In this slim volume Herbert Klein presents brief, static, and in some respects superficial images of the rural society of the La Paz region of Alto Perú and Bolivia. Relying primarily on an analysis of a series of 1786 tribute censuses and the 1882 cadastral (land tenure) survey, along with other related sources, Klein attempts to trace the internal dynamic of haciendas and ayllus over the century between the two documents. His reliance on these two sources, however, leads to an incomplete understanding of La Paz’s rural society and economy.
The imbalance clearly shows in the author’s method of documenting the relative wealth of La Paz’s landed elite. Klein’s sources provide information on who owned haciendas and where they were located, and he dedicates considerable space to analyzing these patterns. But the documents contain little on actual wealth. Klein creates an indirect index of wealth: the number of peasants living on each estate. But this approach does not work, as can be shown by applying it to three Cochabamba haciendas. Hacienda Montecillo had a labor force of 51 colonos (service tenants); Hacienda Arocagua, 121 colonos; and Hacienda Changolla, 140 colonos. By the logic of Klein’s interpretation, the owner of Changolla should have been the wealthiest hacendado. Yet this was not the case. Changolla, situated in a mountainous district, did not produce as much income as Arocagua, which lay in a fertile valley. Montecillo, also in a fertile valley, may have produced as much or more income than Changolla.
Klein makes limited use of other sources that could have enhanced his interpretation, such as notarial records, which provide serial data on land sales and rentals as well as detailed inventories. Klein does use such data in a detailed discussion of the landed wealth of eighteenth-century hacendado Don Tadeo Diez de Medina, for whom Klein found inventories and summaries of hacienda production. But Don Tadeo was atypical. Most of his wealth came from coca estates in the yungas; his altiplano haciendas produced little income or grain, especially in comparison to estates in Cochabamba.
The period from 1786 to 1882 was one of significant change in Bolivia, but Klein does not adequately relate that change to rural society in La Paz. He convincingly documents the decline of coca production in the La Paz yungas in the early nineteenth century, the result of a slump in mining. But he fails to follow the consequences of shifting markets and the removal of trade barriers, which led to imports of cheap foreign wheat and wheat flour. What impact did the mining industry’s recovery in the second half of the nineteenth century have on coca production? Did a class of smallholders emerge in La Paz as in other areas, such as Cochabamba? Klein jumps from the early to the late nineteenth century with little discussion of specific changes, if any, in the La Paz region.
Klein has produced an uneven book that reads more like a collection of essays. The strength of the book is its detailed demographic analysis of the tribute censuses, although these present only a static idea of the structure of the population at one point in time. Klein’s book is conceptually similar to Magnus Mörner’s 1978 monograph on colonial Cuzco, and in this sense it is dated. Revisionist monographs, articles, and dissertations, few of which appear in Klein’s bibliography, employ notarial records, court records, newspapers, and other sources to provide a more detailed and dynamic interpretation of Bolivian rural society. This book will be useful primarily to Andeanists and generally to Latin Americanists interested in demography.
