Gaspar Yanga
The most memorable of the numerous Afro-Mexican maroon colonies in the range was the one founded after a bloody slave rebellion in the sugar fields in 1570. The rebel leader Gaspar Yanga was a slave from the African nation of Gabon, and it was said that he was from the royal family. Yanga led his rebel band into the mountains, where he found a locale sufficiently inaccessible to settle and create his own small town of over 500 people. The Yangans secured provisions by raids upon the Spanish caravans bringing goods from the highlands to Veracruz. Relations were established with neighboring runaway slaves and Indians. For more than thirty years Yanga and his band lived free while his community grew in size. A Spanish study of the situation concluded that Gaspar Yanga must be crushed. With that goal in mind a Royal war party left the city of Puebla in January of 1609. It did not succeed in its goal. Before he died, Yanga would have in hand a treaty with the Spaniards that granted freedom to his followers and established their own "free town."
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