The most common view of the relationship of Spain to Spanish America in the sixteenth century has been nearly unilateral, reflecting a model of change and impact in which the major currents of influence flowed in one direction--westward. Castile exported its institutions of government and church, forms of economic organization, and people to the New World. The new society of Spanish America developed within the institutional and socioeconomic framework imposed by Spaniards, and it preserved the language, religion, and many of the social patterns of the Spanish settlers. Although it is clear that Spain to a great extent did provide the basic outline and direction for the development of postconquest [276] society in the Indies, we also have abundant evidence of the resilience and creative adaptation of indigenous cultures in face of the European conquest and colonization of the New World. Scholars are discovering more and more about how those cultures affected and persisted within Spanish American society. (1) The American context and cultures influenced and at times transformed Spanish expectations and forms of activity and organization. The new Spanish American societies were the product of the encounter, confrontation, and accommodation that took place between the people and cultures of Old World and New in the western hemisphere.
Spain and America also met in Europe, but the process and results of that encounter have not been examined in the same terms or with a specificity comparable to that which scholars have brought to bear on the question of contact between the two societies in the New World. Inquiry into the significance of America for sixteenth-century Spain and Europe has been confined largely to the realm of intellectual perception and response and the topics of economic and demographic impact. (2) But the ramifications and repercussions of the Indies enterprise for Spanish society were more complex and subtle than consideration of scholarly debates or inflationary trends in prices alone would suggest. The assumption that socioeconomic transformation was limited to the American side of the Atlantic reflects a static, generalized view of Spanish society that fails to account for the dynamic changes that already were underway from the late Middle Ages and that would accelerate and become more complicated with the opening of the New World. From the sixteenth century on the Atlantic did not separate Old World and New but rather bound them together; the currents of influence and impact flowed in both directions. If the forces for change did not affect the towns and villages of Castile as suddenly and drastically as those of, say, central Mexico, nonetheless they could touch the lives of people in Spain closely and sometimes dramatically. Perhaps even more important, to people in places like Cáceres and Trujillo the Indies quickly came to represent not an exotic and distant destination that attracted only the most adventurous but a sphere in which they, their relatives, and acquaintances were directly and indirectly involved. Consider the following statement made in testimony in Trujillo in 1549:
The first four chapters of this book offered a detailed account and analysis of the structure, composition, and functioning of local society in Cáceres and Trujillo and the surrounding smaller towns and villages by examining the variety of social and occupational groups and corporate and family units that constituted that society. Describing and analyzing local society and the people who participated in it made it possible to view the careers of emigrants and returnees in the context that played a crucial role in shaping their decisions and future activities. Furthermore, considering the lives of emigrants from the point of view of how they functioned within their home society allowed us to see the extent to which their activities and motivations reflected and conformed to those of many of their kinspeople and neighbors.
Emigrants and returnees were, of course, exceptional in some ways. They undertook ambitious and drastic changes in their lives that went well beyond the more limited moves in search of opportunities made by others who stayed much closer to home, and they often took considerable risks to do so. One cannot discard altogether the notion that an emigrant group tends to draw on the more dynamic and determined elements in a society. Yet we have seen that major, risky moves and career choices, comparable to departure for the Indies, were not unprecedented in this society. Military service probably offers the closest parallel to emigration, since it could entail extended absences from home and an array of dangers (and possible rewards); but even entry into a religious order, for men at any rate, could mean definitive separation from home and family. Certainly emigrants must have been tough and determined people for the most part. But no individual's life or decisions can stand for the experience of an entire group; and a person who decided to go to the Indies no more typified society or some facet of it than did someone who stayed at home. Still, neither [278] the aspirations nor the achievements of emigrants were so distinctive that they separated them clearly from their compatriots in most regards, the only consistently distinguishing factor that characterized them was their choice to go to the New World.
Local society merited a great deal of detailed attention in the book because it was the primary milieu in which the majority of people functioned and the main focus for their loyalty and interest. The word "pueblo" embodies most accurately the significance of the relationship of people to place because it stands for both. Citizens of Trujillo referred to their city as a "pueblo," as did residents of much smaller towns; "pueblo" did not connote the size of a place but rather its perceived unity and integrity. (4) As has been observed in modern times as well, in the sixteenth century the city, town, or village--the pueblo--was the principal arena in which family, social, and economic relations developed and functioned, and therefore it was the main context for achieving and preserving reputation and position. If the nobility based their idea of status and privilege on tradition and lineage, these notions were also closely associated with historical ties to a particular place. As the latter chapters of the book have shown, emigrants carried with them and were strongly affected and even in some ways sustained by their ties to their home towns. Their nostalgia was not for Spain but for their real "patria," which was their tierra and home town. Emigrants who could return usually went back to their home towns. If they endowed a chapel or established a charitable work (regardless of whether they stayed in the Indies), that too would be in their home town. Reputation and status had meaning only where one knew people and was known, in the place where one's family had its roots and would continue to live.
Discussion of the many social and occupational groups also has shown the considerable degree of cultural and social homogeneity that characterized the various ranks and groupings of society. Family structure and strategies were similar at all levels of society. The distinctive practices that were evolving among the nobility, such as the creation of entails and unequal division among heirs, should be seen more as variants of the general pattern than as deviations; these practices could in fact be found among commoners as well, if to a much more limited degree. The nobles were set apart from the rest of society by their privileges and perceived status, but virtually [279] no aspect of their lifestyle--including their wealth--was unique to them, as the arrival of wealthy returnees from Peru so dramatically underscored. Furthermore nobles were closely tied to commoners through business and legal affairs and patron--client, employer-- employee, and even kinship relations (consider the illegitimate children who were the products of liaisons between noble men and common women), as well as the face-to-face, ongoing contacts that people who lived in small cities and towns maintained.
The cultural and behavioral homogeneity of Spaniards so notable in the New World setting had its roots in local society in Spain. Spanish emigrants were accustomed to orienting themselves to small units -- the parish, village, or town -- and at home they were organized into and participated in a range of associations that encouraged vertical integration as well as corporate solidarity. Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of postconquest Spanish American society was how smoothly and efficiently it seemed to function from a very early time. While there were a number of elements in the New World context that contributed to the rapid settling and consolidation of Spanish American society (especially in the two great foci of Spanish activity, Peru and Mexico), the strength and efficacy of Spanish modes of organization imported to the Indies also played an important part. Emigrants were used to functioning in an organizational framework based on family and kinship, common point of origin, patron-client relations, and deference to social superiors. They could transfer these organizing principles to the New World and thus continue to operate much as they always had, even though the setting was quite different from that of home.
Once there were enough people available in Mexico or Peru or elsewhere to do so, emigrants could recreate in some part their customary socioeconomic relations. In the earliest years of conquest and settlement the Spanish presence was still skeletal and experimental, increased emigration after the conquests of the mainland areas in the 1520s and 1530s meant there would be greater concentrations of people from one place together in the New World. This clustering of people fostered the formation of networks of association and cycles of emigration and encouraged a perceptible rise in the emigration of women and families. The emigration movement from the Trujillo-Cáceres region provides a somewhat unusual but nonetheless apt illustration of this process, because of the strong impetus [280] provided by the activities and success of Francisco Pizarro in Peru. Pizarro's extremeño contingent, if rather short on business and legal skills and expertise, nevertheless formed the nucleus for a viable and visible network based on kinship and common origin. The network tied people from Trujillo and Cáceres in Peru to one another and to people back home and allowed them to exploit opportunities in Peru systematically and successfully.
The connections between the cities of northeastern Extremadura and the Indies also would suggest that places the size of Cáceres and Trujillo were almost ideal for taking advantage of opportunities in the Indies in the collective sense. The cities were small and coherent, characterized by direct, personal relations and long-term, stable associations within and between a number of groups. The early participation of cacereños and trujillanos in the conquest and settlement of Mexico and Peru set the stage for the rapid development of mechanisms that would help to assure future emigrants a basis for getting their start in society. Certainly emigration from the Cáceres-Trujillo region was not a mass phenomenon organized deliberately or publicly; nonetheless there is abundant evidence that it was in many senses a collective undertaking that hinged on the existence of networks of kinship and association and ongoing contacts that linked people in the Indies, Seville, and Extremadura. The close relations that existed between people who lived in the relatively small cities and towns of that part of Extremadura enabled them to develop and maintain networks that facilitated the move to the New World and exploitation of its possibilities.
The Indies meant above all an expansion of the resources and career alternatives available to people in Spain. Given emigrants' orientation toward and continuing attachments to home, this expansion of opportunities would have direct consequences not only for the individuals who took advantage of them but for their home towns as well. At home the participation of people in the Indies enterprise meant unanticipated increments of wealth that financed the construction of houses and chapels, the purchase of lands and rents, and the rise of families outside the traditional nobility to new positions of power and influence. The New World offered potential emigrants the chance to break away from the social restrictions and economic limitations that governed their lives in Spain. Although personal and political connections and social status certainly continued [281] to be of great importance in the Indies, it is clear that the New World could reward talent and ambition far more frequently than the Old one. Artisans became encomenderos, and wealthy commoners married nobles. Francisco Pizarro, the illegitimate son of a middling hidalgo, became a marqués and the first governor of Peru; and his career set in motion events that would take the remnants of his family to the pinnacle of wealth and power in his home town of Trujillo and provide the basis for many of his fellow townspeople to establish themselves successfully in Peru.
The Indies allowed emigrants to discard old conventions and find new ways of making a livelihood and a place in society. The career of Juan de Hinojosa, a younger son from a prominent noble family of Cáceres who, because of the family entail, could only anticipate a limited inheritance, illustrates how this could happen. Hinojosa followed his older brother Gómez de Solís, a successful captain and encomendero, to Peru. There he became an encomendero and wealthy entrepreneur and married a woman named Leonor Méndez. Leonor was a commoner, the widow of a man from Salamanca, possibly an artisan, who had been present at Cajamarca. (5) Leonor Méndez was not Hinojosa's social equal, and such a marriage would have been utterly impossible in the more constrained and status-conscious society of Cáceres. Had Hinojosa remained in Spain, most likely he never would have married at all or attained any degree of economic independence. In Peru his marriage made a great deal of sense and probably provided the initial basis for his economic success there.
The careers of individuals like Francisco Pizarro, Juan de Hinojosa, and many others reflect a notable ability to adapt readily and willingly to the new circumstances and possibilities of the Indies. Yet we should not imagine that the opportunities created by the settlement and exploitation of the Indies introduced flexibility and pragmatism into Spanish society. Fluidity and adaptability already existed, but they were hampered by the reality of limited economic resources in many places and a restrictive and tenacious social system based on privilege and wealth. We have seen that upward socioeconomic mobility was by no means impossible even in small cities like Cáceres and Trujillo; but the pastoral-agrarian economic base of the region could provide only so much wealth, and the local nobility had a strong hold over what resources there were. The relatively [282] open and varied circumstances of the New World created an ambience in which the flexibility and pragmatism of Spanish socioeconomic patterns and relations could flourish, at least for a time.
We must, of course, qualify what opportunity in the New World meant. Apart from the first conquerors and earliest arrivals, few individuals who went to the Indies were able to ascend the social scale to any significant degree; Juan de Hinojosa's wife, Leonor Méndez, did not become a "doña" because she married a cacereño noble, and Francisco Pizarro's essentially plebeian background was so at odds with his power and ennobled status that finding a suitable marriage partner was impossible. But the majority of emigrants neither sought nor anticipated social elevation, they wanted to improve their economic circumstances, which at home were often tenuous at best. The Indies not only offered the prospect of a better way of life but the added attraction of living in a milieu where wealth and economic success need not necessarily be accompanied by privileged social status.
The example of Alvaro Rodríguez Chacón, who returned to Trujillo in the mid-1570s to take his children back to Mexico, shows how the move to the New World could work to modify certain values. By his own statement Alvaro had become a well-established merchant in Mexico, where he was financially successful and prosperous. He was from a family of probably marginal hidalgos. Witnesses testified to the family's hidalgo status; but most of these witnesses were tailors, and the wife of one was the cousin of Alvaro Rodríguez's daughter. Significantly, Alvaro himself said nothing about his social rank; what counted was the financial wherewithal that enabled him to take his children away from Trujillo to a place where their improved economic situation would outweigh considerations of social status.
Naturally the reverse process occurred as well, since the altered social landscape of the New World did not benefit everyone. The kinds of opportunities available after the early years were not always very attractive for hidalgos who went to the Indies assuming that their social status would guarantee them a comfortable place that not only preserved or enhanced their social rank but compensated them amply as well. For individuals with those kinds of expectations, the opportunities of the New World must have seemed limited and disappointing. But the majority of emigrants were not [283] hidalgos but rather working men and women. In the Indies many of them found circumstances in which their hard work paid off and enabled them to provide for their families, send home for relatives, or even return to Spain with sufficient gains to reestablish themselves there. For these people the promise of the Indies was not at all a false one.
Along with the more dramatic and visible effects on local society of involvement in the Indies came subtler changes in the lives of individuals. The existence of the Indies and their links to that distant place altered people's perceptions of the world and their relationship to it. We have seen that by midcentury residents of Trujillo were acutely aware of their many fellow townspeople who were living in or had returned from Peru. Individuals who never left Spain developed a kind of expertise on the Indies. A shoemaker named Juan López, the brother-in-law of Diego de Trujillo, the veteran of Cajamarca and encomendero of Cuzco, constantly served as a witness for the testimonies of people petitioning to go to America; although his experience of the Indies was strictly secondhand, López probably was considered to be one of the local experts. We have seen that people in Spain could almost come to blows over opinions about events far away in Peru. And involvement in the New World created new legal and logistical complexities. Disputes over legacies, for example, were hardly uncommon in any case; but if a relative died in Peru or Mexico, settling the estate could become very complicated. It could mean that someone who otherwise might never have contemplated a trip across the Atlantic would decide to go. Similarly the continuing involvement of emigrants in the New World with people and affairs at home could bring them back to Spain to visit or stay. Cáceres and Trujillo were connected to the Indies through kinship and acquaintance. These networks and relationships, which were basic to socioeconomic organization at home, retained their strength and significance even when the geographical context expanded so notably.
Detailed examination of emigration from and return migration to the cities of Alta Extremadura suggests some conclusions regarding the relationship of sixteenth-century Spanish emigration to the larger movement of people from Europe to the western hemisphere in modern times. Although a comparison of the various early modern European migration movements is too large and complicated a topic [284] to treat here, it should be stated that the patterns and forms of emigration identified for sixteenth-century Castile did not differ significantly from those that have been observed for other colonizing societies of Europe. As was true for English or French emigration in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the movement of people between Extremadura and America encompassed the migration of families and of young single people (who often went as servants), return migration, re-emigration, moving back and forth, and even something resembling labor migration. Again, like the other early modern European emigration movements that got their start a century or so later, Castilian emigration involved varying forms of recruitment and state and legal mechanisms that at times acted to restrict, at other times to encourage, migration. None of the movements was monolithic but rather each incorporated a number of patterns and variants; emigration from all the colonizing countries was affected by complex sets of circumstances and actors in both the home societies and the intended destinations.
This study of Cáceres and Trujillo makes it possible to consider
Spanish emigration in much the same light as the heretofore much better
studied movement from Britain. (6) Furthermore
the detailed consideration of local society in Extremadura reveals that,
despite its rather distinctive history, Castile was neither unique nor
peculiar; in its socioeconomic structures and organization Castile much
resembled other societies of early modern Europe. Castile in certain respects
might have been better prepared than other states for the task of expansion
to the New World because of its traditions of conquest and incorporation
of peoples and territories and the institutions it had developed partly
in response to the exigencies of that process. But such initial differences
and advantages as Castile possessed diminished in importance over time
as other countries also successfully worked out their own colonizing systems.
In the end the whole European colonizing effort in the Americas appears
to have been a coherent phenomenon more characterized by similarities and
continuities than sharp contrasts, and patterns of emigration prove to
be no exception. Modern European migration to the western hemisphere arguably
began in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the movement from
the Iberian peninsula and essentially developed over the centuries along
the lines set out by emigrants from towns like Cáceres and Trujillo.
2. See Elliott, The Old World and the New, Chiappelli, ed., First Images, Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westwood, Conn., 1972).
3. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8. The statement was made by Alvaro de Hinojosa, husband of doña Graciana, youngest daughter of Captain Gonzalo Pizarro.
4. See the discussion of the term in Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1971), 7, 30-31. He compares the word "pueblo" to the term "polis." For use of "pueblo" in reference to Trujillo, see testimony by Juan Vicioso and Juan de la Jara in AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8.
5. Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 318-320.
6. See, for example, Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986); Mildred Campbell, "English Emigration on the Eve of the American Revolution," American Historical Review 61 (1955). 1-20; David Cressy, Corning Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); James Horn, "Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century," in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, ed. Thad W. Tate and David Ammerman (Chapel Hill, 1979), 51-95. These are only some of the studies of English emigration; work has also been done on Scottish and Irish emigration.