By the late fifteen hundreds it seemed nothing in Spanish America was as powerful as the Catholic Church.  Most people who came to the Americas from Spain whether conquistadors or craftworkers were Catholic.  Among them were missionaries, or people who worked to make others see the truth of their religion.   Their main goal was to convert or win over to Catholicism, the millions of Indians in the Americas. 

Missionaries often achieved their goal through teaching.  They built churches and schools throughout the colonies.   Missionaries educated many Indians in the subjects that Europeans learned about.  All Schools in New Spain and Peru including the university were run by priest and nuns.  At times though, the goal to convert Indians was achieved by force.

Indians at work
Almost half of all Spaniards in the Americas lived in major cities like Lima or Mexico City.  Most of the Indians, however, continued to live in the countryside. Many were forced to work on haciendas or farms owned by Spaniards or the Catholic Church. 

Like the feudal manors of Europe, haciendas were like small towns.  Indian families lived and worked there to raise wheat, grapes for wine, cattle, and other products that were sold in colonial cities. Although such products brought large profits to hacienda owners, Indians received low wages.  To feed themselves, Indian workers raised corn and beans on small plots of land set aside for their use.

Indians also provided another source of wealth in Spanish America such as Silver.  By law all Indian men had to spend some time working in the silver mines of Peru and New Spain.  Men who had to carry the precious metal had the worst jobs of all.  They worked in darkness with candles tied to their foreheads or little fingers for light.   Carriers hauled as much as three hundred pounds of silver at a time.  Accidents often happened on what was sometimes a sixty story climb to the mine entrance. 

Illness strikes the Indians
Accidents and overwork caused many Indian deaths.  Disease, however, caused an even greater number.  Indians had no resistance to, or ability to overcome the effects of, several of the germs that caused diseases in Europe.  Historians believe that in the fifty years following conquest, smallpox and measles were among the diseases that caused the most deaths.  In those fifty years, New Spain's Indian population may have fallen from about twenty five million people to under three million.  Peru's decreased from perhaps nine million to under two million.

Hacienda owners, and those who ran  the mines saw a rapid drop in the number of available workers.  They soon came up with a new source of cheap workers, enslaved Africans.