LITMIR.BIZ

      II. Mongoyo-Camacan Indian woman of Brazil. Negro and Mongolian strain apparent.

      (Koch Grunberg)

      Since then, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians even of the nineteenth century, had so much visible Negro strain, it is reasonable to suppose that among the first explorers and colonizers of the New World there must have been many individuals of Negro descent, although there is little mention of them as such. The reason is that mulattoes were regarded as white. When a European said, and still says, “Negro” he means an unmixed black man.

      For instance, on Columbus’ Third Voyage, only one Negro, Diego,⁹ is mentioned, and in the list of “noblemen and gentlemen of quality” who accompanied Balboa to the Pacific only one Negro, Nuflo de Olano,¹⁰ is named, but that does not mean that there were not other near-blacks on those voyages. Also, Pietro Alonzo, the pilot of Columbus’ flagship on the First Voyage, is mentioned in “The Libretto,” the original account of the voyage, which was published in 1521, four times as a “Negro.” Samuel Byrd Thatcher,¹¹ an authority on Columbus, says, however, that “Alonzo il Nigro,” was a misprint in the Venetian and ought to have read “Alonzo il Nigno.” Thus the dispute hinges on whether an “n” or a “g” was meant. That Thacher, also, is in error is not impossible.

      It is not improbable, either, that Columbus was of mixed blood. His complexion was olive; his cheek-bones were high, and his lips, as seen in the Yanez portrait, were of the full Negroid kind.¹² This portrait, the oldest of all, was thought the most characteristic of him by his heir, the Duke of Veragua.

      The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World in 1492 started at once the miscegenation of these fair and these dark-skinned Europeans with the Indians. Absolutely no white women came with the first Spaniards and Portuguese. It was nearly a century and a half before they began to arrive in any appreciable number. It is true that in 1526, white Christian slaves were brought to Puerto Rico and other colonies as wives for the white men, but this importation soon ceased because of the inability of the European woman to stand the environment. Thus, it may be said in the most positive manner that the first mothers of persons of European ancestry born in the New World—the creoles—were Indian. This is perhaps wholly true, also, of the mothers of those of African descent.

      The pattern of race-mixing for all the Latin-American colonies from Colorado to Argentina was: First, mixing of white men, some of whom had a Negro strain, with Indian women. The offspring of these were called mestizoes, or mixtures; in Brazil, mamelucos. Incoming Europeans of the next generation took the mestizo girls as wives or concubines, producing offspring that was one-fourth Indian, and so on as the years passed, until sometimes the Indian strain was visible only to the experienced eye.

      Another mixed type arose, also, when male Negro slaves arrived in 1502. Taking Indian mates the Negroes produced the zambo; in Brazil, the cafuso, an almost black type with high, upstanding frizzly hair. A third mixture came in with the arrival of the Negro woman, who mixing with the white man, produced the mulato, a blend with which the Spaniard had been long familiar. Then the three mixed types, mestizo, zambo, mulatto, began mixing among themselves, and these mixtures and their offspring with the whites, until there came to be distinguished fifty-five varieties from the original mating of Caucasian, Indian, and Negro.

      Those in whose veins ran all three mixtures were known as pardos but as time went the amalgamation became so general that it was often impossible to tell a pardo from a mestizo, or a mulatto from a mestizo. Numbers of mulattoes and mestizoes, in time, came to be indistinguishable from a southern European, too. Thus the student of race-mixing in Latin America though he will hear much about the different varieties can safely avoid pursuing them into their intricacies, because the Latin American, whether he be of Negro or Indian ancestry, if too dark to pass for white will usually claim Indian ancestry.

      There are several reasons for this: In claiming Indian ancestry one could always boast that he was the descendant of an Inca or a great chief, and thus be not actually one of the common herd, even though living among the herd. Aristocratic birth counted for far more in those days than now. It was so much believed that all good things came out of kingship and noble birth that even when a black man had gifts that placed him above other blacks, it was said that he was the son of an African king.

      It will be interesting to note, however, that at first contact, Indian ancestry was the most despised of all, and Indian civilization considered so much idolatrous trash. The early Spaniards regarded the Indians as just one tiny step above the beast. They called them gente sin razon, people without the power to reason. When, however, the Indian had been exterminated, or reduced to helplessness, there came a tendency to idealize him, as one does any other nearly extinct species, as say his contemporary, the buffalo, for the same is also true of Anglo-Saxon America.

      Another curious fact about this boasting of Indian ancestry is that in those South American lands in which Indians are still in the majority, the unmixed Indian is still regarded as the lowest element.

      In the case of the mestizo, he, also, like the mulatto, looked down upon his mother’s stock. His aspiration was to be one of the dominant class, which was white, even as the humbler white had aspirations to be a nobleman. The Spaniard in the New World, and even more so his offspring born there, had such great pretensions to being a caballero, or nobleman, that Bishop Damon de Haro of Puerto Rico wrote satirically of his mixed blood Indian and Negro flock a century and a half ago, “He who is not descended from the House of Austria is related to the Dauphin of France or Charlemagne.”¹³

      INDIANS WITH NEGRO STRAIN.