Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (30 page)

Native communities did not simply accept the loss of lands
or other resources without responding, however. They fought to preserve as much
control as possible over village property, although not in most cases by means
of the most obvious form of resistance (i.e., violence). Instead, they tended
to rely on the law, quickly adapting to the Spanish legal system and learning
to exploit the protections it offered them as best they could, even if the
protections that existed on paper often failed to operate in practice. By
challenging Spaniards and their descendants in court, native communities placed
royal officials under moral pressure to demonstrate the legitimacy and fairness
of the Spanish justice system. This course of action was in general not only
far safer but also more likely to result in at least partial success than
resorting to violence or other extralegal forms of resistance that were certain
to provoke a repressive response from colonial authorities.

The experience of an ayllu in the Peruvian village of
Acopia, near Cuzco, provides us with an example. In 1718, the ayllu’s leaders
succeeded in obtaining a legal order for the return of lands taken by the
Spanish owner of a neighboring hacienda, doña Ursula Velásquez. Such decisions
were not as unusual as might be imagined. Spaniards often lost legal battles
with native communities, in part because the interests at stake did not usually
break down quite as neatly along the lines of race or ethnicity as our initial
description of the Acopia case would suggest. It turns out that the ayllu’s
legal victory was assisted by favorable testimony obtained from another local
Spaniard, a longtime resident of the area who was evidently willing to appear
on the natives’ behalf against Velásquez. The fact that many of the region’s
“Spanish” residents, perhaps including the ayllu’s witness, spoke Quechua
better than their supposed mother tongue is one indication of the complexity of
the contemporary social context.

Social complexity hardly erased the advantages enjoyed by
the powerful, however, and native victories in the judicial system were no
guarantee against further conflict. Members of the Spanish elite were generally
reluctant to comply with orders like the one Velásquez received, exhibiting a
dismissive attitude toward their legal obligations that has arguably remained
more characteristic of the Latin American experience than nearly any other in
the world. As a consequence, native communities were often compelled to return
again and again to the judicial authorities in search of a definitive
settlement to problems they thought they had already resolved. During the 17th
century, the kurakas of Urcos, another village in the vicinity of Cuzco, found
themselves engaged in a decades-long struggle to defend the community’s
pasturelands and livestock from the depredations of a local Spanish family. The
Peruvian viceroy himself intervened in favor of the community in 1652, citing
the violence employed by one Pedro del Campo in his quest to seize village
property. Forty years later, the complaints of lawless behavior had yet to
cease, although by then a new Spanish offender had taken Pedro’s place: his
son, Andrés.

Voting with Their Feet: Escaping Tribute
Obligations

Pressures from land-hungry outsiders were not the only ones
faced by native villages. Even worse, perhaps, were the incessant demands for
tribute and labor imposed by royal authorities in Spanish America. In the 17th
century, these fell on village populations that were in many cases still
declining as a result of epidemics and other negative consequences of the
European invasions. A community reduced to half the size it had been at the
time of the most recent assessment found its members staggering under the
weight of obligations that not been adjusted downward. As in the cases
mentioned above, village responses were often collective appeals for legal
justice by community representatives to the crown. But another equally
important response occurred at the individual level and outside the law:
abandoning one’s community of origin forever in order to escape tribute and
labor obligations.

In the Andes, where the demands associated with the
mita
made for especially onerous labor commitments, a veritable flood of
forasteros were willing to give up local ties and the access they enjoyed to
communal lands in their own villages in order to take their chances elsewhere.
As of 1690, almost half the inhabitants of the bishopric of Cuzco were
forasteros. The figures were similar for the province of Charcas, located to
the south in what is now Bolivia. Some of these migrants sought refuge on the
margins of other native villages, where as noted earlier only the originarios
were subject to community obligations. The downside for the newcomers was their
lack of rights to local land, a circumstance that left them scrambling to make
a living and frequently embroiled in conflict with locals. Other forasteros
entered the employ of Spaniards on rural estates or in towns and cities as
either debt peons or wage laborers. In doing so, they established themselves,
and especially their children, as members of a social world that was in many
respects far removed from the one they had left behind in their villages.

Not Knowing Their Place: Undermining
Racial Boundaries

Illicit migration helped make a mockery of 16th-century
Spanish political philosophy, which had attempted to divide the society of the
new American possessions neatly into two coexisting but separate realms: the
“Republic of the Indians” and the “Republic of the Spaniards.” In this ideal
world, native peoples would be protected as much as possible from the bad
influences of Spaniards other than the clerics and royal officials who were
presumed to have their best interests at heart. Laws intended to keep the two
“republics” distinct from one another failed miserably, however, as Spaniards
and other non-natives simply ignored restrictions placed on them in the absence
of effective enforcement. At the same time, as seen above, intense pressures on
native communities drove many of their members into the “Spanish” world.
Moreover, the concept of the “two republics” was already largely irrelevant
before it was even formulated, given the rapid emergence after 1492 of legally and
socially inconvenient groups that did not fit into the scheme. Initially, it
was sexual relations between native women and Spanish men, forcible or not,
that led to the production of “mixed” children who confounded the abstract
neatness of the concept. The decision soon after to transport African laborers
across the ocean by the thousands added significantly to the conceptual
confusion.

By the 17th century the population of
mestizos, mulatos,
and other
castas
was growing rapidly in Spanish American territory.
The forced migration of enslaved Africans to mainland Spanish America was also
reaching its peak in the decades just prior to 1640, although it dropped off
sharply thereafter (the trend was far different in Brazil, destination for more
than four million Africans between 1640 and 1850). None of these nonwhite
peoples enjoyed the legal protections offered to the native population in
return for fulfilling specific duties, however illusory such protections often
were in practice. Instead, non-natives who did not enjoy Spanish status were
defined legally almost solely by
exclusion,
in other words by what they
could
not
be or do. Although they were generally viewed as belonging by
default to the Republic of Spaniards, they were blocked from access to land,
public office, higher education, and many occupations on the grounds of their
“impure” ancestry, which was believed, in a manner we would now label as
racist, to produce innate character weaknesses. Slaves were uniquely
disadvantaged in this regard, but free nonwhites outside of the native
population also suffered legal marginalization. African ancestry was
particularly debilitating under the law. Mestizos, presumed to be of
exclusively Spanish-native descent, suffered fewer restrictions than
individuals defined as
mulato,
black,
zambo,
or any of the myriad
other terms connoting some degree of African origins. For example, free people
of presumed African ancestry, but not mestizos, were required to pay an
alternative tribute known as the
laborío
after the crown decreed its
collection in the 1570s.

Not surprisingly, in practice colonial authorities in
Spanish America were unable to police ancestry as closely as they wished or to
enforce consistently the restrictions they placed on people whose skills, or
simply bodies, were often in desperately short supply. Castas, banned in theory
from infringing on the Indian world, were often hired to supervise gangs of
native workers pressed into service on agricultural estates neighboring their
villages. Armed horsemen of African origins, some free and others enslaved,
roamed the countryside managing the vast herds of leading cattle barons. Market
women of Indian or African ancestry exercised substantial control over key
aspects of urban food distribution. And both black and native artisans moved
steadily into trades long reserved officially for Spaniards, who generally had
little interest in working with their hands.

Sometimes people of mixed origins achieved social positions
that were strikingly out of keeping with their low legal status, often through
the intervention of a powerful father. An example from early 17th century
Guatemala involves Antonio Meléndez de Valdés, the
mulato
son of an
enslaved woman. Antonio’s father, a high-ranking official from Spain, not only
freed his illegitimate son at birth but also left him a substantial parcel of
land and ordered that he be treated as an
hidalgo,
or minor noble. The
Spanish crown frequently expressed exasperation at such flouting of its
prohibitions on social mobility for people of non-European ancestry. A 1622
letter to its representatives in Guatemala expressed grave disappointment at
news that “persons of little account such as
mulatos
and mestizos” were
shamelessly seeking appointment to official posts “without making mention of
the said conditions,” in at least some cases with the assistance of powerful
relatives who belonged to the Spanish elite. 

Rattling Their Chains: Slaves and the Law

Far from Antonio Meléndez de Valdés on the social scale
were enslaved people of African ancestry who enjoyed no favor whatsoever from
their masters. Antonio’s own mother, Juana, was one such person; her owner and
former sexual partner, Antonio’s Spanish father, sold her while their son was
still young, evidently separating mother and child forever. While we know nothing
else about Juana’s life, enslaved individuals like her engaged in a variety of
actions aimed at “working the system” to improve their disadvantaged position
in whatever way possible. They were quick to call on the legal protections they
enjoyed on paper under Spanish rule, whether in an attempt to prevent family
breakup, buy freedom with hard-earned wages, or even seek out someone who would
be willing to purchase them from a hated owner.

Among the most remarkable of these actions was the use of
blasphemy in order to get a hearing from the Inquisition and thereby draw
attention to abuses suffered at the hands of their owners. In the early 17th
century, a number of enslaved men and women were hauled before Inquisition
officials in Mexico after they renounced Christian beliefs while being
physically punished. In doing so, these blasphemers took advantage of the
church’s requirement that they be brought before the Inquisition as soon as
possible, a requirement that put a halt to the punishment, at least temporarily,
if obeyed by their tormenters. Once in front of the Inquisitors, slaves could
attempt to cast their owners in an unfavorable light in hopes of winning
sympathy for their situation.

In 1610, a slave named Juan reported that while being
whipped “very cruelly” by his owners’ sons “he renounced God once, not with
intention to offend him but to liberate himself from the punishment and later
he repented.” Four years later, another slave, Magdalena, went to the
Inquisition to denounce herself after her owner refused to stop a beating and
report her even after she vocally renounced God twice. A witness, another slave
named Isabel, said that prior to blaspheming, Magdalena had first pleaded “for
the love of God do not hit me and she asked it and begged many times.” 
Whatever the precise circumstances of such incidents, whose nature was always
disputed by the slave owners involved, they represented attempts by slaves who
clearly understood Spanish civil and religious law to try to invoke the
protections, however minimal, that even they enjoyed in theory. The barriers
these slaves were up against are revealed, however, in the fact that the
religious authorities took the side of slave owners in most cases of blasphemy,
to the extent of ordering further punishment for Juan and several others like
him.

Color and Status in a Slave Society

Despite the presence of enslaved Africans in Mexico and
other parts of Spanish America, society was not defined there primarily by
dependence on African slavery. It was, however, in Brazil, where the relative
absence of native society in areas under colonial control and the far greater
importance of a plantation economy made slavery the defining feature of the
legal and social landscape. For example, many free Bahian artisans of African
origins existed in a state relatively close to slavery because significant
numbers of slaves were engaged in the same skilled occupations, driving down
their status. On the other hand, enslaved cowboys working on the vast cattle
ranches that stretched out along the São Francisco river in the
sertão,
the
dry backlands of the northeast, led lives that were very different from those
of Bahian artisans, whether enslaved or free, let alone field workers on Bahian
or Pernambucan sugar plantations. The daily life of this last group, as we saw
in an earlier chapter, consisted almost entirely of labor in the harvest for
much of the year, with adult life expectancy often just a few years. “A sugar
mill is hell,” wrote one Bahia-based cleric in 1627, “and all the masters of
them are damned.”