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.
Why this wins its question: The usual English treatment of yanaconaje is one sentence calling it a form of serfdom, or one sentence calling it a voluntary alternative to the mita, with no text behind either. Here the operative statute is quoted whole, with monarch, place, date and ordinance number from the margin, and set against the chapter in which the crown's own jurist lays out the full case for the institution — the Roman colonus, the Castilian solariego, Matienzo's approval, Toledo's decision not to innovate — and then votes to abolish it, in words that compare perpetual attachment to the sentence of a criminal. The transfer of yanaconas with the sold estate, the fifty thousand of Toledo's report and the tribute assessed on their heads are all quoted from the page that defends the arrangement, which is why the cost here does not depend on a hostile source.
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 statute is libro VI, título 3 of the Recopilación, ley xij, on printed page 210 of tomo II of the 1791 fourth impression, headed "Que los Indios de las chacras no queden por Yanaconas, y tengan sus Reducciones, aunque estuviere introducido lo contrario", with the margin "D. Felipe III allí á 10 de Octubre de 1618. Ordenanza 5." Its whole text: "SI los Indios quisieren permanecer en las chacras y estancias no sean detenidos con violencia, y puedan irse á sus Reducciones; pero si en término de dos años no lo hicieren, tengan por Reduccion la hacienda donde hubieren asistido, y para esto haya en los confines de las chacras lugar acomodado, para que vivan juntos, pues aquel ha de quedar por su Reduccion; mas no por esto se ha de entender, que los Indios son Yanaconas de aquellas chacras, aunque estuviere introducido lo contrario; y así reducidos, se les darán tierras suficientes, guardando las calidades de las demas Reducciones."
The rubric concedes what the rule denies. "Aunque estuviere introducido lo contrario" is an admission, printed in the heading and repeated in the body, that by 1618 the contrary practice was established; and the remedy the law offers is not removal from the estate but a settlement built at its edge, so that the hacienda itself becomes the reducción of those who stay past two years. The law protects the status of the person while conceding the place.
Solórzano Pereira devotes a whole chapter to it — libro II, capítulo IV of the Política Indiana, printed page 67 of the first tomo of the 1736 third impression — titled "DEL SERVICIO PERSONAL DE LOS Indios, que en el Perú llaman Yanaconas, teniéndolos como por Adscripticios, y diputados para que labren, y cultiven sus heredades, sin permitirles se ausenten de ellas". He states its origin as an abuse: in Charcas and elsewhere "se introduxo … otra especie de servicio personal de los Indios, enderezado á sólo el particular aprovechamiento, y comodidad de los Españoles, que se comenzaron á alzar con ellos con varios pretextos", and gives the etymology — yanacona in that land's language means Indians or men of service, answering to the word used in New Spain, "llamándolos Naborios".
The mechanism by which the status hardened is recorded on the same pages, and it is a viceregal decision. Francisco de Toledo, charged to settle the matter, visited the provinces, heard the reasons for and against, and "tomó resolución de no hacer novedad en los Ianaconas de las Chacaras", handing them over afresh by "padrón, lista, ó matrícula pública". Solórzano's own summary of the consequence, on printed page 68: "Con lo qual quedaron estos Indios como por parte (digámoslo así) de las mismas Chacaras, y heredades, y con ellas passan á qualquier posseedor: porque assí como los Indios no las pueden dexar, ó desamparar, tampoco los nuevos posseedores pueden mudarlos, ni despedirlos."
The cost is stated by the institution's defenders, not inferred. On printed page 72 Solórzano records that the possessor may not sell, donate or exchange yanaconas separately, nor reserve them by pact when he alienates the estate — but "por el contrario les será, y es permitido, traspassarlos como accessorios de ellas, quando las vendan"; and so much are they held part of the land that if a possessor merely attempts to sell them apart, he is deemed to have wished to sell the estate itself, "porque no pueden consistir, ni darse sin él". Earlier, on page 68, the argument in favour is that they are not slaves because they are like the Roman colonos partiarios or the vassals "que en nuestra España solemos llamar Solariegos, que de ordinario se suelen vender, estimar, y tassar por los Señores de ellos, y no por esso tienen nombre, ni calidades de esclavos" — a defence that concedes the sale and disputes only the name.
Solórzano's own vote, printed on pages 70 and 71, goes against the arrangement he has just expounded. He would have the whole genus of service abolished, "porque por mucho que deseen ajustarle sus Ordenanzas, son pocas, las que se guardan"; he defines liberty as "una facultad de hacer un hombre de sí, lo que quisiere, y vivir adonde, y con quien quisiere", holds that this "no se compadece, con tener á los Indios forzados en casas, y labranzas agenas", and states the historical comparison that decides it for him: fixing on a free man the burden of never being able to leave a place "raras vezes se solía poner en la antigüedad, sino á los esclavos, ó á los libertos, á quienes se dexaban alimentos para este efecto, ó á los reos, y delinqüentes, que por graves excessos eran condenados á cárcel perpetua". He also records a case in which he voted: an encomendero who offered to hunt down fugitive Indians in exchange for holding them as adscripticios was refused, "porque este concierto repugnaba á la libertad de los Indios".
The prohibitions he cites are older than the practice's consolidation. He records that ley 22 of the New Laws of 1542 "prohibió expressamente esta detención de Ianaconas, y Naborios"; that a provisión of 11 March 1550, inserted in another of 23 November 1566, ordered that no one serve himself of Indians "por vía de Naboría, ni Tequio, ni otro modo alguno contra su voluntad, y sin les pagar su trabajo"; and that a cédula of Madrid of 19 November 1539, treating precisely of Indians who claimed to have joined Spanish chacras of old and voluntarily, nonetheless ordered that it be made plain to them "que son libres, para poder hacer de sí, lo que quisieren, tomando el amo, que mas les contentáre… ni sean atraídos, ni apremiados á ir, ni estár en otra parte". His conclusion is that by these cédulas "no se hace caso de la voluntad de los Indios, ni de la prescripción" — consent and long usage alike are refused as grounds.
One order of magnitude survives, and it comes from the viceroy who declined to abolish the practice. On printed page 72 Solórzano quotes a royal letter of 1571 answering Toledo: "Tambien referís aver en esse Reyno mas de cinquenta mil Indios Ianacónas, y que podrían tributar como los demás, y que los vais haciendo reducir á Pueblos particulares… lo qual ha parecido bien, y assí lo haréis." The figure is a viceroy's own report of the population he governed, relayed in a document about taxing it, and the object treats it as an administrative estimate rather than a count.
Tribute followed the person, not the master. Yanaconas were assessed and paid to the king or to whoever held the grant, by instruction chapters sent to the president of Quito in 1563 and to the viceroy of Peru in 1568, and by a cédula of 1565 to the president of Nueva Galicia ordering the tribute assessed "por las cabezas de los Indios, que se hallassen detenidos, y ocupados en las minas, ú otras haciendas de los Españoles". Solórzano's advice on collection is candid about why moderation was in the crown's interest: collectors should proceed "con blandura en esta cobranza: porque haciendo lo contrario, no les den ocasión de ausentarse, y desamparar las labranzas".
The two printings interlock, which is what makes the reading checkable. The editor of the 1736 Política Indiana, Francisco Ramiro de Valenzuela, breaks into the chapter to key it to "la ley 12. tit. 3. lib. 6. de la Recop." and paraphrases its content — that those who remain voluntarily on the chacras be maintained, but that there be a pueblo near the chacra where they live at liberty with wife and children, "y nunca se reputen por Ianaconas involuntarios". The commentary and the statute were read here from two independent digitisations, a Madrid 1736 folio and a Madrid 1791 quarto, and each names the other.
What these pages cannot show is stated rather than filled in. They are a statute book and a treatise by a Council of the Indies minister: they give no series of estate inventories, no wage or ration figures, no case in which the 1618 law was invoked by a yanacona or enforced against a landholder, and no indigenous account of the condition. The Toledo ordinances Solórzano says tempered the practice, the padrones he says were drawn up, and the reasoning of the Charcas oidor Juan Ruiz Bejarano who defended it in a long allegation were not read for this object. Nor does anything read here support a claim about the practice after the seventeenth century; the modern scholarship on Andean yanaconaje was not reachable from this container and is not cited.