Defending Corporate Identity on the Northern New Spanish Frontier: San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, 1780-1810

In 1808, confronted with the latest in a lengthy series of legal challenges to its corporate landholdings, the municipal council of the Indian town of San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, in the northeastern province of Coahuila in New Spain, dispatched a blistering note to its counterpart in the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo. The question of the moment concerned the right of Saltillo residents José Miguel and Juan González to route water they claimed in one place to property San Esteban had earlier allowed them to farm in another. ¹ But to do so meant that the water would be directed across lands belonging to San Esteban. When the Indian town denied them this right, the brothers protested vigorously. They contended that agriculture was, after all, the mainstay of the local economy. It benefited the public, the king, the church, and particularly the families of the pueblo itself. To deny these two farmers access to their water was to jeopardize agricultural production in the area. Further, they argued, San Esteban possessed much uncultivated arid land; perhaps the pueblo should consider renting some of the Gonzálezes' water as it flowed across the town's properties. Implicit in this suggestion was the assumption that San Esteban residents could not deal with what they had, that they were wasteful in utilizing their resources, and that Spaniards, in this particular case the brothers González, were better equipped to exploit the resources of the community.

San Esteban lost no time in challenging what it considered a high-handed assumption. Addressing the González brothers' accusations of its deceitful and cowardly behavior, San Esteban's response was anything but timid. The arid land to which the Gonzálezes referred, they argued, was not uncultivated land at all, but pasture land essential for San Esteban's stock raising activities. The water that the González brothers claimed as theirs was in fact the surplus ( sobrantes ) from a neighboring hacienda that San Esteban had legitimately enjoyed for over two hundred years. Moreover, the Indian town's denial of passage reflected no attempt on its part to deceive; rather, it was firmly based on San Esteban's right as a legally constituted municipality to determine the use of its resources and its obligation to defend the rights of its own citizens. ²

Responding in turn to San Esteban's missive in a letter to the subdelegado (the local lieutenant of the San Luis Potosí-based intendant), the González brothers argued that San Esteban was purposely confusing the issue by asserting claims to sobrantes from one source when in fact its customary rights were to water from an entirely different hacienda, and by having claimed at one point not to own the lands across which the water flowed that now it so vociferously called its own. Resorting again to an argument for the "greater good," they noted the benefit to both San Esteban and themselves in bringing heretofore uncultivated land into production; indeed, they called specific attention to the legal basis of their effort, noting that according to an 1807 crown decree owners who did not cultivate their properties within one year were to lose their rights to those properties (this begs the question for the moment of San Esteban's identification of these as pasture, not agricultural, lands). The Gonzálezes called upon the subdelegate to enforce the 1807 decree, and to compel San Esteban both to allow the passage of water and to rent some of the disputed properties, which would benefit both local consumers and the pueblo itself, the latter through the provision of rental income.

The subdelegate, Saltillo merchant Francisco Antonio Farías, rendered a decision that seemed to consider and affirm certain elements in each of the arguments put forth. Farías allowed the passage of water across San Esteban's lands, but affirmed San Esteban's dominion over those lands. He instructed San Esteban to rent portions of its vacant lands, charging whatever rent the community deemed just. He suggested that San Esteban rent...