Brought to Mexico in chains, Gaspar Yanga and his followers staged a bloody rebellion
His story is as dramatic as Nat Turner’s, but where’s the recognition?
Not keeping up with technology is an excellent path to becoming a slave. Happens to the best of humans. It happened to Gaspar Yanga, and then he fought back.
The first and, arguably, only African Middle Passage rebel to win a fight against his captors and be granted land worked out of the palenques, renegade communities in the part of New Spain, that we now know as Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Captive Africans were indispensable to the mid-sixteenth century agriculture fortune that Spain was building in the Americas. New Spain had the highest slave population outside of Brazil, and by 1570 the coast’s Veracruz region had begun to see palenques of indigenous brown people and runaway blacks.
Though it is poorly documented, we know palenque life was simple: sustenance farming, religion that featured heavily the African but made room for what the indigenous people were into — and sometimes jumping the Spanish who traveled Mexico’s Camino Real (Royal Road). Though none of the palenque scene was especially to Spain’s liking, the Crown particularly disliked the part where caravans were robbed.
Hiding out in New Spain’s coastal highlands, the people of the palenques would attack merchants and armed military alike, with crude weapons and strategy. Spain remained unable to rein in the resistance for more than three decades, in large part because of its leader: a formerly captured Central African called Gaspar Yanga, a man who would be no person’s slave.
Descendants of the Veracruz palenques say that Yanga was royalty from Gabon. This, of course, is unproven, but here’s what’s certain: while young, Gaspar Yanga was, like every victim of the Middle Passage, subdued by the gun.
And when the slavers brought Yanga to the burgeoning sugar fields of New Spain, he found the conditions of servitude at least as intolerable as the lift over. In 1570, he bolted from Nuestra Señora de la Concepción plantation, but not without making bloody rebellion. The African and his followers killed 23 people and then fled the plantation for the untamed land.
The first small African palenque was formed thereafter. The Spanish couldn’t beat Yanga, though they tried. Decades passed, Royal Road travelers were robbed. Yanga’s posse grew. In 1608, the colonial government of what we now call Mexico took action.
Old Spain’s message to New Spain was: “If you don’t stop him, more slaves will follow,” Dora Elena Careaga-Coleman, professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, tells Timeline. “He was embarrassing the Crown.”
In response, 550 Spanish troops marched out of Puebla gunning for Yanga. They had been after the African for decades, but never in such numbers. The palenque countered with 100 technologically evolving, gun-wielding fighters, and 400 others armed with machetes, rocks, and other crude weaponry.
One hundred gunners is not five-fifty, but that matters less when the land’s lay is familiar; technology was but one of the rebels’ weapons.
Yanga attempted to broker a treaty. Spanish commander Pedro González de Herrera refused the terms, and a bloody battle followed at the Río Blanco. The Spanish burned down a primary Yanga settlement, and the rebels scurried into the mountains.
A pure victory could not be named. Yanga’s settlement came back together. In 1632, New Spain viceroy Rodrigo Pacheco negotiated with the aged Veracruz ruler. The palenque would no longer entice slaves, and the Yanga followers would own their land. The Veracruz town of San Lorenzo de los Negros would come to be called Yanga.
Fantastic story of human triumph — history playing out in Mexico, years before Jamestown. So why isn’t Alfonso Cuarón working on the movie right now? A fundamental problem is that Mexico has hardly presented Yanga as a protagonist in its national narratives.
“There are two points of view,” explains Careaga-Coleman. “The official history, and the people from Yanga. The chronicles were written for Spaniards, using a Eurocentric lens. They say he was such a violent man, that he was a criminal, that he was a thief. That’s interesting, because there’s a version of him where people say he was an African prince and a hero, he was an intelligent man with a strategy who challenged and fought against the Spanish Crown and won.”
Careaga-Coleman adds that the story has never been deemed politically relevant, and the meaning of Yanga’s colony remains largely unexplored. “Why, during this time, are Afro-Mexicans fighting for the right to be recognized, legally, constitutionally, and to reclaim territory as well as historic recognition? They are fighting for their civil rights as Afro-Mexicans.”
Slaves were gone from New Spain by 1829, and the specter of slavery never stopped being the elephant in the young nation’s living room. In 1821, after Mexico had become independent of Spain, Vicente Riva Palacio, a grandson of Mexican president Vicente Guerrero, plumbed Inquisition archives with plans to write about Yanga. Guerrero’s own slave heritage was revealed, and Mexico went nuts as it faced the reality of a president with African blood.
Yanga was named a national hero by Mexico in 1871, but his name and story still haven’t made the pop-culture leap from legendary to famous. “The discourse of Mexican national identity has always established that Mexicans are the result of the encounter between Spaniards and Indians,” says Careaga-Coleman. Despite Mexico being located between the major African-slave-holding nations of Brazil and the U.S., the story of Yanga, and of Afro-Mexicans — sometimes known as poblanos — is woefully undertold. “Yanga should be considered to be amongst the great heroes, like Zapata or Villa, who fought for the rights of the poblanos of Mexico.”
