Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (18 page)

In dispensing medical advice and cures, Pinto and other
curanderas
competed not only with physicians but also with pharmacies, which women of
any ancestry were explicitly prohibited from operating under a 1593 Spanish
law. Ironically, the traditional knowledge on which their unapproved cures were
often based— a knowledge combining material and spiritual understandings of
illness informed by various African and European precedents, as well as
indigenous beliefs and practices—was sometimes judged efficacious by the same
authorities who professed to despise that knowledge. Reporting the abatement of
the 1790–1791 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in southern Chile, the
local Spanish commander attributed the turn for the better in part to “the
strange and barbarous manner in which they treat themselves.”  Local remedies
included the use of medicinal plants like
palqui,
noted by a Jesuit
observer to be a treatment for high fever. Effective or not, such medical
practices were no less scientific in origin than bleeding or many of the other
recommendations yet to be excluded from the arsenal of the licensed physician.
In some cases, they were likely to have been more so, sources of consistently
demonstrable health benefits as determined by a lengthy course of
experimentation.

CONCLUSION

The material realm in which colonial people operated — from
the houses in which they lived to their modes of transportation and
communication, from the food and drink that sustained their bodies to the
physical afflictions that undermined the health of those same
bodies—circumscribed the lives they lived in many and varied ways. Even the
wealthy had few protections from most infectious diseases and lived in
dwellings that if palatial in comparison with those of the poor majority were
bereft of many of the comforts enjoyed by the average individual in today’s
richer nations. Long-distance connections were unimaginably slow from our perspective,
with the glacial speed at which people, goods, and news traveled imposing
precise temporal limitations on everything from commercial transactions to the
efficiency of royal bureaucracy to relations with far-flung family members. As
in all times and places, material constraints profoundly shaped human lives.
The activity that may have shaped daily life in colonial Latin America more
than any other, however—taking up the majority of waking hours for most
individuals—was work. The next chapter examines its central place in the
history being told in this book.

5 - WORK AND LABOR

INTRODUCTION

The
main impulse behind colonization of the Americas was the desire for wealth,
shared by whites at every level from the kings and nobility to the most humble
person who made the trip across the Atlantic. Before industrialization
introduced forms of labor in which machines did much of the work, the
accumulation of wealth depended on human energy. The key to wealth was
organizing workers to perform manual labor, then appropriating the product of
their labor. One of the cardinal principles of life on the Iberian Peninsula
was that doing manual labor, having to work in order to live, was a sure sign
of low social status; therefore, carrying their values across the Atlantic, the
Iberian colonists committed themselves to the project of getting rich without
doing the necessary work themselves. That meant putting in place systems of
coerced labor at all sites of production. As a result, the exploitation of
human labor was an essential component of colonial life from its inception. The
labor systems put in place by the Spanish and Portuguese will be the focus of
this chapter.

When the Spanish first set up colonies on Hispaniola in the
last decade of the 15th century, they simply rounded up the native Taínos and
forced them to do whatever manual labor was necessary for the establishment of
the colony. The indigenous population of the island was devastated by the
combination of epidemic diseases against which they had no antibodies, poor
treatment, and the abrupt change from their former agricultural focus on
production for their communities to a life of labor-intensive agricultural
production in an extractive economy. Some estimates place the native population
of Hispaniola around 1 million before the arrival of the Spanish. By the time
15 years had passed, their number had been reduced to 30,000. Alarmed at the
results of the enslavement of the natives, the king approved establishing the
encomienda,
a system that had been in use during the Re-conquest by Christians of the
Iberian Peninsula.

ENCOMIENDA

The encomienda was a grant of workers to a person known as
the
encomendero.
The word
encomienda
comes from the Spanish verb
encomendar,
meaning “to entrust,” so in the literal sense, the encomienda was an
entrustment of native people to a Spaniard. They worked for him and paid
tribute to him. In theory, the encomendero accepted the responsibility to
protect these workers and to Christianize them, thus saving their souls from
eternal damnation. In the view of the Iberians, the Christian god was the
greatest gift they could bring to the heathens of the New World. In practice,
of course, the encomendero was more concerned with organizing the efficient
payment of the tribute, which took the form of bolts of woven cloth, fowl, and
agricultural products, than he was with saving the souls of the Indians. In
addition, the way the encomienda system was put into practice made it not much
different from outright enslavement. The tribute demands imposed on the natives
held in encomienda were a major factor in the demographic collapse. Another
factor was the lack of time people had for the work that had sustained them in
their pre-Columbian communities, that is, finding food and medicinal herbs,
weaving cloth, building shelter, and appeasing the gods that provided for the community’s
needs. In the first two decades of Spanish colonization of the Caribbean, the
colonists came close to accomplishing the total depletion of the native
population. As the native workforce died, the Spanish saw the need to supplant
it with other workers and brought in a new group of laborers from across the
Atlantic. Most of the population of the Caribbean today is descended from this
African labor force.

Encouraged by the sermons of the Dominican priest Father
Antonio Montesinos, the Spanish crown passed the Laws of Burgos in 1512 in an
effort to protect the native population. The laws regulated the Indians’
working and living conditions, as well as the forms of punishment that might be
used. The colonists, however, paid little heed to the legal niceties, and the
crown displayed greater interest in the appearance of moral correctness than in
enforcing these regulations, especially since more effective exploitation of
the workforce meant higher tax revenues for the crown. Another effect of
Montesinos’s sermons was the conversion of the encomendero Bartolomé de las
Casas who came to be known as the “Defender of the Indians.” After Las Casas
renounced his encomienda and became a Dominican priest, he wrote extensively on
the exploitation of the native people by the Spaniards, writings that figured
in the construction of the “Black Legend,” the narrative that accuses the
Spanish of being the cruelest of all the European groups that settled the
Americas. Having established the labor system of encomienda in the early
Caribbean colonies, the Spanish transferred it to mainland Mesoamerica and
later to the Andes when the Pizarro brothers conquered the empire of the Incas.
The conquerors viewed their encomienda as the principal form of booty, a right
of conquest. Hernán Cortés assigned himself a grant of more than 100,000
Indians and received the crown’s stamp of approval. His followers were granted
somewhat smaller, but still impressive, numbers of workers whose labor
supported a sometimes lavish way of life.

The tribute provided to the encomendero varied according to
location, always with the chief goal of bringing him the greatest wealth. Some
of these products were profitable exports, others entered the local markets of
the domestic economy. Either way, control over tribute put the encomendero in
charge of the area’s economy and made him both wealthy and politically
powerful. Typically, tribute payments would be feed for animals, wood for fuel,
corn and wheat, woven cotton cloth, chickens, eggs, coca leaves, cacao beans,
and cochineal, a red dye popular in Europe. The production of some of these
goods fell to the lot of the women of the community. As the Indian population
declined and men were removed from the villages to join public works projects,
tribute demands fell more heavily on the shoulders of the women who were left
behind.

In 1542, the Spanish crown finally heard the accusations of
Bartolomé de las Casas against the colonists and responded with the New Laws,
an effort to limit the power of the encomenderos and protect the native
population from the harshest demands of the encomienda. Another concern of the
crown was the growing wealth and political power of the encomendero families
who were approaching the level of the Spanish nobility. The New Laws took the
encomienda out of the realm of inherited property, providing for any Indians
held in encomienda to revert to the control of the crown upon the death of the
encomendero. However, the colonists rebelled against the New Laws. In Peru,
they even joined forces to seize and execute their viceroy. The viceroy of New
Spain learned from that event and judiciously decided to ignore the New Laws
rather than experience the same fate. The crown removed the restriction on
inheritance, but when encomenderos died without heirs, their encomiendas
reverted to the crown anyway. By 1570, three out of four encomiendas in central
Mexico had already returned to the control of the crown and were being managed
by the crown’s agents. By the end of the 16th century, the encomienda had
largely run its course in the major centers of colonial rule, although it
persisted in Paraguay and other peripheral areas.

REPARTIMIENTO AND MITA

The system that replaced the encomienda was the
repartimiento,
a system that granted an allotment of Indian laborers to the colonial
administration for a public works project or to a colonist for a specified task
or period from a week to as long as several months. The workers were supposed
to receive a small wage for this work, along with food and housing, but since
there was no supervision of the colonists, the workers’ wages and subsistence
were frequently overlooked. By the mid- to late 16th century, the repartimiento
had been instituted in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and parts of Colombia, with
workers assigned to different kinds of work in the different regions. In the
viceroyalty of New Spain, the repartimiento laborers worked in agriculture and
the mines. In some areas, it was customary to assign workers to
obrajes,
weaving
workshops in which the workers were practically enslaved. In other places,
Indians were assigned to dye manufacturing, largely indigo production, where
many became ill as a result of wading up to their knees in the vats of
fermenting leaves.

In the mining areas, repartimiento took the form of the
mita,
a labor system adapted from a similar system of labor drafts used in Incan
times, known by its Quechua name
mit’a.
There was no way to exploit the
precious metal strikes without an enormous labor force. While the Potosí mine
owners had relied on Indian labor from the earliest days in the 1540s, it fell
to Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s to shape the mita into the system that continued
throughout the colonial period. The mita system called for every adult male to
go to the mines every seventh year. In the beginning, Toledo’s restructured
mita supplied about 13,000 native workers to the Potosí mines. As the colonial
period wore on, it became common for those Indians who could afford it to avoid
their mita obligation by paying for a replacement. The wealthy and powerful
mining families collected this cash tribute and used part of it to pay wages to
the mine workers, keeping the rest as income. Some workers, called
mitayos,
came
to the mines to work and stayed on after completing their assignment to work as
mingas,
or wage workers, doing the more highly skilled tasks.
Eventually, the mitayos came to be those who were too poor, or too unlucky, to
avoid the draft, working alongside, or in some cases supervised by, Indian wage
laborers or people of African origins, some enslaved and others free.

The Mita and Silver Mining at Potosí

Potosí, the site of the great silver strike in Upper Peru
(now Bolivia) a decade after the conquest of the Incan Empire, was described by
a 16th-century miner, Luis Capoche, as “sterile and unproductive, and almost
uninhabitable because of its unpleasant and nasty climate.”  The description
goes on to say that the mountain is treeless, cold, snowy, and buffeted by
strong winds. According to this source, no one lived there before silver was
discovered because it was so inhospitable that only potatoes would grow there.
While more recent accounts tone down the severity of the climate and point out
that the early mine owners had an interest in exaggerating the difficulty of
their task and showing how hardy they had to be, certainly the climate and
geography made for a hard life for the mine workers. Others who have been to
Potosí describe a mountain more than 13,000 feet high that has an annual
average minimum temperature of 27 degrees Fahrenheit and average high of 52 to
56 degrees. The area receives about 25 inches of rain a year and supports, in
addition to potatoes, varieties of corn, beans, vegetables, and fruits that
thrive in cold climates.