Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730-1850 9780292793880

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Hijos del Pueblo

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Hijos del Pueblo Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730–1850

Deborah E. Kanter

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2008 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kanter, Deborah Ellen. Hijos del pueblo : gender, family, and community in rural Mexico, 1730–1850 / Deborah E. Kanter. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-71887-6 (alk. paper) 1. Indians of Mexico—Mexico—Toluca de Lerdo Region—Social conditions. 2. Kinship—Mexico—Toluca de Lerdo Region. 3. Sex role— Mexico—Toluca de Lerdo Region. 4. Family—Mexico—Toluca de Lerdo Region. 5. Toluca de Lerdo Region (Mexico)—Social conditions. I. Title. f1219.1.t626k36 2008 307.720972′52—dc22 2008014741

To León, my son and in memory of Manuel Kanter, my father

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Contents

abbreviations  ix acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 1. “Like Three Feet in One Shoe ”  13 The Toluca Region, 1730–1821

2. Hijos del Pueblo  28 The Limits of Community

3. “In Compliance with Marital Obligations”  37 Women, Men, and Married Life

4. “Not in the Street”  52

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

5. Scandalous Men and Intrepid Women  67 6. Neither Alone nor Free  82 Women in Depósito

7. From Fathers to Stepfathers  97 Life after Independence

Appendix 

111

Notes  115 Glossary  135 Bibliography  139 Index  147

List of Maps Central Mexico and the Toluca Region  14 Tenango del Valle and Key Towns  15

List of Tables 1. Population Growth  20 2. Household Composition  55 3. Causes for Depósito  85 4. Person Responsible for Mandating Depósito  89 5. Location of Depósito  90

Abbreviations

AF Archivo Franciscano, in BN AGI Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla AGN Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City AJEM-T Archivo Judicial del Estado de México, Toluca: Tenango del Valle BMM Mexican Manuscripts, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley BN Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City FCSC Fondo Condes de Santiago Calimaya, in BN HAHR Hispanic American Historical Review HM Historia mexicana JCB John Carter Brown Library, Brown University JFH Journal of Family History VEMC Viceregal and Ecclesiastical Mexican Collection, Tulane University

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Acknowledgments

​I

​n 1886 Tenango del Valle’s jefe político declared that the town’s archive had been put in order. Yet he was concerned that “useless papers” remained, including collections of newspapers, cover sheets, and “many other documents of no interest.” He proposed selling these odds and ends as scrap paper and, looking toward the future, using the profits to construct a telephone office. The state governor stopped him, stressing the unseemliness of selling papers from the archive. Without the preservation of such “documents of no interest” this book could not have been written. I thank the staff at the Archivo General de la Nación, the Biblioteca Nacional, and especially the Archivo Judicial del Estado de México. While the musty old judicial cases from Tenango del Valle may seem useless to some, generations of staff members saw fit to preserve them. I hope I have made good use of them here. The University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History provided collegial training in history. Seminars and conversations with my teachers, Edward Ayers, Tico Braun, Walter Hauser, the late Stephen Innes, Joseph Miller, and William B. Taylor, continue to motivate me years later. El Colegio de Michoacán graciously took me in as a graduate student and introduced me to Mexican academia and regional and rural history. Bill Taylor directed the dissertation from which this book evolved. My initial (and vague) topic, rural Indian women, received many quizzical looks from scholars and archivists. Bill Taylor, however, insisted that I could uncover these lives and encouraged me to do so. With his knowledge of archives and colonial Mexico, he helped me find ways to access pertinent materials. He gave me feedback, criticism, and ideas galore as I wrote. I am honored to have worked with a scholar of such breadth and productivity. I could have had no better mentor. Senior colleagues elsewhere gave me their time, interest, and suggestions: Edith Couturier, Pilar Gonzalbo, Ross Hassig, John Kicza, Cheryl Martin,

Acknowledgments

Steve Stern, Eric Van Young, and the anonymous reviewers for the University of Texas Press. Bob McCaa and John Tutino guided me as I began my research and offered crucial advice as I proceeded with the manuscript. I am grateful for support and honest words from my peers, friends, and colleagues: Herman Bennett, Riva Feshbach, Peter Guardino, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Jane Mangan, Molly Mullin, Marcy Sacks, Theresa Stojkov, Rich Warren, and YiLi Wu. Javier Pescador, an inspiring colleague, aided me in too many ways to count. At the history department at Albion College I have been fortunate to work closely with people who value both scholarship and teaching. Over the years my classes have helped shape key themes of the book. I thank my students for working through meanings of house and street, sweeping, and manhood. Financial support for this project came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hewlett-Mellon Fund for Faculty Development at Albion College, the University of Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. The Newberry Library has always provided a much-appreciated scholarly home for me in Chicago. John Aubrey located the illustration on the book’s cover. My parents, Madelyne Kanter and Manuel Kanter; my stepmother, Ruth Klain; and my siblings, nieces, and nephews all deserve credit both for nagging me about the manuscript’s completion and for leaving me alone and then nagging me again. Sadly, my father passed away before the book’s completion. From my first trip to Mexico as a college student to our final visit to Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, he supported and shared my various Mexican ventures. As I readied myself to complete the book, I received guidance from wise, practical Brady Mikusko. Warmth, cheer, and support came at just the right time from Ray Garrison. My son, León Pescador, slowed the book’s completion, but my life is much richer and happier with him in it.

xii

Hijos del Pueblo

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Introduction

​I

​ the Mexican countryside people often used the phrase hijos del pueblo. n Translated as “offspring of the village,” the phrase evokes the vital relationship between family and community in past times and suggests the importance of birthplace in rural society. This kinship metaphor also signifies that a native individual owed deference to the larger community and that the community had responsibilities to its wards. The translation of hijos del pueblo into English, however, is not so simple. As the phrase was used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “sons and daughters of the village” may be more accurate. Yet in some documents, the phrase refers only to village sons. The very ambiguity of the plural, hijos, almost winks at us, inviting an examination of the differences between being male and female. Together with ethnicity, this study advances gender as a central division—“a useful category of historical analysis”1—in rural Mexican society. This emphasis on gender implicitly critiques many canonical works on the ethnohistory of Mexico. Charles Gibson and James Lockhart, for example, present meticulous, thoughtful re-creations of how colonial Indian communities worked.2 Yet by neglecting the essential role of gender, their studies tell an incomplete story. Gender opens up and enriches important topics such as community membership, land tenure, criminality, morality, and the judicial system. Using gender as a lens on Indian village life implies that women had a different experience from men, not a separate one. In these villages men and women depended on each other, shared a culture, and joined in struggles against outsiders. Although women held significant kinds of power, they hardly stood on equal ground with their male kin and neighbors. Local political structures did not include women. Norms about female subordination and morality placed restrictions on their behavior. Patrilocal residence patterns often isolated women from their natal families, barrios, and villages, thus exposing them to abuse without easy recourse to protection. Being born

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a daughter or a son had important consequences for hijos del pueblo. This book explores how gender and family colored community and public life in rural central Mexico.

Place, Region, and Chronology My research focuses on a specific locality: the Tenango del Valle district in the highland Valley of Toluca. Situated just west of the Valley of Mexico, the Toluca area typifies the central regions of Mexico in terms of the timing and nature of conquest, linkage to the colonial economy, and proximity to Mexico City.3 Yet relative success at maintaining community lands and the small number of non-Indian residents (compared to the Valley of Mexico) allowed many village structures and indigenous customs to endure until the late nineteenth century. The region’s Indian majority lived in their natal pueblos, bound by ancestry, access to land, and local customs. Most Indians supported themselves by farming on private and village lands. They retained distinctive garb and hairstyles, continued to speak native languages, and, with rare exception, did not marry non-Indians. Although they traveled to supplement their incomes, permanent migration from one’s home village was uncommon. The term Indian, English for indio, appears often in this book. Although indio bore some disparaging connotations in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Mexico, it was also commonly employed to refer to a legal category. In disputes over land or governance, ethnicity mattered a great deal. Both Spanish jurists and native plaintiffs used indio to designate and claim certain rights in the highly ethnocentric and hierarchical colonial world. On a daily basis the people discussed here identified most with their pueblo (e.g., “los naturales de Tenango del Valle”). Yet when native villagers approached the judicial system, they understood that identifying themselves as indios was proper, efficacious, and potentially beneficial. Indio was an acceptable and meaningful term in what James C. Scott calls the “public transcripts” of the colonial world.4 The language-based labels—Nahua, for example—that have become popular in recent scholarship do not appear in the documents I consulted. Furthermore, this label would hardly describe the multiethnic population of the Toluca region, which included Othomí and Mazahua speakers. The more common term used in public discourse today in Mexico—indígena—began to appear in more elite writings after independence. In daily speech, however, indio has persisted well beyond the colonial period. 

introduction

The Indian majority of the Toluca region was culturally distinct but not isolated from others in early Mexico. A substantial non-Indian minority of Spanish and mestizo farmers and townspeople had lived in the Toluca region since the sixteenth century, especially in the head towns.5 The level of interaction between Indians and their Hispanic neighbors had vastly increased by the late colonial period. Beyond the head towns, separate Indian settlements remained the rule. Regular dealings also took place between some forty Indian villages and the vast Atengo estates, owned by the counts of Santiago, and its employees. This study takes a distinctly local, even microhistorical approach: I focus on a handful of villages and a single hacienda and their families. I bring to bear knowledge of local socioeconomic conditions, demography, settlement patterns, religious life, and politics in and around the Tenango district to interpret family and other face-to-face relations in a comprehensive way. Chronologically, this book takes on the challenge of considering the late colonial, independence, and early national periods—from about 1730 to 1850. Given my goal of documenting cultural change in gender, family, and mentalités, beginning or ending with the traditional chronological boundary of political independence (1810 or 1821) made little sense. An examination of the “middle period”6 offers a more fruitful approach to rural history. Compared to city dwellers, rural Mexicans seldom felt governmental reforms or institutional changes immediately. Thus, looking at a longer span of time and assigning a less defining role to political chronology seems more appropriate to the pace and nature of rural social change. As colonial land tenure patterns shaped Indian communities, continuity rather than change characterized life in the Toluca region until the Ley Lerdo, the desamortization law of 1856. Continuity, however, did not preclude upheavals of various sorts. The period was marked by population growth, numerous subsistence crises, rising food prices, administrative changes, the secularization of parishes, the unprecedented mayhem of the independence wars, and adjustments to government by the Mexican state—phenomena that occurred throughout New Spain. Population growth conspicuously affected communities and family life in Tenango. An expanding Indian and Hispanic population created a situation of crowding that would continue throughout the nineteenth century. Porfirian statistics would show Tenango as the most densely populated district in the state of Mexico. Crowding provoked bitter inheritance disputes and increased reliance on nonagricultural pursuits to supplement household incomes. Crowding raised the stakes in ongoing disputes between the Atengo estates and neighboring villages. It also further restricted female landholding. 

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The independence wars (1810–1821) and their aftermath also changed certain aspects of rural life. The social and political ideals of Hidalgo and Morelos’s movement found little support in the Toluca region.7 Indians there appeared less interested in effecting revolutionary change than in righting specific, local wrongs of recent decades. Their preoccupation with local issues such as land tenure and political autonomy continued into the national era. Yet the wars upset everyday life, provoking a notable rise in banditry. The increased level of fear and insecurity among common people did not subside after 1821. The weak Mexican government did not succeed in changing life in the countryside as intended, but its very instability and the abolition of a separate, protected status for Indians bred new uncertainties for rural Mexicans of all ranks. The illustration on this book’s cover encapsulates the uncertainty and degradation of postindependence native life. In an 1855–1856 collection, Casimiro Castro and J. Campillo portray the road from Tacubaya to Chapultepec, near Mexico City. The liberal writer Florencio M. del Castillo’s companion text emphasizes the Indians’ traditional dress, their poverty, and their generally degraded position as dispossessed, threatened people, who were “even converted into beasts of burden.” The women, del Castillo asserts, “work more than the men, and they cover great distances to Mexico City to sell some miserable merchandise that they carry on their backs in the company of their little children.”8 The artists notably depict Indian women and men on the road, well beyond the more secure confines of the pueblo or the home.

Order and Patriarchy The maintenance of order in Mexico was a primary concern across the period 1730–1850, first for Bourbon officials, then for military officers, and finally for national and state politicians. Bourbon bureaucrats and churchmen saw a society in crisis. Myriad pastoral letters, priests’ manuals, and viceregal decrees aimed to stem a seeming flood of vagrants, beggars, half-dressed women, drunken Indians, and abusive estate owners. The painting genre sistema de castas (caste system) popular in eighteenth-century Mexico similarly suggested that the erosion of ethnic divisions was driving society to the brink. Colonial authorities sought to contain this disorder by stressing the proper place for different orders of Mexicans. The Bourbons’ alarmist descriptions create a seductive portrait of colonial social disorder, but elites tell only part of the story of crisis and change. The vast majority of Mexicans lived in the countryside. They too perceived 

introduction

a decline in order, but their concerns differed. Rural Mexicans voiced their concerns in petitions for justice, fights between neighbors, and anonymous misspelled placards. They decried ever scarcer lands and forests, their ongoing impoverishment, and the arrival of ethnic strangers in their communities. Bourbon bishops and intendants disrupted local customs by trying to impose reglas fijas (fixed rules). Disorder reached new heights in 1810 when both Hidalgo’s insurgents and royalist troops created havoc for farming folk. Taking advantage of the chaos, masked bandits plagued the countryside long after Mexico’s independence in 1821. Rural people found order and justice harder to attain, given the governmental instability that prevailed for decades. Although government authorities and rural people understood the decline of order in different terms, they agreed that social stability required a patriarchal system of rule, that is, rule predicated on hierarchy and assuming the inferiority and debility not only of women but also of most individuals. Where the father rules, all those under his government are, to varying degrees, minors. These minors include women, servants, the young, the poor, and the ignorant—all of whom require the patriarch’s leadership, corrective hand, protection, and example of moral rectitude. In colonial Mexico patriarchy assumed an additional racial dimension. Spaniards saw Indians as childlike, weak, and feminine and so justified their subordinate position for centuries after conquest.9 This book explores the many different social realms in which patriarchy, a gendered system of rule and power, shaped people’s lives. The men and women of rural Mexico called on many local authorities as fathers. An alcalde mayor (district officer) or a priest often called common people his hijos, or children. In turn, commoners might seek his help as a padre, or father.10 A Spanish teniente de justicia (deputy district magistrate), hoping to curb what he perceived as excessive drinking at a village fiesta, ordered villagers to the Indian alcalde’s house by declaring, “Children, come with me.”11 These words may sound patronizing to our ears, but villagers themselves also used this language, at least in the public arena. Asked about their Spanish teniente, one pueblo’s officers reported that they had experienced “only a loving kindness with which he treats the hijos, efficiently correcting those who deserve it.”12 With patriarchy, then, came expectations of a paternal, or fatherly, style of rule. Paternalism colored relations within native communities, as typical exchanges between village government (república) officers and villagers show. One village gobernador (governor) explained that Indian officials should “paternally correct and punish” those Indians accused of minor crimes.13 Another gobernador helped a woman maintain her lands, warning that otherwise 

Hijos del Pueblo

she might desert the pueblo, “like many others have because past gobernadores neither cared for nor tended to them.”14 The commonly used term hijos del pueblo connotes the ideal relationship between república officers, the village fathers, and the rest of the pueblo, the children. The Conde de Santiago, owner of the expansive Atengo estates near Tenango, lived in Mexico City but saw himself as the district’s patriarch. To that end the Conde struck a paternal pose vis-à-vis surrounding pueblos. Atengo administrators offered certain favors (such as access to pastures) to villages willing to provide allegiance and services to the Conde’s estates. In 1793 the Indians of Metepec declared they owed the Conde gratitude, as “Father and Protector of our pueblo.”15 During the Conde’s sporadic personal visits to Atengo, this fatherly pose was manifested in a display of domination and subordination. From Mexico City the Conde would send word of his impending visit to his administrator, who in turn told his workers, who then notified the nearby pueblos. As the Conde’s entourage approached Atengo, villagers would greet him with flowers and music and converge on the estate, bearing gifts of fowl and fruit. During his stay, the Conde would visit neighboring pueblos “with great show and accompanied by friends and adulators, many attendants and employees.” On one occasion, some república officers ordered the church bells rung as the Conde’s convoy passed by. As the entourage entered each pueblo, it was met with “a great fuss of music, fireworks, and flowers.” Descending from his carriage, the Conde himself handed a peso to the gobernador and two or three reales to other officers. He then asked, referring to the pueblo, “Children, to whom does this belong?” His retinue responded, “To Señor Conde de Santiago” or “To our Father the Señor Conde.” At that point the Conde threw a few handfuls of half-real coins into the crowd of Indians.16 These performances in the dusty hamlets bordering the Atengo estates offer a prime example of the “public transcript.” As Scott points out, such acting occurs from both sides: “If subordination requires a credible performance of humility and deference, so domination seems to require a credible performance of haughtiness and mastery.”17 Despite decades of bitter disputes between the land-hungry pueblos and the avaricious estate, villagers participated in these periodic shows of the Conde’s authority as the region’s patriarch and his paternal benevolence. Many of the individuals who were present surely perceived the contradictions embodied in these displays. Yet the Conde and the villagers publicly reenacted this patriarchal ritual year after year to foster certain expectations and deference among the villagers. As a modern reader of historical documents, I cannot help but wonder to what extent the language of fatherly rule was mainly rhetorical. Or did it, in 

introduction

fact, reflect an embedded model of social relations? Even if such words were only words, people throughout Mexican society found advantages in them: this language softened the disparities between the ruler and the ruled and implied their mutual obligations. Patriarchy can function only if people accept the ruler’s authority and their place as minors, awaiting his judgment and charity. For the most part, common people in Mexico accepted this hierarchical rule. As long as officials tended to their needs, they agreed to their subordinate position in the relationship. One Indian widow, for example—poor, burdened with children, sick, and facing a week’s service in a nearby hacienda’s kitchen—found herself incapable of changing this situation. She went to the alcalde mayor and reminded him of his obligation to help her by saying, “You are my Father.”18 If an authority acted too zealously, people criticized his excesses but not the fatherly tone of his dominion.19 As Cheryl Martin argues, “Patriarchy furnished a relatively stable, non-negotiable set of governing principles even when all other rules came into question.”20 It is tempting to see patriarchy challenged in certain cases: for example, when disinherited women petitioned for their share of an inheritance or when a disgruntled wife served a meal to her husband in a surly manner. But such actions did not challenge patriarchy per se; they only aimed to correct harsh or unjust situations. Although women protested individual grievances, they seldom attacked the patriarchal system that fostered the injustices. In sum, patriarchies of all sorts underlay rural Mexican society. We might conceive of a “patchwork of patriarchies”21 at work: overlapping hierarchies based on distinct criteria of gender, ethnicity, wealth, age, and colonialism. Subordinates accepted authorities’ actions when they were considered just. In this way, order was maintained in rural Mexico.

Colonial Contexts and Methodology The scholarship on both ethnohistory and Iberian history provides the context for this study, which seeks to add to scholarship on Mesoamerican ethnohistory by documenting the changing meaning of being Indian in the late colonial and early national period. Indians constituted about 90 percent of the Toluca region’s population in the late eighteenth century. But the Indians of central Mexico did not exist in isolation. Mexican Indian culture reflected three centuries of colonial rule and interaction with Spanish priests, merchants, and judges. More mundane relations with creole and African neighbors also influenced colonial Indians. 

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Thus this study considers rural Mexico as part of the early modern Iberian world, albeit with distinct, autochthonous traditions. In their preoccupations and actions, the Indians of central Mexico may strike readers as remarkably similar to the peasants of early modern, especially Mediterranean, Europe.22 Indeed, Indians shared a great deal with their non-Indian neighbors. For example, Mexicans of all ranks idealized an order that divided space along gender lines. Women belonged in the house or other secure places; men navigated the more dangerous world of the street. This spatial conception of order and gender was not unique to Mexico but was manifest throughout Latin American and Iberian societies.23 Given the prevalence of the house/ street ideal in early modern Iberia, one might suppose that colonial Indians upheld the concept as inculcated by the Spanish. Ethnohistorical work, however, suggests similar conceptions of space existed in precontact Mesoamerica.24 But the purpose and ramifications of the Aztec notion of separate or parallel spheres shifted after conquest, reflecting the Catholic emphasis on protecting female chastity.25 The tension that developed between the house/ street ideal and the realities of rural Mexico underlies much of this book. We can best understand this persistent aspect of Mexican culture by drawing on two historiographic traditions, early modern European history and ethnohistory. Diverse judicial records located at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) and the Archivo Judicial del Estado de México (AJEM) form the basis of this study. These records resound with the voices of Indian men and women, their Spanish neighbors, muleteers, and hacienda peons. This book captures the stories of the poor, the illiterate, and the speakers of native languages. The tribunals that produced most of the documentation used here require some explanation. Under colonial rule, an alcalde mayor (later a subdelegado) or his assistants judged local cases. These district officers performed a range of state functions and often had no training in law. When faced with an unclear case, they sometimes sought the expert opinion of a jurist in Toluca or Mexico City. Local decisions could be appealed or even bypassed by bringing a case to the Real Audiencia or, for Indian subjects, the General Indian Court. With the 1812 Spanish Constitution and after independence, the juez de letras (a person schooled in law) replaced the subdelegado as judge. Whereas the local courts continued to function similarly after 1821, the system of extralocal appeal soon eroded. Spanish law rested on the opinion of a judge or judges, not that of a jury. Cases came before men who were españoles, if not peninsulares (as was the general rule in the high courts of the late Bourbon period). People expected judges to act paternally, to dispense justice personally to the underprivileged 

introduction

and mistreated. Spanish legal tradition also promoted this role.26 Colonial rule likewise emphasized the judge’s and high official’s role as father to Indian subjects. Woodrow Borah’s study of the General Indian Court concludes that royal appointees usually reviewed cases involving Indians impartially and often leaned toward protecting Indian rights.27 Biased review was more common in local tribunals because the district officer and provincial elites maintained social and business links. Yet my reading of local cases from Tenango del Valle shows a high degree of judicial fairness and support for Indian rights, at least during the colonial period.28 Indians believed in the courts’ ability to right personal wrongs and to protect their prerogatives. Even minor disputes could bring people before the district judge or one of his assistants to issue a complaint. The people of the Toluca region gained a deserved reputation as litigious.29 The endless petitions, testimonies, and tales they produced form the bedrock of this book. As opposed to notarial records and personal letters that document propertied individuals, court records reflect all levels of society. District-level cases often have a spontaneous quality. With the blood barely dry on a knife or an insult still ringing in a person’s ears, someone often went straight to the local magistrate to make a report. The magistrate’s secretary recorded these declarations (often filtered first through a translator). Despite the official process whereby the cases were assembled, testimonies include crude phrases, remnants of Nahuatl, unflattering confessions, or discursive storytelling that allow the original voices to be heard. The clear, logical entreaties penned by a lawyer or a schooled person easily distinguish themselves from a lone commoner’s unpolished declaration.30 Judicial records generally allow us to approach common people of past times and to hear their concerns, logic, metaphors, and figures of speech. These court cases greatly enhance our knowledge of rural social relations. Careful reading can reveal how people addressed one another, what activities they shared, how they celebrated, what they bought and sold, and how they might construct an insult. Domestic abuse cases, for example, can reveal a great deal: each spouse’s work, the disciplining of children, whether families ate together, and with whom they socialized. Judicial records present a means to study the relationship between institutional power and gender. While historians have explored how ethnicity affected the judicial process in colonial Mexico, how judges viewed female and male subjects deserves further study.31 Women often tried to take advantage of their supposedly weaker character to gain the court’s paternal mercy. For example, when Rosalia Gil, a humble widow of unstated ethnicity (which 

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suggests she was a mestiza), faced losing a lease, she argued that she needed the land more than Lorenzo, an Indian: Lorenzo is a man, he has opportunities, means, he could subsist in other ways, and for his race [calidad ] and rank, with a little he has a lot. I, on the contrary, am a woman, widowed, with children. Consequently I lack the countless resources that a man has by his sex and that hers denies a woman.32

This 1801 petition warned that if denied her status as the preferred tenant, she would be “thrown out of her house and forced to beg asylum elsewhere.” Clearly, in forming their argument, Gil and her lawyer assumed that no judge would place a respectable widow and mother in such a vulnerable position. Indian women could emphasize their pitiful position as both females and Indians. In a dispute over his late sister’s land, an Indian argued that she had failed to properly defend family interests for, “because of her sex, as well as her calidad and language, she was unable to make herself understood.”33 Given the many Indian women who proved quite capable of representing themselves in court, the brother likely exaggerated. Yet he apparently hoped the judge would agree that Indian women were inept and thus deserved mercy. Spanish judges favorably reviewed such arguments by Indian widows. Judicial records present certain drawbacks, however. Reliance on these official sources leads historians to neglect other, more informal means of mediation common in rural Mexico. Hints of an entire judicial substratum can be discerned in formal documents. Most of these judgments were never committed to paper. República officers or the parish priest mediated many local disputes.34 While my sources do not detail this level of justice, cases often mention that individuals charged with drunkenness or insolence would face imprisonment in a pueblo’s zepo (cell, stocks) or the gobernador’s house, or, for women, depósito (enclosure) in a private home. Despite familiarity with the legal process among rural Indians, for them justice might stray from the letter of law. Spanish legal tradition was largely uncodified (with the important exception of the Recopilación) and thus allowed customary procedures to develop. Law, for example, mandated that a notary should draft wills. But in Indian pueblos (which often lacked notaries), the república officers’ presence was considered sufficient for a will to be binding.35 This custom allowed Indian villagers to deviate from the Hispanic principle of partible inheritance. A few Indians neglected legal heirs altogether.36 While Crown-appointed officers (and later, state appointees) mediated most 10

introduction

of the cases discussed in this study, one must bear in mind the existence and influence of local, customary legal procedures. The historian must consider too the possible manipulation of facts to cater to the judge’s beliefs. Even without a lawyer, common people inevitably changed their stories, stressing certain aspects, omitting others, and playing on the court’s notions of, say, female virtue or Indian naïveté. In sum, I hesitate to take these judicial records as simple revelations of fact. But I also do not dismiss them as mere fabrications. I am concerned in this study less with guilt or innocence than with how common people constructed their accusations and defenses, their “fictions,” sometimes with lawyers, and how judges received them.37 When people exaggerated or even invented parts of their stories, they did so hoping their tales would be believed. The drunkenness argument advanced by Indians, for example, did seem to gain some leniency from Spanish judges.38 Likewise, husbands accused of beating or even killing their wives usually mentioned that their wives had provoked their jealousy and thus rage. This scenario may have been true for many; more important, though, common people knew that a judge would agree that a woman who invited her husband’s jealousy deserved his ire. These manipulations perhaps distort “what really happened,” but they tell a great deal about the logic and values of people living in a colonial society. Court cases have certainly led me to overplay conflict and deviance in rural Mexico. For my analysis of married life, for example, I had few reports of compatible couples. Instead, I had to examine the detailed and blood-chilling stories of wife beating that do tell a great deal about married life. I try to use such cases not to focus on violence but rather to explore values, roles, and understandings.39

The Organization of the Book In the following chapters I illustrate ways in which gender and family intersected with community and public life in rural Mexico from 1730 to 1850. Chapter 1 introduces the Toluca region and its people, paying particular attention to the region’s population growth, competition for land, pressures on late colonial Indian villages, and local ramifications of the independence wars. Chapter 2 concentrates on changes within Indian pueblos, discussing forms of association and gender and social differences in each type of settlement. I examine land tenure issues to uncover the limited nature of community in Indian pueblos. 11

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I then move into the homes and families of rural Mexico. In Chapter 3, on married life, I discuss the expectations that women and men had of each other and the way in which changing economic and social demands hindered the ideal balance between spouses. Chapter 4 considers the relationship between household and family. Here I contrast the intimate relations an individual might have with family members, servants, friends, or neighbors. In the final chapters I return to the larger public sphere to illustrate how gender differences figured into rural social relations and the maintenance of order. Chapter 5 tells three cautionary tales of everyday conflict to suggest how early Mexico accepted patriarchy as the model of order. Chapter 6 examines law and society’s attitude toward women. The wide use of depósito in the countryside shows how the patriarchal order endorsed the protection of women, yet censured much female conduct. Chapter 7 concludes by linking the issues of community, order, family, and gender to appraise change in the postindependence Mexican countryside. Abductions, brawls, and curses abound in the following pages. But I urge you to imagine the calmer side of life in rural Mexico. At work: a young wife sweeping her in-laws’ patio, boys taking the village livestock into the hills to pasture, a man planting his cornfield. At rest: a mother braiding her daughter’s hair on a Sunday afternoon, children playing hopscotch in the street one evening, men drinking and telling stories at the town store. Most days were filled with such activities and in such company for the hijos del pueblo and their neighbors in central Mexico.

12

One

“Like Three Feet in One Shoe” The Toluca Region, 1730–1821

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he most heavily traveled road into the Toluca region originated in Mexico City. Muleteers, Indian peddlers, and royal officials climbed out of the Valley of Mexico before crossing a steep, densely forested mountain pass. Below them lay the “very frigid Valley of Toluca and Metepec.” Visitors often glimpsed the wide valley and its plains “filled with fog over the population.”1 Yet on a clear day the sight of expansive fertile fields, dotted by small villages and churches, greeted travelers as they descended into the valley. The Toluca valley is one of central Mexico’s three main highland basins (Mexico and Puebla are the others). At the time of European contact, the valley had a dense indigenous population and rich lands dedicated to maize cultivation. These features and proximity to the viceregal capital attracted Spanish settlers. By the late sixteenth century the region had developed into a primary larder for Mexico City and mining towns nearby. At the valley’s center stood the Spanish city of Toluca. Plains and small mesas stretched around Toluca, reaching Atlacomulco to the north, Lerma to the east, Tenancingo to the south, and Malacatepec to the west. The plateau’s high altitude brings cold temperatures throughout the year, earning the area the name tierra fría (cold land).2 The Nevado de Toluca, an inactive volcano just south of Toluca, can be snow-topped for half the year. The cold increased chances of frost, shortened the growing season, and exposed the Toluca valley to more frequent crop losses than other highland regions. The vicissitudes of agriculture in the tierra fría affected all residents, Indians and Spaniards. As in most of rural central Mexico, the indigenous population of the Toluca region outnumbered people who claimed Spanish, African, or mixed ancestry. Most indigenous people in the region were Nahuas, the largest linguistic group in New Spain.3 Many Indians (especially women) remained monolingual in the eighteenth century, but many others could communicate in Spanish.4 The non-Indian minority clustered in the commercial and

Hijos del Pueblo

Central Mexico and the Toluca Region. Map by Molly O’Halloran.

administrative cabeceras (head towns) and small agricultural hamlets. For example, in 1746 the cabecera of Tenango del Valle was home to 188 Indian families and about 20 Spanish and mestizo families.5 Ethnic ratios changed over time, especially in the towns. By 1770 Tenango had almost equal numbers of Spanish and Indian households. Yet surrounding villages retained overwhelming Indian majorities.6 Censuses show very few resident black slaves, although free mulattoes lived in several valley towns.7 In 1746 in the densely populated Tenango district, in the central-southern part of the Toluca valley, some fifty Indian pueblos (with many more subject villages), large haciendas, and hamlets of Spanish and mestizo labradores filled its fertile, well-watered plains.8 As the massive ruins of the Aztec outpost at Teotenango, perched above Tenango del Valle, attest, commercial and political links between this region and the Valley of Mexico existed long before Spanish rule.9 Commercial ties with Mexico City also shaped colonial production. Indians concentrated on maize farming, but like their Hispanic neighbors, they planted barley, wheat, broad beans, and chickpeas in the eighteenth century. More economically secure villagers benefited too from keeping some ganado menor (sheep and pigs), but the immense holdings of a few haciendas accounted for most livestock in the region. The Conde de Santiago’s Atengo estates held vast herds of cattle, sheep, horses, and mules. Livestock holdings at Atengo may have been the largest of any late colonial estate in central Mexico.10 14

Tenango del Valle and Key Towns. Map by Molly O’Halloran.

Hijos del Pueblo

The city of Toluca did not provide the primary focus for the region. Compared to Guadalajara, Puebla, or Guanajuato, Toluca had a relatively small and not especially wealthy population: about one thousand families in 1746.11 Toluca’s scanty market demanded only a small proportion of locally produced foodstuffs. Likewise, Toluca exercised little patrimonial power over the region. Only in the 1830s, as the state of Mexico’s new capital, did the city begin to assume greater importance for area residents. Local people in search of markets and employment turned to the mining towns to the south, the sugar plantations of modern-day Morelos, and, most of all, Mexico City. Indians and Spaniards frequently traveled to the capital to sell goods, to work, and to petition civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

Late Colonial Tensions: Juan Pedro Arévalo’s World Mexico underwent profound changes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Bourbon reforms modified colonial rule, especially with regard to fiscal and administrative matters. Demanding greater control over its subjects, the Crown reduced the church’s sphere of influence. Concurrently, long-term structural changes provoked tensions in rural society. The population grew significantly among all ethnic groups in the late eighteenth century. The growth rate among Indians in the Toluca region probably exceeded that of the Valley of Mexico.12 The population surge provoked competition for arable land, rising prices, and impoverishment and provided the backdrop for important struggles in area pueblos. Mexico’s greatest upheavals, however, occurred during the wars of independence (1810–1821). Unprecedented violence tested the long-standing chains of control, at times giving way to chaos. Much of the nineteenth century was marked by repeated struggles to regain the order and political stability lost since 1810. How did these changes affect ordinary men and women? Incidents from the life of Juan Pedro Arévalo, an Indian commoner from San Lucas Tepemaxalco (in the Tenango district), show how one man met the challenges of this tumultuous era. Dissatisfied with his lot, the pugnacious Arévalo openly struggled with his community and with the region’s most powerful landowner. Arévalo’s village also demonstrated a contentious spirit. Subject to Tepemaxalco, San Lucas strove to achieve independent status in the early eighteenth century.13 Their determination exemplified a trend toward separatism throughout central Mexico as the native population began to expand. 16

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

Land-hungry barrios such as San Lucas hoped to gain community lands. Attaining village status also created a new república with its own offices, thus challenging the political dominance of elite or cacique families.14 San Lucas won semiautonomous status in 1727. From then on the village elected its own officials and litigated as a separate pueblo from its larger neighbors. The villagers expressed pride in San Lucas by raising their own church at the village center. A Nahuatl inscription stretches across the church portal: “axca ypa yi xihuil de 1714 anos yc opec simiento axca ypa yni xihuil de 1733 anos yc otlamico yteocaltzin tt” (In the year of 1714 the foundation was begun. In the year of 1733 the temple of our Lord was completed).15 Local notables eagerly commissioned side altars for the church interior. They went so far as to have their likenesses and names painted below the altar’s holy images. San Lucas lies close to the foot of the Nevado de Toluca and bordered the extensive Hacienda de Atengo, part of the entailed properties of the Condes de Santiago. Along with typical regional crops, San Lucas residents also raised livestock, primarily sheep. For pastures, they relied on the mountain’s slopes and base. Access to these pastures proved a source of endless conflict between the Hacienda de Atengo and area villages. Competition over use rights appears first in litigation from 1748. The case revolved around the question of who legally owned the slopes of the Nevado, the Conde de Santiago or the pueblos? The hacienda administrator complained that the villagers wanted “to act like owners.” They threatened the estate’s foreman and successfully blocked him and his herds from ascending the Nevado.16 Juan Pedro Arévalo certainly heard stories of this bitter dispute from his parents and relatives. San Lucas pursued similar suits in 1774, 1791, 1810, 1821, and 1826. As a young man, Arévalo witnessed the trouble that arose from sharing a border with the Atengo estates. In 1774 the Indians of San Lucas issued criminal complaints against the Atengo foreman, Antonio Regulado Garduño.17 Regulado, it seems, seized villagers’ livestock on pueblo land and demanded payment for their return. The Indians also charged that the hacienda employee whipped villagers at will. One Indian, Leonardo, who questioned Regulado’s confiscation of his animals, was brutalized in response. Ignoring these charges, Regulado merely commented that the Indians intentionally let their livestock stray. When the case failed to receive a proper investigation, frustrated villagers wounded Regulado. The judge warned the Indians to contain themselves and told Regulado to refrain from similar actions. The injustices Arévalo witnessed not only touched his community but struck his family as well. Leonardo, the man Regulado severely injured, was the son of another Arévalo, Yldefonso. Juan Pedro Arévalo first surfaces in documents from 1791 that mark the 17

Hijos del Pueblo

beginning of his lifelong struggle against the Atengo estates. Biographical data on this San Lucas native is scant. He must have been born sometime between 1750 and 1755. He spoke both Spanish and Nahuatl. His script and spelling suggest that he had only a basic education, but as a literate man he stood out from his neighbors. In 1791 he had at least one adult son. After his first wife, Paulina (also an Indian), died, Arévalo remarried. He had several children who reached adulthood. He was burdened by a physical malady. When angered, villagers called him “cojo” or “cojo zapo” (cripple or crippled frog). This name-calling drove Juan Pedro’s wife to his defense; Paulina went so far as to punch her husband’s opponents. Despite his infirmity, Arévalo clearly possessed a certain degree of wealth. Unlike many of his neighbors, Arévalo went about on a horse. As an older man, Arévalo employed several servants to oversee his flocks, engaged in extended legal battles with a Spanish lawyer’s help, and so earned the derogatory label “riquillo” (little rich man). His wealth, literacy, and character contributed to Arévalo’s achievement of formal authority. In 1791 he was elected the village scribe (escribano); in 1795 he served as a church deputy; and he later held the position of village alcalde.18 While Arévalo’s literacy and relative affluence set him apart somewhat from his neighbors, his activities and language suggest he shared much with other San Lucas Indians. The many petitions and defenses he proffered over three decades do not suggest a brilliant man. They do, however, demonstrate Arévalo’s persistent and righteous manner, his willingness to engage the judicial process repeatedly, and his fearlessness in the face of formidable adversaries. By 1791, when Arévalo assumed a central role in San Lucas’s relations with its powerful neighbor, grazing rights had fallen into an arrangement that would continue for some twenty years. Hacienda administrators essentially permitted villagers to graze their animals on Atengo pastures without charge. In return, the Conde de Santiago expected villagers to perform certain services, including ditch cleaning. With pueblo lands tightly circumscribed, most villagers made do with this situation. Juan Pedro Arévalo, on the other hand, contested this arrangement. In 1791, acting with three other men from San Lucas, he filed suit against the Conde de Santiago. In turn, villagers legally accused “Juan Pedro el Cojo” and stressed their willingness to supply customary labor to the Atengo estates.19 Arévalo became the focus of acrimonious disputes within San Lucas as the village divided into factions over the ongoing dispute with the Atengo estates. In 1791 el común charged that Arévalo had acted against the Conde de Santiago in the village’s name but without its consent. He faced a similar charge 18

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

in 1810. In both instances Arévalo had pursued litigation despite the willingness of many villagers to cede to the Conde’s claims of legal ownership. As an escribano, Arévalo certainly had the knowledge and ability to pursue suits without the village government’s permission. These actions led neighbors to call Juan Pedro “haughty” and “insolent.” One man claimed in 1791 that Arévalo had boasted that he would soon win the case against the Conde and that “he would then run off those who had not supported his faction.”20 Internal tensions divided many Indian communities. The open rifts of San Lucas, however, were extreme. Faced with the complicated string of complaints that revolved around Arévalo in 1791, the subdelegado conceded that he failed to understand why “the natives of San Lucas hate one another.” With the secretly composed petitions, resentment of individual fortunes, and explicit mention of political factions, San Lucas undoubtedly experienced an unusual degree of village conflict.21 Indian villages in central Mexico persisted as vital entities in the late colonial period, even spawning new villages. Pueblos retained substantial community lands. Each year village men elected their own governing officers. When these officers petitioned in the name of their village community, they projected solidarity in the face of outside authorities and foes. Yet truly speaking for el común, for all, became more complicated when differences of wealth and ethnicity cut across Indian communities. The proliferation of contacts outside the home village also bred internal divisions. With land at a precious premium, many individuals had to supplement their incomes beyond the pueblo. This situation led Indian villagers to become itinerant peddlers beyond the region, to seek temporary work on haciendas, or to serve as domestics in local head towns, Mexico City, or Cuernavaca.22 The ability to speak Spanish was both cause and effect of these typical movements beyond the pueblo. The gradual trend toward castillianization—which the Bourbons spearheaded by promoting Spanish-language primary schools—facilitated more contact with the Spanish world.23 Juan Pedro Arévalo probably learned to read and write Spanish in a village school.24 Individuals who increasingly looked beyond the pueblo for their well-being had less desire and less cause to band together. Yet internal differentiation did not cause pueblos to disintegrate. Even in fractious San Lucas, people often acted as one to defend their community, its lands, and its corporate privileges. This strategy proved necessary and effective in the colonial system where Indians received important privileges only as communities. When the independence movement came to the Toluca region, it reflected long-festering disputes both within villages and between villages and Spanish 19

Hijos del Pueblo Table 1. Population Growth: Tenango del Valle, 1746–1848 Year

Spanish Households

Indian Households

Total Population

1746 1770 1784 1848

20–25 155 300

188 153

  1,020 estimate   1,667   3,925

Sources: Villaseñor, 231–232 (1746). Total population estimate is number of households listed, multiplied by mean household size for each ethnic group drawn from the 1770 padrón and summed; AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 628, exp. 14 (1770); AGN Tierras vol. 2544, exp. 4 (1784); AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 933, exp. 4 (1848).

estates. Before 1810 Arévalo’s village was a constant thorn in the hacienda’s side. In 1801 María Josefa Velasco y Obando, the Conde de Santiago’s daughter, commiserated with the estate’s administrator over troubles caused by San Lucas: the Indians had apparently thrashed the man and his servant. Obando ordered very stiff punishment to suppress what “for them is child’s play, which they carry out every day.”25 During the spring planting of 1803, villagers attacked a tenant of the Atengo estates whom they accused of planting on pueblo lands.26 Tensions between the pueblos and the estate intensified to the point that the Conde de Santiago’s family feared large-scale rebellion.27 Relations between the hacienda and neighboring pueblos had clearly soured by the eve of Hidalgo’s 1810 revolt. Local population growth sharpened competition over resources. New pueblos established themselves and demanded town sites rightfully theirs by law; in doing so, they challenged their neighbors’ holdings.28 Crowding was fully evident by the late eighteenth century, as villages challenged other villages over boundaries, lands, and use-rights of the montes (scrub land or woods).29 Similar litigation involved the Atengo estates, other haciendas, and labradores. Rising prices for grains and meat in the cities also increased land prices and furthered competition in central Mexico.30 The Tenango district grew so crowded that in 1826 Indians would complain that area villages, estates, and ranches squeezed together “like three feet in one shoe.” Long-term population statistics support their charge. By the late nineteenth century, Tenango del Valle was the most densely populated district in the state of Mexico.31 Reflecting and escalating local tensions over resources, in 1808 Atengo began to demand rent from San Lucas to pasture its animals at the hacienda, 20

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

in addition to the decades-old exchange of village labor services for use-rights. Limited village lands and hungry flocks permitted no other choice: San Lucas paid the rent. Yet when a new administrator raised the rent in summer 1810, San Lucas resisted payment and filed another suit against the Conde de Santiago. The village protested paying for access to lands that it contended belonged to the pueblo. In retaliation, in July 1810 the administrator blocked the villagers’ entrance to the pasture.32 San Lucas again failed to take a unified stance. Some individuals, rather than fight the Conde, simply gave in and paid the increased rent in order to feed their animals. A dissident faction of three, including Juan Pedro Arévalo (as the república’s regidor), mounted a judicial attack against their longtime foe in September 1810.33 The outbreak of war against Spain forever changed the tenor of the dispute.

“The Insurgents Will Soon Arrive and All This Will Be Paid” The independence movement came from outside the Toluca region, but once there it subsumed local hostilities. In November 1810 the Conde de Santiago himself (rather than his administrator) wrote to the viceroy.34 An indignant and horrified Conde recounted how local Indians had ravaged his estates that month. He accused the villagers of stealing maize from his fields, closing trenches, opening gates, removing boundary markers, and appropriating various parcels of land, primarily pastures. The Conde asked that royalist troops punish the ringleaders and see that the Indians repair the damages. The five pueblos accused of the rampage included San Lucas. All bordered the Hacienda de Atengo and shared a history of antagonism with the estate and its workers. Although the destruction seemed considerable to the Conde, the Indians had acted in limited, symbolic ways.35 For example, they seized the hacienda’s outlying fields for six days during which the women freely harvested maize for their homes. They did not raid the estate’s casco (main residence), stables, silos, or other important, costly property but instead let their livestock run wild through the pastures and fields and torched the huts of cowhands, their everyday adversaries. Pueblo residents also destroyed the boundary markers and trenches that for so long had led to bitter disputes. Rather than attempt to undo the Conde, the villagers directed their energies at ruining the most immediate symbols of their subjugation.36 Nor did the villagers attempt to undo the Crown. As Eric Van Young ar21

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gues, Indians “were concerned explicitly less with independence from Spain, or with the dismantling or construction of a state, than with local structures of wealth[,] . . . power and precedence.”37 The apparent absence of cries for independence and lack of visible insurgent leadership in the attack on Atengo is striking. The Conde de Santiago believed the insurgency served as a pretext for the tumult and clearly feared a connection to Hidalgo’s movement. Yet in December the hacienda administrator named only Juan Arévalo as the “Comandante de los Ynsurgentes.” Other Indians accused of leading the rampage he merely labeled as cabecillas (ringleaders). Given Arévalo’s history, he may well have instigated the attack on the hacienda. Quite possibly, however, the administrator singled out Arévalo for his notorious past as a troublemaker.38 The villagers’ unprecedented rampages ended quickly. Facing threats of punishment, officials of each pueblo came before the subdelegado in January 1811. Acting on the Conde’s request, the subdelegado obliged the Indians to agree to repair the damages and pay for the stolen grain. While four pueblos readily complied, San Lucas officials (including Arévalo) denied many of the charges made against them. The villagers’ violent outburst against longtime abuses soon subsided in a grudging acceptance of their subordinate position in the region’s order. Some signs of support for Hidalgo’s insurgency did appear among the region’s non-Indian population. Some non-Indians clearly disliked peninsulares (peninsular Spaniards), not only for their national origin. Many of the provincial representatives of political or economic power (particularly merchants) were peninsulares. The wrath unleashed on these individuals after September 1810 had dual roots—popular resentment of their power and their identity as Spaniards.39 In addition to merchants of peninsular origin, many hacienda administrators, parish priests, and district officers fell into the same uncomfortable category, gachupín. Dislike of these individuals as Spaniards surfaced in the months following the insurgent outbreak in the Bajío. Handwritten posters in support of the insurgency appeared on the streets of Santiago Tianguistengo in January 1811. The rhyming couplets, crude and misspelled, must have chilled don Manuel Moncada, a Spaniard and a shopkeeper, who served as magistrate (encargado de justicia). Moncada held an ambivalent place in local society. At times he carried out favors for the Condes de Santiago, and at times he led the pueblos to claim Atengo holdings for themselves.40 The poster warned of the imminent, armed arrival of “Ydalgo, Aldama y Allende.” Its anonymous authors further declared: “the insurgents will soon arrive / and all this will be paid / and Moncada’s throat / we will see guillotined.” The fears of Moncada 22

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

(a creole but apparently mistaken for a peninsular) and resident peninsulares could only have intensified by reading more of the inflammatory broadside. It’s enough you’re a gachupín, Hurry up and say to Manuel that he is an infamous traitor flattering adulator that he must fall like Lucifer, you must also warn him with deprivation you will kill him and so, like this, you must say that ropes are cheap, and your conceit, Moncada, will soon end with you41

Moncada attributed these pro-insurgent and antipeninsular sentiments to a gang of bandits active in his district. His “insurgents” were local youths, from humble Spanish and mestizo Tianguistengo families, bent on robbing homes and creating a public nuisance in the first winter of the independence war. They kidnapped a servant from the Atengo estates, and they were accused of the murder of a Spanish soldier. While Moncada charged the band’s leader, José Alarcón (alias “el Muycon”), with insurgency, the young man may simply have been continuing the criminal behavior he had begun before September 1810, as a military deserter. Taking advantage of the disorder the war caused, Alarcón stole horses and made off with women, but he voiced no political slogans.42 The threatening graffiti proves that some individuals found the independence movement appealing and were hostile to resident Spaniards and royal appointees such as Moncada. The appearance of these posters in Tianguistengo hints at who provided local support for Hidalgo’s revolt. Tianguistengo was an important head town with a substantial non-Indian population, many of whom relied on low-paying crafts such as hat making and domestic textile production. These families had little access to land. Compared to the labradores and Indian villagers, landless townspeople could move more easily with the insurgent army. The insurgency may have appealed most to this poor, disenfranchised, predominantly mestizo sector. Despite simmering political grievances and social tensions in the Toluca region, the insurgency manifested itself there only mildly compared to the Bajío. Perhaps the lukewarm reaction of Toluca valley residents to the insurgency was due to people’s relative security. Most Indian households could still 23

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subsist on a combination of community- and privately owned lands, although other cash-earning activities had gained importance.43 Notably, the agricultural crisis of 1808–1809 did not strike either the Toluca valley or the Valley of Mexico with the same ferocity as the center-northwest of New Spain.44 Tutino correctly emphasizes the relative autonomy of central highland peasant communities (as opposed to the dependent status of the Bajío’s agrarian poor) to explain the passivity of Indians in the Toluca region toward the insurgency.45 The five villages’ attack on the Atengo estates in 1810 marked only a limited rebellion, not a sustained insurrection. Arévalo and his neighbors sought only to remedy the growing imbalance between the hacienda and villages. With the primary military arenas elsewhere, much of the Toluca region did not experience the war directly.46 Most documents from 1810–1821 show little sign of the war or the independence movement. Cholera struck the Toluca valley (and the rest of Mexico) in 1813–1814, leaving orphans, widows, and widowers in its wake. Parents scrambled to sell lands in order to bury their children properly.47 The plethora of intestate deaths further upset the uneasy state of land tenure in the pueblos, evidenced by the inheritance disputes that cluttered local judges’ desks for years to come. Although many places never saw battle, the war had a ripple effect that touched almost everyone in Mexico. A weakened judicial system, new levels of violent crime and robbery, and the ongoing military presence all changed rural life. Marauding bands did not appear with any frequency in the Toluca region until the havoc of 1810.48 The thefts carried out by el Muycon and his followers near Tianguistengo ended in their imprisonment in the capital in 1811. By 1813 a new band of local youths overtook the area, stealing livestock, clothing, and foodstuffs from Indian villagers, labradores, and townspeople.49 Amid the confusion created by the cholera epidemic, thieves found it easy to fence stolen goods without arousing undue suspicion. The decreased efficiency and trust in the judicial system during the insurrection probably furthered the rise in criminal acts.50 In July 1812 a local justice decried the rampant crime. The local military commander had closed that court ( juzgado). The former justice asserted that since criminals “know that there is no justice to contain them,” they felt free to murder and steal, sowing fear among local residents.51 When Juan Pedro Arévalo heard pounding and shouts outside his home one night in 1818, not surprisingly his family first attributed the racket to “the insurgents, or thieves, as usual.”52 Similarly, in 1815 an old Indian woman demanded space in her in-laws’ corral for her animals and ordered her son24

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

in-law to sleep there as protection against the theft that she, like many, anticipated during the time. Her in-laws agreed that such precaution was warranted, “because of the great risk run then, for the insurgents and many thieves who infested this land.”53 Avoiding travel on the open roads became common wisdom. Although local Indians may not have supported the insurgents, the behavior of soldiers in area garrisons gave them ample reason to turn against the Crown. Juan Pedro Arévalo almost lost his flocks, his son, and his life to one such soldier in 1818. As Arévalo told the story, shepherds from Calimaya attempted to steal his grazing sheep and pigs.54 The shepherds stoned the boys Arévalo hired to watch the animals. The boys fled, and Arévalo and his adult sons hurried to secure his animals. At the pasture they encountered the Calimaya shepherds with a royalist soldier, José Antonio Sánchez (whom Arévalo deemed their “caudillo”), a native of Calimaya who had a reputation for violence.55 After attacking Arévalo’s son and his servant, Sánchez intended to take the old man to his captain in Calimaya. Halfway there, the soldier raised his unsheathed sword and declared that he no longer wanted to go before his officer, implying he would kill Arévalo then and there. One of Arévalo’s kinsfolk rushed to inform the civil teniente, who put a stop to the whole affair. A more explosive incident took place in 1819 in neighboring San Antonio de la Ysla. In the midst of the village’s annual celebration of a venerated image of Christ, the Spanish constable, in the company of soldiers from the Calimaya garrison, swept down on the villagers and wounded boys, several men, and a pregnant woman. The commanding officer later agreed with the villagers that the attack was unprovoked. The Indians were outraged by these royalist soldiers, who, they said, were stationed “for our defense and maintained by the contribution of us Indians” but instead made them “the object of their abuses and vilification.” “They constantly mistreat us by word and by deed,” the Indians continued, “relying on force and legal privilege.”56

“We Have Yet to Experience Any Benefit from the Great Work of Our Independence” The end of the war and independence did not bring immediate changes for Arévalo and his neighbors. From 1810 to 1821 laws were enacted that ended tribute, abolished racial distinctions, and declared Indians ciudadanos (citizens), equal to others by law. Yet the real effects of political change on Indi25

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ans and other rural people prove difficult to pinpoint. While independence did not mark a watershed, the ensuing political changes did have portentous consequences. The Spanish constitution of 1820 eliminated village repúblicas and mandated the establishment of larger, multicommunity ayuntamientos.57 This change weakened the autonomy of individual communities and concentrated political power in fewer hands. Arévalo seized this opportunity. In 1820 he became second regidor in San Antonio de la Ysla’s new ayuntamiento.58 That Arévalo managed to assume one of four offices that served three villages speaks to his renown beyond his small pueblo. Taking part in the ayuntamiento probably increased Arévalo’s status but required caution and careful maneuvering in those uneasy times. The abolition of a separate legal status for Indians eventually eroded the privileges and protection accorded them under colonial rule. The ramifications of this major legal shift, however, were unclear at first. For several years, some villagers confusedly identified themselves in legal proceedings as “indio ciudadano” (Indian citizen). Even without legal sanction, Indians’ distinct status, as perceived by themselves and by others, remained a crucial element of life after colonial rule.59 Mexico’s independence revolutionized neither the relations of production nor the domination of contested resources in the Toluca region. In general, postindependence documentation points to declining prospects for local villagers and even their manifest impoverishment. In neighboring Temascaltepec, one priest described how “the misery and scarcity of resources has impoverished this land to the extreme of making almost beggars of the lowest classes.” Each villager claimed a parcel of land, but at best only a year’s subsistence could be hoped for.60 Impoverishment can be traced in part to continued population growth and partible inheritance on finite lands. More aggressive tactics by area haciendas exacerbated the deprivation. In the Tenango district villagers complained in the 1820s that Atengo estate predations left their animals without pastures and watering holes. Having lost their montes to the hacienda, several villages resorted to furtive collection of dried dung from Atengo pastures to replace firewood.61 From Arévalo’s vantage point, the gachupines may have left, but the same difficulties still plagued him after independence. In 1821 cattle from the Hacienda de Atengo ran loose in San Lucas’s fields, trampling the spring bean planting. Villagers blamed the damage on inattentive cowhands and, with regidor Arévalo at the forefront, demanded reparations. The hacienda administrator, Mariano Guadarrama, ignored their requests and barred village livestock from the estate’s pastures. Once again, despite their monthly payments 26

The Toluca Region, 1730 – 1821

of four reales per animal, villagers lost access to grazing lands. Guadarrama also singled out Arévalo for special retribution. In a copy of a note reminding a foreman to bar villagers from the pastures, the administrator added, “That carajo Indian Arévalo will pay me for this.” Arévalo believed his attempts to defend “this neighborhood’s rights” had earned him Guadarrama’s resentment. The question of who possessed the pastures remained in debate, but the records end with the Indians still locked out.62 Personal antagonisms resurfaced the night Guadarrama and his vaqueros attacked Arévalo’s son, José María. In 1822 this estate administrator also held the post of captain of the Urbanos del Imperio. Riding through the village of San Antonio de la Ysla, Guadarrama happened upon the young Arévalo and a friend, Ygnacio Loyola (an Indian who worked for Juan Pedro). Both young men had been drinking, and Guadarrama claimed they insulted him and his cowhands, thus inviting attack. Guadarrama and the elder Arévalo then proceeded to a legal duel over payment of damages. He accused Arévalo of exaggerating the medical costs: because the Indian “always goes about with gossip and plots as much within his village as outside[,] . . . one assumes that he’ll act this way.”63 The colonial history of struggle between area pueblos and the Atengo estates continued, although with new tactics and a different political background in independent Mexico. Beyond the district the actors had changed; politicians replaced the viceroy and the General Indian Court in deciding the outcome of these ongoing disputes. The local players changed little. The Atengo estates remained in the hands of the Conde de Santiago family. The villagers involved were Indians, Juan Pedro Arévalo and, after his death, his contentious descendants. While the father had successfully defended himself with a pen and in the courts, the sons could not count on civil measures to guarantee their patrimony. After independence rural Mexicans faced a different political system and a troubled economy, but neither transformed their lives. As Tenango district villages complained to the state congress in 1826, “We have yet to experience any benefit from the great work of our independence.”64 Furthermore, Indian villagers, especially women, instead found themselves at a greater disadvantage, without a stable government and without a strong judiciary.

27

two

Hijos del Pueblo The Limits of Community

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i​storians have long debated what it meant to belong to an Indian pueblo: How did Indians understand their place within their communities? Hijos del pueblo, the term Indians used to refer to themselves, suggested a certain obedience and subordination to the natal pueblo. There one paid tribute, served a turn in office, performed labor services, and respected the governing officers and elders. In turn, the pueblo and its officers cared for the hijos by granting them land, shielding them from direct contact with Spanish officials, defending the pueblo from outside threats, and maintaining public order. The term hijos del pueblo also suggests the many ways that kinship and community coincided in Indian villages. Kinship ties extended across small settlements. With a limited marriage pool, necessity drove cousins to marry cousins.1 Kinship ties also wove across larger pueblos. Endogamy, or marrying within one’s village, prevailed among Toluca-area Indians.2 Most Indians were born and died in the same village. Their neighbors were also aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. With consanguineous unions and endogamy routine, kinship and pueblo often coincided. Local land tenure customs undoubtedly influenced the preference to marry within one’s home pueblo. Only hijos del pueblo, the natives of a village, were guaranteed a share of village lands. Especially for men who depended on these tierras de repartimiento, marrying outside of one’s natal village could be crippling. When exogamous matches did take place, it was generally women who married out and left their natal pueblo. The model of kinship influenced pueblo life and pervaded the language of community relationships. Village officers might act as “fathers,” to whom native commoners were “children.” These labels convey the ideal at work: familial relationships of domination and obedience, knowledge and ignorance, protection and weakness.3 Just as a son or a daughter anticipates certain rights

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vis-à-vis their parents and family, an hijo del pueblo could expect certain privileges from the pueblo.

Land Tenure and Morality The primary benefit granted to a pueblo native was access to land, in usufruct of tierras de repartimiento or in private, heritable parcels.4 This privilege bore responsibilities: in addition to residing permanently in their villages and paying tribute to merit access to land, pueblo natives usually were required to perform república or parish service. Internal village land disputes provide a window into the meanings and limits of community membership. Virtually untapped by historians, these judicial records contain many distinct voices. In these cases, Indian plaintiffs and defendants, local witnesses, lawyers, village elders, and royal judges voiced opinions on community membership, morality, and land tenure. These disputes cover two primary types of land tenure: the usufruct of tierras de repartimiento and the possession of private parcels. For a long time some Indians had privately owned land in addition to the tierras de repartimiento, community lands divided among the men born in the pueblo. The economic differences between those with private plots and those without became more pronounced in the eighteenth century; villagers forced to live off the small parcels assigned to them expressed bitterness toward the “riquillos” among them.5 Both types of tenure generally came into question during a transfer, usually following a death. While many Indian men and women left written testaments, kin driven by greed, indigence, or jealousy readily challenged these wills. Many Indians died intestate, thus inciting competing claims. People typically defended land claims based on community membership, current family needs, children’s future legacy, upkeep of a chapel or holy images, or as a reward for nursing the mortally ill or having underwritten funeral expenses. To the Indians involved, personal conduct in the pueblo and with one’s family had to be considered in land distribution. Landholding in the villages was not a clear-cut affair. Gender, ethnicity, and personal conduct colored the execution of law in this sphere. Belonging to a pueblo, either by birth or by active involvement, usually permitted uncontested access to land. An hijo del pueblo commonly based his claim to land on that fact alone. Only men habitually received this birthright. No document mentions the rights of village women. Although women could hold land in other ways, they did not attain it merely by virtue of their place of birth. 29

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Upholding one’s status as a vecino or vecina (neighbor) was another sound defense of land rights. Indian vecinos permanently resided in a pueblo, where they lived quietly and actively farmed the land, in order to pay tribute and church fees. They often tried to prove dominion with a will or a bill of sale. If they were unable to produce such written proof, current owners might ask village elders (sometimes ancianas, old women) to attest to their longtime residence and possession of the disputed parcel. Family responsibilities also commonly justified claims to land. Men and women alike argued that they had a right to a plot so that they could provide for their spouse and/or children and to keep their families under one roof. Claimants often warned that without their own land, they would be forced to wander or to lodge in someone else’s home. In 1802, for example, three Indian brothers contested the possession of lands (once held by their grandmother) by their uncle’s wife. The brothers complained that their uncle had “served little or not at all in the village because he was a vagrant.” When the uncle died intestate, the lands, rather than revert to blood relatives, fell into his widow’s hands. The brothers’ plea rested not only on legal improprieties but also on their families’ needs. “Burdened with family,” they argued, “we have absolutely nowhere to plant a grain of corn or to raise a poor shack. We are staying [arrimados] at our mother-in-laws’ houses, as our pueblo knows.” The brothers further argued that the indigence stemming from their homelessness hindered their discharge of community service and tribute payments.6 In essence, the brothers contended that landlessness kept them from acting as proper patriarchs. Elsewhere, a young mother claimed land because she had not even “a furrow” and was forced to live in “strange houses.”7 In the 1790s an Indian widow sought a more equitable distribution of family lands that were in her nephew’s possession, as she found herself “burdened by children and grandchildren . . . all married without anywhere to put them.”8 This widow’s argument reflected the precariousness of subsistence in the late colonial period. In 1782 two adult sons, landless as a result of a sale their widowed mother had made during their childhood, sought to buy back the former family lands. They needed the plots in order to “settle in our village as Your Majesty orders and not to wander about for lack of a place to reside.” Their lawyer scolded their mother for selling the lands, an action taken “without considering the prejudice she caused her sons, who today are married and lack even dust on which to farm.”9 This case, like many others, plays on Bourbon fears of a vagrant Indian class. Individuals who cared for the ill or saw to the proper burial of the deceased deserved respect and a reward—land—for their actions.10 Villagers frowned on those who lacked respect for the dead. In one case, four adult siblings 30

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squabbling over an inheritance found that it mattered very much how they treated their deceased mother. The mother purposely (and illegally) willed all her lands to her two sons, denying any inheritance to her two daughters because they failed to respect her. Defending their windfall, the brothers recalled tending to their late mother’s needs and paying her funeral expenses. They further claimed that when a sister learned of her disinheritance, she taunted, “Let our mother rot or the animals eat her.” The teniente de justicia who heard the case followed the principle of partible inheritance and moved for an equal division of the contested property.11 As the spiritual wishes of the deceased required attention, some land disputes revolved around the care of religious images or a family chapel. In an exemplary case, an Indian entrusted land to his pueblo on his death, providing that a mayordomo (cofradía officer) farm it, with the profits to be used for the upkeep of an altar in the church. In 1809 the donor’s granddaughter Eulogia Martina bemoaned the altar’s neglect and the disregard for her late grandfather’s wishes. The mayordomo had pocketed the income from the lands, and tattered costumes clothed the altar’s saints, with only a meager adornment of seasonal flowers and just a few candles burned on certain feast days. The teniente de justicia readily granted Eulogia’s request to take over her ancestor’s lands and tend the altar herself.12 Access to land, then, often depended on acting within the community’s moral bounds, bounds enforced by the república. With the villagers’ frequent recourse to judicial appeal, Spanish authorities usually had the final word in the documented cases. But the village repúblicas were still powerful in the late colonial Toluca region, effectively controlling the allotment of tierras de repartimiento. An ethic of equality underlay land disbursement in the pueblos. In principle, the needy received parcels to enable them to pay tribute and to provide basic subsistence.13 While repartimiento lands assigned to an individual generally passed on to heirs, the república could choose to reassign them. The república likewise had the authority to void an apparently legal sale.14 In an era of decreasing access to land for most individuals, the república held a powerful means to reward or reprimand villagers.

The Limits of Community Membership S. L. Cline and Susan Kellogg show how a precontact tradition of female land tenure in central Mexico expanded by the mid-sixteenth century.15 With the decline in native population, surviving Indian women easily received village 31

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lands,16 and male villagers had little reason to contest female tenure when they themselves held enough lands. But in the late colonial period, the repúblicas grew more conservative in their distribution of land. With limited acreage to allocate to a now growing populace, they favored obedient Indian men of legitimate birth, native to the village. These hijos del pueblo had greater access to village lands than did outsiders, women (especially widows), bastards, and mulattoes and other castas (persons of mixed race). This process of exclusion could threaten the livelihoods of entire families, as shown in a well-documented 1793 case from San Francisco Xonacatlan. Illegitimacy, outsider status, and gender all figured in this dispute between Michaela Francisca, Indian widow of Santiago Christóbal, and her brothersin-law. As Michaela told the subdelegado, this conflict over family lands had begun a generation earlier. After bearing three sons in wedlock, Antonia Bacilia gave birth to Santiago Christóbal in her widowhood. After her husband’s death, the pueblo tried to oust Antonia from the tierras de repartimiento on which she lived. Antonia not only denounced this affront, but she divided the land four ways, earmarking a plot for each son. This arrangement had pleased her children. Michaela relived her mother-in-law’s dilemma in 1791, when her own husband, Santiago, died, leaving her with four children. By farming her late husband’s small plot, Michaela managed to maintain her family. Then her brother-in-law, Alberto Félix, commandeered the site. Michaela would not tolerate his “depraved” act since it “leaves us with nothing.” She argued for restitution on the principle that “all hijos del pueblo customarily receive land so that they will settle there and not desert.” When Alberto Félix spoke before the subdelegado, he voiced many of the exclusionary tenets current in the pueblos. The plot in question, Alberto stated, belonged to his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, which made him the rightful heir. His late mother had no right to divide the lands because she, a native of another village, owned nothing in Xonacatlan. Furthermore, Michaela’s husband, Santiago, had been born a bastard and not the son of Alberto’s father. Yielding to their mother’s plea, Alberto and his legitimate brother had agreed to share the land with Santiago while he lived, providing that the site would revert to the legitimate sons after his death. Alberto asserted, “Santiago Christóbal never had right to this land. . . . [W]here he could have scratched the earth was in my mother’s birthplace.” Driving his point home, Alberto warned that land cannot be left “to just anyone, only to one of the family line [del tronco del raíz], so that children, and not strangers, inherit.” 32

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This exclusionary reasoning had to overcome the communal ethic that underlay landholding in Indian villages as well as the Crown’s inclination to protect the helpless. Unable to deny her late husband’s illegitimate birth, Michaela based further arguments on the rights of natives to maintain themselves within the village. She contended that all hijos del pueblo have a right to village lands, “whether or not they are legitimate.” Besides, she claimed not to need the parcel for herself but for her children. After more petitions and the brothers-in-law’s futile attempts to produce notarized title to the land, Michaela finally regained possession. (How did she sustain her family during the year Alberto farmed her land?) A 1794 viceregal order decisively favored Michaela because her four children were “minors and neither they nor their widowed mother [had] other land nor goods from which to feed themselves, nor to satisfy Royal Tributes and other fees.”17 The difficulties Michaela faced, as a widow and an outsider, exemplify the precarious situation of many Indian women in rural Mexico. Women could and did hold land in the late colonial period, but they faced a different, less generous set of criteria for ownership. Relatives and neighbors often challenged the legality of women’s territorial possessions, whether inherited or purchased. The overall competition for land intensified attempts to restrict female landholding. Compared to Indian men, women, especially widows, were an easy mark for dispossession. A woman had no formal involvement in village politics; often she was an outsider, living in her husband’s village or surrounded by his family. Taylor argues that this outsider status allowed women to “be victimized with less danger to the political community than would be produced by open attacks on local men.”18 While Taylor aimed to explain physical violence against women, his argument also suggests why villagers tried to dispossess women. Local marriage and residence customs also explain the particular vulnerability of Indian widows as landholders. Most marriages took place between individuals of the same village. Yet exogamous matches that did occur invariably brought the bride to reside in her husband’s natal village, often with his family. A couple’s reliance on an hijo del pueblo’s land allotment in his home village reinforced patrilocality. Like married women throughout New Spain, Indian wives living outside of their natal communities faced the likelihood of ending their lives as widows.19 During her husband’s lifetime, the wife led a decent life, relying on her husband’s lands for subsistence. With the husband’s body barely cold, however, the widow found herself a vulnerable outsider. The late husband’s kin predictably treated the widow with hostility and blocked access to her 33

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husband’s lands and property, with little regard for the children involved. Facing a precarious existence in their adopted communities, many widows returned to their own families to rely on the goodwill of parents or siblings. A widow’s chance for remarriage (and greater economic security) was slight.20 My research has revealed fifteen cases from 1765 to 1821 similar to Michaela Francisca’s: widows who faced dispossession by their late husband’s family and village.21 Land-hungry families squared off against the bereft widow. The república, meanwhile, neither protected the widow nor assisted with her needs. Clearly, certain community members had more rights than others. Men often asserted that women had less need for land. They claimed to need land to farm in order to pay tribute and to bear the costs of pueblo offices. Yet women had considerable economic burdens. Like their male kin, many maintained families, owed church fees, and settled costs of family burials and weddings. Women might owe royal tribute, depending on their marital status and local custom.22 Ignoring these realities, the men who sought women’s lands denied the genuine needs and rights of their sisters, nieces, and sisters-in-law. Consider an orphaned daughter who sought legal title to her late father’s lands in her natal village while she lived on a nearby ranch with her widowed mother. Her opponents contested the petition on the grounds that “she, as absent and as a woman, serves in nothing.”23 In essence, these men argued that women held a negligible place in the pueblo and thus deserved less. Some women in this situation defended their property by stressing their opponents’ callousness toward them as females. A widow who challenged her brother-in-law’s usurpation of her daughter’s inheritance reported being told, “I could protest wherever I would like because my daughter, as a woman, has no right, nor I to seek it for her.”24 Another woman, indignant at her brother’s attempts to seize all of their late father’s goods, reproached him for declaring, “Because I am a woman, in nothing do I serve.” The woman defended her interests, countering, “I am of sound judgment because only in the eyes of one God and one King does one serve.”25 Such protests appealed to the colonial judiciary, a Spanish institution that backed property rights for certain women. As Michaela Francisca’s case shows, the courts opposed plans to divest women of their needful, just holdings. Spanish law firmly upheld the principle of partible inheritance, equal among offspring of both sexes. Assuming a protective role, judges generally championed the cause of truly needy individuals (e.g., those burdened with family), regardless of gender.26 In the case of Indian widows, colonial Spanish judges firmly supported the woman and her children and ordered república officers to see that she receive 34

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a fair share from her late husband’s family. The historical record tells only of those women persistent enough to pursue their claims through a prolonged judicial process until receiving protection from the courts. One can never know how many women simply submitted to the informal village rules that narrowly defined who had right to village lands and who did not. Exclusionary policies also affected Afro-Mexicans, many of whom also considered themselves hijos del pueblo. Indian villagers attempted to expel or dispossess some of these neighbors on the grounds that community membership was, in part, racially defined. In these disputes the Indians had a powerful ally in Spanish law, which had long prohibited non-Indians from living in the pueblos.27 People of mixed, especially African, ancestry bore a certain stigma in colonial society. Indians seemed especially threatened by their presence. Although the Toluca region had a minimal Afro-Mexican presence in the eighteenth century, villagers often used the term mulatto to defame character or to appropriate lands.28 Even if labeling someone a mulatto had no basis in fact, the mere idea cast aspersion on an individual’s status in the community. Juan Pedro Arévalo of San Lucas, for example, was insulted when his nephew bellowed in the street that Arévalo was nothing but a negro carajo soplón.29 Individuals who could not deny their mixed heritage, notwithstanding their adherence to village ways, might face exclusion from the pueblos. In 1782 Antonio Trinidad Molina faced destitution when an Indian who years earlier had sold him his lands suddenly attempted to void the transfer. The Indian contended that the sale had been illegal because Molina was a mulatto. Molina believed the sale had been carried out in good faith: the transfer was recorded, witnessed, and accompanied by food and beverage. Also, because he paid tribute, he needed the land. Molina’s lawyer similarly argued that only tributaries of a place deserved community lands. The lawyer stressed this because Molina’s Indian wife and five children also met tribute demands. The mulatto had served in the república, “ascending from topil [low-ranking officer] to regidor, positions that although honorable are onerous.” Because Molina had borne the burdens attendant with these positions, “of course he should solicit the conveniences the naturales enjoy.” Despite the logic of these arguments, Molina was ousted from his land.30 This case demonstrates how late colonial pueblos tightened their definition of who deserved the privilege of community membership. Bolstered by Spanish law, which explicitly banned non-Indians from pueblos, Indian repúblicas could target mulattoes and other castas in an effort to reduce the number of claims to tierras de repartimiento. Indians often asserted that these ethnically distinct individuals refused to live according to village norms and 35

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to obey Indian officials.31 Yet Antonio Trinidad Molina had proven himself obedient, hardworking, and worthy of village responsibilities. When the Indians grew short on land, however, they sought his ouster. The challenges faced by women, widows, and Afro-Mexicans as landholders call attention to the limited nature of community membership in the late colonial era. The phrase that the Indians themselves used to denote the rights and responsibilities of community membership, hijos del pueblo, in fact applied fully to just a minority of village residents. Hijos del pueblo constituted an entity divided by gender, ethnicity, place, and circumstances of birth. Some villagers, in particular Indian men of legitimate birth, had much fuller opportunities and privileges.32 One answer to the dilemma of sustaining a growing population on finite lands was to circumscribe community membership, thus reserving its privileges for fewer people. While villages in other regions showed relative openness during the late colonial period,33 in the Toluca region pueblo membership became increasingly closed. While some individuals voluntarily abandoned the pueblo because of its diminishing rewards, the exclusive nature of land access forced others onto the same path: to the hacienda, mining centers, and cities. The difficulties widows faced in the pueblos may explain why they, like so many other rural women, chose to migrate to Mexico City and other Mexican cities where women made up the majority of the population.34

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“In Compliance with Marital Obligations” Women, Men, and Married Life

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atriarchy provided the model for the conduct of marriage and family. Most individuals, women included, supported the ideal of patriarchy and the mutual obligations it entailed. Yet the demands of daily life in Mexico, especially for indigenous people and the poor, made it difficult to comply with the patriarchal model. In many humble households wives controlled everyday affairs and husbands found their presumed authority in the marriage eroded. Despite these inconsistencies, husbands and wives, in-laws and neighbors, priests and judges, held fast to the patriarchal ideal and its expectations of male and female roles. When these expectations went unmet, marital relations soured and often turned violent. The indissolubility of Catholic marriage forced spouses to remain in trying, even life-threatening unions. While marriage aimed to save souls from the fires of hell, married life often became its own special inferno. Indians and their neighbors in central Mexico professed a similar ethic regarding marriage and gender in the late colonial period. To some extent this reflects the fact that preconquest beliefs with regard to gender roles overlapped with Spanish views. By the eighteenth century Indians had adopted much of Spanish Catholic morality as well. Yet the similar perspectives on marriage did not preclude different practices and outcomes among the Indians.1

Models of Married Life: An Uneven Reciprocity The models of marital relations, whether spelled out by churchmen or voiced by disgruntled spouses, endorsed reciprocity between spouses. The husband’s and wife’s mutual obligations did not imply their equality. As one Mexico City wife declared in 1857, “The wife is still the weaker half of the couple, despite all the proclamations about the equality of spouses.”2 Pastoral theology gave men the upper hand in marriage. The popular Ri-

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palda catechism declared that men should treat their wives “lovingly and prudently, like Christ with the Church,” and wives should treat their husbands “with love and reverence, like the Church with Christ.”3 Archbishop Lorenzana similarly explained that in marriage “the husband is head, but he must treat his wife as a companion, and not as a slave.”4 Priests were advised to tell brides “to be subject to your husband in everything.”5 While the emphasis on reciprocity varied, ecclesiastical authorities distinctly promoted a husband’s authority over his wife. In the pueblos and ranchos of central Mexico, wives and husbands understood marital reciprocity in more concrete terms. Judicial records reveal their fundamental beliefs about the place of men and women in family life. Both sexes agreed that a husband’s primary role was to feed, clothe, and shelter his wife and children. To this end, people in Tenango have long buried the umbilical cord of newborn males in the monte, so that they will “like field work and to go on journeys.”6 Few could fault the man who provided for (and did not mistreat) his family. Wives did not demand companionship and affection from their spouses; at least women did not say so for the record. Many husbands treated their wives well, but few accounts reveal any show of affection.7 For their part, women were expected to work and stay close to home. Ideally, the wife’s duties corresponded to the house: making the fire, heating tortillas, sweeping the patio, bringing meals to her husband in the fields, spinning, and weaving. One pastoral manual told priests to remind brides, “You will not leave the house unnecessarily, and then with your husband’s permission.”8 In Tenango people bury a baby girl’s umbilical cord beneath the hearth (tlecuil ). Modern informants carry out this custom so that the girl “will like housework and won’t leave the house much.”9 In real life rural women (especially Indians) performed a wide range of labors, many of which took place in the fields, tianguis (market), and montes far beyond their homes. Yet when a husband accused his wife of neglect, he limited his public critique to domestic tasks: failing to mend a shirt, refusing to make tortillas, throwing a meal in his face. A wife was also expected to conduct herself properly. Models of marital relations called for wives to assume a subdued, patient manner. A good wife acted modestly in public so as to evade gossip or her husband’s doubts. When Gregoria Xaviera returned from her magueyes one day, a man pursued her. Gregoria claimed to have rebuffed his overtures, insisting that she had nothing to say to him because “she was a married woman and did not intend to offend her husband.”10 To avoid shame, women likewise were expected to pacify their husbands’ tempers and excesses. Indian society informally charged respectable women with watching over their drunken mates.11 The 38

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prescribed conduct and emotional standards for men were less clearly articulated and entailed fewer limitations. Ideally, then, men and women would observe the assigned division of duties. Women would also uphold certain standards of behavior.12 Couples, with husband and wife in their proper roles, would create a fruitful partnership. Archbishop Lorenzana saw marriage this way. He exhorted Indian couples to work and earn enough to dress themselves suitably. The husband and wife working in tandem would bring “greater decency, less immorality and more modesty to the women, and more honor to the men.”13

Mala Vida: “Such Quarrels Occur Regularly among Indians” Couples aimed to follow the prescribed relations between husband and wife, but people of all social ranks expected discord to ravage marriages. One Indian husband jailed for hitting his wife tried to defend himself by arguing just how ordinary their fray had been. “Such quarrels,” he commented, “occur regularly among Indians.”14 The priest-author Manuel Pérez claimed that every Indian couple he knew came to blows within fifteen days of being wed. He urged other clerics to exhort grooms, “You, man, should not mistreat nor beat your woman. Your obligation is to give her sustenance and that which she needs.” Brides, meanwhile, needed to be told, “You, woman, your obligation is to honor your husband, to obey him. You should neither provoke nor anger him.”15 Dilemmas arose when husbands and wives failed to fulfill the obligations of their gender. The turbulent behavior that Pérez hoped to check was, in fact, the stuff of everyday life. Countless records of marital disputes tell of abusive, negligent husbands and angry, disobedient wives. Authorities had to document and resolve the discordant cases; the historical record contains little about propitious or cooperative unions. Historians can easily fall into the trap of portraying marriage in Mexico as fraught with violence and loathing. Many married couples surely got along. Perhaps relations were smoothest when men provided for their families, women saw to their duties at home, and both agreed that the husband held more authority. Yet this arrangement became more difficult to achieve in the late colonial and early national period as peasant men found their livelihoods challenged by a variety of factors. Episodes of mala vida, or spousal abuse, offer a window on married life. Before their priest or local magistrate, abandoned husbands and physically abused wives detailed how their spouses should have behaved and how their 39

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marriages had strayed from the ideal. The following vignettes illustrate how the model of matrimony could break down in real life. Skirmishes over tortillas, changing a coin, or infidelity reflected more profound issues. In these everyday disputes, couples battled over what Richard Boyer has called “the politics of marriage.”16 For rural, mostly Indian couples, the politics of marriage revolved around the inviolability of a husband’s authority, his role as a provider, and a wife’s mobility and public reputation. Accounts of abuse and neglect show remarkable continuity from 1730 to 1850, especially in terms of causes and episodes.17 Tomás Antonio, wed to Sebastiana María (both Indians), habitually found himself alone. Every day his wife left his father’s home where they resided to visit her parents for the entire afternoon. Tomás feared that his in-laws advised her to belittle him. One day he asked Sebastiana to prepare him a tortilla. According to Tomás, she answered that “I would not see her again because her parents had decided to take her from me and that she would live where she fancied.” Tomás countered that “she would live where [he] wanted and if not, a good judge would have to remedy things.” And with that, ignoring her father-in-law’s admonition that she comply with her marital obligation, Sebastiana insulted her husband and father-in-law and departed for her family’s house. When Tomás attempted to bring her home, his wife and mother-in-law beat him. Later Sebastiana accused him before a court officer of having an affair with her sister—an accusation Tomás flatly denied. Before an ecclesiastical judge, the jilted husband sought his mother-in-law’s punishment. He also demanded, “[My in-laws should leave my wife] at my side, not I with my father nor she with her parents, because now I have somewhere to build my little house once the rains pass.”18 Juan de Dios was a twenty-year-old Indian who called himself a labrador. At home one May afternoon in 1820 he gave his wife, María Santos, a coin to change in order to buy corn. She went out three times but could not change the coin. Juan finally decided that he would exchange the money. Handing over the peso, his wife reportedly cautioned, “Don’t you go and spend it.” Her comment angered Juan. He threw the coin to the ground, responding, “Well, there’s your peso, I don’t want to go anymore, don’t say that I spend your money, go yourself or don’t go.” María, incensed, grabbed the coin and marched off again for change. Concerned about his wife’s long absence, Juan went to find her. From a 40

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distance he spotted María at the house of a village official. She had two men at her side, one of which, Gregorio, Juan believed to have had an affair with his wife two years earlier. Seeing Gregorio with María reminded him of that past offense. When his wife turned toward home, Juan rebuked her, which led to a quarrel in the street. At home Juan grabbed a pole and struck her in the head. María fled to a neighboring house where the women separated the warring couple. To distract the enraged husband, the neighbors invited him out to drink. María fell ill from the beating, and while Juan drank pulque that evening, she died. That night he was imprisoned in the pueblo jail for the murder of his pregnant wife.19 One Saturday in February 1795 Manuela Antonia, an Indian wife and mother, washed clothes in the ravine outside her pueblo, Atlatlauca. Chatting with another woman as she worked, Manuela failed to notice her husband, Paulino de la Cruz, pass by, returning from the tierra caliente (warm or tropical land). One of her daughters came to tell her that Paulino had arrived and handed her mother his cloak to wash. Once home, Manuela greeted Paulino and asked about his trip. According to her, he replied in a disgruntled fashion. Nevertheless, she said to him, “Come, I’ll delouse you.” Later, when Paulino showed her some crates he had acquired during his journey, Manuela scolded him for failing to bring home cash. This exchange soon ended, but Paulino went about restless. The next night Manuela invited her husband to have a supper of fruit that their daughter had brought from Tenancingo. Soon afterward, Manuela suggested that they go to sleep. As he lay down with her, Paulino declared, “I don’t want you to sleep with me, because I don’t deserve you, you go about with your lovers because you find me nauseating.” Manuela did not stir, but Paulino persisted. Eventually one daughter chided, “Father, look how you speak to my mother, as though we were her pimps.” The commotion continued until dawn, when Manuela rose to make tortillas for a daughter who was leaving to sell pulque prepared by Manuela. In the meantime, her husband left the house. Paulino returned in the afternoon while Manuela was sleeping and asked her what he could eat. When she did not answer, he too went to sleep. After sundown, Paulino awoke and asked for some supper. Although his wife heated his food, Paulino went off with his crates to Manuela’s sister’s house. While visiting there, he insinuated that Manuela had a special relationship with her brother-in-law. At her sister’s urging, Manuela came by to pick up her husband. But Paulino did not return home that night. 41

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At dawn Manuela woke to find her husband outside warming himself by the hearth. Manuela ordered her son to sweep the patio; when he failed to obey, she scolded him. Manuela angrily entered the kitchen and demanded of one of her daughters, “Now you better explain how on Saturday and Sunday you earned enough to buy meat.” At that point Paulino got up and punched his wife in the face so hard that he stunned her. He said, “Take the sheep that your friend sent you,” then grabbed her braids, hurled her to the ground, kicked her, and hit her in the head with a poker. When he saw blood flow, Paulino fled the scene and did not return for eight days. While recuperating, Manuela believed her husband expected her to keep this incident quiet as she had done after previous beatings. (Once he broke a bone in her chest. Another time he fractured two fingers.) This time, however, Manuela ended her silence and reported her husband’s brutality to the local magistrate. She demanded that her husband prove her alleged involvement with her brother-in-law or face severe punishment. Manuela insisted that Paulino promise to stop beating her and ensure that he would not endanger her life; if he did not, she would refuse to see him again.20 These three cases reveal husbands’ ineffectual assertion of authority over autonomous wives. The newly wed Tomás Antonio could not keep his wife in “her place” due to intrusive in-laws and his inability to establish a separate household. The young husband Juan de Dios felt his power over his house and wife diminish when she demonstrated her command of the domestic economy by chiding him not to waste money. Seeing his wife with a male rival (although an imagined one) heightened his sense of powerlessness. When Paulino de la Cruz returned from his trip and his wife was not there to greet him, he likely wondered about his status in their home and long-established marriage. Furthermore, Manuela challenged his worth by openly criticizing his earning power. The details of Manuela’s narrative make it clear that she acted as the day-to-day sovereign of their household—bringing in cash, disciplining their children, and seeing to all the household tasks. The vicissitudes of daily life in rural Mexico, it seems, eroded patriarchy in practice. Men in such circumstances felt their authority, assigned by the church, the Crown, and social norms, contested by their wives. A man who lived in his in-laws’ household especially felt his authority undermined. Many husbands tried to transform their sense of impotence inside the home by treating their wives imperiously or beating them. Outside the home, men continued their struggle to feel more powerful by drinking or engaging in acts of bravado.21 42

Women, Men, and Married Life

A wife, on the other hand, felt disappointed by a husband who failed to provide. Many women, especially Indians, expected to sustain their family economically, in addition to running the house and raising children. Women did not complain about their multiple labors (although they did mention them in petitions), but they denounced their husbands if they failed to provide, especially if the latter conspicuously spent money beyond the house. For example, one Indian wife complained in 1780 that her husband gave her neither clothing nor food, instead spending his earnings on other women. To emphasize her economic (and sexual) abandonment, she added, “Only with my own labor of spinning and weaving do I maintain and dress myself.”22 Wives used a number of strategies to try to restore some balance to their marriages. Many women sought intervention from relatives, priests (especially in the colonial period), civil officers, and a variety of local male authorities.23 Frustration led other wives to defy their assigned roles. Some women challenged the prescription of how to treat their spouses (“with love and reverence, like the Church with Christ”) by making critical or snide remarks. For very few, it entailed physical violence. Others found recourse in sexual witchcraft.24 Some wives went so far as to abandon their spouses altogether. In any case, as Steve Stern reminds us, if women “did not challenge patriarchal first principles of male dominance and female subordination as such, they nonetheless surrounded them with pressure.”25 Many a husband was angered by his wife’s command of the household. One man clearly voiced this feeling, announcing that his spouse “is no longer my wife,” for she “has always said I have the right neither to say nor to mandate anything.”26 The discomfort men felt as they watched their authority challenged peppers judicial cases. The Indian couple Leonardo Rafael and Juana Beatriz had been married for fifteen years when, in 1783, she accused him before the parish priest of an affair with a widow in their pueblo. Answering his wife before a civil justice, Leonardo protested, “I have suffered a bitter life with my wife, because with her wicked nature she has never obeyed me at all.” Besides, “she has always insulted me, beating me without fear of God, insulting my parents, hurling herself against them, and saying a thousand opprobrious things to us.” Leonardo then turned to his wife’s charges, which he denied and blamed on her “rabid jealousy.” Her disobedience extended beyond the home. Leonardo claimed that when he decided to appeal to the civil officer, Juana had ridiculed him, saying that the judge did not know how to dispense justice and that she would return to the priest. He demanded that his wife be punished until she could prove her allegation and learned to respect both him and his parents. Leonardo ended defensively, “I give her suitable food and clothing, unfailing 43

Hijos del Pueblo

in my obligation.” His wife, he added, “does not know how to comply with her obligation.”27 By highlighting his wife’s insolence, Leonardo attempted to turn the tables on the charge of his adultery. Some husbands became so sensitive about their status that a joke or comment murmured by their wives could trigger a wave of hostility and violence. Theodora María and Cayetano Mariano (both Indians of Tenango del Valle) had been married for twenty years. Her brother and the teniente de justicia certified that Cayetano had battered his wife for years. Theodora told how, returning home one December evening in 1777, her husband hit his son before entering the house; standing in the kitchen, she heard the row. As Cayetano came into the kitchen, Theodora uttered, “Ave María.” Her husband angrily asked if he was some kind of devil who warranted this invocation and ordered her to shut her mouth. Cayetano then grabbed a bench to hit her and also struck her with a pole. The injury left Theodora near death; a priest was summoned to offer her the last rites, but she recovered.28 Insecure husbands heard scornful comments, jokes, and criticism as a challenge to their ordained place as sovereign in their marriage and household. One Indian man unabashedly told a judge in 1830 that his wife’s “bad tongue” drove him to club her in the head several times.29 Officials sympathized with men who punished these outspoken wives.30 A wife who derided her husband in public—like all insults made in the public sphere—could face serious retribution.31 Few women challenged their husbands’ authority in more aggressive ways. One Indian wife, who had long suffered mala vida with her adulterous husband, grew weary of the ineffectual remedy of complaining to the parish priest. Once when she brought a meal to her husband at work in the milpa, she found that another woman had already fed him. When her husband told her to go see the woman, who was apparently his mistress, the wife admitted that she “threw the meal in his face, with the dish and all, and the same with the little pulque [she] had brought him.” This sedition (in front of other villagers) enraged the husband, who beat her violently with a tecomate (drinking gourd). Only the presence of the other workers stopped him.32 Such an incident was unusual. Women seldom initiated a violent contest or let it escalate to the point of seriously wounding their spouses. When husbands accused their wives of mistreatment, this meant being disobedient, provoking arguments, and insulting him—not physical abuse.33 Some wives scratched, kicked, or slapped their husbands in the midst of a heated argument but only in self-defense or in response to their husbands’ violence. Women avoided violent tactics with their husbands in part because they realized that it would only bring on a violent reprisal. In addition, society 44

Women, Men, and Married Life

condemned such female conduct: few judges would sympathize with a wife who had pummeled her spouse.

Matrilocal Residence and Powerless Husbands The few men who agreed to live with their brides’ families found their authority not only challenged but also upended. Matrilocal residence hindered a husband’s power vis-à-vis his wife in two important ways. First, for Indian men for whom land tenure and livelihood were secure only in their natal villages, living in the bride’s pueblo limited the ability to provide for their new family. Second, his in-laws’ presence eroded a husband’s authority in his marriage. Matrilocal residence was uncommon in the Toluca region, but the few cases that I found show very troubled marriages and husbands under stress.34 Long-term matrilocal residence usually occurred when the wife’s family pressured the groom to consent to this condition before the wedding. Pérez told of some Indian parents who agreed to allow their daughter to marry only if the couple would reside with them. The priest did not explain why such unions broke down, but he noticed that matrilocal residence soon led to “arguments and unpleasantness.” In such circumstances, Pérez contended, a husband could rightfully move and take his wife with him.35 The inaccessibility of land for a husband in his wife’s pueblo seriously handicapped his attempts to provide for his family. Andrés Nicolás, an Indian from Tecama (north of Mexico City), settled in his wife’s village, San Pedro Techuchulco. In 1797 Andrés enlisted a lawyer to petition for a return to his home. Without lands in Techuchulco, he had undergone “immense labors to maintain a house and wife.” Yet he had lands and magueyes in his hometown that would allow him to fulfill his obligations more easily. Mexico City authorities granted Andrés permission to move and to take his wife.36 It appears that economic factors alone provoked this move, but the husband may have found also that his wife’s family interfered with the marriage. The problem of interfering and abusive in-laws may have increased by the late colonial period, as land shortages forced many couples to reside with one set of parents. With patrilocal residence common among Indians, the husband’s parents were generally more involved in a marriage. As a result, brides complained almost as much about their in-laws as they did about their husbands.37 The few wives who lived with their own parents were surrounded and 45

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protected by their original family. They felt secure and acted confidently. In this situation, husbands without land and bereft of ready support from their own parents may have felt especially threatened by a strong-minded wife. When the Indian Tomás Serafín married, to please his mother-in-law he agreed “to subject [himself ] to living in their house and company.” With a lawyer’s aid, Tomás explained to the teniente de justicia in 1819 that he could not “advance at all in that strange pueblo for lack of qualifications and means.” In other words, Tomás found himself landless in his adopted pueblo. He blamed his mother-in-law for causing problems in the marriage. He wanted to return to his pueblo with his wife in tow. There Tomás hoped to free himself from the gossip that upset his marriage and to take advantage of “[his] parents’ help and protection, with [his] own house and lands to plant.” When his wife, Manuela Ysabel, and her mother opposed this plan, they denied Tomás his “marital rights.” But Tomás and his lawyer argued: Everyone knows that the woman is subject to the dominion [ potestad ] of the husband as the head and sovereign of the family, as the apostle Saint Paul says in the epistles; for the same reason she is obliged not only to cohabit with him and serve him however she can, but also to follow him to whatever land . . . for just motive or necessity, having to accompany him even in banishment or to prison.

A wife’s obligation to follow her mate might require crossing the sea. As the lawyer chided, Tomás’s pueblo lay but a league away. But Manuela refused to go with her husband. If Tomás had been one of “those God-fearing husbands, loving of their wives and unfailing in compliance with marital obligations,” she began, “in that case . . . I would sin gravely by disobeying him.” She agreed that, with just cause, a woman should follow her spouse. Manuela and her lawyer maintained, however, that Tomás Serafín was not a decent spouse, adding that he was a “Seraph in name, but Asmodeus in his deeds.” She then detailed his offenses, including affairs with at least five village women. When she confronted him about these intrigues, he beat her and once threatened to knife her. This history of violence led Manuela to ask of the proposed move, “How will he act seeing me alone without my mother’s shelter?” (Her maternal uncle, a priest, lived in the pueblo and likely backed his sister and niece.) Further, Manuela denied that her husband could provide for them, “because he is used to my mother giving us everything we need.” The man had never loved her, Manuela asserted, but had married her 46

Women, Men, and Married Life

for her mother’s wealth. She threatened that if Tomás insisted on taking her to his pueblo she would formally accuse him of adultery and seek a divorce.38 Manuela Ysabel prevailed, and the couple remained in her village. In 1821 Manuela would complain that in eleven years of marriage she had enjoyed not even eleven days with Tomás. She accused him of adultery and named nine women with whom he had sinned; several of the women served in their household (two molenderas [tortilla makers], a wet nurse). His repeated adultery within the house may well have been a bid to overturn his wife’s authority in that sphere.39 His violent attacks apparently continued. In one fit of anger, Tomás had grabbed Manuela and reminded her that “he had married [her], not [her] mother.” He dragged his wife to a nearby ravine, threatening to throw her in, but peons working nearby stopped him from killing her. He disappeared; Manuela suggested that he might have joined the insurgency. So ends the record of this couple.40 While difficulties may well have sprung in such cases from personal traits and differences between spouses, matrilocal residence certainly exacerbated the situation.41

The Wife’s Dilemma Greg Grandin writes suggestively about the intersection of gender, economy, and power in colonial Guatemala. He makes the appealing contention that “through trade and credit, women created a world of countervailing power that mitigated the vicissitudes of patriarchy.”42 Women in Tenango carried out a range of market and entrepreneurial activities, but my assessment of their work in the public sphere is not so optimistic, for their movements outside the home were always suspect. People considered the street and the monte dangerous places, thus the domain of men. Yet many wives, especially Indians, performed productive activities outside the home. Some women planted their own lands. Women had a special dominion over small-scale pulque production. They cultivated the maguey plants, prepared pulque, and sold it out of their homes or in area markets.43 Female vendors dominated market sales in general. These frequent and often necessary forays beyond the “safe” world of the house led to a great deal of friction between spouses. Sarah Chambers argues that “a woman’s leaving the household—even temporarily—was the clearest threat to patriarchal control as it denied her husband any sexual or domestic services and potentially made them available to others.”44 Recall the case of Juan de Dios and his wife, María Santos: sent to change a coin, María found herself in the company of two men, one of 47

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whom her husband believed coveted María. Seeing her standing with these fellow villagers, jealousy seized her husband, who soon beat her, causing her death.45 As I read the case (told from the husband-murderer’s point of view), María does not appear to have acted disloyally. She came into contact with the two men by chance, while carrying out a household errand. Nevertheless, her husband’s interpretation of this casual meeting, notably, in public view, led to her death. Celidonia Martina found it trying that her husband, Joseph Guillermo, similarly censured some of her activities. This Indian couple lived in San Pedro Tlanisco, a mountainside pueblo with little arable land. To support their family, Joseph kept sheep and Celidonia sold pulque. Unaccompanied, Celidonia trekked as far as the mines at Zacualpa to sell the drink. While these sales expeditions (which she claimed were dangerous for a lone woman) did not upset her husband, he exploded when she went with another woman to a fiesta in San Lucas and stayed the night. His beating on that occasion propelled Celidonia to abandon Joseph and her children. She fled to Mexico City, where she found work as a molendera.46 Joseph, like many poor men, had little choice but to let his wife work beyond the house, but he complicated things for her by questioning many of her activities and contacts. Outside the house, the wife was beyond her husband’s control. Many husbands felt their authority undermined by wives who talked back, ran the family, or earned most of the household income. Worse yet was the fear that outside of the house and in contact with strange men a wife might betray her husband. Jealous accusations and physical abuse followed in the wake of contacts with other men. By hitting his wife, accusing her of adultery, and insulting her integrity, a husband tried to reestablish his authority in the marriage. Thus a day spent at the market may have brought money into women’s hands, but it could also spark trials at home.

Reconciliations: The Affirmation of Patriarchy Some wives suffered a long time at the hands of an abusive mate. Theodora María had tolerated years of battering by her husband. Neighbors could plainly see her scars, but, fearing her husband, they chose not to intervene. Her brother had long implored her to report her husband, but Theodora refused. Only when her exasperated brother took the matter to the teniente de justicia did the case receive inquiry. Although Theodora testified about her husband’s violence, she staunchly refused to press charges. She even went to 48

Women, Men, and Married Life

Mexico City and hired a lawyer to hasten her husband’s release from jail.47 Theodora’s decision to hush up and pardon her husband’s abuse was a common response to battering. Similarly, some women put up with their husbands’ adulterous affairs. According to the priest-author Pérez de Velasco, this absolution of male infidelity was commonplace: A married Indian man gets involved with a woman; his wife knows it, sees it, and suffers, because for love of his mistress, the husband neglects her, weakening her, he hits her. The Indian man is arrested; later his own wife comes to declare, not just with words but also with tears, his innocence (a rare thing!).48

However, many wives chose not to patiently suffer their husbands’ attention to other women but accused them before the parish priest or a civil judge. The fact that many other women bore this insult or life-threatening beatings, often for years, needs explanation. Many wives tolerated irresponsible or violent husbands in order to retain some economic security. For example, in 1747 an Indian woman whose husband had been missing for two years after an accusation of adultery decided to drop the charge. If her husband had committed adultery, she argued, it was “not a miracle or anything new.” His guilt did not bother her; like many others, this woman simply wanted her spouse at home to sustain their family.49 Some women elected to conceal abuse, fearing that publicizing domestic problems would bring shame on them. One Spanish woman claimed (with corroborating witnesses) that her labrador husband beat her almost daily. She had suffered this way for some time, but she dared not report her husband for fear of damaging her reputation. “The nature of my reputation stopped me,” she said.50 Another woman had seen all vestiges of proper married life disappear four years prior to making a formal complaint against her ill-willed husband. “Not wanting to make this public,” she remained in his house, “although without the disposition of [their] married state.”51 Few effective options existed for a spouse faced with perennial marital problems. Running away offered one possibility, but flight could mean losing access to land and family. Celidonia María saw no other means than “to put space between them in order to have some rest,” and so she abandoned her abusive husband for Mexico City. There, she found herself in a bleak situation. Hired as a molendera in a mason’s household, poor and far from family, Celidonia became so ill that a priest was called. Realizing she had run away, the priest reported 49

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her, and ecclesiastical officers sent a barely recuperated Celidonia home to her husband.52 This is just one of many instances in which officials found and forced runaway spouses to return to their families. Few individuals sought divorce.53 Because ecclesiastical divorces were difficult and costly to obtain, rural people, especially the poor, seldom considered this option.54 Priests and parents also dissuaded unhappy spouses from pursuing divorce. Some couples opted instead for informal separations. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities counseled spouses to reconcile. Case after case of mala vida tell of a husband and wife brought before the district magistrate or parish priest. The official had the husband vow that he would not mistreat his wife and would provide for her. The wife-victim, in turn, swore that she would stay with her husband. These reconciliations left wives in a disadvantaged position. The woman, regularly brutalized, had to accept a return to her marriage, perhaps to unfriendly in-laws. Yet authorities had few effective means to protect wives. In 1794 one Indian husband who accused his wife of adultery (with scant proof ) agreed to take his wife back only on the condition that she never again meet her supposed lover. The husband demanded further that his wife stop visiting her parents’ house, except in the event of illness.55 Even if a husband’s accusation of adultery had no basis, by promising to avoid certain men the wife essentially had to agree that her comportment merited suspicion. An Indian couple in San Antonio de la Ysla undertook a similar reconciliation in 1799. The wife accused her husband of regularly beating her. The man further eroded his integrity by daring to break into the alcalde’s house where his wife was in a protective depósito. Jailed for this misconduct, he fled his cell and tried to drag off his wife in the midst of a religious procession, threatening to kill her. Pueblo officials again jailed the husband. When the teniente de justicia heard the case, he ordered the couple’s reunion. At that point the husband declared that his wife had a lover at her mother’s house, where tepache (a pulque-based punch) was sold. He claimed that the links with her mother provoked their quarrels. The teniente ordered the husband to live peacefully in marriage with his wife and to treat her well. The officer likewise told the wife to live with her husband in peace and quiet, not to leave his side, “nor to visit houses of scandal and vices.” Both parties agreed to this settlement.56

Conclusion Mexican women and men constantly struggled to live according to models that did not mesh with how they had to live their lives. One woman be50

Women, Men, and Married Life

moaned the fact that for seventeen married years she had failed to realize a proper marriage: “I have never achieved the tranquility and harmony that this state [of matrimony] requires.”57 She probably defined a proper marriage by observing family and neighbors in more stable, peaceful unions, with each spouse fulfilling the obligations appropriate to gender. For many other couples, severe imbalance upset the reciprocity that should have joined them. Wives assumed key economic roles in their families. When they also governed their households, it clashed with the expectation that a man should be the head of his family. Women whose husbands were negligent or abusive found it hard to live up to the expectation that women were to be subdued and easily shamed and careful to avoid insulting their husbands. Despite exhortations to remain within the “shelter” of home, women working in the fields or tianguis regularly encountered men, adding to their husbands’ distrust. Indian couples experienced a special imbalance. A sign of the heightened friction between Indian spouses is that a much higher proportion of Indian assaults and homicides were perpetrated by men against their wives than was true among non-Indians.58 Indian men likely felt more impotent than other men (with the exception of Afro-Mexicans) in colonial society. Not only might an Indian man feel undermined by a commanding wife at home but elsewhere non-Indians treated him as a social inferior. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, Indian husbands found it particularly trying to sustain a family from the land. The propensity to drink further limited the money a husband might bring to his household. Indian men struggled— often resorting to violence—to maintain and assert their authority within their homes. Across this era, patriarchy stood unchallenged as the ideal for the governance of marriage and family in Mexico. Based on this model, husbands and wives bore expectations of each other: submissive and modest wives; authoritative and responsible husbands. But in some homes, especially of Indians and other poor people, the patriarchal ideal and daily realities clashed, provoking disorder. The home, meant to protect women, in fact hardly guaranteed their safety.

51

four

“Not in the Street” Households and the Meanings of Kinship

​I

​n rural Mexico people maintained intimate and dependable ties outside of the standard definitions of family. Servants and orphans sometimes provided companionship, aid, and trust that might be expected of children, aunts and uncles, or in-laws.1 Mexicans idealized the house—as opposed to the street—as a protected space where patriarchs ruled, thus limiting relationships that went beyond their door, especially for women. The household offers an appropriate and revealing unit of analysis for early Mexico. James Lockhart points out that in Nahuatl sources, “no word appears that would have approximately the same scope as English ‘family.’” Rather, “the terms converge on something akin to the English notion of ‘household.’”2 Similarly, in early modern Europe household and family were almost synonymous.3 In rural Mexico the differences within a household proved less vital than the powerful symbolic divide between house and street.

Safe Homes, Dangerous Streets Throughout Latin America people have long idealized the home as a place that shields its residents from the street. In her study of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Sandra Lauderdale Graham contrasts these two realms: House signified a secure and stable domain. To house belonged the enduring relationships of family or blood kin. To street belonged uncertain or temporary alliances in which identity could not be assumed but had to be established. Street was suspect, unpredictable, a dirty or dangerous place.4

Mexicans similarly juxtaposed the spaces of house and street. Perceptions of the symbolic nature of house and street had roots in both

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

indigenous and Iberian cultures. In early Mexico the Mexica saw the home as a place of cleanliness and order. Louise Burkhart describes how the home and domestic activities also had a strong symbolic association with the female. Crossing the threshold, the Mexica believed, one stepped out to a more dangerous and unpredictable world. Accordingly, sweeping became a crucial activity for Mexica women, who protected the home “against invading dirt and disorder.”5 Similar ideas circulated in early modern Spain.6 In both cultures gender was central to this dichotomization of space: the safe space of home would protect women from the physical and moral dangers that lay beyond. Heirs to both cultures, rural Mexicans often counterpoised the calm and security of home with the tumult and unknown of the street—despite the domestic strife that could be found there. The patio and solar (house site or yard) marked a transitional area between the house and the street. Walls, doorways, and windows held great symbolic importance as elements that divided a house from the outside. If an outsider breached or assaulted these boundaries in any way, residents were deeply troubled. Boundaries played a crucial role, for example, in a feud between a Calimaya labrador and a barber. The labrador charged that his foe had the “audacity to dirty [his] house door, covering it with mud.” As a result, officials briefly jailed the barber. Soon after his release, the farmer complained that many mornings he rose to find his door soiled once again. Often at night, he heard his door stoned and rocks landed in his patio. Worse yet, the assailant had “the temerity to scale the walls of [his] house, whistling and shouting while atop the wall, only to ridicule” him and his family.7 A pounding on the door, a refusal to enter a house, a sighting through a hole in the wall could have ominous significance for the individuals involved. The importance of house boundaries demonstrates that people idealized the home as a safe sphere, distinct from the public realm. What actually occurred within and around a house on a daily basis? Let us visit the home of don Lázaro Hermengildo, a member of Capuluac’s native elite (indio principal ), his wife of thirteen years, Ángela Francisca, and their four children. Don Lázaro had inherited their house site from his father. While most rural families in central Mexico crowded into just one or two rooms and a patio,8 in 1811 this six-person family inhabited a house of three rooms, made of adobe and with a flat, clay-shingled roof. Inside, the family had “various saints, kitchen utensils, a bench, a bed with bed clothing, an ax, and three loads of dark maize.” Beyond the house, the couple owned several granaries (trojes), farm animals, and several plots of land planted in maize and magueyes.9 Don Lázaro and Ángela Francisca had a relatively prosperous 53

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household compared to most of their Indian neighbors. Yet like others, this family invested its wealth in land and livestock rather than in the house. One of the three rooms was probably dedicated to cooking. Even Indians of modest means often had a separate cocina in their house. Given the smoke of the cooking fire, people probably preferred to keep the kitchen apart. Eating was not necessarily a family occasion for rural people. (Notably, the inventory above includes only a bench, not a table.) Meals mentioned in documents—tortillas and chile, tortillas alone, fruit—give the impression that meals were simple, almost improvised. People often ate their meals outside of the house, in the fields, in the monte, or in the marketplace. Wives might bring food out to husbands at work in the milpa. Only rarely did meals take on a social aspect: relatives or compadres might join a family for supper and talk. Rural houses also served as workplaces. Women spent much of their time at home engaged in chores such as grinding corn, cooking, preparing pulque, and child care. Artisans worked in their houses and patios. In particular, Spaniards and Indians, both men and women, engaged in textile production within their homes. Looms, spinning wheels, and skeins of yarn cluttered many houses. Religious devotion occupied an important place in rural homes. From his experience in the Puebla diocese, Pérez de Velasco contended that Indians “never pray in their houses, because the men leave in the morning to work and they return at night, thinking only of sleep.” He explained that women did not pray because they were busy with “spinning, weaving, and preparing food for their husbands.”10 The poor may have had little time to devote to prayer, but “various saints” headed an inventory of don Lázaro’s household goods. The vast majority of rural homes kept small shrines with painted or carved images of favorite saints.11 Beyond the house itself, some families maintained a small oratory in the fields. Often holy images had been passed down for generations, and family members showed fervent devotion to the saints who lived with them. The rural poor seldom entertained in their houses. Perhaps an aunt and uncle, a sibling, or a godparent would share a drink or a meal and talk there. Instead people mingled regularly in their neighborhoods, meeting at the nearby well or worshiping at a barrio chapel. Rural people also socialized at village-wide fiestas, processions, and market days. In sum, rural houses were crowded, relatively open to the elements, and provided little privacy. Sounds wafted in and out; spying eyes looked in. Private affairs easily became public knowledge. The many activities that took place in the solar further exposed a household to weather and public view.12 54

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

Material realities aside, people contended that four walls protected the household from the unpredictable world beyond.

Parents and Children: The Hierarchy of Family Similar to the model of married life, parents and children upheld the ideal of reciprocity in their relations. Reciprocity, again, did not imply equality. Even as adults, children owed special fealty and respect to their parents. The hierarchical relationship between parents and children in turn provided a model for masters and servants. The colonial church strongly favored nuclear families. Archbishop Lorenzana advised every father to maintain his own house so as to provide the foundation of an orderly, productive Christian society.13 Most people, especially Indians, lived in nuclear family households in the late colonial period. In Tenango del Valle in 1770 nuclear families constituted 63 percent of households.14 Bishop Francisco Fabián, of Puebla, encouraged nuclear family households among his diocese’s Indians, arguing that a couple in their own home “could better care for their children.” He wanted to see children unequivocally under their parents’ authority.15 Fabián based his disposition in the Fourth Commandment: honor thy father and mother. This biblical mandate has two sides. After asking who honors their parents, the Ripalda catechism Table 2. Household Composition: Tenango and Visitas, 1770

Lone residents Families without a conjugal nucleus Families with a simple conjugal nucleus Extended families Families with multiple conjugal units

Tenango de razón

indios

Visitas indios

1.2% 1.9% 48.3% 8.1% 40.5%

0.7% 0.7% 63.7% 9.1% 25.8%

1.5% 0.9% 68.0% 1.5% 28.1%

Source: 1770 ecclesiastical padrón, Tenango del Valle. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 628, exp. 14. Note: Household typology is that adopted by the Cambridge Group (cited in Flandrin, 315–316).

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replies, “He who obeys, helps, and reveres them.” The catechism also states that parents should “sustain, teach, and provide them [children] with a marital status [estado] not against their wishes.”16 What did raising children actually involve in rural Mexico?17 Did parents treat young children in a special, protective manner? Did “childhood” exist for rural youngsters? Although rural children played games such as flying kites and hopscotch, they were not coddled. Parental discipline was sometimes harsh. The historical records have few examples of parental nurturing, and boys and girls were sent to work at an early age. Many parents sent their children to school only reluctantly, despite the increasing number of primary schools in central Mexican pueblos after 1750.18 In 1740 Xalatlaco’s priest complained that Indian parents kept children from school “with pretexts of their human convenience, employing the children either in guarding their livestock or watching their fields.”19 Parents needed children for these simple but important tasks. Muleteers, village officers, and some peddlers likely recognized that their children could benefit from an education. Yet reading, writing, and learning Spanish may have seemed of limited use to other Indians. Many rural schools had few students as a result. For parents, providing discipline assumed a great deal of importance, and many regularly punished their offspring.20 Some children even expected beatings from their fathers.21 Fathers mentioned these violent incidents with few qualms. One Indian unapologetically recalled that, on returning home one evening, his son irritated him so he beat him.22 As patriarch, such discipline was the father’s duty and prerogative. (Notably, I found no records of women beating their children.) When an excessive punishment occurred, neighbors seldom questioned it as they might if it had been the wife who was the victim.23 People understood that disrespectful children not only deserved but also needed punishment. People expressed some concern that children raised in single-parent homes, especially those headed by widows, might lack discipline. When a humble Spanish couple asked to marry, their priest sought a dispensation for them on the grounds that if they had not yet been incontinent they soon would be, because both were “children of widows.”24 A Spanish widower, hoping to raise his children in the best possible manner, told his priest that he sought to marry a certain woman because she was “noble, honest, and of good customs suitable for the company and education of [his] children.”25 Despite the many households headed by widows and other unmarried women, the belief persisted that a single woman could not properly raise children.26 Widows’ frequent poverty and suspicions of their illicit conduct played into doubts about their competence as parents. 56

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

Little evidence indicates that rural parents lavished attention on their children. Some documents mention women carrying their babies, but only the rare case tells of a parent playing with a child. When children died, parents insisted on a proper burial, sometimes bestowing small luxuries on the little bodies, such as painted coffins, flowers, and white shrouds. In this way Indian and non-Indian parents tried to ease their deceased child’s passage to heaven.27 When children survived to adulthood, parents felt a duty to marry them off, especially their daughters. The mounting preoccupation among the urban Spanish elite that their children make a match of equal social and economic status seldom concerned the rural poor.28 The small group of local native elites (for example, the descendants of caciques) and labradores probably wanted their children to marry into families of similar race and standing.29 Yet widespread concern among Indian parents to see their children marry “well” in economic terms does not emerge in the historical records. Rural parents instead focused on seeing their offspring marry under honorable circumstances. Félix Martín, an Indian father, had his daughter’s fiancé jailed in 1799 when the young man tried to break his promise of marriage. Félix complained that the man had “taken [his] daughter’s virginity.” In fact, she gave birth just days before the planned wedding, while in depósito.30 Félix took the youth to court in an attempt to remedy the insult of his daughter’s publicly known pregnancy and the boy’s reluctance to marry her. A pregnant mestiza similarly accused a suitor of reneging on his promise to marry her. In her 1820 petition to force his compliance, she concluded, “My father is very angry about the condition in which I have ended up.”31 Many parents asserted that their duty toward their daughters ended when they married. An Indian man with two daughters did not bother to leave them an inheritance because he gave their husbands the property his offspring could expect.32 In her will an Indian mother, leaving two unmarried daughters, asked her brother to care for the girls as a father. She added, “If tomorrow or another day they should marry, then he will leave them with their husbands.”33 Many parents did remain involved in their children’s lives, however. If a couple lived with the husband’s parents, the two generations interacted constantly. Mothers might intervene on behalf of a battered daughter. Some parents provided their widowed daughter with a haven from her in-laws’ inhospitable household. While many individuals wanted to leave their parental households to establish their own households, this could prove difficult. In Tenango in 1770, 47.8 percent of the households of gente de razón (non-Indians) and 35.9 57

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percent of Indian households contained either extended families or two or more conjugal units.34 Some couples eager to establish their own dwellings found that building costs or land scarcity stymied their plans.35 Some couples waited years, saving money to establish a separate residence from their parents. Others may have preferred to remain in their family homes, taking advantage of resources there or perhaps to care for an elderly parent. Inheritance disputes tell us much about relations between parents and their adult children. While Spanish law mandated partible inheritance for commoners, rural Indians often drafted wills without a notary and favored some children over others. In the civil suits filed to challenge such inequality, examples abound of both obedient, caring children and their ungrateful, callous siblings. As adults, good children remained subordinate to their parents: obedient, respectful, helpful, and patient regarding any gifts or inheritance that might come their way on their parents’ death. One eighteen-year-old Indian son recalled that when his mother told him to close up their house one night, “he, as a bachelor, promptly (as always) obeyed his mother.”36 But obedience could go too far. An Indian wife, vexed by particularly abusive in-laws, could not convince her husband to reproach his parents; his ingrained subordination would not let him act disrespectfully toward them. Rather than protest himself, the husband finally sent his wife to file a complaint about his parents before the local magistrate.37 Adult children disobeyed their parents in many ways: simple insubordination or name-calling, striking, or publicly insulting their father or mother. Such conduct violated the Fourth Commandment and could prompt disinheritance. Ungrateful children especially dismayed parents. One Indian widow complained of a son who tried to strip her of the lands left by her late husband, disregarding the three children still in her care. “Instead of feeding and caring for me, it is the opposite,” she said. “Having fought against the mother, what kind of son can he be?”38 While offspring could not depend on generosity during their parents’ lifetime, except perhaps for wedding gifts or gifts of livestock, they expected parents to reciprocate on their death. Parents were well aware of this responsibility to leave an inheritance. In land disputes, parents often argued that they needed land in order to endow their children and grandchildren. Individuals criticized parents who squandered their goods, leaving little for their offspring. Perhaps parents insisted on postponing gifts to their offspring until their death in order to maintain the latter’s loyalty and ensure their help through old age and death.39 Social norms held that elderly parents deserved respect 58

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

and care both as parents and because of their age. When two Indian sisters saw that their aged father could support neither himself nor his wife, they chose to act responsibly and respectfully. The daughters supported him and his wife for eleven years, during which time their father never “advanced a peso.”40 Some children refused to care for their needy parents. An Indian woman locked in a dispute with her brother over their paternal inheritance charged that he disregarded their elderly mother. The brother threatened that when their mother died, his sister would pay all her burial costs. Worse yet, the brother maliciously tore down a shelter adjoining his house where the old woman sometimes spent the night. In the sister’s view, he ignored his mother’s advanced age, leaving her “to the four winds.” Although the mother had paid for his marriage, the son (with “evil impiety”) had clearly failed her.41 Thus he defied the norm of reciprocity between parent and child. Ideally, relations between parents and children were mutual, although the Bible and pastoral theology stressed children’s duties to their elders. Many families lived peacefully according to this norm. For others, especially those families affected by land shortages, expectations regarding mutual obligations often went unfulfilled and provoked intense emotions and actions. Some living parents were unable or unwilling to provide their children with resources (land, livestock, or a house site) to begin an independent adult life. Some indigent parents, even on their deathbeds, had nothing to leave their children. Land shortages also obliged many married couples to remain in one spouse’s parental household. The land shortage affecting districts such as Tenango put added pressure on relations between children and their parents. Action against one’s parents not only disturbed family relations; it also challenged a basic element of the social hierarchy. Thus church and society alike condemned disrespectful sons and daughters.

Like Family: Bastards, Orphans, and Servants Examining how people of ambiguous standing such as bastards, orphans, and servants fit into households reveals much about the meaning and practical reality of belonging to a family. Families most fully embraced orphans adopted as sons or daughters. Bastards endured the stain of their birth and were excluded from certain privileges reserved for legitimate family members. Servants had personal, often close links to their employer and his or her family, but they were not included in the family’s innermost circle. 59

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Whatever the circumstance of birth,42 illegitimacy affected the lives of bastards at home and in public. Ann Twinam has shown that illegitimacy created a substantial barrier for the elite sons of colonial Latin America, blocking them from high government posts, the priesthood, and prestigious marriage partners.43 For Indians and others who never had such opportunities, what exactly did illegitimacy imply? At home, usually growing up in their mother’s household, bastards were treated as “family.” I have no evidence that bastard children faced prejudicial treatment at home, for example, by being condemned to an unfair share of labor. During their lifetimes, illegitimate and legitimate children received the same rights, including access to land. One Indian mother with four sons (the last of whom was born during her widowhood) equally divided the family’s landholdings, ensuring that the bastard son received a quarter. Yet he understood he would possess his share only during his lifetime. On his death, the parcel would return to his legitimate brothers, the true lineage.44 Illegitimacy had little effect on this man: properly cared for by his mother, he later married in the church and raised three children with his wife. Yet being a bastard did matter when it came to the rights to inherit and bequeath family property.45 Bastard children might be included in wills,46 and they could even inherit goods unless someone challenged the validity of the bequest. Bastards grew up, however, with the understanding that they could not take any inheritance for granted. The bastard Indian Eusebio Juan grasped the handicaps he faced on receiving family lands. Joined by an aunt, Eusebio fought a long legal battle for their ancestors’ property. He eventually capitulated, stating plainly, “I am an hijo natural [illegitimate] and am widely known as such in the pueblo.” Yet Eusebio pleaded that his aunt should receive the lands.47 Eusebio clearly understood that, as a bastard, he had fewer rights than legitimate offspring. A mother likewise might sue for her bastard child’s paternal inheritance, but such a petition could be rejected. The often-shady circumstances of an illegitimate birth made paternity difficult to prove. Bernabela Antonia, the Indian mother of a seven-year-old boy, sued so that he might inherit from don José Gómez, an unmarried Spaniard who she claimed was the father. She had agreed to sexual relations with Gómez when she was a servant in his house in Calimaya because, she claimed, he had promised to marry her. She raised her child in don José’s house. When he died intestate, Bernabela made a strong case for her son, rather than the deceased’s relatives, to inherit. Don José’s family countered that Bernabela was just a common whore, offering examples of her loose behavior. The true father, they argued, had to be someone else. Finally, they insisted that don José never would have promised to marry 60

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an Indian. The local magistrate, however, sympathized with the bastard son’s rights.48 Being called a bastard implied racial impurity and was therefore especially damning. This accusation, and the additional charge of being a mulatto, was often used to discredit an adversary.49 Refuting a charge of illegitimate birth could prove difficult. Baptismal registers sometimes misrepresented the circumstances of one’s birth. Priests unfamiliar with their parishioners’ home life could be misled to record an illegitimate birth as legitimate.50 In the public domain, a person born out of wedlock might suffer attacks on character and doubts about his or her parentage, especially in terms of race.51 Bastard children suffered ambiguous treatment. Law and society accorded them certain rights within their families, but in questions of inheritance bastards often paid for their parents’ mistakes and choices. A person of bastard birth did not face this fact every day, but eventually illegitimacy might thwart his or her future. Orphans, once adopted, occupied a more secure position than bastards. Some doubts may have existed about their origins, but people tended to view orphans as the victims of unhappy circumstances. If an orphan’s inheritance from his or her adopted parents was contested, judges usually upheld the orphan’s right. In contrast to urban areas, few children in the Toluca region appear to have been abandoned by their parents. Most could call themselves huérfanos de padres, which indicated that they were born of a stable union and orphaned when their parents died.52 Local people seldom questioned their backgrounds since relatives or others who knew their families usually took these children into their homes. Nevertheless, doubt could surround an orphan’s past. Some people seemed to confuse (or purposely conflate) the terms bastard and orphan.53 For example, one man, trying to undo a counterclaim to family lands, declared of his rival, “It is well‑known that he was hijo bastardo, or expuesto in don Leonardo de la Cruz’s house.”54 In some cases the use of both terms was probably correct. In others, calling an orphan a bastard was groundless and hard to refute. Some orphans found their race, rather than their legitimacy, questioned. An orphaned woman of padres desconocidos (unknown parents) found it difficult to prove she was Spanish as she claimed.55 In Indian pueblos, where land tenure and eligibility for village offices rested on race, as with bastards, people might question an orphan’s racial purity. For example, some confusion existed over the race of a villager’s mother orphaned decades earlier. Her son asserted that she was an Indian; orphaned, she became part of a household 61

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headed by a mulatto. Hence the son’s detractors asserted his mother was mulatto.56 Similarly when the villagers of Ocoyoacac took exception to their fiscal (lay assistant to the parish priest) in 1790, they did not hesitate to label him a “mulatto orphan.”57 Both law and ecclesiastical policy promoted special protection for orphans because they lacked parental help. In petitions for dispensations of marriage impediments, priests might mention that an orphan bride lacked protection and thus must marry.58 One young Indian woman left her home pueblo because her widowed mother remarried elsewhere; in her absence, others usurped her paternal inheritance. Colonial judges upheld her claim to the land and ordered the local magistrate to help her reclaim her lands, stating that she needed special protection as required in “the case of minors, principally orphans.”59 Common people too believed that orphans needed special aid and selflessly took these children into their homes. A tradition existed of informal, long-term adoptions by relatives or friends, without a judge or priest’s supervision.60 Recounting life with their adoptive families, orphans often mentioned being treated como hijo or como hija—like a son or a daughter. As with other offspring, adopted children developed reciprocal ties with their new parents. They helped with planting or building the family house. These orphans worked in their new households not as bondsmen but as any respectful son or daughter would. In return, parents paid for their adopted children’s weddings and named them in their wills. For example, an Indian told of “a nephew of [his] called Vicente whom [he has] in place of a son, and [who has him] as father.”61 Some studies of orphanhood in colonial Mexico argue that households took in orphaned or abandoned children for selfish reasons, primarily to increase the household labor force.62 Certainly adoptions occurred that profited from an orphan’s labor.63 Yet most adoptions in the rural Toluca region led to a sense of mutual responsibility and affection between orphans and the adults who sheltered and raised them. Many parents willed an inheritance to adopted children, often calling the adoptee their son or daughter in the testament. Orphans could become part of a family in equal measure to blood kin. Little divided servants from their masters in the humble ranches and village houses of the Mexican countryside. In the past sirviente referred not only to domestic help (maids, cooks, tortilla makers, wet nurses) but also to field hands, watchmen, and shepherds. Servants and masters often slept in the same room, worked side by side, and ate from the same pot. Servants who accepted their subordinate position and demonstrated loyalty to their masters 62

Households and the Meanings of Kinship

could expect to reap some benefits by belonging to the master’s household. Yet compared to orphans, servants occupied an insecure position. Masters were apprehensive of servants as agents of danger and disorder from the world beyond the home. Many servants lived with their employers and family members. Even in wealthier homes, a servant might sleep in the same room with his or her employer. The servant Bernabela Antonia, whose bastard son was raised in don José Gómez’s house, slept in the same room with her master.64 In 1850 a labrador and his wife, wealthy enough to dedicate one room as an oratory, slept with their two young Indian servant girls in the kitchen.65 Servants, employers, and their families shared more than sleeping space. They often worked at the same chores, ate together, talked, joked, bickered, and cared for one another when ill. The familiarity bred in such close quarters might result in sexual encounters whose consequences varied according to gender norms. Society condoned sex between male masters and female servants. Husbands, for example, might commit adultery with the molendera. Pregnant maids vainly attempted to force the master’s son to fulfill his promise of marriage.66 When male servants took advantage of close contact with the women of the house, it proved quite a different story. This was seen as a violation of the safe confines of the very house they were to protect.67 Consider the story of Julián Marcelo, a twenty-year-old Indian servant. After leaving his hamlet in the hope of saving for a future marriage, Julián found work in a wealthy Tenango house (which included three other servants, all females). He grew quite at home with his mistress, doña María Severina Millán, and her husband, don Francisco Rodríguez. A native speaker of Nahuatl, Julián was able to improve his spoken Spanish during his service; still, at times he did not understand his employers. Julián’s tasks included collecting maguey syrup for the pulque produced and sold by the household. He lived in the household for nearly a year without receiving his salary, a situation that hardly seemed to bother the young man. He boasted that he had become so familiar with Millán and her husband that “they both treated him not as a servant but as if he were a brother.”68 Then one rainy summer afternoon in 1790 Julián took that familiarity too far. With the master out of the house, Julián lay about until doña María roused him, calling him a lazybones and chiding him for failing to tend to the magueyes. He got up and, emulating what he understood as his mistress’s joking banter, lifted her onto a table and wrapped his hands round her head or, according to another witness, lay on top of her.69 The other servants watched, as did two boys in the doorway. At that moment the master of the 63

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house entered. Shamed by the spectacle created by his insubordinate servant and brazen wife, don Francisco furiously chased Julián out of the house. He had his “audacious and uppity” servant jailed and sought his banishment from Tenango for “acting boldly toward decent Spanish girls.” With the help of a lawyer, Julián denied overstepping the bounds of decency and tried to prove he knew his place as a subordinate. He pleaded that, despite his lowly origins, “I would never dare to behave as reported, or to act as an equal with Spanish girls.” Brotherly or otherwise, Julián and doña María’s connection persisted: the mistress herself brought him food and pulque in jail. Further shamed by this public show, the master had his wife placed in depósito. Julián remained locked up for three months, then was sent back to his pueblo and warned sternly not to return.70 The hierarchical relationship between master and dependents had eroded to a dangerous degree in this household. But the problem went beyond Julián Marcelo’s trespass of status and gender. The master, an absent and neglectful patriarch, had failed all his dependents. By insisting on the boy’s prolonged jailing and banishment and his wife’s depósito, don Francisco aimed to reestablish his authority at home and to demonstrate his control of wife and servants to his neighbors and family. Masters expected servants to demonstrate their loyalty publicly. They sometimes asked their employees to serve as go-betweens and thugs in violent confrontations. In doing so, servants publicized their loyalty, thus enhancing the master’s status in local society.71 On returning from Sunday Mass with his wife, an Indian servant discovered six men from a nearby pueblo carting off wood from his labrador employer’s monte. The servant fought the thieves and nearly lost his cloak in the process. The man risked his own safety because, as he explained, “all this ranch’s servants have the responsibility of guarding the monte.”72 Loyalty to one’s employer had its dangers. Loyalty also offered advantages for servants, especially for those who served an influential person. One man engaged in a dispute with a widow faced a formidable opponent. The widow, he griped, “as the priest’s servant and with his protection has managed to seize my land.”73 When a doña accused a mulatto of physically threatening her, the fact that he was the parish priest’s servant saved him from serious scrutiny.74 Servants in general had an ambivalent relationship with the households in which they served. Those who lived with their employers shared in all of the household’s daily activities. Relations between a servant and the employer’s family might even be cordial to the point of intimacy normally extended only to kin. Indeed, the young Indian Julián Marcelo held that the prosperous Spanish couple that he served “treated him not as a servant but as a brother.” 64

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Similarly, a loyal servant might use his or her employer’s reputation for personal advantage just as one might invoke a powerful relative’s name for gain. Servants who demonstrated their loyalty to the household—like orphans and bastard offspring—might take a place by the tlecuil, invited to share in the tortillas, pulque, and talk. Yet servants ultimately occupied a liminal status, straddling house and street. The French historian Sarah Maza argues that servants were not family members but “marginal creatures”: outsiders, generally unmarried, and with an ill-defined social status.75 Masters and mistresses viewed servants as an unpredictable, possibly dangerous presence in the home. In the end, servants were only servants. Masters did not include them in wills or help them to marry. Households accepted servants; families did not.

A Word about Friends Friends seldom entered the domestic sphere. One Indian described the “mutual familiarity” between him and a friend as so great that “when he comes to [his] house, he comfortably asks for something to eat, pulque, or whatever there is, so with him as with his children.” He continued, “I treat him with the most disinterested love of friends.”76 My research, however, yielded few such examples of intimacy and generosity beyond the family. Rural men were more likely than women to spend time with friends. Observers reported that some men were inseparable from a particular friend. Male companions shared meals, drank in stores and pulquerías, planned expeditions to the market, and worked together in the fields. Most male socializing occurred, markedly, beyond the house. While women surely had friendships, their work around the house and the disapproval of their ventures outside its walls limited their contacts beyond home and family. Furthermore, those wives who lived in their husband’s barrio or pueblo may have felt unwelcome in the unfamiliar community. For women especially, friends seldom entered into the type of intimate relations one had with family members.77 Stern posits that male and female sociability differed inherently. Women carried on “background conversations pursued amidst female work such as washing, water gathering, or petty vending. For men the context of sociability was more often a diversionary release, a time-out from work and drudgery.” Furthermore, male sociability had an edge of “competition and challenge” and often took place with strangers and could turn violent.78 The street, then, was a domain for men, fraught with potential danger. 65

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The dissimilar patterns of male and female friendships suggest how the idealized divide between house and street limited the social universe of Mexican women. Honorable women stayed in the supposed safety of the domestic sphere, away from the uncertainty and strange men on the streets. The house, it was hoped, would protect them even if their husbands or fathers could not. María Negrete, a twenty-eight-year-old wife in Ocoyoacac, knew this well. Her lover was in the house when her husband returned from business in Mexico City. While her lover rushed to hide inside, she stood in the doorway to greet her husband. He accused her of drinking. Playing the honorable wife, María admitted she had had a bit of pulque, “but she drank it in the house and not in the street.”79

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five

Scandalous Men and Intrepid Women

Question: Who else are understood as Parents (Padres) beyond one’s natural parents? Answer: Those greater in age, knowledge, and government. Ripalda Catechism

Order in Mexico was achieved by hierarchical and patriarchal rule whereby commoners deferred to officials, wives to husbands, and children to parents. The three incidents described here involve women and men who refused to assume the subordinate role appropriate to their position. Each incident revolved around a public event witnessed by a range of people: a brawl in a store, name-calling on the street, and mistreatment in the village jail. Each served as a community-wide lesson about appropriate behavior with respect to an individual’s gender, social standing, age, occupation, and family. To understand popular notions of hierarchy and order, we look to the onlookers: the neighbors, kin, priests, royal officials, and casual bystanders who passed judgment. The resolution of each case points to the enduring strength and popular acceptance of hierarchical and patriarchal rule in Mexico. Ideas about family and gender in the home transferred to the public sphere. People understood that society should follow the model of the father-headed family in which women, minors, Indians, and commoners occupied a subordinate position. Society had little tolerance for insubordinate individuals who disturbed this order. Women who transgressed the norm met with especially harsh judgment. Yet the judicial system, protective and paternalistic toward women, sometimes did not punish them as severely as it did men accused of similar wrongdoing.

Hijos del Pueblo

Countering Patriarchy: Three Cases “Whatever the Son Says, the Father Does” After Mass in Tenango del Valle one morning in 1796, José Mariano Sánchez stepped out of church to see people gathered at don Francisco Mercado’s store. Curious about the noisy crowd, Sánchez, a thirty-five-year-old married Spaniard, proceeded to the store. He witnessed young Manuel Mercado fighting with his father, the proprietor. Sánchez and the crowd looked on as the elder Mercado threw a block of sugar at his son, who hurled it back at his father’s chest. The youth then grabbed a horsewhip, saying menacingly, “Carajo, I’ll teach you to hit,” and struck his father’s head with the handle. Sánchez worried that the boy might kill his father, but several men restrained him. The display so astonished Sánchez that he backed off and urged those nearby “to leave the scene because of the scandal.” He feared “a lightning bolt might strike, brought on by the boy’s unspeakable insolence toward his father.”1 News of the fray reached don Juan Joseph Garduño, Manuel’s grandfather. His daughter, doña Barbara (the boy’s mother), soon complained to him that Manuel showed her little respect. Overhearing his mother, Manuel burst into the room, brandishing a stick of firewood, and goaded his grandfather with “dishonest words.” Seeing this, don Mariano Garduño, Juan Joseph’s son, struck Manuel three times with a branch in order to defend his father. By the time his grandfather and uncle complained to the magistrate, Manuel had fled. When the youth challenged his uncle by repeatedly riding past his house on horseback, don Juan Joseph formally accused his grandson before the teniente de justicia. In this petition (apparently composed without a lawyer’s help), the elder Garduño sought Manuel’s capture, but blamed his son-in-law Mercado for raising the boy so poorly. The boy’s parents, Garduño claimed, were overly lenient with their children when “it should be the opposite[,] . . . whatever the son says, the father does.” Don Francisco’s refusal to let officials jail his son after the notorious skirmish in the store only confirmed his negligence. Garduño charged that Francisco and Manuel scandalized Tenango. Alluding to revolutionary France, Garduño argued that by allowing this scandalous example to go unchecked, “I and the populace will say that we have already entered into the French licentiousness” [underlined in the original]. He begged the teniente not to allow “a father’s honor to be lost nor the son to remain at liberty” and urged him to jail his son-in-law in lieu of the fugitive boy. The teniente followed Garduño’s suggestion: when Manuel’s parents resisted 68

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their son’s arrest, the officer ordered the apprehension of the father, Francisco Mercado. At don Juan Joseph’s request, several vecinos and the parish priest testified about the Mercado household. The four lay witnesses were married Spanish men, from Tenango’s more respectable households. Having read Garduño’s statement, José Mariano Sánchez attested that Manuel Mercado was a “daring, provocative, and insolent youth” and recalled the brawl he had witnessed. Since that morning in the store, similar incidents had occurred, and the interactions between the Mercado parents and children appalled Tenango families. Previous scandals, Sánchez noted, had provoked the Mercados’ expulsion from two small Indian pueblos. The other witnesses largely repeated Sánchez’s report (although two of them had not observed the brawl). With stories about the shopkeeper’s family rife in Tenango, hearsay formed the basis of their reports. The parish priest, bachiller (bachelor’s degree holder) don Mariano Josef Maldonado denounced the Mercado household as “exceedingly scandalous.” As a house of trade, the “curses, obscene words, shouts, [and] fights” offended all the parishioners. Disputes occurred between husband and wife but more shockingly between children and parents as well. Maldonado noted the vulgarity of even the younger children, who addressed their parents with words usually heard in taverns, uttered only by “common people.” Furthermore, the Mercado offspring raised their hands at their parents “before a multitude of people who remained horrified.” The priest declared that all Tenango could testify to the time that Manuel struck his father with the whip handle. Finally, Maldonado disclosed that no one in the Mercado family had complied with the Easter duty of confession and communion; and only rarely did the mother attend Mass. Authorities failed to capture either Manuel or his father for at least two weeks. The fugitives obviously understood the extent to which Garduño, the teniente, and local society condemned their conduct. Garduño filed another petition for their arrest, this time with a lawyer. He focused on Manuel’s threat to kill his own mother, but the true culprit was Francisco Mercado, whose “reprehensible tolerance and dissimulation is what originates and foments it.” The boy’s poor upbringing was the problem. “The good education of children,” declared Garduño through his lawyer, “is an essential parental obligation.” Unable to capture either Mercado, the subdelegado sought advice from a lawyer of the Real Audiencia several months later. The lawyer, like the people of Tenango, believed that the son’s abuse of his father in the store, in front of others, “constituted the extreme of atrocious offense.” The lawyer emphasized 69

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both the scene of the transgression and the impropriety of cursing one’s parents. He advised the subdelegado to pursue Manuel’s arrest; if the boy failed to appear, he should be charged with rebellion. The case ends there, leaving tantalizing questions about Manuel’s age, doña Barbara’s opinion of her father’s pursuit, and past relations between Garduño and his son-in-law. Two questions can be explored. Why did Garduño pursue a lawsuit to correct what was in essence a family matter? Why did people find the incident in the store so abominable? The Garduño family’s position in local society in part answers both questions. Several Garduño families lived in the Toluca valley. While they undoubtedly shared common ancestors, it is unclear to what degree kinship linked families with the Garduño surname in the late colonial period. Having been settled in the Toluca valley for generations, the Garduños called themselves Spaniards and married into the region’s other settled labrador families. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, men named Garduño held relatively important positions throughout the region and clearly belonged to the local elite.2 Don Juan Joseph Garduño occupied a special niche within this successful clan. In an era of increasing instability for labradores, he managed to attain the status of hacendado by purchasing la Asunción estate around 1792. He had business interests beyond the immediate area.3 Garduño’s allusion to France suggests he was educated and informed. His unruly grandson and heedless son-in-law’s display did not befit Garduño’s elevated status in the valley. What people witnessed at the store clashed with notions of proper conduct for a Spaniard and a don, especially for don Juan Joseph Garduño’s family. In rural Mexico the tienda (shop) was an important gathering place. There, all kinds of people rubbed shoulders on a daily basis. While men and women, Indians and Spaniards, met at church, religious processions, fiestas, and tianguis, those were periodic events. Pulquerías also attracted a mix of rural and town people but tended to draw primarily Indians and mestizos. Tiendas, by contrast, daily drew customers from all of rural society. A soldier stationed in Calimaya could stop in a corner store to buy cigarettes or cookies. A Tianguistengo store drew an Indian couple from a distant hamlet to exchange homespun wool for some sugar and a few coins. A Spanish housewife in Tenango purchased spices at a store on the nearby plaza. Vagabonds and groups of gossiping men also hung about store entrances.4 Possibly more than other commodities, storekeepers sold glasses of cheap, locally produced liquors such as aguardiente and tepache. Whereas many pulquerías were tucked away on side streets, often in private homes, tiendas typically faced the main plaza. There drinking became a relatively public activity, frequently ending in 70

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disturbances and violence.5 In sum, the store was a domain open to all and a domain open to scandal. Growing up in the tienda, the Mercado children would know coarse language. That they, don Juan Joseph Garduño’s grandchildren, would direct such words at their parents was an affront. Worse, anyone in Tenango who entered the store might witness the grandchildren’s poor upbringing. The Mercado household provided a tableau of negligent parents and disobedient children. Given the importance of appearances in honor-bound Mexico, I imagine that if the incidents described had taken place behind closed doors, witnessed only by kin, Garduño might have avoided the magistrate. But this disorder occurred in the public arena of Mercado’s store, thus sullying Garduño’s reputation. What explains Garduño’s dogged pursuit of a family matter in the courts? Possibly he avoided extralegal action for fear that it would backfire on him.6 More obviously, Garduño decided to pursue the case with the district magistrate to uphold his own good name after this public disgrace. By calling witnesses and involving the parish priest, Garduño let his neighbors know the limit of his responsibility in the case: not he but the irresponsible Francisco Mercado was to blame. By pursuing this family matter through judicial channels, don Juan Joseph distanced himself from his disreputable, store-owning son-in-law. Simultaneously he showed Tenango that he, as the upright family elder, would see to the punishment of his family’s unruly branch. Judicial action also publicly condemned the Mercados’ disregard of the natural order of family and society. When the boy struck and cursed his father and grandfather, Tenango residents saw an attack on patriarchy, the very basis of the social order they knew and upheld. Apparently without provocation, the youth had challenged his father’s rule. His actions inverted family and social order. Observers found it even harder to accept such aberrant and unnatural behavior in the family of a prominent Spaniard. Local people apparently did not understand this case as an anomaly. No one suggested, for example, that Manuel was sick or mentally unsound, as his extreme violence might suggest. Instead they looked for a general explanation and determined that their world might be breaking down. This was the “French licentiousness” Garduño so feared. One churchgoing vecino perceived the assault on a father’s authority as a collapse of such magnitude as to invite divine disfavor: in Sánchez’s words, lightning bolts from the heavens.

“This Disgraceful Woman, Author of Her Own Ruin” Doña Cayetana Saldívar of Xalatlaco told the teniente de justicia in November 1806 that Victoriano Millán, the mulatto servant of her parish priest, had 71

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attacked her one night and that several days later he had threatened to kill her.7 Although witnesses would dispute her accusation, it set into motion a yearlong series of judicial proceedings in which she struggled to uphold her honor. Doña Cayetana’s pueblo, Xalatlaco, was nestled in the mountains; its predominantly Indian population led a hardscrabble existence, forced to rely on products from the monte to supplement income from their small pieces of arable land. The pueblo’s limited economic prospects drew few Spaniards. It had a history of antipathy toward outsiders and things Spanish. Throughout the eighteenth century, the república contested priests, schoolteachers, and tribute collectors. In 1740 the priest reported that the entire pueblo fled to the monte to avoid paying tribute and clerical fees.8 In 1806 the república filed a point-by-point complaint with episcopal authorities against their priest, bachiller don José Salas Moreno, in which his failure to teach and confess in “our language” loomed large.9 Doña Cayetana Saldívar belonged to the elite in this poor and isolated community. Like her parents, she bore the honorific title “doña,” and she stressed her status as a “doncella,” or maiden. Saldívar always put on the airs of an española, but she was probably a mestiza (as were her cousins). Saldívar never stated her ethnicity in legal proceedings, preferring to refer to herself as “of virgin status and a neighbor of the village of Xalatlaco” (de estado doncella y vecina del pueblo de Xalatlaco). More than pretense placed doña Cayetana among Xalatlaco’s select. She owned property that included the pueblo’s small store (estanquillo), which also served as a pulquería. She sold small quantities of thread or yarn to Mexico City.10 Oddly enough for a doña and a businessperson, in 1806 Saldívar could not sign her name. About twenty-five years old then, Saldívar had an unusually forthright manner and enmeshed herself in local affairs. At the time she and her widowed stepmother (who Saldívar often referred to simply as her mother) lived alone. According to Saldívar, problems with Victoriano Millán began one Monday about ten o’clock at night, as she and her mother returned home from a “certain visit.” Millán appeared in the road, bearing a club with which he threatened the women. Doña Cayetana described Millán as the “servant or I don’t know what of the Señor Cura.” Accompanying Millán was the priest’s vicario (ordained assistant), who also was poised to strike her. Her mother intervened to contain the fight. Saldívar had no idea why the men threatened her. On a Sunday afternoon two weeks later, doña Cayetana set out to visit a female cousin. Two married women joined her on the walk through Xalatlaco: a twenty-year-old Spanish-speaking india and a fifty-year-old española. They passed Millán standing in a doorway, and Saldívar urged her companions to 72

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hurry, fearing his impertinence. Millán followed on horseback. When the trio reached their destination, he tried to force his way, mounted, into the house, but the cousin hastily shut the house doors on him. Millán remained in the street, talking insolently and threatening to kill Saldívar, declaring he would have her neck. So doña Cayetana recounted this incident to the teniente; again she claimed complete ignorance as to why Millán might pursue her. Saldívar presented five witnesses: the friends who accompanied her that afternoon, the female cousin whom they visited and her Indian servant, and an Indian man who glimpsed the encounter as he returned home from sapping his magueyes. They all told the same story as doña Cayetana (including the death threat) and claimed ignorance of any motive that might have provoked Millán to intimidate her. Their reports about the second incident reveal some telling details and contradictions. For example, Millán did not pursue the women on horseback but on a less noble animal, a mule. Only one witness said she heard Millán call Saldívar “a despicable whore.” Another lone witness reported that Millán bore a knife. Although an outside legal counsel found the discrepancies disturbing, he took the charges seriously. He advised the subdelegado to jail the accused, as Saldívar had requested in a second petition (drafted with a lawyer) that stressed her fears of reprisal. Victoriano Millán denied Cayetana Saldívar’s charges, but he did acknowledge a history of antipathy between her and his employers, the parish priest and his vicario. This unmarried mulatto servant had settled in Xalatlaco, arriving from Xalmolonga, a sugar plantation near Malinalco. Slaves and workers from this plantation had gained a bad reputation in recent decades.11 Millán’s polished statement notably does not resemble the typical speech of someone of his background, which suggests that his patrons helped with his defense. The fact that he served Xalatlaco’s “two most respectable persons” shielded Millán in great measure from Saldívar’s charges. Regarding the first skirmish, Millán explained that the priest believed that Saldívar was stirring up dissent among the Indians at all hours. So the vicario ordered Millán to accompany him that night to check on her. When the two men glimpsed her, her stepmother, and an Indian on the dark road, doña Cayetana was shouting to her companions that “the Indians were the same as the priest and the priest the same as the Indians and that the vicario is a drone [zángano].” The vicario responded by calling her a “biting foul-mouth” and ordered her to shut her mouth. If she had problems with the priests, the vicario urged her to explain at the parish rather than in public. Millán claimed that he had remained silent but that Saldívar raised her hand and slapped him. (Perhaps God kept her from striking the vicario, Millán suggested.) The vicario stepped between the two, blocking any further blows. 73

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With regard to the Sunday afternoon episode, Millán recalled that he was visiting with a family when Saldívar and her friends passed by. When she exclaimed for all on the street to hear, “Here is the black bully [negro garrotero],” the servant responded only with “silence and prudence.” Returning to the parish residence, Millán crossed paths again with doña Cayetana, at which point she began to taunt him: “Here come the blacks from Xalmolonga, taming mules, and this one is the Fathers’ chivasti12 and pimp.” Such words merited a physical attack, but Millán limited himself to a verbal one, calling her “despicable, spiteful, vengeful, ordinary, provocative, pies rajados . . . and perhaps other insults that [he didn’t] recall.” By calling her pies rajados (literally, “split feet”) Millán compared her to a shoeless Indian. Despite having used strong words, the servant swore he never threatened to take her life. Millán, like Saldívar, brought forth witnesses about that Sunday afternoon’s events. One was a mestizo labrador (and doña Cayetana’s relative) who witnessed the altercation as he sat in his doorway; from this perch, his visiting brother-in-law also watched. Two female members of the family that Millán was visiting testified as well. The schoolmaster, Sebastián Garduño of Calimaya, was walking through town when he saw Millán and heard a voice from inside a house, which he recognized as doña Cayetana’s yelling insults at Millán. The vicario testified about the previous incident on the road, closely following Millán’s version of events. Unlike Saldívar’s witnesses, these individuals all reported on the previous tension between her and the priest, noting her anger when he failed to officiate at Mass one Sunday. The priest, Salas Moreno, reported on Saldívar days later. He complained that she acted “in contempt not only of [his] status, jurisdiction, and ministry,” but tainted the honor of his house and servants. Her “wicked” case against Millán was perjurious. Because of Saldívar’s role as “seductress and troublemaker” among his parishioners, Salas Moreno had recently accused her before the high ecclesiastical court, the Provisorato. The priest claimed that she gathered the Indians at night in her pulquería, offering them drink. “This disgraceful woman,” he warned, would be the “author of her own ruin.” In April 1807 the subdelegado’s outside legal adviser cleared Victoriano Millán of the charges. Instead he named Cayetana Saldívar as the provocateur and bid her to pay the legal fees. The jurist based his opinion on two issues: the relative credibility of the witnesses and the accuser’s inappropriate conduct as a woman of her social standing. The jurist’s detailed analysis of the witnesses provides a candid look at how factors such as gender and race influenced the administration of justice in colonial Mexico. For example, he found it problematic that only one of 74

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Saldívar’s five witnesses was a man, and that man was an Indian and a tlachiquero (a collector of pulque), which made him a questionable witness.13 Millán, on the other hand, presented six witnesses, four of whom were men, including the vicario. Millán’s witnesses had greater credibility because of “their status, quality, and good reputation.” Better yet, none were related to Millán. By contrast, at least two of Saldívar’s witnesses were her own kin. While the jurist found discrepancies between testimonies on both sides, he nevertheless sided with those proferred by the more respectable witnesses. Besides, in the months since the incidents, Millán never attempted to harm Saldívar. The verbal insults to which each confessed bore equal weight and thus canceled each other. Because Spanish law upheld that physical injuries signified a greater offense than verbal abuse, the blow that doña Cayetana allegedly delivered to Millán that night merited punishment. The jurist concluded that “the true culprit is Cayetana Saldívar.” The jurist finished the verdict with a brief treatise on female comportment: Although she calls herself doña Cayetana, and vows that she is a doncella, it should not influence her censure. Besides that, her behavior does not correspond with her status or with the Don, because a Señora Doncella does not go about accompanied by young indias looking for disputes in the street.

Clearly Saldívar’s general behavior bothered the jurist more than the facts of the case. Her conduct simply did not fit with her gender, marital status, or elite pretensions. Despite his condemnation, the jurist took a paternal stance and forgave doña Cayetana, precisely because she was a woman. Although Saldívar deserved punishment, “in regard for her and her sex,” he thought it better simply to conclude the case, warning both Saldívar and Millán to abstain from similar conduct. Because she was a woman, Saldívar’s case earned her both judicial punishment and protection. Hearing this decision, Saldívar enlisted a lawyer to file an appeal in the Real Sala de Crimen, Mexico City’s high criminal court. Her July 1807 petition was denied. Her lawyer pursued an appeal into the fall, a year after the incidents with Millán. Saldívar seemed obsessed with reopening the case. What did Saldívar stand to gain by pursuing litigation at this point? Given that the later petitions shift attention from Millán to the parish priest, it seems that all along Saldívar’s dispute had more to do with the priests than with their servant. 75

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A history of animosity between the priest Salas Moreno and Saldívar emerges in these entreaties. Her lawyer alluded to the priest’s improprieties, adding that Millán helped his employers in their “excesses.” If Saldívar had called Millán the priests’ “pimp,” her lawyer asserted that such a claim was no lie given their dealings with women. While the lawyer avoided specific charges, he obliquely explained that Salas Moreno’s enmity toward Saldívar began when she rejected his visits, “not finding in them all the purity that one expected of a priest.” Millán’s role as the priest’s intermediary with Saldívar appears in one incident she described. Once while she was bathing in the river, Millán sent some Indians to the same spot with the pretext of washing the priest’s horse. They purposely dirtied the water and then, with the horse, tried to make Saldívar fall into the river. She also offered some new insights into the events of that night on the road. Saldívar’s lawyer admitted that she did strike Millán’s face, but he framed the action as self-defense when the servant supposedly threatened her with a stick. At the same time, the attorney tried to discredit the vicario, asking why he and his servant, as gente de razón, disguised themselves and went out at such late hours to pursue “an honorable family,” Saldívar and her mother. If the vicario had doubts about her activities with the Indians, he should have investigated through legitimate channels. The lawyer maintained that the vicario too had a rancorous past with doña Cayetana and thus “never misses a chance to mortify her.”14 These accusations notwithstanding, in November 1807 the court again denied Saldívar’s appeal. Saldívar would continue to provoke scandal, even as a married woman. In late 1810, against her mother’s wishes, she married a vecino de comercio (businessman, merchant) named don Ignacio de la Puente. In January 1811 Saldívar’s mother accused the two of stealing fifteen loads of grain and 300 pesos from her. The theft undoubtedly took place, because de la Puente readily agreed to reimburse his mother-in-law for the missing grain.15 Whether Saldívar planned the robbery or simply backed her new husband, again she appears to be a schemer. In 1813 Saldívar was once again alone, having been widowed. Saldívar lived in Tianguistengo, but she still considered herself a vecina de Xalatlaco, returning to celebrate her saint’s day with relatives and neighbors. In Tianguistengo she “charitably” opened her home to a Xalatlaco couple hounded by debts. After three months, however, doña Cayetana ordered the husband into court for matters concerning his wife. She charged that her guest neglected his wife, seldom providing more than a real for her needs. Saldívar also claimed that he had threatened to kill his wife on the false assumption that she had had an extramarital affair. Saldívar essentially filed a 76

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mala vida case for the wife, her friend. What, beyond her meddlesome character, drove doña Cayetana to pursue such a case on someone else’s behalf? Not unlike her extended suit against Victoriano Millán, Saldívar intervened here to shore up her own honor. Apparently this man—whom she had so kindly “freed from the threatening ruin of shame” (over his debts)—had raised his voice to call Saldívar his wife’s “usurper.” Doña Cayetana urged the judge to allow the couple to reunite with the proviso that her own marred honor (which he had “so venomously dared to make public”) be restored.16 Saldívar married at least twice more. Her third husband, don Christóbal González condemned her strong character in an 1826 case against her. He protested that, in nine years of marriage, “she has treated me in the most strange and indolent manner, in fact I’ve never had a moment of pleasure at her side.” Moreover, in Xalatlaco and Tianguistengo people had seen her behave in “the most crude and insufferable manner.” Saldívar, in turn, painted her husband as a loafer, accusing him of wasting her money. Their marital strife continued for years as they disputed who would control the store in Xalatlaco. In 1831 Saldívar claimed that González accused her of murdering her second husband.17 At the same time, Saldívar took on the women of the neighboring Fonseca family. Trouble started in 1830 over a fence between their yards and some turkey hens and soon escalated into shoving and insults that ended only when their husbands dragged them apart. Saldívar accused the Fonsecas of immorality because their house contained a tavern. But even the witnesses hand-picked by her lawyer disagreed with this assessment of her neighbors and business rivals. For their part, the Fonseca women told neighbors that doña Cayetana deserved to be hit. To them, she was “a no-name black [una tal negra] who wants to pass as better, forgetting the friends she once had.” Three months after her first complaint, Saldívar remained adamant about the case’s gravity. These “crude and haughty women failed to respect her married status,” she protested, “as they dare to proclaim things that could harm [her] marriage.” After eight months, the case ended inconclusively amid charges that the Fonsecas and Saldívar called one another “whore.” Doña Cayetana tried to gain the judge’s attention by citing the Recopilación that required punishment for anyone who called a married woman a whore.18 People found Cayetana Saldívar audacious, crafty, prying, and offensive, in large measure because she was a woman. Even when married, she acted willfully, unrestrained by a husband or male relatives. Yet, as the last episode shows, she wanted the protection traditionally due a wife. The jurist who ruled on her case with Millán unequivocally pointed to the unseemliness of such conduct for any woman. Nonetheless being a woman, which had led to 77

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censure of her behavior in the first place, ironically shielded her from severe punishment. Perhaps doña Cayetana acted as the “woman on top,” subverting her prescribed role in society, fully aware that her gender would protect her from the full force of the law.19

“A Woman of Naturally Intrepid and Insubordinate Character” On April 1, 1799, the gobernador of Ocoyoacac, don Manuel Rafael Montes, and other república officers set out to collect a third of the year’s tribute from Indian households. By nine o’clock in the morning, they arrived at Manuel Trinidad’s house, where his wife, Xaviera Lugarda, home alone, greeted them. She owed thirteen reales tribute for herself and her husband but had only six reales in the house, which she claimed to have handed promptly to the gobernador. He then demanded payment for her three adult sons who lived in the household. Xaviera did not consider it her duty to pay their tribute, but Montes disagreed and ordered her jailed. His topiles (subordinates) shoved Xaviera all the way to his house and shackled her there. That night, Montes beat her. The next day he ordered an old woman to give Xaviera an enema (lavativa), an unusual and humiliating punishment. She spent two days and nights jailed.20 Xaviera and her husband soon hired a lawyer to protest Montes’s actions. Even if Xaviera had acted insolently, her lawyer stressed, such demeaning punishment was unjustified. The customs of tribute payment neither required her to cover her adult children’s bill nor required her to pay the entire sum until the end of the month. Worse yet, the gobernador was Xaviera’s “nephew” (his father was her first cousin). Perhaps as an orphan she had been raised by Montes’s parents, who had included her in their will. As kin, Montes should have treated her with respect rather than cruelty. Many individuals in Ocoyoacac witnessed Xaviera’s shameful cavalcade through town and her jailing. Many more heard about it. From the school, a teacher watched as the topiles delivered Xaviera to the gobernador’s house. Another Spaniard saw the same from his doorway; he later heard that the woman’s disrespectful behavior led to her incarceration. At the jail, the old midwife ordered to apply the enema, two other jailed Indian women, and their families all believed that Xaviera had somehow deserved the gobernador’s punishment. When Xaviera and her husband brought this case to the attention of Mexico City authorities, the affair moved beyond the village to the subdelegado’s attention. Clear irregularities in the gobernador’s actions emerge in the subdelegado’s 78

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files. Montes blatantly disregarded the etiquette of tribute collection. In fact, he jailed two other Indian women that same day when they too failed to pay tribute immediately. He freed one woman two days later but only on receipt of her household’s tribute. Although Montes had acted with obvious prejudice, he was not chided by the subdelegado. Montes also had his supporters in the village. Several Spanish and Indian witnesses he asked to respond to Xaviera Lugarda’s accusations commented that he treated villagers only with “rectitude” or “love and sweetness.” These men asserted that the insolent Xaviera deserved being jailed. No one suggested that Montes’s unorthodox practices might have provoked her noncompliance. While Montes’s witnesses could not report on the specific incident that led to Xaviera’s jailing, they readily commented on her character. Former village officers noted that Xaviera often failed to respect officeholders. Previous punishments “to control her intrepid condition” had been unsuccessful. One former officer attested that “there is no one who does not complain about her because of her foul mouth and intrepid, rebellious nature.” The subdelegado denounced Xaviera as a woman of “naturally intrepid and insubordinate character.” Quite possibly Xaviera was outspoken, even insolent. Perhaps she did respond rudely to Montes and his officers when he demanded tribute payment—immediately and for the entire household.21 A former escribano recalled that she acted similarly during every collection. Xaviera might even have been the offensive and rebellious person she was accused of on other occasions. Notably, no one vouched for her good character. Yet there were a few dissenting voices. The father of one jailed woman returned home from market that day only to learn that she had been incarcerated. He went to the gobernador’s house, admittedly drunk, and angrily demanded his daughter’s release. Montes ordered the man whipped but then allowed him to take his daughter home. A more disinterested show of protest came from the midwife directed to punish Xaviera with the enema. (The two other female prisoners did not receive this punishment.) This Indian widow of more than sixty did not wish to anger Montes, but she also did not wish to carry out this unusual task. So she entered Xaviera’s cell with a vessel of warm water and spilled some in the corner and a bit on Xaviera’s petticoats (naguas). The midwife then told the gobernador that she had carried out his order. By obeying but not complying, the midwife quietly showed her disapproval of Ocoyoacac’s principal officer. Later cases from Ocoyoacac magnify Montes’s less upstanding qualities. In 79

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1802 he used his position as gobernador to rob one villager of lands inherited from his father. Montes’s “intrusive authority” backfired, and the scheme fell apart. (This time the subdelegado felt obliged to chastise Montes for his malevolence.) In 1809 Montes again tried to usurp an inheritance; he falsified documents to dispossess his own niece and nephew.22 These cases clearly show Montes as a manipulator, abusing his authority and readily using illegal means to satisfy his greed. His disregard for family is apparent as well. Given this more developed character profile, Xaviera Lugarda’s outrage at Montes, her kinsman and gobernador, seems justifiable. Xaviera’s case shows again how justice in colonial Mexico went beyond evaluating the facts of culpability and emphasized issues of personal reputation. When neighbors and judges considered their characters, both Xaviera Lugarda and Cayetana Saldívar saw their status change from accuser to accused. Contentious men who questioned their superiors received little support from society. Women who acted in this manner presented a double threat: they challenged both the social hierarchy and their prescribed role as women.23

Obedient Minors, Responsible Fathers If the well-educated son is his Father’s glory; surely one poorly taught will be his Father’s torment, affront, and ruin; this and much more deserves he who so poorly fulfills God’s confidence, for the education and rearing of those given to him. Diego Rodríguez de Rivas y Velasco, bishop of Guadalajara (1769)

The acceptance of hierarchy was essential to the maintenance of order in rural Mexico. In this world every individual recognized his or her subordination to many superiors. The relationship between subordinates and their superiors was often described as mirroring that of a father and his children. Ideally, alcaldes mayores, pueblo officers, parish priests, and husbands kept their wards’ welfare in mind. As the older, or allegedly wiser and best prepared to govern, these (usually male) superiors decided what that welfare entailed. The condemnation of disorderly conduct and insubordination in the cases described above demonstrates the patriarchal order’s enduring strength in rural Mexico. Local people and distant judges equally denounced children who challenged their parents, women who assumed dominant, typically male roles, commoners who contested pueblo authorities, and castas who presumed 80

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too much status. Consider the colonial proverb: No son de fiar: Indio barbón, Español lampiño, Mujer que hable como hombre, ni Hombre que hable como niño (They are not to be trusted: a bearded Indian, a hairless Spaniard, a woman who speaks like a man, nor a man who speaks like a child).24 Public censure of the individuals who overstepped the bounds of their station served as a clear lesson to others that the established order would remain in place. The authorities in these cases—the magistrates, the priests, the gobernador, and the grandfather—also had special reason to reaffirm their dominance and chastise the unruly. As fathers, “God’s confidence” gave them the responsibility to educate, govern, protect, and punish their subordinates. Men such as don Juan Joseph Garduño and don Rafael Montes made a point of castigating their charges, in part to show their neighbors how conscientiously they fulfilled their fatherly roles. This order worked two ways, resting on a covenant between father-rulers and their wards. Those awarded power bore a responsibility to those below them. As one bishop bid his priests to treat their parishioners, “We should care for them as for children, pupils, and minors.”25 In turn, most people accepted their subordinate position, as long as those above them acted justly.

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Neither Alone nor Free Women in Depósito

​T

​wo incidents that occurred in Indian villages, both dating from 1792, illustrate depósito, a loosely regulated practice whereby women were sequestered in private houses or with parish priests, for punishment or for protection. Lauriana María complained of repeated beatings by her husband, Sebastián Eusebio. Not stopping with sticks and stones, he once hurled Lauriana into the cooking fire. Sebastián ignored anyone who questioned his conduct; the unruly man feared neither the local Spanish officer nor the priest. Her life in danger, what could Lauriana do? With her head injured and arms burned, Lauriana found protection in the house of the parish priest.1 In a nearby pueblo, the Indian woman Mónica Agustina’s neighbor claimed to have caught her husband having sex with Mónica. So accused, Mónica wasted in depósito for more than five weeks and became ill. She could not help her mother in their work.2 People in central Mexico knew such cases well. Whether carried out for punishment for protection, depósito often resembled jail. The growing historical literature on women has revealed variants of depósito throughout the cities and villages of colonial Spanish America and well into the late nineteenth century.3 This chapter draws from 104 cases of depósito in rural central Mexico dating from 1749 to 1856 (see appendix).4 Many women faced sequestration before marriage and less often for sexual misconduct and civil offenses. Priests alone had the authority to order a woman into depósito, but civil officials, husbands, Indian officers, and, infrequently, other women could request it for a woman who seemed to need it. Over time, priests’ mandate to call for depósito diminished, but the practice persisted into the nineteenth century. Depósito exemplifies the ambivalence of patriarchal rule toward female subjects. On the one hand, women were viewed as needing protection because of their inherent weakness; on the other, women’s inherent deviance required chastisement. Depósito often served as both protection and pun-

Women in Depósito

ishment simultaneously. While women and men might question the more obvious abuses of depósito, they maintained a belief in the patriarchal and hierarchal system it embodied.

Rationale for Depósito in Pastoral Theology Early mendicant missionaries left the legacy that priests might go beyond the strictly spiritual aspects of their Indian parishioners’ lives. Priests, like other colonial officials, saw Indians as perpetual minors, niños con barbas (children with beards), who needed special policing. Many priests perceived Indians as ignorant, deceitful, or stubborn and in need of protection and correction.5 Indigenous marriage customs particularly alarmed priests. For centuries, priests wielded depósito as a key weapon in their unending fight to reform their parishioners, especially women. The Indians’ apparent lack of esteem for premarital virginity vexed priests. Manuel Pérez, a priest who spent many years in Indian parishes, lamented in his 1713 manual how few native couples presented themselves for marriage without the bride already deflowered. The sixty-day period from the premarital interview with the priest to the final reading of the banns was seen by Pérez as a treacherous time for the betrothed couple. Furthering these dangers in remote villages, Indian grooms customarily lived and served in the brides’ homes during the couples’ engagement. To prevent sexual contact, Pérez declared it “indispensable . . . to put [the brides] in depósito.”6 Priests turning the pages of Andrés Pérez de Velasco’s El Ayudante del cura found similar counsel. The 1769 manual explained that after the engagement an Indian groom typically moved into the family home of his betrothed as part of montequitl, the Nahuatl term for the labor service performed in lieu of paying a bride-price. According to the priest-author, the couple might as well have been alone during montequitl since the girl’s parents, inevitably drunk, failed to watch her. He also cautioned that all slept together. Because of montequitl, Pérez de Velasco claimed, “when the Girl comes forth to marry as a Virgin, in reality she is already a Mother.” To prevent this situation, he advised bringing the girl to the priest’s house immediately following the engagement; there she could review the catechism until the wedding.7 Although Indians in the late colonial period shared many of the Spanish understandings of morality and honor, many took a different view of virginity and premarital sex. Relations that occurred while betrothed, between a monogamous couple awaiting ecclesiastical confirmation of this state, were 83

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not a breach of honor to most Indians. These engagement customs reflect precontact beliefs about sexuality. At the time of contact, the Nahuas did not emphasize virginity. According to Louise Burkhart, “Such purity was esteemed, but it was not the essential feature of a young person’s character.” No word existed in Nahuatl to indicate virginity.8 Sexual relations before marriage, of course, were hardly unique to indigenous Mexicans. The Counter-Reformation church sought to eradicate premarital sex, but rural Europeans resisted priests’ attempts to reform this aspect of courtship.9 Ward Stavig discusses the persistence of trial marriage (sirvinacuy) in the Andes, which rankled colonial priests for centuries.10 In colonial Mexico, priests found similar conduct as part of montequitl. They placed brides in depósito to combat this Indian custom, to protect brides, and thus to prevent sin.

Depósito in Marriage and Divorce In practice, depósito occurred most commonly as prescribed by the priests— to safeguard a betrothed woman before her wedding (table 3). The intimate contact fostered by montequitl and similar customs probably led priests to shelter Indian brides. I cannot say how widespread montequitl was in the late colonial period, but as late as 1819, in a large pueblo in the Tenango district, one Indian labored for more than nine months in the house of his fiancée’s parents.11 Yet priests in the Toluca region sequestered brides of all ethnic groups, not just Indians.12 Indian courtship traditions, then, do not fully explain the depósito of brides. Any couple whose union involved an impediment could expect the bride to be placed in depósito. Any questionable match (marred by pregnancy, abduction, or parental opposition) justified a bride’s enclosure. When parents opposed a match, a woman might find herself in depósito until all parties reached an accord. In her study of marriage opposition, Patricia Seed explains that depósito initially served as temporary custody. There a bride could consider her choice for several days, away from meddlesome relatives.13 This type of depósito occurred routinely for the non-Indian brides in some parishes. Priests sent Spanish brides from Calimaya to private homes in Tenango while the banns were read. During this time, the women were denied family visitors who might dissuade them from marrying.14 Seed finds that across the eighteenth century prenuptial depósito became more punitive than protective. Parents who opposed their daughter’s choice might prolong her custody for months, hoping to break her will to marry.15 84

Women in Depósito Table 3. Causes for Depósito, 1749–1858 Cause Premarital, engagement Sexual incontinence Murder, violent attacks Spousal abuse (mala vida) Consensual unions Adultery Relatives’ misconduct Defamation, verbal insult Divorce, separation from husband Incest Priest’s anger, whim Tax, tribute collection Not stated Divination Parent-daughter dispute Resisting authority Liquor sales Theft Inheritance dispute Protection of daughter Absent husband TOTAL

Number

Percent

31 10 9 8 8 6 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 104

29.8 9.6 8.6 7.6 7.6 5.7 5.7 4.8 3.8 2.8 1.9 1.9 1.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 100

Compared to Mexico City, where most opposition occurred among nonIndians, few parents in the Toluca region contested their children’s marriages in court. In an exceptional case from 1780, an Indian mother opposed her daughter’s engagement to a mestizo. Citing the Royal Pragmatic of 1776 (which referred only to Spanish parents), she prolonged litigation for a year. Meanwhile, her daughter remained in depósito where she grew short on clothes, food, and other necessities. This tactic eventually broke down the young woman’s determination to marry.16 Certain priests put brides in depósito without apparent cause. In a 1756 petition against their priest, one Indian parish decried his abuse of the schedule of fees (arancel ) and his labor abuses. The priest also forced brides into depósito (despite parental approval of a match) and kept them for long periods in the parish house. Villagers denounced their priest for invoking the practice 85

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“without cause” or when parents did approve of the match. The royal court officer who reviewed the case agreed with the villagers only in part. Indian women, he argued, belonged in depósito to avoid any chance of harm to them. He warned, however, against abuse of their labor. Accordingly, the officer recommended depósito in the home of an honorable neighbor, not that of the priest.17 Priests also used depósito to safeguard women when marriage ended in divorce.18 In Mexico City a woman in the midst of divorce proceedings went into a respectable household or, preferably, with her relatives. Recogimientos provided a less appealing shelter in the late colonial era with their conventor prisonlike atmosphere.19 Because few rural men and women threatened or pursued divorce, I seldom found depósito used in this context. A rare divorce case from the Toluca region suggests that depósito served as a restraint and punishment for the woman rather than a refuge. According to her husband, doña María Ygnacia Mendoza drank too much, acted brazenly, and had extramarital liaisons. He claimed she provided a bad example for her children and scandalized their town. While her husband sought to divorce doña María in 1800, on his request she was placed in depósito in a private home.20 The husband thus maintained his authority over his wife, even as the marriage ended.

Depósito as Protection and Punishment While priests oversaw the types of depósito related to the sacrament of marriage, civil officials might order a woman’s enclosure to punish civil offenses and sexual misconduct. Civil officials and priests also enacted depósito to protect women victimized by their husbands. In these cases depósito was dictated more by an officer’s fancy and local custom than by law or official recommendation. For many wives like Lauriana María, depósito provided a much-needed shelter from their abusive husbands. In cases of mala vida, wives usually sought help and protection with parents, relatives, or neighbors. Yet these informal measures sometimes failed to ward off a brutal husband. When Manuela Martina filed a criminal complaint against her husband, José Pedro, in 1799, she recounted continuous beatings and whippings, an attempted strangling, and being hung nude. A neighbor woman once intervened on her behalf and took Manuela to her home. Her mother and mother-in-law also attempted to shelter her several times. Seeking a safe house, Manuela’s mother eventually brought her to the pueblo alcalde. To everyone’s surprise, 86

Women in Depósito

José tried to violate this depósito, daring to open the alcalde’s door to extract his wife. His audacity earned him a jailing in the casas reales (village hall).21 Few individuals would dare to challenge a priest’s or civil officer’s mandate, especially if the authority sheltered the woman in his personal residence. While in depósito, a wife could generally feel safe from abuse—until the day she and her spouse reunited. A variety of civil offenses provoked the depósito of women in central Mexico. In 1794 an Indian peddler unable to repay a 30-peso loan from a priest found his wife in depósito.22 The same year an Indian widow and her stepdaughter who endlessly disputed the division of the late husband’s inheritance were punished with depósito.23 In 1771 the royal tribute collector accused two women of selling tepache and sent them to depósito.24 In 1775 a parish priest interned the wife of a man who had refused to pay a burial fee higher than that stipulated by the arancel.25 Depósito likewise punished behavior at odds with notions of female subordination. For example, three Indian women spent six days in depósito in 1777 when they refused to pay an increased tax on the pulque they produced.26 And in 1819 depósito was also used to punish a woman who shouted insults at a royalist soldier in the Tianguistengo plaza.27 For women perceived as “loose” or scandalous, depósito clearly spelled punishment. Accusations of sexual relations with a married man landed many women, including Mónica Agustina, in depósito.28 Illicit involvement with single men might have stiff consequences as well. Teresa de Jesús, an india burdened with three children, hoped to marry a hacienda overseer. Having received a promise of marriage, she had sexual relations with him, but the overseer went back on his word. Teresa’s desperation and trust ended in her depósito and another pregnancy.29 Widows constituted a special group of women threatened with depósito, often for mere suspicions of unrestrained sexuality. They could end up in depósito for little more than their jailer’s belief that, as widows, their conduct would upset village morality. In 1769 a jealous wife accused the widow Francisca Bernabela of sleeping with her husband. The civil teniente responded by briefly jailing the adulterous husband and placing Francisca in depósito in a private home. The aggrieved wife failed to prove her case, but the teniente refused to free Francisca—until she found a husband. The officer defended the prolonged depósito, asserting to the viceroy that “the punishment should serve as a brake.” Not only did Francisca face an undeserved punishment, but, as she protested, her children consequently suffered neglect.30 In 1783 another widow, Rosa María, accused of an affair with a married man, was ordered into depósito by the civil officer and parish priest. Although 87

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the married man soon died, authorities agreed to free Rosa María only into the custody of an honorable Christian. Furthermore, they ordered her seclusion until she remarried. Authorities charged that her “lustful condition has ruined various men of her pueblo” and that she needed to be kept in custody because she was “alone and free of any subjection.” This case demonstrates the patriarchal norm that pervaded the Hispanic world: a woman required a man’s authority, in this instance, that of a husband. Rosa María, however, would not abide by these restraints. She fled depósito that night and made her way to Mexico City to appeal the decision. Within a month Rosa María won a superior judicial decree. Not only did she gain her freedom; the local officer was ordered to pay her a real for each day she had spent in depósito.31 In the remote Indian parish of San José Malacatepec depósito fell heavily on widows and other unmarried women. In 1820 some villagers testified that their priest routinely rounded up widows and single women. Bringing them to his residence, he forced them to work without pay until they married. Unmarried women had no choice but to marry or to face what they called a “perpetual depósito.” Other testimony suggested that the priest held in depósito only “free women” (mujeres libres) suspected of living in concubinage. One male villager countered that such suspicions grew from nothing but the gossip of the priest’s toadies. Despite conflicting reports, this priest certainly locked up unmarried women and men and forced marriage on them, even against their will.32

“Correction of Sins Is My Obligation”: The Disputed Role of Priests in Depósito In most of the cases from the colonial period it was priests who ordered that depósito be carried out. Of fifty-eight reports of depósito prior to 1810 in which I can determine who ordered the enclosure, priests mandated thirty-nine, or 67 percent (table 4). Given the priests’ expansive role in village life, their authority over depósito comes as no surprise. Late colonial priests followed their missionary predecessors in “disciplining the Indians,” often going beyond strictly spiritual matters.33 To carry out discipline, village priests might assume the constable’s role and order punishment beyond religious infractions for women and men.34 A Franciscan who served in an Indian parish in 1747 explained this role in a positive light. “As the correction of sins is my obligation,” he said, he could not “find a more gentle and efficient means than that of depósito.” As for Indian men, the friar enclosed them in the chapter meeting room for infractions such as “failing to attend mass, to comply with 88

Women in Depósito Table 4. Person Responsible for Mandating Depósito, 1749–1858 Person Priest, ecclesiastical judge Civil authority, tax collector Unstated Husband Indian governor Woman TOTAL

Number

Percent

47 44 11 2 1 1 106

44.3 41.5 10.3 1.8 0.9 0.9 99.7

the annual precept[,] . . . ignorance of the catechism, drunkenness and other frequent vices.” The friar further asserted that if his parishioners went to the public jail, rather than receive his moderate correctives, it would cost them, and they would miss an opportunity to learn the catechism.35 In other words, this informal discipline, depósito of women and enclosure of men, provided a Christian answer to typical Indian weaknesses.36 Depósito cases demonstrate one way in which Bourbon authorities and regalist bishops unsuccessfully tried to diminish the clergy’s role beyond the church.37 The proceedings of the Fourth Mexican Provincial Council (1771) refer to only two types of depósito: in cases of opposition to a marriage and divorce.38 The proceedings, tellingly, forbade priests to sequester women in their own residences. To remove all suspicion of incontinence, priests were to place women in honorable houses elsewhere in the parish. By the late eighteenth century, depósito in the clerical residence had obviously become widespread and ecclesiastical authorities found it noxious.39 Officers reprimanded priests who jailed women in their own residences, put brides in depósito when no impediment existed, and acted independently of civil officials.40 Clearly, church and Crown were turning against depósito. This shift, however, had little to do with a concern for the women involved. Instead, the Bourbons sought to regulate depósito because it typified the clerical autonomy that the Crown sought to reduce. Villagers disputed the reason for depósito less often than they complained about the conditions of internment. In Xalatlaco the priest commonly secluded brides before marriage. In their 1807 petition villagers objected less to that than to the brides’ lengthy depósito: women might spend up to seven months in the parish house. Extended confinement, villagers charged, led to many “irregularities” among the impatient grooms.41 89

Hijos del Pueblo Table 5. Location of Depósito, 1749–1858 Location Unstated Private residence Ecclesiastical residence Casas reales, officer’s   residence Family member’s residence Carcel de mujeres TOTAL

Number

Percent

56 37 10

50.0 33.0 8.9

5 3 1 112

4.4 2.6 0.8 99.7

Note: In several cases, women were transferred from location to location.

The site of depósito often sparked controversy. Depósito typically took place in one of three locations: the priest’s residence, a vecino’s home, or the home of the woman’s relative (table 5). Some women clearly preferred enclosure in the home of a family member rather than with strangers. With kin, depósito was not so alienating and deprivation would not occur. The debate over location centered on the impropriety of secluding women in the parish house. Civil and ecclesiastical authorities continually warned priests not to enclose women in their own residences but to find a private home.42 These decrees refer ambiguously to irregularities that arose when depósito took place in the priest’s home. Labor abuses may have caused this concern, but the fear of priests having a woman in their houses undoubtedly caused these prohibitions.43 Such restrictions aside, some priests continued to secure women in their houses. The work carried out during depósito by San José Malacatepec’s priest represents an extreme labor abuse. He forced the many unmarried women in the parish house to card, spin, and weave for him until they married. The priest did not pay the women or give them food. Parishioners noted that the priest jailed some unmarried men as well. This 1820 case does not mention, however, if the men faced forced labor, as did female parishioners.44 Elsewhere a priest forced enclosed women to weave mats for him (for which they received neither pay nor food). Another priest was accused of needlessly sequestering brides in order to use them as servants.45 Depósito, in at least a few places, became a means to recruit, use, and abuse women’s labor. All in all, the Bourbon directives to regulate the parish priests’ implementation of depósito had little effect in the colonial era. Change did occur, 90

Women in Depósito

however, with the insurgency and beyond. My data shows that the priests’ authority over depósito declined in the late 1810s. Of thirty-four cases from the period 1810–1858, priests mandated just seven, or 20 percent, of them. From the 1810s and into the postindependence period, depósito became a tool for civil authorities.

Gender Differences in Punishment and Enclosure As a form of protection, depósito certainly was unique to women. As punishment, however, it overlapped in many ways with discipline faced by men. Yet depósito and typical male punishment differed in certain ways that especially stigmatized women. While authorities often described depósito as a light punishment, women and their families found the practice loathsome and shameful. Rural Mexicans contested the more onerous and arbitrary aspects of depósito while showing a strong cultural commitment to the patriarchal values it embodied. Some women in depósito and their kin complained of neglect. Illness, lack of medical care, scarce food, and the inability to care for children typify the kinds of deprivation depositadas suffered. After years of abuse by her stepmother, fourteen-year-old doña María Ana Anzaldo took refuge with her grandfather in 1856. The local judge then placed the young woman in protective depósito in a private home. A month later doña María complained that her father influenced her female custodian, who refused to deliver a gift of shoes from María’s grandfather. Worse, her father sent her no food. The judge responded by transferring María to another home.46 In two cases, pregnant women challenged depósito in the house of strangers on these grounds. Illness (provoked by the conditions of seclusion in one case) brought on fears of miscarriage for both women. They successfully argued that they could not receive proper care in a strange house.47 Women in depósito bemoaned their inability to care for their families. For widows or single mothers, the children’s care must have caused hardship. For others, depósito meant abandoning an elderly parent. One married woman unjustly put in depósito brought her infant with her; after two months, the child died.48 Such deprivation affected women in ways that jailing a man did not. Such cases may have been rare, but people heard about them, and they added to the dread of depósito. The emphasis on labor in depósito reflected the idea that idle women bred social ills. Evidence from the cities shows that interned women often worked, 91

Hijos del Pueblo

either to compensate for their maintenance or as a form of punishment. Despite the prohibition of using women in public works, Mexico City jailers readily sent women jailed for serious offenses to labor in obrajes (textile workshops) and other private establishments.49 Women in depósito in Mexico City worked without pay in business establishments, washing clothes, grinding corn, or cleaning. Even women fortunate enough to be sent to a private casa de honra often provided the household with “inexpensive maid service.” A study of urban recogimientos shows that some of these institutions demanded the inmates’ labor. Men in civil jails for similar causes, however, were not required to work.50 Labor marks but one way in which depósito meant different treatment for women and men. Rural women in depósito did not generally experience a more difficult internment than did their male counterparts in public jails. Although the material conditions of depósito in a private home might have been better and safer than those in the town jails, men at least had one another’s company. Male prisoners could talk, pray, sing, and even dance together;51 a woman in depósito was usually alone. Some women suffered unusually prolonged and undeserved seclusion. With depósito (or in the cities, jail), authorities chose to punish women more than men by enclosure. In colonial Mexico City female offenders were about seven times more likely to be jailed than were men. Typical male sentences included fines, flogging, or service on public works but seldom incarceration.52 The drive to punish women with enclosure reveals a distinct and more restrictive set of expectations about female conduct. Men and women might receive punishment for sexual and moral misconduct, including adultery, cohabitation outside of marriage, and breaking a promise of marriage. Often, however, only the accused female received the depósito sentence, and the male remained free.53 Judges and priests seldom recorded their justifications for this double standard. I imagine these authorities shared the belief, expressed in an 1834 Mexican legal handbook, that “indecency [was] less condemnable and offensive in a man than in a woman.”54 A few cases suggest that officials left the man free to continue his work so that he could sustain his family or the woman who was held in depósito. The more consistent internment of women in cases of sexual misconduct also stemmed from the age-old belief that woman by nature was a seductress. Rural men (and many women) and outside officials agreed that unmarried women, in particular, were untrustworthy. A local priest argued that women had no choice but to marry, freeing themselves “from the insults to their virtue that lone women suffer in these places.”55 This essential mistrust of unmarried women manifested in many places in 92

Women in Depósito

the customary isolation of brides and widows. Priests and justices never jailed grooms and widowers solely because of their marital status. Officials usually placed betrothed women in depósito as a preventive measure, ostensibly to protect rather than punish. Yet the prescriptive literature did not suggest that depósito aimed to shelter an innocent, helpless girl who might fall victim to male passions. Instead priests and judges believed that a woman bore responsibility for her sexual conduct.56 The reason for the bride’s seclusion (and not the groom’s) rested on the common belief that it was women who were responsible for a family’s honor. The depósito of widows epitomized the belief that women possess unbridled sexuality. Authorities and neighbors showed little faith in the many women without husbands, seemingly alone and at liberty.57 The priest Pérez de Velasco described this situation: An Indian woman is widowed, and living secluded, although some time passes, there is no one who seeks her as a wife. Giving way to her passions, she falls with one and with others. She flees with someone, and pursued, she returns after two or three years, with two or three children.58

While Pérez de Velasco stereotypes the impassioned widow, this scenario had some basis in widows’ actual behavior. Robert McCaa has found that widows often acted in questionable ways. Because of demographic disparities of age and gender, older, once-married women had little hope of remarrying. Widows, generally poor and burdened with children, went to great lengths (including sexual relations) to press a suitor to comply with his promise of marriage. Unwanted pregnancies and jailings by disapproving officials followed these desperate acts more often than did the anticipated marriages.59 Such conduct led authorities and many villagers, of both sexes, to mistrust widows. The instances in which widows, whatever their conduct, were locked up until they remarried stemmed from fears about these women, alone and in need of domination.60 In sheer numbers, widows constituted a high percentage of the local population. Widows headed one-fifth of Tenango del Valle households in 1770.61 Despite their numbers, widows found little acceptance. In a general sense, widows became targets for enclosure because the sight of lone women running their own households disturbed the patriarchal norm. A teniente’s rationale that a widow required enclosure because she was “alone and free of all subjection” speaks for more than that case.62 For another widow accused of adultery, depósito was imposed as a “brake” on her conduct.63 Widows received harsh treatment in cities as well. Among female offenders in Mexico 93

Hijos del Pueblo

City, widows more frequently faced sentences of jail or flogging than did single and married women.64 Even married women, with their husbands absent, faced doubts about their self-control and sexual virtue. Unwilling to trust their own wives, some husbands took matters into their own hands and had their wives secured. Before embarking on a journey from his pueblo in 1794, for example, one distrustful Indian left his wife in depósito for the duration of his travels.65 Depósito carried a greater stigma for women than did public incarceration for men. Because depósito often punished women who failed to observe the church’s sexual norms, villagers surmised that a woman in depósito had acted scandalously. The true reason for her internment was another question, perhaps unanswered in the first wave of hearsay and gossip that passed among villagers. In a 1775 suit against their priest, the Totoltepec parish told the story of Nicolás Vicente, an Indian commoner who paid the standard fee for a burial. The priest demanded a higher fee and tried to jail Vicente. Unable to find him, the priest instead put Vicente’s wife in depósito. Not even the woman’s family could explain her apprehension. Vicente believed some “grave” reason had provoked his wife’s depósito. Vicente’s mother-in-law begged the priest to free her daughter, “so that her son-in-law not suspect that she had given some motive for the arrest.”66 Whether intended or not, depósito brought disgrace on the woman and her family. One Spanish woman clearly intended to disgrace her next-door neighbor with depósito. Without obvious provocation, doña Ygnacia Betancur, known as a doncella mayor in Tenango del Valle, fell victim in 1820 to insults from a married Spanish woman. On the street doña Proscopia Hernández accused the spinster of public whoring, insinuating she had had relations with a priest. Doña Ygnacia, to protect her honor (“I love my honor more than my life”), demanded that doña Proscopia immediately “suffer” depósito. The local justice agreed and enclosed doña Proscopia in a private home. Eight days later she almost miscarried. To alleviate her condition, the judge allowed Proscopia to continue her depósito in her parents’ house. A month later doña Ygnacia complained of the brevity of her opponent’s depósito. The case did not conclude until eight months later; only when doña Proscopia apologized to her neighbor did her seclusion end.67 Like the husband-instigated depósitos, this case shows how the practice could become a popular recourse. Here the defamed party insisted on her offender’s depósito precisely because it served as a public shaming and breach of personal liberty. Clearly, many people found the idea of depósito or its occasionally abusive conditions odious. The disgrace depósito involved, the atmosphere of pun94

Women in Depósito

ishment, and disregard of certain church norms led many to flee seclusion. Marriage cases tell of many impatient grooms who extracted brides from depósito. Others found ways to spend time alone with their betrothed during their seclusion. The complaints recounted here came from women, as well as their fathers, mothers, husbands, and children. Village governments also protested depósito as so widely practiced in the Toluca region. Depósito affected everyone, but it most directly stigmatized women. The unwarranted use of depósito that shamed a woman and her family became a rallying cry in several communities.68 In Tlanipatlán, for example, several Indians sought to oust their priest and vicario in 1809. One ringleader, Josef de la Cruz (who bore the alias Bonaparte according to the priest), went door to door, assembling all Indian women to rise against the vicario. He reminded the women that the vicario had recently sequestered a daughter as punishment for her mother’s long-term cohabitation with a married man. This familiar incident rallied the women to protest against their priest.69 Given the prevalence of depósito, each woman there realized that this shameful situation could befall her some day.

Conclusion: Depósito in the Hispanic World Depósito was a common but essentially uncodified practice in Mexico. Because priests’ manuals defined depósito in vague terms, it became subject to personal discretion and local customs. Its many applications reveal the anomalies of judicial practice in rural areas, where the paternalism of civil judges and priests colored their treatment of women. Viceregal and episcopal officials in Mexico City excoriated the practice of depósito precisely because it was unregulated and thus open to abuse. Bourbon desires to regulate depósito had little effect in the Tenango region. Depósito, in its many guises, would persist in postindependence rural Mexico. Unlike cities, rural areas had neither recogimientos nor civil jails for women. Although town jails were supposed to have separate women’s sections, even facilities in the region’s larger towns (Calimaya, Tenango, Capuluac) lacked them.70 The region also lacked recogimientos.71 After 1810 and especially after independence in 1821, authorities who placed women in depósito often noted that they did so because no women’s jail existed. Their remarks reflect governmental desires to standardize and enhance the penal system, but change came slowly to the early-nineteenth-century countryside.72 In the early national period, the punishment and shelter of rural women 95

Hijos del Pueblo

continued to take place through informal channels as opposed to the more standard procedures in the cities.73 Priests originally used depósito to remedy certain “Indian problems,” especially sexual and marriage practices that deviated from strict Catholic prescriptions. Similar to many places in the Americas, the colonizers and the colonized held different views of sexuality. Despite the so-called Spiritual Conquest, Mexican priests in the eighteenth century remained frustrated with their Indian parishioners, especially with the women. Indians and priests had never seen eye-to-eye on the importance of virginity or marital fidelity. Depósito, particularly the premarital enclosure of young women, provided one way for priests to respond to a distinct set of beliefs held by native and other less than orthodox parishioners. Depósito also embodied the transfer of a deep Hispanic tradition of female enclosure to the New World. Mary Elizabeth Perry argues that ideally all women in early modern Spain were to live in one type of enclosure or another: the parental home, marriage, convent, house of correction, or house of prostitution. Enclosed women, living under male authority, were thus protected. Men in the streets then would be safe from “loose” women.74 As priests, civil authorities, and commoners enacted depósito in Latin America, they remade this tradition of female enclosure and expanded it. In the postindependence period, depósito increasingly became a device for civil authorities. Parish clergy played a more restricted role in the punishment and protection of parish women. In contravention of the law, local authorities persisted with depósito, which embodied the values of patriarchal order and gendered divisions of space and conduct.

96

seven

From Fathers to Stepfathers Life after Independence

​I

​n March 1828 the Indian widow Anastacia Roberta brought a long-standing grievance to the judge in Tenango del Valle. Seven months earlier cowhands from Atengo, the neighboring hacienda, stole a dozen of her mares. The theft especially galled Anastacia because she had long rented land from Atengo to pasture the horses. Anastacia first denounced the theft to her municipality’s alcalde. The alcalde reprimanded the hacienda administrator, his compadre, but Anastacia did not get her animals back. She then took her complaint to the state governor in Toluca. The governor’s office sent the widow to the subprefect, and he referred her to the juez de letras. None of these authorities responded to Anastacia’s misfortune. Finally, the exasperated woman declared before the Tenango judge that she had lost all hope for justice because she was a penniless “lone, unhappy widow.” She vented her outrage against the many superiors who denied her justice: the hacendado, the authorities of her pueblo, and the judges.1 Given the lack of a written response to her petition, Anastacia probably went home thoroughly disappointed with the administration of justice in republican Mexico. To historians of the colonial period, Anastacia’s story might suggest that the well-respected colonial judicial system had disintegrated in the chaos of the early Mexican republic. Considered against a range of postindependence judicial cases, Anastacia’s sad story represents an extreme. Her negative experience with the postindependence courts reflected the multiple strikes against her: being Indian, female, widowed, and confronting the servants of Atengo, the region’s most powerful landholder. This chapter examines the social consequences of early-nineteenth-century political and economic instability, focusing on the relationship between rural people and the judiciary. Overall, continuities from the colonial period into the 1850s are striking, primarily for communities. Despite mounting frustration with national and state authorities, Indian pueblos in this region continued to seek mediation and protection from the judiciary. Judges often

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responded accordingly, retaining a paternal attitude toward the pueblos. By contrast, individuals, especially many women, found the courts less responsive to their needs after 1821. The patriarchal ideal remained in place, but the local power holders proved less attentive to its abuses. For Indian communities, the shift from colonial to postindependence rule had mixed consequences. The colonial Indian pueblo as a corporate entity had enjoyed privileges such as a protected core of land ( fundo legal ), selfgovernment, and access to the General Indian Court. After independence Indians became “ciudadanos,” and the General Indian Court and tribute were abolished. Village repúblicas were eliminated as well, replaced by the multiethnic municipio. As Charles A. Hale observes, politicians made a “doctrinaire effort to remove the designation ‘Indian’ from Mexican life,” and few concerned themselves with the situation of los llamados indios. Indeed, many politicians seconded Liberal ideologue José María Luis Mora’s 1824 declaration that “Indians no longer exist.”2 Theoretically Indians stood on equal ground with other Mexicans. The realities of such changes on the local level varied greatly. Few postindependence rulers took a fatherly stance toward individual Indian citizens. Compared to the viceroys and the Real Audiencia, republican authorities seldom acknowledged that Indians might have special needs or merit special protection. Still the objects of everyday disdain and abuse, native individuals could no longer expect the special protection of their colonial fathers. Nonetheless, popular expectations of government from the colonial period persisted to a surprising degree after 1821. Despite Anastacia Roberta’s frustration with her superiors, she did seek the help of one after another. Anastacia acted on a basic principle of the Antiguo Régimen: even the most humble miserable only had to inform the king or his servants to attain justice.3 After 1821 no authority filled the Crown’s role as supreme and lasting sovereign authority for the Mexican populace. Presidents, quickly in and out of office, and state governors made for flimsy substitutes. The extinction of the General Indian Court and the absence of a receptive figure in the Palacio Nacional meant that Indians could no longer count on a father’s help beyond their locality. Politicians in Mexico City and Toluca meanwhile tried to establish a new, constitutional system of rule. Whether liberal or conservative, federalist or centralist, myriad regimes failed miserably in this quest.4 Government especially let down the rural poor. In 1828 a Spanish spy in Mexico speculated on the Indians’ lost confidence in government: “Since the pueblos work for results, they have been deceived. With the previous government, they had enough to eat and more prerogatives and distinctions.” By contrast, Indians 98

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regarded the current government as “entirely comprised of riffraff [canalla], whom they do not respect.”5 Anastacia Roberta would have agreed, imagining that the king’s judges would have handled her case more competently.

“Living Near This Monster of Ambition”: The Tenango District and Atengo, 1821–1850 Local conditions help to explain the declining confidence of the Indians and other rural poor in government. In the pueblos of Anastacia Roberta and Juan Pedro Arévalo, change occurred slowly after 1821 and followed late colonial developments. The Hacienda de Atengo and the villages continued their long-standing feuds, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. The region remained predominantly Indian and heavily populated. In 1878 the Tenango district still had a 74 percent indigenous majority.6 Local people generally lived in deeper poverty after independence. Despite the abolition of racial categories, ethnic differences persisted and were emphasized by local people. Linguistic differences also continued to separate the local population, although to a lesser extent. While some predominantly Indian districts showed signs of castillianization, Spanish remained the outsider’s tongue in many other places in the mid-nineteenth century.7 Population growth continued in places such as Tenango del Valle, although perhaps at a slower rate. By the Porfiriato, Tenango was the most densely populated district in the state of Mexico. “Like three in one shoe” described the district more aptly than ever. Yet villages retained significant landholdings that allowed families to remain in their home settlements.8 Crowding, in the long run, would spell greater poverty for local people. In 1848 a priest from nearby Ozoloapan reported that “the misery and scarcity of resources has impoverished this land to the extreme of making almost beggars of the lowest classes.” Villagers there each claimed a parcel of land, yet they could hope to produce only a year’s subsistence from the plot.9 Any agricultural crisis spelled disaster for the local people. Continued population growth and partible inheritance on finite lands partially explains the region’s privations. The ruin of nearby mines also led to hardships for local people. Beginning in 1810, the mining industry collapsed throughout Mexico. The decline of Sultepec, Temascaltepec, and Zacualpan inevitably affected Toluca valley residents as important markets for their pulque, coal, and crafts shrunk.10 Area haciendas acted more aggressively, furthering land scarcity and destitution in the pueblos. Despite Atengo’s many abuses of villages in the colonial 99

Hijos del Pueblo

period, it had generally abided by judicial decisions and allowed its neighbors certain privileges. Now the Hacienda de Atengo asserted its interests with distinct, more violent tactics and treated neighboring pueblos with a new callousness. Anastacia Roberta was one of many Indians who had been reduced to leasing land from the hacienda in the 1820s. In 1826 villagers recalled how in 1819 armed and mounted estate employees (sometimes accompanied by threatening royalist soldiers) drove them out of their fields and pastures. The estate owner reportedly shouted, “Kill them, kill them, and let’s burn the pueblo to finish them off,” and the villagers fled.11 Hacienda employees went about armed, and some bullied villagers in their pueblos. In the mid-1820s the Conde de Santiago employed don Rafael González Aragon as his administrator; his brother Ygnacio served as his assistant; two other brothers also worked there. As the estate’s debt collector, Ygnacio had ample reason to enter the pueblos, where he committed lawless and immoral acts. Both Indians and Spaniards hated and feared him. In 1824 don Ygnacio abducted the wife of a respected Chapultepec vecino from her home and kept her in his control for a month, before audaciously returning her to the offended husband in person. Ygnacio continued to visit the wife in her home. As the injured husband complained through his lawyer, having three brothers in Atengo’s employ enabled Ygnacio to act as a “despotic criminal in the entire area.” Armed, he went about harassing people in many ways, taking advantage of “the power, support, and wealth of the master he serves.” Ygnacio, villagers knew, had wounded a man but had not been punished by the impotent local officials. Finally the offended husband withdrew his accusation, suddenly placing blame on his wife, who promised to change her behavior.12 Not all local people bowed to these scare tactics. Juan Pedro Arévalo, for example, did not hesitate to demand full payment for crops destroyed by untended Atengo cattle in 1824. He had his son tie up the irresponsible cowhand and brought him before the alcalde for punishment. Arévalo pursued his claim against Atengo despite a late-night visit from hacienda workers who, he claimed, threatened that “if they did not win the dispute lawfully [con escritos], they would win it from me violently.”13 Tianguistengo’s judge also urged action against the outrages committed by Atengo employees. In 1826 he asked the state governor to send fifty mounted soldiers to maintain order. The ayuntamiento urged the governor to “direct his paternal gaze toward the multitude of citizens who have the inexplicable misfortune of living near this monster of ambition.”14 The Hacienda de Atengo had become a more awesome foe in the 1820s. The growing disregard for neighboring communities also reflected the 100

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changing direction of agricultural production at Atengo. The hacienda shifted its emphasis from livestock to grain production by the 1830s, a change under way elsewhere in late colonial Mexico.15 This shift required moving existing livestock to marginal lands (to free up arable terrain), greater dependence on irrigation, and more laborers, of whom many would be seasonal hands. These changes could have motivated Atengo’s new demands of its neighbors.16 The hacienda’s aggressiveness may also have been a reaction to a decade of pillage that began with the assault by local Indians in October 1810. Perhaps owners sanctioned illegal actions against the pueblos after 1821, assuming that the Indians were essentially defenseless without a stable government and judiciary, their traditional protectors. Yet, as in the colonial period, pueblos responded by seeking legal redress. In 1826 a group of pueblos sent a long petition to the government of the state of Mexico.17 The petition noted that several pueblos had failed to seek justice earlier, aware of the futility of any such pleas until a stable regime was established. The petition went before a state congress headed by liberals hostile to community landholdings but who did little to legislate against pueblo holdings. Central Mexican pueblos often ignored any difference of opinion between themselves and the politicians in Toluca. As if appealing to the viceroy, several pueblos petitioned the Congress for new community land grants in the 1820s. The result, according to Hale, was that “congress departed from doctrinaire liberal views and reaffirmed, however tenuously, the rights of the Indian community to hold property.”18 Rather than provoke tensions in the countryside, politicians simply suppressed their own principles about private property. In this political climate, the 1826 petition against Atengo proved triumphant: the state governor ordered Tenango’s judge to redraw the lines between villages and Atengo. People from nearby pueblos poured into Tenango on August 21, 1827, and waited for the judge to begin this historic act of repossession. Fearing trouble from this large crowd of “all classes and conditions,” the judge set out early that day to move boundaries, thus returning lands to several pueblos. In Santa María Xaxalpa, one hacienda marker actually stood on a street inside the pueblo: houses within that area had paid rent to Atengo. The multitude witnessed the toppling of Atengo’s boundary markers and the erection in their place of new markers named Xumetitla Méjico Libre, Hidalgo, Aliuatla de Morelos, and Tepetlaya Allende. The new boundaries gave pueblos such as Xaxalpa the right to “freely use these lands, recognizing no other owner.”19 The pueblos’ victory over the Atengo estates in 1826–1827 created a brief euphoria, but it did not last. The Conde de Santiago attempted to overturn this arrangement, paying considerable legal fees and bribes.20 His local rep101

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resentatives, Rafael and Ygnacio González Aragon, stalled the restoration of lands to pueblos near Tenancingo in 1827.21 These efforts apparently had some success. By 1828 Tenango’s poor found themselves forced to rent farmland from Atengo; the officials of San Miguel Chapultepec desperately sought their pueblo’s traditional land titles (títulos primordiales), suggesting they were in similar straits; and the Atengo administration suspected that the Indians of San Lucas and Ocuila were plotting together against the estate.22 The pueblos’ victory over Atengo proved short-lived. The massive estate continued to cast its long shadow over the valley, eroding the security that its more humble neighbors had sought for the past century.

“They Didn’t Want Stepfathers but Fathers” The struggle against the Atengo estates weighed on many Tenango citizens who attended an assembly called by the ayuntamiento in May 1828.23 The Tenango junta brought together “the poor” (also described as indígenas) and the “citizens of first order”—probably all of them men—to discuss critical fiscal matters. The alcalde who oversaw the junta, Luis Garduño, first raised the issue of primary school finances. The junta agreed that collection boxes in local stores might alleviate the current underfunding. The men next heard the national government’s plea for contributions to rebuild the brigantine Guerrero, recently destroyed near Cuba by the “enemy,” Spain. At first, alcalde Garduño heard only great enthusiasm for this patriotic cause. Then dissenting voices sounded. Some Indians, joined by others known as de razón (whom the alcalde called “unprincipled and of the worst customs”), shouted that they refused to cooperate in the ship campaign until the ayuntamiento pursued a land dispute with the Hacienda de Atengo. The recent loss of town lands to Atengo forced them to pay rent individually in order to farm. Meanwhile, the dissenters claimed, the ayuntamiento guarded untold wealth. Because Atengo bought off officers, they argued, the ayuntamiento failed to act in Tenango’s best interest. The protesters demanded an end to the current ayuntamiento, which they denounced as “a real stepfather to the pueblo.” They complained that municipal officers misspent funds and demanded their replacement with men of their choosing. According to one labrador, the junta turned into a riot, with shouting and whistling. When the parish priest could not contain the clamor, the alcalde adjourned the junta and jailed the protesters for insulting the local government.24 Before the meeting closed, some individuals yelled out, “They didn’t want stepfathers but fathers.” 102

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This episode demonstrates one possible outcome of the changed status of Indians in postcolonial Mexico. With the abolition of the Indian república and the creation of the municipality, Indian men in many villages lost control of local affairs. “The new municipalities,” as Peter Guardino puts it, “were not the former repúblicas.” Especially in ethnically mixed communities, Indians either shared power with or (as in the Tenango case) ceded control to their non-Indian neighbors.25 This situation crippled Tenango’s Indians in their struggle to regain village lands. The rhetorical contrast between fathers and stepfathers lays bare how Indians felt about the Mexican government. Stern notes that in the late colonial period rural Mexicans employed “patriarchal metaphors that contrasted good fathers who ruled by prestige earned through service, risk, and reciprocity in the common good with self-aggrandizing parasites who ruled by absolute right and sheer power.”26 Bereft of good fathers, the Tenango protesters cried “stepfather” to express their disaffection with the local rulers. Similarly, the “patriotic causes” of the republic failed to interest its Indian citizens. Instead, local issues such as land and education held their attention. The Indians (and their comrades of “worst customs”) claimed they wanted fathers, or a return to the rule they knew before 1821 when their interests were protected. In this changing political and legal climate, Indian communities yearned for a system that seemed to have offered them greater control and privileges. In essence, these rural people idealized the colonial past in order to condemn the current system. By the 1840s Indian communities grew desperate as the government failed to act in their interests, or to act at all. In 1843 two pueblos near Tenancingo sued a neighboring hacendado over land. The pueblos complained that although they rightfully stood to win the case, it proceeded so slowly that neither their grandchildren nor those of the landowner would ever see it end. It saddened the pueblos to leave such an “oppressive and bitter inheritance” to their descendants.27 In an 1847 petition against their alcalde, the villagers of Xoquizingo voiced their dissatisfaction with government to the point of vilification. This pueblo described itself as “the plaything” of several rogues. Because the residents were “mostly poor, without connections, and indigenous,” and therefore hesitant to speak up, “vile hypocrites” found it easy to abuse the community. Where could they complain about their alcalde, when “the government itself is the village’s enemy?”28 While this pueblo and others saw the government as the enemy, they nevertheless turned to the judiciary to fight for their rights. They thus continued to assign the role of mediator and protector to the government. These pueblos, like Indian communities elsewhere, also stressed their differences 103

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and special needs as the poor and the helpless in the hope of reviving traditional rights extinguished with independence.29 Some officials did, in fact, continue to think of Indians as different and requiring special treatment.30 In spite of politicians’ general ideological disengagement from Indian needs, even they enjoined local magistrates to retain a paternal stance toward the pueblos. Echoing colonial rule, the congress of the state of Mexico asked local officers in the mid-1820s to “take particular care that the inhabitants of his district, dispersed in the countryside, be reduced to village life, so that once established in society, they can receive the corresponding religious and civil education.” From this directive, Hale extrapolates that the detachment of state-level politicians from Indian problems was countered by the prefects who oversaw district government, where “traditional notions of tutelage continued.”31 Clearly, the ideal of paternal rule persisted in the postcolonial era, especially in the mutual expectations of communities and government.

Female Land Tenure and the Postindependence Judiciary Notions of tutelage did not apply to female litigants. Women certainly gained no rights with the reshuffling of local government. In fact, with the loss of a strong extralocal judicial arm to protect them, Indian women became more vulnerable to the depredations of their male neighbors and kin, as suggested in cases of female landholding and mala vida. Information on female landholding in the villages is patchy after 1821. Records show that some Indian women continued to hold and inherit land in the 1830s and 1840s.32 In 1829 José Teodoro sued his two sisters in the hope of receiving more than a third of their late father’s estate.33 Although José made his case with a lawyer (who cited the medieval Leyes de Toro and Ley de Soria), the presiding judge ignored his arguments and ordered an equal division of the father’s goods. All three children received parcels of land; the sisters got their father’s saints and José his tools. This judge’s protection of the sisters’ rights shows continuity with colonial practices. More commonly, after 1821 women waged lone and ultimately unsuccessful battles to protect their property. In 1831, for example, the widow Bernabela Antonia went to the local court ( juzgado de primera instancia) to take possession of her late husband’s lands. (She brought a will that showed her husband had inherited the lands from his mother.) But Bernabela’s brotherin-law protested and claimed the land for himself. The judge ordered officials 104

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in their village to decide the case. Two months later Bernabela complained to the judge in Tenango that despite her “unending demands,” the village officer had sided against her. The Tenango judge ordered a local officer to investigate, and he came back with a report that damned Bernabela’s case. Because she supposedly refused to hand over her mother-in-law’s will, the officer enclosed Bernabela in depósito. Her case further collapsed when some witnesses to the will in question denied ever having seen it. Other witnesses could not remember the will, explaining that they were drunk. The síndico (an ayuntamiento officer) intimated that Bernabela had lied and failed to respect the authorities. The file ends in midsentence with the síndico’s request, “You judge should decide . . .”34 The lack of a written decision suggests that the judge did not act in Bernabela’s favor but instead left her to fend for herself against hostile in-laws and village officials. The postindependence judiciary seemingly let down another woman on the verge of losing her lands. Anna Maya was married to José López, an itinerant peddler with a weakness for gambling. José not only squandered his earnings but also gambled away the couple’s lands. When he bet and lost parcels that Anna considered hers, she hired a lawyer to seek the district judge’s help. As “an unhappy woman, abandoned by her husband,” she begged the judge to block the dispossession of the lands in question and her house. Anna claimed that her scarce resources “make it impossible to go to Toluca frequently to consult on what should be done.” She continued, “My complete poverty makes this business foreign to me.” Finally, she made this appeal to the judge: “the protection the law entrusts you to grant to miserable persons like myself, a woman abandoned by her husband.” In this case from the 1850s, Anna Maya wanted the judge to act in the colonial role of the father who listened to and protected the weak, including women like her. But it seems she had little success; the petition bears no comment from any court officers, not even the date received.35 Finally, one must consider the relative paucity of cases after 1821 involving women defending their lands. In the colonial period women readily sought judicial protection of lands and other possessions: the Tenango district spawned dozens of these court cases. Yet for the years 1821 to 1855, I found only the few cases described here. The small number of cases suggests to me that after independence women found little advantage in appealing to the courts. By the late nineteenth century, female landholding in the region had become rare.36 The competition for lands worsened in the nineteenth century as the population continued to expand. In some communities, women did receive grants of tierras de repartimiento,37 but I doubt this practice was wide105

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spread. Rather I believe that the attempted exclusion of women as landholders in the late colonial period was more easily realized after independence when women could no longer depend on judicial protection. The already limited community rights of some hijos del pueblo, the women, shrunk yet further in postindependence Mexico.

Mala Vida in Postindependence Mexico Colonial authorities promoted patriarchy in marriage and thus did not always extend sufficient protection to women. With moderate punishment considered a husband’s prerogative over his wife, before and after 1821 judges looked for ways that wives may have “caused” the beatings they received. Colonial judges tended to punish men lightly. They might be jailed for a night or two to “cool off ” but seldom more than that. Still, the fact that many women in the colonial period sought a judge’s or a priest’s protection suggests some faith in being heard and in gaining an acceptable resolution. In the early national period rural women found priests and judges less helpful. As I read through bundles of local judicial documents from 1740 to 1850, a conundrum emerged: compared to colonial records, the postindependence judicial cases included few complaints of wife beating. Given that republican authorities took a more critical stance on wife beating, the apparent decline of these complaints is especially striking.38 I believe that this reflects women’s declining faith in the judiciary.39 Beginning in the late Bourbon period, some priests took a less active role in their parishioners’ marital relations; it seems their role further shrunk as their numbers and power declined after 1810. Women thus lost another possible advocate and protector in the clergy.40 Civil authorities clearly disappointed Brigída Aviles when she reported that her husband threatened to shoot her. The alcalde primero who heard her grievance only tried to “calm them down and reunite them.” Brigída found this an insufficient response to her problems. She abandoned hope of a legal resolution and took matters into her own hands: in 1829 she hired a widow to poison her husband.41 In 1856 María Guadarrama similarly gave up on her community’s auxiliar (sheriff ) when he failed to protect her from her husband. Several times after her husband beat her, María sought the auxiliar’s protection. The official recalled jailing the husband twice for a day before reuniting the couple. When he tried to reconcile the couple a third time, María refused. Even before a judge in Tenango, María still refused the judiciary’s admonishments to rejoin her husband.42 106

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María Magdalena apparently failed to seek outside protection from her husband, Nicolás Guadalupe. In 1830 Nicolás reported that their marriage had its “share of fights.” María, he explained, did not feed him on time, she left the house unkempt, and her “bad tongue” once drove him to club her in the head several times. Relatives on both sides witnessed these fights, but no one sought the intervention of outside authorities. When neighborhood gossip hinted at María’s infidelity, tensions soared. In a drunken rage one night, Nicolás fatally stabbed his wife.43 The judge who heard the case believed that Nicolás had little reason to kill his wife. Why, the judge asked, if she failed at household duties and was incorrigible did Nicolás not go to the authorities for help? Nicolás answered that he was too ashamed to do so. The judge considered shame an inadequate excuse “because those of the indigenous class almost never have this consideration.” The court finally handed down a sentence of five years in the Veracruz presidio. During the colonial period, Nicolás could have expected a much lighter sentence for murdering his wife; Indian perpetrators often received complete pardons. This partly reflected a tradition of Spanish civil law that understood uxoricide as a means to defend a husband’s honor. Light sentences and pardons might also reflect the way in which colonial judges viewed Indians. For example, Indians accused of murder had some success using drunkenness as a mitigating factor in their defense.44 After 1821 uxoricide earned stiffer sentences; five- and ten-year prison terms became common. According to Arrom, this new crackdown on wife murder reflected both an increased disapproval of wife beating and the state’s expanding “role in deciding justice and enforcing law.”45 This change in sentencing clearly aimed to discourage domestic violence. Ironically, the flawed penal system enabled even convicted murderers to escape punishment. Authorities continued to reunite unhappy couples in the nineteenth century. Just three months after marrying eighteen-year-old Felipe Neri, Micaela López, age fifteen, fled for the first time. When he brought her back, Micaela ran away again to Cuernavaca, where she and a lover would later have two children. Ten years later, in 1846, Felipe spied his estranged wife in Tianguistengo’s plaza. At Felipe’s insistence, the local judge rounded up Micaela and her lover, Miguel. After the adulterous couple agreed to end their relationship and to let Miguel take their children, Felipe pardoned his wife. After a decade’s absence Micaela returned to her marriage and lost her children in the deal.46 The same issues plagued marriages among Indians and other rural poor across the period from 1730 to 1850. The dismantlement of racial inequality 107

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created new challenges for indigenous couples. After 1821 the Mexican army took Indian men away from their homes, often for long periods and in wretched conditions.47 This led to scenarios of further poverty, abandonment, and the necessary intensification of female autonomy at home. Finally, my research yielded just three incidents of women murdering men. Not incidentally, all three occurred in the 1820s.48 Perhaps after 1821 Mexican women had to turn to other, extrajudicial methods to rein in cruel and irresponsible husbands.

Conclusion Gender relations, while mainly consistent in terms of the persistence of patriarchy, did change in postindependence Mexico. Facing late colonial pressures, men tried to limit women’s rights and roles. Amid the uncertainty of the era, women sought to retain traditional allies and rights. At the same time, the numbers and power of the local clergy decreased; as my examination of depósito shows, clergy had a more limited role in punishing and protecting their female parishioners. The new state, meanwhile, became increasingly liberal and less inclined to protect rural women. Regarding Indian communities, however, the pre-Reforma Mexican governments hesitated to abandon the tradition of paternal rule. In the state of Mexico, government officials respected the very essence of the pueblo, its lands. Village landholdings did not disintegrate after independence and provided an essential stability to Indian pueblos. Well into the nineteenth century, area villages retained significant landholdings that allowed families to remain in their home settlements.49 Liberal politicians believed communal tenure halted progress, asserting instead that individual property formed the basis for liberty and fostered personal initiative. Despite ambitions to divide village holdings, prior to the desamortization law of 1856 politicians allowed the existing community holdings to stand. When the state of Mexico requested municipal reports on community lands in 1848, local people simply ignored it. Frustrated, the government retreated, later conceding that communal holdings should remain “in possession and property of the hijos de los pueblos . . . to avoid that [the holdings] become a hotbed of conflict.”50 This midcentury ruling shows considerable continuity with colonial policy granting and protecting Indian village lands. It also reflects a fear of pushing the pueblos to rebellion. In the 1840s villagers in Guerrero (then part of the state of Mexico) and elsewhere in Mexico carried out large-scale insurrections.51 108

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The pueblos of the Toluca region, by contrast, tended to pick up pens rather than machetes and firearms to get the government’s attention. By doing so, they maintained their colonial tradition as tenacious litigants. John Tutino notes this tendency among Toluca valley villagers who “repeatedly went to the colonial courts. . . . [W]hile the communities did not always win, they won or gained acceptable compromise often enough to retain an abiding belief in the legitimacy of colonial justice.” This belief, coupled with “substantial subsistence autonomy,” according to Tutino, kept most of the region’s villages from joining Hidalgo’s insurrection.52 Even after 1821, as much as Indian communities felt abused or alienated from early republican government, in times of need they solicited its protection. In the confusion that followed the proclamation of the Ley Lerdo, villages scrambled to protect their lands from extinction. When the residents of Calimaya petitioned the state governor to protect their commons in 1856, they did so in a style reminiscent of colonial petitions: “We implore Your Excellency’s paternal feelings, as the true and sole protector of the happiness of the state’s villages.”53 Mexican judicial records from 1821 to 1855 plainly show continuities from the colonial period: from the strategic appeals for fatherly rule to the state’s tacit protection of community lands. The government’s open ambivalence about individual Indian citizens represents a clearer break from the colonial past. While politicians dismantled racial inequalities on paper, the practice of law shows that they continued to view indigenous Mexicans as different and inferior. Thus policy toward Indians was confused. In fact, no Indian policy as such existed, leaving matters in the hands of local judges and officials, who often had close ties to local non-Indian elites. The pre-Reforma government dealt with Indian communities much as colonial rulers did. But as individuals, Indian men and women could no longer hope for special help or leniency from republican judges. Indians, women, and widows—the miserables of the colonial world—too often found that Mexican authorities failed to heed their cries for justice and protection. For these people, justice became harder to attain as their colonial fathers evolved into less attentive stepfathers.

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a pp e n d i x

Depósito Cases, 1749–1856

District abbreviations: Ixtla = Ixtlahuaca; Temascal = Temascaltepec Racial designations: I = Indian; S = Spanish; M = Mestiza; B = Black, Afro-Mexican Marital status: M = Married; D = Doncella (unmarried, virgin); S = Soltera (unmarried); W = Widow Location: eccl = ecclesiastical residence; private = private home, house of a neighbor; kin = house of kin to the depositada; civil = house of presiding civil officer Asterisk indicates that more than one woman was put in depósito in the same instance. Year

District

Race

Status

Cause

Location

Authority

1749 1750 1750 1753 1753 1753 1753 1754 1754 1756 1762 1762 1762 1762 1763 1763 1763 1766 1770 1770 1771

Metepec Metepec Zacualpa Metepec Temascal Tenango Zacualpa Malinalco Metepec Metepec Malinalco Temascal Temascal Temascal Zacualpa Zacualpa Guazacualco Tenango Tenango Temascal Tenango

I I S S S S S I

M M D S D D S

angry priest

eccl eccl eccl

priest priest priest priest priest priest

I* S B M B I I* B M I S I*

W D D S S S

D W M M

premarital premarital premarital premarital premarital divination premarital premarital premarital premarital premarital premarital incontinence premarital premarital incontinence mala vida liquor sales

private private private eccl private private

private private 1 private private

eccl judge priest priest priest priest priest priest priest priest priest priest civil priest civil

Appendix Year

District

1772 1774 1775 1776 1777 1780 1780 1780 1781 1782 1783 1783 1783 1789 1789 1789 1789 1790 1791 1792 1792 1792 1792 1794 1794 1794 1794 1794 1795 1796 1796 1796 1797 1798 1799 1799 1799 1800 1801 1803

Metepec Tacuba Zacualpa Zacualpa Tenango Tenango Metepec Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Toluca Malinalco Metepec Temascal Igualpa Tenango Tenango Zacualpa Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Temascal Temascal Temascal Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Ixtla Tenango Tenango

Race

Status

I I* I* I* I M I* S I* I I* S I I M

D

S I S I B I I I I I I I S

I* S I I I S I S

D M D M W M W S S S M M D S M W M M M M S S M S

M S M M M S

Cause consensual union premarital priest’s dispute premarital tax collection mala vida premarital brawl 2 theft incontinence consensual union marital separation premarital incontinence premarital consensual union incontinence defamation premarital consensual union premarital mala vida inheritance dispute husband’s debt verbal insult safeguarded brawl incontinence premarital daughter’s flight incest incontinence adultery mala vida premarital tribute divorce adultery premarital

112

Location private private

private

civil private eccl

private

Authority civil priest priest priest civil civil priest civil civil civil civil priest husband priest priest priest

eccl

civil civil priest

eccl

civil priest

private

priest civil husband

eccl

priest priest priest priest

civil civil private

civil priest Indian gob priest civil/priest priest

Appendix Year

District

Race

Status

Cause

1803 1803 1804 1807 1809 1811 1816 1816 1817 1817 1818 1818 1818 1818 1818 1819 1819 1819 1820 1820 1821 1821 1822 1824 1824 1826 1827 1827 1828 1828 1830 1830 1830 1830 1830 1830 1831 1831 1833 1844

Temascal Temascal Tenango Tenango Iscateupa Tenango Metepec Meztitlan Zacualpa Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Metepec Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Ixtla Iscateupa Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Tenango Coyoacan Tenango

B I I

S S M D

premarital incest adultery premarital mother’s conduct incontinence premarital husband’s fight husband’s dispute incontinence husband’s debt mala vida married daughter consensual union knife attack mala vida premarital defamation premarital 4 defamation mala vida divorce premarital incest/adultery premarital abandonment murder adultery murder murder consensual union brawl adultery/abandonment murder criminal consensual union resisting authority defamation/brawl consensual union mala vida

I S S S I I I I M I I S I* S I

I M

I I S

M S M M S M M W W W M S M W,S M M M D S M S M M,W

S M M,W

I

W M M

113

Location

Authority priest civil civil priest priest

3

kin

priest priest priest civil civil civil/priest priest

private private

civil civil

private eccl kin/private 5 private private private

civil priest civil civil woman civil civil

private private private

civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil civil

private private private private

kin

Appendix Year

District

1844 1856 1858

Tenango Tenango Malinalco

Race

Status

Cause

Location

Authority

M D

adultery parental abuse premarital

private

civil civil priest

NOTES 1. This female slave was deposited in a private residence, the casas reales, and in the ecclesiastical residence. 2. This depósito occurred as an abuse of power by an officer of the Acordada. 3. Carcel de mujeres (women’s jail). 4. Priest enclosed all unmarried women and forced them to marry. 5. Enclosed in the alcalde’s house, a private residence, and on a hacienda.

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Notes

The AJEM-T papers were not cataloged when I conducted my research. Papers were bundled with labels (e.g., “Tenango Penal y Civil 1810”) that often did not match the bundle’s contents. Some bundles bore no label. For AJEM-T sources, I list the place and date of each record’s start. When the place and date are insufficient, I include a summary title of the record.

Introduction 1. J. W. Scott. 2. Gibson; Lockhart, Nahuas. 3. Altman and Lockhart, 97–98. 4. J. C. Scott, 4. 5. Lockhart, “Españoles,” 491 n 58. 6. Szuchman, 11–12, argues for a longer “middle period.” I start in 1730 because sustained native population growth began then. Local court cases were accessible only for the years after 1750. 7. Tutino, From Insurrection, 140–151. 8. México y sus alrededores, 17–18. 9. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 57–60. 10. On the priest as father, see Taylor, Magistrates, 162–163. 11. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 21, San Andrés, 1762. 12. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 33, 1776. A priest praised an alcalde mayor who gave maize to his district’s famished Indians as “not only a true and good judge, but like a Father to all his subjects.” AGN Subdelegados vol. 4, exp. 5, Zacualpan 1789. 13. AGN Indios vol. 53, exp. 183, Xocotitlan, Ixtlahuaca jurisdiction, 1733. 14. AGN Tierras vol. 2223, exp. 4, Zinacantepec, 1803. 15. AGN Tierras vol. 2535, exp. 4. On the hacendado as patriarch, see O’Connor, chap. 6. 16. Indian villagers recounted these customary events in 1827. BN FCSC Caja 28, San Antonio de la Ysla, San Mateo Mexicalzingo, La Concepción, San Lucas Tepemaxalco v.

Notes to Pages 6 – 10 Hacienda de Atengo, 1827. An estate administrator boasted that he recruited villagers to work by “treating them as sons.” Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 345. 17. J. C. Scott, 11. 18. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 24, San Antonio de la Ysla, 1769. 19. Indians in San Lucas accused their alcalde of jailing people he found in the street at night and beating them without cause. The alcalde acted as a “bad shepherd” who needed to stop “being so rigorous with his children.” AJEM-T unlabeled, José Joaquín v. Lorenzo Juan, Calimaya, June 15, 1792. 20. Martin, Governance, 183. 21. On the concept “patchwork of patriarchies,” see Few, “Women, Religion, and Power,” 631. 22. Stern, 316–317. 23. On prescribed female custody in medieval Europe, see Casagrande. Perry finds that the ideal of women’s enclosure grew more pronounced in Counter-Reformation Spain. Graham explicitly discusses the workings of gendered spaces. 24. On Aztec ideals of parallel gendered spheres, see Kellogg; Clendinnen, Aztecs, 169; Burkhart, “Mexica Women.” 25. Kellogg, 114–115. 26. Borah, 12–13; Taylor, Drinking, 106. 27. Borah. 28. Indians knew that the courts did not always treat them fairly. Mistreated by their priest, one pueblo hesitated to make a formal complaint in 1822, supposing that “in the tribunals the voice of the powerful is attended to more than that of the helpless.” AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 1009, exp. 1, Tenancingo. 29. Compared to elsewhere in central Mexico, William B. Taylor (pers. comm., January 16, 2008), finds that Indians from the Toluca region were most apt to seek justice in Mexico City in the late colonial period. 30. If known, I mention use of a lawyer. In the high courts of Mexico City, Indians often hired a lawyer. Occasionally people hired lawyers to represent them before the local magistrates; this was a more common practice toward the end of colonial rule. The lawyer and client often collaborated on a petition. Lawyers formed the petitioner’s own story into a more polished, finished product, perhaps integrating allusions to the classics or specific Spanish laws. Most lawyers aimed to tell a clear story with obvious cause and effect. Martin, Governance, 146–147, assigns a more prominent role to scribes and lawyers. See also Kellogg, 13–21. 31. On the Spanish judicial system’s treatment of Indians, see Borah; Taylor, Drinking. Arrom, chap. 2, discusses the courts’ position on women but more from the perspective of legal treatises rather than judicial practice. 32. AGN Tierras vol. 2224, exp. 3, Almoloya, Zinacantepec jurisdiction. 33. AGN Tierras vol. 2223, exp. 1, Zinacantepec, 1801. 34. One village gobernador explained in 1733 that Indian officers customarily corrected minor infractions without informing the district judge. The gobernador’s task was to

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Notes to Pages 10 – 17 “paternally correct and punish . . . whipping them with the necessary moderation, jailing them for some days.” AGN Indios vol. 53, exp. 183, Xocotitlan, Metepec jurisdiction. 35. A dying man “testated in the Indians’ style before the alcalde and república of Casulco, his barrio.” AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” Mateo Pascual v. Aparicio Pascual, 1810. 36. An Indian woman left out of her father’s will suggested that her brother, the alcalde, had authorized the will. AGN Tierras vol. 2300, exp. 8, Santa María la Asunción, 1798. 37. Davis, Fiction; Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 43–45. Taylor, Drinking, 90–91, shows how motives can provide “clues to folk explanations and norms.” 38. Tenango’s subdelegado explained in 1818 that Indians commonly “excuse themselves of their excesses with the abominable vice of drinking, although it may be false.” AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 8. See also Taylor, Drinking, 64–65, 111. 39. Taylor, Drinking; Ladurie; Hanawalt.

Chapter 1 1. Villaseñor, 217–218. 2. Jarquín, 18–21. 3. Entire pueblos and subregions contained a majority of Mazahuas and Otomís. Wood, “Corporate Adjustments,” 12. 4. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 131, exp. 1. In late colonial courts Indians often requested a translator, despite “being very Spanish-speaking” (ser muy ladino). 5. Villaseñor, 231–232. 6. AGN Bienes Nacionales vol. 628, exp. 18; Loera, Economía, 37. 7. Slaves had been more common in the Toluca valley, but by the late colonial period Indians assumed tasks once performed by blacks. Flores; Lockhart, “Españoles.” 8. Villaseñor, 217–222, 231–232. 9. Menegus, Del señorío indígena. 10. BN FCSC caja 33, inventory of the Atengo estates, 1755; Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 143–146. 11. The Toluca region contrasts with more typical regions: the urban market ringed by a rural hinterland. Van Young, “Urban Market.” On Toluca, see Villaseñor, 220; Lockhart, “Capital,” 110–114. 12. Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 243, estimates that Indian tributaries in the Toluca valley expanded from 20,224 in 1742 to 31,710 in 1800. 13. Tepemaxalco sought its own autonomy from Calimaya. Wood, “Corporate Adjustments,” 43–45, 134–135, 181–182, 206. 14. Loera, Economía, 40–44. 15. Lockhart, “Capital,” 119. 16. BN FCSC caja 15, “Los naturales del partido de Calimaya y Tepemaxalco, paguen por tener sus animales en tierras . . . del Sr. Conde de Santiago.” Conflicts over pastures predated this case; Indians cited favorable 1562 and 1646 decrees.

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Notes to Pages 17– 21 17. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 7. 18. AJEM-T unlabeled, Andrés Martín v. Juan Pedro, Tianguistengo, June 7, 1791; “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Bictoriano Martín, Ypólito Casiano v. Juan Pedro Arévalo. 19. As the república’s elected escribano, Arévalo may have thought he acted legally despite the community’s lack of support. His petition in the pueblo’s name was void, however, because the subdelegado refused to ratify his election. AJEM-T unlabeled, “Común del pueblo de San Lucas . . . sobre quejas de Juan Pedro el Cojo y otro Yndios de su pueblo,” 1791. 20. AJEM-T unlabeled, Andrés Martín v. Juan Pedro, Tianguistengo, June 7, 1791. The accuser, Andrés, was also an Arévalo. 21. Van Young, “Conflict,” examines late colonial village conflict in the Guadalajara region, which he attributes to increased internal socioeconomic differentiation. This pattern probably works better for that region’s relatively “open” villages and less so for central and southern Mexico; Taylor, “Indian Pueblos.” 22. Gibson, 248, suggested that “the hacienda offered an escape.” See also Van Young, “Conflict,” 73–75. 23. Kanter, “Indian Education.” 24. Calimaya had a school in 1746. AGN Tierras vol. 2079, exp. 9. 25. Letter reproduced in Lavrin and Couturier, 302–303. See also Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 348. 26. The Conde de Santiago ceded to the villagers’ demands. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Tianguistengo, April 19, 1803. 27. Reports of a massive Indian rebellion in Tepic in 1800–1802 fueled their anxieties. Van Young, Other Rebellion, 455–456; Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 349. 28. When San Lorenzo Quautenco, a Calimaya barrio, petitioned for 600 varas (a vara measures about 33 inches) for the community in the 1760s, four neighboring communities stood to lose lands. Wood, “Corporate Adjustments,” 180–182, chap. 6. 29. In 1758 pueblos on the valley floor agreed to pay a limosna (four to six pesos from each pueblo, for Tenango’s fiesta) for the right to collect wood in Tenango’s monte. By 1810 hillside towns’ annual rents rose to twenty pesos. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” San Antonio de la Ysla v. San Bartolomé Atlatlauca.” 30. Garner. On Atengo’s increased pig-raising, see Lavrin and Couturier, 302–303. 31. The 1826 quote is cited in Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 55. Tenango was the most densely populated district in 1871 and 1900; in the latter year, Tenango had 144 inhabitants per square kilometer. Menegus, “Ocoyoacac,” 59–61; González and Iracheta, 112. 32. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” San Pablo y San Lucas Tepemaxalco v. Hacienda de Atengo, August 8, 1810. San Lucas informants stressed the injustice of doubling the rent on lands they practically possessed. The Conde’s witnesses denied their ownership claims (villagers were “merely tenants”). 33. Petitions made in September–October 1810 received no recorded judicial response until May 1811. 34. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” Conde de Santiago to the Viceroy, November 1810. 35. Guha.

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Notes to Pages 21– 26 36. Bajío estates suffered more violent, sustained attacks in 1811. Tutino, From Insurrection, 195–196. On the localized nature of Indian involvement in the insurrection, see Van Young, “Raw,” 312. 37. Van Young, Other Rebellion, 128. 38. Ibid., 163. 39. Hamnett, chap. 1. A 1786 list of Tenango district shop owners indicates that many were creoles. Of thirty-five shop owners, nearly half bore last names of clans long settled in the area. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” “Diligencias practicadas . . . para la contribución de 30 pesos, cada tienda de pulpería.” 40. Tutino, “Creole Mexico,” 2, 352. 41. The poster reads: “ya vendran los insurjentes / y todo esto pagara / y de moncada el pescuso / veremos gollotinado / bastate ser gachupín, be al punto, y dile, a manuel / que es un infame traidor / lisongero adulador / que ade caer como leesbel, también le as de amwonestar / si con estreches le matas / y en fin, ansi, les a de ablar / que sogas están baratas, y a tu engrimiento moncada / pronto te a de acabar.” AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 14. On the independence era’s verbal culture, see Van Young, Other Rebellion, chap. 14. 42. El Muycon and his band fit well with Van Young’s assessment that “there is no substantial evidence of what one might call social banditry during the period of the independence struggle.” “Raw,” 311. 43. The gilded side altars in San Lucas’s church dating from the 1780s and 1790s suggest relative wealth for such a small community or a very active parish priest. The struggle with Atengo may have spelled a downward turn after 1800. 44. Hamnett, 122. 45. Tutino, From Insurrection, 139–151. 46. Villages suspected as insurgent bases (Amanalco, Xocotitlan) or chosen as battle sites (Tenancingo, Tenango del Valle) suffered more directly. Kanter, “Hijos,” 67–68. 47. Loera, Economía, 74. 48. Compare with the longer history of banditry in the Guadalajara region. Taylor, “Banditry,” 206. 49. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” “Causa criminal . . . contra Miguel Gerónimo conocido por el Angel, el Chino, y Silvestre y socios por robos.” The band’s leaders included a Spaniard, a mestizo, and an Indian—all natives of Capuluac. 50. Few judicial records for Tenango exist from November 1810 through early 1811, when rebel activity was at its height there. 51. Provisional justice of Tianguistengo to the Viceroy, AGN Subdelegados vol. 37, exp. 53. 52. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–19” Calimaya, February 10, 1818. 53. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Don Manuel de San Juan v. Nicolasa María, 1819. 54. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” Calimaya, December 15, 1818. 55. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 13. 56. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 6. These Indians also mentioned that the Hacienda de Atengo denied them access to pasture. 57. On the new municipalities in Mexico State, see Salinas, 39.

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Notes to Pages 26 – 31 58. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 181–22” “El Ayuntamiento de San Antonio de la Ysla, contra don José María de San Juan,” 1820. 59. Many priests kept separate sacramental books for Indians and non-Indians. Church authorities contradicted the Spanish constitution’s newly mandated racial equality, asserting that Indians should continue to pay lower fees. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 715, exp. 13. 60. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 369, exp. 72, Ozoloapan, 1848. 61. Earlier sources show only wood used for fires. To collect dung from estate land, Indians had to give food to Atengo cowhands. BN FCSC caja 28 “Ayuntamientos, alcaldes, y ciudadanos . . . 21 enero 1826.” 62. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22,” 1821. 63. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22,” 1822. 64. BN FCSC caja 28, unnumbered document.

Chapter 2 1. In 1537 the pope granted permission to Indians (as new Christians) to marry beyond the second degree of consanguinity without a dispensation (Rípodas, 171). Mexican ecclesiastical authorities permitted many consanguineous marriages among rural Spaniards and Indians on the grounds of limited population (angustia loci ). AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 217, exps. 47, 112, 114 (1803). 2. Loera, Calimaya, 72. 3. In Peru forasteros (Indian outsiders) who married into communities were known as sobrina or sobrino, niece or nephew, and gained access to land in a new ayllu (primary living group of Andean natives). Wightman, 88. 4. While Spanish law forbade private and inalienable holdings among Indians on tierras realengas (public lands owned by the Crown), Indians and colonial magistrates treated such parcels as de facto private property. 5. A 1749 decree legally restricted those who worked community lands to plant corn or wheat; Indians who privately held lands faced no such restrictions. AGN Indios vol. 56, exp. 103. 6. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” San Mateo Texcaliacac, May 26, 1802. 7. AGN Tierras vol. 2301 exp. 2, Tultepec, 1777. 8. AJEM-T unlabeled, undated petition (on sealed paper dated 1796–1797) of Ana María, viuda de Tomás Christobál, Santa Cruz Atizapán. 9. AGN Tierras vol. 2544, exp. 3, Santa Cruz Atizapán, 1782. 10. Loera, Calimaya, 83. Burial proved pivotal in AGN Tierras vol. 2301, exp. 10, San Juan Xuchiaca, 1792; Tierras vol. 2535, exp. 1, Texcaliacac, 1777. 11. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Capuluac, April 11, 1784. 12. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” Eulogia Martina v. Diego Martín, Santa María la Asunción. On care of a holy image, see AGN Tierras vol. 2544, exp. 14, Tianguistengo, 1795. 13. A lawyer representing Indian clients explained, “Your Majesty concedes tierras de

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Notes to Pages 31– 36 repartimiento to the villages, so that they can be divided among needy individuals.” But, he noted, “some individuals have more parcels than they can farm, so they rent the extra lots.” The surplus of some caused “notable damage to those who have nothing.” AJEM-T “Penal 1789,” Capuluac, 1784. 14. In 1818 one república blocked a land sale by a resident, promoting instead transfer to an individual approved by the pueblo. AGN Tierras vol. 2538, exp. 21, San Francisco Tetecla. 15. Cline; Kellogg. 16. Lockhart, Nahuas, 168–169. 17. AGN Tierras vol. 2345, exp. 3. 18. Taylor, Drinking, 155. 19. Kanter, “Viudas y vecinos,” 28–29. 20. Cultural beliefs and demographic factors explain why few widows remarry. Blom, 193–194; McCaa, “La viuda.” 21. Kanter, “Hijos,” 108. 22. The Recopilación prohibited tribute collection from Indian women, but local custom varied. AGI Audiencia de México 2103. 23. AGN Tierras vol. 2224, exp. 7, San Miguel Almoloya, 1775. The document reads, “ella por ausente, y mujer, nada satisface.” 24. AGN Tierras vol. 2276, exp. 2, San Pedro Tlaltizapan. 25. AGN Tierras vol. 2300, exp. 8, Santa María la Asunción, 1798. The original reads: “es porque soy mujer y que de nada sirvo y soy de parecer porque se viene a los ojos que aún solo Dios y aún solo Rey se le sirve.” 26. Borah, 11–12. 27. Kanter, “Their Hair Was Curly.” 28. On racial insults and other slurs, see Martin, “Popular Speech”; Taylor, Drinking, 83. 29. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Calimaya, February 10, 1818. 30. AGN Tierras vol. 2544, exp. 15, Santa Cruz Atizapán. Mexico City officials voided the sale because the plot in question was community land. The civil teniente was ordered to replace Molina with the neediest villager, chosen by the república. Having heard Molina’s lawyer, the court ordered the pueblo to assign Molina an unoccupied plot. The pueblo considered this impossible; no land stood empty there. 31. AJEM-T unlabeled, Antonio Navarrete v. Andrés García, Metepec, March 17, 1749; “Penal y Civil 1811–18” José Mariano Hernández v. Ciriaco, Calimaya, October 2, 1819. Political rivals accused one another of mixed-raced ancestry. Haskett, Indigenous Rulers, 47–48. 32. Similarly, voting in república elections was limited to those adult males who were “indios puros de padre y madre.” Haskett, Indigenous Rulers, 54. 33. Taylor, “Indian Pueblos.” 34. On female immigration to Mexico City, see Arrom, 106–111; Pescador, De bautizados, 109–118.

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Notes to Pages 37– 4 3

Chapter 3 1. Stavig. 2. Cited in Arrom, 256–257. 3. Ripalda, 55–56. 4. Lorenzana, 228. 5. Manual de párrocos, 123–124. 6. Custom described in contemporary interviews. González and Iracheta, 129. 7. Exceptions include AGN Matrimonios vol. 47, exp. 75; AJEM-T unlabeled, Tianguistengo, July 23, 1803. 8. Manual de párrocos, 123–124. 9. González and Iracheta, 129. On precontact antecedents, see Clendinnen, Aztecs, 153. 10. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 9, San Lucas Tepemaxalco, 1744. Both Aztecs and medieval Europeans counseled women to protect themselves in public with dignified and modest carriage. Clendinnen, Aztecs, 158; Casagrande, 95. 11. Likewise, Indian women were to drink only with their husband’s permission. Taylor, Drinking, 62. 12. Stern, 86–87, stresses the conditionality or contingencies of the marital pact. 13. Lorenzana, 178–179. 14. AGN Indios vol. 61, exp. 250, San Juan Evangelista, Toluca jurisdiction, 1768. 15. Pérez, 150. 16. Boyer, “Women.” 17. Works on domestic abuse in early Mexico include Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists, chap. 4; Boyer, “Women”; Arrom, 228–249; Lipsett-Rivera, “La violencia”; Pescador, “Del dicho”; Stern. For Peru, see Chambers, From Subjects; Stavig. 18. AGN Provisorato caja 97b. The petition bears neither date (late colonial script) nor place. Other documents in this box originated in Texcoco; the petitioner was from Atenco, Zapotlan barrio. 19. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” “Criminal contra Juan de Dios . . . por muerte que dió a su mujer María Santos,” Santa María de la Asunción 1820. 20. AJEM-T unlabeled, February 27, 1795. 21. On male peasant violence, see Stern, chapter 7. 22. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 8. Stern, 82–85, notes the link between sexual and economic negligence. Pérez, 44, argued that when a wife took her husband’s coin, it did not constitute theft since he was obliged to provide for her. He condemned indigent husbands who “not only don’t give them [their wives] anything, but take whatever they [the wives] earn for their drinking.” 23. Stern, 99–103, calls this “the pluralization-of-patriarchs strategy.” 24. Works on sexual witchcraft include Behar; Few, Women Who Lead Evil Lives; Lewis, Hall of Mirrors. Little record exists of this type of sorcery for the Toluca region; Inquisition records, the main source on this practice, are few for this predominantly Indian region. 25. Stern, 97.

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Notes to Pages 4 3 – 4 8 26. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Salvadora Gutiérrez v. Mariano Salomé, Calimaya, 1818. 27. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 18, San Miguel Chapultepec. Leonardo reported that his wife claimed to have a letter for divorce, so that he could marry the widow and she could return to her parents. 28. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 11. See also, AJEM-T unlabeled, Tianguistengo, February 2, 1809. 29. His brother likewise reported that she “paid little attention to her husband. . . . [W]ell, she didn’t even bring him his food when he went to work.” AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Nicolas Guadalupe . . . por el homicidio . . . de su esposa María Magdalena,” Xalatlaco. 30. A local officer urged the abused wife to refrain from using “very strong words” that belittled her husband. AJEM-T “Civil 1855–58” Juan Barrera v. María Guadarrama, May 2, 1856. 31. Stern, 75; Lipsett-Rivera, “De Obra,” 527–531. 32. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Juana María v. José María Serafín, Tianguistengo, 1818. 33. Arrom, 229; Boyer, Lives, 131. Women constituted only about 10 percent of total offenders in central Mexican homicide and assault cases. Taylor, Drinking, 84. 34. Boyer, “Women,” 271–273, reaches similar conclusions about how living with the bride’s family affected husbands. 35. Pérez, 162. 36. AGN Tierras vol. 2301, exp. 15. 37. Pérez, 159–160, tells of a bride who, dreading life with her husband’s pernicious and drunken family, declared, “I don’t want to go suffer with them.” Stern, 92, sees many daughters-in-law as “quasi-servants.” 38. Awaiting outside counsel, the local justice placed Manuela in depósito in a private home. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Tomás Serafín v. Manuela Isabel, Santa María Quaxusco. Asmodeus refers to a demon in the ancient Aramaic Book of Tobit. 39. Pérez, 182, similarly describes many Indians who shamelessly told “their wives: Soand-so is my mistress. Her, I provide for. You, take care of yourself, because she comes first.” 40. Unable to find Tomás, the subdelegado sent the case to the viceroy in July 1821, complaining that the “delinquent has mocked his injured wife and the present judge.” AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22,” Manuela Ysabel Vega v. Tomás Serafín, 1821. 41. Marital discord and matrilocal residence figure prominently in AJEM-T “Penal 1789” petition of Laureano Martín, Almoloya, August 2, 1802. 42. Grandin, 38. 43. Mangan. 44. Chambers, “Rituals of Resistance,” 5. 45. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” “Criminal contra Juan de Dios . . . por muerte que dió a su mujer María Santos,” Santa María de la Asunción, 1820. 46. AJEM-T “1731,” December 3, 1794.

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Notes to Pages 49 – 54 47. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 11. 48. Pérez de Velasco, 55–56; Arrom, 240–241, suggests that women may have internalized the double standard of male and female conduct to the point that they did not view their husbands’ infidelity as breaking the marriage vows. 49. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 9, San Pablo Tepemaxalco. 50. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” María Dolores Rodríguez v. José Valdes, Calimaya, September 12, 1821. 51. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Salvadora Gutiérrez v. Mariano Salomé, San Antonio de la Ysla, 1818. 52. AJEM-T “1731,” December 3, 1794. Stern, 74, describes a similar case. 53. My research on the Toluca region found divorce threatened four times, each time by the wife. By contrast, I found divorce actually pursued in just one other case. Wives threatened to pursue divorce in AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 8, San Miguel Chapultepec, 1783; AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Manuela Isabel v. Tomás Serafín; Josefa Molina v. Agustín Guzmán, 1821; “Penal y Civil 1822–30” petition of José Macedonio Torallo, Calimaya, April 21, 1835. In 1800 a Spaniard of Ixtlahuaca formally sought to divorce his wife. AGN Provisorato caja 97, Villanueba v. Mendoza. 54. In Mexico City the wealthy disproportionately pursued divorce. Arrom, 219–222. Divorce was infrequent among indigenous Andean couples. Stavig, 54. 55. AJEM-T unlabeled, Juan Mariano v. Blaza Polonia, Calimaya, December 2, 1794. 56. AJEM-T unlabeled, Manuela Martina v. José Pedro, Calimaya, 1799. 57. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Juana María v. José María Serafín, Tianguistengo, 1818. 58. Taylor, Drinking, 86.

Chapter 4 1. Kanter, “Hijos,” chap. 5, discusses relations with aunts, uncles, in-laws, godparents, and neighbors. 2. Lockhart, Nahuas, 59. Mixtec and Zapotec sources also refer to household members rather than family. Sousa, 210; Terraciano, 224. 3. Fairchilds, 5. 4. Graham, 4. 5. Burkhart, “Mexica Women,” 28, 35. 6. Perry. 7. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 13, 1806. 8. On rural house sizes and construction, see Kanter, “Hijos,” 211–214. 9. AJEM-T “1810 Penal y Civil” Tianguistengo, May 15, 1811. 10. Pérez de Velasco, 72. 11. A sample of Nahuatl testaments from the Toluca region reveals that 63 percent included religious objects. Other testators may have left such items unmentioned, assuming that heirs would care for their saints. Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 270–272.

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Notes to Pages 54 – 5 8 12. The solar often had a patio, trojes (granaries), a corral, and perhaps an oratory. Indian solares might boast a temascal (steambath). 13. “Reglas para que los naturales de estos reynos sean felices en lo espiritual y temporal.” In Lorenzana, 45–46. 14. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 628, exp. 14. 15. The bishop did not designate special authority to either parent, but most civil law specified that fathers could best control the family. Fabián; Arrom, 77. 16. Ripalda, 54–55. 17. Lipsett-Rivera, “Introduction: Children,” 221–224. 18. Kanter, “Indian Education”; Tanck. 19. AGN Tributos vol. 11, exp. 7. 20. Pérez, 39, 181, contended that Indian parents alternated between negligence and excessive punishment, failing to achieve a balanced discipline. 21. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” “Diligencias . . . sobre la muerte de José López,” 1791; “Penal y Civil 1819–22” “Don Domingo . . . por hija que se robaron,” Calimaya, 1822. 22. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 11. 23. On children’s punishment in Porfirian Tenango, see González and Iracheta, 124–125. 24. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 297, exp. 1, Pedro Rafael Mercado—María Dolores Revollan, San Francisco Temascaltepec del Valle, Temascaltepec jurisdiction, 1818. 25. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 441, exp. 131, San Felipe el Grande, Ixtlahuaca jurisdiction, 1753. 26. Mid-nineteenth-century law still did not grant a widow full rights over her children. Arrom, 86–87. 27. Pescador and Kanter, “De Exequiis Parvulorum.” 28. Seed. 29. An Indian widow of San Felipe blocked her daughter’s plans to marry a mestizo in Toluca. Because the young man was not of same “calidad” (status; referring to race) as her daughter, the mother argued that he would live off her labor, thereby inverting the proper order of marital relations and causing unhappiness. The mother kept her daughter in depósito for a year and broke her will to marry in 1782. AGN Matrimonios vol. 54, exp. 67. 30. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Félix Martín v. Cleto Antonio, Calimaya, February 27, 1799. 31. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” María Josefa López v. José Joachim, Calimaya, April 14, 1820. 32. AGN Tierras vol. 2539, exp. 3, Calimaya, 1789. 33. AGN Tierras vol. 2301, exp. 2, San Pedro Tultepec, 1777. 34. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 628, exp. 14. 35. AGN Tierras vol. 2300, exp. 13, 1795. The higher percentage of extended or multiplefamily units among Tenango’s Spaniards in 1770 may indicate that they had access to land mainly by renting from Indians. The many complex households among Spaniards resulted from married couples who, without lands or a house of their own, had little choice but to remain in their parents’ households. Married brothers similarly merged households.

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Notes to Pages 5 8 – 62 36. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 34, Ocoyoacac, 1766. 37. AJEM-T unlabeled, Petronila María v. Felipe Nicolás, Melchora María, Tianguistengo, September 27, 1792. 38. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Antonia Gerónima v. Antonio Manuel, March 5, 1814. 39. Cline, 78. 40. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22,” July 2, 1821. 41. AGN Tierras vol. 2300, exp. 8, Santa María de la Asunción, 1798. 42. Illegitimate children were born in various circumstances. Hijos de padres desconocidos were children born outside of a stable union. People referred to children born of common-law unions as hijos naturales. Hijos adulterinos were so labeled when one of the biological parents was married to another individual. Documents often mention hijos de viudez, children born during widowhood. 43. Twinam, esp. chaps. 6–7. 44. AGN Tierras vol. 2345, exp. 3, Santa María de la Asunción Xonacatlan, 1793. 45. Legitimacy similarly affected inheritance in early Culhuacan. Cline, 65–66. 46. On his deathbed a man who had fathered six illegitimate children with one woman and then married another expressed his desire to will some land to the bastard children. The priest, however, urged him to leave it to his legal wife for her lifetime. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Tianguistengo, September 19, 1818. 47. AGN Tierras vol. 2276, exp. 1, Santa Cruz Atizapán, 1765. 48. The suit’s outcome is unknown. AJEM-T unlabeled, Calimaya, March 22, 1817. In a similar case, a widow who had three daughters with Ocuila’s priest petitioned in 1816 that he pay monthly support for the girls. BMM 407 exp. 13. 49. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 4, 1753; vol. 124, exp. 35, Ocoyoacac, 1790. Martin, “Popular Speech,” 317. 50. AGN Tierras vol. 2535, exp. 4, 1768; Criminal vol. 123, exp. 10, Acasulco, 1797. 51. On elite views, see Seed, 215. 52. AGN Matrimonios vol. 30, exp. 51. 53. I located just two cases in which adults purposely abandoned children left in their care. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Tianguistengo, May 26, 1802; AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Calimaya, February 16, 1819. On urban versus rural rates of abandonment, see Cramaussel; Gonzalbo, “La Casa.” 54. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Marcelo de la Cruz v. Dionicia María, Tianguistengo, March 8, 1785. 55. AGN Tributos vol. 27, exp. 1, Tianguistengo, 1798. 56. AGN Indios vol. 65, exp. 46, Calimaya, 1775. 57. Further reports confirmed that the fiscal was not merely an orphan, but illegitimate, born of an adulterous union between a mulatto and an india. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 35. 58. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 93, exp. 281, Almoloya, 1789; leg. 217, exp. 47, Metepec, 1803. 59. AGN Tierras vol. 2224, exp. 7, San Miguel Almoloya, Metepec district, 1775.

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Notes to Pages 62 – 70 60. In central Mexico a tradition existed since at least the sixteenth century of aunts and uncles who adopted orphaned nieces and nephews. In Nahuatl, the term niece or nephew was equated with being an orphan. Cline, 72–73; Lockhart, Nahuas, 90. 61. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 26, Techuchulco, 1770. 62. Malvido; Pastor, 396–403. 63. AJEM-T unlabeled, Luciana Martina v. Félix Martín, Tianguistengo, 1808; “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Causa criminal . . . en la muerte de un muchacho José María,” San Miguel Almaya, 1827. 64. Don José’s sister explained that “her late brother customarily had her [the servant] sleep in the same room at night, and there are a thousand honest reasons to explain this that dissolve any malice whatsoever.” AJEM-T unlabeled, Calimaya, March 22, 1817. 65. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1830–50” Bernardo Alonso v. María Modesta, María Leona, Almoloya del Río, 1850. 66. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Manuela Ysabel Vega v. Tomás Serafín, 1821; AGN Provisorato caja 57, carpeta 13, San Francisco Temascaltepec del Valle, 1762. On sexual relations between masters and female servants, see Fairchilds, chap. 6. 67. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” “Don Domingo . . . por hija que se robaron,” Calimaya, 1822. See Fairchilds, 181. 68. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 21, 1790. 69. Placing hands on the head presented a grave insult, if not a sexual violation. LipsettRivera, “De Obra,” 513–514. 70. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 21. 71. Servants became “living symbols of their employer’s status.” Maza, 199. 72. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 36, Atlapulco, 1778. 73. AGN Tierras vol. 2536, exp. 12, Xilozingo, 1779. 74. Chapter 5 recounts this case in detail. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 14, Xalatlaco, 1806. 75. Maza, 136. 76. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Calimaya, May 9, 1785. 77. González and Iracheta, 136, found few signs of female solidarity beyond the family bond between mother and daughter. 78. Stern, 173–174. 79. María’s bid at respectability failed: her husband whipped her and then discovered the lover. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Causa criminal de Pasqual Gregorio,” 1830. Lipsett-Rivera, “De Obra,” 528, notes the distinction between a woman’s conduct in her house and beyond.

Chapter 5 1. AJEM-T unlabeled, Tianguistengo, December 22, 1796. 2. Garduño men held these posts in the Tenango district alone: jailer, store owner, priest, teniente de justicia, and hacienda mayordomo. Tenango’s priest described the Gar-

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Notes to Pages 70 – 77 duño family as “among the pueblos’ most important, well known and of good repute.” AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 217, exp. 34, 1803. 3. AJEM-T unlabeled, José Ortíz v. Juan José Garduño, Tianguistengo, October 13, 1794. 4. Tenango’s subdelegado, Juan Antonio Flores, twice prohibited vagabonds from loitering near stores, which suggests their frequent presence. AGN Subdelegados vol. 12, exp. 8, 1792. On corner stores ( pulperías), see Mangan, Trading Roles, chap. 2. On stores versus chicherías, see Chambers, From Subjects, 109–114. 5. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” “Criminal contra Josef María Yturbe, homicida de Pablo Antonio,” Atlatlauca, 1811. On drinking in pulquerías and violent assault, see Taylor, Drinking, 64–67. 6. In 1794 labradores accused Garduño of committing an “outrage,” of taking justice into his own hands. He blocked access to the road they used to reach their fields, which crossed his hacienda. Before the subdelegado, Garduño agreed to open the road. AJEM-T unlabeled, Francisco y Andrés Romero v. Juan José Garduño, Tianguistengo, June 11, 1794. 7. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exps. 14, 15. 8. AGN Tributos vol. 11, exp. 7, vol. 47. exp. 16 (1740); Indios vol. 53, exps. 39, 52 (1731), vol. 67, exp. 388 (1793). 9. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 15. 10. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1822–30” Cayetana Saldívar v. Casiano Reinoso, undated (paper with 1808–1809 seal). 11. Xalmolonga, a Jesuit-owned plantation, had a large slave population until the order’s 1767 expulsion. After that, flight increased and local Indians complained of the slaves’ criminality. Kanter, “Their Hair Was Curly”; Konrad, 266. 12. A variation of chivo (goat)? In popular Mexican speech today, chivo can refer to an informer or tattletale. 13. While the man identified himself as a spinner, the jurist labeled him a tlachiquero (due to his return from the magueyes). 14. Her lawyer explained that the conflict began when Saldívar brought an infant to be baptized and the vicario made her wait an entire afternoon. When the vicario finally summoned her for the baptism, a headache prevented her return. 15. De la Puente collected alcabalas in Tianguistengo in the 1790s. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–19” María Reynoso v. Cayetana Saldívar, Tianguistengo, January 9, 1811. Saldívar neither testified nor responded here; because she was a married woman, her husband acted for her. 16. Saldívar apparently signed her name in this petition, which she could not do six years earlier. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Cayetana Saldívar v. Leonardo Fonseca, August 9, 1813. 17. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Criminal Doña Cayetana Saldívar pidiendo que su marido vaya.” 18. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” Cayetana Saldívar v. María Nicolasa. The case cited Recopilación, Ley 2, título 1, libro 8.

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Notes to Pages 78 – 84 19. On “the complex license accorded the unruly woman,” see Davis, Society, 146. See also Arrom, 64. 20. AGN Tributos vol. 24, exp. 23. 21. On friction over tribute collection, see Haskett, Indigenous Rulers, 103; Stern, 192–193. 22. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1822–30” Juan Lorenzo v. Manuel Rafael Montes,” 1802; Marcela Micaela y Lucas Manuel v. Manuel Rafael Montes, 1809. 23. On female anger, see Davis, Fiction, 79–82. 24. Cited in Altman, Cline, and Pescador, 275. 25. Fabián, 20.

Chapter 6 1. AJEM-T unlabeled, José Joaquín v. Lorenzo Juan. 2. AJEM-T unlabeled, Tianguistengo, August 2, 1792. 3. Research on depósito in Mexico includes Penyak; Arrom, 212–217, on divorce; Seed, 78–79, on premarital cases; Castañeda, 43–52, on raped women; and Lavrin, “Sexuality,” 68–69, 88 n. 42, on cases of sexual misconduct. Scardaville discusses depósito in his overview of civil punishments for men and women. Taylor, Magistrates, 641 n. 35, lists about ten cases of depósito from central Mexico. On northern Mexico, see Martin, Governance, 153, 180; on Argentina, see Ruggiero. 4. The 104 cases do not include those in which depósito was threatened but not carried out. 5. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 217, exp. 125; leg. 297, exp. 1, Almoloya, Temascaltepec district. Taylor, Magistrates, 173–174. 6. Pérez, 134–135, 158–159. 7. Pérez de Velasco, 87–88. The priest served in the Puebla diocese. Church authorities described a similar custom in which an Indian bought the bride from her parents. The couple cohabited before the wedding; the man might return the bride to her family without marrying her. Concilio III provincial mexicano, 347–348. 8. Burkhart, Slippery Earth, 150–151. The Nahuatl term for “virgin,” ichpochtli, signified a postpubescent girl or an unmarried woman, regardless of sexual experience. Pérez, 185–186. Nor did Andean commoners stress virginity. Stavig, 39. 9. Grieco, 67–69; Nalle, 44. 10. Stavig, 38–47. 11. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1810” San Mateo Texcaliacac, 1819. See also AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1822–30” Calimaya, September 11, 1806; Stern, 207, 401 n. 35. 12. Of premarital depósito cases in which the bride’s ethnicity can be determined, 66 percent were non-Indians. 13. Seed, 78–79. 14. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 1277, exp. 10. 15. Seed, 78–79, 178–187.

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Notes to Pages 85 – 90 16. AGN Matrimonios vol. 54, exp. 67. 17. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 156, exp. 1, San Gaspar, Metepec jurisdiction. 18. Concilio III provincial, 351. 19. Arrom, 212–215; Muriel, 63, 71; Penyak, 92–93. On recogimientos in Peru, see van Deusen. 20. AGN Provisorato Caja 97, unnumbered, “José Joaquín de Villanueba, marido legítimo de Da María Ygnacia Mendoza sobre divorcio,” Ixtlahuaca. 21. AJEM-T unlabeled, Manuela Martina v. José Pedro, San Antonio de la Ysla 1799. Also, AJEM-T “Penal y Criminal 1811–18” Juana María v. José María Serafín, 1818. 22. AJEM-T unlabeled, “Autos . . . contra Ysidro Antonio y Anastacio,” San Antonio de la Ysla, 1794. 23. AJEM-T unlabeled, Santa Cruz Atizapán, September 13, 1794. 24. AGN Tributos vol. 21, exp. 9. 25. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 75, exp. 4, Totoltepec, Zacualpa jurisdiction. 26. AGN Indios vol. 65, exp. 283, Santa María Nativitas. 27. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Carlos Bobadilla v. Rita. 28. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 18; vol. 123, exp. 10. 29. AJEM-T unlabeled, San Antonio de la Ysla, December 9, 1795. 30. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 25. 31. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 18. 32. AGN Bienes Nacionales vol. 1266, exp. 19, San José Malacatepec, Metepec jurisdiction. 33. Clendinnen, “Disciplining.” 34. Taylor, Magistrates, 209–214. 35. BN AF vol. 107, exp. 1476, Calimaya. 36. Haskett, “‘Not a Pastor,’” 327–328; Lewis, “The ‘Weakness,’” 77–78. 37. Despite Bourbon efforts, Taylor, Magistrates, 212, finds that priests throughout Mexico were “maintaining jails and ordering imprisonment in the period 1710–1809.” 38. Concilio provincial mexicano IV, 176, 178. 39. Ibid., 191. 40. AGN Criminal vol. 123, exp. 17. On the Bourbon emphasis on real auxilio, see Taylor, Magistrates, 210–212. 41. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 15. 42. Priests were to correct “the dishonesty of the women” in weekly visits to town jails. Concilio III provincial mexicano, 63–64, 70. 43. In 1756 Archbishop Manuel José Rubio y Salinas condemned the practice of keeping brides in the priest’s house because it led parishioners to imagine illicit relations between the priest and the interned woman or labor abuses. Vera, 266–267. Both the Third and Fourth Provincial Councils declared that priests should employ only women free of suspicion and attractions. Haskett, “‘Not a Pastor,’” 318–322. 44. AGN Bienes Nacionales vol. 1266, exp. 19. 45. VEMC leg. 71, exp. 4, Santa María Chimecatitlan, Tepexi de Seda jurisdiction, 1810; AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 156, exp. 1; Haskett, “Activist,” 149–150.

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Notes to Pages 91– 95 46. AJEM-T “Civil 1855–58” “Don Rafael Estevez pidiendo la emancipación de su nieta,” 1856–1857. 47. AGN Matrimonios vol. 47, exp. 75; AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Ygnacia Betancur v. Proscopia Hernándes. 48. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 15. 49. Haslip-Viera, 125. 50. Scardaville, 296–297; Haslip-Viera, 125–126; Penyak, 91; Muriel, 219; Martin, Governance, 173–174. 51. From a 1783 report on Calimaya’s jail. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 18. 52. Four percent of male offenders faced jail sentences, whereas 30 percent of women were so confined. In Mexico City women sent to depósito or a private home formed but a fraction of incarcerated female offenders. Scardaville, 292–293, 333. 53. For example, AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1929–30” “Contra José Carrillo por el delito de incontinencia” Tianguistengo, 1830. 54. Cited in Arrom, 65. 55. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 297, exp. 1, Tecualoya 1816. 56. Arrom, 64. 57. Stern, 117–123. 58. Pérez de Velasco, 55–56. 59. McCaa, “Viuda”; “Gustos.” 60. Arrom, 65, points out that “a widow’s ‘licentious’ behavior was punishable, whereas a widower’s was not.” 61. AGN Bienes Nacionales vol. 628, exp. 18. 62. AGN Criminal vol. 122, exp. 18. 63. AGN Criminal vol. 124, exp. 25. 64. Scardaville, 337. 65. AJEM-T “Penal 1789” Calimaya, August 19, 1794. 66. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 75, exp. 4, Totoltepec. 67. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1819–22” Ygnacia Betancur v. Proscopia Hernándes. 68. AJEM-T unlabeled, León Antonio de Lucio v. Prudencio Días, Calimaya February 26, 1787; AGN Bienes Nacionales vol. 1266, exp. 19, San José Malacatepec, 1820. 69. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 126, exp. 12, Zacualpa jurisdiction. Stern, 423 n. 8, notes a similar case from Oaxaca. 70. A case in 1811 mentions a carcel de mujeres (women’s jail) in Tianguistengo. AGN Criminal leg. 123, exps. 14, 15. 71. Infrequently, husbands and civil officers threatened to send women to the recogidas, presumably in the capital. A recogimiento may have operated in Toluca. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1811–18” Calimaya, March 10, 1818. 72. Tenango’s subprefect in 1830 urged completion of a women’s jail, without which “very criminal women” stayed in private houses, to the owners’ great “discomfort and no security whatsoever for the criminals.” AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Año de 1830 minutas.” Postindependence officials proposed separate facilities for female criminals in Mexico City but did not execute their plans. Buffington, 172–175.

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Notes to Pages 96 – 102 73. Penyak, 97–98, argues that by the mid-nineteenth century depósito in Mexico City “functioned primarily as a protective institution.” 74. Perry.

Chapter 7 1. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1822–30” Calimaya, March 21, 1828. 2. Hale, 217–218. 3. Phelan. 4. Costeloe; Hale; Warren. 5. AGI Audiencia de México 1157A. 6. Salinas, 21. 7. Reports from 1845 show that both Spanish and native languages were spoken in many villages. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 369, exp. 40, 62, 66. On the persistence of indigenous languages, see Bienes Nacionales leg. 369, exp. 40, 47, 49, 55, 67. 8. Menegus, “Ocoyoacac,” 63–65. 9. AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 369, exp. 72, Temascaltepec district. 10. Kanter, “Hijos,” 330. 11. BN FCSC caja 28 “Ayuntamientos, alcaldes, y ciudadanos . . . 21 enero 1826.” 12. AJEM-T “Civil 1800–08” Manuel González v. Ygnacio González Aragon, July 16, 1824. 13. AJEM-T “Civil 1800–08,” December 23, 1824. 14. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Representación del ayuntamiento de Santiago Tianguistengo,” 1826. 15. Kanter, “Hijos,” 341–342; Van Young, Hacienda, 207–220; Tutino, From Insurrection, 64–67. 16. Similar patterns occurred in the Chalco region in the 1840s. Tutino, “Agrarian,” 106. 17. BN FCSC caja 28 “Ayuntamientos, alcaldes, y ciudadanos . . . 21 enero 1826.” 18. Hale, 228–232. 19. BN FCSC Caja 35, “Testimonio posesorio de las tierras que se aplicaron al Pueblo de Tenango del Valle,” 1827. 20. Estate accounts from 1828 list legal fees for “el asunto de Atengo,” including “honorarios” to a man who served as “comisionado” in hearings held. BN FCSC Caja 17, exp. 6. 21. AJEM-T “Civil 1800–08” Tenancingo, August 15, 1827. 22. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Causa formada contra los cabecillas que insultaron a esta Ylustre Corporación” Tenango, May 1828; “Penal y Civil 1822–30” Chapultepec, March 1828; “Penal y Civil 1826–28” Simon Lorenzo v. Ygnacio González Aragon, Ocuila, Malinalco district, September 1828. 23. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Causa formada contra los cabecillas que insultaron a la Ylustre Corporación de esta municipalidad.” 24. When subprefect Félix Garduño learned that one of the protesters had died in jail, he reprimanded Tenango’s alcalde for the unauthorized jailings (lasting ten days) and

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Notes to Pages 103 – 108 ordered the prisoners freed. On the political inexperience of non-Indians in municipal politics, see Guardino, Peasants, 92–93. 25. Guardino, Peasants, 89. On the opposite scenario, of Indians retaining control of local government, see Guardino, “Barbarism,” 191–192. Similarly, the initial creation of municipios in the Mixteca was reversed as Indians re-created the repúblicas by the 1830s. Pastor, 422–427. 26. Stern, 194. 27. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1830–50” Zumpahuacan and Tejalpa v. Manuel Arrellano, 1843. 28. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1830–50” Xoquizingo v. Luis Nava, 1847. 29. Lira, 75; Guardino, Peasants, 107. 30. In 1820 church authorities urged distinct treatment of native parishioners, due to “their miserable fortune and slight intellectual and industrial abilities.” AGN Bienes Nacionales leg. 715, exp. 13. 31. The directive dates from either 1824 or 1827. Hale, 232–233. 32. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30,” list of land sales in Tenango district, undated (on paper with 1833–1834 seal); “Penal y Civil 1830–50” Martina Homobono v. Martina Teodora, San Lucas Tepemaxalco, 1848. 33. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” Capuluac, May 18, 1829. 34. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1830–50” Ocoyoacac, October 11, 1831. 35. AJEM-T “Civil 1855–58” Xaxalpa, undated (on paper with 1858–1859 seal). 36. Tenango judicial cases from 1880–1910 show land transferred through the male line and few female owners. González and Iracheta, 123. 37. Menegus, “Ocoyoacac,” 49. 38. Mexico City women seem to have realized that judges were less sympathetic to abusive husbands and so complained more openly about abuse in divorce cases after 1830. Arrom, 237, 254. 39. Chambers, From Subjects, 209–210, describes a similar situation in early republican Peru. Law showed a new interest in marital relations, but in practice judges dissuaded women from pursuing cases against their husbands. 40. Chambers, From Subjects, 12–13. 41. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Contra el Sargento de Guardia habilitado Remigio Ruíz por haber favorecido la fuga de la reo Brigída Bobadilla” Tianguistengo, 1829–1830. 42. AJEM-T “Civil 1855–58” Tenango, May 2, 1856. On the position of auxiliar in the state of Mexio, see Salinas, 55–56. 43. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Nicolás Guadalupe . . . por el homicidio que perpetuó . . . de su esposa María Magdalena” Xalatlaco. 44. Taylor, Drinking, 101–102, 104–105; Pescador, “Del dicho,” 381. 45. Arrom, 90. 46. AJEM-T “Penal 1845–48” “Criminal contra Miguel Jaso y Micaela López,” April 1, 1846. 47. Costeloe, 6–7, 168. On military service and marriage, see AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “José Angel . . . por homicidio y deserción” Xalatlaco, 1829.

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Notes to Pages 108 – 109 48. In 1827 an unmarried woman received a five-year sentence in the recogidas for killing her abusive lover. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “María Ventura y Francisco Tenorio por el homicidio de Lorenzo López.” In 1828 a mother and daughter were put in depósito under suspicion of murdering the daughter’s abusive husband. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1826–28” “Diligencias . . . de quienes pueden haber sido los asesinos de José Mateo” Tianguistengo. In 1830 a wife received a five-year sentence of reclusión for murdering her mute husband. AJEM-T “Penal y Civil 1829–30” “Averiguación quien quitó la vida a Miguel Albarran” Calimaya. 49. Menegus, “Ocoyoacac,” 63–65. 50. Quote from the 1849 Memoria Hacienda estado de México, cited in Menegus, “Ocoyoacac,” 45. 51. Coatsworth, 32–34, 49–50; on the Guerrero revolts, see Guardino, Peasants; Tutino, From Insurrection, 249–258. 52. Tutino, From Insurrection, 150. 53. AJEM-T “Civil 1855–58,” July 18, 1856.

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Glossar y

aguardiente:  liquor, often distilled from sugarcane alcabala:  sales tax alcalde:  officer in village república; lieutenant governor alcalde mayor:  Spanish district officer or magistrate arancel:  schedule of fees, often for administration of sacraments auxiliar:  municipal officer, sheriff ayuntamiento:  municipal government, council bachiller:  holder of a bachelor’s degree barrio:  pueblo subdivision or neighborhood cabecera:  head town cabecilla:  ringleader, troublemaker calidad:  race, status carajo:  obscenity referring to male genitals casas reales:  government offices casta:  mixed-race person ciudadano:  citizen cocina:  kitchen cofradía:  religious sodality or confraternity compadre (masc.), comadre (fem.):  an individual linked to others by spiritual kinship or godparenthood depósito:  sequestering of women, often in a private residence, as an informal punishment or for protection don, doña:  honorific title, akin to “sir” or “lady” doncella:  maiden, virgin escribano:  scribe, notary español (masc.), española (fem.):  person of Spanish descent estado:  status, often in reference to marital status fiscal:  cofradía officer; a court officer in the colonial judiciary forastero:  Indian outsider gachupín:  a peninsular-born Spaniard; often used derogatorily gente de razón:  people of European ancestry or non-Indians; lit., “people of reason”

Glossary gobernador:  governor of village república hacendado:  owner of a hacienda hacienda:  large rural estate hijo del pueblo:  member of an Indian village, usually indicating permanent residence and birth there; lit., “child (or son) of the village” hijo natural:  person of illegitimate birth; lit., “natural child” indio (masc.), india (fem.):  Indian; commonly used to refer to indigenous men and women in the colonial period indígena:  indigenous; more formal term than indio, in use in republican Mexico juez de letras:  local magistrate, as mandated by the 1812 Constitution juzgado:  court of justice overseen by royal appointee labrador:  rancher or independent farmer, usually a non-Indian maguey:  agave plant from which pulque is made mala vida:  abuse, mistreatment mayordomo:  estate foreman or supervisor; cofradía officer mestizo (masc.), mestiza (fem.):  person of mixed European and indigenous ancestry milpa:  maize field miserables:  poor or disadvantaged people, often invoked to invite mercy or protection molendera:  female corn grinder, tortilla maker monte:  scrubland or woods unsuitable for farming, often on a mountainside montequitl:  labor service performed by a groom in the house of his bride’s family prior to their wedding mulatto (masc.), mulatta (fem.):  person of mixed African and indigenous or European ancestry municipio:  administrative district, early national period natural:  Indian; native of a given place negro (masc.), negra (fem.):  person of African ancestry padrón:  census peninsular:  person born in Spain Porfiriato:  1876–1910 era (named for President Porfirio Díaz) pueblo:  village, especially of Indians pulque:  fermented alcoholic beverage from the maguey plant pulquería:  tavern specializing in sale of pulque real:  one-eighth of a peso Real Audiencia:  high court of justice recogimiento:  shelter for abused or divorced women; correctional institution for women Recopilación:  1681 compilation of colonial law regidor:  municipal or cofradía officer república:  Indian village citizenry, government síndico:  officer of an ayuntamiento sirviente:  servant; resident hacienda laborer, usually non-Indian solar:  house site, yard

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Glossary soplón:  tattler, stool pigeon subdelegado:  district officer; replaced alcalde mayor in the late eighteenth century teniente de justicia:  deputy district magistrate tepache:  punch made from pulque, often mixed with fruit juice and sugar tianguis:  open market held weekly or biweekly tienda:  store tierra caliente:  warm or tropical lowlands, such as the area surrounding Cuernavaca tierra fría:  cold highlands, such as the Toluca valley tierras de repartimiento:  Indian community lands tlachiquero:  gatherer of maguey juice for pulque production tlecuil:  hearth topil:  low-level officer in village república troje:  silo, granary vecino:  longtime resident of a city or village; often used to refer to non-Indians vicario:  ordained assistant to a parish priest xacal:  shack, hut zángano:  drone; rogue zepo:  cell, stocks

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index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to maps. Afro-Mexicans, 35, 51. See also mulattoes/as; slaves alcohol consumption, 10, 12, 42, 51, 65, 122n22; by Indians, 11, 38, 70, 117n38; by women, 66, 74, 122n11. See also mala vida; pulquerías Antiguo Régimen, 98 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), 8 Archivo Judicial del Estado de México (AJEM), 8 Arévalo, Juan Pedro, 16–22, 25–27, 100, 118n19 Atengo estates, 3, 14; agricultural production of, 101; and feuds with villagers, 97, 99–102; San Lucas land disputes with, 17, 18, 20–22, 26–27, 118n32 Ayudante del cura, El (Pérez de Velasco), 83 ayuntamientos, 26, 102. See also repúblicas bastards. See children: illegitimate/orphan Bourbon officials, 4, 5, 19, 89, 95 Boyer, Richard, 40 Burkhart, Louise, 53, 84 castillianization, 19, 99 Chambers, Sarah, 47 children: abandonment of, 61, 126n53;

death of, 57; discipline and disobedience of, 56, 58–59, 68–71, 125n20; education of, 56; and elderly/deceased parents, 30–31, 59; illegitimate/orphan, 32–33, 59–62, 126n42, 126n46, 127n60; inheritance by, 58–59, 60, 61; marriage of, 57, 125n29; parents, relationship with, 55–62. See also inheritance (land) cholera, 24 ciudadanos, 25, 98 clergy: and Bourbon authorities, 89, 95, 130n37; and depósito, 82–96, 130n43; opposition to, 72; and orphans, 62; paternal role of, 5, 81, 83, 95; role of in marital relations, 38–39, 50, 106; and women, 74–76, 96, 106–108, 130nn42– 43. See also judicial system Cline, S. L., 31 Conde de Santiago, 6, 18–19, 20–22, 100, 101–102, 118n26. See also Atengo estates courts. See judicial system crime: and banditry, 4, 5, 23; and depósito, 87–88, 92, 95; during insurgency, 24–25; sentences for men, 45, 50, 92; sentences for women, 86, 92, 94, 95, 131n52, 131n72, 134n48. See also depósito; homicide; judicial system; mala vida

Index del Castillo, Florencio M., 4 depósito: cases of, 111–114; causes of, 85, 111–114; defined, 82–83; deprivation in, 91; gender differences of, 91–95, 131n52; labor in, 90, 91–92; for marriage and divorce, 84–86, 88, 92–93, 111–114, 129n12; persons mandating, 89, 111– 114; priests’ role in, 88–89, 90–91, 130n43; as protection, 86–87, 132n73; as punishment, 87–88; rationale for, 83–84; sites of, 90–91, 111–114, 130n43; stigma of, 94; villagers’ response to, 89 desamortization law of 1856. See Ley Lerdo domestic violence. See mala vida domination/subordination: of children, 28, 55–58, 67, 80–81; insubordination, examples of, 67–80; in marriage, 43, 67, 80–81; as “public transcript,” 6; and social hierarchy, 67, 80–81 economy: agricultural, 14, 24, 99, 101; and competition over resources, 20, 26, 99; and houses as workplaces, 54; non-Indian, 23; postindependence, 27, 97–99, 101; and textile production, 54; of Toluca/Tenango region, 14, 102; women’s roles in, 38, 47–49, 51. See also Indians: economy of; land tenure; poverty endogamy, 28 families. See children; households; marriage “father”/“stepfather” rhetoric. See under patriarchy Félix, Alberto, 32–33 female landholding. See land tenure: and women food. See meals Francisca, Michaela, 32–34 friendship, gender differences in, 65–66

gachupines, 22–23 Garduño, Antonio Regulado, 17 Garduño, don Juan Joseph, 68–70, 71, 127n2, 128n6 gender: and community/economic roles, 4, 38, 47–48, 51; and depósito, 83–84, 91–95, 131n52; and friendship, 65–66; and judicial system, 1, 9–10, 67, 74– 80, 106–108; and power/authority, 1, 38, 42–44, 51, 108; and space, 8, 47–48, 53, 65–66. See also marriage; women General Indian Court, 9, 27, 98 gente de razón, 55, 57, 102 González Aragon, don Rafael, 100, 102 González Aragon, Ygnacio, 100, 102 government: abuse of Indians, 25, 78–81; postindependence decline of, 5, 27, 97–99, 103–104, 108–109. See also judicial system; patriarchy; repúblicas Graham, Sandra Lauderdale, 52 Grandin, Greg, 47 Guardino, Peter, 103 haciendas, 26, 99, 101–103. See also Atengo estates Hale, Charles A., 98 Hermengildo, don Lázaro, 53–54 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel. See independence wars (1810–1821) hijos del pueblo: connotations of phrase, 1, 6, 28, 36; land tenure of, 28–36, 108 homicide, 24, 48, 107, 123n33, 134n48. See also crime; mala vida households: activities within, 54; composition of, 55, 57–58; symbolic boundaries of, 8, 52–53; women’s roles in, 38, 51, 53, 93, 108. See also children; marriage illegitimate children, 59–62 independence wars (1810–1821), effects

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Index of, 4, 16, 24–27, 101, 103–104. See also insurgency Indians: and alcohol consumption, 11, 38, 70, 107; depósito of 83–96, 111–114; and disputes with haciendas, 17–19, 99– 103; economy of, 2, 4, 14, 16, 43, 47– 48, 54; education of, 56; and gendered power/authority, 10, 31–33, 42–51; government officials’ abuse of, 25, 78–80; independence, effects on, 97–99, 101, 103–104, 107–109; and judicial system, 9–11, 97–99, 101, 103–104, 107–109, 116n19, 116n28, 116nn29–30, 120n59, 133n30; land tenure of, 2, 29–36, 103–106, 120nn4–5, 120n13; languagebased groups of, 13–14; legal status of, 2, 26; mala vida of, 39–51; marital customs of, 2, 28, 33–34, 37–39, 50, 57, 83–84, 129n7; parent/child relationships of, 55–62; patriarchy/paternalism toward, 5–7, 8–9, 28, 47, 81, 98, 103–104, 109, 116n19, 116n28, 116n34; population growth of, 16, 20; and race, 61; religious worship of, 31, 54; repúblicas of, 10, 16–17, 26, 31–32, 34–35, 98, 103, 133n25; residence patterns of, 28, 45–47, 129n7; as servants, 62–65; Spaniards, relationship with, 5, 25; stereotyping of, 5, 74, 83, 89, 96; and war/insurgency, 4, 23–27 indígenas, 2, 102 indio, as legal category, 2, 26 inheritance (land), 58–59, 104; partible, 10, 26, 31, 34, 58. See also land tenure insurgency, 21–25, 108–109 judicial system: described, 8–11; and family disputes, 68–69, 71; gender differences in, 9–10, 67, 74–80, 104– 108; during/after independence, 8, 24, 27, 97–99, 101, 103–104, 107–109; and Indians, 9, 10, 98–99, 101, 103–

104, 107–109, 116n19, 116n28, 116n30, 117n38, 120n59, 133n30; and land/property rights, 2, 29–36, 61, 103–106, 108– 109, 120nn4–5, 120n13; and mala vida, 11, 45, 50, 86–87, 106–108; and officers’ abuse of women, 78–80; paternalism of, 5–7, 8–9, 28, 81, 95, 98, 103–104, 105, 109, 116n19, 116n28, 116n34; and race, 74–75; testimony in, 9–10. See also crime; depósito Kellogg, Susan, 31 kinship, 1, 28. See also children; households; land tenure; marriage labor: agricultural, 14, 24, 99, 101; domestic, 38; sites of, 47–48, 65; and socializing, 65; of women, 38, 47–48, 51. See also economy labradores, 14, 23, 24, 57, 70 land tenure: of Indians, 29–36, 103–106, 120nn4–5, 120n13; and partible inheritance, 10, 26, 31, 34, 58; and private possession, 29; and race/ethnicity, 35– 36; and tierras de repartimiento, 28–29, 105, 120n13; and women, 29, 31–35, 36, 104–106. See also judicial system: and land/property rights Ley Lerdo, 3, 108–109 linguistic groups, 13, 117n3, 132n7 Lugarda, Xaviera, 78–80 magueys, 45, 47, 53, 63, 73, 128n13 mala vida: depósito as protection from, 86–87; husbands abusing wives in, 37, 39–45, 86–87, 106; of Indians vs. nonIndians, 51; postindependence, 106– 108, 133n38; punishment for, 45, 50, 106, 107; and uxoricide, 107; wives abusing husbands in, 44–45, 49, 50, 106 Maldonado, don Mariano Josef, 69 marriage: and abandonment, 48; and

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Index abuse (see mala vida); and adultery, 44, 49–50, 123n39, 124n48; authority of husbands in, 38–45, 48, 86, 88; consanguineous, 28, 120n1; and divorce, 50, 86, 124nn53–54; economic roles in, 38, 47–48, 51, 125n29; exogamous, 33; and expectations of wives’ conduct, 38–39; and marital roles, 37–39; and premarital sexual customs, 83–84; and residence customs, 28, 45–47, 129n7. See also depósito: for marriage and divorce; households; women: marital expectations of Martin, Cheryl, 7 matrilocal residence, 45–47 Maza, Sarah, 65 McCaa, Robert, 93 meals, 7, 38, 54, 65 Mercado, Francisco, 68–71 Mercado, Manuel, 68–71 mestizos/as, 3, 14, 70; in depósito, 111– 114 Mexico City: economic relationship with rural people, 4, 13, 16; judicial relationship with rural people, 8, 98; marriage/ divorce in, 85, 86; population makeup of, 36; women, jailing of, 92, 131n52 Millán, Victoriano, 71–78 mining industry, 99 Molina, Antonio Trinidad, 35–36, 121n30 Moncada, don Manuel, 22–23 montequitl, 83–84 montes, 20, 26, 38, 47, 54, 72, 118n29 Montes, don Manuel Rafael, 78–80 Mora, José María Luis, 98 Morelos y Pavón, José María. See independence wars (1810–1821) mulattoes/as: family inclusion of, 61–62; land tenure of, 35–36; as servants, 71–78; voting rights of, 121n32. See also Afro-Mexicans; slaves municipios, 98

Nahuas, 2, 13, 84 Nahuatl, 9, 17, 83, 84, 127n60, 129n12 order, social, 4–5, 7, 67, 71, 80–81 orphans, 24, 52, 59–62, 78, 126n42, 127n60 partible inheritance. See under land tenure paternalism. See judicial system: paternalism of; patriarchy patriarchy: described, 5–7; “father”/ “stepfather” rhetoric of, 5–7, 28, 81, 102, 103, 105, 109, 116n19; and gender, 5, 47, 67, 82, 98, 108; as model for marriage and family, 37, 42, 43, 47, 51, 56, 67, 71, 88; racial dimension of, 5, 74–75; rural Mexicans’/Indians’ reaction to, 5–7, 103, 109, 116n28. See also government; judicial system patrilocal residence, 1, 45 peninsulares, 22–23 Pérez, Manuel, 39, 45, 83, 125n20 Pérez de Velasco, Andrés, 49, 54, 83, 93 population growth, 3, 16, 20, 99 poverty, 4, 5, 99, 108 priests. See clergy pueblos, 14; community membership of, 28–36; ethnocentricity of, 2; government, relationship with, 97, 103, 108; role of, 19, 28, 29. See also repúblicas pulque, 47, 48, 50 pulquerías, 65, 70, 72 race. See Afro-Mexicans; mulattoes/as; patriarchy: racial dimension of Real Audiencia, 8, 69, 98 recogimientos, 86, 92, 95 repúblicas, 17; elimination of, 26, 98, 103, 133n25; land distribution of, 31–32, 34–35; officers’ role in, 10, 35 Roberta, Anastacia, 97–99

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Index Saldívar, Doña Cayetana, 71–78 San José Malacatepec, 88, 90 San Lucas: as independent pueblo, 16–17; internal tensions of, 19; litigation and disputes over land use rights, 17, 18, 20–22, 26–27, 118n32, 119n43 Santa María Xaxalpa, 101 Santiago Tianguistengo, 22–23, 24, 131n70 schools, 19, 56, 102, 118n24 Scott, James C., 2, 6 Seed, Patricia, 84 separatism, 16. See also repúblicas; San Lucas servants: case study, 71–78; living conditions of, 62–63; loyalty expected of, 64–65; sexual behavior of, 63–64 slaves, 14, 73, 117n7, 128n11. Spaniards. See depósito; independence wars (1810–1821); Indians; judicial system; land tenure; population growth Stavig, Ward, 84 Stern, Steve, 43, 103 subordination. See domination/ subordination

Toluca region, 14; depósito of brides in, 84–85; economy of, 14, 16, 24, 99, 101; litigious reputation, 9, 109; physical description of, 13; population makeup of, 7, 13–14, 16, 35; war/insurgency, effects of, 24–27, 99, 109 tribunals. See judicial system tribute payments, 25, 28, 30, 31, 72, 98; as cause of depósito, 85; and women, 34, 78–79 Tutino, John, 107 Twinam, Ann, 60 Valley of Mexico: 14 Valley of Puebla: 14 Valley of Toluca. See Toluca region vecinos/as, 30 Velasco y Obando, María Josefa, 20 virginity, 83–84, 96 women: and depósito, 83–96, 111–114, 131n52; economic roles of, 38, 47–48, 51; enclosure, tradition of, 96; jailing of, 86, 92, 94, 95, 131n52, 131n72, 134n48; and judicial system, 9–10, 67, 74–80, 105; and land tenure, 29, 31–35, 36, 104–106; marital expectations of, 37–39; scandalous and insubordinate, 71–81, 87–88, 92, 94, 96, 131n60; sexual conduct of, 83–84, 92–93, 96; violence by, 44–45, 49, 50, 106, 123n33, 134n48; violence toward, 37, 39–45, 78–80; and widowhood, 33–35, 56, 87–88, 93–94, 125n26, 131n60. See also gender; marriage

Taylor, William B., 33, 116n29, 117n37-38 Tenango del Valle, 15, 20, 26, 38; and depósito of brides, 84; family disputes in, 68–71; household compositions of, 55, 57–58, 93; land disputes of (see Atengo estates); population growth and makeup of, 99, 118n31, 119n39. See also Toluca region tiendas, 70–71, 128n4 tierra fría, 13 tierras de repartimiento. See under land tenure Tlanipatlán, 95 Toluca, city of, 13, 15, 98, 101

Xalatlaco, 71–78, 89 Xalmolonga, 73, 74, 128n11 Xoquizingo, 103

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