Congratulations to these 2025 prize winners
WMQ New Voices Award
John Paul Paniagua
“Contesting Indigeneity in Colonial Cuba”
July 2024
Drawing on Spanish colonial archives and the Slave Societies Digital Archive, John Paul Paniagua’s essay, “Contesting Indigeneity in Colonial Cuba,” challenges the “false narrative of disappearance,” that Alexander Humboldt and many others repeated, claiming that native populations in the Caribbean had been decimated. By comparing the histories and trajectories of two Cuban communities, Guanabacoa and Jiguaní, Paniagua shows that despite the violence of coerced labor, dispersal, and resettlement, Indigenous people not only survived, but learned to use Spanish civil and religious law to secure metropolitan recognition, rights, and land. Focusing on the different experiences of the Cuban “Indio” towns of Guanabacoa and Jiguani, Paniagua demonstrates not only “communal persistence” but how it was achieved. Paniagua’s careful use of sources, his method of mining expansive local records for granular shifts over time, uncovers the pressure faced by Indigenous people to abandon connections to that category, as well as the ways Indigenous communities and/or identities persisted and changed in response to local environments. The article traces both individual and collective actions, further enriching and diversifying this complex tale, and forcing historians to rethink categories such as the “extinction” and “disappearance” of Indigenous peoples across the many regions of Early America.
Lester J. Cappon Award
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha
“Evasion Ecology in the Contact Era: Fugitive Social Movements and the Atlantic Dimensions of Marronage, 1480s–1530s”
January 2025
Based on impressive research in Spanish and Portuguese archives, archaeological reports, and environmental studies, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha’s essay, “Fugitive Social Movements and the Atlantic Dimensions of Marronage, 1480s-1530s,” upends the historiographical orthodoxy that characterizes the non-native species that accompanied European conquest and colonization as exclusively invasive and destructive. Rocha analyzes similarities in the earliest “colonial invasions” of Hispaniola in the Caribbean and Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea examining not just human who sought to escape enslavement but quadrupeds that ventured far into the hinterlands. In his rendering, enslaved Africans on both islands quickly fled to their respective hinterlands and became the bane of colonists attempting to establish plantation economies. Rocha develops the innovative concept of “evasion ecology,” which he applies to humans and animal species, such as cattle and hogs, and which enabled maroons to survive despite repeated efforts by militias to re-enslave them. By showing the interplay of human, animal, and environmental change, and by focusing on “evasion” rather than on “invasion,” Rocha encourages historians to think of historical processes as contingent from the outset, always challenged by countervailing and influential efforts that unfolded on the same sweeping scale that “settler colonialism” remade the Americas.