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spanish america  Labor  Kris E. Lane I n December 1595 two young men were ordered by Quito’s appellate court to sign contracts. The two, both legal minors between the ages of fourteen and twenty-­ five, had probably been arrested for some misdemeanor, perhaps vagrancy or petty theft. They might have been Quito’s answer to Cervantes’s lovable Seville street hustlers, Rinconete and Cortadillo. In agreements set to last one year, the youths were ordered “to assist in acting in all comedies” staged in Quito and other towns.1 The young men were to receive a wage of twelve and a half pesos every four months, room and board, medical care, a Holy Crusade indulgence, a pair of boots, and a suit fashioned from locally made cloth.Their outfits, consisting of doublet, cape, linen shirt, and tights, suggested that they were lower-­ class Europeans or were perceived as such. The contracts warned that if the youths should flee they would be hunted down and returned to the theater company to finish out their “sentences,” minus benefits and less costs of apprehension and transport. In the same year in Quito a similar fate—worse, perhaps —befell a young woman accused of an unnamed crime. A court-­ ordered indenture placed María de Villalobos in an elite household for a year. María was to be compensated much like the comedy actors except that she would receive only two-­ fifths of their wage and would not be mobile, much less on the stage. According to the scribe, María was mistaken about her costume; she had been wearing “the habit of an Indian woman.”2 Quito’s corregidor ordered that she be dressed as a mestiza immediately. Properly outfitted, María de Villalobos could play her ascribed role in the mundane drama of baroque Quito as a domestic servant. Such binding work agreements pepper notary records throughout colonial Spanish America. Most represent the relatively luxurious, urban end of a spectrum of captive or dependent labor that had as its baseline chattel slavery. Indeed , documents suggest that Spanish newcomers to the Americas almost universally aspired to total reliance on slaves. Slave ownership entailed, if only ideally, the kind of control over labor that people wished to have over land, livestock, or theirown children. Slave labor was secure; and unlike serfdom or indenture, it was liquid. Slaves could be bought, sold, rented, pooled, borrowed against, trained in a craft, and deeded to heirs, all without state or Church intervening much except to enforce contracts and administer sacraments. Although important in the conquest era, Indian slavery was largely outlawed by the 1550s, persisting only on frontiers . Alternatives included the encomienda, a kind of serfdom , but even this quasi-­feudal innovation proved controversial . Beginning in the Caribbean, holders of encomienda fiefs treated their tribute-­ yielding, village-­ dwelling wards like slaves, renting and even selling them. Abuses led to the New Laws of 1542, by which the Crown attempted to restrict conquistador and settler access to indigenous encomienda labor or to various kinds of “personal service.” Reform sparked rebellion. As a result the encomienda faded away gradually rather than being banned outright; it was allowed—like Indian slavery—to persist on frontiers. But enslavement under Spanish law required “just war.” Soon this requirement, rather than any fixed notion of race or congenital inferiority, became the crux of juridical debates. Work in the colonies carried on amid these debates , and by the mid-­ sixteenth century it was clear that most labor in the Spanish Indies, as in Columbus’s day, would continue to bedone by “Indians.”Africans, allegedly taken in just wars and sold mostly by the Portuguese, supplemented and in some places supplanted indigenous workers, most importantly in the lowland cane fields and gold diggings (Fig. 60). Other gaps were filled by apprentices , convicts, artisans, majordomos, petty retailers, even prostitutes—increasingly free men and women of color whose relative independence vexed elites. But it was these same Indians—enslaved, drafted, indebted , or paid—who built and maintained the colonial system. Indian men worked as farmers, herders, stonecutters , miners, loggers, porters, paddlers, sailors, soldiers, guides, even phlebotomists. Indian women served as cooks, laundresses, vegetable gardeners, wet nurses, and babysitters . Many also practiced midwifery and herbal medicine, and still others participated in male-­ dominated crafts and trades. As retailers, native women supplied hundreds of urban marketplaces. Indian slavery and encomienda served, then, as bridges to capital accumulation rather than as lasting labor institutions . It was instead the repartimiento...

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