payment page
The Encomienda System
As soon as the Spanish had settled in North America, they began to enslave native peoples. The idea was that natives could be put to work doing heavy labor, such as digging mines, that would benefit Europeans. The system for organizing that labor was called the encomienda. First, the Spanish monarch would give a land grant (the encomienda) to men who had performed special services for the country. The land grant also came with free laborers—all the Indigenous people who lived on it.
The person who received one of these land grants was called an encomendero. He was allowed to use the native people on his land for whatever purpose he wanted if he also taught them Catholicism. This was one of the reasons such a large percentage of South America embraced Catholicism. The encomendero might use them for labor, sell them, or force them to pay tribute to him. As there was no code of conduct for the encomiendas, native people were horribly mistreated and frequently ran away or died from overwork, beatings, disease, or starvation.
European and West African Groups—Slavery
As struggles with Native American workers continued, some Spaniards began to use African slaves as a source of labor. Enslaved Africans were first brought to the Americas in the 1490s. In fact, some of the enslaved were part of Columbus’s second voyage.
Slavery was already common in 16th- and 17th-century Africa, where people could be enslaved as punishment for a crime, to pay a debt, or as prisoners of war. Traders in West Africa sold slaves to the Portuguese, who dominated the West African slave trade from about 1420 to 1570. (After that, the English took over.) Wealthy kingdoms in West Africa began selling enslaved people to Europeans to satisfy Europeans’ desire for labor in their colonies.
Approximately 11 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1867 in a part of the transatlantic slave trade called “the Middle Passage.” Fewer than 9.6 million actually survived the journey.
Spanish Caste System
As Spanish colonists began to intermarry with Indigenous women, the Spanish developed the caste system. In the system, the more European one was, the higher one's social status. This meant that the highest caste was called Peninsulares, because they had been born on the Iberian Peninsula where Spain and Portugal are located. Because they were fully European, Peninsulares were entitled to the best positions in both the government and the Catholic Church.
The second social group was made up of the Creoles, or children of the Peninsulares. Creoles were also white Europeans; they had just been born in the colonies rather than in Europe. They were considered to be inferior to Peninsulares and were rarely given the highest positions. Some Creoles still ended up becoming incredibly wealthy, however, through trade and inheritance from parents who were Peninsulares.
Below the Creoles were a variety of mixed-race people. Mestizos were mixed white and Indigenous people; Mulattoes were mixed white and African people. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were pure Indigenous and pure African people. All of these groups were banned from political positions, the priesthood, and universities. Additionally, they performed the vast majority of manual labor in the colonies.
