1540s

By the mid-sixteenth century the Triangular Trade had become the defining economic system of the Atlantic world: European manufactured goods traveled to West Africa to purchase enslaved people; enslaved Africans were transported across the Middle Passage to the Americas; American commodities produced by enslaved labor (sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo) were shipped to Europe. This system generated massive capital accumulation in Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands, financing early modern European economic development while destroying millions of African lives and futures.

Emperor Charles V issued the New Laws of the Indies in 1542, responding to Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas's advocacy on behalf of indigenous peoples. While the laws nominally prohibited indigenous enslavement and the encomienda system, they explicitly excluded Africans from protection and thus accelerated the substitution of African enslaved labor for indigenous labor throughout Spanish America. Las Casas himself had earlier suggested importing Africans as a solution to indigenous suffering — a position he later deeply regretted. The New Laws represent a pivotal moment when European law racially differentiated human enslavement.

A free Black man named Francisco (also identified in some sources as 'the Black') participated in Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's 1540–1542 expedition through the American Southwest in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. The expedition passed through present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Francisco's presence — like those of Juan Garrido and Estevanico before him — documents the early African presence in North American exploration while illustrating the ambiguous and precarious status of Black individuals within Spanish colonial society.