Paper short abstract:

Sexual unions between Iberian men and African women were tolerated, and common, in the early Spanish Caribbean, even among elites. This paper argues that the prominence of “Portuguese” migrants among these men points to direct continuities linking the Spanish Caribbean and the Upper Guinea Coast.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of Cuba and Puerto Rico have argued that as early as the sixteenth century, Iberian elites were intent on creating a racialized social order, and that Iberian men who married women of color would be marginalized. While these interpretations are consistent with our knowledge of late colonial plantation societies and twentieth-century race relations, extant sources generated during the Iberian "joint crown" period (1580-1640) paint a very different picture of the Spanish circum-Caribbean. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ecclesiastical records, censuses, notarial records, shipping records, and other sources depict African and African-descended women as the wives and concubines of Iberian men. In this paper, I argue that these relationships—including both informal sexual unions and church-sanctioned marriages—may be viewed in light of earlier patterns of cross-cultural exchange on the Upper Guinea coast. Furthermore, the Iberian men in many of these marriages and sexual unions were explicitly identified as "Portuguese," suggesting not only the importance of Luso-African precedents in the social formations of Spanish Caribbean society, but also direct continuities. By the late sixteenth century, Spanish circum-Caribbean ports such as Havana, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and Panama were home to Portuguese, African, and Luso-African migrants of both sexes who were already familiar with cross-cultural sexual unions in the context of overlapping Iberian and sub-Saharan African worlds.