Introduction

Migration was a ubiquitous phenomenon in colonial Spanish America. Wherever, and whenever one looks, one finds evidence of a spatially mobile society. Yet anyone attempting to study the process of migration will immediately confront a host of conceptual, methodological, technical, and terminological problems that probably explain why so relatively few have undertaken migration studies. In the same way that anyone leaving his proper, and fixed, place in colonial Spanish America immediately became socially suspect, so too anyone moving from one colonial jurisdiction to another creates major problems for the historical researcher. Yet historical population movements are too important to be neglected, or to be allowed to deter research. Migration was one important way in which the very colonial world of Spanish America was created. The diffusion of Spanish immigrants throughout the continent, spreading among other things their gospel, diseases and world view, triggered a migrational response on the part of the aboriginal Indians, only parts of which are we now able to outline in sketchy fashion. Invasion and immigration for whites often meant retreat, and emigration for Indians. For the newcomers their “opening” of the continent resulted in a necessary “closing” of aboriginal worlds, the initiation of cultural assimilation or rejection, racial mixing, the onset of market economies and new trade patterns – in short a new phase in the development of social and spatial structures and processes throughout the continent.

Yet if migration was ubiquitous in colonial Spanish America, it was also highly differentiated. Each and every individual migrant moved for specific, and for us still obscure reasons.