After the Spanish conquest of the Andes the focus became very clearly the accumulation of wealth from the region’s natural resources. Indigenous towns were left alone as long as they continued paying tribute to the Spanish. Mining became a major need/industry because obviously this is how many of the resources were attained. I thought the whole idea of how the Spanish went about getting laborers for these mines was really interesting. They would require people in a town to work for two months straight at a mining site and then they got to go back to their village. The workers would work for absurd amounts of times, along the lines of twenty hours a day. They barely had time to eat and sleep. They also had to be away from their family and friends for these lengths of time.
There were many risks involved with mining, as there still are today, and there was obviously no regulation of it. The workers would have worked and lived in less than acceptable conditions. They also had the risk of cave-ins and therefore the potential for death. In the longer term, many of the workers who worked in mercury mines would have experienced toxicity from the handling of it as well as breathing it in. All of these things were more or less disregarded by the Spanish, though, because all that really mattered for them was the accumulation of the resources so they could send them back to Europe. It is amazing to me that this is the way that the resources from South America were attained. I think it seems like the Spanish would have gone and sought out the resources and found them themselves, but it does actually make a lot more sense that they would have used an alternate source of labor. This really changed the way of life for many indigenous people and their communities. I wonder what effects this really had on them, and what their view of the Spanish really was. I wonder if they preferred the new way of things over the ways of the Inca? Or not? It is interesting to consider.
