REFORM AND RECOVERY 143
conscripted from the surrounding indigenous vil-
lages through a repartimiento, or labor draft. Press
gangs also picked up men charged with “idleness”
or “vagrancy” to relieve the chronic shortage of la-
bor. It was the grievances of the free skilled work-
ers, however, that caused a series of confrontations
and ultimately a work stoppage with an arrogant,
unyielding employer. The extreme division of labor
in the silver mining industry—to get the ore out of
the vein below and load it on mules above required
some thirty different specialized tasks—tended to
develop a sense of shared interests and cooperation
among the workers.
Work in the mines was dangerous, daily ex-
posing the miners to loss of life and limb through
accidents and even more to debilitating or fatal dis-
eases. According to Francisco de Gamboa, the lead-
ing Mexican mining expert of the time, the miners
worked “in terror of ladders giving way, rocks
sliding, heavy loads breaking their backs, drip-
ping icy waters, diseases, and the damp, hot, suf-
focating heat.” Humboldt, who visited Mexico in
the last years of the colony, claimed that Mexican
miners seldom lived past the age of thirty-fi ve. But
the pay was good by colonial standards: workers
who went below received four reales (fi fty cents)
for each twelve-hour shift (one real would buy a
pound of wool or fi ve pounds of beef or veal), more
than double the pay of agricultural workers. This
customary pay was supplemented by the partido,
the skilled worker’s right to a certain share of his
day’s haul of silver ore over an assigned quota.
Attempts by mine owner Romero de Terreros
to lower wage rates of peones (ore carriers) from
four to three reales, increase quotas, and gradu-
ally eliminate partidos provoked a series of crises
culminating in the strike. A sympathetic parish
priest advised the workers on legal ways to achieve
their objectives and sought to mediate their dispute
with the employer. (The priest was later expelled
from the pueblo for his activism.) Eventually, the
state intervened, aware of the critical importance
of sil ver production to the royal treasury and of
the work ers’ strong bargaining position because
of the chronic labor shortage. Francisco de Gam-
boa, the leading expert on mining and mining law,
was sent to arbitrate the confl ict. His arbitration
satisfi ed virtually all the workers’ demands: abu-
sive bosses were fi red, pay cuts were revoked, and
the right to partidos was confi rmed in writing.^4
Doris Ladd has written a brilliant, sensitive
reconstruction of these events. She interprets the
struggle at Real del Monte as a class struggle prior
to the existence of a working class—refl ecting an
emerging class consciousness—and describes the
workers’ ideas as “radical” and “revolutionary.”
She cites the strikers’ insistence on social and eco-
nomic justice, expressed in the words of their law-
yer: “It is a precept in all systems of divine, natural,
and secular law that there should be a just propor-
tion between labor and profi t.” But this appeal for
justice had a limited scope and signifi cance. It ap-
plied to a group of free, relatively privileged, skilled
workers but did not call into question the forced
labor of natives dragged by press gangs from their
homes to the mines. Thanks to a set of favorable
conditions, the strikers won a victory, meaning a
return to the situation that had prevailed before
the dispute broke out. But that victory left the con-
scripted indigenous workers in the same intoler-
able conditions as before. One wonders whether
ideas that accepted such servitude as normal can
be described as truly “radical” or “revolutionary.”POLITICAL REFORMS
Under Charles III, the work of territorial reorgan-
ization of the sprawling empire continued. The
viceroyalty of Peru, already diminished by the
creation of New Granada, was further curtailed by
the creation in 1776 of the viceroyalty of the Río
de la Plata, with its capital at Buenos Aires. This(^4) But the workers’ victory at the Real del Monte was not
the usual outcome of labor confl icts in the mining areas of
New Spain in this period. In the late Bourbon era, Mexican
mine owners displayed a more aggressive attitude toward
their workers. Supported by military and paramilitary
forces, they often succeeded in eliminating or reducing the
partidos that workers were permitted to keep and in reduc-
ing wages.