The mess tropical Marxism makes; VenezuelaThe Economist. 424.905.docx

The mess tropical Marxism makes; Venezuela
The Economist. 424.9051 (July 29, 2017): p19(US).
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Can anyone stop Mr Maduro?
Nicolas Maduro's attempt to impose dictatorship could end
bloodily
IT COULD almost be a piece of contemporary art, rather than a
tool of political struggle. Overlooked by a mango tree heavy
with blushing fruit, a rope is strung across Avenida Sucre as it
climbs through a comfortable middle-class area towards the
forested slopes of Monte Avila overlooking Caracas. Arranged
beneath it are two distressed wooden beams, two pallets placed
vertically, a wheel hub, a rusting metal housing for an electric
transformer and several tree branches. They form a flimsy
barricade watched over by a couple of dozen local residents.
Why are they blockading their own street? "Because we want
this government to go," explained Maria Antonieta Viso, the
owner of a catering firm. They were taking part in a 24-hour
"civic strike" on July 20th, called by the opposition coalition,
Democratic Unity (MUD, from its initials in Spanish). Down the
hill, across innumerable such roadblocks, the sting of tear gas
signalled clashes between demonstrators and the National
Guard, a militarised police force. The strike, repeated this week,

was part of "Zero Hour"--a campaign of civil disobedience
aimed at blocking a plan by Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's
president, to install a constituent assembly with absolute
powers.
Mr Maduro claims that the assembly is the "only way to achieve
peace", to provide Venezuelans with social welfare and to
defend the country against what he claims is an "economic war"
launched by America (though he provides no evidence of this).
"What they are trying to do is to install the Cuban model in this
country," retorts Ms Viso. "We will all be screwed even if we
take to the streets. There won't be private property, my business
will go to the state." The long battle over power and policy in
Venezuela that began when Hugo Chavez was elected president
in 1998 has reached a critical point. Both government and
opposition believe that they are fighting for survival against a
backdrop of a failing economy, rising hunger and anarchy.
Chavez, a former army officer, proclaimed a "Bolivarian
revolution", named for Simon Bolivar, South America's
Venezuelan-born independence hero. He, too, summoned a
constituent assembly, which drew up a new constitution and
which he used to take control of the judiciary and the electoral
authority. For much of his 14 years in power he had the support
of most Venezuelans, thanks partly to his charismatic claim to
represent a downtrodden majority and to the flaws of an
opposition identified with an uncaring elite. But above all the
soaring price of oil gave him an unprecedented windfall, some
of which he showered on social programmes in the long-
neglected ranchos (shantytowns). A consumption boom,
magnified by an overvalued currency, kept the middle class
quiescent. He governed at first through a broad coalition of
army officers, far-left politicians and intellectuals.
Angered by opposition attempts to unseat him and influenced by
Fidel Castro, Chavez pushed Venezuela towards state socialism

after 2007. Economic distortions accumulated, along with
corruption and debt. Before he died of cancer in 2013, Chavez
chose Mr Maduro, a former bus driver and pro-Cuban activist,
as his successor.
From Chavez to Maduro
Mr Maduro, however, lacks Chavez's political skills and popular
support. And he has had to grapple with the plunge in the oil
price. Years of controls and the takeover of more than 1,500
private businesses and many farms mean that Venezuela now
produces little except oil, and imports almost everything else.
The government is desperate to avoid defaulting on its debt,
since that would lead to creditors seizing oil shipments and
assets abroad.
Rather than reform the economy, Mr Maduro has simply
squeezed it, applying a tourniquet to imports (see chart 1). The
government has no clear strategy for external financing, and the
fiscal deficit, mainly financed by printing money, is out of
control, says Efrain Velazquez, the president of the National
Economic Council, a quasi-official body. The result: "you can't
have growth and will have a lot of inflation." Between 2013 and
the end of this year, GDP will have contracted by more than
35% (see chart 2). What this means for most Venezuelans is
penury.
Near Plaza Perez Bonalde, a leafy enclave in the gritty district
of Catia in western Caracas, 100 or so people, mainly women,
queue up outside a bakery. They hope to get a ration of eight
bread rolls for the subsidised price of 1,200 bolivares (less than
$0.15 at the black-market exchange rate). "At least it's
something, because everything else is so expensive now," says
Sol Cire, a mother of two. She is unemployed, having lost her

job at a defunct government hypermarket. Her fate stems from a
change of government strategy.
Generalised price controls had generated widespread shortages
and embarrassingly long queues. Instead, the government has
put the army in charge of a subsidised food-distribution system,
known as CLAP and modelled on Cuba's ration book. Up to 30%
of families get this dole of staple products regularly, reckons
Asdrubal Oliveros of Ecoanalitica, an economic consultancy.
They are chosen not according to need but according to their
political importance to the government.
On the breadline
At the same time, the government has relaxed price controls
(bread is an exception). In Catia's main market, which spills
into the surrounding streets, food is abundant, but pricey. A
chicken costs 7,600 bolivares and bananas 1,200 a kilo. Most
people don't have dollars to change on the black market: they
must live on the minimum wage of 250,000 bolivares. The result
is that four out of five households were poor last year, their
income insufficient to cover basic needs, according to a survey
by three universities. Medicines remain scarce. Walk down
many streets in Caracas and you may be approached by a
beggar.
All this has taken a heavy toll on the government's support. Mr
Maduro won only 50.6% of the vote in a presidential election in
2013, a result questioned by his opponent, Henrique Capriles. In
a parliamentary election in December 2015 the opposition won a
two-thirds majority--enough to censure ministers and change the
constitution.
In the government's eyes, the opposition is bent on
overthrowing an elected president--the aim of protests in 2014,
after which Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader, was jailed on

trumped-up charges. In response, it has resorted to legal
chicanery. If Chavez often violated the letter of his own
constitution, Mr Maduro tore it up.
Before the new parliament took over, the government used the
old one to preserve its control of the supreme court by replacing
justices due to retire. The court then unseated three legislators,
eliminating the opposition's two-thirds majority. Mr Maduro has
ruled by decree. The tame electoral tribunal quashed an
opposition attempt to trigger a referendum to recall the
president--a device Chavez put in the constitution. It postponed
regional elections due to take place last December.
In March the court issued decrees stripping the parliament of all
powers. That seemed to be because foreign investors take more
seriously than the government a constitutional provision under
which only the parliament can approve foreign loans. Although
partially withdrawn, the decrees were the trigger for a
confrontation that continues. They opened up fractures in
chavismo--notably the public opposition of Luisa Ortega, the
attorney-general since 2007 (who had jailed Mr Lopez). Mr
Maduro's announcement on May 1st that he would convene the
constituent assembly intensified both trends.
Chavez's constitution was drawn up by a democratically elected
constituent assembly, convoked by referendum. Mr Maduro is
following a script from Mussolini. He has called the assembly
by decree. It will have a "citizen, worker, communal and
peasant-farmer" character, he said. What this means is that 181
members will be chosen by government-controlled "sectoral"
groups such as students, fishermen and unions. Another 364
members will be directly elected, but in gerrymandered fashion:
each of Venezuela's 340 municipalities will choose one. Small
towns are under the government's thumb; cities, where the
opposition is a majority, will get only one extra representative.

Datanalisis, a reliable pollster, finds that two-thirds of
respondents reject the constituent assembly, more than 80%
think it unnecessary to change the constitution and only 23%
approve of Mr Maduro. At just two weeks' notice, on July 16th
almost 7.5m Venezuelans turned out for an unofficial plebiscite
organised by the opposition. Almost all of them voted to reject
the assembly, to call on the army to defend the constitution and
for a presidential election by next year (when one is due).
Few doubt that the assembly will be a puppet-body and the vote
on July 30th, which the opposition will boycott, will be
inflated. The government counts on the 4.5m people who are
employed in the public sector or in communal bodies. Those
who fail to turn out risk losing not just their job but their CLAP
food rations. Additional pressure to vote in chavista
neighbourhoods comes from the colectivos--regime-sponsored
armed thugs on motorbikes. Officials have said the assembly
will not only write a new constitution but will assume supreme
power, sacking Ms Ortega and replacing the parliament, whose
building it will occupy. It will give Mr Maduro a slightly larger
figleaf than the supreme court for a dictatorship of the minority.
Yet the president will find it hard to make this stick. "How do
you govern the country with 75% against you?" asks Mr
Capriles. "I think he's trapped." For the past four months the
opposition has held almost daily protests. These have a ritual
quality. To prevent demonstrators reaching the city centre, or
blocking the main motorway through Caracas, the National
Guard fires volleys of tear gas, buckshot--and occasionally
bullets. Younger radicals, known as the "Resistance", press
forward, throwing stones from behind makeshift shields. Similar
scenes take place across the country. Looting is commonplace.
In these clashes, over 100 people have died. More than 400
protesters are now prisoners, including several opposition
politicians. After the parliament named 33 justices to a rival
supreme court on July 21st, the government arrested three of

them.
Resistance isn't futile
Mr Maduro has more worries. The first is his own side. Chavista
strongholds are wavering. In the bread queue in Catia, several
people say they are against the assembly. The opposition
managed to set up voting stations for its plebiscite there: at one,
a woman died when a colectivo fired on voters. "Some people
have left us and gone over to the other side," admits a local
official. "But it's very difficult for a chavista to support the
opposition," she adds. Chavez is still viewed favourably by 53%
of Venezuelans, according to Datanalisis.
Rather, a new movement of "critical" or "democratic" chavistas,
including Ms Ortega, several former ministers and recently
retired generals, has publicly called for the scrapping of the
assembly and the upholding of the constitution. When they held
a press conference at a modest hotel on July 21st, some 300
regime supporters outside tried to drown them out with loud
music and chants of "traitors".
Then there is the army. The regime has co-opted it, turning it
into a faction-ridden, politicised and top-heavy moneymaking
operation, with more than 2,000 generals (where 200 used to
suffice). Mr Maduro has given them control over food imports
and distribution, ports and airports, a bank and the mining
industry. Many generals have grown rich by buying dollars at
the lowest official exchange rate of $1=10 bolivares, intended
for food imports, and selling them at the black market rate of
9,000. Others smuggle petrol or drugs.
Murmuring in the ranks
An "undercurrent of muttering" among junior officers is
checked by a network of political commissars and snoops

installed by Chavez, says Jose Machillanda, of Simon Bolivar
University in Caracas. At the top, several thousand Cuban
security personnel guard Mr Maduro and the 30-40 leaders who
form the regime's core.
But the assembly has tested the army's loyalty to Mr Maduro.
He twice reshuffled senior ranks in the past two months.
Caracas is alive with rumours of an impending pronunciamento,
in which the army withdraws its support for the regime.
Another acute threat to Mr Maduro is the economy. The rot has
spread to the oil industry, Venezuela's mainstay. According to
OPEC, since 2015 the country's oil output has fallen by 400,000
barrels per day (or around 17%). This is the long-term price of
Chavez's decision to turn PDVSA, the once efficient state oil
company, into an arm of the welfare state.
Foreign-exchange reserves hover around $10bn, according to
the Central Bank. Economists expect the government to make
$3.5bn in debt payments due in the autumn, but it will struggle
to find the $8.5bn it needs to avoid default next year. China, a
big paymaster, is reluctant to lend more. Russia may be Mr
Maduro's best hope, but it worries about getting entangled in
possible American sanctions against Venezuela.
The fourth problem Mr Maduro faces is that the region has
become less friendly to him. Chavez enjoyed the solidarity of
other left-wing governments in Latin America. Many are no
longer there, or have distanced themselves. Venezuela has been
suspended from Mercosur, a trade group; it could be expelled if
the assembly goes ahead, says Argentina's foreign minister. The
regime showed that it cares about its standing in the region by
the big diplomatic effort it made in June to prevent its
suspension from the Organisation of American States.
Many in Caracas assumed that Mr Maduro intended the

assembly as a bargaining chip, to be withdrawn in return for
concessions by the opposition. If so, he may be trapped by the
forces of radicalisation he has unleashed. Diosdado Cabello, a
retired army officer who is his chief rival within the regime,
appears to see the assembly as his route to power. Back down
now, and Mr Maduro risks losing face among his hard-core
supporters.
Venezuela thus stands at a junction. One road involves a
negotiation that might either fix a calendar for a free and fair
election, or that might see Mr Maduro and other regime leaders
depart. The opposition is mistrustful after talks brokered by the
Vatican and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a former Spanish
prime minister, broke down last year when it quickly became
clear that the government was not prepared to restore
constitutional rule. Mr Zapatero was a conduit for a move that
saw Mr Lopez transferred from prison to house arrest this
month. He is in Caracas again this week.
The city hums with rumours of a new mediation effort led by a
shifting kaleidoscope of foreign governments. But conditions do
not yet seem ripe. "The government sees the cost of leaving
power as very high, that they would be destroyed and
persecuted," reckons Luis Vicente Leon of Datanalisis. The
opposition is suspicious, too. "To return to political
negotiations we have to have real signs that the government is
prepared to change," observes Freddy Guevara, the deputy
leader of Mr Lopez's party.
That probably requires a military pronunciamento. But the army
"looks at the opposition and doesn't see any guarantees that they
would be able to run the country", says a foreign diplomat. The
MUD has worked well as an electoral coalition, and its
plebiscite was impressive. It has published a programme for a
government of national unity. But, crucially, it lacks an agreed
leader with a mandate to negotiate. "The opposition is stuck

together with chewing gum," says Mr Leon.
Anomie and anarchy
Barring a negotiation, the other route looks bleak. There is a
growing sense of anomie and anarchy. On the opposition side,
there is desperation in the self-barricading of its own
neighbourhoods, an action which does little to hurt the
government. Social media have been vital in undermining the
regime's control of information. But they also spread rumours
and undermine moderation. Middle-class caraquenos are reading
books on non-violent resistance. But on the streets many
protesters express mistrust for the MUD. The "Resistance" is
well-organised and trained. It would not be hard for it to take
up arms.
For its part, the chavista block is splintering. The National
Guard now raids properties in chavista areas at night, because
they are being fired on by disgruntled residents. "There's a
growing attitude of 'don't mess with me'," says Mr Machillanda.
Mr Maduro and his core of civilian leftists admire Cuba but
they do not command a disciplined revolutionary state, capable
of imposing its will across Venezuela's vast territory. The 100
or so dead in the protests are fewer than are killed each
weekend in lawless poor neighbourhoods. The "Bolivarian
revolution" has created a state run by rival mafias and
undermined from within by corruption.
"They could try to Cubanise the country," says Mr Capriles.
"But whether Venezuelans accept that is another matter." Given
the intensity of Venezuela's confrontation, it has suffered
remarkably little political violence. Sadly, that may now
change. If Mr Maduro shuts down all hope of political change,
it may take many more deaths to break the deadlock.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The mess tropical Marxism makes; Venezuela." The
Economist, 29 July 2017, p. 19(US). Academic OneFile,
libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do
?p=AONE&sw=w&u=clemsonu_main&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA4
99366934&it=r&asid=5aad00348b2b3758ff267f77aa8eda73.
Accessed 9 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499366934
“IN A WAR AGAINST THE SPANISH”:
ANDEAN PROTECTION AND AFRICAN RESIS-
TANCE ON THE NORTHERN PERUVIAN COAST*
I
n 1641, the rural guard of colonial Trujillo on the northern
Peruvian
coast, accompanied by “many Indians,” attacked a cimarrón
(fugitive
slave) encampment led by two congos, Gabriel and Domingo.1
Indige-
nous men wished to end the fugitives’ raids on their fields and
families.
Towards this end, they guided the Spanish lieutenant magistrate
and his
company to the cimarrón settlement hidden in the hills above
the Santa
Catalina valley.2 Indigenous leaders and commoners of the

Mansiche
reducción—or colonial indigenous village—who maintained
lands in the
Santa Catalina valley, testified that “negros cimarrones”
(fugitive “blacks”)
had been assaulting local inhabitants and stealing from valley
since 1633.3
Yet, Mansiche reducción had not registered a previous
complaint indicating
that fugitive slaves and indigenous people in Santa Catalina had
not to this
point been antagonistic. Rather, the cimarrones’ leaders,
Gabriel and
Domingo, had a history of trading with the valley’s indigenous
farmers who
The Americas
63:1 July 2006, 19-52
Copyright by the Academy of American
Franciscan History
19
* This article has benefited from the careful critique of four
anonymous reviewers for The Americas.
Additionally, I thank Kathryn Burns, Sarah Chambers, Anne
Marie Choup, Leo Garofalo, Ann
Kakaliouras, Danielle McClellan, and Ben Vinson III for their
suggestions and criticism of various ver-
sions. Research for this article was funded by a Villanova
University Faculty Summer Research Fellow-
ship and Research Support Grant (2004), a Short-Term Research
Fellowship from the International Sem-
inar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University
(2003), an Albert J. Beveridge Grant for

Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere from the
American Historical Association (2003), a
Fulbright Fellowship to Peru (1999), and Andrew W. Mellon
Fellowship at the Vatican Film Library,
Saint Louis University (1996).
1 “Real Provisión compulsoria y citatoria para traer los autos
seguidos contra unos cimarrones y
sultedores de caminos,” Archivo Departamental de La Libertad
(ADL). Corregimiento (Co.). Criminales
(Cr.). Legajo (Leg.) 245. Expediente (Exp.) 2500 (1639), f. 1;
“Querella…sobre que le dé y pague 400
pesos que le costó una esclava Felipa de Tierra Firme que lo
ahorcó sin causa ninguna,” ADL. Co. Cr.
Leg. 246. Exp. 2533 (1642), f. 1; “Expediente…contra unos
negros de Francisco Benites llamados
Gabriel y Domingo; sobre salteamientos y hurtos de ganados
mayores y menores, de maiz y otras legum-
bres,” ADL. Cabildo (Ca.). Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1350 (1641), f. 2.
2 ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 245. Exp. 2500 (1639), f. 2-2v; ADL. Ca.
Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1350 (1641), f. 23.
3 “Expediente…contra Juan Lázaro negro y Juan Esteban
mulato sobre haber salteado y robado a
unos indios pasajeros,” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1353
(1642), f. 23.
were members of the Mansiche reducción.4 So why, after years
of tolerat-
ing fugitive slave activity in the Santa Catalina valley, did the
indigenous
villagers and leaders of Mansiche join the Spanish assault? How
did the

resistance of congos cimarrones against the impositions of
slavery clash
with the struggles of indigenous villagers and laborers against
the demands
of Spanish landholders?
The participation of indigenous villagers in the Spanish entrada
(military
venture) against cimarrones and indigenous accusations of
fugitive attacks
provide an entry into two interdependent points regarding
indigenous-
“African” relations in rural environs, a critical yet understudied
issue in
colonial Spanish American history.5 First, the northern coastal
case illumi-
nates how African slaves complemented, but did not replace,
indigenous
laborers in commercial Andean rural economies. Historians
have noted the
decline of northern indigenous communities and the rise of
African-descent
populations, yet this article explore the interactions of these co-
existent
groups in the arid valleys of Peru’s northern coast.6 Second,
when indige-
nous communities and enslaved or fugitive Africans clashed
over scarce
resources, they did so according to their distinct locations in
colonial law
and their places in the local economy. As members of colonial
reducciones,
indigenous communities sought to defend their Crown-
appointed rights
against the expanding Spanish estates. As other scholars have
noted, the

Republic of the Indians offered a legal location for “Indians” to
defend land
and water resources and combat excessive colonial
impositions.7 As the
Crown mandated, indigenous people who paid tribute,
performed required
labor, and converted to Catholicism were vassals to the King
and thus
20 “IN A WAR AGAINST THE SPANISH”
4 ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1353 (1642), f. 23.
5 Significantly, research is expanding with the recent
publication of Beyond Black and Red: African-
Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, Matthew Restall,
ed., (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2005). I employ “African” to name people born
in Atlantic Africa, a region that included
extensive linguistic and cultural contexts, kingdoms, states, and
networked communities. Nonetheless,
the colonial term negro articulated an enslaved or subordinate
position while slave trade casta categories
such as angola and congo labeled European perceptions that
enslaved and free people would transform
into Diaspora identities. “African,” therefore, is an
unsatisfactory gloss, but one that serves to underline
the possibility of an auto-identity rather than a colonial one as
well as the distinction between criollos
born in the Americas and those from the greater Atlantic world.
6 Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-
1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1981), p. 120; Susan Ramírez, Provincial
Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics of
Power in Colonial Peru (Albuquerque: University of New

Mexico Press, 1986), pp. 82-83; Ileana Vegas
de Cáceres, Economía Rural y Estructura Social en las
Haciendas de Lima durante el Siglo XVIII (Lima:
PUCP, 1996), p. 35.
7 Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under Inca
and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1984), p. 158; Ann Wightman, Indigenous
Migration and Social Change: The Foras-
teros of Cuzco, 1570-1720 (Durham: Duke University Press,
1990), p. 12.
deserved royal protection.8 In addition to their use of colonial
courts and the
Catholic Church, this article suggests that northern coastal
indigenous com-
munities survived the hacienda usurpations of resources by
trading with
enslaved Africans and their descendants. Indigenous farmers
and communi-
ties also employed enslaved or fugitive Africans and criollos
(born in the
Americas) as itinerant laborers as another strategy for enduring
Spanish con-
fiscations of land and water. Likewise, enslaved Africans and
free people of
color supplemented their hacienda food rations by trading with
indigenous
neighbors in an ongoing development of mutually beneficial
relationships.
Thus, this article suggests that regardless of the demographic
decline of
indigenous populations or Spanish royal mandates to separate
“Indians”

from “negros,” rural people developed local economic and labor
practices
that defied legal expectations and colonial impositions.9
Yet, when the northern coast experienced a series of
environmental dis-
asters, Spanish estate owners, indigenous communities, and
enslaved
Africans turned to distinct survival strategies. After an
earthquake in 1619,
the northern coastal valleys experienced severe flooding in
1624. The earth-
quake had destroyed the earthen walls of the irrigation canals, a
critical
infrastructure of the desert agriculture on the coastal plain.10
Without proper
irrigation, the fields could flood with contaminated waters and
could not be
cultivated. Compounding the resulting labor deficiency in the
coastal reduc-
ciones, indigenous men sought alternative employment on
neighboring
estates and distant cities. Simultaneously, some Spanish estate
owners, suf-
fering from a lack of income, choose to not feed their slaves.
Subsequently,
hacendados allowed increased mobility in order for slaves to
forage and to
trade for food. By the late 1630s and 1640s, Trujillo’s
municipal council and
indigenous communities along the northern coast reported an
agricultural
crisis as foodstuffs in the city were in short supply.11 Enslaved
laborers, who
RACHEL SARAH O’TOOLE 21

8 Brooke Larson, Cochabamba 1550-1900: Colonialism and
Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 67-68.
9 By placing Indians in quotation marks, I underline the
colonial construction of this term that
attempted to reduce a wide range of indigenous communities
into a singular category.
10 Alberto Larco Herrera, Anales de Cabildo. Ciudad de
Trujillo. Extractos Tomados de los Libros
de Actas del Archivo Municipal (Lima: SanMartí y Ca., 1907-
1920), cites ff. 366-366v, 33, 102v-103;
162-164v; 8-15v, 22-23; 184-185; “Obedecimiento pero no su
cumplimiento de los corregidores de Saña
y partido de Chiclayo…de la Real Provision despachado por el
virrey sobre la repartición de los indios
yungas y serranos para la reedificación de Trujillo—la misma
que había quedado averiada por los efec-
tos del terremoto que asoló y destrujó la ciudad,” ADL. Co.
Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 267. Exp. 3106
(1622), f. 8v; “Mandamiento…para que se tome las cuentas a
los receptores de la alcabalas encabezon-
adas de esta ciudad y villas de Santa y Caxamarca y valle de
Guadalupe,” ADL. Co. Juez de Residencia.
Leg. 275. Exp. 3441 (1637).
11 In 1632 the vecinos of Trujillo complain of the poverty, land
sterility, and ruined city resulting
from the 1619 earthquake. See Larco Herrera, Anales, cites ff.
162-164v. Again in 1639, the Trujillo veci-
had been able to trade labor for food with indigenous

communities, were no
longer able to sustain themselves on the margins of the hacienda
economy.
Indigenous communities, squeezed by the continuing demands
for tribute
and labor as well as the aggressive raiding of desperate fugitive
slaves, allied
with colonial officials to strike out against Gabriel, Domingo,
and their
congo “war against the Spanish.”12
With close attention to how indigenous and African laborers
experienced
these dramatic economic shifts, this article examines the
northern Peruvian
coast to challenge a colonial historiography that often separates
the experi-
ences of “Indians” from slaves. Historians of coastal Andeans
argue that epi-
demics, El Niño flooding, tribute demands, and rapid expansion
of Spanish
estates pushed most indigenous communities to sell their
irrigated valley
lands and become wage laborers (peons or yanaconas) or retreat
to remote,
less desirable, environs.13 Yet, indigenous people simply did
not disappear
from the northern coast or abandon their colonial settlements,
but employed
their legal associations with colonial reducciones to defend
themselves in
the mid-colonial period. Simultaneously, coastal Andeans
searched for alter-
native labor opportunities and market venues as indigenous
people did
throughout the Spanish Americas.14 On the northern coast,

indigenous
strategies also included relationships with enslaved and free
Africans and
their descendants whose numbers increased along with the
Spanish landed
estates. Indigenous people continued to rely on the protections
afforded to
“Indians” under colonial Spanish law. For example, as Spanish
landholders
expanded their holdings during the seventeenth century,
indigenous leaders
demanded re-counts of their tribute-paying members, insisted
that hacenda-
nos complained of the resulting poverty from the earthquake.
See Larco Herrera, Anales, cites ff. 8-15v.
In 1643 the Trujillo cabildo claimed that there was no public
jail in the city since the 1619 earthquake.
See Larco Herrera, Anales, cites f. 100. Anne Marie
Hocquenghem, et al “Eventos El Niño y lluvias anor-
males en la costa del Perú: siglos XVI-XIX,” Bulletin de
l’Institut Français d’Etudes Andines 21:1
(1992), p. 148.
12 “Visita por los del Consejo Real de las Indias la residencia
…,” Archivo General de las Indias
(AGI). Escribanía. Leg. 1189 (1648). In 1642 the slaves on a
Chicama hacienda revolted. See “Auto…
para que vaya al Chicama valle ha hacer las diligencia
necesarias sobre la muerte de Salvador, mulato
esclavo…hecho por Francisco de Cervantes, a causa de haberle
dado muchos azotes y otros mal-
tratamientos,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 246. Exp. 2530 (1642), f. 24;
Larco Herrera, Anales, cites f. 140v.

13 Manuel Burga, De la Encomienda a la Hacienda Capitalista.
El Valle de Jequetepeque del Siglo
XVI al XX (Lima: IEP, 1976), pp. 52, 64, 67, 80, 93, 119;
Nicolas Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar,
Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600-1767 (Albany:
State University of New York Press,
1980), pp. 15, 23, 82; Keith Davies, Landowners in Colonial
Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1984), pp. 25, 35, 50, 53, 62; Susan Ramírez, The World Turned
Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact
and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), pp. 10, 37, 43.
14 Larson, Cochabamba, Chapter Two; Wightman, Indigenous,
Chapter Five; Ann Zulawski, They
Eat from Their Labor: Work and Social Change in Colonial
Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1995), pp. 84, 146-147.
dos provide labor to clean the shared irrigation canals, and
defended the bor-
ders of their communal holdings.15 Likewise, indigenous
Andeans—
detached from the colonial reducción joined other laborers on
Spanish land-
holdings as contracted yanaconas, which entitled them to land,
water, and
sometimes positions of authority.16 Distanced from tribute and
mita obliga-
tions of their original reducciones, hired indigenous laborers
guarded new
privileges of cash wages and land access on the haciendas that
separated

them from mitayos (indigenous men serving mita) as well as
enslaved
African laborers.17 On the northern coast, however, a
significant population
of enslaved and free Africans offered additional market
opportunities to
indigenous communities while simultaneously providing a
judicial reason
for indigenous people to demand legal protections against
potentially threat-
ening “negros.”
In contrast, the rural environs offered enslaved Africans and
their descen-
dants limited economic opportunities and few institutional
protections as
mandated by colonial law. For example, in late sixteenth and
early seven-
teenth-century Mexico City, Herman Bennett has argued that
Africans
claimed corporate inclusion into colonial society as
Catholics.18 Yet, in
greater Trujillo, clerics avoided hacienda parishes composed of
slaves
because of the dispersed nature of the estates as well as the
difficulty of col-
lecting their fee from the hacendados.19 Furthermore,
indigenous reduc-
15 These tactics are familiar to Andean historians: Steve Stern,
Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Chal-
lenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p.
90; Thierry Saignes, “Indian Migration and Social Change in

Seventeenth-Century Charcas,” in Ethnic-
ity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of
History and Anthropology. Brooke
Larson, Olivia Harris, Enrique Tandeter, editors (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995), p. 169. As Ale-
jandro Diez Hurtado has indicated, coastal indigenous leaders
employed secular courts and religious con-
fraternities to protect and to define their transformed colonial
communities. Alejandro Diez Hurtado,
Fiestas y Cofradias: Asociaciones Religiosas e Integración en la
Historia de la Comunidad de Sechura
Siglos XVII al XX (Piura: CIPCA, 1994), pp. 83, 182.
16 For yanacona strategies on the coast, see Cushner, Lords, p.
82; Davies, Landowners, p. 35; Vegas
de Cáceres, Economía, p. 133.
17 For similar strategies of indigenous laborers see Zulawski,
They Eat, pp. 176-177, 195; Larson,
Cochabamba, pp. 84. 86; Wightman, Indigenous, pp. 82-85.
18 Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico:
Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Con-
sciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003). For fugitive men and women
seeking out their spouses or lovers, see “Expediente seguido por
don Bartolomé de Billavicencio, Alcalde
de la Santa Hermandad de Trujillo, contra Juan, negro, esclavo
de Francisco Guerra Yañez; sobre estar
oculto y escondido en casa de Juan Rubio,” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg.
79. Exp. 1325 (1618); “Expediente
seguido por don Pedro de Silva Campo Frio, Capitán de
Infantería y Alcalde de la Santa Hermandad de
Trujillo, contra Ventura, negro esclavo del doctor don Diego
García de Paredes; sobre huída del poder de
su amo,” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1339 (1624).

19 Archivo Arzobispal de Lima (AAL). Apelaciones de Trujillo.
Leg. 14. Exp. 1 “Chicama/Trujillo.
Autos seguidos por fray Diego de Salazar, mercedario, cura que
fue del pueblo de Paiján, contra el fiel
ejecutor Francisco Antonio de Leca para que le pague 360 pesos
de le debe del tiempo en que como tal
ciones may have maintained control over “Indian” cofradias in
the valleys
of the northern coast excluding Africans and their descendants
from another
possibility of articulating a colonial corporate identity.20
Another possibility
was enlistment in colonial militias that may have offered legal
protections to
free Africans and their descendants. On the northern coast,
enslaved and free
Africans, negros, and mulatos who served as assistants to the
rural guard
(Santa Hermandad) were awarded with the uniform of a cape
and sword or
were paid for their work.21 Yet, the colonial militias with
corporate rights
described by Ben Vinson III were not established in the
northern coastal val-
leys until the later seventeenth century and then only in the
regional capital
of Trujillo.22 Other scholars of the Andean African Diaspora
and slavery
societies have explored how Africans and their descendants
(enslaved and
free) seized on legal protections and ecclesiastical justifications
to manumit

themselves and their families.23 Again, without access to urban
courts, offi-
cials, and patrons, rural slaves were less likely to gain these
freedoms. As
such, this article builds on a historiography of African Andean
agency to
expand the focus to enslaved and free Africans and their
descendants who
were unable to access the corporate rights ensured by colonial
law and
cura administró los sacramentos y dijo misa en su hacienda de
Licapa, en el valle de Chicama, como
anexo de su curato,” (1670/1672); “Autos de demandas del
Sargento Mayor don Valentín del Risco y
Montejo contra fray Lorenzo Montero, cura del pueblo de
Santiago de Chicama.” Archivo Arzobipsal de
Trujillo (AAT). Causas Generales. Leg. 4 (1725). Frederick
Bowser, African Slave in Colonial Peru
1524-1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 126,
299.
20 While there is documentation of cofradías for indigenous
men and women in the reducción
parishes, I have found no record of organized confraternities for
enslaved Africans and their descendants
in the rural valleys. Bowser has suggested that cofradías were
primarily urban institutions in seven-
teenth-century Peru as indicated by the active memberships in
the city of Trujillo. Bowser, African, pp.
248, 250.
21 Bowser, African, pp. 197, 199, 204.
22 Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-

Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Free men of color
in Paita and Piura, important ports on the
far northern Peruvian coast, appear to have been members of a
local militia in the early seventeenth cen-
tury as in Callao and Lima. See Bowser, African, pp. 309, 310.
It would not be until the later part of the
seventeenth century when free men of color enrolled in
Trujllo’s militia. See “Receptoria en forma para
hacer probanza ante las justicias de la ciudad de Trujillo,…,”
ADL. Ca. Ordinarias (Ord.). Leg. 23. Exp.
490 (1670).
23 Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los Esclavos
de Lima y la desintegración de la
esclavitud 1821-1854 (Lima: PUCP, 1993); Peter Blanchard,
Slavery & Abolition in Early Republican
Peru (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc.; 1992); María
Eugenia Chaves, Honor y libertad: Discur-
sos y Recursos en la Estrategia de Libertad de una Mujer
Esclava (Guayaquil a fines del periodo colo-
nial) (Sweden: Departamento de Historia e Instituto
Iberoamericano de la Universidad de Gotemburgo,
2001); Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom:
Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves,
1800-1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
Jean-Pierre Tardieu, El Negro en el Cusco:
Los caminos de la alienación en la segunda mitad del siglo XVII
(Lima: PUCP/Banco Central de Reserva
del Perú,1998); Los Negros y la iglesia en el Perú: siglos XVI -
XVII. 2 tomos (Quito: Centro Cultural
Afroecuatoriano, 1997).

Catholic practice. Excluded from the legal protections afford to
“Indians”
and the corporate possibilities of the urban environs, I argue
that enslaved
and free Africans (with their descendants) developed economic
relations
with indigenous populations and Diaspora affiliations to survive
the imposi-
tions of rural slavery.
By asking how indigenous laborers and enslaved Africans dealt
with a
shared crisis of agricultural production from distinct legal
locations in colonial
Spanish American society, this article seeks to disrupt an
unresolved historio-
graphical separation between “Indians” and blacks. Colonial
laws dictated the
separation of “Indians” from non-indigenous populations with
the establish-
ment and the maintenance of the “Republic of the Indians” and
the “Republic
of the Spaniards” that hypothetically included Africans and
their descendants.
Yet, this article demonstrates the fiction of African inclusion in
the Spanish
republic and the ambiguous relation of blacks to the “Indian”
republic. This
close analysis of the labor demands, economic practices, and
survival tactics
of indigenous and enslaved people in the northern coastal
valleys suggests that
colonial law did not uniformly dictate the economic practices of
the colonized.
Yet, indigenous people strategically seized on their legal
protections, espe-

cially when their economic livelihoods were threatened by local
agricultural
crises. “Indian” tactics, however, were not solely dictated by
their legal loca-
tions as indigenous communities called on their rights within
the “Republic of
the Indians” when necessary or useful. Thus, indigenous-
African antagonism
implicitly assumed by previous scholarship was not natural or
inevitable, but
a result of Spanish colonial structures articulated as legal
protections and
demands of local landholders on the northern Peruvian coast.
GREATER TRUJILLO AND THE NORTHERN PERUVIAN
COAST
Located between the viceregal capital of Lima and Pacific-
Caribbean
ports on the Panamanian isthmus, the northern Peruvian coast’s
geography
informed its colonial economy. By the late sixteenth century,
Spanish colo-
nizers established cattle ranches, wheat farms, and sugar estates
in the fer-
tile, irrigated lands of the coast.24 Colonial indigenous
communities
attempted to maintain a system of managed streams and earthen
canals that
crisscrossed the valleys, including Santa Catalina (inland from
the cor-
regimiento capital of Trujillo) and Chicama (directly to the
north). During
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, members of
Trujillo’s

24 Fr. Reginaldo de Lizárraga, Descripción del Perú, Tucumán,
Río de la Plata y Chile (Madrid: His-
toria 16, 1986 [1609]), p. 73; Antonio de la Calancha, Crónica
Moralizada del orden de San Augustin en
el Peru, (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos,
1974 [1638]), p. 1230.
indigenous reducciones cultivated corn, potatoes, garbanzos,
and other
foodstuffs on private lands in the Santa Catalina valley that
adjoined a few
Spanish estates.25 Water was critical and coastal reducciones
continued to
maintain the irrigation system, with erratic assistance of
Spanish hacenda-
dos until the end of the colonial period.26
Spanish landholders purchased or usurped indigenous lands and
water,
private and communal, in the Chicama valley increasingly
throughout the
seventeenth century as local and migrant people joined African
slaves as
laborers on the rural estates. In the smaller Santa Catalina
valley, indigenous
reducciones maintained communal land holdings and individual
farms that
supplied the regional capital. In both cases, indigenous
communities adapted
to the colonial market economy even as tensions among Spanish
estate
owners and indigenous communities grew with hacienda

expansion. The
Spanish estates’ success fluctuated. Throughout the seventeenth
century,
landholders and merchants loaded flour, wheat, soap, hides,
preserves, and
sugar onto vessels that returned with slaves, textiles, and wine
from Pana-
manian and Pacific ports.27 As the colonial estates grew (in
stops and starts),
so did the populations of enslaved and free Africans and their
descendants
until the mid-seventeenth century decline in the transatlantic
slave trade into
the Spanish empire. As the Portuguese withdrew from supplying
the Span-
ish empire with enslaved Africans in the 1640s, the northern
coast experi-
enced a parallel agricultural crisis due, in part, to a lack of
labor.28
Like other mixed economies, mixed economies of the northern
coast fos-
tered multiple labor arrangements on Spanish properties. Susan
Ramírez and
25 Pedro de Cieza de León, Travels of Pedro de Cieza de León
(London: Hakluyt Society, [1553],
1864) p. 234; Modesto Rubiños y Andrade, “Noticia previa por
el Liz. don Justo Modesto Rubiños y
Andrade, cura de Mórrope, año de 1782,” Revista Histórica
[Lima] 10:3 (1936), p. 320.
26 “Autos seguido por don Nicolás Morán Protector de los
naturales de la provincia de San´a, contra

don Marcos Vitores, presbitero, por agravios inferidos a los
indios,” AAT. Causas Generales. Leg. 6
(1737); “Expediente seguido por el sargento mayor don Valentin
del Risco y Montejo, dueño de la
hacienda Chiquitoy, sobre que concurran los demas hacendados
a los reparos del río Chicama, 1730”
ADL. Co. Ord. Leg. 220. Exp. 1793 (1730).
27 Anómino, “Fragmento de una Historia de Trujillo,” Revista
Histórica 8:1 (1925), pp. 97, 98;
Balthasar Ramírez, “Descripción del Reyno del Piru del sitio
temple. Prouincias, obispados, y ciudades,
de los Naturales de sus lenguas y trage,” in Quellen zur
Kulturgeschichte des präkolumbischen Amerika
(Stuttgart: Streker and Schröder, [1597] 1936), p. 29; Antonio
Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendium and
Description the West Indies (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution, [1621]1942), pp. 390, 393, 394; Fray
Diego de Ocaña, Un Viaje Fascinante por la America Hispana
del Siglo XVI (Madrid: Stvdivm, [1605?]
1969), p. 66; José A. del Busto Duthurburu, Historia maritima
del Peru. Siglo XVI-Historia Interna, t. 3
(Lima: Editorial Ausonia, 1972), p. 543. For purchases of
Castilian products in Panama see Susana
Aldana, Empresas coloniales: Las Tinas de Jabon en Piura
(Piura: CIPCA/Instituto Frances de Estudios
Andinos, 1989), p. 59.
28 Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 28.
Manuel Burga have demonstrated that small and medium-sized
farms
depended on indigenous wage laborers who worked alongside

slaves.29 As
Spanish estates transformed the northern coastal economy,
indigenous labor-
ers and community members benefited from distinguishing
themselves from
African slaves. Similarly, in rural Morelos (Mexico), Spanish
estate expan-
sion absorbed indigenous lands, but the re-formed communities
(congrega-
ciones) employed their rights to defend and even to expand their
landhold-
ings during a crisis in the sugar economy in the first half of the
eighteenth
century.30 Likewise, in rural Oaxaca indigenous populations
employed colo-
nial courts and royal protections to defend land titles that had
been estab-
lished in the sixteenth century before Spaniards expanded into
the valley.31
Although free African descendants, slaves, and indigenous
villagers labored
on estates, ranches, and farms, indigenous villagers did not
necessarily adopt
enslaved Africans and other non-locals into their
communities.32 In other
instances, indigenous laborers and farmers would choose to
incorporate free
people of color into their communities or ally with fugitive
slaves against
Spanish colonizers.33 Additionally, the emerging scholarship on
the sugar-
growing regions of Córdoba and Veracruz suggests mixed labor
economies
of indigenous and African, free and enslaved, workers.34

To explain the mixed economies, indigenous and African
populations
appear to be proportional during the first half of the seventeenth
century on
the northern Peruvian coast. In 1604, Spaniards and mestizos
constituted
29 Ramírez, Provincial, pp. 45, 83, 163; Burga, De la
Encomienda, p. 115.
30 Cheryl English Martin, Rural Society in Colonial Morelos
(Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1985), pp. 27, 51, 88
31 William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca
(Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1972), pp. 29, 66, 84, 107.
32 Patrick Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race,
Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 35, 50, 62, 72-73, 78;
Ward Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda of the
Marqueses del Valle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1970), pp. 74, 87-99.
33 Ann Zulawski has suggested that yanaconas associated with
and were even absorbed into free and
enslaved communities of color in an agrarian frontier region of
Alto Peru. Zulawski, They Eat, p. 192.
Jane Landers, “Black-Indian Interaction in Spanish Florida,”
Colonial Latin American Historical Review
2:2 (Spring 1993), p. 158; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in
Colonial Louisiana: The Development of
Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1992),
p. 98; Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a
Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 93.
34 Martin, Rural, pp. 25-26, 51, 60-61; Ramírez, Provincial, pp.
83, 163. As such, revisiting ques-
tions posed for colonial Lima by Jesús Cosamalón Aguilar,
Indios detrás de la muralla. Matrimonios
indígenas y convivencia inter-racial en Santa Ana (Lima, 1795 -
1820) (Lima: PUCP, 1999); Emilio
Harth-terré, Negros e Indios: Un Estamento Social Ignorado del
Peru Colonial (Lima: Editorial Juan
Meja Baca, 1973); Luis Millones, “Población Negra en el Peru.
Analisis de la posicion social del Negro
durante la dominacion española,” in Minorias Etnicas en el Peru
(Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica
del Perú, 1973). For Córdoba and Veracruz, see Adriana Naveda
Chavez, Esclavos negros en las hacien-
das azucareras de Córdoba 1690-1830 (Jalapa: Universidad
Veracruzana, 1987).
twenty-seven percent of the population, with free and enslaved
“negros” and
mulatos as thirty-four percent, and “Indians” as thirty-nine
percent of Tru-
jillo’s total population, including its surrounding farms.35
Populations for
rural environs are difficult to estimate because parish data is not
coterminous
with estate inventories. For example, colonial inspectors
recorded indigenous
laborers on rural haciendas and parish priests kept track of

indigenous parish-
ioners, but neither documented enslaved Africans and their
descendants.
Landholders inventoried their slaves but did not record the
number of indige-
nous workers or specify the identities of seasonal laborers or
itinerant arti-
sans. As Frederick Bowser noted, information that allows a
correlation
between the size of landholdings and “the proportion of African
to Indian
labor” is “rarely available,” further revealing the difficulty of
analyzing inter-
relations between these rural populations.36 Furthermore,
parish records,
ecclesiastical investigations (such as those conducted by
Inquisition courts
and idolatry extirpation judges), and documentation of religious
confraterni-
ties are rare for the northern Peruvian coast. Rural notaries and
indigenous
scribes were active, but their records have been misplaced or
lost. Estate
accounts and overseer correspondence, moreover, most likely
exist in private
archives and are not readily accessible to the researcher. Thus, I
rely mainly
on criminal cases supplemented by urban notary records and
ecclesiastical
documentation from local and national Peruvian archives
emphasizing eco-
nomic and social strategies rather than cultural or religious
practices.37 Doc-
uments of conflict are a challenging source for the researcher
interested in
understanding affinities, yet judicial cases provide rich details

of daily life
and examples of the ways in which rural inhabitants defined
their communi-
ties. Contextualizing indigenous and African relations in an
expanding sugar
economy reveals that just as strategies and interactions of rural
laborers were
not uniform, neither were the categories that bound them.
35 Anómino, “Fragmento,” pp. 90-93; Miguel Feijóo de Sosa,
Relación descriptiva de la ciudad y
provincia de Truxillo del Perú (Lima: Fondo del Libro. Banco
Industrial del Peru, [1763] 1984), pp. 29-
30.With the exception of scattered calculations of indigenous
communities to assess tribute obligations,
there is no other census until 1763 when, again, Trujillo’s
magistrate counted the inhabitants of the city
and its surrounding valley. During his visita of inspection tour
between 1782 and 1785, Bishop Martínez
Compañón estimated that the population of the Trujillo and
Saña regions was nine percent Spanish, 56
percent indigenous, 14 percent mixed descent, and 21 percent
African and African-descent people.
Obispo Baltasar Martínez Compañón, “Estado que demuestra el
número de Abitantes del Obpdo de Trux-
illo del Perú con distinción de castas formade pr su actual
Obpo,” en Trujillo del Perú, v. 2 (Madrid: Bib-
lioteca de Palacio de Madrid, 1985-1991).
36 Bowser, African, p. 95.
37 The research base of this article includes one hundred and
fourteen criminal cases, seventeen civil
cases, and eleven other judicial investigations from the courts

of the corregidor and cabildo housed in
the Archivo Departamental de La Libertad. Notary entries were
collected as part of a ten-year sample of
extant records. Viceregal correspondence as well as reports and
mandates from Trujillo’s magistrate and
the municipal council provide regional and viceregal contexts.
EXCHANGE AND CONFLICT: INDIGENOUS FARMERS AND
ENSLAVED LABORERS
Spanish labor demands on the northern Peruvian coast
encouraged contact
between African slaves and indigenous villagers. In the early
seventeenth
century, Spanish landholders had grown increasingly desperate
for laborers.38
On the one hand, indigenous reducciones were no longer able
(or willing) to
supply the assigned number of mitayos to work as herders and
agriculturists
on Spanish properties.39 Spanish estates appear to have
suffered from this
lack of labor. On the other hand, Spanish landholders were not
able to afford
a sufficient number of slaves for their estates.40 One result was
an increased
mobility of indigenous laborers migrating to and from the
coastal valleys as
African slaves negotiated a certain level of autonomy among the
rural estates.
In this context, Africans and their descendants traded,
celebrated, and inter-
mingled with indigenous inhabitants in moments that may have

appeared to
local authorities as activities of vagrant and unattached
people.41 In particu-
lar, colonial officials considered contact between people of
African descent
and indigenous communities to be dangerous to the colonial
order.42 Illus-
trating these colonial concerns, in 1603, Trujillo’s cabildo
recorded a royal
38 For coastal landholders demanding that highland men travel
to the coast to perform mita see
“Mandamiento de…Theniente de Corregidor en el valle de
Chicama…” ADL. Co. Asuntos de Gobierno.
Leg. 266. Exp. 3069 (1604); “Real provisión...” Archivo
General de la Nación (AGN). Derecho Indígena.
Cuad. 69 (1621).
39 For indigenous communities and individuals protesting
Spanish demands for mitayos see “Pro-
visión confirmatoria de la repartición de mitayos del pueblo de
Paiján y Licapa…” ADL. Co. Asuntos de
Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp. 3072 (1606); “Expediente seguido por
Diego de Sequeira, protector de los nat-
urales por lo que toca a la defensa de los indios de Guañape…”
ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 240. Exp. 2264 (1614);
“Expediente seguido por el protector de los naturales por lo que
toca a Antón Cipen, natural de Magdalena
de Cao…” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 241. Exp. 2298 (1617); AAT.
Padrones. Leg. 1 (1619), ff. 17-18.
40 Ramírez, Provincial, pp. 142, 163.
41 The Crown and colonial authorities viewed independent
actions of laborers unattached to a patron

as a sign of disorder. In particular, royal officials objected to
the mixture of people from distinct stations.
For example, in 1599, the viceroy complained that “loose
people” who migrated from Spain were creat-
ing disorder and abuse among indigenous populations. Vatican
Film Library (VFL). Colección Pastells,
Roll 13, Vol. 76. (Peru) v. 7 (1599), f. 224. In 1608, the Crown
suggested to the Peruvian viceroy that
colonial authorities would need to think of the governance of
negros, mulatos, and mestizos whose num-
bers were multiplying. Kontezke, Colección, vol. 2, t. 1, pt. 1,
p. 145. In 1610, the Trujillo cabildo com-
manded that all the free negras and mulatas in the city attach
themselves to a “master” or a patron. ADL.
Protocolos. Morales. Leg. 181 (1610), f. 13. In 1632, Lima
officials lamented that a large number of free
mulatos, negros, and zambahigos did not have an occupation,
roots, or fields to earn money to pay trib-
ute. Ernesto Germán Peralta Rivera, “Informe Preliminar al
estudio de la Tributación de Negros Libres
Mulatos y Zambahigos en el Siglo XVII peruano,” in Atti del
XL Congresso Internazionale degli Amer-
icanisti (Genoa, 1975), p. 436 citing AGI. Audiencia de Lima,
Leg. 158.
42 In Trujillo, local officials complained in 1606 that fugitive
slaves created disorder on the public
highways and, in particular, among indigenous and African-
descent travelers. Larco Herrera, Anales,
cites ff. 105-107. In 1639, the Trujillo cabildo complained that
because of the continuing lack of a public
jail, the bailiffs had to put indigenous and African-descent men
together presumably in the same cell or
holding area. Larco Herrera, Anales, ff. 22-23. The Crown
continued its interest with separating

cédula that ordered the removal of negros, negras, mulatos, and
free mulatas
from the countryside where they caused harm to the indigenous
popula-
tions.43 In 1627, the Trujillo cabildo declared that armed
fugitive slaves
threatened the indigenous workers on local haciendas.44
Attempts by Spanish
landholders and colonial officials to control a mobile and
diverse populace of
potential laborers, however, underlines the extent to which
Africans and
indigenous people seized on opportunities afforded by local
markets and
labor demands.45 In the process, they commingled, exchanged
goods, and
associated beyond the bounds of colonial expectations.
Local authorities sought to keep order in the rural areas by
persecuting
thieves and errant laborers, but did not strictly control the
movements of
African slaves. For example, Anton Angola was responsible for
his labor
time. On the weekends he lived in the house of Felipe, a
Spaniard, outside
of Chocope, a crossroads settlement in the Chicama valley, and
on Monday
mornings, he was supposed to report to another household for
his weekly
work assignment.46 While similar to the practices of urban
slavery, the dis-
tances of the countryside may have produced more

independence as rural
slaves owned horses and traveled into the highlands to trade or
along the
coast to find work.47 The general mobility of coastal slaves
easily melded
into fugitive slave activity as enslaved Africans and their
descendants inde-
pendently sought new owners or patrons, sometimes without the
permis-
sions of their current masters.48 Fugitive slaves who had been
captured by
colonial authorities confessed to traveling on extensive circuits.
In one case,
this included the viceregal capital of Lima, the highland town of
Huamanga,
and finally the northern coastal valleys.49 Africans and their
descendants,
therefore, seized opportunities of mobility afforded by the
desperate
demands for labor by Spanish landholders. Enslaved men (and
some
Spaniards, mestizos, and mulatos from living in indigenous
towns with an order in 1646. Konetzke,
Colección, v. 2, t. 1, pt. 2, p. 401.
43 Larco Herrera, Anales, cites ff. 238v-242.
44 Larco, Anales, ff. 59-60v.
45 In 1609, the Crown ordered the Peruvian viceroy to reduce
the loose numbers of mulatos, zam-
baigos, free negros, and mestizos living in Spanish towns and
make them pay tribute or tasa. Konetzke,
Colección, v. 2, t. 1, pt. 1, p. 143.

46 “Auto…del caso de un negro esclavo de Juan Baptista de
Espinosa que mató dos indios por
robarle y quitarle lo que tenía en valle Chicama,” ADL. Co. Cr.
Leg. 243. Exp. 2393 (1626), f. 16v.
47 Bowser, African, pp. 103-104; Hünefeldt, Paying, pp. 74.
126; “Expediente seguido por Diego de
Alarcon…sobre las cuchilladas que dieron a Pedro negro
esclavo del ingenio de Chicama,” ADL. Co. Cr.
Leg. 243. Exp. 2407 (1627), f. 2.
48 ADL. Protocolos. Escobar. Leg. 143 (1640), f. 103.
49 “Expediente…contra varios negros zimarrones esclavos por
haber huído del poder de sus amos y
haberse resistido cuando fueron aprehendidos por las
autoridades,” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 78. Exp. 1284
(1609).
women) escaped from their owners, who were often Spanish and
moved
around in a rural environ still inhabited by indigenous people in
the early
seventeenth century.
Rural laborers, African and indigenous, also, lived next to each
other and
built affinities and relationships. Spanish colonial law may have
prohibited
African (as well as Spanish) habitation in indigenous villages or
reduc-
ciones.50 Yet, technically, Crown mandates did not specify who
could

inhabit non-reducción rural settlements. Moreso, local
authorities probably
could (or would) not have been motivated to discourage
indigenous and
African people who lived next to each other as their labor and
market activ-
ity fueled rural economies. Rather than the separations
articulated by Span-
ish law, rural settlements brought together Africans and
“Indians.” Con-
verging around crossroads settlements, indigenous farmers and
herders
serviced colonial inns and enslaved people gathered for markets
and work.
Around the inn on the northern edge of the Chicama valley,
indigenous and
African-descent people lived next door to one another. One
resident, María
Angola, was a free African woman who worked in the fields and
the house-
hold of doña María de Valberde, but lived apart in her own
rancho or rustic
house.51 María Angola’s immediate neighbors included an
indigenous
woman from Chépen (a local indigenous reducción) and an
indigenous
ladino (or Spanish speaker) from the city of Trujillo. In
settlements not
defined by reducción directives, rural Africans and indigenous
people lived
in close proximity, suggesting the possibilities of interactive
community net-
works and daily life left undocumented or lost to the record.
Like free people, enslaved Africans were not confined to
Spanish estates

and often traveled to neighboring indigenous villages or
crossroads settle-
ments to trade.52 Suggestive of this contact, enslaved and free
people of
African-descent frequented the ranchería de indios, or the
indigenous
neighborhood, near the Dominican monastery and the colonial
inn on the
road from the Chicama valley to the city of Trujillo. There, and
throughout
the Chicama valley, slaves bartered small livestock for corn
grown by
50 Ivlian de Paredes, Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de
las Indias (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura
Hispánica, [1681]1973), Lib VI. Titulo III. Ley xxi “Que en
Pueblos de Indios no vivan Españoles,
Negros, Mestizos, y Mulatos,” p. 200v.
51 “Expediente seguido por el Protector de los Naturales de esta
ciudad, por lo que toca la persona
de María Juliana, india natural del pueblo de Chepén y otras
personas…” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 244. Exp.
2446 (1631), f. 2.
52 Slaves lived in rancherías, or clusters of small houses, and
very rarely (if at all) in locked bar-
racks. See “Mandamiento del corregidor de Trujillo para que se
haga averiguación de la pendencia de
dos negros…” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 240. Exp. 2281 (1615).
indigenous farmers and other supplemental foodstuffs as well as

tobacco,
clothing, and other necessities not provided by estate owners.53
Commonly,
African and criollo slaves often purchased chica (corn beer)
from indige-
nous producers; this was a product probably not supplied (or
only irregularly
supplied) by Spanish hacienda owners.54 This trading
relationship was not
accidental; enslaved men and women may have needed to
supplement their
diet with foodstuffs that only indigenous producers could
provide. In fact,
trade between indigenous farmers and African laborers was a
necessary
component of the rural economy. Some enslaved people kept
their own
small livestock, but it is unclear whether they were awarded
provision
grounds.55 It may have been that estate owners were reluctant
to share their
water resources (a scarce commodity on the arid coast) or that
administra-
tors incorporated food production into the routine of hacienda
work tasks. In
any case, most hacienda owners supplied slaves with rations
purchased
locally or grown on the estates.56 In contrast to slaves,
indigenous people
had official rights to land and water as members of a reducción
or as con-
tracted yanaconas on haciendas and grew foodstuffs not only for
themselves,
but for sale.57 Thus, Spanish landholders may have relied on
the abilities of
African slaves and indigenous inhabitants to trade as the

exchanges of food-
stuffs allowed enslaved populations to sustain themselves or to
supplement
their rations. Regardless, hacendados tolerated contact among
enslaved
laborers, indigenous workers, and coastal villagers that
supported a rural
economy of small holders and expanding estates.
Exchanges between enslaved laborers and indigenous farmers
were a crit-
ical part of the informal economy. Because rural notary records
or inspec-
tions of country markets are unavailable in this region, criminal
charges of
theft reveal an informed arrangement of trade and exchange
among indige-
nous and African laborers. One such case was filed by the
widow of Juan
Cipirán, a member of the Uchop parcialidad (an occupational
and adminis-
trative division) of Magdalena de Cao (an indigenous reducción
in the Chi-
53 See “Autos de la visita hecha por don Bartolomé de
Villavicencio, corregidor de Trujillo, a las
estancias, ingenios, trapiches y pueblos de Chicama” ADL. Co.
Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp.
3074 (1607), f. 7.
54 “De la pendencia entre Hernando Cacho esclavo de Andres
Careaga y Juan Bran, esclavo de Juan
Hernández,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 240. Exp. 2258 (1614)

55 “Expediente seguido por el sen´or com. de la caballería, don
Juan Joseph de Herrera García de
Zarzosa, alcalde provincial de la Santa Hermandad de esta
ciudad, contra el negro Joseph Manuel de
casta arara, su esclavo sobre haber matado a pun´aladas a otro
negro, su esclavo, Leandro, de casta cara-
belí.” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 83. Exp. 1481 (1720).
56 Pablo Macera, “Los Jesuitas y la agricultura de la caña,”
Nueva visión del Perú, p. 215; Cushner,
Lords, pp. 91-92.
57 ADL. Co. Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp. 3074 (1607),
ff. 6, 7, 8v, 12, 17, 18v, 23, 28v, 30v.
cama valley), against Mateo, a congo slave.58 According to the
plaintiff,
Mateo congo incorrectly believed that Juan Cipirán, an
indigenous man, had
taken a horse from him (though witnesses strategically hinted
that the slave
himself had stolen the horse in Trujillo). Angry that Juan
Cipirán would not
admit to pilfering the mare—or, if the enslaved congo had
indeed stolen the
horse, perhaps worried that the animal would be recognized in
Trujillo—
Mateo killed Juan Cipirán on the road out of the valley towards
the regional
capital. While this conflict might be interpreted to suggest that
Africans
attacked indigenous people, thus bolstering the argument that
the separation
of the “Republics” was necessary for an orderly society, the

murder in fact
hints at a more complex relationship between the victim and the
assailant.59
Juan Cipirán’s wife and other indigenous community members
testified that
they recognized the congo slave when he rode up to the
settlement and
demanded to see Juan. The slave’s familiarity with the Uchop
parcialidad
indicates that Juan Cipirán and Mateo congo had sufficient
contact to trade,
or that they at least knew about each other’s livestock, for the
Crown did not
forbid commercial exchanges between indigenous and African
inhabitants.
Rather than the murder defining these relations, Juan Cipirán
and Mateo’s
conflict (combined with the witnesses’ testimonies) suggests a
transaction
that had gone sour rather than an outright theft or predatory
attack.
Judicial cases concerning botched trade agreements also reveal
more sub-
stantial connections than mere commerce between itinerant
indigenous
laborers and African slaves. In 1611, Martín Catacaos, an
indigenous mule-
teer, accused Sancho, a slave, of stealing one of his mules.60
However, the
resulting testimony does not suggest a case of mere theft. From
the sugar
mill of Facala in the upper Chicama valley, Martín Catacaos
accompanied
Sancho’s ailing father to Trujillo, where the older man died

shortly there-
after. Sancho kept one of Martín Catacaos’ pack animals while
the indige-
nous muleteer took the slave’s sick parent to Trujillo for
treatment.61 While
58 “Expediente seguido por Juana Quispe, india mujer lex. de
Juan Cipirán, difunto, indio natural
Cao con Matheo negro esclavo de Juan Gutierrez de Farias,
residente en valle Chicama,” ADL. Co. Cr.
Leg. 242. Exp. 2375 (1625).
59 For justification of the separation of the repúblicas because
Africans and their descendants were
aggressive and abusive to indigenous people, see Bowser,
African, pp. 151, 265.
60 “Mandamiento del corregidor de Trujillo para que Martin
Catacaos, indio arriero y morador de
Trujillo, haga información sobre el hurto y muerte de una mula
hecho por el negro Sancho, esclavo de
Francisco de Guzmán,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 239. Exp. 2230
(1611).
61 For non-Indians in rural areas, medical attention consisted of
food donations from the local priest.
See “Informaciones de oficio y parte: Juan López de Saavedra,
cura propietario, vicario y juez eclesiás-
tico y comisario de la Santa Cruzada del pueblo de Mochumí,
obispado de Trujillo,” AGI. Audiencia de
Lima. Leg. 245. No. 12 (1652), f. 3 and “Autos de la visita
pastoral efectuada a la doctrina de Mochumí
desde el 25 abril 1646. Cura de la doctrina,” AAT. Visitas. Leg.
1 (1646), f. 17.

the accusations were contentious, the indigenous man did not
counter with
a charge that Sancho attempted to take advantage of his
goodwill or his
nature as suggested by colonial laws protecting innocent
“Indians” from
“dangerous blacks” would suggest. As a migrant from a coastal
village fur-
ther north, Martin Catacaos did not have the immediate support
of his
indigenous leader and reducción who may have testified or
assisted him
with judicial procedures. Instead, Martin Catacaos was a
muleteer who,
though identified with his reducción by his last name, relied on
other con-
nections and affinities that he had made as an independent
laborer, includ-
ing his relationship with Sancho, the hacienda slave. Neither
party articu-
lated why they had entrusted each other with valuable property
(a mule) or
ailing kin, as Sancho had entrusted his dying parent to Martin
Catacaos’
care. Yet, their initial exchange and resulting judicial case
suggest an affin-
ity that emerged from their shared working relations on the
coastal hacienda.
In addition to coming together to trade, rural laborers also
mingled during
and after Sunday Mass and public fiestas such as Corpus
Christi. Slaves trav-

eled to rural crossroads settlements as well as indigenous towns
where
parishioners sponsored religious events that were not celebrated
in hacienda
chapels.62 Estate owners tolerated, and perhaps encouraged,
baptized African
slaves and indigenous inhabitants to join together during
activities that
proved their shared Catholic identities. Religious events like
market
exchanges reveal moments when enslaved Africans and
colonized “Indians”
intermingled. Rural laborers regardless of their status as
enslaved Africans,
colonized “Indians,” or more commonly another category,
traveled through-
out the northern valleys to work, to trade, or to carry out
errands for acquain-
tances. Local colonial officials read this level of mobility as
evidence of
criminal conduct and resistance to colonial rule. Yet, conflicts
between
Africans, free and enslaved, and “Indians,” on or off the
reducción, provide
evidence of their mutually beneficial contact. More so,
indigenous laborers
and enslaved Africans responded to the current labor market in
the northern
coastal valleys. Spanish landholders required laborers and thus
were willing
to tolerate a certain level of mobility of their slaves who sought
to support
themselves independent of their owners. Still, colonial
authorities articulated
an expectation that mixtures of indigenous and African peoples
indicated dis-

62 “Expediente seguido por Manuel, mulato esclavo…contra
Miguel y Antonio, negros esclavos de
Juan Rubio,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 240. Exp. 2282 (1615);
“Expediente seguido por Bartolomé Gonzáles,
labrador del valle de Chicama, con Juan Pizarro, mestizo y
otros; sobre puñaladas a un esclavo suyo
Francisco,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 241. Exp. 2304 (1617);
“Expediente seguido por don Luis Roldán Davila,
vecino y Alguacil Mayor de Trujillo, contra un negro esclavo,”
ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1321 (1618);
ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 243. Exp. 2407 (1627).
order (as discussed above), and elites imagined that chaos
ensued from labor-
ers who appeared to be without a patron. Thus, “Indian”-African
associations
surfaced as conflictual in the judicial arena or within colonial
law, but these
contacts were most likely regular, reliable, and mutually useful.
DIVIDED COMRADAS: YANACONAS, MITAYOS, AND
SLAVES ON RURAL ESTATES
The Spanish demand for laborers, enslaved or “Indian,” blurred
official
colonial boundaries between the indigenous reducción and the
rest of the
dynamic rural markets and coastal environs. By the first decade
of the sev-
enteenth century, Spanish landholders urged the Crown to force
highland

mitayos into traveling to the coast as local reducciones could
not or would
not fulfill their assigned quotas.63 In the valleys, colonial
indigenous leaders
complained that widespread and repeated epidemics had
severely reduced
their populations.64 More suggestive are their complaints that
indigenous
men had migrated to surrounding haciendas where they seized
on the oppor-
tunities of the coastal economy to contract their labor as
yanaconas or skill
laborers in flour and sugar mills, independent managers of
farms and
ranches, or simply agricultural laborers.65 Thus, some
indigenous laborers
transformed their labor arrangements in the colonial economy
by removing
themselves from the onerous demands of the reducción to
become domestic
workers, miners, muleteers, and artisans.66 Yet, as yanaconas
met Spanish
labor demands and complicated rural hierarchies, they did not
build affini-
ties with African slaves or indigenous mitayos.
In this new context of the colonial hacienda, yanaconas assumed
leader-
ship positions of estate workers who included independent
laborers and
reducción members as well as enslaved African laborers. As
indigenous and
63 ADL. Co. Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp. 3069 (1604);

“Pedimiento de Juan Arias Tinoco,
para que se la otorgue testimonio de los indios mitayos y
ganaderos de hacienda Facala,” ADL. Co. Ped-
imientos. Leg. 285. Exp. 3695 (1613); Archivo General de la
Nación (AGN). Derecho Indigena. Cuad.
69 (1621), f.1.
64 “Testimonio de las diligencias de la visita de los indios de
Repartimiento de Callanca de la juris-
dicción de la ciudad de Trujillo,” AGN. Derecho Indigena.
Cuad. 687 (1606); “Expediente seguido por
don Antonio Chayguac, Cacique principal del pueblo de
Mansiche… se suspenda dar indios…,” ADL.
Co. Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp. 3073 (1607); “Auto
seguido…contra el maestro de campo don
Cristobal de Aróstegui, corregidor que fue de Saña, sobre
ciertas diferencias en las cobranzas de los trib-
utos de Jayanca y Túcume,” AGN. Derecho Indigena. Cuad. 72
(1622).
ff. 2v, 6, 11, 18, 21v, 27.
66 For highland yanacona strategies see Wightman, Indigenous,
p. 6; Karen Powers, Andean Jour-
neys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito
(Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1995), p. 51. For indigenous laborers seeking
work outside of their assigned reducciones
see Larson, Cochabamba, pp. 82 - 83; Zulawski, They Eat, pp.
125, 148.
African laborers—free, forced, and enslaved—sought to build
new strategies

for survival, and in some cases advancement, they acted in
concert bonded
by their attachment or shared experiences on a Spanish estate.
For example,
during the perceived disorder of Carnival celebrations in 1626,
witnesses
reported that a yanacona overseer directed indigenous and
enslaved laborers
under his charge against indigenous men who worked on an
adjoining farm.
The victims testified that the yanacona overseer, Fabian, had led
his group
“like soldiers” indicating not only the threatening nature of the
“Indians and
blacks” who descended to steal chickens and guinea pigs, but
their cohesive
assault.67 In this case, witnesses perceived indigenous laborers
and African
slaves as a collective. Indeed, like slaves, yanaconas were often
migrant
laborers (albeit under distinct circumstances) separated from
their original
communities and without local allegiances. Furthermore,
contracted indige-
nous laborers and African slaves may have shared similar
subsistence needs
as both worked on the haciendas that were not fully
provisioned. These, and
other circumstances, may have encouraged allegiances between
yanaconas
and their subordinates, indigenous or African.
Shared workplaces allowed sustained contact between African
and
indigenous laborers, and perhaps even possibilities of long-
term, formal

relationships. Through parish records for the rural settlements
starting in the
late seventeenth century it is only possible to document a single
African-
indigenous marriage, a 1685 union between an unidentified
enslaved man
and an indigenous woman who had migrated to the Chicama
valley from the
highland town of Cajamarca. Nonetheless, the combined parish
records for
Ascope, an indigenous town, and the Facala hacienda indicate
an increased
number of people identified as “zambo,” a person of African-
indigenous
descent, suggesting the probability of previous African-
indigenous unions
before the later seventeenth century.68 Additionally, other
factors may have
deterred rural inhabitants from formalizing their unions, such as
lack of
clergy, high marriage fees, and difficulties in obtaining
permission from
slave owners.69 Nonetheless, the absence of documentation
does not pre-
67 “Expediente seguido por Antón, indio contra Fabián, indio
yanacona en la chacra de Francisco de
Candia; sobre hurto de más de 50 gallinas, cuyes, en compania
de otros negros,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 243.
Exp. 2390 (1626), f. 2.
68 AAT. Parroquías rurales. Ascope & Facala.
69 The magistrate and other colonial officials also accused
Gregorio de Paz and Pedro de Biamonte,

both mulatos, of stealing not only clothing and horses from an
indigenous woman, Lucía de las Angeles,
of the Guadalupe asiento. One of the men testified that he had
intended to marry the indigenous laborer
in Trujillo. “Mandamiento de…Teniente de Corregidor y
Justicia Mayor del partido de Chiclayo, para que
Salvador Díaz, con la Vara de Real Justicia, prenda a Gregorio
de Paz, mulato, Pedro de Bracamonte y a
la india Lucía y los ponga en la carcel pública de Guadalupe,”
ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 243. Exp. 2421 (1628).
clude the possibilities of African and indigenous marriages and
godparent-
age in the coastal valleys.
Rural indigenous laborers and Africans slaves (as well as their
descen-
dants) may have had to seek legitimization of their unions in
Trujillo where
they were more likely to be able to register and to sanctify their
relation-
ships.70 In 1625, Juan Bautista, a slave, and Mariana Angel, a
mestiza who
was reported to dress as an “Indian,” fled to Trujillo where they
hoped to pass
as a married couple. In addition to the crime of “stealing”
Mariana Angel, her
employer denounced Juan Bautista as a fugitive slave who had
committed
many robberies and assaults against indigenous people in the
countryside and
roads in the Jequetepeque valley north of Trujillo and
Chicama.71 Yet, witness

María Suarez, an indigenous ladina woman, testified that Juan
Bautista and
Mariana Angel had peaceably sought accommodations in her
house as hus-
band and wife. She did not suspect the travelers were criminals
as they
explained that they had come to Trujillo so that Juan Bautista
could ask the
Franciscans to purchase him, a common strategy given the
fluidity between
enslavement, independence, and freedom in the northern coastal
valleys.72
The innkeeper’s testimony indicates that Mariana Angel was
most likely
choosing to accompany Juan Bautista. As for Mariana Angel’s
identity, she
may have been taken for a mestiza because of her familiarity
with Spanish
and other urban cultural practices that did not match her “Indian
dress.”73 A
fugitive from her patron, Mariana Angel may have also been
attempting to
disguise herself. Still, Juan Bautista and Mariana Angel
presented themselves
as a married couple and thus suggest the possibility of
consensual unions
between African and indigenous descendants that the lack of
rural parish
records for the first half of the seventeenth century leaves open
to question.
Despite the existence of long-term relationships and contact on
hacien-
das, indigenous laborers and enslaved Africans also maintained
certain dis-

tinctions. During another instance of raucous pre-Lenten
celebration, a
group of “negros” (as described in the criminal case) came
looking for
70 Archivo Sagrario. Libro de casimientos de mixtos (1619-
1753).
71 “Denuncia de Alonso Siguenza Villarroel, contra el negro
Juan Bautista esclavo del Cap. Juan
García de Aguilar, vecino y residente en asiento de Guadalupe;
sobre hurto de una mestiza del dho
asiento, Mariana,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 242. Exp. 2371 (1625).
72 For more discussion of fugitive slaves seeking new owners
see Bowser, African, pp. 192-195.
73 David Cahill, “Colour by Numbers: Racial and Ethnic
Categories in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532-
1821,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26:2 (May 1994), p.
335; Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “Castas y rep-
resentación en Trujillo colonial,” in Más allá de la dominación
y la resistencia: Estudios de historia
peruana, siglos XVI-XX, Paulo Drinot and Leo Garofalo,
editors (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
2005), pp. 48-76.
chicha in the inn of Francisco Cajamarca, a migrant from a
highland town.
According to indigenous witnesses, the inn outside of Trujillo
was already
full of celebrating self-identified “indios criollos,” acculturated,

Spanish-
speaking indigenous men, who claimed that the “negros”
appeared in a mil-
itary formation with sticks, asking to fight rather than to
drink.74 Francisco
Cajamarca denied entrance to the newcomers and, in response,
some
“negros” grabbed him by the hair and shouted threats, a strong
attack on his
public honor. The indigenous revelers, according to their
testimony, rushed
to the defense of the tavern keeper, while one “negro,” Jorge
tried to deter
his fellows from entering the drinking establishment. According
to one
informant, Jorge told his associates that the indigenous men
were comradas,
or “fellows” and therefore should be left in peace.75 Lending
credence to
Jorge’s claim, Juan Cristobal, an “Indian criollo” from Trujillo
testified to
the magistrate that he knew Jorge, as well as another African
and their
owner.76 Jorge’s choice of the word “comrada” and Juan
Cristobal’s knowl-
edge of the slave’s owner suggest that the two men knew each
other from a
shared workplace. Also, their mutual pursuit of chicha, a
laborers’ drink,
indicates a common status.77 Nonetheless, Jorge and Juan
Cristobal were
obviously choosing distinct company during the fiesta and a
shared work-
place did not deter violence among indigenous and African men.
The distinctions of colonial law and rural labor practices

provided indige-
nous laborers the means to maintain a separate status, even as
they worked
alongside African and African-descent slaves. Crown
regulations protected
yanaconas as agricultural workers by regulating their yearly
wages, ensur-
ing a “letter of contract,” and prohibiting their patrons from
employing them
in the sugar mill.78 Colonial authorities, at least according to
Crown man-
dates, were to monitor hacienda managers to ensure that
indigenous labor-
ers were promptly paid and to punish slaves for stealing from
yanaconas.79
In contrast, local authorities did not inspect the work and the
living condi-
tions of rural enslaved laborers who were not legally afforded
provision
grounds or other terms of a written labor contract. Furthermore,
while yana-
74 “Mandamiento…para que se haga información del hecho
ocurrido en el rancho de Francisco
Caxamarca por unos negros donde salio herido un negro,” ADL.
Co. Cr. Leg. 242. Exp. 2348 (1623), ff.
3-3v.
75 ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 242. Exp. 2348 (1623), f. 3v.
76 ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 242. Exp. 2348 (1623), f. 1v.
77 Indigenous, African, and other laborers drank chicha, a
locally produced beverage, rather than

wine, an exported drink. For African laborers drinking chicha,
see “Expediente…contra Pasqual de
Mora, mulato; por haber herido a Joan Bran, su esclavo con una
tacana,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 241. Exp.
2342 (1622), f. 5.
ff. 2, 2v.
ff. 2v, 3v, 5.
conas may not have chosen to leave their communities, and
landholders
were known to avoid paying requisite wages, indigenous
laborers hypothet-
ically could choose another patron at the end of their contract as
Crown offi-
cials declared that the Spanish pay indigenous laborers fairly
for their
work.80 In contrast, the Crown only protected enslaved men and
women
from extreme physical abuse and mandated that owners provide
food and
clothing, and treatment for illnesses, but did not interfere with
labor arrange-
ments between slave and master.81 In fact, in the northern
coastal valleys
there is little indication that colonial authorities enforced these
Crown pro-
tections of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Yanaconas,
therefore,
had reasons to distinguish themselves from slaves (African,
criollo, or
mulato) who did not enjoy the intervention, however sporadic,

of colonial
officials or the recognized authority, however ignored, of the
colonial
cacique (indigenous leader) or the assigned protector de
naturales (a local
Crown-appointed lawyer of indigenous people).
The colonial rights afforded to indigenous laborers help to
explain why
yanacona Lorenço Payco, who worked on a Chicama valley
ranch, called on
official protection while invoking Spanish cultural and legal
preconceptions of
the “predatory slave.”82 The indigenous laborer complained
that a “black”
slave had stolen clothing and chickens from his house while he
was at Mass.83
Fulfilling a Crown-recognized duty to protect indigenous
inhabitants, the pro-
tector de los naturales filed an official criminal complaint in
Trujillo’s cabildo
court. Either he or the indigenous laborer carefully noted the
presumed
victim’s activity as practicing Catholicism in the moment of his
victimization.
The rural guard, often the sole representatives of colonial law in
the country-
side, also defended indigenous laborers while persecuting
African slaves. In
the Trujillo valley, deputies helped to catch another “black”
thief when two
indigenous laborers complained that he had stolen clothing and
silver from
their houses.84 Furthermore, yanaconas and mitayos on a
Chicama sugar mill

were quick to report to Spanish neighbors that a slave had killed
the Spanish
overseer in a disagreement about a work task. Other slaves on
the hacienda
were not asked to testify while numerous indigenous witnesses
detailed the
80 For 1601, see Cushner, Lords, pp. 14, 81. For 1607, see
Larco Herrera, Anales, cites ff. 153-154.
81 Konetzke, Colección, tomo I, pp. 237-240.
82 Bowser, African, p. 147.
83 “Expediente seguido por don Gerónimo de Villegas,
protector de los naturales de esta ciudad, por
la persona de don Lorenzo Reyes, indio natural del Valle de
Chicama, contra Pedro negro esclavo de
Antonio Franco y de otro negro, esclavo de Manuel Gudiño,”
ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79. Exp. 1344 (1636),
f. 1.
84 “Expediente seguido por don Antonio Solano de Suazo,
Alcalde de la Santa Hermandad, contra
don Francisco negro criollo esclavo,” ADL. Ca. Cr. Leg. 79.
Exp. 1336 (1626).
attack to the investigating magistrate.85 Colonial sanctioned
rights, thus, sepa-
rated “Indians” from “Africans” on the coastal estates.
Indigenous identity,
therefore, provided advantages for indigenous laborers (as well
as reducción
members) who appeared more often as agents in judicial cases

because of their
rights as protected subjects. Enslaved Africans and their
enslaved descendants
who were not afforded the same colonial privileges.
What, then, were the elements of contact or points of fissure
between
rural laborers on coastal estates? In the early seventeenth
century, Spanish
landholders transformed the labor economy of the northern
valleys by pres-
suring indigenous communities to relinquish their land and
water resources
so that reducción “Indians” became indigenous yanaconas.
Some estate
owners developed sugar mills, but most continued to sell flour,
wheat, and
livestock from their ranches and farms to Pacific regional
markets.86 Land-
holders of these mixed estates could not yet afford to purchase a
large
number of adult slaves, valued at five hundred pesos on the
northern coast,
so coastal haciendas relied on a mix of labor practices as well
as laborers.87
Enslaved men (and some women) inhabited, therefore, an
indigenous soci-
ety where mitayos were still part of the rural labor force, but
contracted
indigenous laborers assumed supervisory positions and even
managed
ranches and farms on their own. Also, yanaconas though
separated from
their colonial reducciones, continued to submit obligatory
tribute payments

and to call on colonial protective mandates in colonial courts.
Thus, hired
indigenous laborers on rural estates had significant (and
suggestive) contact
with African slaves and their descendants, but did not form a
shared identity
with these newcomers who did not constitute a protected
collectivity in
practice or in law on the northern coast.
“IN A WAR AGAINST THE SPANISH”:
INDIGENOUS DEFENSE AND AFRICAN RESISTANCE
Indigenous laborers were not the only native coastal inhabitants
to defend
and to define their protected status as “Indians.” Faced with the
demands of
Spanish estates that increasingly included the presence of
enslaved Africans
and their descendants, indigenous communities employed
colonial mandates
to defend the rights of their reducciones, and in doing so
underscored their
85 “Mandamiento del gobernador Fadrique Cancer, corregidor
de Trujillo para que se averigue la
muerte de Cristobal de Olmedo, mayordomo del trapiche de
Diego Gomez de Alvarado por sus negros
esclavos,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 239. Exp. 2254 (1613).
86 Ramírez, Provincial, p. 71.
87 Ramírez, Provincial, p. 163.

colonial position as “Indians.” Indigenous communities
appealed to royal
protection such as in the case of the reducción of Paijan, whose
members
petitioned the viceroy to stop the regional magistrate from
taking more
laborers from their already reduced numbers. The reducción,
with some
notarial assistance, declared that the magistrate took indigenous
laborers
“without having an order or a provision” of the viceroy that was
necessary
for the allocation of mitayos.88 Even in declaring that they
were unable to
supply the required number of mitayos, coastal indigenous
communities
acknowledged their obligation as “Indian” communities to send
forced
laborers, albeit in reduced numbers.89 Indigenous communities
also
employed the protector de los naturales to defend mitayos
against Spanish
abuse and to force landholders to pay appropriate wages.90 In
1609, the
indigenous leader of Chicama and the indigenous colonial
official of Mag-
dalena de Cao employed royal mandates to defend community
members
from labor exploitation by a local hacienda owner.91 In doing
so, indigenous
communities seized opportunities afforded by colonial courts
that, in turn,
defined them as “naturales” or “Indians” deserving protection.
In the context
of encroaching Spanish estates, indigenous leaders asserted

their rights as
colonial subjects within the Republic of the Indians.
Indigenous leaders and communities also employed their
colonial status to
separate themselves from enslaved Africans as well as free
people of color. In
1621, Chicama indigenous leaders asked the viceroy to enforce
the separation
between non-“Indians” and indigenous people in order to avoid
abuse.92 In
doing so, the heads of the indigenous reducciones called on
Crown orders, as
reiterated by Trujillo’s town council, to remove “negros, negras,
mulatos, [and]
free mulatas” living in “Indian towns” (pueblos de indios) and
other rural envi-
rons where they caused “notable harm” to indigenous and
Spanish people.93 By
calling on colonial authorities to enforce these mandates,
indigenous leaders
contributed to discursive, if not actual, separation of indigenous
reducciones or
88 The cacique of Paijan reported that members were “absent”
so the reducción could not fulfill its
mita requirement. ADL. Co. Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266.
Exp. 3072 (1606).
89 An epidemic in Mansiche and Huanchaco inhibited the
reducción from supplying required
mitayos. ADL. Co. Asuntos de Gobierno. Leg. 266. Exp. 3073
(1607).

90 ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 241. Exp. 2298 (1617); ADL. Co. Cr.
Leg. 240. Exp. 2264 (1614).
91 “Expediente seguido por don Pedro de Mora, cacique
principal de Chicama y don Antonio de
Jalcaguaman, alcalde ord. del Magdalena de Cao contra Pedro
de Santiago, español residente en dho
valle sobre maltratos recibidos,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 238. Exp.
2214 (1609).
92 “Petición de Don Diego Mache, cacique del pueblo de
Santiago y segunda persona del valle de
Chicama, para que se cumplan las provisiones y autos
obedecidos de la prohibición a los Españoles de
hacer campañas y arrendar las tierras que los caciques,
principales e indios, tienen,” ADL. Co. Asuntos
de Gobierno. Leg. 267. Exp. 3103 (1621), f. 3.
93 Larco, Anales, cites ff. 238v-242.
pueblos de indios from the rest of the colonial population.94 In
doing so, indige-
nous populations defined themselves as dependents of Spanish
colonial author-
ities by evoking the danger represented by enslaved and free
people of color.
As part of this protective strategy, indigenous leaders pursued
court cases
against fugitive slaves and secured commissions from Trujillo’s
magistrate to
capture escaped slaves who threatened, or were constructed as
threatening, the
Crown protections of the colonial reducción.95 Again,
indigenous communities

were paid for capturing fugitive slaves who also presented a
problem to Span-
ish landholders and other regional elites.96 In this way,
indigenous communi-
ties may have been constructing a separation from free and
enslaved people of
color while associating themselves with powerful patrons: the
owners or the
beneficiaries of the expanding rural estates.97
That indigenous communities constructed conflicts involving
enslaved
Africans according to particular strategies of protection still
reveals continu-
ing contact among slaves and indigenous laborers. During a
weekend bor-
rachera in the Chicama valley, members of the reducción of
Santiago de Cao
assaulted Francisco Mandinga, a slave who had joined their
gathering.98 At
first, the assembled members of the Santiago de Cao community
urged Fran-
cisco Mandinga to accept their invitation to drink. Santiago de
Cao reducción
members knew Francisco Mandinga enough to ask him to join
their gather-
ing. Yet, they did not instruct or protect him once he had
entered their charged
socio-political space, as borracheras were still a means for
indigenous people
to conduct community business. Apparently, he provoked their
ire when he
chose the wrong seat inside the gathering. In addition to
Francisco Mandinga
and probably others like him, members of the Santiago de Cao
reducción still

considered other indigenous men as outsiders. A forastero
(indigenous
migrant) who was drinking with the group testified that he did
not get
involved or attempt to stop the Santiago de Cao members from
beating Fran-
cisco Mandinga.99 Similarly, other migrants and yanaconas who
were present
94 See the 1604 declaration that Indians were not to live outside
of their reducciones and the 1618
ruling that Indians should not leave their reducción to move to
another. Paredes, Recopilación, Libro VI.
Título III, f. 200. Konetzke, Coleccíon, vol. 2, tomo 1, pt. 1, pp.
63, 64.
95 “Expediente seguido por don Andrés Pay Pay Chumbi,
principal del Cao, contra Alonso Sánchez
que llama cuchara, mulato esclavo de Jean de Garcia Calderón,
sobre haberle quitado la mujer,” ADL.
Co. Cr. Leg. 241. Exp. 2329 (1621), ff. 50, 84v.
96 “Auto del maestro de campo don Pedro de Salazar y
Figueroa, corregidor para que se reciba infor-
mación de los delitos cometidos por dos negros cimarrones que
salteaban en el camino real que va a
Simbal y que fueron cogidos por una quadrilla de indios
dirigidos por Tomas principal y alcalde de los
naturales del Mansiche,” ADL. Co. Cr. Leg. 247. Exp. 2583
(1657).
97 Thanks to Ben Vinson III for the reminder of what
indigenous communities had to gain by cap-
turing fugitive slaves.

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