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

1. Introduction—Back to the Future: Law, Politics, and Culture in Colonial Mexican Ethnohistorical Studies

 Historians who surveyed the schools of interpretation within North Amer­ ican scholarship on colonial Spanish America in the 1980s described how social history, history from the bottom up, emerged out of institutional and political history.1 But because all social groups exist within and make use of dense networks of meaning, less than ten years later, a more cultural history—focused on images, mentalities, and the deconstruction of both colonial and scholarly representations of people, places, and processes of change—emerged.2 As issues of representation, memory, and the cultural meanings of hierarchy, hegemony, and power surged to the fore, scholars such as Edward Said and Ranajit Guha wrote evocatively and provoca­ tively about the construction and consciousness of dominators and those who were dominated in the Middle East and South Asia, respectively. Such interests inevitably brought historians back to the study of political and legal institutions.3 These institutions played important, if not determina­ tive, roles in structuring everyday life in racially and class-stratified colo­ nial societies in many parts of the world. 1 Law, Politics, and Culture in Colonial Mexican Ethnohistorical Studies S u s a n K e l l o g g Introduction—Back to the Future S u s a n K e l l o g g  Inspired by books that have taken up these questions in the Latin American context, such as Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, and Peter Guardino’s The Time of Liberty, the essays in this volume turn to earlier periods of time and focus intensively on indigenous interaction with imperial legal and political institutions in colonial New Spain.4 Collectively, they ask, was the colonial political-legal domain simply an instrument of domination or did councils, courts, and legal personnel allow for or adjust to the assertion of agency? While the authors find a nuanced middle ground, they place a special emphasis on the role of indigenous efforts at negotiation in the emergence of a colo­ nial legal culture during the sixteenth century and show that legal culture changed and adapted to different regions, environments, cultures, and new patterns of governance in the eighteenth.5 Many forces shaped this legal culture—political, social, cultural, tex­ tual,material,even environmental. Charles Cutterhasdefineditasahighly flexible set of practices (and, I would add, meanings), the roots of which may be found in the judicial free will (arbitrio judicial) held by officials high and low, whether judges of the Real Audiencia (known as oidores) or local officials, alcaldes, and in the “convergence of written law, doctrina (the opinions of jurists), custom, and equidad (a communally defined sense of fairness).”6 The essays included here, by both Mexican and North American scholars, focus on the roles played by a variety of indigenous cultures and communities in the emergence, functioning, and local varieties of this cul­ ture over space, across time, and in combination with the extreme regional diversity that constituted the viceroyalty of New Spain. While many North American scholars, beginning with Charles Gibson, have contributed in meaningful ways to the study of both the impact of the Spanish colonial project on native people and the ways these people not only reacted to but shaped that project, Mexican ethnohistori­ ans also took up these very important questions. The work of Luis Reyes, for example, with his deep knowledge of the Nahuatl language and Nahua culture, was particularly important. His scholarship bridged the earlier emphasis on the study of pre-Hispanic peoples either archaeologically or through Spanish- and indigenous-language texts and the later emphasis on colonial indigenous peoples who drew upon, yet simultaneously reshaped, earlier cultural traditions. He, James Lockhart, and numerous others con­ tributed studies that not only advance our understanding of regionally and culturally specific responses to the Spanish presence but also help to create a usable, practical rendering of the past with implications for the present by showing, for example, that indigenous languages not only were pre­ served but were viewed by the institutions of colonial governance as legiti­ Introduction—Back to the Future  mate forms of communication, even in the legal arena. This scholarship establishes that while colonial rule led to many negative consequences for native peoples, resistance occurred, and cultural vitality and creativ­ ity existed and have a lengthy history.7 While noting that Mesoamerican native peoples engaged in significant acts of resistance and rebellion, this vitality and creativity help...