The petty trader was first cousin of the petty agriculturalist. The activities of both were attractive to penniless newcomers because they could be undertaken without great capital or connections. Often called tratante or dealer, as distinct from the mercader, who was usually an import merchant, the small trader was rather lower on the scale than the small farmer. Ex-seamen, the lowest of the low, often became tratantes on land. Immigrants of foreign origin (especially Italians, for some reason) tended to gravitate to local small trade, whereas among the farmers the only non-Spaniards, in any numbers, were the nearly Spanish Portuguese. The tratantes dealt in anything that could be bought cheaply in the local economy and resold for silver. They were taverners, peddlers, traders of nags and used clothing. Their most characteristic operation was selling to the Indian population of the cities and mines, people who, if not as rich as the Spaniards, were able to pay money for the rapa de la tierra ('native cloth’), and other products of the traditional Indian economy which they still desired and which the dealers gladly supplied them at a profit.

Andres Garda is the very epitome of a tratante. We can surmise this good industrious man's social status among Spaniards by the fact that he is great friends with a mulatto woman, and married to an Indian. His trade is exclusively in Indian products, sold at the ticmguiz of San Juan in the southwest district of Mexico City, the most important Indian market in the city proper. (Tianquiztli, Nahuatl for ‘market,’ was picked up by the Spaniards and applied to Indian markets specifically; in this sense the word was even carried to other parts of the Indies.) The products Garcia sells are Indian, but not from the region of the capital. They come a long distance, from the southern lowlands of Yucatan, Chiapas and the Guatemalan coast of Soconusco. (When Garcia says he has a cacao business ‘in Soconusco,' he means he is involved in production or buying there; the cacao would be sold in Mexico City.) Trade in these products between highland and lowland long antedates the conquest, of course.

The main areas of sixteenth-century Spanish settlement were the scene of an extraordinarily productive Indian agriculture, which would seem to have left little scope for Spanish farming. However, the Indians grew maize and other things that Spaniards would eat only from necessity. The conquerors in asking for rewards would sometimes list the eating of Indian foods among their great hardships. So from the earliest time there was a demand for meat from European livestock, as well as cereals, fruits, and vegetables of the European varieties.

At first most of this was procured through the encomienda, in a way of which we have seen an example in Letter 11. The encomendero would have one of his Spanish tribute collectors do the agricultural management, or he might hire someone especially for that purpose, usually a Spaniard on the humble side, newly arrived in the country, without many other possibilities. There would be a maintenance crew of a few blacks and permanent Indian employees, with the heavy labor of planting and harvesting done by Indians coming seasonally in fulfilment of their labor obligation to the encomendero. In the case of livestock, very little labor was required, and the small permanent crew was sufficient.

Since the Spanish cities in the central areas expanded so rapidly, in terms of both population and wealth, this system came under pressure almost immediately. Government officials, local entrepreneurs, younger relatives of encomenderos, and others who had some capital but no encomienda began to build up complexes just like those associated with the encomiendas, except for lack of rights to Indian tribute and labor. After a time of hiring seasonal labor fr∼m the encomenderos, they eventually succeeded in attaining an arrangement whereby Indian tribute labor was spread more evenly among the Spaniards and on a short-term basis, rather than being granted for a lifetime to one person in a whole area.

Even earlier and more pervasive than the large estate builders were the small fry, for food production was something susceptible of being carried out on a small scale and with little capital, and the market was increasingly good.

What encomenderos wrote to their relatives was one thing. What they wrote to governors and the crown was another. The encomenderos of the middle and later sixteenth century, many still conquerors or their direct descendants, had a well-defined public position, varying little from place to place. They were poor; their tributes had diminished to nothing; they were being displaced by undeserving newcomers to whom the governors were giving the whole land. Hidden in such words was their desire to maintain the monopoly and total dominance they had in the conquest period, and measured against that unreasonable hope, they indeed fell short and were deprived. Immigration to the central areas was strong, as we have said, and it included well-born and well-connected people who could not be denied their place. Others built up fortunes and connections on the spot, in mining or commerce, and then knocked insistently at the door. Incoming governors needed rewards for their entourage and close allies, to whom they could not give significant salaries. They cemented their base by awarding vacant encomiendas to ·relatives, employees and other followers, as indeed everyone expected them to do. Everywhere the governors acted the same, and everywhere the encomenderos protested. Actually, very few first conquerors or their sons had encomiendas taken away from them. Rather, between civil strife and Indian rebellions in the early time, and diseases in the later, many encomenderos died without direct heirs; it was mainly their grants that the governors gave away. The conquerors, within twenty or thirty years, had come to be a tightly knit group with innumerable nephews, nieces, or humble old friends under their wing, and it is to these that they would have had vacant encomiendas go. When this failed to happen, their response was not to fade into insignificance, but to marry their children into the new favored families, something which the newcomers desired just as greatly for the prestige and local acceptance it brought, so that from the second generation the encomenderos were an inextricable mixture of the new and the old, a situation that continued among leading families even in times and areas where the encomienda had lost its primary importance.

The shares of treasure that the conquerors received, where there was treasure to be had, were only the beginning of their remuneration. As a more basic and permanent reward, first conquerors received encomiendas, which led in turn to other advantages. The full complex consisted of an encomienda with numerous settled, tribute-paying Indians and a large revenue; a large house, establishment and following in the nearest Spanish city; a seat on that city's council; and farflung enterprises of various types from stockraising to silver mining. This was success; to top it off the lucky conqueror would write home the news, at the same time sending money and proof of his credentials, in return for which he hoped to receive from the royal court certain status symbols, the most frequent being a coat of arms and a royal title to his council seat. The present letter illustrates all these things quite fully, being a classic example of the ‘Mother, I've made it’ message for sixteenth-century Spanish America. The reader should not be too annoyed at Verdugo'S transparent bragging; it was the manner of the time. As the young man says, ‘I write you this so you'll be glad.’ A more attractive side of him is seen in his longing for mail. And after saying he was not going to send his mother anything more, he in fact sent her 850 pesos (maybe meant for legal expenses), as well as some emeralds, a ring, a mirror, a comb, and some Indian textile things.

Except for those returning immediately to Spain, the vast majority of fIrst conquerors received encomiendas. But grants varied immensely. To support the kind of complex sketched above, there had to be sizable, stable Indian provincial entities with well-oiled tribute mechanisms, and even that availed little unless there was a steady supply of precious metals in the local economy so that the tribute could be turned into something of value to Europeans. Full success, then, was a rare thing indeed outside Peru and Mexico (one encomendero of Peru once said his grant was worth more than Chile).

Not all husbands were like the Alonso Ortiz in the preceding letter. Others were solicitous, anxious to be with their families as quickly as possible, doing everything they could towards that end. In this letter, Sebastian de Pliego, who has been in Puebla only a short while, is already writing his wife for the second time, is sending her money, and in his great concern is giving her the most detailed instructions of what to sell, buy and bring for the trip. As he goes over everything, much of it twice, he brings the whole migration procedure, from the paperwork to the sea trip, to life for us. He also reaffirms the image seen in Letter 16, of the Indies as a land of plenty, in contrast to the lack of promise in old Spain. Pliego is unusually anxious about the question of proving lineage and identity, possibly because anyone from the Granada area, so recently won from the Moors, was somewhat suspect. His reference to the possible necessity of proving the family's antecedents in Brihuega betrays much. Textile workers from the central Castilian town of Brihuega were prominent in the development of early Puebla as the center of New Spain's textile production. The connection is confirmed in the fact that ‘Juan de Brihuega’ is sending the money for Pliego. Brihuega solidarity, then, operated despite the fact that Pliego's family had lived elsewhere for some time. Pliego was doubtless somehow involved in textile-making himself.

Of course the main thing we have here is the shining expression of unbreakable ties and love in Pliego's concern, his awkward jokes, and the wooden verses which we have attempted to translate.

Very desired and beloved wife:

The present letter is to let you know that, praise God, I am in good health, with much desire to see you. In the dispatch-boat I sent you a letter as soon as I arrived here in the city of Los Angeles, telling you what to do.

Since conquest and settlement were one single ongoing process in Spanish America, we are a little reluctant to emphasize the distinction between them by devoting a separate section to conquest alone. Yet only in this way can we illustrate to what an extent the conquerors were acting like immigrants, businessmen and settlers. Then too, the creation of Spanish cities, governmental jurisdictions and encomiendas took place at the time of the conquests, as a direct reflection and integral part of them. Spaniards tended to take their new cities - the framework of their world - for granted, but the encomiendas and governorships, being the great rewards of the enterprise, engendered strife and comment; whole genres of conquest correspondence grew up to brag, complain or petition about these matters.

We also wish to give some notion of the often down-to-earth first reports on new areas, whether private (Letters 1, 6), official (Letter 2), or mercantile (Letters 4, 5). It is enlightening to compare these with texts written some years after the occupation, such as Letter 3, or the last pages of Letter 36, both good examples of incipient legend formation. Finally, in the accounts of the conquest one gets an impression of the vast geographical spread of the movement, the differences between regions, and the varying success of the conquerors, who achieved quick victory and large rewards in the most densely settled areas of the Andes and Mexico, but experienced long struggles and relative poverty elsewhere.

Since there were many ecclesiastics and men of the law in the Indies, there was no lack of intellectuals to man the institutions of higher learning, both royal universities and academies or seminaries attached to the orders, that were soon established in the regional capitals. Except for some chairs of Indian languages, the content and form of instruction were the same as in Spain; the basic purpose of the schools was to train up members of the second and succeeding Spanish generations as lawyers, churchmen and physicians. The early Franciscans of Mexico, such great students of Indian language and culture, had little to do with the schools for Spaniards, and only rarely did these institutions attain the distinction seen in a few Jesuit professors of the latter sixteenth century, but at least they were there, giving some second sons of encomenderos or ambitious offspring of other Spaniards the qualifications to hold a church benefice or a post with one of the royal courts.

In the present letter our Augustinian friar and professor of theology tells us little about his teaching, though in his shameless preaching at his brothers he gives us a good sample of his pulpit style. Some interesting things emerge about the ecclesiastical world, which shows itself as a network of communications, not unlike the mercantile organizations, since the friar's letters to Spain often go through the sister of the Mexican archbishop. The church is even to some extent a business network, and fray Juan could see to the sale of some bibles now in demand in Mexico City. As a person who has made it, no less so than encomendero Andres Chacon (Letter 11), fray Juan is, like him, prepared to send his relatives gifts and dowries, and would like to have a nephew or two around him. Family ties were an important constituent element in all Spanish organizations, including the intellectual and ecclesiastic.

Gentlemen and very beloved brothers:

May our good God ever dwell in your spirits and give you the health, grace and peace that I desire for you and all your families and households.

Bachelor Calzada gives us in this letter a good object lesson in the economic situation of the secular clergy. The regular orders had general funds, endowments and estates which could shield friars from overt individual activity for economic gain. But secular priests were practically free agents, with no institutional support, and calzada is not exaggerating much when he says their salaries were ‘not enough for drinking water.’ Even to maintain himself in the style the community expected, much less to save anything for retirement, a priest had to have supplementary sources of income. One of the best such sources was a chaplaincy, paying the priest from an endowed fund for saying periodic masses on behalf of the patron. These plums, however, went largely to relatives of the encomenderos and other prominent local people who endowed them. Priests in the countryside commonly worked for their encomenderos as trusted, high-level managers or inspectors, and also began to acquire estates of their own; in towns they invested in whatever was most likely to show a profit, whether commerce, real estate, or here, mines. They ordinarily received certain supplies and labor from the Indians in addition to their salaries, from the same source as encomienda tribute, and indeed the encomenderos were long responsible for seeing that they got it. The products and services were often not of a kind they could use directly; instead they sold the products and employed the labor on their estates. In this way they acquired capital for more lucrative enterprises within the Spanish sector of the economy. These additional emoluments are the ‘rations’ that calzada refers to as being worth 2,000 pesos a year, far more than the salary proper, and that the viceroy has taken away. This measure, had it stuck, would have been the death of Christianity in Peru; but it did not, and rural priests especially continued receiving their rations, in Peru as elsewhere, until the end of the colonial period.

Calzada's ambition is to buy a refining mill using ‘this new invention of mercury.’ Even at Potosi the richest deposits, those which could be exploited through smelting, were not inexhaustible.

To match the hundreds of extant reports to the crown that governors and captains wrote about their conquests, there remain very few of the many letters the conquerors sent from the scene to family and friends. Most of these - and it is a characteristic worth noting - stick close to personal matters (the writer's fortunes, his prospects of coming home, his plans for relatives and for himself), hardly mentioning the progress of the conquest or the nature of the country. So the present letter is doubly rare, since the impressionable young man who wrote it did devote some space to the land of the Inca empire and the climactic event of the capture of its emperor, Atahuallpa, in which he took part. What he says is as fresh and direct as conversation, and with the complete honesty of a person who has no need to extol or excuse. Most accounts of the episode at Cajamarca give prominence to the dramatic parley in which a Dominican friar told Atahuallpa of Christianity and the Spanish king, with the fighting beginning only when the emperor broke off the talk. Gaspar skips over this as though it had never happened - not that it did not, but in his eyes it was an unimportant detail. What really happened was a great display of Indian wealth and numbers, followed by a sudden, total reversal when the Spaniards attacked. Gaspar bears the Indians no ill will and appreciates their accomplishments, indeed more than many other Spaniards of his time, but no need to justify the conquest ever occurs to him, nor is he concerned about the Indians' conversion (though he takes permanent Spanish government for granted).

An aspect that Gaspar lays bare more fully than do many reports by leaders, who enlarge on their own bravery and skill, or keep silent, is the overwhelming Spanish military superiority. When fighting nomads, the Spaniards faced military near-equals.

Letters abound in the records of early Spanish America. Or at least, public correspondence does. Members of all of the different official hierarchies were constantly writing to higher authority, and especially to the Spanish crown, petitioning, proposing, polemicizing. All corporations and interest groups did the same, and so did individuals when aggrieved or desirous of favors. The strident texts produced by this activity were long the main corpus with which historians of the Spanish Indies worked, first taking them at face value, then learning to appreciate their conventions, their propagandistic nature, their systematic distortions when compared with other types of evidence. New evidence emerged in many forms, from tax lists to notarial records, but rarely indeed, until recently, in the true counterpart of official correspondence, that is, private correspondence.

Were there no private letters? Scholars were long inclined to think so, and they even incorporated the supposed lack of intimate written expression into theories of the Spanish character. But in fact there were, and today's scarcity is only the result of the vulnerability of private correspondence to loss. From the examples that have been coming to light one can deduce that letter-writing among private individuals was a well-established custom in both Spain and the Indies (as the Spaniards persisted in calling America). Correspondents acknowledge previous letters, complain of lack of mail, speak of the cheapness of paper and ink, and in other ways betray that it was customary to write letters to absent relatives and friends. The genre was mature, with a complete set of salutations and courtesy endings, and certain conventions of vocabulary and structure, such as for example the frequent use of the word razon ('right,’ ‘reason’) somewhere in the beginning sentences.

Letters must have originated in all areas and gone in all directions, but in general only those which found a place in some official repository have been preserved. Most to appear so far were written from the Indies to relatives and associates in Spain. Of letters directed from Spain to the Indies we know little more than what we can deduce from the replies of the settlers, namely that they contained frequent appeals for money.

As fully pre-Columbian in tone as the previous letter, this text is representative of public rather than private discourse. With its length and full development, the language has breathing room; the rhetoric rolls on to establish an atmosphere, leading inexorably to the main point, a new high tribute assessment, which by the time it arrives seems the climax and crowning disaster of the history of Huejotzingo. This is oratory, an art as well developed among the Aztecs as among the Greeks. Such speeches as this were addressed by nobles to the emperor or other high dignitaries, and examples of the genre may be seen in Book VI of Sahagun's Florentine Codex. of course here the subject matter is postconquest, and a considerable amount of Spanish and Christian terminology has crept into the text. Yet the stylistic devices and most of the vocabulary are retained from earlier oratorical practice. So is the structure, consisting of large paragraph-sized units, each introduced by the invocation totecuiyoe totlatocatzine ('0 our lord, 0 our king’), and each an extensive elaboration of a single basic idea. In a way, it is small wonder that when Nahuatl speakers gave their petitions to Spaniards to translate, the result was often a text less than half the length of the original.

The message is approximately as follows: We salute you, high king. From a distant land we appeal for your mercy. When the Spaniards first came here, we greeted them as friends and helped them in all their wars, far more than the people of Tlaxcala. We accepted Christianity gladly and peacefully, whereas the Tlaxcalans resisted. Now your officials have assessed us a burdensome tribute. All the governors who went before treated us well, and we served them faithfully. What crime have we committed to deserve this? We humbly protest, and dutifully inform you that with such a tribute the city of Huejotzingo will soon cease to exist. The friar who bears this letter can tell you more.

The transparency of this is likely to bring a smile, in view of the contrast with the rhetorical grandeur built upon it. But this was the way of Nahuatl oratory.

The heroic woman in the style of early North American history is not really a central figure of the Spanish conquests. Mainly Indian servant women accompanied the conquerors. Most expeditions set out with no Spanish women at all; at most one or two camp followers or mistresses of leaders, like the well-known Ines Suarez in Chile. But in the relay system of conquest, at the more established base from which the expedition left there would always be wives and female relatives of the conquerors, who would begin to appear in the new country almost before the fighting was over. And legends formed around them. In the rich central regions the first women became known as grain goddesses and bearers of European civilization, each reputed to have introduced wheat and. other European foods and amenities. On the periphery, tales were told of the hardships and battle prowess of the once humble women who came with the conquerors, Ines Suarez again being a good example.

The present letter pertains more to the second phenomenon, though with some differences. The Plata region was indeed the periphery of the periphery, one of the most difficult and, in sixteenth-century terms, economically hopeless regions into which Spaniards ventured. However, this was not known in Spain when don Pedro de Mendoza, expecting another Peru, bypassed the step-by-step series of conquests and brought a great expedition directly from Seville, including no small number of women who were not camp followers; some were ladies with the title of dona and noble surnames like Guevara. As to the rest, dona Isabel tells it, not untruly, but in legendary and heightened form, twenty years after the fact and with the urgency of a disappointed claimant.

Very high and powerful lady:

Several women came to this province of the Rio de la plata along with its first governor don Pedro de Mendoza, and it was my fortune to be one of them.

If the previous letter was unusually private talk from a governor, in this one we have pronouncedly public correspondence. The general tone of official letters from governors to the crown is simply described: hysteria. Eternal emergency reigns. In don Luis de Velasco's picture, Spaniards may not be able to maintain a presence in Mexico; all elements of the population are on the verge of rebellion; the mines will soon be abandoned for lack of labor; the food supply situation is likened to a state of siege. Can this be the most peaceful and populous Spanish American colony at the time when discoveries of great silver mines are revolutionizing its economy, a land so plentiful in food and supplies that never an immigrant fails to comment on it? Don Luis is merely using the rhetoric of the genre, which had become so high pitched that only screams were worthy of attention. Both writers and recipients of such letters were perfectly capable of translating the shrieks into exclamation marks, and today's readers must also learn the art. The best way would be to read ten examples of governors’ letters from ten different times and places, observing how little the tone, vocabulary and content vary. For that we lack space, but it would be easy to find numerous letters in the best-known documentary collections which are close to this one in substance.

Other standard items here are the crude social stereotypes. Everyone is always idle, Spaniards as well as Indians, and the worst are always the blacks, mulattoes and mestizos. The solution proposed is always the same, mass deportation. (Needless to say, this was never carried out anywhere, nor immigration restricted meaningfully, though it is true that in the very early days expeditions into unpromising areas served as a safety valve with considerable effect.) The viceroy always feels that the Audiencia is insolent, that is, he would rather see it fully subordinated to him than have it act as a countervailing force, as it was meant to.