The Missing Century of Black History in the Americas: Jane Landers at TEDxNashville

Well, I'm probably red at this point or maybe you can't see well enough, but thank you so much for being here and letting me be here. I am very grateful to Tedex for inviting me. I am a teacher from Latin America.

history

at Vanderbilt University and I have been working in Latin America for over 20 years since I finished my degree and I grew up in Latin America and my interests have always been race and racial differences and when I began my academic studies. In my career I started working on that topic and it's been that way ever since, so to stay alive in the Academy you have to publish or in Parish, so I do all those footnoted things that we have to do, but also I always wanted to do some kind of more public impact and so I've done a lot of work with public

history

, museum exhibits, archaeological excavations, films and documentaries, and I think no one will read my footnotes, maybe, but maybe they'll come in in a museum or see something, so what I want.

What I have to do today is talk about the narrative of the African past in the Americas and ask you to think about some new things that I hope to bring to you today, so if I asked you to think about African history in the United States. What are some images you could think of about slavery? Well, I have some ideas here that we are very familiar with because in our own American history courses we usually start with The Antibellum Slavery Narrative and we have wonderful, powerful media images like these. That also reinforces the idea that everyone in Africa got off a boat.

Beed was swept away and stayed at Jamestown in 1619. All textbooks begin and then we study The Slavery Narrative and it is certainly a powerful narrative that we want to pay close attention to, but Having grown up in the Spanish world, I learned centuries prior of history for Africans and that is what I am going to try to present today, so we must remember this powerful history, but we must also think about the explorers, the cowboys, the sailors and militiamen and all kinds of other lives that happened for centuries before that we develop this capitalist system of chat slavery that we are more familiar with in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Well, one of the images I wanted to post is this horrible one. so that we think about what we know now think about what we are going to try to learn. I am taking you now to the 13th

century

, but we could go back even earlier, when Africans first moved to the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal and the difference then between peoples was not based on skin color, it was based on their religious practice, so Islam invaded Spain. We had almost 800 years of Islamic occupation in Spain and the fight was between Christians and Muslims, not between whites and

black

s. and the church is one of those institutions that incorporated people in the Iberian world, so here we have a very interesting image of a 13th

century

African, his white godfathers, is being incorporated into the church and this will make him part of Christianity.

The community is nothing else and on the next slide I had I also wanted to think about the Military Traditions that came from the North African Community to Spain and the idea that Africans sometimes enslaved Spanish Christians, as you can see in this image from the 14th century. So I think that gives you some ideas: in the Iberian world, the legal system is Roman law that separates slaves and free, but it is a legal condition not associated with race, not perpetual, not chatter as you know in the system English. So this is It's quite different and you get into slavery, but you can also get out of it in many ways, so there were always free and enslaved Africans, but there were also enslaved Spaniards, enslaved gypsies, enslaved Jews, enslaved Muslims, so which is a very diverse system and is legal, not racial. um so if we have that background when the Americas are discovered and Columbus does it in 1492, as you probably remember, Africans were part of all the explorations and discoveries of the Americas and it's like finding hen's teeth in these narratives, but they're there and If you know where to look and how to look, you can find them, so a list of some of the explorations of our own African countries in each of these Expeditions leaving paper trails that we can trace if you can do the Spanish paleography of the day.

One of the most interesting people who was on one of these expeditions, a man named Juan Gido, was born in West Africa. He was on the Portuguese coast of Africa, went to Portugal, then to Spain and crossed to America, where he is a conquistador of Hispaniola. where he joins up with Juan Pono de León to go to Puerto Rico and help discover that and then discover Florida and then he joins up with Cortez and goes to conquer the Aztecs, so you see it here in these Aztec codices, there's several of these He describes that he was a literate man and he writes to the king of Spain at the end of his many adventures and tells him what he has done and why he wants compensation for it and this was also a tradition that all the explorers did and so did African explorers, so we have written records for him as a minor, as an explorer, as a Christian, etc., etc., but at the same time he is moving up the military ladder, other Africans are being imported to the Spanish Like slaves.

People and rebellion are also a common trope throughout this story, so in the first example we have in what became the United States, San Miguel de Del Guape, this 1526 revolt ruined that occupation of Georgia, what is now Georgia. That exploded and others are happening in other parts of America but while that happens they do not stop including Africans in the explorations and another famous explorer is Stan de Dorantes who made this entire long trip from a shipwreck on the coast of Florida along the entire continent one of the first non-indigenous people to see all that territory to learn the indigenous languages ​​and healing practices etc., another interesting character, so I will introduce you to some new people, there are more of us. familiar, sometimes I joke a lot that you may have had to read in your classes spoke for 12 million people, the slave who came to the US, but there are all these other people speaking too and we just have to save him and rescue him this story um One of the other people I started working in Spanish Florida because that was where I went to school and the records were very intact because the United States took Florida in 1821 and they were not dispersed or destroyed by wars etc. , so I had a lot of material and these are some of the characters I started to find.

Wano was shipwrecked on the coast of Florida, the Indians kept him alive for eight years and when Pedro Menéndez deaves comes and explores Florida and claims him, he rescues him, which is What do you do when you find a Christian among the infidels? Then Juan Niño becomes a translator for the military forces because he knows the life of the Indians. The next character was very interesting, a free militiaman and owner of a store in San Agustín, he leaves a very interesting record. One who was not so well regarded was a convicted

black

smith who came to St.

Augustine in exile there from Cuba. Juan Marino. Women appear in the records because in this system, this legal system, women have a voice. Children have a voice. They enslave people. voice that they can write, they can go to the king with his protest, etc. Isabelle was a baker and she made her living that way so not all of them are exotic but they are free and they are gaining property and keeping it well all kinds of changes when England comes to Charleston and starts establishing Charleston in 1670 because they will come from the Caribbean , from the Bahamas and Barbados and, uh, Jamaica, and they will bring up the idea of ​​slavery where someone is enslaved and becomes a perpetual piece of property at that time, well, if you were in that system, I think you would too you would try to get out of it and the slaves started running away and they found out about the other political system available just to the south across the St Mary's River and the slaves are led there sometimes by Indians and they come to the Spanish and say we want to be Christians please receive us as we saw in the previous example that I showed you of Islamic Spain and they are received and they are finally sufficient so that finally the king of Spain has to issue a Royal Decree on this issue and it is seen that it is quite interesting, it incorporates women, he says.

Freedom to all men and also women so that with their example my liberality others do the same and they did and it is like the first underground railroad is to the south, not to Canada, okay, one of the reasons why people were welcome is that they could provide additional defense for communities in the Americas, so there is a long, long military tradition for Africans in the Spanish world, so Sons. They follow parents, they follow grandparents into the military, they design their own uniforms, they elect their own officers, they pay them, they serve, sometimes they die and they leave a lot of military records, so the religious records of those baptisms and the records Military are some of my best and I.

I never thought I would be working on those types of materials. Well, my focus was on a black town free of those fugitives who arrived in sufficient numbers for the Spanish to eventually build them a free town based on the Indian model of a kind of satellite. Villages and it's called gra de Santa Teresa de MOS, if you go to San Agustín today, it's about two miles north of the big Castle there and that was my thesis project, uh, I started working on it, they sent me to Spain. I got a lot. of documents we worked with archaeologists and engineers to create an image of what the fort or settlement might have looked like and another, another alternative view, a small place but close to the main Spanish settlement. part of the defense network, etc., and they supported themselves by being farmers, horsemen, cowboys, etc., serving in the militia, in the marines, etc., and we have some nice pictures of what they were doing outside of their small settlement. on their own property and they start joining the church like they were supposed to, so we had people baptizing their children, IED, getting married.

One of the most interesting things about the records is that in these Catholic records they paid a lot of attention to which nation. you were and that meant that you are a Congo who marries a Kabali, it would be like if someone from Italy married a German and then how do children arise in that community? So this is something we don't find as much attention to in Anglo-Saxon Records, so it's something we can contribute to the broader narrative. Okay, so one of the most important figures here was the captain of this place, who spoke for the others and entered, please, in his name.

Captain Francisco Menéndez, once he is baptized. so I don't know what it was called in Africa. I don't know what he was like when the English enslaved him. I don't know what he was like when he fought with the Yamasi Indians for several years before coming to Florida so he has multiple lives multiple skills always a leader in his community and we call people like that Atlantic Creoles and it doesn't mean from New Orleans and it doesn't mean the taste of some food, means someone who has linguistic skill, social agility and cultural plasticity. is kind of our term for it, so I consider myself Creole and many of you might be too and he certainly had many lives to live, he becomes the captain of this place, huh, and not long after they established the place, two years later, the English.

They already got tired of this by running away from their plants and launched a large invasion. The Royal Navy arrives from Jamaica. Ogal Thor came down from Georgia with Carolina troops to a great siege for a month and Menéndez was one of the heroes of this siege. and he defends his place and they end up in the English records calling it The Battle of the Damned MOS because they got beat up there in MOS and then what is Menendez going to do while everyone else writes to the king and says you know what? I did it, I did this and that, I was a hero in this battle, please give me a better salary, um, so he is writing in Spanish to the king, so that the people would feel that personal relationship with the Monarch and they could identify and Wait for an answer.

Well, people got interested in it and a member of my thesis committee was the most famous archaeologist in the Caribbean, Kathleen Degan, and we started thinking about a dig there and we got some money from the state legislature's black caucus to do this. . I went back and did a little more historical research and then they did the two seasons of excavations, where you can see some of the team that she was training and you can see some of the kinds of small material objects that we found there. but they also help inform the narrative that is on the paper if we know which people were making bone buttons or were making a small handmade St.

Christopher medal. Christopher is the patron saint of Travelers across the water and someone was doing that and these men served as The Sailors Menendez ends up being a Privateer recaptured in the Atlantic sent to the Bahamas as a slave by the English and somehow returnsto MOS and will lead the community into exile once again in 1763, when the English take Florida and fail to do so. They don't want to stay there so they move south again and this time it's to Cuba. Well, one of the things we wanted to do once we finished the research was make it public, share it, change the narrative and we did a big exhibition in the museum.

It started in Florida, then it traveled across the country and at last count, I think 7 million people had seen it before we brought it home and then we gave it to the community so people could have it and learn from it. and then we did a National Register of Historic Landmarks the state bought the property. They made a big visitor center or a small visitor center there and you can go and see the map of all the things I just talked about. Governor Bush finally opened our visitor center and that's Kathy Degan behind it, so he took note of that.

Also, now all kinds of signs direct people to this site and the best thing for me is that the community has adopted it and so on the 22nd, actually that is today, I think we are

missing

it, they are there recreating. the battle as we speak so I'm sorry but I'm going down to give a talk. I told him I couldn't because it was today that I was doing this, but they have a great time there and it is an opportunity for everyone. that the community comes together and that these people enact a different type of narrative so that they are not chained and so on, they are actually leading the defense of the community and then public history has taken it up, I don't know if you saw the PBS special, uh, that skip that Gates has been doing in the series, but there are many rivers to cross.

There was a small episode in MOS, but I realized that a lot of that history that was Florida was also connected to Cuba, it was also connected to Mexico. to places in Santo Domingo where all these people move around, so I'm starting to go to Cuba as a graduate to track down the people there and I'll be back at the end of April with some of my new graduate students to try to do a little more of that story so I started spreading the word about MOS in Cuba as well and then I realized that there are so many records that are not well preserved, they try but there are no resources and stuff as I'm talking. for you today we are losing this wonderful history uh the documents are being eaten by insects the mold is destroying them uh they are throwing them away burned whatever so uh I am constantly aware that we need to save these records and so I started to receive different small grants to bring teams of people to identify them, locate them.

We first started with big, old, clunky microfilm cameras and now we're working with cool little digital cameras. And that was in Cuba in 1995, when I was still in graduate school. school no, I had just started here and then I finally got some money from the National Fund and I thought the most African places are Cuba and Brazil, so I got partners in those places and trained the students there, we identified the records. and so on, some of the oldest ones in Havana date back to the 1590s and you can give you an idea of ​​the type of records we get.

These are baptismal records. My great graduate students learn to read paleography and they read this and transcribe it. This is what Some of the damage looks like this, you know, we can still make out parts of it, but it's pretty bad, it's the Cuban records and then in Brazil, one of the things I also want to do is bring people to history and have them. take responsibility, so we train graduate students and graduate students in Rio de Janeiro to do these projects, they are given a little money in these STPs and they stay in school, they professionalize and take on these careers and then the next wonderful agency that helps The British library has an excellent endangered archives programme, so we went to Kibo, in the Colombian jungles, where the FARC are.

That is another danger for documents. There are gorilla fights everywhere where we are. In fact, the boys started calling it the gorilla reserve. that's what we were doing because, but we were training these students and now they know their history and they are also professionalized in kibo and some of their records, that's how they keep records. Sorry, but more recently one of the best. things was the Catholic Church where I started working when I was in graduate school at St. Augustine all those years I was reading terrible old microfilm from the Library of Congress and so on, I could barely read, read it, finally the church has allowed us to digitize the Spanish St.

Augustine records, which are the oldest we have for the country, also start in 1590 and um, so I took my former graduate students, now they're all graduated and they're being professors elsewhere, but then I force them to keep the cult alive and train their own students and continue to spread the word and train new students, so this new group made the St. Augustine records that were nearing completion now, um in 1590, the oldest one we have in this country, so there's my team and that's where they were working in the convent there and it's wonderful to save it, but there's so much more that we still have to do around the world and it doesn't just have to be African history, but it's what I am committed to.

Hopefully, by having the opportunity to talk to all of you today, someone else will want to do this too and I'd be happy to share models or write letters of recommendation and give you any advice I can on this. Vanderbilt University has been wonderful about this. I bring all these things back, it's a big effort to keep them also in um, among others. I store them digitally in a library on multiple servers, you have to have them so they don't crash, etc., and we've created a little um website that anyone can access, so I think this also democratizes knowledge because some of the poor kids with Those of me who work in Colombia or Cuba will never have the money to travel and do research on their own, but they can, if they can access a computer, they can find any of these records and some of them are helping to transcribe them for us, etc., so Vanderbilt maintains their site, it's called Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies and for example, Look at it, it's currently updated all the time as we add new things to it and that's my mission to change the narrative, save the history and make it public.

Thank you.