The volume of the return movement and the often notable impact of returnees and their activities on local society suggest that return migration was more than a simple by-product of the movement [248] to the Indies; rather it was, in many senses, crucial and central to the whole phenomenon. Returnees linked the home society in a concrete and visible way with the Indies. The activities of returnees and visitors, their maintenance of connections with one another and with individuals and events in America, and their direct and indirect promotion of emigration of family members and fellow townspeople gave them an importance in the movement to the New World out of proportion to their relatively small numbers. Return migration from the Indies has been estimated to have been on the order of10 percent, with possibly another 10 percent of emigrants returning temporarily -- to visit, bring back family or other relatives, negotiate business, or some combination of these things. ⁽¹⁾ The figures available for Cáceres and Trujillo fall well below this estimate, with the total known volume of temporary and permanent migration closer to10 than 20 percent. But the only available general estimates of return migration are based on scanty and fragmentary evidence, so it is impossible to know if the Cáceres and Trujillo figures are particularly low. It is clear, however, that in both cities -- most notably in Trujillo -- returnees were much in evidence, associated with one another, and stimulated subsequent emigration.

Given the relative smallness of the known returnee group and the disparate experiences of emigrants, no single returnee really typified the group as a whole, although certain individuals might have epitomized the image of the wealthy and successful perulero. ⁽²⁾ The decision to return to Spain, like the decision to leave, hinged on a number of factors both situational and individual. Family background and social and economic status, position within the family, timing of arrival in the Indies and connections and opportunities found there, and, of course, individual capabilities and even personalities all figured. It is often assumed that the most successful individuals -- such as the men who participated in the division of treasure of Cajamarca -- returned home, but they simply might have been the most visible members of the returnee group. The most successful returnees made good marriages with women from noble families, bought, built, or renovated urban residences, invested in rents, properties, charities, and chaplaincies, and acquired seats on the city council. All these activities brought them into the public limelight and left ample record in the documents. Failures, or people [249] whose success was more modest, do not emerge so clearly, since their activities often left little trace. People who returned to visit, or who (like Diego de Trujillo and Martín Alonso) returned with the apparent intention of establishing themselves permanently at home but then left again, represented yet other variants in the possible response to the options offered by New World or Old.

Despite the variation in the experience and decisions of returnees, however, return migration was significant not only because of its perceptible impact on the home society and on subsequent emigration, but also because in a sense it represented a phenomenon new to local society. Returning from the New World in some respects differed from other kinds of physical mobility that had taken people away from local society. People who moved relatively short distances -- within the region, or to Seville -- frequently returned, but individuals who left home for destinations farther afield -- the royal court, Rome, Vienna -- generally did not return permanently, even though they might retain their ties with home. The people whose careers most closely paralleled those of the returnees from the Indies were military officers who served in Granada, Italy, or Flanders and then came back to their native city. Yet here again there was a difference, since military officers often left home with a commission and a specific charge, and emigrants usually departed with fairly vague notions as to what they would do in the Indies and whether or not they would be able to return home. Those who returned, and especially those who returned wealthy, did so largely as a result of personal initiative and enterprise and their ability to manipulate circumstances in the New World, not because they had received a commission or a bureaucratic appointment with a guaranteed salary and the perquisites of office.

Thus the returnee group, small as it was, represented the possibility that an individual could go off to a relatively unknown situation, with few guarantees of success and no previously established time limitation, and still come home to achieve acceptance and high social standing. If by the second and third generations of emigrants to the New World there surely were many individuals who left with no serious intentions of returning -- or at least not permanently --  nonetheless others must have hoped for or anticipated a finite sojourn away from home. For those emigrants, the successful returnees must have exemplified fulfillment of their dreams.
 

Despite the smallness of the returnee group, certain patterns emerge, although on the whole the conclusions they point to are fairly tentative. The little work that has been done on early return migration has suggested that individuals of better social standing would be more likely to return to Spain permanently, since they could expect a good reception there; ⁽³⁾ so it is worth considering the social composition of the returnee group. Nearly two-thirds of the permanent returnees to Cáceres were hidalgos, but perhaps no more than a third of the trujillanos who went home were hidalgos, and those not necessarily of very high standing. Like the discrepancy in the overall social composition of the emigrant groups from the two cities, these rather distinctive patterns require some explanation. Most important, the Cáceres emigrant group included a higher proportion of hidalgos than did the Trujillo group, so logically they would figure proportionately more frequently among the returnees as well.

Once again the size of the movements in both directions might have had some rather complex ramifications. It was suggested in chapter 5 that the larger size of the Trujillo emigrant group probably accounted for its more varied occupational and demographic composition. Given the crucial importance in the Indies of networks and associations tied to point of origin in Spain, presumably the possibilities for people from Trujillo who contemplated emigration -- especially to Peru -- were much better than for cacereños; the trujillanos' potential for finding patrons and opportunities was greater. As a result, possibly more people from Trujillo decided (or were able) to emigrate for a particular purpose (such as work for a relative or someone else from their home town) and for a finite period, with fairly modest objectives in mind. The nobles and hidalgos of Cáceres, who formed a large part of the emigrant group from that city, probably felt that they could return only if their gains in wealth were such that they could set themselves up in impressive style. Two of the early returnees to Cáceres -- Francisco de Godoy and Sancho de Figueroa -- did precisely that (although Godoy was away sixteen years and Figueroa twenty-three). But as time went on, this became more difficult; Cosme and Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes were in Peru for eighteen and twenty-three years respectively, returning [251] only when it seemed likely that each in turn would inherit the family entail that originally had passed to their older brother, who died without heirs. ⁽⁴⁾ Antonio de Ulloa, another cacereño noble, also decided to leave Peru only when news came of the death of his older brother, heir to the family estate; but he died before reaching Spain. ⁽⁵⁾ In contrast, in Trujillo many commoners or even relatively humble hidalgos evidently did not feel that they had to return with great riches. Taking advantage of the differential value of silver in Spain compared to the Indies, a number of men returned to Trujillo fairly young probably with limited gains, sufficient to purchase some property or invest in censos and establish themselves comfortably but modestly.

The questions of how much wealth one needed to return and how long it took to accumulate it relate to two other aspects of return migration -- the length of time people stayed away, and their age when they came back. If we accept that higher-ranking hidalgos and nobles needed substantial wealth before they would consider returning home permanently, and bear in mind that people who missed out on the first spectacular division of treasure in Peru usually had to work a number of years to amass such wealth, then it is not surprising that many cacereños stayed away a long time. Of the sixteen returnees to Cáceres for whom the period of absence can be established with reasonable certainty, nine stayed away at least sixteen years and another three were absent eleven years or more; 75 percent, then, lived in the New World for more than ten years. In contrast the periods of absence that can be ascertained for forty-five returnees to Trujillo show a more even distribution. Half of them (twenty-three) stayed away ten years or less (this category includes six early-returning veterans of Cajamarca), another twelve were absent for eleven to fifteen years, and ten for sixteen or more. This more varied pattern of length of sojourn in the Indies for returning trujillanos is in line with the possibility that more of these returnees had gone to the New World with finite objectives and expectations.

Ages at return further substantiate this idea. Almost a third (nineteen) of the sixty-two permanent returnees were thirty-five years of age or younger when they went back to Trujillo. Many of them, then, were in early middle age or younger, still young enough to marry and establish households, presumably with improved means [252] to do so as a result of their years in the New World. A number of men who returned to Spain with Gasca at the end of Gonzalo Pizarro's rebellion fell within this age group despite having spent some fifteen years in the Indies. Pedro Jara was twenty-eight, Alonso Bibanco thirty, and Diego Jiménez thirty-five. Alonso García de Cervantes, who also returned with Gasca, was thirty and had been away about ten years; Martín Casco, who returned a couple of years later, in 1551, at the age of thirty-five, had spent fifteen years in the Indies, working at least part of that time as an agent for an encomendero of Arequipa. ⁽⁶⁾ There are a number of other similar cases among the Trujillo group, such as the locksmith Santos García. García emigrated to Peru in 1555 with his half-brother and returned to Trujillo before 1574, probably in his midthirties. ⁽⁷⁾ These men's careers suggest a pattern that resembles the long-term but temporary labor migration of modern times, in which single young men work for some years outside their own country, ultimately returning to marry and settle at home. Certainly this was not the predominant pattern of movement among extremeño migrants, but apparently it existed in this period. The data for age at return among the Cáceres group are very sparse, making it impossible to judge whether such a process affected young men there as well.

While certain overall patterns can be identified, the actual length of sojourn in the New World of any individual doubtless depended on and reflected a combination of personal circumstances and aspirations and external events rather than the less tangible question of social acceptability. Obviously some people returned having fulfilled short-term objectives. Juan de Ribera, an hidalgo who left for Tierra Firme and Peru as a merchant in 1562 at the age of thirty-two, returned three years later. Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, the noble who also declared himself a merchant and probably accompanied Ribera, came back even sooner, fleeing authorities who sought him on murder charges in Peru. ⁽⁸⁾ The two sons of Diego de Vargas Carvajal who accompanied him to Peru in 1560 returned to Trujillo in 1563, right after their father's death and the expulsion of the remaining Comisarios de Perpetuidad, although one of them -- don Diego -- might have gone to Peru again in the late 1560s. ⁽⁹⁾

As part of the terms on which they received licenses to go to the Indies, some prospective emigrants posted bonds as assurance that they would stay there only a specified period of time. García Ramiro, [253] a twenty-five-year-old bachelor from Trujillo, in 1555 posted a bond of 100,000 maravedís in Seville as a guarantee that he would return in three years from Lima, where his brother Juan Ramiro, an encomendero, had died without heirs. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Juan Sánchez, a vecino of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in 1583 petitioned for a license to go to Popayán under bond for four years to collect his wife's legacy from her uncle, Juan Rubio; he proposed to take his son with him. ⁽¹¹⁾ Whether these men returned, or returned when they proposed, is not known; but the posting of bonds at least implies the intention of making the stay finite.

In contrast other returnees stayed away many years. Captain Martín de Meneses was in Peru over forty years (he went to Santa Marta in 1536 and returned to Spain in 1578) and very likely did not plan to return permanently to Spain. An encomendero of Cuzco, he obtained permission to leave and retain the income of his encomienda in his absence. In 1583 he was at court, seeking to extend his stay in Spain. Apparently he went there to protest the viceroy's reduction of his encomienda and to request a habit in one of the military orders for one of his sons. After arriving Meneses's wife died, two of his sons became seriously ill, and Meneses himself was frail and under stress. He died in Spain before the question of extending his stay was resolved. ⁽¹²⁾

Others did return permanently notwithstanding long absences. Francisco de Avila, one of three hidalgo brothers from Cáceres who went to the Indies, was away over thirty years; his activities in the 1570s after his return clearly demonstrated that he meant to reestablish himself in Cáceres. His brother Sancho de Figueroa also had returned to Cáceres, in 1548 after an absence of over twenty years; but Figueroa died shortly after his return and marriage. Juan Cano, the cacereño who married doña Isabel Moctezuma in Mexico and became the encomendero of Tacuba, was absent some forty years before returning to Spain in the early 1560s. Cano, however, did not settle down in Cáceres but rather in Seville. His third son, don Juan Cano Moctezuma (born in Mexico), did go to Cáceres, where he married in 1559 and built the "Palacio de Moctezuma" near the plaza of Santa María. ⁽¹³⁾

Most known returnees settled down in their home towns, but a few, like Juan Cano, chose Seville or the court. Some returnees might have preferred the more open and cosmopolitan atmosphere [254] of Seville compared to their small home cities or felt that the incongruity between their newly gained wealth and relatively modest social status barred easy acceptance at home. But probably most returnees who opted for Seville were entrepreneurs and merchants. Francisco Sánchez de Melo, a native of Trujillo, already had become a vecino of Seville by the time he traveled to Peru in the 1550s. Two young relatives of his, the brothers Pedro and Baltasar de Melo, went to Peru as his factors in the late 1550s. Pedro de Melo returned in 1575 and also became a vecino of Seville. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Antonio de Cotrina, a marginal hidalgo of Cáceres, traveled to the Indies at least twice before settling in Seville. There in the 1570s he undoubtedly was an entrepreneur of sorts and frequently acted as a middleman on behalf of fellow cacereños in their dealings with the Casa de Contratación.

Returnees, like emigrants, often made the journey home with their families, relatives, and acquaintances. Martín de Meneses returned in 1578 with his wife, three sons, a daughter, and niece, as well as three women of uncertain relationship, and a criada. Also in his party were Rodrigo Alonso, an ironsmith from Trujillo, and his wife Isabel Alvarez. He had gone to Peru in 1569 with his wife and one son. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Juan de Castro traveled in the 1573 fleet from Tierra Firme with his wife, two daughters, and a son, plus a mestiza and a black woman. ⁽¹⁶⁾

At least seven or eight men from Trujillo accompanied Gasca to Spain in 1549. Apart from the men who had been at Cajamarca, this was the single largest group of returnees who were not related to one another; but doubtless these men's decision to return was based on very different considerations from those of the Cajamarca veterans. Most of the Gasca group, as mentioned, were fairly young, but all had been in the Indies ten years or more. Why did they leave? Though none of these men were prosecuted for participation in the Gonzalo Pizarro rebellion, the end of the rebellion and the reimposilion of royal authority might have left them stranded in a sense. Unlike the great captains (most of whom were cacereños, in any case) who ensured their future in Peru by switching to Gasca's side at the right moment, these trujillanos who left Peru in 1549 had received no rewards, even though probably none was a willing participant in the rebellion. The rebellion and its denouement probably disrupted -- at least temporarily -- networks of association and patronage [255] and discredited the trujillanos, so these men opted to return home. Significantly almost none of them achieved substantial wealth or position, with the possible exception of Diego Jiménez, whose daughter married into a noble family of good standing. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The resounding success of a number of returnees in itself suffices to explain their motivation for going home. Once back in Spain their activities suggest that these men had well-defined objectives and clear ideas for how they would go about reestablishing themselves in their home towns. Some returnees started to lay their plans well in advance of their return. In 1578, while still in Peru, Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes had his brother Cosme buy a house for him in the parish of San Mateo for 900 ducados; after returning in 1583 Cristóbal spent another 2400 ducados to renovate the house. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Juan Cano had been investing in rents and property in Cáceres in absentia for years through his brother, Pedro Cano. His son don Juan Cano Moctezuma (mentioned earlier), who settled in Cáceres, probably inherited most of these holdings. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Perhaps the best way to see how successful returnees functioned is to examine in detail the activities of one person.
 

Possibly better than any other individual, Francisco de Godoy personified the ideal of the successful emigrant and returnee. Member of a fairly high-ranking hidalgo family of Cáceres related to the Aldanas, Godoy was heir to the bulk (the tercio y quinto) of his father's estate but chose nonetheless to go to the Indies. Born in 1515, he went to Nicaragua in the 1520s and from there to Peru in 1533. In Peru he became a captain and participated in the conquest and civil wars, associating closely with his equally illustrious first cousins, Lorenzo de Aldana and Perálvarez Holguín. He was often in the company of other cacereños in Peru as well. The inventory of his estate and other papers prepared after his death in Cáceres in the 1560s showed the transfer in 1537 of a house that had belonged to Antonio de Ulloa to Godoy and his cousin Alvaro de Aldana. The same inventory included a loan of 220 pesos that Godoy made to [256] fellow cacereño Sancho de Perero (also a returnee) in Lima in 1541. ⁽²⁰⁾

Although he was not at Cajamarca, Godoy's activities and connections brought him a number of military and official positions in Peru. He received an encomienda in Lima, where he amassed considerable wealth. When he decided to leave Peru, he actually managed to sell off his encomienda in 1542 for some 9000 pesos, although such a practice was strictly illegal. ⁽²¹⁾ Also in preparation for departure he registered some pieces of silver to be sent from Panama in 1540 and executed a will in Lima in February 1542. In this will he established a capellanía under the patronage of his nephew Lorenzo de Godoy. In August 1541 he had made a donation to the monastery of Santo Domingo in Lima. ⁽²²⁾

Back in Cáceres by the mid-1540s, Francisco de Godoy initiated a remarkable period of activity in which he invested in land, rents, and chapels and, during the remaining twenty years of his life, attained all the trappings of an important noble. He married a woman from a leading noble family, doña Leonor de Ulloa, the daughter of the regidor Lorenzo de Ulloa Porcallo and doña Juana de Ovando, daughter of Francisco de Ovando, el rico. He founded an entail for his son Rodrigo de Godoy; built a splendid house in the parish of Santiago, outside the walls of the old city; spent several thousand ducados on lands and rents; and acquired a seat on the city council in 1555. ⁽²³⁾ He also maintained contact with people and events in Peru. Along with accounts and unspecified letters having to do with the Indies, the 1564 inventory of his estate included a bundle of letters from a Pablo Pérez regarding "cosas de Indias" and a large number of other letters and documents (including wills, accounts, and probanzas) pertaining to people he had known in Peru.

Among these documents were letters and accounts of Juan Morgovejo de Quiñones, member of an important noble family of Mayorga in Old Castile with whom Godoy had close connections. They may have met in Nicaragua, although Morgovejo was present at Cajamarca and Godoy was not. Morgovejo's promising career was cut short in 1536 when he died during the attempt to lift the siege of Cuzco. ⁽²⁴⁾ Godoy took charge of Morgovejo's son Francisco from the time of his death and brought him back to Spain. The boy remained in Cáceres, directly or indirectly under Godoy's care, [257] until he died in 1550. He probably was illegitimate, and Morgovejo's family made no effort to take charge of him while he was still alive. Godoy, on the other hand, went to some effort for his ward, investing money he had inherited from his father in juros and censos and seeing to Francisco's education. In 1546 he sent him to live with a priest in Cáceres named Suero Díaz Barroso. ⁽²⁵⁾

Godoy began work on his house after his return. He had inherited the property near the church of Santiago and an additional lot across the street from his father, and most likely a house already stood at the site; but Godoy rebuilt it entirely, employing the master stonecutter Pero Gómez, and expanded the site by acquiring a house owned by the cofradía of Santa María la Vieja. The cofradía used the house on the "calle de Godoy" for their meetings and allowed two poor women to live there. Godoy offered the cofradía "another new and good house" in exchange for the one he wanted and donated1000 maravedís of rents. ⁽²⁶⁾

In 1560 Godoy purchased the upper and lower sacristy of the church of Santa María for 600 ducados, ⁽²⁷⁾ but most of his acquisitions were in rents and properties. He had already purchased rents in three different dehesas before he returned, and in the 1540s and 1550s accumulated many more. He frequently bought rents from several individuals holding title to portions of the same dehesa, thus achieving controlling interest or even exclusive ownership of certain pastures. In 1546, for example, he bought rents in one dehesa from four different people -- a vecino of Medellín and three cacereños, one of whom was his father-in-law and another his nephew by marriage Benito Moraga. In the same year he purchased a pasture called the "Suerte del Patrón" by buying a quarter from Benito Moraga and three-quarters from another cacereño noble. In the 1540s and 1550s he acquired additional rights to rents in the Atalaya, parts of which he and his brother Martín de Godoy (who had managed his affairs in his absence) already owned. On his acquisitions in pastures alone during the 1540s and 1550s Godoy probably spent over a million and a half maravedís, or 4000 ducados; and these purchases by no means represented the entirety of his holdings. The donation of the tercio y quinto that he made in 1558 to his son Rodrigo de Godoy which -- together with Francisco's inheritance from his own father -- became the basis of the entail, included substantial winter rents in six other dehesas. Godoy [258] also acquired other kinds of property and censos. He bought a vineyard in 1547, a dovecote and an alcacer (barley field) in 1562, and owned a mill. In the 1540s he bought a number of censos, including one for10,000 maravedís from the council of Cañaveral, a village belonging to Garrovillas, as well as a number of smaller censos from vecinos of Garrovillas. Not surprisingly Godoy was a stockraiser who was selling wool in the 1550s. ⁽²⁸⁾

In his will of 1564 Francisco de Godoy reiterated the terms of the entail he had established in 1558 and reserved for himself the right to dispose of half the rents of pasturage for four years in his final testament. By the time of his death, Godoy had three sons and three daughters (the oldest son, Rodrigo, was about twenty); the five younger children were to receive 1000 ducados each on reaching the age of twenty. Godoy also had an illegitimate daughter named doña Mencía de Aldana, a nun in the convent of San Pablo. Godoy's father-in-law became the guardian of his children. ⁽²⁹⁾

In his will Godoy established a capellanía in the church of Santa María for weekly masses to be recited in his chapel of San Juan Evangelista for his parents, his wife, and himself. He named his son Lorenzo de Ulloa, who was studying for the priesthood but not yet ordained, the chaplain; the successor to the entail could name the next chaplain, preferably a priest of Godoy's lineage or otherwise the nearest available relative. In 1579 Francisco de Paredes, the son of Lorenzo de Aldana, was chaplain. ⁽³⁰⁾ Godoy also mentioned in his will the donation he had made in 1541 of a house and store in Lima to the monastery of Santo Domingo and the capellanía he had endowed with houses in Lima in 1542.

Francisco de Godoy's story was one of consistent success. He survived the political and physical dangers of the civil wars in Peru and the arduous journey to the New World and back and returned with a fortune that probably much exceeded his paternal inheritance. That inheritance might have allowed him to live well but not splendidly; his ventures in the Indies, however, brought him rewards that would have been beyond his reach and enabled him to establish his family among the top-ranking nobility of the city. His heir, Rodrigo de Godoy, and daughter, doña María de Godoy, married siblings who were their mother's first cousins and members of the important Ovando family. ⁽³¹⁾

The specific factors that combined to assure Francisco de Godoy's [259] success -- his early presence and good connections in Peru, the sale of his encomienda, his family's position in Cáceres -- might have been unique, but his choices and ambitions were not. This is clear from the activities and accomplishments of other returnees. By the mid-1550s, five returnees from Peru, all of them veterans of Cajamarca, were on Trujillo's city countil; in addition, Hernando Pizarro controlled two city council seats. One of the returnee regidors, Alonso Ruiz, was not even a native of Trujillo, but as seen he had formed a close partnership and friendship with the encomendero Lucas Martínez in Peru. Alonso Ruiz left Peru in 1540 for Trujillo, married Martínez's sister Isabel, became a vecino and councilman, and in 1558 acquired title to the village of Madroñera near the city. By the mid-1540s he had a house and lands and was grazing cattle in and around Madroñera, but he maintained his principal residence in the city in the parish of San Martín. ⁽³²⁾

Juan Pizarro de Orellana, socially the highest-ranking of the Cajamarca veterans, obtained the title of "señor de Magasquilla" (a dehesa, not a village), built a magnificent house just off Trujillo's plaza, and married his son and principal heir, Hernando de Orellana, to doña Francisca Pizarro, the illegitimate daughter of Hernando Pizarro and doña Isabel Mercado. Pedro Barrantes, also from a high-ranking family, became the lord of La Cumbre. His son, Juan Barrantes, married doña Catalina de Orellana, daughter of Juan Pizarro de Orellana. Even returnees of humbler origins could come close to achieving the noble lifestyle. Pizarro retainer Martín Alonso, by the time of his second departure for Peru in 1552, owned a house on Trujillo's plaza worth 1000 ducados and a vineyard in the Sierra de Herguijuela and a garden near the city worth about 1500 ducados; he also held 200,000 maravedís of juros in Seville and Trujillo and 40,000 maravedís of rents of pasturage. In 1534 Alonso had purchased a censo of 100,000 maravedís from the Duke of Béjar through Juan Cortés, another Pizarro retainer and Cajamarca veteran. ⁽³³⁾

Once again, however, it must be emphasized that the Cajamarca men were unusual, not in their ambitions and objectives, but rather in the means they possessed for achieving them. Even years of work or service in the Indies did not guarantee real wealth. Licenciado Diego González Altamirano renovated his father's house on Trujillo's plaza and founded an entail for his eldest son. But despite his [260] two terms of service on the audiencia of Lima, he had no great fortune; his wife had to add her dowry to her husband's entail in order to make it solvent. ⁽³⁴⁾ Another Trujillo returnee, Diego de Carvajal, who had accompanied Hernando Pizarro back to Peru, participated in the siege of Cuzco and received shares of gold and silver. His Pizarro connections notwithstanding -- he married Juan Pizarro's half-sister Isabel de Soto -- after his return to Trujillo in 1541 his status was modest, so much so that in the 1550s he and his brother Gonzalo brought a suit in Granada against the city for including them in the padrón of taxpayers. While Carvajal clearly had some means -- he bought a censo on a mill in 1551 from two merchants for 500 ducados -- he did not occupy a very prestigious position in local society. ⁽³⁵⁾ Other returnees were humbler yet; a Juan Jiménez, perulero, was listed in the 1561 census of Santa Cruz de la Sierra as a "labrador mediano." ⁽³⁶⁾

While most returnees probably tailored their ambitions to their social station and financial wherewithal, some people must have returned because they failed to find a place or do well in the New World. Someone who was unable to take advantage of opportunities in the Indies probably would not find his circumstances much altered on his return home. One less than outstandingly successful returnee was Hernando de Sande, member of an ambitious family recently established in Cáceres that claimed hidalgo status and relationship to the illustrious and powerful Sande clan of Cáceres and Plasencia. Hernando's older brother, Dr. Francisco de Sande, had a long and successful career in the Indies in the last third of the sixteenth century, serving twice on the audiencia of Mexico, as governor of the Philippines, and as president of Guatemala and Santa Fe de Bogota. Several of his other brothers also had successful careers in Spain or the Indies. One served in Flanders and ended up on the Cáceres city council, another as an army officer in the Philippines, and a third was a Franciscan who became head of the monastery of San Francisco de Bogotá at the end of the sixteenth century. All his brothers used the honorific "don," but Hernando did not, although he was their full legitimate brother. He traveled to the Indies in the 1560s and spent some time with Dr. Sande in Mexico, but apparently never found a niche there. After a few years he returned home, where he handled some affairs for his brother Dr. Sande, and died in Cáceres in 1577. ⁽³⁷⁾ One suspects that his failure was largely personal, [261] because Dr. Sande worked hard to bolster the careers and prestige of his other brothers.

Some men were literally forced out of the Indies or, like Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, fled from authorities there. Diego García de Paredes, member of a leading noble family of Cáceres who had a ten-year military career in Europe before going to Peru in 1546 to join Gasca, ran afoul of Gasca or his officers and was sent back to Spain within a few years. Charges that he had participated in the Gonzalo Pizarro rebellion were never proven and in the 1550s Paredes was released from prison; but his career was ruined, and he lived the remainder of his life in obscurity. ⁽³⁸⁾ Hernando Pizarro himself, of course, spent years in prison after returning to Spain because of his involvement in the execution of Diego de Almagro. His confinement in the castle of Medina del Campo, however, in no way inhibited him from actively overseeing his family's affairs and furthering the family interests at every turn. Other returnees may have gotten into trouble once they were back. Pedro Jara and Alonso de Bibanco, two of the Trujillo men who accompanied Gasca back to Spain, had to defend themselves against charges of complicity in the execution of Captain Nicolás de Heredia, a victim in Peru in the 1540s of Gonzalo Pizarro's field marshal Francisco de Carvajal. ⁽³⁹⁾ A Francisco de Rodas left Popayán in the mid-1540s and died within a few days of reaching Trujillo. He left an emerald belonging to the governor of Popayán, don Sebastián de Benalcázar, in the house of a priest, also Francisco de Rodas (no doubt a relative). Rodas apparently had smuggled the emerald into Spain, ⁽⁴⁰⁾ but with his death escaped prosecution by authorities.

These cases, like the careers of the most successful returnees, underline the interconnectedness of people and events on both sides of the Atlantic. The effective authority of royal officials often was limited by their available resources and the resistance of local people to outside interference (royal officials never were able to arrest Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, despite a couple of determined attempts). Nonetheless the prosecution of individuals who had returned to Spain for activities that took place thousands of miles away in Peru or elsewhere reflects not only a high degree of awareness of the actions and whereabouts of people who were moving around, but also the extent to which the entire Hispanic world formed a single arena. Distance notwithstanding, Trujillo [262] was as closely tied to Peru as it was to Seville or the court. Emigrants and returnees, whether they succeeded or failed, moved through channels of communication, advancement, or misadventure that were known and predictable to authorities and private individuals alike.
 

Individuals of all types and for a variety of reasons went back to Spain temporarily. Doubtless a distinction should be made between people who went to Spain to visit -- for a finite period, with definite intentions -- and people who returned intending to stay or undecided as to their future plans who subsequently left again. The latter group, which would include Cajamarca veterans Martín Alonso and Diego de Trujillo, were not visitors strictly speaking but rather second-time emigrants. Francisco de Orellana, for example, after participating in Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition to the Amazon region, returned to Spain only long enough (1543-1544) to obtain the capitulaciones for the further exploration of the Amazon and to organize the expedition. In contrast his fellow trujillano Diego García de Paredes, who accompanied him to the Amazon, had returned to Spain in 1534 with Hernando Pizarro and spent the next ten years fighting in Europe. He did not necessarily intend to return to the Indies when he left there in 1534; his second return, in 1562, followed within the year by his departure as the appointed governor of Popayán, much more likely was a visit. Another trujillano, Rodrigo Bravo, had a similar career. Having already fought in Italy, Bravo went to the Indies in 1555 and served the crown in Chile and Peru; returning to Spain in the 1560s, he fought in the Alpujarras rebellion of 1568-1570. In 1571 he petitioned to go back to Peru, taking with him a relative and two criados. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Bravo, and others like him, may have found it difficult to fit in and settle down on either side of the Atlantic.

Some people got into trouble in the Indies and found themselves making a temporary return to Spain. Alvaro de Cáceres, exiled from the Indies for one year, returned to New Spain in 1575, taking two of his nieces with him. ⁽⁴²⁾ A Diego de Ovando de Cáceres was sent back to Spain in the 1550s by the viceroy of Peru, the Marqués de Cañete. Ovando, whose older brother Lorenzo de Ulloa was an [263] important settler and encomendero of Trujillo in Peru, had arrived in Peru with Licenciado Pedro de la Gasca in 1547. But despite a solid record of service, Diego de Ovando failed to establish himself very well in Peru. Furthermore he had taken on responsibility for his sister, whose husband had died in one of the civil wars; she received only a small pension to support herself and her children. Ovando complained of their situation and clashed with the viceroy, who sent him to Spain. Although he went back to Peru in 1558, Ovando once again was shunted off, this time to Chile. He died shortly thereafter. ⁽⁴³⁾

Another cacereño, Juan de Hinojosa, also got into trouble and paid an unanticipated visit home. Hinojosa was a younger son in a prominent noble family of Cáceres who became a wealthy and successful entrepreneur and encomendero of Arequipa. In the 1560s he wrote a provocative and defamatory letter to the corregidor of that city, who sent out ten or twelve horsemen to a farm of Hinojosa's to arrest him. He eluded his pursuers and fled to Lima, where his lawyer impressed upon him the seriousness of the charges against him. Hinojosa decided it was an opportune moment to pay a visit home and left for Spain without returning to Arequipa, where the corregidor had his properties confiscated. He later returned to Peru. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Restless and troublemaking types aside, the majority of temporary returnees were people who were unable or unwilling to return permanently and decided to visit Spain to see family and friends, bring back their families or relatives to the Indies, or take care of legal and other business. Hernando de Aldana and Gonzalo de los Nidos, two cacereños who were in Peru quite early, both obtained permission to go to Spain in the mid-1530s and retain their encomiendas. Both went back to Peru with siblings -- Aldana with his brother, and Nidos with two of his sisters and possibly a brother as well. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ Francisco Calderón de Tapia of Trujillo in1581 returned from Peru after about eight years there to act as the representative and guardian of the mestizo son of the encomendero don Pedro Puertocarrero. He planned to take back not only his own children but also the wife and children of Juan Carrasco, a native of Zorita living in Lima, who had given him his power of attorney for that purpose. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Doubtless the visit with the most far-reaching consequences was that of Francisco Pizarro, who returned to Spain in 1529 to obtain the capitulaciones for the conquest of Peru and [264] recruit men to join his expedition. Yet the fame and many repercussions of this visit aside, Pizarro did much the same things as other visitors. He transacted business at court; visited his home town and recruited people from Trujillo and the region; and took back family members - -four of his half-brothers -- with him to Peru.

The motivations of visitors for the most part are clear from their activities and circumstances. At least seven encomenderos from Trujillo and Cáceres visited Spain. Permanent return would have meant forfeiting the income of their encomiendas, so these men opted for America. Antón de Andrada, who first left Spain at the age of twenty as part of Lucas de Ayllón's expedition to Florida, returned to take up residence in Seville, where he married. In 1576 he took his family to New Spain. Andrada was a younger son of a leading noble family in Cáceres, ⁽⁴⁷⁾ and one might guess that his first sojourn in the Indies did not enrich him sufficiently to return to Cáceres and set himself up in the style to be expected, given his family's position in society. Like many others, he foresaw better opportunities in the New World.
 

A very perceptible effect of returnees, both permanent and temporary, was that they directly stimulated further emigration, not only of their fellow townspeople but often of their own family members and other relatives. The visit from Mexico of Alvaro Rodríguez Chacón to Trujillo in the 1570s, discussed in chapter 5, serves as an excellent illustration of the impact a visitor could have on subsequent emigration. He went back to Mexico with an entourage that included his three unmarried sons, his married daughter with her husband and four children, and his daughter's brother-in-law, wife, and children, as well as several criados. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ Alvaro Rodríguez Chacón's visit, then, resulted in the emigration of perhaps fifteen or more people. A number of similar examples of people who returned from the Indies and went back accompanied by relatives or servants already have been mentioned. Diego de Trujillo, the Cajamarca veteran who lived in Trujillo for ten years before deciding to return to Peru, was followed a few years later by his wife, Costanza Rodríguez, their two sons, and her two brothers. She also took servants and slaves. ⁽⁴⁹⁾
 
[265] Permanent returnees also stimulated emigration. Juan de Ribera, who made a short trip to the Indies in the mid-1560s as a merchant, sent his sixteen-year-old son Cristóbal de Ribera to join his uncle (Juan de Ribera's brother) in Popayán in 1578, the year that Cristóbal's mother died. Cristóbal's uncle, Bachiller Gonzalo de Torres, by then a high-ranking church official in Popayán, had written many times asking that Juan de Ribera send his son. Cristóbal could "read and write and count," and possibly he, like his uncle, embarked on an ecclesiastical career. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ Two sons of wealthy Cajamarca veteran Pedro Barrantes -- the older a priest in his thirties, the younger an adolescent -- went to Peru in 1579, decades after their father's brief sojourn there. Another man from Trujillo accompanied them as their criado. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Families associated with bureaucratic service might maintain the tradition over generations. Don Blas de Torres Altamirano, one of the sons of returnee Licenciado Diego González Altamirano, in the seventeenth century served as fiscal in Lima and Quito and as both criminal magistrate and judge of the audiencia of Lima, as his father had done. ⁽⁵²⁾

Returnees played an important role in creating and perpetuating cycles of emigration in which family members of successive generations followed one another to the same destination and established themselves in the New World. Juan de Castro of Trujillo, who went to New Granada in 1569 to join his uncle Francisco González de Castro, treasurer and long-time resident of Santa Marta, doubtless departed with another uncle, Pedro de Castro, who returned to New Granada that year with his family. ⁽⁵³⁾ Juan de Castro's decision to emigrate probably hinged as much on the visit and actual presence in Trujillo of his uncle Pedro de Castro as on the letters that his uncle Francisco wrote from Santa Marta.

Returnees and visitors also contributed to the formation and maintenance of networks of friendship and association tied to place of origin that characterized and shaped so many of the activities of people involved in the New World enterprise. The cacereño Benito de la Peña, who had participated in the Gonzalo Pizarro rebellion in Peru in the 1540s (but, like most of the prominent cacereños involved, suffered no dire consequences as a result) was in Cáceres in 1547. By 1549 he was back in Peru. That year he sent his power of attorney to two of his brothers in Cáceres authorizing them to collect a sum of 90,000 maravedís that Peña had lent to another [266] cacereño, Pedro de Vita, in Peru from Vita's estate in Cáceres. Since Vita was arranging for the administration of his property in Cáceres in late 1546, and was with Peña in Potosí in 1549, it seems likely that the two men--visitor and first-time emigrant--traveled together to Peru and continued their association once there. ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Even where it cannot be shown that returnees directly fostered further emigration, their very presence in their home towns as examples and sources of advice and expertise must have encouraged people to consider going to the Indies. Three returnees testified on behalf of Francisco Cervantes, who petitioned for a license to go to Peru in 1571 to join his uncle Diego de Trujillo. Three other returnees in Trujillo testified for Sancho de Cabañas, who wanted to join his sister in Lima in 1575.⁽⁵⁵⁾ There are many such examples, and certainly it was no coincidence that intended emigrants chose returnees as their witnesses. Individuals who had been in the Indies not only could assist them in completing the necessary legal and other preparations for departure but they had contacts in and knowledge of Seville and the Indies that could make a crucial difference in the emigrant's experience, both during the journey and after arriving in the New World.

Returnees forged friendships and associations in the New World that they maintained after their return home, thereby creating networks of association that could encompass people in the Indies, Seville, the court, or other parts of Castile. The example of Francisco de Godoy, discussed earlier, indicates the existence of such a network extending well beyond his home city of Cáceres to include people still in Peru and the family of his ward in Mayorga. People in the New World frequently looked to friends and relatives who had returned home to take care of legal or economic transactions, and they sent money back to Spain for their families or to invest via returnees. For their part the returnees called upon people still in the Indies to administer their properties, take charge of mestizo children they had left behind, and settle various debts. Sancho de Perero, who had been an encomendero in Peru and was back in Cáceres by his midthirties, in 1559 arranged for fellow cacereño Gómez de Solís in Peru to give the Indians of his encomienda 2000 ducados to relieve them of their tribute obligations. Francisco de Ulloa Solís, Gómez de Solís's brother, was a party to the arrangement made in Cáceres. Such restitutions, often made rather late in [267] life or at a time when the original wealth and population of an encomienda had diminished considerably, were not at all uncommon. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

Business dealings, friendships, and family relationships linked not only emigrants and returnees but also people who never left Spain but were themselves associated -- through family, business, or acquaintance -- with those who did. An episode involving a returnee to Cáceres, a barber named Francisco Durán, illustrates the expanded circles of contact and acquaintance within which emigrants and returnees moved. In 1561 Durán stated that he owed 45,000 maravedís to Juan de la Cueva, native of the "city of Baeza and Ubeda [sic]." Cueva had given him the money in Lima to take back to his father in Spain, but instead Durán spent it all during the journey. Cueva asked that Durán repay the money to Francisco de Ulloa Solís, who then would send it to doña Ana de Navarreta, abbess of the cloister of San Millán de Ubeda, perhaps a relative of Cueva's or someone to whom he owed money. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Francisco de Ulloa Solís had two brothers in the Indies -- the aforementioned captain and encomendero Gómez de Solís, and the encomendero-entrepreneur Juan de Hinojosa -- but never went there himself.

By no means of least importance in terms of understanding the changed (and expanded) context in which returnees functioned as a result of their New World experience, they often formed close ties with one another that they maintained and elaborated after reestablishing themselves at home. As already observed, Trujillo society from at least the middle of the sixteenth century showed a perceptible impact of the clustering and association of returnees in the composition of the city council and the marriage choices of returnees and their children. The returnees remained aware of one another's whereabouts and activities. In 1552 when Alonso de Bibanco and Pedro Jara defended themselves against charges brought in connection with Captain Nicolás de Heredia's death in Peru, they elicited testimony from six other returnees who were vecinos of Trujillo and a returnee from Deleitosa, a town near Trujillo and closely connected with it (although in the jurisdiction of Jaraicejo). Bibanco also traveled to Cáceres to get testimony from the returnee Sancho de Perero. Other witnesses were returnees who were natives of Zafra, Garrovillas, Valverde (jurisdiction of Badajoz), and Cazalla de la Sierra (near Seville).

[268] The men who testified in this criminal proceeding -- both the accused and their witnesses -- had many years of association and acquaintance behind them. Pedro de Cuevas, a witness, went to Peru in 1534, at the same time as the accused Pedro Jara, although the two did not travel on the same boat. Both participated in the fighting at Cuzco and supported Licenciado Vaca de Castro against Almagro, and Cuevas and Jara both inadvertently became embroiled in Gonzalo Pizarro's rebellion. At one point during those unsettled times, Cuevas found out that Pizarro's henchman Francisco de Carvajal planned to seize Jara on his way back from Potosí to Cuzco in order to confiscate his goods or money (Jara was a merchant). Cuevas managed to warn Jara to leave the main road and arranged for him to hide for a few days in a cave, where he sent him food; thus Jara eluded capture. The two men returned to Spain together in Gasca's entourage. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Despite perhaps ten years' difference in age, their shared experiences and close association suggest an almost brotherly relationship.

At the same time, long acquaintance and experiences shared in common by no means guaranteed friendship and solidarity. In Trujillo the best illustration of this was the long-term and bitter enmity between returnees Juan Cortés and Juan de Herrera, the origins -- if not the consequences -- of which remain obscure. Both Cortés and Herrera were at Cajamarca, both returned to Spain early (Cortés in 1533, Herrera in 1535), acquired seats on the city council, and married. Both were associated with the Pizarros, although Cortés was some twenty years older and his relationship with the Pizarros (especially Hernando) was of much longer standing and more important than Herrera's. Herrera was in his late teens when he left Trujillo for Peru, and at Cajamarca Cortés received much larger shares of gold and silver, a reflection of his role and his close connections with the Pizarros. The break between the two men occurred because Cortés challenged Herrera's handling of part of the sum of 25,000 pesos that Juan Pizarro had entrusted Herrera to bring back to Spain. The amount of money in dispute was in relative terms so trivial, and Cortés's behavior so vindictive, that the episode surely reflected some already-existing antagonism.

The story went as follows. While Herrera was in Lima and about to leave for Spain with Juan Pizarro's money, Diego de Carvajal arrived with instructions to buy a horse for Juan Pizarro. Since [269] Carvajal had no money for the purchase, Herrera paid 1300 pesos for the horse out of the money he was taking to Spain. Despite ample testimony and proof that the transaction had taken place as Herrera described, Cortés won the suit and recovered the sum. Herrera forfeited his house in Trujillo and 21,000 maravedís in juros and also spent some time in jail. Furthermore the boat in which Herrera returned to Spain had been forced ashore in southern Portugal and the money he was carrying confiscated, so that he had to go to considerable effort and some expense to retrieve it and fulfill his charge. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ If there had been bad feeling between the two men before the dispute, the suit and Cortés's unbending attitude (very likely a reflection of Hernando Pizarro's) fanned the flames of hostility into a burning hatred and "enemistad."

The roots of the conflict seem to have lain principally in Cortés's personality. Significantly, other long-time associates of the Pizarros and Cortés, such as Diego de Carvajal, did not rally to Cortés's side; in fact Carvajal's evidence by all rights should have exonerated Herrera. Returnee Martín Alonso, perhaps the most sympathetic member of the Pizarro circle, once stated that he had tried to reconcile the antagonists but failed. Cortés's propensity for overt conflict and his unwavering devotion to the Pizarros emerged again in a near-violent confrontation with an important Trujillo noble, Juan de Escobar (the brother of the royal confessor, Fray Diego de Chaves). Cortés apparently proclaimed publicly and repeatedly that Pedro Alonso Hinojosa, a captain in Peru and Escobar's brother-in-law, had not acted as a "caballero" and had betrayed Gonzalo Pizarro by turning to Gasca's side. Escobar wrote a letter to Cortés defending Hinojosa's actions in Peru, and Cortés responded by demanding a meeting. The two men nearly came to blows in the church of Santa María and were about to adjourn to fight it out in the countryside, when a friend of Cortés persuaded him to desist by pointing out that the matter did, after all, involve the delicate question of allegiance to the crown as well as loyalty to Gonzalo Pizarro. The disagreement among the men and rancor over events in Peru touched the women close to them as well. Cortés's wife, doña María de Ribera, and Juan de Escobar's mother got into the same argument over Pedro Alonso Hinojosa while visiting in the house of noblewoman doña Juana de Acuna. Their hostess and Juan de Herrera's wife, doña Ana de Hinojosa, managed to make peace between them. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

[270] Apart from their contribution to generating emigration from their home towns and their role in maintaining connections between New World and Old, the greatest impact of the returnees on local society lay in the wealth they brought home. As seen, they used their capital to build and renovate houses; acquire urban and rural properties, rents, censos, and juros; purchase seats on the city council and jurisdiction or señorío over small towns and villages; provide dowries for daughters or sisters to marry well or enter convents; establish or enlarge entails for sons; refurbish and construct chapels, and found capellanías and charitable works. Some people came home with substantial capital resources at their disposal, which was not very common in provincial towns where wealth was mainly agrarian rather than mercantile. The inventory of returnee Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes's assets prepared in1588 showed that in addition to 4000 ducados he had lent to people in the Indies, relatives and acquaintances in Cáceres owed him more than 5000 ducados altogether; one of his cousins, Hernando de Ovando de la Cerda, had borrowed 1000 ducados. These debts were not owed on censos or other transactions, but rather represented loans Ovando Paredes had made. ⁽⁶¹⁾ In 1578 returnee Licenciado Diego González Altamirano lent 3500 ducados to four regidores of Trujillo. ⁽⁶²⁾

The uses to which returnees put their capital were conservative, at least in kind. Certainly they did nothing especially innovative with the wealth they had at their disposal, but rather followed a predictable course in their economic, social, and political investments that was largely shaped (depending on their status and means) by the ideals and aspirations of the upper or middle classes. But despite this basic conservatism in kind, there was a real difference in degree. The amount of wealth brought back and the very size of the return phenomenon led to some striking developments in local society. In Trujillo the altered composition of the city council, acquisition of towns and titles by returnees or their descendants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the sometimes dazzlingly high dowries (at least by local standards) returnee families provided daughters in order to form illustrious marriage alliances combined to produce a returnee elite that directly challenged the wealth and position of the nobility hitherto so dominant in local society. Of course one might argue that the change was far [271] from revolutionary and that, for the most part, only the returnees of fairly solid social origins (that is, hidalgos) attained these heights of prestige and position; commoners Diego de Trujillo and Martín Alonso could not make the leap into the upper ranks. Nonetheless if the achievements of the wealthy returnees fell considerably short of transforming social structure as such, they undeniably caused a shakeup and realignment in the upper ranks of local society, especially in Trujillo. This new configuration underscores again the flexibility and adaptability of social structures that tend to convey, at least outwardly, an impression of great conservatism and stability. The wealth the returnees brought home wrought concrete and perceptible changes in local society, from the appearance of huge and splendid new houses to the formation of a new aristocracy that intermarried and acquired new titles and possessions. These innovations suggest that the fairly closed and stable nature of the old upper class was a result at least in part of the relatively limited resources of local society. By expanding the resources and opportunities available to people in these towns in Extremadura, the Indies enterprise made change possible in local society.
 

Emigration to the Indies often meant the temporary or long-term separation of families; as seen, men might leave their families behind, or parents would take older children with them but leave the younger ones at home. While return migration could mean reuniting with spouses or children, it too could work to perpetuate or complicate the geographical dispersion of families. In1581, at the time of the final division of the estate of Captain Gonzalo de Olmos, a returnee from Peru who died in 1574, three of his sons were in Peru, while two other sons and four daughters (one was a nun in the convent of San Pedro) were living in Trujillo. Olmos may have returned early to Spain, in the 1530s, so possibly his sons were born in Trujillo and later emigrated to Peru on their own. ⁽⁶³⁾ A daughter of Licenciado Diego González Altamirano stayed behind in Peru and entered a convent in Lima and, as mentioned, one of her brothers later returned there to serve on the audiencia.

Children who were born in the Indies or had been there from an early age, however, might come to Spain, sometimes with parents [272] or guardians, other times on their own. A man named Domingo de Arquinigo, who in 1578 testified that he had known some trujillanos in Peru, said he had lived there since he was a child and had come to Spain only recently. He was thirty-two years old. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Families with strong ties and stakes on both sides of the Atlantic could generate a good deal of movement back and forth and end up fairly well scattered. The Loaysa family of Trujillo was a case in point. Two brothers, Alonso and Francisco de Loaysa (nephews of the archbishop of Lima, Fray Jerónimo de Loaysa), went to Peru in the mid-1530s, probably with Hernando Pizarro. Alonso de Loaysa married doña María de Ayala, and possibly some of their children were born in Peru before they went to Trujillo, where Loaysa died in 1574. One of their sons, don Gaspar de Ayala, went to Peru in the late 1580s, returning to Trujillo in 1596. At least one other son, Captain Francisco de Loaysa, and possibly a daughter, made Peru their permanent place of residence. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

The careers and choices of the cacereño Juan Cano and his descendants reflect the complexities that could arise in families that maintained a foothold in both Old World and New. An associate of Hernando Cortés, Juan Cano received an encomienda after the conquest of Mexico but lost most of it. He became an important encomendero only by virtue of his marriage to doña Isabel, daughter of the Mexican emperor Moctezuma. Doña Isabel received the large encomienda of Tacuba from Cortés before she married Cano, with whom she had three sons (Pedro, Gonzalo, and Juan) and two daughters, who entered a convent in Mexico City. Doña Isabel's son by a previous marriage, Juan de Andrade de Moctezuma, after his mother's death in 1551 disputed Cano's claim to the encomienda, and eventually it was divided; in the 1560s the encomenderos were Juan de Andrade, Juan Cano, and the latter's sons Gonzalo and Pedro Cano. But the encomienda represented only part of the basis of the Cano Moctezuma family's fortunes. In the 1530s and 1540s Cano initiated petitions for mercedes (grants or awards) from the crown, alleging that his wife had received only a portion of the patrimony due to her from her father, Moctezuma. Cano's son Gonzalo pursued these claims with some success, and the family also accumulated large landholdings in New Spain. Gonzalo Cano also received several pueblos outside the Tacuba [273] encomienda and the Valley of Mexico through the terms of his mother's will. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ At the same time, before he returned to Seville in the 1560s, Juan Cano was buying lands and rents in and around Cáceres.

Juan Cano's third son, don Juan Cano Moctezuma, left Mexico to settle in Cáceres, where he married doña Elvira de Paredes Toledo and probably inherited most of his father's estate in Spain. He received a royal annuity of 1800 ducados and in the 1570s apparently still had some income from the encomienda or other family properties in Mexico. Contacts between family members in Cáceres and Mexico continued even beyond the generation of Juan Cano and his sons. In 1602 another don Juan Cano Moctezuma (grandson of Juan Cano and the son of Gonzalo Cano, who remained in New Spain) was in Cáceres litigating with his cousins, the sons of his uncle don Juan Cano Moctezuma. The dispute concerned Juan Cano's entail and legacy, which included 300,000 maravedís of juros that Juan Cano had held in the rents of the almojarifazgo (customs duties) of Seville. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

Did these lingering connections between people in Spain and the Indies, sometimes enduring over two generations, mean that some extremeño families were able to maintain themselves as true transatlantic units, comparable to some of the great mercantile families of Spain? Probably only to a very limited extent. Mercantile fortunes were fairly manipulable, but the properties held by extremeños both in Spain and America often were not. Transferring the income from properties and holdings in the Indies back to Spain could cause problems, and maintaining holdings in absentia--especially encomiendas--was difficult or impossible. As a result the familial center of gravity usually could not be shared between family members in Spain and the Indies for long and ultimately came to rest on one side of the Atlantic or the other. If some extremeños returned home to live, others became important figures in colonial society and founded new family dynasties quite independent of family and relatives in Spain. The Cano Moctezumas achieved sufficient wealth and prominence to establish themselves firmly on both sides of the Atlantic. But while Juan Cano's sons and grandsons in Mexico and Cáceres maintained some contacts (if nothing else because of properties held in absentia [274] and occasionally in dispute), the Mexican and extremeño relatives soon came to constitute distinct and independent branches of the family and no longer comprised a single unit.
 

The background, careers and accomplishments of returnees and visitors were sufficiently diverse that it would be fair to regard them essentially as a subset of the overall emigrant group, distinguished from the rest mainly by reason of their return. On the whole returnees were exceptional within the larger group of emigrants because they possessed the means and motivation to return to Spain; individual objectives and personal assessments of what constituted sufficient means could vary considerably. Yet by returning these particular emigrants played a special role, both in stimulating further emigration and altering the fabric and facade of their home societies. The significance of the Indies for local society certainly was not limited to the activities and presence of the returnees; but without the returnees and their accomplishments, the impact of the Indies surely would have been much less tangible and immediate, and therefore far less central.

1. See Theopohis Fair, "The Indiano during the Spanish Golden Age from 1550-1650" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1972), 11, 75.

2. In sixteenth-century Cáceres and Trujillo the term "perulero" is used almost invariably for returnees, occurring not only in informal usage but in legal documents as well, often appended to an individual's name much as occupational designations were. I have seen only one instance of the use of the term "indiano," in testimony of 1549 in Trujillo; Juan de la Jara referred to people who had come from the Indies as "tales indianos," in AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8.

3. See Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 44-52, 63-64, and also his "Letters and People to Spain," in Chiapelhi, First Images of America, 2: 790- 791. Lockhart specifically discusses the returnees to Trujillo who had been at Cajamarca.

4. For their stories, see Altman, "Spanish Hidalgos," 335-343.

5. Pérez de Tudela, Documentos relativos a la Gasca, 1: 567 (letter from Pedro de Valdivia to Hernando Pizarro, September 1545).

6. Casco and the members of the entourage accompanying Gasca appear in the testimony for Pedro Jara and Alonso de Bibanco, AGI Justicia 1126, no. 4, ramo 1.

7. See Catálogo, 3, no. 2447; García testified he was thirty-nine in 1547 (AGI Indif. Gen. 2055), but the exact date of his return is not known.

8. For Ribera see Catálogo, 5, no. 2248, and testimony in AGI Indif. Gen. 2083, 2089. For Andrés Calderón, see Catálogo, 4, no. 2281, and AGI Justicia 1062, no. 2, ramo 1.

9. Catálogo, 4, nos. 483, 486, 1278; Acedo, "Linajes," Vargas, 48 a13-14.

10. AGI Contratación 5218.

11. AGI Indif. Gen. 2094.

12. AGI Lima 199.

13. See Miguel Muñoz de San Pedro, Doña Isabel de Moctezuma, la novia de Extremadura (Madrid, 1965), 28, 31, 33, and AHPC Alonso Pacheco 4103.

14. For Francisco Sánchez de Melo, see Archivo Histórico de Arequipa Gaspar Hernández, 22 December 1551, 22 July 1553, and letter from Diego de Trujillo, Cuzco, January 1564 in AGI Indif. General 2084. For the Melo brothers, see Catálogo, 3, nos. 3557, 4183. For Pedro's return, see AGI Indif. General 2162A; and Acedo, "Linajes," Vargas, 48 M9.

15. AGI Indif. Gen. 2162A.

16. AGI Indif. Gen. 2086.

17. Doña Gracia de Medina, the daughter of Diego Jiménez "perulero," married García de Vargas Carvajal, who was the brother of doña María de Carvajal, the wife of returnee Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero (Acedo, "Linajes," Carvajal, 110 a10).

18. ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 18, leg. 5, pt. 2, no. 20.

19. In 1603 don Pedro Cano Moctezuma y Toledo, the son of don Juan Cano Moctezuma and his wife doña Elvira de Paredes Toledo, was a regidor in Toledo and sold 19,609 maravedís of rents for winter pasturage in dehesas in Cáceres's jurisdiction to his uncle Alonso Cano Saavedra, a vecino of Cáceres (ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 39).

20. Lodo de Maryoralgo, Viejos linajes, 122; Boyd-Bowman, Indice, 2, no. 2741; Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 213 (note), AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113.

21. See Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 20.

22. Godoy's will is in AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113, see also Roa y Ursua, El reyno de Chile, 8-9.

23. He purchased the regimiento from his nephew by marriage, Benito Moraga y Nidos, who was the husband of doña Marina de Carvajal, the daughter of doña Marta Martínez de Orellana (Godoy's sister) and Francisco de Carvajal. Their son Gaspar Moraga y Nidos emigrated to New Spain, probably in 1570.

24. See Lockhart's biography of Morgovejo in Men of Cajamarca, 230-232.

25. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4101 contains the accounting Godoy made in 1558 at the request of Francisco Morgovejo's grandmother and uncle of expenditures made for his ward.

26. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4100.

27. ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 47.

28. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113, 4101.

29. AHPC Diego Pacheco 4113, Pedro González 3827.

30. AHPC Pedro González 3829.

31. Lodo de Mayoralgo, Viejos linajes, 122. Doña Leonor de Godoy, the daughter of Rodrigo de Godoy and doña Teresa Rol de la Cerda (hence the granddaughter of Francisco de Godoy) in 1558, at the age of fifteen, married another very successful and wealthy returnee, Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes (ACC-HO leg. 7, no. 17).

32. See Lockhart's biography in Men of Cajamarca, 343-345; Tena Fernández, Trujillo histórico, 227; AGS Exped. Hacienda 311.

33. Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 288-289, AGI Indif. General 2078, AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1, A-1-2.

34. AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-27.

35. AGI Justicia 1053, no. 5, Lima 565, AMT García de Sanabria A-1-1, A-1-2. Diego de Carvajal bought the censo from the merchants Juan de Camargo and Juan González de Victoria, who had connections with the Pizarros and with the Indies.

36. AGS Exped. Hacienda 189-56.

37. See ARCG Hidalguía 301-55-21, and the discussion of the suit for hidalguía in chap. 2. Hernando de Sande's will is in AHPC Pedro González 3830. See also Altman, "Emigrants and Society."

38. Miguel Muñoz de San Pedro, "Aventuras y desventuras del tercer Diego García de Paredes," Revista de Estudios Extremeños 13 (1957): 17-32.

39. See AGI Justicia 1126, no. 4, ramo 1.

40. AGI Justicia 1067, no. 5, ramo 2. In 1565 the priest Francisco de Rodas had a benefice in Santa María (AMT Pedro de Carmona A-1-1-9).

41. Catálogo, 3, no. 3199; AGI Indif. General 208, (información of Francisco Cervantes).

42. AGI Indif. Gen.2055 (return to Spain in 1574), AGI Contratación 5222 (return to New Spain). See AGI Justicia 215, no. 1, for his activities in New Spain.

43. AGI Patronato 117, ramo 7, and 100, and Justicia 430. See also Altman, "Spanish Hidalgos," 331-332.

44. AGI Justicia 1061, no. 1, ramo 1.

45. For Aldana see Raul Porras Barrenechea, ed., Cedulario del Peru (Lima, 1944-1948), 2: 127, for Nidos see Porras Barrenechea, Cedulario, 2: 217, and Roa y Ursua, El reyno de Chile, 9, 210.

46. AGI Indif. Gen. 2093 and ARCG 38-599-3.

47. AGI Contratación 5220, 5224, and Lodo de Mayoralgo, Viejos linajes, 48.

48. See Catálogo, 5, nos. 3507, 3843; AGI Indif. Gen. 2054, 2056, AGI Contratación 5222.

49. Catálogo, 3, no. 2977; AGI Indif. General 2093.

50. AGI Indif. Gen. 2090.

51. AGI Contratación 5227 the criado was Alonso Donaire (see also Navarro del Castillo, La epopeya, 394, 416).

52. Schäfer, El consejo de Indias, 2: 151, 482, 487, 492, 5i6. Blas Altamirano probably had been in Peru in the 1570s with his parents.

53. Catálogo, 5, nos. 1381, 1451, AGI Indif. General 2083.

54. All the documents relating to the transactions between Benito de la Peña and Pedro de Vita, as well as Vita's power of attorney made in Cáceres in October 1546, are in AHPC Diego Pacheco 4100. Peña was one of that large group of young men who left Cáceres in 1535, ostensibly for Santo Domingo, although most of them ended up in Peru (Boyd Bowman, Indice, 2, no. 2776).

55. AGI Indif. Gen. 2085, 2087.

56. AHPC Pedro de Grajos 3925, Gómez de Solís paid the money the following year.

57. AHPC Pedro González 3830.

58. AGI Justicia 1126, no. 4, ramo 1.

59. Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 220-221, 295; AGI Justicia 1053, no. 5 (for the suit). Juan Cortés had fought in Navarre with Hernando Pizarro (see Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 1). Also see Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8, for testimony about the enmity between Cortés and Herrera.

60. AGI Justicia 1176, no. 2, ramo 8. The account of this episode comes mainly from testimony of 1549 taken from Juan de Herrera, who clearly was embittered and seeking any opportunity to get even with Cortés (by this time the incident in which Cortés's criados had wounded Herrera's brother also had occurred), so Herrera might have been a less than wholly credible witness. Nevertheless, although no other witness recounted the incident in such detail, neither did anyone else contradict Herrera's version, and the details sound authentic.

61. ACC-HO leg. 5, pt. 2, no. 20.

62. AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-23. The regidores were Hernando de Orellana, Juan Casco, Gonzalo Rodríguez de Ocampo, and Melchior González, the last two very likely returnees.

63. AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-27. Navarro del Castillo, La epopeya, 413. Captain Gonzalo de Olmos's brother Juan de Olmos also was in Peru, at least through the 1540s.

64. AGI Indif. Gen. 2090 (informaciones of Cristóbal de Ribera and Juan de Tapia).

65. ARCG 3a-599-3; Boyd-Bowman, Indice, 2, no. 3173; Acedo, "Linajes," Loaysa, 222 a3-15, Don Gaspar de Ayala was thirty in 1596 when he returned from Peru; his brothers don Jerónimo de Loaysa and don Lorenzo de Loaysa Figueroa were thirty-four and twenty-five. They all could have been born in Trujillo in the 1560s, since their mother might have been fairly young when she came to Trujillo. She married a second time in Trujillo, to Diego García Barrantes, son of returnee Pedro Barrantes, and died in 1581 (AMT Pedro de Carmona B-1-23).

66. Icaza, Conquistadores, 1: 31, Muñoz de San Pedro, Doña Isabel, 28, 31, 33; Gibson, Aztecs, 92, 424-426.

67. AHPC Pedro González 3829, ACC-HO leg. 4, no. 39.