The formation of colonies in the United States and Mexico could not have been more different. Although it is not so much the difference of time in which these two colonizations took place, the way in which the colonies were carried out, if it varied much. These differences between the colonizations were so important that they continue to affect us today, since they shaped the nations and made them what they are now. Why are the United States and Mexico so different today if both were conquered by great European powers? Why does something that happened a long time ago affect so much?
The colonization of the Spaniards occurred earlier and more rapidly than that of the United States. In less than sixty years, the Spaniards already had several
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This tolerance, especially in the religion that gave the United States, tolerance of religion which was not in most countries in Europe and that did not occur in Mexico. For this reason the United States was filled with people from many countries while in Mexico foreigners were mainly Spanish. The governments were very different from each other, in Mexico you had the viceroys who were the direct representatives of the king in New Spain and were those who reported to the king, there were also mayors, governors and corregidores. All these were part of a political structure dependent on Spain. In the first years of the colonization of New Spain, the encomienda was instituted as a payment method by Cortés towards the conquerors, here it was possible to maintain a bit of the prehispanic social structure of the Mexica. However, after a while, the encomiendas were banned due to the abuses that existed towards the …show more content…
Although many of the natives died from infections, a conscious effort was made to suppress the Indians. They were given weapons to kill each other and most of the Indians were stripped of their homes and forced to live on infertile land that did not serve the new settlers. I think the reason why the European inhabitants of North America treated the Indians that way was that they did not consider them as people. The natives of the thirteen colonies, unlike those of New Spain, had no friars to defend them and to watch over their rights. The efforts made by many Americans to defend indigenous people were individual and of little relevance, so they did not have a great effect. An example that accentuates very well how the Indians were seen in these two countries is miscegenation; While this mixture between Europeans and indigenous people took place a lot in Mexico, it almost did not happen in the United
People know about the conflict between the Indian's cultures and the settler's cultures during the westward expansion. Many people know the fierce battles and melees between the Indians and the settlers that were born from this cultural conflict. In spite of this, many people may not know about the systematic and deliberate means employed by the U.S. government to permanently rid their new land of the Indians who had lived their own lives peacefully for many years. There are many strong and chilling reasons and causes as to why the settlers started all of this perplexity in the first place. There was also a very strong and threatening impact on the Native Americans through the schooling that stained the past and futures of Native Americans not only with blood but also with emotion. It was all a slow and painful plan of the "white man" to hopefully get rid of the Indian culture, forever. The Native American schools were created in an attempt to destroy the Native American way of life, their culture, beliefs and tradi...
Muzzey talks about the European settlers introducing the civilization to the New World. May 6, 1607, 104 colonist arrived at the Chesapeake Bay by 3 ships. Most of these colonist brought over were men for labor. Colonist were lucky to survive through their first winter because the Indians helped supply them the goods. The colonist neglected to plant corn and take care of good while searching for the gold. There were nearly one thousand colonists by 1624. (Muzzey) Bailey’s text calls the colonist Spaniards. There were about 200 Spanish towns and cities in North and South America by 1574, 33 years before the first English shelter in Virginia. There was a total of about 160,000 Spaniards, mainly...
Both of them had to keep their societies together so in order to do so, laws, religion, and even just making the community aware was something always being done. Natives although did turn to their tribes for help, opinions, and even beliefs. Meanwhile, the Spanish worked more individually for themselves, and wasn’t exactly trying to be as diversified as the Natives were.
At first, they didn’t think much of North America, they had no plans to settle there or to explore the new lands. But their attempts to establish settlements elsewhere had failed due to poor planning and financing. Later on in the 17th century, France made a permanent settlement in North America. New France encompassed the areas around the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, and Ohio Rivers. It had a relatively small white population and they emphasised on fur trade rather than agricultural settlement. Since they depended on the Indians a lot for trade, the French needed to have good relations with them. This may be why the French also had a more humane policy compared to the other colonists. The alliance between the Indians and French colonists was the most long lasting out of all the other settlers in North America. Unlike the other European colonists, they didn’t take a significant amount of Indian land, or conquer and force the native people to work. In Spanish America, colonists forced Indians to perform most of the labor. They worked by extracting gold and silver from mines, which contributed to the empire’s wealth. Spanish landlords also forced Indians to do labor on large scale farms called
The Spanish and English cultures were scarcely similar and notably different because of the interaction with indigenous people and the timing in which the interactions occurred. The Spanish and English were very different in how they interacted with the indigenous people. The Spanish main reason for coming to North America was to spread Catholicism. In the Catholic church if two people were both Catholic then the two people would receive the sacrament of marriage. After marriage the two would create a Catholic of their own. This had created 5 new races of people. The races of humanity was then looked at as social classes. The highest social class was a full white European, then a mestizos, which was a someone who was European and an Indian, followed by Indians, African slaves, and lastly a Zambos,
The outbreak of diseases ravages the Native population. Due to geographic regions and limitations, the Natives never suffered from such strong illnesses as smallpox, measles and the black plague. Some of the European colonies gave the Natives diseased infested animals and clothing. The English and the Natives did cooperate with each other due to it being in the best of their interests. Their mutual trust would later erode due to the English going back to their old habits and started to steal from the Natives.
The European influences to the Native Americans were Europeans carried the new diseases to the Indians. “Europeans were used to these diseases, but Indian people had no resistance to them. Sometimes the illnesses spread through direct contact with colonists. Other times, they were transmitted as Indians traded with one another. The result of this contact with European germs was horrible. Sometimes whole villages perished in a short time” (Kincheloe). Slave trade was another influence to American Indians. Europeans soon realized that they could provide commercial goods such as tools and weapons to some American Indian tribes that would bring them other Indians captured in tribal wars, and these captured Indians were bought and sold as slaves. Therefore, “slavery led to warfare among tribes and too much hardship. Many tribes had to move to escape the slave trade, which destroyed some tribes completely. In time, the practice of enslaving Native peoples ended. However, it had greatly affected American Indians of the South and the Southwest” (Kinchloe). Lastly, Europeans change Native America and African’ roots. Native Americans
The Native Americans were given some laws of protection, however, by this point many Spaniards looked at Native Americans as vile human beings and mistreated them as a social normalcy. Many native Americans died from overwork, and harsh living conditions given to them by the Spaniards. Native Americans introduced the Spaniards and settlers to different types of crops. It is the reason Spaniards had them harvest their farms, to make sure their crops flourished. Spaniards didn’t know how to care for the crops like the Native Americans so they forced them to under violence and deaths. The reason Spaniards were able to defeat native tribes, and force them to work for their own personal greed was due to their using more advanced techniques like the gun Native Americans had already been weakened by being exposed to smallpox so having the guns only made the Spaniards more powerful and dominate over them. Native Americans tried to attacked greatly, but they were outnumbered by Spaniards and settlers. Though there was a point where Native Americans allied with Britain or France during the times of their wars, though the British and French troops turned on them and killed the Native Americans when they wars were done. This led to a huge shortage of Native Americans, and so workers had to be looked for elsewhere. They found in the African culture their new
The Encomienda system was utilized by the Spanish in 1513 in hopes to regulate the Native American labor during the colonization era. The Spanish would take goods, metals, money, etc. from the Indians and in return provide them with protection and enlightenment of the Christian faith. The Encomienda system was thoroughly ingrained into the history and culture of this time. Historians have considered this system to be one of the most damaging methods utilized in the New World. While the initial purpose of the Encomienda was meant for good, it later began to encompass oppression, exploitation, and ultimately became a burden to Native
Towards the development of the United States of America there has always been a question of the placement of the Native Americans in society. Throughout time, the Natives have been treated differently like an individual nation granted free by the U.S. as equal U.S. citizens, yet not treated as equal. In 1783 when the U.S. gained their independence from Great Britain not only did they gain land from the Appalachian Mountains but conflict over the Indian policy and what their choice was to do with them and their land was in effect. All the way from the first presidents of the U.S. to later in the late 19th century the treatment of the Natives has always been changing. The Native Americans have always been treated like different beings, or savages, and have always been tricked to signing false treaties accompanying the loss of their homes and even death happened amongst tribes. In the period of the late 19th century, The U.S. government was becoming more and more unbeatable making the Natives move by force and sign false treaties. This did not account for the seizing of land the government imposed at any given time (Boxer 2009).
The Spaniards arrived at the Americas prior to the English. The Spanish mainly wanted to explore in the first place because after the Black Death, the population increased, and thus, so did the frequency of commerce. There was a sudden new interest in new products and the new strong monarchs who sponsored the journeys wanted to be more affluent. Therefore, explorers such as Christopher Columbus attempted to go west to target Asia. However, he ended up on Cuba and called the natives Indians. The Spanish soon started to consider the Americas less of a blockage and could now see it as a source of resources. In 1518, Cortes arrived into Mexico with his group of conquistadors, or conquerors, which is a proper name because the men after gold exterminated native areas using their military skills, brutality and greed to turn the Southern America into a vast Spanish empire. The smallpox the Spanish unknowingly carried also helped wipe many people out. When they saw the religious ceremonies of the Aztecs that produced many skulls, they thought of these people as savages and not entirely human. This of coarse was quite hypocritical because the Spanish have killed before during the Inquisition for their faith. It was this contempt that made them think it was all right to slaughter the natives. Spanish colonies were established when conquistadors had gotten a license to finance the expedition from the crown to fixture encomiendas. These encomiendas were basically Indian villages that became a source of labor. The Spanish dreamed of becoming wealthier from South America, but they also wanted a profitable agricultural economy and to spread their Catholic religion (the Pueblo Indians converted to Christianity), which became very important in the 1540s.
Spain had a great military presence, including a large Navy and mainly settled in broad areas of the Southwestern and Northwestern parts of North America from 1492 to 1898. The Spanish wanted to conquer, colonize, and politically rule as much of the western hemisphere as possible ("Spanish," n.d.). The Spanish Empire used an encomienda system to set up their colonial government. Encomienda was a system of forced labor where an allotment of native people was granted to conquistadors and officials symbolizing “one of the most damaging institutions that the Spanish colonists implemented in the New World” (Busbin, n.d.). The King gave the Spanish conquistadors land and Native Americans for work, and they engaged in conflicts with the native tribes. The purpose of the conquistadors was to forcefully assimilate the Native Americans by teaching them Spanish and converting them to Catholicism though many tribes rebelled. The role of the conquistador was essential to the colonization of the Americas (Carney, 2013).
The Effects of Colonization on the Native Americans Native Americans had inherited the land now called America and eventually their lives were destroyed due to European colonization. When the Europeans arrived and settled, they changed the Native American way of life for the worse. These changes were caused by a number of factors including disease, loss of land, attempts to export religion, and laws, which violated Native American culture. Native Americans never came in contact with diseases that developed in the Old World because they were separated from Asia, Africa, and Europe when ocean levels rose following the end of the last Ice Age. Diseases like smallpox, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and malaria were unknown to the Native Americans until the Europeans brought these diseases over time to them.
Colonization in Latin America had a major effect on the Americas because the Aztecs died of the disease that the Europeans brought over though the Columbian Exchange. Since the Aztecs could not do much about the diseases that were spreading a lot of them began to die. The evidence from the pictures show that the Columbian Exchange took place during the 16th century. (doc 1). A lot of the Aztecs got sick and died. People could not do much about the diseases because they did not know what kind of disease it was. The Aztecs were also not immune to any of the disease that were spreading. Those are some reasons why the colonization in Latin America had a major effect on the Natives.
When the Europeans Colonization America it changed not only the lives of the Native American people but their cultures as well. Looking at the history of the population of American Indigenous peoples, we can see a catastrophic drop off when the Europeans arrive. When the Europeans came, they forced the natives to pack up their camps and move into other tribes' territories or into infertile grounds, and introduced major disease like smallpox, influenza, measles, and even some minor disease like the common cold and chicken pox’s, which killed more than half of the native population. The natives had no immunity’s to the new European diseases, so the outbreak was almost 100% effective. This is not to say that all of the Europeans influence was negative the Europeans did introduce modern medicines, new animals, exotic plants and new technology to the Native Americans.