The Arrival of Columbus Caused the Death of Many Indians from Violence and Disease

Ever since 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the lives of Indigenous people of the Caribbean and Mexico were permanently changed. Although Columbus never made it to Mexico, ending at Hispaniola which is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti, his followers went on to follow his ideas of conquest and Catholic Crusading. Although the initial purpose of the journey by Columbus was to find a shorter route to the Far East, once Columbus arrived in the Caribbean those plans changed to include expansion and conquest.¹ Future Spanish conquistadors like Hernán Cortés, were able to experience the vast wealth within the Mexican borders including monstrous mountains filled with silver. These new silver mines needed to be worked by someone and Cortés and his followers used the Indigenous people or Indians to do all their manual labor.² However this ran into great contrast against the church's belief that these Indigenous people were humans and had souls worth saving. This presented a conflict between the church's belief system and the mercantilist society which the Spanish were trying to create. So in 1585, lawyer Alonso de Zorita, wrote Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain, which chronicled the negative situations the Indians were facing in New Spain. You can almost consider the passage as an early public relations campaign to try and gain a massive change. The passage Why The Indians are dying was written to cause a massive change in the way the Indians were being treated and to reiterate the Catholic Church's position regarding the Indians.

According to Alonso de Zorita, "In the old days [the Indians] performed their communal labor in their own towns. Their labor was light, and they were well treated. They did not have to leave their homes and families, and they ate food they were accustomed to eat and at the usual hours." ³