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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers - The Baroque Years (66th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - October 2006 |
IV
But there were the nuts and bolts of economics, too. Labor needs, to begin, were a primary worry, more so after the pool of Indian workers began to shrivel up. True, Spaniards migrated to the New World; but only a handful of dirt farmers, men willing to work under the hot sun, abandoned the mother country. Given the nature of colonial reality, Indians had to labor to build New Spain. For this task, the Spaniards invented the repartimientos, having, theoretically, ruled out slavery and the encomienda. Under this unsavory form of compulsory labor, Spaniards had to pay Indians to plow their fields and toil in the mines. The formula was wage labor. However, since Indians saw scant merit in toiling for Spaniards, no matter what the monetary reward, they had to be made to do it.
Indian men, drafted to work by the native caciques, labored forty-five days of every year for the Spaniards. The Indian was paid, and, the legislation stipulated, his employer had to deal justly with him. Only so many Indians could be taken from a village at any one time, and heads of families had to be allowed time to plant and harvest their own crops. Crown policy was both patriarchal and despotic. No longer a slave of the encomendero, the Indian was free; but in a catch-22 dilemma, he had to toil for the Spaniard, particularly in the mines, where, despite the importation of African slaves, he did most of the labor. Repartimientos, forced-labor-drafts, were also employed to build the cities, to do the heavy construction work of streets, aqueducts, jails, and parks. The Indians, moreover, were not exempted from the labor required by the clergy for churches, cathedrals, monasteries, and convents.
As before, Spanish law and practice stood poles apart. Under the repartimientos, the Indian made out poorly. Not uncommonly, Spaniards, wanting to bleed white their repartimientos, used their workers from sunup to sundown, beat them, failed to pay them, or took their clothes away so that they would not run off. Under the guise of the repartimientos, the owner of obrajes in Puebla, sweatshops producing cheap cloth which dated from the late sixteenth century, relied on thugs to ensnare Indians to work for them. . Once shut up in obrajes, the Indians, to quote one scholar, had about as much chance of escaping as from prison. Not a few obrajes moguls locked up their Indians at night under the watchful eye of hired goons. The ill treatment boomeranged; Indians did their best to avoid the repartimiento, apparently quite successfully because crown authorities intensified their “recruiting” efforts, ordering local officials and caciques to provide Indians or face punishment. In 1587, to give an illustration, the viceroy threatened to jail the corregidor and alcalde of Cimapán if they failed to corral Indians for the mines of Pachuca. On another occasion, authorities ruled that constables who could not get Indians to work would have to do it themselves. For all that, the crown, in 1633, abolished the repartimiento except in the mining industry, deeming the extraction of silver too important to leave to volunteers. Nor did the repartimiento die completely elsewhere, lingering on until the next century in the backwards regions of New Spain.
Eventually, wage labor, mostly Indian, held sway; only here and there did unpaid work survive, ironically mostly on public projects. Wage labor, more likely than not, won out primarily because of the scarcity of Indian, the consequence of the population decline, the bonanza of mining, and, to a lesser extent, the needs of the obrajes. The mining boom depended on an army or workers, whatever their nature. When slavery, both African and Indian, as well as the repartimiento proved inadequate, mineowners, who were reaping fabulous profits, started to pay higher wages and by doing that, attracted Indian workers; for instance, at Zacatecas, good wages, the best in New Spain, drew Aztecs, Tlaxcalans, Cholultecans and Tarascans, producing a migration that lasted until the end of the mining bonanza.
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La Valenciana Mine in Guanajuato produces 20% of Silver in the world
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Monument to the miners in Guanajuato
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter V of this fascinating book, The Baroque Years.
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website.
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