A Guanche couple, indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands.
The Top Layers of Family History
To trace a Latin American family tree is to be an archaeologist digging through layers of violence and trauma. Underneath the top layer, the rootless diaspora of me and my children, is my father's generation, which dealt with the pain of seven decades of Colombian civil war, narco-violence, and exile. The next layer down is my grandparents' generation, which survived the frightening era of La Violencia, and then my great-grandparents' generation, scarred by the futile bloodshed of La Guerra de Mil Días. Dig deeper, and there are the constant civil wars of 19th century Colombia, then the war for independence from Spain.
The Layer of Colonial Rule
Beneath it all is the thick layer of colonial oppression and exploitation, and rigid racial caste. Through the technological advancement of DNA testing and the historical preserve of ignorance that is Spanish Inquisition documents, I happened to be able to trace my grandmother's family back to the Herrera Leiva family of Cartagena, Colombia. This elite white cartagenera family was founded by the Spaniard Lázaro de Herrera Leiva (1663-c.1745), a career military man who was first stationed in Flanders in 1682 and probably fought the troops of Louis XIV in the War of the Reunions (1683-1684) and the Nine Years' War (1688-1697). He then immigrated to Cartagena in 1699 and lived long enough to to help Cartagena defeat an English naval siege in 1741 (read more about the failed siege here, here, and here).
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| The coat of arms of the Conde de Santa Cruz de la Torre |
Lázaro married the daughter of another elite military man, Juan Toribio de la Torre y López, who was noted for his attacking (or as documents called it, "pacifying") the Chimila Indians of northeastern Colombia. Despite Juan Toribio's efforts, the Chimila people resisted the Spanish and mestizo invaders of their land well into the 20th century (read more about the Chimila here and here).
At the end of his long career of killing indigenous people, Juan Toribio de la Torre y López was awarded the title of Conde de Santa Cruz de la Torre from King Carlos II of Spain in 1690. As colonial subjects paid a pretty patacón to join the Spanish nobility, the Spanish crown would create at least four counts and six marquises by 1791 in the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (the colonial name of Colombia).
Given that the Spanish nobility was the apex of the Latin American racial caste system, the few colonial subjects who paid their way in had to provide extensive documentation on their ancestry to prove their "purity of blood." So Juan Toribio de la Torre's genealogy digs down to another layer, the time of the conquistadors.
The Layer of Conquistadors
I have not seen Juan Toribio de la Torre's petition describing his ancestry, but the Spanish genealogist Julio Hardisson y Pizarroso wrote about it. Juan Toribio said his maternal grandfather, Antonio López de Francia, was descended from the conquerors of the Canary Islands, and his maternal great-grandfather Pedro Alvarez Perdomo, had military service first in the Canary Islands and then Colombia, where he died battling Indians. He also claimed Pedro Alvarez Perdomo was a "close relative" of the Conde de la Gomera, one of the warlord-landowners of the Canary Islands.
Historians talk a lot about how the Spaniards who first conquered and subjected the Americas often began their military careers in the Reconquista of Muslim-controlled Spain, or Spain's Italian Wars. The Iberian conquest of the Canary Islands is less often discussed, but it was an important "dress rehearsal," as historian Patrick Wyman calls it, several generations before the Caribbean and Latin American genocide and colonization. A long-isolated people with Stone Age technology attempted to defend their land, but could not defeat more advanced European technology and foreigners' diseases. As each island fell under Castilian control, Europeans took control of vast fiefdoms of land and enslaved the indigenous people, creating a "frontier" society that raised cash crops and ruled by brute force. Bartolomé de las Casas would have recognized a lot of the same abuses of power in the Canary Islands that he witnessed in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America a century later.
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| Page from "Le canarien," an account of the first French-Iberian invasion of the Canary Islands in 1402-1404. |
The nearly century-long conquest of the Canary Islands is too broad a subject for this one breezy blog post. For now, just keep in mind that Juan Toribio de la Torre's pride in descending from invaders of the Canary Islands was likely shared by other colonial subjects in Nueva Granada. For example, the last independent Canarian island of Tenerife surrendered in 1496 to a force led by Alfonso Fernández de Lugo. Alfonso's son, Pedro Fernández de Lugo, became the governor of Santa Marta, Colombia in 1535 and appointed Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada to lead the expedition that invaded the Andean center of Colombia and founded the colonial city of Bogotá.
One book that helped me begin to understand medieval Iberian rule in the northern Atlantic is "Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492" by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. But this book leaves out an important voice: the Guanches, the indigenous people of the Canary Islands.
The Layer of the Guanche
Canary birds do come from the Canary Islands, but the name likely comes from the Latin "Canariae Insulae," or "Islands of the Dogs," as the Romans noted the presence of many "dogs of very large size." Long before Romans or Phoenicians stopped by the islands to trade, the ancestors of the Guanches first navigated from northern Africa to the islands around 1000 BC. "Guanches" was how the Spanish wrote down "guanchinet," which meant "person (guan) from Tenerife (Chinet)" in an indigenous language that belonged to the larger North African Berber language family.
I will briefly focus on the island of Titerogakat, which the Genoese later renamed Lanzarote. The indigenous people of this island were called the Majos. Archaeologists have found clay idols, formerly inhabited caves, and the stone ruins of Zonzamas, where the island's rulers lived. No ethnographers studied the Guanche, so they are described as "mysterious" because so much of their knowledge is lost.
In reality, after the Genoese first reached Lanzarote in the 1310s, slaving expeditions led by Iberians and Italians regularly targeted the Guanches. King Guadarfía was said to have escaped slavers six times before the Castilian invasion of Lanzarote in 1402.
The 1402 expedition set out to occupy Canarian land, rather than trade or enslave people. King Enrique III of Castilla y León bankrolled the efforts, but the leader was French: Jean de Béthencourt (c.1362-1425), a minor nobleman from Normandy, France. Béthencourt's men created and broke a peace treaty with the Majos within a few months. Chroniclers estimate that there were only 200 Majo warriors on Lanzarote at the time, but King Guadarfía managed to lead armed resistance for over a year. In January 1404 Guadarfía finally surrendered, was baptized and took the new name "Luis de Guadarfrá." Jean de Béthencourt became the first European "king" of Lanzarote.
When Jean de Béthencourt returned to France in 1406, he left his nephew Maciot de Béthencourt (c.1390-c.1456) as the "king" of the Canary Islands. Maciot de Béthencourt became notorious for his cruelty, and soon faced increasing challenges to his rule. Maciot sold the title of "king of Canary Islands" in 1418, and then stayed on as a governor of Lanzarote until he sold the island to Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator in 1448.
Teguise, a daughter of King Guadarfía, became the concubine of Maciot de Béthencourt. Their daughter, Inés Margarita de Béthencourt (c.1415-c.1480), married a French colonizer, Jean Arriete Prud'homme, and they became the founders of the Canarian Perdomo family. A great-great-niece of Jean de Béthencourt, Inés Peraza de las Casas, who had inherited claims to rule over the Canary Islands, married Diego García de Herrera y Ayala (1417-1485), who became the first Conde de Gomera. These are the Canarian ancestors that genealogists guess are linked to Pedro Alvarez Perdomo, the great-grandfather of the cartagenero count, Juan Toribio de la Torre.
This hypothetical medieval European family tree stretches further back from Maciot de Béthencourt. Assuming that Jean de Béthencourt's brother Regnault is the father of Maciot, then Maciot descended from a patrilineal line of minor Norman nobles, dating back to his 5th-great-grandfather in the 1200s. It's unknown if Maciot was illegitimate or legitimate, but Regnault de Béthencourt's mother-in-law, Marguerite de Châtillon-Porcean, would be a "gateway ancestor" to most of the royal houses of Europe. Marguerite's ancestors include many notable names — Eleanor of Aquitaine, Frederick Barbarossa, El Cid, William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne — as well as apocryphal ancestors like Atilla the Hun, Sigrid the Haughty, and Woden the All-Father. Her family tree also includes hundreds of vicious warlords, like Thibaut V, Count of Blois, who organized the first blood libel in continental Europe in 1171 and had at least 30 Jews burned at the stake. Almost everyone of European descent has genealogical ties to medieval royal warlords, but only a small portion can trace that connection on paper.
The Perdomo and Béthencourt surnames also spread through enslaved Guanches receiving their owners' surnames at their baptisms. Both European and Guanche bloodlines carried the names of Perdomo and all the variations of Béthencourt (Bettencourt, Betancourt, Betancur, etc.) throughout the Canary Islands and then Latin America, as testimony to a nearly forgotten conquest and genocide.
There is a 21st century postscript to this story, as the website MyTrueAncestry.com lets users compare their DNA with DNA from people's remains at archaeological sites. One of the "DNA Spotlight" groups that I matched with is the Guanche. While the "Genetic Distance" does not indicate direct descent from the Guanche, it's interesting that I am a closer match to the Guanche samples than 98% of MyTrueAncestry users. Perhaps we share some common but distant North African ancestry.
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| MyTrueAncestry's comparison of my DNA with Guanche DNA. |
Canarians famously speak through whistles and echoes, in their unique Silbo Gomero language. The Canarian clash of colonizer and colonized echoes through centuries, in the struggles of distant descendants more than 600 years later.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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