Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570-1720. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Jose Cuello

The Conference on Latin American History awarded Wightman the Eugene E. Bolton Prize for the best book of 1990. It has been praised as an important study of Indian migration and its relationship to changes in other aspects of colonial society: demography, royal Indian policy, economic structures, labor systems, concepts of property, and native social organization and identity. Critical comment has been mild and oblique: the voluminous appendices could be better integrated into the text which is already densely packed with information and interpretation.(1) The work will, in fact, survive as a notable contribution to the literature because it breaks new ground and ventures into many areas of colonial Peruvian society that are still poorly understood. However, it will also draw much attention because conceptual and analytical flaws make the book a potential seedbed for revisionism.

This is both a study of migration and of a specific group of "migrants," and the two often get confused. Wightman's analytical equation of forasteros with migrants, "foreigners," and "foreign-born" is questionable. Within the period treated by Wightman, forastero was a term that emerged to label two types of persons: (1) Indians who left their own communities to permanently assimilate themselves into other communities, and (2) descendants of the transplants who did not marry originarios, i.e., original members of the host communities. By the mid-seventeenth century most forasteros were descendants. Wightman's equation is further muddled by the following points: (1) the Toledo resettlement program may have dislocated 1.5 million Indians; (2) among them were the originarios, Indians who were themselves relocated by the official program; (3) most forasteros moved only short distances to neighboring communities and provinces; (4) forasteros constituted a stable residential population; (5) originarios worked outside of their communities for wages, but Wightman sees this as an alternative to migration rather than another form of migration; (6) Wightman excludes from her analysis landless, transient, migrants; and (7) while she does treat yanaconas, individuals who left their communities to attach themselves to Spanish employers, she does so only insofar as it is necessary to distinguish them from forasteros.

In casting a light on a previously neglected areas of colonial society, Wightman peeks into so many places that major parts of her interpretation are left to be proven more conclusively by further studies. Her assertion that forasteros were excluded from the religious practices of their new communities into which they were otherwise functionally integrated needs to be tested or better explained as does her conclusion that forasteros were cut off from the resources of their home communities although they remitted income to those communities where they still claimed property. She does not prove convincingly that forasteros contributed more than any other group to the emergence of a colonial order or to the "transformation from caste to class". She concludes Indian loss of land led to migration, but the evidence may indicate the opposite. Her evidence to support the interpretation that urban artisans were shifting identity from kin-groups to occupational groups is weak and contradictory. One suspects that these issues might be better understood if the forasteros' relationships with their home communities were more fully examined.

The book is a dense read not only because so much is packed into so few pages but also because it is shot full of conclusions and generalizations that are contradictory or weakly-supported. The examples above constitute only a small sampling of the many questions raised by the book. Readers will be further frustrated by organizational obstacles. The forasteros as a group, Indian demographic patterns, and the major causes of migration are not extensively treated until the third chapter after one has already struggled with a discussion of royal Indian policy. Careful readers will have to resynthesize much of the contents for themselves and weed out the analytical chaff from the wheat. Perhaps, this is why one reviewer mistakenly believes that Wightman considers the forasteros to have quickly lost their character as outsiders and another turns on its head her conclusion that they ultimately undermined native culture.(2)

Wayne State University Jose Cuello

ENDNOTES

1. AHR, Feb. 1992: 321; HAHR, Nov. 1991: 890; The Americas, Jan. 1991:371-72

2. AHR, Feb. 1992: 321; HAHR, Nov. 1991: 890