Witnesses, Spatial Practices, and a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca

At approximately eight o’clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged in a legal battle over the land for four years. Their lawyers stood with them. Juan Tirado, a district interpreter, and court witnesses (in lieu of an official notary) translated and notarized the proceedings. From his perch on the back of his horse, the alcalde mayor read the legal decision in the dispute, which the interpreter translated for the benefit of the Zapotec officials. The auxiliary judge, who rendered the decision in the case from the distance and comfort of the diocesan seat of Antequera, had ordered that the land in question should be divided equally between the two pueblos. The lawyer for the cabildo of Tanetze voiced his official protest and vowed to appeal the case to the Real Audiencia. The alcalde mayor registered the protest. Then, he addressed another group of men who had been waiting in the wings: Juan de Yllescas, Andrés Ramos, Juan Baptista, Pedro Hernandes, and Nicolas Santiago, all natives of the Zapotec pueblo of San Miguel Talea, and all of whom had testified in an earlier probanza on behalf of the pueblo of Juquila. Through his interpreter, the magistrate swore them in as witnesses and ordered them to guide the group to the disputed territory, identify the parcels of land and their borders, and determine where they should be divided. From this point on, the Zapotec witnesses took the lead and proceeded toward the disputed territory along the Camino Real, with their “faces pointing south.” In this manner, the legal ritual of boundary marking (amojonamiento) began.¹

Land disputes have provided grist for studies of colonial societies in many regions of New Spain. For the most part, these studies have been macrohistorical, yielding rich, regionally specific data about indigenous politico-territorial relations, colonial forms of land tenure, agricultural production, and class relations.² For the case of the colonial district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, scholars have only recently begun to focus intensively on the dynamics of territorial conflict through examination of pleitos de tierras, lienzos, primordial titles, and other ethnohistorical documents.³

This article contributes to growing interest in territorial conflict in the district of Villa Alta through microhistorical analysis—a close and thickly contextualized reading—of the role of Zapotec witnesses in a land dispute, which lasted from 1715–1719. Through its microhistorical approach, it also suggests a methodology that fruitfully compliments the macrohistorical approaches to conflicts over land that have characterized the history of colonial Mesoamerica more broadly. When read closely, legal struggles over land can be kaleidoscopic, the territorial dispute opening on to complex, shifting glimmers of social, cultural, and political conflict. The protagonists in these interconnected struggles were almost always indigenous elites, acting as witnesses, who had deep local knowledge of land tenure, and who sought to shape not only the map of the region, but also relationships of power and the local political context within the confines of the Spanish legal framework. It is in the details of these disputes that we can see the local specificities of the interaction of Spanish property law and the local indigenous society in question, as well as the strategies that indigenous elites used to maneuver within the labyrinth of colonial law while pursuing local interests.

In this article, I use the term “spatial practices” to characterize the strategies used by Zapotec witnesses in their efforts to shape the local politics of territory. In his recent study of colonial Guerrero, Jonathan Amith defines spatial practices as “either the reconstruction of space (and place) through the movement of people and objects across a landscape, or . . . political and discursive practices, such as the redefinition of administrative boundaries...