Africans played diverse and essential roles in the colonization of the Americas. We might call it European-and-African colonization. The sixteenth-century arrival of Africans in the hemisphere is usually associated with the Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yet while most Africans came enslaved, significant numbers of free people of African descent crossed the ocean or were born in the Americas. Free or enslaved, Africans played important roles as explorers and sailors, conquerors and settlers, urban artisans and rural laborers.

Conquistador records reveal the stories of some of the enslaved Africans whose participation in conquest wars earned them freedom. Their emancipation brought them a place in the new colonies. Some Black African conquistadors fought in enslaved groups comprising dozens, even hundreds. Others served as individuals who won freedom in the conquest wars. For example, Juan Garrido participated in invasion campaigns in Mexico in the 1520s and ’30s. He settled as a guard and town crier in Mexico City, where he was given a plot to build a house. Garrido claimed to be the first man to plant wheat in Mexico. Sebastián Toral fought as an enslaved teenager in the failed Spanish invasions of Yucatán in the 1530s. He returned to help found a colony among the Maya in the 1540s, raising a family as a free colonist. Three decades later, he sailed to Spain to secure an edict from the king confirming the tax-free status of his family.

Although most Africans came enslaved as involuntary colonists, they all—like Garrido and Toral—converted (forcibly or not) to Christianity and had opportunities to have families. Afro-descended settlers were not segregated in Spanish and Portuguese colonies from European or Indigenous peoples. As a result, families of partial African descent quickly developed. Some mixed-race children were born from master-slave relationships in which African women lacked power of consent. Some enslaved women on sugar plantations tried not to have children who would end up suffering such brutal working conditions. African men working in mines often did not survive long enough to have families. But other African men from the Guinea coast, Angola, and other regions of West and West Central Africa found wives in Indigenous communities. Many enjoyed family life in the increasingly multiracial cities and towns of the colonies—from the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima to port cities like Cartagena and Rio de Janeiro to mining centers like Potosí. There, people of African descent could equal or outnumber Spanish or Portuguese settlers. Yet others—who had survived the horrors of the Middle Passage or had been born into slavery in the colonies—escaped to maroon communities. Significant maroon communities developed in sixteenth-century Panama, in Esmeraldas (on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, where a West African–born maroon named Alonso de Yllescas ruled a permanent mixed-race community), and in other regions from Mexico to Brazil. Such communities of refugees from slavery, many with African and Indigenous residents, were a feature of the colonial world. A minority even joined pirate crews.

African colonists can be categorized in two ways. Those who labored in large groups under mass enslavement were more likely to endure shorter, more brutal working lives. This group interacted less with free people of African descent and saw only the plantation or mining town or countryside where they worked. They typically lived in slave societies, where slavery defined and dominated social and economic life. Those who were attached to slaveowner households under individual enslavement were more likely to live in cities, to work as artisans or in other skilled trades, and to interact at work and home with free people of African, Indigenous, European, and mixed descent. Such urban environments were typically societies with slaves.

Regardless of their colonial experience, people of African descent contributed from the very start to population changes in the Americas. They arrived by the hundreds of thousands (and later, millions) in a century when the Indigenous population fell by 70–90 percent. They also contributed to dramatic cultural changes. Colonization generated new cultures in food and drink, music and dance, dress, religion, and healing. These new cultures were based on Indigenous, Spanish/Portuguese, and African ways of doing things. But they developed unique and local expressions. Most Africans coming to the Americas in the colonial era would arrive after 1600. But by that date the African contribution to Latin America was already profound and permanent.