Calca is a highland province inhabited by Quechua-speaking descendants of the Incas, but in the book it is defined by comparison with nearby Acomayo: despite their shared regional and cultural setting, Calca is markedly better off. The contrast is linked to the different economic practices of the two places and to the historical reach of the Spanish colonial Potosí mita, which included Acomayo but not Calca.

Setting and comparison

Calca and Acomayo are both in the mountains and are inhabited by Quechua-speaking descendants of the Incas. The book presents them as places with few apparent differences, making their unequal living standards a pointed comparison rather than an explanation based on geography or population alone. Residents of Acomayo themselves recognize the divide, telling visiting outsiders that people there are poorer than those in Calca and asking why anyone would make the journey to their community.

Access helps make the contrast visible. From Cusco, the ancient Inca center and regional capital, the road to Calca is surfaced, while the road to Acomayo is in serious disrepair. Beyond Acomayo, a traveler needs a horse or mule. These differences do not, in the account, explain the original historical divergence; they illustrate how sharply the provinces’ circumstances differ in the present.

Livelihoods and unequal prosperity

The two provinces grow the same crops, but their harvests enter different economic circuits. In Calca, people sell crops in the market for money. In Acomayo, they grow food primarily for their own subsistence. The comparison therefore concerns not simply what people produce, but whether agricultural production connects them to markets and cash income.

The material disparity is substantial: Acomayo’s inhabitants consume about one-third less than people in Calca. The book pairs this measure with observable differences in roads and livelihoods, presenting the provinces’ divergence as both economic and everyday rather than as an abstract statistical gap.

The historical reach of the mita

The account traces the difference to the colonial labor system organized under Francisco de Toledo. To secure workers for silver mining, Spanish authorities concentrated Indigenous people in settlements called reducciones and imposed the mita, a compulsory labor rotation. The Potosí mita drew workers from a vast catchment area extending across parts of modern Peru and Bolivia; one-seventh of the adult male inhabitants in that area were required to work in the mines. The system endured through the colonial period and was abolished only in 1825.

Acomayo fell within the Potosí mita’s catchment area; Calca did not. The book treats that boundary as the major historical difference between the neighboring provinces and connects it to their later institutional and economic divergence. Calca’s position outside the zone is thus significant not because the provinces otherwise differed greatly, but because the colonial system imposed different historical conditions on places that shared much of their wider setting.

Significance

Calca’s comparison with Acomayo is used to show how institutions can leave durable regional differences. Similar crops, highland environments, and shared Quechua-speaking ancestry coexist with different market participation, consumption, and infrastructure. In the book’s account, the historical divide created by the Potosí mita helps explain why those outcomes diverged, while the contrast between the surfaced road to Calca and the difficult journey to Acomayo makes the disparity tangible.