Although Spaniards brutally enslaved both Indigenous and African people in their colonial enterprise in the Americas, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the racialized nature of their efforts was truly recognized. Previously, the encomienda system implemented by the Spanish crown in the colonies was not often referred to as slavery, and Spain's official rhetoric claimed that slavery was abolished with the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and then again with the New Laws of 1543. Nonetheless, Indigenous subjects’ unpaid labor was mandatory and coerced, as Timothy J. Yeager's definition of the encomienda makes clear. He writes that it was

Ronald W. Batchelder and Nicolas Sanchez point out that the system transformed Indigenous people into assets, given that the encomienda began “in Hispaniola when Columbus assigned repartimentos, or distributions of Indigenous subjects, to the original settlers to provide labor services for them” because “the Indians owed service to the Crown, and the Crown temporarily transferred that service obligation to a Spaniard, usually as a reward for his service to the Crown” (2013, 46).

Research on this topic in recent years has provided more support for this argument. In Global Indios (2015), for example, historian Nancy van Deusen documents explicit evidence of how transatlantic Indigenous slavery began as early as 1502 and was common by the 1520s, though she documents its continuity into the 1580s (2015, 67). Most of the individuals that she identifies had served their masters for years throughout Spanish America and were packed together with the colonial family's belongings upon its return to the Iberian Peninsula (65). Labeled as indios, they litigated against their masters and pressed for their freedom in Spanish courts, thereby leaving a written record of their enslaved condition.