1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [178]
Hernando met Francisca for the first time since infancy when she was seventeen and had just inherited her father’s vast fortune. The fifty-year-old Pizarro married her almost on the spot, Hemming wrote, “unperturbed by consanguinity, the thirty-three-year difference in age, or his own imprisonment.” When Hernando was at last released from house arrest, the couple built a massive Renaissance-style palace on the main plaza of Trujillo, the city where the Pizarros had been born. In a kind of colonial fantasy, they dined on gold plates with Peruvian food and imported a squadron of Inka servants to wait on them.
The Pizarros were wealthier than their fellow conquistadors but in other ways not exceptional. Historians have tracked the lives of ninety-seven of the 150 men who founded Santiago, Chile, in 1541. They had 392 children and grandchildren, of whom 226 (57 percent) were of Indian descent. One conquistador in Chile proudly told the Inquisition in 1569 he had produced fifty children with non-European mothers.4
Few of those children had African blood. That would change—rapidly. As plantation slavery spread, the percentage of Africans in the hemisphere rose, and with it the number of Afro-Indians, Afro-Europeans, and Afro-Euro-Indians. By 1570 there were three times as many Africans as Europeans in Mexico and twice as many people of mixed parentage. (Both were outnumbered by Indians, of course.) Seventy years later there were still three times as many Africans as Europeans—and twenty-eight times as many mixed people, most of them free Afro-Europeans.
On the one hand, Spaniards in some ways easily accepted the hybrid world they were making. Europeans then did not have the same concept of “race” as later generations and thus did not see themselves as being different from Africans or Indians on a biological level. They did not fear what today would be called genetic contamination. On the other hand, the blending of native and newcomer led to enormous fear about moral contamination.
Spain justified its conquest, one recalls, by promising to convert the Indians. Spaniards’ consistent mistreatment of native people impeded this mission. The Franciscan friars who held sway over New Spain’s religious life proposed an apartheid solution: turning the colony into two “republics,” one for Indians, one for Europeans. Untroubled by European demands, Indians would focus on conversion in all-Indian neighborhoods and towns; Spaniards would focus on growing rich from the fruits of conquest in an all-Spanish setting. Thus in 1538 Bishop Vasco de Quiroga began to group thirty thousand Indians in the mountains west of Mexico City into reservation towns that he intended to make into an American utopia—literally, for Quiroga laid out the settlements according to the prescription in Thomas More’s novel Utopia, which had been published twenty-one years before.
The cultural and ethnic jumble in the streets of Spain’s American colonies was often reflected in its art—as in this anonymous eighteenth-century oil, which depicts the Virgin Mary embedded in the great silver mountain of Potosí, visually uniting Christianity with the Andean tradition that mountains are the embodiment of a deity. (Photo credit 8.4)
Exemplifying the pitfalls of the two-republic scheme was the Franciscans’ near-simultaneous founding of an all-European town, Puebla de los Ángeles, on the road between Mexico City and Veracruz. The goal was to solve a problem: Spanish lowlifes were living as parasites in native villages, their constant demands for food, shelter, and women interfering with the crucial work of orderly conversion. The Franciscans’ solution: forcibly collecting the vagabonds and planting them in a city of their own under church supervision. Half of Puebla’s first inhabitants abandoned the project when they discovered that they were not going to be presented