The Impact Of Iberian Culture In The New World
Various Authors
Edited By: R. A. Guisepi
European expansion overseas after the fifteenth century brought
revolutionary change to all the world's peoples, but the Iberian period before
1600 was unique in its violence and ruthless exploitation. Not only were
highly organized states destroyed in the New World, but whole populations were
wiped out by European diseases, shock, and inhumane treatment. This carnage is
one of the most tragic catastrophes in human history. It contributed to a
decided change in the racial composition of Iberian America, as an influx of
black slaves, with continued Spanish and Portuguese immigration, led to a
variegated racial mixture, ranging through all shades of color between white
and black. Fortunately, the Indian populations began recovering in the later
1500s, and their cultures, combining with Iberian and African, formed a new
configuration, to be known later as Latin American.
The Nature Of Iberian Regimes
Iberian regimes in America faced serious problems. Their vast
territories, far greater than the homelands, contained nearly impassable
deserts, mountains, and jungles. Supplies had to be moved thousands of miles,
often across open seas. Communications were difficult, native wars frequent,
and disease often rampant. Such conditions help explain, if not justify, the
brutality of Iberian imperialism.
Despite their unique natures, Iberian overseas empires were similar to
Roman or Turkish provinces; they were meant to produce revenues. In theory,
all Spanish lands were the king's personal property. The Council of the
Indies, which directed the viceroys in Mecico City and Lima, advised him on
colonial affairs. The high-born Spanish viceroys were aided (and limited) by
councils (audiencias), made up of aristocratic lawyers from Spain. Local
governors, responsible to the viceroys, functioned with their advisory
councils (cabildos) of officials. Only the rich normally sat in such bodies;
poor Spaniards and mestizos had little voice, even in their own taxation. Most
taxes, however, were collected by Indian chiefs (caciques), still acting as
rulers of Indian peasant villages.
Portuguese Brazil was less directly controlled than the Spanish colonies.
It languished for years under almost unrestricted dominatin of fifteen
aristocratic "captains," who held hereditary rights of taxing, disposing
lands, making laws, and administering justice. In return, they sponsored
settlement and paid stipulated sums to the king. This quasi-feudal
administration was abandoned in 1548. When Philip II became King of Portugal
in 1580, he established municipal councils, although these were still
dominated by the hereditary captains.
Iberian Economies In America
Both the philosophies and social structures of the Iberian states limited
colonial trade and industry. Most Spanish and Portuguese immigrants were
disinclined toward productive labor. With few exceptions, commercial contacts
were limited to the homelands; Mexican merchants fought a steadily losing
battle to maintain independent trade with Peru and the Philippines. Local
trade grew modestly in supplying the rising towns, but some crafts developed
large-scale industrial establishments. A national transportation system, using
mule teams, became a major Mexican industry. So did smuggling, as demand rose
higher and higher for foreign goods.
Agriculture, herding, and mining silver, however, were the main economic
pursuits. The early gold sources soon ran out, but silver strikes in Mexico
and in Peru poured a stream of wealth back to Spain in the annual treasure
fleets, convoyed by warships from Havana to Seville. Without gold to mine,
many Spanish aristocrats acquired abandoned Indian land, raising wheat, rice,
indigo, cotton, coffee, and sugar cane. Cattle, horses, and sheep were
imported and bred on ranches in the West Indies, Mexico, and Argentina. Brazil
developed similar industries, particularly those related to sugar, livestock,
and coffee. Iberian economic pursuits in America were potentially productive,
revealing numerous instances of initiative and originality, but they were
largely repressed by bureaucratic state systems.
Before 1650, plantations were not typical of agriculture in Iberian
America, although they were developing in certain areas. Portugal had earlier
established sugar plantations in its Atlantic islands (Madeiras, Cape Verde,
and Sao Tome) before the system was introduced into Brazil around 1550. The
Spanish experimented with plantations in the Canaries, later establishing them
in the West Indies, the Mexican lowlands, Central America, and along the
northern coasts of South America. Even in such areas, which were
environmentally suited for intensive single-crop cultivation, it was not easy
to raise the capital, find the skilled technicians, and pay for the labor
required by the system.
Scarce labor, a perpetual problem in Iberian America, was solved
primarily by the use of Indians, but African slaves were imported early and
were coming in greater numbers by the latter sixteenth century. Some 75,000
were in the Spanish colonies by 1600; over another 100,000 arrived within the
next four decades. In Brazil, slave importing boomed after 1560, reaching
annual figures of over 30,000 in the early 1600s. Some slaves were brutally
oppressed as laborers in the mines. Others sweated on Spanish or Brazilian
plantations, but they were the exceptions in this period. The great age of
plantation slavery would come later and be most evident in other European
colonies. Slaves were also teamsters, overseers, personal servants, and
skilled craft workers. Particularly in the Spanish colonies, a good many
earned their freedom, attaining a social status higher than that of Indian
peasants. Free blacks, both men and women, operated shops and small
businesses. Prostitution was understandably common among black and mulatto
women, a profession encouraged by the sexual exploitation of female slaves, as
concubines and slave-breeders, by Spanish and Portuguese owners.
[See African Slave Trade: The Iberian Impact Upon Indian Life The Spanish
and Portuguese brought terrible disaster to most Indians. Having seen their
gods discredited and their temples destroyed, the majority accepted
Christianity as the only hope for survival, as well as salvation. Their
Iberian masters also introduced them to hard and sustained labor. Some died
from overwork, some were killed, and others simply languished as their
cultures disintegrated. The most effective killer was disease - European or
African - to which the Indians had no immunities. Epidemics arrived with
Columbus and continued through the sixteenth century. Smallpox on Haiti in
1518 left only 1000 Indians alive there. Cortes carried the plague to Mexico,
where it raged while he fought his way out of Tenochtitlan. From Mexico, the
epidemic spread through Central America, reaching Peru in 1526. It killed the
reigning emperor and helped start the civil war which facilitated Pizarro's
conquest. Following these smallpox disasters in the 1540s and 1570s a wave of
measles and other successive epidemics continued depleting the population.
Precise accounting is not possible, but a reliable estimate shows a drop in
the native American population by 25 percent during the sixteenth century. ^3
[Footnote 3: Ibid., pp. 272-73.] Depopulation of Indians was partially
caused by their enslavement, despite disapproval from the Catholic Church and
the Spanish home government. The worst excesses came soon after the conquests.
The gentle Arawaks of Haiti, for example, were herded to work like animals by
the first settlers; they soon became extinct. The whole native population of
the Bahamas - some 40,000 people - were carried away as slaves to Haiti, Cuba,
and Puerto Rico. Cortes took slaves before he took Tenochtitlan; other
Indians, captured in Panama, were regularly sent to Peru. The Portuguese
organized jungle "Indian hunts" to acquire slaves before Africans arrived in
appreciable numbers. Another, more common, labor system in the Spanish
colonies, was the encomienda. This was similar to earlier European serfdom,
involving a grant which permitted the holder to take income or labor from
specified lands and the people living on them. Abuses were so widespread and
Indian complaints so insistent that the system was generally abandoned after
the 1550s. The Spanish government made some ineffective efforts to protect
the Indians. The Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), protested
the cruel treatment of the Indians and persuaded King Charles V that
indigenous peoples held the same rights as other subjects. This led to the
"New Law" of 1542, which ended existing encomiendas, on the death of their
holders, prohibited native American slavery, and gave Indians full protection
under Spanish law. Most of these provisions, however, were rescinded when the
law evoked universal protest and open rebellion in Peru. Although later
governors gradually eliminated encomiendas, many Indians were then put on
reservations and hired out as contract laborers, under the direction of their
caciques and local officials (corriqodores). Although this eliminated some of
the worst excesses of the encomiendas, corrupt officials often exploited their
wards, particularly those in Peru. Most Indians were demoralized by their
misfortunes, but some resisted. In Yucatan and Guatemala, where the Mayans did
not believe the Spaniards were gods, bloody fighting lasted until the 1540s.
About that time a revolt among Indians on the Mexican Pacific coast was put
down with great difficulty by the Spaniards. As the silver mines opened in
northern Mexico, the Chichimecas, relatives of the Apache, conducted border
war into the 1590s, using horses and captured muskets. In Peru, an Inca
rebellion led by a new emperor was only subdued in 1572. The most stubborn
resistance came from the Araucanians of southern Chile, who fought the
Spaniards successfully until the close of the sixteenth century. Mission
towns, established by the Dominican and Jesuit religious orders, afforded
Indians the most effective protection. Las Casas led the way in founding such
settlements, where the Indians were shielded from white exploitation,
instructed in Christianity, and educated or trained in special skills. The
prevailing philosophy in the missions stressed patient persuasion, "as rain
and snow falls from heaven, not ... violently ... like a sudden shower, but
gradually, with suavity and gentleness." ^4 Large mission organizations
developed in Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and upper California. But even those
protected by the missions died rapidly in this alien way of life. [Footnote
4: Quoted in H. Hering, A History of Latin America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1968), p. 173.] Iberian Society And Culture Iberian society was stratified
but somewhat flexible. A small elite of Spanish officials and colonial
aristocrats contended over native policy and foreign trade. Merchants and
petty officials were on a lower social level but above mestizos, mulattos, and
zambos (mixed Indo-Africans). Indians were considered incompetent wards of the
king and black slaves were legally designated as beneath the law, but there
were numerous individual exceptions. Many Indians went from the reservations
to the towns, mines, or haciendas; some caciques enjoyed wealth and privilege;
and a few old Indian families retained their nobility as early Spanish allies.
Similarly, some black slaves were craftsmen, overseers, or privileged personal
servants; others acquired freedom and became prosperous merchants; still
others escaped slavery, organized free communities, and sucessfully defended
their independence. Iberian women in America played ambiguous roles. They
were excluded through childhood from male contacts, educated in cloistered
schools to become wives and mothers, married in their teens to achieve family
interests, and legally subordinated to their husbands. Those who could not
marry usually entered convents. There was, however, another side to the story.
Spanish law guaranteed the wife's dowry rights, a legal protection against a
squandering of her wealth and leverage to limit her husband's activities. The
courts recognized separations and at times even granted annulments. Women,
particularly widows acting for former husbands, operated businesses and held
public offices. Some were wealthy, powerful, and even cruel encomenderos,
supervising thousands of laborers. Whatever their special roles, Iberian women
maintained stability, furthered continuity, defended religion, sponsored
charities, dictated manners, and imbued children with family values. Both
the environment and the mix of peoples shaped Iberian-American culture toward
a new distinctive unity. From southwestern Europe came the approach to
government, disdain for manual labor, preference for dramatic overprecise
expression, and ceremonial Catholic Christianity. From Indian traditions came
characteristic foods, art forms, architecture, legends, practical garments
like the poncho and serape, and hundreds of words. From Africa came
agricultural knowledge, crafts, and animal husbandry, along with the rhythm
and dance illustrated by Brazilian drums. By 1650, this characteristic Iberian
culture was being preserved in its own universities, such as those at Lima and Mexica, both founded more than a century earlier.]
