Paper short abstract:

Luso-African merchants, mariners, servants, and slaves were regularly present in Spanish Caribbean ports from the mid-1500s to 1640. In addition to captives, the early slave trade brought Iberians with experience of Africa and Africans (and vice-versa), and prior models for cross-cultural exchange.

Paper long abstract:

Nearly two thousand transatlantic slaving voyages to Spanish America are presently known to have been organized or completed during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A variety of under-utilized source materials generated in Spain and Spanish American port cities provides information on many such voyages, occasionally describing shipmasters and passengers as 'vecinos of Cabo Verde,' 'vecinos of Angola,' and even as 'tangomãos' or 'tangomangos.' Meanwhile, members of slave ships' crews—some of whom were enslaved—included grumetes and sailors of sub-Saharan African or Luso-African origin. In other words, the same vessels that brought enslaved Africans also carried Iberian and Luso-African crew members and passengers who had extensive experience in Africa, and African mariners who were already familiar with the Iberian world. Drawing attention to those who arrived in Santo Domingo, Cartagena de Indias, and Veracruz between the 1560s and 1630s, this paper argues that such individuals provide a unique opportunity to analyze relationships between regions of Atlantic Africa and colonial Spanish America that were closely connected historically, but which have been treated in separate historiographies. Countering narratives that portray Iberian and African interaction in the colonial Americas as an initial 'encounter' between free and coerced migrants with little prior knowledge of one another, this paper argues that some aspects of early colonial Caribbean history may be best understood not as 'creolization,' but as 'Africanization': a migration of concepts, socio-economic roles, and human beings from Atlantic Africa directly to the Caribbean, facilitated and reinforced by the transatlantic slave trade.