Basin of Mexico

Like a giant bowl gouged out of the Earth, ringed by mountains and active volcanoes, the Basin of Mexico, the site of contemporary Mexico City, is one of the world’s most ancient and important cradles of human civilization. Conventionally called the Valley of Mexico, this singular geographic feature has no outlet to the sea, and thus technically is a basin, not a valley.

Tectonically unstable, ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 2,400 meters above sea level, and extending roughly 110 kilometers north to south and 80 kilometers east to west, the Basin of Mexico covers an area of approximately 7,000 square kilometers. Prior to the conquest of Mexico, the basin’s diverse ecological zones saw the rise and fall of diverse city-states and kingdoms.

Because it formed a closed hydrological system, and because it has ample volcanic and alluvial soils, the basin evolved a complex network of lakes, streams, and springs that also made it one of the richest and most productive ecological zones in all of Mesoamerica.

The basin’s first human inhabitants, arriving some 15,000 years ago, found an environment teeming with life—not only birds, fish, plants, and insects but a staggering diversity of mammals like rabbit, fox, pigs, deer, wolves, as well as camelids, horses, mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, bears, and other large prey.


Initially a hunter’s paradise, the basin had by 9,000 years ago seen its largest fauna become extinct, probably due to a combination of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. The beginnings of maize cultivation, which later provided the economic underpinnings for the development of complex societies and civilizations across Mesoamerica and beyond, began in or near the basin around 5,000 b.c.e.

It is hypothesized that the absence of large draft animals suitable for domestication delayed for several thousand years the emergence of fully sedentary societies. As late as 1,000 b.c.e., the entire basin was home to an estimated 10,000 inhabitants—a tiny fraction of its carrying capacity, and of what it would be two millennia later.

Beginning around 1100 b.c.e., in the basin’s wetter southern zones, conscious manipulation of the basin’s abundant water resources marked the beginnings of an agricultural revolution, and along with it of complex societies that relatively quickly developed into large-scale state systems.

Around 500 b.c.e., to the northeast the construction of irrigation ditches and other water-control mechanisms permitted the emergence of the basin’s first true city and state, Teotihuacán. Around the same time, a host of other polities emerged around the five interconnected shallow lakes that dominated the basin’s center—from south to north Lakes Chalco, Xochililco, Texcoco, Xaltocán, and Zupango.

From around 100 b.c.e., and continuing for the next 16 centuries, there emerged an exceedingly intricate array of polities, kingdoms, and city-states across the basin, most with their capital cities located near the lakes at the basin’s center, the exact sequence and relationships of which scholars are still endeavoring to understand. The Aztecs built their capital city Tenochtitlán atop what began as a small island on the western edge of Lake Texcoco, the basin’s central and largest lake.

By the time of the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico was home to an estimated 2 million to 3 million people, making it one of the most densely packed areas in the world, with an average population density of from 300 to 500 persons per square kilometer.

After the conquest, the Spanish devoted enormous resources to draining the giant lakes. In the early 21st century, the Basin of Mexico was home to the world’s second-largest megalopolis and an estimated 25 million to 30 million people.

Maroon Societies in the Americas

Maroon societies is a term designating communities of runaway slaves in the Americas, the formation of which constituted a recurrent feature of the history of African slavery over nearly 400 years, from the first importation of African slaves in the early 1500s through the selesai abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in Brazil in 1888. The term derives from the Spanish cimarrón, originally referring to feral cattle but by the early 1500s also signifying runaway slaves.

Maroon societies were most common in the Caribbean and Brazil but were also widespread in North America and elsewhere. To slave owners and ruling groups they represented a constant and serious challenge to the institution of African slavery generally, while to slaves they represented the possibility of life outside the shackles of the slave regime. Often called palenques in the Caribbean region and Quilombos in Brazil, they had a history closely linked to the hundreds of slave rebellions that also mark the history of the Americas.

Ranging from small nomadic bands to extensive settled communities of thousands of people that endured for decades, even centuries, on the fringes of the plantation economy, Maroon societies came into existence almost as soon as African slavery in the Americas did. Most of their members were African-born, as they reproduced many of the social and cultural features of their homeland in their new surroundings.

Among the first official acknowledgments of the existence of such communities was a report to the Council of the Indies from Hispaniola of March 1542, in which Archdeacon Álvaro de Castro estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 runaway slaves were at large on the island. A follow-up report of July 1546 described some of the island’s numerous Maroon communities, some hundreds strong, and the mixed success of Spanish efforts to subdue them.


Often mixing with indigenous groups and allying with their slave masters’ enemies, Maroon communities displayed tremendous resilience in the face of persistent efforts to eradicate them and horrific punishments meted out to captured runaways, which included castration, amputation of limbs, branding, garroting, and burning alive.

The hinterlands of plantation economies throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, North America, and elsewhere witnessed the formation of Maroon societies alongside the very introduction of slavery.

In Mexico, rapid Indian depopulation prompted colonists to import upward of 120,000 African slaves in the years between 1521 and 1650. Many thousands were compelled to work in the silver mines and ranches north of Mexico City centered on Zacatecas.

From the 1560s to the 1580s, a series of revolts and uprisings rocked the region, as runaway African slaves joined forces with besieged Indians to raid ranches and storehouses, attack travelers, and return to their hidden hamlets in caves, arroyos, and other places beyond the reach of the authorities.

Jungles of Veracruz

In the 1570s, the Crown issued a series of draconian laws intended to discourage such uprisings, which nonetheless failed to have the desired effect. In 1609, a rebel Maroon community in the jungles of Veracruz, led by Yanga, successfully negotiated a peace treaty with the Spanish authorities that granted them their freedom. Nearly a century later, the community was thriving. Slave uprisings and the formation of Maroon societies continued until the selesai abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829.

Some palenques survived for decades, later becoming towns and municipalities, such as El Cobre in eastern Cuba, where a slave uprising in 1731 led to the creation of a stable community that 50 years later had a fugitive slave population of over 1,000 scattered throughout the Sierra del Cobre.

In 1800, following a recommendation of the Council of the Indies, the Crown declared the slave-descended inhabitants of El Cobre free. Other well-known palenques in eastern Cuba included El Frijol and Ciénaga de Zapata, which survived through much of the 19th century.

Despite their best efforts to extinguish such fugitive slave communities, colonial authorities were often compelled to negotiate with them—as in the district of Popayán in Colombia, where in 1732 the Audiencia of Quito authorized a local official to offer a treaty of peace to the palenque called El Castillo, granting its inhabitants their freedom if they would agree to accept no more runaway slaves. The palenque refused the offer, and in 1745 a series of military expeditions finally captured and defeated El Castillo.

More than a century earlier, in the early 1600s, in the Cartagena district of Colombia, a runaway slave named Domingo Bioho, claiming to be African royalty and adopting the title King Benkos, staged a series of raids on plantations and farms around Cartagena and founded a fortified palenque called San Basilio.

After defeating two expeditions sent to subdue his independent kingdom, in 1619 King Benkos negotiated a favorable treaty with the Spanish authorities, only to be betrayed, captured, and hanged. Despite this setback, San Basilio survived for another century and was finally suppressed in 1713–17.

Similar episodes unfolded in the British and French Caribbean islands. In Martinique in 1665, a Maroon who called himself by his master’s name, Francisque Fabulé, led a group of 400–500 Maroons who staged repeated attacks against plantations and settlements. The French Sovereign Council negotiated a treaty with Fabulé that granted him his freedom and a promise that his band would not be punished. He was later condemned to life in the galleys.

In 1771, a decree of the Supreme Council of Martinique lamented the existence of fugitive slave communities on the island, where they had built huts, cleared land, and planted crops, and from which they sallied forth to commit various depredations. In the French island of Guadeloupe in 1668, the governor reported more than 30 Maroons living in Grande-Terre and recommended an example be made by capturing and beheading them.

Despite the authorities’ best efforts, however, the Maroon societies could not be eradicated. Nearly 70 years later in Guadeloupe, in 1737, a group of 48 Maroons led by one Bordebois was put on trial; eight were sentenced to be garroted. Similar events transpired on Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and other islands in the British Antilles.

North American Societiea

Slave hunt in Dismal Swamp area

In British North America and, after 1783, the United States of America, Maroon societies formed and reformed repeatedly. There is evidence for at least 50 such communities during the period 1672–1864 in the mountains, forests, and swamps from Florida to Louisiana to Virginia.

Most notable among these were those in the Dismal Swamp area in the Virginia–North Carolina borderlands, where thousands of runaway slaves and their descendants survived repeated efforts to capture and subdue them. Sometimes Maroons allied with local Indians, forming mixed communities of Indians and fugitive slaves.

Other times Indian individuals and polities allied with Euro-American authorities, assisting them in their eradication efforts, as occurred among the Notchee Indians in South Carolina in 1744, in Georgia in 1772, and in other places.

Communities descended from Maroon societies can be found in many parts of the Americas. In the 1980s, it was estimated that more than 10 percent of the population of the Republic of Suriname was descended from six Maroon or “Bush Negro” communities or tribes that formed in the 1500s and waged a century-long war for liberation against the Dutch authorities before finally winning their freedom in 1762.

The collective memory of the modern-day descendants of such Maroon societies has provided fertile ground for historians, anthropologists, linguists, and other scholars interested in exploring this chapter of the history of Africans in the Americas.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Bartolomé de Las Casas

One of the most influential figures in the history of Latin America, the Spanish priest and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas became known as the “Apostle of the Indians” for his impassioned and relentless susila condemnations of the excesses of violence and cruelty perpetrated by Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos against the native inhabitants of the Americas.

His book, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, first published in 1552, caused a sensation across Spain and at the highest levels of church and state. Translated into many languages, it also formed an important component of the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities, a perspective that continues to hold enormous sway in considerations of the Spanish impact on the Americas. An indefatigable writer and activist, he continued writing, publishing, and speaking in favor of Indian rights from 1514 until his death in 1566.

His writings were an important element of later Enlightenment discourses on the universality of human rights and continue to resonate among liberation theologians, human rights activists, and indigenous rights activists across Latin America more than 450 years after his “brief account” was first published.

Born in Seville in 1484, son of a well-to-do merchant, Las Casas first came to the New World in 1502, at age 18, in the company of his father and some 2,500 other adventurers in the fleet of Nicolás de Ovando. Around 1506–07, he returned to Europe, was ordained a deacon in Rome, and returned to the Indies, where he was granted an encomienda.


In 1512, he became the first priest ordained in the Americas. Over the next two years, an encomendero himself and eyewitness to the forced labor, enslavement, and violence that characterized the conquest of the Caribbean, he gradually came to an understanding of Spanish actions that diverged radically from that of the vast majority of his countrymen.

His first public condemnation of Spanish excesses was in a Pentecost Sunday sermon in 1514. Freeing his own Indians, henceforth he preached incessantly about the evils of encomienda and other forms of forced labor and violence, making many enemies in the process.

In 1520, King Charles granted him an official hearing to expound his views and defend himself against his many detractors. A handful of other ecclesiastics, most notably Antonio de Montesinos and Juan Quevedo, had been advancing similar arguments.

The king sympathized with Las Casas’s position and decreed that the Indies would henceforth be ruled without recourse to force of arms—an unenforceable edict that was largely ignored. After a failed attempt to establish an economically self-sustaining Indian commune in Venezuela, in 1522 Las Casas became a Dominican monk.

Over the next four decades, he wrote prolifically and became an obsessive collector of documents that later proved of inestimable value to scholars. He was instrumental in persuading the king to issue the New Laws of 1542, which placed severe restrictions on encomienda, sparked furious resistance by encomenderos across the empire, and were repealed in 1545–46.

In 1544, he was appointed bishop of Chiapas (Mexico), where he continued his work on behalf of the Indians. Three years later, in response to mounting opposition to the radical bishop, the Council of the Indies recalled him to Spain.

In 1550, came one of the most memorable and important public debates in early modern Europe, on the question of the morality of Spain’s actions in the Americas. Pitting two intellectual giants—Las Casas versus the eminent humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued from Aristotelian premises that Indians were “natural slaves” and that Spanish actions were therefore just and appropriate—the great debate of Vallodolid failed to resolve the question, even though most council members sided with Las Casas.

In the coming years, he wrote many other works of enduring historical importance, most notably his Brief Account (1552), Apologética historia, and Historia de las Indias. He continued denouncing the institution of encomienda and Spanish cruelties and championing Indian rights until his death in July 1566. His body was interred at Our Lady of Atocha in Madrid.

Diego de Landa

Diego de Landa

Among the first Spaniards to venture into the Maya heartland of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa owes his fame, and infamy, to two distinct but related actions.

His infamy rests on his systematic destruction of dozens of Maya texts (or codices) and thousands of Mayan idols in his crusade to extinguish idolatry and spread Christianity among the Maya in the 1560s—a crusade accompanied by tortures, burnings at the stake, and many other atrocities against the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Yet Landa was also among the earliest experts on Mayan language and culture, his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatán, 1556) representing a landmark document that provided an exceptionally vivid, detailed, and important description of Maya language and culture, and that proved key in the eventual decipherment of ancient Maya texts in the second half of the 20th century.

Landa thus occupies a peculiar and highly ambiguous position as both the most important early destroyer and preserver of knowledge on the preconquest Maya of Yucatán.


Born in Cifuentes, Guadalajara, Spain, on March 17, 1524, Landa entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo in 1540. Nine years later he journeyed to Yucatán as part of the broader missionary effort to convert the New World’s indigenous inhabitants to Christianity.

His first several years were spent at the monastery at Izamal, learning Mayan, revising an existing grammar, and undertaking the routine duties of Franciscan missionaries: preaching, tending to the sick, performing sacraments.

Growing restless, Landa sought and received permission to venture alone into the interior, where he spent many months wandering through large parts of the peninsula and acquiring intimate knowledge of Mayan language and culture.

In 1553, he returned to the monastery at Izamal and supervised the construction of a permanent structure at the prominent Maya religious center. Eight years later, in 1561, the General Chapter of the Franciscans appointed the 37-year-old Landa as the region’s first provincial.

By 1562, Landa had overseen the construction of 12 monasteries and the baptism of thousands of Maya, who Landa believed had abandoned their idols and embraced the Christian faith.

In May 1562, a chance discovery of a cave near the village of Maní containing numerous idols and human skulls launched Landa on a crusade to extirpate, once and for all, idolatry among the natives.

Employing a torture technique known as the garrucha, or hoist (in which the individual was bound at the wrists, hoisted into the air, and lashed, sometimes with large stones attached to the feet and hot wax hurled onto the body), the friars gained numerous “confessions” from the natives on their continuing adherence to non-Christian religious beliefs and practices.

Soon afterward, on Sunday, July 12, 1562, the friars celebrated a massive auto-da-fé at Maní, in which great piles of idols (including at least 27 Maya manuscripts, or codices) were set to the torch, and various punishments meted out to offenders against the Christian faith, including floggings, incarceration, and fines.

The inquisition continued for the next three months. Altogether an estimated 4,500 natives were tortured, with many hundreds left permanently disabled and 158 dying in consequence of the interrogations.

Landa’s illegal and unauthorized excesses led to a prolonged power struggle with the region’s bishop, Francisco de Toral, whose authority he was charged with usurping. Ordered back to Spain, he was absolved by the Council of the Indies, and in 1573 he returned to Yucatán as second bishop of Mérida, in which capacity he served until his death on April 30, 1579.

La (Doña Marina) Malinche

La (Doña Marina) Malinche

La Malinche was one of the key players in the 16th century conquest of Mexico by Spanish conquistadores. However little is known about Malinche’s life before or after the years of the Spanish conquest in the 1520s.

Malinche was born into a noble family of the Aztec upper class. Her name is probably derived from a corruption of the Nahuatl word Malintzin. She was probably born in Oluta, in the province of Coatzacoalcos, which is in the area between central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula.

Upon the death of her father, her mother sold Malinche into slavery. During this time, Malinche learned several languages, including Mayan. She was approximately 18 years old when the Spanish conquistadores landed in Mexico and began their conquest of her native land.

In April 1519, Malinche was given as a translator to Hernán Cortés during his dealings with the Aztecs. She was immediately baptized as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Spaniards bestowed upon Malinche the Christian name Marina.


A great amount of the information that has survived about Malinche is the result of the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In his writings, Diaz noted that Malinche was a beautiful woman who was intelligent, extremely loyal, and not easily embarrassed. She was greatly respected by many of the men, both Aztec and Spanish, with whom she interacted in her role as Cortés’s interpreter.

In his famous book The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–21, Díaz del Castillo stated that Malinche’s mother remarried upon the death of her first husband, Malinche’s father.

When her mother gave birth to a new son, in order to safeguard the baby’s inheritance, Malinche’s mother and stepfather sold the little girl into slavery to some Aztecs from Xicalango. The Aztecs from Xicalango then sold Malinche to a group of Aztecs from Tabasco.

After staying in Tabasco for a short period of time, Malinche was eventually given as a gift to Cortés upon his arrival in Mexico. In addition to working as a translator for Cortés, Malinche served as a guide and diplomat.

Cortés was so impressed with Malinche’s efforts on his behalf that he eventually arranged for her marriage to one of his men, a Castilian knight named Juan de Jaramillo. They were married at the town of Orizaba. She later bore him a daughter named María.

Despite her marriage to de Jaramillo, Malinche remained a key figure in Cortés’s later exploits in Tenochtitlán. Diaz observed that she was present when Cortés was carrying on negotiations with Moctezuma II in 1523.

Working with a Spanish priest named Geronimo de Aguilar, Malinche translated Cortés’s words into the Nahuatl dialect spoken by Moctezuma after de Aguilar translated from Spanish to the Mayan dialect that she understood.

Later, Malinche apparently became fluent enough in Spanish that Aguilar’s assistance was no longer needed during the simpulan negotiations with Moctezuma. Indeed, Malinche’s skill in language and in secular politics was so great that she even acted as counselor to the Aztec king during his dealings with Cortés.

In addition to their professional relationship, Malinche bore Cortés a son named Martín. Cortés seemed to have held his relationship with Malinche in some esteem as he named their son Martín after his own father.

Cortés later had the boy legitimized, and he always seemed to favor Martín among his other children in later life. However, in the majority of letters Cortés sent back to Spain, anytime he mentioned Malinche, it was always in her role as his translator. He never alluded to any personal details about Malinche in his Spanish correspondence.

Over the next several years, Malinche’s power seemed to increase. She always dressed in expensive garments and appeared to have her hair styled in the most elegant native fashions. She traveled throughout much of Mexico with Cortés, translating for him in his dealings with the Mayan Empire in 1526.

Sometime after the birth of their son, Martín, the relationship between Malinche and Cortés seemed to flounder. She is rarely mentioned in Cortés’s correspondence after the mid-1520s. After the completion of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in late 1526, Malinche all but disappears from historical records to the point that little to no information is recorded about her death.

There is some speculation that she may have died of complications surrounding the birth of her daughter, María, in 1527 as her husband Juan de Jaramillo is recorded as having married again the following year.

Vilification in History

The vilification of Malinche in Mexican history can be traced to the expulsion of the Spaniards by the Mexicans in 1821. Malinche became synonymous with the image of Eve. Mexican nationalists came to blame Malinche for all the woes suffered by the Mexican people during the colonial rule of the Spanish.

She served as the scapegoat when the Mexican government needed someone to blame for the poor state of political affairs that the new Mexican government faced in the 1820s. Malinche was painted as a scarlet woman whose actions were driven by her extreme sexual appetite.

In the 19th century, particularly in Mexican literary and artistic movements, Malinche’s role as an interpreter, strategist, and diplomat was virtually ignored. Her historical reputation was reduced to that of having been merely Cortés’s sex-starved mistress who betrayed her people.

In reality, Malinche was a respected female who played a crucial role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the growth and spread of Christianity among the Aztec and Mayan peoples. While women such as La Malinche are vilified for their respective roles in the conquests of their peoples by foreign invaders, this condemnation signifies the important role that such women played in the secular politics of their native lands.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada

Gonzalo Jiménez  de Quesada

The man who conquered New Granada (modern-day Colombia) for the Spanish Empire, Gonzalo Jiménez (or Ximenes or Giménez) de Quesada, was one of the least controversial of the famous conquistadores and one of the few to write in detail about his experiences (although the book has been lost).

Jiménez de Quesada was born in either Córdoba or Granada in Spain. He was trained in the law in Granada, which had been captured from the Moors in the last stage of the Reconquest of Spain (Reconquista) in 1492.

After many years as a lawyer, he was offered the position of magistrate and auditor to the province of New Andalucia, the northern part of South America, with a base at Santa Marta in modern-day Colombia.


There Governor Don Pedro de Lugo put Quesada in charge of an expedition to find some land suitable for settlement as Santa Marta, despite being located on the Pearl Coast. Of the 1,000 men capable of bearing arms, Quesada took charge of 800.

He organized the men into work parties and they built six rivercraft. Quesada divided his men into two groups; 200 manned the vessels and sailed up the Magdalena River, while the remaining 600 with him trekked inland, leaving on April 6, 1536. In spite of the heat, all the men wore heavily padded quilted cotton to protect them from arrows; even the horses were covered in the improvised armor.

Quesada had arranged a meeting point up the Magdalena River where the men on foot would meet with the boats, which carried much of the supplies. The land group were slowed down by the jungle, occasional attacks by Indians, insects, and disease.

However they reached the agreed meeting point on time but the sea party was not there. After waiting a few days, Quesada urged the men to continue inland, rather than return to Santa Marta. Although he had no military training, Quesada’s years as a lawyer enabled him to present the matter in a persuasive manner, and all acquiesced.

The men were desperately short of food, and there are the usual accounts of eating snakes, lizards, frogs, and even some dogs captured from the Indians, as well as boiling down leather harnesses to satiate their hunger.

Expedition Saved

The expedition was saved when the sea party turned up soon afterward, having been delayed by tropical storms. Quesada was then able to send the sickest men back to Santa Marta, replenish the supplies of the others, and press on with the expedition, which, in January 1537, reached the foothills of the Andes.

After covering 400 miles in eight months, there were only 166 men and 60 horses left. Quesada then had his men elect him as their captain-general, and they were determined to conquer land for themselves.

Unlike many other conquistadores, Quesada forbade his men to slaughter Indians, urging them to treat them humanely. However, Quesada was not averse to looting Indian temples, which were often covered in gold and precious stones. After one Indian chief, Bogotá, was killed in battle, the Spanish captured his successor, Sagipa, whom they offered to free for a large ransom in gold.

Soon afterward, Quesada heard that Sagipa was planning to trick him, and he had the chief executed. The nearby land was then declared conquered “in the name of his most sovereign emperor, Charles V.” A small township was then built, which Quesada named as Santa Fe de Bogotá (it was long believed that Quesada was born at Santa Fe, in Spain).

Having established his own town, Quesada was eager to return to Santa Marta and have the conquest officially acknowledged. Before he could do so, two other conquistador parties arrived.

One, led by Sebastián de Belalcázar, one of the men who had served under Francisco Pizarro, arrived from Quito, having founded the cities of Pasto, Popayan, and Cali. The other, led by a German adventurer, Nicholas Federman, on an expedition paid for by the Welser financiers of Germany, who had been granted a concession by Charles V, had come from Venezuela.

The three forces—that of Quesada, and the two new arrivals—were all about the same size, and they all realized that any fight would probably leave the victor, with numbers seriously depleted, at risk of attack from the Chibcha Indians, who still lived in the area.

Sense prevailed and the three decided to return to Spain and put their claims to the king of Spain, who would be able to arbitrate the matter. It seems that Quesada would have been the man who suggested this and also thought that he would have the best hope of winning any litigation.

Quesada then returned to the coast and in July 1539 sailed from Cartagena back to Spain. In Madrid, all three conquistadores failed to win the land. Don Pedro de Lugo, who had been a friend of Quesada, had died and his son, Luís, who had abandoned Santa Marta many years earlier after having stolen vast amounts of gold and emeralds from the Indians, was given title to his father’s land, and to the area found by Quesada. Quesada was appointed marshal of New Granada, and an alderman of Bogotá, the city he had founded.

Returning to New Granada, as the new Spanish colony was called, Quesada became one of the most influential men in the region, where he was well known for being critical of the rapaciousness of the large landowners, and also that of some officials.

Many people came to him for advice and it was not until 1569, when he was in his 70s, that Quesada decided to lead one last expedition. This was to try to locate the famous El Dorado, which was said to be 500 miles southeast of Bogotá.

There, an Indian king was said to cover himself in gold dust and then wash it all off in a lake. The legend had long captivated many people in Europe and the king of Spain agreed to help with the expedition in exchange for a share in the proceeds.

The expedition had 300 mounted soldiers, 1,500 Indian porters, several hundred black African slaves, 1,100 horses and mules, 600 cattle, and 800 sheep. Nearly three years later, Quesada led 28 men back to Bogotá.

On the journey several thousand Spanish, Indians, and Africans had died, and others had fled into the jungle. Disease, Indians, and wild animals had taken their toll and even Quesada had contracted leprosy. He was also faced with a massive bill—60,000 ducats—for the failed expedition.

Devastated by his failure, Quesada retired to his country house, La Suesca, where he wrote of his life, in the hope that sales might help pay off his debts. He died on February 16, 1579, of leprosy. His book was lost. The township that Quesada had founded is now the city of Bogotá (current population 7 million), and one of the main roads in the city is Avenida Jiménez de Quesada.

Indigo in the Americas

Indigo in the Americas

Prized for its beauty as a deep blue dye for clothing and textiles, indigo has a long history in the Western world. Archaeologists have unearthed indigo-tinted fabrics in Greece dating to 2500 b.c.e., while the Greek historian Herodotus, writing about 450 b.c.e., provides the first documentary evidence on the use of indigo as a dye.

In the decades after the conquest of Central America, indigo became another of the marketable commodities produced in the Americas to feed the growing European demand for foodstuffs, dyes, and other products.

The dye itself was derived, via a complex and odoriferous steeping and fermentation process, from the dark green, oval-shaped leaves of two species of leguminous shrub in the Indigofera genus: Indigofera tinctoria, indigenous to Asia, and Indigofera suffructiosa, native to Central and South America.

The latter species, called xiquilite in Nahuatl, was used as a pigment and dye by the Maya of Central America for centuries, perhaps millennia, before the conquest. The Spaniards called indigo dye añil, derived from al-nil, the Arabic word for “blue.”


From around 1580 to 1620, indigo production saw something of a boom in the Central American lowlands, particularly western Guatemala and Nicaragua. In light of the precipitous decline in native populations across much of the isthmus, and the severe shortages of labor that ensued, indigo’s minimal labor requirements constituted one of its principal commercial advantages.

The plant itself was sturdy, grew readily in well-drained soils at an elevation below 1,500 meters, and required little attention prior to harvesting the leaves. Only one to two months of intensive labor was required during the harvest and processing phases, making indigo one of the few commercially viable commodities in Central America’s labor-scarce environment.

Initial efforts were focused on wild plants, but from the 1580s indigo plantations and processing facilities were established in many parts of the isthmus. By 1600, indigo had emerged as Central America’s principal export product.

After 1620, production stagnated, witnessing a brief resurgence in the late 1600s before stagnating again for the rest of the colonial period. Nearly a quarter-million pounds of indigo was imported to Seville annually from 1606 to 1620, though these figures exclude illicit commerce, which was doubtless substantial.

Meanwhile, indigo production in Asia continued to grow. Throughout the 1600s, indigo was one of the chief products of the Dutch and British East India Companies. Evidence suggests that the inability of Asian indigo production to meet rising European demand was one of the principal engines of indigo production in the Americas.

Other regions in the Caribbean basin also emerged as important sources of indigo, including Saint-Domingue (France to 1803), Jamaica (Great Britain after 1655), Suriname (Holland), and Brazil (Portugal). Soon sugar displaced indigo, tobacco, and other products as the Caribbean’s principal export crop, though indigo production continued throughout large parts of the Americas through the colonial period and after.

By the 1740s, an indigo boom had emerged in South Carolina, complementing rice production in the same region. It was not until the late 19th century, that a viable synthetic dye finally displaced indigo as the most important source of dark blue coloration in fabrics.