Pueblos within Pueblos: Tlaxilacalli Communities in Acolhuacan, Mexico, ca. 1272–1692 by Benjamin D. Johnson (review)

Benjamin D. Johnson offers an impressive comparative perspective that effectively decenters previous scholarship by presenting “peripheral” tlaxilacalli as significant autonomous groups that make up the altepetl nation-states that built both Aztec and Spanish empires. To achieve this feat, Johnson’s rigorous archival research puts non-elite local governance at the center of both empires, describing in detail the complex hierarchies of officials in which common people participated. The flexible nature of these hierarchies is key to understanding tlaxilacalli provincial officials as autonomous within both imperial economies. These “neighborhoods” dissolved, constructed, and maintained self-governing commoner administrations. This created a leadership that more closely represented and supported local interests than has been previously understood.

For example, membership on Aztec imperial and judicial military councils was made up of representatives from these tlaxilacalli. Their “cooperative and autonomous framework,” which was independent of Aztec rule, remained relevant by adapting to the Spanish colonial era. Johnson shows the tlaxilacalli to be much more than a territorial claim, it functioned as an ethnic group that formed labor units, corporate holdings, local hierarchies, martial units, temples/Catholic parishes, and “even subdivisions of these.” The book thus significantly advances recent research that delves into the local archival or archaeological record to find evidence of concrete workings of discrete and numerous levels of indigenous administration, often glossed in Spanish as pueblo, barrio, aldea, fiscal, or cabildo (see also Schroeder 2016; Melton-Villanueva 2016; Christensen 2013; Arnauld et al. 2012; and Townsend 2009).

In a significant contribution to the field, Johnson scours the extant record for different Spanish cognates for Nahua institutions to present six nested but autonomous indigenous structures of social and economic authority: huei altepetl; altepetl; tlayacatl; tlaxilacalli; altepemaitl; and calli. Because monarchies in the European sense could not conceive of town councils that could contradict imperial directives in the way tlaxilacalli could ignore Aztec directives, the Spanish “conceptual disconnect” in understanding the six nested civic structures contributed to growing tlaxilacalli autonomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, in the first few chapters, Johnson defines community as having multiple, not unitary, authorities.

Local groups from the household level up acted as the administrators and the boots on the ground, building and dissolving empires. The decline of Aztec elite power during the Spanish colonial period meant that tlaxilacalli and other subunits functioned as communal networks of non-elite power. Chapter 3 names the tlaxilacalli of Tepetlaoztoc and defines layers of local administration: the tepixque (people minders), topileque (staff holders), and calpixque (tlaxilacalli managers). The structural independence of local officials endured—even when tlaxilacalli later shifted to calling themselves full altepetl/pueblos. Of special interest is the colonial functioning of tlaxilacalli in the Catholic context. Chapter 6 exploits the seventeenth-century record to show how local leaders continued to further their autonomy and operate under the radar of the Spanish empire. Johnson argues that these administrative structures of empire usually predate their respective cooperative altepetl.

Basing his discussion on the Acolhua codices—the earliest American land surveys—Johnson avoids the erasure of indigenous social structures common in methodologies based on Aztec or Spanish imperial sources. Students will enjoy exploring how Johnson found the tlaxilacalli that settled Mexico Tenochtitlan—foundational facts relegated to near afterthoughts in Aztec histories, because most “[i]mperial sources deliberately subsume autonomous and semiautonomous actions to wider narratives” (5).

Pueblos Within Pueblos will stimulate much research. Names of ethnic tlaxilacalli (like Mexicapan) beg to be collected and added to the partial lists of active altepetl in Johnson’s Table 0.2, a data set to which I expect specialists from varied fields will soon add their endorsement. Those teaching advanced courses in Mexican history and research methods will find this book essential, as it combines language-based original scholarship with a broad review of classic ethnohistorical, archaeological, and art historical studies to reposition our idea of empire in the American context.