Taking the Courts to the Fields: Law, Violence, and Agrarian Custom in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

This article analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to produce performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native judicial officers used their coercive power and symbols of judicial authority to physically enter boundary lands and shape the course of legal disputes. By combining procedures sanctioned by Spanish law with unsanctioned ones, Native officials developed customary judicial practices and performances proper to their own jurisdiction in which objects invested with political, sacred, and quotidian meaning figured centrally. Staffs of office and whips wielded by Native authorities as emblems of Indian administrative and legal jurisdiction represented one category of the everyday materials of law. Clothing, farming implements, and livestock afforded other tools with which Indigenous farmers and authorities made legal claims. When reading land disputes alongside criminal cases of land invasions across Oaxaca’s judicial archives, it becomes clear that Native officials and farmers used these objects to struggle over territory and authority in patterned cycles of litigation, land titling or contracts of joint-possession, and violence that often played out over decades or centuries and formed an enduring facet of agrarian custom in the region.