ABSTRACT
The Peninsula’s southwestern orientation into the Atlantic gave its inhabitants a natural advantage in exploring sea routes to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and eventually America. For a century prior to Columbus’s voyage, the Spanish and Portuguese were conquering and colonizing islands in the eastern Atlantic, and that experience provided important precedents for their forays into the Americas. The Spanish also brought African slaves with them to the Americas, and a smaller population of mulattoes, and enslaved Africans found a place in Spanish American society, chiefly as domestic servants, retainers, and urban workers. Like Spanish America’s mestizos, pardos occupied an important place in Brazilian society, often working as producers of subsistence crops and as urban craftsmen. Mexico City was the capital city of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and one of the largest cities in Spanish America. Ilarione de Bergamo was an Italian priest sent by his religious order to Mexico in 1761 to solicit donations for missionary work in Tibet.
