succession of Spanish families as reward for their service to the Crown during the Conquest. As discussed above, there is indirect evidence that the native Nicoyans were forced to resettle from their original hamlets and villages to a single, nucleated town that is the Nicoya of today. It was not uncommon for the Spanish authorities to order such resettlement to maintain control over indigenous peoples as they suffered a precipitous decline in numbers during the 16th and early 17th centuries. As populations thinned out, the Spanish would simply order the survivors to move to a single community to maintain a political, economic and ecclesiastical eye on them. Nicoya was one such Indian town and in the 1760s had no more than about 320 inhabitants. The structure of social relations were established in the community, approximately two centuries before and at the time, had certainly provided a measure of security. The native Nicoyans were provided with a new social identity in the colonial order – "Indians" – and a social space in a hierarchical caste system based on race that defined their rights and obligations, and a physical space (the town) in which they could exist. The Indians were obligated to make tribute payments and were given limited powers of self-government and had (in theory) access to a public defender's office (Defensor de Indios) for their corporate legal defense. By the decade of the 1760s, however, life in Nicoya was becoming more and more tenuous. The Spanish colonial enterprise, as all colonial enterprises, was an extractive one. Valuable goods were quickly identified and exported to Spain or other colonies: at first the precious metals, followed by traffic in human beings, and later by a variety of agricultural commodities. The small Indian community could not provide sufficient labor and the region's population was therefore augmented by the presence of members from two other racial groups as recognized in Spanish colonial social system: Mulatos (undoubtedly arrived from Panama, although the historical record is silent on this issue) and Ladinos, or people of mixed Native and Spanish ancestry. What had evolved by the mid-18th century in Spanish-dominated portions of lower Central America was, in essence, a system of apartheid, in which islands of isolated indigenous communities were surrounded by non-indigenous peoples of heterogeneous background. Spanish, Mulatos and Ladinos settled on the cattle ranches surrounding Nicoya and, with direct access to the principal factor of