The European in Latin America: Conquest and Gender Impact
This testament to women’s resilience in the face of extreme brutality should not overshadow the tragedies inflicted on so many lives.
Europe’s fateful encounter with the Americas in the late fifteenth century reshaped both continents in ways the early explorers could never have foreseen. What began as a search for new trade routes and valuable commodities quickly escalated into invasions, enslavements, and mass migrations that permanently altered global history. In this post, we will examine how Europe’s drive for power and wealth forged new colonial societies—often through extraordinary brutality—and how the resulting cultural and racial hierarchies affected everyone, especially Indigenous and African women.
Their stories have often been overshadowed by tales of conquistadores, explorers, or the ambitions of European crowns. Yet, these women navigated a world struck by conquest, disease, forced labor, and the emergence of brutal plantation economies—and they left indelible marks on Latin American history and culture.
The Quest for New Routes and the “Discovery” of the Americas
In the late fifteenth century, European powers—most notably Spain and Portugal—sought maritime routes to Asia, hoping for direct access to the lucrative spice trade and new sources of precious metals. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese captain sailing in the service of the Spanish Crown, unintentionally landed in the Bahamas in 1492, believing he had reached islands near Asia. He would die insisting he had discovered a western gateway to the East Indies.
Yet these lands were hardly vacant. Throughout the Americas, tens of millions of Indigenous peoples lived in culturally rich societies, from the Caribbean islands to the high Andes and the dense Amazon. The Nahuatl-speaking groups in central Mexico (collectively known as the Aztec or Mexica) thrived in grand urban centers like Tenochtitlan. The Incas ruled a massive empire in the Andes, connected by intricate road systems. In the Caribbean islands, communities such as the Arawak, Taino, and Carib lived in smaller settlements. Many of these groups cultivated sophisticated agricultural systems—terracing, irrigation, and slash-and-burn—and their men and women played complementary roles in farming, fishing, hunting, and artisan crafts.
European chroniclers often depicted Indigenous peoples in simplistic, prejudiced ways, justifying their later oppression. Some described the Caribs, for instance, as “cannibals,” or portrayed the men as universally violent and the women as entirely subordinate. Most of the written records from the early period come from the conquerors or the clergy who accompanied them, meaning that much of our understanding of Indigenous life is refracted through a lens aimed at rationalizing conquest.
Early Encounters: Columbus’s Violent Legacy
Christopher Columbus was motivated by a blend of fervent religious piety, personal ambition, and a promise of wealth. Though he proclaimed a divine mandate—to spread Christianity and eventually fund a crusade against Islam—his methods on the islands he “claimed” for Spain left a trail of brutality.
On his first voyage, he noted the Arawak’s generosity: they offered food, cotton, and small gold ornaments without hesitation. Yet his overwhelming fixation on gold drove him to abduct Native men and women when they could not guide him to larger sources of the precious metal. Columbus established Spain’s first outpost in the Caribbean and left his sailors there when he returned to Europe. Those men quickly exploited the local population, using violence and sexual coercion. By the time Columbus came back with a larger expedition, he found the island in turmoil, and he responded to Indigenous resistance with ever more ruthless measures.
Desperate to justify his pledges of wealth to the Spanish monarchs, Columbus intensified slave-taking. Entire communities of Arawak and other islanders were forced onto ships to be sold in Europe, with many dying en route. Those who remained behind were compelled to extract impossible quantities of gold. When they failed, the Spanish cut off their hands or unleashed attack dogs. Terrified and decimated by disease, many Indigenous communities resorted to mass suicide and infanticide rather than endure enslavement. Within decades, the Arawak (also known as Taino) of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands were nearly wiped out.
Conquistadores in the Mainland: Mexico and Peru Fall
The Aztec Empire and Malintzin’s Role
In 1519, Hernán Cortés led a small Spanish force from Cuba to the coast of Mexico. His interest was sparked by tales of gold in the Aztec Empire. Cortés quickly forged alliances with local groups subjugated by the Aztec, who were eager to throw off Aztec dominion. One of his greatest assets was Malintzin (La Malinche), an enslaved Indigenous woman given to the Spaniards in the Yucatán. She was fluent in both Maya and Nahuatl and quickly learned Spanish, becoming Cortés’s indispensable interpreter.
Malintzin’s role, caught between the language of Aztec nobility and Spanish conquest, turned her into a symbolic figure. During Cortés’s initial meeting with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the stunning metropolis of Tenochtitlan, Malintzin ensured that her Spanish master understood not just the words but the deeper cultural nuances of every exchange. She often took the initiative in negotiations, wielding authority in unseen ways. To the Indigenous peoples, she was the face and voice of the foreigners. Later, Mexican nationalist sentiment would vilify her for “betraying” her own people, though in her day she was a woman trying to survive a system of war, enslavement, and exploitation.
Moctezuma initially welcomed the Spaniards, offering gold and hoping they would leave. Instead, Cortés imprisoned him and eventually launched a full-scale occupation. The Spaniards’ superior weaponry, steel, horses, and, above all, the waves of smallpox they brought, decimated the Aztec population. While alliances with vassal groups helped Cortés’s army swell into the tens of thousands, disease crippled Aztec resistance more effectively than swords. By 1521, Tenochtitlan fell in a brutal siege.
Conquest of the Inca
Francisco Pizarro followed a similar pattern in Peru. The Inca Empire was vast, well-organized, and linked by advanced roads; but a civil war of succession had weakened it, and smallpox had already begun spreading there, carried by traders from Mesoamerica. Pizarro used deception and alliances, famously capturing the Inca Emperor Atahualpa in an ambush and then extorting a ransom in gold before killing him. Although internal Spanish rivalries flared—Pizarro and his onetime ally Diego de Almagro ended up fighting each other—the Spaniards ultimately seized Peru’s mineral riches, especially silver from the Potosí mines (in modern-day Bolivia).
Throughout these conquests, Indigenous women were largely voiceless in Spanish records. Conquistadores did not hesitate to seize them for sexual exploitation or to staff new colonial households. Historians know that large swaths of Indigenous peoples were coerced into forced labor (encomienda or repartimiento), a system that theoretically protected their souls by Christianizing them but in practice resembled slavery. Indigenous societies, already battered by epidemics, were further destabilized by forced tribute, debt servitude, and the violent destruction of their religious and political structures.
Disease, Depopulation, and the Birth of Racial Hierarchies
Europeans introduced smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases to which Indigenous Americans had no immunity. Mortality rates soared to catastrophic levels. By mid-sixteenth century, perhaps 90 percent of Mesoamerica’s population—originally around 25 million—had been wiped out. Some scholars estimate that as many as 80 million Indigenous people lived in the Americas in 1500, reduced to around 10 million by 1550.
This precipitous decline inspired the Spanish Crown and colonial planters to bring in new labor from Africa. Clerics like Bartolomé de las Casas, who was horrified by the treatment of Indigenous peoples, ironically encouraged the transatlantic slave trade as a “solution” to the labor problem. Over centuries, millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Caribbean and to mainland colonies like Brazil.
The slave system underpinned the plantation economies of the Caribbean (sugar, coffee) and parts of Central and South America. Enslaved Africans joined Indigenous peoples in sugar mills (engenhos in Brazil), tobacco plantations, and gold and silver mines. From this point forward, societies in the Americas were stratified by a stark color hierarchy: white Spaniards and Portuguese at the top, Indigenous and black populations at the bottom, and people of mixed ancestry—mestizo/mestiza (Indigenous/white), mulatto/mulatta (black/white), zambo/zamba (black/Indigenous)—occupying shifting positions in between.
Brutality of Forced Labor and the Role of Women in Slavery
Indigenous Enslavement and Repartimiento
Under the encomienda system, Spanish “trustees” claimed the right to Indigenous labor in exchange for providing religious instruction and “protection.” In reality, it amounted to endless servitude. Indigenous men were forced into mines, carrying heavy loads and working in dangerous tunnels. Women often performed agricultural and domestic tasks, and were subject to sexual coercion. In many communities, birth rates plummeted; the combination of malnutrition, exhaustion, brutality, and epidemic disease made life expectancy shockingly low.
When Indigenous groups rebelled or fled, colonists sold them into outright slavery. Indian slavery was officially banned in Spanish colonies after the mid-sixteenth century, but the laws were circumvented by using forced labor as a “punishment” for supposed rebellions. Meanwhile, epidemics and forced relocations continued to ravage the population.
The African Slave Trade and Plantation Economies
Portugal soon turned Brazil into a sugar powerhouse, importing Africans in vast numbers to satisfy the labor demands. Similar transformations occurred under Spanish rule in Cuba, Hispaniola, and other Caribbean islands. By the eighteenth century, Africans and their descendants dominated the populations of many Caribbean colonies.
Labor in sugar cane fields and mills was notorious: grueling hours cutting cane, followed by near-constant feeding of the furnaces and boiling vats. Men often did the heaviest mechanical tasks in the sugar mill (the boiling house, for example), while women were forced to perform relentless field work, planting and weeding under the tropical sun well into advanced pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, birth rates were low. Many enslaved women, desperate to avoid bringing children into bondage, resorted to abortion or infanticide—tragedies that highlight the utter despair bred by plantation conditions.
Wherever African slavery was practiced—in Portuguese Brazil, the Spanish Main, or the British and French islands—owners justified their violence by casting enslaved people as lesser beings, “naturally” fit for servitude. Dehumanizing assumptions about black women as “lustful” and “strong” encouraged sexual exploitation by white owners. The diaries of planters frequently mention the practice of branding enslaved people, floggings for minor infractions, and forced breeding to ensure new supplies of enslaved labor once the transatlantic trade became contested.
The Complex Stratifications of Colonial Society
Racial Mixing and New Social Identities
Although Spanish and Portuguese crowns initially encouraged “pure” marriages among Europeans, the reality on colonial frontiers was that far fewer white women migrated. Many white men took Indigenous or African concubines, producing a spectrum of mixed-race offspring. Terms like mestizo (white/Indigenous), mulatto (white/black), and zambo (Indigenous/black) sprang up to categorize these children in ever more specific “casta” hierarchies.
In the early years, some conquistadores gave their mestizo children official recognition, especially if the mother was of noble lineage. But as time went on, deeply entrenched racism and class anxieties arose. Pure white ancestry (limpieza de sangre) became the gold standard, not only for holding higher office but also for securing financial loans, marriage prospects, and church positions. European-born Spaniards (peninsulares) claimed superiority over American-born Spaniards (Creoles), even though both groups were considered “white.”
Lives of White Women in the Colonies
Wealthy Spanish or Portuguese women generally lived in urban centers, in large homes or palaces with multiple Indigenous, African, or mixed-race servants. They were subject to patriarchal laws: daughters under paternal authority, wives under husbands, and widows sometimes controlling property only if no male heir was available. Some families sponsored beaterios or convents for daughters who did not marry.
Convent life could be unexpectedly expansive for certain women of means. They could study Latin to follow daily mass, manage complex convent finances, and sometimes write religious or even secular poetry. Yet many convents required sizable dowries, restricting entry to upper-class women of “pure” ancestry. Beaterios, less formal communal houses, served poorer women, who took simple vows of chastity and enclosure without large dowries. Still, the Church and colonial authorities kept tight control.
In Portuguese Brazil, similar patterns emerged. Elite women, often lacking formal education, led highly restricted lives, rarely leaving the house except for major church events. Marriages were carefully arranged with extensive dowries, and families might prefer to send daughters to convents in Portugal if no suitable colonial husband could be found. Yet there, too, certain widows ran sugar estates, cattle ranches, or gold mines once their husbands died. Women in these positions learned accounting, negotiated business deals, and even went to court to protect their property or their children’s inheritances.
The Status of Free Women of Color
Some black or mixed-race women who were freed from slavery (often manumitted in an owner’s will or by pooling resources to buy their freedom) found ways to prosper in colonial cities. They ran shops, sold produce in markets, and built small fortunes. A number of these “free colored” women even owned slaves themselves, which underscores the pervasive nature of the system: one might gain a modicum of power but, in doing so, perpetuate the same injustice that had once enslaved them.
Still, prejudices abounded. Many free or enslaved women of color worked as domestics or nurses. White women often unleashed violence upon black or Indigenous servants, motivated by envy, racism, or the suspicion that these women were having affairs with husbands. A white mistress might punish enslaved women for “insolence” or alleged “laziness,” actions that reflect how colonial patriarchy manipulated all women—yet conferred relative power on white women via racial dominance.
The Church, Misogyny, and Women’s Resistance
Religious Imperialism and the Destruction of Native Beliefs
Catholic missionaries saw their mission in stark, moralistic terms: Indigenous peoples were to be saved from “paganism.” Priests arrived in large numbers, particularly in populous regions like Mexico and Peru. Some showed empathy, writing about Spanish atrocities and lamenting forced labor. More often, the Church tolerated or even encouraged brutal methods.
Monasteries, cathedrals, and missions rose atop razed Indigenous temples. Christian saints replaced native gods. Priests imposed confessions, pressured entire communities to attend mass, and forbade “idolatrous” customs. Through inquisitions, the Church persecuted not just those of Jewish or Muslim origins but also women practicing “witchcraft” or unorthodox mysticism. Women’s healing knowledge, in particular, fell under suspicion if it was perceived to have any trace of Indigenous or African ritual.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: A Beacon of Female Learning
In seventeenth-century Mexico, one extraordinary nun dared to pursue knowledge. Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1649–1695), later known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-taught child prodigy who learned Latin and other subjects in secret. When she was brought to the viceregal court, her brilliance shone in debates on theology, mathematics, and poetry. Entering a convent to continue her studies and religious life, she became celebrated for her writings, which ranged from sonnets about human love (often used as metaphors for divine love) to theological commentary.
However, Sor Juana’s intellectual pursuits clashed with the Church’s entrenched misogyny. A bishop published a letter she had written criticizing a well-known Jesuit sermon, appending to it his own admonition that women refrain from “earthly” learning. In her famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea, Sor Juana defended women’s right to study, claiming that knowledge deepened faith. This stance, in the eyes of the archbishop and other officials, was heretical enough to isolate her. Eventually, under pressure, she sold her beloved library and devoted herself to acts of extreme penance. When an epidemic struck her convent, she cared for the sick nuns, contracted the disease, and died.
Sor Juana’s story epitomizes both the possibilities and perils of women’s learning in colonial society. Her flame of intellectual independence was snuffed out by a system that considered theological study the exclusive domain of men. Nevertheless, her poetry and her defense of the female intellect live on as landmarks in Hispanic literature.
Resistance, Revolts, and the Road to Abolition
Despite the overwhelming might of the colonial system, resistance emerged continuously. Indigenous communities sometimes fled into inaccessible mountains and forests to escape forced labor; others launched rebellions, though many were crushed by Spanish and Portuguese troops. In the Andes, Micaela Bastidas, wife of the rebel leader Tupac Amaru II, took on a vital leadership role during the eighteenth-century uprising against colonial rule.
Among the enslaved African population, collective rebellions were frequent in the Caribbean, Brazil, and other regions. Maroon communities—formed by escaped slaves—flourished in places like the Jamaican mountains and the dense jungles of Suriname. Women played key roles in these escapes and uprisings, caring for children, transmitting African languages and rituals, and upholding communal life in the face of relentless violence.
Plantation owners gradually realized that fear-based, extremely brutal methods diminished productivity. By the late eighteenth century, the idea of “reforming” slavery gained traction in some colonial capitals. Europeans who profited from industry (as opposed to plantation agriculture) also began to argue that the slave trade hindered Africa’s potential as a trading partner. Legislation aimed at “ameliorating” slavery called for better care of pregnant women and limited hours in the fields, but many planters simply disregarded or circumvented such rules.
In British colonies, an ideological tide of abolitionism rose in the early nineteenth century. Britain ended its transatlantic slave trade in 1807, though slavery itself persisted in most colonies until the 1830s. In Spanish and Portuguese domains, the process was slower, continuing well into the late nineteenth century in places like Cuba and Brazil. The entire hemisphere was in the midst of revolutions and independence movements, some of which hinged upon the tension between colonial powers, enslaved or Indigenous populations, and creole elites.
Colonial Legacies
The colonial era bequeathed Latin America a complicated mosaic of cultures, languages, and identities. Wealth was concentrated among European-born or locally born whites and, to a lesser extent, among a small but influential mixed-race elite. The majority population—Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and their mixed descendants—remained subordinated.
Women across all strata faced patriarchal restraints. White women from elite families lived in cloistered comfort but had scant authority, aside from controlling property as widows or nuns. Poor white women performed menial labor under the constant threat of “losing dignity,” while Indigenous and black women often bore the heaviest burdens of forced labor, domestic service, and sexual exploitation. Yet these women found ways to resist and adapt:
- Market Women and Vendors: In cities like Mexico City, Lima, and Salvador da Bahia, countless Indigenous or African-descent women sold goods in markets, forging networks that gave them some autonomy.
- Religious Devotees and Beatas: Women formed communal houses or beaterios that allowed them to support each other, albeit within the strict confines imposed by male confessor-priests.
- Community Builders: Indigenous women who survived the decimation of their villages sustained cultural practices, re-created family networks, and sometimes turned to Christian syncretism—blending Catholic saints with native rituals.
- Healers and Midwives: Despite accusations of witchcraft, women with knowledge of herbal medicine remained indispensable in communities short on European doctors. Their skills were quietly passed down across generations.
- Literary Figures and Artists: A handful of privileged women—Sor Juana is emblematic—found pockets of freedom in convents or supportive circles, producing scholarship, poetry, or music.
By the onset of the nineteenth century, new independence movements across Spanish and Portuguese colonies aspired to cast off European rule. However, most of these new states preserved or quickly recreated hierarchies that favored white or near-white elites. Women’s position still hinged on patriarchal norms, though some new legal codes began to expand property rights or at least formalize inheritance rules.
Conclusion
Europe’s invasion of the Americas was far more than an exploration; it was an exercise in acquisition. The ensuing centuries of colonial rule built a society undergirded by war, epidemic disease, slavery, and relentless subordination of Indigenous and African peoples. Within these oppressive frameworks, women of all backgrounds faced additional layers of marginalization. White women were confined by rigid social and religious norms that prized their “purity” while denying them formal power. Indigenous women, decimated by forced labor and disease, juggled communal survival with domestic burdens. African women, uprooted from their homelands, toiled on plantations or in urban households under the constant threat of physical and sexual violence.
And yet, women were neither mere victims nor invisible. They preserved languages, kept cultural and spiritual traditions alive, and built new hybrid customs in religion, cuisine, and the arts. In the countryside, Andean and Mesoamerican communities found innovative ways to adapt. In cities, free women of color carved out entrepreneurial niches, sometimes amassing enough capital to own property. Wealthy white widows controlled large estates or sugar mills. Nuns in colonial convents mastered intricate financial management, while some (like Sor Juana) achieved literary renown.
This testament to women’s resilience in the face of extreme brutality should not overshadow the tragedies inflicted on so many lives. The colonial experience in Latin America remains one of history’s most significant and stark examples of how race, conquest, and gender norms can form interlocking systems of oppression. It also shows that even under such systems, the human drive toward autonomy, creativity, and community-building endures.
Today, Latin American societies continue to grapple with the deep scars left by centuries of exploitation and forced labor, and by the patriarchy that shaped colonial governments, churches, and economies. Yet the very complexities of those struggles—revealed in the narratives of Indigenous, African, and Creole women—offer a fuller understanding of a region made up of countless cultural threads woven together, sometimes painfully, into the vibrant tapestry we see now. The stories of these women challenge the simplified heroic narratives of conquest and remind us that the forging of the “New World” was a process marked both by barbarism and by the perseverance of its most marginalized inhabitants.
Sophie
Sophie
Sophie
Sophie
