¿Peones Libres? Race, Minting, and the Rationalization of Free Labor in the Late Colonial Andes

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the mints in Potosí and Lima underwent significant modernization. Both had forced men of African and Andean descent to perform the extremely grueling labor that produced the macuquinas (“cut and hammer” coins) that circulated in the first 200 years of colonial rule. In order to produce new, milled-edge coinage and gain greater control over the mining industry and its profits, the Spanish monarchy ordered an overhaul of the mints’ buildings, administration, and labor. Highlighting the new position of peon libre (free peon) created in royal ordinances, this presentation compares the distinct ways in which the two mints rationalized the instructions to employ free labor.

Scholars have largely ignored the mint workforces, except to remark on the predominance of enslaved laborers of African descent in seventeenth-century Potosí. This paper challenges a broader historiography that simplifies this period as a transition from forced to free labor and demonstrates how the division of labor was at the forefront of the late-colonial crisis of patriarchy and the social order. By the eighteenth century, authorities in both locations had institutionalized criminal suspicion of the men of African and Andean descent who had labored there, using this both as a justification for forced labor and a way of organizing the social hierarchy. Yet, the two administrations responded quiet differently to the modernization. I argue that authorities in both mints interpreted free labor in loose ways that allowed for continued coercion, while emphasizing (in Lima) and de-emphasizing (in Potosí) racial divisions. Exploring how and why they did so offers insights into the entangled world of race and labor in the late colonial Andes.