14.1 Online Document Assignment 14: Juan de Pareja: Race and Slavery in the Early Modern Era

Online Document Assignment 14

JUAN DE PAREJA

Race and Slavery in the Early Modern Era

Juan de Pareja defies easy classification. He lived in a time when the meanings of both race and slavery were in flux. Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja, featured in your textbook, juxtaposes the African features of its subject and his European clothes, but our attention is held by the powerful impression that we are looking at an individual—one who projects confidence, intelligence, and pride—rather than a stereotype. Described in the existing records as a “mulatto”—a person of mixed African and European ancestry—Pareja was born in freedom, was enslaved for a time, and died a free man. Thus we cannot simply call him a slave or a free man, an African or a European; he was all of these things and none of them.

Dramatic developments had destabilized long-held ideas about social and racial identity. In Pareja’s own Spain, the preceding century had seen the completion of the reconquista and the conquest of a vast empire in the Americas. The reconquista pitted Muslim Moors against European Christians in an Iberian version of the Crusades that linked religion with race. With the reconquista over, what status would Spain’s defeated enemies have in post-reconquista society? Likewise, Spanish conquests in the Americas raised a host of questions: how should the peoples of the Americas be seen? Did they have rights and, if so, what were they? These issues of race, slavery, and religion were further complicated by the introduction of large numbers of African slaves into Spanish American society in the centuries following contact and conquest.

Such questions were not confined to Spain and its colonies. In all areas of European settlement in the New World, the interactions of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans challenged contemporaries to confront the complexities of identity and to grapple with the meaning of race and slavery. As you examine the following evidence, consider what it reveals about this process. Did all Europeans come to the same conclusions about these questions? What factors were most important in determining their attitudes?

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