The Spanish king gave Cortés the lands and title to compensate for his loss of political and judicial power in New Spain as the audiencia of Mexico and the viceroyalty were created. Granted by Charles V to Fernando Cortés in 1529, after the Conqueror had ruled New Spain for almost a decade, the Marquesado del Valle included holdings in the central valley of Mexico, Cuernavaca, Cuautla, Toluca, the vast area of Oaxaca, and part of Tehuantepec. 1ĭuring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Cortés estate became a lucrative capitalistic enterprise in New Spain.
No matter how much humanitarian reformers and mercantile monopolists might complain, the royal government had to tolerate abuses, because obrajes were useful and necessary to the economy. But by the late sixteenth century the people of New Spain had come to depend on locally produced textiles, and as a consequence it became socially necessary for obrajes to operate outside the law. Concerted efforts to curb abuses in obrajes began in the 1560s and continued until 1805.
Indian slavery, debt peonage, harsh treatment, child labor, and bad food, clothing, and shelter-all of these were characteristics of the Mexican colonial obraje. Sweatshop working conditions prevailed throughout three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico. It resisted both royal labor legislation designed to promote the welfare of the Indian and Spanish mercantile restrictions aimed at limiting competition with the peninsular textile industry. Linked initially with encomiendas and the repartimiento system of forced labor for wages, the obraje outlived these institutions.
T he obrajes in New Spain-cotton and woolen textile mills which produced cloth for everyday use in colonial society-were vigorous capitalistic enterprises which flourished in a feudal-mercantile environment.
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