What encomenderos wrote to their relatives was one thing. What they wrote to governors and the crown was another. The encomenderos of the middle and later sixteenth century, many still conquerors or their direct descendants, had a well-defined public position, varying little from place to place. They were poor; their tributes had diminished to nothing; they were being displaced by undeserving newcomers to whom the governors were giving the whole land. Hidden in such words was their desire to maintain the monopoly and total dominance they had in the conquest period, and measured against that unreasonable hope, they indeed fell short and were deprived. Immigration to the central areas was strong, as we have said, and it included well-born and well-connected people who could not be denied their place. Others built up fortunes and connections on the spot, in mining or commerce, and then knocked insistently at the door. Incoming governors needed rewards for their entourage and close allies, to whom they could not give significant salaries. They cemented their base by awarding vacant encomiendas to ·relatives, employees and other followers, as indeed everyone expected them to do. Everywhere the governors acted the same, and everywhere the encomenderos protested. Actually, very few first conquerors or their sons had encomiendas taken away from them. Rather, between civil strife and Indian rebellions in the early time, and diseases in the later, many encomenderos died without direct heirs; it was mainly their grants that the governors gave away. The conquerors, within twenty or thirty years, had come to be a tightly knit group with innumerable nephews, nieces, or humble old friends under their wing, and it is to these that they would have had vacant encomiendas go. When this failed to happen, their response was not to fade into insignificance, but to marry their children into the new favored families, something which the newcomers desired just as greatly for the prestige and local acceptance it brought, so that from the second generation the encomenderos were an inextricable mixture of the new and the old, a situation that continued among leading families even in times and areas where the encomienda had lost its primary importance.