Iconic reggae singer Winston Rodney, better known under the stage name “Burning Spear,” asks a question of the listener in his seminal 1975 song “Slavery Days.”
“Do you remember the days of slavery?”
It’s a plea to learn from the sins of the past, and honor the millions of enslaved people from throughout the African continent who suffered, endured and survived.
When most people remember the days of slavery, oftentimes the discussion centers around the brutality of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, how it figured into the development of the United States, and its lasting implications up to the Civil War and beyond.
Less talked about, however, is the role it played in Latin America, and how Mexico was one of the largest areas where enslaved Africans started their lives in the Americas.
A new database takes a closer look at the time period from the mid-15th to late-19th centuries, and the tensions that came with enslaved Africans being thrust into Latin America. Some of the key research for that project is happening right here in the Valley.
Trayectorias Afro is a Spanish language database that examines the movement of free and enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade within New Spain – the region that is now between Mexico and the Southwestern United States. The program launched in early March.
The database was created by UC professors and Mexican scholars at the Instituto de Athropologia e Historia (INAH) through the UC Alianza Mexico Latino Studies Project.
This binational project is a living digital humanities tool, aimed to help better understand the intersections between Black and Latino identities.
UC Merced history professor Sabrina Smith is the principal investigator of the project.
“Oftentimes these histories are not in conversation with each other, they’re a little bit isolated,” Smith said. “This is what this project is building on, connecting the histories together.”
With this tool, researchers are able to delve deeper into how the Mexican government began to recognize African descendants in the country as an official minority group, known as Afro-Latinos, and the racial, social and political tensions among citizens.
“If we look at this region (New Spain) through a contemporary lens, it supports the idea that Mexico is vastly multicultural,” said collaborator Anthony R. Jerry, an associate professor who works in the Black Study Department at UC Riverside.“These serve as living museums in some ways. ”
How the program program works
Trayectorias Afro has data ranging all the way back to the early 1500s using archived information from Oaxacan notaries.
Researchers cross-referenced Trayectorias Afro data with information from Slave Voyages to confirm oversea passages. Slave Voyages is a data tool created in 2008 that identified information on vessels that transported enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as well as the people on board.
From there, researchers were able to identify individuals, along with their names, approximate ages and places of origin. Plus, the data also includes information about their arrival to the Americas, overland movement across New Spain, who they were sold to and whether they were able to purchase their freedom.
As a living program, it’s updated through the collaborative research of historians, students, genealogists the more it’s utilized.
These additional details are what differentiates Trayectorias Afro from other databases like Slave Voyages.
It also serves to debunk certain myths about Transatlantic slave trade, collaborator Alex Borucki said.
Such as the belief that most enslaved people came directly from the African continent without stopping in other locations around the world or continuing their lives beyond their initial arrival.
“Those people were not recorded by [Slave Voyages], because it only recorded people who were embarked in Africa and disembarked in a place in the Americas,” said Borucki, professor at UC Irvine. “But people, once they were disembarked in the Americas, they continued to other places.”
According to the data, many of the people transported on slave ships initially landed in Brazil, back when it was a colony of Portugal, then considered a world power. An estimated 12 million enslaved people from Africa arrived in the South American country before being taken to other ports.
Because of this, Trayectorias Afro tracks movement from a much wider net of data throughout Latin America – from Jamaica to Mexico, from the Dutch Caribbean to Venezuela and from Brazil to the Rio de la Plata.
The wider net of data also allows researchers to better understand how enslaved Africans became tied to Latin culture and how that lineage continues to have meaning today.
Bringing Trayectorias Afro into the classroom
The Trayectoria Afro database works similarly to Slave Voyages, which is a popular tool in California classrooms, being utilized in middle and high school grades curricula to explore the time period.
Project leaders for Trayectorias Afro are hoping their database can be used in addition to Slave Voyages. They say Trayectorias Afro focuses more on the lives of enslaved and freed people after their arrival to the Americas.
“This term ‘trayectorias’, it’s not just trajectories in terms of physical mobility,” Smith said. “It’s also about changes in life circumstances, like from captivity to freedom.”
Program developers are working to build Spanish language lesson plans for K-12 teachers in Mexico, according to Smith.
“We’ve already contracted a scholar in Mexico to create lesson plans and identified areas where this database would be particularly useful,” she said.
Key areas include fourth grade California history, fifth grade U.S. history and 10th grade advanced placement world history.
While the curriculum is being developed in Spanish, Smith said they will work on translating it into English, so it can be used in classrooms in the United States in the future.