Alfredo Luis Escudero’s article The New Age of Andeans (Hispanic American Historical Review 103:1) won the 2023 SHCY Fass-Sandin Article prize. The fascinating piece describes features of colonial administration in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest, from the 1530s to 1600s. The article explains how chronological age was introduced and standardised by census-takers, and shows how age was used to regulate and control Andean people. It persuasively argues that the European conception of age – tied to status and financial obligation to the state – was key to Spanish Colonial state formation. Historians of childhood are especially attuned to the variable definitions of age-based categories and shifts in status, so we interviewed Alfredo to dig into some of those points from his article.
I was taken with the idea of “functional age grading” in pre-colonial language, for example “edad de teta” meaning “breastfeeding age.” Could you give some other examples used to describe children and youth?
There are different words used to describe the process of aging in Andean communities which directly respond to the physical capability of a person to perform certain duties or activities. For example, the indigenous writer Guaman Poma’s account of the history of the Viceroyalty of Peru has a drawing of a 9-years-old boy who can hunt small birds (image above). Assuming this was a pre-colonial age category, the Inca chose to assign a specific age when a boy had enough physical strength and skills for hunting. That’s the age of the boy, and not a number. That is what I mean by a functional age.
Age and language seem so entwined—Toledo’s ordenanzas of the 1570s included terms “mozos” and “muchachos” for males 17 and under. What did those terms mean?
Yes, I agree upon the importance of words. The sources include different terms that seem similar in meaning. In Spanish, both mozo and muchacho refer generally to a young man, older than a child but not too old—perhaps the closest term in English would be “boys.” Its use varies according to personal perception, local customs, and sometimes to formal or informal settings. It is always ambiguous how old you need to be to fit in these categories. In the colonial administrative documents, however, the words “mozos” and “muchachos” were used with the same meaning, being under 18 years old (when they became official tributaries). Some documents use more mozos, some others use more muchachos, and some both terms. It is unclear if the distinction reflects the word preferred by the colonial inspector who registered them in the census, or by the people who lived in a specific community.
Completing the visitas, or census returns, was a cross-cultural encounter that might include resistance or negotiation when it came to ages.
Yes, the process of registration for tributary duties was a point of tension between Andeans and the colonial administration. So, Andeans were willing to contest them. I really like the case of Gaspar Cayua who in 1562 reported than under Inca rule (before the Spanish conquest), Andeans paid tribute under 20 years old. I suggest in the article that he mentions this specific chronological age not to reflect how things worked under the Inca (who had a functional sense of age categories) but to be able to communicate in the Spanish style of age-grading. He negotiated and resisted within this system to delay the payments—thereby alleviating the burden for his community.
Then in 1588 there was the case of Alonso Micher who was not registered in previous censuses so his age was unknown when the inspector came to his village. The Spanish inspector met with other heads of the community and “agreed” he was older than 50 years old—the age to stop paying tribute. This is an example of a negotiated effort to set an age, putting Alonso in a category for the elderly. The colonial inspector needed to agree, as he had no way to prove that Alonso was younger than 50 years old. In this case, the lack of a registered age made it possible to discount one tributary from the census, and therefore the overall tribute was also reduced.
You describe some other thresholds for children—teaching of scripture until age 10, not working in coca fields until 12… there are clear parallels with European patterns of childhood education and regulation. You also state that parents could use these regulations to ‘protect their children’—in what way?
I was thinking a lot in comparative terms when I was preparing this article. The parallels are intentional as I wanted to invite readers to think how age articulated similar legal and political purposes in both sides of the Atlantic.
For protection, I meant mostly physical labour. The coca fields, for example, were in the Amazon rainforest which was considered a dangerous region due to extreme heat and rain, and there were several reports of Andeans dying after working in these fields. So, the viceroy Toledo stablished an age threshold to limit children working in the fields. I found it interesting that most uses of chronological age in law were associated with children or youth, under 18 years old.
How did you access the paper records of the censuses?
Most censuses were part of larger land surveys of indigenous communities across the Spanish colonies. For the case of Peru, I could access them in the National Archive of Peru in the city of Lima. Because of the centrality of the tribute, copies of these censuses can also be found in other documents, such as litigation and administrative records. I also benefited from generations of ethnohistorians who published several of them, as these censuses provide extensive ethnographic information.
You describe chronological age as a “vector of power” rather than an objective reality. How can that idea inform other historians’ ways of thinking about age and childhood?
My main take is to think about the “construction” of age rather than a given fact. People are not born with an age. They are given one according to a political, social and epistemological context. When looking at the history of how these ages were created, for example in colonial censuses or in legal documents, we see multiple actors, cultural influences and political anxieties. There is a history behind the registration of age. This is perhaps particularly important for scholars of colonialism, as the expansion of European government also implied the re-construction of age categories, and even the mathematical knowledge to count time through Western numeracy—and thanks to this, I am more interested now in the social history of mathematics!
How does this article fit into your larger research project on early colonial visitas?
I am studying these visitas, censuses and land inspections, and the ways they created knowledge about the landscapes and the people. I investigate myriad topics from these sources, from the testing of crops at the altitudes of the Andes and descriptions of natural resources—such as rivers, forests, etc—to the growing influence of numbers and censuses as tools to enforce control over the population through tribute. I explore the making of demographic information, and how the administration created “tributaries” and new settlements with the purpose of facilitating administrators to govern over colonial lands and peoples. I also analyse how the constant process of registration shaped people’s lives in the villages. Through the construction of local archives, both for tribute and parishes, the ages of people were calculated.
Your acknowledgments mention a conference presentation in the development of your article. How do you find that helpful, and what advice would you have for others to make the most of presenting a paper?
Yes, I participated in the Workshop for the History of Childhood and Youth organized as an AHA event in 2020. It was very transformative for my project in two ways. Before the AHA event, I prepared a first version of this article for my Seminar on the History of Childhood and Youth in Latin America, and my approach at this moment was rooted in rich, but in a way “traditional” debates about the social history of colonial Latin America. The AHA Workshop opened my mind to think age as a power category that radically shaped society across different political and cultural contexts, and I got a lot of feedback. Afterwards, I was thinking more comparatively and engaging with other historiographies. It was then clear to me that chronological age was always a matter tensions and anxieties between state and individuals.
My main advice for those going to events with a wide range of scholars from different areas is to focus on common topics and themes. I got many of my ideas by reading historiography outside my field of Latin America, and by listening to what other scholars of colonialism have said about childhood and youth. My article is really a collaborative enterprise.
To end on a personal note… What was your favorite birthday or most significant age?
Right now, I can think of the most significant age was around 25 years old. I was struggling between “I am too young” to settle down in terms of staying in my stable job, and “I am too old” to going back to school for a PhD. There was (understandably) a lot of pressure on seeking financial stability towards the late twenties.
Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year?
I enjoyed this one on the importance of childhood and state making: Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska, 2014). I can also recommend the following book for those interested in thinking childhood, education, and the social history of mathematics in non-Western regions: Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
And your favorite way to switch off from research and writing?
I really enjoy biking and exercising. It is one of the few things that helps me to be physically and mentally away from research.
Alfredo Escudero is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at Florida International University. He has a focus on censuses and land surveys during the Spanish colonial period of the Andes. He seeks to understand the making of knowledge about Andean nature and peoples through tributary records, and the ways in which indigenous communities produced useful data for the colonial administration.
