ABSTRACT
Indians lived outside the city, close to the mines or fields where they worked. Indians were forbidden from wearing clothing worn by Spaniards, and, when passing a Spaniard on the street, they were ordered to bow down in an appropriate gesture of servitude and submission. Spaniards, from the first day they arrived in the Caribbean, never thought of Native Americans as their social or racial equals. Such work was deemed appropriate only for those they perceived as their social inferiors—Native Americans or enslaved Africans. Some—but very few—Spaniards complained publicly about the mistreatment of Native Americans: Father Antonio de Montesinos, Father Francisco de Vitoria, and Father Bartolome de las Casas, the so-called Defender of the Indians, all challenged Spanish treatment of natives in America. Mounting tensions between church and state, between Spaniards and Portuguese, and even within the church itself led to war in Paraguay in the 1750s.
