From Ladinos to “Atlantic Creoles”: African Perspectives from the Spanish Caribbean, c.1570–1640

This paper argues for greater consideration of the Spanish Caribbean as an overlooked arena of large-scale cultural interaction between African forced migrants and Iberians during the early modern era.  In particular, attention to African’s influential roles in the formations of Spanish Caribbean society offers new insight into the appearance of “charter generations” of “Atlantic creoles” in the early North Atlantic world.  Africans with extensive experience of the Iberian world have been portrayed as exotic and surprisingly “multicultural,” as they may have appeared from Anglo-American perspectives, for example.  However, such women and men who appear in early colonial Northern European sources may be viewed more accurately within an older, deeper history of African-Iberian interactions which took place not only along the coasts of Western Africa, but also in the nearby Spanish Caribbean. Summarizing relevant findings from my dissertation, this paper will briefly review the latest figures on the transatlantic slave trade to Cartagena de Indias, and the Spanish Caribbean’s demographic composition by the early seventeenth century.  In the Americas’ northern hemisphere, the fledgling North Atlantic world evolved on the fringes of an older, circum-Caribbean world peopled in large part by African forced migrants and their first- and second-generation descendants.  The presence of tens of thousands of Africans, many of whom were identified as “ladino” or “latinized”—that is, they spoke Spanish or Portuguese, and were familiar with Iberian systems of meaning as embodied in Catholic practice—forces us to rethink the major precedents for African roles in early Northern European attempts to colonize the Americas.