Gaspar Yanga

Gaspar Yanga — known among his own people as Nyanga — was born around 1545 in what is now Gabon, into what colonial Spanish documents describe as a royal household of the Bran nation. Captured in adolescence and shipped to the port of Veracruz in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, he was sold into a sugar plantation in the highlands of present-day Veracruz state. Around 1570, at approximately twenty-five years of age, he led an escape into the mountains above the town of Córdoba and founded a maroon village in the Cofre de Perote highlands.

The settlement — which Spanish documents called a palenque — survived for nearly forty years as an autonomous polity in the steep volcanic country between Veracruz and Puebla. Under Yanga's leadership it grew to an estimated five hundred inhabitants, supported itself by subsistence agriculture and by raids upon the Camino Real, and harboured fugitives from across the sugar plantations of the Atlantic coast. The viceregal authorities mounted three expeditions against it; the first two were defeated outright.

In 1609 the third expedition under the captain Pedro González de Herrera secured a draw rather than a victory. Yanga — by then about sixty-four — opened negotiations from a position of military stalemate. The treaty signed in 1618 granted the settlement formal recognition as a free pueblo within the viceroyalty, made all its inhabitants and descendants free in perpetuity, prohibited further white settlement within its boundaries, and required only an annual tribute and the surrender of all subsequently fled enslaved Africans. The pueblo was named San Lorenzo de los Negros; in 1932 the Mexican government renamed it Yanga in his honour. The Veracruz town remains today the oldest formally free Black settlement in the Americas.

He is honored here as the founder of free Black self-government in the Western Hemisphere.