82 CHAPTER 4 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF COLONIAL LIFE
(known as mingas) were employed at the Potosí
mines in the seventeenth century.^2
From the fi rst, this wage labor was often asso-
ciated with debt servitude. The second half of the
seventeenth century saw the growth of the system
of repartimiento or repartimiento de mercancías,^3
the compulsory purchase by indigenous villages
of goods from district governors (corregidores, al-
caldes mayores). In combination with their other
burdens, repartimiento was a powerful induce-
ment for them to accept advances of cash and
goods from Spanish hacendados; the tribute pay-
ment was usually included in the reckoning. A na-
tive so indebted had to work for his employer until
the debt was paid. Despite its later evil reputation,
peonage, whether or not enforced by debts, had
defi nite advantages. It usually freed indígenas from
the recurrent tribute and repartimiento burdens of
their community and offered security in the form of
a plot of land they could work for themselves and
their families. But if the hacienda offered escape
from intolerable conditions, it aggravated the dif-
fi culties of those who remained on their ancestral
lands. The hacienda expanded by legal or illegal
means at the expense of the indigenous pueblo, ab-
sorbing whole towns and leaving others without
enough land for their people when the long popula-
tion decline fi nally ended in the fi rst half of the sev-
enteenth century and a slow recovery began. The
hacienda also lured laborers from the pueblo, mak-
ing it diffi cult for indigenous towns to meet their
tribute and repartimiento obligations. Between the
tworepúblicas (commonwealths), the república de
indios and the república de españoles, as Spanish
documents frequently called them, stretched a gulf
of hostility and distrust.
(^2) In the early seventeenth century, the growing shortage
of indigenous labor, due to the ravages of epidemic disease
and the fl ight from communities subject to the mita, gave
rise to a system whereby the delivery of mita labor was
replaced by deliveries of silver collected from native com-
munities and raised through the operation of economic
enterprises supervised by the curacas. Mine owners used
this silver to cover minga costs and to hire minga substi-
tutes for mita labor (mitayos) not received in person.
(^3) The term repartimiento was also applied to the periodic
con scription of natives for labor useful to the Spanish
community.
The importance of debt servitude as a means
of securing and holding labor seems to have varied
according to the availability of wage labor. It was
used extensively in northern Mexico, where such
labor was scarce, but it appears to have been less
important in central Mexico, where it was more
abundant. Some recent studies stress that debt pe-
onage was “more of an inducement than a bond,”
with the size of advances refl ecting the bargaining
power of labor in dealing with employers, and that
hacendados sometimes made no special effort to re-
cover their peons who had fl ed without repayment
of loans. But the evidence for such relative lack of
concern about fugitive peons comes chiefl y from
late-eighteenth-century Mexico, when labor was
increasingly abundant. For earlier, labor-scarce
periods, much evidence exists of strenuous efforts
to compel indígenas to remain on estates until their
debts had been paid off. Indeed, hacendados and of-
fi cials sometimes likened Mexican peons to Euro-
pean serfs who were bound to their estates, with
the right to their services passing with the transfer
of the land from one owner to another.
Widely used in agriculture and mining, debt
servitude assumed its harshest form in the numer-
ousobrajes (workshops), which produced cloth
and other goods, that sprang up in many areas in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Convict
labor, assigned to employers by Spanish judges,
was early supplemented by the “free” labor of na-
tives ensnared by a variety of devices. They were
often tempted into these workshops by an offer of
liquor or a small sum of money and, once inside
the gates, were never let out again. “In this way,”
wrote a seventeenth-century observer, “they have
gathered in and duped many married Indians
with families, who have passed into oblivion here
for twenty years, or longer, or their whole lives,
without their wives or children knowing anything
about them; for even if they want to get out, they
cannot, thanks to the great watchfulness with
which the doormen guard the exits.”
BLACK SLAVERY
Side by side with the disguised slavery of repar-
timiento and debt servitude existed black slavery.
For a variety of reasons, including that Spaniards