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.