Negotiation within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State

Afterword: The Consequences of Negotiation

229 The essays in this volume demonstrate that negotiation was a vital component of the colonial legal system. They support Tamar Herzog’s notion that what was “political” and what was “legal” in early modern states cannot necessarily be clearly distinguished, nor can formal and informal legal practices. These domains and practices were not wholly separable. In her words, “[j]ustice was not imposed by an absolutist state on a subjected people but was instead a multilayered, reciprocal, and negotiated system.”1 In colonial New Spain—and throughout the Spanish empire—just as law was a component of and kind of politics, politics was a component of and kind of law, with royal officials and institutions at all levels intermingling their judicial, administrative, and political roles throughout the colonial period.2 The authors provide highly detailed readings of colonial indigenous behaviors and beliefs relating to the political and legal realms across a variety of regions. Some authors emphasize negotiation as empowering (Baber and Oswoski), some emphasize the ways negotiation and innovation could The Consequences of Negotiation S u s a n K e l l o g g Afterword S u s a n K e l l o g g 230 ultimately make indigenous communities and groups more dependent on Spanish legal and political institutions (Ruiz Medrano, Romero Frizzi, and Yannakakis), and others show that both empowerment and dependency could result (Velasco Ávila and Chávez-Gómez). A combination of geography , population density, and historical events (especially in the case of the Tlaxcalans) may help to explain these variable outcomes. For indigenous peoples, negotiation might result in the preservation of limited spaces of autonomy, a notion not dissimilar from the concept of mediated opportunism as defined by Susan Deeds.3 Describing mediated opportunism as the “crossroads between cultural and environmental opportunism on the one hand and moral boundaries and biological barriers on the other,”4 I would also emphasize political and legal constraints. But disease, ecology, and environment all played roles in shaping the spaces of autonomy carved out by indigenous peoples in all the regions discussed in this book. Other consequences of colonial negotiation processes include the redefining of roles of indigenous leaders and the creation of new leadership positions as well as the growing complexity of imperial bureaucracy as some positions and institutions were reshaped or enhanced and new positions and institutions were created. While sharing certain ideas and concerns, the scholars contributing to this volume certainly have neither identical theoretical orientations nor projects. Their approaches, nonetheless, suggest ways that scholarly interest has focused on indigenous engagement with law and negotiations between Spanish and native officials. The investigation of the latter’s creative deployments of Spanish legal and political institutions and officials has led ethnohistorians from both sides of the border to consider much more deeply the interplay of cultural, political, material, and environmental factors in order to explain the development of the colonial legal culture. For example, the development of colonial indigenous legal discourses , whether in native or Spanish languages, used traditional political and kinship concepts, rhetorics, and symbols in new ways and depended on ecological frameworks for the production of material resources that made legal participation possible. The essays also demonstrate that diverse regional and temporal cultural expressions of negotiation existed. While indigenous allusions to war and the emphasis on social hierarchy are apparent in both Ruiz Medrano’s and Osowski’s essays, the urban milieu and Mexico City as the seat of Spanish power certainly shaped the range of responses possible in that area. In Oaxaca, indigenous conceptions of kinship and the sacred relationships between land and people remain evident in the legal documents of the eighteenth century. In the northern border area, native patterns of political decision making are easily discernible, and Afterword 231 in the south, the complex patterns of movement that contributed to ethnogenesis prior to the arrival of Europeans can be seen to have influenced Maya interactions with the loose, but still meaningful, network of Spanish judicial authority in the region. While the influence on colonial studies of Edward Said’s Orientalism has become obvious in works that show how colonial powers constructed colonial subjects, the continuing influence of Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India also is evident in the essays in this volume. The authors aim to perceive and analyze the consciousness of subjects, almost always through the opaque, official forms...