Indigo

The cultivation of indigo (tinta añil) in the New World dates to pre-Hispanic times. The Indians of northern Central America harvested wild indigo plants, called xiquilite, which they traded extensively and used as a rich blue dye for textiles.

During the late sixteenth century, the Spaniards domesticated the cultivation of indigo in Central America and established indigo plantations in Yucatán and along the fertile Pacific coasts of present-day El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Spaniards exported their first indigo in 1576, when a shipload was sent from Nicaragua to New Spain, where it was used in Mexico's nascent textile industry. By 1600, indigo had replaced cacao—until that time Central America's most profitable commodity—as the leading export. In the early seventeenth century, indigo also became the leading source of hard currency for the isthmus.

Indigo was highly valued in the Old World, where it supplanted more expensive blue dyes from the Far East and inferior dyes produced from woad in northern Europe. From 1580 to 1620 the Central American indigo industry thrived. Añileros (indigo planters) employed Indians for harvesting and processing the plant. Because the work was difficult and dangerous (extended contact with the toxins present in the indigo plant often proved fatal, as did constant exposure to the swamp waters used to extract dye from the plants), the industry was limited by the size of the indigenous labor supply. Although the work was dangerous, labor scarcity gave the indigenous workers some power in the colonial order, according to recent research. The repartimiento (distribution or assessment) system, traditionally explained as a way of forcing indigenous communities to buy unwanted goods, may have provided an incentive to keep the laborers producing indigo. This interpretation suggests that the repartimiento was a form of forced credit that intended to keep the labor force motivated. By the mid-seventeenth century, the indigo industry had stagnated. In the late seventeenth century, however, a resurgence in the size of the Indian population allowed the industry to expand again, at which time African slaves were imported to augment the labor force.

By 1635, San Vicente, El Salvador, had become the hub of the indigo trade, although other important centers were located in Guatemala and Nicaragua. The locus of the trade later shifted to Sonsonate, El Salvador, once the center of the colonial cacao trade, and to Guatemala. In addition to the European trade, Central American indigo also made its way to Mexico and Peru.

Indigo remained the most important export of the Kingdom of Guatemala throughout the colonial period. The industry reached its peak during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the expanding textile industry in northern Europe created a significant demand for the rich blue hue. The "free trade" economic policies of the Spanish Bourbons in the eighteenth century also enhanced the indigo trade, and in 1782 añileros formed an Indigo Growers Society based in Guatemala City. By the last years of the colonial period, indigo generated more than 2 million pesos worth of profits per year.

By the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, indigo exports from Central America began to decline, although the dye continued to bring heavy profits for planters in South Carolina, Venezuela, and the East Indies. In the mid-eighteenth century, Brazil's reformer, the Marquis de Pombal, introduced indigo production to Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão, where the dye's high price helped compensate for the decline of sugar production in that country.

Indigo's importance as a commodity diminished worldwide during the nineteenth century, as cheaper synthetic dyes became available. El Salvador continued to export some indigo into the late nineteenth century.

See alsoFree Trade Act; Slavery: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Class Privilege and Economic Development: The Consulado de Comercio of Guatemala, 1793–1871 (1966).

Murdo J. Mac Leod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973).

William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth Century Central America (1979).

Woodward, Central America: A Nation Divided (1985).

Additional Bibliography

Fernández M., José Antonio. Pintando el mundo de azul: El auge añilero y el mercado centroamericano, 1750–1810. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 2003.

                             Virginia Garrard-Burnett