The Nomadic DJ 🪩 ✈️

🇲🇽 Little known fact: The first black conquistador in Mexico was a combat veteran, a wealthy Mexico City landowner, and the pioneer who introduced wheat to the Americas. His name was Juan Garrido. Born in the Kingdom of Kongo around 1480, Juan traveled to Lisbon, converted to Christianity, and spent two decades fighting his way across the Caribbean…conquering Puerto Rico with Ponce de León, taking Cuba with Diego Velázquez, and hunting gold on the 1513 Florida expedition. By 1519, he joined Hernán Cortés’s campaign to dismantle the Aztec Empire. After surviving the carnage of La Noche Triste, Garrido built the chapel that still stands today as Mexico City's Church of San Hipólito. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, he settled in the conquered capital as a prominent landholder, married, and planted three stray wheat seeds he salvaged from a rice sack…singlehandedly launching the entire wheat economy of the New World while receiving a royal pension from Spain.