As long as there have been Spaniards in Texas, there have been persons of African descent among them. How do we know? The Spanish kept excellent records. They also used a caste system that provides us some insight. The caste system was often used to classify and, unfortunately in some cases order, the members of a group or community. Whether it was a roster of soldiers or a list of settlers for a particular community, the Spanish tended to assign individuals certain race labels. The label assignments were applied loosely but do provide some insight as to the diversity of a given group of people.
The Spanish caste system had many labels to describe its citizens. The labels described the person, mostly by appearance or by known parentage. Mulato/a was the term assigned to individuals who were believed to be from mixed parentage—Spanish and African. Other labels were also used to describe individuals of African descent. Lobo/a was used to describe a person who had an African parent and a Native American parent. These, and other caste labels, help us understand that our history and heritage is like a blanket woven from a vast array of threads of many colors, shapes, and sizes.
When did the first person of African descent arrive in Texas? According to the Bullock Museum, the earliest arrival of a person of African descent in Texas was in 1528 by Esteban or Estevanico, who was enslaved by Dorantes de Carranza with whom he later traveled and arrived in the Americas in 1528.
Esteban was not the only black person to have arrived in Texas via an early Spanish expedition. In 1716, Juan de la Consolacion, a black man, was among the 60-plus people who accompanied Domingo Ramon to Texas. Some of the earliest baptisms among those recorded in the San Fernando Church, in what is now San Antonio, are of mulato children born to free blacks, servants or slaves.
The 1792 Census of San Fernando de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio) is another “view” into the diversity of the early years of today’s seventh largest U.S. city. The 1792 census enumerated 221 “mulato”, 13 “lobo”, 4 “creole” and 4 “negro” (terms used in the census) among the 1,010 persons in the community.
It’s therefore evident that Black history is an integral part of our Hispanic history and heritage in Texas.