Minting Slavery in the Colonial Andes: Labor and Race in Potosí and Lima

Abstract

Historians of racial ideologies in Latin America have long debated about their origins, antecedents, development, and connections to slavery. My dissertation project contends that labor history is an essential lens for understanding not just developments in slavery, but also constructions of race. Using the silver mints in Potosí (Bolivia) and Lima (Peru) as case studies, I examine how racial labels were deployed to categorize laborers and organize different labor and penal regimes between 1565 and 1825. In these protoindustrial spaces, hundreds of officials, employees, and laborers transformed silver (and later gold) from the region’s rich mineral deposits into the Spanish coins that circulated throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, sailed to Peninsular Spain as tax revenue, or leaked out to lubricate the Atlantic Slave Trade and Pacific commerce. Beginning in the sixteenth century, mint administrators tried to associate specific forms of labor with ethnoracial groups, but in practice, people of indigenous Andean, African, and mixed descent labored side by side, frequently performing similar occupations. Race-making processes in the mints were therefore grounded on labor practices, resulting in forms of categorization that clashed with or deviated from administrative visions of calidad (status), casta (caste), and ancestry. Terms like negro (Black) and indio (Indian) sometimes signified workers in specific offices, not race or ancestry. I argue that mint authorities and laborers together produced racial understandings that were tied to labor identities as they clashed (and sometimes cooperated) over commodification processes, labor-disciplinary regimes, rights, and obligations. There are two important limitations in the existing literature: first, scholars have privileged administrative and judicial spaces to reconstruct race-making processes. Yet these were sites of infrequent and irregular contact between common people and church or state officials. Second, slavery is widely acknowledged as a crucial driver of racialization (particularly in plantation societies), but other forms of coerced labor have not received similar attention. Enslavement was part of a broader continuum of forced labor forms and practices that also produced racial meanings and categories. My methodological approach to these questions is situated on a frontier in the field of Afro-Latin American history. In 1997, Anthropologist Peter Wade called for integrating the study of peoples of African and indigenous descent into shared analytical frames. These groups have been traditionally seen as discreet and separate, with sociologists studying people of African descent through metrics of racial inequality and anthropologists studying indigenous peoples through the lens of culture. A small, but growing number of scholars (James Sanders, Marcela Echeverri, Rachel O’Toole, Matthew Restall and Yuko Miki among them) has begun to answer Wade's call by producing studies that either compare the social and political histories of these groups or explore interactions between them. My scholarship engages both approaches yet also insists that boundaries between “Black” and “Indian” were artificial constructions that sometimes collapsed. Laborers of different backgrounds who performed similar tasks and worked in shared spaces built new Afro-Andean communities over time. I study a unique body of financial, legal, and administrative sources from the daily workings of the silver mints in Potosí (1575-1825) and Lima (1568-1592, 1683-1825). My approach to these materials is to analyze claims making, resistance, and performance through questions developed by social historians who study processes of racial formation in the law; as well as questions developed in cultural anthropology, asking when, in which situations, and why someone received a particular racial classification, as Joanne Rappaport does in her work. Authorities in both mints organized production around racial hierarchies involving men of African and Andean descent and through labor forms like enslavement, yanaconaje (a traditional Andean form of dependency analogous to serfdom), and penal labor (which brought European convicts into the mint as well).