The Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo instituted the 'mita' system, a forced labor draft that required one-seventh of the male population of indigenous parishes (covering 16 provinces) to work in the Potosí silver mines. This led to an estimated 8 million deaths over 250 years due to the horrific conditions in the 'Cerro Rico' (Rich Mountain).

The 'mita' is the central horror that the 'Mestizo Baroque' poetry of the Andes (like that of Juan del Valle y Caviedes) tries to process through satire and gothic imagery. Caviedes' 'Diente del Parnaso' (Tooth of Parnassus) rails against the doctors who profit from the sick miners, but the mountain itself is the true monster. The 'cry of the mountain' enters colonial poetry as a guttural, non-human sound. This 'mining poetry' is a literature of exhaustion and 'lethargy,' reflecting the anemia and mercury poisoning of the workers, a stark, unpoetic realism that stands as a devastating counter-narrative to the 'glories' of the Spanish Empire, influencing later Latin American poets of social protest like César Vallejo.