SPANISH CONQUEST
Spanish colonizers first encountered the bay of Cartagena in 1502, though it was not until 1533 that a permanent settlement was established. Pedro de Heredia, the city's founder, named the site and bay after Cartagena in Spain, adding "de Indias" (of the Indies) for its location in the Americas. Heredia and his men soon found gold and wrote back to King Carlos I of Spain requesting permission to import African slaves to the area to aid in searching for and extracting the precious metal (see Slavery in Latin America). By 1545 Cartagena de Indias was developing into a prosperous port town, populated mainly by Spaniards who had been attracted by reports of gold. From 1580 to 1630 gold mines were exploited in the inland towns of Zaragoza, Cáceres, and Remedios, which were accessible from Cartagena by river (see also Mining in Latin America). The mines extended the city's area of influence, determining much of its sociocultural and economic development. As Indian labor was decimated by disease and overwork, demand for black slaves increased. A 1600 census calculated that 300 Spaniards and some 3000 black slaves were living in the city and surrounding areas.

MAROONS AND PIRATES
The city's location as a gateway to South America, its connection with the Caribbean, and the wealth produced from gold mining, trade, and the slave market prompted two important and ongoing events that marked its history from the onset. First, maroonage became a common practice, from the time of the early slaves brought by de Heredia until the abolition of slavery. Escaped slaves, or cimarrones, as reflected in legends surrounding maroon leader Benkos Biohó, constantly had to defend their palenques (maroon settlements; see Palenque de San Basilio) from the military expeditions that were sent with orders to recapture or kill them. When caught, palenqueros were severely punished, often with death. They retaliated, however, by attacking the city's inhabitants and surrounding haciendas as well as the trade ships that traveled up the neighboring Magdalena River. The war against the palenques intensified dramatically during the 18th century. Though many palenques were destroyed, or their inhabitants eventually mixed in with the rest of the population, San Basilio remains today a symbol of resistance and freedom.

Second, Cartagena's inhabitants also lived under constant fear of foreign attacks, which began early on. French and British buccaneers ravaged the city in 1544, 1549, and 1568. The success of the European attacks was due in part to the Europeans' use of local cimarrones and free blacks who served as guides. Most notoriously, Sir Francis Drake plundered the city in 1585 with his troops of maroons from neighboring Panama. Though the Spaniards freed some slaves in order to help defend the city, many escaped and joined Drake's forces in the looting and fighting and then left with the English troops. Therefore, the fear that cimarrones would join pirate or other maroon rebels to take over the city carried into the 17th century. In 1741 England, determined to weaken Spain's dominion over the region, sent Adm. Edward Vernon to capture Cartagena. Vernon led 29,000 men recruited from settlers of Virginia and Maryland, indentured servants from Pennsylvania, British soldiers, and slaves and free blacks from Jamaica. The British troops lost the battle against the also racially mixed army of Cartageneros.

In sum, maroonage and attacks from the French and English powers looking to dominate the Caribbean determined the defensive character of the city. Between 1560 and 1780, military forts and thick stone fortification walls (still standing) were built with slave labor to surround and protect the city. In addition, Cartagena de Indias had to create and maintain a system of military defense from its early years. Blacks, slave and free, as well as members of the castes (formally instituted racial categories for people of mixed descent) gradually became incorporated into the troops. In 1619 an all-black artillery company was formed for the defense of the city, and by the mid-18th century there were several color-segregated platoons. By the time Cartagena was attacked by Admiral Vernon in 1741 the city had an army of 3000 men; four of the companies were composed of mulattoes and Indians, two of blacks, and one of quadroons (persons with allegedly one quarter African blood).

COLONIAL LIFE
By the 17th century Cartagena de Indias had become one of the most important commercial holdings in Spanish America, second only to Mexico City (see Mexico). Merchants from other cities in the New Granada and elsewhere (Panama, Peru, Trinidad, Jamaica, Havana, Santo Domingo, Veracruz, and Honduras) traveled to Cartagena to buy wine, oil, clothes, steel, books, fabrics, and other locally produced or imported goods as well as slaves.

This fluctuation of merchants, sailors, European immigrants, and slaves into Cartagena accelerated its process of mestizaje (miscegenation among Europeans, Creoles, Africans, and indigenous people). Intense intermixing produced a complex system of social stratification based on color and lineage. The elite class was comprised of Europeans and Creoles (native-born whites) who were merchants, encomenderos (owners of lands and Indians; see Colonial Latin America), cattle ranchers, priests, or part of the colonial bureaucracy. They lived or carried out their business inside the fortress walls of the city and in the nearby haciendas. Poor white Creoles usually worked as artisans and lived out of the walled city in the neighborhood of Getsemaní. Members of the castas worked as writers, small merchants, doctors, barbers, and teachers, and lived in the less wealthy sector of the walled city or in Getsemaní.

Slaves and free blacks were at the lowest and most disadvantaged position in the social pyramid. When African slaves initially arrived, they were placed in one of 24 holding stations in the city and were cured, classified, baptized, and sold for local or foreign use. Domestic slaves, male and female, lived and worked in the mansions of the rich in the walled city doing a variety of tasks and were a symbol of prestige for their masters. Some female slaves were also put to work as street vendors or in prostitution, providing a stipend for their masters. Some more privileged female slaves and free black women were able to run small stands where they would sell bread and sweets, or they would administer pulperías (small stores that sold liquor and staples). Most male slaves worked outside the city in agriculture, cattle ranching, sugar production, mining, and the reparation of ships. Many male slaves were also leased out by their owners on a temporary basis to work in the building of the fortress and walls, hospitals, jails, convents, and mansions.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
In unpredictable ways, the Roman Catholic Church either helped preserve or destroy the heritage of African culture that slaves brought with them to Cartagena. While carrying out the evangelization mission that was one of the first steps to acculturation in the New World, the Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval (1576-1652) devised a complex system of classification and description of Africans arriving in the port city which he applied and documented for more than 40 years. Through trained slave translators, he was able to identify many nations and languages. He also annotated the physical characteristics, skin coloring, and tribal scar markings of each individual he baptized. In this manner, though Sandoval was part of the colonizing mission, he indirectly became the first ethnologist of Africans in the Americas and left a unique and interesting document that provides insights on the nascent history of blacks in Cartagena and the New World (see Colonial Critics of Slavery).

The Church unknowingly helped to provide a sanctuary for African culture through the creation and promotion of cabildos (also known as cofradías; see also Cultural and Political Organizations in Latin America) which blacks were encouraged to join. Cabildos were established as mutual aid societies created in the hope of furthering control and preventing maroonage and rebellion. In the cabildos slaves were allowed to meet among themselves, use their native languages, and perform their music, dance, and religious celebrations. Several cabildos in Cartagena identified with their African origins and thus took names such as Arará, Angola, Mandinks, Mina, and Carabalí, among others. In many cases drum beats would convoke members and cabildos would compete among themselves for the most alluring rhythms. As Peter Wade's research points out, the cabildos were allowed to participate in the street celebrations of Cartagena's Virgin of la Candelaria, and perform dances still existing today and identified as bundes, mapalés, currulaos, bullerengue, gaita, and porros (see Cumbia). Not surprisingly, cabildo members often used meetings as a way to instigate rebellion and plan escapes. When Church officials began to understand the link between music and religious resistance, instruments were confiscated and performers punished. Even the priest Pedro Claver, remembered as the foremost protector of slaves (see Colonial Critics of Slavery), was a notable persecutor of drums and would confiscate whatever instrument he could find when public dances took place. In the 1730s the bishop of Cartagena prohibited the "sinful" street celebrations.

One of the most feared institutions of the Roman Catholic Church was the Spanish Inquisition. This tribunal was in charge of trying heretics of the Catholic faith, and in so doing it also persecuted African-derived forms of cultural and religious expression. Established in Cartagena in 1610, the Inquisition had jurisdiction over the New Kingdom of Granada as well as Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Cuba. Documents from the trials of the Inquisition show that black women were often identified as subversive brujas (witches). These women were believed to be part of clandestine groups, known as juntas, that shared ethnobotanical, medicinal, and magical-religious knowledge among them. Their abilities as healers and witches became well known and were appreciated by Cartagena's aristocracy and even the inquisitors themselves, who often called upon them for medical cures and ailments. As scholar Michael Taussig has pointed out, belief in witchcraft was a militant form of denying Christian faith and a way of resisting the oppressors' religion and culture (see also Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft in the Americas: An Interpretation). When they were publicly denounced, the Inquisition tried presumed witches and sorcerers as worshipers of the devil and a threat to Roman Catholic beliefs, and often severely punished them.

CARTAGENA TODAY
Cartagena is now a bustling tourist spot and hosts a major petrochemical complex. It continues to be an important port for Colombia and has preserved its majestic colonial architecture. However, as scholar Joel Streicker has observed, the social divisions of this city of 1 million have marked racial connotations even though 90 percent of the population is to some extent of African descent. Blancos (whites) - understood to mean people of the dominant, wealthy class though not necessarily light-skinned - have left the walled city for the modern high-rise buildings of the nearby Bocagrande Peninsula, where much of middle- and upper-class Colombian and foreign tourism also concentrates. Negros (blacks) are understood to be people of the lowest class, considered by the better off as having little or no "culture" (understood as manners) and as being lazy, rowdy, and potentially dangerous. They generally live in the slums and shantytowns around the city and work in the factories or service sector. At the bottom of the pyramid stand the palenqueros, direct descendants of runaway slaves, who continue to live in their communities in poverty and neglect, as they have for almost 500 years. The palenqueros often live off the tourist sector in Cartagena, where they serve as "exotic" fruit vendors, coachmen, maids, and musicians. The complexities of the African heritage and the city's class and social structure are explored by the poetry of Jorge Artel, one of Cartagena's renowned poets.