History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue
UCTP Educational Resource Series No. 9
A SERVICE OF THE UNITED CONFEDERATION OF TAINO PEOPLE’S DIGITAL LIBRARY ARCHIVE
Reissued September 15, 2011
Contact: UCTP, PO Box 4515, New York, NY 10163 • [email protected] • http://www.uctp.org
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue
UCTP Educational Resource Series No. 9
History of Puerto Rico, the Native Issue
An excerpt from “History of Puerto Rico” by Loida Figueroa
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue | 9/15/2011
Several times during our narrative we have alluded to the ethical-political-economic matters
labelled as the native issue, arising exclusively the lands conquered by Spain. None of the other
nations, except Portugal, which had been, and later became once more, part of Spain, were
concerned with the moral and/or juridical personality of the inhabitants found in the
conquered territories. The matter was brought up in the Spanish dominions by the clergy
(regular), as was logical, since the majority of the conquistadors could not have had such lofty
perceptions.
1
Fray Antonio de Montesinos has the honor of being the first to lift up his voice against the
servitude of the natives. As early as 1511 he preached to the colonists of Hispañola (La
Española) who surely believed they were not sinning when they arrived in strange lands and
forced the natives to serve them under the law of conquest. The Friar questioned if they had
this right, especially since the conclusion has been reached that the natives were rational
beings, susceptible to Christianization. This issue produced a storm of protest from the
colonists, who viewed the Dominican's invective as an attack on their interests. They
immediately sent a proctor to the King, the Franciscan Friar, Alonso del Espinal, to refute
Montesino's charges. The King, perturbed at the narration of the offences against the natives,
founded a board of theologians and officials charged with the study of this question and the
rending of a verdict.
The board recognized the right of the natives to liberty and human treatment, but stipulated
that they had to be subject to Spanish dominion or their religious conversion, this being
absolutely necessary. The encomienda system was judged to be essentially just, although they
supplemented it with an ordinance code issued in Burgos on September 7th, 1512. These
debates did not resolve the question of whether the Christian Princes had legal title to the
natives of the discovered lands, and the Crown ordered various theologians and jurists to
present their written opinions. Two opinions have been preserved, that of Matias de Paz and of
Juan de Palacios Rubios. In them, the politics dominion is valid, if conversion to the Christian
faith is achieved by inviting the infidels (our quotation marks, since it is absurd to term them
thus when they were not yet Christians) to accept the faith. The natives could not be held as
slaves unless they refused to obey the Prince or to accept Christianity Having been converted it
was legal to require certain services from them, even greater than those required of Christians
in Spain, but to a reasonable extent, so as to be able to cover the expenses of the trip and the
colonization. (Cedulario puertorriqueño, Tomo I, vol. III, of the Historia documental de Puerto
Rico, my Monseignuer Vicente Murga Sanz, UPR. Editions, Rio Piedras, 1961).
It could be justly said that these opinions reflect an attempt to rationalize the interests of the
conquistadores, but it would be more apt to point out that the attempt, made during a very
early epoch when nobody else even considered these questions, is a real monument to Spain.
Those who doubt it do not have to search much to prove it. In the doorway to the XX century,
in our own grounds, the transfer of Puerto Rico from Spanish hands to the United States was
justified by having to pay war expenses -- a war that had nothing to do with the Puerto Ricans.
Las Casas completed Montesino's work. In September 1515, he personally went to Spain to
expedite the solution of the status of the natives from the point of view of theology of law, and
of environmental reality. The Catholic King was dead, and Cardinal Cisneros was Regent.
Confronted with a diversity of opinions on the matter, he decided to send some personal
representatives of the Crown to the Indies to see if they could arrive at a just decision there.
The personas chosen were Fray Bernardino de Manzanedo, Fray Luis de Figueroa, Fray Alonso
de Santo Domingo, and Fray Juan de Salvatierra as assistant -- all from the Order of Jerome.
The Jerome Fathers left Spain on November 11th, 1516, and reached San Juan Bautista on the
14th or 15 of December of the same yar, staying there a few days before leaving for the city of
Santo Domingo in La Espa~nola. The native question was resolved by the Jeromes in a
temporizing fashion. Taking into account the theory of the rights of Indian, the Christian
principles and the necessity for the invaders to have labourers in order to survive, the Jeromes - opposed to the system of allotments, searched for a formula that would slowly eliminate the
system of encomienda, giving time for the necessary adjustments to avoid disruption of the
economy.
The first step, taken in 1517 was to determine that those absent did not profit from the
encomiendas of the aborigines. This decree affected the King himself, since he, as well as other
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue | 9/15/2011
The very honesty of some Spaniards contributed to the initiation of what is known as the black
legend of Spain. All conquests are unjust and cruel, then, now and always; moreover the fact
that Spain's rights to the conquest were questioned was used by her enemies to weave a
legend making Spain appear as the only country to commit cruelties. The principal source used
by the foreigners were the writings of Fray Bartolome' de las Casas. During the epoch that
Montesinos was setting forth his claims. Las Casas was living in Cuba as an encomendero. Later
he embraced the ecclesiastic career, and reached the conclusion, as time went by, that the
encomienda was unjust. He based his arguments on a very advanced concept when he
insistently pronounced that all people of the world were men. It is true that at the moment he
was only thinking of the American natives, because they had been born in the invaded
countries. For this reason he suggested that in order to avoid the sinking of the colonial
economy -- the argument given by the conquistadores -- negro slaves should be brought over,
since these last did not fall under the same principle. Before dying Las Casas perfected his ideas
to include all people as equal, and repented of having accepted Negro slavery as a good thing.
2
powerful Court officials, had natives under his command. When the decree was put into effect
it was also decided that the natives left free, having been allotted to absent persons, would
remain emancipated and could not be allotted, persons living on the Island. The Royal Decree
was put into effect and was also decided that the natives left free, having been allotted to
absent persons living on the Island. The Royal Decree that collectively emancipated these
natives is dated July 12th, 1520, and is directed to Judge Antonio de la Gama. Included among
those with rights of emancipation were those at large due to deaths of the encomenderos, or
other juridical causes, such as violation of rules demanding good treatment for the natives. The
aborigines not included in this decree remained allotted, but even these had a toehold to
complete liberty by way of the Complementary Declaration of July 28th, 1513, that established
that those natives who were clothed, Christians, and were capable, could live their own lives, of
course remaining subject to the same obligations sustained by the other vassals.
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue | 9/15/2011
The Jerome Fathers decreed that native villages should be established, of four hundred to five
hundred inhabitants each, close to the villas of the encomenderos. In this fashion they hoped to
counteract the cultural upheaval caused by the Spaniards when they broke down the Cacique
Regime to establish the encomienda system. It would have been more appropriate to try and
return to the old cacique system, but that would have lessened the economic yield of the
encomienda and would have ..nined the plan for Christianization. To obtain at least part of both
objectives the Jerome Fathers thought up the former plan. The communities would be
exclusively native, with the exception of the settling if a married Spaniard, who would then
show them how to live a peaceful orderly life and to handle their haciendas, and a clergyman
who would be in charge of their religious instruction. (It is not strange that by the Spaniard's
point of view the natives had to wait for their arrival so as to be taught everything they had
been doing for centuries. This is the mania of all invaders of the past and present, civilize the
countries they subdue, even when the country subdued might have an older civilization than
the conquering country.)
3
Since many of the encomenderos did not carry out the orders of the encomienda system, the
attacks on the institution continued. Therefore, in 1544, Carlos I of Spain and V of Germany
decided to abolish it. The decree declared the natives to be as free as any Spaniard. It is
worthwhile clarifying, so as not to be classed as naive, that the declaration in itself did not
really compare the conquistador with the conquered, and that the abuses of powers continued,
but at least they were considered as abuses and not as legal procedures. In Peru' the Royal
Decree was set aside in fact when the mita * was introduced, a measure which obliged the
natives to work under compulsion in the interests of common good. The mita, appearing just
and fair on paper, was a source of abuses on behalf of the conquistadores, and although the
Spanish governmental system provided the natives with means to get even, their weakness in
the social whole nearly always impeded the laws from being fulfilled. *(Note: The institution
was of Inca origin.. See Salvador De Madariaga, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire, New
York, The Macmillan Co., 1947. Chapter VI of the Revista de Historia de Puerto Rico, Vol. I, n.3,
Chapt. IX, pp. 228-240.)
If we accept the lesser figure we may conclude that the relatively small population could not
survive the hazards of the epidemics brought by the white and blacks, the low birth rate after
the conquest, the later exodus after the defeat in war and, most of all, the impact of
crossbreeding with the whites and blacks, since the autochthonous element was not
augmented by immigrations. For this reason we have no pure native or half breeds as occurs in
other countries of Latin America. Some characteristics do survive in the total sum of modern
Puerto Rican inhabitants, in some cases more than others.
Our country's natives seem to have been typed as Indians until the beginning of the XIXth
century when Governor don Toribio Montes, faced with the difficulty of fixing ethnic origins,
banded all the non-whites together under the title of free colored people (pardos). In the
census made at the end of the XVIIIth century by order of Carlos III, proof is given that the
natives were not exterminated in the first half of the XVIth century, since in 1778 there was a
contingent of 2,302 pure natives living in the country, which seems to have settled in the
Central Cordillera, in those places known up to now as Indieras. * (Note: Please note that there
was a majority of non-whites. In 1771, 38,259 compared to 31,951, and in 1778 56,295
compared to 46,756. Please note, moreover, that crossbreeds are not specified (native with
White) or other mixtures, under the term free coloured peoples. If we compare this census with
O'Reilly's made in 1765 we see an increase in the number of slaves from 7,592 in 1771 and
11,560 in 1778, compared to 5,037 slaves in 1765.
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue | 9/15/2011
There is no evidence showing that the Puerto Rican natives were considered legally bound to
continue working for the whites. When the decree arrived, on Rodrigo de Bastidas was Bishop,
and he held a ceremony in the city of Puerto Rico (San Juan) where according to his report, sixty
natives, old and young heard the reading of the royal decree. This figure has been currently
interpreted to mean that the natives had almost been exterminated at that early date. Salvador
Brau comments that since Governor Manuel de Lando's census in 1530 reports the existence of
one thousand, one hundred and forty-eight natives, it must be surmised that a tremendous
amount of deaths had taken place to explain this decrease in numbers. Moreover, this same
Bishop later discovered that the landowners had lied about the number of natives allotted to
them when they heard about the abolition of the decree. Six years later the lawyer, Governor
of Puerto Rico, Dr. Vallejo, found a great number of natives on the rural farms, all mixed up
with African slaves and subject (as the salves), for sale and purchase. * In spite of Brau's claims,
the idea that has survived from generation to generation is that the Spaniards exterminated the
Indians in thirty-six years. The padded figure of 6,00,000 inhabitants given by Fray In~nigo
Abbad in his history is also accepted, to make the extermination more brutal. This figure must
be rejected as it is impossible that the Arawak economy, with its rudimentary agriculture and
lack of livestock, could have supported such a high population in an autarchical plan. The
Puerto Rican archeologist, don Ricardo Alegria, based on the archeological remains of the
Precolombian people, calculates that at the most there were some 30,000 inhabitants. *(Note:
Brau, Salvador: Historia de Puerto Rico quoted edition, p. 80 ... We can assume that even the
figure given by Olando, as pointed out before, cannot be absolutely correct.)
4
If we take all this data into account it is evident that the time has come to throw overboard the
fallacy of the extermination of the native population. Of course there were grounds for the
creation of this fallacy and for the subsequent transmission to future generations, as the
documents of the first half of the century repeat that the native Indians had been eliminated. It
is quite possible that the royal officials were referring to the natives subject to encomienda
(remember that by the Jerome decree there were a number who were not subject to it),
especially since the declaration was made with the object of pointing out to the Crown the
necessity of sending Negro slaves to perform labor. When they spoke out of this context they
admitted the existence of natives on the land. It might also have been true that the colonists
who held natives under the encomienda exaggerated the disappearance of the native element
to force the limitless introduction of Negro slaves, which were not subject to the ordinances or
scruples that impeded the exploitation of native labourers.
To sum up, as far as the physical absence of natives in Puerto Rico is concerned, the term to be
used is absorption, not extermination. The absorption was also cultural, although we are not
aware of that. How can we distinguish today, in the intricate cultural pattern, what comes from
the natives, and what from the Negro, especially in zones such as culinary art, quackery,
superstitions and all the folk knowledge inherited by the new generations over and above
modern science? It is not due to this crossbreeding that we do not consider ourselves Arawaks,
nor Spaniards, nor Negroes, but rather as Puerto Ricans?
History of Puerto Rico: The Native Issue | 9/15/2011
All this process of the native question helps us to understand that the Spanish conquest was
different to the other European conquests and to clarify the concept we ought to have of
ourselves as a cultural entity, distinct and separate to the other entities, and to take a look at
ourselves in the mirror of the history of the Arawak people, owners and lords of this land until
1493, when the Spanish boats arrived in their dominions.
5
* The results of the Census were the following:
Year 1771 Year 1778
Whites....................
31,951
46,756
Indians....................
1,756
2,302
Free Colored.........
24,164
34,867
Free Negroes.........
4,747
7,866
Mulato Slaves........
3,343
4,657
Negro Slaves.........
4,249
6,603
Source: History of Puerto Rico, From the beginning to 1892. Loida Figueroa, 1974
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