Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia 9780292720343, 0292720343

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Introduction (page 3)
1. The Mining Sector (page 19)
2. The Commercial Sector (page 47)
3. The Agricultural Sector (page 91)
4. The Medellin Elite (page 111)
5. Conclusion (page 143)
Notes (page 151)
Bibliography (page 179)
Index (page 189)

Citation preview

Miners, Merchants, and Farmers

in Colonial Colombia |

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Latin American Monographs, No. 57 , Institute of Latin American Studies The University of Texas at Austin

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Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia _

by Ann Twinam

, +> University of Texas Press, Austin

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Twinam, Ann 1946Miners, merchants, and farmers in colonial Colombia. (Latin American monographs; no. 57) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Antioquia (Colombia: Dept.)—Economic conditions. 2. Antioquia (Colombia: Dept.)—Social conditions. 3. Antioquia (Colombia: Dept.)—Civilization. I. Title. II. Series: Latin American monographs (University of Texas at Austin Institute of Latin American Studies); no. 57.

HC198.A5T9 1982 338’.04°0986126 82-11054 ISBN 0-292-72034-3

Copyright © 1982 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1982 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions

University of Texas Press P. O. Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712

Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3 | 1. The Mining Sector 19

2. The Commercial Sector 47 | | 3. The Agricultural Sector 91

4. The Medellin Elite 111 | | 5. Conclusion 143

Bibliography 179 | ,

Notes 151 Index 189

a BLANK PAGE

Illustrations |

Figures

1. Fundicion Figures 29 | | 2. Miner and Merchant Pesos de Oro to Fundicién 35

3. Provincial Imports and Fundicién Figures 51

Tables , 4. Division of Trade among Antioquefio Cities 55 5. Abbreviated Genealogical Chart of Mufos Family 120

1. Annual Fundicién Figures, 1670-1807 28

2. Average Fundicién 30

3. Miner and Merchant Pesos de Oro to Fundicién 34 , ,

4. Production Record of Antioquefo Placer Mine 43 5. Distribution of Miner Contribution to Fundici6n, 1770-1808 44 6. Amounts over 10,000 Pesos de Oro to Fundicién, 1775-1808 45

7. Value of Legal Imports into Antioquia, by City 52 , 8. Estimated Prices of Textile Goods in Medellin, 1785 64 ,

9. Estimated Average Price of Imports into Medellin 66 , , 10. Prices of Textile Goods in Mateo Molina’s Account Book 68 11. Volume of Goods Brought into Medellin 70 12. Total Value of Imported Goods, 1763-1810 72

x Illustrations 13. Distribution of Merchant Groups, 1763-1810 75 14. Nonresident Imports into Rionegro, Medellin, and Antioquia City,

1763-1810 79 ,

15. Resident and Nonresident Trade in Rionegro and Medellin,

1763-1810 81 16. Estimated Time and Travel Costs from Medellin to Other Antioquefio

and New Granadan Cities 84 17. Estimated Time and Cost of Transporting Fifty Mule Loads from

Cartagena to Honda 85

18. Estimated Profits of Twenty Largest Antioqueno Importers 89 19. Land Distribution in Otrabanda and San Cristobal, 1787-1788 98

20. Occupations of Medellin’s Municipal Council Officers, 1780-1810 116 21. Correlation between Municipal Council Membership and Wealth 118

22. Peninsular-Creole Ratio on the Medellin Municipal Council 128 23. Mobility into and within the Medellin Municipal Council 130 24. Elite and Subelite Medellin Families 134 25. Medellin Family Classifications by Generation 136 26. The Restrepo Family, 1780-1810 138 27. Occupational Continuity in Medellin, 1780-1810 140

Maps

1. Department of Antioquia 2 | 2. Valley of Medellin 110

Acknowledgments

This monograph has evolved through many stages. Richard M. Morse, my thesis adviser, deserves more than a simple thank you. Only he knows how

much time he consumed in answering questions and correcting manuscripts, and only I know how vital his encouragement and criticism were. Frank Safford has offered detailed and pertinent critiques, as have James Parsons and the late Luis Ospina Vasquez. Commentaries by Emilia Viotti da Costa, Howard Lamar, Zane Miller, and German Colmenares have also influenced subsequent revisions. My research in Bogota was enriched by conversations with Hermes Tovar Pinzon, Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, the late

Alvaro Lopez Toro, and Anthony MacFarlane, and in Medellin by conversations with Hernan Escobar Escobar and Diego Villegas. Ursula

Lamb, Joseph Tulchin, Anthony Maingot, and Charles Boxer also contributed to this effort. The staffs of the Archivo Nacional and the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota provided unfailingly courteous and prompt service. In Medellin I owe a very special debt to the then-director of the

Archivo Historico de Antioquia, José Ignacio Rodriguez, and to his secretary Carmelita Gonzalez. Other thank yous go to the staffs of the

Consejo Municipal and the University of Antioquia Library. Joaquin , Londono of the Asociacion Colombiana de Mineros arranged my visit to the

Pato Division of International Mining Company, where engineer J. Fernando Rico showed me both colonial and present-day mining sites and techniques. Luis Ospina Vasquez’s newly founded Fundacion Antioquena para los Estudios Sociales (FAES—the Antioquia Foundation for Social

Studies) provided the perfect atmosphere for as well as a superb staff to aid | in the final revisions, particularly its director, Juan Manuel Ospina and his wife, Gloria, and their secretary, Mercedes Arias. There are many others whose names do not appear here. They know who they are, and I thank them

xii Acknowledgments for their time and help. Grants from Yale University’s Council on Latin American Studies, the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, the University of

Cincinnati's Renton K. Brodie doctoral fund and Charles Phelps Taft: Memorial Fund, and from the Fulbright Commission have supported my research and writing. My husband, Andy, was a never-failing tower of strength, and my parents never doubted that I could do it.

Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia

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Introduction e

In downtown Medellin, off the Plazuela Nutibara, sits La Gobernacion, a gray- and sand-checked gothic palace, the seat of Antioquefo departmental © politics.'! On one wall a small bronze plaque self-confidently proclaims “Por |

Colombia, los Antioquemos podemos hacer mas” (““For Colombia we Antioquenos can do more’’). Psychedelic T-shirts in downtown stores croon “Medellin is love,” and handbags are emblazoned “‘Medellin is Colombia.”

Posters take a belligerent—and in centrally governed Colombia—even a secessionist tone: ““A federal Antioquia.’’ Murals on the newly constructed Avenida Oriental depict the “‘origen, vida, y grandeza de una raza.”” What plaque and T-shirt, handbag, poster, and mural share is the self-conscious expression of Antioquefio regionalism. Even in a Colombia known for its

distinctive regions (patrias chicas), only the Antioquefios, who call

themselves paisas, could have fostered a poet like Gregorio Gutiérrez , Gonzalez who once boasted, “I write not Spanish, but Antioqueiio.”” An important ingredient in Antioquefio regionalism is the recognition, and

not only by paisas, that Antioquefos have an international reputation as entrepreneurs. Their most-noted accomplishment was the industrialization early in this century of their mountain-locked capital, Medellin. In certain respects Antioquia was an unlikely place for such industrialization to occur.

The department is crisscrossed by the central and western Andean cordilleras and lacks navigable interior rivers, so departmental geography alone posed formidable obstacles to the transportation and communications networks vital to economic development. In spite of these barriers, paisa investors ordered textile machinery from England and loaded it on mules for

the precarious journey over the highest mountain passes. A combination of recalcitrant mules, crushed machinery, and a 1904 bank failure doomed this

first effort, but the second loom was already on order and went into

4 Introduction production by 1906. By 1915 there were 150 mechanical looms in Medellin,

and within the decade their number had increased to 650. By 1945 Antioquefos contributed 24 percent of the value of national industrial production, although the department contained only 14 percent of Colombia’s population.’ By the 1960s Medellin was the center of a dynamic textile industry that included South America’s largest producer, Coltejer. More recently, residents of Medellin (Medellinenses) have invested in food processing, metal goods, precision machinery, and the other usual products of a diversified and modern economy.*

Less-well-publicized though no less dramatic are earlier evidences of Antioquefo enterprise. During the nineteenth century Antioquefios pioneered investments in coffee, tobacco, stockraising, banking, international commerce, colonization, and lode mining, and their colonial ancestors had supplied a substantial portion of New Granada’s gold exports.” Much has been written, and much debated, as to the reason why the Antioquefios, hidden in an isolated mountain valley, have played such a special and important role in Colombia’s economic history. Scholars clash in their judgments concerning the origin, timing, motivation, and development of Antioquefio enterprise, and also concerning the significance of that

enterprise counterpoised against the broader landscape of economic development theory.

EARLIER INTERPRETATIONS OF ANTIOQUENO ENTREPRENEURSHIP Intellectual trends in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have shaped most inquiries into the origins of Antioquefio enterprise. In the 1960s and 1970s an abundant social science literature portrayed Antioquefios as either psychological or ethnic deviants. From the 1930s through the 1950s

Antioquefios themselves developed theories to account for their role as industrial leaders. At the turn of this century paisas defended themselves _ against racist charges that their business acumen derived from a Jewish origin. A critical evaluation of these disparate theories reveals as much about the underlying assumptions of their proposers as about Antioquefio economic achievement. Even so, a review of existing interpretations of that

achievement illustrates more than what has gone before; it also suggests potentially fruitful pathways for later investigations to follow. During the 1960s and the 1970s North American social scientists looked at the world and discovered that the post-World War II prosperity of both conquerors and conquered was not duplicated in Third World continents. In a search for both cause and curative, social scientists emphasized historical,

| Introduction 5 psychological, or cultural barriers that they believed had delayed the appearance not only of ““modern’’ attitudes, but also of industrial economies.

“Traditional”? Latin American attitudes, whether manifested in the importance attached to landed wealth or in the low prestige accorded scientific or business careers or in a reluctance to invest in industry, figured as such impediments. Since the Antioquefios did not hold many of these

traditional attitudes, they, along with a few other examples of local , industrialization (such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Monterrey, Mexico) emerged as possible “‘test cases’ wherein those inherent ingredients necessary for Latin American economic development might presumably be synthesized.° Everett E. Hagen emerged as a central figure among 1960s researchers

when he devoted a chapter to Antioquia in his On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins. His provocative generalizations

elicited numerous responses: Leonard Kasdan expanded the ethnic , components of Hagen’s interpretation, and Frank Safford, Alvaro Lopez

, Toro, William Paul McGreevey and others rejected his proposals and offered alternative explanations. Luis H. Fajardo explored the Protestant ethic of the Antioquemos and James L. Payne chronicled Antioquia’s particular role in national politics in Patterns of Conflict in Colombia.’ Increasingly during the 1960s and the 1970s the Antioqueno case figured in social science theoretical formulations: David C. McClelland on achievement; Seymour Martin Lipset on entrepreneurship; Albert Hirschman on economic development.® Since Antioquefio industrialization presumably

ran counter to a Colombian or Latin American norm, most explanations emphasized the unusual or the deviant in paisa psychology, culture, or history. Hagen’s work proposed both a psychological and an ethnic interpretation for paisa enterprise and provided a stimulus and a base for much of the later theorizing. He argued that Antioquefios suffered from a “status deprivation”’

that propelled them to business success. According to Hagen, this type of loss of status had produced “‘entrepreneurial personalities’ in groups as divergent as the Nonconformists and Scots of Great Britain and the lesser

Samurai and wealthy peasants of Japan. Antioquefio status deprivation, Hagen asserted, was rooted in local history: when their mining sector became depressed in the seventeenth century and their native labor force depleted, paisas were reduced to manual labor. Their colonial peers, from the New Granadan provinces of Cundinamarca and Valle, possessed vast haciendas and more abundant Indian labor and rejected paisas who could not conform to their traditional standards of gentility and “‘landedness.”’ From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries the dominant

6 Introduction New Granadan elites perceived Antioquejfios as “economically backward”’

and “‘socially inferior.” These two hundred years of rejection were the

incubation period for an alternative, Antioquefio value system that _ formulated a distinct self-image that promoted entrepreneurial behavior and

that led to paisa economic success.’ Certain elements of Hagen’s theory struck home, but, on the whole, his interpretation met with severe criticism. Although none would deny that the development of a conscious Antioquefio self-image has played some kind of

role in the region’s development, or that the absence of the large landed estate has been a critical factor in paisa history, Hagen’s thesis not only failed to provide convincing proof for “status deprivation,” but it reduced a complex historical reality to an absurd simplification. Hagen’s traditional Cundinamarca and Valle elites, for example, (whose security in land and Indians permitted them to repudiate the Antioquejfios) proved to be mythical constructs. German Colmenares’s carefully docu-

mented research of conquest and early-colonial New Granada has demonstrated that insecurity plagued conquistadors and their heirs, who

vainly struggled to hold onto their land and unsuccessfully fought catastrophic declines in the number of Indian laborers.'° Significantly, Hagen forwarded no concrete examples of “status deprivation’’ during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and his next instance, in 1808, fell a full 150 years into his two-century “incubation” period. Frank Safford’s research also contradicts Hagen’s thesis. He notes that nineteenth-century

Bogota (Cundinamarca) elites, far from deprecating Antioquefios, welcomed them as eligible marriage partners and social equals.'' The burden of proof of a theory such as “status deprivation”’ rests with the proposer, and in

this case Hagen was not up to the mark. “Status deprivation” proved but one episode in the 1960s and 1970s search for the raison d’étre of an Antioquefio entrepreneurial personality. Taking a key from paisa intellectuals, who had long noted the proliferation of Basque surnames among local families, Hagen proposed in the same essay

that Basques might form an entrepreneurial nucleus that had promoted Antioquefio economic development. Using the 1957 phone book as a base, Hagen calculated that 15 percent of Medellin’s population was of Basque

ancestry. He compared this finding with a detailed list of Medellin industrialists and discovered that 20 to 25 percent of these had Basque surnames. Although he admitted the methodological deficiencies of this exercise, Hagen argued that his statistics were nonetheless impressive, for they showed that Antioquefios with Basque surnames were twice as numerous among entrepreneurial leaders as they were among the population as a whole.’ In a follow-up essay, Kasdan challenged Hagen’s assumption that

Introduction 7 Spanish Basques were necessarily entrepreneurs. He suggested instead that

Basque encouragement of the emigration of younger sons might well have socialized in these migrating Basques some of the essential qualities of the

entrepreneur.'> Hagen’s proposal and Kasdan’s response unleashed a veritable Basque-o-mania among writers on Antioquia specifically, and on economic development in general. Whether they agreed with Hagen and

Kasdan or not, James Payne, Luis H. Fajardo, Albert Hirschman, and Peter Kilby felt compelled to mention the Antioquefio-Basque connection, a connection that also figured in the Stanley Brandes-William DouglasLeonard Kasdan debate on Basque migrant entrepreneurs." Hagen’s Basque theory could be valid only if Medellin’s 1957 phone book -_ provided a representative sample of the city’s population. Since in 1957 only 20 percent of Medellin’s population had phones, the telephone directory was

an inappropriate source. Wealthy Medellinenses or those who owned businesses were overrepresented, compared to the population as a whole.’ If Antioquefios with Basque surnames were an entrepreneurial nucleus, they would appear to comprise a larger percentage of the population than they

, actually represented (based on their listing in the telephone directory). If Basque-surnamed Antioquemos were not entrepreneurs, they would, correspondingly, be underrepresented as phone subscribers. Either way, the phone-book-derived percentage of Basques could not be compared reliably

with Hagen’s percentage of Antioquefo-Basque industrialists. An alternative source, Gabriel Arango Mejia’s Genealogias de Antioquia y de Caldas, which lists the provinces of origin of most typical paisa family

names, shows that Basques accounted for 22 percent of Antioquia’s immigrants.’° If so, Hagen’s figure, which shows Antioquefio industrialists _ with Basque names as 20 to 25 percent of local entrepreneurs, proves that this group was no more enterprising than we might expect. Leonard Kasdan’s assertion that migrating Basques might have a marked

entrepreneurial potential finds some historical support in Peter Boyd-

Bowman’s statistical compilation of Spanish migration to the Americas. nn Boyd-Bowman’s statistics showed that although Basques from 1520 to 1539

accounted for only 4.5 percent of total colonists, they accounted for an impressive 14 percent of migrating merchants. In the next period (15401559), Basque merchants and colonists were about equally represented (4.2 percent merchants, 4.4 percent colonists), whereas from 1560 to 1579 Basque merchants amounted to a slightly higher percentage than Basque emigrants (5.2 percent merchants, 2.9 percent colonists). A comparison of the percentages of migrants and the percentages of migrating merchants from other Spanish regions, however, shows that the Basques had no monopoly

on enterprise: merchants from Andalusia, to cite but one example, also

8 Introduction - formed a significantly higher proportion of the emigrants from their region. !” Boyd-Bowman’s statistics do not extend to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Antioquia received the bulk of its emigrants. My article that deals with Basques in late-colonial Medellin, shows that this group formed

no distinctive language or culture nucleus, nor was its proportion of entrepreneurs larger than its percentage of the population would indicate."*

| Thus, although Antioquia may have received a relatively high percentage of Basque emigrants, no convincing evidence supports the theory that Basques

formed an entrepreneurial enclave that promoted paisa economic development. Although no empirical validity exists for either “status deprivation” or a Basque “entrepreneurial nucleus,” this type of approach, which emphasizes

the alien, or the non-Latin American aspects of paisa history and culture, has roots that extend beyond 1960s social-science conceptualizations. For

more than a century paisas have contended with charges that their resourcefulness results from Jewish blood. The Antioquefio response to such accusations was the gradual development (and eventual flowering in the 1940s) of an aggressively positive self-image: la raza. A myriad of pamphlets, essays, and books proclaim this “ethnological heresy,’ which eclectically blends regional history, literature, geography, anthropology, folk legend, sociology, economics, and psychology, to argue that Antioquefos form a special race, a distinct culture, and a probably superior people within

Colombia.'? Whether deadly serious or tongue-in-cheek, la raza is an

important component of the Antioquemo sense of regionalism and

consciousness of self that endure even today. : Before la raza stretches more than a century when Antioquefios were marked by their fellow Colombians and by foreigners as forming an alien and a Jewish presence within Colombia. Although in the twentieth century

Antioquefios have come to recognize the Jewish connection as a backhanded compliment, in earlier times this linkage was a multiple insult. Anti-Semitism in Colombia, as elsewhere in Latin America, was shaped by tradition and buttressed by fallacious stereotypes. The heritage was religious in nature and depicted Jews as betrayers and murderers of the Savior. Added

to this was a history of Spanish cultural prejudice that proclaimed that “honor” and racial purity (Jimpieza de sangre, literally, “clean blood’’) were not compatible with Jewish ancestry.*° By the nineteenth century Colombians typically deprecated Jews as homeless (Wandering Jew) and miserly (Shylock), although they also conceded that Jews were shrewd businessmen and entrepreneurs. How then did Antioquefios, justly reputed as among the most traditional and devout of Colombia’s Catholics, provoke the accusation that they were

, Introduction 9 descended from conversos, Spanish Jews forcibly converted in the fifteenth

and sixteenth centuries, who had then migrated to the colonies?”! A few | typical Antioquefo family names, such as Correa and Santamaria, could © possibly be of converso origin. However, as the following analysis will show, it was not any significant historical evidence that prompted the AntioquefioJewish linkage. Rather, to other Colombians and to foreigners, Antioquefios looked and acted different, at times even “‘a-Colombian’’; and they decided that these differences conformed to their own stereotypical ideas of what was

“Jewish.” Because of this mental process, the innocent Antioquefio colonizer became a “Wandering Jew,” or, as was more often the case, the enterprising Medellinense merchant or industrialist emerged as a “‘Shylock.”’ The Jewish-Antioquefio connection thus provides a sensitive indicator of

when outsiders began to see Antioquefios as deviants, and, since that perceived deviance usually derived from paisa business dealings, of when

the Antioquefo image became that of entrepreneur. As the following historical inquiry into the roots of the legend will indicate, the linkage of Antioquefio-Jew-entrepreneur substantially predated that most obvious evidence of paisa economic development—the industrialization of Medellin. . Tracing the myth thus provides a guide to yet earlier stages in the evolution

of Antioquefio entrepreneurship, as it actually existed and as it was

-- perceived to exist. |

Although some Colombians still believe that Antioquefios are descended from Jews, it was in the 1920s, when Medellin’s early textile mills formed novel outlines on the Andean landscape, that the paisa-Jewish connection received the most publicity.” Word of Medellin’s industrialization was farreaching, and the credit for that industrialization, at least according to Dr. F.

Milier, a North American visitor to Colombia, rested with Antioquia’s _ “Jews.” In a 1922 report filed with the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Institution, Miller noted that the Department of Antioquia has the greatest surface and population and is the most important in the Republic of Colombia. It derives its name from the town of Antioch, in Syria. Its population is almost all of Jewish origin, for it was here that they established themselves when they fled from Spain. Owing to the disposition inherited from this race, the Antioquefios have succeeded such that the department is the first in finance

and in industry in all the country.”°

At about the same time, Bogota resident Raimundo Rivas speculated in a Medellin historical journal that the Santamarias, an old, wealthy, and highly respected Antioquefio family, were descendants of Rabbi Salemon Ha Levi, | who had taken that Christian name upon conversion.” Even Antioquefios

10 Introduction themselves, Eduardo Zuleta for one, wondered if myth might not be reality: One day when my Madrid-bound train stopped at Bayona, a woman who looked very much like a friend of mine in Medellin entered my car. As the woman noticed my surprise, she looked at me more closely and after a few minutes said, “I believe that we share a similar religion, for you appear to be Jewish.” I told her that I had been born in a , town in Colombia whose inhabitants were believed to be of Jewish origin, but that no one had decisively proved this. ““When you return to Madrid,” she said,“’go to Bayona and visit the Jewish barrio, it might interest you.”’ I did so and was astonished to note the incredible resemblance of those Jews to Antioquefios, and even more so when I learned

that many of them had the same family names common to Antioquia.” , Antioquefio expansion into coffee cultivation and construction of a railroad to carry the coffee harvest to market corresponded with earlier, 1890s versions of the paisa-Jewish connection. In 1892 Colombian novelist

Jorge Isaacs published a poem called “‘La Tierra de Cordoba,”’ the title containing a reference to one of Antioquia’s independence heroes. In the poem Isaacs, himself of Jewish ancestry, asks the question, ““From what race are you descended, energetic people, Titan worker?’ His answer, meant to be laudatory, was the Jews: ““You have rejected the ominous inheritance of the cruel Iberian: . . . Your daughters are beautiful and the

pride of Israel.’””° Isaacs’s reputation as the foremost romanticist of nineteenth-century Colombian letters ensured the widespread circulation of

: the poem throughout the country. As a climax to that year, Dofia Soledad Acosta de Samper, the Colombian delegate to a conference to celebrate the

, quadricentennial of the discovery of America, produced a paper that

tribes of Israel.’ ,

announced that, indeed, Antioquefios were descended from one of the lost

The period of the 1860s to the 1880s saw even earlier commentary on a Semitic origin for the Antioquefos. In 1868 Don José Vergara y Vergara noted in his.Historia de la literatura that the state of Antioquia had been settled by a colony of Jews. He confirmed this by showing the similarity between certain Antioqueno and Jewish surnames, by commenting on the particularly “Jewish” beauty of paisa women, and by noting the innate “commercial” character of the inhabitants. In an 1875 newspaper article Don José Maria Samper sneered that the governor of Antioquia was served by “political Jews.”’ When French geographer Eliseo Reclus, who had lived in Colombia for some years, published his L’'Homme et la terre, he noted a tradition that claimed that Antioquia had been settled by Jews.” Tracing the linkage farther back reveals Antioquefio-Jewish references in the 1840s and the 1850s. In 1851 Gregorio Gutiérrez Gonzalez published “Felipe,” which contained the following lines:

a, Introduction 11 In this enchanted land lives

The infamous race cursed by God; ,

A race of merchants who speculate | With everything and about everything. An impious race, Through whose cold-blooded veins runs

The vile blood of the Jewish nation. Let pesos upon pesos accumulate The price of his honor, his goods; And only the interest is considered Everything is bought here, everything is sold.

There the wife, slave of her husband | Receives neither love nor enjoys pleasures, And subject to her greedy father

Is the innocent daughter.” , When queried about the source of such an unflattering description, Gonzalez Gutiérrez recounted the no-doubt allegorical, but very pertinent tale of the woes of his friend Felipe, a Bogotano, who visited Medellin, where he fell deeply in love with an Antioquefa named Rosa. After a month’s acquaintance Felipe knew he had found his true love and pressed his poet friend into forwarding his suit with Rosa’s father. When he heard that Felipe was “given to literature,’ the enraged parent summarily rejected him as a candidate for his daughter’s hand: “These studious men are not worth anything. ... Do you understand? Worth nothing. They would be incapable of investing two hundred pesos if by chance they were able to earn it.”’°° The Medellinense announced that his daughter would be reserved to someone who was able to support her. Felipe fled Medellin, and, according

, to Gutiérrez Gonzalez, he penned the bitter lines quoted above on the walls of an abandoned house overlooking the valley. Here again, although the poem directly connects Antioquenios with Jews, the origin of these lines stems from the supposedly mercenary attitude of Rosa’s father. The 1840s corresponded to the expansion of Antioquefio investments into

national markets, which might well have produced some competitive , jealousy from less-well-financed Bogota counterparts. In 1844 El Dia, a

, Bogota newspaper, stormed, Look at these diligent and active usurers of Jewish face and hardened heart, friends of their own profit and enemies of anyone else’s, incapable of accommodating anyone, even their own family. Guard well against . . . one of those who descended by direct line from the members of that race persecuted by Phillip II [who] came as parasites to America, hiding their true name and origin, and whose descendants are today the torment of so many individuals.*!

12 Introduction Although this diatribe does not directly refer to a paisa-Jew connection, the image invoked here is that of the Shylock or the shrewd businessman. The earliest known linkage of Antioquefios to Jews extends to the closing years of the colonial era, when Antioquefos first became conspicuous on a

national level as they colonized outside their settled valleys and as Antioqueno merchants extended their commercial operations beyond the home province. It was the purposeful settlement of Antioquia’s hinterland that initially attracted the attention of Valle-born Dr. Don Manuel Antonio

del Campo y Rivas. In his Compendio historial he transformed the colonizing Antioquefio into the Wandering Jew. The Antioquefos of his day, he asserted, were seekers of new land because their forefathers had failed to reach the Promised Land. Those ancestors had rejected Moses’ call to flee Egyptian bondage and only later had they migrated to Algiers, Spain,

and, finally, to Antioquia. The Jews’ New World descendants were men suffering an eternal punishment that drove them compulsively beyond the next horizon in a vain attempt to find the paradise their ancestors had lost. Campo y Rivas also asserted that Antioquia’s native dish, mazamorra, was of suspicious origin. He pointed to its slight resemblance to cush cush and charged that its very name, masa de moros (“dough of Moors’’) was a sign of its crypto-Jewish heritage. He concluded that since Antioquefios looked like Jews and acted like Jews, they clearly were Jews.” Campo y Rivas’s hypotheses notwithstanding, no empirical evidence substantiates an Antioquefio-Jewish connection. For decades paisa intellectuals have rebutted such charges. They have noted that Jewish emigration to

the Spanish colonies was forbidden, and that no Antioquefio ever stood accused as a Jew before the Cartagena Inquisition. Arango Mejia spent the

better part of his life researching Antioqueno family origins, and his Genealogias de Antioquia y de Caldas proved, to those willing to be convinced by historical evidence, that there was no reason to associate Antioquefio and Jew. Although the Antioquefio-Jewish connection is invalid, the historiography of the Jewish myth provides some provocative insights into the state of mind

of the accusers as well as into the actions of the accused. Even if Antioquefos were not Jewish, they must have been acting differently in some way, and doing so with sufficient regularity to attract the attention of fellow Colombians and foreigners alike. Both the nature and the timing of the

charges suggest that it was Antioquefo initiative, be it in colonization efforts, commercial expansion, development of export crops, or industrialization, that coincided with successive revivals of the charge of Jewishness.

Outsiders perceived such enterprise as atypical, as possibly even aColombian, and so they attached the racist and stereotypical Jewish label to

Introduction 13 the Antioquefo. Because of this, the Jewish myth illustrates much more than critical

| benchmarks in Antioquefio economic development. It not only dates Antioquefo enterprise, but shows it to be of long duration, and to be wellestablished significantly prior to the twentieth-century industrialization of Medellin. To understand how Antioquefos industrialized their capital, one can study the prevailing economic, political, and social structure that was Antioquia and Colombia in the first decades of this century. To understand why Antioquefios decided to industrialize necessitates study of Antioquefio enterprise in earlier centuries. This monograph seeks to understand part of _ this why. It focuses on Antioquia in the closing decades of the colony, when

paisa economic efforts were still confined to provincial limits. Antioquenos , who figure in this analysis will, by their postindependence colonization projects and their commercial expansion, be the first provokers of the Jewish

myth. Was this group the transmitter of an enduring Antioqueno entrepreneurial tradition? If so, what in Antioquia’s colonial history prepared them for such a role? To answer these questions, succeeding chapters probe the possibilities

and limitations inherent in colonial Antioquia’s natural and human resources. Chapters one through three study the cornerstones of Antioquia’s

colonial economy: mining, commerce, and agriculture; Chapter four focuses on Medellin and how economic resources shaped the values and composition of one local elite. The Conclusion compares Antioquefos with

selected eighteenth century counterparts. | Antioquefios will not appear here as psychological deviants or as aliens, but rather as Spanish emigrants and their descendants placed in a land that offered them a certain living and chances for a future, but also a land that foreclosed

certain alternatives. The classic monograph on Antioquia, James Parsons’s , Antioqueno Colonization in Western Colombia, endures precisely because Parsons recognized this point. As a geographer and as a historian, he saw that Antioquefios would be incomprehensible without active consideration of the dynamic interaction between paisas and their environment. It is back, then, to those towering mountains and isolated valleys that we, too, must go, for with a different geography this story would never have taken place.

SOME GEOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL PRELIMINARIES Gradually rising from the tropical lowlands to the north, the central and western cordilleras mount to dominate the Antioquefo landscape and twist

the terrain into numberless valleys surrounded by the lush green slopes

characteristic of Colombia’s Andes. Although the mountains separate

14 Introduction Antioquefos from each other and from the outside world, their elevation makes life not only tolerable, but marvelously agreeable. Although lying only six degrees north of the equator, Medellin is justifiably known as the

“City of Eternal Spring.’’ Within its varying altitudes, Antioquia’s mountainous 62,150 square kilometers harbor a rich diversity of climates and harvests, starting with the cacao, rice, and tobacco of the lowlands, and rising to the plantain, cotton, coffee, and potato of cooler mountain terrain. **

Corn and beans, the Antioquefo meat and potatoes, grow in all altitudes. Even today, it is only in the pressurized cabin of a jetliner that the paisa can fully escape the influence of those Andean mountain chains that restrict his climate, diet, and life style. Flying at thirty thousand feet, a jetliner en route from Medellin to Bogota takes less than half an hour, hardly time for a passenger to

consume a cup of strong Colombian coffee. The equivalent journey by bus

consumes from twelve to eighteen hours, breakdowns excluded. If two Antioquenios leave Medellin’s airport and central bus depot at the same time, — the first would be receiving his baggage in Bogota’s El Dorado Airport while the second would be but halfway up the first mountain and still gazing at a vista

of Medellin sprawled beneath him, with a hard day’s travel ahead. Although the mountains dominate the Antioquefio landscape, the present boundaries of the department are shaped by Colombia’s river systems. The Magdalena and the Atrato Rivers form the eastern and western limits of the region, which is pierced through the center by the Cauca. All of these rivers are navigable at some points, although at considerable risk to the traveler and his cargo. The northernmost limits of the department lie on the Gulf of Uraba and the Caribbean; the southernmost boundaries penetrate deep into Colombia’s Andean heartland. The mountains and tropical lowlands thus formed a protective cocoon for the maturation of a distinctive regional economy and society, one element of which, the Indian, was already there when, in the

early sixteenth century, Antioquia received its first wave of conquistadors. Just nine years after Columbus’s sighting of the New World, a Spanish

expedition was picking its way along the Caribbean coast, the Gulf of Uraba, and Antioquia’s northern frontier. Although Rodrigo de Bastidas, Juan de la Cosa, and Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not establish a colony, they found evidence of gold, and this alone assured that their countrymen would soon follow. Antioquia was no easy conquest. The coastal natives were decidedly unfriendly, and their poisoned arrows doomed the first two outposts established near the Atrato River in 1510 and 1524. The legends of the fabulous wealth of the interior stiffened Spanish resolve, however, and the third colony, San Sebastian de Buenaventura, founded in 1535, became the marshaling ground for expeditions into the interior. In 1536 and again in 1537 the expeditions of Pedro de Heredia and Francisco César pushed

Introduction 15 farther and farther into the province, and the next year Oidor Juan de Badillo

reached the Cauca River and followed its path southward to traverse Antioquia completely. When his expedition arrived at the recently founded

city of Cali, two of the strongest currents of the Spanish conquest—the Caribbean and the Peruvian—met and began a protracted and bloody

conflict over the newly discovered terrain. As Badillo’s expedition was pushing its way southward, an offshoot of Pizarro’s Peruvian conquest was moving northward. Sebastian de Balalcazar subdued the natives in the kingdom of Quito and crossed the present-day

boundaries of Colombia to found the cities of Popayan and Cali. Survivors | from the Badillo expedition then joined up with one of Belalcazar’s lieutenants, Jorge Robledo, to begin the conquest of Antioquia.” Participating in both the Badillo exploratory mission and the Robledo settlement was a young Spaniard named Pedro de Cieza de Leon, soon to become the major chronicler of the Peruvian civil wars. His pen was already active, and it is the early chapters of his Travels that supply a first-hand account of the discovery and conquest of Antioquia.*° Neither the land nor the natives welcomed the Spanish explorers. Cieza

de Leon’s accounts of both the Badillo and Robledo expeditions are dominated by conquest horror stories. A continuous rain drenched the starving and exhausted soldiers, huge roots tripped and entangled them,

mountain ascents and descents threatened their limbs and their lives, poisonous reptiles and insects hovered to strike at them. To be sick or hurt meant to be left behind, covered with brushwood to meet death alone in the wilderness. Those who pushed on faced the immediate prospect of more hunger and exertion, punctuated by an ever-present fear of Indian attack.°’ As the Spaniards pushed inland, they encountered evidences of the ritual cannibalism that prevailed up and down the Cauca River. Cieza de Leon recorded that **when we discovered the valleys we found so many human heads at the doors of the chiefs’ houses that it seemed as if each one had been a butcher shop.’’*® The horrified Spanish responded with atrocities of their own, as the Indians of the Valley of Aburra, future site of Medellin, found to their sorrow: “When we entered this Valley of Aburra, the detestation we conceived for the natives was such that we hung them and their women to the boughs of trees by their hair, and amidst grievous moans, we left their bodies | there, while their souls went down to hell.’”*’

Those Caribs who did not fall to Spanish arms fled into the Choco wilderness or succumbed to diseases brought from abroad. The remaining

natives were destined to languish and die as laborers for their Spanish conquerors. Since Antioquia’s Caribs could not compare either in number or

in level of civilization with their Inca neighbors to the south, their —

16 Introduction

correspondingly reduced.” | |

contribution to the subsequent history of colonial Antioquia would be

Although the conquistadors faced tremendous physical hardships, the rewards for the survivors were great. The Robledo expedition never found the legendary El Dorado but they did discover their own “golden men”’ in the guise of natives clad in golden battle armor.*! Indian burial mounds not only gave mute testimony to a more populous civilization that existed prior to the conquest, but also yielded the intricate golden artifacts buried with the

chiefs. When the looting ceased, a more methodical exploitation of the mineral resources of the colony began. The decades from the 1540s to the 1670s form a coherent period in

Antioquefio history, the conquest mining stage. During those years Spaniards concentrated their efforts on the lode mine of Buritica and on the lowland placers of the Cauca and Nechi rivers. They lavishly supplemented their Indian mining force with slave gangs imported from the coast and they acquired wealth that made Antioquia a legend throughout the Indies. Few of

these first Spaniards remained, for their riches lured them to the more cosmopolitan life of Bogota or to honored retirement in the mother country.” They did leave a legacy; not an enduring economic or social structure but memories of a once-golden past when rivers flowed with nuggets and the mining camps of Antioquia, Caceres, Remedios, and Zaragoza resounded with the voices of men who had found their El Dorado.

The city of Antioquia, founded by Robledo in 1541, typified the Spaniards’ willingness to endure an unhealthy climate and an inadequate water and food supply as long as they could be near a ready source of gold. Here the attraction was the lode mine of Buritica, located northwest of the

city and long worked by the native population. Forced by the Spanish conquistadors, the Indian miners continued to sink shafts into the rich veins

of the hill and carry the ore to the river below to separate out the gold. According to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdéz, Buritica supplied the majority of the gold sent to Cartagena during the early conquest years.** The crown, eager to receive its share of this bullion, early established a smelting house (fundici6n) in the city of Antioquia. As late as 1680 Buritica could still make the fortune of its lucky owner, in this case Governor Don Antonio

del Pino Villa Padierna. This official kept his gold from Buritica in onepound balls and he had so many of them that he eventually lost count. A slave sweeping the dirt floor of a house previously occupied by the governor

found one of the balls and with it bought his freedom.” The lack of an adequate technology and of an abundance of cheap labor

eventually doomed Buritica. Although the Spaniards constructed an aqueduct to bring water directly to the hill, they had not improved on native

Introduction 17 mining practices. These techniques were not sufficient to overcome problems created by a lower carat, inaccessible veins, and flooded shafts. From the very beginning, miners had made heavy investments to supplement

the native labor force. As early as 1550, African slaves were mining Buritica, and by 1583 two hundred Spaniards controlled a force of three hundred blacks and fifteen hundred Indians.* As the yields from Buritica declined, and as the Indian population died off, Spaniards found it harder and harder to replenish their labor gangs. Although the wealth of Buritica remained a legend well into the nineteenth century, and although finders of | unexploited veins occasionally struck it rich, overall, Buritica was no longer a consistent producer by 1620. In that year Buritica miners brought only two

thousand pesos to the smelting house.” |

As the fortunes of Buritica waned, miners shifted their operations to the placers of the Cauca River, contiguous to the city of Antioquia. From the first days of the conquest, the Spanish had known that the province’s rivers

ran with gold as one of Cieza de Leon’s fellow expeditionaries had discovered a stone liberally laced with veins of gold, in the Cauca.*’ By the 1620s these placers had replaced Buritica, since more than two-thirds of the gold that entered the fundicion came from the Cauca’s banks.*® The Cauca

placers, however, were never as productive as Buritica, and by the mid-

seventeenth century its riverbeds were exhausted. ,

It was natural for the Spaniards to concentrate their attention first on Buritica with its obvious wealth and adjacent labor supply and then on the nearby Cauca placers. By 1576, however, new expeditions were uncovering

yet other gold-producing areas. In that year the governor of Antioquia, Gaspar de Rodas, founded the city of Caceres on the banks of the northern

Cauca. By 1583 Caceres had 150 slaves working the placers, and by 1608 their number had doubled.” By 1685 the Caceres placers were exhausted.” Another Rodas expedition in 1581 founded the city of Zaragoza, which — became the center of the next major boom in Antioquefio mining. The wealth of the Guamoco district and of the Nechi River placers lured miners from as far away as the Caribbean coast and from the Panama placers. From 1602 to 1620 the Zaragoza placers yielded almost two million pesos de oro (“‘gold pesos’”’).°’ Although they were rich in gold, the lowland placers of the far north took a particularly heavy toll in Spanish and African lives. Whenever a newcomer arrived in Zaragoza, the miners clustered around the parish

priest and bid for the greenhorn’s clothes. The miners assumed that the stranger would quickly die, and since wearing apparel was scarce, all available sources had to be tapped.°* By the 1680s the glory days of the Zaragoza mines had passed, owing, again, to the depletion of the richest placer beds and of the labor force.*°

18 Introduction At the beginning of the eighteenth century Antioquia faced a crisis, for the mining sites of the conquest period no longer produced fabulous wealth. One answer to such depression was the internal reallocation of human resources and the reorganization of domestic economic and social structures. Another

response came from outside, in the form of an externally inspired and imposed complex of measures known as the Bourbon reforms. The primary events in Antioquia’s eighteenth century were no longer to

unfold in the far northern gold districts or in the lowland placers of the Cauca. Instead, this century marked the settlement of regions that, although

not lacking in gold, could not compare to a Zaragoza or a Buritica. The Valley of Aburra, soon to be the site of the villa, or settlement, of Medellin,

was one of these favored areas. This valley had first been discovered by the Robledo expedition, but the obvious fertility of the soil and the temperate climate had posed no lure to

Spaniards searching for El Dorado.** During the early years of the seventeenth century, the valley had been used as pasture by the settlers of

the colonial capital of Antioquia. Attracted by its advantages, some colonists moved their residences to the new site. By 1675 enough colonists had located in the valley to found a town, Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de Medellin.*? Medellin was to play a key role in the later development of the

colony, as were the cities of Rionegro and Marinilla, located in nearby valleys to the east. Even though Antioquia City (population in 1788, 19,318) remained as political capital, housing the governor, fiscal officials,

and the smelting house, it was Medellin, (population in 1788, 16,750), Rionegro and Marinilla Goint population in 1788, 14,206) that became the centers of a new kind of Antioquefo life, not divorced from the gold that surrounded them, but distant from the bonanza days of the early colony.” Added to this internal restructuring of Antioquefio life were the Bourbon reforms, the imperial reorganization and tightening of metropolis-colony relations. Since one goal of Spanish administration was increased revenue, the

revitalization of Antioquia’s mining economy and the channeling of everwidening flows of paisa gold dust to the mother country became high priorities. Antioquefos experienced not only this empire-wide spectrum of Bourbon

reforms, but also received a special, provincially administered dose in the guise of Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde. Sent as a visitador (1782-1785), an administrator with a royal mandate to enact reforms, this oidor (judge from the Bogota audiencia) drafted a substantial body of local legislation. He and his like-minded contemporary, Antioquefo governor Francisco Silvestre (1775-1776; 1780-1785) were visible symbols of the dynamic counterpoint between externally originated reform and internally organized change that

molded Antioquia’s eighteenth century.

1. The Mining Sector

When Francisco Silvestre entered the province of Antioquia in 1775 to take up the duties of governor, one of his first questions to local officials was, ‘Do you know the number of mines in Antioquia?”’ Their reply was a flat no.

Royal treasurer Don Andrés Pardo informed his new superior that such information was impossible to obtain. After studying the mining scene himself, Silvestre resignedly admitted that he, too, could form but hazy estimates of the number of mines, or more importantly, of the actual gold

production of Antioquia. ! | |

Not only was Silvestre’s question pertinent, but, as history was to prove, the answer was controversial. Although researchers agree that the region’s well-being rose and fell according to colonist access to gold, they disagree as to the volume, distribution, and timing of bullion production. Such dispute strikes to the heart of any inquiry into the origins of Antioquefio enterprise, since debate centers on whether provincial mining provided sufficient capital resources to support a nascent entrepreneurship. The historiography of this controversy is divided into three schools. First are those who characterize Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde as the “regenerador’’ (“‘regenerator’’) of a

provincial renaissance. Then there are those who emphasize that the colonial period was one extended depression. Third are those who postulate

that possibilities existed for limited capital accumulation by local elites. Although these interpretations are based on the same primary sources—the reports of viceroys, governors, and colonists—ambiguities inherent in the documents themselves, combined with the varying accuracy eachresearcher _ ascribes to them, inspired such controversy.”

The first school, which portrays Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde as | regenerator, includes historians who wrote at the beginning of this century, such as Tulio Ospina, Isidoro Villa, Manuel Monsalves M., and Emilio

20 The Mining Sector Robledo, and other, more recent investigators, such as James Parsons, Estanislao Zuleta, and Roger Brew. Although the interpretations vary, in

| general these writers support the view that Antioquia’s economic revival dates from the reforms of Juan Antonio Mon y Velarde. There is no question that this visitador gave Antioquia a special exposure to the Bourbon reforms, including such province-oriented legislation as a revised mining code, the introduction of silver currency, measures encouraging merchant competition, and ordinances injecting new life into municipal institutions. These writers | emphasize the success of Mon y Velarde’s reforms, which, they argue, not only ended Antioquia’s colonial depression, but created effective structures for postindependence development. Manuel Monsalves is but one historian

who dates Antioquia’s ““modern” period “‘from Mon y Velarde to the present.’’°

Writers from the second school interpret colonial economic development, particularly that of the eighteenth century, in another light. Some, such as Eduardo Zuleta, who wrote at the beginning of this century, or Everett

Hagen and Alvaro Lopez Toro more recently, propose that Antioquia remained in a state of depression throughout the colonial period.* These writers do not give much credence to the portrait of Mon y Velarde as regenerator, either because they deny that his reforms had the desired effect, or because they doubt that any official, even one as energetic and as capable

as Mon y Velarde, could transform Antioquia’s economic and social structure in only three years of visita (a tour of inspection by a visitador, who

had special duties and powers attached to the inspection). Another branch of this school that downplays the linkages between

colonial and republican economic development is epitomized by the interpretation of William McGreevey.” McGreevey portrays eighteenth-

century Antioquia as a victim, not so much of the province-oriented legislation of Mon y Velarde, as of the imperial cédulas (“‘decrees’’) of reformers in Madrid. Although McGreevey concedes that Antioquia’s economy, particularly its mining sector, may well have experienced a considerable revival during the Bourbon years, he argues that the benefits of such augmented production did not redound to the local populace, but were siphoned off to Spain by means of increased and more-effective tax measures, particularly the tax on tobacco. Bourbon reform thus deprived Antioquefios of any excess mining capital that might have flowed into entrepreneurial activities. McGreevey, like Hagen or Lopez Toro, would place the formative years of Antioquefio economic development after the colonial period. A third school, including writers such as Luis Ospina Vasquez and Frank Safford, takes a middle road in this debate.° This group is reluctant to accept

The Mining Sector 21 personalistic interpretations which attribute provincial economic recovery primarily to the reforms of Mon y Velarde, but neither does it uncritically accept gloomy portraits of regional poverty that sustain a thesis of economic depression. Frank Safford, for example, notes the comparatively greater

economic opportunities present in eighteenth-century Antioquia than in | nineteenth-century Santander, Colombia. The presence of gold made

Antioquia capital-rich, he claims, and thus provided resources for investments in nonagricultural enterprises such as commerce. Safford does

not feel that contemporary reports of provincial poverty form any insuperable obstruction to his thesis, given that “public poverty” (that is, what outsiders might have perceived as poverty) could exist alongside a dynamic, economically active elite. Ospina Vasquez notes that colonial

Antioquia’s almost total dependence on extraprovincial sources for necessities such as textiles had to promote a lively commerce, and by inference a potentially enterprising elite. These authors suggest, then, that - eighteenth-century mining might have provided selected Antioquefios with

enough fluid capital to sustain a pattern of diversified investment and entrepreneurial behavior.

Given these conflicting interpretations, the need to answer Governor Silvestre’s opening question concerning the number of mines and the actual gold production of eighteenth-century Antioquia takes on a new urgency.

_ Only by analyzing the structure, the production, and the distribution of mining proceeds among Antioquia’s population can the limits and potential of colonial enterprise be judged. Preliminary remarks on types of mines and

discussion. ! ,

miners and on available source material can lay the basis for this later

DEFINITIONS The structure of Antioquia’s eighteenth-century mining sector, that is, the type of gold mines and miners, circumscribed not only the extent and limit of

gold production, but also the division of bullion among producers and consumers. Two distinct mining techniques, lode and placer, were the primary modes of extraction during the colonial period. Lode mining, characterized by the construction of subterranean shafts that followed the vein of the precious metal, necessitated a heavy investment in labor and capital prior to extraction, but allowed fuller exploitation of the deposit. Although a very primitive sort of lode mining was common in Buritica during

the early conquest period, by the seventeenth century the Buritica lode was abandoned. One of the most critical factors affecting both the upper limits

and the distribution of eighteenth-century production was the virtual

22 The Mining Sector absence of this higher-capitalized, more-productive, and more-monopolistic form of mining. Throughout the eighteenth century different forms of the placer mining technique, which exploited gold deposited on riverbeds and banks rather than that found in subterranean lodes, produced the majority of Antioquia’s gold. Certain varieties of placer extraction, such as sluice mining, required investment of capital and labor prior to the removal of gold dust, whereas

others, such as panning, did not. Sluice miners often had to clear upper streambeds of boulders and rocks prior to extraction so that water could be channeled in the desired direction with sufficient force to separate gold-bearing sand from extraneous material.

This required a heavy expenditure of time and labor, so sluice miners generally owned slave gangs. Panners, on the other hand, traveled from stream to stream, looking for rocks or calm waters where the heavy gold dust

might have settled. Plunging their wooden bowls (bateas) into the goldbearing sand, they twirled the bowl to allow centrifugal force to separate gold

from water and sand. Of these two placer techniques, sluice mining permitted a more extensive exploitation of alluvial deposits and a correspondingly greater yield.’ Antioquefo mining legislation formally differentiated between mining personnel. “‘Miners’’ were persons who commanded access to a labor force

composed of five or more slave or free laborers (a cuadrilla) and ““mazamorreros’’ either possessed fewer than five workers or mined alone.® The correlation between mode of extraction and designation as miner or mazamorrero was almost exact. Both lode and sluice mining required more than a labor force of five, so miners monopolized these techniques. Those

who practiced the most primitive form of mining, panning, were almost exclusively mazamorreros, although there were some cases where mazamorreros pooled their labor and operated sluice mines.’ Hereafter, ““miners”’

refers to practitioners of lode or sluice techniques and mazamorrero designates those who panned.

SOURCE MATERIALS ON GOLD PRODUCTION Since the accuracy of viceroys’ and governors’ informes (“‘reports’) can vary wildly, depending on the different interpretation and expertise of each

reporter, the primary source for any sustained analysis of paisa gold production is the records of the smelting house (fundicion). The Antioquia fundicion was where gold dust was purified, melted into bars, and taxed. In

| the fundicioén account books are the names and occupations of persons who brought bullion there, the amounts of gold they entered, and information

' The Mining Sector 23 about whether the gold came from a lode (oro de veta) or from a placer operation (oro corrido). For the 140 years between 1670 and 1810, ninetyseven annual lists remain in the Archivo Historico de Antioquia’®. The raw statistics from the fundicion do not represent Antioquia’s annual

gold production. Even during colonial days the crown recognized the impossibility of drafting legislation that would channel the majority of gold

dust from mine to fundicion. The elaborate legislative mechanism that evolved fell far short of the mark, as royal officials ruefully acknowledged.” To appreciate what smelting house records did and did not measure is thus to | explore the gap not only between production and fundici6on, but also between regulation and reality.

Fundicion existed, from the point of view of the crown, to extract the quinto, which, by the Bourbon period, was a 3 percent tax on mining production.'* By the 1690s a body of law regulating the transferral of gold to

fundicion had been established and continued in effect until 1800. Three _

regulations were the keystone of fundicion legislation. One forbade the export of ovo en polvo (“gold dust’’) from the province; a second ordered the flow of miner gold to fundicion; a third taxed merchants in lieu of a direct

levy on the mazamorreros.’* The efficacy of these laws was, as might be expected, directly proportional to the crown’s ability to enforce them. Since the gold dust that was the immediate product of both sluice mine and

mazamorrero batea. was ready currency outside of Antioquia, royal legislation forbade its export.'* Only after gold dust had made its way to the fundicion, where it was smelted, assayed, and, most important, taxed, could

it be molded in a bar with the royal seal and exported as legal tender. Although royal officials attempted to prevent the smuggling of gold dust, in practice it was impossible to inspect even those people traveling on major roads, and the mountain exits from the province offered convenient byways

for an incalculable smuggling trade.’ Within Antioquia a substantial percentage of annual gold production legally escaped the smelting house. Until the closing years of the colony, silver coins were rare, and paisas customarily mined and then used gold dust in their daily transactions. This absorption of unknown quantities of bullion for internal consumption negated any direct correlation between fundicion

statistics and yearly output.’ |

Antioquia’s miners were, by law, obliged to smelt their total production at the fundicion. In theory, royal officials could identify miners and locate their sluices by means of registered claims. Once title was issued, miners were ©

obliged to keep a production record (Jibro de sacas), which detailed their monthly production and which royal inspectors could inspect at any time to determine if equivalent sums had been entered in smelting house records.

24 The Mining Sector When a miner went to the smelting house he identified himself as “miner,” noted the location and name of his mine, and thus fulfilled his obligation. In practice, as one royal official lamented, “it is a very rare miner who pays the quinto.”””’

The temptation for a miner not to bring gold to be taxed was surpassed only by the ridiculous ease with which he could evade this obligation. Mining titles were hopelessly confused, which was not surprising, given that Antioquia’s mining code, a sixteenth-century effort by Governor Gaspar de Rodas (1577-1595), not only was inappropriate for eighteenth-century

usage and had never been enforced by royal officials, but was totally unfamiliar to the sluice miners themselves.'® When an Antioquefio miner discovered gold he customarily claimed all rights to water above and below

his discovery, including the banks of the stream and the riverbed. Such grants covered enormous territories: Don Antonio Quintana had claims to five rivers, which included a significant number of the gold-bearing streams in the province, and Don Andrés Salgado took seven days to walk from one

end of his claim to the other.’” Whereas such miners might monopolize legal titles to mines, they did not control production. Since they could not exploit such extensive claims, they sublet portions to other miners and to mazamorreros.”° Since this subletting was unofficial, the crown could not identify the number of miners working

such claims, could not locate them, nor force them to keep production records or to pay the quinto.”' Even miners with legal titles could make false entries in their production

records and bring only minimal sums to fundicion. During most of the eighteenth century even this slight effort was unnecessary, because royal officials proved extremely lax in reviewing these books. When Governor Silvestre ordered such an audit in 1783, he found that miners could not remember when their accounts had last been checked. When Mon y Velarde

attempted a similar audit in 1787, he found so few current production records that he had to rely instead on miners’ sworn statements concerning their production.” There was yet another way that miners avoided at least direct entries in the smelting house records; many used their freshly panned gold dust to purchase supplies from merchants who sold in the mining districts. When this gold entered the smelting house it was listed under the merchant’s, not the miner’s name, and thus provided one more barrier to realistic calculation of an individual miner’s, or of aggregate sluice-miner production.** Given the massive evasion of fundicién by means of smuggling, unclear titles, false and inaccurate production records, and diversion of miner production to merchant entries, both the number of miners and the value of bullion entered

The Mining Sector 25 are greatly underrepresented in fundicion statistics. The third important fundicion regulation designated Antioquia’s merchants as rescatadores, or intermediaries in the transferral of gold dust from

mining field to smelting house. To a large degree this task fell to the merchants because it was impractical to tax mazamorrero production directly, given that panners were geographically mobile, scattered over both lowland and highland sites, and registered no mining titles.** Although an individual mazamorrero’s production was small (at the subsistence level), the combined production of the panners accounted for two-thirds to fourfifths of Antioquia’s annual production and was well worth taxing.”° Since it

was not pragmatic, nor indeed in the royal interest for mazamorreros to abandon their workings to bring gold to fundicion, the crown satisfied itself with a two-peso direct annual tax on the panners and set up an alternative levy against their production.”° The system-as-evolved collected the quinto indirectly by taxing the gold —

dust that circulated as currency within the province, a substantial proportion of which had proceeded from mazamorrero bateas.”’ Since miners and mazamorreros had access to gold dust, this created a demand in

both urban and mining-district markets for textiles, metals, and some luxuries, which had to be imported from outside the province. Since Antioquia’s merchants were urban-based, and relatively easy to locate and regulate, the crown levied the 3 percent quinto against the value of their imports. The import-export system worked in the following way. Medellin

merchant Mateo Molina, for example, would take gold bars to Bogota where, after he had purchased his merchandise, he would go to a customs house where royal officials issued him a guia, or customs-house permit, which enumerated the total number of mule loads in his shipment and noted

his final destination. This guia was the crown’s method of assuring that Molina did not trade illegally but sold his goods only after they were registered in Medellin. En route to Antioquia, Molina passed through checkpoints at, for example, Nare, where royal officials checked this guia to ascertain that his cargo was intact. Arriving in Medellin, Molina deposited his goods in the customs house, where royal officials again compared guia and merchandise, opened his cargo, and determined the average selling price of the merchant’s imports in the Medellin area. If Molina’s cargo was valued at one thousand pesos, for example, he then had to sign a register and swear that within three years’ time he would bring one thousand pesos’ worth of gold dust to fundicion and pay the quinto on that sum. Molina then sold the merchandise in his store and in the mining areas, where he exchanged his goods for gold dust. Within three years Molina fulfilled his legal obligation by bringing one thousand pesos’ worth of gold dust to fundicion, paying the

26 The Mining Sector ; quinto, receiving gold bars, and beginning the cycle again.

There were, of course, many variations of this cycle. Antioquefo | merchants traded with Cartagena, Santa Marta, Honda, Popayan, and Quito, as well as with Bogota. Local customs houses were established not only in Medellin but also in the cities of Antioquia, Rionegro, Marinilla, and Santa Rosa. Some merchants personally traveled to New Granadan ports and wholesaling centers; others sent delegates or factors. Within Antioquia merchants maintained stores in local cities to supply the surrounding urban population and also went personally or sent factors to the mining districts. It was rare for a merchant to bring gold dust to fundicion in one lump sum. Installment payments were the rule.” Still, within all these variations, royal legislation establishing the regulatory system of guias, the evaluation of the

merchant register in the merchant's Antioquemo base-city, and his subsequent obligation to bring the gold-dust value of his imported goods to

fundicion and pay the quinto remained constant.”’ As might be expected, merchants proved no less innovative than miners in

discovering ways to avoid the fundicion. Contraband traders skirted the system completely by evading checkpoints, not registering in the cities,

going directly to the mining districts, and not smelting gold.*? The regulations themselves had loopholes, for if a merchant’s goods were worth

one thousand pesos in Medellin, they sold for even more in the mining districts, and the difference was not subject to quinto or fundicion.*’ Even

though merchants were more visible and therefore more vulnerable to regulation than were miners and mazamorreros, the merchant portion of fundicion reflects more accurately the growth of the import trade than of annual gold production.

If we recognize that massive evasions of fundiciOn existed and that fundicion legislation, even in its ideal state, was never intended to tax Antioquia’s total annual gold production, why, then, should smelting-house

figures merit analysis? Aggregate fundicion figures, for all their faults, provide a crude guide to the levels of capital generated by Antioquia’s mining sector.** Although miners might first use their gold dust to purchase

personal necessities, to resupply their cuadrillas, or to indulge in a few luxuries, they might then seriously consider the transport of the remainder of their gold dust to fundicion. The most important miners were well known to

royal officials and could not totally escape their share of the quinto. Furthermore, gold dust melted into bars could be more easily hoarded or could be legally exported from the province. Those sums that miners brought to fundicion, then, were probably a closer approximation of their profit than

of their actual production. If so, fundicion statistics not only identify Antioquia’s sluice miners, but also provide some indication of the excess

| The Mining Sector 27 capital available to a mining elite.*° The sums that merchants brought to fundicion did not represent profit, but rather the primary value of their import trade. Demand for goods, however,

depended on the access of Antioquia’s population to gold dust, either directly, as in the case of the miner and mazamorrero producers, or indirectly, as their trade and expenditures distributed their yields throughout the nonmining sectors of the economy. Either way, a rise or fall in merchant

contributions to fundicion provides a broad indicator of the amounts of capital available to the population, and since this capital originated from

mining, a rough gauge of the state of that industry as well. If fundicion , statistics are examined with an eye to determining broad trends rather than accurate figures for total annual gold production, what do those statistics show to be benchmarks in Antioquia’s late-colonial mining history? —

ANTIOQUENO GOLD PRODUCTION, 1670-1800 Table 1 charts the raw fundicion statistics for the available years from 1670 to 1800, and figure 1 graphs the same data. Both chart and graph make

clear that Antioquia’s gold production, as filtered through the fundicion, experienced two periods of consecutive and sustained recovery. Although the period from 1670 to 1749 was marked by fluctuating smelting-house entries (between 14,000 and 43,000 pesos de oro), the decades of the 1750s through the 1770s showed a dramatic recovery (fundicion between 27,000 and 113,000 pesos de oro), which was bettered during the 1780s and 1790s (112,000 to 314,000 gold pesos). Averaging and rounding the figures for

each period clarifies the trend, for if annual fundicion averaged around , 23,000 pesos from 1670 to 1749, it more than doubled, to around 59,000 pesos, for the 1750-1779 period, and then quadrupled, to around 236,000 during the 1780-1799 period (see table 2). Both the 1750s and the 1780s, then, marked new breakthroughs in the mining sector.

The timing of these two stages of growth (1750-1779, 1780-1799) provides some rather telling answers not only to Governor Francisco Silvestre’s opening query concerning gold production, but also to the debate

among those elegizing Mon y Velarde, those claiming a continued | depression, or those settling for something in between. Since fundicion begins a steady rise more than three decades before Mon y Velarde enters Antioquia, the epithet “regenerator”? must be withdrawn from

the visitador, at least with regard to any impetus he might have given Antioquia’s mining recovery. The evidence shows that Mon y Velarde acted

more as a “responder” to developments already in progress than as a “regenerator.” In the case of mining, for example, he tried to bring order to

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36 The Mining Sector total. The trend established in the 1670 to 1740 period is thus confirmed and

reinforced in the 1750 to 1801 period. Although the sluice miners’ contributions to fundicion fluctuated wildly, they showed little sustained growth until the 1780s. It was the merchants who accounted for the dynamic

increases in gold brought to the smelting house. These data imply that if, as I suggested earlier, miner contributions to fundicion most likely represented their excess production or profit, then the

boom years for Antioquia’s sluice miners must not have begun until the 1780s. If sluice mine production did not expand until the 1780s, then the increase in fundicion figures that started in the 1750s must have reflected increases in mazamorrero production. Since the mazamorreros lived at a subsistence level, their gold dust would have been quickly absorbed into

Antioquia’s economy. The dramatic rise in merchant imports, which accounted for fundicion increase, would thus have reflected not the demands of a comparatively small number of miners for textiles, mining implements,

and luxury goods, but rather the increasing capacity of a large number of mazamorreros and their suppliers to purchase basic commodities. Fundicion figures suggest, then, that the recovery of Antioquia’s mining sector

proceeded in two stages: first the mazamorreros increased and then dominated production (1750s), and only later did the sluice miners enter

into the boom (1780s). ,

The theory that mazamorreros rather than sluice miners led the recovery and then dominated Antioquia’s eighteenth-century mining sector faces one major stumbling block. After all, miners also used gold dust to buy from

merchants, and so miner production theoretically could have increased substantially prior to the 1780s and not have been reflected in the miner entries to fundicion. There are at least two indirect lines of inquiry that explore the extent to which sluice miners might have been responsible for the

dramatic rise in merchant imports and fundicion entries in the 1750s. One way, explored in this chapter, is to test the accuracy of trends noted in sluice miner contributions to fundicion by comparing fluctuations with other primary-source descriptions of sluice miner activity. The second approach, discussed in the next chapter, is to investigate whether merchants’ imports (by volume and quality) appear directed more toward filling the increasing demands of an elite (sluice miners) or of a mass population (mazamorreros). Table 3 charts four trends in the decade-by-decade miner contribution to fundicion: a decrease in miner fundicion from 1690 to 1703; the leveling off of fundicion to a markedly lower average between 1710 and 1750; a sharp

decline in fundiciOn in the 1760s and 1770s; a recovery in 1780, with sustained increases after that date. Contemporary colonial sources suggest that these swings in fundicion reflected adverse local conditions (in 1700),

- The Mining Sector 37 , exhaustion of the lowland placers (1720-1740), the initial move to new mining sites (1750-1770), and a new phase of highland-placer mining

(1780-1800).

The drop in miner fundicion from 1690 to 1700 is particularly suggestive,

for it shows how sensitively fundicién could mirror actual production. A

1703 report by the procurador general (a position similar to attorney general) of Antioquia describes the plight of the miners of that city and those of the surrounding valleys of Medellin and Rionegro.” This official reported

| that locusts had caused repeated crop failures, that corn prices had soared to five to six pesos a fanega (1.5 bushels), and that miners were finding it difficult to feed their cuadrillas. He saw no immediate remedy for the miners’

distress because the outlook for the next year’s harvest also was bleak.” This crisis, he noted, had hit the miners a particularly severe blow, given that

they had yet to recover from an epidemic that had swept through the province the decade before and had resulted in the deaths of two thousand slaves and freedmen. The decline in smelting-house statistics from 1690 to 1700 must have reflected, then, an actual lowering of miner production. The smelting-house figures may have been especially sensitive to this change, given that miners who had sluices near the city of Antioquia, and thus were near the fundicion, would have had less opportunity to evade the smelting-house taxes. When

their production and their profits suffered, fundicion mirrored their difficulties.

The second and third trends noted in miner fundicion are the leveling-off of miner contributions from 1720 to 1740 and sharp declines in the 1760s and 1770s, trends which coincide with the exhaustion of the lowland placers and sluice-miner movement to the Rionegro and Santa Rosa highlands. The change of mining site was gradual. Buritica ceased production in the 1590s, the placers near the colonial city of Antioquia declined by the 1620s, and the far north placers of Caceres, Zaragoza, and Remedios continued limited production throughout the colonial period.*’ The transition from the lowland placers of the Cauca and far north to the highland sites of Rionegro and

Santa Rosa began with the discovery of these mines in 1623 and 1638, respectively. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that the Rionegro and Santa Rosa placers became the backbone of Antioquefio gold production.”

Although these placers offered the first requirement, gold-bearing sand, other conditions had to be met before the sluice miners moved in. The switch from lowland to highland placers did not bring about an Antioquefio “gold rush,”’ at least on the part of sluice miners, who. were

reluctant to switch from conquest-era placer sites. Although Antioquia ,

38 The Mining Sector placers were declining by 1620, the 1703 report shows that sluice miners attempted to conquer both the temporary difficulties posed by crop failure and sickness and the more serious long-term problem of exhaustion of the gold-bearing placers. The procurador general noted that ““these placers had first been worked by Indians, then by the conquistadors, and now by another generation.”°? The depressed level of sluice-miner fundicion, especially from 1720 to 1740, no doubt reflected the miners’ reworking of these older placer sites. Additionally, it suggests that the move to highland placers had not yet begun, even though the miners near the colonial capital of Antioquia were only a few days distance from the Santa Rosa discoveries.

Colonial documents do not explain why miners were slow to take advantage of the new discoveries. It is clear, however, that the move to the highlands implied more than just a transfer from one mining site to another; a rather substantial reshifting of population and restructuring of supply routes was involved. During the first stage of Antioquefo mining, the province’s population and towns had clustered in the far northern mining districts of Caceres, Zaragoza, and Remedios and in the colonial capital of Antioquia. These outposts were relatively easy to provision, for they were situated near the Cauca and Magdalena rivers. The highland placers, in contrast, were located in the sparsely populated and difficult-to-supply mountains of the interior. Miners were understandably reluctant to risk their slave gangs until new settlements could develop as support bases for mining activity. Mining in highland Antioquia posed additional technical problems to miners accustomed to the lowland placers, for the Santa Rosa deposits could be worked only during the rainy season, when water was available to wash © the gold dust.°* Miners must have questioned whether such part-time activity would justify an investment, especially since their slave gangs had to be maintained year round. The settlement of Antioquia’s central valleys (the towns of Medellin, Rionegro, and Marinilla) eventually decreased the risks associated with exploitation of the highland deposits. The new cities served as supply bases for a widely dispersed mining population, and the temperate climate and fertile soils provided healthy conditions for miners’ families, as well as the opportunity to farm and mine. The early settlement of the Medellin valley typifies the intermediate stage in the move to the highland districts. Starting in 1650, Spanish emigration to Antioquia directed itself away from the colonial capital and the far northern mining districts (Caceres, Zaragoza) and toward the valley of Medellin.°? There the new arrivals joined with settlers from the city of Antioquia who had been utilizing the valley as grainery and cattle pasture. In 1675 the town of Medellin was officially founded, granted the status of villa, and a municipal government (cabildo)

The Mining Sector 39 distinct from the colonial capital was established.~° Medellin was not solely an agricultural settlement, for the rivers that ran through the valley carried gold-bearing sand. A major stir developed in 1712, when one miner, Don Pedro de Maso, decided to placer mine the river

that was the main source of the villa’s water supply. Outraged Medellinenses, plagued with dysentery, rose in wrath and ordered him to stop.”’ Although Maso may have earned the eternal enmity of his neighbors, he was one of the more fortunate gold seekers, for the placers near Medellin

were soon exhausted. By 1760 Medellin’s miners had widened their horizons and were looking outside the valley and north to the highland placers. In 1761 a Medellin official questioned that villa’s miners concerning their placers, and they reported that many of their number were now starting to mine in Santa Rosa. One witness commented that he had joined with others

to buy the rights to a mine in Santa Rosa and that they hoped to start production soon. Another miner, Don Pedro Josef de Granada, remarked that his placer in Riogrande (Santa Rosa area) had been in production for only fifteen days and that its yields were good. All miners mentioned the names of friends who were interested in or who had started mining in the north.” A later report from the mining district of Yolomb6o (located east of Santa Rosa) confirms that miners were moving to the northern districts in the 1760s and 1770s. A questionnaire dated 1783 asked miners when they had acquired the original rights to their mines. One miner stated that his father, Don Carlos de Gaviria, had acquired title in 1723. The remaining miners stated that their titles had been registered from either the 1760s or 1770s.°*” These reports support the hypothesis that extensive exploitation of the highland deposits by sluice miners did not begin until the 1760s and 1770s. Although perhaps surprising, it is not implausible to find that the 1760s and 1770s marked the lowpoint of miners’ contributions to fundicion, a decline which may have reflected an actual decrease in production, since it took one to six years to put a sluice mine into operation.®’ As miners moved farther away from the smelting house, they became even less responsive to

royal commands to bring their gold dust to be smelted, especially since crown officials had scanty knowledge of the locations or yields of the new mines. Even when the placers began to produce, excess capital was probably used to expand the labor force or to pay off debts accumulated in preparing the mine for operation. This decline in fundicion, therefore, reflected both a short-term decrease in actual miner production and utilization of excess capital to expand placer operations. A shortage of manpower hindered miner exploitation of alluvial deposits

40 The Mining Sector also. Reports from 1755 and 1761 establish that miners were unanimous in

their desire to increase both the number and size of their slave gangs, although less eager to assume the attendant costs. In 1755 six Zaragoza miners pleaded for slaves for this far-northern district. One miner estimated

that 625 more slaves could be profitably occupied, two others suggested imports of 2,100 and 2,600 slaves, and three others asked for 4,200, 4,225,

, and 4,700 blacks.”

The new mining districts also faced acute labor shortages. In 1761 the Medellin teniente questioned miners in his jurisdiction who had slave gangs in the Santa Rosa area. These witnesses seconded their Zaragoza counter-

parts: they needed more slaves. The Medellin miners said that increased _ cost (betwen 225 and 250 pesos de oro per slave) and the rigid terms of sale were the major stumbling blocks to the expansion of their gangs. Miners had

, to make a down payment on a slave and pay the balance within one to two years. If the miner was unable to pay off in time, he lost his first payment and the slave. Miners were doubtful that they could fulfill such contracts, for it took at least a year to teach a new slave to mine, and could take even longer if

language posed a barrier. Although miners admitted that the Santa Rosa placers were steady producers, they still feared taking the necessary risks to

expand their labor force.” It was not until the mid-1770s that Antioquemo miners ventured to increase their slave gangs. Censuses show a low point of 900 slaves in 1759,

which rose to 1,462 by 1770, and then tripled in the next eight years, to

4.896. These data suggest that the miners’ potential production, as measured by their labor force, did not significantly expand until 1778. The 1780s ushered in the most prosperous years for Antioquia’s sluice miners. With the central valleys settled, supply routes established, the highland mines put into operation, and slave gangs providing necessary labor, miner profits soared. In fact, their portion of fundiciOn quadrupled between 1780 and 1800. , Locusts, exhaustion of lowland placers, the move to the highlands, and the expansion of production are thus faithfully reflected in the amounts of gold dust that miners brought to fundicion. It is noteworthy that the delayed move to Santa Rosa (1760-1770) and the even later expansion of the slave gangs

(1770-1780) appear to have hindered substantially the potential for miner production. Since merchant contributions to fundicion from 1750 to 1768 more than quintupled (during those very decades when miners delayed their move north), the logical assumption is that mazamorreros spearheaded the move to Santa Rosa and Rionegro and accounted for the dramatic increase in Antioquia’s gold production (see Chapter 2).

Although mazamorreros led the move to the highland mines and

The Mining Sector 41 dominated eighteenth-century production, they remain hazy and indistinct figures in Antioquia’s mining history, for the few and incomplete lists of these itinerant miners do not provide sufficient information to examine their

numbers. Since bateas and gold-bearing streams proliferated throughout Antioquia, every settler was a potential panner. Fueled by constant immigration and a high birth rate, Antioquia’s population increased significantly in the eighteenth century. Available censuses show that the number of inhabitants more than doubled in the thirty years from 1778 to

1808, from 46,366 to 110,662. | ,

Just as human resources were conducive to an increase in mazamorrero numbers, so also were conditions in the new mining districts, for these goldseekers risked no monetary investment when they ventured into Rionegro and Santa Rosa. They were in the vanguard of the expansion to the highland placers, and, as was the case with the miners, the seasonal nature of highland , mining led to a dual life style for the mazamorreros: during the rainy season they followed Antioquia’s streams, searching for gold; during the rest of the year they tended their small plots in the valleys of Medellin and Rionegro. Fundicion statistics, then, confirm estimates of the ratio of miner-tomazamorrero production and provide a more precise guide to the different recovery rate of each group. Such analysis highlights critical stages in the evolution of Antioquia’s eighteenth-century mining structure and particular- | ly demonstrates that local sluice-mining elites had late access to a relatively small share of annual gold-dust production. Although Antioquia’s miners could accumulate capital, they could not do so on the scale of their Mexican counterparts, nor, in fact, could Antioquia’s mining elite even dominate

production within the province.

THE MINER ELITE Although as a group Antioquia’s sluice miners found their production overshadowed by the mazamorreros’, as individuals the slave-gang owners formed the province’s mining elite and thus enjoyed a greater potential for capital accumulation and greater scope for entrepreneurial activity. Any

inquiry into sluice miners’ profits must necessarily consider those expenditures in time and capital that preceded that final, rewarding stage:

the separation of gold from dirt and sand.

In essence, miner technique did not vary radically from mazamorrero practice, for the final goal of both types of producer was a batea full of gold dust. The major difference between miners and mazamorreros was that the former used slave labor, engaged in more elaborate operations prior to the © actual separation of gold from sand, and ended up with greater quantities of

42 The Mining Sector , the precious metal. To put a sluice mine into operation the miner first had to find a goldbearing stream, which was probably the easiest part of the operation, since most Antioquefo rivers contained gold. Then he channeled the water from the stream onto either the gold-bearing beds or the banks of the river and used the force of the water to separate the heavier, gold-bearing sands from

other matter. Finally he used a batea to separate gold dust from sand. Although the basic techniques remained the same, their implementation could be fraught with difficulties. Water was often a hindrance to placer operations. In the lowlands there was too much water, and the miner had to construct dams or other obstacles to impede the flow. In the highland districts, such as Santa Rosa, there was not enough water to mine all year, and miners were restricted to six months of activity. Even when the highland miner had an adequate supply of water, he had to channel it correctly, which involved the making of what Antioquefio miners called a tonga, a drop in the level of the stream bed, which gave extra force to the flow of water. To make a tonga it was often necessary to divert the waters above the actual mine site temporarily. With this portion of the riverbed dry,

the slave gang would use picks and powder to break up obstacles such as

boulders and rock outcroppings. The clearing of upriver debris was necessary for a number of reasons: it meant that any gold which had settled near these obstructions would eventually wash down to the mining site; it gave the miner a steady channel of water to be diverted to the washing area; and it meant that boulders could not be washed by the force of the water over the tonga and down upon mine and mineworkers.°*’

These preliminaries took time. One miner said it took him four years before production began, and another said he had lost six years in such preparation.°® The elapsed time prior to the actual extraction of gold dust varied according to the number of obstructions upstream, the width and depth of the water, and the stream gradient. In evaluating the feasibility of mining a river, such factors became as important as the actual presence of gold. In one 1787

report, Medellin miner Don José Antonio de Gutiérrez commented that there were many gold-bearing streams in the province that could not be exploited because of the difficulty of preparing the mine for operation.®’ Any evaluation of miner profit, then, must consider the lengthy preparations prior

to the actual extraction of gold. Even when a mine was producing, the time eventually came when the workings were exhausted, and the miner had either to change his site or move to unexploited beds in the same river. A production record of Don Francisco Angel de la Calle, covering the years 1748 to 1752, shows that

The Mining Sector 43 this could be an expensive transition (see table 4). The production record of Don Angel’s account book covers the period from March 1748 to April

1752, during which time (a full two years, or 48 percent of the total Operation time) his mine was not producing, even though he had to feed and

clothe his slave gang year round. Calle’s total stated production during the , four and one-half years was 887 pesos, which averaged over years of production and nonproduction, 197 pesos annual intake for the owner.

TABLE 4 :

PRODUCTION RECORD OF ANTIOQUENO PLACER MINE Gold Dust Washed

Year Month (Pesos de Oro)

1748 March : August 130120 ,

| 1749 July 103 1750*

| | 1752 1751* , April 187 December 98 : April 142 December 4 107

~ Source: Archivo del Consejo Municipal (Medellin) (ACM), vol. 2, no. 1, 1752.

*Mine in preparation but not yet producing. We cannot measure a miner’s profits, then, solely by the amounts of gold dust he produced. Miners had to invest considerable time and capital in the.

preparation of their mines. The sluice-mining technique meant that - eventually miners would exhaust the riverbed and they would have to move to a new site and invest their capital once more. Furthermore, in the Santa. Rosa district, the main source of Antioquia’s production during the Bourbon period, miners were limited to only six months of activity per year. Sluice

mining was a speculative and precarious source of income. Since fundicion records list the names of each sluice miner as well as the

sums each entered, we can attempt a crude approximation of the capital accumulation potential of this sector. From 1770 to 1808, 213 Antioquenos

brought individual totals ranging from 5 to 45,747 pesos de oro to the smelting house. Of these, 87 percent failed to smelt over 5,000 pesos (table 5).

44 The Mining Sector TABLE 5

DISTRIBUTION OF MINER CONTRIBUTION TO FUNDICION, 1770-1808

, Gold Pesos Brought Miners to Fundicion Number %

Less than 500 73 34.3 501 to 1,000 44 1,001 to 5,000 69 32.4 5,001 to 10,000 15 7.0

20.7

over 10,000 12 5.6

Source: Fundicién records, Archivo Historico de Antioquia a (Medellin) (AHA), from 1770-1808, in note 10, Chapter 1.

Note: I put the amounts each miner brought each year on notecards and added to arrive at total fundicion totals for each person.

Table 6 identifies the twelve wealthiest miners, shows their individual smeltery total, and calculates their average annual fundicion entry. These rough statistics indicate that the province’s most-productive sluice miners averaged from 519 to 2,859 pesos annually at the fundicion, sums which were probably a closer estimate of their excess, or profits, than of their production, as previous analysis has indicated. Such relatively modest averages are not surprising, given the massive evasion of fundiciOn and the structure of eighteenth-century mining, in which mazamorreros dominated production, and sluice technique set narrow upper limits on miners’ yields. The significance of such sums rests as much with their comparative as with any intrinsic value. Indeed, not only each sluice miner’s total entries at the fundicion, but also aggregate smelting-house figures themselves acquire meaning mostly through comparison. Juxtaposed against Mexican annual

production or against the profits of Guanajuato’s lode miners, colonial Antioquenos lacked much of a capital-accumulation potential. When viewed in light of historical trends in Antioqueno gold production, sluice miners enjoyed the best opportunities for amassing gold dust since the conquest. Comparing Antioquia’s sluice miners to colonists in other New Granadan provinces provides another perspective, for there were elites in nonmining regions who lacked even the paisas’ limited access to fluid capital. What is clear is that Antioquefo miners fell somewhere in between Mexican silver

miners and New Granadan nonminers, for there was enough capital to

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|No wn :.a| 12.:2iE 33 " . , Se aeiz a 1o From 1775 until independence, the cabildo, dominated by miner/commercial interests, successfully defied this decree, and in years of

scarcity it fixed grain prices. The conflict between farmers and the city

“

The Agricultural Sector 101 council became acute and affords much insight into the roles of agricultural

producers within the Medellin valley. ,

In 1799 harvests were below average and the resulting scarcity sent grain

prices up. As the municipal council moved to regulate, two factions emerged. The first group, headed by Don Nicolas de Ochoa, championed the cause of the farmers, while Don Manuel Jaramillo represented the miner faction. Conflict intensified because of personal enmity between these two men. As one witness testified, This feud dated back to when they drew up [militia] lists in this villa and Don Nicolas was put under the command of Don Manuel Jaramillo, and Don Nicolas de Ochoa rejected Jaramillo publicly, saying that while he was a humble vassal of our beloved

king and would voluntarily arm himself to serve him...thathe wouldnotdosounder

the mulatto, Tomas Beltran.”’ , , Jaramillo’s command, that it would be more honorable to serve under the orders of

This deadly personal insult added fuel to the economic clash, and both sides

rallied their supporters and divided the town into two warring factions. _ Both Ochoa and Jaramillo drew up petitions that explored the question of

whether the municipal council could fix food prices. According to established procedure, each side wrote reports that were presented to provincial and viceregal officers. These documents asked leading questions of witnesses, and the answers served to establish the justice of each side.

Although understandably biased, the documents clearly portray the

differences between the agrarian and mining factions. . Nicolas de Ochoa’s petition was signed by many farmers in the valley, who argued that the municipal council should not regulate the selling price of their corn. Although they admitted that corn had doubled in price (it now sold for four tomines [one-half gold peso] rather than the usual one or two tomines an almud [4.625 liters]), farmers argued that this increased price was justified. They submitted that the particular difficulties of the valley farmers necessitated consideration, not interference; that the municipal council’s intervention was contrary to the natural process of the market; and that the council was unjustly favoring one economic group, the miners, over another, the farmers. Farmers described the state of valley agriculture in somber terms. All cultivators stood at the mercy of diseases that periodically devastated crops. Farmers found themselves in a tightening vise, for valley land, which had been cultivated for many generations, was now exhausted and thus was

yielding smaller harvests. Although production was down, the cost of preparing and harvesting crops was continually rising and limiting profit. These problems could not be easily solved for, since the most fertile valley

102 The Agricultural Sector | land was already cultivated, prices of choice acreage kept rising. Farmers commented that during their lifetimes the price of a fanega (1.6 acres) had risen from thirty to one hundred pesos. This appreciation made the purchase | of additional land within the valley, even if they could find any, impossible

: for most farmers.”°

The alternative, planting crops on surrounding mountainsides and valleys,

was equally unattractive, farmers continued. It was costly to clear previously uncultivated land. It was also dangerous, as the farmer had to

battle snakes and wild animals. Even if farmers surmounted these difficulties, these lands produced only one crop a year, compared to two crops within the valley. Profit was further reduced, since the farmer had to arrange for the transport of his harvest from the mountains to Medellin. The farmers concluded that their position was sufficiently precarious without further interference from the municipal council. The farmers posed other arguments against municipal-council intervention. In effect they suggested that the law of supply and demand should run

its course. Although the current (1799) prices for corn were high, agriculturalists argued that these balanced those years when harvest had been abundant and prices correspondingly low. It was only just, the witnesses argued, to let each cycle proceed without interference. When corn had sold for as low as one tomin a fanega (1.5 bushels) and was not worth the cost of harvesting, the municipal council had not stepped in to aid the farmers. Why, now, should this body take such an interest in agricultural prices? Continuing their argument, the farmers attacked commercial interests, who, witnesses charged, were notorious for buying cheap and selling dear.

The recent price increases for steel and iron, necessary metals for agricultural implements, were but one example of commercial interests’ cupidity. Yet the town council had not interfered when the prices of these items rose. In fact, Ochoa charged, “‘the procurador general [Miguel Naranjo] was practically the first to raise the price of iron, yet he screamed when we raised the price of corn, when it was necessary to boost it, not only

to buy our tools, but also to obtain some cheap remnants of clothes that are | SO expensive, but necessary to cover our bodies.’”*!

The farmers anticipated and rejected the argument that the sale of noncomestibles was not comparable to the sale of basic foodstuffs. Witnesses stated that the high price of corn would not work undue hardship

on the poor, as beans, cacao, and sugar were selling at stable prices and could be substituted for corn. Finally the farmers charged that the municipal council was run by and for

the miner interests: ““Cabildo members are miners as is Councillor Don

The Agricultural Sector 103 Ignacio Uribe and all the rest that have conspired and conspire to keep the _

rate that has been put on the cost of corn.”’” The miners’ faction, led by Jaramillo, questioned first the validity of the petition that listed the farmers’ charges. Perhaps in his eagerness to enlist supporters for his petition, Ochoa had enrolled residents who could not read

and did not understand the document. The mining faction rounded these ] persons up and either bribed or persuaded them to retract their signatures. The miners argued that endorsers of the petition were subsistence farmers, were therefore not affected by the market price of corn, and thus had no real interest in the outcome of the dispute. Such charges naturally represented an attempt by the miner faction to crush what appeared to be a united block of farmers. The miners furthered their effort by personal attacks on Ochoa and two or

three cronies, who were portrayed as culprits behind high corn prices. As Jaramillo charged, “And even when harvests are not that abundant, produce

is never scarce, and that which underlies today’s [scarcity] is that the farmers conspired, even before the harvest, announcing losses of crops... . They hoarded them, holding off sale until the months of April and May when there is the greatest demand.’’* The miners also questioned the farmers’ estimate of costs to sow crops and of their eventual profit. According to the Jaramillo faction, farmers

could make profits selling corn at one tomin an almud, even though the normal selling price was two tomines an almud.** _— Miners defended merchants and argued that the higher costs of imported goods could not be equated with rising agricultural prices. The causes were

different: imports were more expensive because of scarcities and losses due , to the European war, whereas the agricultural crisis originated from the greed of local producers. Miners threatened to close down their placers if farmers continued to charge such high prices. When corn sold for more than two tomines an almud, the miners calculated, the costs of feeding a slave gang exceeded yields from mining. This argument was no doubt aimed at royal officials, whose chief concern was to increase local gold production. This reasoning also appealed to merchants whose prosperity was linked to gold output. The fixing of corn prices by the municipal council was one of those rare

issues over which Medellin’s elite divided into economic factions, for ~ residents usually farmed and mined, or farmed and traded, or did all three.*° | Intimations of this occupational flexibility emerged in this conflict as well. Miners noted that the break-even point in their operations was dependent on corn selling at two tomines a fanega. If the price rose higher, they asserted, they would move their slave gangs from the mining camps and cultivate their

104 The Agricultural Sector own fields within the valley, for agriculture would then be more profitable than mining.*° This statement was no satiric commentary against the farmers

but most likely a reflection of a real economic situation. One of the characteristics of Antioquefo mining was the dual residences of both miners

and mazamorreros, who owned plots within the valley and alternated farming with mining in Santa Rosa, Rionegro, or Titiribi. Both petitions were sent to viceregal and provincial officials. In this instance the dispute ended without an official victory for either side. Yet in a

real sense, the miner/merchant municipal council had triumphed, for the delay in response from higher levels meant that the council was able to regulate prices during this year of scarcity. In 1807 another crisis arose when the harvest in the valley was reduced to nine thousand bushels (six thousand fanegas).*’ Again the municipal council

moved to regulate prices. The procurador general called in the alcaldes

jJueces peddneos, the officers of each subarea within the council’s jurisdiction. He ordered them to make certain that no farmer was selling corn for more than four tomines an arroba (twenty-five pounds). One producer, Don Manuel Londofio, openly defied the municipal council by pricing his

harvest at six tomines an arroba. He initiated a suit against that body and charged that it had no authority to regulate prices.**® The crisis deepened as agricultural middlemen bought up the existing corn

within the jurisdiction to sell in outlying areas. The town council quickly prohibited the export of grain from the valley and set up guards on roads leading out of the area to stop the export of foodstuffs.°*

Not to be outmaneuvered by the council, the middlemen hit on an inventive way to take advantage of the scarcity. With the export of corn prohibited, and the price per arroba regulated, the middlemen went into the arepa-making business. Arepas, unleavened corn bread, were a staple of the

Antioquefio diet, equivalent to the Mexican tortilla. The middlemen produced a minor crisis in Medellin when their undersized (3 0z. as opposed

to 7 oz.) and overpriced arepas appeared on the streets.” The municipal council rose nobly to the new challenge and found its own

ingenious solution to the problem. Council members bought corn at controlled prices and handed it over to a woman and two slaves who baked standard-sized arepas to sell at reasonable prices. From mid-May until the first harvest in July, municipal council members rotated the duty of supervising the arepa making and selling.

Although this incident has its comic aspects, it also emphasizes the determination of the municipal council to keep corn prices regulated and food costs down. The program was popular among the villa residents and of course benefited the immediate interests of the miners and the indirect

The Agricultural Sector 105 profits of the merchants, as well. What of the outcome of Londofio’s suit, still pending, which challenged

the municipal council’s authority to fix prices? The Bogota audiencia, forced to choose between condoning independent and unauthorized price regulation

by a municipal council or overturning the municipal council and thereby occasioning food-price increases and a slowdown in bullion production, opted for authority rather than gold. The audiencia ruled in Londofio’s favor and threatened municipal council members with a five-hundred-peso fine if they tried to regulate.*! Even so, from the time of the original royal decree in 1775 that forbade municipal councils to fix grain prices, until independence,

the Medellin council effectively contravened the imperial decree. The conflict assumed predictable patterns. During agricultural crises the municipal council would illegally fix grain prices and fight the legal suits brought by outraged farmers who appealed to the Bogota audiencia for re-

dress. While the pleading went on, the municipal council regulated, and , when the audiencia ruled against it, the council would capitulate. By then, the seasonal shortages would have passed, and there would be no need to © regulate in any case. Matters would remain in abeyance until the next grain shortage, when the same scene would be replayed. In this way Medellin’s miners and merchants who sat on the town council controlled agricultural prices to their advantage throughout the Bourbon period. _ The conditions conducive to the formation or maintenance of a powerful agricultural elite thus were not present in Antioquia, at least in the most fertile of the province’s valleys, Medellin. Farmers did not produce export crops, which might have enhanced their profit-making potential, nor was agriculture a prestigious profession, for the abundant labor necessary for the development of a peon-based hacienda system was not available. Urban populations and mining centers did create a demand for the excess

harvests of the larger farmers. Yet here, too, profit was limited. An agricultural elite could not monopolize production, since a population of small farmers occupied substantial areas within the jurisdiction. The miners were but one group that owned land within the valley and that could shift its slave gangs from mining to agriculture if the cost of grain rose above the norm. Even more important, mining and commercial elites dominated the Medellin municipal council. They saw low prices as to their benefit and were

prepared to defy both the local agricultural interests and the higher-level colonial officers to achieve those prices.

Given this set of circumstances, we can now understand why the , Antioqueno elite had ambivalent attitudes toward the acquisition of land. As

Mon y Velarde intimated, land owning was rarely the most profitable or _

prestigious occupation in Bourbon Antioquia. |

106 The Agricultural Sector

CONCLUSION , This chapter ends where it began, with the agrarian reform of Mon y Velarde. Although his measures appeared audacious, and even dangerous to the Bogota judges, subsequent developments proved his actions to be not only in the best interests of the Antioquefo elite, but also consistent with the goals of Bourbon reformers.

| If Antioquefos had attached particular importance to land either as a source of wealth or of prestige, Mon y Velarde’s expropriation of private property might have produced the rebellions feared by the Bogota judges.” Instead, the Antioquefio elite welcomed his proposal to establish agromining settlements outside the valleys, for they recognized that this was a valid response to a growing crisis within the agricultural sector. Intimations of an incipient agricultural crisis have already appeared in this

examination of land use within the Medellin valley. By the 1780s most available acreage was under cultivation, prices of farmland were doubling

and tripling, and the small size of most plots discouraged any further redivision by the next generation.** This intensive land use created a growing

band of vagabonds who owned no land and of residents who did not till enough acres to allow self-sufficiency. Mon y Velarde noted that “*the major-

ity of these inhabitants scarcely have (and this in the countryside) their houses and kitchens, much less land where they might plant a garden, and if

, they do have .. . it is useless land that is hardly able to produce even a seed.”’”4

The 1787 censuses of Otrabanda and San Cristobal also show this trend, although not to the extent noted by Mon y Velarde. If the percentages of

| landless and of those cultivating less than the 1.5-acre minimum for selfsufficiency are added, 54.4 percent of Otrabanda’s and 50.2 percent of San

Cristobal’s residents may have suffered the plight described by Mon y Velarde. He aimed to alleviate this situation by establishing new agromining

towns in unsettled terrain.* Although it might appear paradoxical, the movement of excess population from the valleys served to enhance the potential of the mining, commercial,

and agricultural elites. The miners welcomed the impetus given to the exploration, discovery, and settlement of new mining sites that was implicit in this program. The merchants realized that the development of prosperous new towns would lead to increased demand for their imported merchandise.

Since the most prosperous farmers relied on slave rather than free labor, they did not lose potential farmworkers as a result of this relocation but gained additional customers for their lowland produce. Mon y Velarde even had conciliatory words for those landowners whose

The Agricultural Sector 107 property would be confiscated. He pointed out that their unsettled land was worthless, whereas a town located within their boundaries would increase

the value of their remaining land.*° During his tenure four such settlements, | Carolina, San Carlos, San Luis de Gongora (Yarumal), and San Antonio del Infante (Don Matias), were founded.*’

_ Although Mon y Velarde’s resettlement policy was specific to the conditions of late-eighteenth-century Antioquia, it also fit within the policy of Bourbon reform. The royal concern to reorganize, to streamline, and to control, as manifested in the administrative, economic, and social programs emanating from Madrid, also found expression in urban planning. Popula-

tions which had scattered throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were now to be concentrated in towns so that civil and religious authority might be maintained. In Antioquia, Mon y Velarde sought not only to resettle valley populations, but also to bring the scattered mazamorreros together in the new settlements.*® Although a comparison of his program with that of other Bourbon reformers shows a complementarity of goals, it ~ also reveals some striking dissimilarities in the responses of the affected colonists. Throughout the colonies, Bourbon administrators were injecting new life into existing urban networks and initiating a new era of town foundings. In

the 1770s Teniente Don Antonio de la Torre Miranda traversed the province of Cartagena, reestablished forty-three towns, and founded twentytwo new ones. In Chile, the combined efforts of Presidents Antonio Guill y Gonzaga (1766) and O’ Higgins (1792) produced sixty new settlements by the end of the eighteenth century. The Marquis de Sobremonte, Intendent of

Cordoba, founded eighteen new towns in northwest Argentina between

1783 and 1787, and the Real Hacienda of Buenos Aires rounded up volunteers for the settlement of Patagonia. In Uruguay, and even in Cuba, similar, if less-ambitious programs were underway.” It is no accident that Bourbon urban policy found its fullest expression in the less-populated reaches of the empire. Indian regions such as central

Mexico, highland Peru, or central Colombia had well-developed urban networks prior to the Spanish conquest, networks which, with some modifications, were coopted by the conquistadors. Such was not the case in Antioquia or in Cuba, where the high mortality rates of the less-civilized natives had left Spaniards with an unsettled frontier. In Chile and Argentina,

the Indians resisted Spanish domination until well into the nineteenth century, and the new towns founded there were not only settlements, but also

forts. As the Bourbon reformers placed towns in unsettled regions and in strategic positions along trade routes as bulwarks against Indian attack and as supply centers for mining camps, they sought to add new vitality to those

108 The Agricultural Sector urban networks established during the conquest.

Although Mon y Velarde’s confiscation of private property and the establishment of new towns was not unique, the reaction of the Antioquefo

_ elite was atypical. In Argentina, colonists protested new foundings there because they feared that such settlements would detract from the power of their municipal councils and would displace their labor force, who would be given property in the proposed towns.°° In Antioquia, only the landowners directly affected by the confiscation expressed disapproval of the colonization scheme. Furthermore, after Mon y Velarde’s visita ended, Antioquefios continued a “‘new towns” policy.°! The willingness of the local elites to give away land outside the settled valleys and to encourage such colonization is

best seen in the legislation enacted during the Patria Boba.°* The Patria Boba was the interlude between the creole declaration of independence in 1810 and the temporary reconquest of New Granada by | Spanish forces in 1812. The period is called the Patria Boba, or “Silly Fatherland,” because New Granadan elites spent the majority of their time

squabbling rather than uniting to promote constructive legislation or to counter the real threat of the Spanish military.°’ Antioquia was marked by such disputes. At one point, for example, Medellin threatened to secede from the province if the villa were not designated the capital.°* Yet on the whole the Antioquefio elite appeared more united than some of their New

Granadan counterparts.” A land reform bill promoted by Antioquefio independence hero and statesman José Manuel Restrepo was one of the more enlightened pieces of legislation of the Patria Boba period. Although the Spanish reconquest meant that this bill was enacted (in 1812) but never put into effect, the bill still illustrates the Antioquefio elite’s views on land ownership.*° This bill, the Antioquefio equivalent of the United States Homestead Acct,

proposed to give away land to persons willing to clear and settle virgin territory. The terms were generous. A prospective colonist who was landless, or who did not have enough property to support his family, need only apply to officers charged with distributing the acreage. He was given an axe, a gun,

two pigs, three chickens, and seed corn and beans. These costs were to be

- repaid within a five-year period. Colonists were given time schedules detailing when they had to plant the first crop (during the first year), build a

home (during the second year), live in the house and expand the acreage sown (during the third year). They could not sell the land to anyone else until

they had full title, which was given after five years. In this way the Antioquefio elite hoped to expand agricultural production, encourage discovery of new mines, create new markets, and relieve the population pressure within the valleys.

The Agricultural Sector 109 Both Mon y Velarde’s “new towns’”’ policy and the 1812 land-reform bill

highlight the special role of agriculture and land holding within the Antioquefo milieu. Although the majority of the Antioquefio elite were landowners, they did not see further acquisition of property as necessary for the maintenance of prestige or economic well-being.”’ This was logical, given that provincial landowners did not enjoy export markets, much potential for local sales, cheap labor, access to fertile soil, or

tempting profits. Unlike other regions in Latin America, such as the central Mexico valley, Guanajuato, Popayan, or Arequipa, prestige and power in Antioquia did not necessarily accrue to those based on the land. Rather, the particular presence and absence of human and natural resources created an environment which encouraged Antioquefos to maintain their capital

fluidity and eschew life on the estate. Those who continued to invest successfully and whose families maintained such entrepreneurial habits continued, as the next chapter will indicate, to hold the highest positions in | the local economy and society.