From 1493 to 1542, when the New Laws were promulgated that tried to prevent the practice of slavery, about 2,500 Native Americans arrived in Spain as slaves. The number may seem small when compared to the sub-Saharan slave trade, but it far exceeds the 175 indigenous slaves who arrived in Britain throughout the colonial era.
The lives, sufferings and small victories of those 2,500 indigenous people have been detected by the research radar of Esteban Mira Caballos, PhD in American History from the University of Seville. After decades of research and burning his eyebrows in scattered archives, he gathers his work in The Discovery of Europe. Indigenous peoples and mestizos in the Old World (Criticism). The figure is approximate, “because in the case of African slaves who went to America they paid the corresponding tax, so we have a complete list. But this tax was not foreseen for the slaves who came from America to Spain, and we have no records of it”, he explains in an interview for La Vanguardia.
Christopher Columbus already had the idea of ??making slaves and trading with them, but his decision did not please Queen Isabel at all, because she understood that the navigator was exceeding his powers: only the Crown was responsible for what needed to be done with the lives of his subjects.
Slavery was a common practice. The philosophical justification was already provided by Aristotle, when he established that there were men (and peoples) fit to command and others who had to obey. Mira explains very well the other two reasons why it was legal to enslave people: the so-called just (or holy) wars, which enslaved many barbarians, or those carried out against peoples with cannibalistic rituals, something that happened in the New World (also in Europe until not long ago) and which was used as the perfect excuse to pass off natives who were not cannibals.
A Spanish subject was never to be enslaved. But were those uncivilized and unevangelized pagans? Wasn’t it the Spanish’s duty to exercise strict guardianship over it? Many argued that yes, especially the majority sector of the Church, which considered infidels (against whom it was necessary to make war) both heretics and aboriginal pagans (to the latter the more humanist sector sought to incorporate them into the Church through evangelical practices).
From the very beginning, the Crown, influenced by humanist ideas, tried to stop these practices and there is a string of laws that make progress and setbacks: “It wasn’t that easy and even though the Crown tries, it has to continuously going backwards”. In 1530, because wars with certain peoples require that, as an incentive, those who want to go to fight them can make slaves: “No Spaniard wanted to go to fight if it were not for the reward of getting slaves in a just war Thus, when there is the exception of the just war, there is always the shameless person who says ‘well, this is not a just war, but I pass him off as a slave in a just war'”.
And there are also cases in which the owners objected to releasing them “because they had legal title deeds and showed the letter drawn up before a notary. There is nothing more authentic than a notarial deed of sale of a slave. They even showed the iron [brand] that the slave had on his forehead and the fee that was paid to the king to iron the slave on his forehead… You have to consider the context of the time and how harsh they were those times”, argues Mira.
In addition to dissecting the society, customs and lives of these slaves (infinite examples appear throughout the book and in the appendices), one of the main ideas of the study is the teacher’s eagerness to put the reader in front of a mirror and discover the Discovery that the indigenous and mestizos made of the Spanish society of the time: “The important thing about the book is that it builds bridges. We always talk about discovering, conquering, colonizing. It was all shared and the flow was two-way. I always say that Spain discovered America on October 12, 1492, but eight months later the Americans discovered Europe. Hernán Cortés on his first trip in 1493, brought indigenous people who discovered with surprise what Europe was. Because of our Eurocentric nature, we always talk about what we bring to America, but we never highlight, or very little, what they brought to us, the huge legacy they gave us.”
And from that moment of the interview, the historian becomes a torrent of passionate data, of historical origin but with current scope: “We are not talking about hundreds, but about thousands of indigenous and mestizos who arrived throughout the colonial period in Spain, which were genetically integrated into the Spaniards, both those who arrived free and the slaves who remained, and that is why we have indigenous genetics also embedded within us”.
And he adds: “The problem was not racism, but classism. Many of the noble titles are indigenous descendants because there were Spaniards who married indigenous elites; we have the dukes of Abrantes, the Viscounty of Amaya. We have the marquises of the conquest, all of these are descendants of indigenous people, like the marquise of Santiago de Oropesa… from Moctezuma alone, there are several thousand descendants in Spain today”.
That’s why, faced with José María Aznar’s attempt to ridicule the indigenous people or Vox’s statements, he says: “It’s shameful and these ultra-patriots have me fried. You can’t come to America saying we saved them from barbarism and human sacrifice. This is truly barbaric and causes logical rejection and doors to be closed. Now, if you empathize and recognize the events that have happened… We have to stay with what we have, because in the end history brought us together, due to sometimes tragic circumstances. The only way they take us into account is by having an equal position”.
