Cacique

A term that initially meant chief, ruler, or leader of a Taino chiefdom in the Greater Antilles at the time of contact with Europeans but eventually applied by the Spanish to all local indigenous leaders throughout the Americas.

Among the Taino caciques rose to power through their effectiveness as war leaders and traders and their ownership of seaworthy canoes. These leaders received their choice of food and trade items. They and their families usually lived in villages segregated from the rank and file that inhabited homes near the fields and rivers. These caciques ruled most of the Greater Antilles through organized chiefdoms. They generally established these chiefdoms along river basins extending from the interior mountains found on most of these islands to the ocean, thus allowing them to maintain control of a variety of resources needed for survival. Those that dominated the island of Hispaniola had reached a more complex level of organization than their neighbors. Those caciques who did not initially oppose Spanish expansion into the Caribbean became low-level administrators for the Spanish. Most eventually rebelled against colonial authorities and died in battle or were executed by the Spanish.

Upon expanding into North and South America from the Caribbean, the Spanish used local caciques to control Native populations. Often these leaders and their lineages benefitted from the arrival of the Spanish because the Spanish needed them as informants for understanding Native societies and as agents for implementing the Spanish system of government. By being freed from restrictions of higher imperial authority under the Aztecs, Inca, and other forms of complex, indigenous governments, many of these local caciques welcomed and prospered under Spanish imperial control.

Eventually the role of the caciques became obsolete when the Spanish created more traditional forms of town governments based upon cabildos (town councils) usually headed by appointed Spanish authorities. Still, some of these Native aristocracies managed to remain in power at the head of the cabildos and often proved effective in limiting Spanish intervention in their societies. In general, the experience of local caciques and their lineages differed according to geography and historical context, with some suffering quick annihilation as others flourished under Spanish domination.

Further reading: Robert S. Haskett, Indigenous Rulers: An Ethnohistory of Town Government in Colonial Cuernavaca (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991); John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 18001850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Murdo J. Macleod, “Cacique, Caciquismo,” Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, ed. Barbara A. Tenenbaum (New York: Scribner’s, 1996); Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Fall of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Samuel Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).

—Dixie Ray Haggard