Continuing the Bleeding of These Pueblos Will Shortly Make Them Cadavers: The Potosi Mita, Cultural Identity, and Communal Survival in Colonial Peru

Abstract

The exploitation of Andean villagers under the forced labor regime for the mines of Potosi is almost as infamous as the silver they extracted from thecerro ricois famous. Established by Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s, themita, as the system of forced labor was known, remained in place until the smoke and shot of Latin American independence struggles were in the air. For over two centuries, Spain forced thousands upon thousands ofnaturales(a common colonial term for indigenous people) from communities throughout the southern Andean highlands to lend their muscle and sweat, and all too often their blood and their lives, to keep Potosi's veins open and flowing. Through this work themitayosand their communities not only drove the colonial economy, but also were a major force in sustaining the Spanish empire and in helping forge the modern world's dominant economic system. Conversely, mita exploitation threatened the very survival of the communities subject to it. The mita was so onerous that virtually all indigenous peoples subject to the labor draft, regardless of ethnicity or class, raised an almost continuous voice of protest from their communities against the mita and its abuses. Tensions created by the mita also severely strained the bonds that linked community,curaca, and the state, which were primary ingredients in the social glue that kept colonial Andean society from coming apart. To avoid descending into the mines, and to escape such horrors as laboring over mercury vapors, many people permanently fled their communities, giving up the status oforiginarios(community members with rights such as access to land and subject to state obligations) to becomeforasteros(indigenous person not living in community of origin, or descendant of the same, without communal rights but exempt from many state obligations). In this way the mita, one of the few forces that had potential for uniting Andean peoples in opposition to the state also fractured them. Communal solidarity was severely strained and neither the shared experience of the mita nor the commonality of experience in Potosi created sufficient cohesion to overcome the ethnic and regional differences that divided them.