Caciques, Class Structure and the Colonial State in Bolivia

BROOKE LARSON Caciques, Class Structure and the Colonial State in Bolivia i. During the last century of formal colonial rule, Andean peasants intensified their struggle against the state and members of the dominant colonial elite. That struggle took distinct forms, both violent and non-violent, individual and collective. The revolts of Juan Santos and Tupac Catari, who both used Inca guerrilla strategy and tactics of psychological warfare, and the famous military insurrections led by Tupac Amaru in 1780 and 1781, are certainly the most massive, violent and chronicled rebellions of the century', but peasants resisted colonial oppres- sion in other, less visible ways. Indians who continued to wor- ship their ancestral deities and engage in traditional ritual prac- tices, especially in the early colonial period, resisted the evan- gelization efforts of the colonizers and undermined the ideolo- gical justification of conquest and subjugation2. Other native people expressed their resistance in more direct ways. For example, Indians often sabotaged the system of tribute collection by baptizing their children in foreign provinces or recording their male infants as females in the parish records, in hopes of saving them from future tribute exactions1. But of the non- violent forms of resistance to colonial exploitation, flight and mobility — especially the emigration of tributaries from their native communities - most concerned colonial authorities in the 18th century. In 1754, during the viceregal administration of Jose Anto- nio de Velasco, conde de Superunda, Jose de Orellana con- ducted a population count which revealed the magnitude of Indian dislocation in Peru*. In the census, adult Indian males between the ages of 18 and 50 were divided into two catego- ries: originario and for aster o. Indians registered as originarios * New School for Social Research, New York. 198 Brooke Larson were supposed to be those individuals who lived and worked among members of their extended kin groups (ayllus or parcia- UJades). By virtue of their kin membership in a comunidad\ originarios possessed usufructary rights to the village's cultiv- able and pasture lands. In short, the originarios theoretically constituted a stable peasantry which composed discrete kin groups with their own territorial base and which had direct access to community resources. In the census of 1754, 88,210 Indians were matriculated as originarios in the entire Vice- royalty of Peru. The other category of adult Indian males, forastero, meaning «outsider» or «foreigner», referred to those individuals whose ascribed ethnic status was «Indian* but who were alienated from their native kin groups and who had no landholding rights. In 1754 authorities estimated Peru's forastero population to be some 54,920 Indians, or about 38 percent of the viceroyalty's adult Indian male population. Regional distribution of originarios and forasteros, 1754. Ecclesiastical Originarios Forasteros Total % for. jurisdiction Chuquisaca 11,589 15.359 26,948 57 Mizque 3,182 506 3,688 14 LaPaz IO.5JO 13,644 24.'94 56 Cuzco 20,711 ",053 32,764 37 Arequipa 3,08} 667 3,750 18 Huamanga 8,587 i,933 10,520 18 Lima 17.720 5,37i 23,091 Trujillo 12,788 5.387 18,175 3° Total 88,210 54,920 143,130 38 SOURCE: Memories de los vireyes que ban gobernado el Peru... (Lima 1859), vol. IV, pp. 7-15; see also N. S^nchez-Albornoz, Indios y Tributes en el Alto Peru (Iep, Lima 1978), p. 52. If we glance at the regional distribution of forasteros, we see immediately that most Indians registered as forasteros lived in the southern half of the viceroyalty, from the bishopric of Cuzco south to the archbishopric of La Plata. More than a third of Cuzco's Indian males were registered as forasteros in 1754, while in the ecclesiastical districts of La Paz and La Pla- ta, forasteros composed the majority of adult Indian males. In 1770 colonial authorities matriculated 31,053 forasteros in all of Upper Peru, or about 61 percent of some 50,900 adult In- dian males. Some twenty years later, about three-quarters of Upper Peru's 123,174 tributaries were registered forasteros1. Caciques, Class Structure and the Colonial State 199 In his recent study of Indian demography in Upper Peru, N. Sanchez-Albornoz emphasizes the significance of this population as a proportion of the area's native manpower. In few other parts of Spanish America in the 18th century were so many Indians cut off from their kin groups and their ancestral deities and alienated from their community's resources'. The massive forastero population in Upper Peru is one of the more puzzling and important characteristics of the Southern Andean economy and society in the 18th century; yet the forastero phe- nomenon has only begun to attract the attention of historians. Why did so many Indians opt out of their kin groups and relinquish their rights to parcels of comunidad land? As I sug- gested earlier, one explanation is that Indians saw flight from their villages as one way of avoiding demands imposed on them as members of a subject culture. Sanchez-Albornoz believes that forasteros proliferated in the southern Andean provinces pre- cisely because Indians in that zone were subject to the coercive labor institution of mita. The corvee labor system that was supposed to move Indians between their villages and the mines of Potosi in an orderly and systematic fashion produced instead a floating native population which moved from place to place to escape from mita duties and tribute collectors. Sanchez-Albor- noz also emphasizes the employment opportunities available in Upper Peru's eastern temperate and semi-tropical valleys of Cochabamba, Tomina, and Chichas where Spanish haciendas absorbed forasteros as service tenants'. The movement of In- dians from highland villages to valley haciendas was nothing new, of course. The 16th century jurist, Juan de Matienzo, referred to those Indians who had abandoned their birthplaces to live as servile laborers under Spaniards as yanaconas'. In the 18 th century, the valleys still attracted many former comunidad Indians from highland provinces. Cornblit and Martinez-Alier both suggest that the seigneurial regime offered some protec- tion for Indians against the exactions and tyranny of colonial authorities, and Sanchez-Albornoz seems to agree". But not all forasteros sought refuge in the apparent paternalism of ha- cienda life. Many Indians who abandoned their kin groups became proletarianized, working on the free labor market as min- gas at Potosi, or else they joined the growing vagabond population in Upper Peru. It would be misleading, however, to conceptualize foraste- raje as the steady accretion of manpower from native produc- tive units to the Spanish sector where Andean peasants became acculturated agricultural and mine workers, petty traders or a 200 Brooke Larson floating reserve labor force. To some degree, this was indeed what happened. But as we study more closely the valley haciendas of Upper Peru in the 18th century, I suspect we will find that those estates did not exert the powerful magnetic force we might at first be inclined to believe. Many haciendas in the Co- chabamba valleys, for example, were already over-supplied with rural laborers in the mid and late 18th century, and opportunities for employment of migrant Indians were somewhat limited in that region ". Only the cocales of the Yungas seemed to ab- sorb large numbers of permanent and seasonal migrant laborers from highland provinces ". But more to the point, we should recall that until the 1870*5, about two-thirds of all Indians in Upper Peru still lived in independent communities ". The situa- tion therefore was more complicated than the transfer of labor from a highland, subsistence economy to a booming, cash crop economy in the valleys, for Indians also circulated among the comunidades themselves. Indian villages both expelled and absorbed labor during the course of the colonial period. In fact, the high proportion of forasteros in the Indian villages as early as the 1680's impelled the Viceroy, Duque de La Palata, to register for the first time the landless forasteros. The 1683 census showed that even in a province like Chayanta, where few haciendas existed, 34 percent of all adult Indian males were assigned the fiscal status of forastero ". Like their cousins living on Spanish haciendas, the forasteros of the comunidades were usually landless tenants who found some compensation for their lack of kin ties and land rights in their exemption from mita duty and, until the mid 18th century, from all tribute pay- ments. The entry of Indian tenants into local village society stimulated social realignments within the comunidades which we are only beginning to understand ". As Sanchez-Albornoz and Santamaria have shown so well, the reports and commentary of royal inspectors can be mined for a wealth of detailed information about social conditions in the Indian villages of Upper Peru in the late 17th and 18th centuries. But the statistical censuses {pairones) alone leave us with a static view of Indian society frozen in time at specific historical moments (when the censuses were completed: 1683, 1754, and in the last decades of the 18th century, for example) ". From these records, we can note how many Indians were registered as landless forasteros, but we have no way of knowing the provenance of those immigrants. Nor do the records distinguish between recent forastero households and the ancestors of immigrants to a particular comunidad. A more se- Caciques, Class Structure and the Colonial State 201 rious limitation is that the basic fiscal dichotomy between originario and forastero tells us little about social stratification in Indian society at a specific historical moment or through time.

Load more