Viceregal Power and the Obrajes of the Cortés Estate, 1595-1708

Abstract

TaHE OBRAJES in New Spain-cotton and woolen textile mills which produced cloth for everyday use in colonial society-were vigorous capitalistic enterprises which flourished in a feudal-mercantile environment. Linked initially with encomiendas and the repartimiento system of forced labor for wages, the obraje outlived these institutions. It resisted both royal labor legislation designed to promote the welfare of the Indian and Spanish mercantile restrictions aimed at limiting competition with the peninsular textile industry. Sweatshop working conditions prevailed throughout three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico. Indian slavery, debt peonage, harsh treatment, child labor, and bad food, clothing, and shelter-all of these were characteristics of the Mexican colonial obraje. Concerted efforts to curb abuses in obrajes began in the 1560s and continued until 1805. But by the late sixteenth century the people of New Spain had come to depend on locally produced textiles, and as a consequence it became socially necessary for obrajes to operate outside the law. No matter how much humanitarian reformers and mercantile monopolists might complain, the royal government had to tolerate abuses, because obrajes were useful and necessary to the economy.' During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Cortes estate became a lucrative capitalistic enterprise in New Spain. Granted by Charles V to Fernando Cortes in 1529, after the Conqueror had ruled New Spain for almost a decade, the Marquesado del Valle included holdings in the central valley of Mexico, Cuernavaca, Cuautla, Toluca, the vast area of Oaxaca, and part of Tehuantepec. The Spanish king gave Cortes the lands and title to compensate for his loss of political and judicial power in New Spain as the audiencia of Mexico and the viceroyalty were created. In the Marquesado del Valle, Cortes held