The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803299575 ISBN 13: 9780803299573

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century breaks new ground in articulating the early Spanish Caribbean as a distinct and diverse group of colonies loosely united under Spanish rule for roughly a century prior to the establishment of other European colonies.

In the sixteenth century no part of the Americas was more diverse; international; or as closely tied to Spain, the islands of the Atlantic, western Africa, and the Spanish American mainland than the Caribbean. The Caribbean experienced rapid growth during this period, displayed considerable ethnic and religious diversity, developed extensive networks of exchange both within and beyond the region, and played an important role in the broader Spanish colonization of the Americas. Contributors address topics such as the role of religious orders, the development of transatlantic and regional commercial systems, insular and regional political dynamics in relation to imperial objectives, the formation of colonial society, and the effects on Caribbean colonial society of the importation and incorporation of large numbers of indigenous captives and enslaved Africans.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ida Altman is a professor emerita of history at the University of Florida. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of several books, including Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century and The War for Mexico’s West: Spaniards and Indians in New Galicia, 1524–1550. David Wheat is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640.
 

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The Spanish Caribbean & the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century

By Ida Altman, David Wheat

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-9957-3

Contents

List of Maps, 
List of Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction Ida Altman and David Wheat, 
Part 1. Indians in the Early Spanish Caribbean, 
1. The Cemí and the Cross: Hispaniola Indians and the Regular Clergy, 1494–1517 Lauren MacDonald, 
2. The Revolt of Agüeybaná II: Puerto Rico's Interisland Connections Cacey Farnsworth, 
3. War and Rescate: The Sixteenth-Century Circum-Caribbean Indigenous Slave Trade Erin Stone, 
Part 2. Europeans in the Islands, 
4. Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa: Ambition, Fear, and Politics in Early Cuba Ida Altman, 
5. Two Doñas: Aristocratic Women and Power in Colonial Cuba Shannon Lalor, 
6. Between Acceptance and Exclusion: Spanish Responses to Portuguese Immigrants in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean Brian Hamm, 
Part 3. Africans and the Spanish Caribbean, 
7. The Early Slave Trade to Spanish America: Caribbean Pathways, 1530–1580 Marc Eagle, 
8. Biafadas in Havana: West African Antecedents for Caribbean Social Interactions David Wheat, 
Part 4. Environment and Health, 
9. Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz, 1519–1599 J. M. H. Clark, 
10. Hospitals and Public Health in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean Pablo F. Gómez, 
Part 5. International Commercial Networks, 
11. The Hispano-German Caribbean: South German Merchants and the Realities of European Consolidation, 1500–1540 Spencer Tyce, 
12. The Azorean Connection: Trajectories of Slaving, Piracy, and Trade in the Early Atlantic Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, 
Glossary, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Cemí and the Cross

Hispaniola Indians and the Regular Clergy, 1494–1517

Lauren MacDonald

Three years after the arrival of cross-bearing Europeans into his lands, one of the most powerful local leaders on the island of Hispaniola began each day by reciting Christian prayers. Guarionex made an elaborate performance of this practice and obliged his entire household to perform their prayers twice every morning. Guarionex's prayers were witnessed by two outsiders: Ramón Pané, a "humble friar" from the Order of Saint Jerome, and Guatícabanú, a Christian Indian from the northern coast of Hispaniola. Both men had been sent by Christopher Columbus to the island's interior, in part to learn about the area and in part to monitor Guarionex, whose loyalty to Columbus was uncertain. Their time among Guarionex's people was not always easy — among other things, it meant proximity to Guarionex's mother, whom Pané described as "the worst woman I have known in these parts" — but, as Pané wrote later, Guarionex himself "gave us hope that he would do whatever we wished and that he wanted to be a Christian."

Pané's satisfaction was to be short-lived. By 1498 Guarionex had abandoned Christian practices and, suspected of supporting rebellion against Columbus, fled his domains. Meanwhile, Guatícabanú, who had been baptized by Pané under the name "Juan Mateo," was murdered by men associated with Guarionex. Mourning his lost companion, Pané wrote, "I am certain he died a martyr." While writing an account of his experiences for Columbus in 1498, Pané predicted two future paths for Christian evangelization on the island. There was the possibility, Pané wrote, of converting some Indians through simple religious instruction, for he had seen Guatícabanú become a Christian easily. For others, such as the inconstant Guarionex, "there is need for force and ingenuity ... there is need for force and punishment."

Ramón Pané's diverging paths foreshadowed a repeated motif in colonial American history. Subsequent missionaries and colonial officials oscillated between the open palm and the closed fist, from the tentative embrace of indigenous concepts and practices to the violent punishment of heterodox beliefs. Yet while historians have studied these religious dynamics elsewhere in the Americas, little attention has been paid to the islands where the Spanish conquest began, possibly due to the paucity of archival sources for religion in the early Spanish Caribbean.

Much of the existing scholarship on religiosity in the early Spanish Caribbean falls into two categories: studies that use Spanish-authored sources to reconstruct precontact beliefs, or works cataloging the inexorable accretion of papal bulls and the growing numbers of priests, friars, churches, and parishes that signaled the establishment of the Church as a Caribbean institution. In both approaches, conquest-era "religion," whether indigenous or imported, is treated as a static, monolithic entity that could recede or advance but never change. In contrast, recent scholarship on other regions in the colonial Americas has investigated religious identities as dynamic, responsive, overlapping, and entangled. In that vein, this chapter argues that in the first three decades of Spanish settlement on Hispaniola, missionary figures and American Indians tried to understand foreign religiosity within familiar frameworks.

Writing to the Catholic Monarchs in 1493, Columbus claimed that the men and women of the Caribbean were people without any religion of their own. He saw no buildings of worship, no robed priests, no sacred texts. Yet the stories told by the people of central Hispaniola, translated by Guatícabanú and recorded by Pané, attested to creation myths, gods, and the marvelous. Pané's account contained stories of mankind issuing from turtles and birds, divine cemís of stone and wood, and shamans who made the dead speak. While scholars have analyzed Pané's account in order to reconstruct indigenous worldviews prior to the arrival of Europeans, little attention has been paid to the immediate environment surrounding the composition of the account, which was drawn from stories told, sung, or danced to the accompaniment of wooden drums in Hispaniola during the 1490s. The orality and choreography of each evanescent areito potentially allowed its performer to reproduce the stories of her or his community selectively and strategically. Pané described the areito as both a form of memory and a source of political legitimacy: "Just as the Moors, they have their laws gathered in ancient songs, by which they govern themselves." Long after the arrival of the Europeans, the areito continued to be a significant act of memory, negotiation, and resistance for Caribbean Indians. In subsequent decades, Spanish settlers repeatedly described the persistence of the areito on the islands.

The volatility and violence of Spanish Hispaniola shaped the stories that the people of the island's interior chose to tell Guatícabanú and Pané, as well as the stories that the two outsiders chose to record. During the first decade of the Spanish conquest, Hispaniola's indigenous inhabitants experienced violence, social upheaval, coerced labor, and political destabilization. Native leaders revolted against Columbus's tributary demands in 1494, 1495, and 1497; hunger assailed their communities during periods of famine in 1495 and 1496; and in 1497 a group of disaffected Spaniards revolted against Columbus's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803299575
• ISBN 13: 9780803299573
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 330
• Herausgeber: Altman Ida, Wheat David
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande