This Day in Labor History: April 1, 1576

On April 1, 1576, a report was published on another disease epidemic ripping through indigenous people in Mexico and undermining the Spanish forced labor force it relied on for colonization. This date itself is a window into the connections between epidemics and indigenous labor in Mexico, an important part of global labor history.

First, the entire point of colonization was forced labor. In the U.S., our vision of colonization remains warped from the one partial exception, which was the migration of Puritans to New England. Because the Puritans and their New England descendants were culture producers, that remains the dominant popular narrative of British colonialism, thanks to Thanksgiving and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Peanuts’ Thanksgiving episode and everything else. But it really was an exception. By and large, the entire point of colonization–and this is true from New York south to Argentina–was to force people to do labor for the Europeans so they could strip the wealth from the land and send it back to Europe.

Initially, the idea here was to force indigenous people to do the labor. In most places, that didn’t work out long term. There were two major reasons for this. First, there simply were not enough indigenous people to do the kind of gang labor demanded. Second, European disease epidemics decimated Native populations. Violence was a piece of this too of course, but that would be applied to any labor force. So for most of the colonies, African labor became the forced labor of choice by the mid to late 17th century. But in most of Mexico and in the Andes, indigenous populations were dense enough to continue to be the forced labor of choice for the Spanish.

However, not only were epidemics decimating indigenous populations, but they also had a major impact on the labor force. That labor force brought its own history to the table. It’s not as if Mesoamerica did not have its own work ideas and those ideas were connected to the divine. The forced conversions to Catholicism may have changed some of this, but much of it was still in place when the first recorded note about this new epidemic hit in 1576.

The Spanish instituted the encomienda upon conquest. This was basically Native labor tribute, where non-Christian people would serve in proto-slavery conditions for their new masters. This was rewarded as a grant to individuals who would then have the labor force needed to get as rich as a violent Spaniard should be. The Spanish engaged in violent colonialism, killed lots of people, and then reaped their reward through this forced labor system. By 1545, the system was laid out in documents. Sometimes though it was not forced labor but tribute. By the time of this 1576 epidemic, quite a bit of this was happening in this way, with specific amounts of grain or money or something else delineated for communities.

The Spanish responded to the decline in the population by….continuing the encomienda at the same rate but with fewer people. This infuriated indigenous people, who considered it a tax on the dead. I mean, you couldn’t expect the Spanish to suffer here! So fewer people, but the same amount of labor or tribute. For the Spanish, all of this was also religious–these indigenous laborers were building the body of Christ in the form of the Spanish state. So what would letting them off the hook mean?

At the very least, we have records from the town of Tecamachalco, which is in modern Puebla, where local leaders protested against what they considered a tax on the dead. In 1577, a group of leaders went to Mexico City to present their conditions and express their unhappiness. There were about six petitions from this area by 1578, showing a continued campaign of pressure, despite what must have been a dangerous situtation for anyone seen resisting the Spanish state. They called it tlacalaquilli miccatequitl, which translates as “the labor of the dead,” i.e., what was demanded in the encomienda, despite the declining population. The pueblos demanded a new census, one that reflected their real population and the amount of work and tribute they could in fact provide. In fact, they mostly won this as well. There were plenty of Spanish–often priests–who thought this was unfair.

Ideas of collective labor are not unknown in indigenous communities. In fact, forms of collective labor are still demanded in Oaxacan indigenous communities today with real consequences from other community members if they are not fulfilled, which is increasingly happening as evangelical Christianity undermines the tethers tying these communities together. So this wasn’t a labor protest per se in the way that we might consider it under capitalism. Everyone understood and basically accepted the situation of tribute. It was specifically the tlacalaquilli miccatequitl that was the problem. The dead were dead and could not labor. Moreover, for the Nahua, death meant release from the terrible labors of life. And of course, the increased labor required of everyone else meant that more people would die and the problem would just get worse.

So people were really angry and it became a big problem for the Spanish state. Wrote colonial official Melchio de Legaspi wrote to the king in 1577:

The collection of tribute is very belabored owing the great number of people taken by this pestilence. … The land is so transformed that it looks like another place entirely. The tributes cannot be charged, and in this you must make all diligence possible. … The same amount of tribute can no longer be charged as it once was. Almost all the pueblos are asking for a census.

So the repartimiento rose in replacement. This was a different form of forced labor, basically a tribute system in which individuals had to work for a given period for their master. It was still terrible and exploitative of course, but because it was based on the individual and not a community, if you died, others didn’t have to do more work for you. By 1579, a new census had taken place and the people of Tecamachalco were generally satisfied with this. One other thing–it took bravery to request a new census of the actual population because the census takers would often steal what little bit the indigenous people had. But the conditions of labor under the encomienda had gotten so bad that it was worth it for them.

I borrowed from Jennifer Scheper Hughes’ article, “Paying Tribute to the Dead: Religion and Spectral Labor in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Epidemics,” published in Labor in the May 2023 edition, to write this post.

This is the 595th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.