Country: Peru

Group: Quechua

Date: 11/6/2020

Team: Arisha Khan (lead), Tommy Chia, Alexander Hager

Content Warning: none

Approximate Time Period: 1500-1600

Currently, the Quechua are the second largest ethnic group in Peru, behind the Mestizo (Central Intelligence Agency, 2020). Since the 15th century. The Quechua were an important agricultural backbone of the Andean civilization. Quechua has been the language of the Inca Empire (though it predates the empire) which later became the lingua franca of the Spanish Indians throughout the Andes. The Inca requirements of public service did not disturb the traditional way of life for the Quechua, but it was disturbed when the Spanish conquered the Inca empire in the 16th century, breaking the social structure of the Quechua community (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.). The Quechua were forced to produce unfamiliar crops for the Spanish at the expense of their own food supply. The Spanish did not take care of the health or their laborers, and additionally moved them to larger villages, breaking down their political and social institutions (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.). One of the biggest jobs that Spanish forced Quechua to work in was the mining system, precipitated by the introduction of Mercury as a catalyst in 1571 permitting an exhaustive exploitation of inferior ore (Wiedner, 1960).

          The data quality is a 2 because there was information about this ethnic group and there were instances of forced labor. The only documented instances of forced labor were in the colonial period, but nothing in recent times.

Sources

  1. Encyclopedia Britannica. “Quechua | people”. Retrieved October 30, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Quechua
  2. Central Intelligence Agency. “South America: Peru”. The World Factbook (2020). https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/pe.html
  3. Wiedner, D. L. (1960). Forced Labor in Colonial Peru. The Americas, 16(4), 357–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/978993