Marcos Xiorro

Marcos Xiorro was a slave who, in 1821, planned and conspired to lead a slave revolt against the sugar plantation owners and the Spanish Colonial government inPuerto Rico. Even though the conspiracy was unsuccessful, he achieved legendary status among the slaves and is part of Puerto Rico's folklore.

[edit]It is not known when Xiorro was born, or from what region in Africa his ancestors came from. What is known is that he was a Bozal slave - a slave who had been recently brought to the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico from Africa. Xiorro was owned by Vicente Andino, a Militia Captain who owned a sugar plantation in the municipality of Bayamon.Early years

[edit]Importation of African slaves

When the Spanish Conquistadors invaded Puerto Rico, they enslaved the Taínos (the native inhabitants of the island), and many of them died as a result of the Spaniards' oppressive colonization efforts. This presented a problem for Spain's royal government, which relied heavily on slavery to run their mining and fort-building operations.

Spain's "solution" was to import more slaves into the island. At the suggestion of Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, they enslaved West Africans and transported them across the Atlantic.

African slaves came from many different societies of the African continent, and were discriminated against by the Spaniards. They were subject to harsh treatment, which at times included rape. Some of them were even stamped with a hot iron on the forehead, as if they were cattle.This branding signified that they were brought to the country "legally," that they were someone's chattel property, and were not to be stolen or kidnapped.

The slaves were sent to work in the gold mines and in the building of military fortifications. Once the gold mines were depleted the slaves were sent to the vast and growing sugar plantations throughout the island.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Puerto Rico had a diversified agricultural economy - and tobacco, cotton, coffee, cocoa and ginger were all component elements of this thriving economy. The cultivation of these crops required little manpower, and Puerto Rican families were able to manage the farming themselves. Unlike sugar farming, these crops required no slaves.

However, the harvesting of sugarcane is significantly more labor-intensive. The cane has to be slashed with force, usually with a machete or scythe. Until the industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and until the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company mass-produced the first mechanical reapers, the sugar plantation owners had a constant economic incentive to import and exploit the cheapest human labor on the planet: slaves.

As the sugar plantations grew in size and number, they supplanted the depleted gold mines as Puerto Rico's primary source of exports. Sugar plantation owners became the new Puerto Rican aristocracy - an aristocracy built on the backs of slave labor. Since the plantation owners were disproportionately of Spanish-European origin, Spain assisted them with loans, tax exemptions, and permits to participate in the African slave trade.

[edit]The sugar-and-slave surge

The Puerto Rican sugar economy - and the slave population which sustained it - grew exponentially in the early 1800s, precisely during the time of Marcos Xiorro's life. This was due to a confluence of various historical factors:

1. The gold mines were rapidly depleting.

2. The sugar industry of Saint Dominique (Haiti) collapsed during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804).

3. French plantation owners fled from Haiti, re-settled in Puerto Rico, and rapidly built new plantations.

4. Spain accelerated its land grants, tax exemptions, and slave permits.

5. A booming U.S. population, with waves of new immigrants, provided an immediate cane sugar market.

6. Economies of scale favored a one-crop, vertically-integrated agribusiness approach.

7. Bank financing favored the one-crop model.

8. Sugarcane fields were more hurricane-resistant than any other Caribbean crop.

9. The McCormick reaper and other harvesting technologies did not yet exist.

10. Slave labor provided an extraordinary profit margin as well as an international pricing advantage.

[edit]Seeds of the revolution

In Puerto Rico the first major slave rebellion occurred in 1527, as dozens of slaves fought against the Spanish colonialists.^] The rebellion failed, and the few slaves who escaped retreated to the mountains, where they farmed peacefully as maroons and co-existed with surviving Taíno people. The slave rebellions continued and, by 1873, over twenty slave revolts had broken out. Some of these had great and lasting political importance, such as the Ponce and Vega Baja conspiracies.

In 1697, the Spanish Crown ceded the western half of the island of Hispaniola to the French. The Spanish part of the island was named Santo Domingo (today's Dominican Republic) and the French portion was named Saint-Dominque (which was later renamed Haiti). The French settlers dedicated themselves to the cultivation of the sugar cane, and owning plantations which required a significant amount of manpower. They imported slaves from Africa to work in the fields, and soon, the slave population out-numbered the whites.

These slaves lived under terrible conditions and were treated cruelly. In 1791, the slaves organized themselves into an army led by the self-appointed generalToussaint Louverture, and rebelled against the French in what is known as the Haitian Revolution.The ultimate victory of the slaves over their white masters occurred after the Battle of Vertières in 1803. The French escaped to Santo Domingo in utter terror, and subsequently fled the island altogether. They fled to Puerto Rico. Once there, they settled in the western region of the island in towns such as Mayagüez. Bringing their expertise with them, the French immigrants helped develop the island's sugar industry, converting Puerto Rico into a world leader in the exportation of sugar.

Up until 1873, when slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico, the wealth amassed by many landowners in Puerto Rico derived mainly from the exploitation of slaves. But slavery generated its antithesis - disobedience, uprisings and flights. In addition, after the success of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), rumors spread throughout the Caribbean of a Haitian plot to attack all the Spanish territories. These rumors reached near-mythological proportions, and they terrified the Puerto Rican plantation owners - some of whom had barely escaped with their lives in their terror flight from Haiti.

[edit]False rumors of freedom

In 1812, Salvador Meléndez Bruna, the Spanish-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, ordered that any slave who disrespected his master would be punished with fifty lashes by the civil authorities - and then returned to his master for additional punishment. A 100-lashes punishment was given to those who committed a violent act or incited a rebellion.

Ramón Power y Giralt was a Puerto Rican naval hero, a captain in the Spanish navy who had risen to become vice-president of the Spanish Cortes. Power Y Giralt was amongst the delegates who proposed that slavery be abolished in Puerto Rico, and he sent a letter to his mother, Josefa Giralt, suggesting that if the proposals were approved, she should be the first one to grant her slaves their freedom.

Although these proposals were never discussed before the Spanish Courts, Josefa Giralt's slaves learned about the letter and, believing that slavery had been abolished, they spread the "news" that they were now free. A slave named Benito contributed to the rumor by circulating the unfounded news that the Cortes Generales y Extraordinarias de la Nacion(General and Extraordinary Courts of the Nation) had granted slaves their freedom. These false rumors led to various confrontations between the slaves, military and slave Masters.

[edit]Xiorro's conspiracy

In July 1821, Xiorro planned and organized a conspiracy against the slave masters and the colonial government of Puerto Rico. This was to be carried out on July 27, during the festival celebrations for Santiago (St. James).

According to his plan several slaves were to escape from various plantations in Bayamón, which included the haciendas of Angus McBean, C. Kortnight, Miguel Andino and Fernando Fernández. They were then to proceed to the sugarcane fields of Miguel Figueres, and retrieve cutlasses and swords which were hidden in those fields. Xiorro, together with a slave from the McBean plantation named Mario and another slave named Narciso, would lead the slaves of Bayamón and Toa Baja and capture the city of Bayamón. They would then burn the city and kill those who were not black. After this, they would all unite with slaves from the adjoining towns of Rio Piedras, Guaynabo and Palo Seco. With this critical mass of slaves, all armed and emboldened from a series of quick victories, they would then invade the capital city of San Juan, where they would declare Xiorro as their king.

[edit]Failure of the conspiracy

Unfortunately for the slave conspirators, Miguel Figueres had a loyal slave named Ambrosio who divulged the plans of the conspiracy to him. Thewhistleblower also had both personal and financial interest, as slaves who reported any kind of slave conspiracy were granted their freedom and 500 pesos. Figueres then informed the mayor of Bayamón who mobilized 500 soldiers. The ringleaders and followers of the conspiracy were captured immediately. A total of 61 slaves were imprisoned in Bayamón and San Juan.

[edit]Aftermath

On August 15, 1821, the court proceedings ended and 17 slaves were punished. Mario and Narciso, considered to be ringleaders, were executed. Xiorro was captured on August 14 in the city of Mayaguez. He was tried separately and his fate is unknown.

In the years that followed many of the slaves who had been imprisoned and returned to their masters escaped from their plantations. The Spanish authorities believed that Jean Pierre Boyer, the president of Haiti, was behind the conspiracy.

There were other minor revolts and some slaves even participated in El Grito de Lares, Puerto Rico's independence revolt against Spanish rule on September 23, 1868.

On March 22, 1873, slavery was "abolished" in Puerto Rico, but with one significant caveat: the slaves were not fully emancipated - they had to buy their own freedom at whatever price was set by their current owners. In order to accomplish this, the majority of the freed slaves continued to work for their former masters for some time. They received a salary for their labor, and slowly purchased their freedom.

The government placed a limit on this "buy-back" period, and created an insular "Protector's Office" to oversee the transition. Under the new law, former slaves were to remain indentured for a maximum period of three years. After that they would go free. During that three-year period, they could work for their former master, for other people, or for the "state." Once the three-year period expired, if a slave had any remaining debt, the Protector's Office would step in and pay it with an "indemnity bond" - but only at the discounted value of 23% of the claimed debt.

The former slaves earned money by working as shoemakers, by cleaning clothes, or by selling the produce they were allowed to grow in the small patches of land allotted to them by their former masters. In this respect they resembled the black sharecroppers of the southern U.S., except that former slaves in Puerto Rico were not given forty acres and a mule.

[edit]In the movies

In 2007, Cine del Caribe, S.A. released a film titled El Cimarrón, starring Pedro Telemaco as Marcos Xiorro.