As a result of their detribalization, many captives and genízaros acculturated to Spanish (and later Mexican) society and refused opportunities for repatriation later in life. Colonists preferred to obtain Indian children under a certain age to ensure such an outcome. Writing of Apaches in 1789, Commandant General of Interior Provinces Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola observed that many captives who had been taken as youths did not “retain any memory of their Country or [have the] evil intention to return as adults to search for their relatives.” He stressed the importance of acquiring only children under seven years of age, because those would be more likely to develop a sense of dependency and remain with their captors. “Little by little,” Ugarte y Loyola wrote in an explanation of the Spanish assimilation process, these captives would “become instructed in our customs, acquire Christian instruction, and breathe purer air.”46 Over the course of many years, such acculturation tactics proved highly successful, as many abductees attached themselves closely to their new adoptive families.47
The Indian slave trade continued to expand geographically even as Spain’s grasp on the New World loosened during the Age of Revolutions.48 The Enlightenment-era models for these upheavals were the American and French revolutions, the republican ideologies of which not only helped to precipitate the independence of many Latin American countries, but also laid the theoretical groundwork for the eventual emancipation of chattel slaves in the U.S. South—as well as peons and captives in the Southwest—during the mid-1800s.49 Growing Euro-American populations in New Mexico and Alta California during the early nineteenth century increased the demand for servants in both regions.50 In California, hacendados and rancheros subverted mission Indians through a system of debtor servitude in which elites and religious missionaries lent merchandise and then required that it be repaid through labor. Despite California having outlawed the exchange of indigenous servants in 1824, one observer noted as late as 1846 that, with Indians as the primary labor force in the region, “the business of the country could hardly be carried on” without their servitude.51 In contrast to the systems of involuntary labor that prevailed in colonial California, however, slaving mechanisms in New Mexico required greater armed force and coercion to sustain them.
In the late 1700s, the emergence of debt peonage alongside Indian captivity signified the fragmentation of involuntary labor into two systems, both of which revolved around economic dependency. The various semblances that slavery assumed by the early nineteenth century indicate its bifurcation into distinctive forms and demonstrate the strategic maneuvering of authoritarian masters seeking to perpetuate such institutions under misleading guises. Peonage became a transitional phase of dependency—one that lay at the interstices of slavery and wage labor—that characterized Latin America’s agrarian and pastoral areas, most often targeting Indians, mulattos, and mestizos. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Hispanos had adopted credit extension and debtor servitude as a method of securing cheap labor on estates, or latifundios, throughout Mexico as well as New Mexico.52
Indian slavery and debt peonage were in fact quite similar in operation and remained inextricably linked through kinship bonds and interethnic bloodlines. Not only did captivity and peonage form institutions of involuntary human bondage that would later, in American times, be compared to chattel slavery in the South, but they also bore a cause-and-effect relationship upon one another. Many peons could trace their ancestry back over many generations to Indian slaves who cohabited with and bore offspring to Spanish colonists. Brigadier General James H. Carleton, commanding New Mexico’s military department during the Civil War, wrote that “[Indian] servants … bear children from illicit intercourse [and] the offspring of this intercourse are considered as peons.” Carleton was describing the ethnic interconnectedness of captivity and peonage: Indian slaves gave birth to mixed-blood children who often grew up to become a part of New Mexico’s lower class and incurred debts for subsistence, thus becoming peons after reaching adulthood.53
Conniving members of the upper class and clergy devised methods that guaranteed interminable subjectivity on the part of many New Mexicans. Catholic priests charged exorbitant amounts for marriages, baptisms, and funerals, to the extent that most individuals had to secure a third-party loan to pay for such services. Under those circumstances, a person necessarily went into debtor servitude in order to baptize a child, get married, or bury a deceased family member.54 Price-gouging creditors charged four to five times the wholesale cost of goods, a tactic that worked in tandem with continuously compounding interest to ensure that debts grew larger with time. “The initial debt is truly the tie that binds him to servitude from which he finds it impossible to escape for the rest of his life,” Fray Juan Agustín de Morfí wrote in reference to New Mexican peons. “In this way, a man who yesterday lacked a square of cloth to cover himself, today is forced by necessity to enter domestic service much to his shame,” he concluded.55
The fact that Spain never enacted laws either establishing or regulating this type of coercive labor makes it impossible to determine its precise date of origin. A widespread system of debtor servitude involving sedentary Indians and indigent citizens developed in South and Central America during the seventeenth century, largely as a result of Spain’s abolition of the repartimiento system and the subsequent need to devise new methods of labor acquisition.56 The practice did not spread into New Mexico until much later, due primarily to its localized subsistence economy (as opposed to labor-intensive extractive economies in more southerly portions of the empire), and the availability of captive Indian slaves therefore fulfilled the need for workers in the upper Rio Grande Valley. While there is no discernible moment in time when debt peonage appeared in New Mexican villages, there are hints of its existence as early as 1778, and strictures on the relationship between masters and servants in Mexico’s 1824 constitution indicate that it had become fully developed by that period.57
Peonage provided the perfect complement to the preexisting regime of Indian slavery, and it bolstered the labor force in a province experiencing gradual economic and demographic expansion. In a predominantly pastoral and agrarian economy, a plentiful supply of uncompensated tribute-paying workers ensured modest but sustainable profits, and patrones exploited the productive capacity of captive Indians and indebted citizens at every opportunity. Debtor servitude among landless sheepherders emerged as one of the primary forms of peon labor in colonial New Mexico beginning in the late 1700s and endured for nearly a century through partido contracts.58
The establishment of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 and subsequent commercial intensification between New Mexico and Missouri recalibrated the economic dynamics of peonage and captive servitude and widened the gap between rich and poor in the Southwest.59 During the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, these processes coincided with similar economic and demographic expansions in the Deep South, where the rapid emergence of a so-called Cotton Kingdom forever altered the nature and importance of chattel slavery. In both instances, varying levels of capitalist market integration precipitated changes in slaving practices and increasingly reoriented servitude toward economic imperatives, in addition to preconceived kinship obligations and social relationships.60