Native American Slavery

Officially, the 300-year enslavement of Africans in America desisted on December 06, 1865, by virtue of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. (African slaves were brought to so-called Spanish Florida as early as the 1560s.) Dismally, however, Morton's Fork ruled where blacks were concerned; it is an abominable fact that for the three quarters of a century supervening slavery-1865 to1940-capricious, malicious and tendentious applications of obscure, generally anachronistic-as well as flat-out concocted-legalities (not to mention thousands of lynchings) were foisted exclusively upon countless black men and (some) black women who were methodically sentenced to years of hard labor for lack of monies (as most all employers refused to hire blacks) to pay fines imposed for allegedly committing various (mostly trumped-up) misdemeanors.

the course of the sixteenth century, more than two thousand people categorized as indios traveled to Castile. A handful dressed in colorful regalia-wearing feathered garments and bearing weapons-paraded before royal officials or posed for curious artists. Others came in the entourages of indigenous elites who sought diplomatic or political favors, retribution for their subjects, or titles and privileges from the king. Europeans returning from the Indies shared their ethnographic observations about indios and displayed artifacts from America that stirred the cultural imagination of royal authorities and others. If the Castilian royal court was a site where different visual and living representations of indios from around the globe converged, how did Castilians in villages and cities grapple with the ethnographic observations of returning travelers, the images of feathered men and women, or the incredible tales they heard about so-called brutish peoples? How did they reconcile this cultural imaginary with the flesh-and-blood indios in their midst? 1

...they were a people from the rural villages of New Mexico, who found their common origins in the Spanish colony’s slave trade with the nomadic tribes of the region. Silences have grown from their history because its historical and ethnic complexity does not fit into the narrative of the United States, and the trauma associated with the violent memories of human trafficking and servitude are not easily reconciled. Genízaro identity was created from marginalization. The aim of this essay is to locate the silenced Genízaro peoples in history and track the existence of their personal and collective identities as they struggled to survive throughout history and into the present.

In early colonial Latin America many of the women who had been distributed as war booty, taken in village raids, or illegally branded as slaves became the partners of Spanish men. This article privileges these severely compromised historical subjects to consider how relations of violence and intimacy formed an integral part of their lives. An analysis of notarial and parish records reveals that deracinated women in bondage maintained intimate family ties-sometimes over great distances-despite continual vulnerabilities and legal restrictions. Intimacies involved sexual and other forms of bodily, material, and emotional expression and knowledge. This article questions the usefulness of definitions of "family" based largely on Spanish genealogical models and it also exposes the historiographic gender gap in Latin American colonial history between the "invasion" (Part One) and "early colonial settlement" (Part Two) periods which has stigmatized non-elite indigenous women for so long.