Native Americans of Middle and South America

Article Outline

Introduction; Culture Areas; History; Native Americans Today

Other Societies of South America

Beyond the central Andean civilizations, many indigenous societies thrived in other areas of South America. The Chibcha (Muisca), a semisedentary people who occupied the high plain of central Colombia, were located close enough to the Andean zone of high civilization to be influenced by some of the major accomplishments, including the construction of temple complexes and the manufacture of fine jewelry. They produced a substantial amount of gold ornaments and ceremonial objects. They lived in fortified communities and established some limited, unstable empires. They maintained extensive trading relations throughout a broad region that included the more developed Andean societies.

The northern coast of South America was inhabited by the Arawak and the Carib. Over time both of these peoples had migrated from the mainland to populate the Caribbean islands. The Arawak inhabited the coast of present-day Venezuela and the major Caribbean islands. They were a semisedentary people with locally powerful chiefs and communities of considerable size. The Carib, a warlike hunting-and-gathering people who practiced some cannibalism, inhabited the smaller islands of the Caribbean and some areas of the mainland coast.

The peoples of the Amazon River Basin in South America belonged to a great many different ethnic groups. They were organized into chiefdoms. They practiced agricultural engineering, including raised fields, and lived in compounds on earthen mounds they constructed along the river to protect their communities from regular floods. Although they remained substantially dependent on a diet of fish drawn from the river, they increasingly supplemented it with manioc and then maize. They had been producing ceramics for several millennia before the arrival of Europeans.

Most native communities in highland and coastal Brazil were inhabited by members of the Tupian language group. Primarily agriculturalists, these semisedentary peoples lived in communities organized around a headman, who assembled the residents from his extended family, marriage alliances, and friends. These were among the most warlike people in the Americas, gaining prestige and wealth from recurrent conflict against neighboring communities.

European Conquest and Colonization

Spaniards began to colonize the major islands of the Caribbean just two years after explorer Christopher Columbus discovered them for the Spanish Empire in 1492. They demanded labor service from the indigenous peoples to develop the meager gold deposits of the islands. They also introduced epidemic diseases such as influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. These foreign diseases were catastrophic for the native peoples, who had no natural resistance to them. Within 50 years the diseases had decimated the indigenous populations of the large Caribbean islands.

In the early 1500s the Spanish began to broaden the scope of their conquest and colonization to the mainland. In 1519 Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés led expedition forces into central Mexico. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán fell to Cortés’s forces in August 1521. The Spanish then built their own capital, Mexico City, on the site of the conquered and razed Aztec capital. Their colony in Mexico became known as New Spain.

In 1532 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro commanded a force of fewer than 200 Spaniards against the Inca Empire in the Andean zone of South America. Pizarro’s forces executed Inca emperor Atahualpa and conquered the Inca capital of Cuzco after a three-month siege. Pizarro established a colonial capital at Lima. The Spaniards proceeded to establish control over all of Inca-held territory except the Inca kingdom at Vilcabamba, which was protected by difficult terrain. It survived as the last Inca stronghold until the Spanish conquered it in 1572 and executed its ruler, Tupac Amarú.

The Aztec and Inca empires were less than a century old when they were conquered. Both empires extended over vast areas and encompassed millions of people. The imperial capitals fell to the invaders only after prolonged campaigns with numerous casualties among the native armies, but comparatively few among the Spaniards. The same epidemics that had decimated the native populations of the Caribbean islands also afflicted the Aztecs, but not the Incas, during their wars against the Spanish. The conquest of the Incas largely preceded the impact of European diseases, although the peoples of the Andean region eventually were decimated by epidemics as well.

The very size and sophistication of the Aztec and Inca empires worked against them during the European conquests. Their strict social and political hierarchies and their dedication to a certain way of war made them easier targets. The ancient military tradition of their armies, which numbered in the tens of thousands, emphasized one-on-one engagements on the front lines in open, level areas. The bulk of each army remained out of action, acting instead as support forces for the actual fighters as they waited for their turn at the battlefront. The armies made little use of battlefield tactics or ambushes. Further, the primary goal of the combatants was to disable their opponents and take them captive, rather than to slay them. Also, the armies operated under the strict authority of their commanders. They did not use graduated levels of command. If the commander was killed or captured, his army considered itself defeated and withdrew from the battle.

The Europeans enjoyed several major advantages in military conflicts against the Aztec and Inca forces. They had metal weapons and armor, while the indigenous peoples of the Americas had not yet developed large-scale industrial metallurgy. The weapons used by indigenous forces—arrows and spears with chipped-stone tips and wooden clubs—were not effective in inflicting fatal wounds on the armored invaders. At the same time, Aztec and Inca warriors were largely defenseless against the Spanish weapons—sword blades and metal bolts fired from crossbows. At that time firearms were still inaccurate and slow-firing, and the Spanish forces found them ineffective in the type of warfare they used against the Aztec and Inca armies. Meanwhile, many native peoples who had been subjugated by the Aztec and Inca empires sided with the Europeans. They provided invaluable logistical support, but the Spanish used them only infrequently in actual combat.

The Spanish had much less success against the tribal peoples who occupied most other areas of Middle and South America. These peoples did not hesitate to attack from ambush and to flee into the hinterland when battles turned against them. They depended on bows and arrows in combat and sought to avoid numerous casualties. The Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula used such tactics to frustrate repeated Spanish expeditions. In 1542 the Spanish founded the city of Mérida in the northwestern corner of the peninsula, but they effectively controlled only the surrounding region and a couple of other small areas. Independent Maya communities occupied the greater part of the peninsula for many decades, despite repeated efforts to subjugate them or to convert them to Christianity.

The Spanish encountered particularly fierce resistance by the Araucanian tribes. With the conquest of the Inca Empire complete, a Spanish force moved southward to found the city of Santiago in 1541 and to gain control over the fertile central region of present-day Chile. In the southern part of their colony were the Araucanians, who resisted foreign control well into the 19th century. The Spanish built a string of forts to defend their settlements against Araucanian attacks and raids, which were nevertheless frequent and often successful. The Araucanians adapted to the European style of warfare. They learned to ride horses, which Europeans had introduced to the Americas, and to shoot arrows while on horseback. They devised spears to stymie Spanish cavalry charges. In the 18th century the Araucanians raided across the Andes into southern Argentina, defeating the indigenous inhabitants of that region and rustling cattle from the Spanish colonists. They drove these cattle to Chile, where they traded them with Spanish middlemen for armaments and manufactured goods. The Araucanians prospered through this system until the end of the 1870s, when they were defeated in battle by the Argentine and Chilean militaries and forced onto government-designated reservations.

Despite encountering areas of resistance, however, the Spanish rapidly expanded their empire in Middle America, the Caribbean, and the Andean region. Meanwhile, Portugal was much less successful in colonizing its new territory in South America. In 1500 Portugal claimed the eastern coast of the continent. Portugal’s holdings in Africa and Asia were far more lucrative than its new colony until well into the 17th century, and relatively few people from Portugal migrated to the Americas. Those who did depended on alliances with certain tribes to protect their settlements and to provide indigenous labor. Initially Portugal exploited just one product from its colony in South America, the native-growing brazilwood, which yielded a highly prized red dye. (The Portuguese eventually named their South American colony Brazil.) Coastal tribes harvested brazilwood trees and stored them near the shoreline until Portuguese ships arrived with European goods to bargain a trade.

Later in the 16th century, the Portuguese began to develop sugar plantations in Brazil. The clearing of land for intensive cultivation intruded on indigenous lands, and many native peoples fled to the hinterland of the interior. At the same time, the demand for native labor increased. Among the indigenous peoples of this region, women traditionally did the agricultural work; however, the Portuguese preferred male labor for their plantations. Plantation owners tried to coerce indigenous peoples to work in the sugar fields and mills. They also forced many into slavery. Beginning in the 1560s, however, the Portuguese were faced with a diminishing labor force as European-introduced diseases swept through the indigenous villages and decimated their populations. The Portuguese began to import slaves from Africa to work the plantations. The introduction of large numbers of slaves via the Atlantic slave trade continued into the mid-1800s, transforming areas of Brazil into multiracial societies with Native American, European, and African populations.

Forced Change, 17th and 18th Centuries

The Spaniards never saw it in their interest to destroy the structure of native society. Rather, they sought to use established patterns and hierarchies to govern effectively, to mobilize indigenous labor, to funnel resources from the countryside into the colonial cities and the market economy, and to Christianize the population.

Until about 1650 the collapse of indigenous populations was caused primarily by the impact of waves of epidemic diseases that arrived with the colonists. Native Americans living in temperate and tropical climates suffered the most. In central Mexico the native population declined by about 95 percent, or to fewer than 1.5 million, about a century after European contact. The native-colonist population ratios shifted so dramatically that surviving Native Americans acculturated much more fully to the European way of life and could be more closely administered by Spanish officials and priests. In addition, vast expanses of previously populated land became available for use by the colonists.

An unintended consequence of the Spanish conquest was the fragmentation of the great civilization zones that had long prevailed in Mexico and the Andes. The dense connections of belief systems, artistic representation, local economic specializations, skilled craftsmanship, and political networks fell apart after the military defeats through neglect rather than from Spanish policy. Although indigenous villages participated in local markets and the Spanish colonial economy, they became far more culturally isolated and more focused on maize cultivation for their subsistence than ever before.

Native Americans quickly began using metal tools and milled fabrics, and raising animals such as chickens and pigs, that were introduced from Europe. These things improved their productivity and diversified their diet. Native communities made only limited use of draft animals, however, because of their cost. While wheat was introduced and preferred by the Europeans, maize remained the staple of the indigenous diet.

The indigenous peoples quickly adopted Christianity, as they found it compatible with important traditional beliefs. Few priests worked among the native populations, so indigenous communities were able to adapt Christian beliefs and rituals to their local practices. Religious worship and ritual became closely associated with community identity and service. Native Americans incorporated important aspects of Roman Catholicism, such as ritual godparenthood, religious brotherhoods, and devotion to saints, into their own cultures. Individual towns adopted patron saints and shrines that they promoted through festivals and generally developed forms of Catholicism that could be practiced without a priest’s continued presence. A priest appeared usually once or twice a year, especially during the community’s major festivals. Only then were confessions heard, masses conducted, and marriages and baptisms carried out.

The Spanish colonial government required Native Americans to make tribute payments in cash. To make these payments, indigenous peoples had to work on colonial enterprises or raise a crop they could sell. At first, individual Spanish settlers were granted privileged access to the labor of specific native communities through the encomienda system. Another system of forced labor, known as the repartimiento (division), emerged in the mid-1500s. It required Native American communities to supply a quota of workers available for hire by the Spanish colonists.

Spanish and Portuguese colonists clustered in the cities they founded, such as Lima and Santiago, or that they took over from native peoples, such as Mexico City (built on the site of Tenochtitlán), and in nearby farms. They established gold and silver mines wherever they could, but most of these were distant from major zones of native settlement. Few of these ventures greatly disrupted indigenous culture or made heavy demands on the native labor forces. The major exception was the enormous silver-mining complex of Potosí in southern Bolivia. To work these rich deposits, colonial officials required indigenous males to work the mines, usually for six months at a time. Many were accompanied to the mining sites by their wives and children. When their turns were finished, most returned to their home communities.

In the early decades of the colonies, the settlers had depended on drafts of temporary unskilled native laborers. As the colonial economies became more elaborate, however, this form of labor became less useful and survived only in the less developed areas of Middle and South America. Instead, businessmen recruited skilled native workers by offering them better terms of employment. These terms were made more attractive because of the deteriorating circumstances in indigenous communities brought about by population decline and Spanish demands for labor service and tribute payments. Many Native Americans departed from their communities to live in Spanish colonial cities or on Spanish-owned agricultural estates (haciendas). Over the long term, substantial numbers of Native Americans came to reside permanently in Spanish colonial society. Their children were born to this way of life, rather than to the traditional village culture that their parents had witnessed. Indigenous intermarriage with Spaniards and people of African descent in the cities and estates created a growing interracial population. People of mixed Native American and Spanish descent, known as mestizos, were more urbanized and more readily assimilated into colonial society. They adopted many traits and customs of the dominant Spanish culture and had little interaction with indigenous peoples who remained in the villages.

By the beginning of the 18th century the Native American population had begun to recover in some areas. While it never came close to the size attained before the Spanish conquest, the increase placed tremendous pressure on the limited resources and productive capacity of indigenous villages. Although colonial authorities had guaranteed these communities a certain measure of land held in common, the colonists had occupied most of the remaining agricultural land to grow crops for local and international markets. In this situation, many villages faced subsistence crises, in which they could not produce enough to maintain their populations.

In response to this enduring affliction, Native Americans began to work in the colonial economy far more extensively than before. Many more migrated from their communities to the cities and haciendas, where they became permanent workers. However, they were generally unskilled and poorly paid. Even those who remained in their villages labored periodically on the haciendas to earn additional money before returning home. These temporary workers often hired themselves out as labor gangs.

Native American communities also began to organize responses to their circumstances. They brought complaints and entered into judicial disputes over land ownership, boundaries, and access to water. Also, after many decades in which indigenous societies had rarely risen up against the colonial authorities, they began to take action, sometimes violently, to prevent colonists and officials from imposing themselves. These protests typically involved only one village at a time and a complaint against a single issue. Individual revolts lasted for only a limited time and did not expand to embrace larger regions. They also did not challenge the fundamental position of Native Americans in the colonial system.

Wars for Independence, 19th Century

All of the Spanish colonies and Brazil won their independence from the colonial powers by 1824 (see Latin American Independence). But the independence movements that erupted throughout the colonies in the early years of the century did not address issues crucial to indigenous peoples. The fight for independence was primarily an effort by the white elite of the colonies to achieve self-government for their class. For the most part Native Americans did not actively participate in the wars for independence. Mestizos, however, were among the most involved in the wars, fighting in both the patriot and royalist armies.

Before the wars for independence ended colonial rule, Native Americans were officially wards of the Spanish crown and could request that their grievances be heard by special courts. However, under the colonial caste system, which was based on racial categories, Native Americans were placed below whites and mestizos in social status. Therefore they were among the most disadvantaged in the society, along with free blacks and black slaves, and colonial practices such as the repartimiento system allowed them to be greatly exploited and abused.

In 1780, decades before the wars for independence erupted, highland Peru witnessed a massive uprising by Native Americans. An indigenous community leader, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, claimed that he was Tupac Amarú II, a direct descendent of the last independent Inca ruler. He demanded that the Spaniards abandon the highlands and return them to native rule. Tens of thousands flocked to his cause, including many mestizos. Thousands died in the ensuing warfare against colonial forces before Tupac Amarú II and his associates were captured and executed in 1781. The mountainous regions of Peru and Bolivia were marked by similar uprisings until the 1820s. At that time the colonial regime was overthrown, but not to the advantage of the indigenous peoples. Instead, their concerns were largely ignored and neglected by the newly independent nations.

The first uprising of Mexico’s independence movement was led in 1810 by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a priest of Spanish descent in the parish of Dolores. He led his parishioners, who were mostly mestizos, in a poorly planned revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Hidalgo called for the abolition of the tribute payments required of Native Americans. His parish members were soon joined by tens of thousands of others, mostly Native Americans and mestizos, who rankled at the constraints placed on them by the colonial system. They executed many of the people of Spanish descent they took as captives. After suffering a defeat against a small Spanish force, Hidalgo’s movement fell apart and its participants fled back to their communities. He and his associates were soon captured and executed. Four years later a disciple of Hidalgo, José María Morelos, directed a similar, but smaller and more coordinated, rebellion that also ended in failure. The successful independence movement in Mexico in 1821 neither included Native Americans among its participants nor addressed their plight in its program.

The leaders of the new nations believed Native Americans should lose any special “privileges,” such as the grievance courts, afforded them during the colonial period. Liberal leaders called for placing all citizens, including Native Americans, under equal laws and ending the caste system. The new national governments initially aspired to remove the tribute payments and required labor services that had been imposed under the colonial regime. But the reality of nearly continuous national bankruptcy led some of them to reimpose tribute payments, though under new names. Some also reimposed mandatory labor service by Native Americans on local construction projects or agricultural estates, arguing that this taught them proper habits and helped the nation.

The new nations also sought to eliminate communal land ownership in Native American communities, a tradition that was so central to their self-reliance. The governments designated the holdings as private lands. Many indigenous communities eventually lost their property to nearby estate owners who sought to expand their profit-oriented enterprises. The land was often sold without the consent of the native peoples, and sometimes it was seized outright. The native communities no longer had special courts to hear their grievances, and the few courts that did exist were unsympathetic. By the late 19th century a great number of the indigenous villages had disappeared, and their former members lived in destitution as temporary agricultural laborers.

The period between about 1870 and 1920 was perhaps the worst era for Native Americans since the initial conquest period. An atmosphere of disdain toward native peoples proliferated. Business interests, prospering during a period of economic growth, dispossessed Native Americans of their resources. Many indigenous groups responded by organizing regional revolts against these actions. The weak national governments had tremendous difficulty suppressing these uprisings, which continued for years before being extinguished.

One of the largest and longest revolts was the Caste War of the Yucatán, in which Maya rebels, many of them farm laborers, won control over almost all of the Yucatán Peninsula by May 1848. By the following spring the people of Spanish descent in the area, most of whom were town dwellers or farm owners and supervisors, had recaptured the western and central areas of the peninsula. However, the eastern area around Chan Santa Cruz remained an independent Maya stronghold until Mexico’s federal troops invaded the city in 1901.

Striving for Indigenous Rights, 20th Century

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was a major turning point for Native Americans in Middle America. Under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata, a revolutionary of indigenous descent, large numbers of native peoples in southern Mexico fought to regain the traditional community lands they had lost during the preceding decades. In the two decades following the success of the revolution, most native communities had their lands restored by the national government. The Mexican Revolution marked the first substantial reversal of the neglect of Native Americans that had prevailed since the colonial period. After the revolution, the Mexican government promoted indigenismo as a glorious heritage and established agencies to promote native rights and cultures. Since that time Native American children often have been taught their traditional language as well as Spanish, and indigenous artisans have had success marketing their crafts.

The indigenous peoples of Bolivia lost most of their lands when the government eliminated communal land ownership early in the 20th century. Most of them were retained as laborers on the large and often unproductive estates that incorporated their lands. Despite uprisings and other forms of resistance, they had little success in remedying their condition until a larger revolution erupted in the country in 1952. Native Americans took up arms to help overthrow the old regime and bring to power the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, or MNR), a leftist-oriented political party, which pledged to make them full-fledged citizens. The new MNR government immediately extended the right to vote to Native Americans, and in 1953 it instituted a land reform law that allowed Native Americans to reclaim their traditional lands. Since that time, the indigenous peoples of Bolivia have been able to grow crops for urban markets to support their communities, retain authority over their internal affairs, and obtain education and public health services for their communities. They have also been active in local and national politics.

In some countries, however, Native American populations continued to suffer miserably. In El Salvador in the early 1930s, indigenous communities inspired by radical politicians from the cities protested to have lands restored and labor conditions improved. In 1932 the army seized the government and violently repressed the movement, killing between 10,000 and 30,000 rural Salvadorans in what came to be known as La Matanza (The Massacre). Native Americans were especially targeted during the massacre, and those who survived lived under a repressive military regime.

The Maya of Guatemala, meanwhile, had lost much of their land by the beginning of the 20th century and were required by the government to provide labor to the large estates or face arrest. A reform government that gained power in 1944 began to reverse this situation, but a counterrevolution led by the military in 1954 imposed a series of repressive regimes. In response, radical armed rebels established themselves in the countryside to mobilize support against the government. Both sides competed over the Maya population that composed most of the rural population. Violence was endemic, and the national military committed some horrible massacres of Maya communities, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, in the early 1990s the two sides entered into a national accord, and most of the organized armed violence ended. Some communities regained their lands, and in some schools the Maya began to be educated about the magnificent history of their ancestors, occasionally in their own language.