Communities of runaway slaves, more commonly known as “Maroon communities,” were created throughout the Americas. Enslaved people ran away from their owners all the time, often just for a few days, but some decided never to return to slavery and instead found permanent (or semi-permanent) refuge from the harsh life on the plantations in swamps, jungles, forests, and mountains. Sometimes in very small groups of less than ten people, but more usually in much larger numbers, maroon communities attempted to live independently, free from white interference. White responses to maroon communities varied over time and included military assaults and peace treaties.
Article
Richard Lee Turits
In the past, scholars of Latin America often assumed that Spanish colonists abandoned the Caribbean for the bullion riches of Mexico and Peru almost immediately after their conquest, while many Caribbeanists have imagined that Barbados, colonized by the British in the mid-1600s, was the “first black slave society.” Yet, in fact, more than a century earlier in the colony of Santo Domingo (then officially known as la Isla Española or simply la Española), European colonists built the first major American plantation economy and society made up mostly of enslaved people. Those held in chains on the island reached into the tens of thousands by the mid-1500s, and Santo Domingo became a pivotal crossroads in the early modern Atlantic. At first the enslaved population included thousands of people the Spanish called “Indians,” taken from other parts of the Caribbean and the Americas, and even an occasional enslaved person of European (Orthodox Christian or Muslim) descent. But after the mid-1500s slavery in Santo Domingo became isolated to people of African descent. This contrasted with the preexisting demography of slavery in southern Europe, where the enslaved were of more diverse geographic origins. Santo Domingo thus initiated a trajectory of racial and plantation slavery whose contours would shape the course of history in the Americas overall. Santo Domingo’s slave-based economy would also, though, be the first to collapse, at the end of the 16th century, partly because of sustained resistance by the enslaved—their continual escape and rebellion—that was costly for planters. The enslaved had composed most of society in the prior century. Now the majority were escaped and, to a lesser extent, freed slaves, living with substantial autonomy as independent peasants dispersed across the countryside. These themes are illuminated through an exploration of one of the earliest freedom suits in the Americas. This suit was won on appeal in Santo Domingo in 1531 through remarkable transatlantic collaboration by family members and sailors as well as through the evident power of notarized documents in the Spanish Empire.
Article
Small islands offer an unexplored vantage point from which the Caribbean can be interpreted anew. The small western Caribbean island of San Andrés can be a privileged site to launch this reinterpretation that shifts attention away from the dominant narrative of Caribbean history that centers on the establishment, development, destruction, and legacies of plantation societies. Comparing and connecting San Andrés with other small and historiographically neglected Caribbean islands makes possible an interpretation that highlights three ways in which these islands played a central role in Caribbean history: as dynamic commercial hubs, as pirates’ nests, and as imperial laboratories.
Article
Lomarsh Roopnarine
Labor demands following the abolition of slavery in the 19th century led to the arrival of five hundred thousand indentured South Asians between 1838 and 1920 in the plantation zones of the Caribbean. Of this total, two-thirds of them stayed in the Caribbean when their five-year contract expired while a third went back to their homeland of India. These indentured servants used their one-sided contracts to revive the post-slavery plantation system and to develop themselves and their communities. By the Second World War, these once cyclical migrants turned settlers had become a majority population in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, as well as visible minorities in the French Caribbean, Jamaica, and the Lesser Antilles. In so doing, they have retained substantial aspects of their culture, customs, and religion while adapting to a creolized Caribbean. These Indians have contributed to nation-building in the Southern Caribbean in fields including leadership, law, medicine, and business. However, political and ethnic tensions arising from poor governance have led to the steady out-migration of this population from the Caribbean to Europe and North America, where they have experienced new challenges of integration while sending remittances to their Caribbean homeland. Nonetheless, Indians of South Asian background have maintained a different and distinct identity whenever and wherever they have settled in the Caribbean and overseas.
Article
Ida Altman
The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the northern Caribbean with three Spanish ships in October 1492 marked the beginning of continuing European contact with the Americas. With his second voyage of 1493 permanent European occupation of the Caribbean began, with enormous consequences for the peoples and ecology of the region. Failing to encounter the wealthy trading societies that Columbus had hoped to find by reaching Asia, Europeans in the Caribbean soon realized that they would have to involve themselves directly in organizing profitable enterprises. Gold mining in the northern islands and pearl fishing in the islands off the coast of Tierra Firme (present-day Venezuela) for some years proved enormously profitable but depended on Spaniards’ ability to exploit indigenous labor on a large scale. The imposition of the Spanish encomienda system, which required indigenous communities to provide labor for mining and commercial agriculture, and the large-scale capture and transportation of Native Americans from one locale to another wrought havoc among the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean, resulting in high mortality and flight. Spaniards in the islands soon sought to supplement indigenous labor by importing African slaves who, in the early 16th century, became a significant if not always easily controlled presence in the region.
From the earliest years the Spanish Caribbean was a complex, dynamic, and volatile region characterized by extensive interaction and conflict among diverse groups of people and by rapid economic and institutional development. Although the islands became the launching grounds for subsequent Spanish moves to the nearby mainland, throughout the 16th century and beyond they played a crucial role in sustaining Spain’s overseas empire and integrating it into the larger Atlantic system.
Article
Ale Pålsson
The Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy was not large enough to be able to support a plantation economy but managed to gain significant income through neutral trade during the turn of the 19th century. As merchants and mariners migrated to the island from across the Atlantic World and slaves were brought to the colony to work as manual laborers and household servants, Sweden introduced legal and political concepts from other European empires to manage their new colonial venture. The nationality of naturalized Swedish merchants was questioned, especially by the British, who frequently captured ships from St. Barthélemy. Still, St. Barthélemy periodically saw immense amounts of trade, especially in the period following the War of 1812. Yet as war between major Atlantic powers ceased after 1815, the economy of the island dwindled and it was returned to France in 1878. Research on this aspect of Swedish colonialism has been infrequent, yet new access to French colonial archives breathes new life into this seldom-discussed part of Caribbean history.
Article
Reinaldo Funes Monzote
For the greater part of the 19th and 20th centuries, Cuba, the largest island in the Antilles, figured as the principal exporter of sugar cane, a product that dominated the country’s agro-industry. In this way, Cuba became illustrative of the economic, social, political, and environmental impact of basing an economy on monoculture in order to supply foreign markets. This does not mean, however, that sugar cane was the only major crop being grown in the Cuban fields, as there was no dearth of different plants destined for foreign markets, such as tobacco and coffee, or for local markets, such as yucca, plantains, corn, sweet potatoes, and rice, not to mention a long if little-known livestock tradition. However, the dominance of agro-industry almost always eclipses agricultural and economic alternatives that could become potential competitors, despite the periodic adverse circumstances that affect consumers. But, in the 1990s, the production and exportation of sugar suffered an abrupt fall, creating a vacuum that allowed diversification of land use and that prompted a search for alternative agricultural models.
Article
In December 1801, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte sent a massive expedition to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today: Haiti). His goal was to restore direct French rule and overthrow Toussaint Louverture, a former slave who, as governor general of Saint-Domingue, had been suspected of plotting independence. Bonaparte’s secondary goal may have been to reinstate slavery, which France had abolished in 1793–1794.
Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, General Victoire Leclerc, headed the expedition. After landing in Saint-Domingue in February 1802 with 20,000 troops, he managed, with great difficulty, to defeat Louverture’s army. He then deported Louverture to France, where he died in exile. In August 1802, however, resistance intensified as plantation laborers became convinced that the French intended to restore slavery. Leclerc, who lost much of his army to yellow fever, embraced increasingly murderous tactics against the black population until he died in November 1802.
For one year, Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien de Rochambeau, battled Louverture’s successor, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in a brutal conflict with genocidal overtones. The bravery of Dessalines’s troops, lack of support from France, epidemic disease, and the renewal of Britain’s war with France eventually doomed the French effort. After the departure of the last remnants of the Leclerc expedition, Dessalines declared the independence of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti, on January 1, 1804, and then put to death most of the remaining French planters.
Article
Eric Paul Roorda
On August 29, 1916, the USS Memphis wrecked on the coast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. A series of enormous waves drove the heavy armored cruiser ashore, killing forty-five sailors. The fact that the death toll was not much higher is owed to the heroic efforts of Dominicans to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck. This was despite the fact that the US Marine Corps had invaded their country three months before, initiating an occupation with unwonted violence. The US Marine occupation of the Dominican Republic would last for eight years, compiling a record of brutality inflicted on the civilian population that Senate hearings documented in excruciating detail. In the aftermath of the traumatic occupation, the shipwreck of the USS Memphis itself, rusting away in plain sight along the seaside boulevard in the Dominican capital city, became symbolic of US imperialism. The dictator Rafael Trujillo, a Marine protégé who seized power in 1930, pointed to the wreck as a relic of the days before US domination, contrasting it with the happy days after national sovereignty had been attained under his own strong rule. In order to implement the Good Neighbor Policy, an effort to expunge the negative legacy of the era of intervention and occupation known as “Gunboat Diplomacy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the removal of the wreck of the Memphis after taking office in 1933. The wreck’s removal finally took place in 1937.
Article
Peter Haffner
The Midwestern United States is home to several major public museum collections of Haitian art. These collections were established within a short period between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similarities between the contents of these collections and their formations point to particular dynamics of visual-art production in Haiti and cross-cultural interactions in which works of Haitian art were collected abroad. This examination of particular collection histories of two Midwestern U.S. museums, both in Iowa, demonstrates shifting cultural narratives that have contributed to generalized definitions of “Haitian Art.” Considering the dearth of Haitian-American communities in the state and its far-flung geography, the fact that so many works by Haitian artists reside in the Midwest may appear to be a curious occurrence. However, these collections arose from individual bequests from local collectors who began acquiring Haitian art during the second “Golden Age” of Haitian tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. North American travelers who visited Haiti at this time sustained a market for Haiti’s artists and helped maintain international interest in Haitian visual culture. The common characteristics of these two collections—in the cities of Davenport and Waterloo—and the history of their development speak volumes about cultural intersections between Haiti and the United States, especially in relation to the effects of tourism and international travel on the production, circulation, and reception of Haitian art. More broadly, these histories exemplify wide-ranging shifts in North–South relations in the late 20th century.
In the United States, Iowa is home to two of the largest public collections of Haitian art in the country, one in Davenport at the Figge Museum of Art and the other about 130 miles away in Waterloo at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. Considering both distance and regional context, the Midwest’s relationship to Haitian art may seem incongruous. Almost 2,000 miles separate Haiti from the region, and the largest enclaves of the Haitian diaspora reside in major urban centers like Miami, New York, Boston, Montreal, and Chicago. Additionally, stereotypes of the region as provincial and culturally unsophisticated accompany the Midwest’s reputation and add to the intrigue surrounding the seemingly uncharacteristic presence of Haitian art in regional museums. In order to better understand such seemingly random cultural linkages between Haiti and Iowa, we must examine the routes and circuits through which art objects in these collections have traveled, the individuals who facilitated such movements, and the distances, both physical and conceptual, between artists’ studios in Haiti and museum context in the American Midwest.
For audiences in the United States, the word “Haiti” often accompanies news headlines focusing on one of the country’s many crises: political instability, mass migration, natural disaster, poverty. The focus on Haiti’s many challenges of the past decades obscures the fact that in several key periods in the 20th century the country attracted a steady stream of “First World” visitors. With Haiti only a short plane ride away from the United States, travelers were drawn not only to Haiti’s tropical climate and the many upscale hotel accommodations of the time, but also to the country’s cultural offerings, which included a thriving environment of visual art production. A cottage industry producing paintings, sculptures, and handicrafts greeted tourists, journalists, academics, researchers, and other visitors. Some of these souvenir-ready items could be easily dismissed as cheap, mass-produced “tourist art,” but a great many of them reflected an originality and creative quality that emerged within the supportive context of the “Haitian Renaissance.” Haitian visual arts struck many of these art-buying travelers to such a degree that they would make many return visits to Haiti, amassing enough work that would eventually make up collections of art back in the United States. The cross-cultural interactions of these traveling collectors can be framed through a study of the art objects they collected and their interactions with Haitian artists and arts institutions. Focusing on individual case studies reveals broader trends in the international reception of Haitian art and how collections in Iowa and elsewhere were established.
Beginning in Davenport, whose Figge Museum of Art is the earliest established public and permanent collection of Haitian art in the United States, this examination of collection histories will shed light on how global, regional, and individual contexts and circumstances contributed to Haitian art’s presence in Iowa and its reception abroad. In addition, these collection histories highlight connections among collectors, artists, and other active participants in the circulation of Haitian in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second example considers the origins and development of the Waterloo Center for the Arts’ Haitian collection and demonstrates one institution’s efforts to connect Haitian art objects with local audiences. Both case studies also underscore histories of engagement between the United States and Haiti, as well as issues that museums have grappled with concerning their Haitian art collections and the shifting circumstances of art production in Haiti.
Article
Daniel Livesay
Forming and encouraging families in Jamaica was a struggle from the very beginning of English colonization there, making Caribbean households transatlantic in nature. The explosion of plantation slavery in the 17th century prioritized economic expansion over white family cultivation. Likewise, planters were more concerned with profits than they were with enslaved families. Constant migration from Europe and Africa was therefore needed to keep populations stable for the whole history of slavery in Jamaica. The island’s demographic and political security was always tenuous as a result of this, and officials attempted numerous strategies to encourage family growth, among both the free and enslaved communities. As the island transitioned to freedom, regulating the definition of “proper” families became a weapon from which English authorities wielded imperial power. Racist sentimental toward Caribbean households created social tension when thousands of black Jamaicans emigrated to Britain after the Second World War. Their arrival produced new British households that challenged some British conceptions of domestic family life. Throughout this whole history, migration defined the growth and character of families in the Jamaican-British Atlantic World.
Article
Frederick Luciani
The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a prodigious number of poems and letters, which are the subject of an ongoing scholarly project undertaken by Frederick Luciani of Colgate University. Luciani’s work involves more than translating these poems and letters into English—it examines Heredia’s stay in North America against the background of political and historical events, and traces the matrices of his connections with key figures, literary and otherwise, in Cuba and the United States. Questions that have surfaced through the translation process and scrutiny of this period of Heredia’s life include the relationship between Heredia’s poetry and his letters; the value of his letters as a form of travel literature; the contradictions inherent in his exilic condition; the ambiguity of his political sentiments; the nature of the networks that joined 19th-century Anglo-American and Hispanic writers, translators, and scholars; and the challenges and opportunities that Heredia’s life and work pose for readers, translators, and scholars today.
Article
Reinaldo Funes Monzote
In the summer of 1981 the cow named Ubre Blanca (White Udder), born on Isla de la Juventud (formerly Isla de Pinos) in the southern Cuban archipelago, became headline news for her high milk production. After achieving a national record, in the following months she was the focus of the country’s attention for her fast-track to becoming a world record holder, first in four milkings and later, in January 1982, as highest producer in three milkings, collection of milk in one lactation period, and fat content. For the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, and scientists from the cattle industry, it was important to emphasize that it was not only a matter of this incredible cow’s personal achievement but also the fruit of many years of effort to reach a radical transformation of the country’s cattle industry, from an emphasis on beef production toward the priority for milk production and diversification of animal protein sources.
These politics required major changes in bovine herds from a genetic perspective, starting with major cross-breeding of Holstein cattle, of Canadian origin, with the Cebú, formerly dominant in Cuba, along with the creation of new infrastructure and other changes toward an intensive model of cattle ranching. Therefore, the history of Ubre Blanca is tied to that of the politics aimed at increased production and consumption of dairy products, presented as an achievement of the socialist Cuban model and with aspirations to bring dairy development to tropical areas and Third World countries. Although the ambitious goals announced in the 1960s were never reached, there was an increase in milk production and a general modernization of cattle ranching that, nevertheless, began a prolonged decline starting with the deep economic crisis of the 1990s.
Article
U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America in the 19th century initially focused on excluding or limiting the military and economic influence of European powers, territorial expansion, and encouraging American commerce. These objectives were expressed in the No Transfer Principle (1811) and the Monroe Doctrine (1823). American policy was unilateralist (not isolationist); it gradually became more aggressive and interventionist as the idea of Manifest Destiny contributed to wars and military conflicts against indigenous peoples, France, Britain, Spain, and Mexico in the Western Hemisphere. Expansionist sentiments and U.S. domestic politics inspired annexationist impulses and filibuster expeditions to Mexico, Cuba, and parts of Central America. Civil war in the United States put a temporary halt to interventionism and imperial dreams in Latin America. From the 1870s until the end of the century, U.S. policy intensified efforts to establish political and military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, including periodic naval interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, reaching even to Brazil in the 1890s. By the end of the century Secretary of State Richard Olney added the Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (“Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition . . .”), and President Theodore Roosevelt contributed his own corollary in 1904 (“in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to exercise an international police power”). American policy toward Latin America, at the turn of the century, explicitly justified unilateral intervention, military occupation, and transformation of sovereign states into political and economic protectorates in order to defend U.S. economic interests and an expanding concept of national security.
Article
Alan McPherson
From 1800 to the present, US troops have intervened thousands of times in Latin America and have occupied its countries on dozens of occasions. Interventions were short-term and superficial, while occupations lasted longer and controlled local governments. The causes of these troop landings reflected the United States’ motivations as it expanded from a strong, large republic into first a continental and then an overseas empire at the expense of its smaller, weaker neighbors. Those motivations included colonial land hunger, cultural chauvinism, the exploitation of resources, the search for markets abroad, competition against other great powers, political reformism, global ideological struggle, and the perception that US domestic problems originated in Latin America. US troops undertook almost all these interventions and occupations, although private groups sometimes joined. The major periods were the expansion of the continental republic from 1811 to 1897, the war in Cuba and the apex of occupations (1898–1933), the Good Neighbor years (1934–1953), the Cold War (1954–1990), and the post-Cold War period (1991–2018 and ongoing). Scholars of these events have become increasingly critical and diverse, not only seeing them often as unnecessary brutal failures but also foregrounding extra-military aspects of these episodes, such as economics, race, and gender.
Article
Nicole von Germeten
The European ideas associated with witchcraft came to the Americas as a multipronged weapon of imperialism, a conception of non-Christian beliefs not as separate worldviews but as manifestations of evil and the reigning power of the devil over Indigenous peoples and, slightly later, African slaves and free people of African origins or heritage. To create this imperialist concept, colonizers drew from a late medieval demonological literature that defined witchcraft as ways of influencing one’s fate through a pact with the devil and the ritual of witches’ sabbaths. Through the court structure of the Holy Offices of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, Iberian imperialists set up judicial processes that they designed to elicit confessions from their colonial subjects regarding their involvement in what was labeled witchcraft and witches’ sabbaths, but which was most likely either non-European beliefs and practices, or even popular European ideas of healing. Archival documents from the Holy Office fueled Europeans’ vision of themselves as on the side of cosmic good as well as providing some details regarding popular practices such as divination and love magic. Whatever ethnographic details emerge from this documentation, the use of the terminology of witchcraft always signals an imperialistic lens.
Article
Ellen D. Tillman
Woodrow Wilson entered the presidency in 1913, when the United States was already deeply involved in Caribbean interests and European nations were moving almost irrevocably toward war. Wilson’s 1912 election shifted domestic and international policy, though not always in the ways that people expected. Mired in his own ideas about constitutionalism and the progressive course of history toward some ultimate end goal, Wilson inherited an empire that complicated US strategic goals. Caribbean countries and territories, meanwhile, were undergoing massive changes in internal markets and shifts toward the global economy. As industrialization and rapid improvements in communications technology picked up pace, foreign investment reoriented Caribbean economies; the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal deepened US strategic interest in the region. During the years of World War I, from August 1914, Wilson’s administration proclaimed neutrality but increasingly became more interventionist in the Caribbean to protect the canal and to allow the United States to dominate trade in the absence of European powers. From the Mexican Revolution to World War I and the postwar peace process, Wilson’s presidency was largely dominated by the exigencies of foreign affairs—exactly what he had feared at his election. When Wilson became president, he and his secretary of state decried the willingness of the previous presidential administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft to use military force in policing the Western Hemisphere, and yet within a short time Wilson’s administration became the most likely to use force and even military occupation. He decried unequal financial relationships and tax burdens as detrimental to hemispheric solidarity and national sovereignty but expected Latin American nations to follow a particular “Anglo-Saxon” path under US tutelage. When the realities of Caribbean nations did not match his expectations, or when he and his appointees found certain populations unready for democratic government, he was willing in an unprecedented way to use military force to impose the US standard as he saw it. The Wilson presidency (1913–1920) tightened US control over the Caribbean, with the administration intervening intrusively and placing heavy foreign burdens upon Caribbean countries. The occupations in countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic worsened US–Latin America relations. Occupations failed in their stated goals as popular opposition forced withdrawals, although they left US-friendly militaries that guaranteed long-term support for US interests, often under militarily backed dictatorships.
Article
Mariola Espinosa
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
Yellow fever was one of the most dreaded diseases in the Caribbean region from its first appearance in the 1650s until the confirmation of its spread via the bites of infected mosquitos in 1900. Fear of the disease resulted from not just its high mortality rate, but also the horrifying manner in which it killed its victims: after several days of fever, chills, and body aches, the skin and eyes of those who were most seriously infected would turn yellow as their livers failed, they would bleed from the eyes and nose, and they would succumb to the vomiting of coagulated blood. Because the virus caused only mild symptoms in children and a single episode confers lifetime immunity, the disease did not heavily impact natives of the region. Instead, it was newcomers in the Caribbean who suffered the worst ravages.
Article
Regina Horta Duarte
Modern zoos emerged as mass entertainment, spaces of public leisure and of culture. In the past, they served as monuments and expressions of the degree of “civilization” and progress of a city and its respective country. In Latin America, zoos date from the last quarter of the 19th century. The history of Latin American zoos is a political, cultural, and social history. The conditions of their creation and operation over the decades have conferred important specificities to these institutions. Since their inception, zoos in Latin America have reflected nationalistic aspirations, civilizational projects, and social transformation. Over the decades, the history of many zoos has blended with natural history in Latin America, as many zoo founders were important scientists. The development of new sensitivities toward animals also follows the history of zoos in Latin America from the beginning, because the first animal protection societies appeared at the same time. Today, zoos face vigorous claims from animal rights activists calling for their closure. In view of so many challenges, these institutions are reinventing themselves with an increased focus on conservation and environmental education, joining international zoological societies with high standards of quality. Among several of these societies, the Latin American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (ALPZA) stands out. Founded in 1990, ALPZA organizes, reshapes, and integrates Latin American zoos, establishing global connections. Various actors play a role in the defense and contestation of zoos, such as politicians, scientists, conservationists, animal protection societies, anti-zoo activists, visitors, administrators, officials, and, of course, thousands of wild animals from all over the world who have lived in Latin American cities for decades.
