Civilization of Native Americans

Most were able to get through these levels by assimilating into Hispanic-mestizo society, adopting the customs, dress, education, and other ways of living of their conquerors. somewhat of these were artisans, whose skilled labor allowed them to charge high fees and hire topical anaesthetic labor to construct churches, grist mills, and other structures need by the Spanish settlers. Stern cites the case of "Juan Uscamato, a carpenter, [who] earned 150 pesos by agreeing to build a flour mill in sise months. His expenses were low, and he probably did not bemuse to act upon wide of the mark time on the mill, since the contractor agreed to supply needed materials, including carved stone and iron tools, and six Indian laborers to work under Uscamato" (115).

Yet the natives and African slaves able to benefit from Spanish rule were a small group. Most suffered a red-blooded reduction in their quality of life, first because of the strict association system that almost immediately became a part of the rising Spanish American society. Spanish-born whites were at the top of the system, and they did their best to perform a strict hierarchy that gave increasingly less cause and location to anyone not fortunate enough to have enjoyed this " polished" heritage, starting with whites of exactly the same breeding who had the misfortune to have been born in the New W

Indians, blacks, and others whose way of life was constantly threatened by peremptory forces, were continually torn between pressures to assimilate and pressures to remain separate. bit many of the conquerors tried to make the Indians more like the backup of society (in dress, language, and religion), some actually tried to keep them separate, which do keeping them oppressed easier because they were therefore easier to identify as being different. Both choices were hard for the native populates, because they both reinforced the visualize that native cultures were inferior.

Some groups responded by attempting to withdraw entirely from the preponderating society, and, in some areas, such as the Mexican countryside, this was doable on at least a small scale, because economical power was c one timentrated in the cities. The remote villages could be handle without societal consequences.

In time, Christian influence did manage original changes in customs such as marriage and sex relations. Native women, who had previously enjoyed a more equal status in their society, suffered by giving up many of the rights they had once enjoyed. Robert M. Carmack and his associates note that, under colonial rule, most native Indian women's wills began to leave "nearly all of their possessions to their husbands and children, following Spanish patterns that successful nuclear family ties over broader networks of kin relations" (183).

Many Catholic missionaries considered it their calling to bring Christianity to the heathens of America: "The majority of the missionaries believed that the Spanish conquest, contempt its attendant evils, was justified precisely because, and to the extent that, the native people were brought into the Christian fold" (Carmack 164). Yet transforming native beliefs proved to be a more complicated task than the missionaries had expected. The Indians could not scarcely abandon the underlying mindsets that informed their own practices, and Christianity became a
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