THE “HACIENDAS” IN THE COLONY (WEEK10)

An hacienda is a really big house were slaves are contained, there were separated by ranches, each one of does had one encomended who lead the ranch. The hacienda had one big boss that commanded the encomendeds. The encomendends weren’t able to take territory away from the slaves so they started to take territories from Indian communities, big towns were formed with the nucleus of the haciendas. The biggest the hacienda, the most money the owner had and other economic activities, like cocoa, fruits vegetables, gold mines and also animals. As the book (Colombia Imagenes de su Diversidad) says “La hacienda era un simbolo de patrimonio, riqueza, de bienestar y de poder”. (page 112).

When in Europe they saw and taste the cooffe, the haciendas grew more and they started to export to Europe and soon to all the world. When this happened some plants died so they started to make fruit trees for them to give shadow and channels of water for the place to be more humid. This incremented the crops. Before this there were two collecting times a year, with this situation incremented to 4 times a year. But when there were good times there were also bad times and crisis. Some times some haciendas didn’t produced nothing for a year.

I think that the crops were and have been all this time our strength, over all the coffee and the bananas. Without that were would you think Colombia would be?

Black Slaves in America (week9)

In America, Europeans started to bring black slaves for their houses. Between 1550 and 1792 entered like 123 000 black persons to the continent. They were all African descendants. They had to work in mines constructing or even fishing. Their owners had to provide them with cloth and alimentation but sometimes they just provide them with seeds which they had to cultivate on their free time and sell some of it to buy cloth. Women were sometimes used as hores for the owner’s economic situation. Many of these slaves develop many kind of disease, like lepra or physical disease like blinded, deft, without hand, without a leg etc. most of the seek slaves died.

I think that if the owners couldn’t maintain the slaves and kill them why would they bring them. I think the owners should be allowed to have 5 or less slaves in their houses not 30 or 50, who needs that? As always an still the racism is the is a big source of death or even the biggest.

When there was a murder, black people were found guilty for it and were killed. Even most of the black people were treated like animals there were some families that treated their slaves as workers as treated today. After the independence that was the main cause of civil wars in La Nueva Granada.