Pitt Latin American Series

Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

Rachel Sarah O'Toole

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780822977964
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O'Toole examines how Andeans and Africans negotiated and employed casta, and in doing so, constructed these racial categories. Royal and viceregal authorities separated "Indians" from "blacks" by defining each to specific labor demands. Casta categories did the work of race, yet, not all casta categories did the same type of work since Andeans, Africans, and their descendants were bound by their locations within colonialism and slavery. The secular colonial legal system clearly favored indigenous populations. Andeans were afforded greater protections as "threatened" native vassals. Despite this, in the 1640s during the rise of sugar production, Andeans were driven from their assigned colonial towns and communal property by a land privatization program. Andeans did not disappear, however; they worked as artisans, muleteers, and laborers for hire. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Andeans employed their legal status as Indians to defend their prerogatives to political representation that included the policing of Africans. As rural slaves, Africans often found themselves outside the bounds of secular law and subject to the judgments of local slaveholding authorities. Africans therefore developed a rhetoric of valuation within the market and claimed new kinships to protect themselves in disputes with their captors and in slave-trading negotiations. Africans countered slaveholders' claims on their time, overt supervision of their labor, and control of their rest moments by invoking customary practices. Bound Lives offers an entirely new perspective on racial identities in colonial Peru. It highlights the tenuous interactions of colonial authorities, indigenous communities, and enslaved populations and shows how the interplay between colonial law and daily practice shaped the nature of colonialism and slavery.

1. BETWEEN BLACK AND INDIAN

LABOR DEMANDS AND THE CROWN'S CASTA

IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, Father Bernardino de Cárdenas lamented that indigenous people in the viceroyalty of Peru were treated as slaves. He warned that Spaniards forced “poor Indians” to work in the highland mines. Indians, declared the Franciscan, were free people and as such their labor should be compensated.¹ Implicitly, Cárdenas suggested a comparison with Africans and their descendants—as slaves—who were not paid. He echoed ongoing royal concerns with the exploitation of indigenous workers and repeated Spanish anxieties over the sustainability (perceived or actual) of indigenous labor. The cleric also recalled an episode of an African mistreating an indigenous leader (cacique). In Cárdenas's account, a priest arrived and ordered the “black slave” to “leave the Indian alone; realize that you are a slave, and the Indian [is] free.” According to Cárdenas,, the black replied that “he was a slave of one single master, but the Indian was a slave of all the whites and blacks” and therefore could be beaten and insulted—even by a black.²

Cárdenas's account employed a number of stereotypes that circulated throughout the Americas in the colonial period, including a defiant black, a pedantic cleric, and a pitiful Indian. He invoked these figures in a particular context. As he finished his account in 1632, colonial officials were renewing their efforts to collect revenues from indigenous populations, including migrant laborers, in response to fiscal pressures from the crown.³ As Andean communities declined in numbers or refused to serve mita, colonizers wondered whether enslaved laborers or another form of indigenous labor would fulfill their demands. Given these circumstances, the exchange described by Cárdenas suggests a commentary on ongoing debates of whether black or indigenous labor would be suitable for the highland mines, as well as whether forced labor or wage labor was the most efficient or morally appropriate for the viceroyalty. By having compared Indian and enslaved labor, Cárdenas's account suggested how the enslavement of African laborers could be considered as equivalent in some senses with the requirement of mita labor service from Andean populations. At the same time, the Franciscan underlined a colonial maintenance of critical differences between blacks and Indians.

Cárdenas's usage points to royal intentions to separate Indians from blacks while conceding that both provided a similar type of labor. On one hand, official discourse contrasted the qualities of blacks and Indians to justify Spanish colonialism. If Indians were weak and miserable (meaning impoverished and lowly), then the crown was needed to provide protection from supposedly predatory colonizers and, hypothetically, dangerous black men. Colonial authorities emphasized what they perceived to be distinctions between “black” and “Indian” often to depict indigenous people as constantly under threat. By doing so, the crown could continue to promote itself as fulfilling its religious obligations to convert and to protect its “native vassals” while underplaying the fact that Spanish colonizers exploited indigenous laborers. The differences implied by separation, however, did not mean that Indians were incapable of the same labor as blacks. In particular moments of crisis when laborers were lacking during the seventeenth century, viceregal and regional authorities also considered the interchangeability of blacks and Indians, further illustrating the constructed nature of their differences. Those defending the continuation of the mita to Potosí in the early seventeenth century claimed that replacing Indians with black slaves would be too costly.⁴ Others argued that blacks were unsuited to the altitude of the highland mining areas while Indians were more adept than blacks at producing silver.⁵ Unquestionably, the cost of transporting enslaved people to the highland mines may in fact have been prohibitive, but Africans were certainly capable of adapting to the climate. The point is that even within clerical texts and colonial mandates, casta divisions and contrasts were malleable, especially when labor was in demand.

Throughout the viceroyalty, landholders and others eagerly appropriated Andeans and Africans as laborers no matter what their casta. In 1634, during a period of increasing disparity, mine owners called on the crown to favor their enterprises with more generous allocations of Indians to serve mita. Already, the landholders purchased black slaves to replace indigenous laborers lost as a result of exploitative working conditions.⁶ After the 1640s, when the expansion of Spanish estates and the reduction of indigenous landholdings corresponded with the cessation of the legal slave trade into Spanish America, landholders, mine owners, and others demanded the labor of both blacks and Indians.⁷ In the mid-seventeenth century the crown extorted more revenue, but indigenous refusal combined with the dramatic end in the crown-sanctioned slave trade heightened elite anxieties about the supply of labor and influenced the rhetorical construction of all laborers' casta.

Official discourse did not necessarily follow economic realities. For local authorities, as the crown-sanctioned slave trade within Spanish America surged in the late seventeenth century, a need for any laborer, coupled with the erosion of indigenous reducciones, lessened the distinctions made between castas. The repeated attempts to restructure the failing mita (including the reforms of the viceroy Duque de la Palata) only confirmed the perception that enslavement of black men and women was more necessary than before.⁸ These shifting policies illustrate how casta categorization and expectations were remade and recast according to changing economic conditions and changing labor demands of the viceroyalty.

Only recently have scholars articulated how blacks were conceptualized in relation to Indians, but these treatments tended to focus on the abstract constructions of elite concerns.⁹ Here, I explore official mandates in order to understand how the castas of Indian and black were articulated in relation to each other. Moreover, this chapter grounds shifting administrative orders in relation to the end (in the 1640s) and then return (in the 1660s) of the official slave trade when both crown and viceregal officials considered a perceived interchangeability of black and Indian laborers in Peru, thus undermining the specific differences between them that had previously been created. The distinctions between black and Indian, even in official discourse, would eventually dissolve, when the crown could no longer point to a geographically-contained indigenous population within assigned colonial towns in the late seventeenth century. Before examining how Andeans and Africans negotiated, contested, and utilized casta characteristics, this chapter explores how the crown, clerics, and local authorities contradicted and contested each other as they constructed the categories of Indian and black. By locating official articulations of black and Indian within colonizers' anxieties about labor, this chapter demonstrates how the discussions of casta categorization were rooted in shifting material realities and the contradictory discourses of a crown checked by colonizers' labor demands.

Protecting Indians

Since the sixteenth century, the Spanish crown had declared that native peoples of the Americas who agreed to be ruled would be protected from Spanish colonizers in the Americas, corrupt officials, and blacks as well as other people of mixed descent. In their capacity as Indians complying with crown mandates, indigenous people in the Andes paid tribute and provided labor by serving mita. In exchange, well into the seventeenth century the viceroy and the Real Audiencia in Peru continued to proclaim that indigenous laborers would be protected from Spanish colonizers, including mine owners and landholders.¹⁰ The Real Audiencia also ordered owners of textile workshops, sugar mills, and mines to pay their indigenous workers a just jornal (a day's pay).¹¹ In one sense the requirement that labor be compensated with wages illustrated the crown's dedication to an ideal that vassals were free from unjust coercion, including indigenous people. In another sense the crown required payment of indigenous wages so that Indians could pay tribute, an essential royal revenue throughout the seventeenth century.¹² Protecting Indians was a means for the crown to protect a source of income while prohibitions against Indian slavery bolstered the crown's overall moral justification as custodian of indigenous people.

The language of enslaving indigenous people was entangled with the crown religious and legal commitment to defend its native vassals. Since the sixteenth century, the crown (with its viceroys) had attempted to revoke colonial enslavement of native people who resisted or in other ways earned the designation of “barbarous.”¹³ Royal jurists explained that indigenous people as vassals could not be named as or be assumed to have qualities of slaves.¹⁴ In an invocation of royal mandates, fray Alonso Gravero of La Paz (in today's Bolivia) reminded the crown that the “poor natives” were innocent “Christian sheep” who should not be enslaved.¹⁵ The moral mandate had practical consequences. In 1662, Peru's viceroy warned that the continued warfare and enslavement of indigenous Chileans would push them to revolt.¹⁶ In 1669, Santiago's bishop informed the crown that because the local governor had forced indigenous men and women out of their communities to work on Spanish ranches, the Indians had taken up arms to free themselves.¹⁷ These and other mandates warned that without virtuous colonial officials, the crown's mandates to protect Indians had gone unheeded. Indeed, the crown protections of indigenous communities in the central and southern Andes had been repeatedly violated by inspectors and other authorities marking a deterioration of royal authority by the mid-seventeenth century.¹⁸

The loose hold of colonial governance coincided with royal comparisons between Indians and blacks using the language of enslavement in the late seventeenth century. In 1681 the viceroy attempted to explain to the crown why indigenous people had abandoned their assigned colonial towns. He claimed that indigenous leaders (caciques) had enslaved Indians and forced them to work to such an extent that they had fled. Rather than examine the extreme pressures on indigenous communities of tribute and mita that could not be resolved, and keep the colonial treasury solvent, the viceroy's choice of language described slavery as being forced to work without pay, day and night.¹⁹ The same year, the crown had disapprovingly reported that Indians were treated worse than slaves on estates.²⁰ The royal concerns with the repressive treatment of Indians were reiterated on Peru's northern coast. In the required investigation of Trujillo magistrate's retirement in 1672, witnesses were asked if the colonial officials had treated Indians “as if in slavery,” including executing public physical punishments or placing them in the stocks.²¹ In the same period, a Dominican observed that Indians had become “perpetual slaves of the magistrates.”²² Andeans, however, had not become enslaved in the seventeenth century. Instead, many indigenous communities, particularly those subjected to the Potosí mita, had reached a crisis point in the late seventeenth century as the exactions of magistrates from rural Andeans became more excessive.²³ Colonial authorities expressed the nature of these payments as forms of local slavery in ways that played down the ongoing demands of a colonial government that required more revenue due to Spain's ongoing debt and fiscal crisis.

A repetitive language about Indian enslavement contrasts with a silence regarding the experiences of enslaved African and African-descent people, who regularly endured violent punishment and were uncompensated for their labor. The implicit suggestion was that while blacks were expected to suffer the conditions of slavery, Indians were not. For clerics, blacks became a standard image to argue for increased protection of Indians. The Franciscan Bernardino de Cárdenas suggested that Indians were more ignorant of Catholic doctrine than slaves.²⁴ Likewise, Santiago's bishop complained that Indians were being taken from their parishes and forced to continuously work “like black slaves” to suggest a correlation between lack of clerical supervision and labor demands.²⁵ The clerics even suggested that Indians were in worse positions than enslaved blacks. Santiago's bishop explained that once removed from their parishes, Indians had no one to take care of them. In contrast, he explained, owners fed, attended to illnesses, and buried slaves in order to protect their property.²⁶ By speaking of slavery but not enslaved Africans, the clerical discourse suggested that black slaves were better off than indigenous people.

Cárdenas suggested that Indians were enslaved to everyone.²⁷ For clerics, these statements bolstered their case that further evangelization of indigenous people was necessary. In most parts of the Andes, indigenous people were assigned to dedicated parishes and specific clerics. In contrast, enslaved men and women in urban areas were to attend the general, Cathedral parishes and in the rural areas make do with itinerant clerics. The Catholic practices of Africans and their descendants (or even their lack) were not in discussion. Instead, colonial authorities and Catholic clerics employed blacks as discursive objects to construct their relationship with Indians and justify an expansion of their positions even during various fiscal crises of the seventeenth century.

The crown also was charged with a religious obligation of evangelizing native people of the Americas that in many ways supported colonial economic goals. Falling within this moral parameter, the crown was to provide “good treatment” to Indians who, although they were “free vassals,” were supposedly too facile for self-governance.²⁸ For the judge (oidor) of the Real Audiencia of Lima, Spanish rule and even work demands would liberate “miserable” (or vulnerable) and “naturally lazy Indians” from their condition.²⁹ In the Andes crown officials echoed the Consejo de Indias's declaration that Indians, “pusillanimous by nature,” lived in a “wretched” or “miserable” state that made them susceptible to a variety of exploiters.³⁰ By depicting indigenous people as Indians who were unable to defend their communities from “predators” who demanded their work, the legal discourse allowed that colonizers would continue to exploit indigenous laborers and created an indispensable role for colonial officials even as they were increasingly unable to deliver coveted indigenous mitayos and, by the 1640s, captive blacks through the official slave trade to Peru. In many ways royal and viceregal officials abdicated their responsibility by allowing Spanish colonizers to claim all sorts of labor from indigenous vassals, but by constructing Indians as needing oversight, the crown justified royal rule.

In an effort to bolster their roles as protectors of Indians, the crown and its officials constructed forces that threatened indigenous people. Those described as preying on indigenous people (in official discourse) therefore should be understood as part of the authorities' construction of their own status. In crown orders to protect Indians, the devil played a primary role, as did pirates, Jews, and Protestants.³¹ The crown also pointed to the danger of Spanish colonizers, including mestizo intermediaries who preyed on Indians.³² Likewise, crown authorities portrayed Africans and their descendants as dangerous to indigenous communities and disruptive to the social harmony of colonial Spanish society. Secular and ecclesiastical officials repeatedly shared their concerns with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Constructing Casta on Peru's Northern Coast
• Chapter 1. Between Black and Indian: Labor Demands and the Crown's Casta
• Chapter 2. Working Slavery's Value, Making Diaspora Kinships
• Chapter 3. Acting as a Legal Indian: Natural Vassals and Worrisome Natives
• Chapter 4. Market Exchanges and Meeting the Indians Elsewhere
• Chapter 5. Justice within Slavery
• Conclusion. The Laws of Casta, the Making of Race
• Appendix 1. Origin of Slaves Sold in Trujillo over Time by Percentage (1640–1730)
• Appendix 2. Price Trends of Slaves Sold in Trujillo (1640–1730)
• Explanation of Appendix Data
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index