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The Spanish military conquests on the American mainland between, roughly, 1520 and 1540, are justly famous, or infamous, episodes in the history of European expansion. In those two decades a small number of Spaniards, probably not above 10,000 even if late-comers and people behind the front lines are counted, overcame native polities containing many millions in central and southern Mexico, Central America and the regions of South America we now know as Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Great and sometimes acrimonious controversy still surrounds the question of how many millions of Indians there were. The answer will probably never be known for certain. The most sober study of the Peruvian case suggests a range of 4–12 or even 15 million; and for central and southern Mexico, serious arguments have been made for figures from 6 to 25 million. These are the best-studied regions – the heart of the Inca empire, and almost the whole of the Aztecs'. The pre-conquest populations of other areas are still less precisely (if that is the word) known. For understanding the conquests, the numbers in any case do not matter much. Whether high or low estimates are taken, the invaders were still outnumbered by thousands to one. Controversy abounds, too, over the means of conquest, though it is less heated, and has more to do with the ranking of explanations than with identifying them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the seventeenth century the Kingdom or Auditencia of Quito had emerged from over a century of turmoil. It took the Inca state (Tawan-tinsuyu) until 1495 to conquer the region's six independent indigenous chiefdoms. Only forty years later the conquering forces of Sebastián de Belalcázar, Diego de Almagro, Juan de Salinas, and Gonzalo Pizarro established Spanish rule in the region. After founding a town council (cabildo) in their provincial capital of Quito in 1534, the new invaders started distributing the Amerindian settlements into grants of encomienda. This system allowed the Europeans to collect taxes and labor from the Andeans, in return for military protection and religious instruction. A generation of civil war among the conquistadors and periodic indigenous rebellions, however, impeded the consolidation of Spanish rule. It was not until 1563 that the crown established a high court (audiencia) in the city of Quito to head the newly implanted imperial bureaucracy. By then a stable Spanish society had formed in the region, laying the foundations for a vibrant regional economy based on the production of woolen textiles. The Kingdom of Quito's textile sector was linked to a series of prosperous, integrated regional economies extending throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru during the seventeenth century. While silver mining connected the Spanish Andean colonies and the international economy, smaller regional markets supplied foodstuffs, wine and liquor, cloth, and labor for the burgeoning mining zones. Quito's textile economy played an important role among these evolving secondary regional markets for most of the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of Rolando Mellafe's groundbreaking study on the importance of migration in the Viceroyalty of Peru, demographers have emphasized the significance of the city as a factor in colonial Latin American migration patterns. The city has figured prominently in various efforts to characterize general population trends and migrants have been important subgroups in analyses of the censuses of specific cities. Rather than emphasizing the role of the city in migration patterns, this study attempts to address the role of the migrant within the colonial city by utilizing a different data source: the conciertos de trabajo, or labor contracts, governing indigenous workers in seventeenth-century Cuzco. These conciertos yield a variety of data on job descriptions and distributions, periodic crises in the labor market, regional economic patterns, changing family relationships, and growing occupational identification. The detailed information from these valuable notarial documents adds a new and important dimension to the analysis of indigenous migration in colonial Peru. Although this study emphasizes migrations to the city of Cuzco, such migration did not take place in a vacuum. The city was also an important source for an urban-to-rural population outflow, as urban natives moved into depopulated lands in the countryside. Moreover, broader patterns of indigenous migration affected the provinces surrounding Cuzco. Migration within the bishopric of Cuzco varied dramatically according to regional labor trends and mita obligations, but much of that population movement involved short-scale relocation by individuals who remained within rural society. These various interrelated patterns of migration had a profound impact on the indigenous communities and played a major role in the formation of colonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several years ago Rolando Mellafe wrote an introductory article on “The importance of migration in the Viceroyalty of Peru.” In that essay, the Chilean scholar cogently argued that migration was one of the most significant, and generally unrecognized forces in Latin American history. “We could even affirm that the basic characteristic of colonial Hispanic American people was geographic mobility for there was constant movement of people in all senses of the term.” Social scientists who have examined the evidence in the years following Mellafe's brief seminal article have been equally impressed by both the volume and importance of migration in the Andean region of South America. The colonial era in Andean America is a fascinating period and place for the student of migration to concentrate investigation. There are all the key ingredients that interest the curious scholar: the complex migratory situation in the late Inca period; the arrival of an alien and outside force, that was itself divided into a series of independent elements; the introduction of Indian auxiliaries from others sectors of the New World; and finally, the movement of blacks who were either slave or free. Each migratory element was complex. For example, not only did blacks vary in status, free or slave, but their origin and socio-economic background were diverse as well. Likewise, the Spaniards were not just from Andalusia and Estremadura, but also Castile, Galicia, Navarre, and from other parts of a peninsula that was characterized by sharp regional, cultural, and linguistic differences. Further, other Europeans emigrated to the Indies: Portugal, Flanders, Germany, Naples, Genoa, and Greece contributed their share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the pioneering work of Rolando Mellafe which is now nearly twenty years old, the extent and importance of migration in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the colonial period has been noted, and a considerable amount of additional work has been accomplished by various scholars. As regards Upper Peru, the various writings of Sánchez Albornóz, Evans, and Cole have all dealt with various aspects of the topic. The scale of the movement, its origins and causes, the general directions of migration, and some of the consequences are generally understood, and we can at least estimate the numbers involved. A summation of these findings will be provided here, but the major thrust of this paper is to attempt to answer some of the specific questions that arise over the actual processes of migration, and to suggest directions for further research. First, it may be useful to summarize and expand on some of the points on which there is general agreement. We have two major points of reference in any discussion of population developments in seventeenth-century Upper Peru. The first is that of the Visita General of Viceroy Toledo taken in 1575, the second that of the Numeration General of Viceroy Palata, conducted in the years 1683–1686. The first presents us with the following population picture (Table 4.1). While the Tasa provides no systematic details, it is assumed that the overwhelming majority of the population were originarios, although mention is made specifically of yanaconas in La Paz and of various groups of mitimaes. In contrast, the Numeration General shows a distinctive distribution (Table 4.2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]