Religion and Culture
The highest officials in Spanish America were mostly natives of Spain, known as peninsulares because they came from the Iberian Peninsula. Spaniards also played a major role in commerce, especially at the wholesale level and in trade with Spain itself, whose government sought to keep all overseas trade a Spanish monopoly. But after one or two generations of European settlement, the principal owners of the means of production—landed estates, or haciendas, and mining concessions—were mostly criollos (Creoles), that is, persons of Spanish descent born in the New World.
Even while recognizing the right of the Amerindians to keep land of their own, the Spanish monarchy claimed ultimate control over property in the conquered territory, and it rewarded many of the original conquerors with lavish land grants, which eventually passed to their children. In other cases, the early settlers and their descendants were allowed to buy land on favorable terms or simply helped themselves to what they found, assuming that through payment of the necessary fees they could later regularize their title.
Land in itself was of little use without people to work it, but there were a number of ways to obtain the needed labor. As in the other Spanish colonies, one device was the institution of the encomienda(see Glossary), whereby a specific group of Amerindians was “entrusted” to a Spanish colonist to protect them and convert them to Christianity in return for payment of tribute. This tribute often was paid in the form of labor, although that practice was generally against Spanish policy. Even when the Amerindians paid their tribute in money, the result was much the same, as they needed to work for the newcomers to obtain it.
Even though the encomienda never legally entailed a grant of land, in practice the Spanish encomendero(see Glossary) might well find a way to usurp the property of Amerindians entrusted to him. Spanish authorities gradually phased out the encomienda system, but Amerindians then paid tribute directly to the state, and they would still have to work to earn the money. Other systems of quasi-voluntary labor developed, too, while in early years some Amerindians were subjected to outright enslavement. Amerindian slavery was exceptional in New Granada and never took root there, but African slaves were soon being introduced, and although never as important to the overall economy as in Brazil or the West Indies, they became an appreciable part of the labor force in at least some parts of the colony.
While the dominant criollos prided themselves on their Spanish descent, bloodlines in practice were often less pure than they might appear. In order to gain access to higher education, for example, it was technically necessary to prove one’s limpieza de sangre, or “cleanness of blood,” which meant not just European pedigree but freedom from any trace of Jews, Muslims, or heretics in the family tree.
But both formal marriage and informal unions with the native population produced an ever-larger mestizo, or mixed European and Amerindian, population; by the end of the colonial period, this was the largest single demographic group. For most purposes, the population of mestizos was not clearly differentiated from that of criollos. Nevertheless, for a mestizo to enter the higher social strata and possibly marry the descendant of some conquistador, it did help to have a light complexion and some respectable economic assets, because upward mobility in colonial society was not easy to achieve.
It was even harder for someone of African or part-African descent to rise in society. The first African slaves to reach New Granada arrived with the conquistadors themselves because African slavery existed on a small scale in Spain. Greater numbers came later directly from Africa, to work in the placer gold deposits of the western Andes and Pacific slopes, landed estates of the Caribbean coastal plain, and assorted urban occupations. Few were to be found in the Andean highlands, and roughly the same relative distribution of Afro-Colombian people as in the eighteenth century continues to this day.
Although at first all were slaves, the processes of voluntary manumission, self-purchase (with money slaves could earn by working on their own account), and successful escape into the backcountry produced a growing population of free blacks. Free and slave alike mixed with other ethnic groups, and some of the free—mainly pardos (“browns”) of part-European ancestry—became small landowners, independent artisans, or lower-ranking professionals.
Unlike mestizos, anyone with a discernible trace of African ancestry faced not just social prejudice but also legal prohibitions very roughly comparable to the Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation in the United States between 1876 and 1965. These laws were not always enforced, but they placed a limit on the advancement even of free pardos.
By the close of the colonial period, Amerindians accounted for less than a quarter of New Granada’s total of roughly 1.4 million inhabitants. This change naturally reflected both the expansion of other demographic groups and the drastic fall in Amerindian numbers as a result of European diseases, mistreatment, and the widespread disruption of traditional lifestyles. In some peripheral areas, such as the Colombian portion of the Amazon basin, the Spanish had no incentive to establish effective control, and the ancestral modes of political and social organization remained in effect.
In the central highlands and other areas of permanent Spanish settlement, however, the situation of the indigenous peoples was different. Imperial policy aimed to group them into villages where they would have their own local magistrates and would continue to own lands in common (resguardos—see Glossary) just as before the conquest, although under ultimate control of the Spanish and owing tribute to the crown itself or, especially in the first century of colonial rule, to individual Spanish encomenderos. In practice, the Amerindians were often irregularly stripped of their lands and compelled to labor for the newcomers. Willingly or not, they also adopted many aspects of European civilization, from chickens and iron tools to the Roman Catholic faith. In the Muisca heartland, all had become monolingual Spanish speakers by the end of the colonial period (in return contributing place-names and other terms to the speech of their conquerors).
Agriculture remained the principal activity of indigenous villages, the small farms of many mestizos or poor whites, and the large estates of the socially prominent. Products were the same as before the Europeans’ arrival but with the addition of such novelties as wheat, which was consumed mainly by Spaniards and criollos. The hacienda owners also took particular interest in raising livestock. Whether cattle or crops, almost all of this production was for domestic consumption. Gold was the only significant export; it alone could support the cost of transportation from the interior to the seacoast, given the primitive state of internal transport networks.
Theoretically, such tropical commodities as sugar could have been grown for export along the coastal plain, but New Granadan producers could not compete with the more developed plantation economies of Cuba or Venezuela. Hence, gold paid the bill for virtually all New Granada’s imports, which were mainly for the upper social strata: wine and oil from Spain, cloth and other manufactured goods either from Spain or from other European countries by way of Iberia (or as contraband bypassing Spanish ports entirely).
Coarser textiles and other handcraft items were made locally, however, and sometimes traded from one province to another. One example was the cotton cloth produced in the northeastern province of Socorro (present-day Santander Department). This industry featured the putting-out system, whereby an entrepreneur farmed out successive stages of the production process to local households. This system was widespread at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and gave full or part-time employment to a significant number of criollos and mestizos.
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