Kris Lane

Unlucky strike: gold and labor in Zaruma, Ecuador, 1699–1820

This article seeks to shed light on the peculiar history of Zaruma, most durable gold-mining camp, focusing specifically on labor. First exploited in the 1550s, Zaruma was at various times worked by indigenous encomienda charges and mitayos, slaves of African descent, and indebted, mostly mestizo peons. Marginal creole families were engaged in small-scale excavation by the eighteenth century, and an apparently unimplemented plan from the Bourbon era later called for uncompensated convict labor. Due to seemingly intractable problems of labor supply, however, Zaruma never boomed in colonial times. Mine work was deadly nevertheless, and for laborers and owners alike Zaruma proved an unlucky, if not accursed, strike. The small mountain village of San Antonio de Zaruma is probably the longestrunning hard-rock gold camp in the Western Hemisphere, yet it is hardly known outside the southern Andean provinces of the Republic of Ecuador. Again under intense scrutiny from foreign investors at the start of the twenty-first century, in early colonial times Zaruma’s extensive gold deposits were considered among the most promising in the Americas. There were the inevitable comparisons with the great silver district of Potosı́, and Peru’s energetic sixteenth-century viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, even planned a visit. But Zaruma had fallen on hard times by the 1580s. As in Potosı́, workers were already desperately scarce. Nearly everyone agreed that the deposits adjoining the tiny mountain town were extensive and quite deep, ores plentiful and friable. Still, technological limitations meant that many hands would be required to make mining profitable at Zaruma. Crown attempts to force indigenous corvées met strong resistance from both workers and competing employers, and the usual alternative to Amerindian labor then discussed—African slavery on a large scale—was ultimately deemed too expensive. Few solutions seemed viable given the extent of labor needs and the mines’ remote location in the Pacific coast range, far from Quito. How then did Zaruma survive? Just as Potosı́ was achieving peak production due to the success of Toledo’s mita in the early 1590s, Zaruma faced deep crisis. Philip II called for remedial proposals,

Taming the Master: Brujeria, Slavery, and the Encomienda in Barbacoas at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Studies of colonial witchcraft (brujeria) in Spanish South America have generally focused on seventeenth-century extirpation campaigns in the central Andes. The A. offers a comparative case of indigenous magic from the less-studied and more biodiverse Pacific coast of Colombia, a gold mining region conquered and settled by Europeans only after I620. By I700 indigenous Barbacoans combined their knowledge of Spanish encomienda (tributary) law with more traditional forms of resistance, helping to speed reform.

Gone Platinum: Contraband and Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century Colombia

This article examines the strange career of platinum, an element first identified in colonial Colombia. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a high-grade platinum alloy, nicknamed ‘platina,’ appeared alongside gold dust in the alluvial mines of Colombia’s Pacific lowlands and quickly caused problems for mine owners, merchants, and the Spanish Crown. The silvery metal was impossible to melt with available technology, and was therefore considered useless, but since it was dense, shiny, and did not oxidize it could be passed off as low-grade gold to unsuspecting merchants. Crown officials lashed out at slaves and free people of color for using platina to debase gold dust in petty exchanges, but they were not the only ones. Records show that mine owners and itinerant traders regularly added raw platinum to gold ingots, creating difficulties at Bogotá’s royal mint. Crown attempts to forbid platinum mining and circulation grew more elaborate until the mid-eighteenth century, when scientists in England, Sweden, and other parts of Europe began to experiment with the mystery metal and publish results. They had reportedly received bits of platina mixed with gold dust from Spanish merchants in Cartagena de Indias, but more importantly via the contraband slave trade to the Atrato River, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast near the Isthmus of Panama. The story of how platinum went from object of loathing to scientific sensation in the course of the eighteenth century illuminates some of the darker corners of the Spanish Enlightenment, both on the Peninsula and in the American colonies. It also shows how clandestine exchanges between subjects of clashing empires, including enslaved Africans and budding tinkerer-scientists, could have unexpected consequences at both ends of the ‘commodity chain.’ The early history of platinum is frequently glossed by historians of science, but without noticeable interest in its shifting cultural significance or close ties to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Almost nothing is said of its Colombian context,

Memorias robadas: reflexiones sobre archivos, historia y poder

Abstract In these concluding remarks, Kris Lane brings together the issues raised by the preceeding articles, linking them to historiographical and political issues, and highlighting the importance of rethinking the connections between archives, historical research, and interpretations about both the past and the present.

American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (review)

both to assimilate them into the marketplace and isolate them on a reservation.1 With its multiple voices, Clearing a Path does not attempt to avoid the complexities involved in studying diverse peoples and communities once placed in a single category by misguided European explorers, but the confrontations that result are often left implicit. As an example, in discussing new ways of presenting tribal histories, Craig Howe notes the place and people-speciac connotations of tribalism, whereas James Brooks examines the inouence of migration, movement, and plasticity of identity in Native histories, as well as the irony of certain claims to indigenous nationhood as representing “the last vestige of unbroken and uninterrupted . . . heritage and identity” (200). Indeed, the strength of Clearing a Path lies not in the answers that it provides but in the questions that it provokes. Whether or not it succeeds in building a common understanding or merely contributes to an ongoing dialogue, it represents an important contribution to the philosophical, intellectual, and political questions inherent in Native American studies.

The Discovery and Conquest of Peru

Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville’s docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de Leon vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza’s conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination. Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.

Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (review)

By the eighteenth century, pressures for ecclesiastical reform, especially under the Bourbons; the surfeit of debt in the region; and the Great Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (–) undermined the symbiosis between the spiritual and secular sectors of the Cuzqueño elites. Eventually the property concentrated in the ‘‘dead hand’’ of the church was blamed for agricultural stagnation. It was left to the Republican regimes of the nineteenth century to confiscate assets; to force religious communities to provide loans to the government; to ease the renunciation of a nun’s vows; to create alternative public institutions to educate youth and to care for orphans, the disabled, and the elderly; and to decrease the interest on investments. All of these measures and others served to push the oncepowerful and wealthy convents into a communal, more spiritual mode of existence. This book is a good, nuanced example of cultural and social history that assembles solid empirical data to make theoretical contributions to the field. It expands our knowledge of church history while viewing it within a wider social, cultural, political, and economic context. For this reason, Burns’s work would make good collateral reading in many colonial history courses taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The sweet trade revived

[First paragraph]Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. ULRIKE KLAUSMANN, MARION MEINZERIN & GABRIEL KUHN. New York: Black Rose Books, 1997. x + 280 pp. (Paper US

Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750

23.99)Pirates! Brigands, Buccaneers, and Privateers in Fact, Fiction, and Legend. JAN ROGOZINSKI. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. xvi + 398 pp. (Paper US

Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition

19.95)Sir Francis Drake: The Queens Pirate. HARRY KELSEY. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, xviii + 566 pp. (Cloth US