CHAPTER 5 THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN MESOAMERICA 187comiendasin Central Mexico. He may have been the first to express this sentiment in
colonial Mesoamerica, but he was certainly not the last.
One of the earliest Spanish institutions to have a direct economic impact on the
Indians was the encomiendasystem. Initially, encomiendaswere a great source of wealth
for Spaniards, with native communities furnishing large amounts of goods to their
encomendero.An encomenderoof the highland Guatemalan town of Huehuetenango
received the following items in tribute in 1530 to 1531 (Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz
1991:274):
800 lengths of cotton cloth
400 loincloths
400 jackets
400 blouses
400 skirts
400 sandals
400 reed mats
400 woven mats
unspecified amounts of corn, beans, chile, and salt
108–126 large jugs of honey
2,268 turkeysThe Crown repeatedly tried to eliminate the encomiendasystem, but with little
success. In some areas the Crown was successful in revoking encomiendas;in these
cases an Indian town or province became, in effect, an encomiendaof the Crown. In
other areas, however, encomiendasheld by generation after generation of Spaniards
persisted until well into the eighteenth century.
In the 1550s, Indian slavery was abolished, and that act, together with a new pol-
icy that prevented encomenderosfrom demanding labor from the Indians they held
(they could still receive goods), presented the Crown with a serious dilemma: Who
was going to provide the labor required for the various colonial enterprises? The
repartimientosystem was implemented to solve this problem. Repartimientowas essen-
tially a system of forced labor that provided the Spaniards with a new means for ex-
ploiting native people. Under repartimiento,Indian communities were required to
provide labor for public projects such as building and road construction and main-
tenance, for agricultural work, for work in the mines, and for work as porters. The
law required that repartimientolaborers be paid. The system was easily abused, how-
ever, with Spanish officials and their friends using the labor drafts for private en-
deavors and finding ways to cheat the Indians out of the wages they had earned.
A variation of the repartimientoof labor was the repartimientoof goods, in which
the Indians were forced to purchase goods from unscrupulous Spanish officials at ex-
orbitant prices. Often these were items the Indians neither needed nor wanted, such
as Spanish shoes, although sometimes the goods were actually the raw materials that
the natives needed to produce items for tribute payments. For example, a native
community that was charged tribute in textiles might be forced to purchase at high