"1493"

[fiefoe]

Mixed people and the maroons:

• teeming, polyethnic Mexico City. A giddy buzz and snarl of African slaves, Asian shopkeepers, Indian farmers and laborers, and European clerics, mercenaries, and second-tier aristocrats, it was a city of exiles and travelers, the first urban complex in which a majority of
• By about 800 A.D. cane had become particularly common on the Mediterranean coast of what are now Lebanon and Israel, which is where the Crusaders for the first time encountered “reeds filled with a kind of honey known as Zucar”
• Elsewhere the terrain is so steep that in some parts cattle are kept in small, shed-like byres for their entire lives for fear they will tumble fatally down the slopes. (Tourist guides extol Madeira as “the island of sad cows.
• Carlos V refused to see him. The heartbroken conquistador was unable to fathom why the sovereign might worry about creating a powerful new aristocracy of unreliable, impulsive men of action.
• To bolster the legitimacy of their rule, conquistadors often married into or took consorts from the elite of the peoples they conquered, Cortés and Pizarro being among the leading examples.
• When the intertwined conquistador families married into the equally intertwined families of noble native societies, they produced the kind of baroque, multibranched family trees that wake up genealogists at 3:00 a.m.
• The city created to protect Indians from Spanish calls for forced Indian labor thus was wholly based on forced Indian labor. And Indians and Spaniards were again completely intermingled.
• which depicts the Virgin Mary embedded in the great silver mountain of Potosí, visually uniting Christianity with the Andean tradition that mountains are the embodiment of a deity. (Illustration credit 7.5)
• the casta system was an attempt to categorize the peoples of New Spain according to moral and spiritual worth, which was linked to descent. Each group had a fundamental, unalterable nature that combined in distinct, predictable ways with people outside that group. A mulatto (Afro-European) was different from a mestizo (Indo-European) was different from a zambo (Afro-Indian—
• Casta paintings are sets of images, usually but not always sixteen in number, that purport to depict the categories of people in New Spain. Painted or engraved in the colony itself, they portray the mestizos, mulattos, coyotes, lobos, and tente en el aires of Spanish America with the frozen exactitude of Audubon birds.
• Catarina de San Juan, an obscure visionary in the mountains of Mexico, was the granddaughter of an Asian emperor. More peculiar still, this claim was probably accurate, or mostly so.
• When Japan closed its borders to foreigners in the 1630s, Japanese expatriates were stranded wherever they were. Scores, perhaps hundreds, migrated to Mexico.
• More than likely, Puebla’s fake Chinese pottery was created in part by real Chinese potters. If so, they did a splendid job: talavera ware, as it is known today, is now so highly prized that when I visited Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.
• In the Tang dynasty the savants of Beijing had realized that periodontal disease could be prevented by scraping away dental plaque.
• It was evidently worth the inconvenience of wading through the flood to live in an urban dream of chanting religious processions, swishing silk dresses, groaning carriages of silver and gold, and great clanging church bells, a city where people drifted in canoes down canals lined with flowers as sunlight gleamed from the mountains.
• Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood—to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place,
• At thirty-six, his marriage having ended, he returned to the Cherokee, married a half-Cherokee woman, became the Cherokee ambassador to Washington, and took to wearing native garb. Angered by his constant drinking, the Cherokee ejected him from his job and threw him out of the group. Houston became president of Texas after it seceded from Mexico.
• Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it.
• Broadly speaking, says to Thornton, the Boston University historian, “slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.”
• Guns were useless in an hour when fighters could barely see and weapons slipped from muddy hands. Covered in a thick impasto of blood and earth, shouting and sobbing, the two forces
• but were helpless against the bats—“biting so delicately on the tips of [sleepers’] toes, and the hands, and the end of the nose, and the ears,” an Italian moaned, “that one is never the wiser, and gnawing that little mouthful of meat, and sucking the blood that comes from it.”
• By 1819, when the isthmus won its freedom from Spain, these communities’ origin had been almost forgotten. Maroons had won the highest kind of liberty—they were ordinary citizens.*
• Four of those towns were mainly inhabited by Africans—Black Seminole, as they are often called. The relationship between “red” and “black” Seminole was complex, beginning with the fact that some Africans were “red” and some European refugees were “black.” Under Seminole law, most Africans in those towns had the legal status of slaves, but native bondage resembled European feudalism more than European slavery.
• Two months later the French commander died. His army struggled on, but it was trying to conquer its own cemetery.
• Independent Haiti, an entire maroon nation, became a global symbol that terrified slaveholders throughout the world, including the United States. All of Europe and the United States put a punishing economic embargo on Haiti for decades.
• a maroon community called Ipanema—a place so poor, she told me, that families cut their matches in half lengthwise to make a box last twice as long.
• Determined to wring every penny out of the forest that they could, palm hunters scoured the lower Amazon with the implacability of paid assassins.
• In these Afro-Indian communities, the context is head-spinning: people with African ancestors in what amounts to blackface, people with native ancestors who allied with Africans playing other natives who fought with them.
• In the 1960s, the generals who then ruled Brazil looked on their maps and observed to their displeasure that about 60 percent of the country was blank (actually, it was filled with Indians, peasant farmers, and quilombos, but the government dismissed them).
• The rubber tappers had come first, grabbing Mojú’s rubber trees. Then came the timber companies, stripping the forest of mahogany and dyewood. Cattle ranches had seized land in the 1960s and 1970s—the properties, though little used, were still fenced off. A company punched through roads to a bauxite mine upstream. Two other firms that mine kaolin,
• Decades after the last European had departed, its African and Indian inhabitants were still reenacting a faraway battle between Islam and Christendom. They still do today.
• One difference between Dona Rosario and her parents was that she had a phone. Another was that she had some capital—a freezerful of açai and a bank account with a little in it. With the phone she called government inspectors and showed her documents to them, all the while threatening to use her money to hire a lawyer. “They looked it up and said, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t steal this land.’ ” The surveyors backed down.