152 CHAPTER 7 THE BOURBON REFORMS AND SPANISH AMERICA
The Revolt of the Masses
A traditional view portrayed indigenous peoples
as the more or less passive objects of Spanish rule
or of an acculturation process. In recent decades,
deeper, more careful study of their response to
Spanish rule has revealed that they were not mere
“passive victims of Spanish colonization.” On the
contrary, evidence abounds that they were activ-
ists who from the fi rst resisted Spanish rule with a
variety of strategies and thereby modifi ed the colo-
nial environment and shaped their own lives and
futures. These strategies included revolts, fl ight,
riots, sabotage, and sometimes even using their
masters’ legal codes for purposes of defense and
offense.
Flight, under conditions of intense Spanish
competition for indigenous labor, effectively evaded
Spanish pressures. For example, natives routinely
abandoned pueblos that were subject to the mita
so that they could work as yanaconas on farms,
ranches, and other enterprises in exempted areas.
Historian Jeffrey Cole rightly points out that this
“was their most effective means of opposing the
mita, the demands of their curacas and corregi-
dores, and other obligations.” Indigenous peoples
also skillfully used Spanish legal codes for purposes
of “defense, redress, and even offense.” Historian
Steve Stern’s study of the Peruvian province of
Huamanga shows that they lightened the burdens
of the mita by “engaging in aggressive, persistent,
often shrewd use of Spanish juridical institutions
to lower legal quotas, delay delivery of specifi c cor-
vées and tributes, disrupt production, and the like.”
In Mexico there were countless riots—tumultos—
in the eighteenth century. Indígenas let Spanish
authority know that it could not take them for
granted and must heed their complaints.
The recent historiographic stress on native
peoples as agents who in some degree shaped their
own lives and futures by using Spanish juridical in-
stitutions and disrupting production is salutary but
can be misleading. Such efforts were by no means
always successful, and sometimes they resulted in
severe reprisals. Historian Martin Minchom’s study
of eighteenth-century Quito (in modern Ecuador)
reports that when indígenas complained of a pow-
erful Spanish nobleman’s encroachment on their
communal lands, local offi cials responded to their
“temerity” in bringing him before the law-courts
by burning down seventy-one indigenous houses
in the area. Another case study by Mexican histo-
rian Hildeberto Martínez of indigenous efforts to
halt alienation of their lands in two former native
domains in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Mexico (in the modern state of Puebla) suggests
that their resort to lawsuits and other peaceful tac-
tics proved completely futile. Spanish methods of
spoliation included outright violence, fraudulent
manipulation of sales and rental agreements, theft
of title documents, and the unleashing of livestock
on lands they coveted, in addition to more subtle
maneuvers. Between 1521 and 1644, these meth-
ods resulted in the loss of more than 137,000 hec-
tares of land by the two native communities.
Revolt was the most dramatic form of resistance
to Spanish rule by oppressed groups. Numerous in-
digenous and black slave revolts punctuated the co-
lonial period of Spanish-American history. Before
Spanish rule had been fi rmly established, indígenas
rose against their new masters in many regions. In
Mexico the Mixton war raged from 1540 to 1542.
The Maya of Yucatán staged a great uprising in- A descendant of the Inca kings, Manco II,
led a nationwide revolt in 1536 against the Span-
ish conquerors of Peru. In Chile the indomitable
Araucanians began a struggle for independence
that continued into the late nineteenth century.
In the jungles and mountains of the West Indies,
Central America, and northern South America,
groups of runaway black slaves established com-
munities that successfully resisted Spanish efforts
to destroy them. The revolutionary wave subsided
in the seventeenth century but peaked again in the
eighteenth when Bourbon reforms imposed new
burdens on the common people.
The Bourbon reforms helped enrich colonial
landowners, merchants, and mine owners, beau-
tifi ed their cities, and broadened the intellectual
horizons of upper-class youths, but the multitude
did not share in these benefi ts. On the contrary,
Bourbon efforts to increase the royal revenues by
the creation of governmental monopolies and priv-
ileged companies and the imposition of new taxes