Juan Garrido

Juan Garrido (c. 1480 – c. 1550) was a black African-Spanish conquistador. African by birth, he went to Portugal as a young man. In converting to Christianity, he chose the Spanish name, Juan Garrido ("Handsome John").

He joined a Spanish expedition and arrived in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) about 1502. He participated in the invasion of present-day Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1508. By 1519 he had joined Cortes' forces and invaded present-day Mexico, participating in the siege of Tenochtitlan. He married and settled in Mexico City. He continued to serve with Spanish forces for more than 30 years, including expeditions to western Mexico and to the Pacific.

Born in Africa, he went to Portugal as a youth. When baptized, he took the name Juan Garrido (Handsome John). He went to Seville, where he joined an expedition to the New World, possibly traveling as Pedro Garrido's (Handsome Peter) servant.

Arriving in Santo Domingo in 1502 or 1503, Garrido was among the earliest Africans to reach the Americas. He was one of numerous African freedmen who had joined expeditions from Seville to the Americas. From the beginning of Spanish activity in the Americas, Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionaries and, more frequently, as involuntary enslaved colonists.

By 1519 Garrido participated in the expedition led by Marqués del Valle Hernán Cortés to invade Mexico, where they lay siege to Tenochtitlan of the Three Allies (formerly known as the Aztec.) In 1520 he built a chapel to commemorate the many Spanish killed in battle that year by the Aztec.

Garrido married and settled in Mexico City, where he and his wife had three children. He is credited with the first harvesting of wheat planted in the New World for commercial purposes.

Garrido and other blacks were also part of expeditions to Michoacán in the 1520s. Nuño de Guzmán swept through that region in 1529-30 with the aid of black auxiliaries.

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