ABSTRACT
By the late eighteenth century, blacks and mulatos, both slave and free, constituted about 6 percent of New Spain’s overall population. Beginning in 1760, the Bourbon dynasty that had assumed governance of Spanish America in 1700 took the unprecedented step of creating colonial armies to defend its holdings in the Americas while simultaneously expanding the size of its colonies’ local militias. Historians have traditionally posited that considerable animosity existed between various disempowered groups in colonial Mexico. Although the Dragoons of the Plaza of Veracruz and the militias of the Villa of Cordoba have undertaken many missions at different times, in attempts to catch the maroons and finish off the communities, they have been useless because the mountains are impenetrable, as is public and notorious. Later sources about the community reveal that the cimarrones did reach an agreement with the alcalde mayor.
