Enslaved Africans resisted through flight and armed revolts from the earliest decades of colonization

Evidence

At first, as a rule, resistance among the enslaved Africans took the form of flight to native or “Indian” settlements. The notarial archive of the Mexican city of Puebla de los Angeles, for example, which is “virtually complete from 1540 on” is filled with the official reaction to mid-sixteenth-century “runaways.” Fugitives drew the attention of Hernan Cortes as early as 1523 and the first general uprising in Nueva Espana is thought to have occurred in 1537.58 Some of these Africans, however, did not completely sever their contacts with the Spanish. Once freed by their own wits, they returned to plague the Spanish colonists, appropriating food, clothes, arms, tools, and even religious artifacts from the colonists’ towns, their villages, and ranch homes, and from travelers along the roads connecting the ports and settlements. Once they armed themselves, the Spanish would refer to these “fugitives” as cimarrones. (The English would incorporate the term into their own language as “maroons”) In 1503, we recall, Ovando had observed subversive activities among Hispaniola’s ladinos. In the last month of 1522, Ovando’s prevision was realized. Fittingly enough, slaves on the plantation of Diego Columbus (a son of the Admiral) revolted, killing some 15 colonists before they were themselves captured and executed. This had been the occasion for the prohibition of future employ of ladinos as slave labor in the colonies. Similar revolts had occurred in Puerto Rico (1527), Santa Marta, Colombia (1529), and Panama (1531). Back in Hispaniola, Blacks had joined the native uprising of 1533. Resistance had continued for ten years. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 647

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the earliest documented slave resistance in the Americas, grounding the origins of the Black radical tradition the reader seeks.