Encomiendas evolved in the Caribbean from medieval Castilian roots. According to Robert Himmerich y Valencia, they began as rights to labor, repartimiento, but were expanded to include commodities in México where Aztec traditions of tribute were perpetuated.
By the time Juan de Oñate was proposing his contract for conquest, Himmerich y Valencia says encomiendas were declining in importance in México. Still Oñate asked for the right to grant them for three generations. At the time the viceroy controlled all grants made in México, including those transferred through death and marriage. He was only willing to allow Oñate the right of encomienda, if he agreed to submit all names of grantees to México City for his approval.
If any governors followed that stipulation, no one has found the documents generated by the approval process in the Mexican archives. The only sources on encomenderos seem to be Angélico Chávez’s Origins of New Mexico Families and Inquisition records published by early scholars.
Oñate is only known to have granted one encomienda, the Santiago de Jémez, to his new lieutenant, Juan Martínez de Montoya, in 1606. The reason may be the pueblos, unlike the Indians dominated by the Aztec in México, had no concept of tribute. Chávez says the governor in 1613, Pedro de Peralta, sent his immigrant ancestor, Pedro Gómez Durán y Chaves, to collect from Taos and he failed.
It’s possible the reporting requirement fell into abeyance when a new viceroy replaced the one who’d distrusted Oñate in the period before governors were able to execute their right of conferment. When they began is unknown, but Chávez says his ancestor had an encomienda by 1621 for the area around Sandía and Santa Ana.
It may also be the viceroys lost interest, once repartimiento and tribute were replaced by debt peonage on the large agricultural plantations that developed to supply food for México City and the mining town of Zacatecas. The transition was well underway by the time Oñate came north, according to Peter Bakewell.
The Mexican economy was then suffering from an increase in food prices and a decline in the supply of mine labor, factors which may have influenced adventurous men to enlist to avoid hard labor to eat. Oñate, after all, was offering men the opportunity to revive the success of the original conquistadors in a time of economic stagnation.
The number of encomiendas in New Mexico was officially limited to 35, the number of pueblos that might need military protection. David Snow has compiled a list of 41 men and women associated with 26 native communities through two generations.
One reason the number of encomenderos proliferated relative to the number of encomiendas is simple inheritance. Taos may have been granted to Pedro Robledo, who came with Oñate in 1598. All we know is Juan de Tapia, the husband of his daughter, Francesca Robledo, claimed a quarter share, and Francisco Gómez Robledo, his great-grandson through another daughter, Luisa Robledo, had 2 ½ shares. No one has mentioned the owners of the other share or shares.
Another reason for the increase in the number of encomenderos through time is grants were used by governors to reward or punish men who did or did not support them. Luis de Rosas and Bernardo López de Mendizábal were both accused of exercising the right of revocation.
In 1661, Andrés Hurtado, a young man of 31 from Zacatecas, had the encomienda for Santa Ana and neighboring pueblos. Chávez doesn’t mention how it transferred from his ancestor to Hurtado, but does say the latter fell into disfavor with López, who ordered him to move his young family from the Sandía pueblo area to Santa Fé in December.
In contrast, Gómez Robledo became one of the more dependable military leaders, serving governor after governor. He told the Inquisition in 1662 he’d been “undertaking many risks and enterprises, bearing the costs himself, without receiving any salary, serving as royal ensign of the aforesaid town of Santa Fé, captain of the infantry, sergeant major, and commander of the companies of New Mexico, and maestre del campo of the company.”
By then, he’d accumulated an interest in at least seven encomiendas that had to have been granted at different times. The first would have been Tesuque and Taos. Next might have been Pecos and Sandía. The other pueblos, Abó, Ácoma, and the Hopi villages, were pacified later.
A more important reason for the increase in encomenderos is that, through time, the grants came to be seen as commodities to be traded, not feudal contracts requiring military service in return for pay. As the Apache became a greater menace in the later 1600's, Allen Anderson says many men were less willing to take time from their ranches to provide military service. Some argued they were only required to attend the governing council in Santa Fé, the cabildo.
Sales of encomienda in México in the first generation were rare, but not illegal, as they were in Peru. However, they had to be approved by the viceroy. Himmerich y Valencia says the changing attitude toward transfers came from a 1536 royal instruction, the Law of Succession, which defined encomiendas as property that could be inherited.
There was no way the viceroy could have foreseen how that concept of property would evolve in the northern province. When Gómez Robledo was arrested in 1662, the description of his rights to tribute was made more precise. They included:
* All of the pueblo of Pecos, excepting for twenty-four houses held by his brother-in-law, Pedro Lucero de Godoy
* Two and a half parts of the pueblo of Taos
* Half of the Hopi pueblo of Shungopovi
* Half of the pueblo of Ácoma, except for twenty houses
* Half of the pueblo of Abó, which he had received in exchange for half of Sandía
* All of the pueblo of Tesuque, which for more than forty years neither he nor his father had collected because of services rendered on contract in lieu of tribute.
The value of the rights to tribute depended on the number of people living in a pueblo who could pay. In México, Himmerich y Valencia said a man needed at least two to survive. According to John Kessell, the most valuable here was Pecos. Gómez Robledo could have collected corn and blankets from 340 households there, but only from 110 in Taos, 80 from Shongopovi, 50 from Ácoma, and 30 from Abó.
The association of encomiendas with wealth came from the right to repartimiento which was sometimes exercised in place of tribute, and sometimes, extralegally, in addition. Many encomenderos acquired large land holdings next to pueblos, then coerced local men, women, and children to work for substandard pay. In some cases, they also meddled in intertribal trade with plains Indians for goods like hides that could be resold in México.
It was López’s attempt to reform repartimiento, not the encomiendas, that united the colony against him. On his journey north to take command in 1659, the new governor heard reports of abuses and sensed growing unrest among the southern pueblos. When he arrived, France Scholes says he decreed the daily wage would double from half a real to a real and would include meals.
In 1661, estancia owners claimed “they had suffered heavy losses because they had been obliged to do without Indian laborers in harvesting crops and herding livestock” while nine of the Franciscan missions said they “had suffered a loss of more than six thousand head of stock because they had been deprived of the labor of Indians as herdsmen.”
As an aside, Bakewell says the economic problems in México began, not with the conversion to wage labor, but with the epidemic of 1576-1579 that contributed to the need to pay higher prices for scarcer Indian labor. Here men were blaming the governor for a loss of income which probably was caused by dry weather that was leading to famine, epidemics and raids by nomadic Indians on the pueblos. When the native population began dropping, the available labor would have decreased, leading to the unrest López detected. The arid conditions would have affected crop and herd sizes, while the value of encomienda tribute also would have fallen with the population.
The association of encomiendas with status probably arose in the second and third generations of the colony when their economic value was declining, but new settlers, like Hurtado, were coming north with the supply trains and mestizo children of the first generation, like the son of Juan Griego, were rising. Then it was not enough to be the son or grandson of a conquistador, but one needed to have been signaled out as a conquistador of the first order.
And so, vague claims have been handed down. Chávez’s family knows that Pedro’s son, Fernando Durán y Chaves, “inherited Don Pedro’s estancia of El Tunque and his encomienda.” They know the location of Fernando’s later land holdings, but all they know of the encomienda is that they had inherited it from the first generation, they didn’t have to earn it like Gómez Robledo.
They were hereditary encomenderos.
Notes:
Anderson, H. Allen. “The Encomienda in New Mexico, 1598-1680,” New Mexico Historical Review 60:353-377:1985.
Bakewell, Peter John. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700, 1971. The pathogenic cause of the matlazahuatal pandemic is not known; it affected pure blooded Indians, not mestizos or Spaniards.
Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989; the descendants’ claim to the Santa Ana encomienda was consolidated when Hurtado’s daughter, Lucía de Salazar, married Fernando’s son, also Fernando Durán y Chaves.
_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition.
Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991.
Hordes, Stanley M. To the End of the Earth, 2005; the quotation from Gómez Robledo had a different purpose than indicated here.
Kessell, John L. Kiva, Cross and Crown, 1995,
Scholes, France V. Troublous Times in New Mexico 1659-1670, 1942.
Snow, David H. “A Note on Encomienda Economics in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico” in Marta Weigle, Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest, 1983.
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