repartimiento

repartimiento, in Spanish colonial practice, usually, the distribution of indigenous people for forced labor. In a broader sense it referred to any official distribution of goods, property, services, and the like. From as early as 1499, deserving Spaniards were allotted pieces of land, receiving at the same time the native people living on them; these allotments were known as encomiendas (see encomienda) and the process was the repartimiento; the two words were often used interchangeably. The encomienda was almost always accompanied by a system of forced labor and other assessments exacted from the indigenous people. The system endured and was the core of peonage in New Spain. The assessment of forced labor was called the mita in Peru and the cuatequil in Mexico.

The Repartimiento de Labor was a colonial forced labor system imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mita of the Inca Empire or the corvée of Ancien Régime France: the natives were forced to do low-paid or unpaid labor for a certain number of weeks or months each year on Spanish-owned farms, mines, workshops (obrajes), and public projects. Like the encomienda system that preceded it, the repartimiento was not slavery, in that the in that the worker is not owned outright—being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labor—and the work was intermittent. It however, created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of 16th century Peru. In the first decades of the colonization of the Caribbean the word was used for the insititution that became the encomienda, which can cause confusion.

The repartimiento, for the most part, replaced the encomienda of throughout the Viceroyalty of New Spain by the beginnng of the 17th century. In Peru encomiendas lasted longer, and the Quechua word mita frequently was used for repartimiento. There were instances when both systems (repartimiento and encomienda) coexisted.

In practice, a conquistador, or later a Spanish settler or offiical, would be given and supervised a number of indigenous workers, who would labor in farms or mines, or in the case of the Philippines might also be assigned to the ship yards constructing the Manila galleons. The one in charge of doing the reparto ("distribution") of workers was the Alcalde Mayor (local magistrate) of the city. Native communities that were close to Spanish populations were required to provide a percentage of their people (2-4 %) to work in agriculture, construction of houses, streets, etc. The diminution of the number of natives in the Americas due to European diseases (smallpox, influenza, measles and typhus) to which the native populations had no resistance, as well as to desertion from the work fields, led to the substitution of the encomienda system and the creation of privately-owned farms and haciendas. Many native people escaped the encomienda and repartamiento by leaving their communities. Some looked for wage labor; others signed contracts (asientos) for six months to a year, during which time the worker was required to be paid a salary (something the Spanish Crown did not enforce or support), and provided living quarters as well as religious services. There were many cases in which both wage and repartimiento laborers worked side-by-side on farms, mines, obrajes or haciendas.

References

See also

• Cargo system
• Encomienda
• Reductions
• Jesuit Reductions