“I, Juan Garrido, black resident of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king, a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marques del Valle [Cortes] entered it”
The opening of Juan Garrido’s probanza (petitionary proof of merit) from September 27, 1538
As historians and activists question the legacy of conquistadors (the Spanish and Portuguese soldier-invaders who brutally invaded the “New World”) the presence of Black men in their ranks has been overlooked. Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. However, much previous scholarship has focused only on them within the bonds of slavery. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical actors, erased by both colonial records and modern prejudice. During the initial period of Atlantic exploration, contact, and conquest, there any many records of both enslaved and free Black people crossing the Atlantic which have yet to be fully unpacked. For example, Black conquistadors appear in various ship logs, retellings of expeditions, and even in some of the most famous Indigenous testimonies of the conquest – the Nahua codices.
Due to his intriguing story and the vast quantity of primary evidence, Juan Garrido is one of the most prominent figures when discussing conquistadors. Garrido first rose to prominence in scholarship thanks to Peter Gerhard’s 1978 article, ‘A Black Conquistador in Mexico’. Gerhard claims that the role played by Black people as a whole in the colonisation of Latin America is relatively well known, but ‘it is for the most part an impersonal history’, focusing on statistics and logs, and does not discuss the actual hardships of the individuals involved. The early date for Gerhard’s article, long before the analysis of individual experiences of Africans in the Americas reached popular history scholarship, demonstrates Garrido’s foundational role in the field. Gerhard’s work has since been expanded on by scholars such as Matthew Restall in his article, ‘Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America’, which places Garrido among many other examples of Black conquistadors. However, by focusing on Garrido’s life as a case study, it is possible to not only explore the role of Black conquistadors in the invasion of the Americas, but also begin to consider the role race played in 16th century Spanish colonial society.
Garrido was a firsthand witness to many critical events during the expansion of the Spanish Empire – from the initial colonisation of islands across the Caribbeans, the Spaniards’ arrival in Florida and the fall of Tenochtitlan, to various expeditions across northern and southern Mexico. However, the document which makes Garrido so unique is his probanza, a petitionary proof of merit used to petition rewards from the king for service to the crown. While we cannot know if this document was dictated or written by Garrido himself, this outstanding piece of primary evidence not only lets us unpack Garrido’s life but also provides an insight into the life of a Black subject of the Spanish Empire during this period. Written on 27 September 1538, the probanza comes in the form of a letter to Emperor Charles V requesting compensation for his service. And in his probanza Garrido provided evidence of what he had done to further the interest of the Spanish crown.
Garrido’s probanza makes it possible to build a clear chronology of his life. He was born in the Kingdom of Kongo (now present-day northern Angola, the western portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon and the Republic of the Congo), around 1480 and moved to Lisbon in around 1495, although it is unclear if this was due to his enslavement. It is in Lisbon that he was baptised and had the name Juan Garrido imposed upon him. His birth name does not appear in records, as in the case for many enslaved individuals. If Garrido had been enslaved in his youth, it is possible that he became free in Lisbon or Seville. Then, following the initial Spanish wave of Atlantic expansion, Garrido arrived in Santo Domingo in 1502 or 1503. It was only in 1501, that the Spanish had begun trafficking enslaved African people into the newly established colony.
Garrido first resided in Santo Domingo before participating in Spanish invasions across Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Guatemala and Florida between 1508 and 1519. He would then embark on another colonising invasion alongside Hernán Cortés, a lesser nobleman whose relentless pursuit of riches would see him become one of the most infamous conquistadors. In particular, Cortés looked to invade and conquer the Nahua people and their Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec Empire), based in the Valley of Mexico (now Mexico City). Garrido would be present for the Fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Triple Alliance in 1521. The Fall of Tenochtitlan saw Cortés and a small band of Spaniards backed up with other Indigenous groups, topple the ruler of the Nahua, Montezuma II, taking and renaming the Nahua land as New Spain on behalf of the Spanish crown. In the aftermath of the Fall of Tenochtitlan the conquistadors played an active role in widespread slaughter and violent sacking of the city. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people lost their lives. Increasingly, scholars view the Fall of Tenochtitlan as an act of genocide.
Although it is well documented that Garrido was present on the Cortés expedition, the circumstances of his involvement remain unclear. One possibility is that Garrido travelled as the servant – or was enslaved by – Pedro Garrido, a Spaniard who journeyed with his family to Santo Domingo in the same convoy as Juan Garrido and who also joined in the Cortés expedition. Juan Garrido and Pedro Garrido arrived at several places in the Americas at the same time, and it was common for enslaved Africans, once baptised, to have the surnames of their enslavers imposed upon them. Another possibility was that Juan Garrido may have become Cortés’ own servant at some point during the expedition, and Cortés was accompanied by a number of armed Africans. Despite it being a certainty that Garrido was present on this expedition, many scholars have tried to affirm this with reference to more conjectural historical evidence. These include theories that Garrido was the Black man mentioned in Bernal Diaz’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain or that he was depicted in the paintings of Codex Azcatitlan. It is more likely that these figures were generic Black soldiers, similar to the way some Spaniards are represented in the Florentine Codex. Such uncertainty is a reminder that Garrido was not an isolated case: there were likely numerous other soldiers of African descent whose names and stories have since been erased.
One of Garrido’s most lasting actions involves his role in the introduction of Spanish agriculture to the Americas. On the outskirts of Mexico City, Garrido became the first person in the Americas to sow wheat. It was particularly important to the Spanish, who sought to displace native maize or cassava with their own staple, as bread was needed to celebrate mass. Although Cortés claimed he ordered Garrido to plant wheat, Garrido denied this in his probanza, arguing it was his own decision. Cortés’ claim could be the result purely of selfish gain or of his own racial prejudices, commonplace in Spanish society during this period.
Garrido faced other forms of prejudice: despite his fellow conquistadors on the Cortés expedition being granted house plots, Garrido was forced to make his home outside the city limits. He was not gifted a house plot until 1525, four years after the conquest. Garrido was also denied work in the city for anything other than jobs traditionally held by African descendants. This prejudice may have been a catalyst for Garrido to write his probanza to secure land, money, and status otherwise denied him in Spanish society.
Despite the anti-Black prejudice that he faced – and his own experience of enslavement – as a free man Garrido remained entangled in Spain’s expanding regime of conquest and extraction well beyond the events of Tenochtitlan. In 1528, on a gold-mining expedition to Zacautla, he led a group of enslaved African men. And from 1533-36 he accompanied Cortés on another venture to invade what Spaniards imagined as an island of “Amazons” and gold, an attempted mining colony on the coast of what would later be known as Baja California. Around 300 enslaved Black people were forced onto this expedition. His involvement shows how the Spanish Empire constructed a racialised economy that conscripted and commodified both Black and Indigenous lives. Garrido’s own trajectory unfolded within – and at times helped reproduce – that violence.
Garrido’s story reveals the complexities of race and survival throughout the early modern world and within the Spanish colonisation of the Americas. His contributions to the invasion were denied or stolen by white Spaniards and he was denied the same rewards and opportunities as offered to other conquistadors. At the same time, Garrido remained trapped in the Spanish Empire’s system of colonial violence, underscoring the coercive dynamics of an empire that continuously looked to reproduce structures of domination. Garrido’s example, alongside fleeting references to fellow Black conquistadors, shows that such figures were not anomalies, but part of a broader history of the invasion of the Americas. Yet historical prejudice has long obscured their presence. Encouragingly, there has been an increase in scholarly focus being devoted to the Black histories of colonial Spanish America. Garrido’s life should serve as a starting point for further studies that uncover the lives of other Black conquistadors, offering a fuller reckoning with how empire was built through both racial violence.