Zambo

History

The term zambo was not formally used in Spanish territories. Competing terms, such as mulato, were also used. From the beginning the early sixteenth century, when African slaves were first imported to Hispaniola, unions between them and indigenous peoples, and Spanish colonists, began to take place. The two non-European groups sometimes worked together in the mines or on the plantations of Hispaniola, and on other Spanish Caribbean islands following the introduction of sugar cane production in the 1520s. In other cases, Africans took refuge in indigenous communities after escaping slavery. The term zambos was generally used to refer to persons who did not have European ancestry, but all sorts of unions took place through the centuries, of course. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish began making formal racial classifications, and defined zambo in what became its final, official meaning. Some zambo groups became well known after being created by runaway or rebel Africans who mixed with or took over indigenous communities. In the unconquered regions of Esmeraldes, in what would become Ecuador, for example, a small group of shipwrecked former slaves gained control of some indigenous communities, eventually representing them before Spanish authorities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Misquito Zambos developed as the descendants of a group of African slaves who revolted in 1640 on a slave ship. They wrecked it at Cape Gracias a Dios on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua, to escape into the interior. There they united with the indigenous Miskito people. By the early eighteenth century, Afro-Miskito people came to dominate the kingdom. They led warriors on many extensive slave raids to capture slaves for sale to Europeans. Their alliance…