Legacy of Spanish Conquest

Upon reading  Steve Stern’s book Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest his main focus is to examine the reconfiguration of Peru in terms of political and social life.  Stern specifically focused on how the people of Huamanga met the challenge of the European conquest, and how with these consequences themselves (mestizos), the colonizers and in turn Peruvian society were created.  (Stern, xix). In writing his book stern did not focus on themes per say, however he took an chronological approach and described and analyzed the society of native peoples before the arrival of the Spanish, after the arrival, the issues that arose after the Spanish arrived and the actions they took as a resistance began to form. Very similar to Clendinnen’s Ambivalent Conquests the Stern book takes the approach of examining what took place when the Spanish arrived. To counter native resistance the Spanish implemented the Toledan reforms (p. 76) “In Huamanga, Toleda attended to organizing and providing labor to the Huancavelica mines under the state’s control; in Cuzco he order the dramatic execution of Tupac Amaru; in Potosí he directed the construction of a huge hydraulic power and refining complex which, together with a new amalgamation technique , would rescue the moribund silver mines” (Stern, 76-77).  The reforms were intended to control the very political and social structures that existed before the Spanish arrived. The legacy of the Spanish conquest in Latin America, but in Peru is which has been deep and profound. It is class, rather than ethnicity which underpins the analysis of the  creation of a colonial society in central Peru in the century after the conquest. The indigenous population inherited poverty as the principal legacy of the conquest and this legacy is very alive today in Peru and Bolivia respectively.