History of Nicoya

as reward for their service to the Crown during the Conquest. As discussed above, there is also indirect evidence that the native Nicoyans were forced to resettle from their original hamlets and villages to a single, nucleated town that is the Nicoya of today (Meléndez 1983). It was not uncommon for the Spanish authorities to order such resettlement as a response to the need to maintain control over indigenous peoples as they suffered a precipitous decline in numbers during the 16th and early 17th centuries. As populations thinned out, the Spanish would simply order the survivors to move to a single community in order to maintain a political, economic and ecclesiastical eye on them.

Nicoya was one such Indian town and in the 1760s boasted no more than about 320 inhabitants. The structure of social relations had been established in the community approximately two centuries before and at the time, had certainly provided a measure of security for them. The native Nicoyans were provided with a new social identity within the colonial order – "Indians" – and a social space within a hierarchical caste system based on race that defined their rights and obligations, and a physical space (the town) in which they could exist. The Indians were obligated to make tribute payments, but were given limited powers of self-government and had (in theory) access to a public defender's office (Defensor de Indios) for their corporate legal defense.

By the decade of the 1760s however, life in Nicoya was becoming more and more tenuous. The Spanish colonial enterprise, as all colonial enterprises, was an extractive one. Valuable goods were quickly identified and exported to Spain or other colonies: at first the precious metals, followed by traffic in human beings, and later by a variety of agricultural commodities. The small Indian community could not