Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821 (review)
The repartimiento de mercancias in colonial Spanish America has long been something of an enigma. It is usually treated as a system of forced production and consumption in which a Spanish official loaned money or advanced goods to Indian peasant households, collecting the cash repayments or finished products several months later on terms that were very disadvantageous to the Indians. The volume and significance of this trade to the economies of Mexico and the Andean region in the eighteenth century is not in doubt. What has been harder to understand is why so many Indians participated in the system with apparently so little overt resistance. Jeremy Baskes addresses this question through a study of repartimientos of cochineal dyestuff in the Mexican province of Oaxaca. The locale and period are significant, for cochineal was a major export in eighteenth-century Mexico, and nearly all of it was produced by Indian communities of Oaxaca.