Zambo

Zambo (Spanish: [ˈθambo] or [ˈsambo]) or Sambu is a racial term to refer to people of mixed Amerindian and sub-Saharan African ancestry.

The equivalent term in Brazil is cafuzo (Portuguese: [kɐˈfuzu]). However, in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa, cafuzo is used to refer to someone born of an African person and a person of mixed African and European ancestry.

The word is believed to have originated from one of the Romance languages or Latin and its direct descendants. The feminine word is zamba (not to be confused with the Argentine Zamba folk dance.)

In some parts of colonial Spanish America, the term zambo applied to the children of one African and one Amerindian parent, or the children of two zambo parents. In New Spain (colonial Mexico), the term for those of mixed African and indigenous ancestry was lobo ("wolf"). This term of classification appears in official marriage registers and other official documentation.

During this period, many other terms denoted individuals of African-Amerindian ancestry in ratios smaller or greater than the 50:50 of zambos: cambujo (zambo-Amerindian mixture) for example. Today in parts of Spanish America, zambo refers to all people with significant or visible amounts of both African and Amerindian ancestry.

The term zambo was not formally used in Spanish territories. Competing terms, such as mulato, were also used. From the beginning the early sixteenth century, when African slaves were first imported to Hispaniola, unions between them and indigenous peoples, and Spanish colonists, began to take place. The two non-European groups sometimes worked together in the mines or on the plantations of Hispaniola, and on other Spanish Caribbean islands following the introduction of sugar cane production in the 1520s. In other cases, Africans took refuge in indigenous communities after escaping slavery.

The term zambos was generally used to refer to persons who did not have European ancestry, but all sorts of unions took place through the centuries, of course. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish began making formal racial classifications, and defined zambo in what became its final, official meaning.

Some zambo groups became well known after being created by runaway or rebel Africans who mixed with or took over indigenous communities. In the unconquered regions of Esmeraldes, in what would become Ecuador, for example, a small group of shipwrecked former slaves gained control of some indigenous communities, eventually representing them before Spanish authorities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.