Away from the Herd: Indigenous Evasion in Tenerife, 1496–1507

At the close of the fifteenth century, Tenerife, the final unconquered island of the Canary archipelago was colonized in the name of Castile. Following the vicious military campaign led by conquistador Alonso Fernández de Lugo came the capture and imprisonment of the Menceyes, the 9 rulers of the island, and the mass enslavement of the Guanches, the Indigenous peoples of the island. Enslaved Guanches were forced to labor on the site of their own dispossession, with their most prized use by Castilian settlers being to herd livestock across the steep, mountainous terrain of the island.

In 1499, the Cabildo of Tenerife ordered that any Guanche shepherd, free or enslaved, who was found ‘fuera del hato’, away from the herd of cattle or goats that they were responsible for, would be subject to a hundred lashes. This paper will focus on what this and other laws targeting enslaved Guanches in Tenerife reveal about the terrain of Indigenous slavery and resistance on the island. This threat of violence, enshrined in law, came at a critical juncture in the early settling culture of the island. De Lugo, the governor of the island, and other settling elites were intent on legitimizing their total control of the island in the face of petitions and suits launched by Guanche litigants to Castile.

Analyzing legislation targeting enslaved and free Guanches, this presentation plots the illicit activities of Guanches in Tenerife and argues that they created networks of refuge and resistance which shaped the political economy of the early colony. Guanches worked in big and small ways to disrupt labor systems, evade authorities, and maintain communal and kin ties in the face of slavery and settler colonialism. In examining their clandestine movements, this paper expands the temporal and geographical scope of island resistance in the Atlantic world.