Enslaved Africans and the Experience of Displaced Apache Captives in Northern New Spain in the 17th Century

Laborers of diverse origins and statuses interacted in the mining towns of Northern New Spain in the seventeenth century. Enslaved Africans lived and worked alongside draft laborers, wage workers, and other enslaved people of varied origins and ancestries, including Apache Indians acquired in war or through trade with other Natives in lands beyond Spanish control in the North American West. Free and enslaved Africans played an especially important role in the process of incorporating such captives into the Spanish sphere. They trained them in domestic tasks, they served as their godparents, they intermarried, and they ran away or committed crimes together. My presentation will examine such interactions in the important mining center of Parral and consider the social worlds they reveal. While recent scholarship has done much to explain the slave trades targeting Indigenous peoples in the North American West during this period (and in the centuries that followed) less attention has been given to the intersecting systems of bondage that brought exploited peoples of varied origins into close contact. My presentation will suggest that more focus is needed on the role of enslaved Africans and their descendants in shaping the life trajectories of displaced Indigenous people in this time and place.