Talk:Mit'a

Forced labour or mandatory public service?

I was reading the article about repartimiento, where the repartimiento system was described as forced labour similar to the mita. Here in the mita article, the mita is called mandatory public service. In it biased to call one of the forced labour and the other for *"public service"? Both systems should be labelled forced labour, because many groups that had opposed inca rule had to mita by force.Dentren | ^Talk 20:05, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

There are two phases of things like the mita or the yanacuna servants, the inca phase and the spanish phase... essentially, the spaniards used these systems to their profit in peru, hence the repartimiento is compared to the colonial mita. Encyclopédisme (talk) 14:41, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Why not move to mit'a?

That is how the article refers to it. 209.6.120.254 (talk) 16:19, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Mita is a much, much more widepsread spelling of the institution. I guess mita comes from quechua, but quechua is hardly a written language so there doubts if ther is and official quechua spelling of it. Wikipedia is not bound to use always the most original name/spelling of things, but usually the most common. Chiton magnificus (talk) 20:55, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Quechua is a written language. It's official in Peru and Bolivia. Here's the Quechua page on "mit'a", which is also the spelling used by most specialists: http://qu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiraquchapaq_llamk%27ay_mit%27a

Dan Cottrell (talk) 20:53, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

NNPOV?

This article describe Inca use of mita as "public service in the society" while the spanish use of this institution as "form of legal servitude which in practice bordered on slavery." This sounds like a typical black legend story and should be removed if it can not be backed by reliable sources. Chiton magnificus (talk) 20:52, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

This article generally needs work. There is only one citation and it's a broken link. While mit'a was a form of public service (in that it was used on public works projects), it was more accurately speaking a corvée labor tax. That said, when it was adopted by Spanish colonial officials in, say, the silver mines Potosí, it was brutal, though perhaps more due to the toxic conditions of mining silver in that time period than general ill-will on the part of administrators, who were dependent on native labor (and African slaves) to work as Europeans tended to die of disease at alarming rates in much of the Americas during the period. La leyenda negra should of course be avoided, but there's also no need to whitewash what were undeniably horrible working conditions. Mann's book 1493 has a whole section on Potosí and the mining conditions as part of the Columbian exchange.Dan Cottrell (talk) 21:01, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Yap, we very much in need of propor sources and a large article reform. —Chiton (talk) 23:00, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Depends, the black legend stuff won'T really appear in book by ethno-historians concerning the inca, and that's our main sources here. Encyclopédisme (talk) 14:42, 19 February 2024 (UTC)