and nearby Acomayo. There appears to be few differences
among these provinces. Both are high in the mountains,
and each is inhabited by the Quechua-speaking
descendants of the Incas. Yet Acomayo is much poorer,
with its inhabitants consuming about one-third less than
those in Calca. The people know this. In Acomayo they ask
intrepid foreigners, “Don’t you know that the people here
are poorer than the people over there in Calca? Why would
you ever want to come here?” Intrepid because it is much
harder to get to Acomayo from the regional capital of
Cusco, ancient center of the Inca Empire, than it is to get to
Calca. The road to Calca is surfaced, the one to Acomayo
is in a terrible state of disrepair. To get beyond Acomayo,
you need a horse or a mule. In Calca and Acomayo, people
grow the same crops, but in Calca they sell them on the
market for money. In Acomayo they grow food for their own
subsistence. These inequalities, apparent to the eye and to
the people who live there, can be understood in terms of
the institutional differences between these departments—
institutional differences with historical roots going back to
de Toledo and his plan for effective exploitation of
indigenous labor. The major historical difference between
Acomayo and Calca is that Acomayo was in the catchment
area of the Potosí mita . Calca was not.
In addition to the concentration of labor and the mita , de
Toledo consolidated the encomienda into a head tax, a
fixed sum payable by each adult male every year in silver.
This was another scheme designed to force people into the
labor market and reduce wages for Spanish landowners.
Another institution, the repartimiento de mercancias , also
became widespread during de Toledo’s tenure. Derived
from the Spanish verb repartir , to distribute, this
repartimiento , literally “the distribution of goods,” involved
the forced sale of goods to locals at prices determined by
Spaniards. Finally, de Toledo introduced the trajin —
meaning, literally, “the burden”—which used the indigenous
people to carry heavy loads of goods, such as wine or coca
leaves or textiles, as a substitute for pack animals, for the
business ventures of the Spanish elite.
Throughout the Spanish colonial world in the Americas,
similar institutions and social structures emerged. After an
initial phase of looting, and gold and silver lust, the Spanish