Race And Ethnicty In American History

1 RACE AND ETHNICITY Turning to real history, there can be no doubt, first, as to the widespread, nay, universal, prevalence of the race idea. . . . W. E. B. Dubois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)

TABLE 1.1 POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES: PERCENT OF TOTAL BY “RACE,” 2000* WHITE 75.1 BLACK HISPANIC ASIAN

12.5 12.3 3.4

NATIVE AMERICAN

0.9

*Source: Bureau of the Census, 2001. The percentages add up to more than 100 percent because people were allowed to choose more than one race. The Hawaiian population was 0.1 percent.

The population of the United States in 2000 reached 281,421,906. In the last thirty years, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and Native Americans have increased their numbers faster than the white majority. In the 1970 census, these four groups made up about 16 percent of the U.S. population. By 2000, according to the census conducted that year, the proportion had grown to 29 percent. The United States Census Bureau estimates that by 2050 these groups will make up almost 50 percent of the population.

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATIONS The classification of people by race and ethnicity is not easy. As we will see, even the definition of race is under dispute and changes dramatically over time. Some people believe everything about an individual is determined by his or her racial characteristics, which are biologically inherited through the genes. They think everything about a person’s character, including his or her intelligence and behavior, results from racial inheritance. Most modern scientists see race as nothing more than a method of dividing people by the color of their skin, which turns out to be a rather insignificant biological factor. The director of the Human Genome Project has estimated that less than 1 percent of human genetic variations are the result of race. And in 1998 the American Anthropological Association described race as “a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior.” Ethnicity in the United States, on the other hand, is based on a person’s ancestral homeland—a person is Polish because his or her ancestors came from that part of Europe designated as Poland when they migrated to the United States. In Europe, ethnicity is based on language and geography. The French people are the people who live within the borders of France and speak French. But what if Algerian or Belgian or African immigrants speak French and reside within the physical boundaries of that place on the map we call France? Are they French? Many Africans do speak French because France was their colonial master (and French is still the official language of nations like Chad and Niger)—are they French then because they speak the language, eat French food, and know a lot about French history and politics? Yes, they are, just as in the United States, under whose Constitution anyone born within the geographical boundaries of the country is a citizen, regardless of the nationality, race, or legal status of one’s parents. CENSUS BUREAU CLASSIFICATIONS Racial statistics for the United States come from the Census Bureau, which classifies people according to some very broad standards. Census workers generally accept the classification chosen by the respondent. If you mark that you are white on your form you will be counted as white, even if you are Botswanian. This procedure creates some interesting problems. How do you classify a person whose mother in Asian and whose father is African American? Or whose mother is half Italian and half African while the father is one-fourth Mexican, one-fourth Native American, one-fourth Greek, and one-

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fourth Jewish? (Interestingly, for most of American history both would have been classified as black.) In 2000, for the first time, the Census Bureau allowed respondents to designate two or more racial groups, and 2.4 percent chose this option. In 2000 the government accepted six racial classifications: Hispanic (which included all Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, and people from Spain or Portugal); White (not of Hispanic origin); Black or African American (not of Hispanic origin); Asian; American Indian (including Alaskan Native, Alaskan Eskimo, and Aleut); and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander. These classifications were voluntary; respondents could choose any race or combination of races.

R

RACE AND BIOLOGY The American Heritage dictionary defines race as “one of the great divisions of mankind with certain inherited physical characteristics in common, such as the color of skin and hair, and the shape of the eyes and nose.” The meaning of race has changed significantly throughout history. Modern biologists use the term to define a subspecies, part of a species of animal that looks different from other members because of separation over time. For instance, an earthquake or a flood may separate a species of squirrels so that individuals will never have contact with the squirrels on the other side of the divide. Over time each separate community will develop different characteristics in response to unique conditions in its habitat. This is how races develop —through isolation over long periods of time and in response to differing environments. The key scientific difference between a race and a species is that races can breed with all members of the species they belong to, and most species generally include several races or subspecies as biologists call them. Different species, such as lions and tigers, or cats and dogs, cannot breed with each other. Different races within the species, however, such as collies and German shepherds, can and do have offspring. All life forms, both plant and animal, are classified according to their structure and genetic inheritance. Such classification is necessary to bring order out of the seeming chaos of nature. And sometimes the classifications are surprising. Recently, scientists studying DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)—the material that determines an individual’s genetic inheritance—concluded that animals as different as elephants and aardvarks had a common ancestor that probably lived about one hundred million years ago in Africa. Modern researchers believe that,

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

although there is no physical likeness between ten-thousandpound elephants and twenty-pound aardvarks, their DNA is similar enough to provide convincing evidence of their distant kinship. DNA similarities show that the human species has a common ancestor who lived somewhere in east Africa about seven million years ago, and from whom all modern races have evolved. Clearly, all six billion humans now living in the world share more than 99.7 percent of the same genetic materials. In this way, we are all related regardless of skin color, blood type, capacity of the brain, nose shape, or hair texture. Modern biologists recognize that human DNA shows that we all include genetic material derived from one woman, and that she lived in Africa several thousand generations ago. The animal and plant kingdoms contain millions of species and subspecies (races). Humans are classified as follows: animal kingdom, phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Primate, family Hominidae, genus Homo, species Homo sapiens. We are the only living members of that species, all six billion of us. SOCIAL DEFINITIONS OF RACE A lot of confusion has existed over the use of the word race. The biological definition refers to blood types and other things that are transmitted by DNA from parents to their children. This definition has nothing to do with the nationality, the language, or the customs of individuals. Thus there is no French race, no American race, no Russian race, and no African race. There are French, American, Russian, and African people and languages, but these have nothing to do with DNA. Better terms to use when discussing different groups of human beings based on what language they speak or what customs they use are: nations, peoples, and civilizations. These terms define differences between communities based on their historical development, their customs, and their languages—and none of these things are biologically determined. They are human creations and therefore they are subject to change as ideas and cultures grow or decline in response to new environments or historical events. It is easier to change customs and languages, for example, than to change genetic inheritance, or at least it has been until these days of genetic engineering.

Scientists who study the development of human races believe that none of the observed skin color differences among humans are important from a scientific perspective. If they are considered

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important it is because people want color to be significant; using race to define people is a cultural development and subject to change. Ideas concerning the importance of color differ from place to place and time to time. In Brazil, for example, only a person of direct African ancestry is a black, whereas at different times in the United States a person who was seven-eighths European and one-eighth (or even less) African would be considered “black.” Had this person moved to Rio de Janeiro, he or she would become “white” without changing anything about his or her skin color. RACISM Many societies distinguish among individuals because of skin color or other physical characteristics. Some societies make racial distinctions important by suggesting that skin color is linked to differences in intelligence, morality, and behavior. These are racist societies. Racism is a theory of human character that suggests that differences in ability, taste, intelligence, and culture can be explained by the biological inheritance of skin color. German National Socialists (Nazis), for example, believed that all of human history is a struggle between races and that race is biologically determined. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his government established a Race and Settlement Office to conduct research to determine the suitability of wives for members of Hitler’s elite SS forces. Two years later Germany passed the Nuremberg laws, which established a biological definition of “Jewishness.” Later, those labeled as Jews were arrested and killed because of their membership in a so-called inferior race. This was racism in its rawest and most violent form. PREJUDICE Prejudice is a way of thinking based on racist ideas. It is defined as learned beliefs and values that could lead to an opinion or feeling that strongly favors or disfavors an individual or a group. For instance, to say of someone “he is prejudiced toward Indians,” means that he hates them without knowing anything about them, or even knowing any Native American people. He just hates them! He believes they are savage and barbaric because that is the image of American Indians that he carries in his mind. A stereotype is the first picture that comes to mind when you hear a particular term—such as Italian. What first comes to mind when you hear Chinese? Japanese? Mexican? Are your pictures positive or negative? DISCRIMINATION

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Prejudice does not have to lead to any action. Prejudiced people can sit in their homes and hate whomever they want; as long as they take no action this hate does not lead to harm, at least for the people being hated. Discrimination, on the other hand, refers to negative ideas, images, or stereotypes about groups or individuals that lead to action. Discrimination means putting prejudice into action, such as when people join hate groups or talk with others about the alleged defects of the people they hate. For example, a person may be prejudiced against Arabian people, thinking of them as terrorists” or “mad bombers.” When that person calls for laws keeping Arabs out of the United States, this behavior is discrimination. Entire societies can practice discrimination by passing laws taking away the rights of people for prejudiced reasons, as happened in 1882 when the United States Congress approved the Chinese Restriction Act, which barred anyone of Chinese ancestry from entering the country. THE HOLOCAUST Historical examples of prejudice and discrimination are many. The prejudice and discrimination displayed toward Jews in Europe and especially in Germany during the nineteenth century and into World War II provides a particularly deadly example of the horrible crimes committed by nations legalizing hate and prejudice. In 1942 Adolf Hitler told one of his aides: The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch [scientists who researched the causes of epidemics]. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance.

The Nazis attempted to kill all the Jews in Europe during World War II strictly because of their race. Race meant everything to the Nazi party. People’s “blood” determined their destiny in Hitler’s Germany. Nazism provided the world with the purest form of racist thinking in the history of civilization. By the time they were finished, the follower’s of Hitler had killed more than 5,800,000 people because they were considered racially inferior. ETHNIC GROUPS

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The word ethnic comes from the Greek ethnos, which refers to a nation or people. The term “ethnic group” refers to a group of people who have a shared cultural and historical experience. The historical experience of group members usually involves some kind of suffering or abuse, frequently in the distant past. Or an ethnic group might evolve simply because people speak the same language or share the same religious beliefs or customs. Not all nations or peoples form an ethnic group. Nations such as Brazil or Russia or the United States contain large numbers of groups, each with a distinct language and culture. What makes the people in these groups members of a nation is simply the fact that they live within the borders of a specific country. Nationalism is different from ethnicity. You can be a member of the Ukrainian ethnic group in Moscow and still be proud to be a Russian. Or you can speak Spanish in the United States and still take pride in being a member of the American nation. Nationalism is based on loyalty to a government or leader; ethnicity usually is not. Instead it is based on loyalty to traditional customs and a specific language or historical record. Ethnicity gets very confusing. The terms Indian people and African people can refer to hundreds of different ethnic groups and cultures, some of which might hate each other. There are, after all, hundreds of different languages in Africa, and in North America alone there may have been at one time as many as five hundred different Indian cultures, each of which could be considered an ethnic group. Ethnic groups are created out of similarities in language, culture, and historical experience. Many times the historical experiences that create ethnicity are bad ones. Typically a group of people has been exploited, enslaved, or treated miserably by some other group. Over time this memory creates a feeling of hatred toward the exploiters, and a call for the creation of some new, independent people is heard. An ethnic group is born. Ethnic groups sensitive to these past injustices build barriers and create separate communities for their members, apart from the hated conqueror or oppressor. Separation can be physical (walls can be built or individuals can refuse to live next to the enemy or to marry one of them). Or the separation can be emotional (a father can teach his son to hate those “savages who took our land from us and killed your grandfather”). The point is that individuals decide to remain apart from the enemy community. Ethnic feelings based on this kind of historic hate frequently explode into violence, hostility, and mass killing. SEGREGATION

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Ethnic groups can be either cultural or racial. The key is that people who share a negative experience end up feeling hostile and resentful toward their abusers. They decide to maintain a distinction between themselves and the others. Keeping those boundaries closed becomes the chief occupation of group members. Boundaries can be maintained by territorial segregation—”you must live there and we will live here”—or by refusing to participate in the activities of the oppressors. They can be maintained by sticking to patterns of thought and feeling that are totally at odds with the attitudes of the hated majority, or by sustaining the memory of historical abuse for generations through stories, songs, and poetry. Segregation involves physical separation of one group from another. Many times both the conquerors and the conquered want to maintain this separation. The conquering community wants the separation because it sees the conquered as criminal and inferior (“if they were as good as us, they would not have been defeated”). The conquered group resents the conquest and hates being treated unequally and unfairly, so it avoids contact with the enemy. INTEGRATION Integration is a measure of how well a majority group accepts a racial or ethnic minority. The rate of inter-group marriage (marriage between persons of different races or ethnic communities) is an indicator of integration and whether groups accept each other as equals. Statistics show that between 1960 and 1990 in the United States, interracial marriages more than tripled as a percentage of all married couples. But this rate still accounted for only 4 percent of all married couples in 1990, which shows that there is still a high degree of separation based on race in the United States. African Americans and whites are least likely to marry outside their groups (less than 2 percent of all marriages within each group take place outside that community). When whites marry members of minority groups, they are least likely to marry African Americans (less than three-quarters of 1 percent of all marriages are in this category). What does this indicate about white people’s views of African Americans? ASSIMILATION AND ACULTURATION hating each other include: Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, two small African nations; Jews and Christians in Europe for much of history since the fall of the Roman Empire; the Irish and the English; Poles and Russians; Slavs and Croats in southeastern Europe, Albanians and Slavs in the Balkans; Chechnians and Russians; and

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Armenians and Turks. Oppression forced the conquered peoples in these pairings to band together to survive and win back what they had lost—their dignity, pride, and self-respect. The traditional language, religious beliefs, and values of the oppressed were passed down from generation to generation and reinforced the feeling of rejection, making the ethnic community very difficult to break apart. The alternatives to ethnic wars (or ethnic cleansing) are assimilation and acculturation. Assimilation is the full acceptance of the cultural values, attitudes, and customs of the conqueror or the majority. Acculturation is less comprehensive and involves retaining many of a group’s cultural traits while doing what is necessary to work and get by in the conquering or majority culture. Depending on the degree of abuse and degradation involved, assimilation for many people is undesirable, while acculturation is difficult and filled with anxiety. Sleeping with the enemy may be seen as a horrible crime, punishable by death. PLURALISM Can diverse groups form a unified nation? Or does each group have to be out only for itself? Can we all live together as Rodney King once wondered? Ethnic pluralism refers to a system in which distinct ethnic cultures exist independently in the same geographical region by managing to tolerate differences. A pluralist society is one in which ethnic groups live together by respecting each other’s rights. Ethnic loyalty can be expressed by many different groups: Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, German, Nigerian, Mexican, Chinese, Latvian, Kosovars, Albanian, Arabian, Canadian, Herzogovinian, and others. The key in a pluralist system, however, is that all peoples agree to recognize the right of the other groups to live according to their own customs and traditions. “Live and let live” is the pluralist philosophy. Unfortunately, ethnic loyalty can also lead to violence and division, as has been demonstrated in recent years in nations including: Burundi and Rwanda (the Hutus and the Tutsis); Serbia (the Bosnians, the Albanians, and the Kosovars); Iraq, Turkey, and Iran (the Kurds); and Russia (the Chechens). Ethnic warfare results from ethnocentrism— the feeling that your group is vastly superior to the other and deserves its own territory uncontaminated by the other’s blood. One of the deadliest episodes of ethnic war took place in the African nation of Rwanda in 1994. Almost 800,000 people were killed in an outbreak of mass murder. The world had seen nothing like this destruction since the Holocaust. Thousands of members of the majority Hutu ethnic group,

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

which had been oppressed for generations by the Tutsis, hacked to death their Tutsi neighbors. The killing went on for more than a month as bodies filled roads, rivers, and lakes. When asked why they killed Tutsis, who sometimes were their own wives and children, the Hutu replied, because they were cockroaches! Even Hutu nuns and priests (Rwanda having a largely Roman Catholic population) participated in the killing of Tutsis. In 2001 two Hutu nuns were convicted by an international war crimes court of helping pour gasoline on a locked building in which hundreds of Tutsi women and children were praying for mercy. The gasoline was then ignited. EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY Equal opportunity has always been one of the fundamental principles of the American way of life. It essentially means that each person gets the same opportunity to achieve his or her goals in life. Does everyone have that chance? Statistics indicate otherwise. Education has always been the key to equality of opportunity in the United States; educational achievement is a good predictor of a person’s future economic status and health. According to every reliable survey, income follows education—the more education people have, the higher their lifetime income will be. Current studies show that Asians and whites are the groups in the United States most likely to have completed education beyond high school, far more so than African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans. And the incomes of Asian and white American are dramatically higher than those of the other groups. The question to ask is: Do all Americans have an equal opportunity to achieve their educational goals? In 1997, a study showed that about 87 percent of Asians, 85 percent of whites, 49 percent of Hispanics, and 40 percent of American Indians had completed high school. Almost 83 percent of blacks had high school diplomas, a vast improvement since the 1950s, but many questions remained about the quality of the education they received. What accounts for these differences? Is it cultural values (Indian and black cultures do not value education) or genes (perhaps those groups with lower educational achievement are born less intelligent than whites or Asians)? Or do the differences occur because blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics have lived through long years of discrimination and pain, a result being poverty and desperation for many, which makes them unable to compete with the privileged majority?

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Another survey showed that 9 percent of whites and 15 percent of Asians held master’s, professional, or doctoral degrees (does this mean that Asians are smarter than whites?), compared to 4 percent of blacks and 3 percent of Hispanics and American Indians. A survey of the history of prejudice and discrimination in America offers some clues to the answers to these questions. It also provides an explanation of differences relating to the wealth, health, and social and legal status of these groups in American society. Do the statistics below suggest any additional problems? Are these differences explained by race or by history? TABLE 1.2 MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME IN THE UNITED STATES: 1988* BLACK $18,080 HISPANIC

21,920

WHITE

30,410

NATIONAL AVERAGE

28,910

*Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census Report, 1989

THE CHALLENGE In 1997 President Bill Clinton said, “I believe the greatest challenge we face . . . is also our greatest opportunity. Of all the questions of discrimination and prejudice that still exist in our society, the most perplexing one is the oldest, and in some ways today, the newest: the problem of race. Can we fulfill the promise of America by embracing all our citizens of all races? . . . In short, can we become one America in the 21st Century?” We begin looking for answers to this question with the first encounters between white Europeans and the people of the Western Hemisphere.

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2 THE SPANISH AND THE INDIANS 1492–1848 Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. . . . We were born to die! A memory of the Cakchiquel people after the coming of the whites

TABLE 2.1 NATIVE POPULATION OF MEXICO* YEAR 1518 1532 1548 1568 1585 1595 1605

POPULATION 25.2 million 16.8 6.3 2.65 1.9 1.375 1.075

RACE AND ETHNICITY

1622

13

0.75

Source: Woodrow W. Borah, Justice by Insurance (Berkeley, 1983), p. 26

THE EARLIEST IMMIGRANTS The first “Indians” in the Western Hemisphere came from northeastern and central Asia. They crossed the Bering Strait, the body of water that separates Siberia and Alaska, somewhere between 25,000 and 17,000 BC, a few thousand years before the end of the last Ice Age. These migrants were genetically related to the Chinese and Mongolian peoples of central Asia. They moved because over-hunting of local reindeer populations had led to food shortages that had devastated their homeland. The reindeer had nearly disappeared, forcing small communities of the hunters and gatherers to move east and north in search of new resources. After hundreds of years, small groups of hunting families had reached the northern Pacific Ocean coast. The Bering Strait was frozen, making an ice bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. They crossed the bridge and became the first humans to reach the Western Hemisphere, where they found an untapped supply of animals to hunt. They kept coming until the ice bridge melted, about 12,000 BC, as a result of global warming. The melting of the glaciers prevented any new movement of people into the hemisphere for the next thirteen thousand years. Thousands of years of isolation had protected the New World peoples from many of the terrible diseases that killed millions of Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Thousands of miles of ocean prevented the germs that carried diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and whooping cough from spreading their killing power into the Western Hemisphere. With the coming of the Spanish in 1492 that separation ended, with devastating results for New World and its people.

FIRST CONTACT Christopher Columbus was impressed with the people he found on Watling Island in the Bahamas where he landed in 1492. He wrote in his Journal: As I saw they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us. Afterwards they came swimming to the boats, bringing parrots, balls of cotton thread, javelins, and many other things which they exchanged for articles we gave them, such as glass beads, and hawk's bills; which trade was carried on with utmost good will."

He called the people “Indians” because he thought he had reached India. And he was equally wrong about the peaceful nature of the inhabitants. War and conquest were not unknown to these people, as he soon discovered. They are all of a good size and stature, and handsomely formed. I saw some with scars or wounds upon their bodies, and demanded by signs the origin of them; they answered me in the same way, that there came people from the other islands in the neighborhood who endeavored to make prisoners of them, and they defended themselves.

Columbus brought six Indians (of the Carib people) back to Spain for observation by the Church authorities and the King. They all died in Spain. The King, however, upon observation of the Indians’ anatomy, was convinced that they were part of humanity and had been created in God’s image. SLAVERY, DISEASE, AND DEATH On his second voyage to the New World Columbus began enslaving native peoples. It was easy to do. His soldiers had guns and cannons and the Indians did not. Enslavement was necessary, the Spanish thought, because Indians were not used to working and preferred to spend their time in idle pleasure. They would not work for wages, since money was a concept they did not understand, so slavery was the answer. The system that developed was harsh and brutal. Slavery was one of the major causes of death for many groups of Indians. Within ten years of their first contact with the Europeans, almost the entire population (90 percent) of Caribs on the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) had died—mainly from overwork in the gold mines, but also because of disease and war. Among the diseases brought to the New World by Columbus’s crew and their successors were smallpox and influenza. New World Indians had been isolated from the rest of humanity for almost thirteen thousand years

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and had never before been exposed to these diseases, so they died quickly from them. THE ENCOMIENDA AND MITA The system of labor that the conquistadors brought with them resembled the traditional aristocratic system found in their homeland. There the poor worked and the rich played or prayed. It was beneath the dignity of Spanish nobles, government officials, and colonists to work in fields and mines; men of this class did not perform physical labor. Intense work was suitable only for lower beings like peasants and slaves. So, Native Americans were forced to work in the fields and mines. Spanish landowners, according to the law, owned the right to the labor of all peasants or serfs living on their estates. This was called the encomienda system in the Old World. In the New, Indians replaced serfs. The dons (landlords) also received tribute (taxes) from all families living on their huge land holdings. In New Spain, the taxes on Indians averaged about three bushels of maize (corn), and a cotton blanket or deer or buffalo hide, to be paid each year for maintenance of the lord’s army and castle. In times of drought and poor harvests these payments were especially burdensome and deeply resented by the Indians. Native peoples also hated the compulsory labor (the mita) demanded of them by Spanish authorities. They were supposed to get paid for this work but most got nothing. The work was usually aimed at maintaining roads and government buildings and was supposed to last only a few days a month. But in some places the natives were used as pack animals to carry logs and heavy mining equipment hundreds of miles across the desert. This kind of virtual slavery increased Native American hatred of the Spanish invaders and led to several violent revolts. THE QUESTION OF INDIAN SLAVERY The Spanish did not approach the idea of slavery without consideration of their religious beliefs, which in some places raised questions about its legitimacy. A long debate took place over the moral and legal right of Spanish conquerors to take land away from native peoples and then enslave them. The questions asked by lawyers, theologians, and defenders of the Indians included: Were the natives truly part of humanity? Did they possess souls and therefore the potential for conversion to Christianity? Was the conquest of their lands and wealth justified by the fact that they were not Christians? Did some

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

of the customs the Indians practiced, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice, mark them as children of the Devil? Francisco de Victoria, a Franciscan missionary writing in the 1530s, defended “the Conquest.” War against the natives was justified, he wrote, if they refused to let Spaniards live peacefully in the New World, or if they refused to hear the Gospel of Christ. The Spanish also had the right to intervene to save innocent people from cannibalism, which missionaries had reported existed among many New World people. It was the duty of Christians to protect fellow human beings from such “unjust kinds of death,” and one way to do that was to conquer native peoples and convert them to the teachings of Christ. Dr. Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a lawyer, also defended Spanish actions in the West, but he provided a racial defense of slavery. The native peoples were naturally inferior, he argued. They were “idolatrous and sinful,” as witnessed by their marriage customs—some men seemed to have more than one wife and they walked around naked. They were also afflicted with the sin of extreme laziness. They seemed totally unaware of the concept of work. If making war against them and enslaving them would help teach them the benefits of hard labor and bring them to Christianity, then those practices were just and right. Even forced conversions were permissible. OPPOSITION TO SLAVERY Still, loud voices were raised against slavery in the Spanish colonies. Pope Paul III, a Spaniard, writing in 1537, rejected any defense of unfree labor. He decided, after interviewing several natives who had been brought to Rome, that Indians were “truly men,” with souls, and that they were capable of becoming Christians. They had all the physical characteristics of human beings, which meant they were created in the image of God and had souls. Hence they could not be enslaved and had the right to hear the Word of God. Another voice that emerged to oppose the mistreatment of Native Americans was that of Bartolome de las Casas (1474–1566), a missionary and a historian. He defended the equality of Indians in his many-volumed Historia de las Indias, published in Spain in the 1540s. Las Casas opposed forced conversions and the enslavement of Indians. The “Apostle of the Indies,” as he was called, influenced the Spanish king to issue a decree providing protection for the Indians. One of these New Laws of 1542 abolished Indian slavery. But so much intense opposition emerged in the New Spain that the law was never enforced. The New World was too remote.

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AFRICAN SLAVERY IN NEW SPAIN The arguments over slavery in Spain had little impact on life in its colonies. Conquest of the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central America, and most of South America in the 1500s had led to the enslavement and death of millions of Native Americans. The devastation of Indian cultures in the New World was almost total. Slaves died in such large numbers in the first half of the sixteenth century that by the 1550s traders had to turn to Africa for a new supply of unfree laborers. Large numbers of African slaves were brought to the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela, where they were put to work in mines and on sugar and tobacco plantations. Thousands of other innocent victims stolen from their homes in Africa labored on the sugar plantations of Cuba and doing farm work in the coastal valleys of Peru. Unfortunately, defenders of Indian equality were not as fervent in their protests against African slavery. TABLE 2.2 ESTIMATED SLAVE IMPORTS TO LATIN AMERICA, 1551–1810* Years Spanish America Brazil 1551–1600 62,500 50,000 1601–1700

292,500

560,000

1701–1810

578,600

1,891,400

*Source: Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969), p.116

By 1800 about 3.5 million Africans had been sold into slavery in Spanish America and Portuguese America (Brazil). Many died within five years of reaching the New World. The horrors of slavery began early; the voyage across the Atlantic, the “Midpassage,” was devastating. A Spanish missionary visiting Lima provided a description of the arrival of a slave ship coming into port:

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The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict They arrive looking like skeletons; they are led ashore, completely naked, and are shut up in a large court . . . and it is a great pity to see so many sick and needy people, denied all care or assistance, for as a rule they are left to lie on the ground, naked and without shelter. . . . I recall that I once saw two of them, already dead, lying on the ground on their backs like animals, their mouths open and full of flies, their arms crossed as if making the sign of the cross . . . and I was astounded to see them dead as a result of such great inhumanity.

The majority of imported slaves were males between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Many of these young men lived a year or less after arriving in the New World. It was cheaper for their owners to work them to death—frequently slaves labored twenty hours a day—and bring in a new supply of slaves than to treat them decently. Only about one in ten slaves was female, which led to a climate of intense sexual repression in slave communities. Only slave owners had free access to the small number of African women available, which made it very difficult for black mothers and fathers to lead a normal family life. Sexual exploitation led to the growth of a large mulatto (mixedrace) population, many of whom eventually became free either by running away or because they were granted independence by their fathers. Most slaves on plantations were black, however, and lived like prisoners. Their guards and their owners controlled everything they did. The treatment of Africans left a bitter heritage of hatred in Spanish America. THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, 1539–1680 Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande River included Texas, New Mexico, and California. This area, which now constitutes the southwestern part of the United States, has had human inhabitants for thousands of years. Many of the peoples in this largely desert region lived in pueblos (the Spanish word for towns), where they farmed, prayed for rain, and were governed by religious leaders. Even today the many pueblos are distinct and separate from each other, though there are linguistic and religious ties that promote some harmony and cooperation among the peoples. LIVES OF THE ZUNI The Zuni lived in six pueblos widely scattered across the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico. They occupied communities of apartment houses built on the sides of or on top of mesas in very

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remote areas of the desert. The Zuni had no central government; each pueblo governed itself, practiced its own religion, and spoke a distinct language. The Spaniards first entered Zuni lands in 1539. They were drawn by the legend of the Seven Cities of Gold—the Cibola legend— which had spread through Spanish colonies in the New World three years earlier. Indians had told the story to Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spaniard who had spent eight years wandering through Texas, living with the native peoples, after being shipwrecked during a hurricane on the Gulf coast. He related the myth to Spanish authorities in Mexico City and they decided to find out whether there was any truth to it. The governor sent an expedition to find Cibola under the command of a priest named Marcos de Niza. An African slave named Estavan accompanied him and served as an advance scout. He came upon a Zuni pueblo a few days before the priest. But by the time Fray (Father) Marcos entered the pueblo, the Zuni had killed Estavan for “taking liberties” with their women. The priest returned to Mexico City and falsely reported that he had found the Seven Cities of Gold. This report inspired another, larger expedition. CORONADO’S EXPEDITION In the summer of 1540 the governor of Mexico City sent more than one hundred men, including several priests, to the north. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led the expedition. After six months the explorers reached the Zuni villages visited by Fray Marcos. They were greatly disappointed by the pueblo because it was not built of gold bricks as the priest had led them to believe. The Zunis, fearing that the invaders were looking for slaves, met the Spaniards before they entered the pueblo and warned that trying to enter would mean war. Coronado explained through an interpreter that he had come on a sacred mission to save souls for the true God. A priest then read the Requirement, a document that the King ordered read before any battle with “the heathen.” It warned Indians and other non-Christians that if they did not accept Spain’s king, Philip IV, as their ruler, and if they did not embrace Christ as their Lord, the men would be killed and their children and wives would be enslaved. The Zunis listened to the priest and responded with arrows, killing several conquistadors. In a brief, bloody battle, Spanish muskets and steel swords proved superior to the native weapons, chiefly bows and arrows. Coronado’s men then burned the pueblo and slaughtered hundreds of native women and children, taking only a few as slaves. The surviving Zunis fled, leaving behind corn, beans, turkeys, and salt, but no gold. The Spanish were furious. Coronado had crossed the

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desert in full armor (which weighed about two hundred pounds) and had been wounded during the battle but managed to survive. He concluded that Cibola must be somewhere else, beyond the horizon. Before continuing the search, however, he returned to Mexico City for reinforcements. THE ACOMA MASSACRE Coronado’s next expedition did not leave Mexico City until 1598. After marching hundreds of miles through the desert, the explorers reached Acoma Pueblo (the Sky City, or, as the Indians called it), which was built on a four-hundred-foot-high mesa. It could be reached only by climbing a steep, hidden stairway. The Acoma Indians saw that the Spaniards were coming. They launched a surprise attack against the explorers, believing they were part of a slaving expedition, and killed many of them. The survivors retreated south. When news of the attack reached Mexico City, the governor sent another army north with orders to gain revenge. They did. The Spanish killed five hundred men and three hundred women and children. The rest of the villagers (about five hundred) were taken prisoner, tried for treachery, and sentenced to twenty years of slavery. Males over twenty-one had one of their feet cut off while younger children were given to priests as slaves. THE EXPANSION OF SPANISH MISSIONS Dozens of Christian missionaries soon followed the conquistadors. By 1629 the priests had built more than fifty churches in the area of modern New Mexico and Arizona. Catholic Church headquarters were in Santa Fe, which became the largest city in northern New Spain. Indians built the mission churches, with women constructing the brick walls and the men doing the carpentry. Usually they were unpaid “volunteers.” The priests, wanting all people to hear their message, sent eight missionaries to Acoma. They received a friendly greeting and built a large church. A year later one of the priests, Father Estavan de Perez, left his companions behind and headed even further into the desert in search of more people to convert. He came to a village of about eight hundred people and was greeted peacefully. His interpreter told the Indians that the Father had come to free them from slavery and the “darkness of idolatry.” The village was Acoma—the town Coronado had burnt to the ground a generation earlier. Surprisingly, the Zuni allowed the priest to remain and build a church. It was completed three years later.

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But then a dispute broke out between Father Estavan and the traditional religious leaders of the Zuni. Called sorcerers and witches by the missionary, the Zuni priests urged their people to reject the new ideas brought by Father Estavan. The conflicts between the old beliefs and the new were many. In Zuni religion there were many gods, not just one, and the gods lived on the earth in trees, mountains, plants, and animals. Traditional Zunis prayed to water gods who made the corn grow and sustained life in the hot climate of the Southwest. (Water was as valuable to Zunis as gold was to the Spaniards. The Zunis claimed that gold was the true Christian god—Coronado supposedly had told them that the Spanish had a disease of the mind that only gold could cure.) On February 22, 1632, Zuni warriors killed Fray Francisco Letrado, the missionary at Hawikah, while he was saying a mass. The Zunis abandoned the pueblo and did not return. Upon hearing of the killing, Governor Francisco de la Mora Ceballas sent a party of soldiers to find the Indians and bring them to justice. They found the Zuni’s hiding place and killed twelve of the four hundred Indians in retaliation for the priest’s murder. The others were enslaved. A few days later, Zunis killed another priest, Fray Martin de Arvide, at a pueblo fifty miles west of Hawikah. Two soldiers at the mission were also killed. The governor sent another military expedition to avenge the deaths, and a dozen Zuni were executed. POPE’S REBELLION The Spanish had extinguished the Zuni uprising, though the missionaries ultimately abandoned their churches and did not return to the region until 1660. This time they remained until the Rebellion of 1680, the largest revolt in Spanish-Indian history. Led by Pope, a Pueblo religious leader, fighting spread throughout the Southwest and more than four hundred settlers were killed, including thirty-four missionaries. The remaining two thousand Spaniards fled the region and did not return for a decade. When they came back, in 1692, Spanish authorities abolished the worst abuses of the labor system. Pope’s Rebellion proved that native peoples could join together to fight. EXTERMINATION AND RESISTANCE Life in the Southwest was extremely harsh for men, women, and children, Indian or Spanish. The normal life expectancy for Spanish settlers, rich or poor, was about forty years. Death was everywhere. Indian attacks were a constant problem, especially when the Indios

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barbaros, as the Apache and Comanche were called, rode through the territory on hunting expeditions. These nomadic tribes were endlessly fighting their neighbors, whether Pueblos or whites. In 1780 Governor Jose de Galvez proposed a solution to this “Indian problem”: complete extermination. He sent his army out with orders to burn and destroy every Indian village they came across. Through the use of these tactics the Indios barbaros had been almost eliminated by 1810, and the policy was considered close to success. That same year, however, the Mexican War for Independence began in the southern part of the colony, and the Spanish government brought most of its troops back from the frontier to protect Mexico City from the army of independence. During this period of distress and political chaos the Indians in the north staged a comeback. Their raids against Spanish settlements and pueblos in search of slaves grew in intensity and they gained control of almost the entire territory. ANGLO AMERICANS IN MEXICO The war with Spain lasted for more than a decade. The Spanish were not driven out of Mexico by the rebel army until 1821. The first Mexican government was formed that year under the leadership of Augustin Iturbide, who soon crowned himself Emperor Augustin I. During the war life in the north was extremely dangerous; the government lacked the resources to defend settlers against the Comanche, Ute, Navajo, and Apache raiders. One solution proposed by the Iturbide government was to increase the white population in the region by encouraging citizens of the United States to settle in the area. One of these immigrants, Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836) brought three hundred families with him in 1821. Each family received five thousand acres of land from the Mexican government. In exchange the immigrants agreed to obey Mexican laws, learn Spanish, and convert to Catholicism. Because of this offer of free land the English-speaking population in what later became Texas grew rapidly. By 1830 there were twenty-five thousand Anglos and only four thousand Mexicans living in the territory. Cultural conflicts grew as language, religion (very few Anglos actually converted to Catholicism), politics, and ethnicity separated the Anglo and Mexican communities. About three-fourths of the North Americans had come from the slave-owning South and many had brought their human property with them, even though slavery was illegal under Mexican law.

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THE TEXAS REPUBLIC In 1832 a new government in Mexico outlawed future immigration from the United States. After this policy was announced, Sam Houston (1793–1863) organized a movement to break away from Mexico, and three years later the Texas War for Independence broke out. On March 6, 1836, the first major battle of the war took place. The Battle of the Alamo was a tremendous victory for the Mexican army, ending with 187 Texans, including 6 Mexicans, dead. A few weeks later the Texans killed 600 Mexican soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto and essentially won their independence. The victorious Texans were still severely divided by language, ethnicity, and religion. Thus race relations in the Texas Republic, as the new nation was called, were very tense. The new Anglo (Englishspeaking) government took the land of the Spanish-speaking Texans and treated them as an alien people. The new white leadership wanted to drive all Mexicans out of Texas; the resulting violence almost reached the level of a race war. Many Mexican American families, fearful for their lives, fled to their old homeland south of the Nueces River, the recognized border with the United States. THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR (1846-1848) Texans wanted badly to become part of the United States, but anti-slavery forces in Congress refused to add another slave state to the country. Another factor slowing annexation was that Mexico had threatened to go to war if Texas became part of the United States. In 1845 Congress finally voted to annex Texas, and the Mexican government began to prepare for war. In his inaugural address newly elected United States President James K. Polk proposed adding another Mexican province, California, to the United States. He sent a diplomat to Mexico City to negotiate a price, but the Mexican government rejected all his offers to buy California. President Polk then decided to provoke a war with the Mexicans and take California and its excellent ports by force rather than through negotiations. The opportunity for war came after Polk ordered the Army to protect “United States territory” south of the Nueces River, the historic border between Mexico and Texas. Polk claimed that the true border was 150 miles further south, at the Rio Grande River. He refused to settle the border dispute through arbitration by a group of neutral nations, as the Mexican government had proposed, and sent in troops instead. When the American army entered the disputed territory, Mexico declared war. Less than one year later United States forces had

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occupied large areas of Mexico. At one point during the war, the United States Senate debated whether to annex all of Mexico. A majority rejected that idea because, as prominent senators argued, total annexation would have added too many non-Englishspeaking Catholics and Indians to the country’s largely Protestant population. Hostility against Catholics was extreme throughout the United States in the 1840s and early 1850s. The intensity of this religious prejudice is illustrated by an incident during the war. Several hundred Irish Catholics in the U.S. Army—the “St. Patrick’s Brigade”—deserted to the Mexican side and fought against their former comrades. The Irish fled to the enemy to get away from the antiCatholic taunts and hatred they received from Protestant soldiers. The war ended when Mexico, which had lost fifty thousand soldiers to the United States’ eight thousand, signed a peace treaty on February 2, 1848. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, Mexico lost almost one-half of its territory, including California. The population loss was less severe, as only about 10 percent of the Mexican people lived in the lost provinces. Mexico’s territorial losses were among the greatest suffered by any nation in the history of warfare. According to the treaty, Mexicans were allowed to move south of the border (the Rio Grande River, as the winners mandated). About two thousand of the hundred thousand Spanish-speaking residents of the region made that move. Those who remained north of the border were supposed to receive “all rights of citizens of the United States,” regardless of what language they used or what religion they practiced. The war brought an end to more than three hundred years of Spanish rule in the American Southwest. In some of the new territories, such as south Texas, the change of government led to a renewed war aimed at driving all remaining Spanish-speaking residents out of the United States. Thousands of Native Americans in the newly acquired territory now came under the authority of the government of the United States. The policy of dealing with the Indians remained the same, however— extermination and removal. The number of Indians coming into the Union was never counted. Why bother? They would never be allowed to become citizens. They were too “savage and warlike” in the view of many whites.

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