114 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
possess no individual property and are obliged
to work the communal lands.... Forbidden by
law to commingle with the other castes, they
are deprived of the instruction and assistance
that they should receive from contact with
these and other people. They are isolated by
their language, and by a useless, tyrannical
form of government.He concluded that these ostensible privileges were
“an offensive weapon employed by the white class
against the Indians, and never serve to defend the
latter.”
Native commoners, however, did not form a
single undifferentiated mass of impoverished, ex-
ploited people, for there existed a small minority
who found paths to successful careers in the new
colonial order. These included the skilled crafts
and transport, for which there was a high demand.
Artisans quickly entered such “Hispanic” occupa-
tions as silversmithing, masonry, stonecutting,
carpentry, and the like. In late-sixteenth-century
Peru, says Steve Stern, “an independent Indian
craftsman could earn a very respectable income.
In two months, a stonecutter could fashion a stone
wheel worth sixty pesos.” Arrieros (muleteers)
could earn some 80 to 160 pesos a year. Some ac-
cumulated enough wealth to acquire landholdings
for commercial production of grains, vegetables,
and other products. To protect themselves against
expropriations (periodic offi cial inspections of in-
digenous communal land could result in redistri-
bution of “surplus” land to Spanish petitioners),
these farmers acquired individual title under Span-
ish law, which protected the owner from the legal
confi scation to which communal land was subject.
Commoners also successfully resisted Spanish ex-
ploitation by gaining exemption from heavy trib-
ute and repartimiento obligations, which made it
diffi cult to accumulate money needed to invest in
land or other enterprises. In addition to recognized
caciques and kurakas, the exempted classes in-
cluded independent women heads of households,
artisans, offi cials of indigenous cabildos, and lay
assistants of Catholic priests.
These achievements of that small minority
of successful commoners, however, came with a
price. Writing about late-sixteenth-century Peru,
Steve Stern observes that “the tragedy of Indian
success lay in the way it recruited dynamic, pow-
erful, or fortunate individuals to adopt Hispanic
styles and relationships, thereby buttressing colo-
nial domination. The achievements of native indi-
viduals, in the midst of a society organized to exploit
indigenous peoples, educated Indians to view the
Hispanic as superior, the Andean as inferior.”
Most indigenous people lived in their own
towns, some of pre-Hispanic origin, others created
by a process of resettlement of dispersed popula-
tions in new towns called “reductions” or “congre-
gations.” To serve the ends of Spanish control and
tribute collection, these towns were reorganized
on the peninsular model, with municipal govern-
ments patterned on those of Spanish towns. The
organization of indigenous local government in
New Spain and Peru differed. In New Spain, the
indigenous cabildo, which in the mid-sixteenth
century gradually replaced the pre-Conquest sys-
tem of government by hereditary native rulers,
had its regidores or councilmen, its alcaldes who
tried minor cases, and its gobernador (governor),
who was responsible for the collection and delivery
of tribute to the corregidor or the encomendero.
Spanish colonial law required periodic election of
these and other municipal offi cers, but voting was
generally restricted to a small group of elite males,
and candidates as a rule were drawn from an even
smaller number of hereditary aristocratic families,
with the selection of offi cers usually the result of
discussion and consultation with an assembly of
elders, leading to fi nal consensus. Election disputes
were not unknown, however, and generally re-
fl ected factional divisions within the elite. Women,
although barred from voting or holding offi ce,
sometimes played an active part in these disputes,
as illustrated by the case of Josefa María Francisca,
who in the 1720s was a leader of one faction in
the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Josefa, who had
already gained notoriety as a principal litigant in
a stubborn effort to exempt Tepoztlán natives from
the dreaded mining repartimiento, was accused by
the rival faction of setting “a dangerous example
by openly encouraging people to join her in ‘end-
less lawsuits.’”