from their necks, others with ears of corn, others with playing cards, spatulas or balls on the account of their vagrancy, that is, each with the standard of his/her crime. (Chapter 15)
Rodríguez Freile’s distaste for the issue of protecting the native population from abuse, as well as that of our contemporary commentators, who think of seventeenth-century society as peaceful, are good examples of the naturalization of everyday violence in both the New Kingdom of Granada during that time and in today’s opinions about colonial cultural history. Either through systematic military repression (the case of the rebellious Pijao) or gradual and persistent exploitation, the violence exercised over the indigenous population in the society in which El carnero was written was ubiquitous to the point of appearing natural for those subjects not affected by it.
Juan Rodríguez Freile grew up in what historian Germán Colmenares called a “gold economy” which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ transatlantic mercantile capitalism, through a complex web of commercial exchanges, connected the Spanish metropolis with many corners of the American territory. This trade network determined both the nature and quantity of the goods produced in America as well as the excruciatingly exhausting work demanded from the indigenous and African peoples. Large landowners (at first primarily encomenderos), with an economy based on tributes from the indigenous, coexisted with extensive mining operations, which frequently depended on local indigenous technology. The dominance of the encomenderos was derived from the first shares of the conquest loot, including the indigenous lands and labor force. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, and when Rodríguez Freile was a grown man, the encomendero economy was showing signs of exhaustion. The growing non-encomendero Spanish and criollo population competed fiercely for the increasingly scarce indigenous labor force monopolized by the encomenderos, and the progressively more regulatory presence of the Spanish state put great pressure on the encomienda system, which, by the mid-seventeenth century (when Rodríguez Freile was an old man), had become practically obsolete in the area. The demise of this system meant greater economical opportunities for the average Euro-American like Rodríguez Freile.
As a cattle and dairy-farm owner who supplemented his income with the occasional extraction of gold, Rodríguez Freile fit into a gold economy that was beginning to depend less on agricultural goods provided by the native communities and more on those produced by small, nonindigenous farmers. These small farmers depended upon native labor, the hiring of which (with a nominal wage) was now permitted by the crown. Hence, two kinds of economic activities took place in the central region of the New Kingdom of Granada which directly involved Rodríguez Freile: diminishing gold production and increasing agriculture and commerce.
In the written history of the New Kingdom of Granada, the most apparent social force is that of encomenderos, merchants, miners, the state and its bureaucracy, and of course, the church. These kinds of Spanish and criollo characters and their vicissitudes profusely occupy, as we saw, Rodríguez Freile’s attention as well as most of the literary criticism that El carnero has received. The principal position of other social forces is less apparent in this society and its written history. This is the case of the indigenous people whose voice was seldom expressed in El carnero in any ideological formulation that resulted in an appreciation of their culture or political agency. The violent revolts during and after the conquest (such as those of the Pijao and Carare Indians – see Chapter 19) were marginalized in a portrayal of perfidious expressions of savagery; or in the case of the early conflicts with the indigenous under the encomienda system, which tended to be conceptualized inside the dominant scholastic ideology, their representation amounted (according to the Spaniards) to an improper understanding of the natives’ place in their segregated república de indios (Indian republic). A clear example is that of the cacique of Turmequé, don Diego de Torres (and his struggle against the mistreatment of his people), whom Rodríguez Freile represented as a marginal chief unduly and ineptly involved in Spanish politics (Chapters 13–14).
Rodríguez Freile’s Opportunity as A Farmer
When the indigenous communities were first subjected to the encomienda system in the region (ca. 1538) and provided the agricultural goods needed by the Spanish population, they still lived and farmed in their ancestral lands, which at the time were largely untouched by Spanish confiscations. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, and with the demographic collapse of the indigenous population, the state aggressively encouraged the relocation and confinement of the remaining population into poblamientos (towns) and resguardos (reservations of sorts). The move was intended to break the encomenderos’ monopoly over the indigenous labor force as well as more easily control the indigenous people for religious proselytism and the Spaniards’ and criollos’ own labor demands. This move also freed more indigenous land for the colonizers’ confiscations. El carnero illustrates this situation when dealing with president Andrés Venero de Leiva’s term in office. According to Rodríguez Freile, he “ardently encouraged the natives’ conversion by making them live close together in their towns and by supporting their churches” (Chapter 10).
The increase in the Spanish and criollo urban population and the native’s demographic collapse broke the original balance between the needs of colonizers and the indigenous economy to satisfy them, which supported the encomienda system. The result was the emergence of the first estancias (farms juridically different from the encomienda) around the land of the encomenderos, one of which was acquired by Rodríguez Freile. In other words, the author of El carnero found his economical opportunity with the breakup of the encomendero power. And since by then the indigenous were not able to make a living by solely cultivating the small land of their resguardos, they were compelled to work in the Spaniards’ and criollos’ farms. This was very probably Rodríguez Freile’s source of labor for his own estancia. These farms, once Spanish legislation made it easier to secure an indigenous labor force, were able to create a type of agricultural unit capable of supplying the cities and mining centers in and outside the Santafé de Bogotá area with cereals, dairy products, and root vegetables.
These intricacies of the social inequalities among Spaniards, criollos, poor mestizos, and the indigenous are totally erased in Rodríguez Freile’s self-portrait as an estanciero, an erasure that has been preserved by most nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of El carnero. This is evident when Rodríguez Freile, paraphrasing the Latin poet Horace and resorting to a literary trope known as beatus ille (praising the charms and simplicity of country life), proudly proclaims:
Fortunate is the man who, far away from business, and with modest assets, quietly and peacefully retires; he whose nourishment is assured by the fruits of the land that he cultivates, because, as virtuous as mother nature is, it produces them; fortunate is the one who does not expect his reward from the hands of greedy and tyrannical men. (Chapter 21)
El carnero, Its Commentators and the Indigenous Subject
The scholarly attention given to this text has stemmed in two opposite directions. On the one hand, historians such as Juan Friede, David Brading, Germán Colmenares, Julián Vargas Lesmes, and Martha Herrera Ángel – among others – have great confidence in El carnero’s referential value. This is evident in the frequent consultations they make of it in order to illustrate historical characters as well as colonial society, politics, and culture involving both Iberian newcomers and native subjectivities. Literary critics, on the other hand, tend to dismiss or downplay El carnero’s referentiality and have popularized the text’s current reputation
