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ABSTRACT
The captivity, trafficking and labour exploitation of indigenous people from the southern Lowlands of the Andes, in the Real Audiencia de Charcas, and the fate of their descendants in the colonial period, are studied here through individual histories as well as the legislation and its application. When observing diverse experiences of captives, the author considers that these cannot be understood through the slavery-freedom dichotomy or through the use of the language of ethnification, but rather it is necessary to reflect on other more complex phenomena such as non-free work, related to the legal status of the person in the colonial order. This reflection addresses the vulnerability of captives and their descendants to the paterfamilias, but also reveals the ability they showed to enforce their rights before the courts. This historiographical look invites us to observe the complexity of social and labour relations, reminding us that people, in their daily practices, transform the meaning of the denominations imposed by political power.
Acknowledgments
To Christian G. De Vito, for the invitation to participate in the session: “Labor coercion, labor control, worker’s agency” in the European Social Science History Conference that took place in Belfast in 2018 with a proposal that resulted in this text. To Viola Müller and Craig Phelan, for supporting the editorial process for the difussion of this work in Labor History.
Acronyms
ABNB Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia (Sucre)
AGI Archivo General de Indias (Seville)
BNM Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid)
CR Cédula Real (ABNB, Sucre)
EC Expedientes Coloniales (ABNB, Sucre)
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Real Audiencia de Charcas, a colonial ancestor of Bolivia, was a Court subordinated to that of Lima and directly to the King of Spain. Its jurisdiction was initially one hundred leagues around the city of La Plata (today Sucre, Bolivia), its administrative headquarters, and subsequently extended to Collasuyu, Cuzco, Tucumán, Juries and Diaguitas, Chunchos-Moxos and the territories colonized by Andrés Manso and Ñuflo de Chávez. Towards 1573 the southeastern half of Cuzco was dismembered (See Barnadas, Citation1973).
2. Part of the historiography focused on economic analysis has insisted on differentiating the ‘slave societies’ of the large haciendas, from those ‘with slaves’, alluding to regions such as Charcas where fewer Africans arrived and where the workforce did not move the productive apparatus. This reading, anchored in a quite ethnically-based macroinstitutional view of slavery, did not integrate in its analysis the experience of Indians enslaved by law and did not deal with the slavery mechanisms used in other labour systems in which a free population of different origin was immersed.
3. Lowlands here means the region of the East, the Chaco and the Amazon of the jurisdiction of Charcas. Important historians and anthropologists since the second half of the 20th century have produced fundamental studies for the ethnohistory of diverse populations of this region (See Saignes, Citation1985, Citation2005; Saignes et al., Citation1988, Combès & Tyuleneva, Citation2011; Pifarré, Citation1989; Presta, Citation1997; Julien, Citation1997; Oliveto, Citation2010). There is an undeniable gap in the field of study of Indians who arrived as captives in Charcas and their descendants.
4. Beyond the legal condition, the calidad (quality or status) is a Spanish colonial concept that encompasses both origin and heritage, as well as phenotype, occupation and clothing, among other aspects subject to social assessment (see Hering, Citation2011, p. 461).
5. Santa Cruz was founded in 1561 in the mountainous area of the Chiquitanía, south-eastern region of Charcas. In 1604, part of its population was transferred first to Cotoca and finally in 1622, to San Lorenzo el Real, which became the government of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
6. ABNB: EC 1743, no. 135.
7. Strictly speaking, ‘piece’ or ‘piece of Indian’ was the enslaved who measured more than seven feet high on his arrival in Peru and Charcas. Women and children used to be held as fractions of piece and sold together (See Trazegnies, Citation1981, p.90).
8. This extension of meaning occurs from very early on in the legal and notarial documentation of the second half of the 16th century in Charcas and is maintained throughout the colonial period.
9. ABNB EC 1764, no. 134.
10. ABNB: EC 1748, no. 53.
11. ABNB EC 1764, no. 134, f. 1.
12. Penalties could be fines, physical punishment, confinement, temporary exile from the city, deprivation of trade or several combined. In local practice this depended more on the sentence of the judge than on the strict application of a royal provision.
13. Here it alludes to the first law of the second title: ‘Of the freedom of the Indians’ (see Recopilación de Leyes de Indias (Compilation of Laws of the Indies), 1681, book 6). This law, issued in 1526, was reiterated several times in the years to come.
14. On the debate about the legality/illegality of the flight of slaves see García A., Citation2000, p. 99 and ff.
15. There is a possible influence of the lexicon of the Siete Partidas de Alfonso X el Sabio (1256–1265), so cited by the jurists of the time in Charcas. Part VII, title. 14, law 26 states that when a ‘servant’ ran away from his master, the latter had to go to a judge to report him. But of course, the Partidas refer to the old concept of ‘servant’, as a servant in a situation of restricted freedom with slave-like reminiscences, that little by little would give way to the servus of Medieval Latin, legally free worker. In any case, by the 18th century, the royal regulations already insisted that the Indians were free subjects of the king.
16. Her statement is not meaningless considering that Maria had taken refuge in the home of the protector of Indians, Francisco Maldonado, to avoid reprimands by Ocampo during the proceedings, and incidentally, to earn a living while nursing her son, as the defendant indicates.
17. Except the truncated files that do not allow the sentence to be known.
18. In analogy with other groups such as the Caribes of the Antilles, the Aucas of the Kingdom of Chile or the Chichimecas of New Spain, among others.
19. The colonial Chiriguano stereotype, anchored in what Edgar Morin calls the collective imaginary, originates in different traditions to represent the ‘barbarian’: the pre-Hispanic, specifically Inca; the imported European; but also the narrations of the experience of the Spanish conquerors with other populations not redeemed on the American continent.
20. In this case, as in others, the Chiriguano ethnicity, existing prior to the Spanish presence, was altered by the extension of colonial Indianness. See Presta, Citation2000a, p. 72.
21. On the campaigns of ‘pacificación’ and the creation of borders in colonial South America, see Christophe Guidicelli in B. Lavallé (Ed.), Citation2005, p. 157–176; and Guillaume Boccara, Citation2005.
22. On the debate about indigenous slavery see Jesús M. García Añoveros Citation2000, p. 59.
23. BNE, Madrid, mns. 3044, 309.
24. Juan Polo de Ondegardo highlighted this reality in the sessions of theologians and jurists organized at the Audiencia de Charcas to discuss the issue. ‘Information produced by Polo de Ondegardo on 24 October 1573.’ Mujía, Citation1913, p. 82 and ff.
25. Juan de Matienzo (in Julien, Citation1997, p.46) had already indicated this opinion to the king in 1561. During the sessions of the Audiencia de Charcas in 1573, the lawyer Antonio Lopez de Haro was of the same opinion about the uprooting. See Mujía, Citation1913, p. 246–247.
26. Jaime Valenzuela (in Gaune & Lara, Citation2009, p 225–260) recognizes a similar phenomenon in the Captaincy General of Chile, where although the enslavement of the Auca was legal until 1674, the practice of trade in women and children was carried out without any legal argument and called: ‘sale according to custom’ (venta a la usanza).
27. The term was used to refer to all those who had participated in the conquest and who were not encomenderos or merchants, without taking into account their abilities with weapons or even if they possessed them. On the use of the term in colonial Peru, see James Lockhart, Citation1982.
28. ABNB: EC 1673, no. 20, 3.
29. ABNB: EC 1748, no. 107, 1.
30. On the system of encomiendas see (Presta, Citation2000b; Barnadas, Citation1973).
31. I refer to the reflection of Frank L. Zephyr (Citation2004) when studying slavery in 19th-century Brazil.
32. Excerpt from the text of the royal cedula given in San Lorenzo, 17 September 1596. ABNB: CR no. 280.
33. Minutes of consultations made by the Council in matters of the district. AGI: Charcas no. 13, 1.
34. ABNB:EC 1748, no .107, 1.
35. ABNB EC 1764, no. 134, f. 2. This indicates that at the time of the trial Maria was already around 25 years old, old enough to be able to sue.
36. Just war is understood as the basis of legal-theological precepts aimed at regulating warfare during and after it took place.
37. On the figure of the rescue (rescate) see García Añoveros, Citation2000, p. 110.
38. Freedom was in fact contingent, for all subjects having a certain degree of political, economic or moral dependence on another person, whether it was the king, the paterfamilias, the husband in the case of women, the master among slaves or the lord among other servants.
39. On platense colonial society see Presta, Citation2000a.
40. ABNB: EC 1749 no . 58a, fs. 1–2.
41. ABNB: EC no. 35, 1743, f. 1.
42. ABNB: EC 1764, no. 134, f. 3.
43. ABNB: EC no. 35, 1749, fs. 3r-4r. The Court sentenced in favour of Miguel two months after the start of the proceedings.
44. ABNB: 1764 EC no .134, f. 1.
45. ABNB: EC 1748, n° 53, f. 3r.
46. On the multifunctionality of the colonial house as a place of work and residence of Spaniards and Indians in cities such as La Plata, see Presta, Citation2010, pp. 8–10.
47. Jane Mangan has already pointed out that ethnic affiliation and the integration of people in the market must be analyzed simultaneously. See Mangan, Citation2005.
48. ABNB EC 1749, n° 58.
49. ABNB: EC 1764, no. 134.
50. The Chiriguano Miguel de la Cruz complained precisely that Marcos Padilla wanted to subject him and his wife in 1749 to what he called his encomienda. ABNB: EC 1749, no. 35.
51. I refer here to a very flexible quality, understood from the uses and content given by the people who embody and express it, among them and in the face of the power. Carlo Ginzburg (Citation1994) would refer to individuals from the popular world acting as performative agents in the representation of their own reality.
52. The historian finds here further proof of the fragmentary nature of the Indian concept (O’Toole, Citation2012, p. 86).
53. Adjustments that Davir Tavarez (in Fischer & O’Hara, Citation2009, p. 82) calls ‘arrangements’. On the concept of identity as a construct and on the most dynamic side of its uses, I also refer to the works of Jeremy Mumford in the same compilation book.
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Paola Revilla Orías
Paola Revilla Orías PhD in History (University of Chile/EHESS). Member of the Bolivian Society of History and of the Latin American Work and Workers Network (RedLatt). Her research focus lies on slavery and other forms of coercive servitude in colonial Latin America, with emphasis on the African and Indigenous experience in Charcas.