Silvio Zavala here completes his series of volumes summarizing and paraphrasing laws, reports, and debates on Indian labor in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The emphasis of this third volume is on the period after 1790.
Zavala’s sources lie mainly in Spanish archives, as is shown by the fact that, of 212 footnotes, 46 cite the Mata Linares Collection, 28 the Archivo General de Indias, and 26 the National Library in Madrid. Fortyfive other references are to materials in the National Archive of Argentina, libraries in the United States, Peruvian and Mexican repositories, and the British Library (formerly the British Museum). Zavala also draws heavily on printed sources—more than forty books, twenty documentary anthologies, and numerous journals and congressional reports. The most frequently quoted historians are Rubén Vargas Ugarte and Ricardo Levene. The Fuentes for the independence movement edited in 1974 by Daniel Valcárcel are also often cited. The information conveyed in Zavala’s digest of these multifarious sources is made accessible through a detailed subject index, to which are also added indexes of persons and places.
While the volume treats of areas outside Peru proper—for example, Venezuela, Chile, and even Ecuador after independence—Potosí and Huancavelica are the main objects of attention. This, of course, is because they were served by mitas, a system of labor that generated a steady flow of learned informes. Most authors accepted the system, while praising Toledo or glossing Solórzano. The only ones to question accepted opinions were the fiscal of the Audiencia of Lima, Mathías Lagúnez, the oidor Alvaro Cabero, and the fiscal of the Audiencia of La Plata, Victorián de Villava.
Promita reformers of the 1780s—Juan del Pino Manrique and Pedro Vicente Cañete—argued far more perceptively than later, ambiguous redeemers of Indians such as José Baquíjano y Carrillo and Mariano Moreno. Zavala rejoices over the abolition of the mita by the Cortes of Cádiz on November 9, 1812. But surely the mita was not undone by Olmedo’s distant discourse or Rocafuerte’s Whitmanesque ranting (p. 159). Rather, the free mingados had long since replaced most mitayos, in some deeper sociocultural process that remains to be uncovered in Andean archives.
