The Canary Islands and Reality
San Antonio’s history is filled with distortions and fabrications that have been handed down as fact. The Battle of the Alamo is mostly racial fiction. Slavery was the central reason why slave owners fought against Mexico. In fact, Stephen F. Austin proved my point from primary source documents, when in 1832 he said, “Nothing is wanted but money . . . negroes are necessary to make it.” There is another racial fiction that we don’t hear the truth about regarding the settlers from the Canary Islands and the history of the islands. The story of the Canary Islands itself is missing tons of history. The Canary Islands was a stopping point for the slave trade for many years as slave traders, Spanish and Portuguese, used the islands as a “way station” for the shipping of human beings kidnapped along the west coast of Africa.
The Canary Islanders in San Antonio are strictly portrayed as Europeans, and their official status was unquestionably that of white Spaniards. They often deny it, but they represented a mixed ancestry. The original population of the Canary Islands, located 62 miles off the coast of Africa, was of Berber, African, and Moorish ancestry. Spain conquered the Canary Islands in 1496, and more Europeans flooded the islands with enslaved peoples from Africa. Spanish became the official language as they made every attempt to destroy native languages. Spanish officials provided a physical description of the Canary Islanders, who came to Bexar, and they came in a wide range of physical characteristics indicative of the Islands’ diverse population—racists hate the word “diverse” in Texas. Joseph Cabrera, for example, was described as of “medium height, dark complexion, round face, flat nose, pitted with smallpox, grey eyes, chestnut hair and eyebrows, blobber-lipped.” The manifest record of Joseph Cabrera provided the evidence for the Black presence in the Canary Islander immigration to San Antonio in 1731—there were many more who were totally ignored.
Looking back centuries for ancestral origins, with the defeat of the Moors in Spain, the idea of slavery based on skin color began to take a greater hold. Even before the defeat of the dark skined Moors in 1492, darker skin color became the hated norm to physically identify people. According to Ibram X. Kendi, “King Alfonso V commissioned Gomes de Azurara, . . . in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ, to compose a glowing and racist biography of the African adventures of his ‘beloved uncle.’ Azurara finished The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea in 1453, the first European book on Africa,”
Prince Henry provided funding for trips to Africa stopping along the western coasts. He managed to sail beyond Cape Bojador off the coast of Western Africa and southeast of the Canary Islands. At the time a myth developed, because of lost ships and extremely turbulent ocean currents it was believed this cape to be the end of the world. The Portuguese would go on to sail past the forbidden port to the Cape Verde Islands. Eventually the Canary Islands became better suited to the slave trade as a stopping point for the Spanish slave traders. The original Black inhabitants of the islands were subdued in several major wars by the Spaniards. Finally, these Spanish conquers, now called Canary Islanders, a name removed from the historical context of mixed ancestry, brought Black slaves and Black Moors to settle in San Antonio in 1731. For years, some Canary Islanders tried to deny their Black, Moorish, and Arab ancestry and the racist myth continues.
