I have searched up numerous articles, but nothing really makes sense to me. Can someone explain to me what each system exactly is, and how they differed?
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Not super in-depth, because I don’t remember (college was a long time ago and I did modern Latin America). But, there’s a great book called _Colonial Latin America_ by Johnson and Burkholder that goes into it.
Basically, the encomienda system came first, and allowed those granted by the Spanish crown to extract gold and labor from First Nations people in exchange for protection and/or teaching them Christianity. When the Native population declined and abuses were widely reported by Jesuit monks, they moved over to the Hacienda system. In the Hacienda system, you get more of a company store/economic slavery vibe, where the laborers couldn’t leave because they were indebted to the owner of the land. But anyone of any race could be subject to the hacienda system, and it lasted into the mid-20th century in some places.
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