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

6: Costumbre: A Language of Negotiation in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

137 On September 15, 1700, a seismic shift in the balance of political forces shook the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous region far removed from colonial power centers. The residents of the Zapotec pueblo of San Francisco Cajonos and eighteen surrounding pueblos rose up in a violent rebellion that shocked and unsettled the small Spanish population of roughly 150 people who lived in the administrative seat of Villa Alta. More than a century and a half after the conquest of the Sierra Norte, it appeared that Spanish colonial rule was not a fait accompli. Neither the economic exploitation of the region’s 30,000 to 40,000 indigenous residents through the repartimiento (forced production) of cochineal dye nor the “spiritual conquest” of the region by the Dominican order had made the district’s native peoples into docile colonial subjects. The events of 1700 unleashed a period of Spanish repression, administrative reform, and native resistance. The rebellion had other political effects as well: it intensified jurisdictional disputes between ecclesiastical and civil authorities as well as between the secular Catholic hierarchy and the Dominican order 6 A Language of Negotiation in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca Y a n n a P. Y a n n a k a k i s Costumbre Y a n n a P. Y a n n a k a k i s 138 and marked a decades-long renegotiation of the terms of local rule among pueblos de indios (Indian municipalities), the Church, and the state. Much of this negotiation took place within the colonial legal system and was articulated in terms of the opposition between state power and costumbre (local custom). Historianshavewidelyacknowledgedthatthelegalsystemplayedaprimary role in making Spanish colonialism work at a political and economic level and in producing a political-cultural hegemony. Susan Kellogg’s landmark study argues that Nahua use of the Spanish legal system produced a hybrid legal culture rather than a wholesale transformation of Nahua legal-political custom. Although it often served locally defined native interests , legal culture ultimately tied Nahua elites and communities to Spanish systems of authority and undercut native autonomy.1 Kellogg’s case study of central Mexico points to the strong historical connection between legal and cultural pluralism and colonial state formation. More recently, the close relationship between plural legal systems and state formation has come to the attention of scholars of world history. Lauren Benton’s ambitious comparative work on legal regimes posits that colonialism as a global phenomenon concerned itself largely with the construction of legal institutions that emerged as a negotiation between local legal orders (what colonizers recognized and labeled as custom) and state legal orders. Benton cautions us against accepting “states’ claims to legal sovereignty at face value.”2 If we fall into this trap, “early colonial authorities then appear as comprehensive political powers rather than internally fragmented entities that tended to insert themselves within local power structures.”3 Both Benton and Kellogg articulate a close relationship between flexible , pluralist systems of law and the growth of state power and legitimacy in colonial settings, made possible through a process of cultural and legal negotiation between native peoples and colonial authorities. Their work demonstrates that analysis of negotiation as colonial process must consider the reciprocal effects of negotiation on both native peoples and the state. Colonial states and legal institutions did not exist as static monoliths but rather emerged over time in dialectic with native litigation and politicallegal culture. This chapter addresses the renegotiation of local rule in the district of Villa Alta following the Cajonos rebellion through an examination of a sixty-year-long cabecera-sujeto dispute (a dispute between a pueblo that served as a religious/administrative center and the surrounding pueblos subject to its authority) in the parish of San Juan Tanetze–San Juan Yae. The analytical focus centers on the use of costumbre by Zapotec liti- Costumbre 139 gants as a rhetorical strategy and language of negotiation with the Crown and Catholic Church. The recognition and valorization of costumbre in medieval Castilian legal tradition allowed the Spanish state over time to incorporate significant territory in the multi-ethnic and religiously diverse Iberian peninsula and, then later, to patch together the cultural and political incoherence of its Spanish American holdings. As a language of negotiation , costumbre provided an ideal tool of empire. But in the hands of indigenous litigants in the Americas, costumbre as legal discourse also provided a...