Potosi Silver, the Mita System, and Racism in Colonial Bolivia
A passage from Historical, Geographical, Physical, Political, Civil, and Legal Guide to Government and Intendancy of the Province of Potosi (1787) by Pedro Vicente Canete y Dominguez provides insight into the colonial practices in Potosi, a major region of silver production. Dominguez also describes mita, a system of forced labor on the indigenous in silver mines. Tellingly, the book never saw publication, since Victorian de Villaba, the official Protector of Indians, convinced other colonial leaders that the content of the book would cast Potosi in a negative light.
The system of mita was derived in part from Spanish royal decree that ordered the forced relocation of native populations to the silver-rich mountains of Potosi. Viceroy Toledo shaped it further in 1575, making it so after a year of labor, natives would be exempt from mita for roughly six years (as time went on, a year of service earned one fewer years of exemption). Mita is a form of slavery, and either inadvertently or intentionally, a form of ethnic cleansing.
Present throughout the passage is Dominguez racism towards native Americans. The mita is such an excellent system in his mind, since it solves two issues at once. It occupies native populations, who he believes are predisposed to laziness, as well as “drunkenness, adultery, and idolatry” (106). The indigenous also provide a source of ultimately disposable labor though which Spanish demand for silver may be satisfied. Further evidence of the inherently racist nature of mita was how one might earn exemption. Dominguez writes how through their “free dealings with Spaniard, blacks, and mualtoes…they turned into mestizos and other classes” (107).
Dominguez dismissed critiques of the system that mention the high mortality rate of workers. Rather than the brutal demands of their Spanish masters, he blames plague and runaways as the reason that the native workforce at Potosi has declined over the years. The brutality of mita, both in terms of the work itself and the collapse of indigenous agriculture contributed to the steady decline of native populations. At the time Dominguez wrote his book, native populations had shrunk by between one-half or two-thirds, based on the original numbers conscripted under mita. Though the likes of Dominguez denied it, the silver mines of Potosi were destroying what was left of Bolivia’s indigenous population.
Works Cited: Dominguez, Pedro Vicente Canete y. “Mining and the Mita” in The Bolivia Reader, Edited by Sinclair Thompson, Rossana Barragan, Xavier Albo, Seemin Qayum, and Mark Goodale, translated by Adriana Salcedo, Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 200-206.