La Amistad

Josie Mendez-Negrete’s novel, Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed, is a very disturbing tale about brutal domestic abuse and incest.  Negrete’s novel is an autobiography regarding experiences of incest in a working-class Mexican American family.  It is Josie Mendez-Negrete’s story of how she, her siblings, and her mother survived years of violence and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.  “Las Hijas de Juan" is told chronologically, from the time Mendez-Negrete was a child until she was a young adult trying, along with the rest of her family, to come to terms with her father 's brutal legacy. It is a upsetting story of abuse and shame compounded by cultural and linguistic isolation and a system of patriarchy that devalues the

Within this review of Gomez’s work is a comparison of the “truth” I knew and the “truth” I now know. Upon completing Reversing Sail, I argued with my own thoughts regarding Africans and their status prior, and post, enslavement.

Cinque also learned only a few words, as opposed to the whole american language, which Olaudah did. “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” focuses more on the harsh conditions on the slave ships while the “Amistad” story spends more time on the trial that set the slave free. Olaudah Equiano fought against slavery in England while Cinque and the Africans of the Amistad became a symbol of freedom for the abolitionist movement in Pre-Civil War America.

For 63 days, the Amistad had been drifting toward the American shoreline. As conditions deteriorated aboard the vessel, it's inhabitants at the time, Africans, sick and dying, were in need of food and water. Desperate,

Everyone has their own understanding of what slavery is, but there are misconceptions about the history of “slavery”. Not many people understand how the slave trade initially began. Originally Africa had “slaves” but they were servants or serfs, sometimes these people could be part of the master’s family. They could own land, rise to positions of power, and even purchase their freedom. This changed when white captains came to Africa and offered weapons, rum, and manufactured goods for people. African kings and merchants gave away the criminals, debtors, and prisoner from rival tribes. The demand for cheap labor was increasing, this resulted in the forced migration of over ten million slaves. The Atlantic Slave Trade occurred from 1500 to 1880 CE. This large-scale event changed the economy and histories of many places. The Atlantic Slave Trade held a great amount of significance in the development of America. Africans shaped America by building a solid foundation for the country.

The story is narrated in the first person by Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, a Moroccan slave who has been taken by his Spanish master, Andrés de Dorantes, on an expedition to the New World. The expedition lands in Florida in the vicinity of what is now Tampa Bay. Under the leadership of Pánfilo de Narváez, the men leave their ships behind and travel inland to look for gold. As they journey northward, they face resistance by indigenous tribes, suffer from disease and starvation, and quarrel with one another. Within a year there are only four survivors: Cabeza de Vaca, the treasurer of the expedition; Alonso del Castillo, a young nobleman, Andrés de Dorantes, one of the captains; and his Moroccan slave, Mustafa, whom the other three Spaniards refer to as Estebanico. Together, these four survivors travel westward, crossing the continent and living among indigenous tribes, reinventing themselves along the way as

La Amistad movie is a movie from the year 1997 and it is directed by the famous director, “Steven Spielberg”. This famous director has made a lot famous movies like for example the famous movie of “Jurassic Park” or “E.T”. Amistad is the word for “friendship” in Spanish. In this movie four different languages are spoken. English, Spanish, Portuguese and Mende. Mende is the language that the African slaves speak in. This movie is a little recreation of a true story about slave revolt on a small Spanish schooner in 1839. This revolt caused a series of trials beginning in the lower parts of Connecticut. This case not only marks a milestone for Abolitionists in their fight against slavery but it also questioned the natural laws of our Constitution.

In the 19th century there a two floored schooner named La Amistad, which is Spanish for “Friendship”. This schooner was built in the United States of American and was used by Cuba. In July 1839 there was a slave revolt led by captives from Sierra Leone. La Amistad was transporting these people to use as slave labor in Cuba. A man by the name of Cinque creatively used a nail to unlock his chains, and then his fellow captives. They were able to take control of the ship after having to kill the captain and other crew members that wouldn’t submit to their rule. They forcibly ordered the remaining crew to sail them back to Africa. The captives were outsmarted by the captives whom had control over the schooner’s directions. The remaining Spanish crew stir the ship to the coast of Long Island. The Mende people were arrested and imprisoned in Connecticut, were they waited during the court proceedings. Now is when the controversy began. The Spanish and there government ordered the U.S to return the slaves and there schooner as property. At the time in the U.S. slave trade was illegal so the U.S. governemnt refused to send back the Africans because technically there were free and not property. The court case United States v. Amistad in 1941 gained much popularity due to the subject matter of ownership and jurisdiction.

This Revolt brought attention to the issue of slavery. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, approximatelyn expected 12 million Africans were persuasively dispatched over the Atlantic Sea to the New World. Of those, no less than 1.5 million are said to have died before reaching shore. Many states had made the importation of slaves illegal. However, since bondage itself stayed lawful in the greater part of those spots, unlawful exercises flourished. Along the shore of present-day Sierra Leone, for instance, Spanish slave merchant Pedro Blanco kept his business thriving with the assistance of a capable nearby pioneer who gathered together his human freight. This was a legal, and lucrative

In sharp contrast to what most people think, “only about 6 percent of the slaves imported in Africa ended up in what is now the United States.” Most of those taken from Africa ended up, if they survived the long sea voyage, in the West

Slavery is a period of time where people were bought, sold, and treated as property for many years. Slaves were given no rights once so ever from the time they were captured, purchased, or born. Slavery existed in many countries such as contemporary Africa, Mali, Haiti, Niger, Sudan, and Mauritania. Although slavery was equally devastating in many different countries one form of slavery that stands out the most for American history is slavery in the New World. Slaves were shipped from various locations in Africa and also different islands of the West Indies. Contrary to belief, there was a method in Africa specifically Goree Island, where wealthy Africans would sell out other Africans from their country into slavery. These “merchants”

The dramatic story of the Amistad, which was featured in a major motion picture that opened in December, is found among the court records at the National Archives - Northeast Region at Waltham, MA, and in the Supreme Court records at the National Archives in Washington, DC. In 1839, 53 African natives were kidnapped .from an area now known as Sierra Leone and illegally sold into the Spanish slave trade. They were transported to Havana, Cuba and sold at auction as native Cuban slaves to two "Spanish gentlemen." The Spaniards were transporting the Africans and other cargo to another part of Cuba on board the Spanish schooner Amistad when the Africans staged a revolt, seizing control of the schooner, killing the captain and the cook, and driving off the rest of the crew. The two "Spanish gentlemen" were ordered to sail back to Africa. By day, the Spaniards sailed eastward and by night they surreptitiously sailed westward, hoping to land back in Cuba or the southern United States. The ship was seized and towed to New London, Connecticut, where the imprisoned Africans began a lengthy legal battle to win back their

Cinque was An African farmer of the Mende tribe, who is kidnapped from his West African home and sold into slavery. After leading a revolt against the Spanish crew of the slave ship Amistad, he soon finds himself on trial for murder in a small courthouse in the state of Connecticut. Roger Baldwin a Connecticut real estate lawyer who agrees to work for Cinque and his fellow slaves by trying to prove in court that they were not born slaves, and therefore could not legally ever become slaves. John Quincy Adams The sixth President of the US 1825-1829, who was in fact a Congressman from Massachusetts in 1839, who agrees to work for the release of Cinque and his fellow slaves. Martin Van Buren The 8th President of the United States, and a silly politician who was most concerned that the problems with the Amistad did not lead to his defeat in the election of 1840.Queen of Spain had a right to the slaves since they were the property of two Spanish

Prior to the Amistad being detained there was an uprising. A couple Africans killed “the captain and the cook.” However, they let the planters live and “ordered them to sail to Africa.” Once the boat was seized by an American military vessel, the planters were freed and the blacks were put in prison. They were charged with murder, however, that charge was dropped. The case, which became known as the Amistad Case, became more of a property rights case. Did Cuba, Spain, and whoever else claimed that these blacks belonged to them, have the right to own them and enslave them? In the movie, the young lawyer, named Baldwin struggled to win the case the first time around, because he did not have enough evidence to prove that the blacks were in fact from Africa

The United States, Africa, the Middle East and mostly all of the countries around the world have been known to in some shape or form to inhabit slaves and to engage in the business of slave trading. According to the text, in 1619 there were a small group of people, 32 to be exact that reached the shores of America in the Chesapeake (D. Hine, W. Hine and Harrold, 55). It has been long believed that this was the first group of African Americans in British North America; apart of a group who was taken from their home in Angola. Unfortunately during this time, it became apparent that the slaves and those of African descent would be apart of “chattel slavery,” a term coined by the British in the Chesapeake in reference to the enslaved being treated equally to that of the livestock and thus legally treated as property (57). Though the Emancipation Proclamation wouldn’t be a key event until 1863 that would ultimately “free the slaves,” there was a revolt thousands of years earlier by slaves that would lay the ground work for those like them in the future.