Virgin Islands Museum Civic and Cultural Center

19/08/2026

Remembrance 🕊️
Tradition-bearer Bradley Christian

19/08/2026

Te invitamos a la charla sobre nuevas investigaciones en el Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Caguana que ofrecerá la Dra. Lara Sánchez.

Te esperamos este próximo sábado, 22 de agosto de 2026 a las 2:00 p.m., en el salón de conferencias del Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Caguana en Utuado.

18/08/2026

During his four voyages, Christopher Columbus encountered diverse Indigenous populations, including the gentle Taino and Arawak of the Bahamas and Hispaniola, the fierce Carib of the Lesser Antilles, and various trading communities along the Central and South American mainlands. While initial interactions often involved peaceful exchanges of goods like cotton, parrots, and gold for European beads and bells, relations rapidly degraded into violence, exploitation, and enslavement. Columbus imposed brutal gold tributes on the islanders, leading to native revolts and harsh Spanish retaliation, while the introduction of European diseases decimated the local populations. By his final voyage, when he was shipwrecked in Jamaica, initial hospitality had turned to deep hostility due to ongoing Spanish mistreatment, cementing a tragic pattern of colonization defined by broken trust and devastation.

This pattern of resistance became especially pronounced during Columbus’s final voyage, when one of his most serious defeats came at the hands of the Ngäbe people of present-day Panama.

During his fourth and final voyage in 1503, Christopher Columbus suffered a major military defeat at the hands of the Ngäbe people (then referred to by the Spanish as the Guaymí) in present-day Panama. Seeking the region's immense gold reserves, Columbus ignored warnings from the local cacique (chief), Quibián, and built a fortified settlement named Santa María de Belén at the mouth of the Belén River. Tensions boiled over as the Spanish attempted to permanently colonize the area, prompting the Spanish to kidnap Quibián and his family to prevent an uprising. However, the chief boldly escaped, rallied a force of four hundred Ngäbe warriors, and launched a fierce, coordinated counter-attack on the garrison and incoming Spanish boats. Armed with profound knowledge of the terrain and deadly arrows, the Ngäbe killed multiple Spanish sailors, stranded one of their ships, and inflicted severe casualties. Outmaneuvered and thoroughly defeated, Columbus was forced to completely abandon his settlement project on April 16, 1503, fleeing the region with his remaining severely damaged ships.

18/08/2026

Happy to "Reckoning with Race in New Worlds" by Ruth Hill!

A landmark treatment of a pivotal historical question, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' reveals how the empires of Spain and Portugal debated and came to determine who was white and who was not during their colonial era. How did free people with partial Native American, Asian, or African lineage either become or cease to be blancos or brancos—white people? Ruth Hill explains how, in unexpected ways, science and religion joined forces in the early modern era to shape the concepts of purity, mixture, and degeneration that would decide these questions. Fixing the thresholds of whiteness—degrees of blood, generations spent in a foreign environment—instigated centuries-long controversies with enormous consequences. By putting into dialogue archival sources as well as extensive engagement with secondary literature, paintings, and maps, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' crafts a history of human diversity in the colonial era, with profound implications for our understandings of the natural and social sciences and of our racial present.

"From Spanish and Portuguese America to the British Caribbean, from Benito Jerónimo Feijóo to Benjamin Rush, 'Reckoning with Race in New Worlds' is an essential and comprehensive account of how eighteenth-century racial concepts came to be created across a stunning array of geographies, doctrines, and disciplines."
—Neil Safier, Brown University

"Its historical reach and multilingual archival breadth are encyclopedic; its scholarly erudition and cross-disciplinary exigence are nothing short of breathtaking."
—Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10164/

18/08/2026