Local and Regional Ties
Emigrants' economic activities, legal involvements, marriages, and families all underscore the extent to which the extremeños maintained their connections with one another. These associations were so pervasive that they must be considered a crucial aspect of their lives in the Indies with many implications and repercussions. Emi-
grants frequently gave their power of attorney to relatives and other acquaintances from their home towns or regions. Extremeños served as witnesses for the transactions, wills, and other documents executed by their kinsmen and home town acquaintances, testified on their behalf in suits, took custody of orphaned children, and bought and sold property held in Spain or the Indies to each other. The encomendero Maestre Tomás in Mexico in 1527, for example, bought houses in Trujillo for 100 pesos from another trujillano in Mexico, Hernando Pizarro, who was acting as guardian of Francisco de Gaete.[78] Such patterns of association characterized not only the early years but persisted throughout the sixteenth century. Juan Rodríguez de Ocampo, the trujillano who was treasurer of Quito, bought some juros on the sales tax of Trujillo from Licenciado García de Valverde, doubtless while Valverde was oidor in Quito in the mid-1570s.[79] Francisco Calderón de Tapia of Trujillo, who went to Peru in 1573 in his mid-twenties, in 1580 became the guardian of don Pedro Puertocarrero, the mestizo son and heir of his noble father of the same name.[80] Continued reference to and association with relatives and other people from the same home town or region conditioned or affected the decisions and activities of extremeños in the Indies for years.
Letters home in particular shed light on these continuing connections. Andrés Pérez, after living in New Spain for some twenty years, mentioned two other cacereños, Cosme de Ovando and Alvaro de Cáceres, when he wrote to his brother in Spain in 1559.[81] Diego Martín de Trujillo of Garciaz in 1562 wrote to the priest Alonso de Aguilar (apparently his wife's uncle and the guardian of the daughter they had left behind) about several people who must have been from their town or nearby and known to Aguilar: "My sister and Juan López and Miguel Sánchez, my brother-in-law, and Hernan Martín are all alive and well. We know nothing of Andrés Martín for three years because [he went] to Peru with merchandise and we await him here."[82] Fray Gaspar de Carvajal wrote to his brother Diego de Carvajal in Trujillo that their compatriots Martín de Chaves and Alonso García Calderón had drowned together in Peru in 1549.[83] In two letters in 1606 Alvaro de Paredes mentioned the arrival in Vera Cruz of cacereño Alonso Gil, son of the man who owned the oven next to their father's house in Cáceres. Paredes passed along the rumor that Gil and his wife had disappeared from
Vera Cruz because they had emigrated without the proper legal authorization.[84]
Testimony of people who returned to Spain also reflects the network of contact and communication that extremeños maintained in the Indies. Alvaro Rodríguez Chacón, who returned to Trujillo from Mexico in the 1570s to get his children, testified that Francisco Gómez of Trujillo had a tailor's shop with a good business in Mexico City.[85] Seven returnees to Trujillo testified that they had been with Juan Ramiro in Lima before his death.[86] Juan de Ribera, who went to Tierra Firme and Peru in 1562 as a merchant and returned three or four years later, testified at different times in Trujillo regarding people he had seen in the Indies. In Lima he had met Felipe Rodríguez, a silversmith, and Pedro Gómez, whom he said he knew both in Trujillo and Lima; both of them had left young sons in Trujillo. In Santa Marta Ribera stayed in the house of the treasurer Francisco González de Castro.[87]
Emigrants frequently borrowed money from one another. Lorenzo de Aldana's will of 1562 mentioned a debt of 1100 pesos he owed to Leonor Méndez, the wife of cacereño Juan de Hinojosa.[88] The associations of people in the Indies also could generate complicated transactions that involved people at home in Spain as well. Jerónimo Holguín borrowed money from fellow cacereño Benito de la Peña in the 1550s and arranged for the sum to be repaid in Cáceres by making an agreement with a notary, Pedro Pérez, by which 2045 maravedís of rents that belonged to Holguín were transferred to Peña's brother in Cáceres.[89]
The mobility of many Spaniards in the Indies enhanced both the possibility and the importance of maintaining this network of acquaintance and association. Furthermore it must be remembered that the total numbers of Spaniards, even in the largest centers of settlement, were relatively small, which also helps account for their success in preserving and utilizing these connections. Mexico City in the midsixteenth century, for example, had perhaps 75,000 Indian residents but only about 8 to 10,000 Europeans and another 8,000 Blacks.[90] Thus the European element or community there constituted the equivalent of a contemporary small Castilian city. Since Spaniards in their everyday lives in the Indies generally took Indians into account only indirectly for the most part, for many intents and purposes they could maintain social relations with one
another and pursue their economic activities within a frame of reference not entirely unlike that of their home towns and villages in Castile in scale. Naturally the greater diffusion of people over large areas made for some real and important differences in the New World setting; but mobility and the effectiveness of communications among people who were separated geographically to some degree compensated for the scattering of people and worked to bind them together.
The accounts and chronicles of the conquest and civil wars of Peru provide endless examples of the close association of extremeños. After Cajamarca, in which seventeen men from Trujillo and towns nearby and two from Cáceres participated,[91] perhaps the most spectacular episode in Peruvian history that involved virtually everyone from the region in one way or another was Gonzalo Pizarro's rebellion of the 1540s against the New Laws that restricted the encomienda.[92] Many extremeños—above all, the trujillanos—were loyal and enthusiastic supporters of Gonzalo Pizarro from the outset. Although the shrewdest ultimately defected, while the rebellion lasted their support was crucial. Extremeños were not drawn into Gonzalo Pizarro's entourage simply because of common origin, but rather because common origin, as seen, meant common ties of relationship and acquaintance. Pizarro's rebellion, in other words, did not in itself so much call forth local or regional solidarity as draw on it, and of course in turn reinforced already-existing networks and ties by involving people in acts of rebellion and treason. Gómez de Solís (of Cáceres), for example, wrote to Pizarro from Tumbez in December 1546:
I am bringing with me Benito de la Peña, who is the person I talked to you about the night before I left, because he's from my country [tierra] and I love him very much, and I have great trust in him because I know him, and also because he is very dedicated to you.[93]
The trujillano Fray Gaspar de Carvajal wrote from Jauja in May 1547:
I am going with all haste to see you. I bring a companion, father Fray Alonso Trueno of our country [tierra], who wishes to serve you. Although it's not legal for him to take up arms, I know he will use those of Jesus Christ and pray to God on your behalf, as do I.[94]
Naturally, given Gonzalo's strength and momentum during much of the rebellion, expressions of friendship and support might have been the only guarantee of safety. Fray Jerónimo de Loaysa, bishop of Lima, wrote to Gonzalo Pizarro at the end of 1546 "you understand that I an truly your servant and friend, although according to what I understood . . . and later was told . . . there has been no lack of suspicions to the contrary."[95] Given the close ties that extremeños maintained with one another, their mobility in Peru, and the constant communication that resulted, it was all but impossible not to take sides—and taking the wrong one likely had serious or even fatal consequences, as in the case of cacereño Hernando de Aldana. A veteran of Cajamarca and encomendero of Cuzco, Aldana was executed by one of Pizarro's lieutenants in 1546.[96]
Two young trujillanos, Alonso de Bibanco and Pedro Jara, who returned to Spain with Licenciado Gasca in 1549, were subsequently accused in the death of Nicolás de Heredia, executed by Pizarro's field marshal Francisco de Carvajal. Witnesses claimed that Bibanco and Jara had served only brief stints in Pizarro's camp, under coercion. Martín Casco, another returnee to Trujillo, said that Pedro Jara had been with Carvajal maybe two or three weeks. "He went with his merchandise and against his will because the said Pedro Jara told it to this witness later with tears in his eyes." Pedro de Cuevas, who had arrived in Peru with Pedro Jara in the 1530s, at one point managed to warn Jara that Carvajal intended to intercept him on his way back to Cuzco, and he arranged for Jara to hide for a few days. After Pizarro and Carvajal left Cuzco, Pedro Jara came to Cuevas's house, and they stayed in Cuzco until Gasca arrived. Pizarro had posted guards along the river between Cuzco and the royal camp so that no one would desert to the other side. Cuevas said that the guards captured and killed eight or nine men who tried to flee, including a man from Trujillo named Sotelo, after which everyone else stayed put to wait out the denouement of the revolt.[97]
The bonds of kinship and loyalty continued to play a key role to the very end as events unfolded. Gonzalo Pizarro had real difficulty accepting the possibility that such close friends and allies as Gómez de Solís or Pedro Alonso de Hinojosa might actually have betrayed him. When he wrote to cacereño Francisco Hernández Girón from Lima in April 1547, he was convinced that the delegation he had
sent to meet the crown's representative, Gasca, in Panama must have come to a bad end. He wrote "it's fair that everyone should know . . . what I will do in revenge of your friends Lorenzo de Aldana and Gómez de Solís, because if anything has happened, it's certain that they will receive the greatest part of the bad treatment, as a result of being such friends of mine."[98] And Gasca's representative to Gonzalo Pizarro, Pedro Hernández Paniagua de Loaysa, constantly stressed his extremeño ties and origins. He was a cousin of the bishop, don Jerónimo de Loaysa, and Gómez de Solís was his wife's cousin. According to the account of August 1547 that he wrote to Gasca, he judged that these kinship ties had been crucial in securing his safe conduct to Pizarro's camp. In conversation with Gonzalo Pizarro he called the bishop his "nephew," said he had brought with him one of his (the bishop's) brothers, and referred to Aldana as a relative. No doubt tongue in cheek, he appealed to Gonzalo on the basis of their common ties and origins:
I thought that [having] arrived to you, all my labors were done, in that you would grant me a thousand favors and rewards for being from Extremadura, and a deudo and servant of your deudos, and of one friendship and party [bando], and for the letter of Sr. Alvaro de Hinojosa [Pizarro's brother-in-law].
He also pointed out that he had expected to benefit from the favors that his "lord and cousin" the cardinal had always done for Gonzalo's brothers.[99]
The consequences for many of the extremeños who participated in the rebellion were bad or fatal, although quite a few not only escaped punishment but landed solidly on their feet. Some, like Pedro de Bibanco and Blas de Soto, died before the end of the conflict. Soto was Gonzalo Pizarro's maternal half-brother and died just before his wife gave birth to a son.[100] Their deaths notwithstanding, these men were tried and convicted along with a number of other men—Rodrigo Pizarro, Bartolomé de Aguilar, Gonzalo Hernández, Gristóbal Pizarro, all of Trujillo, and Diego de Ovando (son of Frey Nicolás de Ovando)—and their goods confiscated. These confiscations often directly affected people in Spain, since properties there were forfeit as well. Blas de Soto's sister Isabel de Soto, who had been raised by Gonzalo Pizarro's sister Inés Rodríguez de Aguilar and had married the Pizarro retainer and returnee
Diego de Carvajal, had to give up the 1000 ducados that her brother had donated for her dowry.[101] The participants in the rebellion who survived to face trial usually were sentenced to exile from the Indies and condemned to the galleys. One man from Trujillo, Francisco Velázquez, went to trial and was sentenced, spent two or three months in jail, and then went free, according to returnees Alonso Cervantes and Pedro Jara who testified in Trujillo in 1550. Apparently he was recruited by Captain Juan Alonso Palomino to help apprehend other followers of Gonzalo Pizarro who were still at large and received a full pardon for his services.[102]
Certainly leniency and recociliation played an important part in the process by which Gasca won over many of Pizarro's followers and secured their future loyalty. Alonso de Bibanco and Pedro Jara, who returned to Spain with Gasca when they were still young men of thirty or less, formed close ties to Gasca. Returnee Alonso de Cervantes testified in Trujillo that Gasca was fond of Bibanco and "showed him much love." Juan de Monroy, who returned to Spain on the same ship as Gasca, said that since Pedro Jara traveled on a different boat, Gasca sent "to find out how he was and if he needed something to eat" and then sent Jara a quintal of biscuits, saying that "if there were anything else he needed he should say, that he would provide it, and he showed him much love." Pedro de Cuevas testified that after they returned to Spain, he and Pedro Jara went to visit Licenciado Gasca at the home of the archbishop in Cantillana, where Gasca received them and then sent Jara on his way to Trujillo, commending him to Francisco de Loaysa, brother of the archbishop of Lima.[103]
The participation of people from Trujillo and Cáceres in Gonzalo Pizarro's rebellion, along with other less spectacular examples of close association in the Indies, raises the question of what the real scope and extent of associational networks were. Were the networks regional or subregional, or did real cohesion and solidarity actually extend little beyond one's home town? The question is complex. Certainly the appearance—in fact the prominence—of cacereños in Pizarrist camps from the earliest years in Peru attests to significant regional or subregional ties; yet the relations between cacereños and trujillanos on the whole do not reflect the almost invariable solidarity and loyalty that characterized the relations of trujillanos with one another. Essentially the cacereño supporters of
Gonzalo Pizarro were the same individuals who had actively and consistently associated with the Pizarros from the very beginning. But men such as Hernando de Aldana and Lorenzo de Ulloa distanced themselves from the Pizarros fairly early and did not flock to Gonzalo Pizarro's camp, nor did many later-arriving cacereños. In contrast, the trujillanos in Peru supported Gonzalo to a man. Similarly, while people from Trujillo and its town Zorita knew one another, and their ties of kinship, acquaintance, and common origin fostered frequent association, here again solidarity was less consistent, as seen in the dispute between Alonso Carrasco of Zorita and Alonso Pizarro de la Rua of Trujillo.
Other aspects of association reveal similar patterns. Officials assigned encomiendas for which there was no immediate heir not to a person from the same region but rather to someone from the same home town, if possible. Only in their marriage choices for themselves or their children did emigrants abandon their preference for partners from their home towns, and surely this was so because they had no real choice, given the limited possibilities in the New World. If they could make such alliances, they did. It would appear, then, that the more regional (rather than local) nature of marriage choices reflected not the most characteristic or preferred pattern of association by place of origin but rather a much more diluted form forged by the circumstances and context of the New World.
In the end the conservatism manifested in preferences for association failed to become the dominant feature of social organization in the Indies largely because there simply were not enough trujillanos or cacereños available to do everything that needed to be done. Had there been, the factionalism that was so prevalent and disruptive in early Peru doubtless would have been even more pronounced and enduring. Yet if home town identification, clustering, and cohesion were so important and tenacious, why then did people from Seville, for example, not take over and run everything in the Indies? The answer to that question touches on a complicated set of factors involving timing, leadership, occupations, and destinations. But the answer also would underscore the same point made earlier about local society in Spain: Spanish cities and towns were quite separate, with their own distinctive patterns of development and organization. Given its remarkable expansion and dyna-
mism in the sixteenth century, Seville certainly was a far more varied and complex, and therefore far less cohesive, place than the small, conservative cities of Alta Extremadura.