Land, Labor, and Indigenous Response: Huaquechula (Mexico), 1521–1633

Abstract

During New Spain's early colonial period, the Crown pursued a seemingly contradictory policy of exploiting and protecting its indigenous subjects. On a continuum of possible responses, many indigenous peoples chose to appeal to the Crown to defend their interests against arbitrary abuse by Spanish settlers. Based on early colonial-period documents, this article focuses on the case of Huaquechula, a town with deep prehispanic roots in the fertile Valley of Altixco, to describe its attempts to fend off land encroachment and excessive demands for labor. It is suggested that, by using rhetorical strategies that resonated with the Crown, in conjunction with a combination of characteristics specific to it, Huaquechula's attempts were relatively successful.

Keywords:

• altepetl
• encomienda
• royal land grants
• boundaries
• repartimiento labor
• rhetorical strategies

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Timothy Anna for reading an early version of this paper, as well as editor Kris Lane and two anonymous reviewers for CLAR for their helpful suggestions regarding its content and organization. Edgar de Ita Martínez assisted in the transcription of the documents, and Tyson Chen created the figures.

Notes on contributor

Avis Mysyk is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Her long-term research interest involves writing an historical ethnography of Huaquechula, Mexico, from prehispanic times to present day. Her articles have appeared in Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl and Ancient Mesoamerica. She is presently working on the topics of colonial-period indigenous governance, political factionalism, and litigation of cacicazgo property; and, at the other end of the historical spectrum, of the question of how ‘dark’ Day of the Dead tourism is in Mexico.

Notes

1. At the time, exploitation was understood in terms of extracting rents in the form of surplus agricultural products and labor.

2. Baber (2010, 22) considers all responses—from concession, to accommodation, to assertion of interests, to military resistance—to be ‘negotiation.’ Knight (2002b, 151), however, comments that the term, negotiation, is too often used to describe ‘all manner of contestation and conflict that go far beyond negotiation in the conventional sense.’ For this reason, I prefer to use the phrase, ‘appeal to the Crown,’ rather than the term, ‘negotiation.’

3. Archival documents on Huaquechula are not overly abundant. For New Spain's early colonial period, by far the majority are located in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City. Almost all are written in Spanish, not in Nahuatl.

4. Modeled after the prehispanic tequitl system (Hicks 1984, 153), the repartimiento labor system was limited, at first, to public works. However, after the epidemic of 1545–1548, the Crown extended it in order to provide indigenous laborers to Spanish settlers. In the Valley of Atlixco, these included farmers and ranchers.

5. The Franciscan presence in Huaquechula dates from around 1529 to the end of 1697. Between 1530 and 1560, the church of the convent—which still stands today—is said to have been constructed (Kubler 1972, 1:64). Unfortunately, no documents relevant to the topic of this paper were found in either the Archivo Franciscano or the Fondo Franciscano in Mexico City or in an on-line search of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.

6. To date, little research has been conducted on this topic with regard to Huaquechula. Asselbergs (2004) interprets the Lienzo de Cuauhquechollan, created in the early 1530s by the Cuauhquecholtecas to document their role as equal participants in the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. Paredes Martínez (1991) traces the development of agriculture in the Valley of Atlixco from prehispanic times until the end of the sixteenth century.

7. Motolinía (1995, 193–94) states that, because prehispanic battles were waged in the Valley of Atlixco, much of the land was vacant, but Paredes Martínez (1991, 41) suggests that, even though the land might have been vacant, it was not unclaimed.

8. In this, Huaquechula was similar to other cities and towns in the Puebla–Tlaxcala Valley (Hoekstra 1993), such as Huejotzingo (Prem 1978) and Tlaxcala (Gibson 1952), and in the Eastern Puebla Basin, such as Tepeaca, Tecamachalco, and Quecholac (Licate 1981; Martínez 1994). It differed from others in the Eastern Puebla Basin, such as Santiago Tecali (Chance 2000) and Santa Cruz Tlacotepec (Perkins 2005a), and in the Sierra Norte of Puebla (García Martínez 1987), which were initially considered marginal to Spanish agriculture. Even those, however, would eventually be affected by the Spanish presence.

9. Dyckerhoff (2002/2003, 168 n27) states that, although the ethnic composition of prehispanic Cholollan, Tlaxcallan, Huexotzinco, and Cuauhtinchan can be determined, in part, from mid-sixteenth-century administrative sources, that of the Valley of Atlixco cannot because of ‘few and almost incompatible data.’ One must rely, then, on myths of migration to Atlixco (Cuauhquechollan) after the collapse of the legendary Tollan (Tula) in AD 1150. Muñoz Camargo (1998, §63) claims that Cuauhquechollan was founded by Yohuallatonac, the leader of a subgroup of the seven Chichimec tribes who assisted the Tolteca Chichimecas conquer Cholollan around AD 1175. Motolinía (1995, 5) claims that Cuauhquechollan was founded by the Nonoalca Chichimeca leader, Xelhua, and his followers, although the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (1989, §28) claims that he died en route. Regardless of his fate, the sources make no further mention of either Xelhua or the Nonoalca Chichimecas in Cuauhquechollan. Ixtlilxochitl (1965, 2:36–37) claims that, around AD 1179 or 1201, the Chichimec leader, Xolotl, allowed the few Toltec survivors of the collapse of Tollan to remain in the locations to which they had fled, including Cuauhquechollan. Smith (1984, 158) doubts, however, that such groups were as ethnically homogeneous as the ethnohistorical sources lead one to believe.

10. On the one hand, the granddaughter of Yohuallatonac, the late-twelfth-century Chichimec ruler of Cuauhquechollan, is said to have married into one of the two Nahua teccalli in Cuauhtinchan (Reyes García 1988, Genealogía 2). On the other, in the fragment of Nahuatl text from AD 1546 that accompanies the Mapa Circular de Cuauhquechollan, the Huaquechultecas make reference only to their calpolli (Asselbergs 2004, 301–2), not to their teccalli. It may be that, by that time, teccalli—if they did exist in Cuauhquechollan—were becoming politically irrelevant (Chance 2000, 499).

11. During the reign of Ahuitzotl (AD 1486–1502) in Tenochtitlan, Cuauhquechollan had authority over six cabeceras [head towns]—Acapetlahuacan, Atzitzihuacan, Tetellan, Hueyapan, Tlamimilolpan, and Yaotehuacan (unidentifiable)—‘subject only to the rule and regulations of the lord of Cuauhquechollan, where they delivered the royal tribute and under whose flag and protection they went to war.’ By AD 1519, however, the Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tacuba) had transferred Cuauhquechollan's authority over Tetellan, Hueyapan, and Tlamimilolpan to other provinces (Smith and Berdan 1996, 273). None of the three is mentioned in any of the pictorial documents created by the Cuauhquecholtecas in the early colonial period (Asselbergs 2004).

12. According to Clavijero (2003, 192), more than 3,000 Cuauhquecholtecas were taken to Tenochtitlan to be sacrificed to the gods.

13. Service and labor that macehuales [commoners] gave to their lords were referred to as tequitl, and goods—usually those that a conquered province gave to its rulers—as tlacalaquilli (Hicks 1984, 153). Thus, to the lords of Tepeaca, macehuales gave basic goods such as sandals, clothing, reed mats, turkeys, and cacao; household service; and luxury goods such as precious stones, gold dust, and feathers (Paso y Troncoso 1905, 5:28–29). To the rulers of Tenochtitlan, the conquered lords of Tepeaca promised to give laborers, when needed, to do road work and carry loads (Durán 1994, 155); every ten days, to sweep the floors of their households and palaces; and to fetch water and wood (Tezozómoc 1975, 308). Every year, the province of Tepeaca, of which Cuauhquechollan had become a part, gave two bins of maize and two of beans and, every eighty days, 4,000 loads of lime, 4,000 loads of cane, and 800 deerskins (Berdan and Anawalt 1997, 98). Both Tepeaca and Cuauhquechollan also had to give captives from the Flowery War that the Triple Alliance waged against the independent city-states of Huexotzinco, Tlaxcallan, and Cholollan (Carrasco 1999, 291).

14. The boundaries ran from Cerro Tlilhuacatepec, then on the diagonal bordering the town of Tetlan where there was ‘a poplar tree,’ to the mask-rock called texayacatl. From there, it parted ways with the lands of Teyuca and followed a straight line to ‘the place of the painted rock’ where it turned toward the Cerro de las Palmas and Cacaloxuchitl, continuing north to the other side of ‘a dry stream’ to where there were ‘many organ cacti.’ It then turned west, crossing the stream to Tehuiztengo and continued toward two small hills [sic] called Suchitepec. From there, it turned south to a wooded plain through which a river from the volcano, Popocatepetl, flowed, until it ascended three hills called Xoxhinño, Nepopoalo, and Sotelo, then back to Cerro Tlilhuacatepec ‘where the boundaries of said lands end’ (Tierras, vol. 2683, exp. 4, f. 164). Apparently, the document was accompanied by a painted map but, because its whereabouts is unknown (Asselbergs 2004, 297), many of these landmarks can no longer be identified.

15. One league = 5 km. Because the boundaries of Tepapayeca are unknown and in order to accommodate the seven identifiable estancias of Huauquechula, its eastern and southeastern boundaries have been redrawn in Figure 1b. The actual boundaries of Huaquechula might not have conformed exactly to those cited in the Suma de visitas because its main purpose was to determine prehispanic tribute rates (Simpson 1982, 150), not to record geographical boundaries. Huaquechula's four barrios—none of which are identifiable—were Cuyametepeque, Hasichuca, Cuyacan, and Talnabaca. The seven outlying villages that can be identified are Cuyluco (Huiluco), Tecococolco (Tecololco), Açicintlan (Atzitzihuacan), Coatepque (Coatepec), Guayuca (Coayuca), Anteupa (Acteopan), and Calmecatitlan (Calmecac). The four that cannot are Tochteupa, Guaupechuca, Aguacatepeque, and Ciguapiltitlan.

16. In requesting protection of their lands in 1535 and 1545, the Cuauhquecholtecas used similar rhetoric to that used by the Tlaxcaltecas who, in 1528, appealed to the Crown to never be granted in encomienda and to be exempt from tribute (Baber 2012, 43). By the mid-1500s, however, such rhetoric was proving to be less effective. In 1560, for example, the gobernador and alcaldes of Huejotzingo appealed, apparently unsuccessfully, to the Crown for a reduction in tribute (Anderson, Berdan, and Lockhart 1976, 176–91) and, by 1562, even the members of the cabildo of Tlaxcala claimed that they had not been compensated for having assisting the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico (Gibson 1952, 160).

17. At first, mercedes consisted of grants of caballerías [agricultural lands], then of estancias [pasture lands] for ganado menor [sheep and goats] and/or mayor [cattle] and, later, of water rights.

18. Indigenous towns were also awarded mercedes, but never in the numbers that were awarded to Spaniards (Chevalier 1970, 196). In the case of Huaquechula, apart from the merced that it was awarded in 1545, the only other seems to have been a merced of one estancia and seven caballerías of land in 1595 (Mercedes, vol. 21, exp. 537, ff. 119r–20r). By 1613, however, the members of its cabildo petitioned Viceroy Diego Fernández de Córdoba for a license to convert the estancia to plow land because they claimed they lacked the money to buy livestock (Mercedes, vol. 28, exp. 267, ff. 77v–78r). By way of comparison, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla where livestock raising—especially ganado menor—was preferred over agriculture, ten indigenous towns were awarded various combinations of estancias and caballerías of land between 1560 and 1607 (García Martínez 1987, Apéndice 6).

19. Although couched in rhetoric, the towns' concerns appear to have been real. Melville (1994, 148, 150) notes how, in the Valle del Mezquital, livestock threatened Indians' access to resources, such as plants and animals, that they used both to sustain themselves and to pay tribute in Tlapanaloya, as well as to sufficient water for their crops in Tequixquiac, Hueypostla, and Tecozautla. Melville (1994, 104) also notes how Indians from Xilotepec abandoned their towns because livestock had destroyed their crops.

20. Gerhard (1993, 24) suggests that the epidemic of 1545–48 may have been measles. For population figures for Huaquechula in 1550, see Paso y Troncoso (1905, 1:111–12 [Guacachula, f. 81]); in 1570, see García Icazbalceta (1892, 2:24); in 1681, see Gerhard (1981, Cuadro 1, note b). For the north of the Valley of Atlixco, which would include Huaquechula, Vollmer (1973, 46) cites the figures of 71,028 in 1570; 36,419.5 in 1600; and 17,736.5 in 1650.

21. Although cattle were suited to the lands surrounding Puebla, sheep and goats were the livestock of choice in the Valley of Atlixco because they did not destroy the wheat fields (Chevalier 1970, 61). However, goats, in particular, destroyed not only crops but the soil itself, often leaving it unsuitable for agriculture (Paredes Martínez 1991, 74).

22. Although towns in the Sierra Norte of Puebla, such as Zacatlán and Huauchinango, were awarded viceregal licenses in 1550 and 1552, respectively, to prevent Spaniards’ livestock from destroying their fields, ‘often, the conflicts ended violently’ (García Martínez 1987, 142 n96). And, if the Crown's repeated orders from the 1550s onward that non-Indians remove their unlicensed estancias from Tlaxcala are any indication, not even it was entirely successful at preventing such encroachment (Gibson 1952, 85).

23. Even mercedes that were awarded later could be imprecisely described. Among several such examples from Huaquechula is one from 1583, the year in which Bartólome Martínez was awarded two caballerías of land bordering on the lands of Antonio Lorenzo and Gonzalo Mercado—where there were guaje trees—and running towards the west (Mercedes vol. 12, exp. - , ff. 14r/v).

24. As disputes over land between Spaniards and indigenous peoples threatened to destabilize the countryside, the Crown introduced a process of composición whereby Spaniards who could not show valid title to the lands they possessed would be awarded them if they made a monetary contribution in support of the Spanish fleet (Prem 1978, 125). The process, which began in 1591, was completed from 1643–1645. The seven composiciones that were recorded between 1594 and 1619 are found in Mercedes, vol. 19, exp. 669, ff. 223v–24v (1594); Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 1292, exp. - , ff. 135v–36r (1599); Mercedes, vol. 19, exp. - , f. 272r/v (1594); Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 1292, exp. - , f. 132r (1599); Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 1292, exp. - , f. 136r (1599); Mercedes, vol. 26, exp. 520, ff. 152v–53r (1609); Mercedes, vol. 28, exp. 183, f. 47r/v (1613); Mercedes, vol. 34, exp. - , f. 6r/v (1618); and Mercedes, vol. 34, exp. – , f. 120v (1619). In contrast (and outside the scope of this paper), in 1643, 23 Spaniards composed 124.5 caballerías of land, 10.5 estancias (only one specified as to type of livestock—ganado menor), and four surcos of water (one surco = 6.5 liters per second) (AHA-AS, caja 3931, exp. 54417, ff. 588–614). Seven of the compositions clustered around Atzitzihuacan and San Mateo Coatepec, and six around Champusco and San Juan Huiluco. Another five were well within the boundaries of Huaquechula. By way of rough comparison, in 1643, 84 Spaniards composed 443 caballerías of land, including estancias, in the north of the Valley of Atlixco (Prem 1984, Table 9.2); and, in 1643–1644, 92 Spaniards composed 726 caballerías of land, 101 estancias of ganado menor, and 15 estancias of ganado mayor on the boundaries of Tecamachalco and Quecholac (Martínez 1994, 158). Huaquechula, itself, composed very few resources—in 1710, four caballerías of land and three surcos of water and, in 1716–1717, two caballerías of land (BN-ATTPP, vol. 3, exp. 211, f. 6; vol. 13, exp. 419, f. 12).

25. Mercedes, vol. 34, exp. - , f. 98r/v; vol. 34, exp. - , f. 119v; vol. 34, exp. - , f. 120v.

26. Although encomenderos were known more for abusing than for protecting their indigenous tributaries, the latter was not unheard of. In the Sierra Norte of Puebla, for example, the encomenderos of Chumatlán and Tenampulco protected the towns from being awarded as mercedes in 1575 and 1576, respectively, and their indigenous tributaries from Zacatlán and Huauchinango from having to give repartimiento labour outside of the region in 1607 (García Martínez 1987, 238 n49, 252–54).

27. Martínez (1994, 86; 116 n46) cites the malos tratos [ill treatment] to which repartimiento laborers from Tecamachalco were subjected in 1578, 1579, and 1581, including being beaten, being manacled or locked in at night to prevent them from fleeing, and having their pay withheld in order to make them work more hours in a day or more days, even weeks, than they were obligated to.

28. Santiago Atzitzihuacan, San Francisco Tochtepec, San Pedro Izhuatepec, San Mateo Coatepec, San Juan Tecololco, San Felipe Cuauhpechco, and San Marcos Acteopan.

29. Similar tactics were used the Eastern Puebla Basin. Licate (1981, 129) describes how, in 1576, the members of the cabildos of Tecamachalco and Quecholac complained to the viceroy that the priest in the subject town of Santa Cruz Tlacotepec was forcing the Indians to build the parish church, jailing them to prevent them from attending to their repartimiento obligations and, thus, placing the burden on Indian laborers in the rest of the jurisdiction. Martínez (1994, 116 n45) notes that, in 1583, the juez repartidor of Quecholac was accused of trying to compel the town to give, on a yearly basis, the same number of laborers it gave for the dobla [intensive seasonal agricultural labor], on the pretext that it had fallen behind. In 1590, he was accused of compelling the town to continue giving the same number of laborers despite population loss.

30. The reforms stipulated, for example, that, under normal circumstances, only the ‘seventh part’ of the laborers from any town could be called upon at any one time; those who escorted them were to treat them well; they could not be brought from distant provinces, nor be retained longer than the period for which they had been awarded; and those who worked with livestock could no longer be charged for any losses unless they had been paid for the risks incurred (Simpson 1938, 12–14). It appears, however, that the reforms had little effect in the Tepeaca region (Martinez 1994, 118 n48, 86, 117 n47). In 1610 and 1619, Spanish farmers were still being ordered to release those repartimiento laborers from Tecamachalco whom they were compelling to work against their will. And, in 1619 and 1633, Spanish farmers in the province of Tepeaca were still being accused of taking indigenous men, women, and even children from towns such as Santiago Tecali and compelling them to work on their estancias.

31. It would be of interest to compare the ability of Huaquechula to defend its land and labor to that of other cities and towns in the region based on the length of time they were in encomienda–whether partly, fully, or not at all. According to Gerhard (1993), Chumatlán, Huauhchinango, and Cuauhtinchan remained partly private encomiendas until 1664, 1688, and 1696, respectively. Santiago Tecali was still a private encomienda in 1696. Some came under Crown control early—Cholula in 1531, Huejotzingo in 1532, and Tepeaca in 1544; others, later—Santa Cruz Tlacotepec in 1605, Tenampulco in 1626, Quecholac in 1664, Tecamachalco toward the end of the 1600s, and Zacatlán in 1746. Tlaxcala, of course, successfully appealed to the Crown in 1528 to never be awarded in encomienda.