Hybrid Cultures: the Visibility of the European Invasion of Caribbean Honduras in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

The Americas have been an especially important setting for the development of new understandings of the historical processes that followed colonization by Europeans, who acted as agents to introduce large populations of African origin, resulting in a colonial situation of great complexity. Originally conceived of as ‘culture contact,’ these discussions rapidly gained in sophistication (Lightfoot 1995; Lightfoot et al. 1998). Critiques of the idea of contact, in which two somewhat homogeneous entities collided, with the stronger exercising some sort of hegemony over the weaker, were accompanied by the development of detailed investigations of specific historical engagements (Silliman 2005, 2010). These blurred the lines between what could be considered original or novel, ‘authentic’ or hybrid. Models for the emergence of new populations with newly formed identities have been most completely developed under the framework of ethnogenesis (Palka 2005; Voss 2008; Weik 2004). Weik (2004, 36) defined ethnogenesis as, ‘the formation of new or different sociocultural groups from the interactions, intermixtures, and antagonisms among people who took part in global processes of colonialism and slavery’. Our research explores the colonial situation of a region centered on the city of San Pedro Sula, part of the Honduran province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala. Founded in ad 1536 as a Spanish villa (incorporated town), San Pedro flourished as the center for transmission of products of gold mines toward ports, until gold smelting was moved inland in the early 1580s to the colonial capital city, Comayagua. From that point on, the Spanish citizenry of San Pedro Sula steadily declined. We argue that in fact, the transformation of Honduran indigenous life preceded the formal incorporation of the province of the río Ulúa into the administrative district of San Pedro. For more than a decade before the founding of the city, indigenous towns in northern Honduras had experienced impacts of disease, raiding to capture labor for mines elsewhere in Central America,