Tamemes: the prohibition of human porterage in New Spain, 1528-1549
Mesoamerica moved its freight on people's backs, and the Spaniards who arrived kept the system running. Between 1528 and 1549 the crown banned it outright, was lobbied into licensing it under conditions, and then banned it again — this time even where the carrier said he was willing. A Franciscan chronicler prints the sequence with its dates and penalties, and in the same chapter says the orders were not kept. A judge of the audiencia of Mexico describes what continued anyway.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of colonial Mexican transport mention tamemes in a clause and move on to mules, and accounts of Spanish Indian legislation cite the New Laws and the Laws of Burgos while leaving porterage out of the story entirely. Neither tells a reader what the rule actually was. This object prints the sequence from the sheets, with its dates, its penalties and — the part that is almost never quoted — the commercial argument that overturned it in 1533 and the sentence in which the crown says why it changed its mind again in 1549: that given any opening the Spaniards never kept moderation. It sets beside that a serving judge's description of the practice continuing, including the exact legal manoeuvre used to continue it, and a friar's accusation that the greatest Spanish defender of the Indians travelled with thirty of them under load. The achievement, the motive, the lobbying and the failure are four sourced claims in the same entry rather than four positions in an argument.
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 word entered Spanish prose as a thing needing translation for a European reader. Motolinía, writing to Charles V to answer Las Casas, describes Indians carried along behind a traveller as "cargados 27 ó 37 Indios que acá llaman Tamemes" — loaded Indians, "which here they call tamemes". The gloss is the point: the practice was ordinary enough in New Spain to need no explanation there, and strange enough in Spain to need one.
The first prohibition was absolute and expensive. Mendieta, printing the sequence under the side-note "Tamemes de carga quitados por el Emperador", records that in the ordinances of Toledo of 1528 the crown ordered that no Spaniard "de cualquier calidad y condicion que sea" should dare load any Indian to carry anything from one town to another, "ni por fuerza ni de grado" — neither by force nor with the carrier's consent — on penalty of a hundred pesos de oro for each Indian so loaded the first time, three hundred the second, and forfeiture of all his goods the third.
The ban was then argued away, and the arguments are printed with it. The crown was informed "por muchas vias" that if the rule were kept the trade of the country would be lost and merchants could not move their goods as lightly as with tamemes, "en especial por ser algunos caminos tan ásperos que no se podian caminar con carretas ni con bestias"; and that the Indians had carried loads in their own time before Christianity and it suited them, "porque con esto ganaban su vida". On those representations a provision given at Monzón on 13 September 1533 licensed the loading of Indians under three conditions: with their own will, well paid for their work, and with the load not exceeding two arrobas.
Sixteen years later the licence was withdrawn, and the stated reason is a judgement about enforcement rather than about principle. Holding himself deceived by what he had been told, and knowing that "teniendo alguna entrada, nunca los españoles guardaban moderacion en estas cosas", the emperor provided by a cédula issued at Valladolid on 1 June 1549 that no one load an Indian, as had first been ordered, "aunque el indio dijese que lo hacia de su voluntad", on penalty of a thousand castellanos de oro. The consent clause of 1533 is the clause the second prohibition specifically kills.
The accusation was thrown across the party lines of the debate, not only at encomenderos. Motolinía tells the emperor that Las Casas, coming to Tlaxcala as a simple friar, "traia tras de sí cargados 27 ó 37 Indios que acá llaman Tamemes", and reports his own retort to him: that all the zeal and love he claimed for the Indians ended "en traerlos cargados", and that "solo vuestra caridad traeis cargados mas Indios que treinta Frayles". The figure is a hostile writer's recollection of an episode years old and the letter is written to damage its subject, which is why the confidence here is low; what it establishes is not what Las Casas did but that in 1555 the use of tamemes was a charge a Spanish friar expected the emperor to find damning.
What continued is described by a judge of the audiencia of Mexico writing to Philip II. Among the causes of depopulation Alonso de Zorita lists carrying, and itemises it: they have been consumed by being taken "de mil y mil y más y menos, con grandes y pesadas cargas de mercadurías, reventando muchas jornadas", brought out of hot country into cold and cold into hot, "que les es muy mortal y no usado entre ellos"; loaded as well with their masters' "recámaras, camas, sillas, mesas y demás xarcias de sus casas, y servicio de cocina", together with the women and boys and men, over roads and sierras; and on top of all the cargo "llevaban á sus cuestas la comida". They came home half dead, took the sickness of death and died of it, "ó se quedaban muertos por los caminos". He says the encomenderos were still doing it as he wrote.
The same memorial records how the law was got round, which is the part that makes the prohibition legible as policy rather than as sentiment. Officials, Zorita writes, still compel Indians to go to the mines "so color que van á las obras delos edificios de ellas, y que van de su voluntad, y que V. M. no tiene prohibido esto, sino el labrar las minas y que no los lleven contra su voluntad" — the prohibition read narrowly, and consent asserted on the carrier's behalf. He answers that it is certain they are always taken by force, compelled by repartimiento and by provision of the audiencia itself, "contra lo que V. M. tiene proveido". The crown's own judge is describing the crown's own courts breaking the crown's own rule.
Mendieta's verdict on the wider category of forced personal service, given on the page that follows the porterage sequence, is neither triumphal nor dismissive of the law. After listing the cédulas — Valladolid 7 January 1549 forbidding encomenderos to send their Indians to the mines, Valladolid 22 February 1549 removing personal services taken in place of tribute, Toledo 10 August 1529 forbidding that Indians be hired out or lent, Toro 21 September 1551 extending the ban to the service of the viceroy and the oidores themselves — he writes that the emperor so abhorred "este negro servicio personal (que ahora tan sin escrúpulo hacen dar á los indios de por fuerza generalmente en toda la tierra)" that if his cédulas and provisions "se ovieran guardado hasta ahora inviolablemente, no se oviera acabado y consumido tanta multitud de gente, como claramente lo vemos". The legislation and its failure are asserted in one sentence by the same witness.
What the three witnesses opened here cannot show is worth stating, because the temptation in this subject is to let advocacy stand in for measurement. None of them gives a quantity: no count of tamemes, no tonnage, no series of prosecutions under the penalties of 1528 or 1549, and no case in which the thousand castellanos were actually collected. All three are Spanish and all three are arguing — a Franciscan writing his order's record, a Franciscan attacking a bishop, a dismissed judge pleading a policy — and no indigenous account of carrying is cited here. The pre-conquest practice is known to this entry only through the lobbyists' claim of 1533 that the Indians "tenian uso de cargarse en tiempo de su infidelidad", reported by a hostile chronicler at second hand; its scale and its terms are not established by anything read for this object.