ANDEAN, ELITE

June 24, 2015 by admin

Obrajes were textile shops in early Latin America. From the mid-1500s onward, Spanish colonists in Mexico and Peru established obrajes to produce fabrics for local societies. Labor for these shops was often coerced. My research focused on the Peruvian obrajes of the late-colonial era (roughly 1770 to 1820), wherein Andean communities were required to provide tributary laborers. I specifically looked at the changing relationship between the Andean workers and the Spanish elite.

While I first set out to study the obrajes of postcolonial Peru (i.e. those that operated after the wars of independence of the 1820s), I ended up finding more sources that dealt with the late-colonial era. For this reason, I tweaked my original time-frame and title.

I visited three archives in Peru, the first of which was part of the University of San Antonio Abad in Cuzco. Here, I spent two days looking through records from the colonial era. Since none of the information was digitized, it was a tedious process. I also struggled at first with the paleography. While I can read Spanish fluently, the old cursive of the colonial era posed a challenge that I had not foreseen. With practice, though, I became familiar with the distinct characters of colonial cursive and eventually was able to read the documents efficiently.

After the archive in Cuzco, I visited La Biblioteca Nacional, or Peru’s National Library. Since this archive is located in Lima, the city where I was staying, I spent many more days here. Fortunately, this archive had a digitized record system which made searching for documents considerably quicker. I found several useful manuscripts here.

The third archive that I visited was El Archivo General de la Nación, or the General Archive of the Nation. This institution was divided between two separate buildings. I spent several days in both, and, in the process, I found more documents that helped illuminate the changing relationship between the Andean textile workers and the Spanish elite of the late colonial era.

While, overall, I did not find as many relevant documents as I hoped, I certainly found some. For example, I found several legal documents from around 1770 in which workers charged overseers for abuses of various kinds. With additional research, I came to understand that over time in colonial society, the Spanish implemented laws to protect workers, and the workers learned to use these laws to their advantage. The documents illustrated this development in the Spanish-Indian relationship. On one hand, they illustrated the abuses that overseers inflicted; on another, they illustrated the Andean peoples’ ability to use the legal system to defend themselves.

Other useful documents were reports from obraje administrators. Often, obrajes were part of haciendas, or large farms, and the Spanish owners often entrusted the care of these properties to stewards or administrators. Reports of these administrators provided insight into the relationship between the workers and the upper classes. Around 1800, for instance, some administrators complained that the farms and textile shops were falling into decay because the workers were not fulfilling their duties. With further research, I came to understand that, in some regions, the obraje system indeed declined in the years before the wars of independence.

One final set of useful documents dealt with the reestablishment of the obrajes following the wars of independence. The materials that I found included letters or reports of the elite classes about the need to rebuilt certain obrajes. With additional study, I learned that, in many cases, the obraje system was re-implemented after independence.

As I created a paper from these findings, I discussed the theme of hegemony. To define this term, I cited historians Florencia Mallon and John Charles Chasteen. Mallon described hegemony as a “dynamic or precarious balance, a contract or agreement [that] is reached among contesting forces.”¹ Chasteen explained it as, “domination that implies a measure of consent by those at the bottom,” a “steady preponderance,” rather than “control by violent force.”² These definitions capture the essence of the arrangement between the Spanish elite and the Andean peoples. As my research demonstrated, tribute labor in the obrajes fostered an unequal yet workable relationship between the two parties. By embracing such labor, they avoided violent conflict, but, at the same time, they cemented the low status of the Indian in Peruvian society.

Even though obrajes disappeared around 1860, the social hierarchy that they had helped create persisted well into the 1900s. In fact, I concluded that it became a rut from which Peruvian society never fully extracted itself. Spanish-Indian hegemony from the late-colonial era, I believe, helps explain the current place of the Andean people on the periphery of society.