6 - Frontier workers and social change: Pilaya y Paspaya (Bolivia) in the early eighteenth century

Summary

In his book, The Frontier in Latin American History, Alistair Hennessy mentions as one characteristic of Latin American border regions the fact that they were “frontiers of inclusion,” meaning that they were areas in which cultural interchange and miscegenation were common. Other authors have also stressed the importance of contact and kin relations among different social and ethnic groups in fringe areas, generally emphasizing sexual relations between white men and non-white women.

Cultural and biological mixtures certainly typified colonial Pilaya y Paspaya, a wine-producing frontier zone in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia, see Figure 6.1), where in the early eighteenth century the labor force was mostly composed of migrant Indian workers. However, the case of Pilaya y Paspaya is unusual because social change there was clearly more pronounced in one group of Indian migrants, those known as yanaconas, than it was among the majority of immigrants, the forastervs. This chapter will look at the differential change in these two sectors of the Indian labor force and suggest that the reasons for the variation can be traced to the types of relationships that existed between workers and hacendados, and to the extent to which migrants continued to identify with their Andean communities of origin.

The province of Pilaya y Paspaya was noted for its varied terrain which included high altitude flatlands, or punas,in the northwest and malarial lowlands in the south along the Pilaya River. Between these two extremes the province was broken by a series of mountain valleys which became lower and broader as one moved south.