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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers - The Baroque Years (68th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - November 2006 |
V
The Indian had to adapt to more than just changes in the labor system. Spanish colonialism, as was explained earlier, placed in jeopardy ethnic and tribal ties an reduced Indian society to one class. For a brief respite, the Spaniards had allowed the old nobility to survive, employing it to rule the conquered natives. The nobility became the lackey of crown, church, and encomendero. However, outside of Yucatán and Oaxaca, most of the Indian caciques, the last of the old nobility, vanished form the scene. With their demise, Spanish colonialism dictated that Indians be poor and members of the lower class. Being poor and being Indian, more likely than not, meant the same thing.
For the Indian, Baroque splendor spelled trouble. The economics of time, upheld by crown legislation, confined him increasingly to the toil of agriculture, especially when mestizos replaced him in the mines. Spaniards and criollos monopolize the trades, commerce, mining, and what passed for manufacturing. Similarly, most urban dwellers were Indian campesinos, men who tilled their ejidos or the lands of a hacendado. When the hacienda, about the end of the sixteenth century, became the principal supplier of food for the Spanish towns, the agriculture of the Indian suffered. From that point on, the Indian was generally a subsistence farmer; when he had land of his own, he cultivated it to feed himself and his family, having only marginal ties to the capitalistic market of the Spanish towns. His farming techniques remained primitive; his tool was the planting stick of his ancestors, and he domesticated no more than chickens. When the Indian disposed of his products on the marketplace, he sold them cheaply; in contrast, he paid dearly for Spanish goods. Indian craftsmen had difficulty selling their wares in the Spanish towns: their competitors, whether Spaniards, criollos, or, more and more, mestizos, saw to that.
Nothing depicts better their fate than what befell Indian women. Many of them, orphaned or widowed by the wars of the Conquest or the epidemics of disease, found themselves left to fend for themselves, increasingly, if residing in the Spanish towns, as domestics or to labor in mines or obrajes, thirty-six of them by the middle of the century. When they had jobs as servants in Spanish or criollo households, they worked for little more than room and board, as well as for the chance to care for their children, at times the bastard offspring of the master. If not domestics, they carried the produce of countryside to the town or city for sale at the tianguis, the marketplace, learning Spanish, it was said, in order to sell their wares to Spaniards, criollos, and mestizos. Colonial legislation and the church, meanwhile, dictated that Indian men discard their polygamous habits, which meant that they could no longer openly maintain their harems. In pre-Columbian times, however, polygamous men had been responsibly for the welfare of all of their women; after the Spaniards banned the practice, they turned to clandestine affairs, but shed the burden of taking care of their illegitimate offspring.
Oddly, at first glance, Indians appeared to be free¸ they were not slaves. As individuals, they were, more or less, at liberty to do what they wished; but, the pueblos to which they belonged were not, being victimized by the omnipotent Spanish town. This exploitation of one community by another, the latter always more powerful, Mexican scholars title “internal colonialism”; with a flair for words, Marx labeled in the “Asiatic mode of production.”
The Indian, as his behavior revealed, knew he was not free. So, like the Maya in Yucatán, he took to drinking more. On this point, most scholars concur. Few “people in history drank more than the Indian” of New Spain. Again and again, the Indian relied on pulque to mitigate the hardships of colonial rule. Men, particularly, drowned their sorrows; women drank “mostly at fiestas.” A wife, according to the shared wisdom, “should not drink while her husband is drunk.” Every village or family fiesta, whether the wife drank or not, ended in a drunken orgy.
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Hacienda Ochil in Yucatán
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Magueyes from which Pulque and Tequila are extracted
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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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