“To Avoid This Mixture”: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City

Abstract

On June 8, 1692, a popular uprising left Mexico City in ruins. The colonial government blamed the violence on pulque, an indigenous alcohol made from the fermented juice of the maguey. Not all pulque, however, was considered equal. While ostensibly pure pulque blanco (white pulque) was seen as medicinal, pulque mezclado (mixed pulque), which contained certain additives, was condemned as a threat to political stability. This essay takes this often-overlooked distinction as a point of departure for examining the political and social significance of pulque by way of the grid of intelligibility that gave it meaning. For colonial elites, the mixing of pulque had a magnetizing effect on the social world, drawing the urban poor together in the space of the pulquería (pulque tavern) and making possible multiple forms of contact—from solidarity to sex. But it also had epistemological implications: the study of mixed pulque offered elites a language for talking about race mixing (mestizaje), while simultaneously constituting pulque consumers as a seditious collective subject—a plebe (plebeian masses) defined, like pulque, by mixing.

Notes

1. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 28.

2. For a critique of the concept of acculturation and an elaboration of the more nuanced transculturation, the key text, originally published in 1940, is Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, ed. Enrico Mario Santí (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002). A more recent approach is Mary Louise Pratt's formulation of the “contact zone” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1997), 6–7.

3. See, for example, Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); Nelson Foster and Linda S. Cordell, eds., Chiles to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Que Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), chap. 2; Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 660–691; and Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Norton's excellent work deals with the “assimilation” of tobacco and chocolate in colonial context, but primarily as part of an argument about how these products were inserted into the global economy. In a more local vein, John E. Kicza's study of the late colonial pulque industry in New Spain traces the process by which Spanish producers increasingly took control of the production of this indigenous commodity. But, for Kicza, pulque holds little cultural or political significance or specificity; any product native to the Americas (such as cacao or maize) could just as easily fill its role. Pulque thus serves as an empty economic signifier, just another site for Spanish capital accumulation. I am interested in the way pulque in particular offered colonial elites both a site for state intervention and a language with which to articulate the politics of that intervention. Kicza, “The Pulque Trade of Late Colonial Mexico City,” The Americas 37, no. 2 (1980): 193–221.

4. The relationship between food and colonial governance in the Americas has received less scholarly attention. One interesting exception comes from Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, who uses archaeological remains and historical documents to examine eating practices as a form of political strategy for Spanish elites. See Rodríguez-Alegría, “Eating Like an Indian: Negotiating Social Relations in the Spanish Colonies,” Current Anthropology 46 (2005): 551–73. Also see Sophie D. Coe, America's First Cuisines (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), chap. 16; and John C. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

5. Recent scholarship on the events of the uprising includes R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), chap. 6; Natalia Silva Prada, La política de una rebelión: Los indígenas frente al tumulto de 1692 en la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2007); and Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “El nacimiento del miedo, 1692: Indios y españoles en la ciudad de México,” Revista de Indias 68, no. 244 (2008): 9–34. Beginning in 1691, central Mexico was hit by a “dual agricultural crisis” (a shortage of both wheat and maize) that caused grain prices to spike. While viceregal officials were sent to procure grains from the surrounding areas, high prices and distribution problems impeded a solution. In the end, the city's granary (alhóndiga) was left empty. See Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 128–134; and Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “El nacimiento del miedo,” 14–15.

6. Father Joseph de la Barrera wrote of the Indians’ “so entirely unexpected audacity in the most principal court of this Kingdom.” Joseph de la Barrera to Conde de Galve, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Mexico 333, fol. 471v. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

7. “Those who most persisted in their complaints were the Indians, the most ungrateful, thankless, grumbling, and restless people that God ever created.” Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Letter of Don Carlos de Sigüenza to Admiral Pez Recounting the Incidents of the Corn Riot in Mexico City, June 8, 1692,” in Irving Leonard, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1929), 244. According to Irving Leonard, Sigüenza served as “a sort of official historian” for the Viceroy Conde de Galve and his description of the uprising constituted “a semi-official report of the affair, possibly made at the behest of the viceroy.” See Leonard, Sigüenza y Góngora, 105, 112. For a detailed account of Sigüenza's relationship with the viceroy, see Iván Escamilla González, “El siglo de oro vindicado: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, el Conde de Galve y el tumulto de 1692,” in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: Homenaje 1700–2000, ed. Alicia Mayer (Mexico City: UNAM, 2002), II, 179–203. Cope traces the development of this “official” narrative about the uprising, which he calls the “treacherous Indians” explanation, in Limits of Racial Domination, 126–27.

8. Sigüenza, “Letter to Admiral Pez,” 275; translation altered. A decade earlier, Sigüenza had already written of the “DETESTABLE PULQUE” that was “the cause and origin of so much damage” and whose use he called “in no way indifferent, but always sinful.” See Sigüenza, Parayso Occidental, plantado, y cultivado por la liberal benefica mano de los muy Catholicos, y poderosos Reyes de España Nuestros Señores en su magnifico Real Convento de Jesus Maria de Mexico (1684), fol. IXr, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/12585075434593728876657/index.htm (accessed July 2009).

9. Sigüenza, “Letter to Admiral Pez,” 275; see also Antonio de Robles, Diario de sucesos notables (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1946), II, 257.

10. Robles, Diario, II, 264.

11. Robles, Diario, II, 264.

12. Robles, Diario, II, 265.

13. By rendering either pulque or its prohibition “absolute.” See, for example, Leonard, Sigüenza y Góngora, 133; as well as recent essays like Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 127; Silva Prada, La política de una rebelión, 498; and Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “El nacimiento del miedo,” 25–27. Tim Mitchell uses scare-quotes to call into question the legitimacy of the category of white (medicinal) pulque: after the 1692 prohibition, he writes, “legal sales of ‘medicinal’ pulque slaked the thirst of Indians and poor Creoles alike.” Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities: Alcohol's Power in Mexican History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 24. Notable exceptions are José Jesús Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque en la Nueva España, 1663–1610 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979); and William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), chap. 2. For a critique of scholarly overreliance on Sigüenza's text, see Mabel Moraña, “El ‘tumulto de indios’ de 1692 en los pliegues de la fiesta barroca: Historiografía, subversión popular y agencia criolla en el México colonial,” Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad ‘colonial’ en las letras hispanoamericanas, ed. José Antonio Mazzotti (Pittsburgh, PA: Biblioteca de América, 2000), 161–175. Running parallel to the pulque debates, seventeenth-century debates about chocolate as medicine or food highlight the shifting and multivalent significance of food and drink in Europe. See Ken Albala, “The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in Seventeenth-Century Medical Theory,” Food and Foodways 15 (2007): 53–74.

14. Juan de Luzuriaga to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 338r.

15. The University's informe was the only one that was printed. See the Informe que la Real Universidad, y Claustro Pleno de ella de la Ciudad de Mexico de esta Nueva España haze a el Excellentissimo Señor Virrey de ella en conformidad de orden de su Excelencia de 3 de Iulio de este año 1692 sobre los inconvenientes de la bebida de el Pulque (Mexico City, 1692), fol. 1r.

16. “[S]ex … was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life. On the one hand, it was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 145. This is not to say that colonial elites were uninterested in regulating sexuality. Patricia Seed traces a shift in the institutional site of social control regarding marriage in colonial Mexico from the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the state in the eighteenth. See Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). On sixteenth-century approaches to “remedying” indigenous and mestizo women (and in some cases men) in conventos and colegios, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), chap. 1; and Jacqueline Holler, Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Ann Laura Stoler's important work on the regulation of the intimate in the Dutch East Indies has resituated Foucault's approach to race within a colonial context. See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

17. Cf. Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 22: “The hallmark of the Mexican plebe was its racially mixed nature. Mexico's lower class included Indians, castizos, mestizos, mulattoes, blacks, and even poor Spaniards.” I return to Cope's analysis in the conclusion.

18. In the colonial period, the source of the word “pulque” was itself mysterious: Durán suggested that, like “maize,” it came from the Caribbean islands; Clavijero, writing in the eighteenth century, countered that it was originally an Araucan (Chile) word, though he admitted that “it is difficult to say how this name came to Mexico.” See Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (Mexico City: Editora Nacional, 1951), II, 240; Francisco Javier Clavijero, Historia antigua de Mégico, trans. José Joaquín de Mora (London: R. Ackermann, 1826), I, 393.

19. Ayuntamiento to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 322v. If the plebe took on racialized qualities that had previously been attributed to the Indian, as Cope suggests, it was the study of indigenous culture itself—in this case, pulque—that provided colonial elites with the discursive formation necessary to define, and thereby constitute, this plebeian body as such. Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 22–23.

20. According to the Dominican missionary Diego Durán, pulque was considered divine and used solemnly and with much devotion in religious ceremonies. See Durán, Historia de las Indias, II, 237–238. Pulque was “the sacred milk of the inexhaustible breasts of Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey, prototype of the generous mother. Mayahuel was represented as She with Four Hundred (that is to say, innumerable) Breasts…. It was the last taste in the mouths of the captive warriors tethered to fight on the gladiatorial stone, as it was the first in the mouths of infants introduced to public ceremonial life, when pulque was drunk to full inebriation.” Inga Clendinnen, The Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 245. Also see Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, chap. 2.

21. Indeed, pulque's alcohol content (approximately 4 percent) is quite low, significantly less than that of Spanish wine. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 31.

22. Francisco Antonio Ximénez to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 540v.

23. Franciso Xavier Palavicino y Villarasa to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 528r; Francisco Martínez Falcón to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 414v; Obispo de Valladolid to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 283v; and Cayetano Francisco de Torres, “Virtudes maravillosas del Pulque, medicamento universal, ó Polychresto,” Biblioteca Nacional de México (BN), MS 23, fol. 4v. Hernández Palomo gives a detailed description of maguey cultivation and pulque production in the colonial period in La renta del pulque, 14–30. Some of the informes disagreed with this classification of pulque's stages, which follows the informe written by Doctor Ximénez. Friar Antonio Guridi, the minister of the indigenous parish of Santiago Tlatelolco, for example, wrote only of aguamiel on one hand, and a generalized “pulque” on the other, blurring the white and mixed varieties together. See Antonio Guridi to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 496r–497r. I follow Doctor Ximénez here because his informe, which was specifically cited and adopted by the Council of the Indies, best seems to represent the conventional wisdom of the moment. See Consejo de Indias to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 590r–592v.

24. Francisco Martínez Falcón to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fols. 406r-v. This root may have been ocpatli, although it seems unlikely that Martínez Falcón would have been unaware of something so commonly mentioned in other informes, such as Antonio Guridi to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 496v.

25. Augustín de Vetancurt to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 499r.

26. This was part of the archbishop's effort to calculate the number of sins caused by pulque in Mexico City. By multiplying the number of mules entering the city by the number of arrobas each one could carry, he determined that some five million arrobas of pulque entered the city each year. Next, he figured that each arroba would generate two “sins of drunkenness,” thus reaching the total of ten million sins of drunkenness per year. At this point, however, he was forced to give up, because the quantity of other sins caused by drunkenness was so high that “only God can count them.” Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fols. 272v–273r.

27. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 202–42; José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), chap. 4, esp. 125–130, 151–164.

28. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 1v.

29. Taylor argues that these critiques reveal differences between Spanish and Indian drinking cultures or practices rather than in the relative quantity consumed. See Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 41. Pulque blanco was the only kind legally permitted during the colonial period. Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque, 31–33.

30. Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque, 10–13.

31. Martínez Falcón to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 407r. On the life and writings of Francisco Hernández, as well as their diffusion in Europe, see Hernández, The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, ed. Simon Varey and trans. Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Cynthia L. Chamberlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3–25.

32. Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 269r. In fact, much like the church ethnographers such as Bernardino de Sahagún, Spanish doctors like Francisco Hernández drew heavily on indigenous knowledge to produce their findings. Philip II instructed Hernández to “consult, wheresoever you go, all the doctors, medicine men, herbalists, Indians, and other persons with knowledge in such matters [i.e., medicinal uses of native plants and animals].” See “The Instructions of Philip II to Dr. Francisco Hernández,” in The Mexican Treasury, 46.

33. Juan de Luzuriaga to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 337v.

34. Francisco Xaviar Palavicino to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 525r.

35. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 4v. Also see Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 267r.

36. Augustín de Vetancurt to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 499r.

37. For example, Antonio Girón, minister of Santa Cruz parish, argued that pulque should not be considered indifferent “because all things that uniformly induce physical or moral necessity towards an action, cannot be called indifferent [with regard to] the good or the bad.” Girón to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 520r.

38. Augustín de Vetancurt to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fols. 501v–502r. Such claims are problematic, as they rely on the recollections of elite indigenous informants at least a half-century after the fact. Lockhart suggests that historians have “too readily accepted idealized and self-serving posterior statements that hardly anyone drank pulque before the conquest.” See James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 112. Also see Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, chap. 2.

39. Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. Annals of His Time, eds. and trans. James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 51. It is notable that the translators do not know what to do with “iztac octli.” In a footnote, they write, “It is not clear to us if this means simply pulque in general, or if white pulque is a special kind. Molina gives white wine for iztac octli.” But Molina also gives “vino” (wine) for “octli” (pulque); as we saw above, in Doctor Ximénez's reference to “Wine medicine,” it was common practice to refer to pulque in Spanish as “vino.” It is, therefore, highly unlikely that Chimalpahin was writing about Spanish wine, white or otherwise.

40. Chimalpahin, Annals, 55.

41. “Eloquiltic seems to be an adjectival form based on elotl (elote in Spanish), a green ear of corn on the plant, and quilitl, any of a variety of green plants of the type used for salads. Tlemaitl is a sort of ladle to carry fire in and probably could refer to a ladle or spoon more generally.” The translators go on to question, once again, “whether iztac octli could be white wine.” See Chimalpahin, Annals, 54–55n3. Rémi Siméon defines “eloquiltic” as a medicinal plant used to treat pleurisy. Siméon, Diccionario de la lengua náhuatl o mexicana, trans. Josefina Oliva de Coll (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2004), 147.

42. Diego de la Cadena to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 399r.

43. Juan del Castillo to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 386v.

44. Sigüenza, “Letter to Admiral Pez,” 246; translation altered.

45. Miguel de Estrada to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fols. 493r-v.

46. Cf. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 9–13.

47. Bernabé Núñez de Paez to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 463r.

48. Dean y Cavildo to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 315v.

49. Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 271v.

50. Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 273r; my emphasis.

51. Cf. Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11: “How women behave sexually will define the order of colonial society and maintain the separation of the Spanish, Indian, and African races. Mixed-race people—castas—upset this neat order. Women, then, are much more then incidental to the baroque era in Spanish America and its literary expression; they are central actors as the encounter of Old and New Worlds moves into its second century.”

52. “A twisted Catholic puritan, he had a pathological aversion for women, to whom he imputed all the evils against which the Church inveighed. According to his biographer, he regarded his myopic vision as a special boon since it prevented him from seeing members of the less homely sex. If, through some mischance, a woman crossed his threshold, he promptly ordered the bricks torn up and replaced upon which sacrilegious feet had trod.” Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 160. We should take Leonard's words with more than a grain of salt, as he does not entertain the possibility of other, more nuanced readings of these colonial documents.

53. García de Legaspi Velasco to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 308r, 309r.

54. Agustín de Vetancurrt to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 499v. In his Teatro Mexicano, published one year after the prohibition was lifted in 1697, Vetancurt would once again deploy this language. Pulque, he wrote, makes drinkers commit “innumerable offenses against God” including “incest with even their own Mothers…. They trade wives with each other (unos y otros), and if one buys another a drink he is paid back in a lustful exchange with that man's wife; and from this, [come] robberies, homicides, dances, and superstitious idolatries, calling pulque the water of God, as if it were blessed.” Agustín de Vetancurt, Teatro Mexicano: Descripción breve de los sucesos ejemplares de la Nueva España en el Nuevo Mundo Occidental de las Indias (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1960), I, 442–443.

55. Cf. Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 47–92, esp. 57: “Confronting the church at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a situation of lax personal relationships and sexual interethnic encounters among the so-called lesser social elements.”

56. Cf. Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. III, Part 2, eds. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1999), 443–501; and Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 4. These new racial categories would soon after be depicted visually in the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings. These paintings depict cross-race couples and their offspring, mapping the genealogical progression of mestizaje or racial mixing. “It is no coincidence that casta paintings were created only a few years after the famous riot of 1692 in Mexico City.” See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 202.

57. Ayuntamiento to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 322r.

58. There are at least two copies of the University's printed report. One is located in Seville, Spain at the AGI Mexico 333, fols. 566r–584v. The other is in the Fondo Reservado of the BN in Mexico City. The opinion of at least one of the twenty-six signatories was so respected that he was also asked to produce his own separate informe. See Joseph Vidal de Figueroa to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fols. 376r–383r.

59. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 1r.

60. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 10r.

61. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 10r.

62. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 15v.

63. Cf. Guha's discussion of rumor and insurgency: “Ambiguity … is indeed what makes rumour a mobile and explosive agent of insurgency, and it is a function precisely of those distinctive features which constitute its originality—namely, its anonymity and transitivity.” Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 260.

64. Anna More, “Colonial Baroque: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Post-Colonization of New Spain” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003), 215.

65. Juan de Luzuriaga to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 338r.

66. García de Legaspi Velasco to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 309r.

67. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 14r.

68. Informe que la Real Universidad, fol. 15v.

69. Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1726), 327, http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle (accessed July 2009).

70. Sigüenza's segregation proposal is located in Mexico City at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) Historia 413, fols. 4r–5r. In the interest of simplicity, I will refer to the version published by as “Sobre los incovenientes de vivir los indios en el centro de la ciudad,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación 9, no. 1 (January-March 1938): 1–33.

71. “Sobre los inconvenientes,” 6.

72. See Edmundo O'Gorman, “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México,” in Seis estudios históricos de tema mexicano (Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1960), 11–40. Others use the stronger term “segregation” instead. See Magnus Mörner, “La política de segregación en la Audiencia de Guatemala,” Revista de Indias 24, nos. 95–96 (1964): 137–151; and Mörner and Charles Gibson, “Diego Muñoz Camargo and the Segregation Policy of the Spanish Crown,” Hispanic American Historical Review 42, no. 4 (November 1962): 558–568. More recently, scholars working with primary sources written in Nahuatl have suggested that the separation of the two “republics” had more to do with the practical exigencies of colonial rule: Spanish colonialism was built atop the already existing structures of indigenous governance. See Lockhart, The Nahuas, 26–30.

73. Mörner and Gibson, “Diego Muñoz Camargo,” 558.

74. Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 22.

75. Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque, 78–80.

76. The “very important objective of maintaining the Armada de Barlovento” was apparently a central reason for reversing the prohibition. See Consejo de Indias to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 590r. Also see Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque, 80–84.

77. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 68. Even some of the informes condemned the greed of the Spanish owners of the maguey plantations. Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas, for example, wrote harshly of the “Spanish Haciendas measuring eight, ten, and twelve thousand feet [and] dedicated entirely to maguey.” Aguiar y Seijas to Conde de Galve, AGI Mexico 333, fol. 270r.

78. Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 179–80n56.

79. As in Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “El nacimiento del miedo,” 10, 21.

80. “Sobre los inconvenientes,” 17, 22; O'Gorman, “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana,” 28. Cf. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139–140.

81. Informe que la Real Universidad, fols. 5v–6r.

82. Race was named and depicted with different typologies, terminologies, and representational devices in colonial Mexico and Peru. Terminology for racial identity in South America tended to be based explicitly on “race fractions” or relative quantities of blood (e.g., cuarterón, tercerón, etc.), while in Mexico these categories were rarely used. Similarly, with very few exceptions, casta paintings were specific to New Spain, often incorporating specifically Mexican text and imagery. See Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 124–127; Isidoro Moreno Navarro, “Un aspecto del mestizaje americano: El problema de la terminología,” Revista española de antropología americana 4 (1969): 201–218; and Katzew, Casta Painting, chap. 2.