The Sweat of Their Brow: A History of Work in Latin America

A History of Work in Latin America

David McCreery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317454366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Throughout Latin America's history the world of work has been linked to race, class, and gender within the larger framework of changing social, political, and economic circumstances both in the region and abroad. In this compelling narrative, David McCreery situates the work experience in Latin America's broader history. Rather than organizing the coverage by forms of work, he proceeds chronologically, breaking 500 years of history into five periods: Encounter and Accommodation, 1480 -- 1550; The Colonial System, 1550 -- 1750; Cities and Towns, 1750 -- 1850; Export Economies, 1850 -- 1930; Work in Modern Latin America, 1930 -- the Present.Within each period, McCreery discusses the chief economic, political, and social characteristics as they relate to work, identifying both continuities and discontinuities from each preceding period. Specific topics studied range from the encomienda, the enslaving of Indians in Spanish America, the introduction of Black African slaves, labor in mining, agricultural labor, urban and domestic labor, women and work, peasant economies, industrial labor, to the maquilas and more.

Chapter 1

Encounter and Accommodation, 1480–1550

For the people of Castile the best work was war. After Charles Martel stopped the Moorish sweep north at Tours in 732, the small surviving Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia began the Reconquista (Reconquest), a 700–year process of pushing Islam back. Individual and social success for these crusaders came from victory in battle, whether in large-scale campaigns or local conflicts. Military prowess elevated lords and peasants alike, if not equally. Centuries later, one of the more unlucky of the New World’s Spanish conquerors remembered that his family name Cabeza de Vaca (“Cow Head”) and his minor hidalgo (lower nobility) status derived from the exploits of an ancestor, a shepherd who had used a strategically placed cow skull to guide Christian armies to a surprise attack on the Moors. What mattered in the Reconquest, and what elevated many an obscure Spaniard in the New World, was personal valor, a capacity for enormous, if typically short-term, physical exertion, and a high confidence in your arm, your God, and your King. Successful men conquered land and honors and put others to work for them.

Background

By the middle of the fourteenth century the Christians had expelled Islam from most of the Iberian peninsula, leaving only the vestigial caliphate of Granada in the southeast. On the flanks of the peninsula the kingdoms of Portugal, facing the Atlantic, and Aragon and Catalonia, oriented toward the Mediterranean, were shifting their efforts and their economies from war to seaborne commerce. The kings struck bargains with the new, emerging urban bourgeoisies to limit the power of the landed nobility and to pursue policies favorable to trade and manufacturing, in return for financial support for the Crown. These states increasingly resembled commerce-based Italian city-states more than warrior kingdoms, although Portugal, in particular, never entirely abandoned elements of the Reconquest mind set. The kings of Portugal began the modern-day overseas expansion of Europe with the capture of Ceuta on the coast of North Africa in 1415 from Islam. But several hard-fought campaigns soon deflected Portuguese efforts away from direct confrontation with the Moors to explorations down the Atlantic coast of Africa, seeking trade and the possibility of linking up with the almost mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John (present-day Ethiopia). By the 1480s Portuguese ships regularly returned with cargoes of gold, ivory, and slaves obtained at trading posts on the West African coast. In the next decade the king’s servants were actively seeking a route around Africa to Asia.

The fifteenth century developed differently for Castile, the most powerful of the Reconquista Christian kingdoms and located on the peninsula’s high central plateau. Here war had never ceased, although by the mid-1400s this amounted to little more than border raids. Apart from war, Castile’s most important economic activity was stock raising, cattle and, particularly, sheep, to supply wool to the textile mills of Castile and Flanders. Large-scale herding of this sort was unusual in late medieval Europe, where economies more generally depended on a peasant farming that mixed agriculture with modest animal production. Ranching on the Iberian peninsula thrived in a warrior tradition that valued mobility and disdained agricultural labor, a tradition reinforced by the association of farm work with a conquered population of Moors, moriscos (Moorish converts to Christianity), and slaves.

In the second half of the fifteenth century political events in Iberia accelerated. Isabella, queen of Castile, in 1469 married Ferdinand of Aragon to form the embryonic Spanish state. This touched off an uprising of Castile’s nobility, who rightly feared the power of a consolidated monarchy. Victorious after a ten-year war, the Catholic monarchs turned their attention to the remaining Moorish presence on the peninsula. When Columbus brought his brilliant, if flawed, exploration scheme to Isabella, the monarchs were besieging Islam’s last citadel at Granada. Thus, in 1492 the proto-nation state of Spain stood unknowingly poised at a historical crossroads. For centuries Castile’s population hoped and expected to “make something of themselves” through war, to dominate others and to be respected for valor and martial abilities. But the Reconquista was over and, as the Portuguese discovered, North Africa offered limited possibilities for military success. How would the younger sons of hidalgos gain a name or wealth, and how would a warlike and ambitious yeoman peasantry advance? Aragon offered an alternative possible model. At first imitating, and now surpassing, the earlier Mediterranean city-states, Aragon was among Europe’s leaders in the development of commercial capitalism, the accumulation of money capital based on long-distance trade. As events unfolded, it was precisely the combination of Castile’s military prowess with Aragon’s economic power that underpinned Europe’s first, though imperfectly realized, nation-state, but it was Castile and Castilian values that framed the empire.

Empire

What might have happened had Columbus not returned to Granada with word of his discoveries, effectively reigniting the Reconquest and securing Castilian predominance in Iberia and in the New World? If not Columbus, someone else would have made the same or a similar voyage soon, and only Spain had the economic and military power at the time to take control of America. Not for more than another century, for example, was England able to launch a successful New World settlement colony. Thinking about alternative possibilities, though, reminds us that there were two models of empire available in the sixteenth century. Portugal’s approach was essentially medieval and it followed a pattern that went back at least to eighth or seventh century B.C. Greek trading communities in the Black Sea. Portugal set up “factories” in Africa, in Asia, and on the coast of Brazil, accidentally discovered in 1500 by a fleet bound for Asia. These were manned by agents of Portuguese and Genoese merchants who bartered with local populations for goods of value to Europeans. In the early sixteenth century Portugal made no serious effort to control colonial areas beyond those necessary for their trading stations. This was because the economic relations they developed did not require holding territory and because Portugal’s very small national population of perhaps a million in 1500 limited the manpower available for armies and bureaucracies. Even the ships that knitted together this most seaborne of empires increasingly were manned by mixed bloods and local populations recruited in the colonies.

Spain took a different approach to an empire, developed over centuries of the Reconquest and fine tuned in asserting control over the Canary Islands in the 1480s and 1490s. Theirs was an empire of conquest, occupation, domination, and control. Castile, which furnished most of the first-century migrants to the New World, benefited from a relatively large population and one with an appetite for war and conquest. Their experience, which was confirmed repeatedly in the New World, was that militarily they were almost invincible. Emigrants from the peninsula went readily to the New World “to serve God and the King and also to get rich,” in Bernal Díaz de Castillo’s famous phrase. Valor, heroic energy, luck, and ruthlessness could enrich and ennoble even an “obscure cut throat” such as Francisco Pizarro. This was the Age of Miracles, and it could not last. The first phase was over in the central areas by the 1540s, when Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza mounted the Coronado expedition to rid Mexico City of a turbulent population of would-be conquerors, and a new viceroy in Peru executed Gonzalo Pizarro. But no one knew this yet. For another two hundred years entradas (exploratory expeditions) pushed back the fringes of empire, repeating the hardships if rarely the successes of the first generation. War and armed domination unquestionably were work, and the Spanish were their sixteenth-century masters.

Despite the undoubted attractions of conquest, the Spanish did not shun peaceful trade and commerce as paths to riches. What those with social aspirations did avoid was direct involvement in artisan work or retail trade, though they were usually willing to rent property for this purpose and even to be silent partners in small-scale commercial enterprises. Wholesale trade, particularly long-distance overseas commerce, was a world apart from shop tending, and New World elites participated actively in it, often in partnerships with Spanish or foreign merchants. They were also involved in precious metal mining and money lending, as well as large-scale agriculture and stock raising. There was no shame in seeking profit, and a conqueror or a newly arrived viceroy was capable of paying close attention to gains and losses. A figure as prominent as Hernán Cortés spent hours each day preparing detailed instructions for agents and hacienda supervisors who did not seem to be giving enough attention to his income. What those ambitious for social status could not do was to work for others or work with their hands producing goods or services for others. New arrivals who introduced themselves into a community as artisans rarely escaped the social limits this imposed, even if later they prospered, but if they put aside their tools, picked up a sword, and joined an expedition they could move up. The early Spanish colonial world valued hard work and economic success, and like most new societies it was capable of considerable selective “amnesia” about a person’s past in the face of present success.

Social mobility was always easier on the edges of the empires than at the center, and in the sixteenth century all of Brazil was a fringe area. Portugal’s focus was on the East, and it had few resources to spare for the initially unpromising Atlantic coast of the New World. Several of the Europeans who played key roles in the early settlement of the colony were degredados, criminals sent to Brazil for their sins or abandoned on the coast by ships’ captains. In the 1530s men of modest success in India received huge grants of land in Brazil, reinforced by legal and judicial powers of which the Spanish conquerors could only dream. Still, for the first half-century after 1500 the Portuguese presence in Brazil was tenuous, and even after French intrusions and the possibilities of the new crop of sugar stimulated more interest in the 1550s and 1560s, there was no mass migration from Portugal. What arrived instead after 1560 was boatload upon boatload of African slaves, fueling and being paid for by a rapidly expanding export economy. As a result, what emerged in Brazil was a small “white” population immersed in a vast sea of Indians and blacks. Paradoxically, this led the state to reinforce legal race boundaries, while at the same time it prompted and demanded considerable de facto flexibility in the social definition of “white” and of the criteria for membership in local elites.

A term often mistakenly applied to conquest-era Spanish and Portuguese societies, and to much of Latin America since, is “feudal.” In fact, a strong Roman heritage and centuries of Moorish influence meant that the Iberian peninsula was the area of Europe in which classic feudalism was least developed. By the mid-fifteenth century much of the continent was moving to restructure economic and social relations to accommodate the development of mercantile capitalism. Spain and Portugal were among the early leaders in these reforms, but after 1500 they fell behind. This was not because they were “feudal” but because a flood of New World wealth made the often wrenching changes seem increasingly unnecessary. Aggravating a growing conservatism was Spain’s preoccupation with fighting the Reformation, which drained the state of treasure and the nation of blood. To preserve themselves under the hammer blows of Spain the new nations of England, France, the Netherlands, and the German states dismantled the power of the traditional landed elites, broke up archaic monopolies and production systems, and reoriented their economies to more capitalist forms. In a short span Spain went from being economically, as well as militarily and politically, the most advanced country in Europe to a laggard that saw its position continue to decline for centuries. The ready availability of New World silver meant that the economic, political, and social contradictions of early modern Spain were not addressed and remained unresolved, hindering modernization.

In Portugal the bourgeoisie by 1500 had made much greater headway in reorienting national policies to support capitalism. Ironically, though, the very size of Brazil, its lack of immediately exploitable resources, and the limited population available for overseas settlement meant that Portugal’s New World colony developed a much more “feudal” structure than did Spanish America. In New Spain and Peru within a generation the Crown brought the conquerors under control and imposed on them the rule of urban-based, state bureaucrats, at least in the central areas. For Brazil, by contrast, and even leaving aside the abortive pseudo-feudalism of the donatary captains, the development of sugar meant that the countryside dominated the towns. The weakness of the state fragmented power and put it in the hands of the lords of the engenhos (sugar mills) and of the sertāo (back country). The writ of the king’s representative hardly ran beyond the outskirts of the capital Salvador. The most capitalist of the Iberian powers had given birth to the most “feudal” of New World colonies.

Indigenous Populations

Despite evident differences, the culture of the Europeans that arrived in the New World was broadly uniform. This was not so for the indigenous American populations they found there. The outcome of initial encounters and the evolution of the colonies depended on a calculus of clashing social and material cultures, with elements specific to each area. Excepting a few groups that inhabited isolated maritime environments, most Indians in the New World depended on agriculture. Typically, they relied on “slash and burn” cultivation, though the indigenous empires developed more complex patterns of agriculture, and even the Arawaks of the Caribbean built up mounds (conucos) for more intensive use. The principal division of labor was by gender. Typically, men did the heavy clearing of the forest, a task that reinforced the skills necessary for hunting and warfare. Women took care of planting, weeding, and harvesting, as well as child rearing and household duties. Occasionally captives were employed as forced labor, but generally subsistence agriculture was family or community based. These units were largely self-sufficient in material terms, producing not only their own food but the tools, housing and bedding, and clothing and ornaments their members required.

With no urgency to produce a surplus above immediate needs, and scant way to store it or transport it if they did, subsistence societies did not usually support a specialized artisan class or an elaborated ruling elite. Where hierarchies did emerge—the Arawaks, for example, had a well-defined strata of caciques (local lords)—these seem to have been based more on the control of access to the supernatural, or sometimes to a scarce commodity such as salt, rather than on accumulated material, or class, differences.

The rhythm of subsistence societies alternated short bursts of hard and sometimes dangerous work, for example, hunting or fishing or war, with long periods of leisure. They formed what one anthropologist has labeled the “original affluent societies.” Everyone was able to acquire what they needed and were able to use with a minimum of effort, and members of society lacked the means or the rationale to accumulate material capital. As a result, there was little purpose in forcing others to work for them on a large scale. The “improvidence” of these societies and the “laziness” of the population greatly bothered Europeans, particularly when the Indians refused to work under conditions and for the wages set by the new arrivals. Indigenous populations understood and respected work and were capable of enormous bursts of energy when called for. What they could not understand was the accumulation of more and more material possessions, possessions they could not carry, would have to defend, and for which they had little use. Variations on this basic form of subsistence farmer/hunter-gatherer could be found throughout the Americas, from the plains of North America to the cold islands of Tierra del Fuego.

The imperial civilizations of the mainland, most evidently the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca, manifested much more highly differentiated production systems that supported complex social and class structures. At the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid were the peasant farming families, here usually organized into kinship clans called, variously, calpulli, chinamits, or allyu. What set the peasant off from subsistence agriculturalists was the regular production of a surplus, part of which was appropriated by another group for its own purposes. This tax might take the form of agricultural goods or handicraft items such as cloth or worked leather, or natural products or slaves. Where transportation was prohibitively expensive, taxes might be levied instead in the form of “rotary” labor applied to elite or state-owned lands or for public works: men, and sometimes women, were required to work a certain number of days or weeks each year. The surplus they produced supported specialists such as court artisans, a military or priestly class, or a state bureaucracy whose job it was to work full time for the general well-being.

These systems typically involved reciprocal obligations and benefits, and for the mass of the population the very act of generating the surplus reinforced their commitment to society. The early Spanish reported, for example, that pre-conquest Andean peasants had gone “joyfully” to work the Inca’s lands. Where, on the other hand, the people doubted the legitimacy of the demands made upon them or saw these as exploitative, the relationship could be tense and might even become dependent on open coercion. For example, in the last days before the arrival of the Spanish, the Aztec imperial state was experiencing growing popular resistance to its demands for victims for human sacrifice.

In the Andes, villages and small city-states had alternated with empires for centuries. The advantages of controlling resources in several ecological zones, including the mountains, the valleys between the mountains, and the coast, prompted repeated efforts to create centralized states, but difficult communications and local discontent again and again split apart and toppled these larger entities. The Inca Empire, consolidated only at the turn of the sixteenth century, was simply the most recent of such supra-village constructions, and it was far from stable, as a destructive civil war in the early 1530s demonstrated. A state policy of mitmaq settlements combined the functions of military colonies, to keep outlying areas under control, with guarantees of access to different ecological strata. The Inca’s subjects paid tribute chiefly through labor service, mita. These demands could be quite extensive. For example, one community of 4,000 “houses” reported shortly after the conquest that its obligations under the Incas had included sending 400 men to the capital for construction work, 400 men to plant food for the military garrisons in the North, shepherds for the Inca’s herds, and workers to weave cloth and gather dye stuffs. Others mined salt, harvested peppers and cacao in the hot country, guarded the Inca’s fields, transported the products to Cuzco and nearby administrative centers, and carried cargo along the royal highway. The community also furnished to the state various artisan products and sent forty “older”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Encounter and Accommodation, 1480–1550
• Chapter 2: The Colonial System, 1550–1750
• Chapter 3: Cities and Towns, 1750–1850
• Chapter 4: Export Economies, 1850–1930
• Chapter 5: Work in Modern Latin America
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Sources and Additional Readings
• Index