to his supplemental income as a gold prospector of sorts, he tells a story that sheds light on the extractive gold economy imposed by the Spanish in the region. While talking about sacred Muisca lagoons, he tells us about what he calls a pecado (sin), that is, about having persuaded an old shaman of the Teusacá lagoon into helping him extract gold, which, reputedly, had been thrown into the lagoon as part of native religious rituals. The shaman fell on the ground once they reached the lagoon, and as Rodríguez Freile continues, “I was never able to get him up or get another word out of him. I left him there and came back empty-handed with the loss of my investment” (Chapter 5). Did the shaman fall on the ground because he suddenly died? If this is the case, then the sin confessed is not only his greed but also his anti-Christian treatment of a dead man. Or, since he was a shaman previously in charge of that sacred site, did he simply drop to his knees to pray? If this is the case, then it would be a clear instance of indigenous resistance against the domination and plunder of the Europeans and Euro-Americans.
What is clear in this story is the author’s participation in the exploitation of the natives’ wealth and resources, as well as his contempt for the old shaman’s fate. El carnero is, therefore, written in a sociopolitical structure defined by the crown of Castile’s expansionist power and its concomitant encouragement of Spanish immigration; it is the Castilian textual site in which a formal education and access to libraries was limited to the white minority (Spanish and criollo) who controlled the land, its native people, its resources, and the administrative bureaucracy. By its insertion into this sociopolitical and cultural structure, El carnero was written for an elite readership that was generally hostile toward non-European subjectivities and as involved in the ideology of empire as Rodríguez Freile himself was.
The Violent Land of El carnero
A great tension between the indigenous population and Spanish colonialism seeps through the lines of El carnero. The region in which the author lived and wrote was the highland area of today’s provinces of Cundinamarca and Boyacá in central Colombia, which was inhabited by the Muisca, also known as the Chibcha. The descendants of these people correspond today to the majority of the population in these same areas, and some of them (indigenous or mestizo) have embarked upon a process of recuperation of their indigenous culture and territories, as well as in the construction of political agency.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Muisca occupied a territory of about 10,000 square miles. As a rule, the Spanish were attracted to this kind of densely populated area because their main economic enterprise was based on the acquisition of local labor for the extraction of the precious metals accumulated by the natives or present in the mines. The abundant gold in the Muisca, however, was the product of trade, since there were no gold mines in their region. The encomienda (an institution of extraction of riches in which a Spanish encomendero received tributes and a labor force from an indigenous community and their land in exchange for Christianization) was the first economic system used for the extraction of these minerals; it also provided the native labor for the agricultural production needed to feed the Spanish and criollos, as well as the construction of the urban infrastructure needed for the comfort of this invading population. Most studies of El carnero pay no heed to the link between this infrastructure, the wealth accumulated by Spanish and Euro-Americans, including Rodríguez Freile himself, or the massive amount of indigenous forced labor needed to make this accumulation possible.
Different estimates of the Muisca population at the time of the Spanish conquest go from 300,000 to as high as 2 million, although most scholars agree that a figure somewhere between the two was most likely, as historians Frank Safford and Marco Palacios point out. A century later, and as a result of the pressure of the Spanish and criollo mistreatment and demands for labor and resources, as well as European diseases, 90 percent of this population had perished, a fact that Rodríguez Freile acknowledged: “of all of them, only a few remain in this jurisdiction and that of Tunja, and even these ones, we’d better say no more about this” (Chapter 7). In spite of desperate military resistance by the Muisca (such as that of chief Tundama or Duitama), the Spaniards quickly prevailed on the account of the natives’ less advanced military technology and ongoing civil wars.
The encomienda flourished until the end of the sixteenth century. By 1570 (when Rodríguez Freile was about 14 years old) a contemporary Spanish historian, López de Velasco, found in Santafé de Bogotá about 600 male Spaniards who lived off the labor and resources of approximately 40,000 indigenous tribute-payers. In Tunja, a city close to Santafé, there were 200 male Spaniards who had in their service 50,000 indigenous tributaries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, this region (as was the case with most of the eastern highlands) lost its importance as a producer of gold, even though, as Rodríguez Freile himself complains, there was still much of this precious metal buried but little indigenous labor to extract it. The rich farmland of the region was, before and after the conquest, a great breadbasket that benefited adjacent regions. After the conquest, the Spaniards produced a good deal of grains, woven textiles, and some luxury products such as cheese for export. Agricultural crops and cheese were produced on Rodríguez Freile’s farm, as stated in his lawsuit documentation, and procured him generous returns.
The significance of the elaborate casos of civil and moral transgressions of the powerful white elite lies not only in the fact that in them Rodríguez Freile masterfully narrates private, scandalous stories by making use of numerous literary strategies, but more importantly in the fact that these stories demonstrate the violence that plagues the New Kingdom of Granada. However, while this horizontal violence (among powerful white equals) has gained much attention from literary critics as illustrating the origins of Latin American literature, the existence of a more prevailing and enduring vertical violence is ignored: that against the dominated indigenous peoples.
An anonymous 1560 report on a visita (inspection by a crown official) to the New Kingdom of Granada when Rodríguez Freile was about 4 years old illustrates well the daily violence of the Spanish and criollo as well as their predatory reliance on the natives’ labor and resources. According to this report (transcribed by historian Hermes Tovar) there were in Santafé at this time 55 encomienda holders, 57 tribes, and 36,550 indigenous, whose meticulous taxation on behalf of the Spanish seigneurial comfort yielded the following products:
By what can be seen in this tally, the gold quantity amounts to 9,241 pesos of good gold, and the blankets to 9,772; the yield of all the wheat, barley, corn, and bean seeds planted for each encomendero amounts, according to the record, to 1,548 bushels; these crops are planted, taken care of, harvested, and stored in their respective encomendero house by the Indians; besides all this shown in this tally, they hand over many trifles of the land such as salt, deer, fiber thread, chickens, eggs, fish, and coca leaves which they got from their plots, and grass and firewood for the sustenance of their houses [obviously the encomenderos’ residence].
Furthermore, this violence was not limited to public spaces but was present also in the silent enslavement and mistreatment of native women as maids in private residences. There is also judicial violence. Rodríguez Freile celebrates the Spanish authorities’ draconian treatment of indigenous people, which, according to him, “kept the land in peace” (Chapter 15). A case in point is that of the government of his admired tutor, licenciado Alonso Pérez de Salazar (who took him to Spain when he was a young man), and whose application of judicial power over the uprooted, displaced, terrorized, and overworked natives are, for Rodríguez Freile, proof of the able construction of a colonial order. The following description leaves room for the author’s pride and pleasure in the public humiliation and punishment suffered by the indigenous:
Pérez de Salazar would bring a bunch of Indians out on
