Labor and Love in Guatemala re-envisions the histories of labor and ethnic formation in Spanish America. Taking cues from gender studies and the "new" cultural history, the book transforms perspectives on the major social trends that emerged across Spain's American colonies: populations from three continents mingled; native people and Africans became increasingly hispanized; slavery and other forms of labor coercion receded. Komisaruk's analysis shows how these developments were rooted in gendered structures of work, migration, family, and reproduction. The engrossing narrative reconstructs Afro-Guatemalan family histories through slavery and freedom, and tells stories of native working women and men based on their own words. The book takes us into the heart of sweeping historical processes as it depicts the migrations that linked countryside to city, the sweat and filth of domestic labor, the rise of female-headed households, and love as it was actually practiced—amidst remarkable permissiveness by both individuals and the state.
Labor and Love in Guatemala re-envisions the histories of labor and ethnic formation in Spanish America. Taking cues from gender studies and the "new" cultural history, the book transforms perspectives on the major social trends that emerged across Spain's American colonies: populations from three continents mingled; native people and Africans became increasingly hispanized; slavery and other forms of labor coercion receded. Komisaruk's analysis shows how these developments were rooted in gendered structures of work, migration, family, and reproduction. The engrossing narrative reconstructs Afro-Guatemalan family histories through slavery and freedom, and tells stories of native working women and men based on their own words. The book takes us into the heart of sweeping historical processes as it depicts the migrations that linked countryside to city, the sweat and filth of domestic labor, the rise of female-headed households, and love as it was actually practiced—amidst remarkable permissiveness by both individuals and the state.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Labor and Love in Guatemala re-envisions the histories of labor and ethnic formation in Spanish America. Taking cues from gender studies and the "new" cultural history, the book transforms perspectives on the major social trends that emerged across Spain's American colonies: populations from three continents mingled; native people and Africans became increasingly hispanized; slavery and other forms of labor coercion receded. Komisaruk's analysis shows how these developments were rooted in gendered structures of work, migration, family, and reproduction. The engrossing narrative reconstructs Afro-Guatemalan family histories through slavery and freedom, and tells stories of native working women and men based on their own words. The book takes us into the heart of sweeping historical processes as it depicts the migrations that linked countryside to city, the sweat and filth of domestic labor, the rise of female-headed households, and love as it was actually practiced—amidst remarkable permissiveness by both individuals and the state.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804784603 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Labor and Love in Guatemala
THE EVE OF INDEPENDENCEBy Catherine Komisaruk
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5704-1
Chapter One
Changing Communities, Changing Identities INDIANS AND THE COLONIAL WORLD
Early in the fifteenth century, the rulers of the Quiché kingdom founded a new capital at Utatlán and began to build an empire. They expanded their territory across the region that is now western Guatemala, extending it from the highlands southward toward the Pacific coast, until one of their subject peoples, the Cakchiquels, rose in rebellion in the 1470s. The Quichés and Cakchiquels were fighting for domination of the area when the Spaniards with their native Mexican allies arrived in 1524. The invaders came by land along the Pacific coast. They turned inland and hiked up through the cacao orchards into the highlands, where they conquered the Quiché capital and then moved southeast to vanquish the Cakchiquels. The brutality of the Spanish expedition leader, Pedro de Alvarado, earned him a reputation as exceptional even among Spanish conquerors. Yet he followed standard conquistador procedures, claiming Guatemala as conquered territory as he "founded" a Spanish capital (which he called Santiago) at an extant native capital, the Cakchiquel city of Iximche'. The Cakchiquels then rebelled and evacuated the city, diminishing its luster for the Spaniards, who in 1527 moved their headquarters farther south and east to a site near the smaller Cakchiquel community of Almolonga. There they built a city (that is, presumably they had the Indians build it for them), which they also called Santiago (today it is called Ciudad Vieja). This Santiago was situated at the foot of the Volcán de Agua and was destroyed by a mudslide in 1541; the Spaniards again moved their base, now to a location some 5 kilometers northward in the Valley of Panchoy, still calling the city Santiago (this would become today's Antigua Guatemala). In 1773, this capital was severely damaged by earthquakes, and a final relocation followed with the construction of Nueva Guatemala (today's Guatemala City) in the Valle de las Vacas.
During the conquest in Guatemala and the area that is now Honduras and Nicaragua, the Spaniards had enslaved thousands of Indians. Many of the slaves were sold in the 1530s and 1540s for mine work in Peru and perished there or en route. Others accompanied the Spaniards to work for them in the Valley of Panchoy. The enslavement of Indians did not endure, though, partly because the massive slave death toll rendered the system unsustainable. In the mid-sixteenth century, colonial legislation issued in Guatemala abolished Indian slavery. The reform enforced the "reduction," or resettlement, of the former Indian slaves into several barrios within the Spanish capital and in some towns outside the city's periphery. From the perspective of the Spaniards, the main purpose of the Indian barrios and towns was to supply labor and provisions for the colony, which was centered with the huge majority of its Spanish population in the capital. In a sense this changed little across the centuries; at the time of the capital's relocation to the present site beginning in the 1770s, the city remained dependent on its Indian barrios and surrounding Indian towns for food and workers. Although the Spanish authorities announced a divine mandate for the relocation of Indian communities along with the city, earthly economic realities also necessitated the move.
Yet by the 1770s the structures of labor had changed significantly, as part of a broader process of transformation that swept across the whole of Spanish America. In the first generation or two after the conquest, encomienda had prevailed as the major form of Indian labor for the Spaniards, accompanied in Central America by Indian slavery. In the encomienda system, labor was exacted as part of Indian tributes to the Spanish. Individual Spaniards who received royal grants of encomienda, usually in payment for service to Castile in the Conquest, would enjoy the permanent privilege of a given Indian community's tribute labor. Thus an encomienda was a grant of labor (not land, as is sometimes thought). As the numbers of Spanish landholdings increased beyond the numbers of encomiendas, the encomienda form was supplanted by a system of repartimiento, or distribution, of tribute labor gangs among various Spanish employers.
The mechanisms of repartimiento labor recruitment in Mesoamerica are now well known to historians. The drafts were administered at the corporate (institutional) level in both the Spanish and Indian spheres. In Guatemala the Spanish state was the largest single employer of repartimiento Indians, but private employers too, as well as clerical orders, applied to the colonial adminstration for repartimientos of native workers, and the administration then sent orders to native communities. Indigenous community officers were charged with gathering workers and dispatching them to the job. Work crews were refreshed by rotations of laborers out of, and back into, the community—usually at weekly intervals but in some cases longer. (In Guatemala, the longer rotations were called mandamientos in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; by the late eighteenth century the words mandamiento and repartimiento had become interchangeable.) Employers were supposed to pay an institutionally fixed wage, though shortchanging and other abuses were common. The colonial state's desire to maintain steady supplies for urban populations and for export probably ensured a somewhat equitable distribution of workers. The eighteenth century would see the completion in Guatemala of a dramatic, if piecemeal, disintegration of Indian tribute labor. As elsewhere in Spanish America, this was a transition not only from draft labor to free labor but also from state-mediated labor procurement to private arrangement. That is, labor recruitment by colonial administration and by native community governments gave way to informal contracting between workers and employers themselves. This shift was closely intertwined with transitions in the population's ethnic composition. The Hispanic proportion of the labor force was growing, fed by births in the colony's hispanized world and by attrition of individuals from Indian communities. Even those Indians who maintained affiliation with their native communities, and who therefore remained subject to tribute requirements, were increasingly becoming hispanized—notably in terms of Spanish language acquisition—especially near the colonial population centers. Bilingual Indians could contract their labor directly with Spanish employers or mayordomos (managers) without need of state mechanisms on either the Spanish or Indian side.
Thus the tribute labor system eventually became superfluous. At various moments across Mesoamerica and the Andes, as native labor was privatized, the Spanish state let go of coerced Indian labor. Tributes continued, but bit by bit colonial edicts converted labor drafts to cash payments, collected locally by Indian officials and turned over to the Spanish authorities. Tributes that had once been paid in commodities also gave way to payments in coin. Increasingly, Indians were recruited as free laborers who needed wages to pay their tributes. The legislation that gradually formalized this transition does not represent an activist administrative effort to enact social change; as Charles Gibson said of the collapse of repartimiento in Mexico, colonial "law provides an approximation of historical happening, or a commentary upon it." In shifting to cash tributes, colonial authorities were in effect trying to maintain tributes as a source of revenue in the face of changing social and economic realities.
This chapter traces these changes in the Guatemalan context, comparing them to findings on Mexico and adding a new consideration of ethnic identities, gender, and family structures. Studies of labor and recruitment in colonial-era Mesoamerica have generally focused on male workers, and indeed the workers drafted in the tribute labor system were mostly men. Yet I show that the transition from tribute labor to individual arrangements increasingly drew entire families, as well as women and children alone, into migratory wage work. Women's work, I argue, was central in the shift to free labor and in the lengthening duration of Indian migrants' sojourns in the Hispanic world. Further, the restructuring of tributes and labor may have exacerbated certain pressures on women and children. In the new system of cash tributes, women as well as men were required to pay, and women whose husbands were absent (often having fled debts) could face dire straits. My research indicates that widows and women with absent husbands were those most likely to seek wages in the cities. The restructuring of tributes may also have encouraged native parents to put their children out to work in the Hispanic cities. Wages earned by native children were normally remitted to the parents in the sending communities, who faced cash tribute collection and, often, associated debts. The migration of children from native pueblos into Spanish households provided powerful fuel for the hispanization process, since children are fastest to adopt new languages and cultures.
For native communities and ethnicities, outmigration unleashed a complex set of changes. While some migrants sent remittances that helped sustain native households and community coffers, overall the trend of departures decreased native communities' ability to meet tribute demands. Indians who worked for extended periods in the colonial sector tended to be identified increasingly with a Hispanic sphere of residence and work. This shift in identities diminished native communities' assessable populations, hence draining the consituency and authority from native states. The role of Indian polities within the Hispanic system was eroding.
Guatemalan repartimiento labor in comparative context
Historians have observed that coerced Indian labor lasted longer in Guatemala than in most areas with concentrated Spanish populations (Peru is the other noted exception). Repartimiento labor had faded from central Mexico by the middle of the seventeenth century, but in Central America it persisted nearly until independence. Over the years the system grew unruly in Guatemala, with local officials apparently taking authority to allocate repartimientos, until the Audiencia moved in 1761 to regain exclusive control. Convention assigned work gangs from specific towns to the same hacendados (estate owners) year in, year out. Though each assignment was made specifically to the owner and not to the estate itself, in practice the repartimiento sometimes continued even after an estate changed hands. Until about 1770, the Audiencia would quite willingly reissue an old repartimiento warrant at the request of a Spaniard who acquired an estate with a history of draft labor from a particular town. Thus certain Indian towns became tied through customary labor drafts to particular estates. These ties may have made the system especially entrenched in Guatemala, contributing to its persistence there.
The relatively smaller Spanish presence in Guatemala also foretells the longer duration of draft labor there, for the mechanism of change to free labor in Guatemala, like that in Mexico, hinged on hispanization. Linguistic hispanization among Indians facilitated direct arrangements between workers and employers, and the growing numbers of hispanized people living outside indigenous communities increased the availability of free laborers. Thus, repartimiento systems ended as hispanization took hold. In Mexico the hispanization process gained full speed earliest in the vicinity of Mexico City with its concentration of Spaniards and then spread outward. In the Guadalajara area, the agricultural drafts ended in 1750, a century later than in the area surrounding Mexico City. In the region of Antequera (Oaxaca), repartimientos continued as late as 1787 but by that point they were being used only as a stopgap measure to get workers in a pinch—particularly for wheat and cochineal production. Newer forms of recruitment had already become the norm. Likewise in Guatemala, the importance of the draft had been fading, with free labor recruitment on the rise at the time of the 1773 earthquakes, but then the construction of the new capital gave the repartimiento system a second wind in the region surrounding the city. Pueblos as far as 30 leagues away were required to send workers for the building projects. At the same time, a series of epidemics and famine further reduced the number of workers available in the countryside in the 1770s and 1780s. Hacendados in these decades were unable to get enough workers (or were unwilling to pay the higher wages needed to recruit free laborers), and their requests for repartimiento gangs surged. Seeking to ensure sufficient food supplies, the Audiencia specifically exempted certain towns from labor in urban construction and drafted their workers instead to the haciendas. Thus, the colony fell back on the repartimiento system in a period of increased need and reduced supply of labor, using the draft as a way to recruit workers and to balance food production with construction.
In addition to the longer duration of coerced native labor in Guatemala, the structure of the system there placed a larger burden on Indian individuals, families, and communities. In Mexico, colonial regulations limited the weekly repartimiento drafts to at most 10 percent of a town's eligible male population during the laborious periods of weeding and harvest. In Central America, by contrast, the Audiencia allowed 25 percent of a town's eligible men to be drafted in any given week. The colonial administrators in the sixteenth century had apparently meant to limit the draft to only a few men at a time from any community, but by the middle of the seventeenth century, 25 percent—the cuarta parte (one quarter)—had become the rule. Moreover, whereas in Mexico the 10 percent allowance was substantially reduced for about half the year during the agricultural off-season, in Central America the 25 percent allowance prevailed year-round. Male adults in Central America could therefore be required to spend a quarter of the year away from their own crops and families. In many towns in the capital's hinterland and others near outlying commercial agriculture centers, where the draft continued well into the eighteenth century, indeed the full 25 percent (and sometimes numbers in excess of 25 percent) of eligible men were tapped. Some employers' requests for work gangs specified a temporary or seasonal need for labor, but other repartimientos—particularly in public works—were in force during much of the year.
Despite the comparatively heavy burden of the "cuarta parte" (25 percent), indigenous responses to the repartimiento labor draft system in Central America reflected local concerns rather than disputes over differences in other realms of the empire or in other times. This pattern is consistent with the intense localism that scholars have observed in native politics, identities, and writing across colonial-era Mesoamerica. Though indigenous communities in Guatemala complained repeatedly in the eighteenth century that too many men were being requested for the drafts, they never questioned the fairness of the 25 percent proportion. Their petitions focused instead on temporary issues such as crop failures, plagues and epidemics, and church-building projects that lessened their ability to supply workers, and on the ever-decreasing numbers of people in the communities. Indigenous cabildos appealed for re-counts of eligible men and for greater numbers of exemptions for various civic and religious officeholders, but they accepted the one-quarter rule as a given.
Why did regulations allow such a greater proportion of men to be drafted in Guatemala than in Mexico? It is possible that one-quarter of the eligible populations of the Indian towns around the Guatemalan capital in fact amounted to workforce sizes (in absolute numbers) similar to those near Mexico City, where numbers of eligible draftees in at least some sixteenth-century Indian communities were much higher than in Guatemala. Or the difference in draft proportions also may reflect some difference in pre-Columbian labor draft systems. The matter of timing also suggests an explanation. The Guatemalan allowance of up to one-quarter of a town's eligible men became entrenched starting in the mid-1650s—precisely the time when the central Mexican draft disappeared. In the decades preceding 1650, the free labor force in Mexico had been expanding and gradually supplanting the repartimiento system. During the same period in Central America, the repartimiento system was just taking shape, coexisting for several decades with encomienda and unpaid "personal service" (servicio personal). By the time repartimiento became the principal method for procuring Indian workers in Central America, the Spanish population there and its demand for workers had grown, while the indigenous population had suffered multiple, infamous devastations. The Spanish government may have increased the proportion of men who could be drafted each week because of insufficient labor for colonial enterprises.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Labor and Love in Guatemala by Catherine Komisaruk Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Map: Some Cities and Towns in Late Colonial Guatemala xiv
Map: Administrative Jurisdictions, 1785-1821 xv
Introduction 1
1 Changing Communities, Changing Identities: Indians and the Colonial World 16
2 "That They Cease to Be Truly Slaves": African Emancipation and the Collapse of Slavery 68
3 A Quiet Revolution: Free Laborers and Entrepreneurs in the Hispanizing City 109
4 Broken Rules in Love and Marriage: Households, Gender, and Sexuality 185
Conclusion 243
Abbreviations Used in the Notes 253
Notes 255
Works Cited 309
Index 327