San Lorenzo de los Negros

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San Lorenzo de los Negros

After the fall of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire in 1521, Spanish colonists brought increasing numbers of enslaved Africans into Mexico. These slaves immediately began escaping. As most of Mesoamerica remained unconquered in the 1520s, cimarrones (Maroons, or escaped slaves) sometimes fled to native communities. The chronicler Antonio Herrera later wrote that, as early as 1523, "many negro slaves fled to the [unconquered] Zapotecs and they [the slaves] went about rebelling throughout the country" (Palmer, 1976, p. 122). However, due to language and cultural barriers, and because Africans had sometimes joined the Spanish Conquest as black conquistadors, cimarrones were not always welcome in native towns, and many formed their own settlements. Maroon communities sprang up wherever Europeans brought African slaves to the Americas, from Florida to Brazil. Between the 1520s and 1650, a quarter of a million Africans were imported to colonial Mexico, making it (after Brazil) the second most important destination for slaves in the Americas during this period. Mexico was thus a center of Maroon activity, and Spanish officials in the colony considered cimarrones to be a major problem, with the solution being the complete destruction of Maroon communities.

The most extensive and violent confrontations between Spaniards and cimarrones took place near the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz, in the Orizaba region, between 1606 and 1619. In each of the first three years of this period, Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco ordered—in vain—that the region be cleared of cimarrones because, he claimed, for decades they had been liberating other slaves, destroying Spanish property, and "assaulting and killing the Indians and the Spaniards along the highways" (Palmer, 1976, p. 126). An attempt to use a Franciscan as a spy failed in 1609 when the friar was expelled from the main Maroon community (named Yanga, after its leader or king, but subsequently renamed San Lorenzo de los Negros).

Meanwhile, Spaniards prepared to destroy the village with a military force of 450 men led by Pedro González de Herrera. Before the attack, Herrera received a letter from King Yanga (or Ñanga), an elderly African, reputedly from the royal family of the Bram nation in West Africa, who had survived as an escapee in Mexico for three decades. He eloquently denounced Spanish colonialism and the treatment of black slaves, arguing that he and his followers were justified in seeking refuge from "the cruelty and treachery of the Spaniards who, without any right, had become owners of their freedom" (Palmer, 1976, p. 129). Yanga defied the Spaniards to defeat him, although his villagers were fewer in number than Herrera's soldiers, and half of them were more accustomed to tending crops and cattle than to fighting.

In the ensuing battle the Spaniards overran the settlement, but most of the cimarrones fled and—led by Yanga and his general, Francisco Angola—fought the colonists to a stalemate. Under the ensuing peace agreement, the cimarrones offered to return all slaves who had escaped after September 1608 and to respect Spanish property and life. In return, their community was formally recognized as the pueblo of San Lorenzo de los Negros. Yanga was officially made governor, and he ruled the town along with a cabildo (town council) of his peers. San Lorenzo's residents also paid tribute, built a church (there had been a chapel in the earlier Maroon village), received a Spanish priest, and pledged to defend the colony from its enemies. This agreement reflected the degree to which the cimarrones had adopted aspects of Spanish culture, as well as their concern to preserve their own freedom. What had begun in the 1580s as a roving band of men had become by the 1610s a fully developed community of families, and they wanted to preserve this way of life more than they wanted to destroy colonial rule or the institution of slavery.

Violence by and against cimarrones continued in the region of San Lorenzo, as it did in much of Mexico. But the town survived and grew, a symbol of how enslaved Africans in the Americas could not only seize their freedom, but, with audacity and tenacity, win formal recognition as free colonists. The symbolism of this victory became blurred during the seventeenth century, as mixed-race people of indigenous, Spanish, and African descent moved into San Lorenzo. By 1700 the community was indistinguishable from other villages and small towns in the region. Nevertheless, San Lorenzo's origins were not forgotten. Its residents continued to call the village Yanga, as that was its popular name by 1821, the year of Mexican independence, when its population was almost 800. In the nineteenth century its history was promoted by the Afro-Mexican politician and historian Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–1896). Today Governor (or King) Yanga is viewed as a Mexican nationalist hero, and the town, now officially called Yanga, has a prominent statue of its founder, holds an annual Festival of the First Free People of the Americas, and is recognized as a heritage site by the Mexican government.

See also Runaway Slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean