The island of Puerto Rico has been the home to a series of cultures for over two thousand years. In November of 1493, Christopher Columbus arrived on the island of Puerto Rico, or Boriken, in the language of the Taino, the indigenous inhabitants. There the conquistadores encountered a well-established culture that practiced its religious beliefs with song and dance. The Taino cultivated crops, maintained their history through storytelling, played sports, wore jewelry of stones, shells, and gold, wove cotton, and maintained a hierarchical social structure with a chief, or cacique. Less than a century after the arrival of the Spaniards, the Taino population was virtually extinct. Decimated by disease, slavery, and genocide, the Taino traditions are known primarily through the practices the Spaniards adopted to make life comfortable on the unfamiliar island. To produce sugar and coffee, Puerto Ricos' cash crops and primary export, the Spaniards brought in slaves from Africa. Slaves made up the backbone of the agrarian economy of the entire New World. Their forced labor made a profound impact on the success of life in the Americas. Moreover, the culture the Africans brought on their forced migration wove itself permanently into the fabric of every place they went. The Spanish had already been exposed to African culture during the Middle Ages when the North African Moors conquered and ruled Spain for 800 years. One of the first Spanish explorers was Juan Garrigo, a free, Cristianized African who helped conquer Boriken and continued on to Mexico where he planted the first wheat ever grown in the Americas. Slaves were brought from the Gold, Ivory and Slave coasts, named for the primary resource extracted by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Belgian, and Spanish. The Yoruba people represented the majority of the slave population among the diverse group of Seke, Lbo, Fons, Ashanti, Awikam, Krumen, and others.  The African contributions in Puerto Rico range from the everyday processes in cooking to religious festivals.  The town of Loiza, less than 20 miles from the capital, San Juan, bore witness to the syncretism of the three cultures, Spanish, African and Taino.  Loiza still has one of the highest percentages of African descendants on the island of Puerto Rico.

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