Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America

Abstract

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...

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