Conditions of Encomienda Indians in Puerto Rico

 

Another mention of Diego Muriel digitized at PARES contains some very interesting information on the Indian laborers of  the royal Hacienda of Ribera de Toa in 1528. Established with indigenous Puerto Rico caciques and Indian laborers, the document provides some powerful testimony about the exploitative conditions in which Indians in the encomienda system toiled under. Reading between the lines, one can surmise that the "Taino" of Puerto Rico, at least in this hacienda, were scarcely acculturated into Spanish ways. The document lists the improved treatments to be given to the Indians, including ensuring their indoctrination in the Catholic faith and having access to Mass twice per week. One can probably conclude that before 1528, and perhaps after this year, they were not devout or deeply Catholic. In addition, the stipulation that Muriel see to it that the Indians understand marriage and cease the practice of males shifting to different women suggests the indigenous laborers were not following Spanish or Catholic norms of marriage and domestic organization. 

The other proposed methods to improve the treatment of the Indian workforce included the provision of meat, hammocks or blankets, and additional clothes. Perhaps the population was still wearing Indian-styled clothing of enaguas and whatever they received for use during worktime. Overall, this suggests an indigenous population that was probably maintaining older, precolonial practices in religion, spirituality, diet, and dress to whatever extent that was still possible in 1528. As Guitar revealed in her dissertation on Tainos of Hispaniola, the indigenous population in Puerto Rico was probably still practing their areytos, cohoba rituals, and the ballgame, too. Unfortunately for us, however, no one recorded more of the traditions, areytos, or customs of the Puerto Rican Indian that may have given us far more information on precolonial, pre-Hispanic history. But the thin or superficial conversion and Hispanization of the indigenous population definitely explains why their legacy is so strong in Puerto Rico and the Spanish Caribbean.