Gaspar Yanga

Gaspar Yanga, also called Ñanga, was born around 1545 in Central Africa, with traditions placing him in Gabon or Angola and some accounts describing him as a member of a royal family. He was kidnapped, sold into slavery in New Spain, as colonial Mexico was then called, and baptised with the name Gaspar Yanga.

Around 1570 Yanga led a group of enslaved people in escaping a sugar plantation into the mountainous highlands near Veracruz and Córdoba. There they built a maroon settlement, known as a palenque, which survived for more than thirty years by farming and by raiding the caravans that carried goods along the Camino Real between Veracruz and Mexico City.

In 1609 the Spanish colonial government sent an expedition to recover the territory and end the raids. Yanga sent terms of peace through a captured Spaniard, but the Spanish advanced and burned the settlement, and the maroons, with troops led by an Angolan commander named Francisco de la Matosa, held their ground. Yanga's forces fought off the attack, and further skirmishes followed over nearly a decade.

Eventually the Spanish chose negotiation. Under an agreement reached in 1618, the community won recognition as a free, self-governing town, on terms that included only Franciscan priests ministering to them and the right of Yanga's family to rule. The settlement was called San Lorenzo de los Negros, and is often described as the first free town in the Americas, a title also claimed for San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia.

The date and place of Yanga's death are unknown. In 1871 the historian Vicente Riva Palacio proclaimed him a national hero of Mexico and El Primer Libertador de las Américas, the first liberator of the Americas, and in 1932 the town was renamed Yanga in his honour. Every August the town holds a carnival celebrating him, and a statue of Yanga stands there today.