Colonial Resettlement and Disease

This mural, located in Ccatca, a colonial town near Cuzco, Peru, depicts victims of an epidemic outbreak lying on the ground and vomiting blood (details below).

To facilitate evangelization and tax collection, in the second half of the sixteenth century the colonial regime forcefully relocated scattered Indigenous communities into newly founded towns like Ccatca. The forced urbanization led to an increase of population density and face-to-face interaction between diverse groups, which quickly made these villages hotbeds for deadly diseases.

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the relocation project began in the early 1570s, as small communities were forced to move into towns of thousands of residents. Within a decade, the region experienced a series of epidemic outbreaks with death tolls of cataclysmic proportions. Many towns disappeared or were abandoned, while others persisted in a state of near-perpetual plagues.

In Brazil, the missionary villages that Jesuits founded to bring together nomad populations experienced harrowing outbreaks. São Paulo, originally a Jesuit mission, was hit by an outbreak of what might have been pneumonic plague as early as 1554. In the 1560s, smallpox wiped out Jesuit villages in Bahia, killing so many that no one was left to dig graves, while in Espírito Santo, entire settlements were abandoned, with only mass graves left behind.

In Northern Mexico, the establishment of Jesuit missions in 1591 led to smallpox and measles outbreaks in 1593, with death rates of approximately 75 percent among the Pueblo people—a population that had already been diminished by 30 to 50 percent prior to resettlement. Wherever the colonial urbanization project was enacted, disease thrived.

Image Source

• Mural, 1709. Ccatca, Quispicanchi, Peru. Courtesy of Thomas B. F. Cummins.

Further Reading

• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Tassinari, Tomás. “Jesuit Reductions and Epidemics in Brazil.” Experiencing Epidemics. Podcast audio. December 4, 2020. https://experiencing-epidemics.org/ep-6-jesuit-reductions-and-epidemics-in-brazil/.