Yanaconas: the Indians attached to Spanish estates, and the law that refused to call them serfs

In Charcas and across Peru, Indians settled on Spanish chacras came to be held as yanaconas — transferred with the estate when it was sold, unable to leave it. A law of 1618 ordered that they not be detained by force and never be reputed yanaconas, even where the contrary was established. Solórzano, the crown's own jurist, printed the whole defence of the practice and then voted against it: perpetual attachment to a place, he wrote, had in antiquity been imposed only on slaves and condemned men.