The encomienda flourished until the end of the sixteenth century. By 1570 (when Rodríguez Freile was about 14 years old) a contemporary Spanish historian, López de Velasco, found in Santafé de Bogotá about 600 male Spaniards who lived off the labor and resources of approximately 40,000 indigenous tribute-payers. In Tunja, a city close to Santafé, there were 200 male Spaniards who had in their service 50,000 indigenous tributaries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, this region (as was the case with most of the eastern highlands) lost its importance as a producer of gold, even though, as Rodríguez Freile himself complains, there was still much of this precious metal buried but little indigenous labor to extract it. The rich farmland of the region was, before and after the conquest, a great breadbasket that benefited adjacent regions. After the conquest, the Spaniards produced a good deal of grains, woven textiles, and some luxury products such as cheese for export. Agricultural crops and cheese were produced on Rodríguez Freile’s farm, as stated in his lawsuit documentation, and procured him generous returns.
The significance of the elaborate casos of civil and moral transgressions of the powerful white elite lies not only in the fact that in them Rodríguez Freile masterfully narrates private, scandalous stories by making use of numerous literary strategies, but more importantly in the fact that these stories demonstrate the violence that plagues the New Kingdom of Granada. However, while this horizontal violence (among powerful white equals) has gained much attention from literary critics as illustrating the origins of Latin American literature, the existence of a more prevailing and enduring vertical violence is ignored: that against the dominated indigenous peoples.
An anonymous 1560 report on a visita (inspection by a crown official) to the New Kingdom of Granada when Rodríguez Freile was about 4 years old illustrates well the daily violence of the Spanish and criollo as well as their predatory reliance on the natives’ labor and resources. According to this report (transcribed by historian Hermes Tovar) there were in Santafé at this time 55 encomienda holders, 57 tribes, and 36,550 indigenous, whose meticulous taxation on behalf of the Spanish seigneurial comfort yielded the following products:
By what can be seen in this tally, the gold quantity amounts to 9,241 pesos of good gold, and the blankets to 9,772; the yield of all the wheat, barley, corn, and bean seeds planted for each encomendero amounts, according to the record, to 1,548 bushels; these crops are planted, taken care of, harvested, and stored in their respective encomendero house by the Indians; besides all this shown in this tally, they hand over many trifles of the land such as salt, deer, fiber thread, chickens, eggs, fish, and coca leaves which they got from their plots, and grass and firewood for the sustenance of their houses [obviously the encomenderos’ residence].
Furthermore, this violence was not limited to public spaces but was present also in the silent enslavement and mistreatment of native women as maids in private residences. There is also judicial violence. Rodríguez Freile celebrates the Spanish authorities’ draconian treatment of indigenous people, which, according to him, “kept the land in peace” (Chapter 15). A case in point is that of the government of his admired tutor, licenciado Alonso Pérez de Salazar (who took him to Spain when he was a young man), and whose application of judicial power over the uprooted, displaced, terrorized, and overworked natives are, for Rodríguez Freile, proof of the able construction of a colonial order. The following description leaves room for the author’s pride and pleasure in the public humiliation and punishment suffered by the indigenous:
Pérez de Salazar would bring a bunch of Indians out on foot, beating them in the middle of the streets, some of them with chickens hanging from their necks, others with ears of corn, others with playing cards, spatulas or balls on the account of their vagrancy, that is, each with the standard of his/her crime. (Chapter 15)
Rodríguez Freile’s distaste for the issue of protecting the native population from abuse, as well as that of our contemporary commentators, who think of seventeenth-century society as peaceful, are good examples of the naturalization of everyday violence in both the New Kingdom of Granada during that time and in today’s opinions about colonial cultural history. Either through systematic military repression (the case of the rebellious Pijao) or gradual and persistent exploitation, the violence exercised over the indigenous population in the society in which El carnero was written was ubiquitous to the point of appearing natural for those subjects not affected by it.
Juan Rodríguez Freile grew up in what historian Germán Colmenares called a “gold economy” which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ transatlantic mercantile capitalism, through a complex web of commercial exchanges, connected the Spanish metropolis with many corners of the American territory. This trade network determined both the nature and quantity of the goods produced in America as well as the excruciatingly exhausting work demanded from the indigenous and African peoples. Large landowners (at first primarily encomenderos), with an economy based on tributes from the indigenous, coexisted with extensive mining operations, which frequently depended on local indigenous technology. The dominance of the encomenderos was derived from the first shares of the conquest loot, including the indigenous lands and labor force. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, and when Rodríguez Freile was a grown man, the encomendero economy was showing signs of exhaustion. The growing non-encomendero Spanish and criollo population competed fiercely for the increasingly scarce indigenous labor force monopolized by the encomenderos, and the progressively more regulatory presence of the Spanish state put great pressure on the encomienda system, which, by the mid-seventeenth century (when Rodríguez Freile was an old man), had become practically obsolete in the area. The demise of this system meant greater economical opportunities for the average Euro-American like Rodríguez Freile.
As a cattle and dairy-farm owner who supplemented his income with the occasional extraction of gold, Rodríguez Freile fit into a gold economy that was beginning to depend less on agricultural goods provided by the native communities and more on those produced by small, nonindigenous farmers. These small farmers depended upon native labor, the hiring of which (with a nominal wage) was now permitted by the crown. Hence, two kinds of economic activities took place in the central region of the New Kingdom of Granada which directly involved Rodríguez Freile: diminishing gold production and increasing agriculture and commerce.
In the written history of the New Kingdom of Granada, the most apparent social force is that of encomenderos, merchants, miners, the state and its bureaucracy, and of course, the church. These kinds of Spanish and criollo characters and their vicissitudes profusely occupy, as we saw, Rodríguez Freile’s attention as well as most of the literary criticism that El carnero has received. The principal position of other social forces is less apparent in this society and its written history. This is the case of the indigenous people whose voice was seldom expressed in El carnero in any ideological formulation that resulted in an appreciation of their culture or political agency. The violent revolts during and after the conquest (such as those of the Pijao and Carare Indians – see Chapter 19) were marginalized in a portrayal of perfidious expressions of savagery; or in the case of the early conflicts with the indigenous under the encomienda system, which tended to be conceptualized inside the dominant scholastic ideology, their representation amounted (according to the Spaniards) to an improper understanding of the natives’ place in their segregated república de indios (Indian republic). A clear example is that of the cacique of Turmequé, don Diego de Torres (and his struggle against the mistreatment of his people), whom Rodríguez Freile represented as a marginal chief unduly and ineptly involved in Spanish politics (Chapters 13–14).
Rodríguez Freile’s Opportunity as A Farmer
When the indigenous communities were first subjected to the encomienda system in the region (ca. 1538) and provided the agricultural