From the first half of the 16th century until early in the 19th century the Spanish crown possessed a colonial empire comprising the greater the greater part of the western hemisphere. It was organized under the Viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico), Lima (Peru and highland Bolivia) and (from 1776) La Plata with Audencia at Buenos Aires. As colonists the Spanish were not agriculturalists like the Anglo Saxon settlers in North America but exploiters who set up an aristocratic model of society with an economy based on the exportation of a small number of specialized products and the exploitation of Indigenous labor. They therefore did not exterminate the Indigenous population but preserved them as a reservoir for suppressed labor. Few women accompanied the Spanish immigrants, and a large mestizo class arose from the union of the Spanish with the Indigenous peoples. In the second generation there arose a further distinction between the Peninsulares (immigrants who were born in Spain) and the Creoles (unmixed whites who were born in the colony). The Spanish colonists were city builders who tried in all things to reproduce in the colonies the conditions they had known in metropolitan Spain. They were destructive of native arts and culture, importing into their colonies the architecture and art current in Europe. Nevertheless, the employment of mestizo and Indian craftsmen in the workshops set up by immigrant European artists led in the course of time to some syncretism with native traditions of design and representation and to the emergence of local or “mixed” styles.