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1. The Teitipac Communities: Peasant-Artisans on the Hacienda’s Periphery
- University of Texas Press
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The TeiTiPac communiTies 23 chaPTer 1 The Teitipac Communities: Peasant-Artisans on the Hacienda’s Periphery The Teitipac cluster of three communities (San Juan, San Sebastián, and Magdalena) provides a good point of departure for a historical inquiry into the struggle for land, livelihood, and civility in the Oaxaca Valley. The community known as Zeetoba/Quehuiquijezaa in Zapotec and as Teitipac in Nahuatl, and renamed San Juan Bautista in the sixteenth century by the Spaniards, was a major religious-ceremonial center in pre-Hispanic regional civilization. Moreover, owing to the Teitipac area’s early colonial involvement in mining, especially near Magdalena, this cluster is well represented in the colonial archival record and in key historical sources like Burgoa (1934). Spanish colonizers purchased cacicazgo lands in the Teitipac area and combined them with royal land grants (mercedes) in the eighteenth century to form a full-fledged hacienda known as San Antonio Buenavista, which would necessarily affect the economies of its neighboring communities .1 San Juan’s prominence as a Zapotec religious center carried over into the colonial period as it became the site of a church-monastery complex for the Dominican order’s spiritual conquest of the region. San Juan became the focus of a special campaign by the Spanish clergy to extirpate pagan religion. San Sebastián and Magdalena were satellite communities of the San Juan parish; as such, both communities had churches but no resident priests. San Sebastián and San Juan, being less than 2 kilometers apart and separated by a hilly area, were more directly engaged with each other, often in conflict over land boundaries or grazing and watering rights; Magdalena was some 6 kilometers southeast of San Juan at the edge of a high range of mountains. During the second half of the nineteenth century, San Sebastián was the center of operation of Matías Marcial, who became the dominant landowner 24 Land, LiveLihood, and civiLiTy in souThern mexico and merchant in the Teitipac subregion of the Tlacolula arm of the valley, exercising political and economic influence over villagers in competition with the hacendado in San Antonio Buenavista. The Mexican Revolution reduced the influence of Marcial and his heirs but did not result in the redistribution of their landholdings. It did effectively end the hacienda by redistributing most of its land to terrazgueros and establishing an ejido. The demise of the hacienda, combined with the dismantling of the Porfirian “jefe político” system, created a vacuum filled in the late 1920s and early 1930s by local militias under the command of ex-revolutionary general Juan Brito. These developments affected all of the Teitipac communities and the ex-terrazgueros of the hacienda; most of the latter resided in the Buenavista congregation (which would become an ejido), but some permanently relocated to San Juan and San Sebastián. The entry of these communities into the period of modernization, launched by the 1940 opening of the Pan-American Highway 10 kilometers or so to the north but accessible by unpaved roads, was encumbered by a history of oppression and exploitation as well as a system of civil-religious obligations that complicated household economics. The latter topic will be developed more fully in Chapter 2, whereas the present chapter will examine the themes outlined above by historical period. The Pre-Hispanic Period Since San Juan Teitipac was one of the major pre-Hispanic Zapotec settlements in the Oaxaca Valley, its early colonial history overshadows that of its smaller neighbor, San Sebastián. In Zapotec, according to Francisco de Burgoa (1934, 2:70), San Juan was best known as “Quehuiquijezaa, which means palace of stone, of teaching, and doctrine, because it was built over a very large rock, and the kings of Teozapotlán [renamed Zaachila] placed caciques here of great capacity, and intelligence in their rites, and the worship of their gods, for their veneration of them.” Burgoa (1934, 2:95) also noted that Quehuiquijezaa “in pre-Christian times was very celebrated, with a large population and a multitude of people, who lived together for a distance of one league, and in their characters and figures, refer to the fact that their principal founders were two valiant captains, who came out of the pueblo of Macuilsuchil.” These two captains, Baaloo and Baalachi, conquered the Teitipac area for the Zapotec; the identity of their opponents is uncertain, though it has been speculated that they were Mixe (Carriedo 1949, 1:108) or Chatino (Gay 1950, 1(1):233). The Codex...