urban social stratification in colonial chile
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Urban Social Stratification in Colonial ChileAuthor(s): Mario GóngoraSource: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Aug., 1975), pp. 421-448Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2512374 .
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Urban Social
Stratification in
Colonial Chile
MARIO
GONGORA*
N this article
I
would like to
throw some light
on
the
colonial
cities
of Chile
by
showing how the popula-
tion
was
distributed and layered socially, and the
extent to which, after the
Spanish Conquest,
Old World social
strata
were
repeated or
modified in the New. I
believe that a clear
understanding of these aspects of social history
and historical sociol-
ogy
will add something to our knowledge of
urbanism in
Spanish
America. The general outline of this subject
is fairly well known;
however, every historian
knows that such panoramic studies, when
contrasted
again and again, are verified and
refined, and
eventually
even radically modified. To do this demands constant research,
which
enables the historian to approach more
closely the reality
of
the
past. By examining
the morphology of
colonial social strata as
meticulously as we examine the ingredients of
their collective
psy-
chology,
we
uncover not only a specific
historical moment but also
a
long-term historical
phenomenon.
The
Chilean cities on which this study
concentrates are
naturally
those
for
which we have
sufficiently abundant documentary records:
primarily Santiago, and the northern town of
La Serena. The latter
lived from the small-scale placer mining of gold, and from some
production of
silver and
copper at the very time-the seventeenth
century-when
the
remainder
of
Chile was
becoming
a
fundamentally
pastoral
and agrarian country. In addition,
I
have
included the
three
towns of Cuyo
(Mendoza, San Juan, San
Luis), Chillan
in
the
southern
center, and Castro on the southern island
of Chiloe. This
latter group of cities
yields sketchy records,
but some knowledge
is
possible
nonetheless.
As
for
seventeenth-century
records for the
*
This article by the distinguished Chilean historian was presented at the
1971 conference on Comparative Issues and Problems
of
Urbanization
in
Latin
America, organized
at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee by its
Language
and Area Center
for
Latin America.
The
Center was translator.
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422 HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO GONGORA
Biobio frontier, Cautln,
Valdivia, and Osorno, they have been destroyed
by war and earthquake. By
concentrating on the first-named cities,
we can fashion a sharp
enough touchstone to use for further analogies
and contrasts, some of which
will be mentioned later.
The
Urbani
and
Rural Spanish Population
The
first problem that
arises when considering urban strata
is
that during its first centuries a city in the Indies was not
legally
separated from the territory in which it was jurisdictionally set.
To
be
sure,
the
Castilian city also sometimes had quite large jurisdic-
tional districts; i.e., Seville covered a territory that was larger than
the present province of that name,1 and this fact was very impor-
tant for the supply of the
town. But the Castilian jurisdictional
district
included many lay
and ecclesiastical manors
and
the men
who
were their subjects. In addition, there were districts,
settlements,
and villages with their own councils that always possessed some de-
gree
of
jurisdictional
autonomy from the city. Hence, in the Euro-
pean city it is always
possible to differentiate legally and
politically
between those
who were
subject
to the
municipal powers
and were
inhabitants of the city, and
those who inhabited smaller settlements
or were manorial peasants.
In
the Indies, by
contrast, the land was more jurisdictionally
empty. 2 At the level
of
ordinary justice and administration,
the
authority of the king had
been delegated to the
cities,
which
were
the
fundamental nuclei of
settlement and institutional organization.
Seiiorios (manors) can be
found only in exceptional cases, and none
ever achieved anything like
the importance of that
of
Hernan
Cortes.
The
only areas subject to a separate legal order-and each with a
distinct magistracy-were the Indian villages, with their corregidores,
protectores, administradores,
doctrineros (priests), small cabildos-
which
were nonexistent in
Chile-and, finally,
their
caciques,
rem-
nants of
an ancient
seigneurial structure that was constantly
being
weakened.
The
result of
this lack
of
other
institutionally defined
nuclei of
Spanish
settlement is
that until the eighteenth century the registers
do
not
distinguish
between inhabitants who
normally
lived
in
towns,
and those
who
normally
lived
in
the
countryside.
1.
Ramon Carande, Sevilla,
fortaleza y mercado, in Anuario de
Historia
del
Derecho Espanol,
II, (Madrid, 1925), 233-401.
2.
Richard Morse,
Latin American Cities: Aspects of
Function
and
Struc-
ture, in
Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 4:4 (July 1962), 473-493.
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URBAN SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN COLONIAL CHILE
423
Let us consider Santiago. Founded in 1541, it was said
to have
possessed in 1544 no more
than about six houses, the rest being
shacks; but already the governor
had his house with two solares
(plots of land) on the square.
By 1547 there was a two-floored
house on the opposite side
of the square. Meanwhile, the
cabildo
was granting land for buildings
and small farms. It has been calcu-
lated that by 1559 the city of Santiago included some 40
blocks,
which by 1580 had increased
threefold to 120. By this time there
were new squares, the cathedral and convents had been built,
there
were several mills, etc.3
In addition to the land for buildings, vineyard blocks
and
small
farms (chacaras) had been apportioned in all directions. Although
they varied in size, according to the official position of the beneficiary,
generally speaking we can say that these tracts
measured a few
tens of varas wide (1 vara
=
approximately 25 feet) by a few
hundred long, to a maximum of 400 or 500. It was stated
in a
court case of the 1550s that these concessions could be
made
by
the
cities within a radius
of
four
leagues.
This does not mean that
jurisdiction,
in
the fullest
sense of
the
word,
ended
there. While
the common lands were situated close
in to the city site, the pasture grounds, meadows, and woodlands
could
be situated farther away.
In
the court
case mentioned above,
the
woodlands were six leagues distant.4 However,
the area within
which land
could be granted
for estancias and for cultivation only
by
the
governor
continued
under the
lawful
jurisdiction
of
the
cabildo.
Only
the
Indian villages
were
exempt; they
were
placed
under the
jurisdiction of the teniente asesor letrado (legal
advisor
of the
governor) or under
the audiencia.
This
legal framework,
based
on
the
city, began
to
change slowly.
The control of the
Chilean
corregimientos
over
rural
areas
originally
only
covered
indigenous
inhabitants
organized
into
villages (see
the
famous Tasa de
Gamboa,
1580). But,
from 1593
we note that
they
were
given jurisdiction
over
Spaniards, mestizos,
mulattoes,
and
Negroes
who
committed
crimes
against Indians,
or who lived
in
villages
and
farms;
to them also accrued the function
of the
alcaldes
mayores
de
minas
(chief
inspectors
of
mines). They
were thus
exempted
from the
jurisdiction
of
the
towns,
and
these measures
at first produced protest and opposition from the latter. But the
3.
Tom'as
Thayer
Ojeda, Santiago durante el siglo XVI, in Anales de
la
Universidad de Chile,
Tomo CXVI (Santiago,
1905), 1-82, 297-414, 475-517.
4.
Mario Congora,
Encomenderos
y
estancieros
(Santiago, 1970), p. 10.
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424
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
decision of the governors
was upheld, and at the beginning
of
the
seventeenth century the corregidores were officially
designated
justicias mayores (chief
justices), alcaldes mayores de minas
and,
somewhat later, capitanes a guerra (war commanders). Appeals
against their verdicts
were made directly before the tribunal of
the
governor's lieutenant
or the audiencia.5 The city continued
to
be the
basic unit of
settlement, but already the jurisdictional
di-
vision was less coherent.
Meanwhile, Spanish rural settlement was increasing.
For
exam-
ple, in the Quillota
Valley, beside the Santiago-Valparaiso road,
there were sufficient
small and large landowners surrounding a
Franciscan convent for a notary's office to be established there in
1629. In the same year another appeared in Colchagua, so the
in-
habitants of both these
localities no longer needed to go to the
capital to transact their
registration formalities. Those
former
doctrinas (Indian
parishes), whose settlements of natives
had
be-
come depopulated, were remodelled into rural curatos (parishes).
A
document signed by
the notary of the cabildo, in 1639, asserts
that, according to the
register of the royal tithes, the city possessed
no more than 350
inhabitants; but, of these, some 100 lived on
the estancias that came within its jurisdictional territory, thus in-
dicating that both areas were still considered to be a single unit.
This
territory was about
80 leagues long (from the River Choapa
to Maule) by 20 wide
(from the Cordillera to the Ocean). Apart
from
the 100 rural inhabitants we should not forget all those Spaniards
(legally speaking, that is,
creoles as well) who
lived
in
the country-
side as overseers,
foremen,
young vagrants or vagabonds, but who
could not
be classified as
vecinos (head
of
households).
If
the registers before
the eighteenth century do not differentiate
between
vecinos
living
in
the cities
and
those
living
in
the
country,
it is
because of the
fundamental realities and basic concepts of the
time.
Fernand Braudel
has spoken, in passing,
in
his
Civilisation
materielle, of a revival of the antique city, open to its surrounding
territory.7 But, leaving aside
the
obvious
differences
in their
splendor,
such cities never
completely ceased to exist
in
the Mediterranean
5. Actas del Cabildo de Sa-ntiago, June 18 and July 30,
1593; May 13,
1594; July 12, 1603; June 18, 1604, in Coleccion de Historiadores de Chile y
documentos relativos a la historia nacional (Santiago, 1861-1919), XX and XXI.
6.
Mario Gongora, Incumplimiento de una ley en 1639, Bolettn de
la
Academia Chilena
de
la Historia, 76 (1967), 61-96.
7.
Fernand Braudel, Civilisation
AMaterielle
t Capitalisme
(Paris, 1967), p.
401.
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URBAN
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN
COLONIAL CHILE
425
world.
Luis
de Valdeavellano
has shown, in his typology of
Spanish
cities,
the
existence of agrarian
and fortified cities, not
at
all
bourgeois '
n
the mercantile sense
of Northern Europe and North-
ern Spain, but with the privileges
and rights of a city. This
was
the dominant type on the central plain of Spain, from the Duero
to
the
Guardiana.8 Max Weber has classified as a
constant social
structure what he calls towns of farmers (Ackerbiirgerstadt),
dis-
tinct from the village because of the presence of
a
market and
specific urban industries, but where
a considerable proportion of the
citizens are farmers.9
In the Chilean case, as in the Indies in general, the small suburban
farms (chacaras)-the concession of which date from immediately
after the
foundation and that
later enter into every
form
of civil
contract-were an essential ingredient of the urban unit. Too,
it
should not be forgotten that
behind their houses many properties
possessed gardens with acequias (irrigation channels). There
are
innumerable references to these
in the notarial documentation
of
transactions in Santiago. According
to the chronicler Ovalle, par-
ticularly abundant were gardens and vineyards in the western
region of the city site. Several
houses, with shops opening onto
the streets, sold not only wine-as was the custom in Madrid and
France-but also bread, candles,
fat,
and bacon. Not until 1637
(during the years when the Royal
Exchequer,
hard-pressed
by
the
costs of the Thirty Years' War, began to tighten up the previously
lax fiscal system of America),
did such shops become taxed and
controlled.10
All
the important inhabitants
of Santiago owned principal
houses within the city site, a chdcara
on
the outskirts,
and
one
or
more estancias in the rural territory.
These represent, as it were,
an
organic unit of family fortune,
and their presence is very well
revealed to us in wills and inventories.
In the most notable cases,
during
the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the
value
of
estancias
and
farms
was
increased
by
the addition of
a
chapel,
in
which
religious
services
were
occasionally
held for
the local
popu-
lation.
However,
this
scheme
begins
to
change during
the
eighteenth
century,
due to the constant increase
in
ruralization. Proof
of
this
8.
Luis Garcla de Valdeavellano, Sobre los
Burgos y
los
Burguieses
de la
Espaiia Medieval,
(Madrid, 1960).
9.
Max Weber, Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft (Tubingen,
1925),
II,
738-739.
10. Gongora,
Encomenderos, p. 107.
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426
LIHAHR
| AUGUST |ARIO
GONGORA
is found in the lists of
inhabitants. We
possess one from
Chillan
for
the year 1737, and those
of Mendoza
and La Serena for 1739,
listing first the
vecinos of
the city site and, second,
people living
in various
valleys or country
areas-no longer merely
Indians, but
also Spanish
people or
mestizos, more or less
undifferentiated. It
is true that the unit of
jurisdiction was
kept, but the sources no
longer
recorded the city as a unitary whole.
Lists now
appeared that
sometimes consisted
exclusively of the
rural population. There is
an
exceptionally rich one from Colchagua
for the year
1743. That
of
Chillan
for the year
1737 carefully
registered the Spanish
hacendados
who owned a
house in the city even if
they owned
estancias as well, and then it listed the hacendados who lived out-
side the city in
their estancias, thus clearly
marking off
two
groups.1-
The
policy for
new
settlement that was promoted
by bishops
and
governors
during the
eighteenth century tended to restore
the
primacy of
urban settlement. In Chile, as
in many other
provinces,
there
now appeared
innumerable villages and
many
cities
with all
kinds of
privileges to attract
settlers. But since such urban
develop-
ments
were
generally
constructed
on
donated land
in the midst
of
a
complex
of large properties, the
components of
the city
site
did not usually comply with urban requirements (often having to
change
their
location), and the lands for
communal
use
could
not
be
of the
same size
as
they
had
been in
the
sixteenth
century.
Above
all,
the
rural
population adapted badly to
the new lifestyle.
In the
whole
of
central Chile, the
great
landowners preferred to continue
living
in
their
country houses, thus
depriving the new
nuclei of a
possible
commercial stimulus.
A population of small
property owners,
shopkeepers, and artisans
could only-with
difficulty-serve as
a
counterweight
to the current trend of
ruralization.
One
relatively important exception,
at
least in
its
conception,
was Los
Angeles,
a
frontier
village
founded
in
1739.
The
instructions
received
by
Pedro
de
Cordoba
y Figueroa,
a soldier
and
chronicler
charged
with
the
supervision
of its
foundation,
foresaw the distribu-
tion of
a
complete
area of
31,901
cuadras
(blocks), including
the
city site,
suburban
farms of
4
to 6
cuadras
each,
estancias, pasture
grounds,
and common land.
The
estancias varied
in
size
between
200
and
600
cuadras, according
to the rank of each of the
71
founders.
The owners were subject to the duty of keeping arms and horses and
11. Padron of
Chill'an,
Archivo
Nacional, Santiago (hereafter cited as ANS),
Real Audiencia 2755, pp. 18 and 24;
padron
of
La Serena, ANS, Real Audiencia
666, p. 2; padron of Mendoza, ANS,
Real Audiencia 2836, p. 1.
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U:RBAN
SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN
COLONIAL
CHILE
427
of
presenting
themselves
at the barracks in
urgent
need.
Military
obligation
featured as a
condition
in contracts of
bargain
and
sale.12
In
this
modest way
reappeared,
on the
Araucanian
frontier,
some-
thing
of the old
concept of
the city as a
union of
warriors-cultivators-
cattle owners.13
Evidently the
sixteenth-century
concept of
the city in the
Indies
had
been modified
in
good measure by
the
tendency towards rural
settlement.
The minutes of
the
Santiago
cabildo
record the
tenmporary
absence of
regidores who left
seasonally
for their
rural
properties.
We
find a
similar
observation in
the Memoria
de
gobierno
of
the
Viceroy La Palata,
in
Lima, when he
left office in 1690.
But,
even
so, the structural foundation was never completely lost, despite the
double
assault of
both a rural
society and
a state with
basic
concepts
defined in
terms of
territory, as
is particularly
noticeable
with
the
institution of
the
intendencias at
the end
of the
eighteenth
century.
Urban
Social
Strata: The
Aristocracy
Our
fundamental purpose
here is to
identify the
strata which
we
consider to be
basic
to the colonial
city:
the
aristocrats, the
merchants,
the artisans and
poor
Spaniards, and
the urban free
castes.
For reasons, mainly of lack of space, it is necessary to leave aside
the
ecclesiastical
hierarchy
with all its
significant divisions.
While
the
bishop,
as well
as the
governor
and oidores of the
audiencia
were
essentially
superimposed, as exceptional
dignitaries, on
the
social
strata,
the
secular clergy,
particularly at its
highest level
(the canons),
actually
formed part of the
local
aristocracy,
as,
in many
cases,
did
the
urban parish
priests. The
rural
priest was very much absorbed
into
the
society in which he
lived. The
religious
orders, on the
other
hand, were a
unique
force, possessing
very
much their own
char-
acteristics,
and a social
analysis of
them would
require
another study.
We shall
begin, as is
customary,
with the
aristocracy,
the
stratum that
constituted the
very nerve
center
of the city
and
on
which docu-
mentation is
most
abundant.
An
opening
observation: American
stratification derived,
as did
that
in
ancient and
medieval Europe,
from
military
stratification.
Social
institutions
have
sacred and
military
origins. Spanish
cities
had
classified
their
inhabitants as
caballeros
(gentlemen)
and
peones
(footsoldiers), whereas the cities of the Indies placed at the summit
the
encomenderos-so
often
inaccurately
named
vecinos
in
the
docu-
12.
ANS,
Capitania
General 689,
no. 8045.
13. James
Lockhart,
Spanish
Peru,
1532-1560
(Madison,
1968),
chapter 2.
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428
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO GONGORA
mentation, despite the clarity of the reales cedulas in this
respect.
Encomenderos were subject to qualified
military
service with
their
horses. Beneath these were the
simple moradores or inhabitants,
and lower still were the soldados (soldiers), a military group forming
a sort
of urban populace from the time of the Conquest. In
the
sixteenth century these soldiers,
who lived on the hospitality of the
encomenderos and rich inhabitants, received soldadas or salaries, paid
by their patrons or by the royal
exchequer. We find this sort of
soldier in Chile until the first years of the seventeenth century, when
the Crown created a permanent
army and established it on the
frontiers. This group can then no
longer be considered urban as
such; but the soldiers or mozos de soldada of the decades immediately
following the Conquest were such a group, even though they were
not houseowning inhabitants. The
peruleros (soldiers from Peru),
who participated in the
sixteenth-century Peruvian civil wars, can
be found
during these years, not
only in Chilean cities but also
throughout Spanish America.
Groups that originally consisted of warriors eventually lost such
a
character and with time became
a social group. Just as the
men
who
had been medieval knights increasingly during the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries attempted to limit their duty to
present themselves for militaiy
service and demanded an ever-higher
standard of wealth as a minimal
reward, just so the Chilean en-
comenderos, who, until 1600 had
been summoned over and over
again to attend expeditions to the
south, during the last decades
of the
century resisted such
calls-sometimes violently. The feudal
charactelistics of the encomienda
increasingly lost their meaning, and
the creation, about
1601,
of a
permanent
army
on
the
frontier
re-
duced
them
to a theoretical
obligation.
But it was
precisely during
this period
that the
Militias
(or companfas
del
nutmero)
were
in-
troduced
into
the
Indies, arriving
in Lima
in 1596 and in Chile
a
little
after
1608. Earmarked
for service
in the
defense of
the land
against Indians,
or
against
attacks
by
corsairs and
pirates, they proved
insignificant as a military force; but they
did constitute
a
new
body
of
officers, implying
the creation of
new
urban
military
ranks
that
were
sought
after
by
citizens
of
every
stratum.
Promotion to
lieu-
tenant captain, sergeant major,
or maestro de
campo (field
com-
mander), signified a social distinction, even though the holders of
these offices
might
no
longer
be
in
service
but
retired. At the
other
extreme,
the soldiers of the militia
were
principally
men
of
lower or
lowest
rank,
as is
clearly proved by
the
enrollments
of
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URBAN SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN
COLONIAL
CHILE 429
various provinces from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth
centuries.
Thus, the social ranks, through
an inverse process to the original
one, were once again invested
with military roles. This constitutes
a revealing testament to the
perpetuation of medieval notions.
As
yet there did not exist, even
among merchants and artisans,
a purely
civic sphere of interest, which was to play such a significant
part
in
the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
The composition of the aristocracy
can be approached quantita-
tively by studying the proportion
of encomenderos to the total Spanish
population. James Lockhart14
has shown
in
the case of Peru the
gradual progress between 1532
and 1560 from the nonselective grant
of encomienda as a reward to all those Spaniards who had come
to
the Peruvian coast and
were interested
in
obtaining one, to the
aristocratic institution
of the years of the first Viceroy Caniete (1556-
1560).
Towards
the end
of this
period
the
criteria
for
assignment
was
the
length
of
stay
in
Peru, nobility of origin, and participation
in military actions during the
years of Pizarro and the civil
wars.
By about 1560 encomiendas
were no longer given to artisans,
who
had been previously able to
hold them. One can estimate
roughly
that by about 1540 the encomenderos of Peru, Quito, and Alto
Peru
numbered approximately 500, a figure which was not subsequently
surpassed; the total number
of Spaniards there in 1545
must have
been between
4,000
and
5,000;
a
decade
later, about 8,000.
The
proportion of encomenderos
at the end of the period that we might
call
that
of the
Conquest
(1555-1560)
would thus
be '116
of the
Spanish population. Naturally,
the
proportion would vary
with each
city, depending
on
the
number
of
tributary
Indians.
Cuzco,
where
200
conquistadores
arrived with Almagro
in
1534, produced
such a
reward for 80 or 90 participants. Quito, in 1569, possessed a ratio
of
50
encomenderos to 250
Spaniards, which
is
still
a high percentage
of
1
in
5.
On the other hand,
the
figure given by Lopez de
Velasco,
and used
in
a
recent
estimate,15
indicates that
only
1
in
66,
or 30
of
the
2,000 Spaniards,
were
encomenderos
by
the
period
1570-1580.
The
Chilean case
is
quite
distinct. It shows
an important evolu-
tion
from
the
Santiago
of
the
sixteenth
century
to
that
of the seven-
teenth
century:
14. Ibid., passim.
15. Jorge
Enrique Hardoy and
Carmen Aranovich, Urbanizacion en America
Hisp'anicaentre
1580
y 1630,
Boletin
del
Centro de
Investigaciones Historicas
y Esteticas, II (1969),
9-89.
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430
I-IAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MAIRIO
GONGORA
By about 1570-1580, Santiago had some 375 householders;
the encomenderos numbered 27, that is,
almost 1 in 14
(not
counting the encomiendas of yanaconas, insignificant from
the
social point of view). By 1655 the number of houses was 516;
the
encomenderos with
more than 6 Indians
(the others were
not even registered for the purposes of a military convocation)
numbered 164; that is to say, a little less
than
1
in
3.16
These figures show a significant change
in
the social standing
of
the encomenderos. Immediately
after the
Conquest they were
a truly aristocratic group
that
emerged
from
the
first nonselective
encomienda (in 1546 Pedro de Valdivia reduced the original 60
encomenderos
to
only 32). They controlled
the
personal service
of
several
tens of thousands of
tributary
Indians
who populated
the
city territory, although
we cannot
have
much
confidence
in
the
figure of 60,000 Indians given
for
the inital period by a soldier who
wrote
in
1598.
About 1570
the
encomenderos
controlled
%
of the
gold extracted
from
the
placers; however,
their
productivity began
a steep decline
in
the following decade, coinciding with
the
great
epidemics
of the
years immediately
after 1590.
On
the
other hand, by
1655 the
mining economy
in
the whole
of central Chile had given way to a pastoral economy, based on
the
exportation
of
tallow, hides,
and other
products derived from
cattle raising,
destined for
Lima and
for the
recently created (1645)
garrison
of
Valdivia,
which
was
also
an
important
consumer
of
flour from central
Chile.
Since cattle raising
required very little
labor, the indigenous population-already considerably diminished-
was distributed
among
a
larger
number
of
Spaniards.,
through
the
use of diverse legal expedients (orders
to
quit, partial encomiendas,
etc.).
The encomienda
alone
thus
no
longer
guaranteed
an
aristo-
cratic position, and we thus find individuals from a more varied
social range
in
the
list
of
1655.
The decisive factor
in
achieving
aristocratic
status became the association of
an
encomienda
with an
estancias
made
powerful by
its
extent
and
proximity
to the
Santiago-
Valparaiso
road.
In
addition,
the
encomienda
was
not the
only
means
of
acquiring labor;
to it
were
added the
enslavement
in
war of
the
Araucanian
Indians,
black
slavery,
the
pinning
of the Indians
to
the estancias
through
verbal
or
written
agreements that implied
the
granting
of the use of a
parcel
of land and a
salary paid
in
clothing, or the hiring of Indians to an encomendero. The lack of
complete registers prevents
all
estimation of the
number of Indians
16. Gongora,
Encomenderos,
pp.
102
ff., 138
ff.
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URBAN SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN COLONIAL CHILE
431
who were encomendados by about 1655;
but it is
enough
to know
that the individual encomiendas oscillated between 6
and 50 tribu-
tary Indians
in
the decades around that date.
The
smallest en-
comiendas, which were
not
even included
in
the
registration,
were
given to residents of no special distinction, to widows and spinsters
of
great families, to
retired
officers of the army of Arauco,
etc.
On
the
other hand, La Serena, which continued to
live from
gold
panning and newly discovered silver and copper deposits, conserved
for a longer period the
structure in
which
encomenderos constituted
a
more clearly defined aristocratic group. They totalled
12 in
1623,
out of a total of 90 inhabitants recorded about 1630 by Vazquez
de Espinosa: that is, a proportion of 1 in 7. The encomiendas were
here relatively more populated than in Santiago, and the income
from mining allowed those who profited from it to possess smithies
and
ore-crushers. They owned small ships for commerce with
Peru
and
also
estancias for cattle within the district of the city.17
It would appear that the case of Santiago is not exceptional and
is repeated in other cities with a farming economy. Comparison
with
Tunja
is illustrative. This
New Granada city possessed
476
houses
in
1623 (inhabited by 3,300 Spaniards) and 161 encomenderos,
that is, a ratio of almost exactly 1 in
3.18
We could thus tentatively
suggest that a mining economy based on placers-the oldest form
of
large-scale production
in
the Indies-tended to preserve the status
of the
encomenderos as a superior group; and that, on the other
hand,
an
economy based on estancias, cereal farms, and vineyards
tended to
form a
landowning
aristocratic
class,
in which
the pos-
session of encomiendas was not the only decisive factor.
The
status of encomendero had been absorbed, in the agrarian
central
Chile
of
the seventeenth century, by a class of owners
(Besitzerklasse) -to use the terminology of Max Weber-in which
a
combination of
diverse
factors
played a part
in
the achievement
of
power.
First
of all,
the
powerful had to have influence with the
governors, who were
the
incarnation of the state. For the encomienda
and
the
grant
of
land
were a kind of
prebend, distributed by the
state as a
reward to
the
conquistador
or
to the settler. In my judg-
ment,
this
prebendary nature of personal fortune, this dependence
on
the
state,
constitutes
one of
the historical
elements of longest
duration in the Hispanic American aristocracies.
17. Ibid., pp. 40-41.
18. Vicenta Cortes Alonso, Tunja y
sus
vecinos, in Revista de
Indias,
Anio 25 (1965), 155-207.
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432
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO GONGORA
Secondly, sufficient wealth was necessary to acquire
and exploit
suburban farms and estancias, once the initial phase
of grants was
over and the regime of buying and selling had begun. The possession
of principal houses, furniture, and clothes appropriate
to rank-at
a time when imported household goods commanded such high
prices-suggests the requirement for cash. Given the traditional
poverty of Chile (due to the low export prices
imposed by Lima),
a good part of this cash was acquired on credit, through mortgages
on which annual interest payments (censos) were made to merchant
capitalists, convents, or the lenders of the sesmos de indios.19
The profits from the export market on shipments to Peru and the
garrisons of the south were increased by some landowners through
enterprises
that
were truly
mercantile:
importation
of clothes from
Peru, expeditions to Cuyo,
Tucuman,
etc. The highest-ranked en-
comendero-landowner
of the
mid-century, a
certain
Lisperguer, ap-
pears under the name of an intermediary
in
the register of merchants,
so
as
not to belittle his
status.
His
brother
lived in Lima and traded
with
Chile,
in
partnership
with
a merchant
living
in
Santiago.
In
the
port
of
Valparaiso
in
1566 there were
encomenderos
who
main-
tained
not
only warehouses but
also stores.20
However, we would prefer to call this a trading rather than
a mercantile element
within
the
aristocracy.
Just
as the
Conquests
were
authentic war
enterprises
for
spoils
and
domination,
so the
successors to
the
conquistadores
often undertook
enterprises such as:
contracting
for the collection
of
the
tithes; supplying
garrisons with
flour,
dried
meat,
or
arcabuz rope; buying official positions, to which
accrued
the
right
of
receiving dues;
etc.
All
this is well
documented
in Chilean research,21
and
also
corresponds
to
general
trends of Euro-
pean society
in the monarchical
age.22
In
Andalusia,
for
example,
it is
an even
older
feature
of
nobility,
both
high
and
low.23
However,
the
urban aristocracy also had to maintain the status
and ostentation
appropriate
to
noble
life.
Nobility
of
origin, genuine
or
fictitious,
derived
from
descendance
from
either
the
conquistadores,
19. Sesmos (le
indios came from the one-sixth part of mining
income that
belonged
to those Indians
who
had
been encomendados
in
Chile.
20. Benjamln
Vicufna Mackenna,
Historia
de
Valparaiso (Santiago, 1869);
ANS, Escribanos de
Santiago, fs. 290, 334,
and 434v.
21. Gongora, Encomenderos, chapter 2.
22. Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der
Verfassungs-und
Sozialgeschichte
(Got-
tingen, 1968), pp.
271-273.
23. Richard Kenetzke, Forschungsprobleme
zur Geschichte der wirtschaft-
lichen BeWtigung
des
Adels
in
Spanien, (Homenaje
a Ramon
Carande)
(Madrid,
1963).
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URBAN
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
IN COLONIAL CHILE
433
the
first settlers, or the
Spanish nobility: it
demanded a complete set
of
values held in social esteem, a certain
decorum and an ethos,
genuine
or conv7entional,
corresponding to the social model of the
gentleman. In addition, it
involved a class of urban patricians,
not
merely a nobility. It
implied a certain level of participation in
urban
life, the discharge of the office of
corregidor, alcalde,
regidor,
and the other civic
functions, or the duties of
an officer in the
urban
militia. There was a colonial
cut1suis
hoonorum,
which involved
holding these positions.
What
degree
of social
mobility
can be
observed
in
this land-
owning
and urban class? War was the great
channel of mobility
in
the Middle Ages. We need only recall the German
mninisteriales
and
the
caballeria villana of
Castile. As we have
seen,
the original en-
comenderos
of the Indies
derived from the Conquest. Once this
had finished, social mobility
came about
through other channels
opened by the imperial
bureaucracy and a
society in the process
of
becomning aristocratic.
The favor of the governor was the source
of
all grants, military posts,
ranks
in
the
militia
and corregimientos.
Ecclesiastical
posts-bishoprics, archbishopiics,
canonries,
the
regular
prelacies-provided
an
embellishment
to an
aristocratic group. The
higher ranks of the bureaucracy of the audiencia were open to Creoles,
at least
outside
the
provinces
of
their
origin.
The
chief means of
ascent,
however, continued to
be
through
marriage
into
great families.
One
document,
the
genealogical
difficulties of
which
permit only
a
rough
approximation, allows
us
to say that
among
the
164 en-
comenderos
of
Santiago
in
1655,
59
names derived from
Santiago
encomenderos
of the
previous
century, through paternal
or
maternal
lineage.
The
majority, 105,
represent,
in diverse
ways,
an ascendant
group;
they
came
from
provincial
cities or from
Spain itself,
or
fron
families
of the
capital
that
had not arrived n the sixteenth
century.
There
is
no
special
difference in
poweIr
or
prestige
between
new
and old families within this
scheme,
save for those
encomenderos
who
were
exceptionally
low in
rank
and who
certainly
never
came
from old families.
But downward
mobility
can also
be
traced in
some cases
amongst
these latter.
Provincial
honors and
marital
alliances
contributed
considerably
towards
leveling
the
members of
this
urban
and
landowning upper
class.
The registers of the provincial cities in the first half of the
eighteenth
century-we
have none
for
Santiago-give
us
a
glimpse
of the strata
in
these more modest societies.
Nearly
all
these
registers
derive
from
the measure ordered
by
the crown from
1737
to
1739
to
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434 HAHIR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO GONGORA
obtain a voluntary contribution after
the burning down of
the
royal palace in Madrid, a fiscal objective that naturally casts serious
doubts on the veracity of the declarations referring to the personal
fortunes of the citizens in question.
Mendoza, a well-registered city, gives
us the following results: 11
vecinos declared
more
than 10,000 pesos worth
of
possessions; they
all
carry
Don
before
their
names, 7
have the rank of maestros de
campo in
the militias
and
1
that of sargento
mayor; they all possessed
houses
in
the city, and had vineyards,
slaves, carretas (long, narrow
carts), suburban farms, estancias;
one
of
them declared 30,000 pesos,
and
two
26,000 pesos.
Of
the
other
vecinos, 85 declared property
worth from 1,000 to 10,000 pesos, and 51 less than 1,000. Amongst
the latter were mixed
both
those
who
carried
Don
with
their
name
and
those who
did not.
Vineyards and
parts
of
vineyards
form the
patrimony
most
commonly declared by all the categories.
Almost
certainly
there
were
other
inhabitants with
less than
1,000 pesos,
but
the
registration
clerks
must
have considered
listing
them
pointless
for
the fiscal purposes
of
the operation.
Within the urban militias-
made
up
of a total
of
266
soldiers,
in
addition to a few
officers
in
regular service-there figured a company
from the nobility, with
one captain, one lieutenant, one second lieutenant and 32 soldiers,
all classified
as
Don.
Such
offices,
as
well
as those
of
councillor
and
of
corregimiento, constituted the honors associated with
social
standing
in this
aristocracy
of
winegrowers
and owners-of-carts
for
the
trade
in
wine with Buenos Aires.
The 1739
register
of
La
Serena,
more detailed but lacking the total
amount
collected
in
cash, is less serviceable
for an overall analysis.
In
any case, its big difference with the
previous case-and with all
Chilean cities of the eighteenth century-is that the encomienda
continued to be powerful. One encomienda there included 80 to
90
tributary Indians,
an
unthinkable
figure in central Chile, even
in
the
previous century.
In
addition,
there were estancieros and
trapicheros (owners
of
ore-crushers)
who were
also
powerful,
as
is
evidenced by
their
using black slave
labor. Silver mines, smelters,
copper smithies, vineyards, mills,
ore-crishers, subu-urbanarms, and
estancias,
constituted the
objects of
local fortune, a situation that
shows no important structural differences from the city as it was
during
the
previous century.
The
continuation of mining and the
encomienda preserved
the
urban
structure
unaltered. The proudly
titled
vecinos
feudatarios
and
the
mounted
militia
company, called
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URBAN SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN COLONIAL CHILE
435
Guzmanes, together with
the
cabildo, preserved
the
honorary
distinctions.24
In summary then, in Chile we can distinguish two types of towns
of encomnenderos, general throughout the sixteenth
century. First,
the La Serena type was characterized by greater provincial
isolation,
a lower political and administrative level, and the
survival of the
mining encomienda, with a small group of old-established
families
at the summit of the local aristocracy. Secondly, the Santiago type,
was one
in
which the significance of the encomienda was subse-
quently supplanted by that of the great properties
and of the political
career
in
honors among the urban patricians. This resulted in
forma-
tion of a larger and more varied aristocracy, one, whose power did
not derive from a single factor, but arose rather
from the accumula-
tion of all the sources of power, wealth, and prestige.
In a town
of
this
type, the encomiendas themselves were smaller
and more nu-
merous than
in
the first
type, due to
the
predominance of a pastoral
economy.
In
terms of historical sociology, in the
La Serena type
of
town noble
status
and
the
aristocratic class tend to
coincide, while
in the Santiago type the fundamental reality is a landowning
class,
where
the
noble
element
of
status is
supplanted by
the
prestige
in-
herent in the possession of land and official posts.
Up
to
what point
these
types
of
aristocracy
can be generalized is
something that would require a greater abundance
of specific data
than that
which
I
presently possess.
No
fruitful
comparisons
can
be
drawn
with
port towns (such
as
Buenos
Aires),
with their
mercantile
patricians, mining
towns
and
villages (such
as
Zacatecas
or
Durango)
that did not possess encomiendas,
or
those towns of
the Caribbean
that
were highly dependent
for commerce on the
fleets
and that lived
on
black slave labor,
after the extinction
or
freeing
from
service of
the Indians who
had been encomendados.25
Comparison
of systems
of stratification would require
a certain
similarity of economic con-
stitution,
or
rather,
of
population
structure.
A
comparison
could
be
drawn
between
Chilean cities and those of New Granada.
Tunja,
for
example,
an
agrarian city exporting
to
Cartajena, possessed
a
resi-
24. Padron
of Mendoza,
ANS, Real
Audiencia
2836,
pieza
1;
padr6n
of
La Serena,
ANS,
Real Audiencia 666, pieza
2.
25. On Buenos Aires, see Jose Luis Moreno, La estructura social y demogr4fica
de
Buenos
Aires en
el
aiio
1778
(Rosario, 1965);
on Zacatecas,
see
Hardoy and
Aranovich,
Urbanizacion
en
America ;
on Durango,
see Woodrow Borah,
Fran-
cisco
de
Urdifiola's Census
of
the
Spanish
Settlements in
Nueva
Vizcaya,
1604,
HAHR,
35:3 (Aug.
1955),
398-402; on Cuba,
see
Ramiro Guerra y
S'anchez,
et al., Historia
de la Nacion Cubana (Habana,
1952),
I.
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436
IiAHIR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
dential center inhabited mainly by encomenderos; but their number,
proportionally large in comparison with the total number of citizens-
as we have already said-implies that there were considerable dif-
ferences in status among them, as was the case in the city of Santiago
de Chile. Such differences were reflected in the differing numbers
of
tributary Indians held and in
the differences in agricultural wealth.
The data on encomenderos refer
to 1623 for
Tunja26
and to
1655
for
Santiago, but they must reflect
characteristics of long duration.
The
landowning aristocracy
was stronger than in the
initial
scheme
(the vecino-encomendero). It
derived its strength from an economic
development,
which
could
not be controlled within
the
model
of
an
institution for medieval warfare, and ended by dominating social
and urban organization. Unfortunately, it
is
not possible,
on the
basis
of
existing literature, to amplify on these approximations
and
contrasts.
The Merchants
From the
point
of view of
social regard and esteem,
French
merchants at
the
beginning
of
the seventeenth century, according
to
their fellow
countryman
Charles
Loyseau,
are
in
the lowest social
rank
of those
considered as gentlemen, being thought
of
as
honorable
men,
or honest
persons,
and
bourgeois
of
the Cities:
qualities
that
are
attributed
neither to farmers,
neither
to bailiffs,
nor
to artisans,
and
even
less still to
laborers,
who
are considered to be base
per-
sons. 27
Something
similar
could
be said
of
Spain and the
Indies.
The
merchants constitute an
intermediary class, not despised
at all,
but
neither
a class that
was
aspiring
to social or
political supremacy,
working
instead
in
an
agreed
symbiosis
with
the
aristocracy
and,
thence, with the political and ecclesiastical powers.
In the West this acquisitive
class (Erwerbsklasse) (to use the
terminology
of Max
Weber)
always
had
two chief occupations:
exchange,
and
merchandising
as
specific to
the
great merchants.
Lower down were the
shopkeeping
merchants
and the tratantes
(dealers).
In
the Indies
also,
there
were a
few
deposit
and loan
bankers, as
has
been
shown
in
Lima
98
but
they
were
of
no great
26. Cortes Alonso,
Tunja y sus vecinos. In Tunja
the
encomendados
varied between 80 and 2,000; in seventeenth-century Santiago, Chile they never
rose above 80; in
La
Serena,
never
above 100.
27. Quoted
by H. Lapeyre,
Une
famille
de marchands: les
Ruiz
(Paris, 1955),
p.
116.
28. Guillermo Lohmann
Villena,
Banca y credito en la
Amrnica Espafiola.
Historia, 8
(Santiago, 1969),
289-307.
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URBAN
SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION IN COLONIAL CILE
437
social significance because
the system of
loans was fully developed
through
censos and
commercial loans.
Importing and exporting
were the
fundamental merchandising
activities
of the merchants
of the Indies and almost
always both
activities were
combined in
the same persons. In
contrast
with
Spain
and
Mexico, the
great
merchant of Lima also possessed a
shop, usually
on the
Plaza
de Armas or in the streets
around
it,
and there was
a
special
commercial area of town.
The Lima
merchants of the sixteenth
century-studied by
Lock-
hart29-usually worked on a basis of
family ties; the
son did not
immediately abandon the
business. In
the sixteenth century the
merchants were not specialized: in addition to the importation of
clothing (a
word which in reality covered
innumerable lesser
manu-
factured
goods), they
traded in horses
and black slaves; they lent
money at higher rates of
interest than
those of the tax contracts; they
insured
remittances of
money to the Peninsula; and
they invested in
companies of
the most diverse nature,
generally those
that repre-
sented short-term
investments. The Lima
merchant was characterized
by
his lack
of
interest in
investing
in
land; he sometimes
even
lived
in a rented house.
Neither was he
interested in obtaining en-
comiendas. The merchant group in Peru-which organized itself
into a
consulado or
merchant guild at the beginning
of the seven-
teenth
century-included both
independent merchants and, agents
of
the
commercial houses
of Seville.
The
Chilean merchants
were
certainly both importers and ex-
porters: they
imported
clothing, sugar, tobacco; they
exported tallow,
hides,
or
wheat. They
received these products from the landowners
in
exchange
for
manufactured products. Their financial
transactions
resulted in their acquiring
the right to
ship the agricultural products
that were
deposited
in
the warehouses
of Valparaiso
(or
in
the
lesser
ports, respectively).
There, was
also a trade in mules to
Alto
Peru, and in
manufactured products to
northeast
Argentina in ex-
change
for
Negro slaves who had
entered
through
Buenos
Aires.
This lack of
specialization is
more
noticeable
than in
Lima, be-
cause
in
Chile the
merchant
liked
to
invest
in
land.
It
is
true
that
Alonso
del
Campo y Lantadilla, the most
powerful Chilean
merchant
by
about
1590-1630, possessed
luxurious houses and
vineyards,
but
no land; he invested large sums in the form of censos. But it is
a
unique
case.
There
are
numerous references
in
wills and
contracts
to
merchants who
possessed
suburban
farms and
vineyards
near the
29.
Lockhart, Spanish
Peru, chapter
5.
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438
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
city site, and
estancias in
widely varying parts of
the country.30 In
the city,
they possessed a
shop, annexes, and a
yard, sometimes
all
on the same square; some constructed rooms for rent in the patio.
In
other cases they
owned tanneries,
mills, etc. The characteristics
of an
agricultural economy pervaded.
Their
landowning certainly did not
impede
multiple activities of
a
more truly mercantile
nature. They
occasionally undertook varied
business with
ships'
masters and pilots; for the trade with
Lima
they
formed
companies
amongst themselves, or with other
Spaniards,
and
occasionally
with the
secular clergy; they lent risk
money (at
10
percent) to
other merchants; they
bought ships or shares in
ships;
they contracted for the collection of the royal tithes, and later also
other taxes, singly or in
company.3'
We
are
here
more
interested in
characterizing their features as a
group within
the social hierarchy, than
in describing
their economic
activities. It
is notable, of course, that
they generally
were not Creoles
native to the
land in which they
operated. In the
vast majority of
cases, they came from the
Peninsula. There were
also a few
Italians
and
Levantines, and, in the
mid-seventeenth
century, various Portu-
guese. They
were not
encomenderos, except in the
very first years
of the Conquest, when Valdivia wanted to give Indians to a few
merchants
to whom he
owed
money,
or
whom
he
wanted
to attract
to the
new
land. However, there are insufficient
monographs
on
this
subject
for us to be able to speak with
certainty
of
merchant
families; during the sixteenth
and seventeenth
centuries,
when
such
families
actually did reside in
Chile,
there is no evidence to
suggest
that
several successive
generations
dedicated themselves to com-
merce.
It
was not that the
merchant group lacked
a
corporate
sense.
They would sometimes
appear
at the cabildo
to
defend
their
interests.
In
1580,
at
the
cabildo
abierto, they
blocked
the
arguments
of
the
encomenderos
on
matters
concerning
the
royal
quintos,
and obtained
the
support
of
the
governor.
In
1642,
and
during
the
following
years,
on
the matter
of the Union
de
Armas, they negotiated and
made
30.
On Alonso del
Campo y
Lantadilla, see
G6ngora,
Encomenderos, pp.
94-95. On
the lands
of merchants
in
the
period
1580-1600,
ANS, Escribanos
de Santiago 3, fs. 371; 4, fs. 168, 172, 175v., 189v.; 7, fs. 216; 8, fs. 120, etc.;
Real
Audiencia
2319,
p.
1
(1611); Real
Audiencia 1179,
p.
1
(1641,
Pedro del
Portillo en
Quillota); Jesuitas
122,
fs.
52-54 (1641,
comerciante
italiano Nicolas
Otavio en
Quillota);
and
Escribanos de
Santiago 217, fs. 198v.
(1651, Otavio).
31. Loan and company contracts
abound
in ANS,
Escribanos de
Santiago.
On
the contracting for the
diezmos,
see
Congora,
Encomenderos, p.
87 ff.
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URBAN
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
IN COLONIAL CHILE
439
contracts as a group on an
equal basis
with the vecinos. From 1577
on,
election to the cabildo
was open
to distinguished
merchants,
and
various important
merchants could
be
regidores.32
Concerning
the upward mobility
of the merchants, the
docu-
mentation of
Santiago provides some
interesting
facts. There are
cases
of artisans
who
became merchants (a
tailor, at
the
end of
the
sixteenth century); of
merchants
who became
notaries and
founded
dynasties of
notaries, lawyers, and
landowners (the
Toro
Mazote family,
from the end of the
sixteenth
century and throughout
the
following
century). Alonso del
Campo y Lantadilla
succeeded
in
marrying his daughter to
the son of
an oidor; he had
bought the
office of alguacilazgo
mayor,
the chief law-enforcement office, and
after
his
resignation the
office was filled by the two successive
husbands of his daughter,
the second of
whom was an active
trades-
man
who
then
assigned to
another merchant the direct
management
of
his
shop, without
abandoning
successful merchant
enterprise on
the Buenos
Aires route. He
sent
clothes from Chile and
imported
cattle
for his
own
large estancia near
Santiago.33
In
this case, the
title
of Councillor
worked
very favorably for his
social
prestige and
distinction, since
it gave him a seat in
the cabildo.
Acquisition of offices gave a powerful stimulus to the process
of
aristocratization in the
merchant
group. Some such offices were
modest
in
rank
but presumably
handsome profits
accrued to such
of
their
possessors as
the Tesorero
de la Santa
Cruzada.
This
office
was filled
exclusively by
traders during the first half of the
seven-
teenth
century.
In
the
same
way, the ranks in
the
militia
acted
as
a
means
of
ennoblement, and in 1615
the Compantfa del
Comercio
was
organized in
Santiago.
Among
49
retired
captains
in the
militia
of
the capital in
1655, 17 or 18
were or had been
merchants.
Social
mobility was evidence by
the
rise
of simple
shop
em-
ployees
and
agents
to
the status of merchants of
importance.
Martln
de
Briones,
an
employee
of
Del Campo
in
the
1590s, received
authorization to
do some
retailing,
and then to take
merchandise
to sell in
Lima.
He
had become
an
important
merchant 20
years
later.34
Sumptuous domestic circumstances and the number
of black
slaves
were
another indicator
of rank.
One
example appeared
in
the
house
32.
Gongora, Encomenderos,
pp. 71-77.
33. Ibid., p. 101.
Note
also
the case
of
a tailor
(Martin
Garcia) who rose
to
become a merchant, p. 80.
34. ANS,
Escribanos de
Santiago,
8,
fs.
241 (1593); and 9, fs. 354
(1597).
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440 ITAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
of Alonso
del
Campo, which included 16 male
and female
slaves,
plus many
paintings,
rugs,
and
books-rarities in the
Chile of
1630.
The
merchant of Chile and of the Indies-as of Spain, according
to
Henri Lapeyre-was characterized by a marked
piety.35
Several
founded chaplaincies and the
beforemnentioned
Del Campo
dedicated
the greater part
of his fortune to a
foundation of the
Order
of
Santa
Clara. Two
merchants we know of, Pedro
del
Portillo and
Domingo
de
Madureyra,
gave one-half, or all, of their
personal
wealth
to the
Jesuits. At the
end of the sixteenth century, we find merchants who
served as
administrators and treasurers of
the City hospital; later
they were
treasurers of convents. The
tratantes, who were dedicated
to short-distance trade in the produce of the land, were men of
little social significance-hardly greater
than that of grocers and
innkeepers. One such person, who made
his will in 1636, listed as
possessions only
40 square varas of land, one mulatto slave, and
two
earthenware jars; he
remainied
in debt for
interest on censos.36
The
merchants
of Chile were subject
to
continual
instability.
In the sixteenth century this was as a
result of the war, which bled
their
resources
by required assistance to
the soldiers.
In
the
seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, the cause
was a struggle with the
merchants of Lina, who imposed upon them low prices for tallow
and
wheat. Jn
the seventeenth century,
noticeably,
there
were many
merchants who were legally dispossessed
or went bankrupt.
The registers that we possess of the
provincial cities for the
first half of the
eighteenth
century-specifically La Serena, in 1738-
give us a picture of some merchants who
possessed no more than
a
shop. They
owned no suburban farms or estancias, and were
highly dependent on the trade with
Santiago.
In
Mendoza, for
that
same
year, only
six general stores were mentioned; they belonged
to
people of
small to medium fortunes (from 200 to 2,000 pesos).
The fact that
four of them carry Don
before their name, makes
us
wonder
whether they were actually merchants or really property
owners.
The
observation of Eisenstadt, that in
the historic-bureaucratic
empires the
distinction between wealth and prestige is of a structural
nature,37 s moderately well confirmed
in
the
Chilean
case. Moder-
ately
because the
merchant
was not
actually
the
object
of
open
dis-
35. Lapeyre, Une famille, p.
116.
36. ANS, Escribanos de Santiago, 177B, fs. 111.
37. S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York, 1963),
pp.
82-86.
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URBAN
SOCIAL SIRATIFICATION IN COLONIAL CHILE
441
respect-as were the medieval Jewish
moneylenders-and
because
the cursus honorum
was open to them
through the channels we have
indicated. But the thesis is verified in
the sense that such honors
were
part
of
an
aristocratic, as
opposed to mercantile
or
bourgeois,
society. And at the
same time,
through a paradox which was very
much a
charactelistic
of the society
of the
Indies-as it
was
of
Andalucla-a good part of the
lucrative businesses and
enterprises
was
in
the hands of
rich landowners-a very few of
whom, however,
figured through an
intermediary in
the commercial registers of
the
city. The urban
patricians of
Buenos Aires present, perhaps, the
principal relative exception. Even
though they were possessors of
estancias, they dedicated themselves mainly to commerce and did
not
intend, says Concolorcorvo, to
found mayorazgos.38
Latvyers and Professionals
Although the
members of the intermediary group of
lawyers and
professionals were
extremely few in
number
in
Chile,
their
place
in
society
is
of
interest. At the summit were the lawyers.
Some of
them, members (by
birth) of the Creole aristocratic
class, had been
to
the
universities
of
Limnaor Charcas and later
were
able
to
study
in Santiago itself. Others had been able to make connections easily
with the
aristocracy,
through business and marriage.
In
any case,
law
was considered a distinguished
profession.
Lawyers and mer-
chants
gave social consistency to the
category of moradores, which
was in
fact more a
nominal than a real group. From the
beginning,
lawyers were important in the
Conquest, not only as
advisors and
men of
good judgement but also as
staff
to
Governors, delegates,
and
corregidores;
from
1609, with the definitive installation
of
the
Audiencia, they
increased
in
number
and importance. They could
be elected
regidores
and alcaldes as
from
1577. The
inmportance
of their
kind
of intellectual-legal
schooling to the history
(we might
call this
social-ititellectual, rather than
merely
intellectual
history)
of the
Colony and
of
the
Republic is
already
well known.39
Socially
inferior to
them were the
notaries, whose
wills
throughout
the sixteenth
and seventeenth
centuries often
reveal
what
were
really
extremely
modest fortunes.
There
is one
important
exception
in the
mid-seventeenth
century;
Manuel de
Toro
Mazote,
a
public notary
and also notary to the cabildo (the most important of the public
38.
Biblioteca de
atitores
espaiioles, Vol. CXXII (Madrid, 1959),
p. 281.
39.
Javier Gonzalez
Echefiique, Los
estudios juridicos y
la
abogacia en el
Reino
de
Chile
(Santiago, 1954).
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442
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
notaries usually did combine both
functions), possessor of a great
fortune in
land, and associate in mercantile enterprises. In the
case
of Lima, Lockhart detects the ubiquity of notaries and the wide
variety of their original social positions; but in Peru they were
evidently much more numerous
and enjoyed greater opportunities
than in
Chile.40 Inferior to the
notaries were the solicitors.
Of the few
doctors practising in
the medical faculty of
the
Uni-
versity, it could not be said that they formed a social group. Surgeons
were
considered artisans.
Spanish
Ar-tisan-s
The artisans of the sixteenth century occupied a social position
that was higher than in recent
centuries. This occurred because of
the
general lack of social differentiation at the time of the Conquest.
Artisans went to war, received small
encomiendas, made and received
loans, and undertook a variety of
occasional mercantile businesses.
Above all, they possessed a house, a suburban farm, and a small
piece
of
land near the city, which they acquired not merely by grant
but
also
through judicious buying and selling. On such property
they often took out a mortgage in
the form of censo de indios or
censo de convento, to obtain money in extraordinary circumstances.
The
craftsmen used by them
received clothes or money as
salary,
either
by terms of an asiento
(contract)-in the case of Spaniards
or
free
Indians, Negroes, and
mestizos-or by apprenticeship, an
arrangement for young men of any
ethnic origin.
A master
craftsman
could
buy native or Negro slaves, consequently artisans, even those
of
the
poorest sort, usually had
one. We witness
on
one occasion,
through the evidence given at a
criminal trial about a conversation
in
a tailor's back room, that the tailor was in the company of Negro
craftsmen
and
boys.41
But these
master artisans
in
the more
ordinary crafts (carpenters,
cobblers, tailors, jug-makers, etc.)
suffered from the
competition
of
artisans included in the encomiendas. Some
of
the
latter,
near to
the
city,
could
dedicate some
of
their time to
free work.
Subsequently
master artisans
also
faced competition from
the importation
of
prod-
40. Lockhart, Spanish Peru, p. 68
ff.
41. Artisans' lands from 1560-1600, in ANS, Escribanos de Santiago 2, fs.
6 (1564); 3, fs. 190, 261, 408 (1586-1587); 5, fs. 188 (1590); 7, fs. 354v. and
356v. (1591), etc. Alvaro Jara, Los asientos de trabajo y la provision de mano
de
obra para los no-encomenderos
en
la ciudad de Santiago 1586-1600 (Santiago,
1959). Roland Mellafe, La introduccio'n
de
la esclavitud negra en Chile (Santiago,
1959), pp. 137-156. Gongora, Encomenderos, p. 80.
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URBAN SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN COLONIAL
CHILE
443
ucts, not
merely from
Spain but from the other
provinces of the
Indies.42
It is not
surprising then,
that in the mid-seventeenth
century, the
position of the artisans was
much less prosperous. They
usually
still
had their own
house, but we find that, in
general, land
is no longer
mentioned. Listed in wills
are personal possessions,
usually
no more
than the tools
of the craft,
and amounts of money
earned
for
work
undertaken
and not yet paid for. (This
downward
mobility would
later be accentuated in the
eighteenth
century, by passage of the
Free
Trade
Law of 1778.) On the other
hand, in the city
of La Serena,
which
in
1610-1630 continued to
preserve more
archaic features,
artisans-merchants-property owners, possessed solares planted with
olive
trees. This was
particularly true for
the coppersmiths,
the
most
important
artisans of the city. These
craftsmen made the
pans
neces-
sary for
mining, as well as
for the vineyards.43 As late as
1738,
there
still
remained
in La Serena a few
craftsmen who owned solares and
small
pieces
of land with a few
cattle-the remnants of
a
less
com-
partmentalized society.
An indicator of the
slight social
esteem in which the artisans
were
held
in
the
seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, can be found
in the enrollment records of the militia, a faithful reflection of the
whole
spectrum of degrees
of social esteem.
As we have already
said, aristocrats and
merchants filled the
highest ranks
of
officers
(certainly field
master and
sergeant major were posts filled
only by
aristocrats).
But the
soldiers of the militia-as they
appear
in
a
1655
list that
specifies
occupations-were craftsmen
and
master
craftsmen
in
a
proportion
of more
than
2:3
(49
of
the
73
soldiers
of a
company
in
Santiago).
The other soldiers
included
two mer-
chants,
one
doctor, 11
undefined
inhabitants, and 15
men
without
a craft. The
militia was
extremely inefficient, the greater
part of
the
members,
as an official
of that time declared,
avoiding service
because
while
so
occupied, they
were
unable to
earn
the
sustenance
for
their
families.
As was
true for the Old Regime in
Europe, to
rank
as an
officer was prestigious, to be
a soldier was
precisely the
opposite.44
42.
Gongora, Encomenderos, p. 35.
43. Calderero Gabriel de Robledo, in ANS, Notarios de La Serena, 6, fs.
50v., and
various other
entries. Also see the will
(1672) of
Antonio Cuello, who
owned
a
house, a
shop,
a
quarter
interest
in
a
solar,
and one-half
an
estancia,
ANS,
Notarios de La
Serena, 5; and the
reference to P.
Rangel, an artisan
and
merchant
from La
Serena,
in
ANS, Escribanos
de
Santiago, 146,
fs.
324v.
44. Gongora,
Encomenderos, p.
101.
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444
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MAIO
GONGORA
The
artisans formed guilds, and some of these-particularly the
more important ones,
such as the silversmiths-possessed statutes;
but the monopoly of the guild was challenged, particularly in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nonetheless, the cabildos
at-
tempted to impose an
examination and name inspectors charged with
visiting all the craft workshops to ensure that personal and industrial
rules were being observed. The guilds, in any event, had much less
significance in the Indies than in the Old World, and they never
had any political
importance. However they were almost certainly
of
social and
charitable significance. The work of Manuel Carrera
Stampa shows us
that in Mexico the social development of the
artisans' guilds was much richer and more ramified.
Poor-
Spaniards
The archetypal
poor Spaniard of the sixteenth century was
basically
the
soldier.
He certainly had nothing to
do with the future
soldier of the permanent army. Rather his role was with the partici-
pants in the enterprise
of conquest or late expeditions, who had not
settled as
houseowning inhabitants or
r
eceived rewards after the
Conquest. Soldiers
were extremely numerous in Peru because
of
the considerable influx of the 1530s and 1540s; they fought in the
civil wars and later dispersed throughout the other provinces of the
Indies. In Chile
they were numerous because of the forces that
came from Spain or Peru on several occasions during the sixteenth
century, hoping to win
definitively the Araucanian war. Such soldiers
lived on the military
hospitality of the encomnenderos, sharing their
homes
and meals.
During an expedition they were paid a salary by
the
encomendero or,
in many other cases, by the royal exchequer.
They were militarily equipped by the latter or by the encomendero.
Considered the scum
of the Spanish population of that century, they
disappeared with the
founding of
a
permanent army around 1600,
when
the soldier
class established itself on the frontier. But
their
incursions for the
purpose of equipping themselves with horses during
the
winter
continued
to be the
terror
of both the
cities and the Indian
settlements.
Other
types
of
poor
Spaniards
were
servants, orphans, poor
rela-
tions, and guests
who lived
under
the
roofs of
powerful
families.
Wills often mention, in regard to charitable bequests, this numerous
population, many of
whom were
illegitimate
sons maintained
for
a
considerable period
until
they
married.
Throughout
Colonial his-
tory
the
proportion
of
illegitimate
sons was
very high,
and a
large
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URBAN SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION IN COLONIAL CHILE 445
number of them were mestizos.
Many of these dependents
often
served on lands
owned by the family, while others
lived
in
the
city. During the seventeenth
century the gangs
recruited to help
the army
in
extraordinary circumstances
were
made up of young
vagrants
of the countryside and city, and were
from
this
stratum.
Such lads, together
with deserters and Negro cimarrones
(runaway
slaves), made
up the rural vagrants
and the urban unemployed,
so
notorious in the
great capitals at
the end of the colonial period
in
Chile.
Cuadrilleros (foremen of labor
gangs), miners and their foremllen
in
the sixteenth
century, foremen of the estancias in
the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, administrators of the Indian settlements,
cattle farmers without property
who associated themselves with
the
owners of land to form companies
for the raising
of cattle,45 poor
cattle farmers who asked for land
on loan-all these
forms of humanity
whom we call poor Spaniards, and who were
often mestizos-
formed
an extremely interesting stratum
from
the social
point of view.
They could be
compared with army officers who had
come up fromn
the ranks.
Sometimes
they in their turn became owners
of estancias
of
intermediate
or little value. But,
in
any case, they
belonged to
the rural, more than to the urban, environment. They formed the
nucleus of the property owners
in the most remote
and ruralized
regions
of Chile.
Indians and Urban Castes
In the case of Mexico
City,
the
Spaniards
inhabited some
13
large blocks, within which the only
Indians were
master craftsmen
or
those employed
in
domestic
service.46
However, the large in-
digenous population
that settled
there after
Cortes
lived
in
com-
munities
that
had
magistrates
of their own.
In
the two most im-
portant
of
these communities, San Juan Moyotla
and Santiago
Tlatelolco,
the magistrates had jurisdiction
over neighboring
estancias
and their
indigenous
inhabitants.
However,
this order of things,
which was
so much
a
part
of the idea of the
twvo republics
of
the
sixteenth century, was soon overcome by infractions
and
cross-
breeding
of
every sort,
with the result that the parishes of 1770
in-
45. Jean Borde and Mario Gongora,
Evolucion de la propiedad en el Valle
del
Puanque (Santiago, 1956), I, 51-52. Mario
Gongora,
Origen
de
los 'inquilinos'
del Valle Central (Santiago, 1960), p.
33 ff.
46. Eduardo Baez Maclas, Planes y Censos de la Ciudad de
Mexico
1753,
Boletin del Archivo General de la Nacion, 2d series, VII,
1-2,
(Mexico, 1966),
407-484.
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446
HAHR
I
AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
cluded parishioners
of all races.47 The indigenous artisans established
themselves
in
neighborhoods,
as they had done before Spanish domi-
nation, and they now
practiced all or almost all the European crafts,
organizing themselves into guilds, with
their own system of
ap-
prenticeship and examinations-or,
as was the dominating tendency,
incorporating themselves
as craftsmen into the examination system
of the Spanish guilds.
In sixteenth-century Peru, some domestic servants lived in
the
houses of the Spaniards. Others lived in
shacks on the periphery
of
Lima. In
contrast with the case in Mexico
City, the indigenous
artisans did not quickly acquire the European
crafts and techniques,
and their adjustment to the Spanish guild system was inadequate and
slow. In 1555, the surviving Indians in
La Habana were liberated
from slavery and the
encomienda. Those living
on the periphery of
La Habana were
concentrated in the settlement
of Guanabacoa, near
the
city.
Service
was left
entirely to
the Negroes. The activity on
the arrival of the twice-yearly fleets, provided
Negro slaves with some
earnings, through
free occasional work that they could easily
hide
from their masters, and which also gave
them the possibility
of
buying
their
freedom.48
In Santiago de Chile, the resident Indians could be encomendados
who
were, with great
infrequency,
rotated in service. They resided
in houses
as
domestic
servants
(page boys,
Indian
women,
and
chinas,
who served
as
domestics, etc.)
or
on
the
neighboring
suburban farms
(in a
form of
agrarian
servicio personal
rendered by the Indian
settlements in the sixteenth
century). But,
in
those same
positions,
they could
also
be yanaconas, permanently
in
service, without being
rotated.
There
was
also
a
mass
of
free Indians
and Negroes-the
latter came, above
all,
from
Peru,
as
companions
of
the conquerors
or of
churchmen;
nor was
there
any
lack
of
Indians from
Paraguay,
Tucum'an,
Beliches
from
the south of
Chile,
etc.
They
were
fre-
quently
small
urban
property
owners
with
a
plot
of
land
and
some-
times
a
suburban
farm.
The area
in
which
the latter
settled,
by
preference,
was
that of
Chimba,
to
the
north of the
city, separated
from it
by
the
Mapocho
river.
The
notarial
registers
and the acts
of the
cabildo
preserved
for us
many
traces of this stratum:
con-
47.
Charles
Gibson,
The Aztecs uinder
Spanish
Rule (Stanford,
1964),
pp.
397-402.
48.
For
Peru, see
Lockhart,
Spanish
Perut, chapters
10 and
11. Ann
Twinam,
Service
Havana 1555-1600,
unpublished
manuscript
provided
by
Richard
Morse,
to whom
I owe this
information.
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URBAN SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
IN
COLONIAL
CHILE
447
cessions
of privileges
to them, titles for plots
of land bought
and
sold, taxes
they paid, records of
where they worked as apprentices
or craftsmen,
and their wills. A
will dated
1564,
belonging to
a
Peruvian
Indian woman
servant of the Bishop,
shows us a
suburban
farm worked
in
common by 13 Indian
men and women
of various
ages who
were relations or friends
of the testator, and,
in addition,
by
10
other Chilean
yanaconas.
She also left
one-half
of
a
suburban
farm, situated
in
Chimba, to the above
13 Indians.49
The entire mass
of free castes subsisted
from the sale of small
agrarian production
in
the urban
market, or
else from some form
of artisanal
or wage-
earning employment.
Negro and mulatto slaves, or emancipated ex-slaves (horros or
freed ones ),
served in the houses
of the
Spaniards or on plots
of land
at
the
periphery
of the city,
working for their master
if they
were slaves, or for their
own account
if they were free, living
in shacks
they
themselves constructed next
to the fields,
as happened fre-
quently
in Lima. Or
Negroes, freed or enslaved,
could be
artisanal
craftsmen
or master
craftsmen in any of the
crafts, earning
for
themselves
or for their master, according to
the case. The
owner
of
such
slave craftsmen was usually
a master of
the same craft, either
Spanish or Negro. Colored carpenters, cobblers, jug-makers, and,
above
all,
colored masons, can be
found frequently in Santiago.
Free mestizos-that
is,
sons
of an Indiai-
woman who
had
not
been erncomendada-were
in the same economic
situLation as
the
other castes
mentioned
above,
and
they
also
figured
as craftsmen
in
contracts;
but
this
was
with
less
frequency
than
Negroes
and Indians.
The
militia,
as
we
have
noted,
was
a
very
accurate
reflection
of
the
social hierarchy
within
the
Indies,
and
often
included free
Negroes
and
mulattoes
(pardos),
organized
in
separate companies
with
their
own
officers.
In
Santiago
these
companies
were
organized
in
1643,
when
a Dutch
attack
was feared.
Such
companies
were called
up
in
times of danger
and served
as
escorts
to
large expeditions
in
search
of cattle
to supply
the
army.
We
again
find
companies
of
pardos
and
also
of
Indians-which
is more
exceptional-in
Mendoza
in
1738,
in the
register
already
mentioned. The officers of the
Santiago
company
of
pardos argued
forcefully,
in
1690, that
their services
justified
their
opposition
to the
payment
of
a tribute.
In many other
American cities, we find members of the militia who came from the
castes;
so
much
so that
in
the
Jujuy register
of 1778
they
have one
49. ANS, Escribanos de Santiago 2, fs. 64 (Ines Conzalez,
1564).
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448
IIAHR | AUGUST
I
MARIO
GONGORA
identity:
those
who are registered as mestizos and mulattos are
soldiers. 50
Principal Conclusions
1)
The
State
in
the sixteenth-century Indies
was
based on
comr-
plete cities, that is, virtual republics that incorporate as a unit the
city site and its surrounding territory. The gradual ruralization of
settlement provoked the later formation of territorial jurisdictions,
which became increasingly independent, and the concept of the State
itself gradually became territorialized.
2) With reference to the urban aristocracy, in Chile, and prob-
ably
in
many
other
regions,
two
types
of
urban
society
can
be
distinguished: one,
when the
economy
was
principally
based
on
mining, was more archaic, with a ruling class of encomnenderos; he
other
type
of
city
had
an
aristocracy
formed
by
all
landowners
(not
only encomenderos,
and
in
a looser
formation, based on class),
when
the
economy
was
agricultural.
To this
source
of
aristocratic
status was added,
in
the
capital, the
social
and political importance
of the
honor
derived
from
being a councillor, which influenced
the
overall situation.
3)
The
Chilean aristocracy
was
always open to mercantile
enter-
prise
and
profitable
business
(contracting
for
taxes,
making
of
loans,
etc.)
that
complemented
its
agrarian base.
Its members were
not
rentiers
who
collected Indian
tribute,
but
rather
they exploited
their
lands, using them to provide produce for the international or for
the
urban
market.
4) The war was, originally, a source of urban stratification; later,
and inversely, the militia reflected a social stratification that had
already
taken
place.
5) There were
cities in
which the merchant invested
in
land,
and
there
were others
in
which he
invested almost
exclusively
in
mercantile concerns and the
granting
of
credits.
6)
All the social
strata
accepted
the
superiority
of noble values
and
aspired
to
participate
in them.
50.
Beatriz Rasini,
Estructura demografica
de
Jujuy,
in Ame'rica
Colonial.
Poblacion y economia (Rosario, 1965), p. 125.