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Drinking, Homicide & Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages
By William B. Taylor STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6563-3
CHAPTER 1
The Colonial Setting
The areas of central Mexico and Oaxaca well represented in the colonial records by homicides, uprisings, and drinking follow fairly definite political boundaries. For central Mexico, all of the communities were located within the Intendancy of Mexico (created in 1786); for Oaxaca, they fell within the alcaldías mayores of Teposcolula, Cuatro Villas, Antequera, Guaxolotitlán, Teotitlán del Valle, Nochistlán, and Zimatlán (see Maps 1–2). These political boundaries do not chop the history of rural Mexico into arbitrary units. They encompass major subregions of two of the six ethnohistorical regions of Middle America shaped by the complex interplay of natural environment and cultural developments: central Mexico and Oaxaca. The Intendancy of Mexico covers much of the core region of central Mexico surrounding Mexico City, an area of continuous human settlement for at least three thousand years and the heartland of colonial society in New Spain. The alcaldía mayor of Teposcolula corresponds roughly to the Mixteca Alta in the western portion of the modern state of Oaxaca, a major subregion of the Oaxaca ethnohistorical region, and the alcaldías mayores of Teotitlán del Valle, Antequera, Cuatro Villas, and Zimatlán cover the Valley of Oaxaca, another major geographical and cultural subregion. Together, these two subregions accounted for more than half of the Oaxaca population and were mainstays of the region's colonial economy.
Both Oaxaca and the Intendancy of Mexico are located in the mountainous central highlands of Mexico, 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. The rugged spines are interspersed with basins of small to moderate size, from 30 to 300 square kilometers. Especially in Oaxaca, snug valleys and barrancas are the characteristic land forms; in central Mexico the valleys are larger — the Valley of the Mezquital, the Valley of Toluca, and the great Valley of Mexico — and in the Bajío on the northern rim of the central Mexico region, the mountains open up to a broad plateau, the mesa central. The weather generally is semiarid and temperate to cool. In both regions life-giving rains are concentrated in the late spring and summer months. In pre-Hispanic times seasonal rains and some irrigation from year-round water sources supported a productive maize culture, supplemented by a variety of wild plants and secondary native crops, including maguey, beans, squash, chiles, tomatoes, zapotes, nuts, sweet potatoes, avocados, and herbs. The Mixteca Alta was the driest of our subregions, the least easily brought under irrigated farming, and the most susceptible to erosion.
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION BEFORE THE CONQUEST
Central Mexico and Oaxaca were among the most thickly peopled Indian areas of Latin America in the colonial period, their dense indigenous populations concentrated in village communities often no more than three or four kilometers apart. The central Mexico area, defined by Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook as stretching from the Chichimec frontier (roughly following the northern boundary of the gobierno of Nueva España on Map 1) south — through the Bajio and the populous states of Hidalgo, Mexico, Morelos, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Guerrero, Veracruz, and Oaxaca — to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, was occupied by a very large population in the early sixteenth century, supporting perhaps as many as twenty-five million people when the Spaniards arrived in 1519. This population was devastatingly reduced by epidemic disease and relentless labor demands during the following century to little more than one million in 1605. It began to grow again in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To the end of the colonial period the population of both central Mexico and Oaxaca remained predominantly Indian peasant.
Each region had a measure of internal linguistic unity. The Mixteca Alta was and still is inhabited principally by Mixtec-speaking people and their Hispanicized relatives, with enclaves of Trique, Chatino, Chocho, Popoloca, Ixcateco, and Amuzgo peoples. The Valley of Oaxaca villagers spoke local dialects of Zapotec, with an important addition of Mixtec-speakers in the south. In central Mexico, Nahuatl was widely spoken and was becoming the lingua franca of politics even among other linguistic groups such as the Otomís, Mazahuas, and Tarascans.
Both central Mexico and Oaxaca were situated within the area of "High Indian Culture," which supported elaborate societies of artisans, traders, and hereditary elites of priests and warriors who shared political power. Intensive food production by farming villages under the sway of political centers sustained these complex societies. In both regions incipient state organizations developed to extract surplus wealth and labor from the countryside, enabling the elites to carry on their building programs, military ventures, and regulation of public life. The "city state," with an administrative center and outlying dependent villages occupying a well-defined territory, was the basic unit of native state organization in central and southern Mexico at the time of the conquest. In central Mexico, the administrative centers often were fairly large, compact settlements, the political and economic hearts of their sustaining areas. Compact settlements supported by a hinterland of small hamlets of farmers were also found in the Valley of Oaxaca, but in the Mixteca Alta, food-producing villages and hamlets were organized around sparsely occupied political centers.
Combinations of petty states into larger political organizations based on military conquest and alliance occurred in the fifteenth century in both regions but were stronger in central Mexico. In the Mixteca Alta, Tilantongo had a preeminent place in regional associations, based on its earlier power under the warrior-leader Eight Deer in the eleventh century; in the Valley of Oaxaca, Monte Albán may have been a major seat before its decline in the eleventh century, and Zaachila is thought to have been something of a Zapotec capital in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Oaxaca, these larger groupings had limited continuity; the lasting organization in this region of little valleys divided by rugged mountains was the smaller city state. In central Mexico, with larger valleys and better lines of communication, political organizations and cities were more highly developed and based on tighter central control. Important ethnic units, such as the Tepaneca in the Valley of Mexico, groups of Otomí people centered at Meztitlán, and the Tlaxcalans, formed substantial social and political provinces. The great urban nucleus was Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico, the largest city on the American continent before the arrival of Europeans and a major political center.
In the late fifteenth century the Tenocha-Mexica ("Aztecs") of Tenochtitlán-Tlatelolco had allied with two other major city states in the Valley, Texcoco and Tlacopan, to extend state centralization and tribute demands. But even this famed "Aztec Empire" fell far short of a unified political command in central Mexico. According to the recent findings of Warwick Bray, Nigel Davies, and Frances Berdan, the integrated state of the Triple Alliance existed primarily in the Valley of Mexico, and even there it had to contend with fifty or sixty semiautonomous city states. It appears that the Triple Alliance rulers were not able to impose much political or cultural uniformity on their tributaries. The "empire" outside the Valley was a far-flung but loosely organized tribute system sustained by Triple Alliance occupation of strategic locations with a garrison and sometimes the symbolic presence of a governor. Tribute was the integrating institution. The political system lacked most of the instruments of centralized state control — such as police, formalized laws enforced by a system of courts, religious conversion, resettlement, and protection of state sovereignty by local subjects.
Within the extensive territory of the Triple Alliance tribute network, independent regional confederations, or señoríos, existed in Michoacán, Tlaxcala, Yopitzinco, Meztitlán, Cholula, Huejotzingo, Acapulco, and Acatepec; other provinces on the periphery of the tribute area were often in rebellion. The Triple Alliance "empire," then, was loosely organized and tended to atomization rather than centralization and uniformity. Still, the leagues of city states and a few great towns engaged in extensive trade and forced redistribution of goods were striking features of the native society of central Mexico when Cortez encountered them.
EARLY COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS
Disasters of several kinds struck Indian Mexico with the arrival of Spaniards and their rapid dispersion in search of wealth. The military conquest, the best-known disaster, affected Oaxaca less than it did central Mexico, the main area of state organization and concerted armed resistance. But in both regions the military conquest was the blow that native society as a whole was best prepared to withstand. The pre-Hispanic past was filled with wars that, like the conquest, were waged by warrior elites for control of a peasant population not directly involved. During the conquest the rural farmers were spectators at one more in a long series of political battles fought by outsiders.
The physical destruction caused by military conquest and its immediate political consequences fell heaviest on the Indian elites above the city-state level. Tenochtitlán was virtually leveled by 1523, and the "empire" collapsed with the removal of the warrior groups, state officials, and high priests. Provincial chieftains outside Triple Alliance control in central Mexico and Oaxaca also quickly lost their authority to the Spanish invaders, and Indian cities lost their preeminence as centers of native life. Ethnic unities that had supported state organization, such as that of the Valley Zapotecs at Zaachila, also began to decline. Native priests at all levels were systematically attacked in the consolidation of Spanish power. Lands worked for their benefit by subject villagers were confiscated and redistributed, and priests were killed, brought to trial, or harried into secrecy.
Although only the upper levels of the native elite were systematically removed, this fragmentation of native political organization set in motion a half-century of turmoil for the entire native nobility. Old sumptuary regulations of food, drink, and dress broke down, and local nobles found it difficult to enforce old customs of marriage and labor service. After the conquest, some macehuales (commoners) eagerly denounced the arbitrary acts and pagan habits of nobles in order to diminish their authority; and some subject towns and hamlets of landless farmers attached to noble estates (mayeque) seized the opportunity to declare their independence. On the other hand, the majority of natives — rural villagers and peasant families — did not suffer a fall from social eminence with the Spaniards' arrival. Where they had once worked to provide the surplus that maintained native priests and nobles, they now labored to sustain more demanding and less divine rulers.
Although peasant villages and local traditions were not broken apart by the political effects of the conquest, other sixteenth-century disasters did jeopardize rural life. Epidemics of European introduction, apparently measles, smallpox, and typhus, scourged the Indian population. Millions of natives died in the pandemics of the 1530's, 1540's, and 1570's. The Indian depopulation was dramatic everywhere, but especially in the coastal regions where whole communities ceased to exist. In the highland regions of central Mexico and Oaxaca, many communities, although drastically reduced, survived these devastations.
The balance of rural life in the sixteenth century was also seriously upset by the Spaniards' coercive labor practices, their monopolization of trade in certain important goods, their congregación, or resettlement, programs, and their introduction of European livestock. The encomienda system, under which zones of Indian communities were assigned to serve individual Spanish colonists, permitted virtually uncontrolled use of Indian labor in central Mexico and Oaxaca through at least the 1540's. The increased royal regulation of all spheres of Indian life after 1535 under Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza began the gradual decline of encomienda power but did not much alter the heavy labor demands. Transformation of the encomienda based on personal service into the encomienda based on tribute after 1549 signified a radical change in the private authority of privileged colonists, but other state-administered legal devices such as the repartimiento, or labor draft, and penal servitude were found to reintroduce obligatory service. Labor demands were also made on native society by the Church for its building projects and the maintenance of parish priests, and by the Crown through taxation and labor drafts for public works of all kinds. The eventual replacement of encomenderos with royal alcaldes mayores brought with it the reparto de efectos, the officeholder's lucrative monopoly on the sales of certain items, such as horses and chocolate, at inflated prices. Alcaldes mayores in the late colonial period reportedly pressed their monopoly goods on peasant subjects in order to coerce low-cost production of valuable export products, such as cochineal. Numerous complaints against such abuses led the Crown to cancel the reparto de efectos privilege in 1790.
Relocation of Indian peasants by Catholic missionaries during the 1540's and by the viceregal government in the 1590's forcibly uprooted the surviving members of some communities. For central Mexico and Oaxaca, these congregación programs affected the Otomí people of modern Hidalgo most extensively and encouraged the growth of head towns, or local administrative capitals, in the Mixteca Alta. Many attempts at resettlement ultimately failed; peasants who were settled in the congregaciones gradually returned to their original homes and fields. The dramatic increase of European livestock altered the ecological balance of pre-Hispanic times, although perhaps not as drastically as it first appears. Much open grassland was available for grazing, which did not interfere with peasant agriculture (although grazing must have reduced the wild foods gathered by Indians). Stray cows, sheep, and goats nevertheless inevitably spilled onto Indian fields, destroying crops.
The periodic epidemics, limited resettlements, labor requirements, and ranching activities were not frontal attacks on peasant life, but they did bring confusion. During the first fifty years of European rule rapid changes introduced a new fluidity to the way of life of rural Indians. A general Hispanicizing of formal aspects of life took place, in public religious activities, eating habits, dress, and property rights, and most completely among the surviving nobility at the local level and in the old city-state centers that became colonial head towns. Political reorganization within the Spanish Empire also involved a considerable Hispanicization at local levels. Local governments of large Indian communities were modeled after the old annually elected municipal councils of Spain (cabildos), and their relation to the state followed bureaucratic channels established by the Crown. Contemporary Spanish ideas of urban planning and architecture — including the true arch and the grid plan, consisting of a central plaza with streets leading out at right angles from it — were widely imposed.
From the vantage point of pre-Hispanic society, excess and individual license must have seemed the rule in this early period of adjustment, whether in Indian religious rites, such as a kind of confession, which had been performed only once in a lifetime before the conquest, eating habits, the frequency of public celebrations, or vagrancy by young men. A climate of restlessness and "psychological unemployment" in which old habits lost their meaning accompanied the new conditions of uncertainty. Work lost much of its transcendent value as a sacred act and must have appeared to Indians another kind of excess. Migration — from village to city and from one rural area to another — seems to have been common enough in pre-Hispanic times, but it reached new dimensions in the sixteenth century. With the collapse of closed groups of native traders, more Indians set off on their own as peddlers and muleteers; and some small communities were abandoned through congregación, flight from disease, or resolve to escape the growing burdens of mandatory labor and taxation.
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Excerpted from Drinking, Homicide & Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages by William B. Taylor. Copyright © 1979 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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