The República de Indios as a Colonial Project

As a colonial project, the república de indios featured an inherent contradiction between two goals: on one hand, it attempted to transform indigenous peoples into gente de razón (people of reason, a term the Spaniards expediently reserved for themselves), fully conscious of the superiority, value, and potential of Christianity and Spanish habits and mores; on the other, it strove to shield Indians—regarded as minors in legal terms—from the “bad example” given to them by greedy and corrupt Spaniards. This view prevailed in early colonial times; for example, in 1533, the oidor (local Crown representative) Ramírez de Fuenleal rejected a royal proposal for interracial cabildos, on the grounds that Indian officials would be corrupted by participating in them. Some distinguished mendicant priests, such as Vasco de Quiroga in Michoacin and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Vera Paz and Chiapas, attempted to create and maintain isolated, utopian indigenous communities where the Christian faith and a selection of Spanish mores were learned by peaceful and experimental means. By the late colonial period, however, the tide had turned, and Bourbon reformers called for generalized Spanish instruction and acculturation of rural indigenous populations.

 

A compromise between isolation and acculturation was achieved in the form of a policy of congregaciones (reductions), which began in the 1540s and extended into the early seventeenth century. The congregaciones incorporated Indians living in clustered small settlements into a preexisting or a new settlement with a church building and a resident priest. The resulting demographic center often was promoted to the rank of a cabecera (main township), and an indigenous town council was created. In this manner, the relative segregation of indigenous communities was combined with the social and didactic influence of a select representative—at least in theory—of Spanish morals: the parish priest.

 

Pueblos de indios in remote areas tended to function as segregated political and territorial units. For example, in remote areas with no resident priests—such as small townships in Yucatán—contacts with the Spanish colonial administration revolved around tribute collection and weekly doctrinal visits by a priest. Occasionally, territorial isolation and minimal numbers of nonindigenous residents afforded some pueblos de indios unusual political and religious autonomy, as in the case of the eight Yaqui townships established and supervised almost exclusively by Jesuits in northwest New Spain. However, major population centers—nominally a part of the república de españoles—attracted substantial numbers of indigenous migrants from neighboring pueblos. These migrants added additional layers to diverse urban communities, already highly stratified in terms of class and status. Therefore, by the mid-seventeenth century many urban centers substantially departed from the idealized repúblicas defined by colonial law. A case in point was the ethnically diverse, expanding category of naborías (semi-indentured servants) composed of Indian migrants to the city of Oaxaca in the seventeenth century.

Inquisition Tribunal in Mexico

When a separate Inquisition tribunal was established in Mexico in 1571, Indians were excluded from its jurisdiction, but Indian ritual specialists continued to be investigated and occasionally punished in a far less systematic manner by parish priests acting with the approval of their bishops. Indigenous litigiousness—an ingenious response to the new colonial order—was counteracted with the creation in 1592 of an exclusively indigenous tribunal, the General Indian Court, which provided Indians with legal assistance as needed and was funded with Indian taxes. As new Christians, Indians were allowed to keep only a partial fast during Lent and expected to keep only 10 holidays out of the 41 official calendar holidays. Furthermore, Indians were allowed to organize patron saint and other religious festivities in ways that departed from Christian orthodoxy and approached preConquest modes of public celebration.

 

In most indigenous communities, sociopolitical stratification existed within two community domains—the local church and the república itself—and sometimes within a third domain—the cofradía, or religious fraternity, linked to but independent from the church. The top tier of each domain was controlled by colonial authorities. The Indians could elect lower-level local officers, who served in the town’s cabildo (city council): there were two alcaldes mayores (mayors), about four regidores (city council members), an escribano (secretary), and one or more mayordomos (councilors). Although officials as a rule did not serve consecutive terms, in practice these positions were rotated among males with kinship ties to traditional elite groups or ambitious males who desired to increase their social standing; the amount of personal resources and responsibilities required for these offices acted as deterrents for the overburdened commoners. In fact, it was not unusual for a single individual to hold two higher-level political and church posts concurrently. The lowest tier in the political and religious domains featured a number of offices with various functions, such as tax collection, organization of crews for the mandatory labor taxes, edict proclamation, judicial activities, and church functions. Although this system of elite rotation may seem similar to the cargo systems described in many contemporary Mesoamerican communities since the 1930s, the transformation of the indigenous cabildo system into a coordinated system of socioreligious hierarchy may have taken place as late as the latter half of the eighteenth century. This transformation may have been related to two poorly understood social processes: the emergence of indigenous cofradías and the development of communal resource management for the celebration of Christian calendrical holidays.

 

Indians were held responsible for a variety of obligations to the Crown and to the local community. A fixed monetary yearly tax was collected from each adult Indian; women were assigned a lower tax, which did not automatically translate into a reduced obligation, since they had unequal access to monetary income. Male Indians contributed a fixed amount of days of unpaid labor per year — often one full day per week—to various community and Crown projects.

Republic of Indians

In many records of colonial Mexico, the terms república de indios (republic of Indians) and república de españoles (republic of Spaniards) appear with great frequency, often in legal and social contexts that assume two self-contained and fully segregated social or territorial units, one populated by Indians, the other by Spaniards, mestizos, Africans, criollos, and other non-Indian subjects. However, the various social, economic, and political practices recorded in colonial documents suggest that, while initially these two terms referred to two highly differentiated groups of people, by late colonial times this differentiation had been lessened in some domains (large settlements and their neighboring areas) and increased in others (in frontier regions and geographically isolated communities). Therefore, the term repúlica de indios should be regarded as a bureaucratic concept for a set of legal dispositions-not always coherent with social realities—through which the Spanish Crown attempted to maintain a politically expedient territorial, legal, and social division between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples.

Fundamental Traits of the República de Indios

 

The scholar David Brading has pointed out that, in his 1516 Memorial, that Bartolomé de Las Casas presciently argued for the major social and political features that came to characterize the pueblo de indios (town of Indians): segregated indigenous villages directly controlled by Crown officials, with a church and a hospital governed by a qualified priest, and a population subject to rotating, periodical labor obligations related to community needs and to labor-intensive colonial enterprises such as mining and manufacture. To this general framework, one should add land-tenure laws that restricted the sale of indigenous communal or private land to vecinos (non-Indian subjects), and land-tenure patterns that emphasized communal landholdings but allowed elites and influential Indian townspeople to usufruct some portions of land (i.e., to enjoy the fruits of another’s possession). The Indian community could be a cabecera (the head of the smallest colonial administrative unit) or a sujeto (a dependency). Cabeceras had a resident priest who managed the doctrinal education, mass, and public registers and visited the sujetos periodically.

 

Indigenous people were accorded a separate status in legal and religious terms from that of all other colonial subjects. The rationale for this division rested on several factors. The rational and moral capacities of Indians as human beings were doubted by the theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, defended by Las Casas, and eventually acknowledged by the Vatican; as colonial subjects, Indians were regarded as vulnerable and accorded the status of minors under the protection of the Crown; as new Christians, Indians were expected to falter in some observances of the faith. In the first half of the sixteenth century, before the dual legal spheres were formalized, Spanish law treated Indians as jurisdictional subjects: they filed suits in the Royal Audiencia and were tried and punished for idolatry, sorcery, and apostasy by apostolic inquisitors Martín de Valencia in Tlaxcala, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and Visitador Tello de Sandoval in Nahua central Mexico and Oaxaca, and Diego de Landa in Yucatán.

Jesuit Missions

After the initial period of the regular orders’ great expansion, the seventeenth century was a period of consolidation without territorial advances, with the exception of the Jesuit missions in the northeast. The Mercedarians erected a convent in Mexico City, and the Carmelites from the province of San Alberto erected theirs in two sites away from the bustle of the city, where they could live a life of retirement and penance prescribed by their rule. The Carmelite brothers built symbolic “deserts” in San Angel and in the woods of Los Leones. These “holy deserts” became attractions to the residents of the capital, and they took advantage of the trip to enjoy the country setting and to refresh their spirits in the contemplation of so much austerity and mortification.

 

Several female monastic orders were established in the viceroyalty of New Spain, and these influenced family and urban life through the education of young girls and in their examples of piety and devotion. Some depended directly on the ordinary hierarchy, such as the Conceptionists, who owned the richest convents. Others, such as the Claritians and the Dominicans, were under the rule of the corresponding male order, Franciscan and Dominican, respectively. The Carmelites, after having unwillingly obeyed their regular superiors, whom they claimed “did not understand nor know their rule,” defended their right to remain under the direct jurisdiction of the archbishop.

 

During the eighteenth century and until the beginning of the nineteenth, changes shook the religious organization of New Spain. First came the restrictions on construction and limits to the number of novices and religious. Then secular and ecclesiastical authorities met to reduce the number of parishes administered by the regular clergy. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 was the high point of the Spanish Crown’s involvement in religious matters. The military was called in to subdue protesters to the expulsion in many cities of New Spain. The last intervention in religious life occurred in the early years of the nineteenth century, with the so-called consolidation of the royal promissory notes, obligating religious bodies to relinquish much of their capital.

 

The Jesuit expulsion affected the criollos’ education, since this education depended on the Jesuits. It also affected the Indians who lived on missions, since they now were under the jurisdiction of the Franciscans and Dominicans. This meant a change in organization and in daily life. The steps taken to avoid a negative impact on the cultural and religious life of the colony after the expulsion of the Jesuits paved the way for a society that in the future would become more secular and less conservative.