A Divided Landscape

This painting was used as a legal document in order to prove a Spaniard’s ownership of a large estate in the Bogotá savanna. As Spanish legal procedures endorsed a Spaniard’s property ownership, Indigenous peoples were being dispossessed. Indigenous people were given a resguardo or reservation (a much smaller communal property which they were not allowed to sell) and were forced to work on estates. In this sense, this is a map of land dispossession and of the transformation of the Indigenous agricultural landscapes.

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What were resguardos?

Resguardos were communal lands that Indigenous people could farm. They came about as part of the legal reform of 1593, known as the land compositions (composiciones de tierras). Until then, most lands had remained in the hands of Indigenous people.

Could Indigenous people work wherever they wanted?

In 1593—the same year as the reform—the then Audiencia president Antonio González created an administrative mechanism for a Spaniard to distribute Indigenous labor. This new official was authorized to tell Indigenous people where to work and to regulate how they managed their affairs.

Why is this a divided landscape?

Resguardos were created at a time when the imperial administration defined Spaniards and Indigenous peoples as having different economic capacities: Spaniards had extensive commercial lands while Indigenous people had restricted economies supervised by the imperial administration. Indigenous people lost access to about 95% of the lands that had been available to them for farming before the conquest.

What happened to the villages and resguardos?

Villages and resguardos have had a long and unstable trajectory since the sixteenth century, going through waves of confrontation and resurgence. Most municipalities on the high plateau were former Indigenous villages. In the case of resguardos, after many attempts to dismantle them during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Political Constitution of 1991 made it possible for them to become ethnic territories once again and since then resguardos have offered Indigenous peoples new possibilities of ethnic autonomy.