The Mantuanos' Protest
For several successive generations, in some cases as many as four generations by the 1740s, steadily expanding cacao production had given similarly steadily expanding elite families the means to sustain the level of material wealth and social standing which their ancestors had enjoyed. For these Caraqueños the Tuy River boom of the 1720s and 1730s was only the continuation of a remarkable process of expansion that had gone on without much variation since the 1670s. But there are indications that by the 1740s, especially after the importation of African slaves came to a virtual stop in 1738, the cacao economy could no longer support the expanding
number of people who could claim elite status in the Caracas community by virtue of their illustrious lineage and family name. The fear of downward social mobility does not appear stated explicitly in any of the available sources, but a conspicuous theme in the literature of protest is that the Guipuzcoana Company's policies were harmful to families, and to elite families in particular, especially those that were headed by elderly parents soon to be succeeded by a new generation. The prominent place given to elite widows on many of the petitions drawn up to protest the Company manifests this concern. As bulwarks of the social order, there were no individuals who were more vulnerable or more worthy of royal attention and protection than these women.
In January 1741 the Council of the Indies received a petition protesting the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company signed by "eleven widows, vecinas of Caracas and cosecheras de cacao ." The memorial claimed that the households of these women had haciendas that together produced more than 4000 fanegas of cacao per year, but that they had very little else besides cacao to sell, and that because of the low prices offered by the Company for cacao they had become "indebted and subjugated" to the Basque monopolists. The widows informed the council that the previous years had been ones of great agricultural expansion for the province, that many new haciendas had been created, some of them with credit provided by the ecclesiastical establishment, and that many of these haciendas were now in danger of foreclosure because the price paid for cacao, even at ten pesos the fanega, was not enough to pay what was owed. The Caracas diocese stood to suffer if prices did not rise, for the tithes were reduced and the people had nothing with which to make gifts (limosna ) to the church.
The sale of imported African slaves, so essential to the expansion of cacao agriculture, had become part of the Company monopoly as a result of the war with England and the collapse of the English asiento, but in 1741 there were very few slaves offered for sale and the Company collected "20, 25 and more" fanegas of cacao for each one. Twenty years earlier, the women complained, the same amount of cacao would have purchased as many as three slaves. What was especially galling to the widows was the very different image of itself that the Company projected: "They would make you believe that the Company is the cause of the progress in
the Province, because the people of this city can take advantage of the fact that the Company will buy at a reasonable price all the cacao we can grow, but it is certain that for the most part they do not pay even ten pesos." At this price, the widows' haciendas, despite their productive potential, had become nearly "useless," which was "a great misfortune."[15]
The price paid for cacao stood at nine pesos the fanega in 1744, and, because it was widely known that the same cacao would bring fifty-two pesos on the Mexican market, the ire of most Caracas hacienda owners reached a critical point. They were angry because they were sure that the alternativa, repartimiento por padrón , and quota policies were designed to allow the Guipuzcoana Company to make excessive profits by keeping the purchase price for cacao far below what it would have been in a free market. In November 1744 many of Caracas's most influential townspeople, describing themselves as "Interested Citizens, both Merchants and Planters," prepared a petition to the king, begging for royal clemency and relief from the Company's exploitative practices. Beginning once more with the town's prominent widows, this memorial bore the signatures of ninety-three people, representatives of most but, significantly, not all of the elite families of Caracas.[16]
The 1744 memorial is a most useful document, both for the names it provides of those mantuanos who were willing to protest the Company, and for the names of similarly prominent individuals who are conspicuous by their absence from the list (appendix H). Comparison of elite townspeople who protested in 1744 with other mantuanos who did not sign the memorial on the basis of certain pertinent characteristics provides a rather clear idea of the Guipuzcoana Company's impact in Caracas. In the following pages the signatories are first identified by family and the quantity of cacao owned by them is determined. Then three possible reasons for their opposition to the Company, none directly related to the economy or cacao agriculture, are considered: they were members of families with longer tenure in the colony than those who did not sign; their origins were not identifiably Basque; and they were members of families with considerable political influence in Caracas, measured by town council activism, while those who did not sign did not have this activist tradition in their family backgrounds. Next, two factors of an economic sort, debts owed the Company
and the possession of sugar trapiches (sugar sold in the local market was an alternative to the cacao export trade), are used as a test of the financial vulnerability of the memorial signatories. Finally, all of these circumstances are examined in the specific cases of three families, one, the Blanco, who were firmly opposed to the Company, and two, the Bolívar and the Palacios, who either made no complaint or supported the Basque monopolists.