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Indian reductions in the Andes (reducciones) were settlements built by Spanish authorities and populated by the forcible relocation of indigenous Andean populations. Beginning in 1569, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered the resettlement of more than one million native people into approximately six hundred of these reducciones. The resettlement was primarily carried out in the Audenicas of Lima and Charcas (modern day Bolivia and Peru, roughly speaking). The specific goals of the campaign are still debated, but there is general agreement that the Spanish authorities sought to consolidate scattered, native populations and place them into a more easily controlled system of grid-based towns. The native populations, who had adapted to a way of life suitable to the many, minor microclimates throughout the Andes, experienced immense hardship in the transition to these new regions. Despite these hardships, certain aspects of native Andean life were fiercely preserved by their own agency, and life in the reductions reflected a complex hybrid of forced Spanish values and those preserved from the older native communities.

Background
Reducciones were not new to Latin America, and had been a policy in many other regions, starting in the Caribbean as early as 1503. Early in his assessment of the Andean region, Francisco de Toledo idealized a universal resettlement to transform Andeans “from savages to men and from barbarians to civilized people.” The campaign that took place in the Andes was part of the larger reforms he had been conceptualizing since 1567 and consulting with Spanish authorities on. His ambition coincided with the goals of Spanish crown to "aggrandize Spanish power by consolidating viceregal rule and to revive the flow of Andean silver to the metropolitan treasury." In order to achieve these economic and political goals efficiently, Toledo attempted to relocate the scattered indigenous populations of the Andes into larger settlements.

Toledo himself conducted a massive inspection of the Andean heartland from 1570 to 1575 and brought the entire viceregal court on the journey. Trekking through mountains in the central and southern highlands, he took detailed observations to legitimize his plan and motivated the inspectors and administrators of the project. The selection of “appropriate” sites for the reducciones often fell within “areas of proven or potential economic benefit to the Crown”, which was often near mining zones and agricultural valleys. Toledo also developed an immense and thorough body of rules that would set the framework for the colonial ambition of reorganizing Andean society.

Purpose
Before the construction of the relocation towns, indigenous peoples throughout the Andes lived in small, localized and dispersed villages, which were difficult for Spanish colonial authorities to oversee. A primary motivation for the massive resettlement program "was to establish direct state control and facilitate the church's Christianization of the native population, while enhancing the collection of the tribute tax and the allocation of labor."

Toledo further justified the reducciones under the theory that they would protect natives from “being exploited by local landowners and miners, harassed by the colonial judicial system, and deceived by a false religion.” Such paternalistic attitudes were common among Spanish authorities who perceived indigenous groups as volatile and prone to lawlessness if not placed under strict administration.

Organization
Many Spaniards viewed Christianity as an inseparable component from town building in the colonial era, believing that it was necessary for the proper functioning of civilized urban life. This was based around the concept of policia, which portrayed an idealized civic life that extolled cleanliness, strict organization, and virtuous citizenship (Mumford, 4). Reducciones were, in large part, conceived within this philosophy.

The structural layout of the reducciones was based on a common template, modeled after a Spanish-style rural town. Each settlement was built with a quadrilateral, uniform street grid. Each reducción had a town square, around which were arranged the chief buildings: a church with an assigned priest, a prison, and a travelers lodge. They can best be described as a type of camp designed to model an ordered town.

Special governors, under the titles of corregidores de indios, were appointed to oversee the reducciones and were vested with an immense amount of authority. They were instructed to build cabildos (municipal councils) in the reducciones of common natives who were recruited from the general population. The effort to recruit commoners was meant to undermine the influence of caciques, indigenous lords who possessed immense power in Andean societies. However, many caciques used their knowledge and social capital as leverage against the corregidores, which made reducción governance less simple than Spanish authorities assumed. Though the caciques almost universally opposed the policy of resettlement, many of them took advantage of the opportunity to transition their positions of power into the reducciones and actively challenge Spanish authority.

Impact on indigenous people
The shift into the reducciones had highly disruptive effects on indigenous societies. Traditional family and kinship ties that existed for centuries were severely disturbed as small villages were forced to consolidate into poorly organized and often oversized settlements. This fundamentally different living environment forced natives to acclimate to a new socioeconomic order in which their power was severely curbed by the violent coercion of Spanish forces.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an indigenous chronicler, recounts the changes due to the reduccions in The First New Chronicle and Good Government. He notes that the local Andean agricultural system thrived based on plots cultivated according to the microclimates up and down the Andean mountain range. Each microclimate and corresponding agricultural product contributed to the health and overall well-being of the Native American population. However, the reductions destroyed this "'vertical' organization of farming."

The people were torn from their established agricultural system and crops, and their familiar villages, but they were potentially relocated to completely different climate zones, requiring new crops and techniques. Poma also notes that the new sites were "sometimes set in damp lands that cause pestilence" (disease).

Despite the exploitation and circumstantial hardships that Andeans faced, many of them found ways to exercise their agency in certain spheres where opportunity presented itself. Poma took special pride in the cabildos (municipal councils), comprised of natives in each reducción, and saw them as a path towards developing indigenous self-government. In addition, many Andeans were able to negotiate deals to keep all or some of their previous villages and farmland, which resulted in an ebb and flow of people from the reducciones to the countryside. Some managed to avoid Spanish detection and escape the reducciones altogether to pursue radically different lives.