The Other Slavery (19 page)

One strategy to achieve this goal involved advancing wages in pesos or specie (silver coins) to free workers. Since food, clothes, and many other necessities were outrageously expensive in Parral (and often because of gambling and drinking habits), workers frequently incurred debts. In principle these were free individuals who had temporarily fallen on hard times. But the reality was more ominous. Unable to repay their debts, these workers could not leave the mines until they closed their accounts. We may think of debt peonage as a phenomenon of great haciendas in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution. Yet two centuries earlier, indebted servants and peons proliferated in Parral. One miner’s account book, for example, shows that out of the twelve Indians in his labor gang, seven of them were in debt. From such scattered evidence, it is not possible to draw general conclusions about the overall level of indebtedness in Parral and the level of coercion used to get workers to pay. But it is clear that many indebted workers were considered part of the mines’ inventories and more or less permanently attached to them. For instance, when Parral owners put a mine up for sale, they specifically listed the number of indebted workers. Evidently the existence of such workers was a major consideration for prospective buyers.
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Notwithstanding the free or supposedly free workers, some 3,000 of Parral’s 5,500 Indians consisted of forced laborers under the encomienda and repartimiento systems. There were relatively few encomienda Indians
directly involved in Parral’s mining economy, as they were mostly set aside for agricultural and ranching activities. The majority of forced workers in the mines and ore-processing haciendas came from neighboring communities and missions as part of the extensive repartimiento system of forced labor. The system was set in motion when owners requested workers from colonial authorities, specifying the number of Indians needed and the type of work to which they would be assigned. Governors and local authorities would then work out the number of Indian workers (both male and female) that each community and mission was required to contribute to meet these requests. It goes without saying that failure to provide sufficient workers would result in significant repercussions. And, as it is easy to imagine, the actual drafting of these Indians was a process fraught with abuse that could lead to violence. The fact that local officials were regularly admonished to exercise great caution while acquiring repartimiento Indians suggests that things could easily get out of hand. For their part, Indians had every reason to resist. They were forced to abandon their families and leave their animals and fields unattended. They had to travel twenty, fifty, or even a hundred miles to the mines. And although in theory their work stint could not last more than six weeks, in reality it could be much longer. Repartimiento Indians were supposed to receive compensation, but their wages were woefully inadequate, and they were often paid in clothes rather than cash. Indians considered the repartimiento system a major inconvenience at best and tantamount to periodic enslavement at worst. Parral’s explosive growth in the 1630s and 1640s, as well as the mine owners’ great need for workers, meant that repartimiento Indians came from a large catchment area and experienced longer and more arduous tours of duty.
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By the late 1640s, the strain of the mines on surrounding Native communities and missions had become so great that the Indians started to revolt. The colonial archives of Parral include no less than 225 files on “seditions,” “uprisings,” and full-scale “rebellions” from 1633 to 1789. The Indians resented the repartimientos, epidemics, and other problems that stemmed directly or indirectly from the furious expansion of the silver economy. No historian has delved fully into these files, but even
a partial examination of the records for the seventeenth century reveals that Parral’s prodigious growth disrupted Indian life within a radius of two to three hundred miles. The wave of indigenous unrest reached a high point in the 1650s, when the Tarahumaras, Conchos, and others turned defiant and rendered labor relations extremely volatile. At the same time, Parral experienced a significant population decline. By 1640 the town had 8,500 residents, but by the 1650s that number had dropped to around 5,000. Parral’s demographic decline was clearly linked to the wave of indigenous rebellions all around it, but the precise causal chain remains murky. The most likely explanation is that Parral’s easy silver had been exhausted by the late 1640s, and therefore a higher level of exploitation was required to extract the remaining silver, which in turn prompted the Indians to revolt. However, it is also plausible that the rebellions around Parral made the recruitment of Indian workers even more difficult, resulting in fewer people in Parral and less silver.
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Regardless of the exact sequence of events, mine owners ultimately addressed the problem of insufficient workers by bringing Indians to Parral from even farther away. Indian slaves had been present there since the mines’ inception. In 1640 there were about 500 of them, or about ten percent of the indigenous workforce. But after the wave of Indian rebellions in the 1650s, miners were forced to rely more and more on these slaves. As we have seen, frontier captains were in the habit of waging war on the “barbarous” or “errant” nations, accusing them of a variety of crimes, and convicting captives to five, ten, or twenty years of forced labor. Technically these were not slaves but criminals serving out their sentences. Yet such technicalities were lost on those who were captured in raids, stuffed into carts, transported over long distances, and sold to the highest bidder in Parral’s central plaza. Hundreds of Indians came from the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa. These coastal Natives were hunted down and transported with great difficulty across the Sierra Madre Occidental to Parral. Other slaves came from the large desert region to the east of Parral, where various bands of Indians vaguely known as Tobosos both enslaved other Indians and were themselves victims of slaving raids. The largest stream of Indian captives pouring into Parral came from the northernmost reaches of the Spanish empire.
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New Mexico’s Mining Connections

The conquest of New Mexico is often presented as an incomprehensible story of Spanish cruelty and wanton destruction. In 1598 Juan de Oñate arrived there with his men and in short order took possession of this kingdom. Oñate apportioned Indians who submitted peacefully in encomiendas, but he reserved a far worse fate for those who resisted. To this day, New Mexicans recall Oñate’s exemplary punishment of the Indians of Acoma after they revolted: all males over age twenty-five had one foot cut off. In this rendering, Oñate appears as a royal envoy mindlessly expanding the bounds of the empire. Hidden from view, however, are all the mining connections. In truth, Oñate went to New Mexico first and foremost as a mining baron. His father, Cristóbal de Oñate, had been one of the founders of the silver mines of Zacatecas and therefore was one of the richest individuals in all of Mexico. Juan de Oñate himself was born and raised in Zacatecas and knew all there was to know about silver mining. His stated purpose in going to New Mexico was to open new lands to Christianity. But his far more practical reason, as we shall see, was to prospect for precious metals and obtain Indian laborers.
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For a start, Oñate’s expedition was part of a mining rush that was already spilling into New Mexico. At least since the 1580s, mine owners, labor recruiters, and Indian traffickers from northern Mexico had attempted to tap into New Mexico’s population. Little information survives about these early entradas. Entrepreneurs engaged in trafficking Indians were understandably secretive, but the few extant sources are quite revealing. One young soldier named Diego Pérez de Luxán enlisted in a 1582–1583 expedition into New Mexico and kept a diary of his experiences. He casually described how the party ran into a
jacal
(hut) along the Conchos River that was very far from any Indian or Spanish settlement. (The Conchos is a tributary of the Rio Grande just south of New Mexico.) This structure, he explained, had been built by a party of slavers the previous year to keep its human quarry. Pérez de Luxán knew all of this because he himself was a slaver. Indeed, the following year our diarist returned to New Mexico to conduct additional raids.
We would never have known about these activities had Pérez de Luxán not repented of his youthful mistakes later in life, denounced the “unjust wars” waged against the Indians, and accepted the position of
protector y defensor de los indios
in the mining district of Santa Bárbara, a thriving slave market close to the hill that would later give rise to Parral.
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Another example of an early slaving raid into New Mexico was the one led by Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, the lieutenant governor of the New Kingdom of León who took charge of the province after Governor Luis de Carvajal was forced to leave. Castaño de Sosa remained in the town of Almadén with around sixty Spanish colonists until 1590. His position became untenable not only on account of the dwindling silver around Almadén but also because of the hostility of two successive viceroys. To escape possible prosecution, as well as to explore another kingdom, Castaño de Sosa conceived the fantastically bold plan of relocating his entire township from Nuevo León to New Mexico. It was the first—albeit unauthorized—European attempt to settle New Mexico permanently.
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Consisting of hardened settlers uninhibited by the presence of churchmen or royal officials, Castaño de Sosa’s party spent much of 1590 traversing the parched lands of northern Coahuila, venturing up the Pecos River, and eventually reaching the territory of the Pueblo Indians, more than twelve hundred miles from Mexico City and one of the most inaccessible corners of the empire at the time. The viceroy then in charge of New Spain, Luis de Velasco II, dispatched a captain and forty soldiers to this unimaginably remote locale to capture the renegades and bring them to Mexico City in chains. As the members of this second party made their way to New Mexico, they began gathering dep-ositions from some of the Nuevo León settlers who had refused to go with Castaño de Sosa, as well as some of the men who did accompany him but were apprehended by the soldiers near the Rio Grande. The proceedings—close to eighty pages of testimonies and confessions—detail some of Castaño de Sosa’s slaving activities. One prominent colonist named Diego Ramírez Barrionuevo, for instance, stated that Castaño de Sosa and his soldiers had taken “many pieces of Indian men and women all of whom were sentenced to service, and taken out of their land and
environment, and sold away in other parts.” From such depositions one can only conclude that slave taking had become a significant economic activity in the northernmost reaches of the Spanish empire.
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Oñate’s 1598 expedition was the latest bid to integrate the kingdom of New Mexico into the expanding silver economy of northern Mexico. As it turned out, Oñate did not find any gold or silver there, but he did find that the number of Indians living in
pueblos,
or towns, was remarkable. New Mexico contained the largest number of sedentary Indians north of central Mexico. These Pueblo Indians, as they came to be known, were surrounded by several nomadic groups with whom they traded. Governor Oñate immediately parceled out the pueblos as encomiendas. He was ruthless toward Indians who refused to submit to his authority, but he was also an entrepreneur; his punishments usually tended to be utilitarian in nature. For example, quite apart from the few dozen Indians from Acoma whose feet were amputated, Oñate and his captain sentenced all Acoma males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and all females over age twelve to twenty years of personal servitude. Hundreds of Indians were thus divvied up among the earliest Spanish colonists of New Mexico.
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There is little information about the fate of these early Pueblo captives, but two points are worth emphasizing. First, they were expensive. Oñate’s nephew and subsidiary captain, Vicente de Zaldívar, received dozens of Acoma Indians. But according to Zaldívar’s deposition, sixty of them subsequently ran away. Zaldívar estimated his losses at more than 10,000 pesos, which works out to a little more than 160 pesos per slave. This sum of money is greater than the value of a stone house in Mexico City or Oñate’s yearly salary as governor. Second, even though these slaves were potentially very valuable, in order to turn them into real money, one had to transport them out of New Mexico and sell them in more southerly markets, where small pieces of silver and other forms of liquid payment were in circulation. According to Oñate, at least forty-five Spanish soldiers and officers, “in anger at not finding bars of silver on the ground right away,” left New Mexico, taking slaves with them. Even Oñate and his nephew Zaldívar were accused of transporting slaves all the way to Mexico City (although they were later
acquitted of this charge). Traffickers had to set aside wagons to transport the slaves and had to go through the trouble and expense of feeding them for months along the way. They did it because they knew that in the end, they would still make a profit.
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Governor Oñate set an enduring precedent in this line of business. A long list of New Mexican governors, right up to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (see
chapter 6
), were not only tolerant or complicit in the trafficking of Indians, but they were directly and actively involved in this human trade. Instances of seventeenth-century officials implicated in the traffic of New Mexican Indian slaves are too numerous to recount here. However, a few vignettes point to some of the milestones in the development of the Indian slave trade. Governor Juan de Eulate (1618–1625), for example, was the first to issue
vales,
or small pieces of paper authorizing the bearer to seize an “orphaned” girl or boy. “And once they get their vales,” one witness recalled, “the soldiers go to the pueblos and take the orphans and keep them in their homes as if they were black slaves.” One friar averred that such children were treated as if they were “yearling calves or colts,” while another resident observed that often they were not orphans at all, but children forcibly taken away from their parents. At the end of his term, Governor Eulate traveled to Mexico City, where he was arrested for illegally transporting Indians out of New Mexico.
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