This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil and ecclesiastical. In this way, the legal system facilitated the negotiation of colonial rule, including the growth and transformation of legal institutions and practices, and the relationship between Indian and Spanish jurisdictions. The legal system also provided an arena for cultural encounter in which Spanish and native forms of law and knowledge were circulated and constructed. Scholarship on these topics is growing fast, putting ethnohistory into an exciting dialogue with comparative studies of law and empire.The engagement of native people with Spain's colonial legal system is a burgeoning topic in the historiography of colonial Mexico and the Andes, and promises to reorient the field of colonial ethnohistory while adding new dimensions to the comparative history of law and empire. The existence, or absence, of indigenous languages sources has shaped the scholarly trajectories for the two regions. In the case of Mesoamerican ethnohistory, the recent scholarship of the New Philologists analyzes "mundane" native language documents in order to identify native cultural categories and chart cultural change over time. 1 This approach has yielded invaluable data about indigenous culture with less attention paid to colonial institutions and forms of power. Although Andean ethnohistorians share an interest in understanding indigenous society on its own terms, the near total absence of native language notarial documentation has forced Andeanists to rely on Spanish language sources, pushing scholars to attend to the colonial system that mediated them. Also, a more coercive and exploitative form of colonialism in the Andes -because of the mining complex and the Church's protracted war against idolatry -intruded in more pronounced ways on Andean social organization and culture. As a result, historians of the Andes have focused on native forms of resistance and accommodation to Spanish rule with native people and Spanish institutions occupying the same frame. More recent scholarship on Christian evangelization, language use and multilingualism, inter-ethnic relations, flows of knowledge, and the experiences of urban Indians has begun to reorient Mesoamericanist scholarship toward the broader society of which native people formed a part. 2 Indigenous engagement with the law provides one of the most compelling of these areas of inquiry and promises to put Mesoamerican ethnohistory in dialogue with emerging trends in Andean, Atlantic, and comparative imperial histories.Just as significantly, cross-disciplinary and comparative studies of law and empire 3 have much to gain from schola...

At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, thealcalde mayor(Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged in a legal battle over the land for four years. Their lawyers stood with them. Juan Tirado, a district interpreter, and court witnesses (in lieu of an official notary) translated and notarized the proceedings. From his perch on the back of his horse, the alcalde mayor read the legal decision in the dispute, which the interpreter translated for the benefit of the Zapotec officials. The auxiliary judge, who rendered the decision in the case from the distance and comfort of the diocesan seat of Antequera, had ordered that the land in question should be divided equally between the two pueblos. The lawyer for the cabildo of Tanetze voiced his official protest and vowed to appeal the case to the Real Audiencia. The alcalde mayor registered the protest. Then, he addressed another group of men who had been waiting in the wings: Juan de Yllescas, Andrés Ramos, Juan Baptista, Pedro Hernandes, and Nicolas Santiago, all natives of the Zapotec pueblo of San Miguel Talea, and all of whom had testified in an earlierprobanzaon behalf of the pueblo of Juquila. Through his interpreter, the magistrate swore them in as witnesses and ordered them to guide the group to the disputed territory, identify the parcels of land and their borders, and determine where they should be divided. From this point on, the Zapotec witnesses took the lead and proceeded toward the disputed territory along the Camino Real, with their “faces pointing south.” In this manner, the legal ritual of boundary marking (amojonamiento) began.

This article analyzes ambiguities in the roles and identities of the indigenous allies of the Spanish conquerors of Oaxaca's Sierra Norte by putting into dialogue the Lienzo of Analco—an indigenous-produced cartographic narrative of the conquest of the sierra—and archival documentation. The Lienzo of Analco communicates the story of the conquest in an area far removed from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican power centers from the perspective of lesser or “forgotten” allies of the Spanish conquerors: naborías (native people in the service of Spaniards, who were neither slave nor free); and it recounts the birth of their ethnic polity, the barrio of Analco. The status of these indigenous allies marks a central tension in the lienzo's message: were they allies (indios conquistadores) or servants (naborías)? Historical documents say both, but the coexistence of these statuses poses a conundrum, since in other parts of Mesoamerica, Indian allies of the Spanish endeavored to distance themselves from naborías. The patrons and painters of the lienzo sought to resolve this tension by casting the dependent servitude of naborías as merit-worthy service to the Spanish crown with the goal of achieving special collective status and privileges as “Indian conquistadors.”

IN THE HEART OF Ñudzahui (Mixtec) territory in southern Mexico, a group of indigenous commoners built a temporary court for a Spanish judge. 1 It was the rainy season, July 1683, and the court was made of movable materials-most likely sticks and branches, perhaps a reed roof or a piece of cloth to create shade, maybe a few flowers adorning it to make it like a ceremonial arch. Observers referred to it alternately as "receiving quarters" or a "receiving house," and sometimes simply as a recibimiento, which in the Spanish of the time could connote an antechamber. The terms reveal that, despite being put up rapidly on land near wheat fields on the outskirts of four indigenous municipalities, the structure was intended for serious legal business. 2 In fact, the Spanish colonial judge, known as the alcalde mayor, was on his way there. He was traveling to the area from the closest Spanish tribunal in the region, in Yanhuitlan, Teposcolula, in the Oaxaca region, to issue a summary decision in a land dispute between two native villages, San Andrés Sinaxtla and San Mateo Susuquitepeque. 3 Word was that the ruling would favor San Andrés. Still, the formalities for the reading of the decision were required just the same. For obvious reasons, the villagers of San Mateo were not going to like the ruling, and a restless group of women and men from the pueblo gathered. They focused their ire on the makeshift court: the struc-The authors would like to thank Kristin Mann and the anonymous readers and editorial reviewers for the AHR for their generous engagement with this article. 1 "Tay Ñudzahui" ("people of the rain place") is the term of self-ascription used in the native language (the Ñudzahui language) in this region. See Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 2002). In the scholarly literature, the term "Mixtec," derived from Nahuatl (the indigenous language of central Mexico), is used most widely to refer to the people and the language, and "Mixteca" to the region. 2 In the legal dispute showcased in this article, participants and witnesses consistently talked about the recibimiento, rancho, and casa, as it was alternately called, as "being [located] in" or "near" a paraje, which is a site or place. Thus it was expressly a structure-like a court-rather than a site alone. Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca [hereafter AHJO], Teposcolula [hereafter T], Criminal series [hereafter Crim.], legajo [hereafter leg.] 18, expediente [hereafter exp.] 28, 1683. 3 In the 1683 dispute examined here, the term amparado is used repeatedly, indicating that the litigating parties hoped for summary justice without a full and costly suit due to their status as native litigants. On natives' adaption of the amparo mechanism, which had been part of medieval Spanish law, see Brian P.

In midcolonial Villa Alta, Oaxaca, New Spain, indigenous political conflict intersected with the extirpation of idolatry to shape an arena of native social life and colonial legal culture about which we know little: Indian jurisdiction over crime. Through analysis of bilingual missionary texts and a unique corpus of Zapotec-language criminal records, this article highlights the role of indigenous judges as translators and innovators of legal procedure, notarial form, and criminal discourse. As they prosecuted crimes in Indian tribunals while seeking justice in Spanish courts, native judges and litigants—in conflict and alliance with Spanish civil and ecclesiastical officials—engaged in a spiraling process of translation that vernacularized colonial criminal justice. By putting the histories of Christian translation and of law and empire into productive dialogue, we reconstruct the processes whereby a Spanish and Christian moral order became locally meaningful and politically useful in indigenous communities far removed from Spanish administrative centers.