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Cortés's African Companions: The Unseen Conquistadors
Description
When we picture the Spanish conquest of Mexico, we tend to imagine armored Europeans and their Indigenous allies. But among Cortés's small army were men whose stories have been almost entirely erased: African conquistadors, both free and enslaved, who fought, built, and died alongside the Spaniards. This episode follows figures like Juan Garrido, a free black conquistador who crossed the Atlantic, participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan, and later became the first known wheat farmer in New Spain. We also examine Estebanico, an enslaved Moroccan who survived the disastrous Narváez expedition and became one of the first Africans to explore the North American Southwest. Through their eyes we see the conquest from a different angle — not as a black-and-white story of European vs. Indigenous, but as a complex web of race, class, and survival in the early colonial world. Drawing on Spanish legal records and early chronicles, we recover the lives of men who were both oppressors and oppressed, and ask why their place in history has been forgotten.