Mita was a form of coerced labor in South America under the Spanish. It was derived from the Incan tradition of mit'a, described below: Show During the colonial period, the Spanish co-opted the Inca system of mit'a to force millions of indigenous to work, perhaps most notably in the mines. However, the Spanish were conscious of the decimation of the Caribbean Indian population by the Spanish, which led to the New Laws of 1542, forbidding the use of forced indigenous labor in mining. Thus, in the Andes, they were more conscious of the well-being of the indigenous, albeit only to further their own selfish goals.[2] Mita Labor in the Mines of PotosíDuring the colonial period, the Spanish co-opted the Inca system of mit'a to conscript millions of indigenous to work in the mines of Potosí in modern day Bolivia. "The mita was a draft Indian labor regimen designed by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1573 to meet the need for unskilled labor in the revitalized silver industry at Potosí. That revitalization was prompted by the development of a new amalgamation refining method suitable to the mining zone's high elevation, which held the promise that Potosi might recapture the fabled production levels that had made it famous during its first two decades of exploitation (1545-65)."[3] "In three centuries Potosí's Cerro Rico [Rich Hill] consumed 8 million lives. The Indians, including women and children, were torn from their agricultural communities and driven to the Cerro. Of every ten who went up into the freezing wilderness, seven never returned... The Spanish scoured the countryside for hundreds of miles for labor. Many died on the way, before reaching Potosí, but it was the terrible work conditions in the mine that killed the most people."[4] "The mita labor system was a machine for crushing Indians. The process of using mercury to extract silver poisoned as many or more than did the toxic gases in the bowels of the earth. It made hair and teeth fall out and brought on uncontrollable trembling. The victims ended up dragging themselves through the streets pleading for alms. At night 6,000 fires burned on the slopes of the Cerro and in these the silver was worked, taking advantage of the wind that the "glorious Saint Augustine" sent from the sky. Because of the smoke from the ovens there were no pastures or crops for a radius of twenty miles around Potosí and the fumes attacked men's bodies no less relentlessly."[5]Articles and ResourcesRelated Sourcewatch ArticlesReferences
Mita, a colonial Andean system of rotating forced Indian labor assigned by the state to designated beneficiaries. The Spanish conquerors derived the mita from the Quechuan mit'a, whereby Andean society made temporary assignments of workers for community projects. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581) established the colonial mita, issuing laws regarding the size of the draft levies, the wages to be paid the workers, and the frequency with which an individual worker served. Without approval of the crown (which remained ambivalent about the morality of coerced labor but willing to profit from it), Toledo instituted a formal mita for the silver mines and mills at Potosí between 1572 and 1575. Each year it mobilized over 11,000 Indians from the highland provinces between Potosí and Cuzco. Toledo established another important mita at the Huancavelica mercury mines. Particularly before the catastrophic decline in the indigenous population, viceregal officials occasionally assigned mitas to other mines and to Spanish towns, making cheap but unspecialized labor available to other sectors of the colonial economy. Such a mita provided textile sweatshops in Quito with much of their labor. The mitas coerced reluctant Indians into participating in the colonial economy and subsidized economic production through low wages. Mitayos (mita workers) sometimes stayed on to earn the higher wages paid free labor. By the 1700s, the number of mitayos who worked at Potosí or Huancavelica was only a tiny fraction of the assigned quota. Some villages successfully resisted fulfillment of the mita obligation. Other villages paid colonial administrators to hire substitutes from the pool of voluntary laborers. Thus, free labor was available, but the Spaniards preserved the mita because it subsidized mining through low wages. Poor ore quality at Potosímade production unprofitable without the mita subsidy during the eighteenth century. The mita elicited opposition on humanitarian grounds, but many complaints about it also came from priests, governors, kurakas (Indian leaders), and landowners who wanted to retain the Indians for other forms of economic exploitation. The cortes of Spain finally abolished the mita in 1812, but it survived at least into the nineteenth century. Clorinda Matto de Turner's 1889 novel Aves sin nido shows how forced labor in the form of pongos is extracted from Quechua speakers. The pongo system has survived in fact until the present day. Other regions of Latin America had similar systems of forced labor such as the tequitl in the Nahuatl-speaking territories of Central Mexico. See alsoHuasipungo; Mining: Colonial Spanish America; Slavery: Indian Slavery and Forced Labor. BIBLIOGRAPHYAquiles R. Pérez, Las mitas en la real audiencia de Quito (1947). Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Las minas de Huancavelica en los siglos XVI y XVII (1949), esp. pp. 91-100. David L. Wiedner, "Forced Labor in Colonial Peru," in The Americas 16, no. 4 (1960): 357-383. Enrique Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour in Late Colonial Potosí," in Past and Present 93 (1981): 98-136. Peter J. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (1984), esp. pp. 54-105. Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (1985). Additional BibliographyMatto de Turner, Clorinda, Torn from the Nest. Ed. Antonio Cornejo Polar. Trans. John Herman Richard Polt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Premo, Bianca. "From the Pockets of Women: The Gendering of the Mita, Migration, and Tribute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru." The Americas 56:4 (April 2000): 63-93. Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Kendall W. Brown Indentured Servants , Indentured servitude was an important form of labor utilized in British North America during the colonial and early national periods. Bound laborers… Labor , LABOR Between the Civil War and World War I, the United States experienced great economic changes, ultimately emerging as an industrial power. The Gi… Cochineal , Cochineal (grana cochinilla), a bright red dye made from the bodies of small insects found on the nopal cactus. The production of cochineal dates to… Potosi , Potosí Potosí was the most famous and most productive source of silver in the Spanish empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Settlement o… Joel Dorman Steele , Labor and War. The relationship between the paid labor force (union and nonunion workers) and the government at war is twofold. First, any country en… Oruro , Oruro Oruro, city and department of Bolivia. Officially founded in 1606, the city lies north of Lake Poopó at an altitude of 12,150 feet. The region… |
What is the mit’a system and how was it exploited by the spanish empire?
zusammenhängende Posts
Urheberrechte © © 2024 frojeostern Inc.
