Unit 10 · Societies of the Americas

The people we often call the Aztec called themselves the Mexica. Around 1325 they founded their city, Tenochtitlan, on a small island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico. The land was swampy and hard to use. In less than two hundred years, the Mexica turned it into one of the largest cities in the world. Mexico City stands on the same spot today.

To grow food, farmers built chinampas. A chinampa was a long, narrow garden made by piling mud and plants inside a fence of stakes in shallow water. Trees planted at the edges held the soil in place. Canals ran between the plots, so farmers could move crops by canoe. Chinampas could give several harvests a year of maize, beans, squash and flowers.

Three long causeways, or raised roads, linked the island to the shore. An aqueduct carried fresh water from springs at Chapultepec. By about 1500, Tenochtitlan may have held around 200,000 people, though historians give different estimates. In 1428 it joined two other cities in the Triple Alliance. Together they built an empire that collected tribute from many peoples across central Mexico.

At the top of Mexica society was the huey tlatoani, or great speaker, the ruler of Tenochtitlan. Below him were the pipiltin, the nobles. Nobles served as officials, judges, priests and army leaders. They could own land worked by others. They wore finer cotton clothes and could live in stone houses. Noble boys often went to a school called the calmecac, where they studied religion, history and law.

Most people were macehualtin, or commoners. They farmed, fished, built, made crafts and served as soldiers. Commoners belonged to a local group called a calpolli, a neighborhood of related families. The calpolli gave each family land to farm and ran a school for its boys. In return, commoners paid tribute in goods and gave labor for public works like temples and dikes.

The line between the groups was strong, but not closed. A commoner who captured enemies in war could win honors, better clothing and gifts of land. Laws also set out duties for nobles, and they could be punished harshly for crimes. Supporters of this order saw it as a fair trade of service for protection. Critics, then and now, point out that commoners carried most of the heavy work.

The pochteca were long-distance merchants. They traveled in groups for weeks, carrying goods to far towns and bringing back feathers, jade, cacao and cotton. They were organized in guilds, with their own leaders and their own god. They also brought back news. Rulers sometimes used them as spies. Some pochteca grew very rich, but they were careful not to show off, because nobles did not want rivals.

The market rules were strict. Market judges, like the ones in the opening story, settled arguments and punished cheating. Most trade was barter, which means swapping goods for goods. Cacao beans and cotton cloth worked a bit like money for setting prices. The Aztec tribute system also moved goods: conquered towns sent cloth, food, feathers and other items to Tenochtitlan on a fixed schedule.

At the bottom of society were enslaved people, called tlacotin. A person could become enslaved for debt, as punishment for a crime, or by selling himself in hard times. Aztec slavery was harsh, but it differed from later slavery in the Americas. Enslaved people could marry and own some property. Their children were born free. Some were able to buy back their freedom.

Walk through the rainforest of northern Guatemala and you come to Tikal. Its stone temples rise above the treetops, some more than 60 meters high. During the Classic period, about 250 to 900 CE, Tikal was one of dozens of Maya cities spread across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Other great cities included Calakmul, Copan and Palenque.

The Maya did not form one empire. They lived in city-states, cities that each ruled the farms and villages around them. Each had its own ruler, called a k’uhul ajaw, or holy lord. People believed the king stood between them and the gods. Kings led ceremonies, went to war and built temples. Powerful cities like Tikal and Calakmul formed alliances and fought long wars against each other.

Kings left records on tall carved stones called stelae. One famous ruler, K’inich Janaab Pakal of Palenque, ruled for about 68 years in the 600s CE. His tomb, found in 1952 inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, held a jade mask. Below the kings were nobles, scribes, craftworkers and many farmers. Farmers grew maize, beans and squash and gave labor to build the great plazas.

The Maya created one of the few full writing systems invented in the Americas. Scribes used glyphs, signs that could stand for whole words or for sounds. They carved glyphs on stone and painted them in books made of bark paper. Spanish priests burned many of these books in the 1500s. Only four are known to survive today. Scholars have learned to read most Maya glyphs since the 1970s and 1980s.

Maya counting used a base of 20, not 10. A dot stood for one, a bar stood for five, and a shell sign stood for zero. Zero let the Maya write large numbers by place value. Each step up in place was worth 20 times more. Very few ancient peoples anywhere had a symbol for zero, and the Maya developed theirs on their own.

Maya astronomers watched the sun, moon and Venus closely. They kept a 260-day ritual count and a 365-day solar year. The two ran side by side and lined up again every 52 years. They also kept the Long Count, which tracked days from a starting date far in the past. Many Maya cities in the southern lowlands were left empty between about 800 and 900 CE. But the Maya people did not vanish. Millions of Maya people live in Mexico and Central America today and speak Mayan languages.

High in the Andes Mountains of Peru sits the city of Cusco. In the early 1400s it was the center of a small kingdom. Then, from about 1438, a ruler named Pachacuti began a burst of conquest. His son and grandson went further. By the early 1500s the Inca ruled land stretching about 4,000 kilometers along western South America, from today’s Ecuador to Chile. It was the largest empire in the Americas at the time.

The Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, meaning the four parts together. Its ruler was the Sapa Inca, the only Inca. People taught that he descended from Inti, the sun god. He owned, in principle, all land and herds. Below him came Inca nobles from Cusco, then local lords of conquered peoples, and then the great mass of farming and herding families.

The Inca ruled many peoples who spoke different languages. They made Quechua a shared language of government. Sometimes they moved whole communities to new places to settle or to break up resistance. They built stone temples, forts and estates with walls so finely fitted that no mortar was needed. Machu Picchu, built around 1450, may have been a royal estate for Pachacuti.

A family in an Andean village belonged to an ayllu. An ayllu was a group of related families who shared land, herds and work. Members helped each other plant, harvest and build houses. The ayllu divided its fields among families each year by need. A bigger family got more land. This habit of sharing work, called reciprocity, was old in the Andes long before the Inca.

The Inca did not ask most people to pay taxes in money or goods. Instead they asked for labor. This labor tax was called mit'a, meaning a turn. Each household took turns working for the state for a set time. People farmed state and temple fields, built roads and bridges, served as soldiers, or worked in mines. While they worked, the state fed them, often with food and maize beer.

The harvest from state lands went into thousands of storehouses, called qollqa, built along roads and on hillsides. The stored food, cloth and tools fed armies and workers and helped in times of drought. Supporters describe this as a system that protected people from hunger. Critics point out that people had little choice about their work and that the state could move them far from home.

The Inca built a road network called the Qhapaq Nan, or royal road. It ran along the coast and through the high mountains, with many branches. UNESCO describes it as more than 30,000 kilometers long. Workers cut stairs into cliffs and built rope bridges over deep canyons. Rest houses called tambos stood about a day’s walk apart. The roads were for armies, officials and llama caravans, not for private travelers.

Messages moved by relay. Runners called chasqui waited at small posts along the roads. One runner sprinted to the next post and passed his message on. The next runner carried it on. In this way, news could cross the empire far faster than one person could walk. The Inca had no wheeled carts and no horses, so feet and llamas carried everything.

The Inca did not use written letters as the Maya did. Instead, record keepers used the quipu, a main cord with many hanging strings. Knots in the strings stood for numbers in a base-10 system. Colors and positions may have shown what was counted: people, llamas, or bags of maize. Experts called quipucamayoc read and made them. Scholars still debate whether quipu also recorded words and stories.

Much of the food the world eats today was first grown by farmers of the Americas. Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, squash, chili peppers and cacao all come from here. Andean farmers bred thousands of kinds of potatoes and built terraces, flat steps cut into steep hillsides. The terraces held soil and water in place. Aztec chinampas fed a city of many thousands.

Each society had its own strengths. The Maya built a full writing system, the number zero and precise calendars. The Aztec built a great island city with causeways and an aqueduct. The Inca built thousands of kilometers of road and ran a huge empire without written letters. They did all this without iron tools, draft animals like oxen, or wheeled vehicles for work.

Their stories were also written down. The Popol Vuh is a book of the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala. It tells how the gods made the world and people. It was written in the K’iche’ language in Latin letters in the mid-1500s. Many Nahuatl speakers helped create the Florentine Codex around 1577, which records Aztec life in words and pictures. These works let us hear these peoples in their own voices.

A hierarchy is a ranking of people from top to bottom. The Aztec, Maya and Inca all had one. Rulers and nobles held power and wealth. Commoners did most of the farming and building. In each place, people were taught that this order came from the gods. That belief helped keep it stable for many generations.

These empires also grew through war and tribute. The Aztec took captives in war, and many were killed in religious sacrifice at the great temple. Conquered towns resented heavy tribute. When Spanish soldiers arrived in 1519, thousands of Tlaxcalans and others who opposed the Aztec joined them. The Inca were fighting a civil war between two brothers when Francisco Pizarro captured the ruler Atahualpa in 1532.

Historians try to hold two truths at once. These were creative societies that built cities, sciences and systems that still amaze people today. They were also ruled by powerful few who asked much of the many, as were most societies of the time, including those of Europe. Judging fairly means using the same standard for every society and listening to evidence from all sides, including the voices of the peoples themselves.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, reached the Caribbean. Two years later, in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal agreed on a line to divide the lands they expected to claim. Portugal received the eastern part, which became Brazil. Spain claimed most of the rest. The peoples who already lived there were not asked.

A colony is a land ruled by a distant country. Spain conquered the Aztec capital in 1521 and began the conquest of the Inca in 1532. It ruled its huge American lands through viceroyalties. Each was led by a viceroy, who governed in the king’s name. The Viceroyalty of New Spain was ruled from Mexico City. The Viceroyalty of Peru was ruled from Lima.

Colonies were meant to make money for the ruling country. Silver was the great prize. In 1545, Spanish colonists began mining a huge silver mountain at Potosi, in today’s Bolivia. Brazil grew rich from sugar and, later, gold. Catholic missionaries also came to spread their faith. Some protected Indigenous people from abuse, while mission life also pressed Indigenous people to give up their own beliefs.

After the conquest, the Spanish crown rewarded many conquerors with an encomienda. This was a grant of the labor and tribute of the Indigenous people in a certain area. In return, the holder, called an encomendero, was supposed to protect them and teach them Christianity. In law, the Indigenous people were not his property. In practice, many encomenderos worked people very hard and punished them cruelly.

At the same time, diseases from Europe, such as smallpox and measles, spread through the Americas. Indigenous peoples had no earlier contact with these illnesses. Terrible epidemics killed a very large share of the population in the 1500s. Scholars debate the exact numbers, but in many regions most people died within a few generations. War, forced labor and hunger made the losses worse.

Other forms of forced labor followed. In Peru, Spanish officials took over the old Inca mit’a. They used it to send Indigenous men in turns to work in the silver mines of Potosi, where many died. Indigenous communities pushed back. They filed lawsuits in Spanish courts, fled, and sometimes rose up. In 1780, Tupac Amaru II led a large revolt in Peru against colonial abuses.

Bartolome de las Casas came to the Caribbean as a young colonist and held Indigenous laborers himself. Around 1514 he changed his mind. He gave up his laborers, became a Dominican friar, and spent about fifty years speaking against the cruelty he had seen. He argued that Indigenous people were fully human, with rights to their lands and freedom.

Las Casas argued with other scholars in Spain. Later, in a famous debate at Valladolid in 1550 and 1551, he faced Juan Gines de Sepulveda. Sepulveda claimed that conquest was just. Las Casas said it was not. Years before that debate, his reports had helped push the king to pass the New Laws of 1542. These laws aimed to end new encomiendas and to stop the enslavement of Indigenous people.

The New Laws had limited effect. Colonists protested so strongly that parts were soon softened. Las Casas also has a mixed record. Early on, he suggested bringing enslaved Africans to spare Indigenous workers. He later wrote that he deeply regretted this. His life shows how a reformer can change his views and still leave a complicated legacy.

In a Spanish colonial city, two men of Spanish families might live on the same street. One was born in Spain. He was a peninsular, from the Iberian Peninsula. The other was born in Mexico City. He was a criollo, or creole. Both claimed Spanish ancestry. But the crown often gave the highest posts, such as viceroy, bishop and top judge, to peninsulares.

Criollos were often rich. They owned land, mines and businesses, and many were well educated. Still, they felt shut out of the highest offices, especially in the late 1700s, when Spain sent more officials from Spain. Over time, many criollos began to think of themselves as Americans more than Spaniards. Their frustration later helped fuel movements for independence in the early 1800s.

This ranking is part of a larger social hierarchy. Birthplace, ancestry, wealth, religion and job all shaped a person’s place. The crown and church kept careful records of births and marriages that often listed a person’s group. Portuguese Brazil had its own ranks, with people born in Portugal at the top and enslaved Africans at the bottom.

Spanish America was never only Spanish. Indigenous people were the largest group in many regions for centuries. Africans, most brought by force, formed large communities, especially near the coasts. Over generations, many families mixed. A mestizo was a person of Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. A mulato was a person of Spanish and African ancestry. Many other combinations had names.

The Spanish used the word castas for people of mixed ancestry. Colonial law and custom ranked these groups. People of mixed ancestry often paid different taxes, could be barred from some schools, guilds and church posts, and faced limits on carrying weapons. Indigenous people lived under their own set of laws, with their own towns and leaders, and paid tribute to the crown.

The labels were not as fixed as the laws suggest. A person could be written down as one group in a baptism record and another in a marriage record. Wealth, clothing, language and friends could change how others saw someone. In the late 1700s, some people even paid the crown for official papers that raised their status. Historians see these changes as signs that the system was often bent by the people inside it.

In the 1700s, painters in New Spain made sets of casta paintings. A set was often sixteen panels. Each panel showed a mother, a father and a child, with a label naming each person’s group. The painter Miguel Cabrera painted a famous set in 1763. Many sets were sent to Spain, where people were curious about life in the Americas.

The paintings follow a pattern. Families at the start of a set, with Spanish ancestry, often wear fine clothes in pleasant homes. Families later in the set, farther from Spanish ancestry, often look poorer. Some panels show quarrels. The paintings also show food, fruit, clothing and trades of the colony in rich detail, so they are useful for other kinds of history too.

Historians treat casta paintings as primary sources that show an idea, not a photograph of real life. They show how colonial elites wanted to explain and rank a mixed society. Some scholars also see pride in them, a way for American-born painters to show the richness of their homeland. Reading them well means asking who made them, who paid for them, and whom they left out.

The transatlantic slave trade carried captive Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. It lasted from the early 1500s to the 1860s. The SlaveVoyages database, built by historians from ship records, estimates that about 12.5 million people were forced onto ships. About 10.7 million survived the voyage. Most came from West and West-Central Africa.

Traders from Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and the Americas all took part. On the African coast they bought captives, often taken in wars or raids, from African traders and rulers in exchange for cloth, guns, metal goods and other items. Some African states grew rich from the trade. Others were torn apart by it. Many Africans resisted capture and fought back.

The voyage was called the Middle Passage. People were chained below deck in crowded, airless spaces for weeks or months. Disease, hunger and brutality killed well over a million people at sea. Captives sometimes rose up on ships or refused to eat. Those who arrived were sold in ports across the Americas. Most were sent to work on plantations.

On a Caribbean island in the 1700s, a sugar mill runs day and night at harvest time. Enslaved workers cut cane in the hot fields, then feed it into rollers and boil the juice in huge kettles. Burns and crushed limbs are common. Sugar was the main crop that drew enslaved Africans to Brazil and to islands like Jamaica, Barbados and Saint-Domingue.

The work was so harsh that many enslaved people died young. In many sugar colonies, deaths outnumbered births. Many planters found it cheaper to buy new captives than to improve conditions. This is why far more Africans were shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean than to North America. In Saint-Domingue, by the late 1700s, enslaved people made up about nine out of ten people in the colony.

Enslaved people built lives and cultures under this pressure. They kept African languages, music, foods and faiths, and blended them with new ones. Religions such as Candomble in Brazil and Vodou in Haiti grew from African traditions mixed with Catholic practices. In Brazil, enslaved people could sometimes buy their freedom, so a large free Black population grew there. Freedom, though, did not mean equality.

About 400,000 captive Africans were brought to mainland North America, a small share of the whole trade. Yet by 1860 there were nearly four million enslaved people in the United States. The difference came from natural increase: births outnumbered deaths there. Slavery in the United States was hereditary. A child born to an enslaved mother was enslaved for life.

Enslaved people grew tobacco, rice and, above all, cotton. After Eli Whitney’s cotton gin of 1793 made cleaning cotton faster, cotton spread across the Deep South. Enslaved families were often split apart by sale. Laws in many Southern states made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read. The United States banned bringing in new captives from abroad in 1808, but the trade within the country kept growing.

Enslaved people resisted in many ways. Some worked slowly, broke tools or ran away. Some, like Harriet Tubman, escaped and returned to lead others to freedom. Others kept faith, family and songs alive in secret. People who opposed slavery were called abolitionists. Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and became one of the most famous abolitionist speakers and writers.

Deep in the hills of northeast Brazil in the 1600s stood Palmares. It was a quilombo, a settlement of people who had escaped slavery. Palmares grew to thousands of people and lasted for most of the century. Its people farmed, traded and defended their towns against many attacks. Portuguese forces destroyed it in 1694. Its last leader, Zumbi, was killed in 1695. Brazil honors him today with a Black Consciousness Day on November 20.

Communities of escaped people were called maroons in English. They formed in Jamaica, Suriname, Colombia, Florida and many other places. In Jamaica, maroon fighters forced the British to sign treaties in 1739 recognizing their towns. In Colombia, San Basilio de Palenque was founded by people who escaped slavery and still exists today.

Most resistance was quieter. Enslaved people slowed work, broke tools, pretended to be ill, or ran away for short times. They kept their names, languages and faiths. Parents taught children their family history. Historians call these everyday acts resistance because they pushed back against a system that tried to control every part of life.

Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was the richest colony in the Caribbean. It produced huge amounts of sugar and coffee. About half a million enslaved people worked there. In August 1791 they rose up in a massive revolt in the northern plain. It became the Haitian Revolution, which historians often call the only revolt of enslaved people in history that created a new nation.

The war was long and complex. Spain and Britain sent troops. In 1793 and 1794, French officials and then the French government in Paris ended slavery in the colony. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man, became the leading general and governor. When Napoleon sent a large army in 1802 to restore French control, Toussaint was captured and shipped to France, where he died in prison in 1803.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the final fight. Yellow fever and fierce resistance destroyed much of the French army. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, the second independent nation in the Americas after the United States. The war was brutal on all sides. Afterward, many nations refused to recognize Haiti, and in 1825 France forced it to pay a huge indemnity in return for recognition.

Abolition means ending slavery by law. It came country by country. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Britain ended it in most of its colonies in 1834. In the United States, the Civil War led to the Thirteenth Amendment, adopted in 1865. Illinois was the first state to ratify it, on February 1, 1865. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end slavery, with the Golden Law of May 13, 1888.

Abolition came from many forces. Enslaved people resisted and escaped. Abolitionists, Black and white, wrote, spoke and organized. Religious groups, such as Quakers, called slavery a sin. Some economists argued that free labor worked better. Wars and revolutions also broke slavery apart. Historians still debate how much each of these causes mattered in each place.

Freedom did not bring equality. Formerly enslaved people often got no land and faced unfair laws, low pay and violence. Across Latin America, the old ranking by ancestry left lasting gaps in wealth and schooling. Scholars and citizens today debate how large these legacies are and what, if anything, should be done. They agree that the history helps explain patterns of inequality that can still be seen.