Afro-Latino Settlers on the Anza Trail: The African Roots of Early California

Among the earliest non-Native residents of California were hundreds of people of African descent, whose ancestors had been taken to colonial Mexico in slavery. These Afro-Latino settlers helped found the towns and ranches that became Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey and San Jose — and some rose to great wealth and high office. Their story runs along the route of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail.

Africans in colonial Mexico

Africans arrived in Mexico with the Spanish conquest: Juan Garrido, a Black soldier, fought under Hernán Cortés against the Aztec empire in 1519. As the Indigenous population the Spanish had enslaved declined, colonists turned to capturing and enslaving Africans for labor. Perhaps as many as 50,000 Africans had been brought to Mexico before 1580, and roughly 100,000 enslaved people, mostly Africans, between 1580 and 1670; by 1645 Mexico held 80,000 enslaved people.

By the eighteenth century, free Black people outnumbered the enslaved, with a visible presence in Mexico City, Puebla, Guerrero and Veracruz. They still met prejudice: some cities barred them from owning land or entering skilled trades. Many moved to the northwestern frontier, where discrimination was lighter, and free Black communities grew in places such as Rosario, Mazatlán, Cosalá, Villa Sinaloa, Culiacán, Durango, Parral and San Miguel de Horcasitas. By the late eighteenth century, frontier towns counted Afro-Latino soldiers, merchants, artisans, priests, mayors, councilmen, ranchers and farmers.

North with Anza

Captain Juan Bautista de Anza. Image from NPS’s page.

In 1774, Spanish captain Juan Bautista de Anza opened a new overland supply route from northern Sonora to California. He soon organized a colonizing expedition (1775–1776), recruiting dozens of families from Culiacán, Villa Sinaloa, Altar and Horcasitas — the northwestern towns that supplied California’s first colonists.

Once the overland route existed, Afro-Latino settlers came in large numbers. By 1790 they made up nearly 20 percent of California’s population — one resident in five. European-born Spaniards ran society through a caste system based on color, yet Afro-Latino and mestizo Californians won real political and economic influence under Spanish and Mexican rule.

A more open society

Unlike the United States, where people were largely segregated by race, early nineteenth-century California saw Afro-Latino, mestizo, European and Native American people live together and often intermarry. California offered chances unavailable in central Mexico, where colonial privileges were reserved for Spaniards of “pure blood.” Afro-Latino Californians owned vast lands and served as officers and officials — while most African Americans in the United States were enslaved, and even free Black Americans had few rights. That prosperity came at the expense of the Native peoples dispossessed of their land and sovereignty.

Prominent families

After 1848

Everything changed when the United States took California. The Mexican-American War, begun in 1846 under President James K. Polk and seen by many as a grab for Mexico’s northern provinces, ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded them to the United States.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848. Library of Congress.

The gold discovery that same year brought a flood of Anglo settlers, many squatting on Mexican-owned land. U.S. courts rejected many Spanish- and Mexican-era land titles, and thousands of Mexicans lost their property or sold it to pay legal costs. The new government stripped rights from Mexicans, Asians, African Americans and Native Americans:

• The 1849 constitutional convention voted to deny the vote to “Indians, Africans, and descendants of Africans.”
• The next year, the state limited the militia to “free white males,” barred nonwhite testimony in cases involving white people, and passed vagrancy laws that enslaved Native Americans until the end of the Civil War.
• Lawmakers let anyone who claimed a Black person who had entered the state before 1850 as a former slave have that person detained.

Nearly 250 years after Anza, Black communities — Afro-Latino descendants among them — still thrive along the trail, and their early history helps explain California’s long struggles with racism, classism and colorism.

Sources

Based on "Afro-Latinidad on the Anza Trail," National Park Service, from the brochure Discovering Early California Afro-Latino Presence by historian Damany Fisher, edited and updated by Dr. Brittany Romanello (2024) through the Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. The source dates the forced migration to Mexico to the “fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” though the first African it names arrived in 1519, so no century is given; and it places the frontier towns “northeast” of Mexico City, where they lie to the northwest.