Counterpoint between mitas: mitayo labor in the highlands and the coast, the city and the countryside in colonial Peru

This comparative study confronts a multiple and very complex labor reality of indigenous mitayo work in colonial Peru, based on unpublished or little used information. The essay addresses the study of the labor regime of the colonial mita in two different conditions in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. On the one hand, three different types of mita: cattle ranches, textile work and Huancavelica mine performed by tributary population of a high Andean plateau; on the other hand, the mita on coastal haciendas toward Lima City, performed by tributaries from different parts of the coast and the Lima highland. This counterpoint shows us both the common and the divergent fundamental aspects of a labor system that was central to the economic order of the colony but less known to be applied out of the mining colonial industry.