as
well! Even though racism
and religious intolerance were fundamental tenets of the cultural
baggage the Spanish brought with them, this is no way impeded them
from exercising their own lust and greed to the full, sanctioned as
it was by their having been
"Christians". When
Spanish males came ashore in the Indies after several months at sea,
one of their first imperatives was to find the solace of a
woman. And it mattered not whether
she was an underage daughter or a devoted wife, or if she herself was
willing; as long as she found favor in his eyes, that was reason
enough to take his pleasure with
her. Thus, the sexual
exploitation of the native women has been a fact of life since the
first Spaniards set foot in the Americas, and inevitably led to a
degree of miscegenation paralleled only in the colonies occupied by
their Iberian brethren, the Portuguese.
Along with their genes and their inflated opinions of
themselves, the Spanish brought with them sicknesses of various
kinds, to most of which they had acquired some immunity but to which
the Native Americans had none. Thus, within a decade of Columbus'
arrival in the New World, Hispaniola, the main base of colonial
Spain, had been so depopulated by war, disease, and sheer physical
abuse that the Spanish welcomed the first slave ships from Africa to
begin the process of replacing Indians with Negroes, totally altering
the demographic complexion of the Caribbean
region.
One reason the process was so rapid, of course, was that there
were relatively few natives living on the islands in the first place
-- most of them from a subsistence level of hunting, gathering, and
slash-and-burn agriculture. That was why Cortés'
conquest of the Aztec empire with its large population of sedentary
farmers, its bustling market places, its grandiose capital, its
widespread network of trade and tribute, and its immense riches was
such a prize. Here, at last, was something remotely comparable
to the great cities and opulent potentates of India that Columbus had
been seeking.
Following a practice which had evolved during the Reconquest
as new lands were wrested from the Moors, their ownership immediately
passed to the crown, which then doled out those areas which could be
cultivated to "deserving" individuals, most often to the conquering
officers involved, but not without retaining all mineral and water
rights for the king. In a feudal society such as that of Spain, it was
the ownership of land that conferred wealth and prestige on an
individual, and the larger the holding, the more prestigious the
holder. When the
subjugation of the Caribbean islands began, a modified form of this
practice known as the encomienda was instituted,
although it was not the land itself that had any intrinsic
value. In the New World there was an abundance of land to
be had for the taking, but little which promised the holder any great
wealth or prestige in and of
itself. Only if the
native peoples living on the parcel of land in question could be
coerced into providing the holder with tribute or labor in the form
of personal service would the "owner" be assured of some measure of
opulence, and the more vassals one controlled, the greater the
potential wealth of the
encomendero. So, once
the subjugation of the Aztecs was complete, Cortés immediately
set about dividing up the subject territories among his subordinate
officers, but not, of course, without reserving some of the most
populous parcels to himself, including not only rich areas
surrounding Mexico City but also most of the fertile Valley of
Oaxaca. To be sure, the
lure of becoming an encomendero was one of the primary motives for
pushing the Conquest as rapidly as possible into other areas because
later-arriving officers saw this as the easiest manner in which to
enhance their own wealth and status.
However, experience in the Caribbean isles had already shown
that the encomienda system was anything but the civilizing force it
was intended to be. In return for his encomienda,
the encomendero was expected to protect the Indians who lived on
"his" land and to Christianize
them. In point of fact,
more often the Indians were treated dishonestly, seriously
overworked, and frequently physically
abused. Indeed, the system had been such a fiasco that
King Carlos V expressly forbade Cortés from issuing
encomiendas, preferring that the Indians of Mexico become vassals of
the Spanish crown instead. For his part, Cortés
argued that his men not only deserved and expected such compensation
for their services, but that it was the only manner in which the
natives could be made good servants of the crown and members of the
church, while at the same time being protected from the malicious
influences of their former chiefs and
shamans. Unable to
rescind what had already become an accomplished fact, the king's only
recourse was to limit as sorely as he could all future encomiendas
awarded to individuals, but this did not preclude additional awards
being made to the church and government itself.
Unjust as the encomienda system was in stratifying Spanish
colonial society along racial lines by separating the white elite
from the bronze under-class, perhaps an even greater source of
injustice and inhumanity was the so-called repartimento
system. Each week every Indian
village was required to supply a quota of workers who were
conscripted to carry out projects such as building and maintaining
roads, erecting governmental or church buildings, and digging
irrigation ditches. Although nominal payment was supposed to be paid
for such labor, there was little guarantee that any money actually
changed hands at the conclusion of a
project. Somewhat later
when plantations and haciendas had come into being, conscription for
"public works" might include tilling land for the hacendado and when
mining began in earnest, many an Indian who was conscripted into the
mines "disappeared" as surely as though he were shipped off to a
Soviet gulag.
Not only was the Spanish monarch disenchanted with the
encomienda idea, but he also realized that unless careful scutiny was
maintained in the rich new colony, his own "piece of the pie" -- the
quinto, or royal fifth -- might not be fully
forthcoming. Thus,
as early as 1528 he appointed an audencia, or board of judges, to keep an eye on Cortés and
to see that all the legal niceties were
observed. As it turned
out, one of the judges, Nuño de Guzmán, was himself a
scoundrel of the first order who was particularly jealous of the
wealth and prestige that had already accrued to
Cortés. But,
afraid that his own misappropriation of funds might come to the
sovereign's notice, he abruptly decided to strike off with an army of
his own in the following year to gain fame and fortune for
himself. The brutal campaign he launched against the
Indians of the Jalisco-Zacatecas borderlands was one of the bloodiest
and most savage in the annals of colonial
history. In the process,
he laid the foundations of a second "kingdom" which he called Nueva
Galicia and whose capital -- repeatedly relocated because of Indian
counter-attacks -- became the present city of
Guadalajara.
Probably because the audencia may not have been as successful
a watchdog as the king had hoped, in 1530 he decided to appoint a
loyal and trusted friend as his personal representative in the colony
-- a viceroy. However, his appointee, Antonio de Mendoza, wanted
to be certain that the perks of the position would be fitting to a
man of his stature, and he demanded a palace of his own, the right to
wear royal robes and to be treated deferentially, a guard of honor,
and a handsome salary. Not until all of the above
were in place, did he accept the position -- which, as it happened,
was five years later! Even so, Mendoza turned
out to be an effective office-holder, not only settling the war that
Guzmán had begun in the west but also carrying out extensive
voyages of exploration along the west coast and into the far
Pacific. By the time he
left office in 1550, he had immensely enhanced his personal fortune
-- perhaps the first Mexican public official to do so but certainly
not the last.
It is likely that the king learned something from this
experience as well, because later appointees were audited both when
they took office and when they left
it. To ensure that
nothing untoward happened between the arrival and departure of his
bureaucratic underlings, he also dispatched royal spies -- more
formally known as visitadores -- to conduct spot-checks on the colonial administrative
apparatus, thereby maintaining a somewhat haphazard system of checks
and balances between the local politicos and the power structure at
home.
In religious matters the Spanish crown had already worked out
a special modus vivendi with the Vatican as the colonization of the
Caribbean got underway.
This was known as the patronato
real, or right of royal
patronage. In return for
Christianizing the natives and undertaking the construction of
churches and monasteries to accomplish that purpose, the Spanish
monarchs were given the right to nominate candidates for all
ecclesiastical offices from cardinals on down, as well as to collect
tithes, to allocate specific geographic areas to the missionary
activities of individual religious orders, and to establish the
geographic boundaries of the episcopal sees. Moreover, they exercised the
right of veto over any papal bulls or decrees that might apply to the
Indies and also censored any religious communications moving between
the home country and the colonies.
During the lengthy war of attrition that the Spanish termed
the "Reconquest", it was probably only natural that the role of the
soldier should take on an importance virtually equal to or greater
than that of the clergy.
With the final collapse of Moorish resistance at Granada in
1492, feudal Spain stood ready to unleash its now-unemployed hordes
of soldiers on new heathen enemies across the
Atlantic. Indeed, in a
rigidly stratified society where primogeniture was the foundation of
inheritance and thus of wealth and prestige, the opportune opening of
a New World provided the otherwise disinherited second, third, and
fourth sons of Spanish families with a chance to secure fame and
fortunes of their own. While these were opportunities much appreciated by
the genteel 'hidalgos' -- "sons of somebody", i.e., noblemen, and by
caballeros -- those who by reason of birth were entitled to ride
horses as "gentlemen", they were perhaps even more appreciated by
those whose lowly station in life qualified them as "peons", or
"those who walked rather than
rode". Had it not been
such an advantageous means of elevating one's station, it is almost
certain that a pig-herder by the name of Francisco Pizarro would
never have entered the pages of history -- nor, for that matter,
would many another "conquistador" who became known to later
generations.
The Spanish colonial heritage was almost the complete
antithesis of that of the English, who followed them into North
America almost a century later. The Spanish conquest was
almost exclusively a masculine venture, rather than the relocation of
entire families to the New World as in the English experience.
Whereas the latter were given to expelling their dissidents and
ne'er-do-wells overseas, whether it be Pilgrims to Massachusetts,
Catholics to Maryland, or convicts to Georgia, the Spanish took great
pains to prohibit the emigration of any but those of unquestioned
Catholic faith to their
colonies. Moreover,
besides their religious orthodoxy, so must they be 'politically
correct' as well, for the divine rights and absolutism of the Spanish
monarch were not to be questioned. Any notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity
were so far removed from the social fabric of medieval Spain as to
have been unthinkable. In the strict hierarchy of
feudal Spain, one's place in life was largely predestined by one's
birth, and one of the few ways to ever break out of such a
"straight-jacket" was through glory attained in the service of God
and King in the Indies.
Ironically, at the same time that Spanish clerics were
philosophically arguing whether the "Indians" were actually people at
all, since the Bible made no mention of them, or, if they were indeed
one of the "lost tribes of Israel", which one they might be, the
Spanish foot-soldier was finding out for himself how human they
were. Yet, with a
disdain for skin color inherent in virtually all Caucasoid peoples,
even his cross-bred progeny were regarded as "less worthy" than their
"pure white" fathers. As Spanish colonial society continued its
interbreeding, not only with the native Americans but also with the
African slaves brought in to replace them as they were decimated by
war, disease, and sheer abuse, it came to recognize no fewer than
sixteen "grades" of citizenship, depending on the degree of
intermixture between the races. Indeed, as if to heighten the absurdity of it all,
even after Spanish women arrived in the New World and gave birth to
"pure white" sons and daughters, such progeny were consigned by
place of birth to a rank one rung lower in the social hierarchy
than those born in Spain itself. Perhaps most ironic of all,
it was precisely these "second-class" criollos who eventually would lead the wars of independence against
the peninsulares born in Spain to create the new nations of Latin America,
no more democratic in any way than their colonial forbearers, except
for one less repressive class at the very top. As early as 1537, Pope
Paul III issued a series of encyclicals intended to ensure more
humane treatment of the
Indians. First and
foremost he declared that it was heresy to believe that the Indians
were not human beings and he affirmed they could be "saved" both by
preaching and by example.
Although he strictly forbade the enslavement of the Indians or
the taking of their possessions under penalty of excommunication, the
Spanish monarch viewed these encyclicals as an abridgement of the
patronato real and summarily revoked the decrees the following year.
Nonetheless, similar efforts at humanizing the treatment of
Indians were being led in Spain itself by a Dominican friar,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, who succeeded in having the so-called
New Laws enacted in 1542. These forbade the enslavement of Indians under any
pretext whatsoever, abolished all personal service to encomenderos by
Indians, prohibited any further encomiendas from being granted,
obliged all royal and church officials to surrender their rights to
tribute from the Indians, and specified that all existing private
encomiendas would become the property of the crown upon the death of
the present holder. As
might have been suspected, when the royal emissary, Francisco Tello
de Sandoval, arrived in New Spain to promulgate the New Laws, he was
greeted with such hostility by both the encomenderos and the clergy
that the viceroy decided he could not enforce them, and decided to
suspend them instead. In the face of such
opposition even the Spanish monarch backed down, and agreed that
encomiendas could continue to be inherited, at least for the time
being.
Following the conquest of the Aztecs, the task of converting
the native peoples of New Spain to Christianity was soon taken up by
various of the religious orders, the first mendicant Franciscan
fathers arriving already in 1523. Their austere customs
appealed to the Indians who by and large received them
well. Architecturally, their churches and convents
bespoke a still-unsettled time, for most of their edifices had the
character of fortresses as well as places of
worship. Geographically,
most of their endeavors were concentrated in the more populous areas
of the plateau in and around the Valley of Mexico, in the west, and
in Yucatán.
Three years later the Dominicans arrived, bringing with them
not only the Inquisition but also a much more richly ornamented
building style. It is chiefly in the
Oaxaca region where they left their strongest
imprint. When the Augustinian friars arrived in 1533, they
fanned out in all directions from the colonial capital, turning their
attention southward to the peoples of Guerrero, northward to the
Otomí, northeastward to the Huastecas, and westward to the
Purépecha. It was not until considerably later (1572) that
the Jesuits arrived to take up their work, much of it focussed in the
then-recently conquered areas of the northwest.
By learning the native languages, the friars gained an insight
into the beliefs, gods, ceremonies, and culture of the peoples with
whom they worked and among their first efforts were the translation
of the catechism, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria, and other
Christian rites into the various tongues. Although rejecting
everything that had to do with the indigenous calendar as
"diabolical", they made a special point of attempting to transform
ancient festivities into Christian fetes, associating them with
"Saint's Days". In this regard it is
questionable as to how successful they were, for what are perhaps the
two most prominent religious holidays in the Mexican calendar -- the
feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Day of the Dead -- can both
be shown to have pre-Columbian roots.
It should not be assumed for one moment that the Indians
embraced the teachings of their "white fathers"
wholeheartedly. Indeed, they resisted them in many ways, including
in some of the most rugged areas of the country, by force of
arms. In fact, it may be that the
open hostility of the Indians found a critical "ally" in the very
dissected and isolated character of their homelands, for Spanish
evangelization of the Cazcanes, the Acanxees, the Coras, and the
Huicholes in the precipitous approaches to the southern Sierra Madre
Occidental was all but given up in colonial times, as it was amongst
the Mixe in the northeastern mountains of Oaxaca. Moreover, some of the most
serious native uprisings against the Spanish and their teachings -- such as the Mixtón
War of 1540-41 -- had their roots in the same remote areas.
Even though the Church came to recognize the Native Americans
as "human", it never did recognize them as gente de razón -- "people of
reason." Along with
black slaves from Africa, the Indians were regarded as being
incapable of rational thought, and therefore obliged to be
paternalistically treated as
children.
While many of the Spanish fathers tended to approach their
would-be Indian converts in a spirit of "love" and "kindness", if
this approach failed to have the desired results, they were not above
using physical violence to drive home their
teachings. There are
numerous records of the Indians being imprisoned, flogged, and
tortured in order to accept "salvation". That is why in the whole history of colonial
Mexico, it is the rare padre indeed who earned the undying love and
respect of his converts, among the chosen few being Bartolomé
de Las Casas in Chiapas and Vasco de Quiroga in
Michoacán.
Although Spain's European enemies were quick to challenge it
on the high seas -- in fact, the French pirate Fleury managed to
seize a couple of silver-laden galleons as early as 1523 -- a more
direct assault on the colony of New Spain was not attempted until
nearly half a century later. Spanish fears were especially heightened when
French Huguenots arrived in the area of northern Florida to found a
colony in 1565. They immediately dispatched
an expedition to raze the settlement and to establish a protected
anchorage at San Augustín (Saint Augustine) to provide shelter
to their galleons on their way up the Florida Straits on their voyage
back to Sevilla.
Three years later an incident of quite another nature took
place: an English privateer by the
name of John Hawkins was attempting to open trade with the Spanish
colony when a hurricane forced him to take refuge in the port of
Veracruz. Before he could leave, the
arrival of a hostile Spanish fleet resulted in a battle that left
over 100 English sailors stranded on the
shore. Captured by the
Spanish, they were taken to Mexico City to stand trial before the
Inquisition as "heretics".
Three of them were burned at the stake for being
"unrepentant", whereas most of the others were condemned to serve as
galley slaves for up to ten
years. One of the
survivors of this episode who escaped along with John Hawkins was
Francis Drake, and he returned to plague the Spanish wherever and
however he could, attacking their ports not only in their home
country but also at Santo Domingo and Cartagena in the
Caribbean. When he showed up to ravage the Pacific ports of
Peru and New Spain some months later, the Spanish felt certain that
he had discovered the elusive "Straits of Anian" which supposedly
linked the two oceans, not suspecting for one moment that he had
followed Magellan's route around South
America. By the time he
appeared in Alta California and tried to claim it for the English
crown as "Nova Albion", the Spanish resolved to redouble their
efforts to find the "Strait" and to fortify it against further
English incursions.
The resultant expedition of Juan de Oñate through the
northern interior ended up locating instead the Pueblo Indians and
founding an outpost at San Juan, New Mexico, only to have the
provincial capital moved to Santa Fe two years
later. A concurrent
expedition along the coast led by Vizcaino was scarcely any more
successful, because although he found the bay of Monterey, he did not
consider it a particularly safe anchorage for the Manila galleons
because it lay quite open to the prevailing northwesterly
winds.
The next challenge, again from the English, came in 1655, when
by the force of arms they wrested the island of Jamaica away from the
Spanish. Because the island contained
no mineral wealth of any consequence, its loss was not considered
particularly serious by the Spaniards, although it did become an
unwelcome lair for privateers seeking to disrupt the galleon trade
between Puerto Bello and Havana. To the English, however, its
primary importance was as a colony in which to grow sugar, and to
that end African slaves were quickly
introduced. A few years
later, when English freebooters and slave ships ended up on the rocks
of eastern Yucatán, the roots of a yet-closer but less ominous
colony were also laid there, in what eventually became British
Honduras. But, throughout the Spanish
colonial period, it remained more a refuge for shipwrecked slaves
than it was an organized political entity.
Late in the 17th century the Spanish were given more reason to
fear encroachment by their European
foes. By 1682 the French
explorer La Salle had not only penetrated the Great Lakes region but
had portaged into the Mississippi and descended to its mouth in the
Gulf of Mexico.
Ironically, when La Salle tried to find the Mississippi's
mouth from the seaside two years later, he couldn't locate it and
after a disastrous voyage along the bayous of Louisiana and Texas,
his crew finally mutinied and murdered him in 1687. Not aware that the French
"threat" was momentarily over, the Spanish set about searching for a
protected anchorage along the north shore of the Gulf to checkmate
any possible French incursion from that
quarter. The result was
the founding, in 1698, of Pensacola, on a great natural bay in what
today is the northwestern corner of Florida.
The French, meanwhile, had gone directly to Hispaniola, the
main Spanish base in the Caribbean, and captured the western end of
the island in 1697. Again, thanks to African
slave labor, in a matter of a few years they had managed to turn it
into the richest sugar colony in the New
World. Unable to expel
them, the Spanish could only rue the fact that their critical
shipping lanes had become even more
threatened -- now from
bases only a few scores of miles away from the heart of their New
World empire.
As the eighteenth century dawned, the reality of the French
presence along the north shore of the Gulf of Mexico became all the
more apparent. In 1711 de Moyne founded
Mobile on a great natural embayment only a few miles to the west of
Pensacola, and for the next nine years it served as the capital of
the territory of Louisiana. The Spanish countered by
erecting a fort on a hill overlooking the bay from the east, a place
still known as Spanish Fort.
However, as good a harbor as it was, Mobile lacked access to
the vast interior hinterland of the Mississippi valley, and in 1718
de Moyne founded the city of New Orleans at a strategic bend in the
river about a hundred miles upstream from its mouth. This provocative move led to
an immediate reaction from the Spanish, who proceeded to construct
and fortify a small mission along the San Antonio River in
Texas. Though the latter never experienced a challenge
from the French and remained a remote and minor outlier of the
Spanish empire for the next hundred years, New Orleans served as the
capital of Louisiana from 1720 up until 1763, when the English
expelled the French from North America. However, recognizing the
imminent loss of its colonies both in America and in India, France
ceded Louisiana to Spain -- to which it was dynastically linked
through the Bourbons -- in 1762. Following the French
Revolution, after Spain had unsuccessfully attempted to unseat the
new French government, the latter in turn managed to reduce Spain to
the status of vassal-state of France and in the secret treaty of San
Ildefonso of 1800, Spain was forced to cede Louisiana back to the
French. But, only
three years later, due to the deplorable state of France's finances,
Napoleon I sold the territory to the United States. Ironically, it was from this
new American republic that both Spain and its prize colony, New
Spain, would ultimately face their greatest
challenges.
Before that day dawned, however, Spain had dispatched a new
expedition into Alta California under the command of Portola to found
settlements at both San Diego and Monterey and to reinforce the chain
of missions which Padres Kino and Serra had
established. It was on
this expedition that the Spanish belatedly stumbled into San
Francisco Bay from its landward side, having missed it from the sea
for over two hundred years because of low-lying fog
banks! Nevertheless, a
renewed presence of the English on the Oregon coast in the 1770's and
the planting of a Russian fur trading post at Fort Ross just north of
San Francisco early in the 19th century managed to keep the Spanish
nervous about the future of their overextended empire along the
shores of the Pacific right up until the Mexicans threw off the yoke
of colonialism in 1821.