Piñol y Sala, José (?–c. 1780)

José Piñol y Sala (d. ca. 1780), a powerful merchant in late colonial Central America. A native of Barcelona, he emigrated to Guatemala in 1752. There he served as the factor of the Real Asiento de Negros, while conducting trade on behalf of his family's Cádiz firm, dealing primarily in slaves and indigo. In 1760 a vessel belonging to his family's company carried over 200,000 pesos worth of indigo, roughly one-third of Central American indigo exports for the year. Piñol served as alcalde ordinario (city magistrate) of Santiago de Guatemala (today Antigua) in 1774, following the devastating earthquakes of 1773, which ultimately prompted the removal of the Central American capital to the present site of Guatemala City. Like many peninsulares (natives of Spain) Piñol married into a prominent creole family, the Muñoz clan. His offspring established especially close relations with the powerful Aycinena family—two daughters and a son joined the fellow peninsular clan—and became part of the core of Central America's late colonial and early independence aristocracy.

See alsoIndigo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Miles L. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (1982), p. 123.

Diana Balmori, Stuart F. Voss, and Miles L. Wortman, Notable Family Networks in Latin America (1984), pp. 60-61.

Additional Bibliography

Adams, Richard E. W., and Murdo J. MacLeod. Mesoamerica. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

                                 Richmond F. Brown