Addicted to Their Homeland: The Indians of The Province of Antioquia Confronting the Policy of Town Congregation (1755-1811)

Abstract

The policy of congregating indigenous villages among themselves was a common measure in the virreinato of the Nuevo Reino de Granada. Through it, it was intended to solve both the problem of the decrease in natural populations and the uncontrolled increase of the "libre de todos los colores" population. However, this measure could never be successfully applied in the province of Antioquia; Due to this, the following questions arose: how did the transfer attempts in Antioquia occur? What reasons motivated the authorities to try to carry out this policy? What mechanisms did the Indians use to resist it? And finally, why were the towns of the province able to be maintained in their integrity? These are the questions that we intend to investigate in this work. The methodology used to carry out this research was the analysis of the reports, records, and petitions related to the topic, these were examined under an anthropolegal approach, used to understand how the communities and the axes of the power of the province acted about the phenomenon. Therefore, the following article offers a summary of the procedure for carrying out the transfers, an analysis of the representations of different actors, and finally an exposition of some probable reasons for the failure of the congregation policy in the province. In this way, the complete panorama of a general problem that had not been studied for the case of Antioquia is exposed.