Yanakuna

Last updated

Yanakuna were originally individuals in the Inca Empire who left the ayllu system [1] and worked full-time at a variety of tasks for the Inca, the quya (Inca queen), or the religious establishment. A few members of this serving class enjoyed high social status and were appointed officials by the Sapa Inca. [2] They could own property and sometimes had their own farms, before and after the conquest. The Spanish continued the yanakuna tradition developing it further as yanakuna entered Spanish service as Indian auxiliaries or encomienda Indians.

Contents

Etymology and spelling

The word yana in Quechua, the main Inca language, means black, servant, and is possibly derived from the verb yanapa to help, Qosqo Quechua, yana, black, servant, partner, spouse, and paramour. [3] The -kuna suffix in yanakuna indicates the plural, [4] thus if yana is translated as "servant" yanakuna is "servants" [5] or "slaves". [6] Hispanicized spellings of yanakuna are yanacona and yanaconas.

Inca Empire

In the Inca Empire yanakuna was the name of the servants to the Inca elites. The word servant, however, is misleading about the identity and function of the yanakuna. [7] It is important to note that they were not forced to work as slaves.[ citation needed ] Some were born into the category of yanakuna (like many other professions, it was a hereditary one), some chose to leave ayllus to work, and some were selected by nobles. [8] They were to care for the herds of the nobles, do fishing, and were dedicated to other work, like the making of pottery, construction, and domestic service. Yanakuna were sometimes given high positions in the Inca government. Mitma is a term commonly associated with yanakuna, but its meaning is different, as the mitmaqkuna were used as labor for large projects. Yanakuna were specifically not a part of an ayllu and were relocated individually instead of in large labor groups. An example of the differences of the classes is that mitmaqkuna were labor that built Machu Picchu, but yanakuna lived and served the Inca there. [9]

In Chile, the mapuche used this word to refer to alleged "traitors of their race". The concept of traitor was unknown to them, so when asked to translate the word from Spanish they referred to the Spanish native auxiliaries.

Spanish Empire

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in modern-day Peru, the yanakuna assisted the Spaniards to take control of the empire. These people, who the Spaniards, during the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, began to use the name for the indigenous people they had in servitude, in encomiendas, or in military forces as indios auxiliares (Indian auxiliaries).

After the conquest, as craftworkers and laborers, the yanakuna played a significant role in a variety of both rural and urban production sectors in Peru's colonial economy.

First Decades of Colonization

The Spanish initially exacted tribute from the indigenous peoples of Peru through the ayllu-based encomienda system, by which native subjects were forced to contribute labor and goods (increasingly in the form of silver money) in service of the Spanish crown. [10] Yanakuna, however, were separate from this system of obligation, and often performed different tasks. While the indios de encomienda fulfilled the most menial jobs in the Potosi silver mines, for example, yanakuna served as skilled artisans. [11] Some yanakuna did work in the mines themselves from their beginnings in the 1540s, but unlike the indios de encomienda, they worked as free wage laborers. [12]

Yanakuna in Mining and the Mita

Under the reforms imposed by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569-1581), a system of draft labor known as the mita came to replace the encomienda system, by which villages within a several-hundred mile radius around Potosi had to send around one seventh of their male tribute-age population (from ages 18 to 50) each year to work in the mines. This change in labor organization occurred for a number of reasons: the Crown's explicitly stated preference for Peru to emphasize silver export and advances in mining technology increase the demand for labor; at the same time, the imposition of the mita allowed the Crown to push against the power of the encomenderos (Spanish recipients of encomienda grants), and offer native labor to non-encomenderos in Peru. [13] [14] [15]

With this shift, yanakuna retained their place within the colonial economy of labor, and even grew in importance. As indios de encomienda decreased in number at Potosi, yanakuna increased. And, though mitayos (mita labor draftees) filled an important role in completing tasks undesirable to free laborers, they did not constitute a majority of laborers at Potosi— in 1603, for example, only 5,100 Indians out of 58,800 working at Potosi were mitayos. [16] The proportion of mitayos continued to decrease through the seventeenth century, as the proportion of yanakuna increased: in the latter half of the sixteenth century, yanakuna constituted less than 10% of tribute paying subjects, while they constituted about 40% of this population in the latter half of the seventeenth century. [17]

A 1601 order from the Crown stated a preference for voluntary labor; [18] indeed, though the yanakuna may have been bound as servants, historian Raquel Gil Montero suggests that after the Toledo reforms, the tribute-paying yanakuna at Potosi could be considered "free laborers." It was to the natives' advantage to work for market-rate wages as a free laborer (as opposed to the below market-rate wages of the mitayos), considering the expectation of tribute in money form. [19]

Yanakuna in Other Economic Sectors and Labor Arrangements

As Spanish settlers brought European agriculture to Peru, yanakuna labor supplemented that of mita draftees on farms. In this context, "yanakuna" referred to laborers who permanently resided at their place of employment. [20] As an alternative to mita draftees, Spaniards preferred yanakuna were to African slaves, as the former were familiar with both indigenous and European methods, and did not need to be purchased. [21] As in the mines, yanakuna labor in some areas represented a significant proportion of the labor force. The historian Steve J. Stern has written that Spanish colonials in the Huamanga region of Peru increasingly depended on contracted yanakuna labor as the mita labor draft became less reliable, especially for less politically influential settlers (in part due to resistance and evasion from within ayllus, as well as indigenous population decline). This was the case not only in farming and mining, but also in ranching and manufactures. [22]

In these contract relationships, a yanakuna promised labor services to a master in exchange for subsistence, as well as land and credit. Labor arrangements mimicking this yanakuna form— separate from the natives' ayllus— proliferated through the early seventeenth century, as Spanish employers sought to secure a labor force. In some cases, factory owners brought laborers from their ayllus to reside in situ like yanakuna; in others, contracts with free wage laborers came to resemble yanakuna contracts in their duration and reciprocal guarantees. What Stern calls "yanacona-like" relationships developed as a way for Indian workers to repay debts to a Spanish employer. And, due to labor demand, Spaniard's sometimes sought to convince Indians to voluntarily enter yanakuna contracts on farms with attractive wage offers. The need for coercion to secure labor indeed decreased, as the monetization of tribute, the associated integration of a commercial economy, and the burdens of the mita made ayllus less self-sufficient, and induced Indian members to seek subsistence beyond. [23]

Though separate from their ayllus, yanakuna were not completely dislocated from community. Many still owned land, and some of those working on farms lived their with families. [24] In general, like other colonial-era migrants, yanakuna moved with their families and spouses. [25]

In urban areas, yanakuna owned and passed down real estate. Unlike many other urban Indian laborers bound in servitude, often in domestic work, urban yanakuna maintained a more privileged status working as skilled craftspeople. Here, they were also distinguished by their comparably greater degree of acculturation to Spanish custom and language. Some scholars argue that this integration into urban colonial society by yanakuna actually represented an extension into a new context of older Andean practices of migration meant to fulfill different ecological niches. [26]

The term yanakuna also was used during the conquest of Chile and other areas of South America, like the New Kingdom of Granada.

Modern use

In modern times people in Chile use "yanacona" as an insult for Mapuches considered to have betrayed their people. [27] Use of the word "yanacona" to describe people in the press has led to legal action in Chile. [27] Héctor Llaitul, leader of the militant organization Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco, has declared that those Mapuche who work for forestry companies are "yanaconas". [28] [29]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish colonization of the Americas</span> Invasion of the American continents and incorporation into the Spanish Empire

The Spanish colonization of the Americas began in 1493 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the initial 1492 voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus under license from the Queen Isabella I of Castile. These overseas territories of the Spanish Empire were under the jurisdiction of Crown of Castile until the last territory was lost in 1898. Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Catholic Church peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish colonists settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and the existence of valuable resources for extraction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viceroyalty of Peru</span> South American administrative district of Spain (1542–1824)

The Viceroyalty of Peru, officially known as the Kingdom of Peru, was a Spanish imperial provincial administrative district, created in 1542, that originally contained modern-day Peru and most of the Spanish Empire in South America, governed from the capital of Lima. Peru was one of the two Spanish Viceroyalties in the Americas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

<i>Ayllu</i> Traditional community in the Andes

The ayllu, a family clan, is the traditional form of a community in the Andes, especially among Quechuas and Aymaras. They are an indigenous local government model across the Andes region of South America, particularly in Bolivia and Peru.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Potosí</span> City in Bolivia

Potosí, known as Villa Imperial de Potosí in the colonial period, is the capital city and a municipality of the Department of Potosí in Bolivia. It is one of the highest cities in the world at a nominal 4,090 m (13,420 ft). For centuries, it was the location of the Spanish colonial silver mint. A considerable amount of the city's colonial architecture has been preserved in the historic center of the city, which - along with the globally important Cerro Rico de Potosí - are part of a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Túpac Amaru II</span> Leader of a large Andean uprising against the Spanish in Peru (1738–1781)

José Gabriel Condorcanqui – known as Túpac Amaru II  – was an indigenous cacique who led a large Andean rebellion against the Spanish in Peru as self-proclaimed Sapa Inca of a new Inca Empire. He later became a mythical figure in the Peruvian struggle for independence and indigenous rights movement, as well as an inspiration to myriad causes in Spanish America and beyond.

Mit'a was mandatory service in the society of the Inca Empire. Its close relative, the regionally mandatory Minka is still in use in Quechua communities today and known as faena in Spanish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patio process</span> Metallurgical process: extraction of silver by amalgamation

The patio process is a process for extracting silver from ore. Smelting, or refining, is most often necessary because silver does not very frequently occur in the nature by itself as a native element mineral like some metals nobler than the redox couple 2  H+ + 2  e−⇌ H
2 (gold, mercury, ...). Instead, it is made up of a larger ore body. Thus, smelting, or refining, is necessary to reduce the compound containing the Ag+ cation into metallic Ag and to remove other byproducts to get at pure silver. The process, which uses mercury amalgamation to recover silver from ore, was reportedly invented by Bartolomé de Medina in Pachuca, Mexico, in 1554. It replaced smelting as the primary method of extracting silver from ore at Spanish colonies in the Americas. Although some knowledge of amalgamation techniques were likely known since the classical era, it was in the New World that it was first used on a large industrial scale. Other amalgamation processes were later developed, importantly the pan amalgamation process, and its variant, the Washoe process. The silver separation process generally differed from gold parting and gold extraction, although amalgamation with mercury is also sometimes used to extract gold. While gold was often found in the Americas as a native metal or alloy, silver was often found as a compound such as silver chloride and silver sulfide, and therefore required mercury amalgamation for refinement.

The Repartimiento was a colonial labor system imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept, it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mit'a of the Inca Empire or the corvée of the Ancien Régime de France: Through the pueblos de indios, the Amerindians were drafted work for cycles of weeks, months, or years, on farms, in mines, in workshops (obrajes), and public projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cerro Rico</span> Mountain near Potosí, Bolivia

Cerro Rico, Cerro Potosí or Sumaq Urqu, is a mountain in the Andes near the Bolivian city of Potosí. Cerro Rico, which is popularly conceived of as being "made of" silver ore, is famous for providing vast quantities of silver for the Spanish Empire, most of which was shipped to metropolitan Spain. It is estimated that eighty-five percent of the silver produced in the central Andes during this time came from Cerro Rico. As a result of mining operations in the mountain, the city of Potosí became one of the largest cities in the New World. It is said that revolutionary hero Simon Bolívar once waved a flag from the top of this monumental mountain in a historic moment that symbolized the founding of a new nation. Just a year later, congress decided to change the colors to yellow-red-green and include a coat of arms featuring the iconic condor, alpaca and Cerro Rico mine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Incas</span> Incan Civilization

The Incas were most notable for establishing the Inca Empire which was centered in modern day South America in Peru and Chile. It was about 2,500 miles from the northern to southern tip. The Inca Empire lasted from 1438 to 1533. It was the largest Empire in America throughout the Pre-Columbian era. At the peak of the Inca Empire, it was the largest nation in the world and to this day is the largest native state in the western hemisphere. The Inca civilization was located from north to south of the western hemisphere of South America. The Inca state was known as the Kingdom of Cuzco before 1438. Over the course of the Inca Empire, the Inca used conquest and peaceful assimilation to incorporate the territory of modern-day Peru, followed by a large portion of western South America, into their empire, centered on the Andean mountain range. However, shortly after the Inca Civil War, the last Sapa Inca (emperor) of the Inca Empire was captured and killed on the orders of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of Spanish rule. The remnants of the empire retreated to the remote jungles of Vilcabamba and established the small Neo-Inca State, which was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francisco de Toledo</span>

Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, also known as The Viceroyal Solon, was an aristocrat and soldier of the Kingdom of Spain and the fifth Viceroy of Peru. Often regarded as the "best of Peru's viceroys", he is as often denounced for the negative impact his administration had on the Indigenous peoples of Peru.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reductions</span> Spanish colonial settlements for relocation and Christianization of natives

Reductions were settlements established by Spanish rulers and Roman Catholic missionaries in Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies. In Portuguese-speaking Latin America, such reductions were also called aldeias. The Spanish and Portuguese relocated, forcibly in many cases, indigenous inhabitants of their colonies into urban settlements modeled on those in Spain and Portugal.

<i>Kuraka</i> Official of the Inca Empire who held the role of magistrate

A kuraka, or curaca, was an official of the Inca Empire who held the role of magistrate, about four levels down from the Sapa Inca, the head of the Empire. The kurakas were the heads of the ayllus. They served as tax collector, and held religious authority, in that they mediated between the supernatural sphere and the mortal realm. They were responsible for making sure the spirit world blessed the mortal one with prosperity, and were held accountable should disaster strike, such as a drought. Kurakas enjoyed privileges such as being exempt from taxation, the right to polygamy and to ride in a litter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Destruction of the Seven Cities</span> 1598 destruction of seven Spanish settlements in South America by a Mapuche–Huilliche uprising

The Destruction of the Seven Cities is a term used in Chilean historiography to refer to the destruction or abandonment of seven major Spanish outposts in southern Chile around 1600, caused by the Mapuche and Huilliche uprising of 1598. The Destruction of the Seven Cities, in traditional historiography, marks the end of the Conquest period and the beginning of the proper colonial period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conquest of Chile</span> Period of Chilean history, 1541-1600, period of Spanish conquest

The Conquest of Chile is a period in Chilean historiography that starts with the arrival of Pedro de Valdivia to Chile in 1541 and ends with the death of Martín García Óñez de Loyola in the Battle of Curalaba in 1598, and the destruction of the Seven Cities in 1598–1604 in the Araucanía region.

Francisco Pizarro and his fellow conquistadors from the rapidly growing Spanish Empire first arrived in the New World in 1524. But even before the arrival of the Europeans, the Inca Empire was floundering. Pizarro enjoyed stunning successes in his military campaign against the Incas, who, despite some resistance, were defeated and in 1538 the Spaniards completely defeated Inca forces near Lake Titicaca, allowing Spanish penetration into central and southern Bolivia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historiography of Colonial Spanish America</span>

The historiography of Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (criollos) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton. At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented. The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economy of the Inca Empire</span>

During the Inca Empire’s comparatively brief reign, from 1438 to 1533, Inca civilization established an economic structure that allowed for substantial agricultural production as well as cross-community exchange of products. Inca society is considered to have had some of the most successful centrally organized economies in history. Its effectiveness was achieved through the successful control of labor and the regulation of tribute resources. In Inca society, collective labor was the cornerstone for economic productivity and the achieving of common prosperity. People in the ayllu worked together to produce that prosperity. This prosperity caused the Spanish to be amazed by what they saw when they first encountered the Incas in 1528. According to each ayllu, labor was divided by region, with agriculture centralized in the most productive areas; ceramic production, road construction, textile production, and other skills were also part of the ayllus. After local needs were satisfied, the government gathered all surplus that is gathered from ayllus and allocated it where it was needed. People of the Inca Empire received free clothes, food, health care, and schooling in exchange for their labor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Encomiendas in Peru</span>

An encomienda in Peru was a reward offered to each of the men under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro who began the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532. In the early colonial period of the New World, land had little economic value without the labor to exploit it. The grant of an encomienda gave the grantee, the encomendero, the right to collect tribute from a community of indigenous people." The word "encomienda" means "trust", indicating that the indigenous people were entrusted to the care and attention of an encomendero. In reality, the encomienda system is often compared to slavery. Theoretically, the encomendero did not own the people or the land occupied by his subjects, but only the right to tribute, usually in the form of labor, that he could extract from them.

Polo Ondegardo was a Spanish colonial jurist, civil servant, businessman and thinker who proposed an intellectual and political vision of profound influence in the earliest troubled stage of the contact between the Hispanic and the American Indigenous world. He was born in Valladolid, when the city was the capital of the kingdom of Castile, to a prominent noble family that had strong ties to the royal family. He spent his entire adult life in South America in what is now Peru and Bolivia. He was involved in the political and economic management of the Spanish colony and based on his good knowledge of the laws as licenciado (licentiate) acquired a deep knowledge and practical experience of the Native Americans in the southern Andes, being an encomendero, visitador and corregidor in the provinces of Charcas and Cusco. His administrative reports, well known and appreciated by his peers and contemporaries, have had wide repercussions in the field of Andean studies up to the present time.

References

  1. ↑ Lewellen, Ted C. (2003). Political anthropology: An introduction. ABC-CLIO. pp. 38–39. ISBN   978-0-89789-891-1.
  2. ↑ Childress, D. (2000). Who's who in Inca society. Calliope, 10(7), 14.
  3. ↑ "yana - Quechua cuzqueño-Español Diccionario". Glosbe. Retrieved 2019-05-22.
  4. ↑ Alan L. Kolata, Ancient Inca, Cambridge University Press, 2013
  5. ↑ Garcilazo de la Vega, Primera Parte de los Comentarios Reales de los Incas(1609), available online
  6. ↑ Teofilo Laime Ajacopa, Diccionario Bilingüe Iskay simipi yuyayk'ancha, La Paz, 2007 (Quechua-Spanish dictionary)
  7. ↑ The Inca and Aztec States 1400-1800. Anthropology and History by George A. Collier; Renato I. Rosaldo; John D. Wirth.
  8. ↑ Malpass, M. A. (1996). Daily life in the inca empire. (pp. 55). Greenwood Publishing Group.
  9. ↑ Bethany L. Turner, George D. Kamenov, John D. Kingston, George J. Armelagos, Insights into immigration and social class at Machu Picchu, Peru based on oxygen, strontium, and lead isotopic analysis, Journal of Archaeological
  10. ↑ Gil Montero, Raquel (2011). "Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries". International Review of Social History. 56 (S19): 303–305 – via Cambridge Core.
  11. ↑ Gil Montero, "Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," 303–305.
  12. ↑ Bakewell, Peter (1984), "Mining in colonial Spanish America", in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), Volume 2: Colonial Latin America, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 127, doi:10.1017/chol9780521245166.005, ISBN   978-0-521-24516-6 , retrieved 2020-11-30
  13. ↑ Gil Montero, "Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," 298, 305-307, 317.
  14. ↑ Bakewell, "Mining in colonial Spanish America," 124.
  15. ↑ Sempat Assadourian, Carlos (1992). "The Colonial Economy: The Transfer of the European System of Production to New Spain and Peru". Journal of Latin American Studies. 24, Quincentenary Supplement: The Colonial and Post Colonial Experience. Five Centuries of Spanish and Portuguese America: 58–59 – via JSTOR.
  16. ↑ Gil Montero, "Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," 307-308, 314.
  17. ↑ Ibid., 315-316.
  18. ↑ Bakewell, "Mining in colonial Spanish America," 126.
  19. ↑ Gil Montero, "Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," 299, 316.
  20. ↑ Sempat Assadourian, "The Colonial Economy: The Transfer of the European System of Production to New Spain and Peru," 60-61.
  21. ↑ Stern, Steve J. (1982). Peru's Indian peoples and the challenge of Spanish conquest : Huamanga to 1640. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 141. ISBN   0-299-08900-2. OCLC   8176675.
  22. ↑ Stern, Peru's Indian peoples and the challenge of Spanish conquest : Huamanga to 1640, 139, 142-143.
  23. ↑ Ibid., 142-157.
  24. ↑ Ibid., 143, 155.
  25. ↑ Zulawski, Ann (1990). "Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 1640-1725". Latin American Research Review. 25 (2): 100–101 – via JSTOR.
  26. ↑ Ibid., 99-104.
  27. 1 2 "Audiencia en caso Mapuexpress: Querellante pidió censurar al medio a cambio de retirar la demanda". El Desconcierto (in Spanish). July 27, 2017. Retrieved September 4, 2019.
  28. ↑ González F., Tomás (2021-03-30). "Héctor Llaitul y ataque a equipo de TVN: "Detrás de esto está la mano negra y siniestra de las forestales"". Radio Universidad de Chile (in Spanish). Retrieved 2022-10-01.
  29. ↑ Basadre, Pablo (2021-04-02). "La verdadera zona roja mapuche: Cómo es el lugar donde fue atacado el equipo de TVN". Ex-Ante (in Spanish). Retrieved 2022-10-01.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.