The reducción of the Indians: the crown's jurist defends compulsory resettlement and records its cost
Gathering scattered native peoples into fixed towns — reducción in Peru, congregación in New Spain — gave them self-governing towns with churches, magistrates and common land, and bound them there by force for tribute and labour. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, a judge of the Council of the Indies, gave the policy its fullest legal defence in one chapter of his Política Indiana — and there quoted a friar who wept its harm, granted the fleeing Indian was scarcely at fault, and held its land protected.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts present the reducciones and congregaciones as simply forced relocation for control and taxation — true as far as it goes, and told from outside. Here instead is the policy argued from within, in the one chapter where the crown's chief jurist set out its law: the flat statement that Indians were to be congregated "sin atender si gustan, ò no gustan", the double purpose of faith and tribute named together, and — given equal weight and quoted from the same pages — the friar who "weeps" the harm it did, the admission that it contravened royal cédulas, the concession that the fleeing Indian is scarcely to blame, and the rule that the community's land is protected against seizure and prescription. Both the coercion and its named limits, from one primary chapter opened page by page, at a confidence that marks where the jurist is defending his own government.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The text used here is the Política Indiana of Juan de Solórzano Pereira in the tercera impresión ilustrada, Madrid, Matheo Sacristán, 1736, in the first of its two tomos, Libro II, capítulo XXIV, whose running head "Libro II. Capitulo XXIV." stands on each leaf. The chapter treats the reducciones or agregaciones of the Indians into pueblos. Solórzano is a crown judge and minister of the Council of the Indies arguing for the justice of his own government's policy, and the 1736 edition is a posthumous setting whose editor's additions are not always separated on the page; the reliability of the source is held below its tier for both reasons, and the confidence of each claim below reflects how directly the page supports it.
The chapter states the compulsion without euphemism. Paragraph 26 holds that the Indians may with the greater reason and justification be compelled to leave the fields, the idolatries and other vices they practise there and be reduced to the pueblos "sin atender si gustan, ò no gustan de reducirse: pues las razones de utilidad, y conveniencia publica se executan siempre sin atendencias particulares." Congregation was to be carried out whether or not the Indians consented to it.
The purpose the jurist gives for binding the Indians to the town is double, and he names both halves. Paragraph 31 holds that just as the inhabitants of Roman municipia could not abandon them, the Indians cannot leave the pueblos, reducciones and repartimientos where they are settled and registered (empadronados); if they leave and flee they may be sought, punished and returned even against their will, by the Justicias and by their own encomenderos and doctrineros — "porque de otra suerte ni conocieran Cura proprio, ni pudieran ser instruidos en la Fè, y Religion Christiana … ni los hallaramos para la paga de los tributos, y otros servicios Reales, y personales". The reducción served at once Christian instruction and the collection of tribute and labour.
Solórzano puts the case against the policy on the record beside his defence of it. In paragraph 20 he reports that Fray Juan Zapata "dice mucho mal de estas agregaciones: y refiere, y llora los graves daños, y perdidas de hacienda, que por causa de ellas han causado à los Indios", whether by the wrongs done them in the resettling or by settling them in lands contrary to their temperament; in paragraph 21 that all of this was done "en contravencion de las Cedulas"; and in paragraph 34 that the old cédulas of 1536 and 1566, which seemed to give the Indians liberty to move where they wished, "nunca se pusieron en execucion" once the form required for their government and Christian teaching was recognised.
The most striking concession is the jurist's own. In paragraph 38 he writes that "no es mucho de culpar en un Indio, si por tales malos tratamientos se huye de la reducion, adonde le llevaron, y detienen contra su voluntad" — the fleeing Indian is scarcely to be blamed, given the ill-treatment inflicted by encomenderos, corregidores, doctrineros and others, and given that a man may be made to leave the very lands he was born on where he would otherwise have lived content. That a crown judge writing to justify the settlement should grant this much is part of what the object records.
Against the compulsion the same chapter sets a protection of the community's land. Paragraph 43 lays down that one must not easily use the right of reversion to strip these lands from the communities and pueblos of the Indians for any flight or absence: just as wards do not lose possession of their property by intent alone, neither do the Indians when they leave "por agravios, hambres, ò pestilencias" while there is hope they will return, and "no vale prescripcion contra ellos", which Solórzano rests on "una elegante ley de nuestras Partidas". Paragraph 45 adds that when Indians are reduced or merged from one pueblo into another they keep all the rights, lands and privileges granted to the first municipio, by the rule the doctors call subrogación.
Solórzano frames the reducción as nothing new to the Indians themselves, and the framing is his argument, not a neutral report. In paragraph 28 he holds that this "no parece se les puede, ni debe hacer grave, ni nuevo à los Indios, y en particular à los Peruanos: pues sabemos, que sus antiguos Incas lo hacian muy de ordinario, mudando, no solo familias, y Pueblos, sino Naciones enteras de sus naturales Provincias à otras muy remotas, con causa, ò sin ella", the transplanted peoples being called Mitmas or Mitimaes — a point he draws from Acosta, Matienzo and Garcilaso. The comparison served to make the Spanish policy seem continuous with Inca practice.
What this source is and is not is worth saying plainly. It is a jurist's systematic commentary, not an administrative record: strong evidence of the legal theory of the reducción and of what the crown's own minister was willing to concede went wrong with it, and no evidence of how any given congregación was actually executed, how many Indians it moved, or how many died of the diseases that concentration spread. The structure it defends gave the reduced Indians a town, a church and a title to common land, and in the same breath held them to that town against their will for the tribute and the labour the crown drew from it.