The First Christmastime Revolt Against Slavery in Santo Domingo: A Hallmark Strategy to Liberation
By Allison Guess and Ramona Hernandez
A crucial practice during Black History Month is the exposition of various instances of Black liberation globally. Black people were never complicit in their oppression, and as we embark on a month dedicated to the commemoration of Black History two hallmark events warrant our remembering. December 2021 marked the 500-year anniversary of one of the earliest documented, Black-led Christmas rebellions to take place in the Americas. Eleven days later — January 6th — was the quincentennial of the drafting of the very first set of currently known anti-Black slave laws, which were written by Christopher Columbus’ eldest son, Diego Colón. The close occurrence of these two events is hardly incidental.
The 1521 Santo Domingo Slave Revolt, commonly referred to as the 1521 “Christmas Rebellion,” involved a mass of people — led by Black people — whose actions shook the foundation of Hispaniola. This bold and bloody insurrection also seeded a longer and larger tradition of Black-led militancy during the Christmas holiday throughout the Americas.
These rebellions, collective and otherwise, include Jamaica’s “Christmas Day rebellion,” also known as the Baptist War (1831–1832), and Black-led rebel activity in the Colombian Pacific during Christmastime, as evidenced through Dr. Yesenia Barragan’s 2021 work. Other Black-led acts of sedition and mutiny also coincide with Christmas. In North America, the great Black abolitionist Harriet Tubman challenged the dominant society often by traveling during the Christmas holiday to gather and guide currently enslaved Black people to freedom. Former U.S. President George Washington’s very own personal chef, Hercules Posey, might have begun to plot his freedom and thus his escape from enslavement during or in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas holiday in 1796. In his most recent book, Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory (2019), historian Robert E. May notes that pro-slavery Virginia planter Edmund Ruffin wrote about fear of Black insurrection during Christmastime in his novel, Anticipations for the Future. Such rumors and fears were commonplace among property-owning white enslavers. These fears corresponded to a preemptive securitization of property and a ramping up of discipline. Disciplinary efforts to curb the prospect of Black-led rebellion in the aftermath of Christmas also became widespread in 16th-century Hispaniola; hence, the onset of the earliest set of anti-Black slave laws in Hispaniola, which were publicized in January of 1522. In light of all this, we should consider that the 1521 Christmas Rebellion played a significant role in inaugurating a tradition of Black-led freedom and resistance during the Christian holiday, the month of December, and the month’s longer aftermath, more broadly.
While some scholars have remarked on the 1521 Christmas Rebellion, few have closely examined Las Ordenanças de los Negros of 1522, which are the earliest known set of documented anti-Black slave laws to materialize in the Americas. They mark the emergence of racial taxonomies and racial regimes in the Americas and, in turn, establish this brave act of Black-led rebellion as a lesson on a shared commitment to everyone’s liberation.
Penned on January 6, 1522, these early slave laws were authored by Christopher Columbus’ very own son: Diego Colón. At the time of the 1521 Christmas Rebellion, Colón was not only the governor of the island of Hispaniola, he was also the master of the rebels who organized and launched the Rebellion. Colón’s 1522 slave laws afford insight both into this early, Black-led insurgence and into the judicial infrastructure for subsequent anti-Black laws and practices including Le Code Noir (1685) of Saint Domingue and El Código Negro Carolino (1784) of Santo Domingo. The 1522 ordinances are likely the origin of later anti-Black laws in North America such as the Black Codes of 1865, commonly referred to as the “Black laws” in the U.S. South, and the Jim Crow laws, which followed Reconstruction in 1877. Colón’s 1522 decree can additionally be linked to more contemporary policing practices and habits that have materialized unevenly across the planet, including “Broken Windows” policing and “Stop and Frisk.” While these practices impact the lives of all people, they disproportionately threaten Black, Indigenous, and Brown people in the United States.
As many recently celebrated Christmas and its promise of salvation through the birth of Christ, we might also do well to honor the sacrifices and practices of a group of people who dared to enact life-saving efforts to the benefit of freedom from oppression. In so doing, we must begin by honoring the organizers of the 1521 Christmas Rebellion — not just during Christmas or Black History Month — but we must commemorate these liberators always.
The quincentennial of the 1521 Christmas Rebellion has been marked in some corners of academia, most notably at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute in Harlem, New York, which hosted a commemoration of the Rebellion called The Struggle for Freedom in La Española on December 2–3, 2021. While the conference was a potent and powerful reminder of the legacies of the earliest documented Christmas Rebellion in the Americas, we need more revolutionary commemoration of the bravery of Black-led efforts moving everyone toward liberation.
Take a moment to imagine the anxiety that must have swept across the island of Hispaniola just one day after Christmas, a time in which some ruling white Christians might have been recovering from the festivities surrounding La Noche Buena. On the dawn of December 26, the scale and scope of Black-led insurgent activity became apparent as a mixed band composed of “blacks and slaves” — as Colón referred to them — rose and acted. According to official reports written in the period, Black-led insurgents neither spared nor saved any (ruling) white Christian they encountered along their way.
These courageous Black-led peoples of 1521 Hispaniola resisted social and racial division and reinforced transformation by closing ranks, enacting possibly the earliest protagonist democracy in the Americas. For Black-led liberators, the promise of salvation resided in collective being and in embracing our ability to save and respect each other, and by extension, the Land itself.
Many people — including the two of us — during this Black History Month will continue to think about the actions and sacrifices of these rebel ancestors who challenged their condition, in Santo Domingo, and during the 1521 Christmastime. We might specifically honor the Black-led rebels, whom the names of these ancestors may remain unknown to us for the time being, as those who rose up in December 500 years ago, and made possible a different season — one ignited by a drive for liberation. Their actions and bravery flip the script on a Christmas season most often marked by bloated consumption and market-driven capitalist imperatives. This is the day — indeed, the expansive season — to radically honor the commitment of those who rose up 500 hundred years prior and made an incalculable contribution to the liberation of the planet. Christmastime is here!
It is this time to recollect the innumerable acts of generations of Black dissidents. It is a moment to renew the perennial promise of salvation delivered by those who dared to oppose and reject unfreedom. We must remember the 1521 Christmas Rebellion not just because it is Black History Month or because we are just two months beyond the Rebellion’s quincentennial, but because it is the guiding star of a global, Black-led commitment to our liberation that persists to this day.
Dr. Allison Guess is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at William College. Guess also holds a position as a Research Fellow at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute in Harlem, NY, and she is currently working on several book projects, one tentatively titled, Plotting on the Plot in Hispaniola: The 1521 Christmas Rebellion as a 16th Century (Dis)continuous Black Land Story and an Insistent Unsettling Crisis of the New World and the other, provisionally titled, Mama Tingó: Rebel Land Defender. Through her Fellowship with the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, Guess is working on a project conditionally titled, Catching a Case of Freedom: Places, Practices and Possibilities of Black Revolt in 16th-17th Century Hispaniola. Named a “rising Latino studies scholar,” in 2020, Guess is a former Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) Mellon Dissertation Fellow. She earned a Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) at the Graduate Center at CUNY.
Dr. Ramona Hernandez is a renowned Dominican-American sociologist, community leader, and public intellectual. Hernandez is Professor of Sociology at City College of New York and the director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. She is the author of various scholarly works about Dominican migration, workers mobility, and the restructuring of the world economy, namely her book titled, The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (Columbia University Press, 2002). Dr. Hernández is a trustee of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation. Her work is celebrated in the Dominican Republic where she has received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Meritorious Order of Duarte, Sánchez y Mella. Hernandez serves as a trustee of the International Institute of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Instituto Global de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales).
