Spanish rape of Mexico:
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from "Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People", by Ramon
Eduardo Ruiz, copyright 1992.
page 56
Only by exploiting the land, which required Indian labor, could the
Spanish colony flourish. Thus began the rape of the Indian, especially
brutal between 1521 and 1550. The pillage of the Indian community
included the taking of women, "the most beautiful and the virgins,"
according to the natives of Santo Tomas Ajusco; the Spaniards "were
never satisfied."
The hunt for labor and tribute, which Spaniards exacted from the
Indian, helps explain the never-ending expeditions to explore, pacify,
and enlarge the boundaries of New Spain. Even before the dust had
settled on Tenochtitlan, Cortes dispatched expeditions to the four
winds. Before long, Spanish soldiers had seized all of Mexico, marched
into Central America and braved the arid region lying between the
Californias and New Mexico.
The subjugation of the Maya of Yucatan, actually never truly
completed until the middle of the 19th century, lasted for a decade and
a half, from 1527 to 1542. The mastery of Yucatan was entrusted to
Francisco de Montejo, a companion of Juan de Grijalva on his expedition
to Yucatan and later of Cortes. With the blessings of the crown, which
named him an "adelantado", Montejo sailed from Spain in 1527 with 400
men. In 1540, with the pacification of Yucatan still unfinished, and
old and exhausted Montejo delegated the subjugation of the Maya to his
son. Montejo El Mozo completed what his father had set out to do,
founding Merida, the capital of Yucatan, in 1542.
Tha pacification of southern Mexico started in 1521, when Cortes
sent Gonzalo de Sandoval to Coatzalcoalcos. Luis Marin went off to
impose Spanish control on the Zapotecs of Oaxaca and, to do so, pushed
south into Chiapas, where he established a town. Chiapas resisted the
Spaniards until 1527, when Diego de Mazariegos subdued its inhabitants.
Pacification of northern Mexico began under Beltran Nunyo de Guzman,
a corrupt and sanctimonious lawyer of noble family with friends in high
places. Guzman set off for Mihoacan in 1529, acquiring almost
immediately a reputation for cruelty. The natives knew him as the
"senyor de la borca y cuchillo", the man who relied on the noose and
knife to kill. Among his wanton acts one stood out: the hanging of six
Indian chieftains simply because they failed to sweep the path over
which he would walk. For six years, this sadistic Spaniards pillaged
Mihoacan, southern Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Culiacan, a region baptized
Nueva Galicia.
page 61
Encomenderos, first off, had their pick of the Indian women, whether
with husband or not. They used them as domestics and as concubines and,
when they were no longer useful, drove them away. On the sugar
plantations, the encomenderos "married" them off to their slaves. Some
beat their Indian to death; others buried them alive; the less cruel
killed them with guns. When they fled from his grasp, the encomendero
pursued them with bloodhounds. Cortes and fellow encomenderos earned
money by selling their Indians into slavery. Juan Ponce de Leon, one of
these encomenderos, beat his Indians so badly that the authorities
arrested him for crimes. The best of the encomenderos drove their
Indians from dawn to dusk, while the heartless robbed them of their
goods.
page 68
Zumarraga, one of the most fanatical of them, believed that they must
discipline Indian heretics. As apolistic inquisitor, he brought before
him some 19 Indian "sinners", one being Don Carlos Chichimecatecuhtli,
whose notorious trial in Texcoco in 1539 ended with his burning at the
stake. In Mihoacan, a Augustinian zealot had 4 Indian heretics tied to
a pole in the town plaza, laid quantities of wood at their feet, and
then lit a fire, which the wind supposedly blew out of control.
Whatever the friar's intent, 2 of the Indians were burned alive and the
others scarred for life. Another friar in Mihoacan had an Indian
tortured in order to compel him to confess his sins. On the next day,
when the jailer came to his cell, he found that he had hanged himself
to escape further torture. Similar accounts besmirched the reputation
of the Franciscans in Yucatan, where they kept a tight reign for over 2
centuries. Beatings were common, as well as reliance on church jails to
woo the unconvinced. At church masses, the absent were noted and, when
caught, whipped.
page 77
The dramatic decline of its native population also recast the
society of New Spain. The death of millions of Indians, as well as the
fickleness of mining, shaped the silver age. According to some
scholars, of the 25 million people who dwelt in central Mexico in 1519,
just slightly over one million survived over a century later. Even when
the original figure is cut in half, as dissenting sages urge, and the
number of survivors is doubled, the loss of Indian life is still
breathtaking. Not until the mid-seventeenth century did the decline
come to an end. No other European conquest had such devastating
repercussions.
Illness alone did not kill the Indians. The black legend off a
ruthless Spain was no myth. The Spaniard was directly responsible for
the death of millions of native peoples. The Spaniards, after all, came
to get rich, if not with gold and silver, off the labor of the Indian.
Not exempt from blame were the missionaries, often the same friars
who defended the Indian. Determined to erect temples, convents, and
monasteries, they demanded labor of their neophytes and settled them on
mission lands, where European maladies spread like wildfires. Every one
of the Catholic shrines, usually edifices for the use of a few friars
and staffed with a raft of Indian servants, arose at the expense of the
Indian's way of life. The clergy and their secular allies, furthermore,
disturbed the ratio of food to man by reducing the numbers of dirt
farmers while multiplying the ranks of townsfolk who must be fed. The
policy of congregating Indians in pueblos, which exposed them to
European diseases, exacerbated their plight. Spaniards, also, upset the
ecological balance, cutting down the forests and using the wood for
their buildings or fuel. Within a century, vast stretches of land lay
barren of trees. The iron plow cut deep into the soil, often on
unprotected slopes; when the rains came, they carried the topsoil away,
leaving ravines and gullies. Cattle roamed freely, stripping the earth
of its grass cover and adding to its woes in time of rain, or, more
than once, wandered into the fields or corn and squash tilled by
Indians, destroying crops and enlarging their food supply. Colonial
record are replete with Indian complaints of damage done by cattle.
The pivotal injury done to the Indian, maybe the clue to his demise,
only students of the human psyche can measure. By intent and by
accident, Spaniards altered drastically the native cultures. Conquest
was a traumatic experience because the Spaniards made no effort to
reach a cultural compromise. The Indians, recalled Bernardino de
Sahagun, we so "trampled underfoot that not a vestige remained of what
they had been." Sahagun exaggerated, but none of the major Indian
groups, the Aztecs included, weathered the Conquest; only groups of
marginal importance to the Spaniards, the Maya for one, survived.
Still, even in Yucatan, the conquest was a terrible episode. The
arrival of the Spaniards reduced Maya society essentially to one class,
converting even the native elite, which lost all but a few of its
privileges, to milpa farmers. Eventually, there were no native
soldiers, no full-time craftsmen, no shopkeepers or millers of flour,
occupations reserved for non-Indians.
Subjugation transformed other aspects of native life. Before the
arrival of the European, Indians ate raw food and vegetables in
abundance and drank alcohol sparingly. The Europeans changed that.
Among the Maya, for example, a people who drank sparingly before the
Conquest, alcoholism became a major vice and the drinking of
aguardiente, a raw, white rum, commonplace. Indians were also told to
change their ancestral way of dress, to give up loincloth for
zaraguelles, white cotton trousers, standard wear by the end of the
16th century. Women of the humbler families, accustomed to leaving
their bosoms naked, were shamed into covering them with the huipil,
before long their traditional blouse.
page 87
Before 1540, just 6 percent of Spaniards in New Spain were women. But
Spaniards, like males the world over, could not live without women, and
so they fornicated with Indian females and sired mestizos.
page 89
Cortes also introduced the first African slaves to New Spain. Most
of them were of the Islamic faith, hailing from the western Sudan, the
Congo, and the Gulf of Guinea. The Spaniards had first enslaved the
Indian, at times placing him in chains, as had Nunyo de Guzman in Nueva
Galicia. In the Panuco region of the Gulf of Mexico, they sold into
slavery 15,000 Indians shipping them to the sugar plantations of the
Caribbean. Spaniards held as many as 200,000 Indian slaves in 1542....