The Main Threads of the Story

We have now followed the winding and interwoven trails of Azángaro's history for some one hundred and fifty years, and it is necessary to seek high ground allowing us to look back and discern the major direction of these trails. Several turning points mark the trajectory of the region's society and economy: the 1780s, the 1850s, and the 1920s. The middle decades of the eighteenth century were a period of growth for the northern altiplano, fostered by the recovery of silver mining in High Peru and Cuzco's booming woolen industry, which drew its raw materials from livestock herders in Azángaro and neighboring provinces. Encouraged by Bourbon enlightened notions about property, provincial elites sought to convert informal exploitation of Indian communal land and labor, hitherto justified by notions of reciprocity, into formalized estates with a resident labor force. Hacienda formation continued strongly for much of the eighteenth century. Although the altiplano's population recovered vigorously from the epidemics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, population density remained low. Land was not scarce in absolute terms; it had monetary value only in conjunction with livestock. Nevertheless, conflicts over land rose sharply after midcentury, both among community peasants and among the communities, their kurakas, and other sectors of the hispanized provincial elite. Bourbon policy limited the lands each community could hold according to its population and sold "excess lands" to private landholders. Affluent peasants increasingly relied on landholdings in fee simple. But the major challenge for the livelihood of the communal peasantry was posed by the growth of forced surplus extractions, in the form of repartos de bienes, and taxes and fees levied by crown and church. During the 1760s and 1770s the peasant economy was threatened primarily through harsher terms of the colonial tributary mode of production.

The era of crisis and gradual realignment began during the 1780s and lasted until the mid-1850s. Competition from European textile imports, the semisecular decline of Upper Peru's silver production, and, after independence, rising transport costs coincided with depressed prices. Elite-controlled trading circuits between Upper and Lower Peru gradually decayed. The division of the former "Andean space," first into separate viceroyalties and later into distinct republics, drove the disruption of commercial circuits forward. Complementary exchange relations between peasants fared better during these decades.

The Túpac Amaru Rebellion marks the onset of the era of crisis and realignment for the northern altiplano, as it exacerbated the contradictions of the Bourbons' political economy. The colonial authorities relied both on repression and limitations of elite surplus extraction to regain control over the communal peasantry in the Andean highlands. They sought to halt the consolidation of haciendas but could not bring themselves to implement their protoliberal property notions on disputed crown lands or in the peasant communities. Estates of kurakas, the church, and private hispanized entrepreneurs lost land to peasant squatters. In the last decades before independence a sense of uncertainty permeated social and property relations in the altiplano. To say that the peasants lost the Túpac Amaru Rebellion is only half true.

The agrarian reform laws of the 1820s helped to consolidate the gains that peasants had achieved through land occupations and lifted the corporate character from the communities. But early republican governments did not challenge social hierarchies in the communities, as they sought to stabilize revenue collection from the head tax. With demand for labor stagnant, elite-controlled trade in disarray, the land base more secure, and per capita collections of head tax and of other forms of surplus extraction diminished, the Indian community peasantry enjoyed a brief interval of enhanced autonomy, crucial for its capacity to withstand the gamonal onslaught that was to come.

During the first three postindependence decades a new provincial elite gradually took shape and sought to set the criteria for social stratification. The disintegration of the colonial system of domination, based largely on state-sanctioned surplus extraction, laid bare a social landscape that was "Indian" to a surprising extent. Except for parish priests and a handful of large landholding families of colonial origin, the emerging provincial elite thus pulled itself up by its own bootstraps from modest backgrounds. The tools to do so were provided by opportunities in trade and control over public office, avenues to power intertwined in broadening clientele networks. It was only during the early 1850s that traders and large landholders

in the northern altiplano relinquished all hopes of reconstructing colonial trading circuits and fully embraced the exportation of wools as the inevitable base for provincial trade. And only the upswing of the export economy during the 1850s provided the fiscal wherewithal to stabilize political power on the provincial and local levels. The emerging hispanized elite relied on notions gleaned from the ascending European bourgeois civilization—the importance of private property, education, and "modern" patterns of consumption—to establish its difference from the vast majority of Indian community peasants and estate colonos and to buttress its claim to exclusive exercise of political power and leadership in the province. The Indians now became those "barbarians" who did not embrace the hallmarks of a progressive civilization, and by the late nineteenth century their distinctness was increasingly described in racial terms. Although income and property distribution was gradated between the most affluent large landholding families and the poorest peasants, with a considerable overlap between marginal finca owners, small traders, and affluent peasants, altiplano society became polarized sociopolitically.

The redefinition of the Indians from a historic corporate group to an intrinsically distinct racial group outside of the pale of civilization came to form the basis of the neocolonial relationship between the peasantry and the provincial elite. It justified enhanced surplus extraction by local authorities and the increasing incorporation of community peasants into estates as colonos. The self-made gamonal elite invested its growing power to convert the Indian peasantry into directly dependent clients in the spheres of both commercialization and production. But this was a dialectical process. One could equally say that it was the growing gamonal control over Indian land and labor and over the peasants' commodities in the marketplace that constituted the essence of the provincial elite's growing power. The gamonales, rural bosses in the districts and the province, constructed their own position in society both through intimacy with the peasant world, from whence many had come themselves, and through difference from that world.

Between the 1850s and 1920 the wool export trade was the motor of the economy of the altiplano and of much of southern Peru, just as silver mining had been during the colonial period. Although export volumes grew only modestly, rising international prices delivered growing incomes to producers and traders. Decreasing costs of international transport and the devaluation of Peruvian and Bolivian currencies augmented regional returns on the export trade. Articulated through the rail line between the altiplano and the port of Mollendo, the wool export business created a dendritic pattern of trade throughout much of southern Peru. It fostered

a new spatial pattern of commerce centered on the entrepôt Arequipa and slowly marginalized exchanges with the Bolivian altiplano. The wool export economy helped define a common southern Peruvian identity that had first appeared in the political struggles during the Túpac Amaru Rebellion and Peru's postindependence civil wars. After an interim phase in which prominent altiplano merchants acted quite autonomously as wool bulkers, merchant bankers, and distributors of European imports, in the late 1880s the Arequipa export houses began to extend their influence in the production zone through a hierarchical system of agencies and itinerant wool buyers. Traders and producers alike became increasingly dependent on credit from the Arequipa firms. Although competitive on each level of trade, wool buyers sought to create local monopolies and firmly tie producers to themselves. By the early twentieth century peasants were eager to participate in trade but bitterly resented and resisted the ruses and violence of hispanized traders and local authorities that greatly diminished their returns on every deal.

Regional trade in foodstuffs, stimulants, textiles, household goods, and building materials grew in tandem with wool exports. Although imports gradually led to a restructuring of processing industries, artisanal production did not vanish; in fact, local processing of wools grew more rapidly than wool exports did during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Low productivity, in both the agrarian sector and processing, in association with the neocolonial system of domination, kept income levels low for most people in the region and precluded an advancing division of labor. In addition, high transport costs, even after the establishment of the rail link, and maintenance of localized fashions and tastes and of long-standing personalized exchange relations among peasants in various ecological zones contributed to keep regional artisanal production competitive with imports and the modest beginnings of import-substituting industries.

Fueled by the rise of the wool export trade, old and new hispanized large landholders acquired an unprecedented amount of land from community peasants to found new livestock estates and expand old ones. Land purchases were correlated with fluctuations in the demand for wool and the price of livestock. Only as an outcome of this massive process of hacienda expansion, swallowing between one-fourth and one-third of Azángaro's usable lands in the short span of some sixty years, did livestock haciendas come to control the majority of land in the altiplano. The number of haciendas and fincas in Azángaro province more than doubled between the 1820s and 1940, with most new estates founded since the 1850s. Most of the new foundations remained small, cobbled together by traders, officials, and established landholding families through the acquisition of small strings of peasant

estancias. Some two dozen haciendas had become very large indeed by World War I. All large haciendas had their origin in colonial estates, expanding rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by incorporating other estates and numerous peasant holdings. Church property, much of it operated through long-term leaseholds, survived virtually undiminished until the second decade of the present century.

The distance between the income and wealth of families owning large estates and most other hacendado families had grown since the mid-nineteenth century. Most affluent hacendado families could hold on to their landholdings for three or more generations and found ways to avoid splintering their properties through inheritance. Indeed, revisionist writers on Latin American haciendas may have overemphasized the rate of sales of haciendas, as they failed to consider frequent intrafamily contracts. Hacendados realized the central importance of family cohesion for holding on to the family's estate and social position.

Despite the enormous upswing in land transfers, it would be misleading to speak of a land market in the altiplano around 1900. There was no open marketplace for land. Perfect strangers, without social or family ties, political power, or business connections in the province, normally had no way of knowing what was "for sale" and virtually no chance at all of buying rural property. In most cases the notarial bill of sale, which purported to be a contract between free and equal agents, in fact inscribed a long-standing relation of dependency or, worse, a fait accompli based on deceit or violence. Over the sixty-five years of the wool export economy, prices for haciendas gradually came to reflect market conditions, and the custom of "conventional prices," changing only with major long-term economic shifts, gave way. But as late as 1920 prices for peasant lands still reflected specific social constellations between seller and buyer rather than supply and demand.

A fully developed land market is intimately connected to the notion of private property, as defined by laws and sanctioned by the state's law enforcement and judicial agencies. Such a notion was not unequivocally accepted in the altiplano. Land invasions, vague land boundaries, and livestock rustling remained pandemic. The ambivalence toward private property was shared by community peasants and large landholders. Members of the provincial elite made fine speeches about the "defense of private property," which was, after all, one of the key planks of the worldview through which they hoped to distinguish themselves from the Indian peasantry. Yet in moving border posts, leading their livestock onto neighbors' fields, impounding neighbors' livestock, and, manu militari , occupying lands claimed by others, they were ready to disregard precepts of private property if in doing so they could broaden their own control over

land. The courts, the notaries, and the land registry office in Puno functioned not as indisputable arbiters and guarantors of property rights but as arenas for contesting power between various gamonales and their clients. A title deed, highly prized by peasants and landholders alike, served not as a symbol of indisputable rights but as one of various tools or weapons wielded in the struggle over land. Possession of land required its unchallenged, habitual use or the effective projection of power up to the borders one claimed. A property title, without use or power over the land, did not guarantee possession.

In parcialidades and ayllus corporate communal landholding became rare after the agrarian reform of the 1820s. During the following century it was largely the patrilineal family descent groups, embedded within the communities, that continued the practice of common usufruct of pastures. With higher livestock and population densities and the growing market opportunities for livestock products, however, the sharing of pasture commons came under pressure in the family descent groups. Communal solidarity remained important on other levels. As gamonales increasingly used the parcialidades' hierarchy of officeholders to extract labor, commodities, and money, the locus of that solidarity often shifted to sectors of peasants within the old communities, the family descent groups, for example.

The number of autonomous rural peasant settlements grew sharply during the early decades of the twentieth century, and the principales were losing their grip on the community population. These shifts were closely connected to the penetration of market forces in the communities' social stratification. Inequality, nothing new in the communities, increasingly came to be based on economic factors. But that did not diminish the need or the practice of communal solidarity, in defense of land, in resistance to arbitrary demands by authorities, in common work projects, and in celebrations. As long as provincial and local elites construed their power in juxtaposition to an Indian peasantry marked as inferior and different, communal organizations, expressions of ethnic identity and defense, would remain strong.

The number of colonos residing on livestock estates increased greatly between the late 1850s and 1920. Most were the former owners of the estancias that new and old estates were incorporating. Because the colonos maintained their autonomous peasant economy, often even continuing to reside on their former land, the change in their way of life and their income was less dramatic than has often been assumed. The majority of hacendados did not have the capital resources required to attempt a change to capital-intensive methods of production. Like the officeholders in the districts, they continued to exercise a paternalistic authority, all encompassing and

fragile at the same time. In most of the small fincas and some of the largest haciendas the owner's control over resources remained strictly limited, and often the colonos together held as much livestock as their patrón. The minority of hacendados who sought to build highly productive livestock enterprises based on wage labor encountered massive colono resistance. Change to a wage labor regime here occurred in a painstakingly slow process between the 1920s and the 1950s.