It has been claimed that the legal arguments of the Tlaxcaltecah "were creative stories that were influenced by the rhetorical norms and political culture of Castile" and while they contained "elements of truth and recognizable descriptions of reality" they should be viewed as "artifacts of human creativity, first and foremost", reflecting "native people's ingenuity and agency" (Baber, 2011, p. 57). However, the complaints, alarming diagnoses and even denunciations expressed by the Tlaxcaltecah need to be cast in the direct spotlight of the catastrophic and recurring crises affecting the inhabitants of the province from the onset of the colonial period and begetting profound social and economic upheavals: extreme depopulation, waves of famine and "cataclysmic" climatic changes whose status as "historical facts" historians simply must recognize (Martínez Baracas, 2008, pp. 257–259; Skopyk, 2020). In fact, royal privileges improved local affairs only to a very minor degree: orders prohibiting Tlaxcaltecah labor and personal service in the city of Puebla, banning Spanish settlements and *estancias* and controlling monopolies were constantly violated (Gibson, 1967, p. 169). Emerging *obrajes* (manufacturing workshops) became the places of exploitation of the local population despite royal legislation aimed at counteracting the abuse. The Spanish-owned *obrajes* in the province included closed workshops (*obrajes cerrados*) where Tlaxcaltecah workers were practically imprisoned. In addition, both the forced and voluntary involvement of local people in the *obrajes* reduced the number of people engaged in agriculture, whereas the development of the city of Puebla itself contributed to the depopulation of Tlaxcallan (Sánchez Verín, 2002, pp. 43–54, 79).

Moreover, the content of the official petitions and legal suits takes on a different perspective when illuminated by the proceedings of the *cabildo*, recorded in Nahuatl for the internal needs of the ruling class of the *altepetl* . As much as they are replete with traditional rhetorical tools relating to perceived threats and the needs of the community, this layer of historical records underpins and shores up the concrete measures and actions undertaken by the Indigenous government. Their goal was to address, contain and counteract threats and forge favorable solutions in the new reality by means of the available resources and structures, very much in accordance with the contemporary understanding of agency (Giddens, 1984; Sztompka, 1991). And indeed, the policies and fears of the Indigenous *cabildo* were no doubt perspicacious and far-sighted; the multi-faceted effects of Spanish infiltration into the province proved disastrous for local land-holding, control over resources and linguistic-cultural assimilation, both in the mid- and long-term perspectives.

### **Other Early Responses**

The responses of Indigenous authorities and residents of the province to both threats and opportunities emerging from the contact with Spaniards were by no means limited to legal actions and legal rhetoric. While the influx of Spanish cattle herders and their animals eventually slipped out of the control of both local and Crown authorities, an important strategy was aimed at protecting the environment and preventing damage to Indigenous settlements and fields, especially in key moments of the agricultural production cycle. In February 1548, the *cabildo* decided to expel the sheep from the wetlands where Indigenous people would sow amaranth and chili: *chiyauhtently ca quizazque yn ichcame ypanpa yn zan cuel toca maceoaltzintly zan cuel quitoca auhtly yuan chilli quitepeua yuan quequeza tonalchilli* (*Actas de cabildo*, fol. 10v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p.

Struggles over containing the negative impact of the presence of Spanish cattle spiraled into conflicts between the colonists and the local people, who resorted to their own retributive responses. Although in 1548 the Spanish *corregidor* issued an order obliging the local government to build a corral for cattle and horses caught consuming or destroying Indigenous crops so that the animals could be retained until released to their owners (*Actas de cabildo*, fol. 12v), the Tlaxcaltecah would slaughter roving cattle and sell their meat. In response, in 1568, the viceroy Martín Enriquez banned all slaughter houses in Native communities, only excluding pork under appeal, and then allowing more exceptions for towns which also housed friars and other Spaniards (Gibson, 1967, p. 153). However, daily interactions followed their own course as the rigidity of legal regulations gave way to the more practical retributive responses of the Indigenous people. An archival testimony of 15828 reveals the incident of three oxen that were caught devastating Indigenous fields in Apizaco. A man named Francisco Martín put them in safekeeping so that the Indigenous people would not kill the roving animals; he only let the owner, Francisco López, retrieve them when the latter had recompensed both the losses to the Indigenous people and the rescuer's work of saving the animals' lives.

While striving to limit the harm done by Spanish cattle, the *altepetl*  also owned significant numbers of sheep. In December 1547, the municipal government ordered the sale of 580 sheep and to inquire about how many sheep were currently held in the wetlands of Amalinalco (*Actas de cabildo*, fol. 3v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 42). This evidence attests to the careful management of resources in economically profitable ways. Although foreign intrusions were recognized as a source of threat, the economic exchange and imports provided essential opportunities that the Indigenous people could not ignore. An important factor in play could also have been the need to solve the problem of the huge amount of unused land, which increased after the drastic demographic declInés in 1545 and in 1576–1578. Rearing livestock made it possible to avoid falling under the dreaded *tierra baldías* category that threatened ownership titles (Skopyk, 2020, p. 47). Thus, quite early on, the *cabildo* began to explore and exploit such new resources, engaging in novel economic enterprises, including buying sheep, in a conscious effort to secure sufficient food supplies in these times of climatic anomalies and epidemics that brought about depopulation, famine and growing areas of wasteland.

8 AHET, Fondo Colonial, Sección Judicial, Serie Criminal, Caja 10, exp. 1,

Accordingly, three years after the traumatic epidemic of 1545, the *cabildo* decided that planting wheat on the fields belonging to the *altepetl* was an important opportunity to "multiply" its property (*Actas de cabildo*, fol. 12v: *yn atltepetl ycuentla motocaz Castilla cently yuan yn nican cently ynic momiequiliz atltepetl ytlatqui*; "Wheat [lit. Spanish corn] will be sown along with local corn on the fields of the *altepetl* so that its property will be multiplied"). This strategy required entering into arrangements with Spaniards to manage herding and to provide expert support in new agricultural investments involving European plants (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 31). This happened in 1549 (fols. 30v–31r), when a Spanish expert was hired for two years in order to take care of the *cabildo*'s sheep and teach Tlaxcallans about breeding, as well as wool and cheese production. In 1550, the Indigenous government obliged the Spanish *corregidor* to find a knowledgeable Spaniard to herd the city's sheep, pastured over the plains of Amalinalco (fols. 55v–56r), while another foreigner was recruited to supervise agricultural works and the sowing of wheat in Chicueimalinalco, in the same region (fols. 95r–95v). This was not just a short-term strategy of assimilating and making a profit from newly available resources: evidence from the end of the seventeenth century reveals that rates of Indigenous draught animal usage were equal to or higher than those found on the majority of Spanish estates (Skopyk, 2020, p. 114).

The Tlaxcaltecah successfully employed intimate knowledge of their natural environment for agroecological adaptations, developing new niches of agricultural production and farming. As convincingly argued by Bradley Skopyk, based on local environmental knowledge they were able to develop and maintain an active and creative response to the changing social ecologies and the adverse climate change associated with the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, with its excessive cold and humidity: "native communities in central Mexico acted as the primary sites of ecological creativity, assembling knowledge and skills for cultivating native and exotic plants and animals to form new, and successful, agrosystems that defy the binary native and non-native" (Skopyk, 2020, p. 19).

## **Communities' Stories of Resilience: Legal Battles in the Latter Part of the Colonial Period**

Along with the troubling climatic and demographic change, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries power shifted from the central government of Tlaxcallan to elected town functionaries at local levels. At the same time, the significant number of Spaniards living in the area resulted in Spanish pressure on the Indigenous authorities and the emergence of a separate Spanish jurisdiction that was not envisioned in the original sixteenth-century organization of the province. The duality of power spurred conflicts and debilitated the Indigenous *cabildo*  (Martínez Baracs, 2008, pp. 352–502). Between 1590 and 1610, "caciques sold vast quantities of land to Spaniards and thereby created a new rural geography that interspersed Spanish haciendas with indigenous lands" (Skopyk, 2020, p. 116). This new socioeconomic and ethnic landscape resulted in growing pressure on Native land and other resources, despite the fact that the Indigenous population was still vulnerable to devastating epidemics and very much reduced when compared to the pre-Hispanic and early colonial periods.

I began this paper with a quote from the interview with Doña Rosaria, a healer from the municipality of Contla, formerly San Bernardino Contlan. This place is well-attested in the archival record, which offers glimpses into the collective actions of local people in the past. Thus, for example, the year 1688 witnessed a major legal struggle by the representatives of San Bernardino Contlan against Francisco and Diego González Gallardo, his son. These Spaniards and hacienda owners from Santa Ana Chiauhtempan allegedly sowed barley and cleared trees on community land located on the lower slopes of the sacred mountain, the volcano Matlalcueyeh (known today as Malinche), and bordering with the *barranca* of Quauhtzincola.9 The barrio of Quauhtzincola was located on the wooded slopes of the mountain, in

9 Los naturales y común del pueblo de San Bernardino contra Francisco y Diego González, AHET, Fondo Colonial.

Sección Administrativa, Caja 141, Expediente 13, Año 1688.

the area corresponding today with San Felipe Cuauhtenco. This forested mountainous area at the southeastern edge of the town of Contlan is clearly seen in the late colonial map of Tlaxcala (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3).

With the support of the town attorney (*procurador por el comun y naturales del pueblo*), the Natives presented their petition in the Audiencia court in Mexico, arguing that land recently restored to Francisco and Diego González Gallardo in another legal dispute with Contlan had been illegally extended to what was the property of the town. The Spaniards invaded the area and began to clear the trees, thus

**Fig. 3.2** Colonial map of Tlaxcala, courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

**Fig. 3.3** Matlalcueyeh, courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

damaging the community's livelihood and limiting the local people's access to the *monte*, the wooded slopes of Matlalcueyeh, which provided them with firewood and other natural resources.10 As a result, the people of Contlan secured a royal provision prohibiting the two Spaniards' usage of this land, including cultivation and the extraction of trees, thus leaving it under Indigenous control and restoring unrestricted access to the mountain to the community.

The hacienda owners rejected the accusation in January of 1689, contesting the Indigenous ownership of the land in question. In turn, the community of Contlan responded in May 1689 that the foreigners "have entered this mountainous piece of land, plowing it and clearing trees to extract what belongs to our community, having been inherited

10 Pasando a desmontarlas y ararlas en grave perjuizio de d < ic > ho pueblo Y sus naturales Como tambien a ympedirles y embarazarle las entradas y salidas del monte donde no podian escusarse a yr y cortar la leña y madera para sus preçisos menesteres.

from our ancestors".11 Moreover, they convinced the Tlaxcallan authorities to imprison the Spaniards for crimes and violence against the town. Several Indigenous witnesses presented their testimony through the translator, attesting to having seen Francisco and Diego Gonzalez entering their land, clearing and sowing it, thus causing the local people a "violent dispossession" (*violento despojo*). In response, Don Diego de Arcos y Rivera, the *teniente general de Tlaxcala*, proceeded with the imprisonment of the accused: Francisco Gonzales was indeed arrested but his son could not be found. However, the *hacienda* owner argued that the land in question was part of another dispute with the community and hence not in their legal possession. He also asked to be released from prison because of his health issues and advanced age.

At that point the *teniente general* resumed the case, admitting more witnesses and agreed to release the Spaniard with bail. In the course of the litigation, Francisco Gonzales accused the people of Contlan of being "trouble-makers and instigators who go around pursuing lawsuits without legal basis or right"12 and claimed to have worked on the land for two preceding years without any objections from the local people. Indeed, some Spaniards testified in favor of the *hacienda* owner, stating that they had seen him working this parcel in 1688 and 1689 without complaints from the community and that it formed part of the disputed land in the Real Audiencia court. Nonetheless, a number of Indigenous witnesses confirmed that this piece of land was separate from that under litigation. In the testimonies they referred explicitly to their intimate knowledge of local territory ("por el conosim<ien>to que tiene de ellas"), an important detail that the notary decided to record each time. The authorities of Tlaxcallan, headed by the Spanish *teniente*, recognized the validity of the Indigenous claims, refusing the *hacienda* owner the possibility of appeal as they considered his claims groundless. The documentation of the case in the archive of Tlaxcala

11 "nos querellamos criminal mente de fran<cis>co gonsales gallardo Díego gonsales gallardo su hijo en racon de que Los suso d<ic>hos dem autoridad se han entrado en vn pedaso de tierra grande montuoso harandolo í descascarando los arboles p<ar>a derívarlos lo qual es proprio de n<uest>ra comunidad. havído y heredado de n<uest>ros antepasados"

12 "inquietadores y perturbadores y andar moviendo pleytos sin accion ni derecho"

ends with the request of Gonzalez Gallardo to the Real Audiencia in Mexico City to revoke the royal provision conceded to Contlan and to transfer the documents to the court of appeal.

The legal regulations for New Spain maintained the principle of equal access for both Indigenous people and Spaniards to unoccupied forests (*monte*) and grasslands for foraging, firewood collection and hunting (Greer, 2018, p. 254). In the case of the disputed land, the court case implies that its possession was strategic to the community, probably not only because of the access to the forest, as claimed in the legal arguments, but also for cultivation purposes on the lower slopes of the volcano. There were already many Spanish *ranchos* located on the slopes of Matlalcueyeh at that time, including in the area around Santa Ana Chiyauhtempan (Skopyk, 2020, p. 122), so the pressure on Indigenous land was growing. In a responsive adaptation to adverse climate conditions, farmers in Tlaxcallan developed large-scale cultivation of maguey (agave) plants on hilltop terraces for the purposes of the pulque production that was booming for most of the seventeenth century. But this form of land management turned out to be destructive to the environment: in the long term this cultivation strategy, combined with violent climatic anomalies, caused serious erosion problems. The Crown's withdrawal of tax exemption for *pulque* production additionally contributed to the decline of maguey cultivation, field abandonment and mass landslides, as well as both desiccation and flooding (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 123–129).

Maguey cultivation was also vital in the area of San Bernardino Contlan and this community was responsible for violent *pulque* riots in 1680, opposing the abolition of the tax exemption (Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 389). The legal struggle for land on the slopes of Matlalcueyeh that unfolded in the same decade confirms that hilltop cultivation areas and forest resources were vital for the community. Its residents showed particular determination in their collective action against Spanish intruders: we can only speculate as to whether the crisis of *pulque*  production was among the factors that contributed to the community efforts undertaken to secure the vital resources of the town. What we do know, however, is that Contlan and other towns in Tlaxcallan were entering into turbulent times that made their economic and demographic situation very precarious, especially in the subsequent two decades.

The importance of *monte*, or wooded land adopted for local farming and settlement, is also salient in the history of San Toribio Xicohtzinco, located in the lower area of Río Zahuapan where it joins the upper basin of the Atoyac River. In 1720, the Indigenous people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco brought a charge against a mulatto, Francisco Antonio, who was the slave and *mayordomo* of the infantry captain, Juan de Torres.13 They accused him of closing the town's points of entry, and of beating and threatening the Indigenous community members who tried to pass.  On a Sunday morning, he then whipped another *topileh*, Juan Thomas, when the constable was on his way to attend mass. The *mayordomo* also tried to shoot him with a musket, but others intervened. The Natives managed to put the mulatto in prison for the duration of the legal proceedings, while the judge made sure that Don Juan de Torres did not leave the town during the course of the trial.

Juan Thomas, the *topileh* who had suffered violence at the hands of the slave of the *hacienda* owner, stated in his testimony that the community possessed a map and writing proving that from time immemorial they had had "the usage and custom" (*el uso y costumbre*) of carrying out commercial activities on the roads that the mulatto and his owner had closed. This, according to this official, violated the laws of the Indies, which guaranteed free access to public roads. Indeed, the map preserved as part of the legal documentation features not only the land of the community, but also all the roads, where they lead to and even who is in charge of maintaining them (Fig. 3.4). The dimensions of the town, which is identified with the church, are specified, as is the area with individual houses called *quauhtla*, or "monte", probably a wooded area adapted for residence, and the official responsible for it, the *quauhtlatlalpixqui*. It also contains a short genealogy going back to Don Luis Xicotencatl (Fig. 3.5). Below him is a person called

13 AHET, Fondo Colonia, Siglo XVIII, Serie Administrativa, año 1720-1722, Caja 56 Exp. 41; fragments of this legal case were published by Meade de Angulo (1985).

Tecpaxochitzin Maxixcatzin, also mentioned in documents from the local archive in Xicohtzinco as one of the women who donated land to the town (Macuil Martínez, 2017, p. 100).

We learn more about the meaning of this imagery from the Nahuatl text on the reverse side of the page. According to this late colonial rendering of local sixteenth-century history, when the viceroy Don Diego de Mendoza14 arrived, the rulership began in the town and was established precisely by Don Luis Xicotencatl. He also divided the land and assigned it to local rulers along with the *tlahuiztli*—the insignia in form of a heron device. The establishment of the *cabildo* followed and its officials were elected on a yearly basis. The rulers and officials were

**Fig. 3.4** Map of San Toribio Xicohtzinco, AHET, Fondo Colonia, Siglo XVIII, Serie Administrativa, año 1720–1722, Caja 56 Exp. 41. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

14 No doubt reference to Don Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain who held office from 1535 to 1550.

**Fig. 3.5** Genealogy accompanying the lawsuit between San Toribio Xicohtzinco and hacienda owners, AHET, Fondo Colonia, Siglo XVIII, Serie Administrativa, año 1720–1722, Caja 56 Exp. 41. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

to keep *yn tlahuistli motocayotia astatetl* ("the insignia called heron" [literally: "heron stone"]) along with the rights to the land referred to as both *tlalli* and *quauhtla* ("land and forest"), also depicted in the document. This corresponds with *aztatototl xicotzinco axcatl,* a strange non-possessive construction apparently meaning "the heron bird, the possession of Xicohtzinco", found in the genealogy section. It was indeed the pre-Hispanic insignia most closely identified with the Tlaxcallan *altepetl* and also became its main heraldic device in the colonial period. By highlighting this association, the people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco not only argued for the legitimacy of their town and titles to land but also attempted to link it to the very core of the Tlaxcallan *altepetl* as a source of legitimacy, including on the symbolic and visual level. The document was supposedly made 25 years after the

arrival of the Viceroy Mendoza (1535), who confirmed the rights of the town so that their borders would never be questioned. Orthographic details, however, leave no doubt about the late colonial date of this manuscript, which is roughly contemporary with the legal suit.

By now it is clear that the whole fight was not about roads: the roads were only a means to open access to community's land. In response to the presentation of the pictorial and textual documents and to substantiate his own claims, the *hacienda* owner brought in much earlier legal documentation that he had received from his *causantes*, the persons from whom he derived his own rights to the *hacienda*. According to this evidence, on June 22, 1682, in the presence of the Indigenous authorities of Tlaxcallan, including the governor, the land was measured 500 *varas* 15 from the church in San Toribio toward each of the cardinal directions. The borders were marked with crosses and maguey plants. During the process, two neighbors intervened. They pointed out a contradiction based on the alleged circumstance that the land around the church belonged to Doña Ana de Anzures and her *hacienda*. However, the authorities assured that the measurements were correct from the legal point of view. To confirm this, all of the community members threw stones in an act of taking possession. The legal basis for the ceremony was provided by the royal decree of 1567, which determined the legal status of the so-called land *por razón de pueblo* ("by right of township"; called *fundo legal*, or "legal basis", in the nineteenth century), specifying its perimeters at a minimum distance of one thousand *varas* that should be kept between an Indigenous town and the nearest private estate (the center being measured from a church or *hermita*) and setting the town center with five hundred *varas* in each of the four cardinal directions (Wood, 1990, p. 118). A significant change came with the 1684 *ordenanza* of the Real Audiencia that gave actual possession to the Indigenous people of the land contained within a radius of 500 *varas*, measured from the most peripheral construction in the town (Castro Gutiérrez, 2015, p. 77). This was only two years after the process started and a year before it officially ended.

15 The *vara* ranged from ca. 0.83 to 0.85 meters depending on time and place (Chardon, 1980, p. 295).

The *hacienda* owners appealed this decision. They brought the following argument: there was no church, but only *una hermita*  constructed by an Indigenous woman on a little piece of land that belonged to her. Along with other people, she then obtained permission to celebrate holy mass there. So, according to the Spaniards, the Indigenous people of the larger neighboring town of Santa Inés Zacatelco in fact tried to establish a separate town based on this hermit shrine. The *hacienda* owners also claimed that San Toribio Xicohtzinco did not have a governor, *alcaldes* or other officials, nor a sufficient number of houses; in fact, there were only five houses and that it was a subject settlement of Santa Inés Zacatelco. However, Xicohtzinco's existence is confirmed in the census of 1556–1557 (Gibson, 1967, p. 131). Around 1554, it had an *iglesia de visita* dependent on the convent of Tepeyanco, which in 1646 shifted under the jurisdiction of the *doctrina* of Santa Inés Zacatelco (Gonzáles Jácome, 2008, p. 266). In response to the allegations of the *hacienda* owners, the community made a legally valid argument that there is a general *altepetl* of Tlaxcallan and its governor is also the governor of all towns and *sujetos*  in the province, including San Toribio Xicohtzinco. However, the Audiencia decided to restore the land to the *hacienda* owners in 1685, although they would not be able to execute the decision for years. The community opted to ignore the decisions coming from Mexico City. Ironically, the decree of 1687 by king Charles II extended the lands surrounding and pertaining to any Indigenous center by another one hundred *varas* in each of the four cardinal directions from the last houses and called for eleven hundred *varas* to the nearest estate; in other words, all settlements became entitled to the land *por razón de pueblo*, not only head towns with a governor or a church but also all *sujetos* (Goyas Mejía, 2020, p. 79). This meant that the case made by the people of Xicohtzinco was perfectly justified even if they did not modify the original claim of taking the location of their church as the point of reference. Later on, the decree of 1695 revoked the "last house" rule, ordering that the six hundred *varas* be measured from the principal church in each town (Wood, 1990, p. 118), but local claims were made in accordance with this general rule.

We do not have information regarding what happened after that, until the next trial in 1720, when the community brought the case against the slave of the *hacienda* owner. We know, however, that across New Spain communities' interest in securing the legal endowment *por razón de pueblo* gained new strength after the legal revisions of 1687, although not without opposition from land owners. Their efforts continued even after the less favorable ruling of 1695, also invoking the legal acts as a means to restore the possession of land that had earlier been lost (Wood, 1990, pp. 118–122). When the people of Xicohtzinco restored the case, the owner at that time, Juan de Torres repeated the same argument that had been successful forty years before, entirely ignoring the fact that the legal circumstances had changed. He stated that "It was not for any other reason that they were expelled and their houses demolished, than that they were illegally built on the land of the *hacienda* that today is mine". In the same way, he says, they do not have any rights to roads "because they have nowhere to enter and from nowhere to leave, so for what purpose do they need them?".

The community responded in 1721 that access to the shrine was fundamental because "this is the way to the church of this parish where the mass is celebrated on Sundays […] and it is necessary for the divine worship". Moreover, "today the parish is composed of eighty families, which is sufficient to form a town". What is more, according to their argumentation it was in the best interests of the Crown that "the native people have land to sustain their families and contribute to the royal tribute and responsibilities toward the church". Accordingly, the people of Xicohtzinco challenged whether defending the Spanish *hacienda*  owner was indeed in the best interests of the Crown: "What is the utility of an individual who with his rancho causes harm to the poor *indios,* mistreating them as we have documented?" As had happened with the previous litigation with Doña Ana de Anzures, Don Juan de Torres also died during the process. The documentation ends with his son Don Joseph de Torres asking for an appeal. The individual *hacienda*  owners died and changed during the course of the litigation, while the community persisted with its claims, actions and occupation of the land they considered their own.

We can speculate about how much the progressing climatic, environmental, socioeconomic and demographic changes could have contributed to the Indigenous determination to secure the *monte* area for their settlement and probably also for cultivation. The time period during which the long-term battle between the people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco and Spanish *hacienda* owners took place was harsh: in 1691 a huge climatic crisis began with disastrous frosts, while epidemics, hunger and cold weather persisted until 1697, only to be followed by hard years of drought, forcing many people to emigrate to Mexico City (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 123–125). While depopulation deepened due to repeated waves of epidemics, there were also other factors affecting the socioeconomic strength and structure of Indigenous settlements. The long-term colonial project of *congregaciones*  gained some success not earlier than in the first decade of the seventeenth century, but it wasn't until 1749 that the Tlaxcallan *cabildo*  announced that the resettlement has been completed because people had abandoned their lands and homes in the "hills and ravInés", a process that reinforced the division between center/periphery and infield/outfield (Skopyk, 2020, p. 87). However, as the concentration of centralized Indigenous towns increased, they suffered from a growing encroachment of Spanish *estancias* and *haciendas* that made it difficult for Native settlements to expand in moments of demographic rise, as, for example, in the case of San Juan Ixtenco, which was forced to establish the satellite community of San Pedro Cuauhtla in 1681 (Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 460). This seems to be a paradox considering that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a huge percentage of land in Tlaxcala remained unused or underused (Skopyk, 2020, p. 103), but what Indigenous people fought for in the eighteenth century was quality, well-watered land or areas safe for settlement.

In the case of Xicohtzinco, the litigation makes it clear that this wooded land was crucial for the community, probably because the valley land was insufficient, too greatly transformed by geomorphological processes or too prone to inundation, as it was located in the area of confluence of the Zahuapan and Atoyac Rivers. The flood frequency of the Zahuapan in Tlaxcala increased from 1650 and especially in the period 1700–1774, while sand sedimentation affected low-lying agricultural fields; the situation was especially alarming downstream of the city of Tlaxcallan. The town of Nativitas, located between the city of Tlaxcallan and Xicohtzinco, was at the mercy of the unpredictable waters of the Zahuapan, which destroyed bridges and buildings and flooded land and roads, including the *camino real* between Tlaxcallan and Puebla (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 136–148). Encroached on by Spanish *hacienda* owners and affected by climatic anomalies and diseases, the people of Xicohtzinco struggled for their rights and for the integrity and well-being of their community through persistent collective action. Eventually, in 1741, they managed to purchase the *hacienda*, but were forced to sell it two years later because they lacked a sufficient workforce due to the epidemics of 1737 (Gonzáles Jácome, 2008, pp. 266–267).

The microhistorical insights into the struggles undertaken by Tlaxcaltecah communities show that the premonitions of the Indigenous *cabildo* in the sixteenth century regarding the adverse impact of Spanish settlers on the Native population, land and natural resources were indeed right. In this late colonial era, replete with disasters and socioeconomic challenges, the struggle over vital resources was often linked to the activities and abuses of Spanish land and cattle owners. At much the same time as the two cases just discussed, on the other side of the volcano Malintzin, where it descends toward the town of Huamantla, housing not only an Indigenous but also a growing Spanish and mestizo population, a water crisis developed in 1705.16 According to the denouncement, Cristóbal and Gabriel Báez, mestizos from the *hacienda* of Andrés Báez, caused serious damage to the pipes that brought water from the mountain's springs to the town, causing it to "suffer from many calamities because of the lack of water".17 The mestizos filled the aqueduct with plants so that water would not descend to Huamantla, but redirected its flow to feed their own cattle. As a result of the investigation, the people of the *hacienda* were imprisoned, fined 25 pesos for the aqueduct repair costs and obliged to

16 AHET, Fondo Colonial, Sección Judicial, Serie Criminal, Caja 6, Exp. 17, Año 1705.

17 "a benído el pueblo a padeser munchos Calamidades por la falta del agua"

make sure that neither they nor other *hacienda* workers would cause any damage to the water pipes in the future but that they would respect the use of this important resource by the residents of the town. Indeed, climatic anomalies and provincial authorities' inadequate political and administrative crisis management, as well as the economic and demographic challenges of that turbulent period, affected Indigenous, mestizo and Spanish residents of the province, sometimes creating space for cross-ethnic alliances directed against abusive landowners.

### **Traditional Knowledge, Healing, Language and Well-Being**

But stories of resilience and resistance are not limited to struggles for land. They also extend to defending key traditional practices and ways of healing as components of local well-being. For example, Spaniards were astounded by the Native custom of regular sweat bathing and scandalized by the fact that women and men bathed together. In the oldest known dated document in Nahuatl, a 1543 act against idolatry from Tlaxcallan, "those of us men who bathe themselves together with women, those who bathe themselves in public" are listed among the abominable sinners subject to persecution (Olko & Brylak, 2018). Such baths, performed in steam houses (*temazcalli*), had crucial ritual, purifying and curative functions. It was essential to keep the ritual equilibrium of female and male participants in this liminal place. Spaniards had a hard time eradicating this custom. One example of Indigenous resistance to the Spanish attempts to eliminate this fundamental practice comes from 1706. It is a criminal case that followed the reissued decree, announced in public plazas in the communities,18 prohibiting joint female–male sweat baths under severe penalties. The Natives rebelled against this prohibition. Indigenous laborers of the *hacienda* of Masegualpa, after receiving this warning from a Spanish official who found them cleaning a *temazcalli*, became extremely angry (*se alteraron*), to the extent that they started a

18 AHET, Fondo Colonial, Sección Judicial, Serie Criminal, Caja 6, Expediente 51, Año 1706*.*

commotion (se *yvan juntando con alboroto*), chasing away the intruder, who later filed a complaint against them.

As this eighteenth-century archival document shows, Spaniards met with persistent local resistance from the Native people with regard to their obedience to this prohibition. Today, the *temazcales* persist in numerous Nahua communities and are often to be found in Tlaxcalan households. However, according to local women from San Miguel Xaltipan in the municipality of Contla, keepers of both the Nahuatl language and intimate knowledge of traditional healing, "before all people would bathe in the sweat bath" (*achto nochi omotemaya de temazcal* ), including small children, who "would take sweat baths, but not anymore" (*ometemaya ahorita yocmo*), but in the present day just a few of them are taken to *temazcales* (*motema, pero zan cequi, occequi yocmo*, "they take sweat baths, but only some, others not anymore"). The lack of continuity of traditional practices—expressed by the oldest community members—is accompanied by the sense of loss of natural resources. As signaled at the beginning of this text, many herbal plants used in healing and grown in and around the town have disappeared, while community members are more and more reluctant to rely on traditional knowledge transferred across generations: *Yocmo catqui in xihuitl de non achto, den achto oyeya pero miec xihuitl itech in tlalli* ("The herbs of the past are gone, before there were many plants [growing] on the land"); *yocmo cah quimi in achto, achto oyeya miec xihuitl tlen timopahtiayah* ("there are not [plants] any more like as in the past, earlier there were many herbs that we used for curing"); *yopolihqueh, yopoliuh ihuan non tanto cualimeh, cualli in pahtli* ("they have already disappeared, it is gone and they were so good, good medicine").

The loss of crucial healing rituals and natural resources assuring individual and collective health and well-being is accompanied by the shift to Spanish and reluctance to learn the language of the grandparents: "They do not want to learn" (*Amo quinequih zalozqueh*), the elders repeatedly say about their grandchildren. And yet, our most recent research shows that speaking Nahuatl is related to speakers' well-being in Contla; surprisingly, when compared across four different Mexican regions where this Indigenous language is still spoken, the effect is the strongest in the most urbanized and assimilated region of Contla, despite the fact that it suffers from the deepest loss of the heritage language and of the traditional knowledge conveyed in it (Olko et al., 2022).

### **Summary and Conclusions**

It has been argued that the rhetoric of the Tlaxcaltecah employed in their colonial-period petitions and court documents reflects their high-level ability to forge skillful strategies and formulate effective legal arguments, but does not necessarily reflect their "lived experience" or "a native reality" (Baber, 2011, p. 42). However, when confronted with the internal sixteenth-century records of the Native *cabildo*, along with the disastrous demographic, climatic, environmental and socioeconomic data, the voices of the inhabitants of the province struggling to protect their land, resources and well-being can be viewed in a much sharper and more dramatic light. The mid- and long-term consequences of processes set into motion in the early colonial period, such as the increasing role of Spanish landholders, also proved that the concerns and sinister prognoses of the Native government were not exaggerated. However, both the Tlaxcallan elites and the commoners were by no means passive observers of the calamities and challenges that became an inadvertent part of their daily reality. As aptly summarized by Skopyk, "even in the context of sickness and death, the pluvial fueled a creative and productive response by local communities as they sought to protect resources and find ways to profit from the changing ecology" (Skopyk, 2020, p. 34). The pressures and threats that initially manifested themselves in the first decades after the arrival of Spaniards continued across the colonial era, but the Tlaxcaltecah were able to use a number of strategies to protect their land and their well-being.

Colonial legal battles show that collective threats generated collective responses. Local resilience was grounded in the ability to maintain and mobilize social networks for action. While in the sixteenth century, the response was at the level of the *cabildo*, of Tlaxcallan, later on the struggle became decentralized, with local communities taking on a number of initiatives and strategies to safeguard their own resources. Both leaders and community members actively and resourcefully protected essential assets and components of their well-being, responding not only to abuse and violence but also to climatic and epidemiological challenges. And despite all the complexity and magnitude of challenges, they have been able to keep much of their traditional economy and industries, as well as their language, cultural practices and forms of organization, until the second half of the twentieth century, and in some aspects until the present day. Social approaches to agency developed in the context of contemporary societies emphasize the dualism of the "individual" and "society" or "structure" that is both "enabling and constraining" (Giddens, 1984, p. 162, 169), while social actors are seen as reproducing or transforming social systems through praxis (Giddens, 1984, p. 171; see also Sztompka, 1991). The history of Indigenous people in the colonial period reveals a demonstrable collective and social level of agency and resilience based on the ability to mobilize social networks for support and action, grounded in traditional power structures, even if channeled through specific groups of actors. The latter could be the *cabildo*, composed of local nobility or town representatives acting in the name of whole communities, as seen in the cases of San Bernardino Contlan and San Toribio Xicohtzinco.

Many legal steps turned out to be of little effect, and some adverse processes were ultimately unstoppable. However, historical texts reveal complex battlegrounds upon which the Tlaxcaltecah strove to maintain control over land, environment and various kinds of resources. It is through these texts that we can see how the Indigenous inhabitants of this particular territory protected essential assets and components of their well-being that were embedded in traditional concepts of power and local knowledge. When seen separately and in their own contexts, particular historical documents do attest to Indigenous agency but often do not immediately make us aware of a longer historical process in which some of these battles were won and some were eventually lost. Yet this can be seen when one ties together the common threads of microhistories—some of which are discussed in this paper—across longer periods of time, different places and available documentary genres; and it is even more salient if we acknowledge that the aftermath of these apparently remote historical processes continues to unfold to this day. Thus, there is no contradiction between the *longue durée*  approach to history and microhistory (Frankopan, 2021, p. 25), as only together they provide the necessary bridge between past and present. In the case of Tlaxcala, the erosion of the traditional economic base, accompanied by accelerating assimilation to the dominant Spanish/ Mexican culture, can be seen as socioeconomic and sociocultural processes set into motion in the colonial period and related to land ownership, control of natural resources and acculturation processes.

Modern communities in Tlaxcala have suffered intense and prolonged discrimination, forced assimilation and an accelerated language shift to Spanish (e.g., Hill & Hill, 1986; Nutini & Isaac, 2009; Robichaux, 2005). The loss of language and profound changes in ethnic identification are accompanied by the loss of traditional knowledge and of environmental resources such as medicinal plants. The ongoing urbanization processes and changes in local economy, including farming methods, are often perceived today, especially by elder community members, as threats to their well-being and as direct causes of health problems affecting the Indigenous population. As shown in this paper, the sense of loss can be traced back to the sixteenth century, even if the partial nature of our evidence often leaves us with a history of silences, gaps and erasures. This reminds us that "the remembrance of absence, of loss that endures, a void from which we can still learn" (Hicks, 2021, p. 114) should be recognized as an inherent part of Indigenous history.

Tlaxcalan history is yet another example of the deep intertwining of human action and environmental change, with nature playing an active role in historical processes. It showcases the complexity of human–environment relations that have been affected both by climate change and by colonization and postcolonial domination. Intimate links with the environment, and especially with sacred mountains such as Matlalcueyeh/Malintzin, have marked crucial relationships that continue to be perpetuated in local communities through healing practices and story-telling (e.g., Nava Nava & Cuahutle Bautista, 2015). And not unlike in colonial times, the Tlaxcaltecah today continue to face ongoing threats to the integrity of their communities, the control of resources, a healthy environment, cultural survival and a local, relational sense of well-being.

## **References**

Gibson, C. (1967). *Tlaxcala in the sixteenth century*. Stanford University Press.

Giddens, A. (1984). *The constitution of the society. Outline of the theory of structuration*. Polity Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **4**

## **Ñudzahui Custom, Contracts, and Common Lands in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca**

**Yanna Yannakakis**

Land represented a nexus for Indigenous customary claims in Mexico's colonial courts across three centuries of Spanish rule. The Crown recognized the lands of the Native nobility, who were considered Mexico's "natural lords," as entailed estates under the designation of *cacicazgo*. The question of which noble lineages controlled what lands provoked much controversy, as did the use-rights of commoners. From the 1530s through the 1570s, in response to challenges mounted by Native rivals or Spanish colonists, Native people appeared in front of the Real Audiencia to claim and dispute ownership or use-rights based on pre-Hispanic custom. They often substantiated their claims with recourse to painted histories and maps. Due to the moral authority that Spanish judges accorded to pre-Hispanic institutions and the practicality of maintaining aspects of Indigenous land tenure and labor, they often affirmed Native claims based on custom (Kellogg, 1995, pp. 45–51; Menegus Bornemann, 1994a, 1994b; Ruiz Medrano, 2010,

Y. Yannakakis (B)

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
pp. 31, 38–39; Villella, 2016). In doing so, though, they did not simply affirm established Native rights; they produced new ones by incorporating Native customs into a Spanish normative order (Herzog, 2013).

Native customary claims to land fell off considerably by the end of the sixteenth century, in part because of Spanish officials' changing attitudes toward the pre-Hispanic past and Indigenous forms of knowledge, and also because of the exploitative economic demands of Spanish officials and colonists, and the ravages of epidemic disease. In response to a precipitous decline in the Indigenous population, and with the ambition of nucleating the survivors into concentrated settlements to facilitate evangelization, organization of corvée labor, and tribute collection, the missionaries spearheaded a program of forced resettlement, known as *congregación* or *reducción*, depending on the region. This took place in two waves, the first in the mid-sixteenth century from 1550 to 1564, and the second from the 1590s through the first decade of the seventeenth century (Borah & Cook, 1963; Cline, 1949; Cook & Borah, 1971). Congregación and population decline displaced Native people from their ancestral lands and left much of it vacated, opening local communities to expropriation by Spanish colonists (García Martínez, 1987). In order to stem the chaotic expansion of Spanish property, and harness land distribution and titling to royal power, Philip II issued a royal *cédula* (decree) in 1591 requiring Spanish colonists to present their land claims and titles so that they could be validated by Spanish law. If they possessed land but had no title, they could acquire one for a fee. Any vacant lands without proper title—known as *tierras baldías*, or simply, *baldíos*—would escheat to the Crown so that they could be used, sold, or distributed at royal discretion (Menegus Bornemann, 1994b; Solano, 1984, pp. 273–274). The fees would go into the royal treasury to ameliorate the Crown's ailing finances. The royal land titling program, known as the *composiciones de tierras*, persisted through the seventeenth century, allowing for a massive transfer of lands from Indigenous to Spanish control (Menegus Bornemann, 1994a; Ots Capdequí, 1946).

Native communities went to court to defend their lands, and they presented varied kinds of evidence to prove possession and make

customary claims to land use and tenure, including Spanish legal instruments that recognized Indigenous possession. Native people also resorted to local knowledge and forms of representation to support their claims, despite Spanish disinclination to take such evidence seriously. These included maps that blended European and Indigenous styles, and a genre of painted histories and genealogies known as the Techialoyan codices (Wood, 2007, 2012). Native towns also generated a written genre of Native-language documents known as primordial titles that recounted the migration of the community's founding ancestors, the marking of territorial boundaries, the consecration of the community's Church, and the establishment of the Native town council (*cabildo*) (Cortés Márquez & Reyes García, 2004; Haskett, 2005; Oudijk, 2003; Menegus Bornemann, 1994b, p. 208; Oudijk & Romero Frizzi, 2003; Romero Frizzi & Vásquez Vásquez, 2003, 2011; Sousa & Terraciano, 2003). Across these encapsulations of Indigenous memory, Native writers and painters reimagined antiquity, the anchor of custom, by braiding together pre-Hispanic and colonial symbols, histories, and chronologies (Megged & Wood, 2012). Despite Native efforts to stem the tide of dispossession, however, the *composiciones de tierras* continued to transform Indigenous lands into Spanish haciendas and ranches in many regions of New Spain and across Spanish America (Goyas Mejía, 2015; Borchart de Moreno, 1980; Florescano, 1971, p. 44; Glave, 2008; Rivera Marín de Iturbe, 1983; Torales Pacheco, 1990).

The recovery of the Indigenous population at the end of the seventeenth century combined with the Crown's desperate need to generate revenue to pay for its expensive imperial wars created a shift in land policy, which in turn reinvigorated Native claims to land.1 Until 1691, the policy of composición applied to Spanish and mestizo colonists, but from 1692 forward, the Crown widened its net to require Native towns to title their lands. In order to do so, they needed to

1 Based upon the Montemayor census of 1661, Borah and Cook's classic study estimates the population of the Mixteca Alta to have been 22,841 during the period 1660–1670. Based upon censuses of colonial jurisdictions, parishes, and towns, their population estimates for the eighteenth century are as follows: 1715–1720: 41, 687; 1742: between 49, 133, and 54, 200; 1750–1755: 61,272; 1777: between 68, 554, and 73, 911; 1803–1804: between 75,990 and 80,835. See Cook and Borah, 1968, pp.75, 89.

prove possession since time immemorial and pay a "voluntary donation" to the Crown to have their lands surveyed and their boundaries marked. Royal regulations required that communal lands, known in Spanish as *fondo legal* or *bienes de comunidad* , should measure at minimum 600 *varas* in diameter, from the village church or the center of the pueblo outward. Any territory beyond the limits of officially designated communal land lacking documentation of ownership had to be titled for a fee. If not, it could be declared royal land, and subject to confiscation and public auction (Wood, 1990). Native participation in the *composiciones* of the 1692–1696, 1707–1709, 1717–1718, and the composiciones that followed in the rest of the eighteenth century, produced a range of results, including Native land titles, reduction of Native communal lands, and official recognition of customary and "irregular" forms of land tenure that sat at the margins of the law (Carrera Quezada, 2015; López Castillo, 2010, 2014; Mendoza, 2011, pp. 54–59; Menegus Bornemann, 2017; Pastor, 1987; Radding, 1997, pp. 171–207, 2005, pp. 89–116; Torre Ruiz, 2012; see also Radding's chapter in this volume).

Prior to the eighteenth century, most Native communities possessed land, rather than owned it, since securing or producing a title of ownership was more difficult than claiming possession in Spanish courts (Owensby, 2008, pp. 90–129). Possession, in fact, constituted a primary means by which individuals and communities held land in the Spanish empire, and the Mediterranean-Atlantic World more broadly (Bastias Saavedra, 2020; Greer, 2018; Seed, 1995). The *Siete Partidas*—a statutory code from medieval Castile that strongly influenced legal practice in Spanish America-defined possession as lawfully entering, occupying, and holding a piece of land, a concept that was distinct from ownership, which required legal title. Central to this definition was the absence of force or coercion, which made a claim to possession unlawful and unjust. Evidence of possession included longstanding use and cultivation, manifested by crops or structures.2 The community's judgment often determined the legitimacy of claims to possession in courts of law, anchored in the expression "since time immemorial."

2 Burns, ed., *Las Siete Partidas*, Partida III, Title XXX, Laws I, II, III, VI, 850–851.

Whereas titles carried heavy weight as evidence of ownership, so too did custom—local practice as accepted and recognized by the community.

This chapter analyzes Native claims to customary land tenure and possession since time immemorial in response to the *composiciones de tierras* and other challenges to communal territory in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. The land titling program dovetailed with the expansion of the livestock economy, population growth, and an increase in tribute and taxes during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a context of increasing scarcity and pressure to normalize landholding, many Native communities went to court with competing claims to land. But conflict and litigation were not the only strategies deployed by Native authorities to address the need for subsistence and income. Indigenous pueblos also came together to create plural ownership that allowed them to pool resources and share territorial jurisdiction. Partnership contracts—the form in which plural ownership was legally instantiated—were more legible to Spanish authorities than codices, maps, and primordial titles, and had practical benefits since they were much less costly than litigation. Through partnership contracts, Native authorities preserved or extended the territorial expanses of their communities, challenged or whittled away at the property of powerful caciques, and transformed customary claims into new legal rights with an eye to securing the territorial integrity of their communities for the future.

### **Ñudzahui Territory, Land Tenure, and a 1690-Partnership Contract**

Oaxaca provides a counter-narrative to Native dispossession during the early rounds of *composiciones de tierras* of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, most Indigenous nobles and communities in Oaxaca maintained their landholdings from the conquest until the end of the colonial period. Oaxaca's economy, which was dominated by commerce and fueled by Indigenous production rather than mining and Spanish-controlled haciendas, provides a central explanation for this trend (Chance, 1989; Menegus Bornemann, 2009; Pastor, 1987; Taylor, 1972; Arrioja Díaz Viruell, 2011).3 In the case of the Mixteca region, the few Spaniards who settled there rented land from Native nobles and communities and focused their energies on trading in the valuable products of native labor, most notably, cochineal dyestuff, wheat, cattle, leather, and cloth (Romero Frizzi, 1990).

The persistence of Native landholding meant that community land tenure remained deeply informed by Indigenous notions of territory, which did not conform to clearly delineated boundaries. In the Mixteca, this fungible relationship was expressed by the Ñudzahui institution of the *yuhuitayu,* sometimes shortened to *tayu*, a political entity made up of two communities (*ñuu*) joined through the marital alliance of lords from each. The yuhuitayu was not a geographical designation, as was a European kingdom or señorial estate, but rather a shifting mosaic of constituent communities and sub-units, known as *ñuu*, that periodically realigned depending on élite inter-marriage and the tributary claims of their lords. Often, they were not contiguous territories nor evenly distributed geographically. A small settlement in close proximity to the palace complex of one yuhuitayu might have been subject to or affiliated with another yuhuitayu. Autonomy often defined the relations of the ñuu within the yuhuitayu and between individual ñuu and the seat of the yuhuitayu. Although lordly marriage served to combine the resources of the constituent ñuu, it did not compromise the autonomy of either. Sometimes ñuu seceded from yuhuitayu and shifted allegiances to others (Dahlgren, 1954; Spores, 1974).

The *yuhuitayu* as a form of territorial and political organization endured well into the eighteenth century, though it had been modified somewhat by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century process of congregación, spearheaded by Dominican missionaries who were the dominant religious order in Oaxaca. The effort to impose the Spanish administrative arrangement of the *cabecera* (administrative and parish

3 In the districts of Teposcolula and Villa Alta, with a few exceptions, Native caciques and communities held their lands throughout the colonial period. In Oaxaca's central valleys, there was a rise of Spanish owned haciendas and ranches during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by the late eighteenth century, Zapotec nobles and communities began to expand back onto the lands.

seat, literally "head town") and its *sujetos* ("subjects"), which were geographically proximate and politically subordinate villages or dependencies, and whose residents owed tribute and labor to the authorities of the cabecera met with only modest success. Dispersed settlement patterns persisted, and many ñuu maintained their identities, locations, and lands. The territorial imprint of the yuhuitayu persisted, as did its political meaning, as evidenced by the pervasive use of the term in colonial-era Ñudzahui-language documentation (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b; Spores, 1967; Terraciano, 2001, pp. 119–120).

Although it did not affect the territorial organization as much as Spanish officials had intended, the imposition of the cabecera-sujeto model had important political implications for inter-community relationships. Spanish officials designated some yuhuitayu, and not others, as cabeceras, and recognized some lords (yya) as caciques by granting them señorial title to land (cacicazgos), while discounting the claims of others. The yuhuitayu that were assigned the lesser status of subject towns resisted the imposition of new hierarchies strongly, bringing legal cases to the Audiencia of Mexico from the 1550s forward in which they argued for the right to "secede" from their cabeceras. In their petitions, they railed against paying tribute and performing services for cabeceras and caciques, and they were aggrieved that their neighbors, as parish seats, had become the centers for sacred rituals (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b; Pastor, 1987, pp. 175–178; Terraciano, 2001, p. 124). For their part, caciques and cabeceras took advantage of their status, and competition between yuhuitayu took new forms, including legal disputes over the boundary lands that separated communities, which according to Ñudzahui *lienzos* (Indigenous cartographic histories painted on cloth), included sacred sites (Aguilar Sánchez, 2015/2016, 2020; Van Doesburg, 2001). These conflicts heated up at the end of the seventeenth century as the Indigenous population recovered from its devastating decline during the previous century, and as the livestock economy expanded, putting new pressures on land (Spores, 1984, pp. 210–225).

Royal legislation at the end of seventeenth century contributed to the tensions. In 1687, the Crown issued a cédula that granted subject communities the same expanse of lands that had previously been reserved for cabeceras: 600 *varas* radiating outward from the town church. The idea was to provide expanding settlements with the territorial foundation necessary for subsistence agriculture and pastureland. Consequently, many subject communities built churches, had their land surveyed, and declared themselves independent cabeceras in their own right, to the chagrin of the authorities of their former cabeceras (Menegus Bornemann, 2009, 2017, pp. 62–72).

Litigation in Spanish courts provided one answer to these conflicts, though not a desirable one because it was expensive and time-consuming. Native authorities turned to other means to address land disputes, pivoting away from Spanish courts and attempting to resolve conflict within the ambit of Native jurisdiction. A 1690 Ñudzahui-language notarial record documenting a land-use agreement between the communities of San Juan Sayultepec and San Andrés Sinaxtla provides an example.As occurred with many Native-language legal records, the 1690 agreement was sewn into a voluminous four-hundred and thirty-eight-page land dispute between the two communities, adjudicated in a Spanish court across three and a half decades, between 1713 and 1749.4

The 1690 Ñudzahui-language record was a genre of contract, whose origins can be traced to the concept of partnership (*societas*) in Roman Law. In contrast to commercial contracts, which were reciprocal in nature (one party does something to receive something else from another party), and presumed an opposition of interests, the purpose of partnership contracts was to pool resources, such as property or labor, for a common purpose, and sometimes against the interests of a third party. Partners in *societas* were friends and allies rather than antagonists (Zimmerman, 1996, pp. 451, 454–455).

Through the Ñudzahui language contract, the Native authorities of San Juan Sayultepec and San Andrés Sinaxtla aligned the relationship among yuhuitayu into the Spanish relation of partnership. In the text of the contract, they referred to their communities as "chayu" (a variation

4 In my analysis, I use the Ñudzahui-language petition and its Spanish translation transcribed and published in Jansen and Pérez, 2009, pp.338-340. They cite case as AGN Tierras 1717, vol.308, fs. 140-142.

of "tayu," short for *yuhuitayu*), instead of using the Spanish designations of cabecera and sujeto. For place names, they used Christian-Ñudzahui hybrids, rather than the Christian-Nahuatl names imposed on their communities by Spanish and Mexica conquerors: San Juan Sayultepec was written as "Sa Juan tiyuqh" and San Andres Sinaxtla, as "San Andres atata." (Jansen & Pérez, 2009, p. 339). The Native authorities stated that the purpose of the contract was to protect the agricultural lands of the two communities against the territorial predations of a third community, Santa María Asunción Nochixtlan, an important pre-Hispanic and colonial-era commercial and political center. In the 1680s, Nochixtlan, which had been part of the Spanish province of Teposcolula-Yanhuitlan, became a Spanish administrative seat, with jurisdiction over the pueblos of Tilantongo, Chachoapan, Etlatongo, Huaclilla, Tejutepec, Tiltepec, and Jaltepec (Spores, 1984, p. 98). The concentration of Spanish and Indigenous political power in Nochixtlan produced tensions with Sinaxtla and Sayultepec, powerful native communities in their own right. Perhaps emboldened by newfound status, the local authorities of Nochixtlan saw an opportunity for territorial expansion. In the text of the contract, the officials of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla expressed their common outrage that the natives of Nochixtlan sought to expropriate valuable irrigated land where corn fields cultivated by each community came together at the boundary among all three communities.

Through their partnership, the officials of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla joined together in common cause against another mutual antagonist: the cacique don Domingo de San Pablo. The narrative of the agreement devoted significant space to a shared past in which the communities united in "friendship" against the cacique and the authorities of the town of San Mateo Yucucuihi who made heavy demands of them, presumably in labor and tribute. The authorities of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla stated that they would no longer recognize don Domingo or any other Native lord as their cacique, and that "only the lord God and lord King are our lords."5 Their refusal to recognize the cacique's

5 See Jansen and Pérez, 2009, p. 339 for the Mixtec original, and p. 340 for the Spanish translation.

customary authority and prerogatives represented a growing trend across the Mixteca. Economic and cultural transformations spurred by colonialism stoked these conflicts. Spanish entailment of cacicazgos in the early colonial period transformed don Domingo de San Pablo and other native lords in the region into a powerful rentier class who earned significant income from the lease of their lands to Spaniards, mestizos, and other Natives. Don Domingo and other Ñudzahui caciques like him were often wealthier than the region's Spanish merchants, and had the goods to show it: luxurious European clothing, horses, high-quality wooden and silver home furnishings, and elaborate Christian art. Their easy assimilation to Christianity and migration to urban centers where they could live comfortably off of their earnings exaggerated the social distance between themselves and Ñudzahui commoners. Caciques' detachment from their pueblos loosened the reciprocal obligations that bound them to their communities, inflamed resentments, and led to what one historian has called the eighteenth-century "revolt against the caciques." The revolt was primarily a legal one, in which pueblos took caciques to court to protest unjust demands and abuses of authority (Pastor, 1987, pp. 166–175).

Disavowal of don Domingo in the contract may have had something to do with the land under dispute, in that it could have pertained to his cacicazgo. By claiming that they did not recognize don Domingo as their cacique, the authorities of Sinaxtla and Sayultepec cleared the way to claim possession of the land for their communities, which if it had belonged to don Domingo, they might have worked through usufruct in the past. The remainder of the contract recounted legal procedures typical for recognizing possession, including a boundary survey and placement of boundary markers in order to preclude controversy in the future. The fact that the native authorities of the two communities conducted a land survey and produced a legal agreement on their own, without the presence of a Spanish court functionary, points to an autonomous Native forum and set of procedures for addressing conflicts over boundary lands.

The agreement closed with a reassertion of friendship and partnership. Behind the aspiration of social harmony, however, lingered some doubt. The contract closed with the stipulation that if any

member of either community were to disturb the peace, the officials of either pueblo could appeal to the Real Audiencia (the highest Spanish court in the land), which would insure the maintenance of the agreement. With this clause, the signatories concurred that only the King's justice could enforce the partnership between the communities.6 This legal instrument was written, then, with an eye to preventing conflict in the future, not only with Nochixtlan but also between its authors, the communities of Sinaxtla and Sayultepec. Although it was written in the Ñudzahui language and archived in the town halls of the signatories, the Native authorities produced it with the possibility in mind of presenting it to a Spanish judge as evidence of possession in the boundary lands, the most liminal and vulnerable part of a community's territorial grant, and where friends of the moment could become enemies in the future. This indeed came to pass. As discussed above, the officials of San Juan Sayultepec submitted the agreement as evidence in the case, arguing that the natives of San Andrés Sinaxtla had broken its terms by claiming the land as their own.

The 1690 partnership contract written and signed by the Native authorities of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla bore the imprint of Indigenous territorial and political organization. At the same time, it reveals how the European legal category of possession shaped inter-communal relations in the boundary lands between Ñudzahui communities, and how customary claims to land could be used to instantiate new rights through written agreements. The ephemerality of the agreement, and its incorporation into a future land dispute points to an important dynamic in Oaxaca's agrarian history during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Partnership contracts were but one component in *longue-durée* struggles over land. Although they were supposed to endure, they often did not. Rather than etching the contours and conditions of communal land in stone, they represented a reprieve from open conflict and a space for the re-negotiation of political and territorial relationships. This process was not unique to colonial Mexico but rather occurred throughout the Atlantic World where partnership

6 See Jansen and Pérez, 2009, p. 339 for the Mixtec original, and p. 340 for the Spanish translation.

contracts constituted a strategy used by rural communities to negotiate land rights (Blaufarb, 2010; Herzog, 2015). In this regard, the authorities of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla were actively contributing to an Atlantic World legal culture as they forged their Ñudzahui-language agreement in their rural town hall in the Mixteca.

## **Partnership and Plural Ownership in the Eighteenth-Century Composiciones de Tierras**

The eighteenth-century composiciones de tierras provided an opportunity for Ñudzahui communities to reaffirm customary landholding patterns in their boundary lands, while creating new legal norms. Whereas the communities of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla achieved this temporarily within the ambit of Indian jurisdiction, the special court of land titling constituted a higher-order legal forum in which Native officials could negotiate customary access to boundary lands. In July of 1717, the Native authorities of the Ñudzahui communities of Tecomatlan and Magdalena Zahuatlan appeared before don Félix Chacón, Spanish magistrate of Teposcolula-Yanhuitlan with such a petition. The land bureau tasked with overseeing the composiciones de tierras—the Superintendencia del Beneficio y Composición de Tierras—had appointed Chacón as a judge to the royal commission of claims, titling, and sale of land and water in the district of Teposcolula-Yanhuitlan. In this role, he was tasked with overseeing agrarian matters, especially payment for the composiciones de tierras (Carrera Quezada, 2015). The court that he administered for this purpose was known as the Juzgado Privativo de Tierras (Torre Ruiz, 2012).

The Native authorities' petition requested a license to form a partnership contract regarding possession of some land that lay in between their communities, much like the written agreements produced by Sayultepec and Sinaxtla. In the recent past, the Natives of each town had claimed the land as their own. With forensic detail, the officials related the Ñudzahui place names that the land encompassed, citing the river that contoured it, and the location of three crosses that served as boundary markers. The problem was that although both towns had asserted possession, in actuality, farmers from both communities planted corn on it, such that their crops were interspersed. According to Spanish law, occupation manifested by cultivation proved legal possession, so barring the existence of legal title to the land, this dispute would be difficult to resolve in court, a point that the Native authorities understood well. In order to preclude competing legal claims to the land and costly litigation in the future, the two towns had arrived at an agreement to share the land and preserve the custom of interwoven cultivation. Apparently, though, the agreement between the two communities was not enough, which is why they petitioned Judge Chacón to intervene and authorize their agreement. Through the flourish of the Spanish judge's pen, the agreement would produce a relationship of joint-possession over the land, valid for all time, equal in force to a decision rendered by a civil judge. In short, the contract would fix the towns' customary use of the boundary lands unless a third party produced a title to the land.7

By 1717, the year that the officials of Tecomotlan and Zahuatlan petitioned Judge Felix Chacón to form the partnership, the population of the core region of the Mixteca Alta had jumped from 28,000 in 1660 to 42,000 in 1720, on an upward trajectory that increased to 76,000 by 1803 (Spores, 1984, p. 223). In the meantime, two rounds of composiciones de tierras had taken place, from 1692 to 1696, and 1707 to 1709, with a third underway from 1717 to 1718, sending Native caciques and communities to Spanish courts to obtain titles to land and firm up their territorial boundaries. The trends that had pushed the communities of Sayultepec and Sinaxtla to form their partnership contract in 1690 had intensified: population growth, commercialization of agriculture, expansion of the livestock industry, increased pressure on land and resources, and an explosion of litigation over land.

As spelled out in their petition, the Native officials of Tecomotlan and Zahuatlan did not seek to clarify their boundaries in order to

7 T Civil Leg.21 Exp. 16.093 1717 "Petición de licencia, carta de compromiso," f.201–210.

produce land titles for their pueblos. Rather, they hoped to maintain the custom of interwoven cultivation in their borderlands. As evident in their petition to Chacón, the Native officials surveyed the boundary lands and consulted with one another to hammer out some of the fundamental terms of the agreement. The composiciones de tierras provided them with a unique opportunity to give agrarian custom the force of law and protect landholdings from the predations of third parties, like caciques or larger pueblos.

Judge Felix Chacón was persuaded by the petition and granted the towns of Tecomotlan and Zahuatlan the license they sought to draw up the partnership contract.8 From where he stood, maintaining peaceful relations between pueblos was always preferable to rancor and the threat of violence over boundary lands. Furthermore, whereas a primary goal of the composiciones was to make boundaries and titles, another goal, far more pragmatic—and opportunistic since it implied a fee—was to codify customary uses of land that sat on the margins of the law.

Partnership contracts regarding land tenure were as much an agreement about the nature of the partnership—the ties that bound Native communities to one another (and to the Spanish courts)—as about the relationship of the communities to the land. This was evident in the 1690 Ñudzahui-language contract between Sayultepec and Sinaxtla, in which the political purpose of the partnership was intertwined with the integrity of each community's landed possessions at the boundaries. The partnership proposed by Tecomotlan and Zahuatlan was different in that the two communities had asked for recognition of an arrangement that did not align with the Spanish ideal of a territorially bounded community. Since the communities would be farming the lands together, the question of who would be responsible for material losses if one party did not uphold the agreement—in short, questions of harm, injury, liability, and enforcement—had to be taken into account. This required the intervention of a Spanish judge.

The partnership contract signed by the authorities of Tecomotlan and Zahuatlan entailed a promise to one another to uphold special rules and mutual obligations regarding land use. Preservation of customary

8 T Civil Leg.21 Exp. 16.093 1717 "Petición de licencia, carta de compromiso," f.201–210.

agrarian practice, harmonious relations between the two communities, and collective possession of the land provided the contract's stated purpose. The first of its five clauses indicated that the lands that the Natives of each pueblo cultivated would be the lands that they continued to cultivate without alteration. The language used to express this—"sin ynnovar en cosa alguna"—was also part of the medieval Spanish discourse of custom, which was double-edged: it preserved longstanding, continuous practice, but at the same time could be altered and established anew. Custom's flexibility allowed for change and adaptation, but in this case, the Native authorities adopted a staunchly conservative posture toward it in their attempt to preclude any innovation. The fifth clause underscored the imperative to preserve custom by stipulating that if the Natives of one pueblo or the other had more or fewer crops in the commonly held lands, they should not try to sow them equally; instead, each pueblo should sow what they presently sowed even if some of the lands remained *baldíos* (uncultivated lands). The importance of maintaining the status quo "in order to avoid disputes" was accentuated by the risk implied in leaving untitled lands uncultivated. The policy of the composiciones program held that untitled and uncultivated land could be confiscated by the Crown via invocation of eminent domain, to be redistributed according to royal discretion. Despite the risk, the contract held that the land would remain untitled: the second clause stated that neither pueblo nor Natives therein could claim legal title to the lands. The Indigenous authorities appear to have counted on the contract as a form of insurance against expropriation, a process that could be triggered by an *amparo*, or judicial stay based upon legal documents that provided evidence of possession. The objective of maintaining good relations between the pueblos and avoiding litigation was telegraphed clearly through the contract's fourth clause, which maintained that the pueblos "must conserve and continue always the peace, union, and law-abiding manner in which they have lived without disputes." The fifth clause sought to preserve the peace by precluding the land invasions that were increasingly common in the region: each pueblo would possess and continue to possess its parcels without entering into one another's lands.

At the same time that it aimed to shore up horizontal and equitable relations between the pueblos, the contract reinforced the hierarchies of status and power that structured Ñudzahui communities. The fifth and final clause prescribed punishment for any member of the pueblo who broke the agreement. The punishments varied according to social status. If the perpetrator was a town notable (*principal* ), he would be fined 100 pesos in common gold (*oro comun*), half destined for the judge of the Real Camara and half for the compliant party. If the perpetrator was a commoner (*macehualli*), the punishment would be 200 lashes. This was serious business. Two-hundred lashes constituted common punishment for highway robbery, murder, and sedition, and could easily lead to the death of the person to whom it was applied. The disparity in punishment was in keeping with Spanish criminal law, which applied punishment unequally according to social rank, and advised harsher punishment for commoners.9

Perhaps most importantly, the contract required each pueblo to renounce its own jurisdiction over the land and transfer jurisdiction to one other in order to produce joint-jurisdiction. Additionally, each pueblo had to renounce legal claim to the lands and transfer possession to one another to produce joint-ownership and remain "equal pueblos." Property and jurisdiction were separate but related legal categories as applied to Indigenous communities. Property pertained to the community land base, and jurisdiction to authority over the people and territory of the community. Joint-ownership meant that both communities possessed the land. Joint-jurisdiction implied authority over the land, the capacity to determine its use, and the power to punish those who transgressed the laws that applied to it. The clause about joint-jurisdiction was in keeping with transatlantic developments in legal agreements regarding collective land tenure in which the emphasis was as much on the right to administer common lands and resources as a means of conserving and defending them from encroachment by third parties as it was on possession and ownership (Ingold, 2018).

9 Burns., ed., *Las Siete Partidas*, v.5, Partida VII, Title XXXI "Concerning Punishments" Headnote, Law VIII, 1463, 1466–1467.

The inter-pueblo partnership contract between Zamotlan and Tecomotlan created during the composición program was one among several produced during the early eighteenth century.10 Taken together, the contracts represented attempts by Native authorities to short-circuit conflict and litigation over land, as well as expropriation by the Crown and third parties, like caciques or more powerful pueblos. They also served to maintain aspects of customary agrarian practice rooted in the yuhuitayu, while accommodating the expansion of the livestock economy. At the same time, the contracts instantiated a logic of debt—particularly individual responsibility for joint-liability—into local relations of land tenure. Joint liability meant that every member of the pueblo had to comply fully with the contracts' stipulations, even though the document was signed only by the Native officers. And any member of the pueblo who broke the agreement had to pay for their transgression, but with distinct penalties based on social status. In this light, partnerships of co-ownership did not represent an assertion of egalitarian communalism against powerful local landholders and state actors. Collective land tenure had many faces, depending on the laws that framed them, and the underlying agrarian relations that gave them shape.

### **Partnership, Plural Ownership, and Cacicazgos**

Native authorities also used partnership contracts to transform customary use-rights of cacique lands into joint-possession, thereby expanding and securing their land base at the expense of cacicazgos. As Margarita Mengus Bornemann has shown, almost all communal land in the Mixteca fell under the designation of *propio*, lands used to sustain

10 A T Civil Leg.21 Exp. 16.099 1717 "Petición de licencia, carta de compromiso," fs. 215r-217v; T Civil 1717 Leg. 21 16.101 "Petición de licensia, escritura de compromiso," fs. 219v.- 222r; T Civil 1717 Leg. 21 Exp 16.108 "Petición de licensia, escritura de compromiso," fs. 232r-234v; T Civil 1718 Leg. 21 Exp. 16.132 "Petición de Licensia. Escritura de Compromiso," fs. 276r.-279v; T Proto "Escritura de convenio," 19 de junio de 1733,Leg. 6 Exp.4.17, fs. 25v-30v.

the cabildo, and the tax and tribute obligations of the community. The pueblos of the region do not appear to have held *tierras del común repartimiento*, which in other parts of Oaxaca and New Spain were distributed to individual families for their subsistence. Instead, Native commoners often enjoyed usufruct rights on cacique lands, which they cultivated for their own use in exchange for rent paid in specie or labor to the cacique. These relationships were not written down or contractual, but regulated according to custom. During the composiciones de tierras, some of these pueblos claimed that they possessed the land since time immemorial and should therefore be given title. They insisted that they did not recognize the authority of any caciques, only that of the Spanish king. Claiming land in this way was strategic since usufruct rights were distinct from possession. According to Spanish law, usufruct encapsulated the right granted by a proprietor to someone to work his or her land usually in exchange for labor or fees. Even if dependent laborers (*terrazgueros*) had worked the land for decades or even centuries, they could not claim it through possession because it belonged to someone else. Nevertheless, communities of terrazgueros seized upon the opportunity of the composiciones to claim the land through immemorial possession. By disavowing their caciques, they rejected the basis of the cacique's right to their labor and the land. Through this legal sleight of hand, they transformed customary usufruct rights into ownership, making the cacique's land their own (Menegus Bornemann, 2017).

Two partnership contracts from the Mixteca Alta district of Tlaxiaco show how communities and caciques disputed and resolved their competing claims to land outside the confines of the composición program, and in a region in which land rights were especially layered and complex. During the pre-Hispanic period, Tlaxiaco was one of the largest and most powerful yuhuitayu of the Mixteca. Its territory encompassed lands in different ecological niches, including cold, temperate, and tropical, allowing for agricultural complementarity and the production of diverse trade goods. It was also a multi-ethnic polity, comprised of a majority Mixtec population, with Triqui and Nahua minorities. Compound lordship defined its political organization, with many *yya* (lords) controlling specific territories through shared or confederated authority (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b, pp. 44–46).

After the congregaciones of the late sixteenth century, Tlaxiaco became a cabecera with multiple subject communities, some of which were cabeceras in their own right, making its jurisdiction layered and at times, conflictive. Due to its strategic location, it became a center for trade, and its fertile lands, especially a territory known as the cañada of Yosotiche, made it a center for sugar production, livestock grazing, and agricultural production more broadly. During the eighteenth century, the cabecera of Tlaxiaco rented the rich agricultural lands of Yosotiche to Spanish sugar producers, positioning it as one of the most important proprietors in the Mixteca region (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b; Pastor, 1987, pp. 181–188). Tlaxiaco's commercial success can be explained not only by its location and the quality of its lands but also by its relationship with its subject communities, which was more cooperative and complementary and less hierarchical than that of other yuhuitayu of the Mixteca region. Each community managed grazing and agricultural lands to the benefit of the whole, contributing to a generalized prosperity (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b, p. 63).

Tlaxiaco's strength was counterbalanced by the multiple cacicazgos of the region, which concentrated power and wealth, and created additional layers of authority. The compound lordship of the pre-Hispanic period may explain this phenomenon of plural cacicazgos. In some cases, subject pueblos of Tlaxiaco and other cabeceras were embedded within the territorial limits of cacicazgos. Notably, San Pedro Mártir Yucuxaco, San Juan Ñumi, San Antonino, San Sebastián Almoloya, and Santo Domingo, all subject towns of Tlaxiaco, were located within the cacicazgo of don Pedro de Chávez y Guzmán, making them subject to the authority of both the cabildo of Tlaxiaco and the Chávez family. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various members of the Chávez family served in the cabildo of Tlaxiaco, making the body an instrument of lordly power (Martín Gabaldón, 2018a, 2018b, pp. 43, 59).

In the eighteenth century, the Chávez family's hold on regional power began to wane, as the cabecera of Tlaxiaco and many of its subject communities came to define their interests against those of the caciques. This local trend tracked with a broader regional pattern in which cacicazgos across the Mixteca found themselves in crisis by mid-century due to challenges from Spaniards and Native commoners. As the livestock economy expanded, caciques leased their land to other caciques, Native commoners, mestizos, and even religious orders, some for cultivation, but most for grazing. The rent of cacique lands increased fourfold from 1671 to 1730, with a marked increase from 1700 to 1730. Many of the most significant renters were Spanish ranchers, who often sought to turn the land they leased from caciques into their own property by making dubious claims in court. For the most part, the caciques successfully defended their cacicazgos, but at the high price of endless legal fees. By 1740, almost all of the Mixtecan cacicazgos were embroiled in some form of litigation over land, a process that seriously undermined their economic solvency (Pastor, 1987, pp. 172–173). Not only did they face challenge from Spaniards but they also faced challenges from communities of *terrazgueros* and subject communities located on their lands. Sometimes caciques rented the boundary lands of their subject communities, sending Native authorities to the courts to cry foul.

The caciques of Tlaxiaco played their part in this process. Between 1714 and 1742, don Pedro Martín Chávez de Guzmán entered into seven rental agreements.11 One of them, signed in 1723, authorized the rent of lands named Yosoñama to Leonor de Aguirre, a wealthy resident of Tlaxiaco, so that she could use it to establish a ranch for cattle, sheep, and goats. Yosoñama sat within the limits of the pueblo of San Juan Ñumi, whose territory was embedded in Chávez' cacicazgo. In addition to an annual fee of twenty pesos, she was expected to pay for all of the improvements to the land required for the founding of the

11 T Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras" 1714, Leg. 4 Exp 2.163, fs. 376r-377r; T Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1714, Leg.4 Exp. 2.164, fs. 378r-379r; T Civil, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1715, Leg.21 Exp. 16.008, fs. 27v-30v (Note, this is a collective agreement in which Chávez rents along with the cabildo of Tlaxiaco); T Proto, "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 30 de octubre de 1722, Leg. 5 Exp. 1.122, fs. 241r-243v; T, Proto, "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 1723, Leg. 5 Exp. 2.43, f. 91r-94v; T Proto, "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 1728, Leg. 6 Exp.2.36, f. 63r-65r; Ta, Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1733, Leg. 6 Exp. 4.04, 4ry, fs. 7r-10v. ; T Proto, "Escritura de Arrendamiento," 1741, Leg.7 Exp. 5, fs. 41r-45v; T Civil, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1742, Leg. 30, Exp. 29.7, fs. 14r-17r. ; T Civil, "Licencia, Arrendamiento de tierras," 1742, Leg. 30 Exp 29.7, fs. 14r-17r.

ranch. Like most rental agreements, it was valid for a period of nine years, in this case, until 1732.12

Doña Leonor's ranch disappeared from notarial records after the 1730s, and its fate remains unclear. It does appear, though, that ownership of the lands called Yosoñama, nested within the concentric circles of San Juan Ñumi, Chávez' cacicazgo, and the cabecera of Tlaxiaco, was muddy enough that the municipal authorities of Tlaxiaco attempted to rent the lands in 1741 to don Juan Antonio de Ladesa, the lieutenant of the *alcalde mayor* (Spanish magistrate) of Teozacoalco, for nine years at the rate of seventeen pesos per year.13 This set off a land dispute among the municipal authorities of Tlaxiaco, San Juan Ñumi, and don Pedro Chávez. In 1742, the dispute gave rise to a partnership contract in which the municipal authorities of Tlaxiaco and San Juan Ñumi claimed joint possession of the land for cooperative use, against current and future claims of the Chávez family.14

Tlaxiaco and Ñumi had not always enjoyed a cooperative relationship. In their petition for a license to form the contract, the authorities of both towns recounted how since August of 1742, the two pueblos had been engaged in litigation over Yosoñama. The officials of Ñumi asserted that under pressure from don Pedro Chávez, they entered a claim to Yosoñama in court, implying that Chávez was angling for a land grab from Tlaxiaco. For their part, the cabildo of Tlaxiaco defended what they claimed was their right to Yosoñama. To put an end to the dispute, Tlaxiaco agreed to give Yosoñama to San Juan Ñumi, but only under the condition that villagers from Tlaxiaco could continue to enjoy the fruits of the land through usufruct, not rent. In fact, they insisted that the land could not be rented at all. In short, the partnership contract would transform lands that the cacique don Pedro Chávez had formerly claimed as his own to lease out for ranching to agricultural land jointly held by Tlaxiaco and Ñumi.

The problem was that the authorities of Tlaxiaco had already tried to claim the land as their own and rent it to don Juan Antonio de Ladesa.

12 T Protoc "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 1723, Leg. 5 Exp. 2.43, fs. 91r-94v.

13 T Proto, "Escritura de Arrendamiento", 1741, Leg.7 Exp. 5, fs. 41r-45v.

14 T Civil, "Contrato de mancomunidad de tierras," 1742, Leg.30 Exp. 29.18.

To address this problem, the contract stipulated that Ladesa would have to remove his livestock by June of 1743. By ceding the land to Ñumi, a community that did not have a rental contract with the Spanish rancher Ladesa, the cabildo of Tlaxiaco did not have to break its contract, and Ladesa and his animals could be sent packing. Once the land was free of livestock, the two pueblos could strengthen their claim to possession by putting the land under cultivation for the necessities of each community, one of the stated purposes of the partnership, and a surefire way to protect the land from expropriation by the Crown.

The other crucial part of the agreement was that neither pueblo would recognize any of the Chávez family as their caciques. As discussed earlier, disavowal of cacique authority represented a strategy used by communities to claim cacical lands through the composiciones. At the same time, relations among Tlaxiaco and its subject communities and the Chávez family had been souring for decades. From 1715 to 1734, Tlaxiaco and some of its subject communities, including San Juan Ñumi, formed a partnership to rent pasture land to a religious order, the Compañia de Jesús del Colegio de la Nueva Veracruz. In the 1715 contract, don Pedro de Chávez de Guzmán and his brother Miguel Chávez formed part of the partnership. Afterward, they did not.15 It appears that Tlaxiaco and Ñumi had either cut the Chávez brothers out of the agreement or claimed the land as their own. And in 1723, the pueblo of San Martín, which like San Pedro Ñumi was embedded within Chávez' cacicazgo, sought an *amparo* (writ of protection, or judicial stay) to protect communal lands in their possession from Chávez' claims.16 One year later, Chávez agreed to "donate" the lands under dispute to San Martín, and allowed the pueblo to maintain its writ of amparo, insuring that its possession of the lands would be respected in the future.17 The resolution of the

15 T Civil, "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 1715, Leg.21 Exp. 16.008, fs. 27r-30v; T Civil, "Arrendamiento de Tierras," 1727, Leg. 25 Exp 2.15, fs. 36v-39v; T Proto, "Obligación de Pago," 1734, Leg. 6 Exp. 4.26, fs. 51r-55r; T Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1733, Leg. 6 Exp. 4.08, fs. 12v-17r; T Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1733, Leg. 6 Exp.4.09, 17r-18v; T Proto, "Arrendamiento de tierras," 1734, Leg. 6 Exp. 4.46, fs. 85v-96v.

16 T Prot "Poder especial," 1723, Leg. 5 Exp. 2.48, fs. 104r-106r.

17 T Proto, "Escritura de convenio y donación," 1724, Leg. 5, Exp. 2.89, fs. 188r-193v.

dispute raises questions. If the pueblo of San Martín possessed the lands, why did Chávez need to donate them? Perhaps Chávez preferred this extrajudicial arrangement to the costly litigation that a full-blown land dispute entailed. Indeed, Chávez appeared to be facing pressures from many sides. During the same year, the cabildo of Tlaxiaco gave power of attorney to an *alcalde* (magistrate) and principal of their community to represent them in the Real Audiencia in a land dispute against Chávez.18

The 1742 partnership contract between Tlaxiaco and Ñumi represents a moment, then, in this long conflict between pueblos and caciques. Perhaps the power-sharing among the multiple cabeceras of the region and the more cooperative relations among subject communities facilitated a collective stance against the cacique. This spirit of cooperation for mutual benefit came through in the conclusion of the contract, which summed up its purpose: to end their legal dispute over Yosoñama, farm the land together for their common necessities, never rent the land, nor recognize *any* cacique.19 Unlike the partnership contracts drawn up during the 1717–1718 composiciones, the contract between Tlaxiaco and Ñumi did not invoke joint or partial liability, or liability of any sort, and contained no punitive measures with which to enforce its provisions.20

### **Conclusion**

In late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Oaxaca, Native landholding and forms of territorial organization endured to a much greater extent than in other regions of colonial Mexico. For example, in northwestern

18 T Proto, "Poder Especial," 1724, Leg. 5 Exp. 2.77, fs. 167r-170r.

19 Ibid.

20 The cabildo of Tlaxiaco formed another partnership in 1742, this time for joint-possession of boundary lands with Chilapa, a cabecera that fell under the jurisdiction of Tlaxiaco, and four of its subject communities. The contract put an end to ongoing litigation, and allowed all of the signatories to enjoy the right to water, palm, maguey, and timber, all customary uses of boundary lands. Each of the signatories had equal claim to the land and would give up any prior or future legal claims to it. T Civil, "Escritura de Convenio," 1742, Leg. 30 Exp. 29.11, fs. 26v.-31r.

Mexico, Hispanic settlement, population growth, expansion of cattle ranching, and the legal regime of private property and fixed boundaries undermined Indigenous communal land tenure and variable use-rights over the course of the eighteenth century (López Castillo, 2010, 2014; Radding, 1997, pp. 171–207, 2005, pp. 89–116). By contrast, in Oaxaca, Indigenous legal claims to customary land tenure, use, and possession produced a broad range of agrarian relationships that preserved old forms of collective ownership in new guises or created new forms altogether.

Although many Native communities in Oaxaca acquired title to their lands during this period through the composiciones de tierras, others resisted drawing firm boundaries around their communities, opting instead to share land through cooperative agreements. In some instances, they resorted to custom to legitimize claims to joint-possession and joint-jurisdiction, and in others, they claimed possession in order to transform customary usufruct into a contractual relationship. Partnership contracts provided an alternative to the bitter, expensive, and lengthy processes of litigation and land titling, at least temporarily. They also represented a strategy to pool land and natural resources, and to join forces against powerful outsiders, whether Spanish ranchers, officials, or caciques. Crucially, although claims to custom pointed to the preservation of traditional agrarian order, when incorporated into the partnership contract they became a potent mechanism for challenging that order and generating new rights, while preserving the privileges of the Native authorities who were their signatories.

Partnership contracts expand our view of the legal repertoire available to and developed by Native people to make customary claims and not only preserve but also produce common land. Partnership contracts were distinct from other forms of Mesoamerican claim-making—like maps, primordial titles, and codices—in significant ways. The contracts framed Native territoriality and social order in forms that appealed to Spanish norms of ownership, and collective and individual responsibility. In addition to providing evidence of customary practice and possession, the contracts also produced new legal effects, like liability, through which burdens for transgression were shared

unequally. By petitioning Spanish judges to put into law customary arrangements that sat at the margins of legality, a rising class of legally literate Native officials strengthened their authority over people and land, while ceding some of their limited sovereignty to Spanish judges. The laws of medieval Spain allowed them to move strategically between agreement and conflict, and social harmony and exploitation. The fruits of their efforts demonstrate that Native custom and communal land in Mexico were not primordial or static, but rather works in progress, conditioned by laws, Native legal agency, and political and economic transformations. Joint-ownership and joint-jurisdiction had a lasting legacy in Mexico that stretched beyond the composiciones de tierras. During the nineteenth century and up until the Mexican Revolution, co-ownership (*condueñazgo*) provided a strategy for Mexico's peasant communities—some Indigenous, and some of mixed ethnicity—to respond to state-led efforts to fiscalize, privatize, and legalize communal landholding.21

### **Bibliography**

### **Archives consulted and referenced**

Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca (AHJO) Teposcolula Civil, Teposcolula Protocolos (T Civil, T Proto) Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGN)

### **Printed Primary Sources**

King of Castile & Leon, A. (2001). *Las siete partidas* (R. I. Burns Ed. & S. P. Scott Trans.). University of Pennsylvania Press.

21 There is a robust literature on nineteenth century *condueñazgo*. See the seminal work of Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, 1993.

### **Secondary Sources**

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## **5**

## **The** *Yoreme* **Creation of** *Itom Ania*  **in Northwestern Mexico: Histories of Cultural Landscapes**

**Cynthia Radding**

We gathered in the patio of a village elder in the small community of Los Nachuquis ("place of the *huachapori* thorns"). Under the shade of mesquite and *piocha* trees we discussed the vital link between strengthening the *Yoremnokki* language among contemporary *Yoreme*  communities and the defense of *lutu'uria*, their rightful claim to the forested spaces of the monte, *huya ania*, and the resources it provides. Several of the men and women present recalled their ancestors' legacy in the stories they had told about their struggles to defend their land, affirming that *territory*—*itom ania* or "our world"—signifies not only the land but also the culture and wisdom of the people.1

C. Radding (B) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
1 Piocha, in the regional vernacular of Sonora, Mexico, is the *Melia azedarach* tree known in temperate climates as the white cedar. Possibly introduced from Asia in the past, it has acclimated to subtropical environments in the Americas. The word *piocha* is derived from

Radding, "Jornada de trabajo en torno al Pueblo de Cohuirimpo," field notes, 23 October 2021

Language plays a fundamental role in our interpretation of the rich archival sources that allow us to comprehend the deeply rooted knowledge base that Indigenous peoples developed from the material and spiritual worlds through which they moved in seasonal patterns of migration and dwelling. Language is also an essential part of the living histories we construct in collaboration with the Indigenous peoples that maintain their traditions in a radically transformed ecological region through their ritual cycles and collective memories that derive their meaning from the natural world. Indigenous perceptions of their environment were rooted in the landscapes they had created in the course of pursuing subsistence strategies for centuries before European contact. The arid environments of the coastal plains and highland valleys bordering the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts required access to a diverse range of resources and ecological spaces. Indigenous peoples adapted the traditions they had developed over centuries to secure a livelihood to the demands and the opportunities of the colonial economy. Following the initial violent encounters with early Spanish *entradas*, Native villages coalesced into mission towns, whose internal economies combined Indigenous cropping and irrigation methods with European cultigens and livestock. Their settlement patterns were altered even further as they intersected with the colonial enterprises of mining, livestock raising, and commercial agriculture that developed in northwestern New Spain (Deeds, 2000).

Indians were not explicitly "environmentalists" in their worldview. Nevertheless, their territorial defense arose from longstanding holistic practices of land use that included arable land for cultivation, coastal estuaries for fishing, and the forests and grasslands for foraging. The

Nahuatl *piochtli*, meaning "full of grace or magnificent" (RAE Diccionario https://dle.rae.es/ piocha). Mesquite (*Prosopis velutina*) is Native to northwestern Mexico.

Los Nachuquis, like Punta de la Laguna, Bachoco el Alto, Buaysiacobe, and other small communities in the middle portion of the Mayo river basin, are linked together by the Traditional Government of the Pueblo of Cohuirimpo, *Batwe Cowiktipo*, a historic *Yoreme*  town and one of the eight Jesuit missions founded in the early seventeenth century. *Lutu'uria yo'owe*, the ancient or greater truth (Lerma Rodríguez, 2011, p. 214).

term *monte* occurs throughout the documentary record and in common speech to refer to uncultivated spaces in forests, grasslands, and wetlands near rivers or coastal estuaries. The meanings that Native peoples ascribed to places and the intensity of conflicts that erupted over basic resources stemmed from practices that linked labor to water and land, including floodplain cultivation and the renewable vitality of the *monte*.

This chapter offers new readings of land titles for the colonial provinces of Ostimuri and Sinaloa, focusing on the Mayo river valley. The analysis of changes in land tenure and use that are documented in these archival sources foregrounds ecological conditions and cultural meanings through the dual lenses of environmental history and ethnohistorical perspectives. It privileges Indigenous knowledge of landforms, biological species, and the cultural values that the communities of this region ascribed to the physical features and the territorial extension of the spaces they inhabited and defended. Its objectives seek to highlight the parallel production of oral and written sources and, thus, to suggest points of intersection in the languages and modes of communication that are inferred from both colonial documents and ethnographic registers. Finally, its purpose is to contribute an historical analysis that is useful for the *Yoreme*  communities in their present-day defense of their territory and its resources.

The research that supports this chapter is rooted in archived land titles and judicial cases involving Indigenous pueblos and Hispanic settlers during the Spanish colonial administration of northwestern Mexico. These archival materials are supplemented with botanical information and place names collected by the author using hand-written notes during conversations with elders in the Pueblo of Cohuirimpo in 2017–2018 and 2021, as shown in Tables 5.1 and 5.2. In turn, the author has given transcriptions of the archival documents to the community in both printed and digital formats in an effort to collaborate with their vital interests for demonstrating their persistence as corporate communities in the region over centuries and their cultural practices for dwelling in the land. The research methodology is basically historical: to analyze a corpus of selected land titles that was compiled

**Table 5.1** Placenames and names of plants derived from Yoremnokki

*Sources* Crumrine (1977), Camacho Ibarra (2017), Conversation with Elders of Cohuirimpo (2017)

from different repositories in order to create a narrative that is sensitive to change over time and informed by relevant insights from the archaeological and ethnographic literature.

(continued)

### **The Spatial and Cultural Creation of** *Itom Ania*

Northwestern Mexico constituted a series of overlapping borderlands radiating northward from the tropical environments of the Gran Nayar, Chametla, and Culiacán to the arid lands of the Sonoran Desert (Hers, 2013, pp. 273–312; Sauer, 1935).2 What the Spaniards first called *petatlán* (land of reed houses) became defined by four major river valleys—the Sinaloa, Zuaque (Fuerte), Mayo, and Yaqui—that flowed through slopes and canyons to water the coastal plains leading from the sierra to the Gulf of California. Petatlán reflected the production of culturally crafted spaces through mixed practices of food procurement and dwelling in the land. Native peoples created these landscapes through their labor, knowledge, and ceremonial cycles across different ecological zones extending eastward from the Gulf of California through coastal beaches and brackish wetlands, networks of streams and floodplains, and the *monte* of thorn forest, cacti, and hardwood trees (Crumrine, 1977: 11–14; Camacho Ibarra, 2017: 18–19; Gentry, 1942: 27–41; Gentry, 1995; Ingold, 2000) (Fig. 1).

Indigenous peoples in this region defended these territories as "our world" (*itom ania*) through their relationship to nature. These mosaics of distinctive geographical features were further inscribed with meaning by the spiritual power that emanates from nature (Camacho Ibarra, 2017: 312; Crumrine, 1977: 98; Shorter, 2009). In addition to the life-giving monte—the source for hunting, gathering medicinal plants, fruits, seeds, and building materials—*itom ania* embraced *kawi* (the sierras) with hills and ranges whose names evoke stands of vegetation, boulders, and oral traditions of *rancherías* (small, seasonal settlements); *wasam*, cultivable farmland in the river valleys; *pueplum,* the villages that mark their domestic spaces, the *ramadas* (arbors) for their rituals and centers of governance; *batwe,* the streams and arroyos that flow into the main river channels; and *bawe*, the maritime estuaries and open waters of the Gulf of California (Lerma Rodríguez, 2011: 53–72).

2 Sauer and Brand (1998) referred to the pre-Hispanic northwestern frontier of Mesoamerica as Aztatlán, extending from Acaponeta to Culiacán.

**Fig. 5.1** Northwestern New Spain: Provinces of Sinaloa, Ostimuri, and Sonora. Map designed by Javier Etchegaray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Reprinted with permission from the University of Arizona Press

The peoples of these four river basins adapted Mesoamerican cultigens to these semi-arid but watered valleys, developing local varieties of maize, cucurbits, beans, chilis, amaranthus, cotton, and tobacco as well as root crops like camotes (*Ipomoea batatis*). Beyond the floodplains, along the arroyo beds, and in small clearings throughout the monte, the *Yoremem* and neighboring peoples planted shifting milpas with periods of fallow.3 Their combined practices of planting, harvesting, and gathering redistributed different species of herbaceous plants, succulents, and cacti; furthermore, all the Indigenous communities of the highlands and river valleys both cultivated and gathered numerous varieties of edible and fibrous plants (Bañuelos, 2013: 403–407; Harriss Clare, 2012: 27, 72–73). The rivers and coastal mangroves and estuaries provided an abundance of fish, clams, freshwater shrimp, mollusks, and amphibians as well as salt. Indigenous peoples lived in these spaces and moved seasonally through different biomes to create a mixed livelihood of farming, foraging, and trade.

Indigenous landscapes were not timeless or unchanging, however, and their practices for planting, hunting, and foraging produced evolving and shifting borderlands. Indigenous skills for survival learned over centuries through experimentation created knowledge that was passed across the generations through quotidian practices, oral traditions, and rituals of dance and song (Shorter, 2009; Yetman & Van Devender, 2002). Recent archaeological findings suggest that the Fuerte river valley was occupied continuously for at least 2000 years BP, and the cultural roots of the historical communities of this region ran deep through changing environments from the Mocorito valley in the south to the Yaqui basin in the north. Analyses of ceramic, lithic, and shell remains for different sites in the Sinaloa, Fuerte, and Mayo drainages support hypotheses of continuous settlement in Petatlán with datable material for over a millennium prior to European contact. Adapting to ecological transformations in these fluvial borderlands, ethnic boundaries shifted within networks of chiefly alliances and rivalries

3 The Mayos, Yaquis, Guarijíos, and Rarámuris constitute living peoples with enduring cultures to the present day. The Tepagüis, Macoyagüis, and Conicaris no longer exist as separate ethnic groups; however, they maintained their languages well into the nineteenth century, and they identify as *Yoreme* or mayo to the present day.

among different bands of rancherías and villages (Carpenter, 2014: 37–52).

The peoples of the floodplains and highland ranges throughout the four major river basins of Petatlán exhibited discernible patterns of livelihood and political organization that differed from the urban settlements of Culiacán and Acaponeta to the south, the terraced villages of the eastern Sonoran highlands, and the hunter-gatherers of the Sonoran Desert. Archaeological surveys and excavations carried out in present-day central and southern Sonora point to shared cultural traditions in the piedmont leading eastward to the Sierra Madre Occidental with cultivation, terracing, and methods for manufacturing ceramic and lithic artifacts even as they suggest regional variations in their time span and settlement sizes (Doolittle, 1988; Pailes, 1972, 1994). A complex of villages known as Huatabampo developed on the coastal marshes of the Mayo and Fuerte river valleys through agriculture and long-distance trade networks from c. 200 BCE to 1450 CE (Álvarez Palma, 1990). On the northern boundary of Petatlán in the mid-Yaqui drainage and its tributaries, archaeological surveys of the Ónavas Valley found evidence of trade with Huatabampo, in the lower Mayo valley, and the Casas Grandes complex centered in Paquimé, in northwestern Chihuahua (Gallaga Murrieta, 2006: 105–252).

Petatlán was connected through these trade routes to Aztatlán and the urban centers on the western and northern borderlands of Mesoamerica. Even after the ceremonial and trading hubs of Huatabampo, Paquimé, Chalchihuites (in Durango) and the Hohokam settlements in the Gila and Santa Cruz river valleys of Arizona began to disperse a century before European contact—due to climate change, internal dissention, and external invasions—clusters of agricultural villages throughout the alluvial valleys and piedmont continued to thrive, producing food surpluses, tools, and prestige insignia like pearls, shells, obsidian, and cloth, that supplied the regional trade networks Spaniards would encounter in the sixteenth century (Berrojalbiz, 2012; Webster et al., 2008). Well-storied sixteenth-century expeditions led by Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Marcos de Niza, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Francisco de Ibarra passed through portions of Sinaloa and Ostimuri, following multi-lingual Indigenous guides who traveled from one province to another along trails that linked together coastal routes, highland ravines, and mountain passes (Obregón, 1584/1988; Pailes, 1997: 147–157; Sauer, 1932).

## **Colonial Borderlands in Petatlán**

Spanish colonialism came to the *Yoreme* borderlands in the early seventeenth century through Jesuit missions and the mining industry. The Society of Jesus founded a network of mission districts from its base in the Colegio de San Felipe y Santiago in the Villa of Sinaloa, extending through the river valleys of Sinaloa, Ostimuri, and Sonora. In mid-century, the frontiers of mission evangelization advancing northward from the Villa de Sinaloa met the mining frontier proceeding westward from Parral in Nueva Vizcaya. Mining began in Ostimuri with silver strikes in the 1660s deep in the sierra between the Yaqui and Mayo drainages (West, 1993: 44–55). From the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, new mines opened in the Reales de los Alamos, Río Chico, Tacupeto, Piedras Verdes, and Baroyeca. Alamos and La Aduana became the principal commercial and administrative centers for Indigenous pueblos and Spanish settlements in the Mayo river basin (Cramaussel, 2012; West, 1993: Fig. 18, "The Alamos mining district, southern Sonora").

The parallel development of missions and *reales de minas* created conflicts involving labor and resources. The mines and surrounding settlements became markets for mission produce and livestock, but at the same time missions became labor repositories for the mines through the supply of rotational workers recruited for specific places and time periods, known as *repartimiento* (BNFR AF Caja 32, 650.1, 1698. Fojas 1–44v.) The Real de los Alamos drew heavily from the Mayo pueblos even as Yaquis, Mayos, and other Indigenous groups from Sonora and Ostimuri crossed the Sierra Madre to work in Parral (Cramaussel, 2014). Parallel to the labor drafts ordered through repartimiento, Indians traveled on their own to the mines, incorporating paid labor into their patterns of seasonal migration. Over time colonists and mission pueblos competed ever more rigorously for Indigenous workers and the productive resources of croplands, pasturage, woodlands, and sources of water in streams and springs.

Colonial boundaries were negotiated over more than three centuries through different practices of defining space and allocating resources in a mixed thorn forest and riparian environment, extending from the basin-and-range topography of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the deltas, wetlands, and estuaries of the Gulf coast. The Jesuit missions were intended to bring scattered Indigenous settlements into permanent villages, but, in practice, they became an interface between the rancherías that supported the Indians' seasonal movements through different biomes and the ceremonial and political centers of the missions. As the Spanish population grew with the expansion of mining and livestock ranching, the institutional status of the missions under colonial law protected Indigenous agricultural lands and portions of the monte, where Native shepherds and cowhands tended mission herds. Yet, mission lands were not necessarily contiguous or clearly defined; rather separate parcels of croplands, dependent on rainfall or the seasonal flow of intermittent streams, and grasslands mixed with thorn forest, were occupied at different times by both Indigenous and Spanish cultivators, pastoralists and foragers. Called *parajes*, which translates simply to "place," these irregularly shaped stretches of monte were named—often with Indigenous toponyms—thus revealing locally recognized histories of occupation and use.

Customary land tenure and usufruct in these northern borderlands of New Spain became more formal under the pressures of population growth and an increase in the size of livestock herds. Over the course of the eighteenth-century colonial authorities in Nueva Vizcaya, Sinaloa and Sonora pressured Spanish *vecinos* (Hispanic resident heads of households) to regularize their occupation of portions of the monte, known as *realengos* (public lands nominally owned by the Crown), through *composición*, a legal process involving the payment of royal fees to carry out the measurement, public auction, and issuance of title that turned open parajes into discreetly bounded pieces of private property (López Castillo, 2010, 2014; Radding, 1997: 171–206, 2005, 2022: 152–191).4 Private landholdings evolved from use rights negotiated through verbal agreements to demarcated and titled properties. The legal process for enclosing portions of the monte contrasted with informal arrangements for sharing pasturage and water or transferring use rights through purchase and inheritance.5 Formal land ownership with measured boundaries and property markers ran counter to Indigenous practices of land use and access based on seasonal occupation of the monte and the resources of water, forests, and wildlife sheltered within it. Table 5.2 lists a selection of archival sources for the legal enclosure of private landholdings in the Provinces of Ostimuri and Sinaloa.

### **Defending the** *Monte*

In the middle portion of the Mayo river drainage, where the floodplains widened to support extensive croplands, the pueblos of Camoa, Tesia, Navojoa, and Cohuirimpo straddled both the northern and southern banks of the river. The Indigenous officers of Navojoa became the principal litigants in a case that represented the entire village in their demand to maintain the riparian wetlands and scrub forest that surrounded their croplands as open monte not to be measured or adjudicated to private owners. Together with the officers of Tesia, they claimed these realengos by right of possession and "because the king, in

4*Realengos* referred to lands that were nominally under the jurisdiction of the monarch and not alienated to a private owner. See the interesting discussion of *realengos* and *real* in BNFR AF Caja 32, 650.1, 1698, f. 44. Vecinos were Hispanic subjects, identified as residents of a given city or town, with potential landholding rights and the duties to contribute to local defense. The provinces of Sinaloa, Ostimuri, and Sonora were under the administration of the Kingdom of Nueva Vizcaya under 1734, when the governorship of Sonora–Sinaloa was established; with the Intendancy system of 1786, the western provinces from Chiametla to Sonora came under the authority of the Intendancy of Arizpe.

5 Hundreds of files created through the process of approving land titles through composición, often called *títulos primordiales*, are preserved in the Archivo General del Estado de Sonora, Títulos Primordiales (AGES TP), in the Archivo Histórico General del Estado de Sinaloa, Ramo de Tierras, in the Archivo Histórico de Jalisco, and in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramos de Tierras and Indiferente Virreinal.

his mercy, had given them the lands that were left unmeasured" between the boundaries of neighboring villages and private landholdings.6 The contentious arguments recorded in the field and entered into the court proceedings in the Audiencia of Guadalajara hinged on the meanings of *possession*; their dissonance arose from distinct ways of securing a livelihood and dwelling in the land. In the following paragraphs, the positions upheld by the *Yoreme* village officers are analyzed in detail, because they illustrate in profound ways both the material qualities of the land and its resources and the values that Indigenous peoples ascribed to the landscapes that they and their ancestors had created.