Robert S. Smith

Statutes of the Guatemalan Indigo Growers' Society

Much fruitful research has been devoted to clarifying important legal questions concerning the occupation and use of land in Hispanic America but comparatively little has been said of the down-to-earth problems of crops, markets, and the financing of colonial agriculture. Only fragmentary accounts of the production of dyestuffs have been published, despite the fact that dye woods, indigo, and cochineal were important exports of colonies which lacked metals to satisfy the auri sacra fames of the mother country. In Guatemala, production of indigo commenced in the sixteenth century, and in time it became easily the most important commodity which this region supplied to Spain and the rest of Europe. The high repute of this vegetable dye in the expanding textile industry continued until well into the nineteenth century, when synthetic products dealt a mortal blow to the agricultural foundations of dyeing throughout the world. Scarcity of labor and capital seem to have been the most pressing problems of the indigo growers in the piedmont of San Salvador province, where the indigofera called jiquilite was grown with greatest success. Stern measures were employed to enforce the royal prohibition of the employment of Indians in the fetid and backbreaking dye-works (obrajes de aiiil), but efforts to solve the manpower shortage by the importation of West Indian Negroes appear not to have been wholly satisfactory. In 1782, to meet the needs for capital, the government of the audiencia established a revolving fund for making crop-production loans. The fund, or montepio, was administered by the Society of Indigo Growers, which had its principal office in the town of San Vicente. The royal treasury loaned the society 100,000 pesos with which to begin operations; thereafter, loans to growers were financed by the export duty of four pesos per zurron (214 pounds) of indigo concentrate. The fund grew steadily, and after 1800 outstanding loans frequently exceeded 600,000 pesos a year. In 1800, the society received permission to reprint one hundred copies of its statutes, but a search of archives and libraries has, so far, failed to turn up a single copy of either the first or the second edition. Since the statutes of 1782 should be the starting point of any study of the activities of the Sociedad de Cosecheros de Afiiles, the appended docu-