Daily Life In Colonial Latin America by Ann Jefferson

Author:Ann Jefferson [Jefferson, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5 - WORK AND LABOR

INTRODUCTION

The main impulse behind colonization of the Americas was the desire for wealth, shared by whites at every level from the kings and nobility to the most humble person who made the trip across the Atlantic. Before industrialization introduced forms of labor in which machines did much of the work, the accumulation of wealth depended on human energy. The key to wealth was organizing workers to perform manual labor, then appropriating the product of their labor. One of the cardinal principles of life on the Iberian Peninsula was that doing manual labor, having to work in order to live, was a sure sign of low social status; therefore, carrying their values across the Atlantic, the Iberian colonists committed themselves to the project of getting rich without doing the necessary work themselves. That meant putting in place systems of coerced labor at all sites of production. As a result, the exploitation of human labor was an essential component of colonial life from its inception. The labor systems put in place by the Spanish and Portuguese will be the focus of this chapter.

When the Spanish first set up colonies on Hispaniola in the last decade of the 15th century, they simply rounded up the native Taínos and forced them to do whatever manual labor was necessary for the establishment of the colony. The indigenous population of the island was devastated by the combination of epidemic diseases against which they had no antibodies, poor treatment, and the abrupt change from their former agricultural focus on production for their communities to a life of labor-intensive agricultural production in an extractive economy. Some estimates place the native population of Hispaniola around 1 million before the arrival of the Spanish. By the time 15 years had passed, their number had been reduced to 30,000. Alarmed at the results of the enslavement of the natives, the king approved establishing the encomienda, a system that had been in use during the Re-conquest by Christians of the Iberian Peninsula.

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