Velasco Murillo offers an important contribution to our understanding of the indigenous labor migrations toward the mines of Spanish America. Mining was one of the central pillars of this colonial political economy. At its apogee in the late eighteenth century, the sector encompassed hundreds of mining districts, many of which were thriving towns and even cities. From Mexico to the Andes, these urban populations were primarily composed of indigenous peoples. Almost all of them arrived from elsewhere. The big mining cities of northern Mexico—Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and, the subject of this book, Zacatecas—were established in thinly populated zones. The hundreds, and then thousands of workers who would populate them came up from Central Mexico. They were mainly Nahuatl-speaking Mexica, Tolucans and Tlaxcalans, or Purepecha- speaking Tarascans. Velasco Murillo shows that in 1754, they counted for very close to half of Zacatecas’s population.
Documenting the structures and conditions of work...
