Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (20 page)

At Potosí in Upper Peru, thousands of Indian mita workers
represented the bulk of the workforce, but there were also many Africans and
people of African descent. Statistics from 1600 show that just under 70 percent
of workers were Indian wage workers, about 18 percent were mita workers, and
about 14 percent were enslaved Africans and their descendants. Some Africans in
Potosí took the place of mules, pushing the mill wheel at the
Casa de la
Moneda
(the mint); others performed household labor or some form of
artisanry. By 1780, there were around a thousand people of African descent in
Potosí in a population of 23,000.

In New Spain, there were more than 800 enslaved Africans
working at the silver mines of Taxco in 1569. In Honduras, most underground
mining of silver was done by enslaved Africans rather than Indians. This
suggests that when the mining site was closer to the slave markets of the
Atlantic, making enslaved Africans less expensive to purchase, mine owners were
just as happy to exploit African workers as indigenous ones.

At the end of the 18th century in the Mexican city of
Guanajuato, which replaced Potosí as the most important silver-mining area in
Spanish America after 1740, nearly half of the mine workers were people of
African descent, with white and indigenous workers about evenly divided to make
up the remaining 60 percent. All were wage workers; none of them were slaves.
In many mines— Zacatecas in New Spain is one example—wage labor eventually
replaced the mita system of drafting laborers. In Zacatecas, debt held the
labor force at the mine. Although ostensibly free, workers were tied to their
work sites by contracts and the threat of violence at the hands of a special
armed force called the
Santa Hermandad
(Holy Brotherhood), which hunted
down workers who ran away.

PEONAGE

One way of ensuring a necessary workforce, not only in
mining but on the farms and plantations of Spanish America, was to tie the
workers to the work site through debt. Haciendas needed laborers. Indeed, the
colonial period experienced a severe shortage of labor throughout much of its
history. Land was often readily available, but without people to work it, land
could not produce wealth for its owner. The hacendado’s chief problem was
finding laborers he could rely on. As long as the peasantry retained land,
laborers resisted working for wages, preferring the life of subsistence
farming. It may have been a hard life in some ways, but by growing their own
food, building their own houses, and weaving their own clothes, peasants met
their own basic needs and maintained control over their schedules of work and
play.

Various methods were employed to induce workers to come and
live on the hacienda, where they would generally be paid through some form of
barter, given the shortage of currency at the time. Frequently, workers were
offered a small hut, a garden plot to grow their own food, possibly some food
ration for themselves and their families, or a loan, by which they were
indebted to the landowner. In addition to these benefits, a worker gained the
opportunity to form a vertical relationship with a powerful person who could
serve as his
patrón,
so both parties had something to gain: the
landowner got his crops tended and harvested, as well as getting domestic work
done by the female members of the peasant family, while the worker gained the
protection of a powerful person in dealings with the law.

In an effort to retain his laborers, the patrón defended
them from labor drafts or service in the militia, vouched for them in court, and
lent money to cover their family emergencies. A debt, once contracted, was
generally impossible to pay off, given low wages and the likelihood that the
debt would accumulate interest, fees for such privileges as buying goods at the
hacienda store, and possibly a fine for some infraction. Workers tied to the
plantation in this way were known as indebted peons; if they died without
canceling the loan, it would likely be passed on to their children.

While this system of debt peonage was one way to ensure
that there would be laborers available when they were needed, workers sometimes
abandoned both the work site and the debt, so the system failed to provide an
ironclad guarantee of a dependable labor force. In general, however, a worker
probably could not expect a better life by breaking the law and trading in one
hacienda for another or leaving agricultural work to go into the mines. Staying
on the hacienda with neighbors he had known all his life, marrying the girl
next door, and living the life his father had lived before him might be a
relatively attractive option, given the other choices.

This system of a large landowner, a patrón, with a group of
dependent laborers continued past the colonial period in some areas. While some
evidence indicates that peonage and other forms of coerced labor diminished
during the 1700s, vestiges of these systems lived on in the unsettled years of
the 19th century, and even into the 20th century, when a patrón might deliver
his peons to the polls to ensure their participation in the voting process.
Once there, in the absence of poll watchers and international observers that
would not come on the scene until late in the 20th century, the peons would
have found it in their interest to follow the recommendations of the patrón in
casting their ballots.

SLAVERY

The labor system that had perhaps the greatest impact on
Latin America as a whole was plantation-based slavery, especially in sugar
production. An understanding of this form of coerced labor and its significance
is central to any study of work life in the colonial period. From the point of
view of whites who dominated colonial society, the function and purpose of
Indians and Africans was to work, so to a great extent it was work that defined
not only their daily lives but the meaning of their existence. It is this fact
that makes the historical evidence of enslaved workers refusing to be reduced
to simple beasts of burden all the more inspiring. Their insistence on their
humanity in the face of a brutal and unrelenting system of dehumanization is
what makes their story remarkable.

Slavery in Europe

Iberians had considerable experience with slavery as a
labor institution. While slavery in most of Europe had been replaced by other
labor systems by 1300, it continued on the edges of Europe where there was
contact with other peoples, and where laborers were sold in slave markets. Many
of these were of eastern European or Slavic origins, with the Medieval Latin
word
sclavus,
or Slav, also becoming the root word for “slave” in most
Western European languages. Meanwhile, Africans from south of the Sahara had
been brought north across the desert as enslaved laborers for centuries, if in
relatively small numbers. Beginning in 1441 when Portuguese traders got as far
south as Senegambia in their exploration of the western coast of Africa, these
numbers began to increase dramatically. During the remainder of the 15th
century the Portuguese brought about 900 African laborers annually back to
Portugal. European traders, therefore, were already supplying enslaved African
workers to Europe, mainly as domestic help, long before the colonization of the
Americas began. In addition, the conjunction of African labor and sugar
production, with its highly labor-intensive process of harvesting and refining,
began on the Iberian Peninsula. From there, the Portuguese transferred sugar
production based on enslaved African workers to Madeira and other offshore
Atlantic islands as they moved down the western coast of Africa.

Origins of African Slavery in Latin
America

Slavery in Spanish America began with the enslaving of the
native peoples of the Caribbean, especially in the search for gold on
Hispaniola. As the indigenous people fell victim to epidemics and the need for
more laborers grew, the colonists came to rely on workers from Africa,
justifying the practice by arguing that through baptizing their workers they
extended to them the Christian promise of eternal life. When Iberian colonists
in the Americas sought to augment or replace the labor of the native people,
they turned to the thriving markets of West Africa to buy these workers.

In the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the area that
ultimately received more than one-third of all the Africans who landed in the
Americas, colonists first enslaved the native peoples. Indian laborers were
obtained by offering them a wage, by barter, or by
resgate
(rescue), the
practice of trading for slaves with native groups who held them. The
justification for resgate was that a harsher fate awaited them at the hands of
their captors, that of being cooked and eaten in a cannibalistic rite. In the 16th
century, the usual system of Indian labor was for the colonists to trade tools,
knife blades, or other goods desired by the indigenous people in exchange for
their work on a specific project. By the 17th century, working for a wage had
become more common and joined slavery,
aldeia
(village) labor, and the
barter system, all methods of ensuring that the
engenho
(sugar mill)
would have the necessary labor.

Among enslaved Indians the male–female ratio was about
three to two. When an indigenous male head of household entered slavery, his
whole family went with him to the engenho, where the women often worked on the
farm producing food for the workforce. In this form of agriculture, women
predominated, as they had in pre-Columbian agriculture.

At first, the Portuguese bartered for labor on short-term
jobs, but the Indians, feeling no need for a wage, refused to do longer-term
work on the barter system. Also, barter became more expensive for the
Portuguese. Some native groups tired of the trinkets Europeans sought to trade
and began to demand pricier items in trade for the brazilwood they cut and
dragged to the coast. The natives of Brazil were uninterested in profit since
social status in their societies derived from their prowess in war and from the
capture of future victims of ritual cannibalism rather than from wealth; this
affected their trade partnerships with the Europeans who lived by different
economic principles. The Portuguese viewed the native peoples as lazy because
of their lack of interest in accumulation. Often workers simply did not show up
for work. If the opportunity arose, they were likely to run away and disappear
into the territory they knew so well. Even as late as the late 16th century,
however, they constituted the majority of laborers in the sugar engenhos. There
were Africans, but the cost of buying them was prohibitive for many sugar mill
owners until later in the colonial period after they had grown wealthier.

Like the native workers in the Caribbean, those in Brazil
contracted and died of diseases brought by the Europeans. The first reports of
an epidemic, possibly smallpox, in Brazil came in 1559. Estimates of indigenous
dead in settled areas reached 30,000; no count could be made of those who died
in the wilderness. Shortly after that, a measles epidemic carried off an equal
number. This first round of epidemics lasted from 1559 to 1563, disrupting the
community’s agricultural production and causing some Indians to enter slavery
to avoid dying of hunger. So the epidemics joined restrictions imposed by the
crown on Indian slavery and the ever-increasing demand for sugar in Europe to
create the motivation for restructuring the workforce and increasing the
reliance on African workers.

The Europeans’ growing fondness for sugar as a sweetener
and the rising international price in the first 20 years of the 17th century
were key factors in the dramatic increase in the numbers of Africans brought to
the Americas. On one engenho, 7 percent of the workforce was African in 1572;
only 19 years later, that had increased to 37 percent, and by 1638, 100 percent
of the workforce was African or African-descended, a dramatic change in just
over 50 years.

Why Africans?

What was behind this rapid conversion from an Indian to an
African labor force? According to some historians, the Africans and the
Europeans were culturally closer to each other than either group was to the
indigenous people, and this led the Europeans to value African workers more
highly. The agricultural practices of West Africa and the use of iron had
enabled the people of that area to become accustomed to agricultural work,
whereas many of the Indian groups lived by gathering the fruits of the land and
by trapping wild game. In addition, the Portuguese already had experience with
African workers in sugar cultivation on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the
Azores, and the Canaries. The African workers also resisted European diseases
better than the indigenous people because Africans and Europeans had been in
contact for centuries. While African workers cost more—they sold for three to
five times more than Indians with the same skills—they were more productive,
and Portuguese colonists wrote that this outweighed the difference in price.
Among free workers, the native people were always paid less than Africans or
their descendants, and sometimes they were paid in bartered goods, food, cloth,
or alcohol. While other free workers were often paid by the day, Indians might
be paid at the end of the task or the end of the month. New protective
legislation that increased the cost of Indian labor, the tendency of the native
people to run off into the forest they knew so well, and their lower resistance
to European diseases all combined by the late 16th century to make African
workers preferable in many areas of Latin America.