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A Seventeenth-Century Encomienda: Chimaltenango, Guatemala.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Lesley Byrd Simpson
Lesley Byrd Simpson*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, California
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Extract

Captain Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, whose proud boast it was (as he never tires of reminding us) that he was the great-great-grandson of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in his erratic, rambling, and frequently delightful Recordación Florida (c. 1690), has this to say about the ancient town that will be the subject of this article:

Three smooth and pleasant leagues north of this City of Goathemala, on a road thickly studded with villages and tile yards, upon a high eminence in the midst of a wide and marvelous plain, but so accessible and gently sloping that, despite the many carts, the journey can be made quite comfortably in a carriage, lies the town of Chimaltenango (called by the Indians, Bocco). This broad and smiling plain is always clothed with pleasant and fertile meadows, and with rich and extensive cornfields. It is more than sixteen leagues in circumference, of rich and very fecund soil, and produces in abundance, corn, chickpeas, beans, capons and chickens, as well as other things… . The Indians of the district do not cultivate other crops, but maintain themselves with what it yields, so that the people of its villages are plentifully supplied with everything, according to their own way of living, and have no need to seek food elsewhere… . On the contrary, the people from other villages come to their market to buy whatever they lack … , so that for three leagues roundabout (the distance to which their commerce extends) there is as much provender as one finds in the abundant markets of Goathemala City.

Type
Documents
Information
The Americas , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , April 1959 , pp. 393 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1959

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References

1 That is to say, 3,000 indios tributarios, or heads of families, which gives a population of 12,000, according to the one-to-four ratio that Fuentes y Guzmán invariably employs.

2 The fountain was completed and is today the main attraction of Chimaltenango for tourists, since half its water flows to the Pacific, half to the Atlantic, the town being upon the continental divide. Fuentes y Guzmán notes with wonder that the water running off the roof of the church does the same thing.

3 de Fuentes, Francisco Antonio y Guzmán, , Recordación Florida: Discurso historial y demostración natural, material, militar y política del Reyno de Goathemala, 1, 343–345.Google Scholar (3 vols.; Guatemala, C. A., 1932–1933).

4 Una cuenta dada por el Capitán Don Joseph de Aguilar Rebolledo, velino desta Ziudad de Santiago de Goathemala en las Yndias, a la Señora Doña María Magdalena Ruiz de Contreras, Condesa de Alba, de lo prozedido de la encomienda que en indios vacos de dicha Ziudad y su Provinzia tenía dicha señora de tres mill ducados cada año.

A certified copy signed by Joseph de Aguilar and various public scriveners, May 14, 1689. 44 folios.

When, in 1929, I published my Encomienda in New Spain (University of California Publications in History, vol. XIX. Second edition, 1950), it was criticized because it said nothing about the actual operation of an encomienda. No one was more acutely aware of that lack than myself, and so for thirty years I kept a weather eye out for some account of how that much lamented institution worked. I had long since come to the conclusion that the encomenderos kept no records whatever, when I came across this unique document in the private collection of Mr. John Galvin, of Santa Barbara, California, who generously placed it at my disposal.

5 The reader will recognize in the peso de plata the “piece-of-eight” of colonial times, which become our dollar. The tostón became the standard coin of Oriental trade, the “Chinese dollar,” or “dollar Mex”).

6 “There occurred in the years 1661, ’62, and ’63, darkening the sun and filling all the element of the air, an incomparable plague of locusts, which devoured and destroyed fields and crops” (Recordación Florida, II, 23). The “great difficulty” in collecting arrears, as we shall see again later on, was met by casting the Indian officers into prison until they made up the deficit.

7 Net, after deduction of tithes in the amount of 3,071/2/0. Apparently tithes were not collected on money tributes. It may be that the cost of maintaining priests and religious, and the various charges for alms, etc., met by the encomendero (see below, under CREDIT) were considered to be the equivalent.

8 Aguilar did not collect a fee for the 2,599 tostones received from his predecessors in 1664—hence the apparent discrepancy.

9 A law of Philip II of 1571 provided that an encomendero, upon absenting himself from his district, must pay into the hand of the viceroy or governor, money with which to employ a substitute (escudero) to assume his functions. The law evidently applied, as here, to encomiendas held in absentia. (Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Lib. VI, Tit. IX, Ley vi. [2d ed.; Madrid, 1756]).

10 It is interesting to note that the curandero (an uncertified physician) evidently had official status. The peste could have been any one of several diseases endemic among the native population, such as typhus, smallpox, malaria, and matlazahuatl—-this last a peculiarly virulent kind of spotted fever. Epidemics, native and imported, killed off immense numbers of Indians in the first century of the Conquest. (See Cook, S. F. and Simpson, L. B., The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century [Berkeley, 1948]).Google Scholar The medicaments prescribed by the curandero, except sugar, are all purgatives. Sugar was prescribed for fevers because of its “cooling” property. (For a brief discussion of colonial medicine, see my Many Mexicos, Chapter 16. [Berkeley, 1957]. For the standard remedies of the time, see my “Medicine of the Conquistadores,” in Osiris, vol. III, Part 1, pp. 142–164 [1937]).

11 The amount, value, and origin of the tribute in cacao are not given. Chimaltenango was paying a heavy tribute in cacao as early as 1549, 48 xiquipiles a year, or about 800 pounds. The cacao bean was used as small currency in New Spain down to the end of the old régime and had an official exchange rate (after 1551) of 100 to the real, or 400 to the tostón. Roughly, the shipment of 1668 was worth, in Guatemala, 480 tostones. Its value in Spain was at least four times as great.

12 Recordación Florida, II, 102–104. Fuentes y Guzmán’s indignation over the pitiable lot of the Indians is not to be taken quite literally. He is writing as a good criollo (white American). In the seventeenth century the Spanish Empire was staggering under an ever-growing pyramid of taxes, as the Crown faced bankruptcy and extinction, and the criollos were extremely unhappy about it. The Indians, to be sure, bore the ultimate and heaviest burden, and then, as the Crown absorbed more and more native labor in the salt pans and elsewhere, it reduced the labor supply upon which Fuentes y Guzmán and the rest depended.

13 Each year the Indians were-directed to cultivate and weed 16 acres of corn, harvest the crop, and store it in Chimaltenango. The encomendero was enjoined to do the plowing with oxen.

Each year they were to cultivate and weed 16 acres of wheat, harvest the crop, thresh out the grain by driving animals over it, and store it in Chimaltenango.

Each month they were to deliver to their encomendero four xiquipiles of cacao and 30 “chickens of Castile.”

Each year: 10 fardos (probably cargas) of chile, 10 fanegas of beans, and 12 gallons of honey; 2 dozen crocks (cántaros), 2 dozen pots (ollas), and 2 dozen clay griddles (comales, used for baking tortillas).

Each Friday they were to bring to Guatemala City 3 dozen eggs and supply 30 Indians for domestic service, or send them to work in the tile yards.

The Indians were to be supplied with food by their encomendero, who also assumed the obligation of having them taught in the Christian doctrine (the standard formula in all grants of encomiendas).

(Relación y forma que el licenciado Palacio, oydor en la Real Audiencia de Guathemala, hizo para los que obieren de bisitar, contar, tassar, y rrepartir en las provincias deste Districto. … Archivo General de Indias, Aud. Guat., leg. 128 [64–6–1]. 413 folios.)

14 The Encomienda in New Spain, Chapter 16. (1950 edition).