Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century 1009180312, 9781009180313

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I Building the Mexican-Caribbean World
1 Veracruz Before the Caribbean
2 Environment, Health, and Race, 1599–1697
3 Imperial Designs and Regional Systems
4 The Large and Small-Scale Introduction of Africans to Veracruz
Part II The Caribbean in Veracruz
5 After the Slave Trade: Nation, Ethnicity, and Mobility After 1640
6 Practice and Community in a Spiritual Borderland
7 Caribbean Defenses, the Free-Black Militia, and Regional Consciousness
Conclusion: The Mexican Archipelago
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was the busiest port in the wealthiest colony in the Americas. People and goods from five continents converged in the city, inserting it firmly into the early modern world’s largest global networks. Nevertheless, Veracruz never attained the fame or status of other Atlantic ports. Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century is the first English-language, book-length study of early modern Veracruz. Weaving elements of environmental, social, and cultural history, it examines both Veracruz’s internal dynamics and its external relationships. Chief among Veracruz’s relationships were its close ties within the Caribbean. Emphasizing relationships of small-scale trade and migration between Veracruz and Caribbean cities like Havana, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, Veracruz and the Caribbean shows how the city’s residents – especially its large African and Afro-descended communities – were able to form communities and define identities separate from those available in the Mexican mainland. Joseph M. H. Clark is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. His research examines the intersection of Mexican, Caribbean, and Atlantic history in the early modern period, focusing especially on African Diaspora.

cambridge latin american studies General Editors KRIS LANE, Tulane University MATTHEW RESTALL, Pennsylvania State University

Editor Emeritus HERBERT S. KLEIN Gouverneur Morris Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia University and Hoover Research Fellow, Stanford University

Other Books in the Series 127. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth Century Spanish New World, Adrian Masters 126. A History of Chile 1808–2018, 2nd Edition, William F. Sater and Simon Collier 125. The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers: The Politics of Animal Disease in Mexico and the World, Thomas Rath 124. Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain, Richard M. Conway 123. Journey to Indo-América: APRA and the Transnational Politics of Exile, Persecution, and Solidarity, 1918–1945, Geneviève Dorais 122. Nationalizing Nature: Iguaza Falls and National Parks at the BrazilArgentina Border, Frederico Freitas 121. Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690, Juan José Ponce-Vázquez 120. Our Time Is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala, Julie Gibbings 119. The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s–1950s, Paulo Drinot 118. A Silver River in a Silver World: Dutch Trade in the Rio de la Plata, 1648– 1678, David Freeman 117. Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971, Rachel Hynson 116. Violence and The Caste War of Yucatán, Wolfgang Gabbert 115. For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Robert Weis 114. The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521–1600, Ryan Dominic Crewe (Continued after the Index)

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

JOSEPH M. H. CLARK University of Kentucky

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009180313 doi: 10.1017/9781009180337 © Joseph M. H. Clark 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-009-18031-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents, Mike and Karen

Contents

List of Figures

page ix

List of Maps List of Tables

x xi

Acknowledgments Note on the Text

xii xvi

List of Abbreviations

xvii

Introduction

1

part i building the mexican-caribbean world 1 Veracruz Before the Caribbean

23

2 Environment, Health, and Race, 1599–1697 3 Imperial Designs and Regional Systems

49 74

4 The Large and Small-Scale Introduction of Africans to Veracruz

106

part ii the caribbean in veracruz 5 After the Slave Trade: Nation, Ethnicity, and Mobility After 1640 6 Practice and Community in a Spiritual Borderland

vii

151 192

viii

Contents

7 Caribbean Defenses, the Free-Black Militia, and Regional Consciousness Conclusion: The Mexican Archipelago

226 254

Appendices

263

Bibliography

267

Index

301

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 3.2 5.1 8.1

Plan of Nueva Veracruz, ca. 1600 page 28 “Ventas de Buitrón” and San Juan de Ulúa, ca. 1592 46 Veracruz and its harbor, ca. 1601 53 Incoming and outgoing ships in Havana by month, 1602–1650 90 Incoming and outgoing ships in Veracruz by month, 1600–1612 91 View of Veracruz, ca. 1690s 186 The Mexican Archipelago, ca. 1688 259

ix

Maps

0.1 0.2 3.1 5.1

The Mexican-Caribbean world in the seventeenth century Veracruz’s interior in the seventeenth century Mexican-Caribbean trade networks, ca. 1620 Possible origins of African ethnonyms, Corpus Christi festival, 1667

x

page xix xx 87 171

Tables

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

Veracruz shipping traffic, 1600–1622 page 84 Veracruz almojarifazgo, 1590–1700 85 Havana shipping traffic, 1602–1650 85 Cartagena shipping traffic, 1600–1620 86 Vessels in Havana and Veracruz by region, 1602–1650 94 Ships arriving with captives in New Spain by provenance, 1545–1713 117 Ships arriving with captives in Spanish Caribbean by provenance, 1545–1713 118 Transatlantic slave ships to multiple ports, 1595–1640 126 African ethnonyms in Xalapa, 1578–1693 157 Census of Tlacotalpan, Tlalixcoyan, and Medellín, 1681–1688 162 “African” second names in the Tlacotalpan, Tlalixcoyan, and Medellín padrones, 1681–1688 165 Corpus Christi “dances,” 1667 170 Patients of the Hospital NS de Loreto by birthplace, 1684–1695 188 African-descent patients of the Hospital NS de Loreto by birthplace, 1684–1695 190 Inquisitions involving Santa Marta in Mexico and Cartagena, 1610–1640 197

xi

Acknowledgments

In the decade or more since I began work on this book, I have benefitted from the generosity, insight, and guidance of innumerable colleagues and friends whose inspiration, large and small, can be found throughout the manuscript. There are some people whose guidance has been with this project from its start. A conversation with Ben Vinson early in my graduate career set me off to Mexico to find the Caribbean. Ever since, he has been a constant advocate and mentor. Franklin Knight, whose own work blends Caribbean and Latin American perspectives better than I could ever hope to, guided this project through its development, helping me realize a coherent thesis out of what began as a single question. Through Frank, I met Jane Landers, who provided counsel on research in both the AGI and the AGN and offered generous commentary on the manuscript. To Jane, I am ever grateful for your kindness and support. Though he always cautioned that the topic was “outside” his area, Gabe Paquette helped me complete this book as much as anyone. His advice on writing, organization, and arguments guides my work to this day. I reserve special thanks for David Wheat, whose incredible generosity helped bring this book into existence. About ten years ago, I encountered David’s dissertation by chance as I was beginning my own prospectus. Inspired, I wrote to him cold to ask advice about the AGI. His unbelievably detailed reply, replete with selected legajos, became my starting point for research in Seville. Over the years, when his own research touched on Veracruz, he would share references and research notes with me. At the same time, he has also shared comments on multiple chapters (and multiple iterations of chapters) and ultimately the entire xii

Acknowledgments

xiii

manuscript. It is hard to imagine what this book would look like without him. At the same time I wrote to David, I also contacted Alejandro de la Fuente, who directed me to the Escribanía section of the AGI, where I found much useful material. In Seville, I also benefitted from the famous collegiality of the AGI, where I shared my time with many scholars more brilliant than myself, including Chloe Ireton, Ernesto Mercado-Montero, Masaki Sato, Santiago Muñoz, Kara Schultz, Adrian Masters, Guillermo Ruiz Stovel, Alex Ponsen, Brian Hamm, Edward Collins, Jose María García Redondo, Marc Lentz, Roberta Fernandes Dos Santos, Jonathan Graham, Diego Chalan, Elizabeth MontañezSanabria, Daniel Genkins, Adolfo Polo, and Arthur Tarratus. I would like to thank Nelson Fernando González especially for helping me retrieve much needed reproductions. My research in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Xalapa got an early boost from Patrick Carroll, who set me on a research path in fall 2012. Like many young Mexicanists, once I arrived at the AGN, Linda Arnold was there with much needed guidance to the catalog. In Mexico, conversations with Juan Manuel de la Serna, Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Johanna von Grafenstein, and Matilde Souto were formative. I also thank Nancy Alvarez-Marquez and Christopher Woolley for sharing their time in Mexico with me. I am indebted especially to Inés Santos, a friend with whom I also shared time in Seville, who introduced me to the materials of Indiferente Virreinal in the AGN. I would like to thank the staffs of the AGI and the AGN, where I split most of my research time, as well as those of the AHCV in Veracruz, the ANUV in Xalapa, and the Huntington, Bancroft, and British libraries. My research for this book was made possible by the generous support of Johns Hopkins University, University of Kentucky, the Conference on Latin American History, and The Huntington Library. In drafting the manuscript, I benefitted from the generous insights of Richard Kagan, Erin Rowe, Sara Castro-Kláren, Eduardo Rodriguez, Phil Morgan, François Furstenberg, Toby Ditz, Sara Berry, Earle Havens, and Sidney Mintz at Johns Hopkins. In their own ways, Pier Larson and Bill Rowe introduced me to scholarship that, while not always found among my footnotes, transformed the way I see the past and remains foundational to the kind of scholarship I aspire to. In Baltimore, Katie Hindmarch-Watson and Natalie Elder gave me a home and their friendship while I finished the dissertation that became this book.

xiv

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many scholars who have generously read chapters and other drafts. Jesse Cromwell, Kris Lane, and Fabríco Prado’s comments on Chapter 3 were especially helpful, and their scholarship has been inspiring. Elena Schneider, Margaret Chowing, and the affectionately named Berkeley Latin American History (BLAH) group read a draft of Chapter 7. Another former BLAHista, Melisa Galván, helped me articulate in my earliest drafts of Chapter 1 what exactly I wanted this project to be. Pablo Gómez, Marc Eagle, Ida Altman, Matt Childs, and Gabriel Rocha’s feedback on material in Chapters 1 and 2 helped me revise those chapters. Kristen Block’s comments on part of the dissertation were formative to my research in Chapter 6. I am especially grateful to Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, who read an early version of the manuscript. Over the years, I’ve also benefitted from conversations at conferences with several scholars that have shaped my thinking in ways big and small, including Jim Sweet, J. Lorand Matory, Tamara Walker, Fritz Schwaller, Rob Schwaller, Molly Warsh, Juan José Ponce Vazquez, Martin Nesvig, Wim Klooster, Jim Garrigus, Bernard Moitt, Ted Cohen, Danielle Terrazas Williams, Sherwin Bryant, Arne Bialuschewski, Beau Gaitors, Barbara Tenenbaum, Miguel Valerio, and Nicole von Germeten. A particularly insightful comment from Herman Bennett at a conference panel changed the way I understood one of the book’s core arguments. My colleagues in History, Latin American Studies, and African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky provided feedback on several chapters as well. Francie Chassen-López, Christopher Pool, and Scott Hutson offered feedback on Chapter 2. Scott Taylor gave generous comments on the Introduction, as did Vanessa Holden on Chapter 6. I would also like to thank Karen Petrone, Phil Harling, Jeremy Popkin, Anastasia Curwood, Devyn Benson, Eladio Bobadilla, Nikki Brown, Mónica Díaz, Amy Taylor, Hilary Jones, Erik Myrup, Akiko Takenaka, Ana Liberato, Dierdra Reber, Karrieann Soto Vega, James Ball, Jakob Turner, Gabriela Montero Mejia, Bertin Louis, Shauna Morgan, and Kamahra Ewing, who have provided a welcoming intellectual environment in Lexington. If this book appears at times to be inspired in different ways by Latin American, Caribbean, Atlantic, and early modern Spanish history, that is because it is inspired largely by the overlapping interests and insights of my graduate colleagues and friends from Johns Hopkins, including Guillermo García Montúfar, Katherine Boníl Gomez, Matthew Franco, Álvaro Caso Bello, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Jonathan Greenwood,

Acknowledgments

xv

Carolyn Salomans, María Lumbrejas, Dexnell Peters, Brandi Waters, Nick Radburn, Katherine Smoak, Jeremy Fradkin, Nathan Marvin, John Harris, Christopher Consolino, Claire Gherini, Will Brown, Ian Beamish, Alexey Kritchal, Steph Gamble, Steffi Cerato, Ren Pepitone, Katie Hemphill, Rachel Calvin-Whitehead, Meredith Gaffield, Ada Link, and Jennie Grayson. Norah Gharala introduced me to Mexico City in 2011 and has been a faithful confidante since. A substantial portion of the manuscript was written amid running dialogue with Lauren MacDonald, who has been a sounding board, fellow traveler, and friend for this project’s duration. In the project’s final stages, Catherine Hinchliff, too, was a loyal writing partner and friend. I will always be indebted to John Thornton and Linda Heywood, whose support as an undergraduate set me on a path to this field. Their scholarship remains the inspirational model I look to when I think about what kind of historian I want to be. At Cambridge University Press, I would like to thank Kris Lane, Matthew Restall, Cecelia Cancellaro, Victoria Phillips, and the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Ben Pease for creating the maps that appear in the book and Jolanta Kormonicka for her work on the index. Thanks to everyone who helped make this book a reality. My parents, Mike Clark and Karen Hopper, filled my world with books and taught me empathy. I’ve been fortunate to call on their support throughout this project, as well as that of my siblings, Harry Clark and Tully Jordan; my friends, Bennett Jordan, Vanessa Montero, Jon Remple, Richard López, Mikey Rabinowitz, Andrei Anghelescu, Ke Ren, Will Brown, Morgan Shahan, Jean Morrow Edmonds, and Andrew Edmonds; and the Carr, Carleton, Coan, Mokros, and Hopper families. This project has evolved in unexpected ways since it first began and so has my universe. The center of my universe is my family, Emily Mokros, Miles Clark, and Oliver Clark. Emily has been there for me as a confidante and companion – across oceans and continents – since before this project began. She has ever been a model of brilliance and determination, and I am lucky to share my life with her and our children, Miles and Ollie.

Note on the Text

This manuscript makes use of early modern print and manuscript sources in Spanish, English, French, and Italian. Unless noted, all transcriptions and translations are my own. Throughout the manuscript, I use modern diacritical marks and punctuation that were not standardized in the early modern period and do not always appear in originals. I also standardize certain measures for the sake of consistency and use modern spellings of most Spanish names and surnames. These occasionally differ from the original, though in some cases the original is also not consistent. Meanwhile, African and indigenous names, ethnonyms, and placenames follow the original unless noted.

xvi

Abbreviations

AGI AGN AGS AHCV AHN AHR ANC ANUV BANC BL BnF CIESAS CSIC EEHA ENE

FCE GP HAHR HM

Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico Archivo General de Simancas, Simancas, Spain Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad, Veracruz, Veracruz, Mexico Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Spain The American Historical Review Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana, Cuba Archivo Notarial de la Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA British Library, London, United Kingdom Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Mexico City, Mexico Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, Seville, Spain Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed. Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–1818. 16 vols. Mexico City: Antigua Libería Robredo Fondo Cultural Económica, Mexico City, Mexico General de Parte The Hispanic American Historical Review Huntington Manuscripts, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, USA

xvii

xviii

IIA IG IIH INAH IV MP PR SA SD TAM TASTD

UNAM WMQ

List of Abbreviations Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico Indiferente General Instituto de Investigaciones Históricos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, Mexico Indiferente Virreinal Mapas y Planos Patronato Real Slavery and Abolition Santo Domingo The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History David Eltis, et al., eds., Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, www.slavevoyages.org (Accessed August 15, 2020) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico The William and Mary Quarterly

NORTH AMERICA

BERMUDA

La Florida o

Ri Gr

OCEAN

de

an

AT L A N T I C

Gulf of Mexico

VICEROYALTY OF NEW SPAIN

Havana

Tampico

Panúco Mexico City

Tamiahua Tuxpan

Veracruz

Mérida

Puerto rto Principe Princ P Princi Principale c

YUCATAN

HISPANOLA

Santiago de Cuba

Campec Camp C ampec pecche h Campeche Tabasco (Frontera)

Ocoa

JAMAICA

San Juan de Puerto Rico TER EA GR

Coatzacoalcos

THE BAHAMAS

CUBA

Santo Domingo

Jamaica Trujillo

LESS ER AN TI

Rio de la Hacha PA C I F I C O C E A N

Cartagena Portobelo

ANTILLES

Caribbean Sea LLES

Cumaná

Maracaibo Caracas TIERRA FIRME

N

0 0

250 250

500 miles

500 kilometers

map 0.1 The Mexican-Caribbean world in the seventeenth century. Created by Ben Pease.

SOUTH AMERICA

Papantla Pap Guachinago Guach Gua ch nag nago Gulf of Mexico

Mexico Mex c co t City

Xalapa Xa alapa apa

Api p zaco Apizaco

Camino Real

Cam

ino

Huatusco Huatus Hua tusco Cam

Puebla bla de los Ángeles oss Á nge g les

ino

Atrisco Atrisc Atr isco

Rea l Orizaba Orizab zab b

Cordóba Corrdóba Co

Re al

Antigua Veracruz

Veracruz Medellín Med llí Tlalixcoyan Tlacotalpan

N

0 0

50 50

100 00 miles m es 100 km

map 0.2 Veracruz’s interior in the seventeenth century. Created by Ben Pease.

Introduction

In late May 1683, the Mexican port city of Veracruz – the most important port in the viceroyalty of New Spain and mainland North America – was desolated. A band of nearly 1,000 French, Dutch, and English corsairs, hiding between the sand dunes that surrounded the city, attacked and overwhelmed its defenses, occupied it, and held thousands of its residents as hostages. The occupation lasted seven days – a single week that vanquished Veracruz’s treasury and left one out of twenty of its inhabitants dead while a further fifth were abducted into captivity. The inquests that followed were long and acrimonious. Blame was cast and scapegoats found. Solutions were proposed to a litany of failings, perceived and real, in the hope that future strikes might be prevented. Some were probably adopted, but most were not. After all, what solution could address Veracruz’s ultimate failing? It was a port serving the largest and wealthiest of Spain’s American colonies. It was a point of connection and exchange in a sea that was, to use a word of contemporary officials, infested with corsairs, smugglers, colonists, adventurers, opportunists, and desperate men and women. The seven days between May 17 and May 24, 1683 suddenly and violently revealed Mexico’s most strategically important port to be firmly embedded not in the colony of New Spain, but in the Caribbean.

*** In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was one of the most globally connected cities in the world. Its warehouses and markets teemed with Madeiran wine, spun gold and silver from Spain, Chinese silks and porcelain, Cuban mahogany, Dutch linens, Venezuelan chocolate, fine central Mexican textiles, featherwork from Michoacán, and hides from across the

1

2

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

Caribbean. Private residences, even those of poorer inhabitants, were appointed with the overflow of its many trades: chipped porcelain, rent fabric, damaged furniture. Beaten and broken luxury in a city at the intersection of commercial routes connecting five continents. Founded at the outset of the Cortés expedition in 1519, by 1525, Veracruz served as New Spain’s only legal port of international trade on the Atlantic coast. By mid-century, it was the largest port in North America, one of the largest silver entrepots in the world, and a major transshipment point for Asian commodities in transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Travelers, migrants, and captives from around the world walked the city’s streets and filled its taverns; sought redemption in its cathedrals, community in its confraternities, and fortune in its docks. Before 1700, first-hand accounts and descriptions of Veracruz had been produced in no fewer than seven languages, including the 1683 account of a Syrian Christian traveler written in Arabic and the missives of a Japanese embassy that passed through on its way to Rome in 1614. Many called it home, but for most, it was one stop, often a brief one, in a much longer journey.1 Most people who passed through Veracruz were enslaved. At the start of the seventeenth century, Veracruz was one of the largest slave-trading ports in the Americas. Already by 1599, more than 10,000 captives from West, West Central, and Eastern Africa had landed at the island port of San Juan de Ulúa, where they were inspected, branded, and housed until healthy enough to be sold either in Veracruz, or, more often, in the larger interior markets of Xalapa, Puebla, or Orizaba. By the end of the seventeenth century, tens of thousands more enslaved Africans would pass through the city. Most were bound for hinterland plantations, mines, and factories, but others remained or returned. By the time of the buccaneer raid in May 1683, more than 60 percent of Veracruz’s permanent 1

See: Ilyas Mawsili, An Arab’s Journey to Colonial Spanish America: The Travels of Elias alMûsili in the Seventeenth Century, edited and translated by Caesar E. Farah (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003); Alicia Girón, coord. , La Misión Hasekura: 400 años de su legado en las relaciones entre México y Japón (Mexico City: UNAM, 2015). Multiple accounts are in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Nahua. See: Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies (London, 1699); Samuel de Champlain, Œuvres de Champlain, ed. C.-H. Laverdière, 2nd ed. (Québec: C.-H. Laverdière, 1870); Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Giro del mondo del dottor d. Gio. Francesco Gemelli Careri: Parte sesta contenente le cose piú ragguardevoli vedute nella nouva Spagna vol. 6 (Naples: Nella Stamperia di Giuseppe Roselli, 1708); Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del obispo de Tlaxcala: un recorrido por el centro de México a principios del siglo XVII, ed. Alba González Jácome (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1987); Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, Crónica Mexicáyotl, translated by Adrian León (Mexico City: Impresos Universitaria, 1949).

Introduction

3

residents were Afro-descended, as many as a third of whom were not born in Mexico, but in Africa, Europe, or the Caribbean. Many of these men and women were free. Most spoke Spanish or Portuguese, but some spoke Kikongo, Mbundu, Fon, or Vai languages. The diversity of Veracruz’s African and Afro-descended residents was preserved in its social and religious associations. By 1667, at least five of Veracruz’s confraternities used African ethnic language to mark their members, while others existed for its black creole and Portuguese residents. Despite being at the center of routes of trade and migration that, by 1571, connected Veracruz to the luxuries of five continents, it never attained the size or status of other major American port cities, like Philadelphia, Havana, or Cap-Français. Within a decade of its founding, Veracruz gained a reputation for pestilence, keeping settlers away and the city small. Even merchants who relied on the port for their trade often opted to live in the more salubrious highlands of the interior, visiting Veracruz only when ships were in port. The city did not have a large financial sector and, despite being the port of entry, cities in the near interior like Xalapa and Orizaba developed larger marketing systems off Veracruz’s trade. In the absence of free settlers, over the course of the sixteenth century, the city increasingly relied on the labor of enslaved Africans. Using a nascent vocabulary of race, many early modern Europeans who traveled through the city remarked – in Italian, French, English, and Spanish – on the asymmetry between the wealth of Veracruz’s trade and the poverty of its people. An asymmetry persists too in the treatment of Veracruz within historical scholarship of colonial Mexico and the early modern Atlantic: As New Spain’s most important port, Veracruz regularly plays a central role in Mexico’s colonial narrative, but the social and cultural world of its residents is not always fully illuminated. In the history of colonial Mexico, for example, Veracruz has been a featured location in monographs on African diaspora, international trade, and warfare and imperial competition.2 It has also featured in religious history, as the Inquisition

2

For histories of African diaspora featuring Veracruz, an abbreviated list: Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Control, 1570– 1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Nicole von Germeten, Black

4

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

found Veracruz to be a potent site for crimes like bigamy and cryptoJudaism, as well as a key location for the censorship of books and paintings entering the colony.3 These studies have contributed a great deal to our knowledge about each of those important subjects, but in each, the tendency is to ask what Veracruz can tell us about Afro-Mexico, colonial economies, defense, or religion, rather than to question the history of Veracruz itself. There are a few notable exceptions to this rule. The most important is Antonio García de León’s magisterial Tierra adentro, mar en fuera, published in Mexico in 2011, an exquisitely researched tome that brings Veracruz and its people to full life.4 Over nearly 1,000 pages, García de León elaborates the economic, social, and cultural world not only of Veracruz itself, but, as its title suggests, of its interior and Atlantic entanglements. Importantly, García de León’s research is distributed equitably across the colonial period, as he dedicates hundreds of pages to New Spain’s “middle century.” This contrasts with some of the other major works that center Veracruz, which, like much history of colonial Latin America, tend to be balanced either toward the period in the sixteenth century popularly known as “conquest” or the period between Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006); Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Esclavos negros en las haciendas azucares de Córdoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830 (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987); Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570– 1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On trade and imperial competition, see: Matilde Souto Mantecón, Mar abierto: la política y el comercio del consulado de Veracruz en el ocaso del sistema imperial (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Instituto Mora, 2001); Pierre and Huguette Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650 (Paris: A. Colin, 1955–9); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Paul E. Hoffman, The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Vinson III, Bearing Arms. 3 See: Francisco Fernández del Castillo, Libros y libreros en el siglo xvi (Mexico City: FCE, 1982); Martin Austin Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Richard E. Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969); Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame, and the Inquisition (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970); Richard E. Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 4 Antonio García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera: el puerto de Veracruz y su litoral a Sotavento, 1519–1821 (Mexico City: FCE, Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, Universidad Veracruzana, 2011).

Introduction

5

the Bourbon Reforms (ca. 1743–1808) and the Wars of Independence (ca. 1808–21).5 Whether concentrated on its beginning or end, almost all historians of the colonial period tend to approach Veracruz from the perspective of either of two broader geographic constructs: one called “Mexico” or “New Spain,” the other called “the Spanish Empire.” The tendency to fix the social and cultural worlds of Veracruz’s residents within colonial or imperial structures is evident both in studies dedicated to Veracruz and in those in which it is incidental to the larger topic. In Veracruz, soldiers and militiamen defended the “colony of New Spain.” Merchants and sailors involved in the transatlantic silver trade participated in the establishment of Spain’s global commercial empire. Africans and free-blacks who participated in corporate groups like confraternities were mediating colonyspecific categories of caste and race and becoming “Afro-Mexicans.” Inquisitors who prosecuted bigamists and secret Jews in Veracruz were protecting the spiritual purity of New Spain, in many cases literally guarding its border from heretical infiltration. For their part, heretics and witches contributed, in the words of García de León, to the evergrowing catalog of “mestizo devils” that showcase colonial Mexico’s cultural and religious diversity, its syncretisms, and multiple (and multiplying) roots. In other words, in most scholarship, Veracruz contributes evidence, data, and cases to the history of Mexico or the history of the Spanish Empire. Locating Veracruz and its seventeenth-century residents in the context of colonial Mexico (or the Spanish empire) is not wrong. As the dominant geographic framework through which Veracruz’s diverse communities are understood, “Mexico” has been and will continue to be a primary organizing historical concept, vital for the understanding of Veracruz’s communities, and one that has the distinct advantage of being rooted in 5

See: Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Apuntes historicos de la heróica ciudad de Vera-Cruz, precedidos de una noticia de los descubrimientos hechos en las islas y en el continente americano, y de las providencias dictadas por los reyes de España para el gobierno de sus nuevas posesiones, desde el primer viage de Don Cristobal Colon, hasta que se emprendió la conquista de Mexico, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Cumplido, 1850–8); Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, La fortaleza de San Juan de Ulúa (Mexico City: Citlaltépetl, 1961); Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, La ciudad de tablas (Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano Cultura, 1999); Bernardo García Díaz, Puerto de Veracruz (Veracruz: Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, 1992); Pablo Montero and Daniel Goeritz, San Juan de Ulúa: puerta de la historia (Mexico City: INAH, 1996). An important exception is: Pablo Montero and Minerva Escamilla Gómez, Ulúa, Puente intercontinental en el siglo XVII (Mexico City: CNCA, INAH, ICAV, 1997).

6

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

strongly held contemporary understandings of jurisdiction and law as well as strongly held understandings of geography and history in the present.6 At the same time, however, in ascribing Veracruz’s early modern inhabitants with the default appellation of “Mexico” or “New Spain,” or in ascribing the city itself, historians who address Veracruz risk the elision of a vital regional perspective that heavily inflected its early history, shaped its social and cultural institutions, and became one prominent lens through which its residents understood and represented their own interests and identities in the seventeenth century: the Caribbean. What the present work proposes to add to earlier research on Veracruz is not only greater detail on an understudied period or a new trove of documents to illuminate some previously unexplored theme, but a critical perspective that fundamentally challenges the way we understand Veracruz and its residents in the early modern period. What the present work proposes, then, is that Veracruz, in the seventeenth century, was not simply a Mexican city. From the early stages of the conquest of Mexico, Veracruz retained distinct connections to the Caribbean world, expressed in the forms of shared environments, an intensity of commercial interactions, and a common legacy of the slave trade. By emphasizing these material relationships, we can construct an alternate spatial lens through which we can then understand processes of community formation, cultural transformation, and corporate identity.7 Without diminishing the See: Eric Van Young, “Doing Regional History: A Theoretical Discussion and some Mexican Cases,” Yearbook. Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers vol. 20 (1994): 21–34. 7 This study will not be the first to highlight the abundance of Caribbean entanglements that suffuse Veracruz’s history. In addition to García de León’s work on the entirety of the colonial period, several scholars – Johanna von Grafenstein, Matilde Souto Mantecón, Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, Bernardo García Díaz, and Laura Muñoz Mata, to name a few – have drawn out Veracruz’s Caribbean relationships in the mid-eighteenth century and later. This study owes a great deal to von Grafenstein’s pathbreaking work on the “Gulf-Caribbean” system of port cities. Beyond reading von Grafenstein’s “GulfCaribbean” system backward into the seventeenth century, this study attempts to understand not only material relationships between Veracruz and the Caribbean, but how material relationships conditioned the development of the city’s social and cultural world. See: Johanna von Grafenstein Gareis, ed., El Golfo-Caribe y sus puertos, 1600– 1930, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2006); Johanna von Grafenstein, Nueva España en el Circuncaribe, 1779–1808: revolución, competencia imperial y vínculos intercoloniales (Mexico City: UNAM, 1997); Bernardo García Díaz, Puerto de Veracruz (Veracruz: Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, 1992); Bernardo García Díaz and Sergio Guerra Vilaboy, eds., La Habana/Veracruz, Veracruz/La Habana: Las dos orillas (Veracruz: Universidad de Veracruz, 2002); Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (Chapel Hill: 6

Introduction

7

utility of “Mexico” or the “Spanish Empire,” applying the Caribbean as an analytical frame can enhance our understanding of early modern Veracruz, allowing us to see patterns of development that are otherwise obscure. Beyond the history of Veracruz itself, this study calls attention to the necessity of defining precisely the spatial systems that informed the production of social and cultural meaning. In placing Veracruz outside of the frame of “Mexico” or the “Spanish Empire,” this study proposes not only a new interpretation of one city’s history, but a model of history that does not privilege the perspectives and priorities embedded in colonial archives. As historians, our task is to take a limited documentary record and to organize it into narrative that elucidates patterns of human interaction, social and cultural change, and political and economic development. In most cases, this process requires the rigorous application of a contextualizing schema, whether that schema refers to region, gender, class, race, or something else. In many cases, the most appropriate regional scheme aligns neatly with easily identifiable administrative categories commonly used and understood in the period of study. In some cases, however, regions are more obscure, such as in borderlands, where political power is contested, or in isolated frontiers, where no decisive power has evidently asserted itself. There is another option, too, and it is this final option I apply to Veracruz in the seventeenth century. In this case, multiple regional systems operate parallel to one another in the same place, at the same time. They are not opposed to one another, as in the borderlands case, but neither do they work to the same ends. In Veracruz, the two regional contexts I see working side by side are “New Spain” and the “Caribbean.” As the chief administrative unit to which Veracruz belonged, New Spain and its viceroy held legal authority over the city and its residents. Although that authority could be and was at times contested or ignored, it was as often tacitly or tangibly accepted. At the same time, Veracruz was engaged in material exchanges with ports in the Caribbean, the precise nature of which was often tangential to

University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Souto Mantecón, Mar abierto; Laura Muñoz Mata, ed., México y el Caribe: vinculos, intereses, region (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2002); Yolanda Juárez Hernández and Leticia Bobadilla González, eds., Veracruz: sociedad y cultura popular en la region Golfo Caribe (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009); María del Rosario Rodríguez Díaz and Jorge Castañeda Zavala, eds., El Caribe: vínculos colonials, modernos, y contemporáneos: nuevas reflexiones, debates, y propuestas (Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, IIH, Instituto Mora, Asociación Mexicana de Estudios del Caribe, 2007).

8

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

viceregal or imperial concerns. Highlighting these exchanges can offer new ways of thinking about Veracruz and its social and cultural development within a framework that challenges and refines the view from national and imperial vantage points. While we may expect a port city like Veracruz to resemble other ports in its shipping occupation, the material links between Caribbean ports also produced informal networks and compatible local institutions like the free-black militia and confraternal organizations, which in turn mediated the production of ideas about race, nationality, and other social categories. In this way, Veracruz’s material links to the Caribbean created social and cultural opportunities that were not designed by colonial architects. The Caribbean framework is particularly useful as a lens for understanding Veracruz’s African and Afro-descended residents. Throughout the seventeenth century, people of African descent constituted most of the city’s permanent inhabitants. For Veracruz’s African community, connection to other Caribbean ports where Africans also constituted a majority facilitated awareness and access – which J. Lorand Matory has called a “live dialogue” – to alternate means of self-identification that may not have existed to the same degree in the Mexican interior.8 Drawing Veracruz into the Caribbean allows us not only to compare processes of diasporic identity production in disparate colonial contexts, but to better understand how Africans in Veracruz defined their relationship to the colonial state in a way that transcended colonial boundaries. Moreover, because Veracruz’s Caribbean relationships were an “unintended outcome” of the colonial process, the social and cultural formations they enabled were not strictly the product of an interaction between center and periphery, but instead of a multicentric spatial system.9 In this sense, Caribbean connections not only gave Veracruz’s Afro-descended

See: J. Lorand Matory, “The ‘New World’ Surrounds an Ocean: Theorizing the Live Dialogue between African and American Cultures,” in Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006), 151–92. See also: J. Lorand Matory, “Surpassing ‘Survival’: On the Urbanity of ‘Traditional Religion’ in the Afro-Atlantic World,” The Black Scholar 30, nos. 3–4 (2000): 36–43; J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 284–7. 9 My use of “unintended outcome,” like much of my inspiration here, is drawn from Joseph Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, Remembering: Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, edited by José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (New York: Humanity Books, 2004). 8

Introduction

9

residents distinctive ways of engaging the state, but tools of selfdescription that did not depend on a dialectic confrontation with the state. Placing Veracruz within the Caribbean provides one answer, therefore, to the troubling question of how to best understand subjugated communities we typically only see through the eyes of their subjugator.10 A recent wellspring of scholarship on Afro-Mexico gives us ways of thinking about community, religion, identity, and status within Veracruz’s Afro-descended population.11 Studies of witchcraft, confraternities, religious devotion, the militia, Afro-Indigenous relationships, free-black tribute, the caste system, family construction, urban and rural labor, and free-black economic practices have rendered in vivid detail the ways in which African

See: Herman L. Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (2000): 101–24; J. Lorand Matory, “The ‘Cult of Nations’ and the Ritualization of their Purity,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 171–214. 11 See: Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches; Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico; Bennett, Colonial Blackness; Ryan A. Kashanipour, Between Magic and Medicine: Colonial Yucatec Healing in the Spanish Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers; Miguel A. Valerio, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico; Vinson III, Bearing Arms; Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African–Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Robert C. Schwaller, “‘Mulata, Hija de Negro y India’: Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (2011): 889–914; Robert C. Schwaller, “The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (2012): 675–90; Vera Tiesler, Pilar Zabala, and Andrea Cucina, eds. Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Colonial Campeche: History and Archaeology (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010); Vera Tiesler and Pilar Zabala, eds. Orígenes de la sociedad campechana: Vida y muerte en la ciudad de Campeche durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2012); Norah L.A. Gharala, Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019); Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Danielle Terrazas Williams, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). 10

10

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

diasporans in Mexico navigated baroque systems of status to build families and communities; to mitigate immiserating legal circumstances; and to claim rights and privileges, both individually and collectively. These studies offer a valuable model for understanding Afro-descended communities in Veracruz. At the same time, elaborating the city’s Caribbean connections offers both new insights into these issues and the opportunity to consider explicitly how diasporic experiences in mainland Mexico were mirrored and informed by those elsewhere. To their credit, scholars of Caribbean history and culture are ecumenical in the definition of the Caribbean region, and questions of the Caribbean’s geographic limits are often addressed explicitly and with great care.12 While the Mexican littoral does not always feature in Caribbean history, neither is it always excluded, and Veracruz itself regularly appears in histories of the early modern Caribbean in particular.13 Although not all Caribbeanists include the Gulf Coast in their definition of the region, I doubt many will be surprised by the act itself. What I hope to offer to the field of Caribbean history, then, is first an approach to the region that emphasizes the diachronic evolution of its component societies.14 Scholars of Caribbean history and culture have long questioned the meaning of the region’s “supersyncretic” See: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 19–42; Dale Tomich, “Spaces of Slavery, Times of Freedom: Rethinking Caribbean History in World Perspective,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 17, no. 1 (1997): 67–80; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean Region,” Daedalus 103, no. 2 (1974): 45–71; Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xiii; Antonio BenitezRojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern, 2nd ed. (London: Duke University Press, 1997); Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 615–30. 13 See: Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500–1750 (New York: Routledge, 2015); Jane G. Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free-Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, edited by Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 111–46; Hoffman, The Spanish Crown; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570– 1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 14 See: Prasenjit Duara, “Postscript: The Methodological Limbo of Social History,” in Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 261–8. 12

Introduction

11

diversity: Does the Caribbean’s multiplicity of languages, cultures, and legal systems portend fragmentation or unity in the common experience of transculturation?15 The Martinican poet Édouard Glissant captures this problem eloquently: We know what threatens Caribbean identity: the historical balkanization of the islands, the engraining of different and often ‘opposed’ languages . . . the umbilical cords that link, firmly and resiliently, each island to particular metropolitan powers . . . This isolation defers in each island the awareness of a Caribbean identity and at the same time it distances each community from its own truth.16

Elsewhere, building on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s powerful proclamation that the Caribbean’s “unity is submarine,” Glissant rejects “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History,” and instead centers a Caribbean narrative told through “the subterranean convergence of our histories.”17 By asking continually how Veracruz was connected to other Caribbean societies – how those connections were formed, how they changed over time – this project proposes a unitary, “submarine” narrative of Caribbean history as seen through Veracruz. In its focus on material exchanges and networks that existed beyond metropolitan control, it describes a submerged Caribbean past not fragmented by its diversity, but made coherent: not necessarily by common experiences, but by tangible relationships that confounded colonial categories.18 The “submerged” Caribbean world this book describes is particular to the seventeenth century, and it is there the book makes a second intervention in Caribbean history. Caribbean societies between the early stages of conquest and the later stage of large-scale sugar planting are often summarily dismissed as “backwaters.”19 John Elliott exemplifies succinctly the argument of this trope in his otherwise inimitable comparative study of the British and Spanish empires: “After the early years of plunder and ruthless exploitation were over,” Elliott writes, “the Spanish Caribbean

15

Benitez-Rojo, 87. Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 423. 17 Glissant, 134. See also: Edward Kamau Braithwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savacou 11/12 (1975): 1. 18 See also: Bernard Bailyn, “Introduction: Reflections on Some Major Themes,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3. 19 See: Wheat, Atlantic Africa, 8n6; David Wheat, “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570–1640,” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2009), 2–3. 16

12

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

became something of an economic backwater. The more ambitious settlers moved on in search of richer prizes on the mainland, and with their departure the white population of the islands stagnated or declined.”20 For many historians of Latin America and the Atlantic world, the Caribbean remained silent from the middle of the sixteenth century until the final decades of the seventeenth century.21 In 1654, shortly after the end of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the Dutch West India Company was driven out of the Brazilian sugar-growing region of Pernambuco, which they had occupied for more than two decades, taking with them the sugar technology that would soon take root in Barbados, Jamaica, and many other Caribbean Islands.22 In the ensuing decades, Caribbean sugar came to be one of the most dominant commodities in the Atlantic world, driving demand for captives, competition for land, and the rise of new plantocracies.23 The Caribbean’s emergence as what Sidney Mintz has called the “crucible of modernity” has also driven an intense – and intensely productive – scholarly interest in a variety of topics no smaller than the transatlantic slave trade, the “birth” of Afro-American cultures, the origins of capitalism, and the emergence of modern democratic and republican thought.24 20

John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 105. 21 There have been several fine exceptions, however. See: Lane, Pillaging the Empire; Hoffman, The Spanish Crown; Ida Altman, “Marriage, Family, and Ethnicity in the Early Spanish Caribbean,” WMQ 70, no. 2 (2013): 225–50; Irene Aloha Wright, “The Spanish Resistance to the English Occupation of Jamaica, 1655–1660,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society vol. 13 (1930): 117–47; Alejandro de la Fuente with César García del Pino and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jane G. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 7–28; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundations of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22 Matthew Edel, “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition,” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 1 (1969): 24–44. 23 See: Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Press, 1985); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Kingston: Canoe Press, University of the West Indies, 1974); Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 24 Sidney W. Mintz, “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumenê,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 2 (1996): 289–311. See also: Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Richard B. Sheridan, “Africa and the Caribbean

Introduction

13

In the shadow of vast mainland kingdoms and a later world of slavery, sugar, and revolution, the intervening years of Caribbean history can indeed feel a bit small. Recently, however, there have been renewed efforts to elucidate the Caribbean’s lost century. Ida Altman, David Wheat, and a constellation of other scholars have made key contributions to our knowledge of the years between the conquests of the mainland and the ascendance of the plantation complex.25 Much of this work has built on the innovations of Atlantic history, emphasizing the ways in which early Caribbean societies functioned as the “multiethnic” testing grounds from which later colonial conditions would emerge. In this analysis, the

in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” AHR 77, no. 1 (1972): 15–35; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, 2nd ed. The Birth of Afro-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, “The Importance of the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain,” The Journal of Economic History 60, no. 1 (2000): 123–44; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 25 See: Wheat, Atlantic Africa; Ida Altman, “Key to the Indies: Port Towns in the Spanish Caribbean, 1493–1550,” TAM 74, no. 1 (2017): 5–26; Ida Altman and David Wheat, eds., The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019); Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” TAM 74, no. 4 (2018): 609–38; Marc Eagle, “Restoring Spanish Hispaniola, the First of the Indies: Local Advocacy and Transatlantic Arbitismo in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Colonial Latin American Review 23, no. 3 (2014): 384–412; Pablo F. Gómez, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Black Spanish Caribbean,” Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013): 383–402; Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Spanish Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Molly A. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,” SA 31, no. 3 (2010): 345–62; Erin Woodruff Stone, Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); Spencer R. Tyce, “German Conquistadors and Venture Capitalists: The Welser Company’s Commercial Experiment in 16th Century Venezuela and the Caribbean World,” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2015); Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Casey Schmitt, “The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530–1690,” (PhD diss., The College of William and Mary, 2018); Lauren E. MacDonald, “The Regular Clergy and Reformation in the Early Spanish Caribbean, 1493–1580,” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2018); Ana María Silva Campo, “Roots in Stone and Slavery: Permanence, Mobility, and Empire in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2018).

14

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

Caribbean was the site of early experiments with slavery, plantation agriculture, the “Atlantic commons,” and creolization and ethnogenesis.26 By incorporating Veracruz into this emerging narrative of early Caribbean history, we can open new ways of understanding the Caribbean’s seventeenth century. In one sense, we gain perspective on how the early Caribbean, long ignored, influenced the course of colonial projects in the American mainland. While earlier characterizations of Caribbean societies as backwaters have suggested Caribbean cities were only aroused from long seasonal slumbers by the annual passage of the silver fleets and their connections to more important events in the mainland, connecting Veracruz and the Caribbean can offer a model of how events in the Caribbean became vital issues of concern for both mainland administrators and residents of the mainland littoral, as they did in the corsair strike of 1683. In another sense, in elucidating the ties that connected the mainland and the islands, we find networks through which early modern Caribbean people mediated the repressive conditions of colonial society and formed ideas about ethnicity, religion, and status. In other words, we begin to see not only how conditions in distinctive Caribbean places mirrored one another, but how tangible connections across colonial borders catalyzed identities, communities, and even advocacy. A final contribution to Caribbean history this book makes is less narrative and more practical. The Caribbean’s patchwork of political and juridical systems throughout the colonial period – not only its many imperial interests and languages, but also distinct jurisdictions within the Spanish Empire itself – resulted in an uneven archive, which has contributed to a sense of its fragmentation. Here, defining the history of Veracruz within the Caribbean can be especially helpful. As part of New Spain, Veracruz’s history is recorded in remarkable detail, not only in the colonial archives in Seville, but also in an almost unimaginably large font of records preserved in Mexico. Through civil, religious, notarial, criminal, and inquisitorial records in Mexico, it is possible to render intricate portraits of Veracruz, its people, and the communities they built, as scholars from Miguel Lerdo de Tejada to Antonio García de León and beyond have shown us. These are not only portraits of Mexico; they are portraits of the Caribbean. The Mexican archive not only illuminates 26

On the “Atlantic commons,” see: Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 185–286.

Introduction

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Veracruz, but, through Veracruz and its Caribbean entanglements, offers us impressions of Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, and other Caribbean spaces beyond what can be found in Seville. This is the underlying argument of this book: the Mexican archive is a Caribbean archive. From its conception, a central goal of this study has been to tell a story that is at once part of Mexican and Caribbean history, in a small way bridging the historiographical divide between two large and complex scholarly traditions. This has not always been easy. No two places are precisely alike, and the history of Veracruz is not a metonym for the history of the Caribbean. But early colonial Mexico has much to offer the early modern Caribbean, and questions that often motivate Caribbean history – about creolization and survival; contraband and smuggling; piracy and imperial competition – can be profitably asked of Mexico. By examining these topics in Veracruz, I hope we can begin to contemplate new ways of placing colonial Mexico and the Caribbean within a shared historical frame.

*** To evoke both a coherent regional system and its function in Veracruz, this study is divided into two parts. In four chapters, Part I, “Building the Mexican-Caribbean World,” focuses on the material links that united Veracruz and the Caribbean in a distinctive regional relationship. Chapter 1 takes the long view of regional development in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands, from prehistory through Veracruz’s foundation in 1519 and its refounding as Nueva Veracruz in 1599. It examines geography, environment, and how human societies mediated coastal spaces before the seventeenth century, asking what scale of interaction between islands and mainland initiated regional integration. It culminates with Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, which followed an extended battle between powerful merchants in Mexico City, Seville, and Puebla and Veracruz’s own cabildo. While metropolitan merchants and administrators wanted to locate the city closer to port facilities at San Juan de Ulúa, local officials resisted the move, arguing the coastal climate was “unfit for the sustenance of life” and proposing to relocate it further into the mainland interior.27 By the end of the sixteenth century, metropolitan forces had won out, moving Veracruz closer to the port and securing the primacy of coastal climates and maritime commerce and migration in its social and cultural development in the seventeenth century. 27

AGI-México 350, August 17, 1575, fs. 96r-97v.

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 2 examines the environmental and epidemiological consequences of Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, drawing on hospital records, cabildo reports, and published traveler accounts. When Veracruz resettled at Ulúa, it was subject to many of the dangers the cabildo warned about in the sixteenth century: more mosquitoes, less arable land, and no stable supply of drinking water. These factors contributed to Veracruz’s reputation as an impoverished, insalubrious, and unwelcoming place. Such descriptions have inevitably contributed to the historical labeling of Veracruz as a “backwater,” but they also represent the deliberate efforts of early modern writers to spatially classify Veracruz as a part of the Caribbean world. In particular, white male European writers explicitly linked Veracruz’s ostensibly “poor” environment to its large African population, suggesting the city’s climate was suited for Africans, but not Europeans or indigenous people. By linking Veracruz’s climate with the skin color of its residents – even by means of a negative trope – European writers defined the city into a discrete environmental and phenotypical space distinct from both Europe and other parts of the Americas. While European writers classified Veracruz’s environment and society within the Caribbean, it was also increasingly involved in relationships of small-scale trade with Havana, Cartagena, Campeche, and other cities in what I call the “Mexican-Caribbean world” (see Map 0.1). Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade – which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention – I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the MexicanCaribbean was also not entirely a by-product of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system. Part I’s final chapter examines Veracruz’s role as a hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published data, including archival manuscripts held in Mexico and not previously used in studies of the slave trade, Chapter 4 offers a detailed examination of the slave trade to New Spain in three chronological stages: an “early

Introduction

17

period” before 1595; the “asiento period” from 1595 to 1640; and the “decline period” from 1640 to 1713. In its examination of both the early and later stages of the slave trade, Chapter 4 departs from earlier studies that focus mainly on the Portuguese asiento between 1595 and 1640. As we will see, more captives arrived in Veracruz in the early and decline periods than have been acknowledged and those who did hailed disproportionately from the West African regions of Senegambia and Cape Verde (unlike the peak years, when most came from West Central Africa). Across all periods, Chapter 4 demonstrates the complexity of the early modern slave trade to the Spanish Caribbean. I focus especially on the intercolonial slave trade and on non-linear slave ship voyages that may have delivered captives in multiple colonies, emphasizing the systemic integration of the slave trade to the early modern Spanish Caribbean. I argue that we should not think of captives who arrived in New Spain as a distinct “cohort,” but as part of a region-wide diaspora to multiple Caribbean territories. In its revisions to chronology and provenance data, Chapter 4 counters recent suggestions that the slave trade to Veracruz followed patterns atypical of the early Caribbean as a whole. At the same time, its emphasis on slave trading within the Caribbean region not only suggests the slave trade to Veracruz resembled that which supplied other Caribbean areas, but argues that the slave trade itself predicated a broader regional integration. Environments, commercial exchanges, and the slave trade tied the port cities of the Caribbean islands and mainland littoral together in a series of material exchanges, many of which developed outside intentional imperial designs. Part II, “The Caribbean in Veracruz,” turns to the social and cultural consequences of Veracruz’s Caribbean relationships. Focusing primarily on Africans and their descendants, I examine how people in Veracruz and its surrounding area drew on Caribbean relationships to form ethnic identities, religious ideologies, and diasporic communities distinct from those formed elsewhere in Mexico and the Atlantic world. Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language.

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling. Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, Chapter 6 considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity, as well as the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies. As unenslaved people of African descent used Veracruz’s Caribbean connections to build clandestine intercolonial networks of practitioners, others used the Mexican-Caribbean world to articulate more explicit corporate and regional identities. Chapter 7 investigates Veracruz’s function as a military-strategic bulwark of the Spanish Caribbean, focusing on the role of the free-black militia in the defense of the port. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Spain faced increasing threats to its Caribbean territories from its imperial competitors. Territorial losses in Jamaica, Hispaniola, and frequent attacks on its ships and ports forced Spain to reconsider its strategic priorities. Setting aside earlier fears of arming men of African descent, Spanish port cities turned to free-black militias to fulfill the duties of defense. In Veracruz, free-black militia service was formalized in 1669, when militiamen received relief from an unpopular tribute tax. Remarkably, in their petition for tribute relief, Veracruz’s free-black militia cited precedents in Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, and Campeche, manifesting an explicit articulation of a Mexican-Caribbean regional identity. Over the next thirty years, tribute relief for militia service was extended to free-black men in other Gulf

Introduction

19

Coast cities, but did not reach militias in the interior until the middle of the eighteenth century. The uneven use of tribute relief therefore mirrored and reinforced regional variations in the colonial system of race and caste. In examining Veracruz and its Afro-descended population in the context of Caribbean piracy and warfare, the final chapter also considers the importance of the 1683 corsair raid that began this introduction. As Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva has shown in his detailed study of the raid and its victims, approximately 1,500 of Veracruz’s Afro-descended residents were taken captive and sold into slavery throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic world.28 To a large extent, Part II of this book is a study of the multiple ways Veracruz’s Afro-descended residents, as individuals and in corporate groups, were shaped by the material world of the Caribbean. In other words, it is a study of “the Caribbean in Veracruz.” In considering the black captives of the 1683 raid and the lives they may have lived in nascent Caribbean and Atlantic settlements in French Saint-Domingue and Charleston, South Carolina, the final chapter suggests additional ways of understanding the role of “Veracruz in the Caribbean.” Building on the corsair raid of 1683, the Conclusion turns to the end of the seventeenth century, when Mexico and the Caribbean underwent a political realignment. In the Caribbean, ascendant European empires began to construct the monocultures that have come to dominate the study of Caribbean history. Meanwhile, in the mainland, renewed interest in New Spain’s northern frontier initiated a new series of cultural encounters and violent contests that signal the origin of borderlands history. While it is tempting to see in these two developments the disintegration of the Mexican-Caribbean world, I argue that the end of the seventeenth century was not an unmaking but a remaking. As Spanish power in the Caribbean receded in the shadow of new plantation economies, bonds between remaining Spanish island and mainland settlements strengthened. At the same time, Veracruz and the Caribbean both played an important role in the construction of Mexico’s northern border and the Caribbean’s new economic and political relationships. In this, the study looks forward to the development of new material relationships that informed the social and cultural possibilities of people in Mexico’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean islands into the eighteenth century. 28

I am indebted to Sierra Silva for sharing with me his scholarship on the 1683 raid. See: Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Pirate Link: Rethinking Early Charleston, Blackness and the 1683 Raid on Veracruz,” unpublished paper delivered at the Addlestone Library, College of Charleston, February 20, 2020. Cited with author’s permission.

part i BUILDING THE MEXICAN-CARIBBEAN WORLD

1 Veracruz Before the Caribbean

Long before Veracruz harbor became Mexico’s principal port, it was the southernmost outpost of Totonac society. Sometime in the early postclassic period (900–1521 ce) Totonac people began regularly visiting two coral islands in the harbor, likely using them to conduct periodic trade with people further south.1 The islands – Tacpantlayacac and Chalchitlapasco in Nahua, but which later Spanish colonizers called San Juan de Ulúa and Sacrificios – also acquired ceremonial significance. Chalchitlapasco became a funerary site for Totonac elites, and both islands housed multistory stucco temples. The temple on Chalchitlapasco was dedicated to the cult of Quetzalcoatl, feathered serpent and lord of the winds. At Chalchitlapasco, Quetzalcoatl presided over a site long known for powerful gales blowing west from the Gulf of Mexico (nortes). The temple at Tacpantlayacac was dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl’s brother and rival and lord of hurricanes.2 At what point can we begin to locate Mexico’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean within a common social and cultural universe? Before European invasion, there was no legacy of routine trade or migration between Mesoamerica and the Antilles. Although irregular contacts

1

See: Wilfredo Du Solier, Isla de Sacrificios (entierros) (Mexico City: Revista de Educación, 1938); Alfonso Medellín Zenil, Exploraciones en la Isla de Sacrificios (Xalapa: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1955); José García Payón, “Archaeology of Central Veracruz,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 10 and 11, edited by Robert Wauchope (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 505–42. 2 See: Manuel Torres Guzmán and Rogelio Ramírez Herrera, “Ciudades fortaleza y rutas de comercio en el Veracruz prehispánico,” Revista de Divulgación Científica y Tecnológica de la Universidad Veracruzana XVI, no. 1 (2003).

23

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

produced some important cultural links – for example, a version of the Mesoamerican ballgame was played in the Caribbean – how those exchanges came about remains unclear.3 Other human links, like common crops, followed similarly uncertain trajectories.4 A more certain yet perhaps softer link may be found in common climates and ecologies – phenomena that not only create common experiences, but also often factor into people’s attempts to explain the world and their place in it. If we consider Veracruz’s barrier islands themselves, for example, we might ask why Totonac people chose to consecrate two barren reef islands on their southern frontier. Tacpantlayacac and Chalchitlapasco were exclaves of the Totonac heartland, the furthest extent of Totonac society; in erecting ceremonial sites on each, did the Totonac likewise extend their religious belief inexorably to the sea? In dedicating one temple to Tezcatlipoca and the other to Quetzalcoatl – two central figures of Mesoamerican religion to be sure – did they attempt to control or explain seasonal winds and hurricanes? Can we reasonably consider the incorporation of regional phenomena into local cosmology a “cultural link” between the mainland and the islands? Can wind and storms define a coherent region?

*** This chapter considers the early history of the coastal region that became Nueva Veracruz, focusing on the land, sea, and how early Spanish colonizers mediated local environments and incorporated the coastal lowlands into broader understandings of space. It has two central goals: first, to offer a description of Veracruz’s geography and second, to consider the longue-durée evolution of Veracruz’s interactions with the maritime spaces to its east. While a speculative

For a summary, see: Scott M. Fitzpatrick, “Seafaring Capabilities in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 8 (2013), 101–38. On cultural similarities between Mesoamerica and the Antilles, see: Richard T. Callaghan, “Patterns of Contact between Islands of the Caribbean and the Surrounding Mainland as Navigation Problem,” in Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 59–72; Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, “Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind,” in Islands at the Crossroads, 164–192; Ricardo E. Alegría, “The Ball Game Played by the Aborigines of the Antilles,” American Antiquity 16, no. 4 (1951): 348–52. 4 On crops shared between the islands and the mainland, see: Hayley L. Mickleburgh and Jaime R. Pagán-Jiménez, “New Insights into the Consumption of Maize and Other Food Plants in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean from Starch Grains Trapped in Human Dental Calculus,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39, no. 7 (2012): 2468–78. 3

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connection between Totonac temples and east winds may not be enough to suggest a firm human link between the islands and the mainland, it is worth considering what kind and scale of exchanges could spark regional integration. Can we think of Veracruz as part of the Caribbean in 1518, when Juan de Grijalva landed at Tacpantlayacac and renamed it for himself and a misunderstanding of Mesoamerica’s indigenous name? In 1519, when a subsequent group of Spanish expeditioners from Cuba hastily founded the “town” of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz? In 1552, when a hurricane inundated the city and destroyed its port? In asking these questions, we can begin to define what we mean by regional constructs and what power they have over the lives of people who reside within them. This chapter’s first section considers coastal geography and touches on the role of maritime spaces in pre-Hispanic lifeways. While preHispanic residents of the coastal lowlands made both functional and symbolic use of the maritime world, deliberate material connections between the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean Islands were rare. The following section examines Spanish colonization of the coast between 1518 and 1526, drawing on early written descriptions. As we will see, Veracruz was founded in 1519 to facilitate Hernando Cortés’s incursion into the mainland, but when political circumstances changed, the city was moved to the Antigua River to create smoother connection with the maritime exterior. The final section turns to the final seventy years of the sixteenth century, focusing on a prolonged dispute over the city’s location that pitted Veracruz’s cabildo against imperial officials and mercantile elites in Seville, Mexico City, and Puebla de los Ángeles. After a devastating hurricane in 1552, officials in Veracruz requested the city be relocated into the interior, but metropolitan merchants insisted it move closer to its port at San Juan de Ulúa. At Ulúa, Veracruz would be exposed to hurricanes and a harsher disease climate but would be better positioned to support maritime trade. Although local officials resisted the move, metropolitan authorities exerted significant political and economic leverage to force the city to relocate to the coast in 1599, where it was renamed Nueva Ciudad de la Veracruz. In the drawn-out conflict over the city’s location, we see Veracruz’s transformation from a space in which maritime resources, climates, and ecologies influenced local lifeways, to one in which economy, society, and culture were inextricably bound to maritime relationships in the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds.

26

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

the gulf, the sea, and the coast Some 200 million years ago, the Americas separated from the Eurasian and African land masses, creating what is now the Atlantic Ocean. Over the next 25 million years, North America drifted apart from its southern counterpart, creating a second breach to the continent’s south. The force of the rift between North and South America spun the northern continent counterclockwise. The Yucatán Peninsula uncoiled away from the Louisiana coast, and seafloor began to spread in a widening opening between the two. Meanwhile, the submerged Florida Peninsula rotated around the “Trinidad corner” of South America, creating, about 140 million years ago, an eastern continental boundary for the newly formed Gulf of Mexico.5 The origin of the Caribbean is less well understood. What is known is that about 10 million years before the Gulf of Mexico was complete, North and South America pulled apart completely, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans via a channel south of the Yucatán. According to a long-dominant theory, the Caribbean plate originated in the Pacific Ocean, drifting eastward into the Atlantic when the continents were separated. The larger islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico were a part of this drift, all but Puerto Rico arriving in the Atlantic as “continental fragments.”6 The Greater Antilles were followed by other continental fragments, which settled to form Central America. Meanwhile, the Caribbean plate collided with the South American plate in the east, giving rise, 40 million years ago, to a chain of volcanic islands – the Lesser Antilles – and forming the eastern boundary of the Caribbean.7 Because Mexico’s Gulf Coast is insulated from the open ocean by the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, the system of currents it relies on is more forgiving than those that prevail in the Antilles. In the Gulf Coast, Dale. E. Bird, Kevin Burke, Stuart A. Hall, and John F. Casey, “Tectonic Evolution of the Gulf of Mexico Basin,” in Gulf of Mexico: Origin, Waters, and Biota: Volume 3, Geology, edited by Noreen A. Buster and Charles W. Holmes (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 3–16. 6 Unlike other Greater Antillean islands, Puerto Rico is a volcanic arc island formed in the Pacific Ocean approximately 190 million years ago. See: James L. Pindell and Stephen F. Barrett, “Geological Evolution of the Caribbean Region: A Plate Tectonic Perspective,” in The Caribbean Region, edited by Gabriel Dengo and James E. Case (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 1990), 405–32. 7 K.H. James, M.A. Lorente, and J.L. Pindell, eds., The Origin and Evolution of the Caribbean Plate (London: The Geological Society, 2009). See also: C. Montes, et al., “Middle Miocene Closure of the Central American Seaway,” Science 348, no. 6231 (2015): 226–9. 5

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a series of clockwise eddies link together to create a current that sweeps the mainland coast, from the northern tip of the Yucatán to the southern tip of Texas, an area called the Bay of Campeche.8 Sailing ships could travel almost the entire extent of Mexico’s Gulf Coast rather than directing traffic to a single landfall. Traveling west from Cuba toward the mainland, a ship would catch the east winds of the Yucatán Channel to sail across the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, gradually steering south and then back north along the Tabasco coast. Returning eastward, a typical ship would continue to sail north along the coast until reaching the mouth of the Pánuco River, at modern-day Tampico, at which point the ship would come to the northern extent of a clockwise eddy and the winds would turn eastward with the Florida current, bringing the ship back toward the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Lying in the middle of the Bay of Campeche is Veracruz harbor. An arc of coral barrier reefs – including the islands of San Juan de Ulúa, Sacrificios, Pajaros, and Verde – define the harbor’s limit. While Sacrificios and Ulúa were both ceremonial sites in the pre-Hispanic period, in the colonial period, only Ulúa was put to official use, housing shipyards, docks, warehouses, and the city’s primary fortress. According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, San Juan de Ulúa was favored over the mainland as a port because of its greater harbor depth (thirteen meters) and because the lee of the island protected docking ships against gales.9 Underwater shoals closer to shore also made navigation to the mainland difficult for large vessels. Later accounts, like that of the French navigator Samuel de Champlain, who visited the port in 1598, describe how the shoals made Ulúa “the most dangerous port that we can find” for sailors who did not “know well the entrance of the channel.”10 The coastal area immediately across from the islands, where the city of Nueva Veracruz would eventually be located (which I call the Ulúacan Coast), was somewhat of an anomaly in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands (tierra caliente).11 To the north and south of the Ulúacan Coast, multiple permanent rivers and escarpments give the coast a verdant tropical ecology, with plentiful rainfall, year-round planting, and temperate climate in On currents in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, see: Fitzpatrick, “Seafaring Capabilities,” 104–7. 9 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, edited by Genaro García, translated by Alfred Percival Maudslay (London: Hakluyt Society, 1908), 55–6. 10 Champlain, 21–5. 11 The lowlands are typically defined as coastal regions below 800 meters of elevation. 8

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

figure 1.1 Plan of Nueva Veracruz, ca. 1600. Source: “Puerto de La Vera Cruz nueva con la fuerça de S Ju° de Ulua en el Reino de la Nueva España en el Mar del Norte” (Florence: Lit. di A. Ruffoni, 16). Courtesy of BnF.

the near interior due to rapid elevation gain. The segment of coast just at Veracruz’s harbor, however, lies within a rain shadow produced by the Sierra Chiconquiaco to the north. The Tenoya River, which cut through the colonial city and emptied into the harbor, suffered extended dry spells and was eventually infilled in the eighteenth century. The flat plains of the near interior were dotted with brackish marshlands and offered little escape from strong winds or lowland heat.12 In the seventeenth century, Nueva Veracruz straddled the Tenoya River (see Figure 1.1). On the south bank were warehouses, a Dominican 12

See: William T. Sanders, “Cultural Ecology and Settlement Patterns of the Gulf Coast,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 10 and 11, edited by Robert Wauchope (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 543–57. See also: Andrew Sluyter, “Vestiges of Upland Fields in Central Veracruz: A New Perspective on Its Precolumbian Human Ecology” (MA thesis, University of British Colombia, 1987).

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29

convent, Jesuit residences, a post office, and a bullfighting ring. The north bank was home to most of the city’s residences and government buildings, including the town Council building and the customs house. Veracruz’s main plaza and cathedral were also located north of the river, as was the city’s dock. Three wooden bridges were built over the river to connect the two sides until it was built over completely.13 Neither the river nor the brackish lakes of the interior provided a reliable source of drinking water. Instead, the city relied on rainwater collected in cisterns for its drinking water, and occasional droughts could lead to periods of acute water shortage.14 In the 1650s, the colonial government sponsored an unsuccessful attempt to divert the Jamapa River, twelve kilometers to the harbor’s south, to Nueva Veracruz in a bid to end the city’s water shortage.15 The Jamapa entered the Gulf at the town of Alvarado. Unlike the Tenoya, it was a permanent river, and one seventeenth-century writer claimed it had “the best water that there is in all the world.”16 According to Alexander von Humboldt, who described the city’s climate in the eighteenth century, the coast was so sandy and the winds off the shore so strong that sand dunes of eight to twelve meters in height formed on all sides of the city during the dry winter months. When the weather turned warm again in the summer, the dunes would “contribute very much to the reverberation of the sun’s rays . . . to increase the suffocating heat of the air.”17 Further inland, mountain-based urban centers like Xalapa, Orizaba, Huatusco, and Córdoba – which were described by Alexander von Humboldt as “cool and agreeable retreats, while the coast is almost uninhabitable from the mosquitos, the great heats, and the yellow fever” – stood between 800 and 1,500 meters.18 By most accounts, better conditions prevailed a short distance from Veracruz’s harbor, not only inland, but along the coastal lowlands both to the north and south. Larger permanent rivers – like the Actopan, Tecolutla, and Panúco to the north and the Cotaxtla, Papaloapan, and Coatzacoalcos to the south – provide a dependable source of freshwater and riverine transport for population centers at Zempoala, El Tajín, Tres Zapotes, and La Venta. Similarly, slightly higher altitudes in the foothills of the northern escarpment of the Sierra Chiconquiaco and southern 13

Manuel B. Trens, Historia de la H. Ciudad de Veracruz y de su ayuntamiento (Mexico City: Taller Gráfica de la Nación, 1955), 38–9. 14 Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay of the Kingdom of New Spain, translated by John Black (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ormé, and Brown, 1822), 217–20. 15 AHCV-Caja 1, vol. 1, fs. 403r-22v. 16 Mota y Escobar, Memoriales, 47. 17 18 Humboldt, 215–17. Ibid., 269.

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Tuxtla mountains translate to cooler temperatures and greater rainfall than are found on the Ulúacan Coast. Reliable access to freshwater rivers and springs may be one reason why the two largest pre-Hispanic Gulf Coast societies, the Olmec (ca. 1200–400 bce) and the Totonac, concentrated to the south and north of the Ulúacan Coast, respectively.19 Veracruz’s indigenous societies mediated coastal climates and ecologies and integrated the sea itself into their belief systems, but both the functional and symbolic importance of maritime space to pre-Hispanic lifeways is not entirely clear. While many archaeological studies of the Olmec focus on agriculture, for example, recent research suggests floodplain resources – particularly saltwater fish – may have been more important for subsistence in coastal communities.20 Representations of the sea in Olmec iconography have undergone a similar reconsideration, including greater emphasis on the supernatural shark monster. In one such reinterpretation, the shark monster serves as the central opponent in the Olmec creation myth, whose defeat at the hand of a mythic hero allows earth to spread across the world-sea.21 As with the Totonac temples to Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl in Veracruz harbor, the recent elevation of the shark monster in Olmec cosmology suggests the symbolic importance of the maritime world but leaves its meaning and centrality to our interpretation. Although the role of maritime spaces in pre-Hispanic life remains ambiguous, there is very little to suggest Veracruz’s earliest societies had regular, direct interactions with the Caribbean Islands or territories beyond. Despite this, there have been persistent attempts to link the indigenous societies of Veracruz – particularly the Olmec – to a variety of non-Mesoamerican “origin” societies in the Caribbean, West Africa, and East Asia.22 The most famous of these loosely documented theories 19

On the Olmec, see: Richard A. Diel, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). On the Totonac, see: Pablo Valderrama Rouy, “The Totonac,” in Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, edited by Alan R. Sandstrom and Enrique Hugo García Valencia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 187–210. 20 See: Philip J. Arnold III, “Settlement and Subsistence Among the Early Formative Gulf Olmec,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28, no. 4 (2009): 397–411; Thomas W. Killion, “Nonagricultural Cultivation and Social Complexity: The Olmec, Their Ancestors, and Mexico’s Southern Gulf Lowlands,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5 (2013): 569–606. 21 Philip J. Arnold III, “The Shark-Monster in Olmec Iconography,” Mesoamerican Voices 2 (2005): 1–38. 22 Of the non-African Olmec origin theories, the most prominent connect the Olmecs to Shang dynasty China and to the Jaredite tribe of the Book of Mormon, both of which found proponents in academia. See: Betty J. Meggers, “The Transpacific Origins of

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contends that a group of West African migrants crossed the Atlantic centuries before Christopher Columbus and landed in Veracruz, founding the Olmec civilization.23 This theory originated in 1869 with the Mexican traveler and writer José María Melgar y Serrano, but gained wider traction in the political moment of the 1960s and 1970s, as Afrocentric scholars sought long-lost African “monument” societies. The “Afro-Olmec” origin theory survives in some corners even in the 21st century: As scholars have begun to acknowledge and embrace the long-ignored legacy of Africa in colonial Mexico, a few push through the colonial to the pre-Hispanic, and through the factual into the mythical.24 Although the Afro-Olmec origin theory is long discredited, it informed early ethnographic and historical work on Veracruz and frames scholarly discourse about pre-Hispanic Veracruz in a way I find revealing, particularly when read alongside more mainstream academic debates. At the same time as Afrocentric scholars (primarily in the United States) were raising the question of Olmec origins, mainstream anthropologists and archaeologists famously disputed the proper place of the Olmec within Mexico’s cultural patrimony: Did the Olmec constitute a “mother culture” that had exerted a significant cultural influence on later civilizations in the Yuacatán and Central Mexico? Or were they a “sister culture,” sharing aspects in Mesoamerican Civilization: A Preliminary Review of the Evidence and Its Theoretical Implications,” American Anthropologist 77, no. 1 (1975): 1–27; John L. Sorenson, “When Lehi’s Party Arrived in the Land, Did They Find Others There?” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 1, no. 1 (1992): 1–34. 23 Theodore W. Cohen, Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 39–40; 251–65; See also: Christopher A. Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35–47; José María Melgar y Serrano, “Antigüedades mexicanas, notable escultura Antigua,” Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, época 2 vol. 1 (1869), 292–7. 24 For critiques of this myth, see: Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour, “They Were NOT Here Before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 2 (1997): 199–234; Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour, “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 419–41; Odile Hoffman, “The Renaissance of AfroMexican Studies,” in Blackness and Mestizaje in Mexico and Central America, edited by Elisabeth Cunin and Odile Hoffman (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013), 81–116. For examples of the myth’s persistence, see: Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York: Random House, 1976); Gladys Casimir de Brizuela, “Hubo negros en América Precolombina. En busca de una metodología,” Africa en México, 3rd Annual Conference, Xalapa, Veracruz, March 22–4, 2004; Gladys Casimir de Brizuela, “Algunas noticias de contactos africanos antes de 1492,” Revista Lotería, no. 408 (1996): 102–9.

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common with other later indigenous civilizations, but not quite a progenitor?25 Put another way, as fringe scholars suggested Veracruz could be an “African” space long before the first “Africans” arrived in the Americas, mainstream scholars asked whether the Olmec were an authentic forebearer of indigenous Mexico. Both questions highlight Veracruz’s ambiguous position within Mexico’s national narrative, as historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists wonder aloud whether Veracruz – even before it is called by that name – truly belongs to Mexico, or whether it truly belongs somewhere else. Before the sixteenth century, Mesoamerica’s Gulf Coast shared significant traits with the Antillean archipelago and the northern coast of South America, including ecologies, climates, cultigens, and pathogens. Coastal communities from the Olmec to the Totonac incorporated some of these traits as cornerstones of rituals and belief systems. Still, just how central coastal and maritime spaces were in Olmec and Totonac lifeways remains uncertain, as scholars of Mesoamerican antiquity have traditionally focused on how closely the coast was tied to the central valley. While future studies may reveal previously unknown human connections between indigenous communities in the Gulf Coast and the Greater and Lesser Antilles, it was not until the sixteenth century that a Spanish invasion of the mainland would create the first enduring link between Veracruz and the Caribbean.

spanish arrival and early caribbean connections In June 1518, a Spanish expedition landed at Veracruz harbor, a detachment from Cuba led by Juan de Grijalva.26 According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a member of the expedition, the Spanish were attracted to Chalchitlapasco when they observed smoke rising from a temple on the island.27 “We found two masonry houses,” Díaz later wrote, “each with 25

The Mother/Sister debate concerns a series of detailed disagreements about how to classify perceived or actual continuities in the art and architecture of the Olmec and that of subsequent indigenous societies, but also, as its name implies, implicates the question of heritage. See: Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica, 15–17. 26 Although Juan de Grijalva also left a four-part Crónica of his expedition, it does not include a specific description of the Ulúacan Coast. See: Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Décadas del Nuevo Mundo . . . vol. I (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1945), 405–10, 415–16, 419–23; Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Décadas del Nuevo Mundo . . . vol. II, 440; Díaz del Castillo, 67–73. 27 See: Seth M. Low, “Indigenous Architecture and the Spanish American Plaza in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean,” American Anthropologist 97, no. 4 (1995): 748–62.

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steps leading up to some altars,” where, Díaz claimed, the Spanish discovered the recent remains of five sacrificial victims, and thus called the island “Sacrificios.” The expeditioners proceeded to the “broad sandy beach” of the mainland, where they were greeted by local traders and promptly decamped to the neighboring island Tacpantlayacac.28 In his first description of the island that would later become New Spain’s primary anchorage, Bernal Díaz drew a contrast between the deficiency of the land and the superiority of the port: “We built huts atop the highest crests of sand to escape the mosquitoes, of which there are many, and with our boats (bateles) we made a thorough sounding of the port, finding that the island provides good shelter against the northern gales and has a good harbor.”29 The Spaniards named the island “San Juan” after their leader, Juan de Grijalva, and after Saint John the Baptist – whose feast day, June 24, they had celebrated earlier that week – and appended the suffix “Ulúa” for what they incorrectly understood to be the island’s indigenous name.30 The Grijalva expedition spent a week at San Juan de Ulúa before proceeding north along the coast as far as Panúco, then returning south to Cuba by way of Tabasco. Though the first Spanish expedition to Veracruz did not establish a permanent settlement, it laid the groundwork for Hernando Cortés’s colonizing venture the following year.31 Ten months after the Grijalva expedition spent one week camping at San Juan de Ulúa, the Cortés expedition returned, in mid-April 1519, and met an embassy from the indigenous city of Cotaxtla, dispatched to the coast after reports of Grijalva’s arrival reached Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. For a month, Cortés and his followers received provisions and support from the Cotaxtlan coterie, but when they declined an invitation to Tenochtitlan, the Cotaxtlans departed. On May 15, the expedition proclaimed the establishment of a town council at “La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz.”32 The first iteration of the later On Tezcatlipoca, see: Guilhem Olivier, Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2003). 28 29 Díaz del Castillo, 54. Ibid., 55. 30 See: Lerdo de Tejada, Apuntes Historicos, 102–3; Tezozómoc, 39, 159; Angel Núñez Ortega, El primativo asiento de Veracruz (Mexico City: Citlaltepetl, 1969) 2nd ed., 48; Manuel B. Trens, Historia de Veracruz vol. II (Xalapa-Enríquez: Talleres Gráficos del Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1947), 22–3. 31 Gonzalo de Illescas, Conquista de México, edited by Bartolomé Juan Leonardo de Argensola, Fernán Pérez de Oliva, Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (Mexico City: Robredo, 1940), 103. 32 John F. Schwaller, with Helen Nader, The First Letter from New Spain: The Lost Petition of Cortés and His Company, June 20, 1519 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 13–15. The petition itself can be found at AGI-México 95, and in facsimile, transcription,

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city and port of Veracruz was something of a legal fiction. By founding a settlement with himself as its titular head (alcalde mayor), Cortés created a paper trail which he could use to claim autonomy from Cuba’s governor, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who had revoked the expedition’s authorization before it left Santiago de Cuba. By “founding” a town, Cortés and his allies could evade Velázquez’s authority.33 In crafting the town’s formal charter, however, the expeditioners self-consciously portrayed the “the rich land of Vera Cruz, where we are now” as a territory that was distinct from the islands of the Caribbean.34 They suggested their original mission of “rescate” (sometimes translated as “forced barter” or ransoming hostages, but also often used to mean unregulated trade), which had also been the goal of earlier expeditions, would be wasteful in this new territory, which was larger and more populous than any they had encountered in the Caribbean. Therefore, Cortés reasoned that “it seemed better . . . that a town should be founded and peopled.”35 Cortés followed Grijalva’s year-old footsteps to the Ulúacan Coast. After staying there for one month, he made the politically expedient choice to establish a town council. In so doing, he portrayed the mainland as a space qualitatively distinct from the Caribbean Islands, a representation that later colonists and historians often followed.36 It is unlikely that and translation in Schwaller and Nader, 63–106. See also: Hernán Cortés, Cartas de Relación, edited by Ángel Delgado Gómez (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1993), 105–58; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar oceano vol. III (Madrid: 1853), 529. 33 J. Omar Ruiz Gordillo has argued that Cortés chose the Ulúacan Coast for his legal gambit because it was less populated than other coastal areas the Spaniards had encountered. See: J. Omar Ruiz Gordillo, “Fundaciones urbanas en México: La Veracruz en el siglo XVI,” Altepetl. Revista Geografía Histórica – Social y Estudios Regionales 5, no. 6 (2012). 34 Hernán Cortés, Letters of Cortes: The Five Letters of Relation from Fernando Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, edited by Francis Augustus MacNutt (New York: Putnam, 1908), 127. 35 Ibid., 156. 36 The common representation of Cortés’s colonizing expedition as a second stage of Spanish colonization in scholarship is often a passive echo of Cortés’s own description. For illustrative examples, see: Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 129; José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 98–100; Eric R. Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 154–6. Importantly, there are also some scholars who emphasize the precedent of Caribbean conquests and their continuity in the mainland or, conversely, how developments in Mexico continued to be a part of the Caribbean’s development. See: Ida Altman, “Spanish Society in Mexico City after the Conquest,” HAHR 71, no. 3 (1991): 413–45; Stone, Captives of Conquest, 76– 100; Carlos Macías Richard, ed., El Caribe mexicano: origen y conformación, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico City: Universidad de Quintana Roo, Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2006).

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Cortés intended to leave a long-term settlement on the Ulúacan Coast, but in this action, Veracruz became both a symbolic gateway between two distinct worlds – one Caribbean, one Mesoamerican – and a foothold through which future mainland ambitions could be exercised. While the original iteration of Veracruz served as a safe harbor and beachhead, it did not last long at the coast. Less than a week before founding the town, Cortés declined an invitation to visit Tenochtitlan. On May 12, the embassy decamped. The Spaniards had relied on the Cotaxtlans for food and water since landing on the coast on April 22. Once the embassy was gone, Cortés and his followers were forced to locate these resources on their own. They sought a new indigenous sponsor and a potential staging ground for an incursion to the interior. They found both in the Totonac village of Quiahuiztlán, about thirteen leagues (75 km) north of Veracruz harbor.37 The relocation of Veracruz to Quiahuiztlán was indicative of the geographic and logistical limitations of the Ulúacan Coast. Safe harbor or not, Cortés’s intention to make a foray into the interior necessitated provisions and hinterland access that were not available at San Juan de Ulúa. In a tactical move symbolic of the city’s revolving landward and seaward orientations, after arriving in Quiahuiztlán, Cortés ordered his ships destroyed – save for the anchors and riggings – thus limiting the possibility of a return to Cuba and forcing his companions to focus their attention deeper into the Mexican mainland. From Quiahuiztlán, the Cortés expedition soon advanced to the larger Totonac town of Zempoala, from there to Tlaxcala and, eventually, into the Valley of Mexico, reaching Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519. Within two years, Cortés and his indigenous allies had seized political control of Tenochtitlan and important routes connecting the Gulf Coast to the Valley of Mexico. Even as fighting continued in Mexico’s western, northern, and southern provinces, Cortés and his allies began the long process of reorganizing Mesoamerica’s political and economic landscape in the territories they controlled.38 While the prerogatives of conquest saw 37

On chronology, see: Schwaller and Nader, 15–16. Quiahuiztlán supposedly takes its name from the Nahuatl word “quiyahuitl,” meaning “rainstorm.” See: Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America vol. IV (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1883), 132n4. See also: Ross Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 65–77; On the distance between Quiahuiztlán and Ulúa, see: Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 364. 38 On ongoing conquest, see: Ida Altman, The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford

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Veracruz move to Quiahuiztlán, the island of San Juan de Ulúa remained the functional port for arriving ships. At Ulúa, passengers and goods were off-loaded and ferried up the coast to Quiahuiztlán (which the Spaniards had begun calling “Medellín”), while returning ferries brought exports bound for the Caribbean and Europe.39 While the settlement at Quiahuiztlán facilitated the Spanish invasion, postconquest administrators soon began to identify its weaknesses as a port. The coastal ferrying process proved inefficient and costly, and rough weather sometimes resulted in lost or damaged goods. Meanwhile, the indigenous population of Quiahuiztlán declined rapidly in the 1520s, as it did elsewhere in Mesoamerica, which eliminated one of the justifications for locating the Spanish settlement so far away from San Juan de Ulúa.40 In 1526, the town’s administrators moved it a second time, to the nexus of the Antigua (Huitzilapan) and San Juan (Actopan) Rivers. “Antigua Veracruz,” as it was called, was more than ten leagues south of Quiahuiztlán and therefore only three leagues north of San Juan de Ulúa, cutting ferry time significantly. It was also only four leagues south of Zempoala, a much larger population center than Quiahuiztlán. Equally important, the Antigua and San Juan Rivers were larger than the Tenoya and provided estuary access to the interior more than half of the way to Xalapa.41 Veracruz harbor was chosen at the outset of the Cortés expedition as an expedient port of refuge. Beset by mosquitoes, lacking fresh water and resources, and isolated from overland access, the city’s founders sought a more advantageous landscape for their new city almost immediately, moving it to Quiahuiztlán. At Veracruz’s original founding, its founders deliberately marked their separation from Diego Velázquez’s authority and shored up legal claims of autonomy. When Veracruz moved to

University Press, 2004), 64–95. On reshaping landscapes in the Gulf Coast, see: Andrew Sluyter, “The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Geographical Review 86, no. 2 (1966): 161–77. 39 AGI-PR 20, n. 5, r. 21. The “Medellín” at Quiahuiztlán is distinct from Medellín del Bravo, a town south of Nueva Veracruz. See: Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), 93–4n3, 107–8. 40 The literature on disease-related indigenous demographic decline following conquest is voluminous. For a general overview, see: Robert McCaa, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1995): 397–431. 41 See: Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 32.

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Quiahuiztlán, it was to secure a local sponsor for expeditions into the interior. In one move, the founders looked back toward Cuba; in the other, they looked to the Mexican interior. When Quiahuiztlán proved too distant from the port, Veracruz’s residents resolved to move the city again. Although Antigua Veracruz was closer to San Juan de Ulúa than Quiahuiztlán, the city remained separated from the port itself. Although the city remained at Antigua for the next seventy years, it was only a few decades before mercantile elites and imperial officials in Seville, Mexico City, and Puebla de los Ángeles began calling for it to be moved closer to the port to hasten the pace of trade. The city’s cabildo resisted the admonitions of the imperial center for much of the sixteenth century, citing the unhealthiness of the coast and advocating instead for the city to be moved further into the interior. In the chapter’s final section, I examine this dispute, demonstrating how the economic motives of the empire began to outweigh the concerns of Veracruz’s residents.

metropolitan priorities and local preferences, 1526–1600 On Friday evening, September 2, 1552, residents of Antigua Veracruz began to notice “very great winds” arriving from the north and “other points of the compass, blowing in such a way that it was understood to be a hurricane.”42 The next morning, Bartolomé Romero, one of the city’s priests, woke early as usual and prepared to give mass, but was prevented from leaving his quarters due to the “water that fell from the heavens and the wind that accompanied it.” Trees split and fell under the pressure of the wind, and houses soon followed – first those of wood and palms, and eventually houses of stone. The city’s alcaldes mounted horses and raced through the streets and squares, warning residents to seek a “strong house” that could withstand the wind. Other residents, “men and women, and children and slaves,” evacuated to the hills of the interior.43

42

The same hurricane swept through portions of the Yucatan the day before, crossing the Bay of Campeche before making landfall at Veracruz. See: Tomás López Medel, De los tres elementos: tratado sobre naturaleza y el hombre del Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Alianza, 1990), 33. See also: Virginia García Acosta, et al., Desastres agrícolas en México: catálogo histórico vol. 1 (Mexico City: CIESAS, FCE, 2003), 109–10. 43 AGI-PR 181 r. 25, September 27, 1552. The same report appears with additional testimony in AGI-México 351, n. 5, f. 51r-66r, September 27, 1552. Some of these documents are transcribed in Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ENE, t. VI (Mexico City: Antigua Libería Robredo, de José Porrúa e Hijos, 1939), 181–206.

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As evacuations began, the San Juan and Antigua Rivers began to rise, flooding low-lying streets and houses. Some residents with canoes and other small boats braved the storm to rescue people trapped by the flood. One of the responders, Juan Romero, was later honored for his bravery. Not honored – and scarcely mentioned – were the two African men who accompanied him in his rescue efforts.44 Over the next several days, as news of the cyclone circulated inland, two residents of the interior, Alonso Nunez and Alonso de Buiza, were given commissions to commandeer supplies from nearby stores and warehouses to aid refugees who were left “very sick and weak” in the storm’s wake.45 In the following weeks, rescue efforts gave way to assessments of damage. Wind had destroyed several structures completely, including homes of tabby concrete, adobe, and even some stone buildings. Many not demolished in the torrent were flooded, including several merchant warehouses and bodegas. Thousands of pesos’ worth of textiles, wine, olive oil, and vinegar were damaged, while cases of silver, gold, and other precious commodities were lost in the receding storm surge. At San Juan de Ulúa, dozens of small merchant ships from coastal and regional trading circuits (carabelas de Tabasco) were demolished, five transatlantic vessels sank, and four others sustained extensive damage. Four of the island’s docks were swept out to sea, taking four or five sailors and dock workers with them. Others took refuge on the island, but dozens drowned when their shelter was blown away.46 In the aftermath, Veracruz’s alcalde mayor, García de Escalante Alvarado, traveled the coastal highlands on horseback, surveying possible locations where the city could move to avoid future disasters. On May 12, 1553, Escalante petitioned the Crown and the viceroy to move the city, recommending an area called the “Hato de Doña María.” According to the historical geographer Andrew Sluyter, the hato (cattle ranch) Escalante suggested was likely owned by a woman named María del Rincón, who held several titles on land throughout the plains and highlands of Veracruz’s interior – including three encomiendas inherited from three deceased husbands and an estancia she ran independently.47 According to Escalante, the Hato de Doña María was northwest of

44

Paso y Troncoso, ENE, t. VI, 183; Paso y Troncoso, ENE, t. VI, 189. García Acosta, et al., Desastres agrícolas en México, 109–10. 46 Stuart Schwartz gives a dramatic retelling of the storm and its fallout in the opening anecdote of his book on hurricanes. See: Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 1–5. 47 Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 90–1. 45

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Antigua Veracruz and inland from the coast “one league more towards Mexico.”48 In his petition, Escalante cited several benefits of relocating the city to the interior. Hato de Doña María was on higher ground and would not flood as easily as Antigua Veracruz. It was on a plain, with good pastures for livestock, and the ground underneath was limestone that would make for stouter building foundation than the sandy swamps of the coast. He also claimed the water was cleaner and, above all, the new location would offer “healthier” airs than the coastal lowlands. Antigua Veracruz, Escalante averred, was “sickly” and suffered from oppressive humidity and a brackish river that flooded in rainy seasons, turning the entire city into a marshy breeding ground for mosquitoes.49 Escalante was hardly the first Spanish official to address the Crown on the topic of Veracruz’s insalubrity. One of the earliest administrative responses to Veracruz’s health came from New Spain’s first bishop, Juan de Zumárraga. After arriving at the port in 1528, Zumárraga petitioned both the Crown and Pope Clement VII for funds to build two hospitals: one at the island of San Juan de Ulúa (Hospital Real de San Juan de Ulúa), to treat gravely ill passengers and sailors as they arrived, and one at Antigua Veracruz (Hospital de San Martín), to treat the city’s residents.50 In a 1533 letter to the Pope, the Crown supplemented Zumárraga’s request, saying that a hospital at San Juan de Ulúa would engender the “good reception” of the ill, emphasizing the value of sacrament to greet arriving migrants into a Catholic realm.51 Although we might expect travelers arriving in any port after weeks or even months at sea to be sickly, some officials ascribed the rate of illness in Veracruz not to long voyages but to Gulf-Caribbean climates. A real cédula (decree) responding to Zumárraga’s request suggested that “many who disembark [in San Juan de Ulúa] fall ill due to the great indisposition and extremity of that land.”52 Such descriptions conform with the dominant understanding of health in early modern European thought. Based on the ancient treatises of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, early modern medical thought held that fixed physical places and climates caused 48

49 Paso y Troncoso, ENE, t. VII, 36–9. Ibid. María Luisa Rodríguez-Silva and Verónica Ramírez, Los cirjuanos de hospitales de la Nueva España (siglos XVI y XVII): miembros de un estamento profesional o de una comunidad científica? (Mexico City: UNAM, 2005), 102–4. 51 AGI-IG 422, l. 16, f. 25r-26v. 52 AGI-IG 1962, l. 6, f. 50v-51r. As quoted in Rodríguez-Silva and Ramírez, 104. See also: AGI-MP 20, February 20, 1534. 50

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specific kinds of disease. Although many early modern medical writers believed individuals who traveled between climate zones were more disease-prone than those who remained in their native environment, it was still the particularity of place – and not travel itself – that led to illness.53 Whether Spanish officials believed the locus of ill-health was within Veracruz itself, the coastal lowlands, or the Caribbean torrid zone more generally, it is clear that civil and church officials in New Spain understood early Veracruz to be a distinctly unhealthy city. Health continued to dominate administrative discourse about Veracruz throughout the sixteenth century. Some of this discussion focused on the smallpox epidemics that afflicted indigenous populations, as they did elsewhere in Mexico. As early as 1539, Veracruz’s cabildo passed an ordinance banning the disposal of indigenous corpses in the city’s rivers, declaring that “those [indios] who were Christians” should be buried in the Catholic cemetery, while those who were not should be buried elsewhere. The penalty for those who did dispose of an indigenous corpse in the river, regardless of religion, was to be a fine of fifteen pesos, one-third of which would go to funding public works, the other two-thirds to the judge who passed the sentence and the person who denounced the offender.54 See: Andrew Wear, “Place, Health, and Disease: The Airs, Waters, Places Tradition in Early Modern England and North America,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 443–65; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” WMQ 41, no. 2 (1984): 213–40; David Arnold, ed., Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500– 1900 (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996); Alison Brashford and Sarah W. Tracy, “Introduction: Modern Airs, Waters, and Places,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 4 (2012): 495–514; Ioan McCleery, “From the Edge of Europe to Global Empire: Portuguese Medicine Abroad (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries),” in Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, edited by M. O’Doherty and F. Schmieder (Belgium: Brepols, 2015), 55–90; Michael Solomon, Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 81–8; Edward Behrend-Martínez, “Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (2005): 1073–93; Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 223–30. 54 AGI-México 350, July 3, 1539, fs. 1r-10v. Veracruz’s cabildo passed a similar ordinance regarding the bodies of enslaved Africans in 1547. See: AGI-México 350, June 15, 1547, fs. 14r-25v. The problem of properly disposing of non-Spanish cadavers was also common across the New World. So much so that the 1680 compilation of the Laws of the Indies includes a specific provision on the retrieval of drowned slaves whose bodies attracted “many sharks, which haunt the fisheries and bring grave danger, forcing fishers to cease their operations.” See: Recoplicación de las Leyes de los Reynos de Indias vol. IV (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1973), título XXV, ley XXXV. See also: William 53

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41

The extirpation of Amerindians in the greater Veracruz region elicited more detailed comment from local officials in 1580. In this case, the official in question was a licenciado and trained physician named Alonso Hernández Diosdado. In a relación geográfica, Hernández noted the “very remarkable decline of the indios of this region,” expressing concern that if the epidemic continued apace, it would lead to the “total ruin and extermination” of the indigenous population. Hernández claimed that the massive death toll “could not be explained but by the bad temperance and inclemency of this land in general, and the miserable plague of mosquitoes that it has.”55 Even though Hernández recognized the epidemic decimation of Mesoamerica from the moment of Spanish arrival, he followed earlier assessments in tying demographic decline to what he assumed to be the intrinsic febricity of the coastal lowlands. While Veracruz’s health was a recurrent concern of sixteenth-century officials – both locally and in metropolitan centers – there was no consensus either on the severity of the problem or what should be done about it. Writing in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane, Escalante had cited the city’s ill-health to propose a move to a healthier location. Five years before the 1552 hurricane, Escalante’s predecessor as alcalde mayor, Alonso de Herrera, described Veracruz as “an unhealthy city but the key to New Spain nonetheless.” Seeking royal support, he characterized Veracruz’s residents as resilient and “loyal vassals” who provided essential security to New Spain and its supply route, guarding against foreign corsairs and maroons alike, despite its pestilential environment.56 Unlike Escalante, who represented Veracruz’s climate as a debilitating weakness, Herrera drew on perceptions of Veracruz’s unhealthiness to demonstrate its essential role in the empire. In Herrera’s telling, Veracruz’s vecinos (residents) assumed great personal risk to their health to provide services to imperial and commercial order. As we will see, the Crown and New Spain’s viceroy would later use this same reasoning, which in 1547 was

H. Dusenberry, “Discriminatory Aspects of Legislation in Colonial Mexico,” The Journal of Negro History 33, no. 3 (1948): 295–7; Palmer, Slaves, 42. 55 René Acuña, ed., “Relación de la ciudad de Veracruz y su comarca,” Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Tlaxcala vol. 2 (Mexico City: IIA, UNAM, 1985), 301–36. See also: José Pardo-Tomás, “‘Antiguamente vivían más sanos que ahora’: Explanations of Native Mortality in the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias,” in Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, edited by John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada, and José Pardo-Tomás (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 41–66. 56 AGI-México 350, n. 2, June 15, 1547, f. 11r-13v.

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intended to elicit royal support, against Veracruz’s own cabildo, as evidence of the risk of further removing the city from its port. Official anxiety that Antigua Veracruz was located too far from San Juan de Ulúa to service the port’s needs is evident, if inchoate, as early as the 1533 cédula requesting papal support for a hospital. San Juan de Ulúa needed a hospital of its own, the Crown reasoned, because “the closest population is . . . the city of Veracruz, which is five leagues [away].”57 This anxiety seemed to allay somewhat with the appointment of Luís de Velasco (the elder) as New Spain’s viceroy. In 1551, Velasco appeared to support a movement among local civil and church authorities to relocate Veracruz to an area in the near interior that was “healthier, richer, and more secure.”58 Velasco’s opinion changed, however, in the wake of the 1552 hurricane. While the storm spurred local officials to request a move into the interior, metropolitan authorities and members of the mercantile elite in the imperial center were alarmed by its impact on shipping. Because the city and the port were separated by more than a dozen miles, relief had to be funneled to two separate disaster zones. Moreover, the storm had severely damaged the port’s facilities, which would require manpower – stationed at the port itself – to rebuild. To support this effort, Velasco approved an additional 1 percent tax on imports and exports to fund the purchase of “fifteen or twenty black slaves” to work on repairs and unload ships.59 The Crown’s purchase of captives to support port works not only addressed immediate needs of recovery, but it also suggested the longterm benefit of amassing a larger population at the port itself. Other developments in the Caribbean suggested the same. Writing just one month before the French pirate Jacques de Sorés’s famed sack of Havana, Velasco cited reports of daring attacks on Caribbean ports by French corsairs as a key reason for keeping the city close.60 If Veracruz moved further into the interior, then it would not be able to reinforce the

57

Rodríguez-Silva and Ramírez, 102–4. María Justina Sarabia Viejo, Don Luis de Velasco, virrey de Nueva España, 1550–1564 (Seville: CSIC, 1978), 450–52. Sarabia suggests Velasco’s support for relocating Veracruz also centered on the Hato de Doña María, the same site Veracruz’s alcalde mayor proposed following the 1552 hurricane. See also: AGI-México 280, January 6, 1551. 59 AGI-México 19, n. 17, June 3, 1555. 60 One year earlier, the corsair François le Clerc had raided Spanish ports in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and had occupied Santiago de Cuba for one month. See: Lane, Pillaging, 13–22. 58

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battered and vulnerable port. Tellingly, at no point in his report to the Crown discussing the repairs did he mention the question of health.61 In the second half of the sixteenth century, metropolitan discourse on the city’s location focused on the efficiency of shipping above all else. Subsequent viceroys followed Velasco’s example by calling on their authority over the port’s defenses to put pressure on the city’s cabildo. This was particularly true after the city was attacked by English corsairs in September 1568, when five English vessels under the command of John Hawkins engaged in a naval battle with ships of the Spanish fleet docked at San Juan de Ulúa.62 Although the Spanish ships scored a decisive victory, New Spain’s new viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza wrote an urgent missive to the Council of the Indies requesting financial support for the construction of two bulwarks on the mainland to supplement the island’s defenses.63 Enríquez’s appeal followed on the heels of the beginning of construction of a fortress on the island itself two years earlier, in 1566, under the direction of the Spanish military engineer Cristobál de Eraso. That same year, the previous viceroy, Gastón de Peralta, granted a license to a man named Juan González de Buitrón to construct a private residence on the mainland directly across from the island. Buitrón also received a license to open an inn (venta) that would serve the overflow population of soldiers, sailors, laborers, and incoming migrants during the period of construction on the island.64 The license was the first of fifty that would be granted for ventas, solares (plots of land), hospederías (guesthouses), and provisions farms on the Ulúacan Coast between 1566 and 1599. Two of these licenses also indicated the presence of other residents, including a free-black woman named Francisca de Villegas, whose house was listed as a neighboring plot in a grant of two solares in 1592.65 In effect, New Spain’s viceroys systematically used their power to direct funding in support of colonial defense. Not incidentally, one effect of that funding was a redistribution of population, commerce, and infrastructure 61

AGI-México 19, n. 17, June 3, 1555. Othón Arróniz, La Batalla naval de San Juan de Ulúa, 1568 (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1982). 63 64 AGI-México 19, n. 39. AGN-Mercedes, vol. 9, f. 97r. 65 AGN-Mercedes, vol. 10, fs. 266v; vol. 11, fs. 19r, 39r, 42v, 66r, 87r, and 155r; vol. 12, fs. 144r; vol. 14, fs. 15v; vol. 15, fs. 228v; vol. 16, fs. 192v; vol. 17, fs. 48v; vol. 18, fs. 136v, 142v, 143r, 186v, 200v, 218r, 290r, 302v, 303v; vol. 19, fs. 12r, 103r, 115v, 123r; vol. 20, fs. 3v, 40r, 154r, 154v, 165r, 197v; vol. 21, 31r, 34r, 305v, 316v, 359v, 362v, 363r; vol. 22, fs. 25v, 35v, 75v, 125v, 126v, 127r, 127v, 130v, 133r, 144v, 160v, 216v; vol. 23, 11r, 46v, 49r, 52v, 54r, 65r; vol. 24, fs. 1r-1v. 62

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to the Ulúacan Coast. Whether or not this was an intended outcome of increased defense spending, the early flow of settlers to the Ulúacan Coast set an important precedent. As more sailors and travelers made use of the mainland’s service economy, the more service economy relocated from Antigua to the Ulúacan Coast. At the same time, merchants in Puebla, Mexico City, and Seville were growing agitated by long delays in the transshipment of goods from San Juan de Ulúa to Antigua, which could take as much as two weeks. Once goods arrived in Antigua, the pace of trade did not hasten, as the Antigua River was often too shallow to move goods into the interior without interruption. At some points, river boats were forced to unload their cargoes on the bank, transferring the merchandise to teams of muleteers who would cart the cargo overland while the boat proceeded unladen until the water was deep enough to transfer the goods back. Some cargo took as much as two years to arrive in Mexico City from the time it was unloaded at San Juan de Ulúa.66 Merchants themselves were not the only ones who complained about the long distance between San Juan de Ulúa and Antigua. In 1572, a group of Spanish ship captains and pilots based in Seville and Triana, frustrated by the small service economy at the island, petitioned the Crown to move the city closer to San Juan de Ulúa. In their petition, the seafarers appealed to commerce, claiming that trade would be better off if cargo entered the mainland at the Ulúacan Coast and progressed overland than it would be if ferried from the port to Antigua.67 Meanwhile in New Spain, a separate group of merchants in Puebla petitioned Viceroy Martín Enríquez to build a new dock (atarazana) at San Juan de Ulúa, which he approved. The growing movement in Seville, Puebla, and Mexico City to relocate the city nearer the port was not well received in Antigua. Resistance to the idea of moving the city to the Ulúacan Coast was strong and immediate. In August 1575, the city council sent a letter to the Council of the Indies stating in unequivocal terms all the dangers of moving the city: By another letter this city has written to Your Majesty to tell of the general and universal damage that will be done to Your Majesty’s treasury and to the merchants and vecinos of this city and this kingdom if the viceroy is indeed successful in his attempt to have ships unload their goods in the mainland of the port of San Juan de Ulúa. There will be no sailor who will not die of work and sun, nor could he leave the city by foot, for that land is greatly unpopulated and the terrain is rough, its rivers dangerous, and its swamps and marshes large and deep. Nor is

66

AGI-México 350, December 24, 1595, fs. 268r-272v.

67

AGI-PR 259, r. 41.

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there wood nor grass nor anything that is good for the sustenance of life. The site is beaten with great northern gales and the wind is very bad in such a way that moves the sand dunes, creating mountains of sand that shift from one place to another, so that one year the city is blind and the next it is open for the mosquitoes that make this land uninhabitable.68

Not only did the cabildo object to relocating the city, but they also lambasted the “remarkable” underhandedness and “prejudice” of Poblano elites who, they claimed, had convinced the viceroy to undermine the city, causing “irreparable damage . . . to our royal service and the general good of the Republic.”69 Alongside protestations about the dubious actions of Poblano merchants and the viceroy, the cabildo made several requests for grants that would allow them to improve the city at Antigua, including a new roof for the cathedral, money for a prison “for the large quantity of galley slaves (galeotes) and other prisoners who arrive with the fleets,” a new cabildo building, and convents to house the itinerant Franciscans who stopped in the city.70 These requests often met no response, a fact the cabildo complained about in subsequent letters. But if Antigua’s requests for more public buildings and infrastructure went unanswered, those of the burgeoning settlement on the Ulúacan Coast did not. In the 1590s, the Ulúacan Coast underwent rapid development, as its population growth outstripped the city at Antigua. Beginning in 1594, new residences, shops, and guesthouses were joined by a series of convents and hospitals granted to various religious orders – first to the Jesuits, with the Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians following shortly after.71 The year 1595 also saw viceregal approval for the construction of the city’s first portale (a covered and arcaded public market), though it is unclear when that project was completed, since it is not mentioned in subsequent reports or urban plans. Since no city had yet been formally established on the site, these grants specified the area as the “ventas de Buitrón” (see Figure 1.2). Although the city of Veracruz officially remained at Antigua, it was evident by then that metropolitan and mercantile interests had succeeded in turning the port at San Juan de

68

AGI-México 350, August 17, 1575, fs. 96r-97v. Ibid., February 13, 1576, fs. 98r-171v. 70 Ibid., May 3, 1583, fs. 177r-178v. See also: Ibid., February 2, 1584, fs. 195v-196r. 71 On Jesuits, see: AGN-Mercedes, vol. 18, 303v; vol. 21, 316v. On Franciscans: AGNMercedes, vol. 20, fs. 40r. On Carmelites: AGN-Mercedes, vol. 22, fs. 130v. On Augustinians: AGN-Mercedes, vol. 22, fs. 160v; fs. 216v. 69

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figure 1.2 “Ventas de Buitrón” and San Juan de Ulúa, ca. 1592. Source: Baltazar Vellerino de Villalobos, “Vista del puerto y Fortaleza de San Juan de Ulúa, 1592” copy of Manuel Orozco y Berra, 1857. Courtesy of Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra.

Ulúa into the magnetic force around which the coastal population would gather. The effectiveness of metropolitan subversion wore down the resistance of Veracruz’s residents. In 1590, the port’s chief accountant, Antonio Cotrina, penned the first of two letters to the Council of the Indies requesting the city be formally relocated. Both referred to the opening of two new overland routes – one through Xalapa, the other through Córdoba – that connected the Ulúacan Coast to Mexico City (see Map 0.2). Writing from San Juan de Ulúa in June 1590, Cotrina explained that “the new road . . . is further [from Antigua Veracruz] than the old road by 24 leagues (by Xalapa), 35 leagues by the Tierra Caliente [Córdoba], which is very harmful for the conservation of the naturales that tend to the carts and pack animals.”72 When Viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga Acevedo ordered the relocation of Veracruz to the Ulúacan Coast in 1599, renaming it “Nueva Ciudad de Veracruz,” it was the culmination of a process orchestrated by

72

Paso y Troncoso, ENE vol. 13, 252–3.

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47

metropolitan authorities in Puebla, Mexico City, and Seville for more than three decades.

*** In an account of the 1552 hurricane that ravaged Antigua Veracruz and San Juan de Ulúa, Stuart Schwartz suggests that the Spaniards “had chosen poorly” in building their settlement on the coast, rather than in the highlands of the interior as indigenous communities had done for centuries. Locating the city at Antigua and later the Ulúacan Coast did expose the settlement to inclement weather and dangerous disease climates. However, the administrative battles over the city’s location demonstrate that the decision to keep the city in the coastal lowlands was not only a sober and informed decision, but one that went against the expressed preferences of the city’s own residents. While Schwartz correctly points out that “the Totonacs could have warned [the Spaniards] of the dangers of the region,” it is unlikely any such warning would have been heeded.73 After all, New Spain’s viceroy, its merchants, and the Council of the Indies failed to heed their own experience and the warnings of local Spanish administrators, let alone the indigenous communities of the coast. Although indigenous groups like the Totonacs and others had avoided settling the Ulúacan Coast, the Spaniards who arrived there in 1519 were engaged in the construction of a transoceanic commercial system the likes of which had never existed in Mesoamerica. If locating New Spain’s primary port city in the Gulf lowlands was a risky choice, then it was one made in service of commercial goals that cared little for the perils of hurricanes, flooding, and pestilence. In this sense, the Spaniards did not choose the Ulúacan Coast poorly; they chose it ruthlessly.74 Veracruz’s many early movements reveal not only the truism that the city’s geography responded to the dictates of colonial priorities, but also the way that shifting priorities reflected the negotiation of what kind of city Veracruz would be. In its initial foundation on the Ulúacan Coast, it was a city facing seaward, a landing for a group of eager conquerors arriving by ship from the island of Cuba. When the city moved to Quiahuiztlán, its mission shifted to providing land-based infrastructure in the form of food, water, and supplies to facilitate Spanish incursions into the interior. Following the success of those incursions, the city gradually moved southward, first to Antigua, where estuary access to the

73

Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 2.

74

Ibid., 1–5.

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hinterland and proximity to San Juan de Ulúa combined to complement both the city’s landward and seaward uses, and finally, as it became clear the city’s central purpose was to act as a hub of maritime traffic, to its original location on the sandy, mosquito-infested strip of land that was once considered too barren to inhabit.

conclusion Coastal climates and the maritime exterior informed the daily lives and belief systems of Gulf Coast societies long before the town of Veracruz was founded. Although the Spanish invasion in 1519 resulted in the first lasting link between the coast and the Caribbean, eight decades later, a question of whether it would be a city defined by its maritime entanglements or one that held the sea at a distance persisted. As a series of largescale political and economic developments pulled the city back toward the coast, it became evident that maritime connections to the Caribbean and Atlantic would structure the city’s social and cultural universe in a way they never had before. Veracruz’s return to the inhospitable shores off San Juan de Ulúa in 1599 was a belated admission that the city’s main purpose was to facilitate maritime commerce, even against its own terrestrial needs and “sustenance of life.” In this way, the city that began in 1519 as a foothold in the mainland became, eighty years later, the western extent of the Caribbean archipelago.

2 Environment, Health, and Race, 1599–1697

In the early morning of July 2, 1625, an English Catholic priest named Thomas Gage climbed into an empty barrel in the Andalusian port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. When he emerged later that day, he and the barrel were on their way to the West Indies onboard the carrack (nao) San Antonio, and Europe was growing distant. The San Antonio sailed in a fleet of forty ships bound for the Americas, where Castilian law forbade the presence of English-born travelers. Thomas Gage, of Hailing Manor, Surrey, traveled in a group of twenty of his fellow Dominicans, determined to bring the true faith to a new world.1 After seven weeks passing time fishing, gambling, and singing nightly hymns beneath paper lanterns, the fleet reached the islands of Dominica and Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles. Passengers exchanged iron goods for plantains, sugarcane, and turtle meat from local Caribs, who met the fleet in painted canoes. Among the Caribs was a mulato named Luis – a formerly enslaved man who had escaped his Spanish captor in Seville and, like Gage, stowed away on a ship bound for the Indies. Luis had lived among the Caribs for twelve years, taking a wife and fathering three living children. Identifying Luis by his hair (rather than by his skin, which was painted red) as a man of African descent – and therefore a man of the Old World – Gage and his fellow clergy approached him and, finding he spoke Spanish, pleaded with him to return to Christendom and civilization, which Luis agreed to do. Later that afternoon, as they dried their clothes and waited for Luis on the beach, poisoned arrows began to rain down on the Spaniards from beyond the tree line. The attack, which Gage suspected 1

Gage, 1–48.

49

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

had been prompted by Luis, left dozens of Spaniards dead and sent the rest fleeing to their ships. Leaving the Lesser Antilles, the fleet sailed north and west into the Caribbean Sea, passing within sight of the southern coasts of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. As they did, individual ships broke off from the convoy – three to Santo Domingo, two to Jamaica and Havana, one to Margarita – until, finally, sixteen of the original forty entered the Yucatán Channel and the Gulf of Mexico, bound for the island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa and the port city of Veracruz. Veracruz was the largest port in the viceroyalty of New Spain, which was known in Europe to be the wealthiest and most powerful colony in the Americas. If Gage’s first experience in the Americas was in an island he considered to be the realm of heathens, in Veracruz, he expected to disembark in a Catholic kingdom. Shortly after arriving in Veracruz, Gage noted a contradiction between the city’s commercial prosperity and the humility of its appearance. “The great Trading by Mexico,” Gage wrote, “from the East Indies, from Spain, from Cuba, Sto Domingo, Yucatan . . . and by Portobello from Peru, from Cartagena . . . maketh this little Town very rich, and to abound with all the Commodities of the Continent Land, and of all the East and West India’s treasures.” The city’s priory was “richly dressed” with “many Pictures, and . . . Hangings, some made of Cotton-Wooll, others with various coloured Feathers of Mechoacan . . . Tables covered with carpets of Silk; Cupboards adorned with several sorts of China Cups and Dishes.” Its most elite inhabitants were “extraordinarily rich” and his host, one of the city’s Dominican friars, displayed his material wealth with an enthusiasm Gage considered “nothing but vain boasting.”2 This ostentation was lost on the city itself: “Of the Buildings little we observed, for they are all, both Houses, Churches and Cloisters, built with Boards and Timbers, the Walls of the richest man’s house being made but of boards.” At night the “impetuous winds” became so harsh that Gage and his companions were certain their lodgings were on the verge of collapse and were “caused to flie from our rest . . . and with our bare feet, to seek the dirty Yard for safer shelter.” The next morning “the Friers of the Cloister, who were acquainted with the whole Winds and Storms, laughed at our fearfulness; assuring us, that they never slept better.”3 Walking the streets, Gage and his compatriots “found the situation of it to be sandy, except on the south-west side, where it is moorish ground, and full of standing bogs, which, with the great heats . . . cause it to be 2

Ibid., 48–53.

3

Ibid.

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a very unhealthy place.” The city’s unhealthiness Gage regarded to be a particular blight. He estimated its population numbered no more than 3,000 and opined that a plethora of disease had caused the city to remain smaller than its trading might suggest. The cause of disease lay in the fruits and water of the city, which, he found, “causeth dangerous fluxes, and hasteneth death to those that newly come from Spain to those parts . . . for want of temperance.” A similar want of temperance caused another member of Gage’s party, friar Antonio Calvo, to insist they depart Veracruz only one day after arriving “for his fear [of] eating too much the fruits of that country, and drinking . . . too greedily of the water.”4

*** In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was one of the most important ports in the New World. It was one of the first Spanish cities on the American mainland, founded by Hernán Cortés and his compatriots at the outset of the invasion of Mexico in 1519. As early as 1571, the mule trains of the camino real linked Veracruz to Mexico City, the Pacific port of Acapulco, the Manila galleons, and transpacific markets in silk, spice, and porcelain.5 When silver production in New Spain began to outpace its South American counterparts at the end of the sixteenth century, Veracruz became the primary distributor of metal wealth in the Atlantic basin.6 It was the port of entry for the majority of European migrants to the North American continent, and between 1580 and 1640, it was the second-largest disembarkation point of African slaves in all of the Americas (see Figure 2.1).7 In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was also – in the eyes of some early modern authors – a sparsely populated tropical miasma. Its trade was managed by merchants in Mexico City, Pubela, and Seville, and even their 4

Ibid. Ramón María Serrera Contreras, Tráfico terrestre y red vial en las indias españolas (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1992), 29; Scott Brady, “An Historical Geography of the Earliest Colonial Routes Across the American Isthmus,” Revista Geográfica, no. 126 (1999): 123–5. 6 See: Pierre and Huguette Chaunu; Pierre Chaunu, “Veracruz en la segunda mitad del siglo xvi y primera de xvii,” Historia Mexicana 9, no. 4 (1960): 521; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 7 See: Ida Altman, “Spanish Migration to the Americas,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Richard Cohen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28–32; Ida Altman, “A New World in the Old: Local Society and Spanish Emigration to the Indies,” and Auke Pieter Jacobs, “Legal and Illegal Emigration from Seville, 1550–1650,” in Ida Altman and James P. Horn, eds., “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 30–60. 5

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agents often chose to live in the coastal highlands near Xalapa or Orizaba rather than in the city itself.8 As early as 1572, those same merchants colluded with New Spain’s viceroy to undermine Veracruz’s cabildo and force the city to move to a new location more favorable to commerce, but which local officials described as inhospitable “for the sustenance of life.”9 There, writers like Gage described a city built atop sand and standing bogs; a wooden city, with few stone-built buildings even as the volume of the silver trade swelled.10 Meanwhile, its resident population fluctuated between 6,000 and 8,000 people, making it only the seventeenth most populous city in the diocese of Tlaxcala despite being one of the most important commercial nodes in the entire colony.11 Even as thousands of migrants passed through the city each year, like Gage and his party, few remained in the city long and many moved on within hours of arriving.12 How could Veracruz be at once the most important port in one of the wealthiest colonies in the New World and an underpopulated and impoverished colonial outpost? To answer this question, this chapter focuses on health and environment. As we will see, both published traveler accounts and administrative correspondence often laced descriptions of the city with references to extremities of disease, climate, or natural disaster. Many authors described strong winds, punishing heatwaves, and mosquitoes, and Veracruz’s encounters with storms, fires, and yellow fever outbreaks are well documented.13 Cumulatively, early modern Richard Boyer, “Mexico in the Seventeenth Century: Transition of a Colonial Society,” HAHR 57, no. 3 (1977): 467. 9 AGI-PR 259, r. 41; AGI-México 350, fs. 96r-97v; Boyer, “Mexico in the Seventeenth Century,” 465. 10 Manuel Toussaint, “Ensayo Sobre los Planos de la Ciudad de Veracruz,” in Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1947), 26. 11 Peter Gerhard, “Un Censo de la Diócesis de Puebla en 1681,” Historia Mexicana 30, no. 4 (1981): 530–60. 12 Rachel A. Moore, Forty Miles from the Sea: Xalapa, the Public Sphere, and the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 25–6. 13 See: Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 1–5; Paul César López Romero, “El huracán que pasó por la ciudad de Veracruz y el puerto de San Juan de Ulúa, Nueva España 1552. La construcción de un ‘desastre’ en la época virreinal,” Teoría y Praxis 14, no. 29 (2016): 75–88; Mayabel Ranero Castro, “Políticas nosológicas en dos puertos del Caribe: Veracruz y La Habana,” in Ciudades Portuarias en la Gran Cuenca del Caribe: Vision Histórica, edited by Jorge Enrique Elías Caro and Antonio Vidal Ortega (Barranquilla: Universidad del Norte, 2010), 138–68; Andrew L. Knaut, “Yellow Fever and the Late Colonial Public Health Response in the Port of Veracruz,” HAHR 77, no. 4 (1997): 619–44; Beau D.J. Gaitors, “Commerce, Conflict, and Contamination: Yellow Fever in Early-Independence Veracruz in the US Imaginary, 1821–1848,” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 25, no. 3 (2018): 779–95. 8

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figure 2.1 Veracruz and its harbor, ca. 1601. Source: Samuel de Champlain, Brief discours des choses plus remarquables que Samuel Champlain de Brouage á reconneues aux Indes occidentales (1601). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

accounts of Veracruz portray a city made wealthy by trade but brought low by the natural world. While references to Veracruz’s alleged calamities are abundant in the seventeenth century, early modern accounts should not be understood simply as empirical assessments of the city’s environment. The travelers and administrators who describe Veracruz are predominantly white European men, and their accounts are often misinformed or motivated by self-interest. Additionally, Veracruz was not unique in its vulnerability

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to environmental extremity, and grim descriptions of it fit a recognizable genre of early modern travel writing. Instead of using these reports to construct an overly negative image of Veracruz, then, I use them to understand how Veracruz was stereotyped and to ask how its environmental reputation fit within early modern renderings of other tropical spaces in the Caribbean and Atlantic world. In their writing, travelers like Gage coded Veracruz’s environmental shortcomings – real or invented – to its social and cultural milieu, suggesting that its ostensibly fixed, “natural” surroundings were coterminous with the character of its inhabitants. For example, accounts of the city often linked its black and African population with over-the-top descriptions of heat, pests, and pestilence, suggesting an early modern logic that Afro-descended people could thrive in harsh tropical environments where Europeans could not. These observations led European writers to classify Veracruz as distinct from cities in the Mexican interior. Similarly, although descriptions of Caribbean environments vary across time and space, negative depictions of Veracruz highlighted traits it shared with Caribbean settlements, like vulnerability to hurricanes and tropical disease. In this way, early modern authors used Veracruz’s environment to define it out of the mainland and into the Caribbean. Just as early modern authors used environmental language to construct coherent regions, so have historians. The ascription of common geographies and environments has long undergirded scholarly understandings of the Caribbean in particular. When Sidney Mintz set out to show that Caribbean communities shared important social and cultural characteristics in 1965, the first condition he identified was “lowland, subtropical, insular ecology.”14 As environmental history has become more popular, subsequent scholars have focused on specific phenomena like disease, hurricanes, and deforestation as common experiences that link Caribbean societies.15 In 2010, historian John McNeill coined the term Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as Socio-Cultural Area,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale. Journal of World History. Cuadernos de Historia Mundial 9, no. 1 (1965): 915–17. 15 David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change since 1492 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–40; Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 8–9; Reinaldo Funes Monzote From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492, translated by Alex Martin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2–3, 333; McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 17–23; Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–3; Schwartz, Sea of Storms, x–xi; Warsh, “A Political 14

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“creole ecology” to describe the Caribbean’s particular ecological transformation in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. More recently, Pablo Gómez has used the term “Caribbean experiential” to signify the distinctive role African and Afro-descended healers played in mediating Caribbean disease environments. Significantly, Gómez draws a contrast between “Caribbean intellectual spaces” where African healers dominated and mainland centers in New Spain and Peru where learned and popular understandings of the natural world followed “European cultural norms” and the “Hispanic baroque.” The identification of environmental similarity as a precondition of the Caribbean’s social and cultural synchronization is expressed perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Stuart Schwartz’s regional history of hurricanes: “From Charleston to Cartagena or Veracruz to Bridgetown,” Schwartz writes, “similar vegetation, similar landscapes, similar rhythms of life, and similar products had made the Caribbean societies sisters in experience.” Above all, Schwartz averred, “shared environmental conditions and hazards . . . have created a certain ‘transnational’ unity of experience.”16 In this chapter, what I find more significant than environmental similarity is how early modern authors not only classified Veracruz as part of the Caribbean’s socioenvironmental system, but also distinguished Mexico’s Gulf Coast from its interior. While environmental similarities themselves may be evocative of regionality, regions do not spring forth from the natural world without human interpretation. Importantly, too, as the fields of climate history and paleoclimatology have grown, they have demonstrated the need for caution in using narrative sources to describe environmental conditions in the past as if they were empirical, especially in comparative contexts.17 Therefore, while Veracruz and the Caribbean may have shared certain physical features – exposure to hurricanes and lowland conditions conducive to tropical disease – this chapter focuses more on the way contemporary authors amalgamated those features into a regional construction, placing Veracruz alongside Havana, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and other early modern Caribbean settlements and apart from the Mexican interior. Ecology”; Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492– 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 62; Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 2–4. 16 Schwartz, Sea of Storms, x–xi. 17 For an overview of methodologies for extracting climate data from narrative sources, see: David J. Nash, et al., “Climate Indices in Historical Climate Reconstructions: A Global State of the Art,” Climate of the Past 17, no. 3 (2021): 1273–1314.

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disease and disaster in the new city of veracruz If the motives behind Veracruz’s many sixteenth-century relocations are instructive of shifting colonial priorities, then the final move is instructive of the city’s physical conditions in the seventeenth century. As we have seen, each time the city moved, the new location was chosen with largescale political and economic goals in mind, rather than the needs of people who lived in it. In the final instance, metropolitan elites mandated the city’s relocation to the Ulúacan Coast above the objections of its own cabildo, leaving residents to contend with the externalities, including fires, scarcity, and yellow fever. For many travelers and administrators, these and other environmental factors typified seventeenth-century Veracruz, helping to explain the city’s perceived underpopulation, stagnant commercial growth, and impoverished built environments. While early accounts may not leave us with a perfect understanding of the typical lived experience of Veracruz’s residents, they are suggestive of how early modern observers indexed the city and its people. As common as epidemic disease was in sixteenth-century New Spain, European observers understood Veracruz’s struggles with illness as atypical. Already in the sixteenth century, Veracruz had been called the “tomb of the Spaniards” in papal correspondence, suggesting that disease outbreaks in Veracruz affected Europeans, whereas elsewhere they primarily affected indigenous people.18 When the city moved to Ulúa in 1599, it adopted Saint Sebastian as its chief patron, a saint who had been considered a protector against plague in Europe for centuries. As early as the 1610s, arriving travelers noted the incongruity of the port’s wealth and the city’s penurious built environment with the dubious moniker “ciudad de tablas.”19 By the end of the seventeenth century, sailors in Spain’s transatlantic fleet had begun calling Veracruz the “ciudad de los muertos.”20 As Veracruz acquired sobriquets labeling it a city of sickness and poverty in the fallout of its final relocation, it also underwent demographic and structural changes implicating public health. Within a year of moving to the Ulúacan Coast, Veracruz’s size doubled. Virtually all the city’s residents abandoned the earlier settlement, leaving Antigua a hollow ghost town. At the same time, the city’s new proximity to the port 18

See: AGI-MP 20, February 20, 1534. The name “ciudad de tablas” was affixed to Veracruz in Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s 1609 account of the city and later popularized in Adrian Boot’s 1615 rendering of it. See: Mota y Escobar, 53; Toussaint, 21. 20 Alain Musset, Ciudades nómadas del nuevo mundo (Mexico City: FCE, 2012), 67. 19

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attracted migrants who sought to capitalize on what promised to be a booming service economy. In 1601, a Dominican convent joined the other four religious orders that had moved there in the 1590s. Around the same time, a garrison of soldiers was permanently stationed at the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, adding to the city what was to be its largest single source of permanent residents of Spanish origin and descent.21 The rapid growth of the mainland settlement necessitated a reorganization of public-health resources. There had been a hospital on the island of San Juan de Ulúa since 1569, but its warrant was only to treat sailors of the transatlantic fleet, soldiers in the fortress, and arriving captives. On the mainland, a small convalescence home run by the Jesuits was overmatched by the city’s new population. Months after the city’s official relocation in 1599, Jesuit priest Gil Peréz wrote to Mexico’s archbishop seeking funding for “urgent” repairs to the Hospital Real de San Juan de Ulúa, which he said was needed “because of the many impoverished people who come from Spain.”22 To help with the overflow of patients and noting the old city had been mostly abandoned, in 1603 the Viceroy mandated the Hospital de San Martín in Antigua be relocated to Nueva Veracruz. Three years later, as the mainland population continued to grow, the Viceroy issued a second order commanding the Hospital Real de San Juan de Ulúa to move to the mainland “banda de Buítron” and merge with the Hospital de San Martín. The creation of a new, larger hospital on the mainland in 1606 was not intended to privilege local needs of the city over those of maritime traffic. In Antigua, the Hospital San Martín primarily served Veracruz’s residents.23 Once the two hospitals merged – rechristened the Hospital de San Juan de Montesclaros – arriving sailors and travelers were its primary clients, particularly as the hospital relied on maritime traffic for funding. Every ship in port, whether of “the fleet, which arrive from the kingdom of Castile, as well as those that come from Guinea, Cartagena, Havana, and other parts,” was required to pay monthly a fee to the hospital.24 Although the hospital’s account books are discontinuous, a sample suggests ships operating in both transatlantic and Caribbean circuits of trade

21

AGI-México 350, July 30, 1602, fs. 285r-287v. AGN-Jesuitas, vol. I–14, exp. 422, August 2, 1599, f. 1r. 23 Rodríguez-Silva and Ramírez, 133–4. 24 AGN-Hospitales, vol. 18, exp. 9, 1611, fs. 67r-68r. Similar funding schemes existed for hospitals in other port cities as well. See: Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 54–6. 22

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provided a major source of funding through the end of the seventeenth century.25 Responding to a persistent lack of health resources for the city’s own residents, in 1610, a surgeon named Pedro Ronson, a native of Venice, founded the Hospital de Nuestra Señora de Loreto. In his will, Ronson dictated that the hospital’s mission would be the treatment of “abscesses, sores, wounds, boils and other ailments concerning surgery and syphilis.” He also specified that the hospital should never be merged with Montesclaros and further that “those who serve in one hospital should not serve in the other, and the Hospital de Nuestra Señora de Loreto should not share clothes, medicine, nor criados [domestic servants] nor slaves with the Hospital de San Juan de Montesclaros.”26 Regulations on shared resources stemmed from a fear of contagion, but nonetheless symbolized the separation and even opposition of the well-being of Veracruz’s residents and sailors of the fleet: They were to be quarantined from one another. As the city’s public health infrastructure adapted to accommodate separate local and transient populations, its newfound proximity to the port caused other issues as well. Residents complained about the endless festivities and disruptions of unruly soldiers from San Juan de Ulúa. As early as 1602, the cabildo addressed the Crown directly to express their frustrations, noting that because the soldiers fell under the jurisdiction of the castellan rather than local authorities, their crimes went unpunished.27 While earlier ordinances and cedulas restricting the activities of soldiers and sailors of the transatlantic fleet had moved with the city from Antigua to Nueva Veracruz, a separate question arose as to whether those regulations could be applied to the island of San Juan de Ulúa, which fell under royal jurisdiction.28 Similarly, sailors of the transatlantic fleet, which typically docked in Veracruz between August and December of most years, were more likely to reside within the city once it was closer to the port and occasionally wreaked havoc of their own. Among other imports, sailors often arrived in port with large quantities of fireworks, gleefully setting them alight after long nights of carousing. Displays of fireworks posed “great danger

25

AGN-IV, Hospitales, 0261–004. AGN-Hospitales vol. 3, exp. 24, fs. 303r-315v. Transcribed in Rodríguez-Silva and Ramírez, 425–32. 27 AGI-México 350, July 30, 1602, fs. 285r-287v. 28 AGI-México 350, October 7, 1639, fs. 333r-333v. 26

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and risk, as any fire that might happen in the city would destroy many houses, as they are made of wood and many of them of boards taken from former ships, and so are lacquered with tar.” In 1607, a group of “artillerymen, soldiers, and men of sea who came with the fleet” set off a firework display during a night of festivities, igniting large quantities of “merchandise stored in warehouses and shops.” Sailors, like soldiers, often fell under the jurisdiction of their superiors, leaving local authorities with little recourse. After the 1607 incident, the cabildo appealed to the viceroy, who in 1610 issued a decree prohibiting the use of fireworks in the city and giving the cabildo permission to punish such acts “in the manner appropriate.”29 The city was especially vulnerable to fire in the dry winter months, when the shallow Tenoya River sometimes disappeared completely. Veracruz suffered what was perhaps its most devastating fire of the colonial era on the evening of December 5, 1618, eight years after the prohibition on fireworks. The fire began in a private residence at eleven o’clock. Within two hours, it had consumed several private residences and shops, the Dominican and Jesuit convents, and most of the city’s government buildings. Responders were able to salvage most “cajas [cashboxes] and papers” from the treasury, but by the next morning one-third of the city was burned. By command of the Viceroy, local officials undertook an investigation of the fire’s origins, which they suspected to be fireworks, but the result of the inquest was inconclusive. The precise origin of the 1618 fire was never determined, but 25 years later, Veracruz’s cabildo remained convinced of the underlying root of the city’s many problems. In a 1643 missive to the Crown, the cabildo wrote: Veracruz is the only entrance to this vast kingdom of New Spain and other neighboring provinces of the mainland, being founded only for this purpose, in a site due to your influence, where it suffers innumerable calamities.30

A generation after the city had been forced to relocate, its public officials continued to blame relocation for what it described as endless misfortune. The cabildo went on to note that, in spite of these misfortunes, the city not only served all of New Spain and its neighboring provinces, but lent critical support to “all of the presidios of the North Sea . . . such as Campeche, Havana, Florida, and Puerto Rico.”31 In many ways, their appeal was typical of the genre: complaints of suffering followed by 29 30

AHCV-Caja 1, vol. 1, October 29, 1610, fs. 21r-23v. 31 AGI-México 350, April 18, 1643, f. 341r. Ibid.

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protestations of service, a formula that we see also in the sixteenth-century correspondence of the city’s cabildo, when it was still located at Antigua. What is revelatory, however, is the particularity of the complaint and the service. In 1643, the city’s cabildo still considered forced relocation, the misfortune of its physical location, and the service that it offered as a port – both to New Spain and to the Caribbean – as an effective rhetorical strategy. Fire was not the only natural disaster that, in the eyes of local administrators, swept into Veracruz from its maritime exterior in the early modern period. Between 1648 and 1651, Veracruz was one of the many Caribbean port cities struck in what was possibly the first large-scale outbreak of yellow fever in the Americas. “In August of 48,” Gregorio Martín de Guijo described in his Diario de sucesos virreinales, “an incurable plague visited the residents of Veracruz, and shortly devastated all of the city, as the infected lasted only three or four days.”32 The disease subsided with the winter months but returned each summer for the next three years, wreaking annual havoc on non-immune residents and travelers.33 The total volume of the dead is unknown, but John McNeil has suggested that the death toll was likely higher than 20 percent of the resident population.34 Although historians and epidemiologists have tracked the origin of the outbreak to the island of Barbados in 1647, at the time, officials in New Spain believed the virus to have originated in either Puerto Rico or Santo Domingo, and that it was carried to Veracruz, Campeche, and Cuba onboard “an infected ship.”35 This suggests an understanding that diseases were not necessarily the product of the innate airs and waters of the lands they affected. At the same time, however, local authorities reacted to the outbreak with new public-works projects aimed at improving the quality of the city’s water. While attempts had been made in the past to divert the Jamapa River to the city, the yellow fever outbreak provoked greater urgency, as the city council decreed that: All vecinos, residents, homesteaders, and visitors above the age of fourteen years . . . including women, who will equally use the utility . . . must contribute for this work one jornal [a rented slave] for one month of every eight months for as

Martín de Guijo, Diario de sucesos virreinales: 1648–1664, 2 vols, ed. Manuel Romero de Terreros (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1986), 22. 33 Ibid., 168–9. 34 McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 64–6. 35 AGI-México 374, fs. 409r-410v, as quoted in García Acosta, et al., 183; Guijo, 15–22; AGN-Hospitales, vol. 18, exp. 19, fs. 120r-133v. 32

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long as it takes to complete the project, paying six reales each, four for the renting the jornal and two to feed the jornal.36

Although the effort to divert the river would once again prove unsuccessful, it demonstrates that even as authorities began to track the geographic spread of disease, they still pursued the mediation of local resources in response to it.37 In other words, while yellow fever might have come to Veracruz from the Caribbean, official actions suggested it was only able to take root because of the city’s poor temperance. In this sense, it is possible to see the operation of an official logic that attributed disease climates not only to local spaces, but to regions that shared climactic factors, allowing diseases to spread within them. Rather than understand disease as a product of Veracruz, then, it was understood as the product of the Caribbean region. While the city undertook public-works projects in response to yellow fever, its hospitals struggled to respond to the needs of the infected. As in the Caribbean ports of Cartagena and Havana, Veracruz’s hospitals relied on the service of enslaved Africans. In 1584, the Hospital Real de San Juan de Ulúa listed seven slaves among its workers: four women – Cathalina Criolla, Ysabela Cazanga, Dominguilla, and Leonor Biafara – and three men – Ambrozio, Luis, and Juanillo, the last of whom was Cathalina Criolla’s son.38 When the Hospital de San Martín moved from Antigua to the Ulúacan Coast in 1603, the porters who transported its stores were paid captives. Meanwhile, in Pedro Ronson’s 1619 will, three Africans were listed as “slaves linked to the hospital [Nuestra Señora de Loreto]”: a sawyer and carpenter named Francisco Colo; Antonío Arara, a stone mason; and an enslaved woman known only as María.39 By 1640, there were six African captives linked to Loreto: a married couple named Fernando and Antonia, who were described variably as “from the land of Angola” and “of the Angola nation”; their three American-born children, Gregorio, Antonio, and Nicolas, whose ages ranged from two to seven years; and a 70-year-old man named Sebastian Angola.40

36

AHCV-Caja 1, vol. 1, July 1652, fs. 403r-422v. Access to potable water was a common problem across the colonial world, most famously in Mexico City, but also in Caribbean ports like Havana, Cartagena, and Puerto Principe (Camagüey). On Mexico City, see: Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation of Mexico City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 61–2. On the Caribbean, see: Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 42–3. 38 AGN-Hospitales, vol. 18, exp. 2, fs. 9r-12r. 39 AGN-Hospitales, vol. 3, exp. 24, fs. 303r-315v. Transcribed in Rodríguez-Silva and Ramírez, 425–32. 40 AGN-Hopsitales, vol. 96, exp. 1, f. 1v-2r. 37

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The number of captives employed in the city’s hospitals grew during the yellow fever epidemic in the 1640s and 1650s as hospitals tried to manage the overflow of patients. At the height of the outbreak in 1648–9, the hermano mayor of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto doubled the number of enslaved hospital staff from seven to fifteen.41 Notably, eight years after the end of the regular slave trade to Veracruz, all the new hospital workers were African-born, whereas only four of the original seven had been African-born. The kind of labor enslaved staff performed is not explicitly stated and probably varied.42 Like the captives who worked in the hospital in 1619, one of the enslaved workers who came to the hospital after 1648, a man named Domingo “of the Angola nation,” was identified as a member of the city’s “guild of stone masons.” There are also slight indications that African-born hospital staff may have had experience in healing practice. For example, one of the captives who arrived during the yellow-fever outbreak was a woman named Esperanza, who was willed to the hospital by her deceased owner: Francisco Colo, himself one of the captives affixed to the hospital in 1619. Another new captive, a man named Manuel “of the Matamba nation,” was married to an enslaved woman who worked in the Hospital Real de San Juan de Ulúa.43 Did the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto seek African-born captives during Veracruz’s 1648–51 yellow fever outbreak or was it merely the easiest solution to a staffing shortage? Did captives come to the hospital as practitioners? While definitive answers to these questions are elusive, as the epidemic wore on, royal officials and European doctors in New Spain and around the Caribbean came to believe that Amerindians and people of European birth were the most vulnerable to yellow fever. People who had lived longer in the tropical lowlands of the Caribbean and Africa, they implied, were more likely to have acquired immunity to the disease.44 In 41

On captives held in 1645, see: AGN-Hospitales, vol. 96, exp. 1, f. 32v-33r. On 1648, see: f. 51v-55v. On jornales (enslaved day laborers), see: AGN-Hospitales, vol. 80, exp. 1, f. 75r. 42 Importantly, as Pablo Gómez has shown, hospitals in Caribbean ports were not strictly specialized healing spaces in the modern sense but served multiple functions as sites of religious instruction and charity. See: Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 54–6. 43 AGN-Hospitales vol. 96, exp. 1, f. 55v. 44 As Mariola Espinosa has shown, there was no medical consensus in the early modern period as to whether Africans were less susceptible to yellow fever than others, though some practitioners probably believed they were. See: Mariola Espinosa, “The Question of Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever in History and Historiography,” Social Science History vol. 38, no. 3–4 (2014): 437–53.

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this context, the hospital’s decision to respond to the epidemic by acquiring African-born captives can be understood as meaningful. To ameliorate the conditions of a disease that originated in the Caribbean and fixed to the environmental space of Gulf Coast, the hospital enlisted the labor of African men and women. In this, they placed Nueva Veracruz not only on an axis of climate and health, but also on an axis of phenotype. As we will see, they were not the first to do this, and neither would they be the last.

climate and race in the early modern period If, in the eyes of colonial officials, Veracruz’s African population appeared to suffer less from yellow fever, this appearance may have contributed to the perception that Veracruz existed in a different category of the natural world than Europe or the Mexican hinterland, a category that ostensibly “better suited” Africans and their descendants. By the 1640s, several European writers had already expressed this sentiment. While Thomas Gage focused his contempt on the “vanity” of the city’s friars – a deliberate political choice in the context of the English Civil War, when his narrative was first published – other authors conditioned their descriptions of Veracruz’s disease climate with reference to the city’s black population. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European writers who visited the city described its black population using metaphors of disease and climate. On their own, these descriptions added to the city’s reputation as a backwater. In the context of early modern European thought, they became part of a growing body of literature that assigned cities and regions to innate climates and in turn held climate to be predictive of human physical traits – including phenotype – as well as individual temperament and collective social and cultural character. By connecting Veracruz’s physical geography with the physical and behavioral makeup of its inhabitants, early modern writers entered the city into a transatlantic catalog of spaces that were, in their own logic, united across political boundaries by shared climate, demography, and culture. In September 1585, a Franciscan priest named Antonio de Ciudad Real arrived in Veracruz from Mexico City. He was traveling with the entourage of padre comisario Alonso Ponce, who was charged with reviewing the progress of the Spanish mission to “urbanize” the indigenous populations of Mesoamerica under centralized spiritual and colonial authority in newly established pueblos de indios. Unlike most of the cities and towns that Ciudad Real visited, however, Veracruz had no indigenous population. “The convent has only four or five friars,” he wrote, “and has

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guardianship of no Indian town . . . [instead,] they minister to the fleets that have in them cofradías, saying mass for them every week.” The city was home to “very few children” and almost no residents of advanced age. The people he did see he described as sickly and “discolored.” Even the Spanish migrants who arrived in the port in abundance were scarcely to be found, as most headed directly to the more salubrious highlands of central Mexico, while Ciudad Real noted that “many of those who arrive from Spain die here.” If Native Americans and Spaniards, children, and the elderly did not thrive in Veracruz, however, then there were two populations that did: “[Veracruz] is a very hot and sick land,” Ciudad Real observed, “a land where the mosquitoes reign, and even the negros, because of all the people they are the greatest in number and have almost all the freedom that they want.”45 A similar description came in December 1609, when Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, the bishop of Tlaxcala, visited Veracruz during a tour of the convents in his jurisdiction. Approaching Veracruz from its southern outskirts, Mota y Escobar first came across a small fishing village near the mouth of the Jamapa River, where the vecinos were “fishermen of the Greek nation, whose wives were negras and mulatas.”46 Though the river was too shallow to allow the passage of large ships, the water that it did provide was salubrious, leading Mota y Escobar to remark that it was “the best that there is in the world.”47 Mota y Escobar arrived in Veracruz itself on the morning of December 21, the feast of Saint Thomas. Upon his arrival, he learned that the townspeople had not prepared a reception for him, as he was accustomed to in other places. Not having arranged accommodation, city officials purchased the bishop a room in a guesthouse, where he stayed through the third day of Christmas feasts. Over the course of a week, Mota y Escobar visited all four of the city’s convents, meeting with priests and vicars as well as public officeholders and royal officials. He traveled 45

Antonio de Ciudad Real, Tratado Curioso y Docto de las Grandezas de La Nueva España, vol. 1, edited by Josefina Garcia Quintana and Victorio M. Castillo (Mexico City: UNAM, IIH, 1976), 116–18. In Slaves of the White God, Colin Palmer relates an identical description of Veracruz, sourcing it to Alonso Ponce himself. In Palmer’s translation, however, he connects the phrase “críanse en aquella cibdad pocos niños,” to the black population specifically – “even the negroes in that city have few children” – which I do not. The discrepancy likely results from our use of different editions of the same account. The edition Palmer cites is: Martín Fernández Navarrete, et al., Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vol. 57. (Madrid, 1842–1895), 188. See: Palmer, Slaves, 49, 217n52. 46 47 Mota y Escobar, 50. Ibid., 50.

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by canoe to San Juan de Ulúa, where he met with soldiers and castellans, noting with surprise the large number of “mestizos, mulattos, and blacks” who filled out the ranks of the musketeers. Throughout his visit, Mota y Escobar echoed the earlier commentary of Ciudad Real, particularly in his assessment of the city’s climatic and somatic traits, remarking that “the vecinos of this city are Spaniards all, having many black slaves and many other free-blacks. It is hot in temperature, sickly, and has many mosquitoes, as it is situated by the sea.” To this familiar analysis, Mota y Escobar added a comment on the city’s built environment, appending to Veracruz a name, “ciudad de tablas,” that would become its moniker throughout the seventeenth century and that persists in scholarship on the period: “It is a city entirely made of wood, so that the residents live in great suspicion and fear of fire, because in the past a great part of the city had already burned.”48 A final assessment along these lines came at the end of the seventeenth century, more than 100 years removed from the travels of Antonio de Ciudad Real. In 1697, the famed Italian traveler and physician Francesco Gemelli Careri passed through Veracruz during his decade-long voyage around the world. In his overland route from Mexico City, Careri traversed dense jungle in the tropical highlands to Veracruz’s west, making a brief stop at the maroon town of San Lorenzo de los Negros, of which he observed: “because it was inhabited entirely by Blacks (Neri), [it] reminded me of the land of Guinea.”49 Two days later, Careri arrived in Veracruz to find a city surrounded by sand dunes and “barren” so that all “food comes from a long distance, and life is dear.” The airs of the city were “little salubrious, particularly in summer,” being so unhealthful as to drive off “people of means, who retreat to the interior.”50 Those left behind struggled to maintain the city’s most rudimentary public works, leading Careri to aver that “those who built the city’s walls brazenly defrauded their King, as they are only six palms high.”51 Careri described a city whose central districts consisted mostly of “small wooden houses [only capable] of short duration” and a surrounding belt of shantytown “huts that are covered with leaves and held together with strips of reeds.”52 To summarize the city’s combination of “barren” landscapes, “fraudulent” public works, “bad airs” (mal’aria), and dilapidated housing, Careri concluded that “instead of being great and rich as Mexico, Veracruz is inhabited by a few poor Spaniards and most of the time only

48

Ibid., 53.

49

Careri, 138.

50

Ibid., 141.

51

Ibid.

52

Ibid., 142.

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by Blacks (Neri) and mulattoes, so that the only time one sees whites is when the Fleets arrive.”53 What do we make of the rhetorical coupling of Veracruz’s unhealthy climate and poor infrastructure with its large African population? Although all three accounts clearly imply a relationship between the physical city and the blackness of its inhabitants, none of them explicitly suggests a causal link. Is the presence of black bodies intended to be indicative of Veracruz’s hot climate and poor health, or are its hot climate and poor health meant to explain the presence of black bodies? Why does Thomas Gage, whose 1625 description of the city opened this chapter, avoid mention of the city’s black population while repeating the same observations about disease and dilapidated buildings? Conventional wisdom in the early modern period held that disease, hurricanes, and other natural disasters were the consequence of divine intervention in the natural world, and that particularly bad disasters were the product of moral failings. In other words, the sickness and poverty of the land mapped onto the spiritual and social health of its people. For instance, according to a 1632 biography of the Jesuit priest Alonso Guillén, who founded the Jesuit convent in Veracruz at the end of the sixteenth century, the city suffered from a “spiritual disease that is in this land more than elsewhere, being hot, like a plague rising and falling.”54 For Guillén, the founding of a Jesuit convent would help address both the sickness of the land and the spiritual sickness of its people, including its many Afro-descended residents. As his biographer reasoned: Veracruz . . . has greater need for doctrine than any city in New Spain, as there are so many blacks and such a diversity of foreign nationals who come here with the fleets; and those same fleets bring people who are sick and in need of our help . . .55

Without a “church of [his] own,” the biography continued, people who lived in and arrived in Veracruz would not only continue to suffer and die in their bodies, but would continue to suffer a “spiritual damage” which, because the city was home to Africans and non-Spanish Europeans, he believed was greater there than anywhere. In tying the city’s black population to the threat of spiritual and bodily harm, Guillén’s biographer again suggested a link between space and phenotype. Administrators did as well, including those who drew a distinction between the “black” space of the coast and the indigenous space of the near interior. In 1599, shortly after Veracruz had officially 53

Ibid.

54

AGN-Jesuitas, vols. I-26, exp. 1, fs. 2r-3v.

55

Ibid., f. 1r.

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relocated, Viceroy Zúñiga y Acevedo appointed a new officer tasked with inspecting overland mule trains carrying people and goods to and from San Juan de Ulúa along the newly completed roads to Xalapa and Orizaba. The job of the officer, the Viceroy wrote, was to ensure that muleteers would not “carry indios to the tierra caliente [the coast] during prohibited seasons” or “bring blacks fleeing their masters or other slaves” out of the city. The later prohibition was to protect Amerindians of the near interior from the alleged “offenses to God and injustices” of escaped captives.56 Like Guillén’s biography, the creation of a new office to police the movement of black and indigenous people signaled the separation of the coastal lowlands and the interior into different social categories: The coast was dangerous for indigenous people to visit, while Afro-descended people of the lowlands carried its dangers in their movement. If failures of spirit could be blamed for disaster, then displays of piety were believed to prevent disaster or alleviate its effects. During the yellowfever outbreak that gripped the Caribbean region from 1647 to 1651, for instance, churches and confraternities in Mexico City erected stone crosses and held flagellant processions, hoping to stave off a similar fate of “plague” that had befallen Veracruz.57 Similarly, in the aftermath of the 1618 fire that burned one-third of the city, Spanish king Philip II wrote to New Spain’s viceroy, Fernández de Córdoba, laying blame not on misfortune, but squarely on the shortcomings of the city’s residents, stating that “although fires such as this often seem to be the result of accident, they are always caused by the faults, negligence, and omissions of the residents, which is greater than the guilt of simply not being careful.” Philip went on to suggest that the fault was particular to the residents, and not to the city’s poor infrastructure, as “there are many provinces and kingdoms where . . . the buildings are made of wood.”58 At the same time, in the seventeenth century, white Europeans living in the Americas were increasingly invested in representing new-world environs in a positive light for their European counterparts. Those living in the Spanish Americas in particular faced challenges both from their Iberianborn countrymen, who questioned the legitimacy of creole rule in the Americas, and from northern Europeans who were eager to diminish Spanish dominion in the Gulf-Caribbean region. They did so both through militaristic predation of Spanish territory and through rhetoric that challenged the legitimacy and efficaciousness of Spanish rule, suggesting that 56 58

57 AGN-IV, Indios 1439–020. Guijo, 15. AHCV-Caja 1, vol. 1, July 14, 1620, fs. 34r-35r.

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the depopulation and poverty of the Caribbean was the product of Spanish failure. In countering these claims, Spanish creoles promoted the favorability of American climates where they could reasonably do so. Representing American climates as healthy, however, required a qualification regarding indigenous and African populations. If New World conditions truly produced favorable humors, then, in Hippocratic-Galenic logic, it should follow that Indian and African bodies that were indigenous to the New World should be subject to the same humors. In his famous article, “New World, New Stars,” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra argued that this contradiction generated the first articulation of “modern forms of racism.”59 To simultaneously protect their own claims of dominion against their European detractors and to legitimate their subjugation of non-white people, “learned white creoles” created a system of classification that differentiated white bodies from their non-white counterparts. There were some regions and territories – like Veracruz – where white creoles did not feel they could reasonably claim the land, air, and water produced good humors. In these places, the qualification that Africans were essentially different from Europeans worked in reverse: Afrodescended people could endure the extreme environments of places like Veracruz, where European-descended people could not. By emphasizing the connection between Veracruz’s environment and the skin color of its inhabitants, seventeenth-century writers not only argued the city and its people should be classified separately from the Mexican interior, but also justified the city’s poverty by leaning on racialized understandings of blackness as innately suited to impoverished tropical landscapes. In Gage’s account, which does not mention Veracruz’s African population, the role of moral inferior is inhabited instead by the city’s Spanish friar, whom Gage described uncharitably as incurious, vain, and avaricious. Unlike other accounts reviewed here, Gage’s narrative is not structured to absolve Spaniards and white creoles of Veracruz’s natural ills, but to implicate them specifically. This is because he wrote for an English-speaking audience and published his account in 1648 at the height of the English Civil War. By that time, he was a silent convert to

59

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” AHR 104, no. 1 (1999): 33–68. See also: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 64–95.

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Protestantism and a supporter of Oliver Cromwell. As one of the few Englishmen with extensive experience in New Spain, he plied his knowledge to gain Cromwell’s favor, becoming a proponent of Cromwell’s “Western Design” (the English strategy to wrest the Indies from Spain), which he hoped would lead to the “ruining and utter fall of Romish Babylon, and to the conversion of those poore and simple Indians.”60 While Gage described Spanish lethargy and vanity across New Spain, his depiction of Veracruz captures his exaggeration of those traits at their most extreme. His choice to leave the city’s African population out of his tale can be understood as a deliberate omission designed to link Spanish governance more strongly to Veracruz’s alleged decrepitude. As other writers used Veracruz’s black population to distance Spaniards and white creoles from the city’s faults, Gage used their absence to lay those faults at the feet of the Spanish Catholic empire. If early modern Europeans indexed Veracruz by its reputation for poor health and its social milieu (whether black or Catholic), how did the city’s own residents classify its natural and social world? Did the city’s African and Afro-descended residents also understand it to be part of a socioenvironmental system specific to the Caribbean, or did they have other ways of understanding Veracruz’s environmental space? Pablo Gómez has argued that African and Afro-descended practitioners did taxonomize Caribbean spaces as distinct from those of mainland centers. He attributes this largely to the social dynamics of the Caribbean itself, arguing a proportionally large black population allowed a greater diversity of healing practices, and thus the development of an understanding of the natural world in the Caribbean that was less possible in Mexico City or Lima, where colonial authorities restricted black and indigenous medicine more assiduously.61 While this strikes me as an appropriate explanation, it is not precisely what I argue here. Instead, I argue the explicit climatic division of Veracruz into Caribbean spaces by European authors and colonial administrators laid the groundwork for social dynamics that followed. This is not to deprive Africans and their descendants of the agency inherent in defining the natural and social world they inhabited. Rather, it is to explain the environmental forces that 60

John Thurloe, A Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, esq., vol. 3, edited by Thomas Birch (London, 1742), 61. As quoted in: David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” The Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 538. See also: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” WMQ 45, no. 1 (1988): 70–99. 61 Gómez, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge,” 386–7.

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contributed to the construction of a social space that Veracruz’s inhabitants, as we will see in Part II of this book, made their own.

*** After twelve years traveling New Spain and Guatemala, in 1637, Thomas Gage resolved to abandon his post at the Dominican convent in Petapa and return to England. Recalling the difficulty of his passage through Veracruz, he traveled south to the province of Cartago, Costa Rica, where he boarded a ship for Cartagena. After eight days in Cartagena, he traveled with the South American fleet to Havana, where it awaited rendezvous with the fleet from New Spain for the return voyage across the Atlantic.62 In Havana, Gage “chanced . . . to have occasion to take a little physic . . . and thereby learned what before I never knew . . . the diet which on such a day the best physicians of Havana prescribe unto their patients.” Much to Gage’s surprise, his Havana physician “left order that I should have a piece of roasted pork,” which Gage understood to be a diet “contrary to that day’s extremity.” On rejecting this advice, the physician replied, “what pork might work upon man’s body in other nations, it worked not there, but the contrary.”63 As in Veracruz, Gage related much about the “lucre” of the people of Cartagena and the “dunghill” of Havana, but little about the Afrodescended populations of either city.64 His description of the “contrary” tendencies of consumption in Havana, however, once again emphasized the anomalous place of Caribbean environments within European concepts of nature, climate, and the body. Similarly, when Careri visited the “miserable” city of Havana at the end of the seventeenth century, he found that “although the climate is temperate, wheat has not flourished for many years,” going on to describe how local diets were supplemented by domestic crops like yucca.65 Unlike Gage, Careri once again tied Havana’s consumption patterns to the prevalence of its black population, suggesting the entanglement of “contrary” foods, Caribbean climates, and phenotype. Just as traveler descriptions of heat and mosquitoes found their way into administrative correspondence in Veracruz, the question of Caribbean food and its effect on the body also entered official discourse. In 1595, for example, the audiencia of Santo Domingo

62

Gage, 333–75.

63

Ibid., 373.

64

Ibid., 372, 373.

65

Careri, 293–4.

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complained to the Crown about a lack of supply ships from Spain, claiming: In this island . . . no grain nor wine nor oil is harvested, and if these are not supplied from Spain [it will] risk the lives of people born and raised in Spain, who, accustomed to eating bread and drinking wine, upon lacking this . . . come to die, for the cassava, which is a root without nourishment at all, does not substitute for the lack of bread, nor does water substitute for wine.66

Even when climates were deemed temperate and lands fertile for European agriculture, those crops seemed to fail. For example, in 1611, the Abbott of Jamaica, Bernardo de Balbuena, claimed that “although it is tierra caliente, it is less so and more temperate than any of the neighboring islands and lands, fertile and suitable for growing all the seeds and grains cultivated in Spain, but its people are slothful, lazy, and opposed to working.”67 Eight years earlier, in 1604, Jamaica’s procurator had also written to the Crown complaining about the failure of the island’s crops, blaming not slothfulness, but drought and a lack of African captives.68 Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, a succession of governors reported the island’s fertility went to waste, as a small population suffered under poverty and pestilence. In 1581, governor Juan de Cespedes claimed that Puerto Rico’s fertility was untapped as its impoverished residents “fled” to the mainland.69 Later, in 1597, Antonio Mosquera agreed with his predecessor about the island’s potential, but claimed it could not be realized because it was “full of pestilence . . . and the pestilence is spreading with it much famine.”70 Two years later, in 1599, one of Mosquera’s successors, Alonso de Mercado, complained that he arrived to find the island “ill-conditioned, sick, and naked.” Each governor’s complaint was attended with a request repeated across the early modern Spanish Caribbean: send more African captives. Like Veracruz’s Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto, when faced with pestilence, drought, and shrinking Spanish populations, Caribbean administrators sought captive African labor. Extended commentaries on heat and mosquitoes in Veracruz do not perfectly match extended commentaries on food, agriculture, and 66

AGI-SD 51, May 2, 1595, f. 26r-27v. AGI-SD 155, July 14, 1611, f. 1r. See also: Francisco Morales Padrón, Jamaica Española (Seville: EEHA, 1952), 182. 68 69 AGI-SD 177, April 23, 1604. AGI-SD 155, August 1581. 70 AGI-SD 155, June 13, 1597. 67

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pestilence in Havana, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Likewise, neither do the environments of disparate Caribbean locales perfectly match the environment of Veracruz, even as certain phenomena – hurricanes and yellow fever – connected them physically. What united Veracruz and the Caribbean was not perfect environmental symmetry, but the tendency of early modern observers to claim a common set of environmental problems: populations “lost” to healthier places in the mainland interior; scarcity of resources; vulnerability to disease and disaster; and, above all, airs, waters, and foods that did not well sustain Spanish populations or diets, but might sustain Africans.

conclusion On a long-enough scale, every city, town, and village experiences environmental calamity. In the seventeenth century, many parts of the world seemed to be in a perpetual state of environmental crisis. The “Little Ice Age” froze rivers and canals across the northern hemisphere, produced blizzards in Istanbul, and prolonged droughts in Mesoamerica, northern China, Senegambia, and throughout the Mediterranean.71 In southern Spain, torrential rainfalls raised the Guadalquivir above its banks and inundated Seville at least four times during the seventeenth century. The worst of these floods occurred in 1649 – the same year as the Caribbean’s yellow-fever outbreak – and coincided with an epidemic of bubonic plague across Andalusia that lasted from 1647 to 1652. Combined, the flood and the plague claimed the lives of over 60,000 people in Seville alone, nearly half of the city’s total population.72 In his global history of seventeenth-century crisis, Geoffrey Parker quotes a Spanish tract called Nicandro, written in 1643: “Sometimes Providence condemns the world with universal and evident calamities . . . This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world.”73 What is significant in the case of Veracruz is not calamity, but the extent to which disease and disaster became one of the city’s defining

71

Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 3–25. 72 Antonio Domínguez Ortíz, Historia de Sevilla: la Sevilla del siglo XVII (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1984), 74. 73 John Huxtable Elliott and José F. de la Peña, eds., Memoriales y cartas del conde-duque de Olivares, vol. 2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1981), 276; Parker, xxi.

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characteristics. The fires and diseases that befell Veracruz did not kill as many people or cause as much destruction as other disasters, but environmental struggle was one of the few perspectives through which early modern Europeans understood the city. As Europeans began to incorporate spaces in Africa, Asia, and America into earlier models of the climatic division of the world, Veracruz’s reputation for disease and harsh climate became entangled with the prominence of its black population. As creole elites were increasingly beset by questions of their fitness to rule in the Americas, they began to redefine the categories of the natural world in such a way as to separate Veracruz from the more temperate lands of the Mexican interior, placing it instead into a social and cultural space typified by tropical climates and African descent.

3 Imperial Designs and Regional Systems

In the seventeenth century, the port cities of the Caribbean and the mainland littoral were stitched together both by similar experiences of climate and disease, and by the real and imagined descriptions of European travelers and colonial administrators. The same cities were stitched together through relationships of trade. Like port cities elsewhere, Caribbean ports shared certain aspects of maritime culture: shipyards, fortresses, and custom houses; sailors, migrants, porters, and merchants; inns and taverns.1 More than these typological similarities, Caribbean ports were bound by an intensity of material exchange with one another. For example, as we will see, in Veracruz and Havana, regional shipping accounted for roughly 60–70 percent of all traffic into and out of port. On a yearly basis, more than 100 ships traveled between Veracruz and regional ports, carrying finished goods, raw materials, food, migrants, and news from around the Caribbean. If environments influenced the way male European writers understood, categorized, and troped Caribbean spaces, trade formed a tangible link between them and became the basis for a deep social and cultural affinity. While it should come as no surprise that shipping played a central role in the economy and society of Caribbean port cities, the importance of regional exchanges between Caribbean and Gulf Coast ports is not always 1

On port city “mirroring,” see: Patrick O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500– 1900 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 11. See also: Jacob M. Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974). Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

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elucidated. Particularly for the larger ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena, transatlantic trade tends to dominate our understanding of shipping economies. As hubs of the transatlantic silver fleets (the carrera de indias or the flota), those ports welcomed the arrival of dozens of transatlantic vessels on an almost annual basis. Collectively, oceangoing naos and caravels delivered and carried off significantly more merchandise and migrants and paid more import and export taxes than the smaller barcos, pataches, and balandras of regional circuits. But regional vessels were greater in number and moved between Gulf-Caribbean ports with more frequency than transatlantic ships did, sometimes making multiple tours of the regional circuit in a single year. Although the frequency of regional shipping is often understood as a byproduct of transatlantic traffic (and sometimes was), as we will see, it followed its own patterns and the proximity it fostered operated independently of transatlantic trade. By highlighting Veracruz’s trade relationships with the broader Caribbean, we can see the emergence of a coherent regional system of material exchange. By placing those relationships alongside the city’s transatlantic trade, we can see how trade in the Mexican-Caribbean world – while not separate from the larger transatlantic circuit of which it was a part – outlined a distinct region within the Atlantic world. This chapter does both, drawing from import and export duties (almojarifazgo) assessed primarily in Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Using each city’s tax record, I describe the major routes and ports of both regional and transatlantic shipping. Rather than focus exclusively on the quantity and value of merchandise, I emphasize frequency, seasonality, and other measures of shipping that allow us to step back from our impulse to center the largest trade relationships. Indexing trade by tonnage and value alone tends to leave us with a perspective of material exchanges and relationships as they were viewed by imperial architects. Spain’s transatlantic trade was designed to extract large quantities of highvalue goods. Even if it did not always operate perfectly according to design, asking which trade relationships were largest means asking which were designed and controlled (or at least, meant to be controlled) in metropolitan centers. Refocusing on trade of smaller scale, we can elevate relationships that were not designed or controlled nearly as assiduously, but nonetheless influenced social, cultural, and economic life in port cities. Importantly, I classify traffic between Veracruz and other coastal Mexican ports as part of the Caribbean circuit, rather than a distinct

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coastal circuit. This is because tax collectors typically only recorded a vessel’s most recent port of call (upon arrival) or proximate destination (upon departure), conflating coastal and Caribbean traffic. Ships sailing to Veracruz from the Caribbean Islands and South America, for example, followed the coast west and north, passing Campeche, Tabasco, and Coatzacoalcos before reaching Veracruz. Many ships stopped in one of those earlier ports and, upon arrival in Veracruz, would be recorded as a ship “from” a coastal provenance rather than the Caribbean or South America. Likewise, ships sailing from Veracruz to Havana followed the coast north before turning east, passing Tampico.2 While Veracruz’s exchanges with other Mexican ports could fairly be classed as “coastal,” defining them as “Caribbean” allows us to see coastal routes as an integral part of a larger regional circuit. The sheer volume of ships that passed between Veracruz and other Mexican ports suggests we should see coastal relationships as an especially dense subset of regional shipping. Still, if we separate out coastal traffic, we not only suppress the number of exchanges between Veracruz and other Caribbean ports that traveled through Campeche, Tabasco, or Tampico, but we also represent trade relationships as more bounded and discrete than they were. The chapter’s first section offers an overview of transatlantic trade, showing why it has been the central concern of earlier studies of Caribbean commerce. The importance of the transatlantic fleet should not be understated. As we will see, between 25 percent and 33 percent of all ships that entered Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena were transatlantic vessels, and taxes on transatlantic shipping constituted more than 80 percent of all shipping tariffs raised in port treasuries. Because the same ports also functioned as transshipment centers, a substantial portion of regional shipping spun out of (or into) transatlantic trade, meaning the importance of transatlantic traffic was greater even than data suggests. At the same time, regional shipping registered a deceptively large impact on Veracruz’s society and culture and, I argue, was qualitatively different than transatlantic trade. In the second section, I highlight the

2

We know this because in rare years, Veracruz’s tax collectors made a special effort to record interstitial ports, opting to specify a ship had come “from Havana with a stop in Campeche” or that it left “for Havana by Tampico.” We also know this because, over the course of the entire period of study, there is a consistent imbalance in the number of arrivals “from” and departures “to” coastal Mexican ports. For example, between 1600 and 1622, 776 ships “from” Campeche paid import taxes in Veracruz, but only 214 ships departed Veracruz for Campeche. Nearly identical imbalances exist in Veracruz’s exchanges with Tabasco and Coatzacoalcos and, in the other direction, with Tampico and Havana.

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frequency and seasonality of shipping to show that inter-Caribbean trade was both more frequent and more regular than transatlantic trade. Similarly, an examination of “soft” factors like vessel types, tax rates, and types of merchandise exchanged in each corridor reinforces this distinction, while also providing alternate ways of thinking about trade and its meanings. The social meanings of trade are especially evident in the captains and crews of the Caribbean and transatlantic circuits. As we have already seen, Veracruz’s residents had a strained relationship with the sailors of the transatlantic fleet, whom municipal officials described as unruly and disruptive.3 Sailors in regional circuits, however, moved more frequently between Caribbean ports and were more likely to be American-born than transatlantic sailors, allowing them opportunities to foster social connections in the communities they visited. My intervention follows a recent tendency in Caribbean and Atlantic scholarship to highlight regional trade relationships “that had very little to do with the metropolis, and reached well beyond the confines of empire.”4 Scholars have used commercial connections between cities like Boston and Kingston, Caracas and Curaçao, Santa Marta and Saint Croix, and Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo to demonstrate the ways in which American ports formed economic, social, political, and cultural bonds that were either extraneous or

3

See also: Pablo Emilia Pérez-Mallaína Bueno, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, translated by Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); J.L. Sariego del Castillo, De Sevilla a Veracruz: Historia de la Marina Española en la America Septentrional y Pacifico (Seville: Gráficas del Sur, 1975). 4 Mark Peterson and Trevor Burnard, “Trade, War, and Imperial Expansion in the Urban British Atlantic: Boston and Kingston, 1740–1765,” Paper Presented at Port Cities, 1500– 1800 Conference, November 5–7, 2015. See also: Ramon Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas: introducción al studio del contrabando en la provincia de Venezuela en tiempos de la Compania guipuzcoana, 1730–1780 (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1993); Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 23–84; Fabrício Prado, Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Río de la Plata (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015), 58–82; Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 33–87; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade; Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Alex Borucki, “Trans-Imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526–1811,” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 29–54; Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 65–80 and passim.

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explicitly opposed to imperial designs.5 In Latin America specifically, the bulk of this scholarship is concentrated on the transimperial smuggling circuits that operated between the northern coast of South America and the Caribbean Islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing connections between contraband trade and comercio libre, Ernesto Bassi, Jesse Cromwell, Linda Rupert, and others have argued that the Caribbean “was turning into a de facto free trade area” by the end of the eighteenth century, bypassing imperial restrictions on trade.6 Through trade, Caribbean societies – and port cities in particular – fostered novel connections to one another, the consequences of which were the development of a human geography that was “more attuned to local physical, economic, and cultural realities than to imperial imaginings” and the emergence of a coherent regional consciousness.7 One of the great innovations of this scholarship has been its reorientation of Caribbean and Latin American history away from a traditional focus on hinterland plantations and rural agriculture and towards the ways in which largely free populations (which Cromwell has called “sinew populations”) interacted and created networks across geographic and imperial boundaries.8 In so doing, however, this scholarship often looks forward to the role contraband trade in the independence movements of the nineteenth century.9 Revising an older scholarship that emphasizes On Boston and Kingston, see: Peterson and Burnard, “Trade, War, and Imperial Expansion in the Urban British Atlantic.” On Caracas and Curaçao: Ramon Aizpurua, Curazao y la costa de Caracas: introducción al estudio del contrabando en la provincia de Venezuela en tiempos de la Compañía guipuzcoana, 1730–1780 (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1993). On Santa Marta and Saint Croix: Bassi, Aqueous Territory, 58–9. On Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo: Fabrício Prado, “Trans-Imperial Networks in the Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy: The Rio de Janeiro-Montevideo Connection, 1778–1805,” TAM 73, no. 2 (2016): 211–36. 6 Bassi, Aqueous Territory, 26. 7 Linda M. Rupert, “Contraband Trade and the Shaping of Colonial Societies in Curaçao and Tierra Firme, Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 48. 8 Jesse Cromwell, “More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans-Imperial Caribbean and its Sinew Populations,” History Compass 12, no. 10 (2014): 770–83. 9 Many studies focus specifically on Veracruz’s role in transimperial trade in the late colonial period. See: Jackie R. Booker, “The Veracruz Merchant Community in Late Bourbon Mexico: A Preliminary Portrait, 1770–1810,” TAM 45, no. 2 (1988): 187–99; Jackie R. Booker, Veracruz Merchants, 1770–1889: A Mercantile Elite in Late Bourbon and Early Independent Mexico (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Robert Sidney Smith, “Shipping in the Port of Veracruz, 1790–1821,” HAHR 23, no. 1 (1943): 5–20; Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach, “An Atlantic Silver Entrepôt: Vera Cruz and the House of Gordon and Murphy,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: 5

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rural rebellions as the “precursors” to independence, the transimperial school argues that trade across the Caribbean’s political borders – often illegal, but rarely suppressed – fed into sentiments of regional identity and rebellion against Spanish rule following in part from attempts to crack down on contraband activity.10 Transimperial relationships are often rightly considered to be specific to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Wim Klooster has noted, although contraband had always been a part of the Caribbean commercial universe, it made a “quantitative leap” at the end of the seventeenth century. By implication, only then did it take on the region-forming qualities transimperial historians have identified in the port cities and littoral spaces that it touched.11 If we look back to the seventeenth century, we may not find the same kind of transimperial relationships elucidated by the scholars cited above, but we might find an earlier precedent for Caribbean networks operating in ways tangential to metropolitan concerns. The regional trade considered in this chapter occurred largely within the Spanish empire, but often across jurisdictions. Smaller in value than transatlantic trade, it was also more frequent and less subject to imperial oversight. Just as the emergence of large-scale contraband trading at the end of the Habsburg period may have evoked a regional consciousness opposed to imperial designs, earlier patterns of trade between islands and mainland similarly integrated disparate spaces into a cohesive regional construct, which I call Mexican-Caribbean. The Mexican-Caribbean united port cities in relationships of trade that operated parallel to imperial administration. As imperial officials created and regulated a transatlantic system of exchange to serve the goals of empire, people in Mexico and the Caribbean built bonds with one another to serve local needs.12 These bonds became the foundations for the

University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 149–67; Javier Ortiz de la Tabla Ducasse, Comercio exterior de Veracruz, 1778–1821: Crisis de dependencia (Seville: EEHA, 1978). 10 Jeremy Adelman has made a similar argument about the role of trade in the development of a political language of sovereignty in the decades before the Spanish American Wars of Independence. See: Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 153–62. 11 Wim Klooster, “Between Habsburg Neglect and Bourbon Assertiveness: Hispano–Dutch Relations in the New World, 1650–1750,” in España y las 17 provincias del Países Bajos: una revisión historiográfica (XVI-XVIII) vol. 2, edited by Manuel Herrero Sánchez and Ana Crespo Solana (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2002), 703–18. See also: Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 180–1. 12 Here I borrow from John Leddy Phelan’s classic argument that Habsburg bureaucrats and “central authorities” strategically devised a governing system of “ambiguity and

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development of similar social and cultural institutions. My concept of the Mexican-Caribbean builds on Johanna von Grafenstein’s pathbreaking work on the region that she has called the Gulf-Caribbean (golfo-caribe) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.13 As von Grafenstein defines it, the Gulf-Caribbean was a space in the greater Caribbean, a “sub-region of the Atlantic,” in which similar historical processes and productive industries “imprinted common [sociocultural] characteristics.” As I define it, the Mexican-Caribbean was also a subregion of the Atlantic, but its foundations – in intracaribbean trade between Spanish colonies, rather than the transimperial context of the eighteenth century – examined in this chapter, and its sociocultural functions, examined in subsequent chapters, differed in important ways from what came later.

the impact of transatlantic shipping While it is generally accepted Caribbean ports maintained active trade relationships with one another throughout the colonial period, those exchanges are often de-emphasized within historiographical traditions that privilege the transatlantic fleet.14 For the regional trade in Havana, Cartagena, and Veracruz, for instance, all three cities maintained more conflicting standards” creating a “chasm between the law and its observance in the Spanish empire.” In the absence of political and material power to apply strict standards, Habsburg administrators turned to a policy of salutary neglect, leading to the emergence of unplanned and unintended relationships between colonial jurisdictions. In the context of trade, this system has been revealed in relief in Michel Bertrand’s examination of the professionalization of officials of the royal treasury in Veracruz from the late seventeenth century to the Bourbon period. See: John Leddy Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1960): 47–65; Michael C. Scardaville, “(Habsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order: State Authority, Popular Unrest, and the Criminal Justice System in Bourbon Mexico City,” TAM 50, no. 4 (1994): 501–25; Michel Bertrand, “Los hombres de la Real Hacienda en Veracruz: ¿burócratas o empresarios?” in La Casa de la Contratación y la navegación entre España y las Indias, edited by Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Antonio Acosta Rodríguez, Adolfo Luis González Rodríguez (Seville: CSISC, Universidad de Sevilla, 2004), 863–83. 13 von Grafenstein, El Golfo-Caribe, 7–9. See also: von Grafenstein, Nueva España en el Circuncaribe. 14 On the relationship between Havana and Veracruz, see: Francisco Pérez Guzmán, “Veracruz y La Habana en la concepción estratégica del Imperio español en América,” Sotavento 3, no. 6 (1999): 9–17; García Díaz and Guerra Vilaboy, eds., La Habana/ Veracruz; Muñoz Mata, ed., México y el Caribe. The historiographical tradition that privileges transatlantic exchanges is largely driven by scholarly interest in the role of American silver in early modern global trade and in the development of capitalism. While these topics are undoubtedly worthy of the attention they have received, they tend to overshadow regional trades not seen as vital to the process of global economic

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profitable and, occasionally, more trafficked commercial relationships with metropolitan and viceregal centers like Mexico City and Seville than they did with any individual Caribbean port.15 Moreover, because Havana, Cartagena, and Veracruz all served as designated ports of transatlantic trade, it is difficult to separate out smaller regional trade from that service. As the primary hubs of the fleet system, all three cities served as transshipment points, meaning their relationships with smaller regional circuits can be reasonably understood as the byproduct of transatlantic exchanges, rather than their own entities.16 Alejandro de la Fuente demonstrates the scope and intricacy of these connections in his study of sixteenth-century Havana, identifying three overlapping circuits of trade that converged in the city: transatlantic, intercolonial, and coastal. Arguing these trades were “mutually dependent,” he shows how all three circuits came together to form one large complex commercial system.17 The success or failure of each circuit relied

development. See: C.H. Haring, Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918); Chaunu and Chaunu; Antonio García-Baquero González, Cádiz y el Atlántico (1717–1778): el comercio colonial español bajo el monopolio gaditano (Seville: EEHA-CSIC, 1976); Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 54–80; Carla Rahn Phillips, “The Growth and Composition of Trade in the Iberian Empires, 1450–1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, edited by James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 34–101; Jiménez Codinach, “An Atlantic Silver Entrepôt”; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–21; Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade and War; Boyer, “Mexico in the Seventeenth Century,” 455–78; Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 15 On Veracruz’s emplacement in landward and seaward networks, see: Ita Rubio, Lourdes de, ed. Organización del espacio en el México colonial: puertos, ciudades y caminos (Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico: IIH, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo; Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 2012), 97–206 and passim. 16 The other two ports that served as the principal hosts of the Spanish fleet were Cartagena and Portobelo (Nombre de Dios). Together, these four cities are sometimes referred to as the “Sistema Antonelli,” after the military engineer Bautista Antonelli, who, in the late sixteenth century, was commissioned to design fortifications in each of them. I prefer this notation, since referring to the transatlantic convoy simply as the “fleet system” directs our focus to the ships themselves, which can lead us to forget that land-based fortifications were also an integral part of the convoy system. See: García de León, Tierra adentro, 470– 83. 17 De la Fuente, with García del Pino and Iglesias Delgado, 11–50. See also: Leví Marrero, Cuba, economía y sociedad, 8 vols. (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: San Juan, 1972). De la Fuente and García del Pino’s emphasis on the intercolonial trade was even stronger in an

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upon that of the others. Regional vessels took advantage of the expansion of local markets while the fleet was in port, and the fleet in turn relied on regional trade for provisioning before and after sixty-day voyages across the Atlantic. Though the three circuits operated independently of one another in terms of commodities, vessels, and financing, they all responded to the same stimuli and, ostensibly, in pursuit of the same goals. Although all three of the circuits relied on one another, the transatlantic fleet emerges in the historical imagination as the circuit with the most influence on local society. With its larger grander oceangoing vessels, the fleet arrived in force at roughly the same time each year – late summer in Veracruz and Cartagena and early spring in Havana – filling the arrival port with hundreds or even thousands of sailors and migrants, delivering news and merchandise, and drawing greater numbers of locals into the port than were there at any other time of the year.18 In some years, the fleet’s arrival was accompanied by festivals, displays of fireworks, and bull runs.19 In Veracruz, where there was a comparatively small service sector, the overflow was so large that it could spill into the interior, as sailors filled inns and guesthouses as far away as Puebla, even as they were ostensibly required to stay in the port in case of urgent need. In addition to the masses of free people who flocked to Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena for annual market fares, the arrival of the fleets brought legions of enslaved African laborers from nearby plantations, rented out by their enslavers as jornales in response to the increased demand for urban labor.20 Given the combined effect of the ships, their crews and cargoes, and the flood of travelers from nearby towns and haciendas, the arrival of the fleet transformed the cities it visited, often for months at a time. earlier article: Alejandro de la Fuente and César García del Pino, “Havana and the Fleet System: Trade and Growth in the Periphery of the Spanish Empire, 1550–1610,” Colonial Latin American Review 5, no. 1 (1996): 95–116. 18 On market fairs, see: Manuel Carrera Stampa, “Las ferias novohispanas,” Historia Mexicana 2, no. 3 (1953): 319–42; Alfredo Castillero Calvo, “La carrera, el monopolio, y las ferias del trópico,” in Historia general de América Latina (Madrid: Trotta, 1999), 75–124; Matilde Souto Mantecón, “Las ferias de flota de Xalapa: una cuestión silenciada por los escritores de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII,” in Historia del Pensamiento Económico. Testimonios, proyectos, y polémicas, edited by José María Luis Mora (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009). 19 ANC-Indiferente, vol. 1456a, February 1, 1621. 20 See: De la Fuenta, with García del Pino and Iglesias Delgado, 154–6; Antonio García de León, “Economía política de la esclavitud en la Nueva España: un ensayo de aproximación general,” Historias, no. 77 (2010): 51; Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita, Pardos, Mulatos y Libertos: Sexto Encuentro de Afromexicanistas (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 2001), 118.

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The fleet not only projected an image of its importance, but it also left behind a record of itself in terms of its frequency and economic impact.21 For example, in a typical taxation period – in this case, between September 1603 and November 1604 – twenty-four ships (naos) of the fleet arrived in Veracruz.22 It was the second arrival of the fleet within a fourteen-month tax cycle – a period during which 133 registered vessels arrived and paid taxes in the port.23 Of those, a total of 38 belonged to the transatlantic silver fleet, while seven more arrived from ports in Castile (three), the Canary Islands (two), and Angola (two). Together, these 45 arrivals from ports across the Atlantic constituted just over 30 percent of all traffic into the port. As a portion of taxation, the prevalence of transatlantic trade was even more pronounced. The fleet accounted for 85 percent of all import and export duties assigned in Veracruz, and roughly half of all taxes raised in the city, from any source, during the period of taxation.24 While these numbers vary from year to year, they are typical of the first half of the seventeenth century. Transatlantic traffic regularly represented between 20 percent and 40 percent of all ships in Veracruz (see Table 3.1).25 Prior to 1630, transatlantic shipping also accounted for 53 percent of all money remitted into Veracruz’s treasury. Although the Emiliano Gil Blanco has done extensive work on the financial impact of shipping in Veracruz, covering largely the same years examined here. See: Emiliano Gil Blanco, “El Almojarifazgo como Indice de Interpretacion del Comercio del Puerto de Veracruz, 1600–1622,” Estudios de Historia Social y Económica de América 2 (1986): 89–119; Emiliano Gil Blanco, “La fiscalidad como fuente de información del comercio y el tráfico colonial (1573–1650): el almojarifazgo de la Caja Real de Veracruz,” América Latina en la Historia Económica 25, no. 3 (2018): 133–59; Emiliano Gil Blanco, “The Financing of Spanish Colonial Commerce in America: The Almojarifazgo and the Port of Veracruz,” in Perspectives on Economic Development: Public Policy, Culture, and Economic Development, edited by Ryan Merlin Yonk and Vito Bobek (London: IntechOpen, 2020), 145–62; Emiliano Gil Blanco, “El Tráfico del Puerto de Veracruz en 1572,” Estudios de Historia Social y Económica de América 6 (1990): 19–26. 22 AGI-Contaduría 882, pza. 6, September 1603 to November 1604; AGI-México 26, n. 51, May 16, 1605; José Manuel Azcona Pastor, Possible Paradises: Basque Emigration to Latin America (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004), 79. 23 To be registered meant that the vessel was recorded in the tax records of the contaduría. Usually, this also means the ship paid tax into the real hacienda, but ships that were assigned no taxes also appear in the register. Of course, many ships were likely unrecorded, some of which (but not all) were contraband. 24 AGI-Contaduría 882, pza. 6; John J. TePaske and Herbert S. Klein, Ingresos y egresos de la Real Hacienda de Nueva España (Mexico City: INAH, 1986). 25 This data excludes traffic of the transatlantic slave trade, which is considered in detail in the following chapter. Slave ships typically paid a separate tax called “derechos de esclavos,” but occasionally appear in records of almojarifazgo. 21

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century t a b l e 3 . 1 Veracruz shipping traffic, 1600–1622 Circuit

No. of ships

% of ships

Transatlantic Atlantic Islands Castile Circum-Caribbean Cartagena Florida Havana Puerto Rico Santo Domingo Other Coastal Mexico Campeche Coatzacoalcos Tabasco Other Unknown Total

1,007 115 892 758 150 31 462 44 39 32 1,451 990 51 378 32 63 3,279

30.7 3.5 27.2 23.1 4.6 1 14.1 1.3 1.2 1 44.3 30.2 1.6 11.5 1 1.9 100

Source: AGI-Contaduría 882, pzas. 1–8; AGI-Contaduría 883, pzas. 1–12, 1613–22.

overall portion of tax revenue attributed to shipping fell significantly after 1630 – when changes to the tax code expanded the catch-all extraordinario tax, which applied to any activity deemed productive – transatlantic shipping remained a consistent source of income, constituting 84 percent of all shipping tariff revenue from 1590 to the end of the seventeenth century (see Table 3.2). In Havana and Cartagena, the other two major nodes of the transatlantic fleet, a similar pattern emerged. According to Isabelo Macías Dominguez, between 1602 and 1650, 44 percent of all ships paying tax on arrival and departure in Havana were transatlantic, while such vessels accounted for 80 percent of almojarifazgo (see Table 3.3). Similarly, while comparable data on the total number of ships that arrived in and departed from Cartagena is not currently available, between 1600 and 1620, 77 percent of Cartagena’s almojarifazgo came from transatlantic shipping (see Table 3.4). In all three cities, then, transatlantic traffic was responsible for between 77 percent and 82 percent of all shipping tariffs.

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t a b l e 3 . 2 Veracruz almojarifazgo, 1590–1700 Region

Amount (million reales)

% shipping tax

% all tax

Transatlantic Navíos sueltos Unspecified Total

6.88 1.34 0.16 8.38

82 16 2 100

12 2.3 0.2 14.5

Source: Herbert S. Klein and John J. TePaske, Las Cajas de Real Hacienda de la América Española. Siglos XVI a principios del XIX, CD-ROM (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, INAH, FE-UNAM, 2004).

tabl e 3 .3 Havana shipping traffic, 1602–1650 Region

No. of ships

Transatlantic 958 Atlantic 237 Islands Castile 721 Circum1,351 Caribbean Campeche 450 Veracruz 789 Other 112 Total 2,309

% of ships

Almojarifazgo (million pesos)

% of all almojarifazgo

41 10

54.3 17

80 25

31 59

37.3 13.8

55 20

20 34 5 –

2.1 11.2 0.5 68.1

3 16 1 –

Source: Isabelo Macías Domínguez, Cuba en la primera mitad del siglo XVII (Seville: EEHA, 1978), 516–61.

The impact of the fleet’s annual arrival went beyond its expansion of local markets and populations, as it became a central concern of the local coffers. Additionally, a closer look at shipping tax in Havana reveals a separation between ships taxed on entry and those taxed on departure, both in the transatlantic and in the regional circuit. While ships in the regional circuit paid a larger share of tax upon arrival in Havana, ships in the transatlantic circuit tended to pay a greater share of tax upon departure. What this demonstrates is a flow of taxation that appears to be unidirectional: taxable goods entered Havana from regional vessels and were reexported with the

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Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century table 3.4 Cartagena shipping traffic, 1600–1620 Region

Almojarifazgo (million pesos)

% of total

Transatlantic Atlantic Islands Castile Caribbean Islands Cuba Hispaniola Jamaica Puerto Rico Caribbean mainland South America Central America New Spain Campeche New Spain, unspecified San Juan de Ulúa Through ships Other Total

77.83 5.45 72.38 3.55 1.55 1.28 0.53 0.19 4.5 3.93 0.57 13.85 0.18 12.51 1.16 0.2 1.15 101.1

77 5.4 71.6 3.5 1.5 1.3 0.5 0.2 4.5 3.9 0.6 13.7 0.2 12.4 1.2 0.2 1.1 –

Source: BANC ms. 98/72z, ESHDC, carton 26, folders 1–6. See also: AGIContaduría, legs. 1387–92, 1600–20.

departure of the fleet. In short, this appears to show regional shipping as a side effect of the movement of the transatlantic fleet (see Map 3.1). The directionality of the fleet and its links with regional shipping have led historians to describe it as preeminent, dictating the pace and volume of smaller circuits of trade.26 If the two circuits overlapped, forming a mutually dependent relationship, then it certainly appears all trade activity, regional

26

Historians elevated the importance of the transatlantic trade with particular reference to the debates about the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century, in which economically inclined scholars, following Chaunu, attempted to determine the extent of Spain’s ostensible “decline” in the seventeenth century using transatlantic trade as a measuring stick. See: J.I. Israel, “Mexico and the ‘General Crisis’ of the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 63 (1974): 33–57; John J. TePaske and Herbert S. Klein, “The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in New Spain: Myth or Reality?” Past and Present 90 (1981): 116–35; Emiliano Gil-Blanco, “Interpretación del comercio de un puerto colonial novohispano durante un período de crisis: Veracruz (1587–1650),” Estudios de Historia Social y Económica de América 14 (1997): 75–123.

NORTH AMERICA La Florida Ri

(1%)

o

AT L A N T I C

de

an

Gr

OCEAN

Gulf of Mexico Havana VICEROYALTY OF NEW SPAIN

(21%)

Tampico Tamiahua

Mérida

THE BAHAMAS

CUBA

Puerto rto Princi P Princc p Principale Principe HISPANOLA

Campeche

Veracruz

Santiago de Cuba

(45%) (2%)

JAMAICA Jamaica

Tabasco (17%)

(2%) TER EA GR

Coatzacoalcos

San Juan de Puerto Rico

Ocoa Santo Domingo

(2%)

Trujillo

LESS ER AN

Cartagena de Indias

Veracruz’s Regional Trade Tier 1 (above 5%)

(7%)

Tier 3 (below 1%)

0 0

250 250

TILLES

Caracas

PA C I F I C O C E A N

Tier 2 (1% - 5%)

N

Maracaibo

TIERRA FIRME

500 miles

500 km

map 3.1 Mexican-Caribbean trade networks, ca. 1620. Created by Ben Pease.

SOUTH AMERICA

ANTILLES

Caribbean Sea

88

Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

and transatlantic, ultimately spun off the energy of the transatlantic fleet. Not only was transatlantic trade more valuable than regional trade, but regional trade also depended on the fleet for its existence, in a way validating scholarly focus on transatlantic shipping. At the same time, which trade sector we prioritize depends on the motive underlying our study. If our goal were to find the most valuable trade, the one that most occupied the minds of royal administrators, accountants, and merchants in imperial centers, then we could end here. If we were to ask how trade influenced social ties between port cities, we might also consider alternate measures of trade, including seasonality, frequency, and materiality.

seasonality, ships, and people of the mexican-caribbean circuit Given the numerical prominence and financial superiority of transatlantic trade, it is not difficult to understand why it is usually afforded primacy in the study of Spanish American ports themselves or in the study of economic history in the colonial era more generally. Even Alejandro de la Fuente’s systematic detailing of intercolonial and insular trades ultimately portrays those circuits as subordinate to larger transatlantic trade. This approach has had substantial benefits: not only do studies like de la Fuente’s add detail to the diversity of trade in the early modern period, but they also portray multiple circuits of trade as interdependent: The importance of one is buoyed by the existence of the other. Regional and coastal trades attain greater privilege by their association with the transatlantic fleet than they would if evaluated on their own, as the fleet connects them to important circuits of global exchange. On some level, then, to abstract Caribbean commerce from its place within transatlantic and transcontinental networks is to reduce significantly the universe Caribbean cities inhabited. There are, however, compelling reasons to shift focus to Caribbean trade routes set apart from the larger circuits of which they each were a part. For example, if as much as a third of shipping traffic in Havana and Veracruz belonged to the transatlantic vessels in some years, that leaves two-thirds of incoming vessels to Caribbean trade. Each year, hundreds of ships operated in the Mexican-Caribbean circuit, connecting the larger transatlantic ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena with each other and with smaller Gulf Coast and Caribbean cities and towns. The sheer frequency of circum-Caribbean voyages deserves our attention. Each individual voyage created an opportunity for interactions and exchanges, while the collective frequency of regional trade allows us to understand

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regional shipping as a daily part of port life. While regional trade cannot be completely abstracted from the larger transatlantic and overland circuits of which it was a part, there is value in analyzing Mexican-Caribbean material exchanges in a clearly delimited context, particularly when it comes to the qualitative interpretation of trade data – that is, an interpretation that centers the potential social and cultural effects of trade instead of evaluating trade for its own sake. While transatlantic trade may have outpaced regional trade in terms of volume, regional trade created opportunities for social and cultural exchange that did not exist within the transatlantic circuit. Drawing again from import and export tax records, in the pages that follow I examine the various ways in which regional trade created spaces for exchange within the regional circuit, beginning with the frequency and seasonality of shipping, followed by a consideration of vessel types and naming practices. I then examine the different taxation methods used throughout the seventeenth century to reiterate the pitfalls of thinking of tax income in purely monetary terms, and finally consider the role of human networks within the two circuits: captains, crews, and merchants.

*** The first area in which regional trade differed significantly from transatlantic trade was seasonality: the timing of shipping cycles throughout the calendar year. It is well known that the comings and goings of the fleet followed a tightly regimented schedule. Beginning in 1555, two separate fleets departed Spain for the New World each year, one bound for San Juan de Ulúa and Veracruz, the other for Cartagena and Portobelo. The New Spain fleet was typically organized in Seville in the late winter months, departing for its voyage across the Atlantic from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in April or May. It would arrive in Veracruz in the late summer months and winter in port until the following spring. Meanwhile, the Tierra Firma fleet, with a somewhat shorter voyage, departed later in the summer, sailing first to Portobelo and then to Cartagena for winter. The following spring, the Veracruz-based fleet and the Cartagena-based fleet both sailed for Havana, where they would resupply for a summer journey east across the Atlantic.27 Counterintuitively, this schedule often meant that the fleet sailed during hurricane season in the Caribbean, but this was 27

On the timing and routes of the transatlantic fleets, see: BL, add. mss. 13992, 1669, f 35r39r; Luis de la Cruz, Ynstruccion y avisos excelentes de las derotas y carrera de las yndias, HM 30957.

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considered preferable to sailing during winter, when the sea was generally rougher, and preferable to spending summer months docked in ostensibly humid and pestilential tropical ports.28 The fleet’s regimented schedule can be construed as evidence for the imperium it commanded over other shipping cycles, and scholars like de la Fuente have argued that the seasonal cycles of regional shipping traffic were synchronized with the fleet. According to the dominant understanding, regional shipping was concentrated in the period immediately before the arrival of the fleet and the period immediately after its departure, as smaller trade circuits fed into and out of the fleet’s largesse. While there is a spike in regional traffic associated with the arrival of the fleets, it is not nearly as dramatic as it is sometimes assumed to be (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). In Havana, the peak month for regional shipping was July, just as returning fleets prepared to depart for Spain. Similarly, in Veracruz, May was the most active month for regional traffic, in advance of the fleet’s usual June departure. In both cities, however, the peak months of regional traffic were well within a standard deviation of median monthly traffic. For instance, tax records show about two (2.1) regional vessels in Havana per month between 1602 and 1650. During the same

350 300 250 200 150 100 50

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figure 3.1 Incoming and outgoing ships in Havana by month, 1602–1650 Source: Macías Domínguez, 516–61.

28

Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 34. See also: Castillero Calvo; De la Fuente and García del Pino.

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figure 3.2 Incoming and outgoing ships in Veracruz by month, 1600–1612 Source: AGI-Contaduría 882, pzas. 1–8; 883, pzas. 1–5, 1600–12.

forty-eight-year period, the peak month of regional traffic, July, averaged just under three (2.9) regional vessels. Similarly, between 1600 and 1612, about eight (7.5) regional vessels arrived in Veracruz per month. In a typical May, regional traffic increased to about fourteen vessels (13.6) – a greater boost than Havana, but still well within a single standard deviation of the mean. Regional traffic did increase with the presence of the fleet, but it was relatively stable throughout the twelve-month calendar year. In a typical year, regional vessels arrived and departed larger Caribbean ports in every month. Meanwhile, entire months could pass without a transatlantic vessel. The arrival of the fleet in Havana might represent a greater volume of annual traffic than vessels from Veracruz, but there is a significant difference in the synchronous influx of two dozen ships, occurring at roughly the same time every year, and the paced arrival of “loose” ships (navíos sueltos) spread across twelve months. One event is attended with fanfare and anticipation as the city is completely transformed, while the other is a routine occurrence. Compared to the extravagance of the fleet, the quotidian arrival of regional vessels appears on its face to be another reason to think of the fleet as predominant. Another way of putting it, however, is to say that transatlantic shipping was exceptional and regional shipping was typical. One way of understanding this difference is the concept of cognitive distance. In geography, cognitive distance is the physical perception of

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a space from a particular vantage: the distance between two points as observed as opposed to the true distance between those points. I use this concept to refer to the distances separating Gulf Coast and Caribbean ports from each other as perceived by trade.29 To describe the cognitive distance between Havana and Veracruz, for instance, we could look at the amount of time it took the average ship to sail between the two ports. This would be roughly three weeks – approximately the same amount of time that it would take a typical traveler to make the overland journey between Veracruz and Mexico City, and slightly less time than it would take an overland mule train to make the same journey. In other words, despite the geographic divide that separated the two cities, the time to travel between them was roughly equivalent or even less than the time it took to travel from Veracruz to the viceregal capital. Another common interpretation of seasonality has emphasized the drastic transformation that a city would necessarily undergo whenever the fleet was in port. There can be little doubt that the presence of dozens of ships, as many as a thousand sailors, and a new inventory of merchandise in port did dramatically change the way that the city operated. Further, the length of time the fleet stayed in port – sometimes as many as eight months in Veracruz, and sometimes as long as a year in Havana in the event of a bad hurricane season – prolonged this transformation. Sailors in port formed relationships, annual voyages meant that many returned year after year, and upon retirement, some petitioned the Crown for license to permanently settle in the New World. These social formations developed in the context of the transatlantic trade. At the same time, the dramatic shift in the operation of daily life while the fleet was in port can be understood as a potent symbol of the cognitive distance that separated Caribbean ports from Spain. The transformation of the city would necessarily reinforce the idea that the period during which the fleet was in port was unusual. Meanwhile, the same social formations were available to sailors who worked in regional circuits of trade. And though there are few records that allow us to track the activities of sailors in the regional circuit with the same depth it has been possible to track those of the fleet, it is likely regional sailors moved

29

I borrow “cognitive distance” from Jens Baumgarten, “Transfer, Circulation, and Visual Systems in Latin America: The Example of Colonial Brazil,” in Image – Object – Performance: Mediality and Communication in Cultural Contact Zones of Colonial Latin America and the Philippines, edited by Astrid Windus and Eberhard Crailsheim (Münster: Waxman Verlag, 2013), 36.

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between ports even more frequently. Using the same tax record to construct a nominal database allows us to follow individual ship captains as they moved back and forth throughout the Caribbean over spans of time that sometimes lasted as much as three decades. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the typical captain of a regional vessel visited the same port about three times (2.7) in his career, while a captain of a transatlantic vessel might have visited once or twice (1.8) Regional captains were also twice as likely to visit a port four or more times throughout their career. The Caribbean captain Jacome Perez, for example, made twelve recorded round-trip voyages between Havana and Veracruz over a ten-year period, from 1605 to 1615, stopping at least twice in Campeche in the same time.30 The same regional vessels often visited the same port multiple times within a year, as a round-trip voyage between Gulf and Caribbean ports took less than half the time of a roundtrip voyage between Havana and southern Spain.31 None of this is to say social relationships formed in the regional circuit were more meaningful than those of the Atlantic. Yet each recurrence of a vessel in entry records is another opportunity for the development of social relationships, for the exchange of material goods or information, or for any of the other processes that are typically associated with trade.32 None of these possibilities were available exclusively to the men and women who participated in regional circuits of exchange, but they were available with more regularity. Another illustration of cognitive distance comes in the technological means of trade. As with seasonality, it is well understood that the types of vessels that operated regional circuits were different than transatlantic vessels. But again, this difference may have been more meaningful than we sometimes imagine. For example, different classes of vessels might

30

AGI-Contaduría, legs. 1093–1095, 1605–15. On the length of voyages, see: A. Lugo-Fernández, D.A. Ball, M. Gravois, C. Horrell, and J.B. Irion, “Analysis of the Gulf of Mexico’s Veracruz-Havana Route of La Flota de la Nueva España,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 2, no. 1 (2007): 24–47. 32 Manuela Cristina García Bernal has shown that ship captains – transatlantic and regional – served several important roles in the commercial process, suggesting they had considerable agency in negotiating the terms of trade, including routes and materials of trade. Following this observation, we can imagine recurrent voyages as part of a specific and deliberate construction of commercial networks. See: Manuela Cristina García Bernal, “Maestres y señores de naos en el comercio marítimo de Yucatán (Siglo XVI),” in La Casa de la Contratación y la navegación entre España y las Indias, edited by Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Antonio Acosta Rodríguez, and Adolfo Luis González Rodríguez (Seville: CSISC, Universidad de Sevilla, 2004), 779–814. 31

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require different outfitting, technological preparation, or specialized crew.33 Differences in the size and build of a ship might also register a visual impact on contemporary observers.34 Focusing on vessel class can also illuminate patterns of shipping traffic that are not evident in the records themselves (see Table 3.5). For example, sorting vessels by class in Veracruz’s port entry records can give us an idea of just how many ships arrived with a stated provenance of Campeche may have originated in other Caribbean ports. Half of all Campechebased ships that arrived in Veracruz were navíos, compared to less than 20 percent of ships that arrived from other coastal ports, like Coatzacoalcos, Tampico, or Panúco. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of ships that arrived in Veracruz from larger Caribbean ports like Cartagena and Havana were navíos. What this implies is that possibly as much as a third of all ships that arrived in Veracruz from Campeche originated in another Caribbean port.35 While the trade with Castile was dominated by the largest classes of vessel, 85 percent of traffic between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean was handled by navíos and only 4 percent was handled by caravels, table 3 .5 Vessels in Havana and Veracruz by region, 1602–1650 Vessel Type

Mexico

Caribbean

Atlantic Islands

Castile

Total

Caravel Frigate Galleon Carrack Navío Other Unknown Total

2% 54%