Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain (review)

Latin American historians have traditionally maintained that Spanish rule imposed 300 years of peace on colonial Mexico (then known as New Spain), a region that in pre-Columbian times was characterized by internecine warfare between native tribes. While conceding that the indigenous people were cruelly exploited, they note that the flexibility of the imperial administration and its ability to co-op potentially hostile groups enabled it to control a vast area with a minimum of military presence. The absence of any concerted effort on the part of the Indians to overturn the regime further underscored the success of the Spanish in creating a Pax Colonial.

The essays contained in this volume are well designed to challenge this view. Drawing attention to five incidents of native resistance and revolt that occurred during the middle to final years of the colonial period, the authors—five historians and one anthropologist—offer a convincing case that, far from being peaceful, the Spanish colonial system was inherently attuned to violence that was not confined to any one institution, group, or gender but was ubiquitous across New Spain’s society.

Susan M. Deeds in “First-Generation Rebellions in Seventeenth-Century Nueva Vizcaya” examines revolts by the Xiximes in 1610, the Tepehuanes in 1616, and the Tarahumaras at mid-century and again in the 1690s to show how each group tried to use Christian and royal symbols to regain some form of local autonomy. Ronald Spores in “Differential Response to Colonial Control among the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of Oaxaca” argues that although, on occasion, natives responded with violence to a local administrator’s outrageous demands for labor and tribute, intertribal conflicts were more common in Oaxaca than class-based warfare between Indians and Spaniards. In “Religion and Rebellion in Colonial Chiapas,” Kevin Gosner suggests that the large-scale Mayan rebellion in 1713, known as the Tzeltal revolt, was a struggle fundamentally about power—“about inequalities between Mayas and Spaniards, of course, but also about hierarchy, privilege, and legitimacy among Mayas themselves” (66); in “Culture, Community and Rebellion in the Yucatec Maya Uprising of 1761,” Robert W. Patch describes a nativistic, revitalization movement that was a harbinger of the great Caste War of the nineteenth century. After examining the worldview of the Chapala rebels and the nature of royalist coercion and counterinsurgency in “The Indian Insurgents of Mezcala Island on the Lake Chapala Front, 1812–1816,” Christon I. Archer concludes that the rebels were struggling for traditional goals and idealized village societies rather than the revolutionary principals espoused by Mexican Liberals.

In the final essay, “Some Thoughts on the Pax Colonial, Colonial Violence and Perceptions of Both,” Murdo MacLeod analyzes the violence of the Spanish colonial era within the context of other great colonial empires, and agrees that incidents of resistance have been largely unacknowledged. He argues that because scholars are attracted to major revolts, they have overlooked the low level of violence endemic to Spanish rule, and he calls on researchers to resurrect this hidden but important history by examining the causes of resistance and rebellion within the basic framework of Indian society.

The case studies presented here have clearly responded to MacLeod’s challenge. All five authors use an eclectic mix of methodologies drawn from ethnography, archaeology, oral history, and quantification to examine previously untapped archival materials from an indigenous perspective. Their essays are solidly researched, well written, intellectually stimulating, and illustrated with helpful maps. Since the incidents they discuss occurred on the geographical peripheries of Spanish rule and throughout more than 250 years, one is still reluctant to conclude that rebellions continually disrupted Spanish rule. Nevertheless, when taken together, they offer a strong argument that ethnic violence was a major undercurrent in New Spain, and as MacLeod suggests, by returning to “the most obscure colonial documentation and analyzing it from the native point of view,” it may be possible to conclude in the future that rebellions were only...