January 1513

Juan Garrido, a free Black African man, participated in the conquest of Puerto Rico and Florida alongside Ponce de León, becoming one of the earliest documented Africans in the Americas as a free person. He later joined Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico and is credited with being the first person to plant wheat in the New World around 1523. His life demonstrates that some Africans in the early colonial period held free status and participated actively in Spanish expeditions.

Juan Garrido, a free Black man from West Africa, joins Ponce de León's 1513 Florida expedition as one of the first Africans to set foot in North America. He later serves under Hernán Cortés during the conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, and is documented as the first person to grow wheat in the Americas in Mexico City.