Juan Prieto, Moreno or Portugués: A Black Man in Christopher Columbus’ First Voyage in 1492

While conducting research about the early years of colonization in the New World, archivist Isabel Aguirre discovered a document jealously guarded at Archivo General de Simancas in Spain. Aguirre enlisted the support of renowned historian Consuelo Varela to shake the dust off a story that reveals that blacks lived in La Espanola, or the New World for that matter, from the very beginning of European colonization. The important document, dated 1500, is about an investigation ordered by the Crown of Spain regarding Christopher Columbus’ acts as governor in La Española. Christopher Columbus governed the New World from 1493 to 1500.
 
Several witnesses were summoned throughout the investigation and their testimonies are recorded in the 1500 document. Part of the witnesses’ account reveals that a young black man, referred to interchangeably as Juan Prieto or Juan Moreno, who lived in La Española during the early years, worked as a personal servant of Christopher Columbus.
 
Prior to Varela and Aguirre’s great discovery, renowned historian Juan Gil, had also found a series of documents related to La Española at Archivo General de Indias, dated November 20, 1516. In these documents Gil had also discovered that a black man named Juan Portugués (John the Portuguese), was residing in Colonial Central America in 1516, but that he had arrived in La Española in 1492 with Christopher Columbus.
 
While other researchers will likely uncover whether the young Juan Prieto or Moreno from 1500 is the same Juan the Portuguese of 1516 and 1492, or whether there were two young black men called Juan (instead of one) with Christopher Columbus, the documents found so far leave no doubt whatsoever about the fact that there was a young, non-slave black man residing in La Espanola after 1492. La Española was then where this black young man and many of the other earliest black residents of the Americas, slaves or not, lived during the first two decades of the Spanish-European colonization of the continent.
 
This is to say that according to written records found so far, Juan Prieto, Moreno, or Portugués is the first ancestor of black people in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in the Americas.
 
Read more about the stories of Juan Prieto, Moreno or Portugués in the original documents shared through a new revolutionary digital platform, First Blacks in the Americas, where you will find these and other stories about the first African black people who populated what came to be known to outsiders as the New World, a narrative that began on the island Spaniards baptized as La Española.
 

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