Category Archives: Public Documents

Blacks from Gran Canaria, Moorish from Lanzarote

Chronicles, Public Documents, Ethnography, Histories, , , , , , , ,

Part of the author’s maternal family, native from Santa Lucía de Tirajana, Gran Canaria, circa 1960 (photo: Antonio López Casanova / López Alonso family archive).

In memory of my mum, Carmen Alonso Suárez, a Tirahanera by her origins, a Teldense at her heart, a Palmense because of her birth and a Schamannera through rooting.

Not long ago a newspaper article attributed the non-existence of a Chinatown in the Canary Islands to the double fact that the Chinese community resident in the Archipelago is small, and to the integrationist spirits of the Canarian population.

The truth is, unlike what is usually understood as cosmopolitanism in large Western cities, which in its less friendly side results in the progressive formation of neighbourhoods where only people belonging to the same ethnic or social group coexist and interrelate, the cosmopolitan character of the Canary Islands is due to the happy paradox that their very nature as islands, and more specifically as small islands, tends to make it difficult to form closed human groups, and no less decisive in this context has been the lack of a clear-cut division between urban and rural areas, forcing the lack of physical distance, in both cases, to coexistence and social interaction. This is undeniably positive and desirable.

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Inés Peraza and Luis de Herrera: An untold relationship

Collaborations, Public Documents, Studies, , , ,

We have the pleasure, honor and no small responsibility to open the History section of the new issue –the 70th– of the Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, with a paper in which we present six unpublished documents on Inés Peraza, last holder of the Seigneury of the Canary Islands

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The Ganigo of Guadajume (3/3): Killing Peraza

Chronicles, Public Documents, Studies, , ,

A recreation of an ancient Gomeran woman according to Leonardo Torriani circa 1590 (source: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, catalogue number Ms. 314, f. 81r.)

To commemorate 20 November 1488, the day La Gomera allegedly uprose against Fernán Peraza the Younger, the Castilian lord of the island, we are going to continue our previous couple of posts on this important historical milestone with an unpublished testimony that sheds more light on the events and propose a new hypothesis based on these data.

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Too many Canarians...

Colonial Culture, Indigenous Culture, Public Documents, ,

A pintadera made by ancient Canarians kept at Museo de La Fortaleza, Santa Lucía de Tirajana, Gran Canaria (source: PROYECTO TARHA, 2016)

It is usually argued that after the conquest of each of the Canary Islands, especially after the campaigns undertaken by the Crown of Castile itself in the cases of Gran Canaria, La Palma and Tenerife, the new, imposed political, legal and administrative order was configured in such a way that the original inhabitants enjoyed the same rights and freedom as the other subjects of the kingdom, as long as they embraced Christianity and submitted themselves to the authority of the Castilian throne, a consideration officially included in documents such as the already exposed Letter of Calatayud. Nevertheless it is well known that the new colonial regime discriminated against and marginalized most of the indigenous population compared to the European one, especially those individuals and family groups that actively or passively refused to collaborate with the invaders during and after the occupation war.

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Esteban de Junqueras at the War of Canaria (1478-1483): an official evidence of his participation

Chronicles, Public Documents, Histories, , , ,

A drawing by Javier García Gómez of Esteban de Junqueras’ cenotaph now preserved in the chapel of Pazo de Oca, Pontevedra province, Galicia –GARCÍA GÓMEZ, (2016, p. 262)–.

Some of the narrative sources dealing with accounts on the so-called Royal Conquest of Gran Canaria witness the participation of captains Pedro de Santisteban, Cristóbal de Medina and Esteban de Junqueras commanding a number of troops sent by the Crown of Castile between 1480-1481 in order to support the invading forces already stablished on the Island. Although some coetaneous public documents do confirm the involvement of the two former no data as strong were known until now to prove the intervention of this third person, an evidence that we present in this post.
Antonio M. López Alonso

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On the recruit of delinquents for the War of Canaria

Public Documents, , ,

An idealized effigy of Captain Juan Rejón, military commander of the expedition to invade Gran Canaria ordered by the Catholic Monarchs, on a commemorative plaque located in Vegueta neighborhood, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, year 2018. (source: PROYECTO TARHA).

(This post has been extended with a fourth document, 11th December 2022)

By their nature, armed conflicts have always been a destination and a departure point at the same time. A departure point for those who are forced by violence to suffer the physical, cultural and emotional uprooting that fleeing from a war zone entails. A destination for those who see in the chaos of the conflict an opportunity to escape punishment, reprisals and persecution ordered by the established power or at the design of third parties, either for political or personal reasons, or because the fugitive actually exercised criminal violence against people or assets. In the latter case, war dresses the offender with a cloak of impunity that allows him to continue committing, this time with no other restriction than his own will, those or other crimes and felonies.

An especially profitable case of twinning between delinquency and warmongering is the employ of convicts by political power as war troops in order to fulfill its own interests, freeing those been governed from the risk posed by the presence of the criminal and on the other hand channeling towards the war effort at zero cost the latent aggressiveness in the person or alternatively his will to survive a conflict that he may judge as alien to his interests.

On this matter, three out of the four public documents whose transcriptions we are presenting here are not unknown ones[1]We detail the appropriate references in the notes of the respective transcripts.. In fact they were listed in 1981 by Professor Eduardo Aznar Vallejo[2]AZNAR VALLEJO (1981), pp. 19, 26-27, 32., one of them was partially copied earlier by Professor Antonio Rumeu de Armas and at least two of them have subsequently been the subject of discreet publications, although one of them is incomplete. We now intend to make them known in their entirety along with a fourth and to offer at the same time a broader perspective on their context.

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From Guise's side. From Ayose's side

Chronicles, Public Documents, Ethnography, Histories, Colonial Heritage, Indigenous Heritage, , , ,

The idealised statues of Guise and Ayose, a work by Lanzarote-born sculptor Emiliano Hernández García, standing on the namesake viewpoint in the municipality of Betancuria in Fuerteventura (source: Luc. T / Wikimedia Commons).

In honor of my father’s family: my great-grandfather Matías Casanova «El Charco», my grandmother, Susana Casanova Darias, and my great-aunt Manolita. From Vega de Tetir. «From Guise’s side.»

That Guise and Ayose were the names of the two maho chieftains who ruled Fuerteventura island at the time of the conquest by Jehan de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle is something well known in Canarian popular culture. Such is so that the latter has been a relatively frequent anthroponym imposed among males born in the Canary Islands since the mid-1970s, a time when recognition and homage to precolonial cultural and historical roots began to be claimed with some force after being silenced for a long time.

But a much less known fact is that both names survived the European conquest for four centuries without losing an iota of their everyday nature. And even more surprising is that they did not do it in the field of toponymy, a common refuge for forgotten words, but in a very unusual way: the administrative field.

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"The said Canarians could not live": Return to the Pact of Calatayud

Collaborations, Colonial Culture, Indigenous Culture, Public Documents, Ethnography, ,

A fragment of folio 1v. of the RGS-1515-01-32 manuscript containing a copy of the so-called Letter of Calatayud (source: Archivo General de Simancas)

«[…] the said Canarians could not live without coming to our reigns of Castile and Leon to trade […]«

(Letter of Calatayud, 30th May 1481)

INVITED AUTHORESS: CECILIA CÁCERES JUAN

This 30th of May, «Day of the Canaries», we celebrate the fact that Canarians did indeed live and thrive without trading with Castile. They live and will live.

In a single sentence from the so-called Pact or Letter of Calatayud, signed by the Catholic Monarchs and an anonymous guanarteme –Grandcanarian chieftain– the 30th of May 1481, the downfall of autarchy and dismantling of the polities that sustained the life and society of the ancient Canarians is laid bare.

This short article will examine the effects of the pact on Canarian identity through a subjective analysis of relevant documents and in relation to the theme and ethos of the above quoted sentence. To contextualize this extract, we should consider certain misconceptions regarding the pact, such as the belief that this pact gave origin to the Day of the Canaries, or “Día de Canarias”.

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Tanausu: Benahoare's Hero

Chronicles, Indigenous Culture, Public Documents, Ethnography, Histories, , , , , , ,

«Tanausú, Tierra y Nobleza» (Tanausu, Land & Nobility) (2016), an idealized picture embellishing the facade of Casa de la Cultura Braulio Martín Hernández in El Paso (La Palma), a work by Lanzarote-born muralist Matías Mata, nicknamed Sabotaje al Montaje (source: PROYECTO TARHA).

For La Palma, our Benahoare, nowadays in such a need of strength and courage.

In the traditional historical memory of the Canaries, individuals belonging to the precolonial island societies who faced the European Conquest with the technological and numerical disadvantage inherent to their way of life, environment, material resources and demographics who sometimes chose to sacrifice their own lives rather than surrender are bestowed the role of true people’s heroes regardless of whether the referred subjects enjoyed any sort of privileged social status.

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