AskHistorians

Nah, iirc it was always negros (pronounced closer to nay-gross) in Spain at the time. No idea about the Portuguese, I just don't recall how it's pronounced or spelled, but afaik, their slang and slur words for black people were less focused on color, same as Spanish.

Pulling off of memory, I wanna say that the general derogatory terms vary a good bit, like in English, but with none of them being so directly and singularly used the way the n word is.

One that I vaguely recall was essentially calling them shit arabs, or shit moors. And I wanna say that another translates to goat fucker. That's Spanish, again I'm not as familiar with Portuguese terms on this because they never had as much presence here in the US. Means that the Portuguese terms didn't seep into the French and Spanish, much less English. A lot of the slurs for black people here in the US come from French or Spanish to some degree, though English speaking oppressors came up with plenty of their own as well.

But, yeah, negro just means black, so the word is still in use, and doesn't have a bigoted context directly. There's even variants that are considered nice, like negrita, which is often a pet name between couples where the woman/girl is black. There's a different weight to it than just saying "black" I'm English when derivatives like that are used.

Strangely, some South American Spanish speakers use blanco as a derogatory term for whites, though it isn't super common, as there are better ones in use.