Blacks, Indians and Spaniards: Reclaiming the Forgotten in Colonial Mizque, 1550-1782 (review)

Mizque, at once a river valley, town and a political jurisdiction, is located between the city of Cochabamba and Sucre (formerly La Plata) in Bolivia. Before and after the Spanish Conquest, Mizque was a frontier zone in which lowland tribes, especially the Chiriguano, made incursions on the highland groups that had been moved into this area by the Inca. Once Spanish control was secured, the Mizque Valley emerged as an important center of wine which was produced on Spanish-held haciendas. Far to the east of the valley lie the rainy yungas where coca cultivation dominated the land use. Mizque's agricultural products were in high demand in Potosí where a large and wealthy population dependent upon silver mining could justify the long-distance trade over difficult terrain.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, three racial elements came together in Mizque. The native peoples of several ethnicities living there before the Spanish Conquest were later joined by others who came as landless workers (yanaconas). Following the short encomienda phase, Spaniards quickly and ruthlessly took over much of the productive land, especially in the valley. So great were the economic opportunities that in 1603 a Spanish town prestigiously called a villa was built next to the Indian reducción. People of African ancestry brought as slaves comprised the third population category of the Mizque Valley, and they provided most of the labor on the wine estates. As time went on, the miscegenation that produced mestizos, mulatos and zambos complicated identities and relationships.

Information sources for this work came largely from documents in two repositories, the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Cochabamba and the Archivo Nacional in Sucre. From an ethnohistorical point of view, the sixteenth century was the most important period in Mizque, but with documentation available for it being relatively sparse, the period is poorly developed in this book. By contrast, the seventeenth century was Mizque's heyday and is more fully sketched out in this volume. The economic downturn of the eighteenth century was caused by the accumulated effects of malignant disease and falling trade when silver mining at Potosí declined. One is reminded that the archival researcher in constructing a narrative of the past must interpret fragments and traces from uneven document resources to finesse manifold gaps in information. For example, the circumstances of building a bridge over the Río Grande in 1629-1630, a crossing direly needed to safely move people and mules from Mizque to La Plata (Sucre) and on to Potosí are quite fully presented, but the reader never learns how the bridge functioned daily or seasonally. Debates about the bridge construction generated a flurry of documents, but once the bridge was in place, little was recorded about it.

Spaniards, as the proprietary and literate group, dominate the book's perspective though not necessarily the content. Brockington perpetuates the classic tautology used in Latin American history that the unreliability of Indian labor accounted for the presence of African slavery without adequately examining the reasons for such undependability which I assert was related to the presence of disease. Being valuable property, blacks are relatively well documented in estate records and bills of sale report their ascriptive labels, names (usually without patronyms), ethnicity, degrees of acculturation to Spanish ways, kinds of work responsibilities, perceived defects, presumed age, family situations and numbers of children. The work provides none of that range of data for native peoples. As would be expected, Spaniards and their families get strong coverage in these pages.

Essentially left untreated in this book is the role of disease that descended on this valley zone after the arrival of outsiders and which affected these three main human groups unevenly. Calenturas or tercianas as malaria was then called made Mizque the most unhealthy place in Alto Peru (Bolivia) for almost four centuries. The first malaria incidence there...