This well-written book provides the first attempt at a systematic overview of the resettlement of Andean peoples (Reducción General de Indios) ordered by the fourth viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo (1569–81). Toledo hoped that moving indigenous people into settlements of at least 400 families would allow Spanish rural magistrates (corregidores de indios) to levy taxes, assign Andeans to state corvée labour (mita) and assure religious instruction by Roman Catholic priests. According to Jeremy Mumford, this campaign involved congregating over one million indigenous people from dispersed settlements into large, Spanish-style towns, called reducciones. Mumford argues that some Spaniards and Andean ethnic lords (caciques) and commoners resisted this radical attempt at social engineering and often preserved traditional indigenous towns, patterns of exchange and customs. While Mumford makes a convincing case about Andean resistance to the reducciones, it is not clear from the data presented that the General Resettlement was ever fully implemented, even during the tenure of Toledo.
Drawing on a variety of secondary works, Mumford presents an overview of the Andean highlands as populated by dispersed ethnic communities, where local caciques dispatched colonists (called mitimas) to locations up and down the mountainsides in order to gain access to resources at different ecological levels. Inca cities (even the capital of Cusco) were largely centres of administration, religious ceremony and state production, particularly of textiles woven by chaste female servants of the state (aqllas). After the conquest, Spaniards divided Andean settlements into grants of encomienda, with the Spanish overlord (encomendero) providing military protection and religious instruction in return for indigenous labour service and tribute. The crown usually affirmed these encomiendas for just two or three generations, but encomenderos always lobbied to make the grants hereditary family possessions. In 1554, before Toledo's tenure, they even offered the financially strapped Spanish crown 7.4 million silver pesos for the rights to hold the grants in perpetuity and to appoint judges with jurisdiction over their Andean subjects. Andean caciques countered this offer with the promise of 7.5 million pesos if the crown would allow all encomienda grants to fall vacant, leaving the ethnic leaders sovereign over their communities. The crown appointed a commission to study both offers but ultimately accepted neither, instead extending its own network of corregidores de indios to collect taxes, make mita assessments and administer justice over indigenous communities.
During his five-year inspection tour (visita general) of the vast viceroyalty of Peru, Toledo appointed 42 inspectors to resettle the Andeans into Spanish-style reducciones organised on an orderly grid pattern. The inspectors typically took a census of the population, determined tribute and mita allotments, and resettled the indigenous population into the reducciones. The resettlement soon came under intense opposition from Spanish landowners worried that the towns would disturb regional property rights, from churchmen fearing local corruption and abuses, from encomenderos afraid of losing control over their indigenous charges, and most importantly from Andean caciques and commoners, who baulked at leaving their traditional settlements. By 1575 Toledo complained that this opposition had hindered the resettlement plan, which remained unfinished and would take at least three more years to complete. To justify his reform programme, Toledo had his aide, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, conduct interviews with indigenous leaders in order to write a history of the Inca empire, which would prove conclusively that its rulers and local caciques had been abusive tyrants, thus invalidating any claims to authority by Andean leaders in the sixteenth century.
Despite the enormity of the undertaking, Mumford has found records of the resettlement in only five districts – Moromoro, Chérrepe, Condes, Yanquecollaguas, and Milleara – and in these areas the record of implementation was at best uneven. The inspector of Moromoro, Juan de Matienzo, the author of a treatise supporting a general resettlement of Andeans, for example, lamented that resistance from churchmen, Spanish elites and Andean communities undermined his efforts at establishing reducciones. Records from the other regions show that plans often designated previously existing settlements as reducciones, divided districts and lines of local authority in bewildering ways and even provoked lawsuits over the disposition of mitimas. Mumford then describes how the Andean author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and numerous Spanish officials termed the reducciones a failure, as poor initial town locations, bureaucratic corruption and native flight undermined the resettlement programme. Nonetheless, Mumford concludes that ‘whether full or empty, the reducciones exercised authority over most of the surrounding rural population’ (p. 157).
Although the book provides a thoughtful discussion of the General Resettlement, it leaves the reader with a nagging question: just how successful was Toledo's ambitious programme of social engineering in the Andes? Mumford skilfully points out that Toledo wanted to transform indigenous village life, but without damaging traditional Andean practices, particularly the vertical exchanges of agricultural products and other commodities by mitimas. As a result, Mumford notes that inspectors in Yanquecollaguas merely designated existing settlements as reducciones, instead of founding new towns. Even an inspector dedicated to resettlement, such as Matienzo, had to admit failure in Moromoro, and Mumford acknowledges that other reducciones were nearly empty administrative and religious centres, as Andeans continued to reside in traditional villages. Moreover, it is also puzzling that inveterate record-keepers in the Spanish bureaucracy preserved so little data on the implementation of the programme at the local level; Mumford found only the five cases. Even in petitions to the crown for rewards (probanzas de méritos), the inspectors charged with implementing the resettlement programme gave only brief mention of their role, apparently indicating that they did not view their service in this undertaking as very important or notable among their career accomplishments. Moreover, Toledo's own tribute scale (tasa) registered taxpayers by their home communities (repartimientos), not by their assigned reducciones. Even Guaman Poma mentions the reducciones only briefly, instead going on to discuss Spanish-style governmental institutions, which might have functioned in either the reducciones or in traditional Andean communities. Certainly, the Andean ayllu structure became destabilised by the seventeenth century, but epidemic disease and migration might well have been the principal culprits, not the Toledan reducciones. In short, this is a useful book on an important topic, but the author seems to follow the lead of previous generations of scholars in accepting the propaganda of Toledo and his partisans, who may well have overemphasised the successes of the General Resettlement programme.
