“Cuzco” here means the diocese of Cuzco, embracing much of southern highland Peru. The period covered runs from the viceregency of don Francisco de Toledo to the severe Andean epidemic of 1719-21, the effects of which caused changes in Spanish policy that brought to a close in several respects an era dominated by Toledo’s schemes. Wightman argues that to a considerable extent the forastero phenomenon—the migrating of native people from their traditional communities and their resettlement in rural and urban places—was an outcome of Toledo’s reforms, such as mita and reducción.
An immense amount of information and argument is packed into the 153 pages of text in this book. Anyone concerned with social, political, and economic matters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru will find food for thought here, because Wightman, properly hut quite admirably, presents forasteros in the context both of the traditional arrangements of Andean communities and of Spanish Indian policy and introduced economic systems. The forastero theme is thus related to demography (the real decline of native population may have been rather less than generally thought); labor (outmigration from traditional villages connects directly with the rise of wage labor, urban and rural); concepts of property (forasteros’ movement contributes to the rise of private land ownership by native people and the parallel decay of community property); and social organization (caste is undermined by encroaching class distinctions). Splendid discussions of ayllu, yanaconas, and the reducción program are more specific attractions of the book.
Just as forasteros are shown here to have quickly lost much of their character of outsiders as they integrated into new surroundings, so they are now no longer strangers to historians. This is skilled and sophisticated work, at the level of Karen Spalding’s and Steve Stem’s.
