“Diablo del oro”: mining tensions in colonial America (Ecuador, 17th century)

Abstract

In 1959, Ecuadorian poet César Dávila Andrade evoked the suffering of a mitayo, an indigenous Ecuadorian forced to work in the mines during the colonial period, in a 286-line poem entitled Boletín y Elegía de las mitas. A legacy of a painful colonial past, mining in the Americas remains to this day a source of economic, political, and social tension. The history of the colonization of America must therefore also be the history of the exploitation of the immense mineral wealth of the New World.