Don Pedro de Mendoza introduces 200 enslaved Africans, in what constitutes the first authorization to introduce enslaved people into the Río de la Plata.
Juan Ortiz de Zárate is authorized to introduce 100 enslaved Africans into the Río de la Plata.
Pedro Gómez Reynel, a Portuguese merchant and general slaver for the West Indies, obtained the authorization to bring 600 enslaved people to the Río de la Plata.
The testament of Hernandarias' estate is one of the earliest records of enslaved people arriving in the Río de la Plata.
The French slave ship «Notre Dame de l'Epine», bound for Buenos Aires, ran aground on the coast of Rocha, near Castillos. The Africans were taken to Colonia del Sacramento. This would seem to prove that the first stable African population inhabited Colonia, and that the captives arrived to the coasts of the Banda Oriental intermittently and transiently, also creating interactions between them and the indigenous communities.
After passing through Montevideo, the ship «King William» arrived in Buenos Aires with 557 Africans who had survived the ocean crossing. Shortly after, the «Saint Quintin» arrived with 299 captives. In this coming and going of slave ships, the Spanish authorities of Buenos Aires learned that a Portuguese garrison had begun the construction of a fort in the peninsula of Montevideo, claiming the port for Portugal. Alerted, Governor Bruno Mauricio de Zabala crossed from Buenos Aires and forced the Portuguese retreat. It was the first step in the foundational process of the city.
The construction of the Cubo del Sur, a defense tower integrated to the wall surrounding Montevideo, began with slave labor.
The powerful merchant Alzáibar asks the Crown for permission to sell hides to the English slave ships in Montevideo.
The Cabildo of the city, arguing lack of arms for work, requested the importation of enslaved Africans.
The regular introduction of enslaved people to Montevideo began. The first ones would have been originally from Guinea and arrived through the commission agent Thomas Navarro, in exchange for hides.
The ship «Santa Isabel» arrives in Montevideo with 61 enslaved people, coming from Rio de Janeiro.
The Spanish Society of Jesus, with strong presence in the foundational process of Montevideo, raises the Rancheria of the Jesuits in the current Rincón and Ituzaingó streets, in front of the Matriz Square. This residence was the first site syndicated and criticized by the Spanish colonial authorities due to the celebrations of Africans and Afro-descendants that took place there. The Jesuit order was the largest owner of enslaved women and men during the city's early period. Through slave labor they supported their religious and educational activities.
The Municipal Chamber of Montevideo installed a permanent scaffold in the Plaza Mayor with its corresponding gallows, as a warning against «the pride and audacity, the insubordinate spirit and excessive insolence» that -according to the authority-, «the blacks were increasingly exhibiting». The death penalty existed and the gallows were applied to enslaved Africans, Afro-descendants and Amerindians accused of homicide. Other executions were applied to «whites».
The slave trade was so intense that the Cabildo forced the captain of a ship to deposit his human merchandise between the Cerro and the Miguelete, due to the contagious diseases that affected his slaves.
The Royal Company of the Philippines was granted permission to carry out the slave trade and built the Caserío de los Negros. It was located outside the walls, in the current Capurro neighborhood. It was the largest construction outside the walls of colonial Montevideo and its function was quarantine, storage, fattening and branding enslaved women and men for later sale, as well as a burial place. More than 200,000 enslaved people passed through this space.
The revolution begins in Haiti and the Spanish Crown includes Montevideo in the list of free ports for the enslaved trade, lowering taxes on sales and allowing merchants to set their prices.
During the French Revolution, Spain again lowered taxes on goods traded for slaves, facilitating trade between the colonies.
The gardener Joaquin Jose de Muxica was stabbed by his slave Pedro, who was hanged for the crime.
A rebellion took place on the slave ship "San Juan Nepomuceno", which had departed from Montevideo. The enslaved, who numbered about 70, had embarked for Lima and a week later, at the Strait of Magellan, they took control of the ship under the leadership of an enslaved ship carpenter named Antonio, who lived in Montevideo and had already fled from his owner. The voyage back to Africa lasted five months and ended in Saint Louis Island, off the coast of Senegal, governed at that time by a French revolutionary and abolitionist. Those who disembarked were never captured or enslaved again.
The scaffold is removed from the Plaza Mayor.
The Governor proposed to install in the Plaza a pillory to «tie up the blacks condemned to whipping», according to him, an instrument «necessary given the excessive pride that the black slaves have taken».
A remarkable act of rebellion of enslaved Africans took place for the entire Rio de la Plata, when some twenty enslaved and freed people fled as a group from Montevideo to settle as free men and women on the islands of the Yí river.
The frigate «Joaquín» arrives from Mozambique with 376 enslaved people on board. Only 64 of them made it alive, to be sold by the slaver Alzaga. The cause of so many deaths was an intestinal disease aggravated by melancholy, depression and mourning. The doctor in charge of the case affirmed that they had developed «a total indifference to life».
The Matriz Church is inaugurated.
Due to the complaints of the enslavers, the celebrations in which the enslaved people performed dances, tangos and candombes, meetings and gatherings that accompanied with songs, dances and percussion, were prohibited inside and outside the city.
The Government of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata provides that no one shall be born a slave (freedom of wombs), and that slaves from foreign countries shall be free «by the mere fact of stepping on the territory of the United Provinces».
Mariana, an enslaved woman tried to take her own life because of the mistreatment she received at the home of her owners, the Salvañach-Wich family. She was imprisoned for six months for an offense she did not commit and requested «sale paper» several times. She also begged the government to leave her in the Charity Hospital or any other measure so that she would not return to the house of her enslavers.
Celebrations by enslaved people were allowed, but only outside the city walls. However, during the Fiestas Mayas -a popular celebration held in the month of May-, enslaved men and women joined in the festivities in the main plaza, with the instruments, costumes, and dances of their respective nations.
After a long trial, the enslaved Encarnación and Mariquita were found guilty and executed in the Plaza Matriz, for having killed their enslaver Celedonia Wich, from whom they suffered many punishments.
The Florida House of Representatives declares that all those born in the province shall be free without exception of origin, prohibiting the traffic of slaves from foreign countries. The law remains only on paper.
During the first Three Kings Day in independent Uruguay, a Justice of the Peace suggested that the police relocate the African celebrations to the southeast of the city, near the Cubo del Sur, in an area neighboring the future Barrio Sur. Thus, all the African gatherings and parties were confined to a single, peripheral and isolated place, easily controlled.
The first Constitution of the Republic was sworn in, including among its articles that «no one shall be born a slave in the territory of the State; their trafficking or introduction into the Republic is forever prohibited», leaving it to the future legislature to regulate the prohibition of the trafficking of enslaved persons.
The merchants Teodoro Vilaza and Domingo Vázquez made a contract with the State to bring in enslaved persons up to 16 years of age as «settlers», a regime whereby minor Africans of both sexes would serve their employers for a period of 12 years, after which they would become freedwomen and freedmen. The Rivera government received important revenues for granting permits for the introduction of enslaved persons.
239 African boys and girls arrived as «settlers» on the ship «Aguila I», and disembarked on the bar of the Santa Lucia River. Nearly 90 percent of the captives were under 10 years of age. Fifty-six percent were boys and 44 percent girls.
On October 30, it is established that in the Capital and in the Departments where the Treasury permits, «there will be a school for free or liberated girls of color, where they will be taught with all perfection the rudiments of Religion, writing, sewing, ironing and all kinds of domestic farm work.»
The brig Río de la Plata arrives in Maldonado with 338 «settlers». There were children under 9 years old, and among them a boy of only 5 years old.
The ship «Delfina» arrives in Maldonado. The government confiscated more than 250 Africans and arranged for their boarding rights to be sold among the neighbors of Maldonado. The amount of sale was 200 pesos per settler. The State would be the depositary of the sums earned, which would be delivered to each freedman once the term of the contract had expired. Now it was Oribe's government that obtained an important sum for this operation, but the money never reached the hands of the enslaved.
The ship «Esperanza Oriental» arrived in Montevideo with 350 Africans, of whom about 60 died during a storm that broke out at the time of disembarkation at the port of Buceo. They were tied in twos and threes, with strong chains that squeezed their necks.
A law is passed establishing that those «colored men who enter the eastern territory as slaves, settlers or any other denomination, become free». However, they were required to serve three years in the army.
The Police issued a decree regulating «the dances called candombes, with the use of drums». In it they are prohibited in the interior of the city and only allowed in front of the sea, towards the south, on holidays and must end at nine o'clock at night. Later they were authorized inside the houses in different parts of the city, having therefore fallen into disuse the primitive ordinance.
The newspaper «El Compás» publishes that as of the prohibitive law of 1830, the number of enslaved persons arriving in the República Oriental was 4,000.
In the middle of the Guerra Grande and at a time when Uruguay had two governments, on December 12, early in the morning, the enslaved Francisco José, who worked in a salting plant, is executed. That same day in the afternoon, the Government of the Defense decrees the abolition of slavery.
Still during the Guerra Grande, the other side, the Government of Cerrito, declared the abolition of slavery.
Both the 1842 and 1846 laws freed the enslaved from their enslavers, but obliged them to enlist in the army. On the other hand, enslaved people were still allowed to enter the country through «labour contracts» or as «settlers», two legal ways of disguising enslavement. Under the colonization regime, more than a thousand African girls, boys, young women and men were brought into our country.
Two years after the end of the Guerra Grande, custody over the children of enslaved and emancipated enslaved was eliminated, but the law was not enforced in the absence of claims.
«Labour contracts» are prohibited, and in December of the same year, the government declares the abolition of slavery.
In August the first issue of the Afro-Uruguayan weekly «La Conservación» was published, whose first editors were Andrés Seco, Marcos Padin and Agustín García. It reached 17 issues until November 1872.
The Afro-Uruguayan weekly «El Progresista» appears.
The «Negros y Lubolos» troupe made its appearance in carnival, being the first one in which Afro-descendants and whites participated. Precisely, «lubolo» is the term that designates people with white skin who paint their faces to join the Afro-descendant celebrations.
Construction of the Medio Mundo tenement house in the Sur neighborhood, a future bastion of Afro culture and candombe. Initially it was known as «Risso tenement», surname of its owners.
Construction of the group of tenement houses that made up the Barrio Reus al Sur-Ansina, in what is now Palermo, and which, like the Mediomundo tenement house, would become emblematic for its strong link to candombe and Afro-Uruguayan culture. The work was completed in 1889.
A conflict arises between the municipal authorities of Montevideo and the laundresses of the Pocitos stream -most of them African descent-, giving rise to the first strike led and won by women in Uruguay in defense of their work.
The magazine «Nuestra Raza» is published, calling itself «social newspaper, news and organ of the Afro community». In its first stage it ceased publication in September 1917.
On July 3, 1927, in a plebiscite to decide the jurisdiction of the town Cerro Chato in Uruguay, the exercise of women's right to vote was recorded for the first time, both in our country and in all of South America. The first woman to claim her right was Rita Ribeira, a 90-year-old Brazilian immigrant of African descent.
Issue number 1 of the second season of the independent monthly magazine «Nuestra Raza» is published in Montevideo. In this second season it was published until September 1948.
Pilar Barrios founded the Partido Autóctono Negro (PAN), a political organization whose main objective was to vindicate the rights of the Afro-Uruguayan community. It was dissolved in 1944.
In April 1936 Iris Cabral and Maruja Pereyra participated in the first National Congress of Women of Uruguay, organized by the Women's Union against the War, representing the women's section of the Committee of the Black Race against war and fascism.
The Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguay Negro (ACSUN) is born, a cultural institution dedicated to promote the visualization of the contributions of Afro-descendants to the Uruguayan identity, mobilizing against racism and social exclusion.
The Círculo de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores Negros (C.I.A.P.E.N.), an Uruguayan cultural institution of Afro-descendants founded by journalist César A. Techera, is founded. The objective was to bring together Afro-Uruguayan artists, journalists, professionals and writers. Among its members were Pedro Ferreira, Ramón Pereyra, Virginia Brindis de Sala, Pilar Barrios, Mario Rubén Méndez, Alberto N. Méndez, Roberto Cisneros, Ventura Barrios, Evagoras Fernández, Anselmo I. García, Washington Viera, José R. Suárez, Abel Cardozo and Juan C. Da Silva. The trace of this institution was lost after 1948.
During the civil-military dictatorship, the Mediomundo tenement house and several blocks of the Reus al Sur-Ansina neighborhood were declared Historical Monuments among other buildings in the city.
The civil-military dictatorship takes away the investiture of Historical Monument to the Mediomundo tenement house and to the tenement houses of the Reus al Sur-Ansina neighborhood, decreeing at the same time the eviction of these houses. This year the eviction of the Mediomundo took place. The families were expelled from their homes and from the neighborhood where they lived, forced to leave part of their belongings, being moved in municipal trucks and rehoused in different parts of the city, in municipal stockyards, abandoned factories and temporary homes in conditions of extreme precariousness, poverty and exclusion.
Eviction of the inhabitants of Barrio Reus al Sur-Ansina. Hundreds of Afro-descendant families were evicted from their homes and rehoused in conditions similar to those of the inhabitants of Mediomundo.
Mundo Afro is born, one of the historical organizations of the Afro-Uruguayan social movement, with national scope. It arises from the Asociación Cultural y Social del Uruguay Negro (ACSUN), first as a magazine, to later become a non-profit organization with headquarters in the Central Market, where today the Development Bank of Latin America is located. The legal name is Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Afro (CEIAF). Since the end of 2014 it has its headquarters located in the Old City of Montevideo, on 25 de Mayo Street.
The Black Women's Support Program was created, whose executing arm for gender and race policies is the Afro-Uruguayan Women's Support Group (GAMA).
The meeting of Afro-descendant women from 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries is held in the Dominican Republic. At this meeting, the Network of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women was born. From then on, July 25 was established as the International Day for Afro-descendant Women, also known as Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women's Day. On this date, the Afro-descendant women's struggle against racial discrimination, sexism, poverty and marginalization is remembered.
Afro-Uruguayan women who had participated in the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin Women's Network since the 1990 Feminist Encounter organized the First National Encounter of Black Women in 1993.
UFAMA (Unidad Familiar Mundo Afro) is born, a housing cooperative of and for Afro women, heads of families, to vindicate the families evicted from the Palermo neighborhood during the last civil-military dictatorship.
Construction of the UFAMA al Sur housing complex begins.
The III World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and All Forms of Related Intolerance is held in Durban, South Africa. The Plan of Action of this conference recognizes slavery as a crime against humanity.
The Municipality of Montevideo created the Municipal Thematic Unit for the Rights of Afrodescendants (UTDA), within the orbit of the General Secretariat, becoming the first Racial Equity Mechanism in a Uruguayan state agency.
In the Municipality of Montevideo, the UTDA became part of the Department of Social Development. The legacy of this Thematic Unit includes support for the UFAMA program aimed at cooperative housing solutions, the promotion of ethnic health at the level of municipal polyclinics, training courses for community agents, the articulation of access to student scholarships, the mainstreaming of the Afro perspective in the gender equality plan, the action around the memorial of the Caserío de los Negros in Capurro, the promotion of new nomenclatures, the promotion of the Afro-descendant community, the recognition of spaces of Afro Memory, the commodatums and agreements of spaces such as the headquarters of Mundo Afro and the Casa de la Cultura Afrouruguaya, and the promotion and support of cultural and entrepreneurial people.
The Afro Women's Department was created in the National Women's Institute (InMujeres). In this area, which was responsible for the design and implementation of public policies for Afro-descendant women, the National Network of Afro-descendant Women in the country was created and the ethno-racial dimension was incorporated in intersection with gender in State agencies as part of a cross-cutting policy.
The National Parliament declares December 3 as the National Day of Candombe, Afro-Uruguayan Culture and Racial Equity. This day celebrates and disseminates candombe as a cultural expression and recognizes the Afro-descendant population's contribution to national construction and the shaping of the cultural identity of the República Oriental del Uruguay.
UNESCO declares Candombe as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The UFAMA al Sur housing units were inaugurated, handing over the keys to 36 families and becoming the first affirmative action of reparation aimed at Afro-descendants after the process of trafficking, slavery and crime that has harmed all of humanity.
The Law of Affirmative Actions for People of African Descent was passed, which recognizes trafficking and slave trade as crimes against humanity, and the Afro-descendant population as historical victims of racial discrimination. A commission is created to enforce the actions enacted by the law. This commission is advised by an Advisory Council made up of representatives of the civil organizations Casa de la Cultura Afrouruguaya, Mundo Afro, Triangulación Kultural, Mizangas and the Coordinadora Nacional Afrouruguaya.
The Municipal Thematic Unit for the Rights of Afro-descendants (UTDA) is transformed into the Secretariat for Ethnic-Racial Equity and Migrant Populations (SEERPM). This transformation includes indigenous and migrant populations in the work of the Secretariat, under the Social Policies Division within the Department of Social Development.
The Law of Sites of Memory is established with the purpose of recognizing and remembering those places where people suffered from State terrorism, so that they may be used as spaces for the recovery, construction and transmission of memory, also serving as a tribute and reparation to the victims and the community.
In accordance with a request from the Working Group on the Memory of the Afro-Uruguayan Community in times of State terrorism, a plaque will be placed outside the building where the Mediomundo tenement was located (Zelmar Michelini 1080), and another plaque in the housing complex Barrio Reus al Sur-Ansina, located between Isla de Flores, Minas, San Salvador and Lorenzo Carnelli streets.
The place where the Caserío de los Negros was located is declared a Historical Memory Site, in the Capurro neighborhood.
UDELAR (University of the Republic) declares itself anti-racist, promoting diversity and the fight against racism in the academic environment. This declaration takes place on October 12, 2023 in the Maggiolo Hall of the UDELAR, being an activity organized by the Social and Artistic Area, the Afro-Latin American Studies collective and the Faculty of Arts.
People who tell us stories and places that have built the life of the neighborhoods. We invite you to meet them, go to a point on the map and scan the code.
Each point of the tour is independent of the others geographically and chronologically.
You can visit them in any order and any day of the year, at any time.
