History of Nicoya

mically defunct and its community quickly dying. The choice presented by the Ladinos was one between life in the form of a new creole town and death if they had to rely on Nicoya. The Crown agreed to their petition.

The representation that the Ladinos made of social conditions in Nicoya may not have been far off the mark. Essentially isolated within their community and surrounded by more-or-less hostile neighbors, the native community persisted, it would appear, more by the weight of centripetal forces exterior to the community itself, keeping in check the centrifugal pressures within the community for dissolution. In more concrete terms, the economic and political needs of the State maintained the artificial boundaries and structure of an "Indian" community, well past the date when the community, as an ethnically identifiable social entity, would have dissolved through the typical processes of acculturation and assimilation.

To this historically particular moment we add the structural contradictions in the political structure of the Spanish colonies. The point of contact between Crown and Indians was the local administrative authority, the Corregidor. Provided enormous leeway in the weak state system of colonial governance, the position of Corregidor was purchased and the individual who held it for a specified number of years was free to exploit it for his personal economic benefit by functioning within a closed market system as the sole distributor of manufactured goods to the Indians in the towns they controlled and by purchasing marketable goods produced by the 'Indians' under their charge. No controls were placed on prices beyond the caprice of the Corregidor, who had the coercive power of the state to insure that the price demands were met. While the Corrregidor did fulfill an important economic role, clearly the system was ripe