The first section of ¡Presente! is “Colonial Legacies.”
Invasion and Slavery:
Label Text and Object Descriptions
Colonization had violent consequences for Indigenous and African peoples.
Most Indigenous communities resisted European control. However, diseases introduced by colonists decimated Indigenous populations and weakened their societies. Some Indigenous peoples fled areas settled by Europeans, while others formed new political alliances to hold off colonization. Many had no choice but to live under colonial control.
Africans and their descendants were enslaved throughout the Americas. From the 1500s to the 1800s, roughly 12 million Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to ports such as Cartagena, Colombia, and Charleston, South Carolina. They too resisted and, when possible, escaped slavery. Sometimes they escaped alongside Indigenous peoples.
Resistance and Uprisings:
Label Text and Object Descriptions
African, Indigenous, and mixed-race peoples remade their societies, despite the inhumanities of colonization.
They adapted their traditions, mastered new environments and ways of life, and built communities. These survivors also protested the abuses of European colonizers. They fought injustice in different ways. Some burned and escaped plantations and missions. Others made their cases in court. Many also participated in their nations’ wars of independence from Spain.
The objects and images here focus on diverse stories of resistance like Indigenous rebellions in Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and California; the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804); and the daily endurance of enslaved Puerto Ricans.
Mexico’s Northern Frontier:
Label Text and Object Descriptions
From about 1600 to 1800, Spain colonized present-day New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, and California.
Priests, soldiers, and families traveled from central Mexico to the northern frontier. They built their earliest settlements in present-day New Mexico. Official documents describe these colonists as Spanish, Black, Indigenous, Filipino, and mixed-race. By 1800, Spanish New Mexico’s population numbered about 30,000. The descendants of colonists, called nuevomexicanos, outnumbered local Indigenous peoples by this period.
During the 1770s, Spanish colonists occupied California. They built settlements, such as San Diego and Monterey, near Indigenous villages. Unlike the New Mexicans, they were vastly outnumbered by an estimated 300,000 Indigenous Californians.
Comanche Warrior:
Signature Object
His-oo-sán-chees was a Comanche warrior with Spanish or Mexican ancestry. From the 1700s to the mid-1800s, the Comanche dominated the region around New Mexico and Texas through trading and raiding. This painting was made in 1834 during a U.S. Army expedition into northern Texas. Though part of Mexico at the time, this region was under Comanche control.
