Conquistadors and Spanish Conquest of the Americas:

  • From the voyages of Columbus in 1492 onward, the Spanish began to build up a large presence in North and South America.
  • As far as European claims on the two continents were concerned, the pope in the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, had granted jurisdiction over all the Americas to Spain.

a)The exception was Brazil, which went to Portugal.

  • At first, the Spanish moved into the islands of the Caribbean.
  • One of their most important outposts in the New World was Havana, in Cuba.
  • The Spanish then conquered, during the early-to-mid 1500s, Florida, Mexico (the Aztecs there were defeated by Hernán Cortés, from 1519 to 1522), much of what is now the southwestern and southern United States, and the northern Andes (the Incas were toppled by Francisco Pizarro from 1531 to 1536).

a)The Spanish called this domain New Spain, and the principal headquarters there was Mexico City, built on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

  • Over time, Spain’s system of governing this constantly expanding territory became more complex.

a)Spain established viceroyalties (from the word “viceroy,” meaning “in place of the king”): the Viceroyalty of New Spain (the oldest and most important, created in 1535), the viceroyalty of Peru (founded in the 1590s), the Viceroyalty of New Granada (formed in 1730 to control what are today Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama), and the Viceroyalty of La Plata (which administered Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay after 1776).

Reasons for the Success of the Spanish Conquest:

  • The Spaniards’ advantage in military technology, including gunpowder weapons, played a key part.
  • The Spanish also proved adept at ‘divide-and-conquer’ tactics: stirring up rivalries among various native tribes and allying with some against others.
  • First and foremost, however, was disease.

a)Unwittingly, Spanish (and Portuguese) explorers and colonizers brought with them diseases, such as smallpox and measles, to which the Native Americans had never been exposed.

b)Having no immunity to these new illnesses, Native Americans sickened and died in massive numbers.

c)Such a major population loss had the obvious effect of weakening the natives’ ability to resist Spanish invasion.

d)Estimates of how many Native Americans perished as a result of European-borne diseases vary greatly, from one quarter of the original population to almost one half.

e)Whatever the case, the death toll was hideously high.

The Encomienda System:

  • Encomienda made all Native Americans subjects of the Spanish crown.
  • Spanish generals and explorers were allowed to use the ‘Indians’ as a source of labor.
  • Although it was not technically meant to do so, the Encomienda system effectively enslaved the Native Americans for a number of decades.
  • The character of Spanish rule changed during the 1530s and 1540s.

a)The viceregal system placed New Spain under the control of the government in Madrid, rather than the conquistadors themselves.

b)The House of trade was established to direct all trade and shipping from the New World through the Spanish port of Seville.

c)As a local labor force, the Native Americans proved unwilling and unable to work in the manner the Spanish had wanted.

d)In addition, many Catholic clergy, especially the Dominican monk Bartolomé de Las Casas, protested the cruel treatment of the Indians under the Encomienda system.

e)De Las Casas’s book The Tears of the Indians, written after 1514, did much to sway opinion about the plight of Native Americans.

f)Thanks to the New Laws, a set of labor regulations sponsored by Las Casas, the Encomienda system was abolished in 1542.

g)Harsh treatment of Native Americans continued, however.

h)Also, the effect of freeing the Indians from forced labor was to encourage the Spanish to bring black slaves from Africa to the New World (in this, they imitated the Portuguese, who had already started the practice).

Mining and Precious Metals:

  • Whatever their labor force, the central purpose of the Spanish in the Americas remained the exploitation of natural resources.
  • By far the most important was precious metals: the Spanish, along with the Portuguese, took 185,000 kilograms of gold from the Americas between 1503 and 1650.
  • Even more astounding was the amount of silver mined: 16 million kilograms.
  • The largest silver mines were located north of Mexico City and in Bolivia (Potosí, the so-called “mountain of silver”).

Agriculture and Sugar Production:

  • Agricultural production was also important.
  • The Spanish organized agriculture according to the plantation system: huge estates known as haciendas, estancias, and latifundias (the names depended on the part of Latin America in question) allowed European settlers to grow large quantities of a single crop very cheaply.

a)This practice is also commonly known as monoculture.

  • The labor was provided either by Native Americans, who worked very cheaply, or by slaves, so the plantation system was doubly profitable for Spanish landowners.
  • Besides encouraging slavery or unfair labor practices, plantation monoculture, by placing so much emphasis on farming one crop or a small number of crops, tended to be environmentally damaging.
  • Plantation agriculture also fails to diversify a country’s resource base.
  • It has generally led to long-term economic backwardness in Latin America.

Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu; Pablo Neruda

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays –
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.