Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History

XI INDIANS

XI INDIANS BlACKS were the most important. but not the only auxiliaries the Spaniards had in the task of conquering and ruling Peru. Partly acculturated Indians of several types lived among the Spaniards and performed many of the same tasks as the blacks. constituting. therefore. a segment of Hispanic society in Peru.· The group most comparable to the blacks were the foreign Indians. from Nicaragua. New Spain. and other areas of previous Spanish occupation. In the early 1530·s. these non-Andean IndianS. most of them slaves. actually surpassed the blacks in numbers. As foreigners. they had many of the same qualities. and they played an important transitional role during the period of relative scarcity of black slaves. Of far greater ultimate significance is the other main group. made up of Indians of Peru itself. Starting with the earliest irruption of the Spaniards into the Peru of the Incas. numbers of indigenous Andeans were caught up in the growth of Spanish Peruvian society. At Cajamarca and on less memorable occasions. Spaniards appropriated to themselves. as servants and mistresses. Indians who thenceforth traveled·Since the time of the first edition of this book. the tenn -Indianhas become problematic to me and to many others. In my ethnohlstorical work I use it comparatively little. The need for a general tenn for the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. however. continues to be felt. and it is hard to imagine a better one than that used spontaneously by the Spaniards in the conquest period and for some hundreds of years afterward. even if. to the people so denominated . the word had little or no significance. In the present case. -Andean- will often not do. since Nicaraguans and Guatemalans also play their part. I have continued. then. to use -Indian.- construing it as a neutral translation of the term tndto. which is such a pervasive feature of the sources behind this study and was such a real and meaningful concept to the Spaniards. if not to the word's referents. 225 Copyrighted Material 226 SPANISH PERU about the country in their personal retinue. Torn out of the indigenous social context, many such people lost their geographical context as well. A large proportion of them settled down with their masters in parts of Peru remote from their birthplaces, so that even they shared a certain degree of foreignness with blacks and foreign Indians. Some Peruvian Indian servants came from the ranks of a pre-Spanish dependent class, the yanaconas, who already in preconquest times stood outside the normal sociopolitical framework of rights and obligations, the ayllu. Yanaconas, both preSpanish and newly created, were important in the Spanish silver mining settlements as metallurgists and skilled workers . Any Indians who happened to live in or near Spanish cities were gradually absorbed to some degree within the Spanish society that dominated those settlements. Also, many members of the indigenous ruling groups did their best to emulate Spanish behavior, some of them actually living in the Spanish ciUes all or a good part of the time. These Peruvian Indians who were directly touched by Spanish society form a group unique within the present book and within the history of the period. They found themselves on both sides of the process of the Hispanization of Peru. As active members of the Hispanic sector, auxiliaries in the Spanish occupation, they were a fringe group, increasingly numerous, but less important, more marginal, and generally at a lower level than the blacks and foreign Indians, because less thoroughly Hispanized. As recipients, a part of the gradual process of cultural impact on large segments of the indigenous Andean popUlation, the Hispanized Indians were a first example of the way Spanish culture was to work itself deeply into the lives of the original inhabitants. Foreign Indians came to Peru mainly as slaves, branded with the "Rtf (for Rey) that signified the Spanish king. Some few accompanied Spaniards as free servants, but the majority were products of the Spanish tendency to enslave Indians who resisted conquest, a tendency which in some places without other major economic assets, like Nicaragua and the coast of Venezuela, led to a large-scale Indian slave traffic. One of the reasons why foreign Indians faded in significance in Peru after a brief period was that the enslaving of indigenous Copyrighted Material INDIANS 227 people ceased in most parts of the Indies by the 1540's. The greatest single source...