Valencia and Seville were the main centers where the Canary aborigines captured during the Conquest of the islands by the Crown of Castile between the 15th and 16th centuries were sold as slaves.
This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Rocío Jiménez Díaz, a researcher at the University of Teramo (Italy), in a program co-supervised by the two public universities of the Canary Islands, which reveals how the dynamics of enslavement of the aborigines of the Atlantic islands were a precedent for what was to come with the then incipient conquest of America.
As detailed by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) in a statement, Jiménez has reconstructed the dynamics of enslavement of the aborigines of the islands and how they were inserted into the Atlantic trade circuits that were being configured at that time, as a preliminary step to the slave trade that brought millions of African slaves to America in the following centuries.
The majority of the people who left the Canary Islands enslaved were transferred to Valencia, where their value was lower than in Seville, given Valencia's redistributive role in the Mediterranean context compared to Seville's dependence on other primary ports.
The author points out that these people were used as an economic resource to settle debts and generate profits.
Their predominant age range is between 14 and 25 years old, although the existence of enslaved people under 13 in Valencia and over 35 in Seville is documented. Both men and women were traded in these markets.
Jiménez Díaz emphasizes that "enslaved Amazigh-Canarian people have always been a subsidiary study within monographs or broader studies on slavery in Europe."
Therefore, her work seeks to deepen the knowledge of the specific dynamics of slavery originating in the Canary Islands, in order to gather more information about the lives of these people: who they were, where they came from, how they arrived in this city, how they were framed within the heterogeneous group of enslaved people, how they were valued, and what processes are reflected in the historical documentation.
Similarly, the researcher considers it necessary to review the historiographical language that has been traditionally used: she prefers to dispense with the word 'slave', because it "objectifies the person," and to use 'enslaved person' instead, as she considers that it "shifts the action towards the enslaver."
In her opinion, "avoiding dehumanizing visions" and "not adopting the colonial discourse allows these people to be repositioned at the center of their own processes, and of the geographical dissemination to which they were forced."
Another aspect that the study emphasizes refers to the depersonalization suffered by enslaved people, which implied the loss of their cultural and linguistic identity.
Thus, for example, baptism replaced their aboriginal names with Christian names, which hindered their documentary tracking.
Living outside their place of origin also favored the adoption of European languages and customs, and the gradual erosion of their original identity, adds this research.
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