Praise for Juan Gonzalez’s
Harvest of Empire
“A serious, significant contribution to understanding who the Hispanics of the United States
are and where they come from.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A profound book with an equally profound message about the origins of Latino migration,
domination, and colonization, and historical lessons not found in many American
textbooks.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“A compelling—and enlightening—chronicle … offers an insider’s view of the rich and
varied fabric of the people soon to be the largest minority in the United States.”
—The Miami Herald
“Anyone who finishes Harvest of Empire will never again see Latinos as a monolithic
group, but as a diverse society of citizens and future citizens, worthy of recognition and
respect.”
—Fort Worth Morning Star
“In what would seem an impossible task, journalist Juan Gonzalez tackles the entire history
of Latinos in North and Central America in a single volume … illuminating.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Required reading, not simply for Latinos but for everyone.”
—The Kansas City Star
“Gonzalez’s ever-enjoyable prose grabs the reader and fills in the gaps left by a traditional
American history education.”
—In These Times
“Here at last is the extraordinary saga of the Latinos in North America, brilliantly and
compactly told. All the descendants of the old immigrants should read this book, to remind
themselves of where they came from, and where all of us are going—together.”
—Pete Hamill, author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life
“This excellent history of Latinos in North and Central America is fair-handed, extremely
well-documented, and filled with the sort of details that explain rather than enflame.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Juan Gonzalez brings us a sweeping account of the raw quest for empire that shaped the
New World and is finally in our time transforming the United States. The history is often
brutal, the experiences of the people caught up in the process wrenching. But Gonzalez
paints a canvas that is in the end profoundly optimistic, for in the Latinization of the United
States he sees the possibility of a renaissance of American democracy.”
—Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Regulating the Poor
PENGUIN BOOKS
HARVEST OF EMPIRE
, a columnist with New York’s Daily News, and a two-time winner of the George Polk
journalism award, was named one of the nation’s one hundred most influential Hispanics by Hispanic
Business, and has received a lifetime achievement award from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts
and Sciences. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he grew up in a New York City housing project, graduated
from Columbia University, and was a cofounder of the 1960s Young Lords. He lives in Manhattan.
JUAN GONZALEZ
A History of Latinos
in America
Revised Edition
JUAN GONZALEZ
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
This revised edition published 2011
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Copyright © Juan Gonzalez, 2000, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
González, Juan, 1947–
Harvest of empire: a history of Latinos in America / Juan Gonzalez.—Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58994-6
1. Hispanic Americans—History. 2. Immigrants—United States—History. 3. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. 4.
Latin America—Emigration and immigration—History. 5. United States—Relations—Latin America. 6. Latin America— Relations—
United States. 7. United States—Territorial expansion—History. 8. United States—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
E184.S75G655 2011
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The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America’s greatest danger. And
since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will
not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will
remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in the best of men and distrust the worst.
—José Martí,
January 10, 1891
Contents
Introduction
Part I—Roots (Las Raíces)
1. Conquerors and Victims: The Image of America Forms (1500–1800)
2. The Spanish Borderlands and the Making of an Empire (1810–1898)
3. Banana Republics and Bonds: Taming the Empire’s Backyard (1898–1950)
Part II—Branches (Las Ramas)
4. Puerto Ricans: Citizens Yet Foreigners
5. Mexicans: Pioneers of a Different Type
6. Cubans: Special Refugees
7. Dominicans: From the Duarte to the George Washington Bridge
8. Central Americans: Intervention Comes Home to Roost
9. Colombians and Panamanians: Overcoming Division and Disdain
Part III—Harvest (La Cosecha)
10. The Return of Juan Seguín: Latinos and the Remaking of American Politics
11. Immigrants Old and New: Closing Borders of the Mind
12. Speak Spanish, You’re in America!: El Huracán over Language and Culture
13. Free Trade: The Final Conquest of Latin America
14. Puerto Rico, U.S.A.: Possessed and Unwanted
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Interviews
Index
Introduction
Between March and May of 2006, an estimated 3 to 5 million people, most of them Latinos, filled the
downtown streets of some 160 U.S. towns and cities in the largest series of mass protests the nation
had ever seen.1
Not even during the heyday of the American labor movement in the 1930s, or during the high tide of
civil rights protests and public opposition to the Vietnam War during the 1960s, had such astonishing
numbers paraded peacefully in so many different localities over a common grievance. Never before
had a group at the margins of U.S. society taken our political establishment by such complete surprise.
Word of the mobilizations, it turned out, had spread largely via Spanish-language radio and TV and
through social networks of young Latinos on the Internet, so government leaders and the general
public had little idea of what was happening until the huge crowds suddenly started to appear on our
city streets.
The immediate aim of the marchers was to defeat a bill in Congress that would establish tough new
criminal penalties for immigrants who were in the country illegally. The opponents sought not only to
derail what came to be known as the Sensenbrenner bill, but to replace it with a comprehensive
overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, one that would include a “path to citizenship” for an estimated
12 million undocumented workers already in the country. Protest leaders framed their effort as a
moral call for compassion and respect, for dignidad for illegal immigrants. Many adopted the slogan
Si Se Puede! (Yes We Can), the nearly forgotten words that legendary Mexican American labor
organizer César Chávez had coined half a century earlier for his United Farm Workers Organization.
Their message reverberated from the bustling streets of established Latino neighborhoods in the
major cities to scores of newly sprouted barrios in small towns and hamlets across the American
heartland. The rallies they scheduled suddenly swelled with tens of thousands of maids, nannies, and
maintenance workers, with lowly gardeners and day laborers, with restaurant busboys and
dishwashers, with hotel waiters and bellhops, with hardened slaughterhouse workers and
construction hardhats, many of whom had quietly led a furtive existence in the shadows of society,
always afraid of being stopped by a local cop or sheriff, or of being caught in an immigration raid and
hastily deported. Suddenly, this brown-skinned and once-docile mass of humanity was parading
through glistening city centers in broad daylight. With spouses and children at their side and their
infants in strollers, they proudly marched with their entire Pentecostal or Catholic congregations, their
ministers and church banners at the front, waving both the American flag and those of their native
countries.
These were not simply gatherings of the undocumented, however. Hundreds of thousands of Latinos
who had been born in the United States or become naturalized citizens, or who were longtime legal
residents, also participated. And leading the way in virtually every protest were startling numbers of
U.S.-born Hispanic high school and college students, many of them facing the prospect of being
separated from their immigrant parents who could end up being deported.
All shared the same burning sense of outrage. All were fed up with the mainstream media’s
reigning stereotype that depicted hordes of Latinos and undocumented workers as a new menace
engulfing the country.
And though Latinos made up the overwhelming number of marchers, they were hardly alone;
joining them as well were thousands of Polish, Irish, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants, along
with many white and black religious and labor leaders and supporters.
The immigration protests of 2006 marked a rare example of an outcast group suddenly rising up
and forcing the majority to rethink accepted notions of democratic and human rights. For most of the
marchers, it was their first act of social protest, one that would permanently alter the way they
viewed the world. For just as the 1963 March on Washington defined the outlook of many black
Americans, and just as the college rebellions of 1968 shaped the thinking of a generation of white
Americans, so too did these protests represent a political coming of age for the nation’s Hispanic
minority.
The new movement burst on the scene with such unexpected force that it quickly gave rise to
several contending narratives in the commercial media. On the one hand, scores of mainstream
newspapers and television stations started for the first time to produce poignant and sympathetic
stories about the lives of the undocumented, a perspective the press had largely ignored until then,
preferring instead the stereotype of the “illegal alien.” On the other hand, the fast-growing Spanishlanguage media offered a radically different narrative—one of solidarity, not of sympathy. From the
scores of popular radio DJs around the country to the big television networks like Univision and
Telemundo, from the hundreds of weekly Hispanic newspapers to the big city dailies like La Opinión
in Los Angeles and El Diario–La Prensa in New York City, the Spanish-language press openly
extolled and promoted the movement. They depicted it as a heroic effort by Hispanic Americans to
finally be recognized for their contributions to the nation.
But an equally powerful narrative emerged from right-wing talk radio and TV hosts like Rush
Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Lou Dobbs. Seizing on the fact that some protesters proudly waved the
flags of their home countries alongside the Stars and Stripes, these commentators openly sought to
stoke public rage. They demanded tougher immigration policies and mass deportations and warned of
an attempt by Latino radicals to reconquer the former Mexican territory of the Southwest as a
Hispanic homeland.
Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant sentiment in the general population became more virulent, more
sustained, and more clearly targeted at Hispanics. As it did so, local politicians around the country
became overnight celebrities for instituting local crackdowns on immigrant communities. They
included Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County; Joe Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton,
Pennsylvania; and Steve Levy, the Suffolk County Commissioner in Long Island, New York. From
across the political spectrum, many white and black Americans angrily demanded stepped-up
deportations and stiffer penalties on companies that employed undocumented workers. They urged a
sealing of the U.S.-Mexico border through the rapid completion of a physical and virtual wall across
its entire two-thousand-mile length.
The protesters and their allies, however, were equally defiant. Such was the force of their outcry
that the Sensenbrenner bill died in the Senate. But so did a proposed bipartisan comprehensive
immigration reform bill in 2007 that was backed by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy,
Republican senator John McCain, and President Bush.
The new movement failed to achieve its main goal of immigration reform, yet it still left a deep and
unexpected imprint on the entire country, for its stunning rise effectively marked the end of thirty years
of conservative domination over national politics. Six months after the immigration protests,
Democrats swept control of both houses of Congress, and one of the chief reasons for that historic
power shift was the mushrooming Latino vote. The number of Hispanics casting ballots that
November jumped by nearly 1 million over the previous midterm election—from 4.7 million in 2002
to 5.6 million in 2006. And since the Republican Party was most closely associated with the
Sensenbrenner bill, the percentage of Latinos who cast ballots for Republican candidates in the
House of Representatives plummeted from 38 percent to 30 percent.2
Then in 2008, Illinois Democratic senator Barack Obama, borrowing the same “Yes We Can”
slogan of Chávez’s farm workers and the immigrant rights movement, captured the White House.
Obama owed his historic victory in no small measure to the overwhelming support he received from
Latino voters. Some 9.7 million Hispanics cast ballots for president in 2008, 2.1 million more than in
2004. Obama garnered 67 percent of those votes, while Republican John McCain received just 31
percent, with McCain’s share representing a significant drop from the 40 percent Latino support
George W. Bush enjoyed in his 2004 reelection.
The 2.1 million additional Latino voters in 2008 mirrored a similar startling jump among African
Americans; and along with a sharp increase of more than 300,000 Asian Americans, it produced the
most diverse electorate in the nation’s history and assured the election of our first black president. In
the euphoric aftermath of Obama’s inauguration, many claimed the United States had entered a new
postracial era. A dispassionate review of voting statistics, however, did not provide such comforting
visions of change, nor did the rise of the right-wing Tea Party movement soon after. Obama, after all,
had received the support of only 43 percent of white voters, while John McCain amassed 55 percent.
Such a yawning gap among whites would normally signal a Republican victory. Only the enormous
turnout and overwhelming support Obama generated among the country’s racial minorities—95
percent of African Americans voted for him, as did 62 percent of Asian Americans—made it possible
for him to win the election handily.3
Obama’s rise thus reflected how the country’s electorate was changing, and not just in terms of
greater opportunities for African Americans. The first decade of the new century saw the number of
Hispanic elected officials nationwide surpass 6,600. Between 1994 and 2009, the number of Latinos
in Congress climbed by nearly 50 percent—from 17 to 25—while the number of Hispanics holding
elected positions in state governments increased by one-third—from 184 to 247. At one point during
the past decade, a record three Latinos held seats in the U.S. Senate—Mel Martinez (R-FL), Ken
Salazar (D-CO), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).4
When I penned the first edition of Harvest of Empire at the end of the 1990s, the federal government
was in the early stages of erecting a wall between Mexico and the United States, just south of San
Diego. The makeshift barrier, I noted then, was not nearly as impressive as our planet’s great
testament to human insecurity, the 1,500-mile long Great Wall that China’s emperors spent centuries
building against the Huns. Nonetheless, the American version was a clear indication that the U.S.Mexico border had become the epicenter of momentous changes in our hemisphere: by day, a constant
stream of trucks headed south, carrying goods to newly erected factories bustling with nearly a
million low-wage workers; by night, a silent flood of people headed north in search of the U.S. wages
that could spell survival for family members the migrant had left behind. Both movements were
creating huge windfalls for tiny investor elites on both sides of the border, while leaving horrendous
social conditions on the Mexican side.
The movement of labor northward, rivaling in size the great westward trek across the North
American frontier by early European settlers, has produced a remarkable transformation—the
Latinization of the United States. Unparalleled immigration has taken place from Mexico, the
Caribbean, Central and South America since World War II, especially escalating since the 1960s.
Over 40 million foreigners settled here between 1960 and 2008, more than during any fifty-year span
in the country’s history, and half of those newcomers were from Latin America. Yet most experts
were not fully grasping the magnitude of the change, despite a string of hyperbolic press accounts
during the 1980s and 1990s that focused on Hispanic population growth.
The Census Bureau, for instance, has had to repeatedly revise upward its projection for the future
growth of the Latino population. Its most recent estimate predicts the country’s current Hispanic
population, which was 46 million in 2009 (and that’s without counting the 4 million residents of
Puerto Rico who are U.S. citizens), will nearly triple to 132 million in 2050. At that point, Latinos
will comprise nearly one-third of the entire U.S. population; and together with African Americans
and other nonminorities, they will make up more than half of all U.S. residents—235 million of 439
million people.
Whites of European descent, in other words, will cease to be a majority in the United States by
midcentury, though they will no doubt remain the dominant racial group in terms of wealth and power.
Looking out beyond 2050, it is now likely that by the end of this century a majority of the U.S.
population will trace its ethnic heritage to Latin America, not to Europe.5
This is amazing when you consider that Latinos numbered a mere 9.1 million and represented just
4.5 percent of the population as recently as 1970. The Hispanic population explosion is no longer
confined to the Southwest border region, or to a handful of big states like California, New York, and
Florida. It has now extended to virtually every suburb, small town, and rural area of the country, with
Mexican restaurants, Spanish bodegas, and Latin music now a ubiquitous part of life throughout the
United States.
Such rapid change has understandably led to deep insecurity among non-Hispanic whites, even
among some black Americans. This is especially so for the large baby boomer generation, whose
members grew up during the 1950s and 1960s when U.S. immigration rates were at the lowest levels
of the twentieth century. The foreign-born population was not only tiny then, but the prevalence of
racial segregation and the proliferation of all-white suburbs meant that both white and black
Americans had little social interaction with people who were culturally or linguistically different
from themselves. The country, in other words, was racially divided but demographically
homogeneous.6
Today, many of those older Americans are the ones voicing the greatest fear that Latino and Asian
immigration will permanently alter the American way of life. A disturbing number started to believe
in the 1990s that the country was under attack by modern-day Huns, hordes of Spanish-speaking
“barbarians at the gate.” Many came to regard the multicultural education movement in the public
schools and universities as nurturing a divisive form of ethnic nationalism, one that is subverting the
Eurocentered traditions of U.S. history and fostering such “un-American” reforms as bilingual
education. Nothing seems to inflame advocates of our nation’s Anglo-Saxon traditions so much as this
issue of language. Since a people’s culture is inevitably expressed through its language, the growth of
“foreign” language use somehow implies the growth of alien cultures. Hispanics, whether rightly or
not, are now seen as the vanguard of a linguistic threat.
One manifestation of widespread insecurity is the rapid escalation in hate crimes against Latinos,
with the FBI reporting a 35 percent jump between 2003 and 2006. Other studies suggest the bureau’s
tally drastically undercounts the extent of the problem, especially when it comes to Latinos. In 2008,
for instance, the FBI reported 7,780 bias-crime incidents. That number, compiled from local police
reports, has fluctuated between 6,000 and 10,000 throughout the decade. Only 11.5 percent of the
2008 incidents, according to the FBI, were because of ethnic or nationality bias.7
But a separate 2005 analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics claimed the real number of bias
crimes has been far greater, averaging more than 190,000 annually for much of this decade. That
study, based on the National Criminal Victimization Survey, revealed that nearly 30 percent of hate
crime incidents between 2000 and 2003 involved ethnic bias. It also noted that more than half of bias
crimes were never reported to police, with a major reason being that undocumented victims of such
attacks are far less likely to file a police report than citizens or legal residents.8
At the same time, some local governments increasingly adopted laws targeting illegal immigrants.
Perhaps most controversial was the law the Arizona state legislature passed in 2010 that authorized
police to stop and question anyone who they had a “reasonable suspicion” was in the country
illegally.
Our country is hardly unique, however, in its unease over Third World immigration. Since World
War II, the shrinking of the modern world through air travel and mass communications and the everwidening chasm between the rich, developed countries on the one hand, and poverty-stricken Asia,
Africa, and Latin America on the other, have fueled unprecedented immigration to the West.
Invariably, the old colonial ties meant that Third World immigrants gravitated to the metropolises of
their former colonial masters. In Great Britain, burgeoning Pakistani, Indian, and Jamaican immigrant
populations have unnerved native whites. In France, a new right-wing movement targets Algerians
and Tunisians. In Germany, foreign nationals from Turkey, Africa, and Southeast Asia have drawn the
ire of native citizens.
But how did the vast explosion in the Hispanic population of the United States occur? What were
the forces that propelled so many Latin Americans to come here? Was it simply lax border
enforcement and misguided federal immigration policies? Or was it something more fundamental to
our own nation’s very development?
The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin
America has always been—and continues to be—the underlying reason for the massive Latino
presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire.
Most of us are uncomfortable thinking of our nation as an empire, even if Wall Street speculators
and investment banks have repeatedly shown their ability to wreck entire economies halfway around
the globe in a matter of hours—a power far greater than the Roman or Ottoman empires ever wielded.
Our public schools have failed miserably in this regard, for they have taught us little about the
machinations that accompanied our nation’s territorial expansion or that helped bring about U.S.
domination of the modern world.
Not too long ago, Latin America was generally pictured as our exotic backyard, a series of
nondescript banana republics and semicivilized nations where Americans liked to travel for
adventure or for vacations or to accumulate cheap land or to make their fortunes. The region’s hapless
governments became perpetual prey to the intrigues of competing circles of U.S. bankers and
investors and to the gunboat diplomacy of U.S. presidents. But now Latino migrants, the product of
those old relationships, have invaded the North American garden, kitchen, and living room. We are
overflowing its schools, its army, even its jails.
Immigrants have existed, of course, from the beginning of civilization. And the basic reasons
people move from one land to another have not changed—starvation or deteriorating social
conditions, political or religious persecution, a chance to improve one’s lot by starting anew
somewhere else. But Latin American migration and the Latino presence in this country, as I attempt to
show in this book, differed from that of the Europeans in several important ways.
First, the Latino migrant flows were directly connected to the growth of the U.S. empire and
responded closely to its needs, whether it was the political need to stabilize a neighboring country or
to accept its refugees as a means of accomplishing a broader foreign policy objective (Cubans,
Dominicans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans), or an economic need, such as satisfying the labor demands
of particular U.S. industries (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians).
Second, once the Latin Americans got here, they moved not from an immigrant to a mainstream
status, but to a linguistic/racial caste status, mostly as a result of how language and race conflicts
have been dealt with throughout the United States and Latin American history.
Third, most Latin Americans arrived here when the United States was already the planet’s
dominant superpower, as our society was entering a postindustrial period and as our gap between
rich and poor was growing, which meant that the unskilled factory jobs European immigrants had
utilized to rise into the middle class were no longer a major option.
But as our corporations and financial institutions penetrated ever more deeply into Latin America,
they fueled an unprecedented movement of labor from the south to the north. Government policies
aimed at promoting greater economic integration only ended up exacerbating income and wealth
disparities between inhabitants of the two regions. This is especially true in those countries most
under the sway of Washington and Wall Street. As a result, our economy became an irresistible
magnet drawing low-wage labor from the poorest areas of our “common market.”
In 1990, for instance, four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took
effect, federal estimates of the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally ranged from
3.4 to 5.5 million. Most reliable estimates today place that number around 12 million, with Mexico
being the source for more than two-thirds of those migrants. Before NAFTA took effect, an average of
350,000 Mexicans were migrating to the United States annually. By the early years of this decade, this
had climbed to nearly 500,000 per year. Mexico now has the dubious distinction of sending more of
its nationals to work abroad than any other country in the world, including China and India.9
But grasping the underlying causes of Latino immigration is just the start. It is equally important to
recognize the flesh and blood stories behind this enormously complex phenomenon. Why did each
Latino group come when it did? Why did some come and others not migrate at all? What did the
pioneers of each group find when they got here? How did they interact with other Americans? How
did they build their communities? Why did some retreat into ethnic enclaves and others not? How are
Latinos changing the nation, and how do Anglo-Americans, white and black, feel about those
changes?
This book seeks to answer many of those questions by presenting an integrated historical look at
both Latin America and Latinos in the United States—how both contributed to and were affected by
the development of American ideals and American reality. It is divided into three main sections,
which I have called “Roots,” “Branches,” and “Harvest.”
“Roots,” composed of three chapters, traces the long and tortuous relationship between Latin
America and the United States. The first chapter, covering the colonial period, summarizes how Latin
America and the United States developed into such radically different societies from the 1500s to
independence; the second, how the United States expanded into an empire during the nineteenth
century through seizing and exploiting Latin American territories; and the third, how our leaders
turned the Caribbean region into a U.S. protectorate in the twentieth century. Admittedly, reviewing
five hundred years of New World history in three short chapters is a daunting task, so be forewarned:
I attempt to focus on key lessons and patterns that I have culled from various histories by both Anglo
and Latin American authors, with an eye toward what light can be shed on our contemporary situation.
The second section, “Branches,” is composed of six chapters, each devoted to one of the major
Latino groups in the country. Here I combine the research of others on the modern migration saga with
my own oral history interviews and investigations as a journalist. The immigration story of each
Latino nationality is unique in the times it occurred, the class and type of people who came, and the
way they dealt with their new environment. Our immigrant tales are as varied as those of the
Swedish, Irish, Germans, Poles, and Italians who preceded us. No doubt, several books could be
devoted to each Latino group, but I chose to focus my individual chapters on a family or a few
individuals who tend to reflect the general migration story of that group, especially in its early years.
I have tried to zero in on immigrants who became leaders or pioneers of the migration, and who have
thus spent some time consciously digesting their own experiences. Most of them are people whom I
have met during more than thirty years working as a journalist here and in Mexico, Central America,
and the Caribbean. They are not the usual ethnic politicians whom outsiders look for when they want
a quick read on how a community feels or acts. Rather, I have focused on grassroots leaders, people
who clearly have earned the respect of their fellow migrants, but who rarely get interviewed or
known outside their own communities.
The final section, “Harvest,” is about Latinos in America today. It is composed of five chapters on
some of the most pressing issues the average American usually associates with Latinos—politics,
immigration, language, and culture. In addition, I have added a chapter on a key cause of Latin
American migration over the past sixty years—U.S. trade policy, or what should more properly be
called globalization. Finally, there is a chapter on Puerto Rico. Why a whole chapter? Well, that tiny
island in the Caribbean was a bigger source of profit for U.S. investors during the twentieth century
than any other country in the world. It also happens to be the last major American colonial
possession. Yet Puerto Rico receives very little attention commensurate with its importance. Ending
colonialism there is an issue with far-reaching repercussions, and not just for the 7.8 million Puerto
Ricans here or on the island. Until Puerto Rico is decolonized, American democracy will not be
complete.
Developments in Latin America and the United States over the past ten years have produced a
wealth of new evidence to support my original “harvest of empire” thesis. In this revised edition, I
have sought to trace those key developments. The book’s first two sections have remained the same
except for minor stylistic improvements. I have extensively revised and updated, however, the five
chapters in the final “Harvest” section, supplementing them with more up-to-date data and with
accounts of key incidents and trends that are shaping the Latino community’s evolution. Among the
most noteworthy of these over the past decade have been:
The post-9/11 crackdown on illegal immigration by both federal and local governments and the
astonishing immigrant rights movement it sparked.
The growing influence of the Latino electorate in the nation’s political life, perhaps best
symbolized by President’s Obama’s historic appointment of the first Hispanic Supreme Court
Justice, Sonia Sotomayor.
Puerto Rico’s extraordinary four-year battle to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, as well as the
island’s deepening economic crisis and still unresolved status issue.
The disastrous impact of U.S. free trade policies on Latin America and on immigration to our
shores in the wake of NAFTA.
The emergence of left-leaning populist governments throughout Latin America and how that sea
change has affected the Latino population of the United States.
No nation, of course, is as crucial to U.S. relations with Latin America, or to establishing control
of our immigration flow, than Mexico. The exodus of that country’s workers to El Norte has become
so massive that a few years ago Mexico moved into first place as the nation supplying the largest
number of legal immigrants to the United States since the federal government began keeping statistics
in 1820. It has now surpassed even Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Ireland in this regard.
NAFTA, which was supposed to spur more new jobs in Mexico and thus slow the pressure on
Mexicans to emigrate, has instead led to a greater exodus to the United States. Meanwhile, American
corporations have sharply increased their control over Mexico’s manufacturing, banking, and
agricultural sectors, and they now dominate its trade. Foreign banks moved into the country in a big
way after the 1994 peso crisis, to the point that Citigroup is today one of Mexico’s largest banks,
while a handful of U.S. and other foreign firms now control more than 80 percent of that country’s
banking assets.10
Tens of thousands of subsistence farmers in the Mexican countryside have been driven to near ruin.
Instead of planting traditional beans and corn they have been increasingly lured by violent drug
cartels to switch to marijuana and opium crops. Some officials estimate that as much as 30 percent of
Mexico’s farmland is now devoted to illicit crops. The large number of unemployed men in border
cities like Juarez, Tijuana, and Brownsville have become easy recruits for the private armies of the
drug cartels. Spiraling drug violence in those cities has become a harrowing replay of the tragedy that
engulfed Colombia in the 1980s.11
The book is aimed at the general reader who wishes to deepen his or her understanding about
Hispanics as well as at the growing number of Latino students, professionals, and intellectuals, who
may know a great deal about their particular ethnic group—Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, for
instance—but little else about any other Hispanics.
So who am I to undertake such an ambitious task? Well, I was born in 1947 to working-class
parents in Ponce, Puerto Rico. My family brought me to New York City’s El Barrio the following
year and I have lived in this country ever since. As a journalist, and before that as a Puerto Rican
community activist who helped found and direct two national organizations, the Young Lords in the
1960s, and the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the late 1970s, I have spent decades
living in and reporting on scores of Latino communities throughout the United States and Latin
America, devouring in the process every study or account of the Latino experience I could find.
At some point, I grew tired of having our story told, often one-sidedly, without the passion or the
pain, by experts who had not lived it. There have been several such well-intentioned efforts for the
general reader over the years, but too many fell into what I call the safari approach, geared strictly to
an Anglo audience, with the author as guide and interpreter to the natives encountered along the way.
In our universities, meanwhile, many fine historians have broken important ground in recent
decades with their research into Latino life in this country, and this book would not have been
possible had they not paved the way. But many of those efforts focused on one Latino group, or on a
specific area such as culture or politics, or a specific period of history. Few have attempted to sketch
a broader canvas, to connect the past to the present, to cut across academic disciplines, while still
making the entire process coherent to both Latinos and Anglos. Few attempt to understand our
hemisphere as one New World, north and south. Even fewer trace the seamless bond between Anglo
dominance of Latin America—two hundred years of massive and ever-increasing transfers of wealth
from south to north, what Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano has called the “open veins of Latin
America”—and the modern flood of the region’s people to the United States. It is the view of this
book that one would not exist without the other.
If Latin America had not been pillaged by U.S. capital since its independence, millions of
desperate workers would not now be coming here in such numbers to reclaim a share of that wealth;
and if the United States is today the world’s richest nation, it is in part because of the sweat and
blood of the copper workers of Chile, the tin miners of Bolivia, the fruit pickers of Guatemala and
Honduras, the cane cutters of Cuba, the oil workers of Venezuela and Mexico, the pharmaceutical
workers of Puerto Rico, the ranch hands of Costa Rica and Argentina, the West Indians who died
building the Panama Canal, and the Panamanians who maintained it.
In this country, just how white and black America cope with the mushrooming Latin American
population will determine whether our nation enjoys interethnic tranquility in the twenty-first century
or is convulsed by conflicts such as those that tore apart the multiethnic states of Eastern Europe, the
old Soviet Union, and elsewhere.
The reader will hopefully find in these pages not facile solutions to complex problems but a frank
attempt to make sense of both the Latin American and North American experience. It has not been
easy to separate my head from my heart as I sought to chronicle this story. I have met too many
Latinos throughout my life who struggled and sacrificed far beyond the endurance of most of us to
create something better for their children, yet found no respite and little respect, only to be, as the late
poet Pedro Pietri once wrote, “buried without underwears.” The deeper I delved into the twohundred-year record of shenanigans by our statesmen, businessmen, and generals in Latin America,
the angrier I became, especially since those leaders never seemed to learn from the past. My anger,
however, is not tainted by hate; it comes from the frustration of seeing how bountiful our nation’s
promise has turned out for some, how needlessly heartbreaking for others, and it is tempered by the
conviction that the American people still cling to a basic sense of fairness, that once they understand
the facts, they rarely permit injustice to stand, which is in part why I have included in the book a host
of facts not commonly known about Latinos.
Hopefully, by the time you have finished this book, you will see the Latino in America from another
viewpoint. We Hispanics are not going away. Demographics and the tide of history point only to a
greater not a lesser Latino presence throughout this century. Ours, however, is not some armed
reconquista seeking to throw out Anglo occupiers from sacred lands that were once Latino. It is a
search for survival, for inclusion on an equal basis, nothing more. It is a search grounded in the belief
that, five hundred years after the experiment began, we are all Americans of the New World, and our
most dangerous enemies are not each other but the great wall of ignorance between us.
A word about language usage. I believe needless time has been spent by Latino intellectuals in this
country debating whether the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” best describes us. Neither is totally
accurate but both are acceptable, and I use them interchangeably in this book. Much as blacks in this
country went from being comfortable with “colored,” then Negro, then black, then African American,
so will U.S. Latin Americans pass through our phases. I remember back in the mid-1980s attending a
joint conference in Mexico of Mexican and U.S. Hispanic journalists. The small Indian town where
the conference was being held organized a reception for us visitors one night. The town square was
decorated with a huge banner that read: Bienvenidos, periodistas hispano-norteamericanos
(Welcome, Hispanic–North American journalists”). So, to each his own labels.
Likewise, we all know the word “America” has been unfairly appropriated by the people of the
United States to refer to this country when it actually denotes the entire hemisphere. Latin Americans,
meanwhile, refer to the United States as norteamérica, or North America, and to U.S. citizens as
norteamericanos (apologies to Canadians). And in Mexican American communities here, whites are
sometimes called Anglos. Here, too, I have eschewed purism, using Americans, North Americans,
and Anglos interchangeably.
I have used Mexican Americans or Chicanos to refer to Mexicans born and raised in the U.S., and
mexicanos, tejanos, californios to refer to those Mexicans who lived in the country before the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo made them U.S. citizens. I have italicized Spanish words wherever possible
and have provided a glossary of definitions of those words at the back of the book.
That said, I ask you to travel back with me to tear down some walls and begin a new journey
through the American story.
PART I
Roots(Las Raíces)
1
Conquerors and Victims:
The Image of America Forms (1500–1800)
We saw cues and shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous site.
—Bernal Díaz del Castillo, 1568
T
he arrival of European explorers to America began the most astounding and far-reaching
encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. It brought together two portions of the
human race that until then had known nothing of each other’s existence, thus establishing the
basic identity of our modern world. French writer and critic Tzvetan Todorov has called it “the
discovery self makes of the other”; while Adam Smith labeled it one of “the two greatest and most
important events recorded in the history of mankind.”1
Of the Europeans who settled America, those who hailed from England and Spain had the greatest
impact. Both transplanted their cultures over vast territories. Both created colonial empires from
whose abundance Europe rose to dominate the world. And descendants of both eventually launched
independence wars that remade the political systems of our planet.
That common history has made Latin Americans and Anglo Americans, like the Arabs and Jews of
the Middle East, cousins in constant conflict, often hearing but not understanding each other. Most of
us know little of the enormous differences between how the Spanish and English settled America, or
how those disparities led after independence to nations with such radically divergent societies. For
just as adults develop key personality traits in the first years of childhood, so it was with the new
nations of America, their collective identities and outlooks, their languages and social customs,
molded by centuries in the colonial womb.
This first chapter seeks to probe how both Latin American and Anglo American cultures were
shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s,
particularly how each culture took root in separate regions of what now makes up the United States.
What kind of people were the original English and Spanish settlers and how did the views and
customs they brought with them affect the America they fashioned? What was the legacy of the
settlers’ religious beliefs, racial policies, and economic relationships? How did the colonial systems
of their mother countries influence their political traditions? How were the rights of individuals
regarded in the two groups of colonies? How did divergent views toward land, its ownership and its
uses, promote or retard the development of their societies? To what degree did the various
Amerindian civilizations the Europeans conquered influence the settlers’ own way of life?
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
The native population at the time of first contact has been much debated. Estimates vary wildly,
though there seems little doubt that it equaled or surpassed that of Europe. Most likely, it was around
60 million; some scholars place it as high as 110 million.2 The greatest number, perhaps 25 million,
lived in and around the Valley of Mexico, another 6 million inhabited the Central Andes region, while
the territory north of the Rio Grande was home to perhaps another 10 million.3 A bewildering level of
uneven development prevailed among these Native Americans. The Han and Capoque were still in
the Stone Age, nomads foraging naked along the bayous of the North American Gulf Coast. The slavebased city-states of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, on the other hand, rivaled the sophistication and
splendor of Europe. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was a bustling metropolis. Meticulously
designed and ingeniously constructed in the middle of a lake, where it was accessible only by wellguarded causeways, it contained some 250,000 inhabitants when Hernán Cortés first entered it.
(London’s population at the time was a mere 50,000 and that of Seville, the greatest city in Castile,
barely 40,000.) The Spaniards were awestruck. One of Cortés’s captains, Bernal Díaz del Castillo,
left a vivid description of what he and his fellow Spaniards beheld that first day from the top of the
central Aztec temple:
We saw a great number of canoes, some coming with provisions and others returning with cargo and merchandise; and we saw too that one could not pass
from one house to another of that great city and the other cities that were built on water except over wooden drawbridges or by canoe. We saw … shrines in
these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight.
Some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said they had never seen a market so well
laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.4
But Aztec civilization could not compare in grandeur, archaeologists tell us, to its predecessor, the
city-state of Teotihuacán, which flourished for several centuries before it collapsed mysteriously in
A.D. 700, leaving behind soul-stirring pyramids and intricate murals and artifacts as clues to its
resplendent past. Nor did the Aztecs approach the sophistication of the Mayans, America’s Greeks,
whose mathematicians and astronomers surpassed any in antiquity and whose scholars invented
during their Classic Period (a.d. 300 to 900) the hemisphere’s only known phonetic script.
Farther north, beyond the Rio Grande, hundreds of native societies existed when the Europeans
arrived, all with their own languages and traditions, though only the Pueblos of New Mexico and the
Iroquois Confederation in the Northeast approached the level of civilization reached by the natives of
Meso- and South America. The Pueblos were descended from the even larger and more advanced
Anasazi, who flourished in present-day Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries A.D. before they, too, mysteriously disappeared. By the time the first Spaniards
arrived in the region in 1540, the Pueblos numbered around sixteen thousand. They were living in
small cities of multilevel adobe apartments built on high plateaus, among them Acoma, Zuñi, and
Hopi. A peaceful, sedentary civilization, the Pueblos survived off the ocean of barren scrubland and
buttes by planting extensively in river bottoms. They practiced a complicated animist religion that
revolved around their ceremonial center, the kiva, where they taught their young that
“competitiveness, aggressiveness and the ambition to lead were … offensive to the supernatural
powers.”5
The Iroquois Confederation, formed around 1570 by the Mohawk shaman, or chief, Hiawatha, was
the largest and most durable alliance of native societies in North American history. Its influence
stretched from the hinterland of Lake Superior to the backwoods of Virginia. Feared by all other
Indians, the Iroquois became gatekeepers to the huge fur trade and a decisive force in the competition
between the English and French for its control. They lived in towns of up to several thousand
residents in wooden longhouses protected by double or triple rings of stockades. Social authority in
each of the five Iroquois nations was matrilineal. Women chose the men who served as each clan’s
delegates to the nation’s council, and each nation, in turn, elected representatives to the
confederation’s fifty-member ruling body, the Council Fire. That council decided all issues affecting
the confederation by consensus.
The Europeans who stumbled upon this kaleidoscope of Amerindian civilizations were themselves
just emerging from a long period of backwardness. The Black Death had swept out of Russia in 1350,
leaving 25 million dead. There followed a relentless onslaught of epidemics that so devastated the
continent that its population declined by 60 to 75 percent in the span of a hundred years. So few
peasants were left to work the land that feudal society disintegrated, the price of agricultural labor
soared, and new classes of both rich peasants and poor nobles came into being. The sudden labor
shortage spurred technical innovation as a way to increase production, and that innovation, in turn,
led to the rise of factories in the cities. The social upheaval brought about a new mobility among the
long-suffering peasantry, and with it a new aggressiveness. Rebellions by the starving poor against
their feudal lords became more frequent. Some even assailed the all-powerful Catholic Church,
whose bishops preached piety to the common man while surrounded by the privileges of the nobility.6
By the fifteenth century, the frequency of plagues ebbed, population rebounded, and the continent
emerged into a dazzling era of artistic and scientific achievement. The first printing presses
disseminated the new knowledge widely, through books written in scores of vernacular languages,
ending forever the monopoly of Latin and the stranglehold of the clergy on learning. In 1492, as
Columbus launched Europe’s historic encounter with the Amerindians, Renaissance geniuses like
Hieronymus Bosch and Leonardo da Vinci were at the apex of their fame; the German master
Albrecht Dürer, was twenty-one; Niccolò Machiavelli was twenty-three; Dutchman Desiderius
Erasmus was twenty-six; the Englishman Thomas More was fourteen; Copernicus was only nineteen,
and Martin Luther a boy of eight.
The revolutions in production and in knowledge were reflected in politics as well. For the first
time, strong monarchs ruled England and Spain, kings who were determined to create unified nations
out of fiefdoms that had quarreled and warred against each other since the fall of the Roman empire.
Foremost among those monarchs were King Ferdinand of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile,
who joined their twin kingdoms and finally ousted the Moors in 1492 from the Kingdom of Granada,
the last Arab stronghold in Europe. For most of the previous eight centuries, Moors had occupied the
Iberian Peninsula, where they withstood fierce but intermittent crusades by Christian Spaniards to
reclaim their land. Those crusades—the Spanish call them La Reconquista—had succeeded over the
centuries in slowly shunting the Moors farther south, until only Granada remained in Arab hands.
Ironically, the Moorish occupation and La Reconquista prepared Spain for its imperial role in
America. The occupation turned the country and the city of Córdoba into the Western world’s premier
center for the study of science and philosophy, while the fighting engendered a hardened warrior
ethos in the hidalgos, Spain’s lower nobility. It was those hidalgos who later rushed to fill the ranks
of the conquistador armies in the New World. The wars provided vital practice in colonization, with
Spanish kings gradually adopting the practice of paying their warriors with grants from land they
recovered in battle. Finally, La Reconquista reinforced a conviction among Spaniards that they were
the true defenders of Catholicism.
Unlike Spain, which grew monolithic through La Reconquista, England emerged from the Middle
Ages bedeviled by strife among its own people. The most bloody of those conflicts was the thirtyyear Wars of the Roses, which finally drew to a close in 1485 when Henry Tudor of the House of
Lancaster vanquished Richard III of the House of York. Henry VII quickly distinguished himself by
creating a centralized government and reliable system of taxation, the first English monarch to do so.
His success was due in no small measure to the prosperity of English farming, to the flowering of
English nationalism, and to his enlightened concessions to local self-government. Henry’s subjects
proudly believed themselves to be better off than any people in Europe, and they were largely right,
for neither the widespread class divisions nor the famine and squalor that afflicted much of the
continent during the fifteenth century could be found in England. Slavery, for instance, did not exist in
the kingdom, and English serfs already enjoyed greater liberties than their European counterparts.7
The yeomanry, small farmers who comprised a large middle class between the gentry and the serfs,
fostered economic stability and provided a counterweight to curb the power of the nobility. At the
same time, Parliament and the traditions of English common law accorded the average citizen greater
protection from either the king or his nobles than any other political system in Europe.
Such were the conditions in 1497 when Henry, fired by news of Columbus’s discoveries,
dispatched explorer John Cabot to America. Cabot landed in Newfoundland and laid claim to North
America for the British Crown, but he perished in a subsequent trip before establishing a colony. That
failure, along with the discovery of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru a few decades later,
permitted Spain to catapult to the pinnacle of sixteenth-century world power. Meanwhile, the English,
bereft of colonies and increasingly consumed by religious and political strife at home, were reduced
to sniping at Spanish grandeur through the exploits of their pirates.
When they finally did embark on a New World empire a century later, the English brought with
them not just their tradition of local self-government but the vestiges of their domestic conflicts as
well, most important of which were the religious schisms and sects that arose after Henry VIII broke
with the pope in Rome and established the Church of England. Among those sects, one in particular,
the Puritans, was destined to leave a vast imprint on American society.
Another “British” conflict that was to greatly influence the New World was the colonizing of
Catholic Ireland and the bloody repression that accompanied it. By their callous treatment of the Irish,
Anglo-Norman Protestants set the stage for the massive Irish flight that followed. English leaders
justified that occupation by claiming that the Irish were a barbarian people, but in doing so, they gave
birth to notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority that they would later use to justify their conquest of
Native Americans.8
EARLY SPANISH INFLUENCE IN THE UNITED STATES
The textbooks most of us read in grammar school have long acknowledged that Spanish
conquistadores crisscrossed and laid claim to much of the southern and western United States nearly
a century before the first English colonies were founded at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay. But
most Anglo American historians have promoted the view that the early Spanish presence rapidly
disappeared and left a minor impact on U.S. culture when compared to our dominant Anglo-Saxon
heritage.
Those early expeditions, however, led to permanent Spanish outposts throughout North America, to
the founding of our earliest cities, Saint Augustine and Santa Fe, and to the naming of hundreds of U.S.
rivers, mountains, towns, and even several states. Moreover, they led to a Spanish-speaking
population—more accurately, a Latino/mestizo population—that has existed continuously in certain
regions of the United States since that time. That heritage, and the colonial society it spawned, has
been so often overlooked in contemporary debates over culture, language, and immigration that we
would do well to review its salient parts.
Juan Ponce de León was the first European to touch what is now U.S. soil. His fruitless search for
the Fountain of Youth led to his discovery in 1513 of La Florida. He returned eight years later but
was killed in battle with the Calusa Indians before he could found a settlement.
Nearly two decades after Ponce de León’s death, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Hernando
de Soto, their imaginations fired by the treasures Cortés had seized in Mexico, each led major
expeditions in search of the fabled cities of gold. Starting from central Mexico in 1539, Coronado and
his men marched north into present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas,
planting the Spanish flag wherever they went. By the time the expedition returned in 1542, the
Spaniards had discovered the Grand Canyon, crossed and named many of the continent’s great rivers,
but discovered no gold. The same year Coronado set out, De Soto led an expedition out of Cuba that
explored much of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, but he
and half his men perished without finding any treasure.
The most extraordinary exploit of all, however, was that of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who
arrived in Florida in 1527—fifteen years before De Soto—as second-in-command to Pánfilo de
Narváez, the bungling onetime governor of Cuba whom King Charles of Spain authorized to complete
the colonization of Florida. After landing on the peninsula’s western coast, Narváez led a threehundred-man expedition inland near present-day Tallahassee, then foolishly lost touch with his ships
and was killed. His men, unable to withstand the constant Indian attacks, headed west along the Gulf
Coast on makeshift barges.
Only four survived the ordeal, among them Cabeza de Vaca and a Spanish Moor named
Estevanico. The four spent the next seven years wandering through the North American wilderness.
Their six-thousand-mile trek, one of the great exploration odysseys of history, and the first crossing of
North America by Europeans, is preserved in a report Cabeza de Vaca wrote for the king of Spain in
1542. At first, they were separated and enslaved by coastal tribes, where Cabeza de Vaca was beaten
so often his life became unbearable. After a year in captivity, he managed to escape and took up the
life of a trader between the tribes: “Wherever I went, the Indians treated me honorably and gave me
food, because they liked my commodities. I became well known; those who did not know me
personally knew me by reputation and sought my acquaintance.”9
His rudimentary medical knowledge enabled him at one point to cure some sick Indians. From that
point on, the tribes revered him as a medicine man. Once a year, when the various tribes gathered for
the annual picking of prickly pears, he was reunited with his fellow Spaniards, who remained
enslaved. At one such gathering in 1533, he engineered their escape and they all fled west through
present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. As they traveled, word spread of the wondrous white
medicine man and his companions, and soon thousands of Indians started to follow in a caravan of
worshipers. The four did not finally reconnect with Spanish civilization in northern Mexico until
1534. By then, Cabeza de Vaca had been transformed. He no longer regarded the Native American as
a savage, for he now had an intimate understanding of their culture and outlook. Instead, the barbarity
of his fellow Spaniards toward the Indians now filled him with despair. His description of his trip
through an area where Spanish slave traders were hunting Indians remains a powerful revelation into
the nature of the Conquest:
With heavy hearts we looked out over the lavishly watered, fertile, and beautiful land, now abandoned and burned and the people thin and weak, scattering or
hiding in fright. Not having planted, they were reduced to eating roots and bark; and we shared their famine the whole way. Those who did receive us could
provide hardly anything. They themselves looked as if they would willingly die. They brought us blankets they had concealed from the other Christians and
told us how the latter had come through razing the towns and carrying off half the men and all the women and boys.10
THE TOLL OF CONQUEST
The devastation Cabeza de Vaca warned of still defies comprehension. By the late 1500s, a mere
century after the Conquest began, scarcely 2 million natives remained in the entire hemisphere. An
average of more than 1 million people perished annually for most of the sixteenth century, in what has
been called “the greatest genocide in human history.”11 On the island of Hispaniola, which was
inhabited by 1 million Tainos in 1492, less than 46,000 remained twenty years later.12 As historian
Francis Jennings has noted, “The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did
not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one.”
Fewer natives perished in the English colonies only because the Amerindian populations were
sparser to begin with, yet the macabre percentages were no less grisly: 90 percent of the Indian
population was gone within half a century of the Puritan landing on Plymouth Rock; the Block Island
Indians plummeted from 1,500 to 51 between 1662 and 1774; the Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s
Vineyard declined from 3,000 in 1642 to 313 in 1764; and the Susquehannock tribe in central
Pennsylvania nearly disappeared, falling from 6,500 in 1647 to 250 by 1698.13
Much of this cataclysm was unavoidable. The Indians succumbed to smallpox, measles,
tuberculosis, and bubonic plague, for which they had no immunity, just as Europeans had succumbed
to their own epidemics in previous centuries. But an astounding number of native deaths resulted from
direct massacres or enslavement. If the Spaniards exterminated more than the British or French, it is
because they encountered civilizations with greater population, complexity, and wealth, societies that
desperately resisted any attempt to subjugate them or seize their land and minerals.
The battle for Tenochtitlán, for instance, was rivaled in overall fatalities by few in modern history.
During the eighty-day siege of the Aztec capital by Cortés and his Texcoco Indian allies, 240,000
natives perished.14 A few Indian accounts of the battle survive today only because of Franciscan
missionaries like Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego de Durán, who as early as 1524 developed a
written form of the Nahuatl language, the lingua franca of central Mexico. The missionaries urged the
Indians to preserve their tragic songs and reminiscences of the Conquest, and several of those
accounts, such as the following section from the Codex Florentino, vividly describe what happened at
Tenochtitlán:
Once again the Spaniards started killing and a great many Indians died. The flight from the city began and with this the war came to an end. The people cried:
“We have suffered enough! Let us leave the city! Let us go live on weeds!”
A few of the men were separated from the others. These men were the bravest and strongest warriors. The youths who served them were also told to stand
apart. The Spaniards immediately branded them with hot irons, either on the cheek or the lips.15
Less than a quarter century after the arrival of Columbus, the Indian genocide sparked its first
protest from a Spaniard, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who had arrived in Santo Domingo as a
landowner but opted instead to become a Franciscan missionary. The first priest ordained in
America, he quickly relinquished his lands and launched a campaign against Indian enslavement that
made him famous throughout Europe. As part of that campaign, he authored a series of polemics and
defended the Indians in public debates against Spain’s greatest philosophers. The most famous of
those polemics, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, recounts scores of massacres by
Spanish soldiers, including one ordered by Cuba’s governor Pánfilo Narváez, which Las Casas
personally observed. In that incident, according to Las Casas, a group of natives approached a
Spanish settlement with food and gifts, when the Christians, “without the slightest provocation,
butchered before my eyes, some three thousand souls—men, women and children, as they sat there in
front of us.”16
Las Casas’s untiring efforts on behalf of the Amerindians led to Spain’s adoption of “New Laws”
in 1542. The codes recognized Indians as free and equal subjects of the Spanish Crown, but
landowners in many regions refused to observe the codes and kept Indians in virtual slavery for
generations. Despite his heroic efforts, Las Casas, who was eventually promoted to Bishop of
Chiapas in Guatemala, also committed some major blunders. At one point he advocated using African
slaves to replace Indian labor, though he ultimately recanted that position. While his polemics were
among the most popular books in Europe and led to widespread debate over the toll of colonization,
they greatly exaggerated the already grisly numbers of the Indian genocide, thus making Las Casas the
unwitting source of the Spanish “Black Legend” propagated by Dutch and British Protestants.17
Spain, of course, had no monopoly on settler barbarism. In 1637, the Puritans of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony mistakenly concluded that local Pequots had killed two white men, so they set out to
punish them. Assisted by other Indian enemies of the tribe, the Englishmen attacked the Pequot village
on the Mystic River while its braves were absent, and roasted or shot to death between three hundred
and seven hundred women and children before burning the entire village.18 Forty years later, during
King Philip’s War, colonists and their mercenaries conducted similar vicious slaughters of women
and children. An estimated two thousand Indians perished in battle and another thousand were sold
into slavery in the West Indies during the conflict.19 And South Carolina’s Cherokee War (1760–
1761) turned so brutal that a colonist defending a fort against Indians wrote to the governor, “We
have now the pleasure, Sir, to fatten our dogs with their carcasses and to display their scalps neatly
ornamented on the top of our bastions.”20
This type of savagery, often reciprocated by Indians desperate to defend their land, became a
hallmark of Anglo-Indian relations far after the colonial period. A particularly gruesome example
was carried out by Andrew Jackson in 1814. Settlers and land speculators from the Carolinas had
started moving into the territory shortly after the War of Independence. When the settlers tried to push
out the Indian inhabitants, the Creeks resisted and the U.S. Army, led by Jackson, intervened. During
the war’s decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, on March 27, 1814, Jackson’s men massacred
and cut off the noses of 557 Creeks, then skinned the dead bodies to tan the Indian hides and make
souvenir bridle reins.21
THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH
While all European settlers justified the Indian conquest and genocide as God’s will, the Spanish
and English differed substantially in their methods of subjugation, and this eventually led to radically
different colonial societies. English kings, for instance, ordered their agents to “conquer, occupy and
possess” the lands of the “heathens and infidels,” but said nothing of the people inhabiting them,
while Spain, following the dictates of Pope Alexander VI, sought not only to grab the land but also to
make any pagans found on it “embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals.” In Spain,
both Crown and Church saw colonizing and conversion as a unified effort. Priests accompanied each
military expedition for the purpose of Christianizing the natives. Within a month of landing in Mexico,
Bernal Díaz reminds us, Cortés presided over the first Indian baptisms, of twenty women given to the
Spanish soldiers by the Tabascans of the coast: “One of the Indian ladies was christened Doña
Marina. She was a truly great princess, the daughter of Caciques and the mistress of vassals … they
were the first women in New Spain to become Christians. Cortés gave one of them to each of his
captains.”22
As the Conquest proceeded, priests performed such baptisms by the thousands. Before the holy
water could dry on their foreheads, the Indian women were routinely grabbed as concubines by
Spanish soldiers and settlers. The priests even performed occasional marriages between Spaniards
and Indians, especially among the elite of both groups, thus fostering and legitimizing a new mestizo
race in America. For example, Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, called El Inca, was born in
1539 to a Spanish officer and an Inca princess, while the parish register of Saint Augustine, Florida,
recorded twenty-six Spanish-Indian marriages in the early 1700s, at a time when only a few hundred
natives resided near the town.23 Far more important than legal marriages, however, was the
extraordinary number of consensual unions. Francisco de Aguirre, among the conquistadores of
Chile, boasted that by fathering more than fifty mestizo children, his service to God had been “greater
than the sin incurred in doing so.”24
The first English colonies, by contrast, began as family settlements. They maintained strict
separation from Indian communities, sometimes even bolstered by segregation laws.25 In North
America, Indians rarely served as laborers for settlers or as household servants, and unmarried
sexual unions between natives and whites were rare except for captives of war.
The English, furthermore, never saw proselytizing among the Indians as important. True, the
Virginia Company listed missionary work as one of its purposes when the Crown granted Jamestown
its charter in 1607. And nine years later, the Crown even ordered funds raised from all parishes in the
Church of England to erect a college for the natives. But the company never sent a single missionary
to Virginia and the college was never built. Officials simply diverted the money for their own ends
until an investigation of the fraud prompted the Crown to revoke the company’s charter and take over
direct administration of the colony in 1622.26
Likewise, the New England Puritans segregated themselves from the Indians, not even venturing out
of their settlements to win converts until decades after their arrival. In 1643, sections of Harvard
College were built with money raised by the New England Company among Anglicans back home.
While donors were told the funds would be used for Indian education, some of the money ended up
buying guns and ammunition for the colonists.27 So minor was Puritan concern for the Indians’ souls
that by 1674, fifty-five years after the founding of Plymouth Colony, barely a hundred natives in all
New England were practicing Christians.28
At one time or another, clerics Roger Williams of Rhode Island, Cotton Mather of Massachusetts
Bay, and Samuel Purchas of Virginia all vilified the natives as demonic. The Reverend William
Bradford, one of the original Pilgrim leaders, insisted they were “cruel, barbarous and most
treacherous … not being content only to kill and take away a life, but delight to torment men in the
most bloody manner.”29 Throughout colonial history, only Williams’s Rhode Island colony and the
Quakers of Pennsylvania showed themselves willing to coexist in harmony with their Indian
neighbors. Despite their low view of the Indians, the English settlers did not try to bring them under
heel. At first, they merely purchased or finagled choice parcels of land from some tribes and
pressured others to move toward the interior.
In the Spanish colonies, however, the natives were far more numerous, and the policies of the
Catholic Church far more aggressive. Church leaders did more than merely recognize Indian humanity
or accommodate mestizaje. The Church dispatched an army of Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit
monks, who served as the vanguard of sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism. The monks who flocked
to America perceived the chaotic rise of capitalism in Europe as auguring an era of moral decay. In
the Native Americans they imagined a simpler, less corrupted human being, one who could more
easily be convinced to follow the word of Christ. So they abandoned Spain to set up their missions in
the most remote areas of America, far from the colonial cities and encomiendas.
Those missions—the first was founded by Las Casas in Venezuela in 1520—became the principal
frontier outposts of Spanish civilization. Many had farms and schools to Europeanize the Indians and
research centers where the monks set about learning and preserving the native languages. Quite a few
of the monks were inspired by Thomas More, whose widely read Utopia (1516) portrayed a fictional
communal society of Christians located somewhere on an island in America. One of More’s most
ardent admirers was Vasco de Quiroga, who established a mission of thirty thousand Tarascans in
central Mexico and rose to bishop of Michoacán. Quiroga, like More, talked of trying to “restore the
lost purity of the primitive Church.” Since Indians had no concept of land ownership or money, the
missionaries easily organized cooperative tilling of the land and even communal housing, just as
More espoused.
The natives proved less malleable and far less innocent than the Europeans imagined, so much so
that early colonial history is filled with countless stories of monks who met hideous deaths at the
hands of their flocks. Despite those tragedies, the monks kept coming, and as the years passed, some
of their missions even prospered. That prosperity enraged colonial landowners, who increasingly
regarded mission Indian labor as unwanted competition for the products of their plantations. In 1767,
the colonial elite finally succeeded in getting the Jesuits, the most independent of the monastic orders,
expelled from the New World. By then, 2,200 Jesuits were working in the colonies and more than
700,000 Indians resided in their missions.30
Long before those Jesuit expulsions, Spanish monks played a crucial role in colonizing major parts
of the United States. Most important were the Franciscans, who founded nearly forty thriving missions
in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama during the 1600s and numerous others in the Southwest. Saint
Augustine was the headquarters for the Florida missions, in which as many as twenty thousand
Christianized Indians lived.31 While most of the Florida missions eventually were abandoned, several
in the Southwest later turned into thriving towns, with Spanish monks today recognized as the
founders of San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey, and San
Francisco.
The Florida missions and settlements left a greater imprint on frontier American culture than we
might believe. That influence was not always a direct one. Rather, it came by way of the Indians and
Africans who remained after the missionaries were gone and who carried on some of the customs
they learned from the Spanish settlers. Indians who traded with Europeans at Pensacola in 1822 were
“better acquainted with the Spanish language than either the French or English,” notes historian David
Weber, and Englishmen who settled in Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia encountered Indians who
were already cultivating peach trees the Spanish had introduced from Europe. Weber notes that the
missionaries of Florida and New Mexico “taught native converts to husband European domestic
animals—horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens; cultivate European crops, from watermelon
to wheat; raise fruit trees, from peaches to pomegranates; use such iron tools as wheels, saws,
chisels, planes, nails, and spikes; and practice those arts and crafts that Spaniards regarded as
essential for civilization as they knew it.”
The knowledge the missionaries imparted to the Indians, whether in agriculture, language, customs,
or technology, did not disappear when the last monk departed. Rather, it remained part of Indian
experience so that by the time Anglos began settling in the Southeast, they discovered the “civilized
tribes,” among them the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Choctaws. Even some of the most nomadic
and fierce of the Southwest nations, the Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas partially assimilated into
Spanish society. In one unusual case, Apache Manuel González became mayor of San Jose,
California.32
Apart from the missions, the Church reached into every corner of colonial life. It functioned side by
side with Spanish civil government, sometimes even above it. In every town, the church was the
dominant structure adjacent to which was erected the central plaza, the cabildo, and la casa real.
While the Crown collected its royal fifth from the elite, the Church collected its 10 percent tithe from
everyone, rich and poor, white and colored, as well as tribute from the Indians. Parish priests were
the main moneylenders, and bishops held unparalleled power over the social life of colonists and
natives alike. While the Church served as a buffer for the Indians against the worst abuses of Spanish
civil society, it also discouraged independence or self-sufficiency and it demanded obedience from
the natives it protected.
Even Europeans who dared question Church authority or doctrine were liable to be called before
the all-powerful Inquisition, which could threaten anyone up to the governor with excommunication or
prison, and which routinely prohibited the circulation of thousands of books and works of art it
deemed sacrilegious. Its demand for blind faith toward Church doctrine impeded for centuries the
spread of tolerance, ingenuity, and creativity in Latin American thought.
No English colonial Church enjoyed a monopoly power approaching that of the Catholic Church in
the Spanish territories. The proliferation of sects among Protestants meant each denomination, even
when its leaders wished to set up a theocratic colony, could do so only within a circumscribed area,
as the Puritans did in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Puritan witch trials of the late 1680s in
Salem and surrounding Essex County rivaled the worst atrocities of the Inquisition. Twenty men and
women were executed and more than 150 imprisoned, but the fanatics proved incapable of controlling
everyone. Long before the witch trials, Roger Williams rebelled and founded the Rhode Island
colony, where he permitted all manner of worship, and other colonies followed similar liberal
policies. Catholic Maryland enacted a religious tolerance law and Quaker William Penn set up his
Pennsylvania colony, which, likewise, welcomed all believers. New York City turned into such a
hodgepodge of religious groups that its English governor reported in 1687: “Here, bee not many of
the Church of England, [and] few Roman Catholicks, [but] abundance of Quakers—preachers, men
and women, especially—singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-sabbatarians, some
Anabaptists, some Independants, some Jews: in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the
most part of none at all.”33
After Parliament declared religious freedom in the colonies with the Toleration Act of 1689, the
emigration of sects from Europe soared. Thousands of Germans, among them Lutherans, Moravians,
Mennonites, and Amish, settled in the Middle Colonies and the hinterlands of the South, as did
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the South.
THE ROLE OF RACE
Beyond their religious practices, the English and Spanish colonial worlds diverged substantially in
their attitudes toward slavery and race. The long period of Arab domination left an indelible legacy
of racial and cultural mixing that the Spanish immigrants carried to the New World. Moorish
occupiers of the Iberian Peninsula had invariably taken Spanish wives, setting off an era of
miscegenation so extensive that “by the fifteenth century there were dark-skinned Christians, lighthaired Moors, hybrids of every shape and complexion in Castile,” according to one historian. Some
Muslims, called Mudejars, continued to live under Christian rule, while some Christians, called
Mozarabs, learned to speak Arabic and adopted Muslim habits. The dress, foods, and traditions of
Moors and Spaniards permeated each other’s societies. In architecture, for instance, the horseshoe
arches, tiled floors and walls, and open interior courtyards so commonly associated with Spanish
design in America, all drew from Arabic inspiration.34
This tradition of racial mixing made it more acceptable for Spanish settlers to engage in sexual
unions with both Amerindians and Africans. This was especially true for settlers from Andalusia in
southern Spain, the province that endured the longest period of Moorish occupation, and which
supplied nearly 40 percent of the early settlers to America.35 At the beginning of the Conquest,
Seville, Andalusia’s main port, was Spain’s most cosmopolitan city and the nexus for commerce with
Africa. It quickly turned into the bustling crossroads for transatlantic trade as well. By the middle of
the sixteenth century, the city counted nearly 100,000 inhabitants from all parts of Europe and the
Mediterranean, including 6,000 African slaves.36
But racial mixing did not mean racial equality. As the Indian population of America gradually
rebounded, and as black slave labor assumed a greater role in colonial plantation production, the
Spanish and Creole upper classes became increasingly fearful of revolt—so fearful that after the
Haitian revolution, the Council of the Indies, the Crown’s administrative body for colonies, banned
all marriages between whites and free blacks or mulatos. Despite the ban, the practice of mixed
racial marriages continued, with dispensations often granted in cases where the honor of the woman
was at stake. Upon denying one such request in 1855, the civil governor of Oriente Province in Cuba
remarked, “There is little doubt that the dissemination of ideas of equality of the white class with the
coloured race puts in jeopardy the tranquillity of the Island, the largest proportion of whose
population consists of the said race.”37
Apart from the ban on white-colored unions, the institution of marriage itself played a distinctive
role in Spanish society. It was one of the many avenues the Church utilized to mitigate the worst
aspects of slavery that were so evident in the English colonies. The Church would not permit slave
owners, for instance, to separate married couples, and it sanctioned marriage between slaves and free
persons. Historian Herbert Klein reports that in selected parishes of Havana between 1825 and 1829,
more than a third of all marriages were between slaves, and nearly a fifth were between a slave and a
free person. In many parts of Cuba, the marriage rate among slaves was equal to or higher than among
whites.38
Perhaps even more important than formal marriage, however, was the social impact of consensual
unions. No European society before the nineteenth century witnessed the level of free unions found in
Latin America. Illegitimate births among free persons of all classes were close to 50 percent. Among
the white upper classes, they were higher than among any other European elite.39 Those unions, which
were invariably between white men and nonwhite women, were preferable to official marriage
because they did not subvert the class structure.
The prevalence of both consensual unions and miscegenation, along with the strong influence of the
Catholic Church, led to major differences between how the English and Spanish regarded the rights of
slaves, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, all colonial powers had
allowed masters to free their slaves. But after the Haitian revolution, the British, French, and Dutch
started to restrict manumission, while the Portuguese and Spanish colonies promoted and codified the
practice.
As a result, only in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies did giant classes of free blacks develop,
and with them the mulato group (in some countries they were called pardos or morenos) that so
distinguished Latin America’s rainbow racial spectrum from North America’s stark black-white
system of racial classification. In the United States, for instance, the first federal census in 1790
reported that “free coloreds” were less than 2 percent of the population, while black slaves were 33
percent.40 The same proportion of free blacks to slaves was roughly true in the British, Dutch, and
French Caribbean colonies. But the opposite trend prevailed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies,
where free blacks or coloreds outnumbered slaves, with perhaps 40 to 60 percent of free blacks able
to purchase their emancipation outright.41 The viceroyalty of New Grenada, which included
Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, had 80,000 slaves and 420,000 free coloreds in 1789.42 Cuba
had 199,000 slaves and 114,000 free coloreds in 1817.43 By 1872, free coloreds composed 43
percent of Brazil’s population, outnumbering both pure whites and black slaves.
Color and status so deeply demarcated the English colonies, however, that the free colored class
was considered an abnormality only barely tolerated.44 A drop of black blood made you black in
Anglo-Saxon society, while in the Portuguese and Spanish world, mestizos and mulatos, no matter
how dark, were invariably regarded as part of white society, although admittedly second-class
members.
Racism obviously persisted in both groups of colonies, but in the Iberian ones it assumed a muted
form, its operation rendered more complex by the presence of a huge mixed-race population. The
quest for white purity in Latin America became confined to a tiny upper class, while dispensations for
lower-class whites to marry outside their race were routinely granted. The reasons were simple. For
rich whites, marriage was first and foremost a question of securing inheritance lines. Racial mixing
was not allowed to subvert the class structure, though on occasion even some of the elite officially
“recognized” their mixed-race children, ushering them partially into white society. The arcane types
of mixed-race offspring that developed in Latin America were astounding. Beyond mestizos and
mulatos, there were zambos (Indian and black), coyotes (mestizo and Indian), salta-atrás (those with
Negroid features born of white parents), chinos (offspring of Indian and salta-atrás), cuarterones
(quadroons), and even more exotic distinctions.
For the Anglo-Saxon colonies, on the other hand, interracial marriage was taboo, by any class of
whites. Even after independence and emancipation, it remained banned, and while rape or
unsanctioned unions obviously occurred, Anglo-Saxons almost never recognized their mixed-race
children, no matter how light-skinned the offspring or how poor the father.
LAND AND POLITICS IN THE TWO SOCIETIES
Beyond religion and race, the Spanish and English colonies diverged radically in the way they
managed their economic and political systems. Spain’s colonies were royal affairs from the start.
Conquistadores functioned as direct agents of the Crown. And Spain’s main object, at least for the
first century, was gold and silver; by 1600, its colonies had already produced more than 2 billion
pesos’ worth, three times the total European supply before Columbus’s first voyage.45 (The total
surpassed 6 billion pesos, mostly in silver, by 1800.) The flood of silver coin, however, only led to
massive inflation at home. Domestic industry and agriculture stagnated as more than 200,000
Spaniards left for the New World during the first century of colonization. Countless others abandoned
the Spanish countryside and flocked to Seville and Cádiz to engage in mercantile trade.46 The
Crown’s expulsion of the Moors and Jews only exacerbated the economic crisis, since those two
groups had provided much of the country’s professional and commercial vitality. Jewish merchants
fled with their wealth to the financial centers of London, Amsterdam, and Genoa.47 With Spain forced
to resort to huge loans from foreign banks to meet the spiraling costs of administering its vast empire,
much of the production from the mines of Mexico and Peru passed into the coffers of Dutch and
English bankers and went to pay for manufactured goods to supply the colonies.
When they finally started their own American colonies nearly a century after Spain, the English and
the Dutch rejected Spain’s state-sponsored approach. They relied instead on rich nobles financing
individual colonies and on a new type of business venture—the joint stock company. The London
Company, the Plymouth Company, the Virginia Company, and the Dutch West Indies Company all
secured charters from their monarchs to populate the new territories.
While the Pilgrims and other colonists indeed fled religious persecution, the same cannot be said
of the companies that transported them. Utopia for these new capitalist concerns was far less spiritual
in nature. It meant the chase for enormous profit: from trading for furs with the Indians; from wood
and iron and other raw materials that could be shipped to England; and from charging hefty rates for
relocating England’s malcontents and dissidents to the New World. In 1627, for instance, the London
Company declared one of its objectives to be: “The removing of the surcharge of necessitous people,
the matter or fuel of dangerous insurrections, and thereby leaving the greater plenty to sustain those
remaining with the Land.”48
The mass exodus from England and Europe, however, was not simply a spontaneous emigration of
the continent’s persecuted and destitute, as immigrant myth would have us believe. More than half the
population of the thirteen colonies before 1776 was composed of indentured servants. Among these
were fifty thousand convicts who were released from English jails during the seventeenth century to
populate the Maryland and Virginia colonies, and a considerable number of children who had been
kidnapped and sold into servitude.49
Land speculators who worked in tandem with merchants orchestrated and engineered much of the
exodus. Labor agents scoured the British Isles and the Rhineland for recruits to work the huge tracts
of American land the speculators owned, enticing farm families to sell their property and seek instant
wealth in the New World.50 William Penn, for example, employed recruiting agents in London,
Dublin, Edinburgh, and Rotterdam. Penn’s merchant friend in Rotterdam, Benjamin Furly, was so
successful advertising the colony in the Rhine Valley that he turned Pennsylvania into the center for
German immigrants to the colonies.51
At first, England left colonial administration in the hands of the companies, since the Crown was
preoccupied with its own domestic strife and religious battles. But by the end of the seventeenth
century, Parliament assumed direct administration through its Board of Trade, the counterpart to
Spain’s Council of the Indies. Even then, however, England kept its New World bureaucracy rather
tiny.
The Spanish empire, on the other hand, spawned such a huge colonial bureaucracy that 1.1 million
people held religious office of some kind in the Spanish colonies by the seventeenth century, and
nearly half a million held government jobs.52 Like most bureaucracies, the colonial Church and civil
government slowed the pace of decision making, buried innovation under mountains of reports and
edicts, and stifled all manner of dissent. In fairness to Spain, its empire was the largest the world had
ever seen. From Oregon all the way to Patagonia, it stretched over some of the world’s most
impassable mountains, longest rivers, most forbidding deserts and impenetrable jungles. The
population of its colonies, ten times that of the mother country, required far more effort to control than
the more compact and less densely populated English colonies east of the Allegheny Mountains.
Latin America’s great size and mineral wealth required an enormous supply of laborers. Indians
and mestizos mined the empire’s gold and silver, built its cities and churches, tended its herds, and
grew its food. And once mining declined in importance, African slaves harvested the new gold, sugar,
as well as tobacco, cocoa, and indigo. For a Spaniard in America to engage in hard labor was almost
unheard-of.
In the English colonies, on the other hand, Amerindians never formed part of the labor force. The
colonial economy depended on three groups of workers: free white farmers, propertyless whites
(both indentured and free), and African slaves. Nearly 70 percent of all white immigration to the
colonies until the Revolution was made up of indentured servants. Those servants, having completed
their required years of work, became free artisans in the cities or moved to the frontier to start their
own farms. By the time of the Revolution, the majority of the white population was comprised of
independent yeomen, small farmers, and fishermen.53 That agrarian group—simple, unassuming,
skeptical of far-off government control, and determined to create a new life out of an immense and
fertile wilderness—would form the cultural core of the new North American society, or at least of its
white majority.
Radically different land policies further demarcated English and Spanish colonial society.
Frenzied speculation in land was ubiquitous in the English territories.54 “Every farmer with an extra
acre of land became a land speculator—every town proprietor, every scrambling tradesman who
could scrape together a modest sum for investment,” says one historian.55 Both the English colonial
administrators and, later, the state and federal governments fostered speculation. Time and again,
those in charge of government created overnight fortunes for their friends and themselves through
corrupt schemes aimed at amassing huge holdings. By 1697, for example, four Hudson Valley
families, the Van Cortlandts, Philipses, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers, had amassed for
themselves 1.6 million acres spanning six present-day counties in mid–New York State, creating that
state’s new landed aristocracy.56
Where the English had their tradition of land speculation, the Spaniards had the opposite, the
mayorazgo, in which a family’s rural and urban holdings were made legally indivisible, handed
down from generation to generation through the eldest son. Other family members could be assigned
portions of the family estate to administer and profit from, but they could never own and, most
importantly, could not sell that portion.
The biggest mayorazgos went to the original conquistadores. More modest allotments were
assigned to their lower-ranking soldiers, and even smaller grants to civilian settlers. As the
generations passed, intermarriage within the elite created labyrinthine mergers of old estates.
Merchants, miners, and later immigrants often tried to purchase titles or marry into the established
mayorazgos. The giant estates only got bigger, never smaller, and individual buying and selling of
land for quick profit was rare.57 The mayorazgos, together with the labor system of the encomiendas,
thus became the basis for Latin America’s latifundio system, in which a tiny portion of the white
population owned most of the land and all others were reduced to laborers.
In contrast to both the English and Spanish, Native Americans invariably saw land as a resource to
be used by all and owned by none. Even in the most stratified Indian societies, land was owned
ultimately in common. Among the Aztecs, for instance, the calpulli, or extended clan, apportioned
land to each member. The members, in turn, remitted a portion of their crops to clan leaders, who
used that portion to pay the emperor’s tribute.58 No matter how many treaties the Indian nations may
have signed to placate white settlers, they invariably saw themselves as ceding use of the land, not
perpetual ownership.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the English and Spanish settlers brought with them vastly
different political traditions. When each group attempted to transplant those traditions in the New
World, they found themselves deeply influenced by the Amerindians who had preceded them. In
Mexico, for instance, the Aztec ruler, chosen from within the royal family by a council of nobles,
stood atop a highly differentiated class society. He exacted tribute from his own people and from
conquered or dependent city-states like Tacuba, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, and Tarasca. The Spaniards did
not dismember those centralized structures of power; instead, they appropriated them from above,
erecting the scaffolding of their colonial organization, from viceroys to middle-level corregidores,
over an already autocratic Indian foundation. And they astutely relinquished control of the cabildos
(town councils) outside of the major cities to the In...
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