Neither Enslaved nor Adopted: Criados and Child Labor in Colonial Yucatan

Yucatan stands out as a region where exploitation of unpaid, forced indigenous and African-descent inhabitants took many forms and persisted with a tenacity unseen elsewhere in much of Latin America in spite of repeated royal prohibitions on coercive labor arrangements such as the repartimiento and servicio personal. Yet even after the eighteenth-century abolition of the encomienda (1785) and renewed efforts to eradicate repartimiento and servicio personal, one significant form of labor extraction persisted into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the removal of criados, nominally orphaned children from typically rural settings to work in elite and middle-class homes, usually in one of Yucatan’s larger towns or two cities, Campeche and Mérida.

The process of using the service of child laborers, unpaid and dependent upon the upper-class householders of the homes in which they resided, has received less attention than other coercive labor mechanisms, such as the repartimiento or the encomienda, or later, debt peonage. This oversight derives largely from the clandestine nature of the removal of criados from their pueblos of birth and their relocation to upper- and middle-class residences. Moreover, Criados defy easy categorization. Natives performed duties related to the repartimiento, encomienda, and servicio personal and slavery was restricted to Afro-Yucatecans, yet mestizos, Mayas, Afro-Yucatecans, and even occasional Spaniards served as criados. This paper explores the backgrounds of criados, the work they performed, and touches on the connection between the prevalence of criados in regions where elites had limited access to slave labor.