Juan de Matienzo y su proyecto de sujeción laboral: identidades funcionales para la compulsión de mano de obra indígena en Charcas colonial, 1567

Abstract

While acting as a judge in colonial Charcas (1561-1579), Juan de Matienzo wrote and dispatched to the Crown a vast corpus of documents, integrated by letters, reports and a thick treaty entitled Gobierno del Perú (1567). Beyond his sharp legal observations –highly valuable for the history of indigenous rights– and his political and tax provisions, the treaty also contains a discourse on indigenous peoples that fits in the logic of a protoethnography that was instrumental in the colonial project of labor subjugation in the turbulent decades of 1560-70. Based on textual fragments contained in the first part of this seminal work, we analyze the mutual relationship between identity classifications of indigenous people and its close relation with their labor determinism. We argue that this anthropological naturalization was the discursive precedent for legitimizing a classificatory order, which was functional to peninsular colonialism of late 16th century. Furthermore, we reveal how the authority of Juan de Matienzo’s descriptions of otherness was sustained by the declaration of an in situ knowledge, as well as the strategic uses he granted to the classical tradition (with emphasis on Artistotle and Plato).