The underwater archeology works in Sisal, in southeastern Mexico.INAH
Mexico has unearthed a never-before-seen part of its slave-owning and colonialist past at the bottom of the sea.
A group of researchers has found and identified the remains of a ship dedicated to the Mayan slave trade to Cuba during the 19th century, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced this week.
The find is the only one of its kind in Mexican territory and is also the first material indication of a practice that spread even after the formal prohibition of slavery after the start of the War of Independence in 1810, explains Helena Barba, head of the INAH for Underwater Archeology in the Yucatan Peninsula.
"This shipwreck provides a lot of information about a problem that occurred for decades in this region, but of which we had no evidence beyond the documents of the time," says Barba.
“We are touching the tip of the
iceberg
with this discovery, we still have to go deeper ”, adds the researcher.
The discovery of the vessel occurred in 2017 about four kilometers off the coast of Sisal, in the State of Yucatán.
After three years of work it was identified which ship it was.
La Unión
was a steamship of the Spanish company Zangroniz Hermanos y Compañía.
It was shipwrecked on September 19, 1861. The accident was caused by the explosion of one of the boilers, which ended up setting fire and sinking the ship shortly after setting sail, according to the investigation.
The reconstruction of the event has been possible thanks to historical and journalistic documents.
The Sisal fishermen, who have kept the memory of the shipwreck alive for several generations, also contributed to the story.
"The event went unnoticed and they avoided giving it much publicity, I think intentionally, just saying that passenger traffic with Cuba was suspended for the moment," says Barba, part of a multidisciplinary team that dove into the waters and in the historical archives of Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
The shipment of Mayan slaves to Cuba occurred in the context of the caste war, an extensive social conflict in the Yucatan peninsula between 1847 and 1901, in which the native populations rose up against the abuses of the white Creole elites and mestizos, who concentrated economic and political power.
Yucatán was then the world's leading producer of henequen, a plant used to make fibers, which was a cornerstone of the economy during Mexico's early years as an independent country, but which was produced on farms under conditions that were ominous for indigenous workers.
In the middle of the armed conflict, groups of "enganchadores" promised the Mayans land, work and voluntary exile as settlers in Cuba, which was still a Spanish colony.
"The indigenous people were enslaved through deception and false promises or simply to get them out of the region," adds Barba.
In reality, the Mexican and Spanish “enganchadores” recruited Mayan-speaking Indians to do forced labor on the island, with contracts that were usually written in Spanish and that in many cases were false.
This is how
La Unión
came out
from Cuba loaded with sugar cane, it reached Yucatan and continued its route with stops through ports in the Gulf of Mexico such as Tampico, Veracruz and Campeche, before returning to Sisal.
During the tour, other goods were shipped to the island such as henequen, tanned hides and woods such as dyewood, as well as first and second class passengers.
The indigenous people realized the deception when they were already on board the ship, where they were forced to travel in small and unsanitary compartments, the investigation points out.
“There were Mayan children and adults who were treated as merchandise and who were part of an impressive slave trade,” says Barba.
Each slave was sold for 25 pesos of the time to intermediaries.
That price multiplied in Cuba where each man was bought for 160 pesos and the woman for 120. Barba points out that only Zangroniz y Hermanos traded about 3,600 slaves for 10 years, at the rate of 30 people trafficked each month.
The calculation is possible thanks to the fact that the operations of the shipping company were exposed with a raid a year earlier, although the lack of traffic records makes it difficult to obtain an exact figure.
The prohibition of slavery was one of the pillars of the Mexican Independence movement, embodied in the cry of Dolores on September 17, 1810 and founding documents such as
José María Morelos'
feelings of the nation
in 1813. Far from official history And despite a national imaginary that has no account of slavery in independent Mexico, the slave trade was a scourge for the first governments of the country.
In May 1861, four months before the shipwreck of
La Unión
, Benito Juárez issued a presidential decree in which the sending of indigenous people abroad was punished by the death penalty and the seizure of the boats.
The investigation reveals that 80 crew members, 60 passengers and an unknown number of slaves died in the wreck.
In the depths of Sisal there was still the exploded boiler and the burned wood of the lower part of the hull, but also ceramic instruments, fragments of glass bottles and brass cutlery of the first class passengers with the emblem of Zangroniz and Hermanos, that are already exhibited in the Underwater Archeology Museum of Campeche, in the south of the country.
However, there are no mortal remains that can be examined.
Barba explains that the high temperature of the waters, the presence of bacteria and the currents erased the trail of bone remains and other organic remains.
Researchers have now proposed to name those who died during the shipwreck and help their descendants re-appropriate their history.
The erased trail of the Mexican Mayans in Cuba left clues, such as the Campeche neighborhood in Havana, where investigators believe various groups of slaves settled.
"It's like a mystery novel," says Barba, "and a unique opportunity because we rarely get to know human interaction with archaeological remains."