Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation

Franklin Franco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317665281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation is the first English translation of the classic text Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana by esteemed Dominican scholar Franklin J. Franco. Published in 1969, this book was the first systematic work on the role of Afro-descendants in Dominican society, the first society of the modern Americas where a Black-Mulatto population majority developed during the 16th century. Franco's work, a foundational text for Dominican ethnic studies, constituted a paradigm shift, breaking with the distortions of traditional histories that focused on the colonial elite to place Afro-descendants, slavery, and race relations at the center of Dominican history.

This translation includes a new introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse University) which contextualizes Franco's work, explaining the milieu in which he was writing, and bringing the historiography of race, slavery, and the Dominican Republic up to the present. Making this pioneering work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this is a must-have for anyone interested in the lasting effects of African slavery on the Dominican population and Caribbean societies.

1
The Black Population

In September 1501, don Nicolás de Ovando was named Governor of Hispaniola, the Indies, and Tierra Firme by the Catholic Monarchs, and among the general instructions they gave him, “he was ordered not to allow Jews, or Moors, or new converts to go to, or to be in, the Indies, but that he should permit the introduction of black slaves, provided they had been born under Christian power.”¹ This is the earliest surviving information about black slaves in Santo Domingo. We can say that this is the moment when the colonization of Hispaniola truly gets underway, and after this point, the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the new territories.

Slavery as a kind of socially organized labor had, however, already been tried out on the indigenous population, not just in the disguised form of Roldán’s repartimientos, but also openly.

The indigenous people’s low level of cultural development, their inability to adapt physically and mentally to the harsh slave labor system, and, as a consequence, their heroic resistance against the brutal conquest, all resulted in their immediate replacement, given the urgent need for a workforce. And so on the basis of the Portuguese experience in Europe, the numbers of black slaves who were brought in greatly increased after 1501.²

In contrast to the self-determination enjoyed by the first expeditions of the Discovery, the Crown quickly moved to centralize everything related to the running of the newly discovered lands under its own control. A complete administrative apparatus, the Casa de Contratación in Seville, was set up for this purpose. “Every one who wanted to set sail was required to have a permit to leave the Peninsula and settle in the recently discovered lands. A license was also required to carry merchandise and items of all kinds, thus creating a record of everything headed for the Indies.”³

Such a provision, i.e. such a license, was also necessary to transport black slaves to fill the pressing need for manpower in mining and agriculture. Alongside the license, smuggling was another important source of supply.

At first, the overwhelming number of men in the settlements led to a major problem, which was later resolved by historical development itself. Thus already by 1506, “a significant number of the new settlers had formed unions with Indian women, with the most highly prized women going to the nobles.”⁴

However, the rapid extinction of the indigenous population because of the mass suicides and the inhuman slave labor system—only sixty thousand Indians remained on the island in 1507—together with the absence of white women, forced the colonists to replace indigenous women with black women. By the end of the sixteenth century, so many children had been born to Spanish fathers and black slave mothers that the Crown ordered, “because we are informed that some of the soldiers of this fortress [i.e. the fortress of Havana] have fathered children with some of our slaves, and they want to buy the children and set them free, if the children whom these soldiers have fathered with our slaves are to be sold, you shall give preference to their fathers who want to buy them for that purpose.”⁵

Although this Royal Ordinance refers specifically to soldiers at the fortress of Havana, nothing leads us to believe that similar situations, with the same explanation, weren’t occurring in Santo Domingo.

Initially the black slaves were mainly used in mining. At this time, gold smelting was done four times a year in Hispaniola: twice in the city of Buena Ventura for the old and new mines in San Cristóbal, and twice in Concepción for the mines in the Cibao, and the others, which were closer to the aforementioned town of La Vega. For the first of these two cities, each smelting represented an inflow of 110,000 or 120,000 marks. The smelting done at Concepción de la Vega, on the other hand, typically brought in 125,000 or 130,000 or, sometimes, 140,000 marks; as a result, the value of the gold extracted every year on the island added up to 460,000 marks. So on the basis of the rumors spreading around Spain that you could make a sizeable fortune in a very short time in that colony with no risk, provided you were on good terms with the governor-general, so many people scrambled to share in the wealth that there weren’t enough boats available.⁶

The rapid exhaustion of Hispaniola’s gold mines due to intense exploitation and the poor gold deposits, plus the depletion of the indigenous population (by 1511, there were just fourteen thousand Indians left⁷) provided the impetus for the development of agriculture in the colony—principally the cultivation of sugarcane, which was then considered on a par with gold because of its high cash value—and for the importation of black slaves. Rulings from the Crown stressed that the blacks sent to Hispaniola should be from Guinea, because in Spain, Wolofs and Berbers had led real rebellions against their enslavement and their actions were essentially blamed on the influence of the Moorish (Islamic) religion. By contrast, Guineans “were considered to lack any religion, and if they did have anything of the kind, it was just ridiculous superstitions that they didn’t practice after they were brought to America.”⁸ Despite these detailed instructions, the experience of black slavery in Santo Domingo began inauspiciously. Ovando himself soon wrote to the Crown asking that the shipments of black slaves be halted, “because they ran away, joined up with the Indians, taught them bad habits, and could never be caught.” As a result, and because the instructions given to Ovando weren’t followed, in 1506 the Crown ordered by royal decree that all Berber slaves and new converts be expelled from the island and, says Saco, “no rebellious black slaves, or any who had been raised with Moors,⁹ were to be allowed to go there. The term ‘black slave’ does not refer to them all indiscriminately, just to those who had not been born under Christian power, as had been ordered.”¹⁰

The depletion of the mines on the one hand, and the fertile soil and the adaptation of sugarcane to the climate on the other, pushed the Crown to promote its cultivation. Special provisions were passed to boost its production and, as a consequence, for black slaves to be imported for that purpose. Yet it was always emphasized that “no rebellious black slaves, or any who had been raised with Moors,” were to go to Hispaniola. In a very short space of time sugarcane cultivation flourished dramatically. Fernández de Oviedo says on this subject:

Sugar is one of the most profitable kinds of farming there could be in any province or kingdom in the world, and on this island there is so much of it and it is so good, and given the short time they have been doing it here, it is only right (though the fertility of the soil, and the ready accessibility of water, and the availability of the great stands of wood for the huge fires that burn constantly are so suitable for this kind of business) that the person who showed how it was done and who first set it up should be given so many gifts and rewards.¹¹

The cultivation of sugarcane increased greatly after the industrial testing done by Gonzalo de Velosa who, “at his own cost and with huge expense, according to what he had and with a lot of his own work, brought sugar masters to this island and built a trapiche.”¹² Based on a contemporary list, in 1520 there were already twenty-four ingenios and four trapiches producing sugar in Hispaniola, which were distributed as follows:

INGENIOS AND TRAPICHES IN HISPANIOLA¹³
–1520–

Ingenios	Trapiches	Location	Owner
1		Rio Nigua	Gonzalo de Velosa
1		La Vega	Pedro de Atienza
1		Rio Nigua	Esteban de Pasamonte
1		Rio Nigua	Francisco Tostado
1		Rio Nigua	Diego Caballero [de la Rosa]
1		Rio Nigua	Joan de Ampies
1		Rio Nigua	Luis Colón
1		Rio Nigua	Antonio Serrano
1		Haina	Lic. Vásquez de Mella
1		Haina	Cristóbal de Tapia
1		Nizao	Miguel de Pasamonte
1		Nizao	Alonso de Ávila
1		Nizao	Lope de Bardecia
1		Ocoa	Licenciado Zuazo
1		Azua	Diego Caballero [de la Rosa]
1		Azua	Fernando Gorjón
1		San Juan	Pedro de Badilla
1		Cazuy	Joan de Villoria
1		Sanate, HigüeyJoandeVillo	Joan de Villoria
1		Puerto Plata	Vázquez de Ayllón
1		Puerto Plata	Diego de Morales
1		Bonao	Sons of Miguel Jover
1		Árbol Gordo, Santo Domingo	Cristóbal Lebrón
1		Quiabón, Santo Domingo	Melchor de Castro and Hernando
			de Carvajal
	1	Azua	Alonso de Peralta
	1	Azua	Martín García
	1	Puerto Plata	Francisco de Barrionuevo
	1	Puerto Plata	Joan de Aguilar

We should emphasize that the majority of the owners of the ingenios and trapiches shown in this table were officials of the Crown.

Yet according to Las Casas, the number of ingenios was even higher: in 1518 there were some forty ingenios on Hispaniola, “some driven by water and others by horses.” He also says that each water-powered ingenio required eighty or more slaves and each trapiche needed from thirty to forty. About the labor system in operation in the ingenios and trapiches, Las Casas says,

In the old days, before there were ingenios, we on this island used to believe that if they didn’t hang a black man, he never died, since we had never seen a black man die from an illness, because, just like the orange tree, black people truly found their place here, and it is more like home to them than their own Guinea. But after they put them in the sugar mills, as a result of the great torments they suffered and the brews of cane syrup [they make] and drink, they encountered death and disease, and as a result many of them die every day.¹⁴

The slave mode of production was the base on which the colonial economy was organized. By its nature, this was not the usual form of slavery; this was slavery based on a new and more rational return on labor—and this is what its timid hints of capitalism rest on—the use of black slaves as direct instruments in the production process. Human beings were thus simultaneously the labor force, the machinery, and the merchandise in the same process. A black slave was worth what he yielded. What are obviously rough estimates put the black population at this time at around twenty thousand.

Indians carried out the inhuman slave labor in the mines and sugar mills with the blacks. When the indigenous population of the island had been exterminated, Indians were imported from the nearby islands and the mainland. A Royal Ordinance issued in Seville in July 1511 permitted Indians to be brought to Hispaniola, “from islands where there is no gold,” and in December of the same year there was a further ruling that “Carib Indians may be enslaved.”¹⁵ The enactment of the Laws of Burgos in 1513 brought about significant changes in the treatment of the indigenous population, which produced an immediate differentiation between Indians and blacks in the work sphere. Above all else, the differentiation was brought about by the tremendous physical stamina of the black slaves in their work in mining and agriculture, given that “the work of one black was more useful than that of four Indians.” This strengthened the policy of the disguised forms of slavery represented by the repartimiento and the encomienda, in contrast to the open enslavement of the blacks. The colonial economy flourished so dramatically on the basis of this social organization of labor that by 1518 “there were two cities and sixteen towns in Hispaniola. The cities were [Santo Domingo], not the first one founded in 1494 by Columbus’s brother, don Bartolomé Colón, but the one relocated by Nicolás de Ovando in 1502, and Concepción de la Vega, which was built by the aforementioned Columbus. The towns were: Bonao, Puerto Plata, Buenaventura, Santa María del Puerto de la Yaguana, Monte Cristo, Vera Paz, Salvatierra de Sabana, San Juan de la Maguana, Villanueva de Yaquimo,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• A Dominican Classic of Caribbean Thought: Introduction to Franklin Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation
• Prologue
• 1 The Black Population
• 2 The Black Population and the National Consciousness
• 3 The Constitution of 1801
• 4 The Other Face of the Reconquest
• 5 “Foolish Spain” and “Rebellious Africa”
• 6 Complete Unity and National Unity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index