Mestizaje in Colonial St. Augustine

Abstract

Although the Spanish occupation of Florida left no apparent mestizo population segment as in modern Latin America, the mestizaje process did occur. Documentary data concerning Indian-Spanish interaction, the St. Augustine Cathedral Parish Records, and archeological data are used to more fully define the process and results of mestizaje in colonial Florida, and to formulate an hypothesis with archeologically-testable implications to explain this process. The decimation of American Indians in the face of Spanish conquest is a widely recognized fact of the contact period. This was particularly evident among the aboriginal populations of both New Spain (Mexico) and Florida during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recent estimates of population decline in New Spain (Cook and Borah 1960) have suggested that between 1519 and 1605 the aboriginal population of Mexico fell from approximately 25,000,000 to approximately 1,000,000; and in Florida we know that between 1600 and 1727 the Timucua Indian population fell from approximately 6-10,000 to fourteen (Valdes 1729). Although the structures of contact in Mexico and in Florida were considerably different, many of the same detrimental influences were at work on the Indian populations of both areas. The primary factor in the population decline was European-introduced epidemic disease. Smallpox, measles, influenza, dysentary and syphilis were rampant among Mexican Indian tribes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Dob…