While the traditional historiography of early Latin America poses a static colonial order in which urban-based Spanish elites extracted tribute and forced labor from stationary Indian communities, contemporary research, including that reported here, points to a more mobile, interactive pattern. Recent findings indicate that the Spanish invasion of the New World set in motion one of the most dynamic movements of peoples ever experienced in the Western hemisphere. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the impositions of the colonial regime and the socio-economic dislocations that resulted, generated mass migrations of Indians away from their communities of origin. Because tribute and forced labor (the mita) were levied on their communal villages, Indians, in an attempt to survive, increasingly evaded these exactions by fleeing to Spanish cities and haciendas, or to other native villages. There they escaped the excessive demands of the Spanish state by losing themselves in urban or rural frontier settings, or by entering the employ of marginal Spaniards and Indian lords.

So rampant was migration in the Andes that by mid-eighteenth century the forasteros (migrant Indians and their descendants) represented one-half the population of La Paz and one-third that of Cuzco. The Audiencia of Quito, far from lying outside this process, may well turn out to be its most illustrative case. Indeed, it would appear from the record that the indigenous peoples of Quito may have been, at least chronologically speaking, in the vanguard of the Andean migration phenomenon. My research indicates that native migrations in the Audiencia of Quito were early and massive.