Las dudas de la corona: La política de repartimientos para la minería de Potosí (1680–1732)

Abstract

Potosí’s mita continues to intrigue students of colonial Andean history. Peter Bakewell, Jeffrey Cole, and Enrique Tandeter analyzed how the system of forced labor affected the mining economy of Upper Peru. Other scholars, especially the late Thierry Saignes, examined the mita’s impact on indigenous society in the home provinces. Ignacio González Casasnovas now provides an insightful study, based on his doctoral dissertation, of the conditions at Potosí and in the mita provinces that led to the late-seventeenth-century attempts to reform the labor system.Not particularly original but useful nonetheless, the first third of the book summarizes the secondary literature about how the mita by the late 1600s affected life in the Andean villages subject to Potosí. Drawing on works by Saignes, Luis Miguel Glave, Carlos Sempat Assadourian, and others, González Casasnovas presents an excellent synthesis of the structural problems that undermined the provinces’ ability to fill their mita quotas. The mita uprooted and dislocated the indigenous population at the same time powerful interest groups, such as kurakas, provincial governors, village priests, and Spanish agriculturalists, competed with the Potosí silver producers to control labor. Provincial interests complained that the mita killed and maimed workers, that survivors failed to return home, and that Indians fled to avoid conscription for Potosí. The silver refiners accused provincial elites of greedily hiding Indians from the mita and criticized the government for failing to produce promised contingents of workers. Meanwhile, rather than waiting passively to be exploited, many Andeans sought conditions that offered more security and opportunity, even if to do so required migration.By the 1680s complaints from Potosí and the decline in revenues from Potosí’s silver mines prompted a major attempt to revive the mita, the subject of the middle third of González Casasnovas’s book. The duke of the Palata (viceroy 1681–89) ordered a census of the viceroyalty and with the resulting information tried to satisfy the silver refiners’ demands. Palata subjected forasteros (previously exempt Indians who had abandoned their ancestral communities) to the mita. He also extended the mita into new provinces. A victory for the silver refiners and, Palata hoped, the royal treasury, Palata’s policy harmed interest groups in the provinces. Kurakas refused to serve, the new mita provinces resisted sending workers to Potosí, and provincial Spanish elites protested vehemently. Palata had tried to revive the sixteenth-century model for the Peruvian economy, which privileged Potosí when its ores were rich, the indigenous population comparatively larger, and competition for labor less intense.The final third and most original part of the book traces the attempt to develop a new paradigm for dealing with Potosí. This phase began with the arrival in 1689 of Palata’s successor, the count of Monclova, to govern Peru. González Casasnovas considers Palata’s policies misguided, but sees Monclova as honest, enlightened, and astute. As viceroy of Mexico, Monclova had seen colonial mines prosper without forced labor. He rescinded Palata’s initiatives and formed a commission to analyze the Potosí question. For González Casasnovas, the commission’s work constituted “one of the most transcendent episodes of American history during the colonial period” (pp. 259–60). Following the lead of a judge from the Lima high court, Matías Lagúnez, the commission concluded that with Potosí’s exhausted ores, refiners only garnered a profit by paying below-subsistence wages to the mitayos. Most silver registered in the Potosí treasury came from mines in the surrounding provinces that enjoyed no mita subsidy. The mita abused the Indians and degraded the provinces, while Potosí’s mines contributed less and less to the economy. The commission decided that Potosí’s Rich Hill no longer deserved its privileged position and that the mita was both immoral and a waste of labor. With careful analysis, a determined Lagúnez advocated the mita’s abolition. The viceroy and crown instead reduced its size commensurate with the number of tributaries in the old provinces; freed the new provinces from the mita; and removed mitayos from marginal and inactive silver refining mills. Spurred by Lagúnez’s arguments, pressure to end the mita continued. In 1718 the Council of the Indies decided to abolish it. The great Andean epidemics of 1719–20 caused labor shortages, and the Council’s rivalry with the new secretary of the navy and the Indies hindered its implementation. The debate ended in 1732 when the crown permitted the mita’s survival.Broadly researched in archival and secondary materials, the book will reward readers interested in colonial labor systems, mining, indigenous policy, and the early Bourbon reforms. The first, synthetic section is long but profitable. González Casasnovas provides more detail than Cole about the Palata-Monclova period. His analysis of the early Bourbon period shows that the historiographical gap between the studies of Cole and Tandeter had hidden a real possibility, but tragically missed opportunity, of eliminating the mita.