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CHAPTER 1
Tribute and Calidad in the Spanish Empire
In the name of expanding revenue and demanding loyalty to the crown, late colonial officials and bureaucrats sought new families and individuals in New Spain who could be subjected to tributary status. These actions infringed on ordinary people's lives in ways that tested marriages, depleted meager incomes, and ruined reputations. In 1793, a woman named Lugarda de Jesús was arrested for failing to pay royal tribute in the jurisdiction of Tenango del Valle, now in the state of Mexico. Although Tenango del Valle was home to thousands of Indian tributaries, she had been registered as a mulata. Concerned about the fate of Lugarda de Jesús, her husband Agustín Antonio, an Indian, sought an investigation into the matter by royal authorities. In response to his entreaties, Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes Pacheco de Padilla, second count of Revillagigedo, requested more information on the matter from the local subdelegate, Juan Antonio Flores. He informed the viceroy that "it is true that [Lugarda de Jesús] is a mulata." Who recorded her as a mulata and why are questions unanswered in the short, formal document. Living with her Indian husband, Lugarda de Jesús may have eventually run afoul of someone who sought to discredit her, prevent her from engaging in commercial activities, or even remove her from her home. Frictions between Indians and free people of African descent in Tenango del Valle arose over property ownership and belonging, as well as tribute payments. To confirm Lugarda de Jesús's reputation, the subdelegate cited her inclusion on the padrón de pardos, or Afromexican tribute register. He seemed uninterested in pursuing the matter of a single tributary any further, considering it a waste of time and a strain on the already stretched resources of the tribute regime. The couple pressed for a resolution to the situation, leading to Lugarda de Jesús's release without explicitly changing her tributary status or her monetary obligations to the Spanish monarch.
Characterizing the matter as unworthy of the viceroy's continued attention, the subdelegate quipped that "if they were loyal vassals, it would be better to pay what they owed his majesty than to spend so much on impertinent journeys and complaints." The connections between loyalty, vassalage, and tribute were not lost on officials with local or regional jurisdictions, who saw a refusal to pay tribute as tantamount to an insult to the colonial order. The "impertinence" of these members of the tributary class, Indian and mulata alike, seemed to question the looming social divide between the tributary and nontributary groups. This divide was critical to understanding the lives of ordinary people in colonial New Spain as well as their relationships with agents of the colonial regime. These men had the power to apply labels like "mulata" or "Indian" and thus change the economic lives of individuals and families for generations to come.
Tribute had two major outcomes for the lives of ordinary people and authorities. First, tribute was a principal institutional channel through which free people of color interacted directly with agents of the colonial regime. Second, the process of registering for and paying tribute reinforced and reinscribed colonial categories of caste, gender, and reputation. As these categories changed, the tribute regime adjusted to reflect changing social realities. When tribute officials did not accurately assess social relationships of kinship and genealogy, reputation and status, or color and caste, potential tributaries petitioned authorities using legal channels. Tribute offers a lens through which to view the process of fiscal reform in the Bourbon period as well as a chance to understand the impact of free people of color on those processes and how members of this group — or those attempting to distance themselves from the group — understood their positions within colonial society. As an institution that both occasionally rewarded loyalty and routinely levied burdensome taxes on families because of their African ancestry, tribute demonstrated the complex relationship between blackness and the colonial regime. Changing categories of taxation and social markers existed within the tribute regime over the course of the colonial period, and the relative flexibility or lack thereof was crucial to the success of royal tribute.
This chapter explores the development of social and economic categories related to the tribute regime and their meanings in Atlantic, colonial, and imperial contexts. Although a small part of the overall treasury, Afromexican tribute appeared to Bourbon bureaucrats as an untapped potential source of revenue with the means to control a segment of the masses that bureaucrats often characterized as untrustworthy, unruly, or simply dangerous. Tributary status joined other social markers in the colonial context that informed the vocabularies of bureaucrats and ordinary people as they described colonial hierarchies as well as their own families. A primary determinant of tributary status was calidad, a term used to describe an individual status, but what kind of people were obligated to pay tribute was a question that ordinary people and bureaucrats struggled to answer over the course of the colonial period. Within the tributary category, distinctions remained important, for bureaucrats able to apply rates of royal tribute and for ordinary people who found that the categories within this tributary class also influenced their daily lives, abilities to conduct business, personal relationships, and understanding of themselves within a colonial regime.
AMERICAN TAXATION AND IMPERIAL WEALTH
The fiscal systems of early modern Spain and its empire contained distinct tax statuses based on social groups or geography, producing a wide range of information, institutions, and government agents. The fundamental distinction in taxation in the New World was between Indians and non-Indians. Indians were the first to pay tributes to encomenderos and the Spanish crown as part of a severe ecclesiastical and civil tax regime. Indian tribute in labor built churches and public works, while goods such as blankets and foodstuffs sustained holders of encomiendas, grants of Indian labor and tribute. These Indian tributes in goods and labor reflected pre-Columbian practices, though Spanish colonial taxes were undoubtedly much more exploitative. Indian tributes were especially abundant in what became the Kingdom of New Spain and were not to be found on the same scale elsewhere in North America. Even as the larger unit of the Viceroyalty of New Spain grew to the north, income from tribute remained comparable to that of the Andean zone, partly owing to the loss of potential tributaries into the mestizo category in the mid and late colonial periods. To alleviate some of the strain on Indian communities, the crown excused them from paying sales taxes. This tax status kept rural Indian economies under the protection of the crown, which reserved for itself a set rate of tribute based on population and production.
Non-Indians were subject to sales and customs taxes such as the alcabala and almojarifazgo applied to trading in local economies and larger commercial networks. The Castilian crown created the innovative alcabala, a sales tax, in the fourteenth century. Prior to the establishment of the alcabala in the Americas, the principal income from American treasuries to Spain was made up of the quinto and diezmo taxes on silver followed by Indian tribute. Together, these accounted for more than 75 percent of the income from the Americas at the beginning of Philip II's reign (1556–98). Of these taxes, the quinto mining tax would bring the most annual income to Spain. Taxation from non-Indians and the commercial activities they controlled was, from an early stage, the fiscal underpinning of the colonial project.
Only free people of African descent were required to pay both sales taxes and royal tributes, among other taxes. This special status grew out of the legacies of slavery and conquest in New Spain, the uncertain place free people of African descent occupied in the colonial legal regime, and the assertion of early colonial monarchs that free people of color were vassals with fiscal obligations to their lord. More than three hundred thousand free people of color, as well as ten thousand slaves, formed vital labor forces in the urban centers and mining communities of New Spain. They grew during the eighteenth century from just 1 percent to about 10 percent of the population. With this demographic shift, free people of color and their economic activities occupied an increasingly important place in the minds of policy makers in the eighteenth century. Thousands of free people of color paid tribute, with a remarkable surge in registration and collection following the visitation of José de Gálvez (1765–72), who placed an emphasis in his report on the need to incorporate free people of African descent into the tribute regime more effectively. Although many of Gálvez's suggestions would never be implemented, new registrations of free people of color eventually occurred because of more streamlined administrative methods and aggressive attempts to maximize the tributary population.
A degree of flexibility continued to flourish within this modernizing tax regime, allowing local administrators to control revenue in ways that were beneficial to the continued survival of the Spanish Empire. Individual jurisdictions often maintained local tax privileges based on geopolitical factors such as proximity to hostile Indian groups. Subjects throughout the Spanish Empire expected to be able to reject taxes they saw as unfair or unlawfully extracted. In the far-reaching Viceroyalty of New Spain, tributary status became complex, and even broke down, where powerful rivals challenged the Spanish for economic and political control. Distance allowed officials and subjects to assert their needs while creating multiple nodes of authority throughout New Spain. This tension between control and variety would become a hallmark of taxation across Spanish America, allowing the tax regime to reflect locally and regionally specific histories, economies, and demographic patterns.
The tax structure of late colonial New Spain reflected the growth of Indian and casta populations, the colony's expected prosperity, and its compliance with imperial demands. As the centerpiece of Spanish Atlantic trade and effective colonial taxation, Mexico became the "tax jewel" of the Spanish Empire, especially after 1780. Mexico City was the capital of the vast Viceroyalty of New Spain, which included the Philippines, the Spanish Caribbean islands, Florida, what is now the western United States, and Central America, with the exception of Panama. Within the viceroyalty, the Kingdom of New Spain contained most of the population. Its capital city was the largest city in North America in the late eighteenth century with more than 112,000 residents. As a center of colonial administration and taxation, the Kingdom of New Spain was the key to fiscal success in the Americas.
The sheer size of the Real Hacienda in New Spain meant that sources of income like royal tributes, which made up relatively small percentages of the overall income, remained fiscally significant. Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, in his extensively researched Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain of 1811, estimated that New Spain produced more than a third of all the bullion in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas during the course of three centuries; subsequent historians have placed the figure closer to 45 percent. Royal tribute registration among Indians was actively expanding at a rate of between 13 and 25 percent at the end of the century, reaching 1.1 million pesos in net income to the royal treasuries between 1795 and 1799. This accounted for a little less than 8 percent of the total revenue collected in the royal treasuries of New Spain, which exceeded 15.3 million pesos after collection costs. An 1805 summary showed Indians paid more than 1.3 million pesos in tribute, compared to about 200,000 pesos collected from free people of African descent. Royal tributes paid by free people of African descent, then, amounted to only 19 percent of what Indians paid for the same tax. Just as significant are the experiences of taxpayers who found themselves, often unwillingly or unexpectedly, subject to tax increases at the core of Bourbon colonialism. The outcome of the rapid growth of Afromexican tribute in New Spain was a tax base that was more integrated into the colonial regime and increasingly burdened by discriminatory laws and practices, including taxation.
THE RISE OF TRIBUTE IN THE SPANISH ATLANTIC
Iberian taxes transplanted to the New World solidified the relationship between the Spanish monarch and Indian subjects in the Castilian tradition of inclusion through taxation. Taxes were already in place on Jews and Muslims resident in medieval Castile, incorporating them within Castilian society but marking them as subjects for royal financial gain. Indian tribute grew out of medieval and early modern predecessors from Castile as well, including the pecho peasants paid. Supplemental taxes called "servicios" of variable amounts were charged according to the needs of the crown. The servicios defined the status of pecheros, who were the only members of society required to make the contribution. The pechero designation was somewhat nebulous, being defined by inclusion on a register rather than belonging to a particular social status or an assessment of income. In contrast, free blacks in Portugal paid taxes based on categories pertaining to the sizes of their estates, which were usually meager in both Lisbon and rural areas. Many formerly enslaved Africans in Iberia lived in poverty, and their economic circumstances depended in part on behavior and decisions of former masters. This population was not subject to a special tax based on blackness. While there were some similarities between the pecho and the tax paid by free people of African descent in Spanish America, the tax statuses were distinct. Indeed, officials in the Real Hacienda at the end of the eighteenth century characterized the tax as "original and unique to the Americas."
Attaining the status of the minor nobility, the hidalgos, led to important tax exemptions in the early modern period. Lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias derived "hidalgo" from the root "itálico," denoting one who did not pay any tributes. In Spanish America, all Spaniards received exemption from royal tribute, signifying their nobility over all other caste groups. Tax breaks of various kinds were regularly granted to European colonists in North America. The Cámara de Indias extended the practice of granting patents of nobility to peasants through cartas de hidalguía comparable to those used in Castile, with the consequence that these titles were also available to members of the Indian nobility who held the title of cacique. Originally associated with nobility, by the eighteenth century this term came to refer to members of a family of status whose members held offices in local Indian governments. For Indians and Spaniards, tribute became another method of recognizing privileged status in the new society.
In the New World, the monarch experienced fewer barriers to taxation, unlike in Castile where consultation with the Cortes of Castile, or Castilian parliament, could stall tax reforms. Members of the aristocracy who enjoyed privileges in the area of taxation understood themselves to be bound by a contract that, to be broken, required the agreement of nobles and monarch alike. In contrast, the Indies provided the Spanish crown with revenue in the form of the quinto real and Indian tribute, both justified by the act of conquest and subsequent ownership over the land. Charging royal tributes was a means, throughout Spanish America, of formalizing an economy based on conquest and plunder. Indian tribute in New Spain was originally conceived as a tax in kind, by which Indian residents would produce goods for collection by caciques. These goods would eventually benefit individual encomenderos or the Spanish monarch. As well as being the most economically significant tax levied on Indians in the early colonial period, the administration of this tax required the first integrated aspect of governance involving both Spaniards and Indians. For royal tribute, Indian local officials collected the funds or goods and handed them off to district magistrates (alcaldes mayores or corregidores) or their agents. These officials were notoriously corrupt in both New Spain and Peru. From its earliest implantation, tribute collection could easily lead to abuses, such as graft and physical violence, by provincial officials.
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Excerpted from "Taxing Blackness"
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