Date:  1539, September 3.  [Seville] Spain. 

Theme: Catalina Fernández, a freed black woman residing in Seville, obtained the license to travel to Santo 

 Domingo in La Española with her daughter Francisca de Castilla, apparently a freed person as well.  

Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles, Archivo General de Indias, CONTRATACION, 5536,L.5, F.197R 

Not all black people who arrived in La Española during the sixteenth century were enslaved people.  Some arrived on their own will and volition and established themselves in the young Spanish colony as free individuals.  And out of these, some were women.  That was the case of this Catalina Hernández, who traveled across the Ocean from Seville to Santo Domingo in 1539 accompanied by her daughter Francisca de Castilla, apparently a free person as well. 

Catalina, says the archival record, was a former slave who had obtained her deed of manumission or freedom three years earlier, and under her new status she was granted a licencia or permission to travel, which she showed to the authorities as she was about to board a ship in Seville, the commercial capital of the growing empire, bound to Santo Domingo on the other side of the Atlantic. 

Both Catalina and Francisca’s father, García de Castilla, are described in the sources as denizens of Seville at the time, which may indicate that Francisca may have been a Spain-born young woman, either a mulatto or black person, depending on whether García de Castilla was a white or black man, which the record does not mention.  

If the trip was indeed fulfilled, this would put Catalina and Francisca in Santo Domingo by the end of 1539. Catalina, as in the case of other black women mentioned in other archival records as traveling alone to the Indies, could have been herself a native of La Española taken to Seville by former settlers of the island that returned to Spain and may have been just trying to return to the place where she grew up and where she possibly had relatives, but she could have also been just a woman with a lot of initiative trying to begin a new life in the Americas.