Blacks, Indians, and Spaniards in the Eastern Andes

On a bus from Cochabamba to Sucre, one passes through the area of Mizque, a rugged region of mighty Andean foothills in eastern highland Bolivia. Except on its interior edge, which descends toward the lowland savanna, the area is dry. But rivers flow down the many valleys among the parallel ranges of the foothills, eventually finding their way to Amazonia. The watered, fertile floors of these valleys have, from the distant past to the present, offered fine agricultural opportunities, which Spanish colonists were quick to exploit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period with which this book is mostly concerned.The first European occupation of the Mizque region seems to have been a continuation of the push southwards from Peru in the late 1530s and early 1540s that led to the founding of La Plata (now Sucre) and Potosí. A Villa de Mizque existed by 1557, and the area later became a corregimiento. Among the early European occupants were encomen-deros from already powerful Andean families. They quickly set about using their Indians, and the lands they acquired, to produce livestock, sugar cane, wine, and — on the warm and humid eastern fringe, following preconquest precedent — coca. They also had to exert considerable effort to drive back incursions by the various native groups known generically as Chiriguanos, long resistant to outsiders of whatever origin.Brockington’s early chapters examine that conflict, along with settlement, agricultural production, and trade, in well-supported detail. At first sight, the wealth of early documentation about Mizque, primarily in the Bolivian national archive and the municipal archive of Cochabamba, might seem surprising. The area seems so remote. But of course it was not so in the period covered by the book. A large reason for the abundant papeleo is undoubtedly that, as Brockington shows, the Mizque area was an important source of supply for Potosí from the very start. The Potosí market, and to a lesser degree that of La Plata, hangs as a massive magnet over the early colonial history of Mizque. One of the most engaging sections of the first half of the book is a chronicle of the building, in the early 1630s, of a bridge over the Río Grande, the main hindrance to trade between Mizque and the La Plata and Potosí markets.Production, however, is not the core of the book. What interests Brockington most, and yields her most intricately argued pages, is the population that underlay production. Encomienda provided the initial labor and continued to do so for some time, though it is not clear for how long. What is certain, however, is that the native population shrank dramatically in the century after contact, as elsewhere in the Spanish colonies, from a combination of disease and flight. (One running theme of the book is, indeed, that of people’s mobility in the Andean foothills and the deeper interior plains, colonial movement continuing a well-established earlier pattern.) The surviving Indians became yanaconas (workers or servants personally attached to Spaniards) on chácaras, the local farms and estates. The number of yanaconas working at any moment is unclear. But two of the many extant tribute assessments (padrones) of Mizque chácaras, documents which are one of the central sources for the book, show 1,513 yanaconas on 38 chácaras in 1597 – 98, and 1,359 on the same number in 1683 (pp. 221 – 25). Brockington emphasizes the distant origins of some of these workers and their typically weak attachment to any particular landholding.Far more striking than the yanaconas’ mobility, however, is the fact that some of them were of African descent. Chapter 5, “The Africans and Their Descendants,” is the central point of the book. Africans first arrived in Mizque as members of early conquering or exploring parties. More came later as slaves imported through Buenos Aires. The desire and capacity of Mizque farmers to buy black slaves would seem to indicate that agriculture was profitable, although the decline of the native population was certainly also an incentive. The slaves mingled with the remaining native people, so that mulato in seventeenth-century Mizque signified the mixture of black and Indian. Since mothers in mixed unions were generally Indians, children, taking the mother’s status, were born free; hence the mulato yanacona. As the seventeenth century wore on, individuals’ occupations tended to override their racial identification, in characteristic Spanish American fashion. So it was that in 1683 there appears on one estancia a mulato curaca (“curaca” meaning here not a village leader but the supervisor of the landholding) (p. 173). Brockington devotes many pages to analyzing the complexities of ethno-occupational nomenclature in seventeenth-century Mizque, a slippery topic.This book is a careful, revealing, and intelligent blend of economic, social, and cultural history. It reminds us that what is now peripheral was not always so. More than a decade in the making, its arrival is most welcome

Archaeology · Cartography · Colonialism · Foothills · Geography · Livestock · Settlement (finance) · Forestry · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Latin American history and culture