Date:    1553, December 5.  Seville, Spain.
Theme: A young man of Black complexion from Santo Domingo studying in Seville, decides to return to Santo Domingo
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles–Archivo General de Indias, Contratación, 5217B,N.9,R.15
 
On December 5th, 1553, in Seville, the administrative and commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, merchant and city resident Andrés Gómez Adalid provided an oral affidavit stating what he knew about a Miguel de Torquemada, who is defined by the authority issuing this document as a young man of short stature and with a face of dark complexion (“caritrigueño”) and an early beard.  Gómez himself described Torquemada as being age 18 and a native of Santo Domingo City, adding that he knew Torquemada’s  parents, who were denizens of the same city, and that now Torquemada wanted to return to Santo Domingo to join his mother “who is seen by people in the said city.”

If our interpretation of the semantics of the word caritrigueño is correct, this statement is evidence that there were not only some free mulatto or dark skinned people born in Santo Domingo by the mid sixteenth-century, but also that some of them were of an economic status solid enough to have a son travel back and forth from the colony of Santo Domingo to the city of Seville, a sort of New York City-like global city of the times. This traveling between the two Atlantic shores of the empire, even when limited, seems to have been more frequent than what the prevailing scholarship would lead us to believe, at least for the case of a colony like Santo Domingo that is often thought of as having suffered an increased isolation as decades went by during the second half of the sixteenth century.

Assuming the weather in Spain, and more particularly in the southern region where Seville is located,  in the mid-sixteenth century was not very different than nowadays, December 5th would normally be a time in the year where a cool weather would usually prevail, and it is reasonable to imagine that Torquemada, as a person having grown up in the year-long warm weather of a Caribbean city like Santo Domingo, must have been wearing a kind of garment that would cover both his upper and lower body, possibly leaving only the face uncovered.  It is understandable that the official trying to describe Torquemada physically would refer to his facial complexion, in this case describing it as “wheat-like,” and meaning in all likelihood “brown.”

Interestingly, one of Torquemada’s witnesses when requesting the license to travel back to his hometown was a Luis Mateos that stated being also from the city of Santo Domingo and having grown up “together” with Torquemada there. As other witnesses, he concurred that Torquemada was the son of Alonso and Ana Cerón, denizens of Santo Domingo.  So this means that there were at least two young men from Santo Domingo living in Seville at the time, possibly both for study purposes.