Kelly McDonough

abstract:Spanish Crown policies of the colonial period in Mexico brought waves of forced indigenous reorganization (congregación) and legal processes of formalized distribution and titling of lands (composición). Both threatened and at times negated indigenous land rights and by extension corporate unity. At the same time, the Spanish court system provided a venue for indigenous peoples to advocate for themselves and contest encroachment of their territories. In this context, many indigenous communities of Mexico brought forth indigenous-language alphabetic and pictographic manuscripts—today known as "primordial titles"—as evidence of their rights to lands. Through an analysis of the Nahuatl-language primordial title of San Matías Cuixinco, this essay offers a systematic analysis of the culturally specific ways in which the stories in primordial titles worked together to ensure the indigenous people's survival as a coherent socio-political unit vis-à-vis their land base. Emphasis is placed on the context in which titles were produced and circulated, the material form they took due to cultures in contact, and a consideration of the underlying conceptual framework—(i)ixiptlatl complex, cellular principle, and macehua—that would have made these manuscripts meaningful to the people who created them.

This essay sheds light on the often contentious and always-in-process social relations among indigenous peoples of distinct social classes in colonial Mexico. Through a discourse analysis of one of Tlaxcala’s most important heritage sources, the Nahuatl-language annals of seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan noble and statesman Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala), I examine the subjective and objective factors that challenged Tlaxcalan noble claims to political authority, and provided the means by which indigenous commoners could advocate for themselves during the seventeenth century. A discourse analysis of this source demonstrates that tax and tribute issues as well as mestizo and/or non-indigenous interests disrupted noble hegemony. Equally, commoner recourse to the Spanish legal system and their denial of material items and labor to the nobles were mechanisms to register dissatisfaction and potentially affect change. In this way, this study advances how we understand inter-indigenous relationships of the colonial period, particularly how indigenous nobles and commoners negotiated their inherently intertwined social, political, and economic lives. Este ensayo arroja luz sobre las relaciones sociales, a menudo polemicas y siempre en proceso, entre personas indigenas de distintas clases sociales en el Mexico colonial. A traves de un analisis del discurso de una de las fuentes mas importantes del patrimonio de Tlaxcala –los anales en lengua nahuatl del noble y estadista tlaxcalteca del siglo xvii don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala)– examino los factores subjetivos y objetivos que pusieron en vilo el reclamo de autoridad politica de los nobles tlaxcaltecas, y que proporcionaron medios a los plebeyos indigenas para abogar por si mismos durante el siglo xvii. Un analisis del discurso de esta fuente demuestra que el tema de los impuestos y el tributo, asi como los intereses mestizos y/o no indigenas afectaron la hegemonia noble. De la misma manera, el recurso de los plebeyos al sistema legal espanol y su negativa a entregar objetos materiales y labor a los nobles fueron mecanismos que registraron la insatisfaccion y afectaron potencialmente el cambio. Asi, el presente estudio profundiza en la manera en que comprendemos las relaciones interindigenas del periodo colonial, particularmente la manera en que los nobles y los plebeyos indigenas ajustaron sus vidas sociales, politicas y economicas inherentemente entrelazadas.

This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geográficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual framework of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total.

Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues in digital format. Recently, new approaches have emerged as methods to reuse and make available the contents for computational purposes. This work introduces a methodology to transform digital collections into Linked Open Data following best practices. The framework has been applied to Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives based on the collection Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala provided by the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The results of this work are publicly available. This work aims at encouraging Cultural Heritage institutions to publish and reuse their digital collections using advanced methods and techniques.

The team created an ontology to annotate the maps and carried out a workshop which was attended by 27 scholars from UNAM and ENAH, delivering training on Recogito and presenting an introduction to the Spatial Humanities and the use of these technologies. The project coordinators and contributors met online every week to take part in 'mappathons' with all our participants, completing the annotation of our full corpus of sixteenth-century maps. This was a collaboration between LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at The University of Texas at Austin, the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), and the University of Lisbon.

abstract:Spanish Crown policies of the colonial period in Mexico brought waves of forced indigenous reorganization (congregación) and legal processes of formalized distribution and titling of lands (composición). Both threatened and at times negated indigenous land rights and by extension corporate unity. At the same time, the Spanish court system provided a venue for indigenous peoples to advocate for themselves and contest encroachment of their territories. In this context, many indigenous communities of Mexico brought forth indigenous-language alphabetic and pictographic manuscripts—today known as "primordial titles"—as evidence of their rights to lands. Through an analysis of the Nahuatl-language primordial title of San Matías Cuixinco, this essay offers a systematic analysis of the culturally specific ways in which the stories in primordial titles worked together to ensure the indigenous people's survival as a coherent socio-political unit vis-à-vis their land base. Emphasis is placed on the context in which titles were produced and circulated, the material form they took due to cultures in contact, and a consideration of the underlying conceptual framework—(i)ixiptlatl complex, cellular principle, and macehua—that would have made these manuscripts meaningful to the people who created them.

This essay sheds light on the often contentious and always-in-process social relations among indigenous peoples of distinct social classes in colonial Mexico. Through a discourse analysis of one of Tlaxcala’s most important heritage sources, the Nahuatl-language annals of seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan noble and statesman Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala), I examine the subjective and objective factors that challenged Tlaxcalan noble claims to political authority, and provided the means by which indigenous commoners could advocate for themselves during the seventeenth century. A discourse analysis of this source demonstrates that tax and tribute issues as well as mestizo and/or non-indigenous interests disrupted noble hegemony. Equally, commoner recourse to the Spanish legal system and their denial of material items and labor to the nobles were mechanisms to register dissatisfaction and potentially affect change. In this way, this study advances how we understand inter-indigenous relationships of the colonial period, particularly how indigenous nobles and commoners negotiated their inherently intertwined social, political, and economic lives. Este ensayo arroja luz sobre las relaciones sociales, a menudo polemicas y siempre en proceso, entre personas indigenas de distintas clases sociales en el Mexico colonial. A traves de un analisis del discurso de una de las fuentes mas importantes del patrimonio de Tlaxcala –los anales en lengua nahuatl del noble y estadista tlaxcalteca del siglo xvii don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Historia cronologica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala)– examino los factores subjetivos y objetivos que pusieron en vilo el reclamo de autoridad politica de los nobles tlaxcaltecas, y que proporcionaron medios a los plebeyos indigenas para abogar por si mismos durante el siglo xvii. Un analisis del discurso de esta fuente demuestra que el tema de los impuestos y el tributo, asi como los intereses mestizos y/o no indigenas afectaron la hegemonia noble. De la misma manera, el recurso de los plebeyos al sistema legal espanol y su negativa a entregar objetos materiales y labor a los nobles fueron mecanismos que registraron la insatisfaccion y afectaron potencialmente el cambio. Asi, el presente estudio profundiza en la manera en que comprendemos las relaciones interindigenas del periodo colonial, particularmente la manera en que los nobles y los plebeyos indigenas ajustaron sus vidas sociales, politicas y economicas inherentemente entrelazadas.