Commentary No. 030
Date: 1537, February 3. Valladolid, Spain.
Theme: In the late 1530s the Spanish Crown tried to expedite the application of the death penalty against the Blacks that were rebelling in La Española
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles--Archivo General de Indias, SANTO_ DOMINGO, 868, L.1,F.33R-34V
In February of 1537, the Spanish monarch, expressing concern about the news received in July and September of the prior year about uprisings by enslaved Blacks in La Española, approved a decision by the President of the Audiencia of that colony, Alonso Zuazo, to hire locally an additional judge to make possible the examining and sentencing of two cases of uprisings by Blacks that had been stalling at the court,
The fact that some fellow oidores were away from La Española and others had passed away without their vacancy being filled, had left the president with only one fellow judge to work with. And since, according to Zuazo, as president he did not intervene in determining the criminal cases involving punishment by death or mutilation, and the local ordinances prevented him from acting in the judging of appeals, he had requested approval from the king of his initiative for an additional judge. The monarch responded positively and announced that he would be issuing a cédula on the matter to regulate similar situations in the future.
Further ahead in his communication, the king explicitly mentioned having been informed of “Indians and Blacks” captured for crimes and sentenced to death in La Española had been presenting appeals to these sentences that had to be submitted to the authorities of higher judicial rank in Castille, thus generating a “delay” from which “some inconveniences may stem.” The king announced that he and his advisors had decided to suspend the issuing of those appeals and to order for the Audiencia itself to locally review them and to issue final sentences on them.
As indicated elsewhere in this website, this document is a clear indication that, besides rebelling against the Spanish colonizers in the late 1530s in La Española, a number of Blacks were also doing their best to resist the power of the settlers by utilizing in their favor the colonial legal and judicial system under which they were to be processed once accused of those rebellions, in this case through the submission –while it was politically accepted-- of judicial appeals that would postpone the final decision on their cases at least until metropolitan judicial authorities received their records and issued sentences about them.
The scholarship about the lives of Black people in subsequent centuries of the colonial world of the Americas has pointed out the active efforts of Blacks to use in their favor or self-protection the colonial legal system within which they were constrained. This document from the 1530s tells us that this resistance practice had been initiated early on in the colonial process by their ancestors and predecessors in La Española.