Gaspar Yanga

Gaspar Yanga was a Central African man who led a maroon colony of enslaved Africans in the highlands near Veracruz, New Spain, under early Spanish colonial rule. Thought to be of Bantu descent, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, and around 1570 escaped a sugar plantation with others to the highlands near Mt. Orizaba, where their palenque grew to about 500 people and raided caravans on the Camino Real. In 1609 the maroons held off a Spanish force of about 550, and the stalemate ended in a treaty granting them freedom and self-rule, achieved sometime between 1618 and 1641. Their town, San Lorenzo de los Negros, was the first free town in the Americas and was renamed Yanga in 1932.