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Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave Community, 1735–1827

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Patrick J. Carroll
Patrick J. Carroll
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi State University
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Extract

Most runaway slave communities in the Americas were quickly overcome by whites. However, a good many of those communities not only survived but became legally recognized towns whose residents eventually blended into the surrounding population. The first part of this article attempts to demonstrate that, although whites managed to eventually destroy most New World fugitive slave settlements, a surprising number of them managed to survive. The second section analyzes the social, demographic, and economic changes that one such community, called Mandinga, went through in evolving from a runaway hideout to a legal township.

Type
Race and Status
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 488 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1977

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References

1 “Maroon” is the root of the word maroonage which is based upon the French word marron. The French term represents an adaptation of the Spanish word cimarron, which, in itself, is derived from the Spanish word marron, meaning wild, and the Latin word cyma, meaning summit, or mountain top. The word cimarron, therefore, literally meant wild on the mountaintop. Additional meanings have been ascribed to the term. In French, Italian, and other Southern European languages derivatives of maroon came to denote a particular type of chestnut, or simply chestnut in color. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word took on three more meanings: to put a person ashore and abandon him or her on a desolate coast or island; to escape from slavery; and one of a class of Negroes, chiefly fugitive slaves or their descendants living wild in the mountains and forests of some of West Indian islands and in Guiana, especially Surinam. The American Heritage Dictionary of the American Language (Boston: American Heritage Publishers/Houghton Mifflin, 1969)Google Scholar; Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1971)Google Scholar; The Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1933).Google ScholarPubMed

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