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 HALL
OF MIRRORS
Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

laura a. lewis

d u k e u n i ve rs i t y p res s d u rh a m & l o n d o n 2 0 0 3

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 Introduction

adriana ruíz de cabrera and

the mexican inquisition in 1655

In 1655, at the midpoint of New Spain’s three-hundred year

colonial period, a woman named Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera was
accused of witchcraft (hechicería) in the eastern port city of Vera Cruz.∞
She was carted o√ to Mexico City, the colony’s capital, where she was
condemned to a dungeon run by the Holy O≈ce of the Inquisition.
The records of her trial identify her as belonging to the black casta
(caste), but while the majority of blacks in colonial Mexico were likely
enslaved during this era, Adriana, as it happens, was not.≤
The trial opened with the inquisitors’ accusation that Adriana had
used herbs, ‘‘superstitions,’’ and ‘‘tricks’’ to uncover thefts and ‘‘take
revenge’’ on people. The immediate complaint indicated that she had
o√ered her services as a witch to ascertain who had robbed a boarder in
the rooming house she owned. To do this, she had allegedly gathered
together for a washtub-water divination a group of women who ‘‘know
about and use the things’’ of witchcraft. In conformance to the caste
classifications conventional in the colony, one of these women was
identified as Spanish, one as mulatto, one as Indian, and one, like
Adriana, as black.
Adriana claimed to be a confirmed and baptized Christian who knew
‘‘nothing of witchcraft.’’ The washtub, she said, held only herbs to make
a scented mixture for the religious sisterhood of which she was an elder.
Moreover, she had grown up in the ‘‘unblemished’’ house of a Spanish
lieutenant and his wife. Had she been raised by a ‘‘suspicious’’ woman, she
added, she would more likely have blasphemed. While she might have

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succumbed in her youth to ‘‘women’s weaknesses’’ ( flaquerías de mujer),
including sexual promiscuity in the form of incest with her brother, she
had only once been called a witch, and that was in jest. From her point of
view, the charges were therefore ‘‘tricks, lies, and false testimonies.’’
It was customary for the inquisitors to keep denunciants secret,
which they did in this instance as well. But Adriana knew that her
accuser was Ana María de la Concepción, another free black woman
who had asked to rent a room at Adriana’s boardinghouse and had then
stolen items from one of Adriana’s three black slaves. The plainti√
could not ‘‘be any other person than the black Ana María,’’ Adriana
insisted, for the woman was a ‘‘lying cheat’’ whose ‘‘evil’’ (maldad) had
to be stopped. All of Ana María’s accusations were lies, she added,
‘‘because [Ana María] is a black [woman] [negra].’’
Tales like Adriana’s illustrate the role caste played as a system of
values, practices, and meanings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Mexico: the dispute ostensibly dealt with whether or not Adriana was a
witch, but the textual narrative highlights how she, her defenders, and
her accusers constructed their arguments in great part through claims
about caste. In this vein, Adriana went on to defend herself with the
help of two Spanish priests, who insisted that she had overcome her
‘‘natural’’ inclinations. She was once ‘‘rebellious and too much given to
sensuality,’’ said one, but had since come to control these ‘‘excesses’’—
she was respected, owned slaves, and had a well-appointed home. The
other remarked that she behaved quietly and peacefully, prospered, and
gave alms to the poor and to clergymen. Both told the inquisitors that
Adriana regularly heard mass, confessed, took communion, and made
sure that her family and slaves arrived punctually to church. Adriana’s
attorney then contrasted her with the ‘‘lying’’ Ana María: Adriana was
‘‘a clean-living black woman,’’ he said.≥ She was devoted to the Virgin
Mary and had dealings with the principal Spanish men and women of
Vera Cruz. She was not idle, he insisted, and she gained a livelihood
through her own hard work.
In support of Adriana, the attorney also discredited Ana María for
what he claimed to be her instability as a woman and her baseness as a
black. By law, he pointed out, ‘‘women are kept from testifying in
criminal cases due to the fragility of their sex and their fickleness . . .
They bring false testimony, and even civil law excludes them if, along
with being women, they have an evil reputation.’’ Ana María’s ‘‘other
vices,’’ including the ‘‘vileness of her caste,’’ also barred her from testify-
ing. Adriana, he argued, was not a ‘‘similar case.’’

2 Hall of Mirrors

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 Ana María was not a native of New Spain, and a notary duly de-
scribed her as a ‘‘foreign black.’’ Born in Guatemala, she had apparently
been stolen as a young girl and taken to Spain, where she was raised as
a slave. She was eventually brought to Cartagena by the count who
owned her. When he died, she fled with a slave girl she herself had
abducted and kept by her side through various forms of subterfuge.
After turning Ana María over to the authorities for stealing from one of
her slaves, Adriana searched Ana María’s clothing. There she found
tucked into a pocket, a falsified deed of slavery for the girl. Because
Adriana could not read, she gave the deed to a court clerk, who de-
clared that Ana María should be ‘‘broken and burned.’’
For her part, Ana María testified that everyone was against her, for
‘‘people’’ said of her: del monte sale que en el monte quema (one who
comes out of the backwoods burns in the backwoods). In the colonial
imagination, the hills or backwoods (monte) marked the undomesti-
cated spaces beyond civilized towns and cities. The backwoods were
associated especially with runaway slaves and Indians who, having fled
Spanish rule, were seen to have reverted to their former ways. By invok-
ing this idiomatic phrase, Ana María must have been relating what
others perceived to be her intractable wildness.
In her testimony, Ana María also insisted that Adriana and the Indian
who had participated in the alleged washtub ritual were longstanding
friends. This claim was loaded with a meaning that Ana María further
pressed as she added that Adriana had once asked the Indian woman to
divine for her and, in fact, had invited her to lead the divination in the
washtub ritual, a request with which the Indian had complied. When
all was said and done, then, Ana María might have been ‘‘of the monte,’’
but Adriana was worse, for she had allegedly engaged an Indian witch
right in the heart of town.
During her months-long trial, Adriana repeatedly claimed that she
was innocent of the charges. In the end, she was indeed vindicated
when Ana María finally conceded that she had lied. She never imagined
that the Inquisition would act on her contentions, Ana María said,
nor could she be held entirely responsible for her actions because the
‘‘devil had tricked her.’’ She was fined a considerable sum, and Adriana
was set free.

Court records such as the one that preserved moments of Adriana’s life
are the best sources available for gaining access to colonial people’s
quotidian experiences, for in them individuals testified about, cen-

Introduction 3

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sured, and defended their own and others’ perspectives and day-to-day
activities.∂ Although the records are ones of conflict, they more broadly
tell us about the meanings and usages of caste in New Spain. As
Adriana’s dispute indicates, individuals drew on caste symbolism and
caste practices to delineate social boundaries, values, and their own
positions. Adriana thus verbally distanced herself from the ‘‘evils’’ of
blackness, pointed out that she owned slaves, and tied her heritage to
estimable Spaniards, while Ana María elaborated Adriana’s bonds to an
Indian ‘‘friend.’’ Both of these women knew, as did the inquisitors who
oversaw the proceedings, that proximity to Spanishness and Spaniards
indicated conformity to proper colonial values. Conversely, proximity
to Indians and Indianness marked a potent and nonconforming super-
naturalism. It is more than suggestive that the discourse of the text
draws connections between the black woman Adriana and both Span-
iards and Indians, for colonial caste logic provided for a range of inter-
stitial actors who took on qualities of power represented by Indians
and qualities represented by Spaniards. In the end, the ambiguous
question of Adriana’s witchery turned on the ambiguities of caste itself.
Was Adriana Spanish (and not a witch) in spite of her blackness? Was
she really Indian (and definitely a witch) in spite of her Spanishness?
Was she legally black according to the genealogies that the Inquisition
typically policed? Or did her identity more complexly play o√ of the
social and symbolic implications of her caste a≈liations and practices?
The colonial politics of caste reflected a social world in which the
divide between rulers and ruled was constantly criss-crossed and medi-
ated by a multiplicity of subjects. In light of this, this book uses records
that address inter-caste experiences and relationships involving people
legally classified as ‘‘Spaniards’’ (españoles), as well as those classified as
‘‘Indians’’ (indios), ‘‘blacks’’ (negros), ‘‘mulattoes’’ (mulatos) (the o√-
spring of a black and an Indian or a black and a Spaniard), and ‘‘mes-
tizos’’ (mestizos) (the o√spring of a Spaniard and an Indian).∑ Those
records indicate that caste spoke to the distinct but interlocking kinds
of power that each of these categories represented, while indexing a
clever and multilayered process that pulled individuals into a colonial
world while e√ectively allowing them to strategize within it.∏
Colonial Mexicanists who write in English tend to translate casta as
‘‘race’’ and to base their analyses of the caste system (sistema de castas)
prevalent in the colony on caste as a stratified set of sociolegal rankings.
Yet while race was produced through taxonomies developed to exclude
from power individuals western science construed as essentially dif-

4 Hall of Mirrors

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ferent due to blood, ancestry, or color, caste constituted a more ambig-
uous and flexible set of qualities that combined social a≈liations, kin-
ship, and inherent di√erences as it worked to facilitate incorporation
into systems of power.π Ultimately, caste was something of a capacity,
elaborated through the genealogical, moral, and operational aspects of
a person’s place in relation to other persons. Such capacity was ani-
mated and transmitted through ‘‘dense webs’’ of social networks like
those Michel Foucault identifies as key to the ‘‘thematics of power.’’∫ As
he argues, such thematics do not rest on a ‘‘certain strength,’’ an ‘‘ele-
mentary force,’’ or an ‘‘essence.’’ They are rather about the strategies
deployed by persons who act on others, who in turn are potential
actors in their own right.Ω

the sanctioned and unsanctioned domains

Especially because of its large populations of blacks and Indians, colo-

nial Mexico raises interesting questions about the history of racial
thinking and the enactment of power. In the documentation, one finds
nothing so simple as a shared camaraderie or a mutual resentment
between these two subordinated groups—the one initially imported as
slave labor and the other enduring as conquered indigenes. Rather,
every manuscript page reveals a complicated social sparring indicating
that connections between blacks and Indians, and broader questions of
domination and resistance, have to be contextualized in a world wider
than one might initially suppose.∞≠ Indeed, analysis of what turns out
to be a complex colonial politics of caste must include those classified as
Spaniards, as well as the mulattoes and mestizos whose numbers grew
rapidly after the initial conquest period.
As discussed here, the politics of caste involved two trajectories of
power, which mirrored each other and were inextricably intertwined.
The dispute around Adriana indicates that patterns of kinship (includ-
ing figurative), friendship, and patronage tying people to Spaniards
were meaningful, and so were ones tying people to Indians. The first set
of patterns indexes colonizing processes that politically organized caste
to privilege Spaniards and Spanishness while subordinating Indians
and Indianness, and turning blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos into medi-
ators who extended Spanish authority. In this book I call the social
fields that constituted this domain sanctioned in order to convey a sense
of routine caste behaviors and meanings that were implicitly—if not

Introduction 5

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always legally—condoned by the colonial state and its agents. The
second set of patterns indexes the world of witchcraft, a term which
described state-censured sets of moral violations ranging from unor-
thodox religious behavior, including trysts and pacts with the devil, to
popular forms of sorcery or ‘‘black magic.’’ The social fields of this
domain—which I call unsanctioned—reversed sanctioned patterns by
organizing caste in ways that privileged Indians and Indianness, while
subordinating Spaniards and Spanishness and reorienting blacks, mu-
lattoes, and mestizos, who could now attach themselves to Indians in a
bid to undermine Spaniards. Put simply, these domains were some-
thing of Spanish and Indian worlds bracketed by Spaniards and In-
dians, and integrated and brought together by the mediating groups. If
the health of the sanctioned social body depended on the ‘‘vigor and
proper functioning’’∞∞ of its interrelated caste parts, so too, in the end,
did its unsanctioned illness.
While the sanctioned and the unsanctioned referenced two possible
trajectories of power, the unsanctioned also followed inevitably from
the sanctioned ways in which the colonial state organized and gave
meaning to caste. In particular, both trajectories spoke to a logic that
converged around the Spanish attribution of weakness to Indians.∞≤ A
feminized quality, weakness justified and made possible Indian subser-
vience to Spanish governance in the sanctioned domain. But weakness
also produced that domain’s reversal, for in the unsanctioned domain
the devil made victims of Indians, who came to wield authority over
Spaniards through witchcraft. Colonial ideologies generated both do-
mains, and colonial institutional and social policies drew into their
spheres of influence a cross section of individuals from a range of caste
categories.
In her study of contemporary Gawan (Papua New Guinea) society,
Nancy Munn draws on the concept of hegemony and Foucauldian
understandings of power as ‘‘the pressures embedded in social inter-
action’’∞≥ to semantically situate Gawan witchcraft within the wider
social field of Gawan conceptions of self and society, emphasizing nega-
tion in the form of witchcraft as an integral part of the social collective.
Examining how the ‘‘world’’ of the witch and the ‘‘world’’ of the non-
witch belong to the same cultural system, Munn concludes that neither
world can be said to be prior;∞∂ instead, the witch personifies the ‘‘nega-
tive principles’’ that hold sway over everyday Gawan life.∞∑ Drawing on
Munn’s ideas, we can look at the colonial Mexican unsanctioned do-
main as, on the one hand, what Munn refers to as a ‘‘ ‘world’ of its own’’

6 Hall of Mirrors

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with reference to Gawan witchcraft.∞∏ On the other hand, it was made
operational in the context of a cultural system that included the sanc-
tioned domain, which set the terms of the debate over values and with
which the unsanctioned cohered through the idiom and implications of
caste. In both domains, power filtered through the social a≈liations
people forged as the di√erent castes were drawn into a unified system
of meanings that shifted with the frame of reference: the same caste
qualities made individuals less esteemed in one domain and more es-
teemed in the other. What remained consistent was the idea that pres-
tige operated through the shaded distinctions to which caste spoke.
Thus, while the sanctioned and the unsanctioned were in opposition,
that opposition was itself constituted through the singular logic of a
caste framework that delimited patterns of power, including the con-
trariness of witchcraft. Both the sanctioned and the unsanctioned pro-
duced spaces for elite and subaltern activity and passivity, and both
provided viable paths to authority and its loss.
Raymond Williams’s observation that ‘‘the dominant culture, so to
say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture’’∞π
therefore bears keeping in mind. Colonial Mexican witchcraft, though
at first glance seemingly counterhegemonic, derived from the hege-
monic, which referred back to its own opposition in an endless loop.
Witchcraft was not, then, an autonomous realm of resistance. It was
instead a set of discourses and practices derived from the colonial im-
plications of caste. The conflicts it embodied spoke to the struggles
characteristic of hegemony, which William Roseberry describes as a
‘‘common material and meaningful framework for living through, talk-
ing about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domina-
tion.’’∞∫ That common material and meaningful framework generated
in the present case by caste principles reveal fissures that both desta-
bilized, through witchcraft, and reinforced, through not-witchcraft,
the hold of colonialism on the populace.∞Ω
In his study of ‘‘wildness’’ and witchcraft in colonial and contempo-
rary Colombia and Peru, Michael Taussig brings the above issues to bear
on the Latin American case through an artful analysis of Indian magia
(magic) as a hegemonic social force linked to Western ideas about race
and the ongoing political economy of conquest.≤≠ As he explores the in-
terpenetrating worlds of colonizers and colonized, Taussig calls social
analysts to task for imposing order on the inherent disorder of social
life.≤∞ In this book, I seek to explain aspects of that disorder by showing
how Spanishness, Indianness, and other caste qualities constituted a deep

Introduction 7

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logic in the colonial imagination and, consequently, in the lives and
experiences of colonial peoples. In piecing together that logic, I turn to
gender themes and, to a lesser extent, class themes in order to show how
caste was organized by sets of meanings that seeped into these other
configurations.≤≤ For instance, we have seen that the Indian witch
brought to the fore in Adriana’s case was a woman, as were the litigants
themselves. Ana María described the Indian as the leader of a group of
women gathered together for allegedly nefarious purposes, and cer-
tainly the problem that was femaleness otherwise runs through the
narrative.≤≥ References to class do as well. Thus, for instance, Adriana’s
propertied status served to reinforce her honor by countering the fickle-
ness assigned to Ana María, a thief and a vagabond.
In addition to extending the implications of power in the above
ways, I maintain a focus on the forms of mediation and interstitiality
represented by non-Indian, non-Spanish actors like Ana María and
Adriana. This is because actors and qualities defined by blackness, mu-
lattoness, and mestizoness straddled Spanish and Indian power and the
Indian and Spanish worlds, while simultaneously rea≈rming social hi-
erarchy. In many ways, these actors best represent what Carolyn Dean,
in her study of the Inca nobility, calls ‘‘the colonizer’s quandry,’’ which
is ‘‘the paradoxical need to enculturate the colonized and encourage
mimesis while, at the same time, upholding and maintaining the di√er-
ence that legitimizes colonization.’’≤∂
Finally, the significance of judicial punishment and restitution are
crucial to our understandings of Spanishness and Indianness. The judi-
cary’s role as an institutional enforcer of caste di√erence made it central
to colonization processes. But the judiciary also reveals a contradiction
in those processes, for judicial authorities did not just punish. They
o√ered restitution, especially to the Indians on whom Spaniards ex-
pended many of their ideological and material resources, and with
whom they resolved most of their labor needs. Colonial justice there-
fore countered colonial exploitation, a point that takes on further sig-
nificance and connections to caste politics because the dual character of
Spanish authority was mirrored in the Indian kind. While Indians in-
flicted harm through witchcraft, they also had the ability to heal. Thus,
in a profoundly colonial sense the judiciary acted as a kind of sanctioned
magical force controlled by Spaniards (which echoes Taussig’s consid-
eration of the ‘‘magic of reason’’), while witchcraft operated as a kind of
unsanctioned system of justice controlled by Indians.

8 Hall of Mirrors

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history and anthropology

A number of anthropologists have studied the cultural consequences of

‘‘high’’ colonial formations in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.≤∑ Their inter-
ests have included unpacking the mechanisms behind the creation and
maintenance of social hierarchies; exploring tensions among classes of
colonizers over colonial goals and practices; identifying confusions and
contradictions in colonial ideologies; tracing the ways in which race,
gender, class, and sexuality intertwined through material production;
and examining the new social relations and cultural fields that brought
colonizers and colonized together. Although institutional, disciplinary,
and even area studies boundaries have in many ways conspired to keep
anthropologists and historians unsympathetic to each other’s strengths
and struggles,≤∏ people trained in both disciplines share interests in
understanding the perspectives of subordinated peoples in colonial situ-
ations, and in grappling with questions of representation.≤π Because of
this, in recent decades historians and anthropologists have both been
drawn to ‘‘subalterns’’ and to new ways of reading colonial documents.
From this, the relatively new field of historical anthropology has emerged.
Studies of subalterns show that they are not a coherent group, and
that their ‘‘popular’’ culture is not an autonomous domain.≤∫ Sub-
alterns might act, but not necessarily in concert, and their culture can-
not be disentangled from that of elites. One of the most important
contributions historical anthropology has made to these questions has
been a focus on what Brian Keith Axel describes as ‘‘the ways that
supposed margins and metropoles, or peripheries and centers, fold
into, constitute, or disrupt one another . . . constituting new centers of
inquiry, just as it demonstrates the powerful positionality of the mar-
gins right at the center.’’≤Ω Central to this focus are the cultural worlds of
European missionaries and colonizers, whose perspectives are rightly
deemed as worthy of study as those of natives. Indeed, it is only by
bringing the two sides together, and therefore destabilizing the divide,
that the importance of the disruptions at the center of historical anthro-
pological studies can be fully realized. By the same token, calls to move
beyond ‘‘essentialist taxonomies of the subaltern’’≥≠ —which typically
fail to address the heterogeneity of subordinated persons and their
experiences, and the consequent fluidity of relations of domination and
subordination—recognize the di≈culties of managing the tensions be-
tween simultaneously exposing power and acknowledging the agency
of subordinated persons.≥∞

Introduction 9

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 Recent conversations among Latin Americanist historians over the
‘‘new cultural history’’ of Latin America, especially of Mexico, speak to
the issues outlined above.≥≤ In particular, these historians have debated
the failure to move beyond essentializing taxonomies, and the related
tendency of some scholars to impute too much agency to subalterns.≥≥
Eric Van Young thus observes that in an e√ort to recover the perspec-
tives and capacities of subordinated peoples, some new cultural histo-
rians have made of agency an ‘‘apotheosis’’ by imputing to colonized
subjects what Alan Knight refers to as a near ‘‘rational-choice’’ instru-
mentality.≥∂ As Knight notes, this leads to the resulting ‘‘paradox that
subalterns, who are defined precisely by their subordinate and disem-
powered status, are seen to be calling the shots.’’≥∑
The problem, however, might not be so much whether subalterns
have agency or how much they have, as it is the tendency to approach
agency as if it had a universal and uniform character. Turning our atten-
tion to culture itself will perhaps help to resolve this problem. I under-
stand culture not as one among many distinct realms of human life, nor
as a set of mentalities or ideals, but as the symbols inscribed in words
and things that reflect and shape unique qualities and logics in human
thought and activity. Bringing culture to bear on creative human ac-
tion, Sherry Ortner reminds us of the ways in which ‘‘every culture,
every subculture, every historical moment, constructs its own forms of
agency’’ as the ‘‘structure of domination’’ ascribes to both the super-
ordinated and the subordinated values and traits making particular
kinds of action possible and others inconceivable.≥∏
Here I draw attention to how the Spanish colonial project in Mexico
was itself implicated in the production of various kinds of e√ective
actors whose practices generated various kinds of hierarchy. That proj-
ect provided spaces for subalterns to act and to act subversively, but in
ways that often conformed to the expectations of elites—expectations
implemented by direct force but also through institutions like the judi-
ciary, and through economic processes that inculcated networks of
power. As I explore the cultural politics of caste in the colony’s sanc-
tioned and unsanctioned domains, then, I am therefore speaking simul-
taneously to the intersection of subaltern and elite spaces, domination
and subordination, and power and culture.

10 Hall of Mirrors

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framework of the book

In order to clarify the two patterns, the book treats the sanctioned
domain first and for the most part separately from the unsanctioned
one. In part, this organization follows colonial norms that juridically
separated witchcraft from other kinds of conflicts; and in part it indi-
cates how witchcraft was a world within the larger colonial world pop-
ulated by individuals like Adriana and Ana María, and the Indians,
Spaniards, and others with whom they were involved. Because witch-
craft was part of and not apart from that larger world, it was as central
to colonial reality as labor practices or civil controls. The sanctioned
cannot therefore be fully understood without the unsanctioned, and
vice versa. The reader will notice that at various points the one world
creeps in as the other leaves o√.
My methodological approach is interpretive. I therefore tease out
from the documents thick cultural data, which I present through direct
quotes from the records even as I weave together the various strands in
order to systematize the meanings and social practices that caste shaped
and that shaped caste. Interpretation does not eschew the laudable goal
of objectivity. It rather recognizes the complexities of knowing, and of
what one desires to know. Its point is to capture the noise that the
statistician tends to find irksome in order to probe the deeper and
messier meanings of human beliefs and behaviors, and to uncover what
is inherently ambiguous and fragmented. Thus, I am reading texts that
are already ambiguous and fragmented for their also ambiguous and
fragmented content.
The materials are drawn mostly from colonial judicial records housed
in the Mexican National Archives (agn).≥π Although I do not define
my work in what Knight describes as ‘‘simple time-place terms,’’≥∫ most
of the information pertains to Central Mexico and its vicinities. This was
the most densely populated indigenous region both before and after
the conquest. It had the highest concentration of colonial state institu-
tions and activities and the largest numbers of blacks during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. The records date from 1537 to 1695,
with three-quarters clustered between 1590 and 1675, a period Louisa
Hoberman describes as the ‘‘heart of the middle colony.’’≥Ω I focus on
the longue durée rather than on change over time, not because culture
does not change but because the documentation suggests that caste
patterns changed slowly, or only in their details rather than through

Introduction 11

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substantive reconfigurations. Indeed, aspects of those patterns are still
apparent in parts of Mexico today.∂≠
The texts raise questions about documentation and construction that
must be addressed, as I do in chapter 1, even if they cannot be fully
answered. Chapter 1 also elaborates my understandings of what caste
was, while providing an overview of political economy and judicial
organization with respect to the ways that caste meanings informed–
and in turn were informed by—both. Chapters 2 and 3 delineate the
social fields characteristic of the sanctioned domain, first examining the
Spanish/Indian relationship with particular attention to contradic-
tions in Spanish colonial practices. The idea that these contradictions
originated in Spanish perceptions of Indians as weak leads to an explo-
ration of women/Indian analogies. Weakness favored certain kinds of
colonial social a≈liations and convinced elites that women and Indians
could lose self-control, only to end up mired in the devilish witchcraft
that gave to ‘‘passivity’’ a particular form of agency. Chapter 3 also
investigates the ways in which blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos were put
to work in the sanctioned domain, attending to how mixed-casteness
itself became an idiom for arguing about rights, and to how Spaniards
who facilitated the abuse Indians su√ered then turned around to ‘‘heal’’
Indians through judicial and non-judicial interventions that punished
the perpetrators.
Chapter 4 explores rebellions and alliances between Indians and the
mediating blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos, focusing on the ways in
which the intermingling ‘‘character’’ attributes of the di√erent castes
could pose challenges to Spanish authority. In chapters 5 and 6 I exam-
ine the caste hierarchies that characterized the unsanctioned domain,
where Indians gained authority precisely because of their ‘‘weakness.’’
Again, there are parallels between women and Indians, and also be-
tween Spanish and Indian power. Here, of course, Indians are the
perpetrators of ‘‘abuse,’’ while they also hold out the magical potential
to cure. Chapter 6 addresses the entanglement of blacks, mulattoes, and
mestizos in the world of witchcraft dominated by Indians. I attend to
the amalgam of black/Indian witchcraft and to the surprising hybridity
of the devil himself. Ultimately, I argue that the complete cycle of
bewitching and healing included the Spaniards abused and cured by
Indian witches, as well as the blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos to whom
both Spaniards and Indians were connected.
Chapter 7 begins with a tale about a mulatto slave whose story of
escaping with the magical help of an Indian brings her straight back to

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Spanish justices. Using this tale to bring together the themes addressed
in the book, I draw out the ways in which the objectives of witchcraft
and the desires of witches were entwined with sanctioned social values.
Witchcraft, I conclude, was not a revolutionary language of resistance
as much as it was an a≈rmation of hegemony. In the end, it not only
developed out of colonialism, it also upheld the allure of the wealth,
mobility, and power controlled by elites.

Introduction 13

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 1
Forging a Colonial Landscape

caste in context

Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Vera Cruz in 1519. Over

the next two centuries, Spanish influence on and control of the
territory centered on New Spain came to extend from the mining zone
of San Luis Potosí in the north, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and
the Gulf of Mexico, and to the present-day borders of Chiapas and
Jalisco states to the southeast and northwest.∞ New Spain urbanized as
Spaniards built cities and towns from San Luis Potosí to Antequera
(Oaxaca) in the south, and the ports of Acapulco and Vera Cruz on the
western and eastern coasts. Mexico City, built over the ruins of the
Mexica (Aztec) center of Tenochtitlán, became the colony’s admin-
istrative, political, and cultural center. Both the ‘‘belly’’ and the ‘‘hands’’
of the region, it was the principal point of convergence for consump-
tion, production, and a trading network that extended the length and
breadth of New Spain.≤
Mexico City’s symbolic and economic significance made it then, as
now, the region’s most populated and diverse city. An ordered space,
the city transformed social values into physical reality. The outlying bar-
rios of San Juan Tenochtitlán and the Indian town of Santiago Tlate-
lolco were separated from a Spanish core, from which the indigenous
peoples Spaniards referred to as Indians (indios) were periodically
banned.≥ The surrounding valleys produced wheat and vegetables, tex-
tiles made in workshops (obrajes), and other goods such as tools and
furniture for consumption in Mexico City and in Puebla, the vice-
royalty’s second largest city. Trade routes traversed by muleteers (har-

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rieros) also came together in Mexico City, bringing sugar, rice, cotton,
tobacco, cacao, cochineal, indigo, and livestock principally from south-
ern regions, and livestock, silver, and wheat principally from northern
and central ones. Some goods were consumed domestically. Others,
such as silver, dyes, and cacao were exported from Mexico City to
Europe and points east through Vera Cruz, and to Manila and points
west through Acapulco. Trade was also vigorous with southern regions
of Spain’s New World empire.∂
The period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century
marks the height of New Spain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave
trade.∑ It also covers the demographic collapse of the Indian popula-
tion, as well as that population’s revitalization.∏ During this period,
elite landholdings consolidated while rural Indian populations were
displaced and regrouped, and Spanish ideas and values spread formally
and informally. Legal institutions matured as caste rights and obliga-
tions were written (though not systematically) into laws that main-
tained distinctions between Spaniards and non-Spaniards, and among
non-Spaniards themselves.

indian labor and its contradictions

As in other Latin American colonies, New Spain’s economy during this

era was heterogeneous.π It included traditional forms of production,
property ownership, and labor organization (such as state work drafts,
tribute, slavery, and the domestic confinement of women) derived
from both European and indigenous systems. Over time, however,
notions of property rights and legitimate ownership came to be domi-
nated by Spanish ideas,∫ as capitalist relations of production came to
characterize important sectors of the colonial economy in manufactur-
ing, agriculture, trade, and mining. In some economic enclaves, la-
borers were increasingly free and paid with wages even as they were
constrained by legislation, debt-peonage, and force.Ω
Spaniards claimed rights to Indian tribute in the form of goods and
labor through encomienda, the earliest economic institution. Encomi-
enda had originated in the Caribbean, where the crown lacked a clear
policy toward Indians.∞≠ Here, rapacious settlers, engaged in what
many claimed was just war against heathens who resisted Spanish at-
tempts to civilize and convert them, virtually enslaved Indians through
encomienda and other extractive measures. As is well known, within

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decades of Spanish arrival, the native populations of the largest Spanish
settlement on Hispaniola and of the smaller islands had been destroyed
by disease, overwork, and violence. During this early period, clergy and
crown debated Spanish obligations to Indians, the feasibility of con-
verting them to Christianity, and whether and how Spanish authority
was to be legitimately imposed on converted peoples.
The crown identified closely with the Catholic Church, its ally against
Islam during the late-fifteenth-century reconquest of the Iberian penin-
sula from the Moors, and the source through papal decree of Spanish
rights to New World territories. State decisions were therefore deeply
informed by theological concerns which, while not uniform, did con-
verge around the need to preserve Indian lives in the interests of evan-
gelical projects. As settlers fought for a consistent labor supply, Domini-
can friars defended Indians, and called into question ‘‘the very legality of
the Spanish New World enterprise.’’∞∞ Believing that the principal role
of Spaniards was to evangelize, they soon refused to hear confession
from, or give communion to, encomenderos.∞≤
The crown had an interest in upholding the moral authority of the
church and defending Indians from the excesses of settlers. It also had
to pacify those settlers, however, and both the crown and the church
wanted to reserve Indian labor for themselves. Indians therefore had to
be protected, but they also had to be made to work. Early mandates of
Spanish and Indian rights and responsibilities spoke to the conflicts
inherent in a vision of authority divinely sanctioned and driven by self-
interest. For instance, in 1502, the crown gave Indians freedom from
enslavement once they became Christians. At the same time, it imposed
an annual crown tribute on them, and authorized the governor of
Hispaniola to compel them to gather and mine gold, to produce food
for Spanish settlers, and to work on the construction of public build-
ings. In 1510, Spanish jurists again mandated improved treatment
through the Laws of Burgos, which also gave priority to Indian conver-
sion to the religious and sociopolitical norms of Christianity and Span-
ishness. But provisions for involuntary Indian labor continued under
these laws, as the crown authorized the use of Indians for mining,
agriculture, and public works projects, and permitted force to be used if
Indians resisted Spanish governance.∞≥
The manner in which Indians were to be utilized was still an open
question in the first decade after the conquest, when Cortés proposed
that New Spain’s Indians provide labor to Spanish settlers. The crown
objected that such service had killed most Caribbean Indians. There-

Forging a Colonial Landscape 17

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fore, Cortés limited his proposal to tribute in foodstu√s and cotton to
be produced by Indians on their own lands, the construction of dwell-
ings for Spaniards, and the raising of Spanish-owned cattle. He also
stipulated that Indians not be used in the particularly arduous environ-
ment of mining. But he insisted that settlers needed Indian tribute for
their own sustenance, and that encomienda would ultimately benefit
the crown without interfering with its interests. Moreover, as one duty
of encomenderos was to facilitate the conversion of Indians, religious
indoctrination could proceed apace.
The crown soon acquiesced, and encomienda continued to develop
in New Spain, as the debate shifted from whether it should exist to how
it should be administered.∞∂ Royal law called for the rotation of enco-
miendas granted only for a limited time. Nevertheless, as Peggy Liss
observes, ‘‘a military mentality bent on living o√ the spoils of conquest
predominated.’’∞∑ Many Indians became de facto slaves as the first gen-
erations of Spanish settlers attempted to retain their encomiendas in
perpetuity. They also used Indians in a number of economic enter-
prises, including mining.
Over the decades, the crown became increasingly nervous about the
increasing wealth and autonomy of settlers, as well as about the fate of
New Spain’s Indians, who were following their Caribbean counter-
parts into precipitous decline. In a bid to reassert its seignorial au-
thority and to acknowledge the plight of Indians, the crown issued the
New Laws of 1542. These were prompted by the priest and Domini-
can monk Bartolomé de Las Casas, who began a vigorous defense of
all New World Indians in 1515, and would later become Bishop of
Chiapas. The New Laws stipulated that encomiendas would be re-
manded to the crown upon the deaths of their owners, and that labor
would be eliminated as a tribute obligation of Indians.∞∏ The laws also
explicitly declared Indian enslavement illegal.∞π Although their full im-
pact was short-lived—because encomenderos in Mexico, as well as
those in Peru, resisted retraction of their rights—over the course of the
sixteenth century, encomienda weakened in New Spain.∞∫
In accordance with the moral and juridical tenets of the medieval
Spanish legal code known as the Siete Partidas, the crown was a pater-
nalistic, benevolent, and sacred institution.∞Ω The monarch was consid-
ered God’s earthly representative whose rule was willed by divine man-
date.≤≠ His duty was to preserve the law of the land and the integrity of
the social body. In the New World, crown authority widened due to

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what was perceived as a ‘‘jurisdictional vacuum’’ and to the overt inter-
vention of the crown in social matters.≤∞ There, the king’s Old World
obligation to see to the needs of ‘‘widows, orphans and the wretched of
the earth’’ extended to Indians who, as the most ‘‘miserable’’≤≤ people,
were special wards of the crown.≤≥
During the sixteenth century, the crown shifted toward free Indian
labor compensated with wages. While this was a step toward consti-
tuting Indians as royal subjects equal to Spaniards, various forms of
legal and extra-legal coercion also obliged Indians to work on Spanish-
owned properties such as agricultural estates (haciendas) and ranches
(estancias). These properties were expanding as the Indian population
decreased, and as land—which, under Spanish law, could not be con-
fiscated from subject populations—was subsequently freed up and ac-
quired by Spaniards in often fraudulent ways. In some regions labor
coercion was accompanied by debt-peonage, perhaps the most serious
threat to free movement,≤∂ and decrees against vagabondage helped
channel both Indian and non-Indian laborers to specific work-sites.≤∑
Spanish organization of rural Indian populations to meet the needs
of propertied Spaniards emptied outlying communities. Their inhabi-
tants, along with isolated families, were moved to head towns (caba-
ceras) or to satellites of these towns.≤∏ This process of concentrating the
population (congregación or concentración) freed up land for Spanish
use, while Indians were given new plots for their own subsistence in
areas more convenient to Spaniards. These were typically located near
the monastery complexes whose friars were entrusted with religious
conversion.
The Indian population began to rebound in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. Litigation over land rights then increased as Spaniards
continued to take over vast amounts of land illegally as well as through
legal grants (mercedes), consolidation, expansion, and purchase.≤π Con-
flicts also arose over Spanish needs for converts and labor: Spanish
enterprises needed Indian workers, but religious indoctrination—at
first by the regular and then by the secular clergy—required Indians to
be present in their villages. So too did the crown labor draft known as
repartimiento, which conscripted Indians for public works projects and
specific industries—such as silver mining—important to crown inter-
ests.≤∫ Demands on Indians also came from remaining encomenderos,
and more and more from the royal tribute mechanism of corregimiento,
which was run directly by the crown’s administrative o≈cers and their

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deputies (corregidores or alcaldes mayores, mayordomos, and alguaciles).
Some Indian communities came to owe tribute to settlers and to the
crown.≤Ω

slavery and freedom

Spanish colonials in the Caribbean had turned to African slaves as early

as 1501.≥≠ The use of such slaves accelerated there as Indians, ‘‘weak and
of little strength,’’ in the king’s opinion, died out.≥∞ Until 1518, the
crown only allowed slaves Hispanicized in Spain to be brought to the
New World. Pressure from settlers, however, soon compelled slave
importations directly from Africa.≥≤
As its Indian population waned over the course of the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, New Spain came to have one of the largest
concentrations of African slaves in the Americas.≥≥ Indeed, during its
first two centuries New Spain received on average two-thirds of all
African slaves brought to Spanish America legally, as well as many
brought illegally.≥∂ Although the peoples Spaniards referred to collec-
tively as ‘‘blacks’’ (negros) were only a small part of the colony’s overall
population, in 1619 Philip III declared there were so many in the
colonies that in ‘‘a short while the Indies would become theirs.’’≥∑
Most African slaves brought to Mexico were men.≥∏ Those Hispani-
cized elsewhere were Spanish-speaking (ladinos) and already skilled in
Iberian modes of production.≥π Due in part to their relative scarcity,
African slaves were expensive. Spaniards also considered them, and
blacks in general, to be hardier than Indians. Brought through the port
of Vera Cruz, slaves were sold and then sent to do hard physical work in
the northern silver mining regions, on ranches to the north and west of
Mexico City, and on the sugar plantations, ranches, and mines that
followed the southwestern belt running from the city of Puebla to the
Pacific coast.≥∫ They were also taken to major urban centers such as
Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, and Vera Cruz. Here they toiled in
Spanish households, in obrajes, in craft guilds, and as day laborers
whose masters took most of their wages in a practice known as jornal.
Although slaveholders were generally Spanish, slave ownership ex-
tended to some high-ranking Indians and even to aspiring free blacks,
such as Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera, whom we have already met.
The crown mandated that all African slaves be baptized before they
reached the New World. Baptism, therefore, took place on board slave

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ships or immediately on reaching port. Slaveholders were obliged to
feed and clothe their slaves. They were also required to see to their
slaves’ ongoing religious training. That is why, as part of her defense,
Adriana made sure the inquisitors knew that she regularly took her own
slaves to mass.
The Siete Partidas outlined several routes to manumission, including
slaves’ rights to freedom if they married free persons, a provision nul-
lified in the 1520s by the crown and local o≈cials. Still in e√ect, how-
ever, were provisions for slaveholders to free their slaves, third parties
to purchase and free them, or slaves to purchase themselves for an
agreed-upon price (which they sometimes paid in installments with
their share of jornal wages).≥Ω In addition, according to the Siete Par-
tidas the status of children followed their mother. The o√spring of
female slaves who, willingly or not, had Spanish partners automatically
became slaves if they were not freed by their fathers. The o√spring of
male slaves who partnered with Indian or other free women, which was
often the case, were then free.∂≠ Interestingly, and perhaps ironically,
this might have meant that mulattoes of Indian/black ancestry were
more likely than their Spanish/black counterparts to have been free.
The right of slaves to marry was provided by the Siete Partidas and
encouraged by the church.∂∞ Yet colonists controlled slaves by forcing
convenient marriages slaves did not desire, thwarting ones that they
did, or forbidding marriage altogether. The tension between law and
colonial practice is clear from a conversation the Spaniard Francesca de
Aguilar had with her friends in 1572, while they sat around the table at
her home in Pachuca. Over a meal the group was discussing how the
service of slaves deteriorated after they married, when Francesca inter-
jected that her experiences with her own slaves had taught her that
married blacks did not make good servants because they did not ‘‘settle
down.’’ She then squabbled in front of her friends with one of her
female slaves, telling the woman that ‘‘with these dogs one does not
have to do what God orders.’’ With her conscience weighing heavily,
Francesca turned herself in to the Inquisition for blasphemy.∂≤ As Fran-
cesca’s confession indicates, although slaveholders knew that their
resistance to slave marriages contradicted o≈cial morals, they found
a√ective kinship incompatible with servitude, because in becoming
‘‘people’’ by forming their own families, slaves’ ties would be redirected
away from their masters.
Many slaveholders thwarted not only their slaves’ wishes to marry
but also the possibilities for slaves to gain freedom legally. The judiciary

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tended to favor the interests of slaveholders in this respect,∂≥ but by the
middle of the seventeenth century perhaps 15 percent of blacks and
mulattoes were nevertheless classified as free. Many were women and
children, which might have reflected Spaniards’ favorable treatment of
their mistresses and the o√spring they had with them, but many of the
mulattoes might have been the o√spring of Indians, free because of
their mother’s status.∂∂ Legally barred from certain occupations, free
blacks and mulattoes—like most of the urban lower classes—found
work as laborers and servants.∂∑ Beginning in the 1580s, they were
required to pay crown tribute alongside Indians. They also had to
petition to carry weapons, live under Spanish supervision, and conform
to dress codes that distinguished them from Spaniards.∂∏ Finally, legis-
lation controlled their spatial and temporal movements, for all blacks
and mulattoes were forbidden from holding dances ‘‘in the plazas and
streets,’’ gathering in groups of ‘‘more than three,’’ and going out at
night.∂π
Although provisions for freedom existed for individual black and
mulatto slaves, the protracted debates over Indians’ rights to freedom
that took place in the sixteenth century were never at any time fully
extended to blacks and mulattoes as a class. From our perspective, this
might be one of the most di≈cult issues to understand, particularly
because both Indians and slaves were subject to processes of religious
conversion. Nevertheless, Indians were freed from enslavement in part
because of this conversion while, until Independence in the early nine-
teenth century, blacks (and mulattoes with slave mothers) could be
legally enslaved in spite of conversion.

caste and race: the qualities of blood

As was the case throughout colonial Latin America, individuals in New

Spain were legally and socially classified according to casta. The etiol-
ogy of the term is unclear, but it originated in Iberia, where it indicated
breed, kind, or lineage.∂∫ Iberians brought the concept to di√erent
parts of the world inhabited by di√erent peoples. Caste therefore came
to have several meanings. In Latin America it did not refer to the
endogamous and ascribed socioreligious groups the Portuguese under-
stood as characterizing Hindu India. Instead, it was more akin to mod-
ern notions of race, insofar as it referred to descent and to putative
distinctions carried in blood, ancestry, and color. But caste was not

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exactly race, at least in the sense that the latter has come to be under-
stood—above all in the Anglo West—as the unambiguous separation
of the world’s peoples according to alleged biological di√erences.∂Ω
The term race (raza) coexisted with caste during the period under
question here, but the two words did not refer to the same thing. Con-
sider, for instance, a Spanish woman suspected of witchcraft, who was
asked by the Mexican inquisitors in the late sixteenth century whether
her blood was ‘‘clean’’ (limpia).∑≠ She replied that she did not know
if there was any ‘‘evil (mala) raza’’ in her ‘‘casta.’’ What did she, in
fact, mean?
Raza is the more modern of the two terms, and its first documented
use in 1438 was in the phrase ‘‘good race.’’∑∞ In fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century Spain, however, a national identity began to build around Ca-
tholicism and the Castile region of Spain. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisi-
tion was established in 1478, specifically to target converted Jews (con-
versos), who were widely thought to be heretics hiding their religion
under a thin veneer of Christianity. Through genealogical proof before
the Inquisition, ‘‘Spaniards’’ distinguished themselves from such con-
versos, as well as from converted and equally secretive Moors (mor-
iscos). As the social community (república) came to be defined more and
more around Spanish-speaking Christians, status-seeking individuals
became obsessively concerned with their blood purity (limpieza de san-
gre), and Spanish writers began to link raza explicitly to genealogy and
blood.∑≤ Following the final stages of the 1492 Reconquest, raza was on
its way to losing positive associations as it came to refer to Jews and
then to Moors, both of whom posed challenges to Christian domi-
nance. By the early seventeenth century, raza must have fully taken on a
negative sense, for in his definition of the term, the Spanish lexicogra-
pher Sebastián de Covarrubias indicated that it meant ‘‘possessing the
raza of a Moor or a Jew.’’∑≥ By this time as well, the Spanish state had
forced conversions and expulsions of both converted and unconverted
Jews and Moors, while forbidding these groups from settling in its
colonies.∑∂ Indeed, as Deborah Root writes with reference to Moors,
‘‘orthodoxy, heresy, dissimulation [were] all collapsed into the physical
body, into the ethnicity that could not be changed by any action or
belief.’’∑∑
As raza became associated with Jewish and Moorish ‘‘blood’’—an
immutable and undesirable substance—it thus came to also signify the
religions that challenged Spanish Christianity. When the Mexican in-
quisitors asked the Spanish woman about her mala raza, then, they

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clearly wanted to know if she had any Jewish or Moorish blood. She
could not answer their question. But clearly, like other colonial sub-
jects, she had a caste that could be ‘‘contaminated’’ by such blood.
What, then, was caste?
Covarrubias defined caste as both a ‘‘noble and pure-blooded lin-
eage; one who is of good line and descent’’ and, in the vernacular, as
referring to people as of ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ caste.∑∏ At first glance,
it seems not very di√erent from raza, as both linked social qualities
to blood or ancestry. But according to the Spanish etymologists Joan
Corominas and José Pascual, while raza embodied the idea of purity,
casta had a ‘‘neutral sense that did not a≈rm or negate the purity of the
kind [of thing].’’∑π Caste, then, seems to have been a less charged qual-
ity that applied to any kind of (non-Jewish or Moorish) ancestry. Yet
such ancestry could still be desirable or undesirable, and each caste had
a set of associations. In this respect, Covarrubias o√ers another clue
about the meaning of caste, for he locates the naturaleza (nature or
disposition) of a person in his or her caste.∑∫ This might be over-
simplifying the issue, but his discussion does seem to correspond to the
dispositions that in the colonial context made Spaniards attribute rea-
son to themselves, weakness to Indians, and aggressiveness to blacks.
These qualities became central to the politics of caste, and they were
generated by, even as they maintained, processes of colonization.
During the period under discussion here, the Spanish state was expel-
ling persons with mala raza and forbidding their entry to the New
World, while the colonial state was simultaneously inculcating a sys-
tem of castas. Claudio Lomnitz intermingles converted Indians, Jews,
Moors, and Africans in his discussion of the colonial ‘‘racial hierarchy,’’
and Irene Silverblatt argues compellingly for connections between New
Christians and Indians in colonial Peruvian discourse.∑Ω Yet, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that while none of the non-Spanish groups—Jews,
Moors, Indians, blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos—could claim legiti-
macy as Old Christians or Spaniards, they were also not entirely inter-
changeable in the colonial imagination. For example, as Silverblatt also
documents, at least some theologians believed that Indian resistance to
Christianity did not run as deeply as that of the Jews.∏≠
At base, the castes included Spaniards, as we have already seen from
the case of our Spanish witch. Additionally, Indians—as well as blacks,
mulattoes, and mestizos—were essential to Spanish prosperity in the
New World, while Jews and Moors threatened it in the Old. As a result,
the colonial state initiated a system of inclusion through similarities

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while the budding Old World nation-state tried to rid itself of the
contamination of di√erence. Jews and Moors thus retained a kind of
ineradicable otherness that conversion could not erase, but o≈cials in
the colony went to great lengths—with varying degrees of optimism
and success—to make Christians of all the non-Spanish castes, includ-
ing African slaves and Indians. Some came to be more Christian than
others—indeed the evidence suggests that blacks, mulattoes, and mes-
tizos were on the whole more Christianized than Indians∏∞ —but by
stressing the possibilities of conversion and concurrently generating an
inclusive system based on distinctions, colonialist ideologies put di√er-
ence to work while national ones attempted to expel it.

caste and lineage

The concept of lineage is a useful way to think through the meaning of

caste because of the semantic links between the two terms, the impor-
tance of descent in Iberian culture, and the genealogical and more
broadly social implications of the concept. Even if we confine caste to
the idea of blood connections, people who belonged to di√erent castes
were concurrently linked genealogically to one another. In its simplest
sense this meant, for instance, that a mulatto would have a Spanish
parent and a black parent, or a black parent and an Indian parent. And
as genealogical branches proliferated in the New World, so did caste
terms, at least in the works of colonial writers. The blood of casta was
therefore more easily blended than the blood of raza, and the genealog-
ical implications of caste convey a sense of kinship constituted by po-
tentially infinitely traceable connections.
Because caste was transmutable, caste taxonomies had a complex
segmentary e√ect through which operated a principle of achievement
culminating in Spanishness. Lomnitz argues that because of this, al-
most everyone was ‘‘redeemable’’ over the course of several genera-
tions.∏≤ He excepts blacks from his scheme,∏≥ but if the idea of caste is
expanded to include kinship claimed symbolically through the kinds of
pseudo-genealogical ties that Adriana proposed for herself, even blacks
could argue that they were ‘‘Spanish.’’ While the connections that estab-
lished caste identities thus included parents, they might also have in-
cluded symbolic genitors.
The concept of caste can be yet further extended to embrace a more
abstract sense of social connectedness people developed with other

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persons that they did not necessarily claim as kin. Thus, Adriana was
associated not just with the Spaniards who raised her but also with the
entire Spanish community of Vera Cruz, including the priests who
defended her. She was also accused of consorting with the Indian witch
said to be her friend and confidant. Hence, this black woman could
conceivably take on both Spanishness and Indianness through the vari-
ous kinds of ties I have proposed as being central to caste. In the end,
while understanding caste requires attention to the importance placed
by the state on blood connections, it is also important to trace how
people could assimilate the attributes of another caste through the
various sets of symbolic and social a≈liations that were equally a part of
caste’s cultural terrain.

indios

Lineage was central not only to the construction and enactment of

caste. It also provides a clue to Spanish evaluations of what we might
call ‘‘personhood’’ and, consequently, to colonial social dynamics.
Lomnitz notes that slavery was ‘‘predicated on destroying group identi-
ties’’ while Indian collectivities were recognized.∏∂ With this as a start-
ing point, we can begin to evaluate the di√erent ways that Indians and
blacks were drawn into colonial processes and therefore into relation
with one another.
For Spaniards, cities were the realm of the civilized, and lineages and
families the foundations of civil life.∏∑ Spaniards had encountered peo-
ples without cities in the Caribbean. But upon their arrival to the main-
land they found that the central region of what would become New
Spain was dominated by the urban space of Tenochtitlán, a city remark-
able even to the conquistadors who methodically destroyed it while
building their own paeans to civilization over the wreckage.∏∏ Span-
iards recognized the familial ties of New Spain’s sedentary Indian in-
habitants, and they gave all Indians a communal status as a ‘‘people.’’
This is evident in caste terminologies. Spaniards designated as indios
groups who, before the conquest, had disparate cultural and linguistic
traditions and names for themselves.∏π ‘‘Indio’’ did not maintain these
distinctions; indeed, it homogenized dissimilar groups. It was also a
misnomer insofar as it rested on Columbus’s erroneous assumption
that he had reached Asia. Yet indio nevertheless conveys the idea that
Indians belonged to a geographical place (the Indies), and were thus

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members of a juridico-political entity in much the way that Spaniards
(españoles) were natives of Spain, which was also an organized juridico-
political entity.
The indigenous polities Spaniards came upon were highly stratified.
They distinguished commoners from nobles, and Spaniards recognized
such hierarchical distinctions, which they translated into their own
categories and used to further their own interests. Indian town govern-
ment continued to be led by the nobility long after the conquest.∏∫
Nobles gained special privileges, such as permission to ride horses and
wear Spanish clothing, and exemption from tribute requirements and
labor services to Spaniards as long as their lineages survived.∏Ω Span-
iards also married noble Indian women, and used indigenous ranking
systems to extend Spanish authority over Indian commoners.
In many respects, the Indian nobility was given a legal status similar
to people classified as mestizos. Indeed, one royal decree noted that
wearing Spanish clothing ‘‘inspired arrogance in [Indian common-
ers]’’ and caused them to be easily confused with mestizos and Indian
nobles.π≠ In a bid to distinguish himself sartorially from commoners,
one Indian noble figuratively cloaked himself in Spanishness as he peti-
tioned in late-seventeenth-century Mexico City to wear Spanish cloth-
ing. It was argued that he was ‘‘fluent in Spanish’’ and—like the black
woman Adriana several decades earlier—that he was brought up by
Spaniards. Even more pointedly political claims were made on his be-
half: ‘‘Ever since it was announced [that Indians could not wear cloaks]
there is a great deal of outrageous disorder and common Indians have
no respect for noble ones, because all are considered equal . . . among all
types of nations persons are distinguished and separated by the quality
of the decoration of their clothing or by knowledge of their ancestors;
all is ordered not only by divine providence but also by natural and
practical law.’’π∞ The phrase ‘‘knowing one’s ancestors’’ spoke directly to
the importance of lineage in Spanish idea systems, and probably in
Indian ones as well. The noble’s references to order stemming from
divine judgment, as well as from ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘practical’’ law, also
indicate the ways in which Spanish views could be taken up to serve the
interests of non-Spanish subjects.
Spanish distinctions between noble and commoner Indians benefit-
ted the nobility. Yet Spaniards also recognized rights of commoners. All
Indians were special wards of the crown, and it is important to recog-
nize that although early extirpation campaigns sometimes entailed the
removal of children—including that of the nobility—from their par-

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ents, Indian families were generally not broken up by the state, even
when later concentraciones forced whole villages to relocate. Thus,
Indian collectivities were recognized at the familial, community, and
political levels.
Sedentary Indians engaged in what to Spanish eyes were recogniz-
able—if seriously misguided—religious rites. Although at first Spanish
settlers set out to destroy Indian religious life outright, the o≈cial
position soon moved to coaxing Indians toward a transformation in
beliefs, for at least initially many missionaries viewed them as either
‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘true’’ Christians, as was the Dominican view, or as pre-
Christian ‘‘meek innocents,’’ as was the Franciscan view.π≤ Catechism
redirected Indian spirituality, as did the plays that taught Indians to act
(often as Spaniards) in dramas with Spanish themes by transforming
their outer selves with the help of costumes and makeup. By conveying
political, cultural, and religious messages in a highly controlled setting
through these plays, missionaries hoped to shape Indians into ‘‘reason-
able people’’ who would welcome the triumph of Spanish honor and
the Christian tradition.π≥
Sedentary Central Mexican Indians set themselves apart from the
nomadic northern Chichimecs, and Spaniards followed suit.π∂ In mis-
sionary theater, Chichimecs came to stand for Spanish fears and there-
fore everything the sedentary Central Mexican tribes should reject.π∑
Indeed, if sedentary Indians were marginally civilized to the colonizers,
then Chichimecs were savages, for they appeared to live in ‘‘unstruc-
tured groups with no means of exchange, no communication (conversa-
ción) with other groups, no identifiable social organization and no
material culture.’’π∏ Chichimecs threatened Spanish expansion at New
Spain’s northern frontier. Said to ‘‘infest’’ the roads surrounding Span-
ish towns and to attack ‘‘with inhuman stealth,’’ they moved about
‘‘invisibly, like elves (duendes),’’ππ assaulting churches and priests, Span-
ish settlers, and the ‘‘domestic’’ Indians and blacks who accompanied
them to the region.π∫ Colonial o≈cials rendered Chichimecs as ‘‘barba-
rous’’ Indians (indios bárbaros) and cancerous sores on the body poli-
tic.πΩ Settlers felt free to enslave Chichimecs long after Indian emanci-
pation. In fact, as late as 1672, the king was still issuing special orders
demanding freedom for Chichimec slaves.∫≠

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negros

Anthony Pagden argues that because Africans were not vassals of Spain,
the Catholic monarchs took no responsibility for them and did not
debate their status.∫∞ But this position begs the question of why, as
David Brion Davis puts it, ‘‘certain peoples were always considered
more expendable than others.’’∫≤ In fact, while the use of Indian slaves
was contested almost immediately, even theologians initially took for
granted that blacks should take their place. Las Casas himself obtained a
license to import black slaves in 1544 while criticizing the taking of
Indian slaves ‘‘as if [the Indies] were African lands.’’∫≥ He appears to
have later rejected the notion that blacks deserved enslavement any
more than Indians, a position taken as well by his contemporary, the
archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar.∫∂ But crown o≈cials never
fully addressed the issue.
Religion had helped to abrogate enslavement for Indians, but it actu-
ally helped to justify it for blacks. In European thought, blackness was
associated with cursed descent from the biblical Canaanites, which
‘‘condemned blacks to perpetual bondage.’’∫∑ Religious discourse also
turned slavery into a kind of penance for blacks’ former ‘‘savagery.’’ As
the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira informed slaves newly arrived in
early-seventeenth-century Brazil, ‘‘Jesus himself . . . washed the apos-
tles’ feet, [was] sold like a slave by Judas, tied up and flogged like a
slave, forced to carry a cross through the streets like a slave, and cru-
cified like a slave.’’∫∏ Slaves should ‘‘thank God for having removed
them ‘from the country where [they] and [their] ancestors lived like
savages,’ ’’ he said, and while their African brethren would ‘‘burn in
Hell,’’ Brazil’s slaves ‘‘would go to heaven instead.’’∫π The religious dis-
course that made ‘‘innocents’’ out of Indians, thus simultaneously made
blacks ‘‘guilty.’’ This contrast indicates that the romantic vision of In-
dians that had already developed in the sixteenth century did not in any
way extend to blacks, whom Spaniards as a rule considered unfit for
freedom.∫∫
Spanish caste terms again o√er clues. While Indians were given a
sociopolitical designation, Africans were labeled with a color term,
negro. Covarrubias wrote that ‘‘black’’ was an ‘‘unlucky and sad’’ color,
while citing in his definition the proverb ‘‘although we are black, we are
people.’’∫Ω Spaniards thus saw indios as something like themselves, but
about blacks they were more ambivalent. As proper nouns, both español
and indio would be capitalized in English, while the noun/adjective

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negro would not. It is for this reason that I do not capitalize black and
do capitalize Indian and Spaniard here. To do otherwise would be an
anachronistic attempt to equalize what were clearly distinct orders of
being in the Spanish imagination.
The nomenclature invented for the ‘‘mixed’’ o√spring of Indians,
Spaniards, and blacks adds to the impression that blacks were distinct
from both Indians and Spaniards. For instance, the word mestizo, de-
rived from the Spanish word mezcla (mixture), implied that although
they were clearly separate, Indians and Spaniards were nevertheless
blendable and might successfully mate to create new persons. In con-
trast, mulato,Ω≠ which derives from the word mulo (mule), a sterile cross
between a donkey and a horse, advances the notion that blacks were of a
di√erent kind insofar as the o√spring they had with Spaniards or In-
dians were seen to produce nothing replicable; that is, no lineages.Ω∞
One reference to a woman as belonging to ‘‘the Angolan caste’’ sug-
gests that African-born blacks, like Indians, were identified with a
place.Ω≤ Indeed, slaveholders sometimes attributed their slaves’ personal
qualities to their geographical origins, as did one who linked his slave’s
defects (tachas) as a ‘‘thief,’’ a ‘‘runaway,’’ and a ‘‘traitor’’ to the slave’s
Tierra de Cape birthplace.Ω≥ But, like Mexican-born slaves, ‘‘social-
ized into the racial slavery of the Americas from birth,’’Ω∂African-born
ones would have eventually joined the homogeneous ranks of ‘‘blacks,’’
whom Spaniards typically stereotyped as naturally belligerent. Accord-
ing to what one Dominican friar told the Lima Inquisition in 1575, in
addition to their skin color, an emblem of genealogical sin, blacks were
‘‘untameable and bellicose and would disturb themselves and others if
they were free.’’Ω∑
The notion that free blacks ‘‘disturbed’’ themselves is also apparent
from a letter a priest sent to the Mexican Inquisition in 1609.Ω∏ The
priest had been sent to evangelize the Gulf Coast runaway slave (cimar-
rón) community, where he found practices he thought were contemp-
tuous of Spanish norms.Ωπ For instance, although ‘‘fish, corn, squashes
and fruit’’ were available, the cimarrones defiantly ate meat on Fridays,
Saturdays, and holy days. And although the priest o√ered to sanction
one of their ‘‘rebellious’’ marriages, which he saw as an illicit cohabita-
tion (amancebamiento), the cimarrones roundly rejected his gesture.
When an emissary from the cimmarón head town came to the village to
assess the situation, he became enraged that the villagers had received
the priest at all. For his part, the priest tried to soothe the emissary by
telling him to ‘‘hear mass so that the Lord opens the eyes of your soul.’’

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But the man scornfully replied that he did not want the priest’s mass,
for the priest was nothing but an ‘‘imposter.’’
Although a very few cimarrón communities were able to survive,
generally by accommodating themselves to the demands of the colonial
state, cimarrones generally endured in the monte, at the margins of
Spanish-controlled territory. Some records of cimarrón activity echo
descriptions of Chichimecs. For instance, colonial o≈cials wrote that
cimarrones ‘‘disturbed’’ not only themselves, but robbed, assaulted,
and murdered ‘‘travelers’’ and Indians alike.Ω∫ They were reported to
enter Spanish houses to abduct mulatto and black slaves, whom they
presumably carried to freedom.ΩΩ One account states that a group
of cimarrones on the southern Pacific Coast lived ‘‘as if actually in
Guinea,’’ and ‘‘threatened’’ a nearby Indian community.∞≠≠ The implica-
tion, of course, is that liberated blacks would inevitably revert to their
former ‘‘savage’’ state, becoming a danger not only to themselves but
also to the social spaces and norms of Spaniards, as well as to the pliant
Indians and even to the ‘‘domestic blacks’’ (negros domésticos) that Span-
iards included in their plans.
Cimarrones were routinely hunted down, often by groups of Span-
iards and Indians. Domestic blacks were sometimes made to help, as
documented in materials from the Pacific and Gulf coasts, and by the
aforementioned priest, who had in fact used his own ‘‘domestic’’ slaves
to spy on the cimarrones.∞≠∞ Captured runaways and rebellious slaves
merited equal punishment, such as mutilations like castration.∞≠≤ This
procedure was meant to tame as well as to castigate, and of course it
confirmed that blacks had no rights to family.
As they instilled the idea that blacks were uncivilized, Spaniards
therefore thwarted blacks’ claims to group identities. We have already
seen that the Spanish woman Francesca blurted out what many Span-
iards must have believed about the marriages of their individual slaves.
But the slave trade itself broke both community and family bonds,
leaving blacks ‘‘socially dead’’ to Spaniards in ways that Indians—how-
ever much their internal social di√erences were erased—were not.∞≠≥
Enslavement replaced African kin groups with the authority of Span-
iards, who forced Christianity on slaves, claimed them as property and
pseudo-kin, and sometimes branded their own names on their slaves’
bodies.∞≠∂
The denial to blacks of what Lomnitz calls a ‘‘world of their own’’∞≠∑
gave them and their mulatto o√spring particularly liminal positions.
This is evident in court proceedings, where all litigants were identified

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by caste. The inquisitors went a step further than other authorities
because they routinely requested genealogical information from liti-
gants. But they explicitly excluded blacks and mulattoes from such
inquiries. Sometimes we find notary comments like those regarding the
slave Juana Maria de Chaide, who was not asked about her family ‘‘for
having declared herself a black born in Guinea.’’∞≠∏ When slaves born in
the New World were asked their genealogies, they could sometimes
trace them to their parents, but not beyond. For instance, María de los
Angeles, a mulatto slave woman born and raised in Spain, identified her
parents as Don Francisco Esteban de Zuñita de Xerez, ‘‘her master and
father,’’ and Esperanza, his black Angolan slave, who died when Juana
was three. She did not know her paternal grandparents; her ‘‘mother’s
side were blacks from Guinea and she does not know anything of her
lineage there,’’ wrote a notary. For their part, the inquisitors ‘‘did not
ask about her maternal grandparents because she said that her mother
was a black Angolan, nor about the rest of her relatives in this line.’’∞≠π
Free blacks and mulattoes also had a lineage disadvantage. The inquisi-
tors thus deliberately omitted Adriana Ruiz de Cabrera’s genealogy
from their inquiries into her activities as a witch because, as the notary’s
record of the proceedings flatly stated, ‘‘she is black.’’
In disregarding her kinship ties, the inquisitors were excluding Adri-
ana from membership in a proper community of persons, a denial that
extended to all blacks, regardless of legal status. Yet Adriana still spoke
of her mulatto son, and the Spaniard Francesca would not have had to
confess had she not had experience with married black slaves.∞≠∫ This
serves as a reminder that people who often appeared ‘‘alone in the
world,’’ as Solange Alberro has put it, were not.∞≠Ω At the same time, the
fact that Spanish o≈cials denied kinship to blacks and mulattoes high-
lights the importance of lineage in colonial discourse and practice.
Because it was Spanish lineage that elevated one’s status, and because
lineage could be negotiated through connections other than strict kin-
ship, even blacks might claim a kind of Spanishness. Adriana, as we
have seen, symbolically tied her genealogy to the Spanish couple that
raised her. More subtly still, she extended her definition of family to
include her three slaves, as well as her mulatto son. This perhaps cap-
tures the ironies of being a colonial Mexican black slaveholding woman
with a genealogy irrelevant because of the infamy of slavery associated
with blackness: Adriana makes herself ‘‘Spanish’’ in part by claiming her
slaves as ‘‘family.’’ She even takes everyone to church! Her claims re-
pudiate the denial of lineage to blacks. But that those claims tied her to

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Spaniards and to Spanish moral codes also shows that non-Spaniards
had to and could appeal to Spanishness to establish their sanctioned
status.
Importantly, the colonial state actually wrote the benefits of connec-
tions to Spaniards into law. As an example, black and mulatto women
who were married to Spanish men were permitted to wear shawls,
although ‘‘not luxurious ones.’’∞∞≠ In another instance, the mulatto
Joseph Gómez creatively juggled legal norms and lineage when he peti-
tioned for the privilege of carrying weapons because he had a Spanish
wife and therefore, according to him, Spanish children.∞∞∞

the colonial pyramid

Colonial Mexicanists have tended to approach caste as a set of strati-

fied legal rankings resting on pseudo-biological distinctions.∞∞≤ Yet at-
tempts to derive social status from such rankings do not accord with
the historical evidence.∞∞≥ How, for instance, is one to explain why
blacks consistently had contact with and power over Indians, even
though as a class the latter had a protected status and a higher rank than
the former, including freedom from enslavement?∞∞∂ Lomnitz reasons
that blacks and Indians cannot be organized in a single model of stratifi-
cation because Indians were legally set apart from non-Indians, while
blacks were at the bottom rung of a hierarchy headed by Spaniards.∞∞∑
To some extent, the distinction holds, for blacks were in many respects
Hispanicized and attached to the Spanish world in ways that most
Indians were not, and Indians retained an autonomy that blacks did not
enjoy. Yet blacks and Indians also had extensive and systematic contact,
and the nature of that contact has to be explained. If the autonomy,
freedom, and ‘‘di√erence’’ of Indians were problems that Spanish set-
tlers were compelled to overcome, and caste was an integrated system
of relations and dispositions rather than a series of distinct stations,
then we might want to understand colonial society as something of a
fluid pyramid, with Spanishness most associated with the Spanish elite
at the top, Indianness most associated with the masses of Indian com-
moners at the bottom, and interstitial spaces most fully inhabited by
blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos at various points in between.
We can begin at the bottom by noting that, although legislation
might have protected Indians from the most labor-intensive industries,
including mining and textile and sugar production, such legislation was

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only sporadically enforced because labor needs coupled with the ex-
pense of black slaves made Indians indispensable. Indians therefore
came to perform most unskilled tasks in those industries as well as on
haciendas and other Spanish properties.∞∞∏ They were often joined by
newly enslaved Africans (bozales)∞∞π who, for pragmatic reasons (for
instance, lack of Spanish language skills), were also initially incorpo-
rated into colonial political economy as unskilled workers.∞∞∫
At the other end of the extreme, the Spanish elite owned virtually all
of the estates, plantations, and mines, held all high-level o≈ces, and ran
the legal system. Spaniards also owned most of the slaves and employed
free blacks, as well as mestizos and mulattoes, many of whom had
family ties to Spaniards. Together, these groups acted as specialized
workers or supervisors, as majordomos and deputies of Spanish o≈-
cials, and as assistants and servants of Spaniards. In these capacities,
they were pushed into sustained contact with the Indians on whom
Spaniards depended for their own prosperity. Sometimes the interme-
diaries oversaw Indian workers and other unskilled laborers directly.∞∞Ω
At other times they guarded and benefitted from Spanish political and
economic interests, and in even more indirect ways they worked to
draw ‘‘weak’’ Indians into spheres of Spanish influence.∞≤≠
Yet, while Spaniards held power, they were also vastly outnumbered.
There were probably three times as many blacks, mulattoes, and mes-
tizos as there were Spaniards by the middle of the seventeenth century,
and ten times as many Indians.∞≤∞ As a result, the colonial pyramid
consisted of successive and interpenetrating layers, with the order of
each layer inversely related to its volume. Prestige and authority flowed
from the relatively small Spanish top to the vast Indian base, wending
its way through the middle layers of mestizos, mulattoes, and blacks. As
one seventeenth-century Indian noble lamented, ‘‘From the priests and
corregidores to the vilest negro and mestizo [everyone] beats [the
Indians] and mistreats them.’’∞≤≤
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed a pyramid model
for the Christian type of authoritarian rule that developed during the
Middle Ages. As she writes, ‘‘the seat of power is filtered down to the
base in such a way that each successive layer possesses some authority,
but less than the one above it, and . . . precisely because of this careful
filtering process, all layers from top to bottom are not only firmly
integrated into the whole but are interrelated like converging rays
whose common focal point is the top of the pyramid.’’∞≤≥ Arendt per-
haps overemphasizes consensus and conformity. And of course she does

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not attend to the pyramid’s inversion in the Mexican case, as Indians be-
came the producers of the witchcraft that undermined Spanish power.
But Arendt’s important focus on filtering and the circulation of author-
ity does emphasize the way hierarchy works to ‘‘incorporate inequality
and distinction as its all-permeating principles.’’∞≤∂ In her model, then,
inequality, distinction, and integration together characterize the forma-
tion of power, which is di√used and consolidated at the same time.
Hierarchy is therefore not so much about separation and isolation as it
is about the relational nature of its layers.
Arendt notes that the source of authority for her model actually lay
outside of it.∞≤∑ That source was the Christian God, who also com-
manded the pyramid in Mexico, where crown legitimacy had sacred
foundations and where all of the castes, including Indians, were theo-
retically part of the Christian world. However, because religion, like
caste itself, joined non-Spaniards to Spaniards without making them
equal to them, it served as another way for Spaniards to maintain
the pyramid as a ‘‘natural’’ hierarchy of ‘‘superior, middle and infe-
rior ranks.’’∞≤∏

the colonial state, legal organization,

and social realities

As in other early modern colonial centers, New Spain’s legal environ-

ment was at first characterized by ‘‘legal pluralism,’’ defined by Lauren
Benton as the coexistence between, and overlapping jurisdictions of,
colonial and indigenous, or metropolitan and local, legal institutions
and customs.∞≤π But, as Susan Kellogg has shown, by the end of the
sixteenth century pluralism and respect for Indian custom in such areas
as property and inheritance had already given way to Spanish rhetoric
and procedures.∞≤∫
Legal institutions that emerged in Spain prior to the sixteenth cen-
tury were closely tied to the centralizing state and to a Spanish national
identity given definition through the Inquisition that simultaneously
constructed and condemned Jewish and Muslim ‘‘deviance.’’∞≤Ω Similar
processes characterized English state formation and the making of En-
glish citizens, especially during the crucial late-sixteenth-century Eliza-
bethan consolidation.∞≥≠ A national identity was not yet at issue in New
Spain, and some of the cultural processes Phillip Corrigan and Derek
Sayer identify as central to English state formation might be more fully

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applicable to later periods of Mexican history.∞≥∞ Nevertheless, colonial
state law became hegemonic in New Spain as judicial institutions pro-
duced and regulated subjects through overlapping moral and civil
codes. These codes must be read for their symbolic content, as well as
for their overt protection of elite interests.∞≥≤
Theoretically, the colonial Mexican judiciary was to apply what Peggy
Liss calls Spain’s ‘‘mania for order.’’∞≥≥ At base, it policed the caste system
integral to colonial political economy by maintaining distinctions that
reflected what colonial texts refer to as ‘‘the di√erences between people’’
and ‘‘respect for Spaniards.’’∞≥∂ Although, as Cope points out, much of
this caste legislation was ine√ective or ‘‘activated (for brief periods of
time) in moments of crisis,’’∞≥∑ it nevertheless organized, classified, and
quantified populations through registries and produced endless stat-
utes stating peoples’ rights and obligations.∞≥∏ Laws dictated who could
ride a horse, who could carry a weapon, where people could live, and
who was to participate in work drafts, as well as how those drafts would
be organized. Laws also produced ‘‘outlaws’’ by defining and persecut-
ing vagabondage and idleness (which English Elizabethans considered
‘‘the mother of all vices’’).∞≥π They determined how populations would
be shifted to benefit Spanish enterprises; what constituted sobriety
(sometimes coupled with religious purity) as peyote was banned and
pulque regulated;∞≥∫ and which sexual acts and marital patterns were
transgressive, such as sodomy, bigamy, and common-law unions. Fi-
nally, the legal system included prisons to hold those who violated social
norms.
Because of their special legal status, Indians were separated juridically
from non-Indians through the tribunals of the General Indian Court.∞≥Ω
Although many Indian legal cases never went beyond provincial courts,
the General Indian Court was a court of the first instance in the capital
and surrounding areas, and an appeals court for cases outside of that
jurisdiction.∞∂≠ It heard Indian complaints against local magistrates,
appeals of their decisions, and suits brought by Indians against Indian
defendants. Its findings and decisions were signed by the viceroy, New
Spain’s highest judicial and administrative authority.∞∂∞ The viceroy also
directly handled Indian cases considered administrative (such as land
petitions and grievances against o≈cials), along with criminal and civil
suits initiated by Indians but involving non-Indian defendants.∞∂≤ In
addition, the viceroy was president of the audiencia (Royal High
Court). Its civil and criminal chambers∞∂≥ heard non-Indian complaints

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and criminal cases against Indians.∞∂∂ (These were rare because, as Vice-
roy Velasco wrote to Philip II, Indians were usually victims rather than
defendants in cases involving non-Indians.∞∂∑) An ecclesiastical court,
also subject to viceregal authority, heard matters regarding church doc-
trine, family law, and clergy.∞∂∏
The Inquisition was the only legal body o≈cially outside of viceregal
control, although inquisitors could not openly challenge the viceroy.∞∂π
Inquisition tribunals had spread with Spaniards to every part of the
New World, and New Spain’s reached the height of its activity in the
mid-seventeenth century.∞∂∫ Indians had been released from its jurisdic-
tion when the formal tribunal was established toward the end of the
sixteenth century, in part because they were newly converted, ‘‘weak,
and of little substance,’’ as one priest wrote.∞∂Ω But even newly con-
verted blacks, along with Hispanicized ones, were—together with mu-
lattoes, mestizos, and Spaniards themselves—vulnerable.∞∑≠
As was the case in seventeenth-century England and in Spain itself,
colonial Mexican church and state identities and goals ‘‘echoed back’’
on each other.∞∑∞ The Inquisition was especially enmeshed in uphold-
ing moral order and its civil implications, and it is the institution that
perhaps best speaks to church/state interpenetrations. Like its Spanish
counterpart, the Mexican Inquisition was to guard royal and aristo-
cratic privilege from the encroachment of newly wealthy elites, and the
Catholic faith against heresy and blasphemy. It policed lineages and
behaviors that challenged state and church authority, punishing idola-
try, Protestantism, Judaizing, and ‘‘unnatural’’ practices like bigamy,
polygamy, same-sex acts, prostitution, cohabitation, pacts with the
devil, witchcraft, fortune-telling, astrology, and superstition, which,
though milder, fell under the same category as witchcraft.∞∑≤
The Spanish Inquisition developed an overtly political function in
tandem with the centralizing state, shifting its attention from the
witchcraft closely associated with women to the religious heterodoxy
of conversos, moriscos, and, later, Protestants. In New Spain, however,
Protestants and Judaizers were less of a threat, and the Inquisition there
maintained a focus on witchcraft which, as in England, was considered
to be an a√ront to the ‘‘godly state.’’∞∑≥ Mexican witches were tried
consistently during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the
relatively few suspected Judaizers only during the last decades of the
sixteenth century and briefly during the middle of the seventeenth.∞∑∂
As in Spain, witchcraft in Mexico was a shortcoming usually attributed

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to women. But as Spaniards consolidated their control in New Spain,
witchcraft was also associated with the non-Spanish castes, and practi-
tioners were often male.∞∑∑
Despite its central role in regulating morality, the Mexican Inquisi-
tion was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. It had few personnel
for the vast territory it covered.∞∑∏ It often failed to investigate the de-
nunciations and testimonies that poured in, and inquisitors neglected
their duty to exhort confessions and o√er consolation to prisoners like
Adriana, who languished in damp and noxious dungeons.∞∑π Indeed,
the colonial Spanish position on witchcraft was ambivalent in other
ways. During most of the colonial period Indians were not under the
Inquisition’s jurisdiction, and a high proportion of witchcraft accusa-
tions were never even brought to trial, particularly when defendants
were women. This was especially true in later periods when the witch-
craft of women came to be more consistently seen as superstition born
from ignorance and a lack of good sense.∞∑∫ In the final analysis, then,
although women and Indians were the classes most consistently associ-
ated with supernaturalism and therefore with threats to the sanctioned
order, they also had to be excused from the consequences of their own
ignorance because of their imputed weakness.
The contradictions in colonial perspectives and policies highlight
methodological problems, especially with respect to Indians, who al-
most never appear as defendants or plainti√s in Inquisition litigation
and are not on the descriptive covers of Inquisition manuscripts. This
has probably contributed to the erroneous belief that there are no
Indians in Inquisition cases,∞∑Ω for their presence cannot be gleaned
from a glance at the index housed in the agn. But even if Indians were
not persecuted directly, Inquisition transcripts are nevertheless full of
Indian witches, healers, diviners, and devil’s advocates.∞∏≠ The consis-
tent presence of Indians in Inquisition cases is due to several factors.
First, while bishops no longer acted as inquisitors after 1571, they did
continue to rely on the Inquisition to investigate Indian idolatry.∞∏∞
Church authority over Indians was therefore confused as Inquisition
investigations of Indians continued throughout the colonial period.∞∏≤
Second, and more importantly, Indians were at the center of the
social forces that developed around witchcraft, and were continuously
implicated in the witchcraft of non-Indians. In fact, the documentation
often registers second order acts of witchcraft, that is, the witchcraft of
those who both directly and indirectly had received powders, herbs,

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instructions, and cures from Indians who charged money for their
services. These Indians were not chimerical. They were often named
and placed, their relationships to plainti√s and defendants were de-
scribed, and although they were not punished, they were sometimes
called before the inquisitors to testify about their actions and the con-
tours of their moral universe. All of this might be surprising if we take
the Inquisition’s lack of authority over Indians to mean that the In-
quisition had no contact with them. But it is less surprising if we realize
that the point was not for the Inquisition to punish Indians; it was
rather for the Inquisition to ‘‘correct’’ others who made use of witch-
craft, a process which inevitably involved Indians.
All told, the people who came before the courts were often entangled
outside of the courtroom in ways that did not necessarily accord with
bureaucratic structures. Because individuals of di√erent castes, who
might have been subject to di√erent forms of justice, were so entan-
gled, attempts to separate persons juridically were bound to meet with
failure. In reality, then, judicial activities and the documents they pro-
duced speak as much to the disorder of social life as they do to the
regiment of rule.
The functional separation of judicial units itself also defied the Span-
ish mania for order.∞∏≥ First, the responsibilities of the colonial courts
sometimes overlapped. For example, Indian administrative business
had technically been removed from the audiencia’s jurisdiction and
made the responsibility of the viceroy by the mid-sixteenth century, but
conflicts over jurisdiction prevailed for decades after.∞∏∂ As another
example, secular, ecclesiastical, and Inquisition authorities all ostensi-
bly oversaw slaveholders’ treatment of their slaves.∞∏∑ Because of such
overlaps, proceedings sometimes focused on jurisdiction rather than on
the merits of a case.∞∏∏ Second, texts could include aspects of both sanc-
tioned and unsanctioned ‘‘crimes’’ because such crimes were mutually
invoking and provoking—that is, witchcraft occurred in tandem with
secular violence. And because witchcraft challenged not only church
morality but also ate at the activities and identities sanctioned by the
state/church, it fell under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction while seeping
also into the secular courts.∞∏π Third, confusion occasionally arose over
how an incident should be legally defined. This happened, for instance,
when the Indian Domingo de la Cruz of Tulancingo was beaten nearly
to death by two mulattoes who accused him of refusing to cure an
Indian woman they alleged he had bewitched. When Domingo com-

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plained of the beating to the local alcalde mayor, the Inquisition had to
inquire into his activities as a witch before the gravity of the mulattoes’
crime could be determined.∞∏∫
As he sought justice in the early morning hours following the beat-
ing, Domingo appealed to the authorities by referring to himself as a
‘‘vassal of the king’’ who was owed protection. His words and actions
expose another crucial set of issues: as legal forums became widespread
and accessible during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, New
Spain saw a range of people develop the quite astonishing ‘‘habit’’ of
litigation as they negotiated state controls, their rights, and the state’s
definition of who they were while narrating the social strategies that
took place both inside and outside of the courtroom.∞∏Ω This is not to
deny that Spanish men controlled the courts and therefore the contexts
in which social relations were represented in them, nor that courts fa-
vored certain classes of people over others. Agents patrolled the streets
looking for malefactors, and individuals often came to the Inquisition
to confess after hearing an Edict of Grace, or were victims of serious
charges of heresy.∞π≠ But many people caught up in everyday and not-
so-everyday problems saw judicial forums as a way of putting their
consciences to rest, of negotiating their rights, and of settling interper-
sonal disputes.∞π∞
As in other regions of the colonial world, in New Spain the shift from
legal pluralism to state-run judiciaries was in fact in part precipitated
not by the ‘‘top down’’ imposition of the state on subject peoples but
rather from the actions of litigants themselves, who strengthened state
control through ‘‘forum shopping,’’ and appeals to the ‘‘highest repre-
sentatives of imperial authority.’’∞π≤ As litigants appealed to such repre-
sentatives, the state gained more influence and the monopoly on deter-
mining the ‘‘truth’’ that came with that influence.∞π≥ In the process,
state courts became potent sources of hegemony, for in confirming
the importance of caste, that each caste had rights and that such rights
were negotiable, they probably deflected more radical attacks on the
system.∞π∂
Indians were especially notable litigators.∞π∑ But, as we have already
seen, free blacks threatened each other with the Inquisition; together
with mulattoes and mestizos they also argued for the right to carry
weapons and other privileges. Slaves petitioned for their freedom and
complained of ill-treatment by their masters. They also sometimes tried
to punish those masters by reporting them to the authorities as hereti-
cal Judaizers veiled as ‘‘Portuguese.’’∞π∏ Slaves also denounced each

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other for blasphemy and witchcraft.∞ππ Although most women, Span-
ish or not, were prohibited from litigating on their own, they often
voluntarily confessed to witchcraft and found ways to air grievances
against other parties, as we saw Ana María do. Sometimes women di-
rectly approached the justices. More commonly, they testified through
priests, o≈cials, or male relatives, thus establishing their sanctioned
legitimacy by a≈liating themselves with Spanish men.
Although we have no way of knowing what percentage of the popu-
lation actually made use of the courts at any given time, and cannot
specify the exact relationship between the textual narratives and lives
lived outside of court, the fact that even Indians, slaves, and women
litigated, shows that a legal consciousness had permeated the pyramid
as people used courts for the expression and negotiation of power and
identity through the language and enactment of caste.∞π∫ Not everyone
was equal. But the appearance of justice encouraged a variety of people
to believe they had a stake in the system.

court proceedings

The available documentation ranges from regulations, petitions, and

summaries of oral proceedings to initial inquiries and full-scale reports
with testimony, counter-testimony, arguments by counsel, ratifications,
and sometimes sentencing. Full-scale proceedings produced the richest
and most complex testimonies, but initial inquiries and criminal and
civil complaints, as well as Inquisition confessions/denunciations that
were never pursued, are also good sources because they constitute suc-
cinct statements of issues more fully elaborated in trial proceedings.∞πΩ
The Inquisition and secular courts used similar personnel, but Inqui-
sition judges were also prosecutors. In addition, while secular judges
focused on the facts of a case and on punishment, inquisitors were
more concerned with moral instruction.∞∫≠ Trials typically began with
complaints. But Inquisition hearings could be prompted by confes-
sions, in which case no trial was necessary. If an investigation was
undertaken and a case built (the standard formula being three wit-
nesses for the prosecution), the accused was arrested. The Inquisition
confiscated its defendants’ money and belongings, which were used to
cover court costs and to support the defendant while he or she was in
jail. Inventories of these goods were recorded, and they were often part
of trial records, as they were of Adriana’s.∞∫∞ Justice was relatively swift

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in criminal and civil trials, and for Indian complaints.∞∫≤ Inquisition
defendants like Adriana, however, could languish for months in dun-
geons as testimony was repeatedly entered by plainti√s and defendants.
Special attorneys and advocates aided the poor, Indians, and slaves,∞∫≥
and defendants could answer the testimony of plainti√s and witnesses.
But the inquisitors shrouded everything in secrecy by withholding
from the accused the names of witnesses and plainti√s until after sen-
tencing. Yet, while secrecy might have instilled fear, defendants often
had a good idea of who their accuser might be, as Adriana did.
Defendants were immediately told the charges in civil and criminal
suits, but in Inquisition ones they were not. Inquisitors first asked de-
fendants to ‘‘search [their] conscience.’’∞∫∂ They then moved to open-
ended questions regarding a person’s knowledge of crimes she had
committed against the faith. If the defendant said she did not know, the
inquisitors admonished that ‘‘the Holy O≈ce did not arrest people
unless it had su≈cient information.’’ If the accused still did not answer,
they read the denunciation and solicited her response to specific points.
Because the inquisitors did not initially reveal the charges, people
often confessed to failings that had nothing to do with the original
complaint, as when Adriana admitted to incest in her youth. Witnesses,
including character ones, also added information, much of it only tan-
gentially related to the charge. The most e√ective witnesses in all kinds
of venues were Spanish men, such as the priests who defended Adri-
ana’s reputation. But many di√erent kinds of people testified, even, at
times, slaves. In the end a variety of factors, including physical evidence
recorded by notaries, influenced the outcome of a trial.∞∫∑
Torture to extract confessions was uncommon in the New World,
and it was never used against witches.∞∫∏ Although confession without
torture could be the last resort for an accused witch who had su√ered a
stay in an Inquisition jail and was willing to exchange punishment for
freedom, people like Adriana might also uphold their innocence in the
face of extreme discomfort and coercion. Moreover, authorities did
not always believe confessions, and they sometimes reexamined de-
fendants. Sentences handed down by the di√erent tribunals included
forced labor, fines, and lashes. But the secular courts often resorted to
incarceration in jails or obrajes, and punishments meted out by the
Inquisition for witchcraft o√enses ranged widely.∞∫π The institution’s
‘‘instruction’’ could and did include death.∞∫∫ Yet in contrast to witches
in early modern France and Germany, New Spain’s witches never suf-
fered such a fate, and neither did Spanish ones after the early sixteenth

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century. In Spain, witches were often ‘‘rehabilitated’’ by forced removal
to villages where their ‘‘unsavory reputation was not known.’’∞∫Ω In
New Spain, punishment included the occasional whipping, but more
often fines, public confessions and humiliation, temporary exile, and
confinement to the feminized spaces of home, church, and hospital.∞Ω≠

reading the texts

Secular judges were more interested in what a defendant might have

done, while inquisitors were more concerned with the defendant’s
moral world and motivations.∞Ω∞ Because of the inquisitors’ broader
concerns, Inquisition texts as a class are longer and more detailed than
their secular counterparts.∞Ω≤ Historians of Europe have long used sto-
ries from a range of inquisition tribunals to reconstruct popular belief
systems.∞Ω≥ Many emphasize the forums inquisitors provided for giving
voice to the voiceless and the accuracy with which Inquisition notaries
recorded testimony.∞Ω∂ Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for instance, draws
attention to the ‘‘direct testimony’’ of French peasants meticulously
recorded by the inquisitors.∞Ω∑ Such approaches can be criticized for
ignoring the context of power in which the texts were produced,∞Ω∏ but
many Inquisition scholars have nevertheless approached the texts in
measured ways, emphasizing neither their verity nor their falsity, but
rather their multilayered representations.∞Ωπ
Those representations evolved in contested situations bounded by
the very categories they reveal. Thus, in colonial Mexico, people nego-
tiated meanings and strategies around caste as they acted out their
participation in a hierarchical community of subjects in front of Span-
ish justices. Through the tensions between authority and its ques-
tioning we learn something about Spanishness as well as about the
other caste identities and qualities that developed against and around it.
Thus, it is because of, rather than in spite of, the context in which they
were produced, that the records o√er insight into caste. Moreover,
while trials did not take place on neutral ground and the cultural mean-
ings they generated were not uniform, the records nevertheless contain
a necessarily shared language because people of all backgrounds had to
communicate with each other in court. The texts therefore indicate
what people were capable of and interested in expressing in a particu-
lar context, how they responded to one another, and what terms and
meanings were central to the debate. The trick in studying them is to

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manage the tension between the texts as ‘‘constructed’’ and as histo-
riographic ‘‘windows’’ on peoples’ lives.∞Ω∫
Translation is a major interpretive di≈culty, in no small part because
most of New Spain’s Indian subjects did not speak Spanish.∞ΩΩ O≈cials
met this and other linguistic challenges by providing interpreters.≤≠≠ An
early royal decree also tried to ensure fair hearings for Indians by allow-
ing them to bring ‘‘Christian’’ (Spanish-speaking) friends to court. The
best-intentioned translations are inherently problematic, however, be-
cause often there is no primary equivalency in meaning between words,
which both reflect and map social worlds. The use of interpreters might
also have encouraged the tendency to summarize portions of reports
rather than to record what was said verbatim, and summaries were
standard procedure for Indian cases heard by the viceroy.≤≠∞ When
testimony was in a language other than Spanish, it was virtually always
recorded in Spanish in the material under question here. We therefore
have no way of comparing, for instance, material in Nahuatl with its
Spanish equivalent. Indian ‘‘friends’’ who spoke Spanish were also
not always faithful to Indian plainti√s and defendants, and Spanish-
language statements given by Indians often su√ered from the imposi-
tion by clerks of Spanish stylistic conventions, which reshaped those
statements by making the wording conform to that of native Spanish
speakers.≤≠≤
Nevertheless, attempts to capture and a≈rm what people said indi-
cate Spanish attention to accuracy, as well as the desire to ensure fair-
ness by gathering and transcribing all of the available evidence.≤≠≥ The
elaborate appeals process might have also been meant to promote what
Spaniards considered just for all. Moreover, court personnel routinely
read back what notaries had written as they solicited ratifications from
defendants and witnesses. Even the notary foibles and personalities
attested to in the documentation by misspellings and written asides in
the margins add authenticity by suggesting that notaries were not pro-
ducing records according to a singular standard.
In the end, of course, we cannot gauge how freely ratifications were
given nor how accurately the texts we have in hand reflect what was said
in court. Non-Spanish speakers could not challenge a scribe’s accuracy.
And even those who spoke Spanish but, like Adriana, were not literate,
might a≈rm what the Inquisition notary read, but could not corrobo-
rate that with the written account. In short, because no one wrote their
own words, unmediated written testimony—especially by nonliterate

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peoples, Spanish-speaking or not—did not exist, even in the secular
court documentation that routinely goes unquestioned by scholars.
But the presence of mediation in these texts does not mean that they
were fabricated by court personnel,≤≠∂ or that Spanish-language texts
cannot teach us about non-Spanish speakers. Serge Gruzinski o√ers us
the important reminder that although no colonial voice can be ‘‘dissoci-
ated from European modes of expression’’ neither can it be from ‘‘the
colonial situation,’’ which was shaped by the world views of both colo-
nizers and colonized.≤≠∑ In this respect, the documentation speaks to
what William Hanks calls, with reference to colonial Mayan texts, ‘‘hy-
brid discourses’’ created out of conquest.≤≠∏ As a measure of colonial-
ism itself, hybridity is key to reading Spanish-language texts and even
indigenous-language ones, many of which follow Spanish legal and
writing conventions but are nevertheless privileged by some ethno-
historians for what is considered their more direct reflection of Indian
beliefs.≤≠π
The problem of translation is thus really the problem of colonialism
itself, and it goes beyond the practical to embrace broader problems of
interpretation—mine as well as that of colonial interpreters and nota-
ries. I try to remain faithful to the original texts, and to privilege the
voices of my ‘‘informants’’ as they are recorded in those texts.≤≠∫ From
my perspective, one cannot examine the events and beliefs described
in the records without considering the context of the courtroom, and
the justices with whom litigants interacted, as well as the structures
and conventions of the world beyond the courtroom. In this sense, the
texts perhaps best capture what Derek Sayer calls individuals’ ‘‘perfor-
mances’’ of ‘‘the lie that is ‘the state.’ ’’ As he writes, ‘‘[Individuals’]
beliefs are neither here nor there,’’ but ‘‘believers or not, participants are
by their very actions a≈rming the power of what is sanctioned.’’≤≠Ω The
fabric of the state, of Spanishness, and its determination of authority
were, one might then say, insinuated in the very ‘‘truth’’ of court perfor-
mances. Whatever those performances reveal about consciousness, au-
thenticity, and beliefs, they surely speak profoundly to that ambivalent
social reality Taussig refers to as the ‘‘sweaty warm space between the
arse of him who rides and the back of him who carries.’’≤∞≠

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 2
The Roads Are Harsh

s pa n i a r d s a n d i n d i a n s i n

the sanctioned domain

Let us now turn to the story told by Ursula de Castañeda, a

Spanish woman who, in 1643, was living in Xochimilco, a village
just south of Mexico City. Ursula approached the criminal court on
her own to report about an altercation she had with a mulatto named
Juan de Agilera, his Indian mother, Juana Bautista, and another Indian
woman named Angelina.∞ The courage it took to do this must have
stemmed from her faith that the justices would believe her version of
what had happened, for she might have been a woman but she was also
a Spaniard like them. The justices did respond swiftly, first arresting
and then fining the mulatto Juan. But they also they left Juan’s Indian
mother free and even allowed her to speak in her son’s defense. The
narrative that unfolds in court documents has much to say about the
nature of Spanish authority, as well as sanctioned caste performances
and meanings.
Ursula told the justices that she had been in her house the previous
day, quietly nursing one of her children, when the defendants arrived at
her door. According to Ursula, they demanded to know if she had
accused them of stealing, and then selling, a hen belonging to her sister,
Magdalena. When Ursula a≈rmed that she had done so, the defendants
beat her badly, giving her, in her own words, ‘‘many slaps about my
body and face, leaving me all black and blue.’’ If her sister and her father
had not come to her aid, she continued, ‘‘[the mulatto and the Indians]
would have killed me out of hatred and anger.’’
Most of Ursula’s indignation seems to have derived from the social

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rather than from the physical wounds she claimed to have su√ered. As
she explained, ‘‘they injured me with dishonorable words . . . they
committed grave crimes worthy of punishment because I am a married
woman and a noble and honorable one. They are mulattoes [sic] and
Indian people, vile and low.’’ According to one Spanish witness, Juan
had even declared to Ursula that he and the Indians were ‘‘better’’
than she. Ursula’s husband had not been at the scene of the crime, but
he testified anyway. His wife was ‘‘Spanish,’’ he pointed out, and a
‘‘noble person,’’ defiled and degraded in particular by the ‘‘vile’’ and
‘‘lowly’’ mulatto, who had dared to mistreat a woman of such ‘‘quality’’
as his.
Under questioning, the mulatto Juan denied that he had attacked
Ursula, although he did admit that he knew her. When the justices
summoned his Indian mother, she defended her son by insisting that
his imprisonment reflected ‘‘favoritism’’ toward the Spaniards. The ac-
cusations had scant basis, she contended, because all of the witnesses—
many of whom were not even present at the scene—were Ursula’s
‘‘intimate friends,’’ including Hernán Pérez, her father and accomplice.
Other Indian witnesses corroborated Juana’s testimony, adding that
Ursula had tried to bribe them into testifying on her behalf. A priest
then came to the mulatto’s defense. He contended that the suit should
be dismissed because Ursula did not have her husband’s permission to
bring it.
The defense countered Ursula’s story by insisting that Juana had
gone to Ursula’s house in search of bread and candles to buy, and that
the Spaniards had attacked her for an unstated cause. In this version,
Juan ran to his mother’s aid, as did a Spanish woman named Leonor de
Abiego who had been visiting Juana’s home when Juana left for Ur-
sula’s. Leonor was Juana’s co-mother (comadre).≤ This was a fictive kin
relationship marked by mutual obligation as well as lineage symbolism.
It is unclear whether Leonor was Juan’s godmother (madrina) or even
whether the comadre relationship between Leonor and Juana was for-
malized, but Leonor and Juana were obviously close. Indeed, shortly
after Juana had departed for Ursula’s house, a young Indian girl had
come straight to Leonor, shouting ‘‘Ma’am Leonor de Abiego, go to
Ursula de Castañeda’s house, for she is beating and mistreating your
comadre.’’ When she arrived at Ursula’s, Leonor found that Juan was
tied up and that Ursula and Hernán were beating Juana. Leonor posi-
tioned herself between the Spaniards and the Indian. As she did so, she
advised the Spaniards that ‘‘it looked bad to be mistreating natives.’’

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They ignored her, however, and continued to flog Juana. At one point,
they called her ‘‘an old whore witch’’ (una puta vieja hechisera [sic]),
thus associating the Indian with a feminized sexual and religious im-
morality.
The di√erent phases and facets of this dispute expose the broader
politics of sanctioned gender and caste principles. Ursula, a Spaniard,
was the principal plainti√, but her gender subordination was high-
lighted by the priest’s objection to the suit she had initiated without her
husband’s permission and by the fact that her husband spoke on her
behalf. Similarly, the Indian Juana’s caste subordination was signified
by the Spanish woman Leonor speaking on her behalf, as well as by the
beating she endured. From one angle, then, Ursula and Juana occupied
analogous structural positions, for both were women with ‘‘weak’’
voices and both had to appeal to their kin or fictive kin of a higher sta-
tus: Ursula-the-Spanish-woman therefore linked herself to her Spanish
husband, who spoke to her ‘‘value’’; Juana-the-Indian-woman’s most
vocal advocate was her Spanish comadre Leonor, who spoke to her
innocence, and therefore to her credibility. As in Adriana’s case, a Span-
ish priest also came to the defendant’s aid. Yet Ursula might have won
had two witnesses to her bribery not come forward.
Leonor defended Juana in part by speaking for Spanishness in gen-
eral when she admonished that ‘‘it looked bad to be mistreating na-
tives.’’ Her reprimand did not rest on her personal relationship to
Juana; she did not, for instance, say ‘‘stop beating this woman because
she is my comadre.’’ Instead, she made Juana stand for all ‘‘natives,’’
while she, Ursula, and Ursula’s relatives, stood for all ‘‘Spaniards.’’ Her
statement seems a bit extraordinary if, as Nicholas Dirks observes, colo-
nialism is a ‘‘trope for domination and violation.’’≥ What do we learn
from Leonor’s words about what colonialism was like in Mexico? To
whom did it look bad to be mistreating the natives? Why did it look
bad? Why would a Spanish woman admonish other Spaniards? Why
would she defend an Indian?
At base, Leonor’s comment reflected inherent contradictions of
Spanish rule. That rule was characterized by the ongoing abuse typified
by Ursula and her family, but it also spoke paternalistically to Indian
defenselessness and to Spaniards’ roles as providers of justice in both its
narrow and broader senses, the position Leonor and the justices who
left Juana free upheld. Philosophical and theological dimensions of this
contradiction have been explored by others.∂ My purpose here, how-
ever, is to situate the paradox in the day-to-day life of the colony by

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explaining the logic of violence and connecting it to the logic of Spanish
protection, both of which rested on colonial understandings that In-
dians were weak. That weakness was linked in the Spanish mind to
Indian indolence, which produced a range of ‘‘bad’’ behaviors from
laziness to witchcraft introduced by a devil who provoked breaches in
rules of sanctioned comportment and undermined ‘‘proper’’ produc-
tion. The acts and comments of Ursula and her cohorts—who beat the
Indian but also conflated her sexual and supernatural faults with derog-
atory claims that she was an ‘‘old whore witch’’—speak with violence to
this consequence of Indian frailty.

the weakness of indians:

the creation of separate republics

The missionaries who accompanied Spanish conquistadors to New

Spain set out to evangelize their new charges with firm conviction
grounded in teleology and prophetic history.∑ Some missionary writ-
ings—such as those of Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún—
‘‘prefigured an ethnographic process’’ as they described Indian customs
and history in order to facilitate conversion.∏ The writings are still of
ethnographic interestπ even though (or perhaps because) they blended
the exotic Indian both chronologically and ideologically with the Euro-
pean past and the colonial present, as they assimilated Indian customs
to cultural and historical traditions familiar to Spaniards trying to make
sense of their own presence and purpose in the New World.∫
Sahagún hoped to replace European Christianity and the ‘‘Spanish
way of life’’ with a new church peopled by the ‘‘good savages’’ of the
New World living in their ‘‘golden state.’’Ω For him and for other Francis-
cans, Indians were ‘‘innocents,’’ and the wholesale destruction of Indians
and things Indian that came with conquest therefore called for a policy
of indirect crown rule that would bypass the vices of the colonists to
reach Indians through their own elites.∞≠ The Franciscan Gerónimo de
Mendieta, who was one of the most vocal proponents for the separation
of Indians and Spaniards in the colony, wrote in the same vein. For he
believed that ‘‘the Indian with respect to the Spaniard is like a small dog
in front of a mighty lion. The Spaniards have all the evil desire and the
strength to destroy all the Indians of New Spain, if they were ever given
the chance . . . The Indian is so phlegmatic and meek that he would not
hurt a fly. Consequently, one must always assume in case of doubt that

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the Spaniard is the o√ender and the Indian is the victim.’’∞∞ Mendieta
then called for ‘‘two republics, two nations—the Spanish and the In-
dian’’ that would ‘‘never live together.’’∞≤ Many missionaries favored
such a division in the hope that it would protect Indian autonomy and
facilitate the conversion process. These two issues were connected inso-
far as, in the view of some missionaries, common Spaniards not only
thoughtlessly exploited Indians. They also morally corrupted them.∞≥
Crown and church interests in New Spain initially coincided in the
issue of Indian separation from Spaniards. Through the New Laws, the
crown had reined in the excessive demands of settlers. Through the
nominal creation of two republics, subject to di√erent regulations and
expectations, it established its authority over Indians. The two repub-
lics were not strictly geographical entities, yet the Indian Republic
(república de los indios) roughly corresponded to Indian rural villages
and the Spanish Republic (república de los españoles) to Spanish urban
areas. Angel Rama’s contention that New World cities were the physi-
cal incarnation of social ideas can thus be expanded to include the
countryside.∞∂ Beyond their spatial significance, however, the two re-
publics also symbolized what for Spaniards seemed di√erent ways of
life: the barbaric and the civilized; the irresponsible and the responsi-
ble; the pagan and the Christian; that of gente sin razón (people without
reason) and that of gente de razón (people of reason).∞∑
In practice, the notion of two republics defended Indian political
structures and autonomy as long as Spanish interests continued to be
served and legislation was developed to protect Indian communities
from outsiders. For a time, many of those communities continued to be
self-contained and self-governing, with their own strategies for resist-
ing incursions of outsiders or even for incorporating them into their
internal politics.∞∏ Yet, in legislating Indian protection, the state also
imposed uniformity by creating ‘‘Indians’’ out of what had been sepa-
rate polities, and by homogenizing disparate native legal traditions so
that Indians could not independently resist infringement by settlers or
profoundly influence colonial policy on their own terms.∞π
The idea of two republics also brought to a head essential contradic-
tions between material and philosophical ideals: while protection of
Indians through separation from Spaniards was in theory the objective,
especially for the early friars, in practice it was impossible to achieve.
Indians were the principal labor and tribute source that Spaniards,
including the crown, depended on for their own fortune. The state
thus came to acknowledge limited indigenous autonomy while keep-

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ing Indian communities in ‘‘a condition most amenable to o≈cial
control.’’∞∫
Peter Wade notes that ‘‘indians were often treated extremely badly’’
despite the fact that they had a special relationship to colonial of-
ficialdom and bureaucracy.∞Ω In part this was because Indian autonomy
and rights came continuously under attack. As they did, the ideal of the
two republics broke down, and Indians e√ectively became an estate
within colonial society.≤≠ As such, they were subject not only to Cas-
tilian laws and institutions but also to the ‘‘barbarous’’ practices of such
Spaniards as Ursula, Magdalena, and Hernán. It might indeed have
‘‘looked bad’’ that these Spaniards were beating Indians, as Leonor
pointed out, but such behavior can also be read as perfectly logical
given the conflicting aims of crown policy and the interests of colo-
nizers. Leonor’s intervention was equally logical, however, because it
embodied the protective side of sanctioned Spanish authority. Such
protection rested on charitable crown and church policies meant to de-
fend Indians, including the establishment of the General Indian Court
and the release of Indians from the Inquisition; the emancipation of
Indian slaves in the middle of the sixteenth century; and Indians’ gen-
eral status as the king’s most ‘‘miserable’’ of vassals, which in theory
excluded them from the more arduous work situations.

‘‘it looks bad to be mistreating natives’’

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Spaniards were settled

densely next to Indians in New Spain’s cities and in many parts of the
Central Valley countryside.≤∞ Judicial records from this period include
hundreds of directives outlining the boundaries meant to be enforced
between the Indian Republic and the Spanish one as Indian autonomy
and rights eroded.≤≤ These directives forbade persons such as muleteers
(harrieros) with business in Indian villages from staying for more than
three days at a time; and Spaniards, as well as their black, mulatto, and
mestizo slaves, servants, overseers, deputies, and majordormos, from
residing in or holding o≈ce in Indian villages. Indians protested often
and loudly about their encounters with Spaniards. Whether or not
these encounters represented the norms of daily life, they were consis-
tently pernicious to Indians, as contemporary observers and modern
historians alike have noted.
Although the overall patterns of Indian complaints are well known,

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they hold to several consistent themes that can be highlighted here:
Spaniards stole from Indians; they forced Indians to work against their
will without pay; they kept them in debt and destroyed their land; and
they caused whole villages to empty as the inhabitants fled into the hills.
Indian grievances were widespread, both geographically and chrono-
logically. We can begin in 1590, when an Indian o≈cial from the Tutu-
tepec region, which was to the northeast of Tulancingo, lamented that
his village was ‘‘dying’’ from agents of the Spanish onslaught:

The governor, alcaldes and community of Cayuca have told me how a

Spaniard named Ju(an) Martin has a ranch outside the village. On his own
authority and against the will of the natives he enters their houses and takes
them to serve him each week and he pays them for eight days two tomines [a
unit of currency] and others he does not pay at all. He mistreats them and
beats them. There are few of them and they are poor. They could not
tolerate him and they had no legal support nor anyone to favor them. This
was the reason that the village was dying.≤≥

In the same year, the Spanish alcalde mayor of the mining town of
Tasco, in what is now northern Guerrero, was ordered to expel two
Spaniards residing illegally in the Indian village of Tetipac. The Span-
iards customarily ‘‘annoyed’’ and mistreated the Indians, ‘‘taking their
hens and other things by force and beating them and entering their
houses and loading things up by errand boys and making them give
them hay and other things as their horses and mules eat and destroy
[the Indians’] fields.’’≤∂
Three years later, several Spaniards, along with ‘‘the people’’ re-
siding within the boundaries of their farms and estates, attempted to
persuade the Indians of Zinacantepec, located just west of Toluca, to
take money in advance, thus landing them in debt and perpetual bond-
age to the Spaniards. ‘‘They take them from their quietude and treat
them like slaves and take them to the haciendas,’’ read the complaint.≤∑
That same year, Indians from the Ometepec region of what is today
southeastern Guerrero reported that cattle ranchers from Mexico City
had let loose on their land 100,000 head of cattle (surely an exaggera-
tion), destroying their crops and causing several small villages to empty
out. The authorities sent a delegation to determine the extent of the
damages.≤∏
In 1620, Indians from several north-central Oaxacan villages re-
counted how two Spaniards had ‘‘entered the villages at night, stirring
them up and taking an Indian man and an Indian woman . . . to

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the mines, because of which [the Indians] have left their villages and
houses and moved to the mountains.’’≤π From the city of Cholula, a
mid-seventeenth-century account declares that ‘‘in this city and its sur-
roundings, many Spaniards on farms and cattle ranches . . . customarily
take Indians from the city against their will, using them and doing
other annoying things to them.’’ Appealing to crown authority by re-
minding the justices of the king’s obligation to his most ‘‘miserable’’
vassals, the Indian plainti√s pointed out that ‘‘all of this is against what
his majesty has ordered.’’≤∫
Royal obligation showed itself again as the crown responded to In-
dian complaints against its own o≈cials and those of the church. Sym-
pathizers like Viceroy Martín Enríquez would document the grounds
for such complaints noting, for example, that ‘‘the Indians, as miserable
people who have no resistance’’ were being mistreated even by friars,
corregidores, and their agents.≤Ω In response, Philip II directed his
viceroys to gather information pertaining to the ‘‘excesses of the cor-
regidores and other o≈cials . . . the harm and annoyances [they]
cause . . . especially to the Indians.’’≥≠ Later crown decrees regularly
named almost every type of Spanish o≈cial, including alcaldes may-
ores, priests, deputies (tenientes), prelates ( prelados), and attorneys
(letrados).≥∞ Rather than helping the Indians, the king repeatedly pro-
tested, those who were responsible for their well-being had become
their ‘‘worst enemies.’’ A typical decree reads as follows: ‘‘The attorneys
that the Indians of these provinces and especially those of the city and
province of Tlaxcala have appointed to defend them at trial, instead of
protecting them and favoring them are their enemies and spies . . . it
cannot be believed that people named by my viceroys could act like that; that
instead of protecting and defending the Indians from the annoyances,
o√enses and vexations that they ordinarily receive from every type of
person . . . they are their enemies.’’≥≤
Such statements expose the paradoxes of Spanish colonialism as the
crown strove to protect Indian lives against its own settlers and agents,
who made those lives miserable. That the crown so often issued decrees
favoring Indians suggests that the abusive practices documented in the
texts were common. When crown agents sanctioned these practices, in
defiance of crown decrees, it was not because they were legal, but
because they were the customary and logical outcome of Spanish colo-
nial interests. In part, this situation arose from the fact that not just
settlers but the crown itself extracted wealth from Indians. Indeed, the
king’s own welfare could be used as a pretext for Indian exploitation. In

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seventeenth-century Metepec, to the northeast of the mining center of
Temazcaltepec, Indian o≈cials protested the labor conditions villagers
were forced to endure. Every week eleven Indians were to present them-
selves in the mines for repartimiento.≥≥ When they were finished, an-
other eleven were supposed to take their places. But the miners would
typically keep the Indians against their will for two, three, or four weeks,
forcing them to work day and night ‘‘without letting them go to mass.’’
They would fail to feed them, and they habitually locked them up and
mistreated them. If the Indians were paid, it was in ‘‘shoes, ribbons and
other things from the store that they do not need, and not in money.’’
Over a six-year period, thirteen Indians died ‘‘because of the bad treat-
ment they received.’’ And when those who survived escaped or were let
go, many returned home to find their kin—including their women and
children—dead and their belongings gone.≥∂
While Indians appealed to crown authority for protection, miners
also appealed to it in order to justify their treatment of Indians. As one
foreman insisted while overseeing a brutal beating of Metepec’s Indian
laborers, ‘‘work you dogs, [so] that the king is served.’’≥∑ The respon-
sibility of these ‘‘dogs’’ was therefore to serve under duress the very king
who shielded them.

beneficiados are served for free

In the sixteenth century, the church had shifted away from the large
monastery complexes organized around Indian territorial (altepetl)
units, and toward small parish churches with secular clergy.≥∏ The friars’
initial mission to convert Indians was then replaced with a priestly one
to preach to the already converted and to administer the sacraments in
Indian communities. Friars and priests feuded among themselves over
control of Indian parishes throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.≥π Friars allied themselves closely with the viceregal admin-
istration and the king’s o≈cers—composed for the most part of native-
born Spaniards ( peninsulares)—and fought Mexican-born Spaniards
(criollos) under the pretext of protecting the sorely demoralized Indians
(but also probably in support of the labor needs of their own hacien-
das). In contrast, the secular clergy had closer links to the criollo lay
population, which consisted of their ‘‘cousins and friends.’’≥∫
The crown claimed that the ‘‘complete mission’’ of friars and priests
was to be ‘‘found in the Indian.’’≥Ω Nevertheless, the British friar

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Thomas Gage noted that the Spanish American clergy loved money
and ‘‘vainglory’’ more than God.∂≠ One of his first observations when
he entered Mexico in 1625 was ‘‘the power of the priests and friars over
the poor Indians, and their subjection and obedience unto them.’’∂∞
While his words should probably be read more as a political commen-
tary than as a faithful rendition of colonial Mexican social conditions,
royal decrees also suggest that Indians fared little better under the
religious than they did under settlers and crown agents. The king might
have insisted to his viceroy that friars and priests were to ‘‘lighten the
Indians’ burden,’’ but he was also forced to acknowledge that certain
clergy had made personal slaves of the ‘‘miserable natives,’’ who were
not slaves, he had to remind the viceroy, but rather the king’s own free
vassals, ‘‘worthy of his protection,’’ as Indians themselves were aware.∂≤
Because the ‘‘Indian problem’’ can in part be couched as reflecting
conflicts in crown and settler interests, it is perhaps not surprising that
the documentation indicates Indians saw priests as enemies more often
than they did friars. This might have been because for Indians, priests
represented the exploitative side of Spanish authority as embodied in
the criollo settler population with whom priests were closely allied,
rather than the protective side as embodied in the friars, the king, and
the Spanish-born elite of the church and royal administrations.
The secular clergy had long been forbidden from taking extreme
measures against native religious practices, which were generally un-
derstood as ‘‘idolatry,’’ because such clergy tended to abuse their power
and because the prerogative to discipline Indians was royal.∂≥ Both the
courts and the crown directly admonished priests who defied the or-
ders. The Inquisition called one priest to task in 1625 for taking matters
into his own hands in Chiautla (to the south of Chietla) by punishing
an Indian who had taken ololiuque.∂∂ The Inquisition’s wrath might
have also been stoked by the fact that the priest had proclaimed himself
a commissioner of the Holy O≈ce as he brought the Indian to church,
naked from the waist up, read him a sentence, and ordered him given
fifty lashes.∂∑
Some years later, Philip IV informed his viceroy that he had heard the
Indians of the far eastern territory and Yucatán were su√ering from
priests who demanded alms. He reminded the viceroy that Indians
should be protected and treated with ‘‘complete charity and love.’’∂∏
Toward the end of the century another priest, with, in fact, ‘‘little love
[or] charity,’’ had apparently whipped an Indian in a village near Mex-
ico City, cut o√ his long hair (melenas), and verbally abused him be-

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cause he missed a mass.∂π ‘‘It was too much punishment’’ for such a
minor transgression, the plainti√ argued in ecclesiastical court.∂∫
One series of incidents involving a priest elucidates the cultural
themes of Indian weakness. The priest’s behavior was reported to the
ecclesiastical authorities in the late seventeenth century by the Indians
of Acapetlaguaya, a village to the southwest of Tasco.∂Ω The priest,
Francisco de Zarate y Molina, could not ride by himself on horseback
but instead had to be ‘‘very gently’’ led by an Indian. If the Indian was
careless and went too quickly, Zarate whipped him right there in the
road before continuing on to his destination. He insisted that every
village have a ‘‘gentle’’ horse waiting for him as he made his rounds, and
if the villagers failed to comply he cursed them, had them whipped, and
forced them to carry him in a litter. This was ‘‘impossible,’’ said one
Indian in a comment striking for its evocation of Indian fragility, ‘‘for
the roads are harsh and the natives are not made of similar things.’’ The
villagers were ‘‘disconsolate,’’ they told the justices, because although
they wanted to give their priest a good horse, there were no Spaniards
to provide one.
During the first day of a four-day stay in the village, Zarate ‘‘upon
rising from bed . . . went to the kitchen and broke all of the cooking jars
and made the women kneel and whipped them.’’ The day he was to
leave, he requested a mule belonging to a municipal council member.
But the mule was hiding from torrential rains, and the angry Zarate
again whipped and beat the Indians. He then ordered the black slaves
who accompanied him to drive the Indians into the church. One slave
wielded a machete, with which he ran the Indians about, going after
in particular a church constable named Marcos, who escaped. Zarate
searched Marcos’s house but found only his wife, who had just given
birth. He kicked the woman, in the process knocking her to the floor
and ripping her shirt. Zarate then took the woman to his house and
would have sent her to jail but for the intervention of an Indian o≈cial.
She subsequently became gravely ill.
During his stay in the village, Zarate had apparently also beaten two
young girls for failing to wash his clothes as quickly as he would have
liked; he had flogged a young boy ‘‘for no reason’’; and he had repeat-
edly hit an Indian in the head. One Indian fell ill and could not go to
Mexico City at Zarate’s request, thus angering him. Zarate thrashed yet
another Indian who asked him for candles, and he beat the alcalde who
requested that Zarate pay for the Indian messengers and mules he
wanted the community to send to Mexico City. Zarate then announced

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to the Indians that ‘‘because he is beneficiado (clergy) they have to serve
him for free.’’
Zarate’s seemingly frenzied actions emerge as a complex statement
about the politics of caste. On the one hand, ‘‘Indianness’’ was charac-
terized by servility while ‘‘Spanishness’’ was equated with the honor of
literally being carried by Indians. On the other hand, Spaniards found
it highly aggravating and ine≈cient to depend on Indians. In this re-
spect, many of Zarate’s excesses appear to have been reactions to what
he perceived as defects in the Indian character: that Indians were physi-
cally weak was indicated both by their propensity to illness and by their
admission that they were incapable of traveling the ‘‘harsh’’ roads while
carrying Zarate on their backs; that they were morally infirm was sig-
nified by their idleness and by the failure of the two young girls to wash
the priest’s clothing rapidly enough. The priest attempted to ‘‘correct’’
the Indians with the aid of his black slaves, who chased the Indians into
the church—the holy site of redemption.

the feminization of the indian:

reason and its implications

The contradictory treatment of Indians, both exploitative and protec-

tive, can in part be attributed to Spanish beliefs about the Indian capac-
ity for reason. This matter was central to Spanish theological and politi-
cal concerns, for reason entailed not only full knowledge of God but
also a strict adherence to Spanish norms of conduct.∑≠ It was something
Spaniards—especially high-born ones—came by naturally because it
was carried in their blood. Mendicants like Las Casas believed Indians
could be transformed into reasonable beings who would receive Chris-
tianity voluntarily and recognize the kings of Castile as ‘‘overlords
and emperors.’’∑∞ But others saw Indians as ‘‘perpetual children’’ and
‘‘weak-willed.’’∑≤ Many of the first friars advocated the separation of
Indian children from their idolatrous and irresolute parents.∑≥ They
also turned those children into one of the principal vehicles for the
‘‘inner reconstruction’’ of all Indians: as sedentary Indians were made
into good Christians in missionary theater, and as Chichimecs repre-
sented evil, Indian children played angels and Christians against Indian
adults who acted as ‘‘devils, infidels or enemies.’’∑∂ These plays thus
made sedentary Indians ‘‘good’’ in relation to Chichimecs, and Indian
children metaphors for these ‘‘childlike’’ Indian peoples.

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 Childishness implied a certain purity and virtue, but it also spoke to
Indian defectiveness, which the royal chaplain and philosopher Juan
Gínes de Sepúlveda emphasized when he insisted on the Spanish right
to rule Indians. Advocating a position that found wide support among
Spanish settlers, Sepúlveda entered into a well-known debate with
Las Casas.∑∑ The debate brings out the ways certain colonialist logics
worked not just to infantilize but also to feminize Indians.
Shortly after the New Laws were implemented, only to be resisted by
settlers, Sepúlveda wrote an impassioned treatise justifying the wars
waged by Spaniards against Indians. The treatise blended Christian and
Aristotelian notions of humanity, the doctrine of natural law, and the
divine origins of Spanish social norms to prove the inferiority of In-
dians, their unwillingness to accept Christianity, and the right of Span-
iards to rule them by force. In Sepúlveda’s view, Indians were ‘‘barbar-
ians,’’ or Aristotle’s natural slaves.∑∏ He then leapt ‘‘metaphysically,’’ as
John Leddy Phelan puts it, into arguing that Indians were best gov-
erned by Spaniards, who were Christians and followed proper (Span-
ish) norms of conduct.∑π
Sepúlveda wavered on Indian defectiveness, noting in one passage,
for instance, that Indians did not completely lack reason and were not
exactly ‘‘bears’’ or ‘‘monkeys.’’∑∫ Yet the overall thrust of his argument
placed Indians outside of civil life because for him they were cruel and
extreme, practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice, and were sexually
indiscriminate—committing, in his view, both sodomy and bestiality.
He also cited their ‘‘primitive’’ technology.∑Ω Indians might therefore
have approximated civilized beings, but all told they lacked in their
material and spiritual lives a certain quality, the Christian ‘‘humanitas’’
of Spain, which would have made them fully human.∏≠ Moreover, for
Sepúlveda the imperfections of these ‘‘inhuman people’’ ( gente inhu-
mana) were located not in individuals, for any individual could sin, but
in the entire people, who failed to recognize the natural law of God in
its ‘‘customs and public institutions.’’∏∞
Some modern scholars deem Sepúlveda an extremist.∏≤ But others
argue that he articulated a pervasive view of the nature and status of the
Indian in Christian and European intellectual thought.∏≥ Certainly his
contention that Indians needed to be forced to comply with ‘‘things
Spanish’’ quickly found favor with settlers,∏∂ who most fully repre-
sented the exploitative side of Spanish authority.
Las Casas rejected Sepúlveda’s position because it negated Las Casas’s
own belief that Indians, like all people, could achieve Christian reason.

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For Las Casas, ‘‘all the ‘races’ of the world [are] men,’’ as he wrote in one
famous passage, while for Sepúlveda Christianity was an essence with
which some people were naturally endowed. Las Casas considered
Sepúlveda’s Aristotle to be ‘‘a gentile philosopher burning in hell.’’∏∑ In
his view, Indians were not the barbarians. Rather, Spaniards ‘‘with their
cruel and abominable acts’’ had ‘‘devastated the land and exterminated
the rational people who fully inhabited it.’’∏∏
Las Casas published those lines in 1552 in his defiant and remarkable
work, The Devastation of the Indies, which reverses the conventional
imagery of ‘‘civilized’’ Spaniards and Indian ‘‘barbarians’’ while conflat-
ing the qualities of Indians with those of meek mendicants.∏π The pub-
lication was Las Casas’s angry response to the slow implementation of
reforms by the crown, which had passed the New Laws at his prompt-
ing and whose jurists favored his position over Sepúlveda’s. The debate
between Sepúlveda and Las Casas over who Indians were in relation to
Spaniards resonates with a pervasive conflict between two competing
views of the world and humankind. But these two positions were not
just in ideological tension; they were woven into the social fabric of the
colony. Hence, Indians were ‘‘dogs,’’ but they were equally innocents
owed protection.
Like other Spanish theologians, Sepúlveda wrote paternalistically of
Indians through analogies with children. Aristotle compared natural
slaves to children, whom he also associated with women when he ar-
gued that neither could truly master their passions.∏∫ To Sepúlveda,
women and children were also imperfect, but he went a step further
in employing a child/woman analogy to argue against Indian auton-
omy.∏Ω ‘‘In prudence, talent, virtue and humanity,’’ he wrote, ‘‘[In-
dians] are as inferior to Spaniards as children are to adults and women
to men.’’π≠ In Sepúlveda’s imagination, then, women, children, and
Indians were essentially ‘‘incomplete men.’’π∞ Elsewhere in his treatise
he narrowed these analogies by focusing on what he saw as the femi-
nine qualities of Indians, such as their second-rate minds and their
cowardice.π≤ As evidence he claimed that during the conquest of Mex-
ico ‘‘thousands and thousands of [Indians] fled like women from very
few Spaniards,’’ while Moctezuma, ‘‘cowering like a woman,’’ reluc-
tantly received Cortés.π≥
Although Indians and women were often compared independently
to children, Sepúlveda’s explicit linking of women to Indians was rather
unconventional. Philip II had passed laws making two Indian or three
women witnesses ‘‘worth one Spanish man’’ (an equation that consid-

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ers one Spanish man a complete human being and women and Indians
only partial ones), but woman/Indian analogies were not elaborated
by other commentators.π∂ Sepúlveda himself abandoned this feminine
imagery when he later re-presented the Mexica as a ‘‘more dignified’’
and ‘‘heroic’’ warrior-like foe of the victorious Spaniards, but it is nev-
ertheless worth pausing to consider his initial logic.π∑
Nancy Stepan has convincingly shown how nineteenth-century sci-
entists used gender analogies to confirm their notions about race. She
also notes that the history of such analogies has yet to be explored.π∏
Anthropologists of Latin America have examined the Indianization of
women and the feminization of Indians in several contemporary con-
texts.ππ Other scholars have pointed out the presence of feminizing
imageries in Spanish colonial discourse, noting that beginning with
Columbus’s letters and diaries such imageries were central to many
Spanish accounts of the natives of the New World.π∫ Spanish women,
in turn, were themselves Indianized and ‘‘primitivized’’ in the conduct
manuals written for them in the sixteenth century.πΩ The judicial texts
examined here describe women and Indians in similar ways: both were
ignorant (de poco saber), weak ( flaca), and sinful ( pecadora). The texts
thus speak to the parallel and overlapping cultural and juridical basis for
the subordination of women and Indians; to the historical develop-
ment of interdependent gender and caste ideologies and hierarchies;
and, ultimately, to the core logic of the caste system as it played out in
colonial people’s day-to-day lives.

containing women and indians

Under Spanish law, women in general and children under the age of
twenty-five were legally prohibited from litigating on their own behalf.
Instead, they were to be represented by ‘‘male guardians, tutors, hus-
bands, parents and relatives.’’∫≠ Until women reached adulthood, they
were legally controlled by their fathers. Once married, they were con-
trolled by their husbands, who managed most property in the marriage
and whose permission was needed for legal transactions. Independent
decisions were reserved for grown women without male superiors,
notably widows, who acquired control over their own dowries when
their husbands died, and could continue to run their husbands’ busi-
nesses. These women could receive loans, as well as bequeath their own
property.∫∞

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 We have seen both the unmarried black woman Ana María de la
Concepción and the married Spanish woman Ursula de Castañeda
bring legal suits on their own. Moreover, we know that the black
woman Adriana, also unmarried, possessed quite some property, in-
cluding three slaves. These few examples indicate that the law was not a
‘‘dead letter’’: women did buy and sell property, own slaves and free
them, borrow money, and initiate suits. Moreover, patriarchy was espe-
cially limited with respect to choice of marriage partner.∫≤
But gender ideologies could also be invoked to thwart women’s inde-
pendent action. We might recall in this respect that the legal prohibi-
tion against women litigating, as well as the ‘‘fickleness’’ of women in
general, was cited by Adriana’s lawyer as he discredited Ana María’s
testimony. The legal prohibition was also invoked by the priest who
defended the mulatto Juan from Ursula’s accusations. Susan Kellogg
has demonstrated the vigor of such prohibitions by showing that, al-
though Indian women initially enjoyed much greater autonomy than
Spanish ones, by the seventeenth century Indian women too had be-
come legal minors, placed under the protection of their husbands.∫≥
The notion that women possessed inferior reason can be found in
widespread western cultural codes linking passion to femaleness and
reason to maleness. Yet it is important to recognize that male as well
as female qualities are always situated in particular social and histori-
cal contexts. In this respect, Spanish culture was characterized by an
ethos of self-control emphasizing lineage and the maintenance of family
honor.∫∂ Honor referred both to social status (characterized by wealth
and blood) and to the preservation of virtue in the form of virginity,
which signified a morally pure life and respect for the church. Virginity
also guaranteed the character of future lineages in societies highly strati-
fied by wealth, color, and religion. In theory, sexuality was a site of social
control for both men and women.∫∑ But because women were regarded
as more carnal than men, they required closer supervision. Supervision
protected them from their own weaknesses, but more generally it pro-
tected Spanishness itself by preserving male salvation and honor, which
were vulnerable to corruption by women, who could weaken men’s
minds with lust and their bodies with venereal diseases.∫∏
Rates of illegitimacy were extraordinarily high for Spanish women as
well as for Spanish men in colonial Mexico, where all kinds of non-
Spaniards posed lineage threats. Unlike men, however, women could
not legally decide who their legitimate children were.∫π Female sexual
freedom in this regard was therefore also more dangerous than male,

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and maintaining Spanish purity in the New World became the par-
ticular onus of Spanish women. Protection was accomplished in part
through the enclosure conventions that ideally kept all women—but
especially Spanish ones—at home, where they were charged with per-
forming or overseeing domestic chores like spinning, weaving, and,
most importantly, food preparation.∫∫
Women carried their domesticity with them outside of their homes.
They were expected to do charitable work for hospitals and focus their
energies on church activities, such as mass and religious sisterhoods,
where they could also be supervised by men. The state of enclosure was
complete for nuns.∫Ω Prostitutes were enclosed as well, required to
reside in brothels or ‘‘public houses’’ where, in the words of a sixteenth-
century Spanish clergyman, ‘‘the filth and ugliness of the flesh are gath-
ered like the garbage and dung of the city.’’Ω≠ Gatherings of women
outside the control of men could have potentially nefarious intents and
therefore raised suspicions. We might recall in this respect how Adri-
ana deftly transformed a suspected water divination with a group of
women friends into work for her religious sisterhood in order to estab-
lish her sanctioned social place.
Although domestic confinement was the ideal, many women had no
other means of subsistence than ‘‘the power or skill of their hands.’’Ω∞
Women compelled by economic circumstances to be on the outside
were mostly non-Spanish or poor Spanish women (of which there
were few, since there were few Spanish women altogether). They la-
bored at domestic tasks such as dressmaking and cooking both outside
and inside the home, worked in mines and sweatshops, and ran small
commercial enterprises. Unable to comply with enclosure etiquette
due to their class and their caste status, these women inevitably lost
honor and value.Ω≤ Adriana tempered this potential loss by running a
boarding house, thereby earning a livelihood that melded the domestic
and extra-domestic spheres. She also had three slaves who performed
household chores for her. Free women who had to work outside their
homes did such chores for pay, and were often called into other homes
to help elite women or single men manage their own domestic tasks.
Like women, Indians had their ‘‘appropriate’’ place in the moral
economy, and when they were not engaged in outside labor under
Spanish supervision they were also subject to forms of enclosure. In an
echo of women’s domestic spaces, they were expected to remain in the
villages of the Indian Republic. Just as husbands, fathers, and priests
were supposed to teach women right from wrong, so too were Span-

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iards supposed to teach Indians. Enclosed Indians could be protected
from the dissolute. They could also be organized for e≈cient prayer
and production by the priests who morally guided them, and by the
Spanish district o≈cials who supervised them and made them available
for tribute and labor drafts.
We might highlight here the fact that while domestic labor for the
benefit of men was performed mostly by women (of all castes), public
labor for Spaniards was performed mostly by Indians (including some
Indian women). While not all women were removed from public life,
and while not all (and of course not only) Indians labored for Span-
iards, it could be argued that ideals of honor made men ‘‘Spanish’’ by
distancing them from manual production both inside and outside the
home as colonial labor became the domain of women and Indian pro-
ducers.Ω≥ Because the producer/consumer relation between women
and men parallels the one between Indian and Spaniards, the caste/
gender analogies under consideration here can be extended to include
the idea that Indians were ‘‘feminized’’ and women were ‘‘Indianized’’
through the dishonor of production.

laziness and escape:

the perils of production

Enclosure was meant to increase productive capacities and cultivate

moral qualities. But both women and Indians had to be coerced into
focusing their energies on their appropriate tasks, and both were con-
stantly on the verge of moral escape. Indians were ‘‘such loafers,’’ Arch-
bishop Montúfar wrote in 1554, that they did not even want to ‘‘work
for themselves.’’Ω∂ And as a viceroy wrote to the king some fifty years
later, ‘‘experience has shown the Indians are enemies of work, and they
cannot be persuaded in any way nor are they inclined [to do] what is so
opposite their nature.’’Ω∑ Indian idleness and unwillingness to work
were seen as vices that could and should be cured by benevolence.Ω∏ Yet
church and state demands could not long be ignored while Indians
were gently coaxed into performing their duties. Just as straying wives
were physically disciplined ‘‘within reason’’ by their husbands,Ωπ Indian
‘‘laziness’’ was met with force, as we saw with the priest Zarate and the
Metepec foremen who called Indians ‘‘dogs’’ as they beat them.
Indians responded to such force by fleeing and hiding, thereby elud-
ing the control that Spaniards tried to impose.Ω∫ As they left their dying

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villages, they dodged labor obligations and escaped abusive neighbors
while avoiding the surveillance of Spanish priests and friars, who la-
mented that escaped Indians were living without catechism and mass.
Colonial discourse linked this lack of religious instruction to general
social disorder. In the words of one priest, who was referring to the
Coyoacán region just south of Mexico City, ‘‘[Indians abandon] estab-
lished villages, and have gone up, and continue to go up, to live in the
hills and mountains [where] they make their fields, leaving much good
land and the comforts of their villages.’’ They ‘‘lack religious instruc-
tion,’’ he continued. ‘‘If it is not stopped . . . it will do general and
irreparable harm to the republics.’’ΩΩ
The ‘‘hills and mountains’’ to which Indians fled were extra-domestic
wilderness spaces where they lived without appropriate supervision—
like cimarrones, Chichimecs, and women who escaped their homes.
And it is no coincidence that in the wilderness witchcraft and devils
flourished; it was there that Indians readied the herbs and powders
used for witchcraft. These spaces thus symbolized the intertwined
themes of sacrilege and moral flaccidity, an entwinement made more
explicit by Archbishop Montúfar: ‘‘Not with little labor,’’ he observed
while connecting work, discipline, and prayer, ‘‘do the religious find
themselves having to undo the tangle of . . . indolence’’ once Indian
runaways were redirected to their care. In a somewhat convoluted way,
then, witchcraft might be seen as a consequence of the Indian un-
willingness to do sanctioned work and therefore as both a challenge to
and a confirmation of the state’s organization of Indian labor. For
Indians sold their witchcraft to a wide clientele, and thus did join the
market economy—they just produced something other than what the
state desired.
Female slothfulness was also a sign of witchcraft. Food preparation,
in particular, was a double-edged sword, for women could nourish
with food or use it to ensorcel. Ensorcelling often entailed feeding with
adulterated victuals, but withholding food altogether could also be a
sign that a woman was a witch, for it too spoke to her transgression
of the gendered rules of production, which included not just making
good food but furnishing food at all. In support of this point, we can
take a brief look at what happened to the mulatto Francesca Cerdan,
who was knocked to the ground at her home in Vera Cruz by a Span-
iard named Francisco when she failed to produce his midday meal. She
claimed to be ill and unable to do so, and went on to describe an
altercation that illuminates gender roles and qualities: she explained to

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the inquisitors that she had resisted when the Spaniard physically as-
saulted her, and protested when he tore a religious print from her wall
(an act that of course equated women’s laziness with their lack of Chris-
tian principles). But the Spaniard dismissed her objections. ‘‘What do
you know?’’ he allegedly asked her. And then he said that ‘‘he knew
more because he was a man.’’∞≠≠
This gendered representation of links between knowledge and power
was bolstered by another of the Spaniard’s contentions: that the woman
had been seduced by the devil, who turned her into a witch. She, in
turn, had allegedly ‘‘tied’’ (ligar) the Spaniard so that he was unable to
have intercourse with any woman but her.∞≠∞ His loss of control over
her productivity (the fact that she failed to nourish him with a meal)
thus led to the loss of his own (he was unable to have sexual relations
with any woman he desired). These losses were further linked in his
mind to the mulatto woman’s perversions of the closely intertwined
themes of legitimate sexuality, religious orthodoxy, and gender power.
In the end, then, the Spaniard’s maleness depended on the mulatto
woman carrying out her proper female role, but through her own
laziness, which was so attractive to the devil, she undermined the sanc-
tioned order that surrendered women’s material production and moral
guidance to the control of men.
We might be inclined to believe that women and Indians were re-
garded as evil with their disobedience interpreted as resistance. Yet
disobedience was deeply enmeshed in issues of power, and therefore in
the imputed qualities that rendered women and Indians subordinate in
the first place. Again, one way to understand this subordination is to
draw on the metaphor of the child, which was invoked with reference
to both women and Indians as capricious, ignorant, and weak, and apt
to get into trouble when they escaped the control of their superiors.
When Indians fled spaces governed by Spaniards, including their own
villages, they essentially left ‘‘civilization’’ and returned to their old
ways in hills populated by witchcraft and the devil. And women who
literally or figuratively fled the confines of domesticity were also return-
ing themselves to a ‘‘pre-social’’ state by unwittingly hurling themselves
into a world full of ‘‘corruption and dishonor,’’ a world that, as we shall
see, was also full of witches and devils.∞≠≤ In some profound sense,
Spaniards and men saw themselves battling the forces of nature, doing
so in part by socializing and civilizing ‘‘immature’’ Indians and women.
Thus, the religious and colonial o≈cials tried to keep Indians in their
villages in order to teach them Christian ideals of work and prayer,

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while the Inquisition punished women by, for instance, confining them
to their homes, which they were to leave only to attend mass.

breaching the borders

Enclosure as a cognitive metaphor for the state of women and Indians

persisted, as did the image of the outside as a source of corruption. But
it was also inevitable that the borders between domestic and public,
control and disorder, would be breached. The most serious threats
came from ‘‘darkness’’: non-Spaniards, especially, were among the
‘‘dangerous guardians of the erotic arts,’’ and dark women were doubly
a∆icted with ‘‘superstitious’’ tendencies.∞≠≥ Spanish women routinely
had contact with non-Spaniards, including the female slaves and ser-
vants they brought into their homes and the ones they mingled with
outside. These women then became important conduits for nefarious
forces brought directly into Spanish homes, and so often inflicted on
Spanish men. The devil himself was typically a dark-skinned man, and
he at times invaded women’s beds.
Inter-caste contact also provided occasions for the social boundaries
between Indians and Spaniards to blur and for the social order to
reverse, in part through the alliances blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos
forged with Indians beyond watchful Spanish eyes. Ironically, these
intermediaries facilitated Indian productivity for Spaniards, and were
therefore vital to colonization processes that depended on the inter-
penetration rather than on the separation of the Spanish and Indian
worlds. In many ways blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos figured in the
Spanish domination of Indians and their communities. The exploita-
tion Spaniards inflicted on Indians through these intermediaries in-
evitably led to Spanish intervention not only because, as the Indian
Juana’s Spanish comadre Leonor put it, ‘‘it look[ed] bad to be mistreat-
ing natives,’’ but also because Spaniards feared a≈liations among the
lower orders.

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 Notes

introduction

1 I refer to hechicería as ‘‘witchcraft’’ following Behar (1987a, 1987b) who

translates hechicera/o variously as ‘‘witch,’’ ‘‘shaman,’’ or ‘‘sorcer/ess,’’ yet
calls the whole complex ‘‘witchcraft.’’ In the New World the definition of
witchcraft included classic European practices like devil-worship, ora-
tions, divination, causing male sexual impotence (ligatura), and also and
especially the use of herbs and powders, and forms of divination associ-
ated with Indians. The Inquisition distinguished between ‘‘explicit’’ and
‘‘implicit’’ pacts with the devil, depending primarily on whether the per-
petrator was male or female, as I discuss below.
2 agn, Inq vol. 457, exp. 16, 1655.
3 Emphasis added. Defense attorneys (who were referred to as letrados
or abogados, depending on their training) were routinely assigned to
defendants, including to slaves (for example, agn, Inq vol. 444, exp. 4,
1659).
4 As Van Young notes, such texts are where ‘‘private lives cross the public
record’’ (1999: 238).
5 The term casta also sometimes referred to colonial Mexican blacks, mu-
lattoes, and mestizos as a group.
6 On many levels my argument contrasts with that made by Cope in his
study of the impact of colonial Mexican ‘‘racial’’ ideologies on ‘‘plebe-
ians’’ (1994). For example, Cope interprets the evidence to suggest that
the caste system was ‘‘not ritually woven into the fabric of daily life’’
(1992: 162) and that the fluidity of that system indexed the failure of
colonial domination rather than its success, as I argue here. Cope also
understands class as more meaningful to plebeians than race, whereas I

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 understand class and caste to be overlapping idioms about di√erence and
hierarchy.
7 I expand on these issues in chapter 1 (pages 22–26), and note also my
own earlier tendency to blend concepts that I now see as more distinct.
8 Foucault 1978: 96.
9 Foucault 1978: 92–94; 1982: 220–21; Dirks et al. 1994: 9. This is not to
say that my framework is entirely Foucauldian. For instance, whereas
Foucault seems to ‘‘look everywhere else but the state’’ for relations of
power (Dirks et al. 1994: 7; Foucault 1980: 121–22) I was led to inevi-
tably consider the colonial state as a kind of social actor. In part this is
because early modern Spanish thinkers did not separate the state from
society (McAlister 1963: 349), and indeed Foucault’s work mostly con-
cerns the modern state. But it is also because the material itself implicates
the state in surprisingly direct ways.
10 Comaro√ and Comaro√ underscore this point particularly well when
they draw connections between what ethnographers and cultural histo-
rians do. Both recover ‘‘dispersed fragments’’ of subaltern worlds, the
one from the field and the other from texts. Understanding those frag-
ments requires their contextualization in a wider world that is ‘‘home to
other dramatic personae’’: the bourgeoisie, the missionaries, the colo-
nizers, the elite (1992: 16–17). Their important observation that in
many ways ethnographers are no more privileged than historians is a
crucial counter to historians’ often confused understanding of ethno-
graphic interpretations as ‘‘verifiable’’ by informants who can serve as a
‘‘check on the anthropological imagination’’ (Mallon 1999: 334; Van
Young 1999). To my way of thinking, a historian’s ‘‘rehydration’’ of texts
into rich cultural worlds is more easily checked because the texts remain
in the archives, where anyone can read them. In contrast, the ethnogra-
pher’s moments are lost as soon as they happen, and verification by the
natives of an ethnographer’s reading is shaped by the subject positions of
the natives, who are as diverse as the inhabitants of the ethnographer’s
world.
11 McAlister 1963: 350.
12 The term weakness and variations thereof are repeatedly associated with
women and Indians in colonial texts. Franco writes in this regard that
‘‘the ‘natural’ weakness of women was the ideological pin that rotated the
axis of power’’ in New Spain (1989: xiii; Silverblatt 1987: 161). I extend
the implications of this observation to Indians.
13 Munn 1986: 311.
14 Munn 1986: 215.
15 Munn 1986: 233.
16 Munn 1986: 215.
17 Raymond Williams 1977: 114. I find the most fruitful discussions on the
nature of hegemony to be ones that, like Williams’s, present it as process
and conflict rather than as ‘‘end point’’ and consent (Comaro√ and Co-
maro√ 1991: 19–27; 1992; Mallon 1999; Roseberry 1994; Taussig 1987).
For recent perspectives on the relationship between resistance and domi-

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 nation see Abu-Lughod 1990; Jean Comaro√ 1985; John Comaro√ 1989;
Comaro√ and Comaro√ 1991: 26; Foucault 1978: 95; 1982: 21; Ortner
1993; Roseberry 1994; Sayer 1994; James Scott 1985, 1990; Taussig 1987.
18 Roseberry 1994: 358.
19 For Comaro√ and Comaro√, hegemony’s fissures are what permit the
emergence of ideological contestation and social change (1991: 26–27).
I mean to emphasize a slightly di√erent take on hegemony, one that sees
the fissures themselves as part of the hegemonic project.
20 Taussig 1987.
21 Taussig 1987: 220.
22 I have found the following works, which draw from Latin American and
other contexts, especially helpful for thinking through class/race and
gender/race coconstructions: Banet-Weiser 1999; Bourgois 1989; de
la Cadena 1991; Friedlander 1975; Gilman 1991, 1985; Hendrickson
1991; Martínez-Alier 1989; Smedley 1999; Stepan 1990; Stoler 1989; and
White 1985.
23 Unlike Stern, I think a ‘‘reliable picture of enduring gender patterns’’ can
be culled from what he sees as the ‘‘experimental’’ and ‘‘fluid’’ quality of
sixteenth-century colonial Mexican social relations (1995: 22). As shall
become clear, my perspectives on gender issues in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries have been shaped in part by the work of Alberro
(1987), Behar (1987a, 1987b, 1989), and Franco (1989) on Mexico,
Silverblatt (1987) on Peru, and Perry (1999, 1992, 1990) on Spain. Most
of these authors deal either fully or in part with the politics of witchcraft,
but generally with reference to women.
24 Dean 1999: 47.
25 For instance, Jean Comaro√ 1985; John Comaro√ 1989; Comaro√ and
Comaro√ 1991; Cooper and Stoler 1989, 1997; Dirks 1992b; Stoler
1989, 1992a.
26 On the history of disciplinary boundaries, parallels, and shortcomings
see Axel 2002.
27 See especially Mallon 1994 and Comaro√ and Comaro√ 1992.
28 Mallon 1994; Joseph and Nugent 1994; Spivak 1988: 197–221.
29 Axel 2002: 2–3.
30 Coroníl 1997: 16.
31 As Mallon writes in her discussion of the ways in which Latin American-
ists have taken up subaltern studies, ‘‘most subalterns are both domi-
nated and dominating subjects, depending on the circumstances and the
location in which we encounter them’’ (1994: 1511). See also Ortner
(1993) on the failure to grapple with the ethnographic messiness of
subalternity, particularly in the Latin American scholarship.
32 See especially Mallon 1994; the essays in hahr 1999 (especially Van
Young 1999); and Knight 2002. Van Young argues that the move to put
culture into history only dates back to 1990 or so (1999: 221), but
certainly one of cultural history’s main concerns—recovering the voices
of members of marginalized groups—can probably be traced back to
Gibson’s pathbreaking work (1964) (as Van Young also acknowledges).

Notes to Pages 7–10 187

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 With its focus on Indian peoples, Gibson’s book marked a transition
from older Mexican historiography almost uniformly focused on Span-
ish institutions and perspectives (Leonard 1959; Ricard 1966; Simpson
1982; Chevalier 1963). More recent work has focused on subordinated
peoples, probing in the main the intersection of Indian and Spanish
visions and values (Behar 1987a; Burkhart 1989; Cline 1986; Gruzinski
1988, 1989, 1993; Farriss 1984; Hanks 1986; Haskett 1991b; Kellogg
1995; León-Portilla 1994; Lockhart 1991, 1992; Oueweneel 1995; Seed
1991; Taylor 1979). Scholars have also recently extended attention to the
histories of women (Alberro 1987; Arrom 1985; Behar 1987b, 1989;
Giraud 1987; Gonzalbo 1987; Franco 1989; Lavrin 1978, 1989; Stern
1995) and to the largely unexplored experiences of blacks (Aguirre Bel-
trán 1972; Alberro 1979; Carroll 1991a; Martínez Montiel 1994; Palmer
1976) and the urban lower classes (Hoberman and Socolow 1986; Cope
1994).
33 The issues outlined here are discussed by Knight (2002) and Van Young
(1999).
34 Van Young 1999: 243–44; Knight 2002: 142.
35 Knight 2002: 142.
36 Ortner 1993: 186. See also Comaro√ and Comaro√ 1992.
37 See Note on Sources.
38 Knight 2002: 136.
39 Hoberman 1991: 6.
40 Although I did not use ethnographic evidence to guide my historical
work—having done the latter long before the former—some of the pat-
terns to which the present study speaks are still apparent in the histori-
cally black region of Mexico where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork
today. See Lewis 2000, 2001; Flanet 1977.

1 forging a colonial landscape

1 Neighboring territories such as Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, Nuevo

León, and Nuevo México had their own judicial bodies, but they all also
answered to Mexico City.
2 Hoberman 1991: 22. The Viceroyalty of New Spain eventually included
territories in North America as well as Central America, the Caribbean,
and the Philippines. The Viceroyalty of Peru, with the viceregal seat in
Lima, included in its jurisdiction parts of Central America and South
America.
3 Rama 1984. Late-eighteenth-century urban Mexican spaces were also
organized along caste lines. For instance, Spaniards occupied the center
of the city of Xalapa (Veracruz), mulattoes and mestizos the periphery of
this core, and Indians the outlying villages (Carroll 1991a: 115, fig. 4).
4 This summary draws on Hoberman, who provides a detailed overview of
production and trade during this period (1991: 1–32). Other sources on
specific aspects of the colonial economy are cited where appropriate.

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5 Over the three hundred year colonial period, about two hundred thou-
sand slaves were brought to New Spain (Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 81–95;
Rout 1977: 95, 279). New Spain’s (and Peru’s) slave importations
slowed dramatically during the late seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, as the colonists’ need for slave labor became less acute. By the end
of the eighteenth century, slave importations were occurring mostly in
sparsely inhabited districts of the Yucatán, and the Mexican popula-
tion included only about nine thousand enslaved blacks and mulattoes
(Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 15–95). When slavery was abolished with inde-
pendence in the early nineteenth century, it had in fact nearly ended: in
1821 fewer than three thousand people were still enslaved in what would
become the Mexican Republic. The Mexican trade needs to be under-
stood in tandem with that of other New World colonies. The scholar-
ship is massive and impossible to cite here but the broad contours of the
trade (from Klein 1986) are as follows: by 1700 the trade to Spanish
America had been eclipsed by Brazil and the West Indies, where sugar
production was developing. As the plantation system took hold in the
sugar-producing islands (Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint Domingue),
where African slaves outnumbered Europeans, Brazil’s output dropped
to third place, and gold mining came to dominate the Brazilian economy.
By the end of the eighteenth century, a new stage of Spanish American
slavery centering on Cuba and Puerto Rico took shape as Saint Do-
mingue experienced a slave rebellion that led to revolution, and dropped
out of the sugar market. In the nineteenth century, Cuba came to domi-
nate the sugar industry and Brazil rebounded as the second largest pro-
ducer. At the same time, the United States became the largest slave so-
ciety in the Americas.
6 Historical demographers have long debated the size of Mexico’s precon-
quest population (see McAlister 1984: 83–85). Although some estimates
are higher, a figure of twenty-five million, mostly concentrated in the
central valley, is generally accepted. The population likely spiraled to a
low of perhaps one million to one and a half million by the first decades
of the seventeenth century and began to rebound in the 1650s (Cook and
Borah 1979; Gerhard 1972: 22–23). It tends to be forgotten that diseases
also felled great numbers of Africans on slave ships and once they were in
the New World (Gerhard 1972: 25; Palmer 1976: 49), and that blacks as
well as Indians died from malnutrition, overwork, and violence. Wood-
row Borah (1951) has characterized the seventeenth century as one of
economic depression brought on by the decline in the Indian popula-
tion. Subsequent studies show, however, that trade and mining grew
until the 1630s, contracted from the 1640s through the 1660s or 1670s,
and experienced something of an erratic recovery until the end of the
century. Market-oriented agriculture remained strong throughout this
period, while textile enterprises expanded into new regions (Hoberman
1991: 16–17).
7 See Stern 1988.
8 Kellogg 1995: 48–49; Lockhart 1992: 166–70.

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 9 Semo 1973; Stern 1988; Zavala 1988.
10 On the New World encomienda see Gibson 1964: 58–97, 194–219; Liss
1975; Lockhart 1992: 28–29; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: 68–71; Mac-
Lachlan 1988; Robert Williams 1990; Zavala 1992. Some precedent for
encomienda existed in Spain, where the Crown awarded ‘‘deserving per-
sons or corporations’’ with temporary rights to dues and services from
villagers (McAlister 1984: 157). The Mexica state had also collected
tribute and draft labor from subjugated populations.
11 Robert Williams 1990: 86.
12 Ulloa 1977; Robert Williams 1990: 85–86; Zavala 1992: 20–36.
13 Robert Williams 1990: 86–88; Liss 1975: 18.
14 Zavala 1992: 40–73.
15 Liss 1975: 96.
16 By the beginning of the seventeenth century, in areas most closely con-
nected to the Spanish economy, tribute in money began to be paid along-
side tribute in kind (Lockhart 1992: 180), but money did not replace in-
kind tribute for some time (Semo 1973: 87).
17 Indian enslavement continued in Central Mexico for at least a decade
after the New Laws were implemented (Haskett 1991a: 453) and for an
even longer period at the colony’s peripheries. Forms of slavery had also
existed in pre-Columbian times throughout the Americas (Clendinnen
1991: 101; Gibson 1964: 153). Following the conquest, Indian slave-
holding of other Indians was forbidden under Spanish law as all Indians
became subordinated to Spaniards. Indian nobles in Mexico nevertheless
continued to hold Indian slaves until the middle of the sixteenth century
(Gibson 1964: 154).
18 Cintrón Tiryakian 1979: 28; Liss 1975: 40; MacLachlan 1988: 58–65.
19 On the nature of Spanish kingship in this period see especially Cintrón
Tiryakian 1979; Hoberman 1980; MacLachlan 1988; and Elliott 1989.
20 MacLachlan 1988: 1–12; Elliott 1989: 167.
21 McAlister 1963: 353; MacLachlan 1988: 13–19.
22 Miserable referred to Crown paternalism toward Indians, and to Indian
‘‘wretchedness’’ due to poverty and illness. Borah (1983) argues that the
term emerged in tandem with the move away from Indian autonomy and
toward the political and legal incorporation of Indians as a class in Span-
ish society.
23 McAlister 1963: 358; Borah 1983: 13, 80.
24 Zavala 1988: 217. Since the work of Chevalier (1963) and Borah (1951),
a primary focus of Mexican agrarian history has been the development of
the hacienda system and the prevalence of debt as a ‘‘controlling feature
of labor’’ (Bauer 1979: 62). Chevalier’s and Borah’s analyses of the ‘‘feu-
dal’’ Mexican countryside with its large, and underproductive, estates
and labor forces held captive through debt-peonage (Van Young 1983:
10) was not contradicted until Gibson published his findings that debt-
peonage was less prevalent than earlier studies had suggested (1964:
248–49). While I have nothing to add to the debate, I refer the reader to
Van Young’s excellent review of the scholarship on this issue (1983), and

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 to the work of Bauer (1979), who suggests that the practice prevailed
only in Yucatán and southeast Mexico.
25 Gibson 1964: 149–50; MacLachlan 1974: 30–31; Cope 1994: 20–21.
26 Gibson 1964: 282–83; Lockhart 1992: 44–46. Although most congrega-
ciones were formed during the seventeenth century, the earliest ones date
to the middle of the sixteenth century (Gerhard 1975; Lockhart 1992:
45). Lockhart discusses the complex ways in which Spanish political
organization a√ected, and was a√ected by, the central settlements of
indigenous altepetl units, territorial entities headed by dynastic rulers
(1992: 14–58).
27 Gibson 1964: 282–89; Lockhart 1992: 164–70.
28 Zavala 1988; Gerhard 1972: 17–22.
29 Gibson 1964: 84–85.
30 Even before Columbus’s voyages, African slave labor was established in a
limited way in Spain and on the Portuguese-controlled islands o√ the
West African coast, where the sugar plantation model that would later
dominate the Caribbean had already taken root.
31 Palmer 1976: 8.
32 Palmer 1976: 6–10. Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to control who
entered the New World in order to exclude those—such as Jews and
Moors—who might seriously undermine processes of conversion. As a
result, Islamic ‘‘Wolof ’’ slaves from Guinea were the most systematically
kept out of the colonies (Palmer 1976: 7).
33 Between the initial conquest in 1519 and 1640, when the indigenous
population was on the rebound and large numbers of mulattoes and mes-
tizos had been added to the labor force, probably one hundred thousand
African slaves arrived in New Spain (Palmer 1995: 226). In the sixteenth
century, slaves came mostly from West Africa (Senegal, Guinea-Bissau,
and Sierra Leone); in the seventeenth century they were drawn more
from Central Africa, principally from Angola and the Congo (Palmer
1976: 20–23). Palmer attributes this shift to the Portuguese penetration
of Angola (1976: 20–21; Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 240–41). The first black
in the Americas was actually probably a free man who arrived with Co-
lumbus in 1493. At least one free black, a man named Juan Garrido, also
accompanied the first conquistadors to Mexico, who also brought several
black slaves. Garrido might have taken part in the conquest of Tenochtit-
lán. He was definitely involved in post-conquest expeditions to control
outlying lands, and was the first person to farm wheat in Mexico (Ger-
hard 1978).
34 Israel 1975: 63–64; Palmer 1976: 6–35; Aguirre Beltrán 1972.
35 agn, rco vol. 6, exp. 232, 1619.
36 Partly due to sexual imbalances in the population, the replenishment of
slaves depended more on the external trade than on internal reproduc-
tion (Palmer 1976: ch. 1; Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 240–41).
37 Konrad 1980: chap. 10.
38 Davidson 1979; Dusenberry 1948; Palmer 1976: chaps. 2 and 3.
39 I cannot do justice here to the arguments surrounding the nature of slave

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 societies in the Americas. Essentially, the liberal nature of Spanish laws
prompted a generation of comparativists to argue that the traditional
(Catholic) customs and institutions of Spanish America tempered the
harsh realities of the Protestant/capitalist slaveholding societies of the
north (Tannenbaum 1947; Elkins 1976; Klein 1967, 1969). The com-
parison seems a faulty exercise in ethnology, however, as it presents Prot-
estant North America as the norm and Catholic Latin America as the
romanticized other. The question is still unresolved (Smith 1992: 358).
Part of the problem is that legislation and implementation are two dif-
ferent things. The Spanish and Portuguese were clearly ‘‘tainted by racial
prejudice’’ (Davis 1969: 70; also Mörner 1969; Sweet 1978; Rout 1977),
and Genovese maintains that in some respects the treatment of slaves
in Latin America—especially in nineteenth-century Brazil—was much
harsher than it was in North America. Keeping di√erent time frames in
perspective, he also points out that North America had its share of pater-
nalism (1967; also Davis 1969: 75–76). Davis argues that although it is
probably true that ‘‘slavery in Latin America, compared with that in
North America, was less subject to the pressures of competitive capital-
ism and was closer to a system of patriarchal rights and semifeudalistic
services,’’ scholars also need to stop opposing ‘‘patriarchy’’ to ‘‘capital-
ism’’ (1969: 73). Slavery was not radically di√erent in the two contexts,
he contends, but rather di√erent manifestations of the same general
construct. I would add that we should also contextualize slavery in de-
veloping racial ideologies, which were themselves linked in important
ways to capitalism. As I discuss in chapter 7, the Latin American evi-
dence suggests that in the eighteenth century race began shifting from a
lineage-based ideology that allowed for mobility (caste) to one that
emphasized exclusion (race). We therefore need to understand di√erent
forms of slavery in concert with changing racial ideas, as race became a
more di≈cult line to cross in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
when scientific theories promoted competitive models that supported
sharp racial distinctions as well as free market economics.
40 Cope finds high rates of endogamy in a late-seventeenth-century Mexico
City parish for all social groups (1994: 80), but he also points out that
because most black women in seventeenth-century Mexico were slaves
(1994: 81), they were not favored as marriage partners by free persons,
or even by male slaves, who were more likely to marry free persons
themselves (1994: 81; see also Love 1971; Palmer 1976: 56; 1995: 219–
20).
41 The state did not actively intervene in marriage choice until the latter part
of the eighteenth century. This issue is taken up in chapter 7.
42 agn, Inq vol. 29, exp. 4, 1572.
43 Palmer 1976: 173–79; Davidson 1979: 88; but see agn, Inq vol. 418,
exp. 4, 1643; agn, Criminal vol. 685, exp. 4, 1622 for exceptions.
44 Palmer 1976: 176–78; Rout 1977: 90. Most free women and children
were in fact mulatto. Palmer believes that this reflects slaveholders’ favor-
able treatment of persons of Spanish/black ancestry over ‘‘pure’’ blacks

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 (1976: 179). However, as ‘‘mulatto’’ also referred to people of Indian/
black ancestry, it is equally likely that the high numbers of free mulattoes
can be accounted for by the fact that many of them were free because of
the status held by their Indian mothers.
45 Palmer 1976: 43; Karasch 1986: 253; Cope 1994: 88, table 5.1. Although
free blacks and mulattoes were restricted from participation in particular
craft guilds, an area in which Indians were encouraged to develop their
skills (Gibson 1964: 398–99; Cope 1994: 88–90), these guilds never-
theless appear to have been the main avenues for freedmen’s economic
advancement because labor shortages created opportunities for them
(Bowser 1972: 50; Johnson 1986: 238–39). This, however, was the only
Spanish profession into which free blacks, especially, made inroads.
46 Black and mulatto women, for instance, were forbidden from wearing
silks and adorning themselves with gold, silver, and pearls, because doing
so meant that they were ‘‘trying to put themselves ahead of Spanish
women’’ (agn, Ord vol. 2, exp. 169, f. 158v, 1604; also agn, rcd vol. 3,
exp. 182bis, f. 157, 1598, which also refers to the appropriate dress for
mulatto men, and Gage 1958: 68) A later decree allowed free black and
mulatto women who paid tribute to adorn themselves with gold and
silver, and to wear silk capes and dresses (agn, rcd vol. 48, exp. 247, f.
160v–161r, 1644).
47 agn, Ord vol. 3, exp. 56, 77v, 1618; and vol. 4, exp. 40, f. 40v, 1622; agn,
rcd vol. 48, exp. 440, fs. 320r–321r, 1644; also Cope 1994: 18.
48 Pitt-Rivers 1971; Corominas and Pascual 1980, vol. 1: 913–16.
49 In earlier versions of this work (Lewis 1996a, 1996b, 1995, 1993) I did
not make this distinction either.
50 agn, Inq vol. 206, exp. 5, 1593.
51 Corominas and Pascual 1980, vol. 4: 800.
52 Covarrubias implicitly tied blood to ‘‘biological’’ inheritance by noting
that ‘‘blood . . . sometimes signifies kinship ( parentesco)’’ ([1611] 1984:
925). (Smith also notes the links between concepts of race in modern
Euro-America and kinship through the concept of ‘‘a common sub-
stance symbolized by blood’’ [1992: 265].)
53 Covarrubias [1611] 1984: 896–97; Root 1988. The derogatory aspects of
raza might also be related to a similar Spanish word, raça, which signified
‘‘defect or blemish in a piece of cloth’’ (Delacampagne 1983: 33; Stolcke
1991: 24; Corominas and Pascual 1980, vol. 4: 800). Covarrubias defines
this blemish as ‘‘the thread unlike the rest of the threads in the weft’’
([1611] 1984: 896).
54 Unconverted Jews did not fall under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction in the
fourteen years leading up to their 1492 expulsion, but suspected con-
versos were persecuted in Spain until the end of the eighteenth century.
Moors were forced to convert beginning in the early sixteenth century,
but moriscos were not expelled for another hundred years.
55 Root 1988: 132; Perry 1999.
56 Covarrubias [1611] 1984: 316.
57 Corominas and Pascual 1980, vol. 1: 914–15. They add that ‘‘it is much

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 easier to move from the general idea of ‘class or kind’ to a ‘kind apart,’
[or] ‘pure lineage,’ than the reverse’’ (ibid.).
58 Covarrubias [1611] 1984: 824. Although he states that ‘‘nature’’ derived
from ‘‘caste or nation’’ (emphasis added), which might suggest that caste
and nation were interchangeable, it rather seems that he means to dis-
tinguish them, for he does not include ‘‘nation’’ in his definition of caste.
59 Lomnitz 1993: 263–64; Silverblatt 2002.
60 Silverblatt 2002: 106.
61 Lyle McAlister’s well-known and often-cited definition of New World
caste includes adherence to religious orthodoxy (1963: 355). Yet one
reason why this does not make sense is that blacks were in fact legally
inferior to Indians, who were on the whole less orthodox than blacks.
62 Lomnitz 1993: 273–74.
63 Katzew also addresses this issue (1996: 10–11) but with reference to the
later colonial context that I return to in chapter 7.
64 Lomnitz 1993: 269–70.
65 Pagden 1982: 71; Solano 1990: 18.
66 Only Tenochtitlán and the Inca center of Cuzco were completely de-
stroyed and replaced with new cities. Dean discusses how the colonizers
actually used fragments of indigenous architectural structures to con-
struct their own buildings in Cuzco (1999: 25–26). Colonial urban set-
tlements were built to enclose and protect Spaniards. As Solano writes,
they ‘‘were evidence of permanent possession, of dominion, of the con-
stant presence of sovereignty’’ (1990: 20).
67 In Mexico indio was sometimes followed by further descriptive qualifiers
describing the exact ethnic group, such as otomí or tarasco. Indians were
less frequently referred to as naturales (natives). According to Lockhart,
while other ethnic terms brought by the Spanish became Nahuatl loan-
words, indio was an exception. By 1600, away from Spaniards, so-called
indios, regardless of rank, referred to themselves as macehualli which, at
the time of the conquest, was the Nahuatl term for ‘‘commoner’’ (1992:
114–15). According to Kellogg, however, Indian elites used macegual in
a derogatory way (1995: 71).
68 Haskett 1991b.
69 Following the conquest, the Indian nobility convinced Spaniards that it
had not paid tribute, even though it had (Lockhart 1992: 106; 132).
Lockhart (1992: 130–31) argues that the nobility survived for a much
longer period than that suggested by Gibson (1964: 163–64). Although
its members continued to marry among themselves, many became ‘‘His-
panicized in their material culture’’ (Gibson 1964: 154), which com-
moners also adopted in complex ways (Lockhart 1991: 3–4). Some com-
moners also began to accumulate wealth and to be recognized as nobles,
thereby turning what had principally been a hereditary rank into an
achieved one (Gibson 1964: 156).
70 Archivo General de la Nación 1938: 16, 12. Non-Indians, in turn, could
not dress like Indian commoners. One mestizo woman who dressed in

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 Indian attire claimed to be too poor to dress like an ‘‘ordinary’’ Spaniard
(agn, gp vol. 4, exps. 502 and 505, fs. 142–43, 1591).
71 agn, Ind vol. 32, exp. 73, 1692.
72 This point is elaborated in chapter 2, n. 8. It should also be noted here
that many missionaries thought Indians had been seduced by the devil,
and many were not sure of which force—God or the devil—inspired
Indians. This point is taken up in chapter 5.
73 Trexler 1984.
74 The meaning of the word chichimec is unknown, but it was used by
the indigenous peoples of Central Mexico to refer in a generic way to
nomadic northern groups (Behar 1987b: 132–35). Particularly in the
territory of Nueva Galicia, with important silver deposits around Zaca-
tecas, Chichimec nomads gained a reputation for fierceness that con-
trasted sharply with sedentary Central Mexican agriculturalists and their
neighbors. See Powell (1975) for a history of early Spanish colonization
of the northern zones of Mexico.
75 Trexler 1984: 199.
76 Pagden 1982: 77.
77 agn, Criminal vol. 369, exp. 2, 1661. Covarrubias defines duendes as
house spirits that in ancient times accompanied people in their daily lives
([1611] 1984: 752). In the European Middle Ages elves or fairies were
‘‘part of the great army of good and bad spirits with which the world was
thought to be infested’’ and were frequently considered ‘‘highly malevo-
lent’’ (Thomas 1971: 606–7).
78 agn, rcd vol. 47, exp. 423, f. 262, 1567; agn, rcd vol. 4, exp. 17, 1651.
On the northern frontier churches and priests represented institutional
authority in an area where other institutions were sparse. They played an
important role in pacifying Indians and implementing Spanish political
authority. Gutiérrez’s account of the Franciscan missions that ‘‘civilized’’
New Mexico is indispensable to an understanding of this process (1991).
Here, too, Indians targeted religious sacra.
79 Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain were portrayed in similar ways.
‘‘The association of Moriscos with disease,’’ writes Root, ‘‘resurfaces in
references to infection and vermin, and the need to ‘cleanse’ Spain and
make it ‘pure and clean from this people’ ’’ (1988: 131; Boase 1990).
80 agn, rcd vol. 30, exps. 8, 9, and 45, 1672. In places far from the centers
of Spanish settlement, such as New Mexico and presumably other areas
to the north of New Spain, Indian enslavement was also tolerated as a
form of compensation for settlers (Gutiérrez 1991: 150). In New Spain,
black slaves were always favored over Chichimec ones, and were much
more expensive. As a Spaniard noted somewhat redundantly when he
did not want to pay more than five pesos for the recovery of a runaway
Chichimec, ‘‘one must be charged less for a chichimec than for a black
because of the black’s higher value’’ (agn, gp vol. 1, exp. 74, f. 14–14v,
1575).
81 Pagden 1982: 33.

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82 Davis 1984: 65; Martínez-Alier 1989: 6; Jordan 1977.
83 Cited in Friede 1971: 165.
84 Scholars have debated Las Casas’s position on African slavery. For in-
stance, Friede notes that Las Casas began to have doubts about it. He did
not consider the institution itself to be inhuman. Instead, he seems to
have become aware of the unjust nature of the capture of black slaves by
Portuguese slavers (1971: 165–66). Also Bataillon 1971: 415–16. Mon-
túfar wrote to the king that ‘‘we do not know what reason exists that
blacks be captives more than Indians, because they willingly receive the
holy spirit and do not wage war against Christians’’ (bnah Archivo
Histórico, Colección Francisco de Paso y Troncoso, Legajo 115, June
1560); Friede (1971: 166).
85 Davis 1966: 63–64, n. 2. Medieval Arab writers also invoked this biblical
curse (Davis 1984: 42–43). Rout observes that for the mid-fifteenth-
century Portuguese chronicler Eanes de Zurana, ‘‘Canaan’s descendants
had [already] become a race’’ (1977: 12).
86 Sweet 1978: 110.
87 Sweet 1978: 105–6.
88 Fairchild 1934: 9–10. This perspective might point to the beginnings
of modern exclusionary racism. I will show later that as the colonial pe-
riod went on, blacks, like Jews and Moors in earlier periods, seemed to
be carved out for exclusion. This is evident in the late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century caste paintings that I discuss in chapter 3, and in the
Crown’s intervention in marriage choice toward the end of the eigh-
teenth century, which I discuss in chapter 7.
89 Covarrubias [1611] 1984: 826.
90 Zambo and zambaigo were also terms for black/Indian mixtures, but they
are rarely used in this documentation.
91 In New Mexico, where there were few blacks, mestizo and mulato were
both used to refer to someone of mixed Spanish/Indian ancestry (Gu-
tiérrez 1991: 197). I would speculate that this was because, like the
northern Chichimecs, Indians in New Mexico were considered more
barbarous than their Central Mexican counterparts and were therefore
classified somewhat the way blacks were in New Spain, where most
Indians were sedentary and closer to what Spaniards considered civi-
lized. As the terminologies developed in New Spain were increasingly
elaborated during the later colonial period, they displayed a marked
propensity to identify non-Spaniards, especially blacks and mulattoes,
with color or animal terms (Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 163–79; van den
Berghe 1978: 52; Palmer 1976: 41–42). Indeed, mulato and negro are
themselves animal and color terms.
92 agn, Inq vol. 559, exp. 1, 1652.
93 agn, Civil vol. 862, exp. 2, 1579; Zapata 1989: 73; Aguirre Beltrán 1972:
186–87. Whether or not Africans identified with people from their own
land has been little explored. Palmer has published an interesting study
suggesting that African-born blacks in Mexico preferred marriage part-
ners of similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds. He did not find the

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 same preferences among creole blacks (1995). Although I have not sys-
tematically investigated the question, I have found intriguing evidence
that cultural ties were indeed significant to African-born blacks. For in-
stance, one black slave, reporting on the Judaizing practices of a Spanish
captain as told to him by another black slave, who had heard it from an
Indian, who had heard it from one of the Spaniard’s mulatto slaves,
testified that he had told the other black slave that he would have to
confirm the story by asking yet another black, who was from ‘‘the same
land and would tell him the truth’’ (agn, Inq vol. 435 [1], f. 78, 1650).
94 Palmer 1995: 225.
95 Cited in Bataillon 1971: 417.
96 agn, Inq vol. 284, exp. 77, 1609.
97 Cimarrón also meant ‘‘untamed,’’ ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘savage,’’ and ‘‘uncultivated.’’
The word probably derived from the word cima (summit) because of the
mountains and woods to which runaways often fled (Corominas and
Pascual 1980, vol. 2). Most cimarrón communities were overrun. This
one seems to have been a satellite of San Lorenzo de los Negros, which
survived, but only by accommodating the realities of colonial domina-
tion through developing economic relationships with surrounding com-
munities and by agreeing to return runaway slaves in exchange for its
community’s independence (Carroll 1977). San Lorenzo (also called
San Lorenzo de Cerralvo) was headed by an African named Yanga and
granted a charter as a free settlement in 1612. Over a century later in the
same general vicinity of Veracruz, slave uprisings in sugar mills produced
new cimarrón activity. Through negotiations with colonial authorities,
these cimarrones came to aid Spaniards in their mid-eighteenth-century
war against Great Britain, and were granted autonomy at the war’s con-
clusion. Historians have also speculated that on the Pacific Coast during
the same period slaves escaped the ports of Acapulco and Huatulco,
setting up communities in the present-day states of Guerrero and Oaxaca
(Rout 1977: 106–7; Carroll 1977; Davidson 1979; Palmer 1976: 119–
24). While freedom for blacks was generally restricted by legislation that
persecuted any hint of independence, it is possible that in relatively au-
tonomous cimarrón communities aspects of ancestral cultures could suc-
cessfully be maintained (Palmer 1976: 52–53). The fact that an emissary
from the head town came to complain about the friar’s presence in the
San Lorenzo satellite also points to a conscious, politicized rejection of
Spanish religion and custom, and suggests that cimarrón communities
could be highly organized. Challenges to Spanish authority were proba-
bly also brewing among groups of sedentary Indians, who hid in the hills
when the daily abuses of encomenderos and priests overwhelmed them.
Because these groups had experienced the colonial order, they might also
have had the consciousness and the strength of a ‘‘communal identity’’ to
reject it (Comaro√ and Comaro√ 1991: 24).
98 agn, rcd vol. 49, exp. 10, fs. 14–15v, 1643.
99 agn, rcd vol. 5, exp. 803, 1607. In the cited text a distinction seems to
be made between cimarrones and negros huídos (runaway blacks). This

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 distinction may have di√erentiated blacks who had already established
their own communities (cimarrones) from those who had only recently
fled captivity.
100 agn, gp vol. 4, exp. 328, f. 94, 1591.
101 agn, gp vol. 5, exp. 284, f. 65, 1599. ; agn, rcd vol. 5, exp. 803, f. 197,
1607; agn, Criminal vol. 643, exp. 2, 1619; agn, rcd vol. 49, exp. 10,
fs. 14–15v, 1643.
102 For instance, agn, rcd vol. 3, exp. 130, 1590.
103 ‘‘Social death’’ is the phrase Patterson (1982) coins to describe the
slave’s ‘‘liminal’’ state between enslavement and manumission. It refers
to both the slave’s natal alienation and to his or her incomplete assimila-
tion to the new social context of enslavement. Davis states that in this
respect slaves were the first ‘‘modern’’ people. Typically foreigners and
outsiders torn from their families, their modernity lay in their ‘‘incom-
plete and ambiguous bonding to a social group’’ (1984: 15). See also
the discussion in Smedley (1999: 120–21).
104 Genovese discusses the significance of masters’ and former masters’
surnames among slaves and freedmen in nineteenth-century North
America (1972: 443–50). He also ties the matter to the importance
of kinship to African Americans. He notes, for instance, that ‘‘when
[slaves] married in formal ceremonies they often wanted to see their
names written down in the master’s family Bible’’ (1972: 445); more-
over, freed slaves often took their master’s names or the names of other
whites who had owned their relatives. Genovese believes that this was a
way to ‘‘recapture, as best they could, their own history’’ and a ‘‘genuine
identity’’ (1972: 446).
105 Lomnitz 1993: 266.
106 agn, Inq vol. 559, exp. 1, 1652.
107 agn, Inq vol. 494, exp. 2, 1655.
108 See with respect to this issue Palmer 1995, especially 230–31; Brath-
waite 1971: 204; Genovese 1972: 450–58; Smith 1992: 275.
109 Alberro 1979: 133.
110 agn, rcd vol. 3, exp. 185, f. 160, 1598.
111 agn, rcd vol. 20, exp. 47, f. 36, 1654.
112 Chance and Taylor 1977: 460; McAlister 1963.
113 Mörner 1967: 61; McAlister 1963: 356.
114 This issue has been raised, though not attended to at length, in Carroll
1991a: 89; Israel 1975; Lomnitz 1993: 266; Palmer 1976: 60–63; Mör-
ner 1967: 30–31, 60–61; and Wade 1997: 30.
115 Lomnitz 1993: 269–70.
116 Israel 1975: chap. 1; Palmer 1976.
117 Bozales (‘‘brutes’’ or ‘‘savages’’ [Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 157]) were
African-born blacks while negros criollos were slaves born in Mexico and
ladinos were those born elsewhere in the Hispanic world.
118 Palmer 1976: 34–35.
119 Carroll 1991b: 10; Israel 1975: 73; Konrad 1980: 246; C. Martin 1985:
138–39; Palmer 1976: 65–83.

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120 Not all Spaniards fell into the elite class and not all non-Spaniards were
poor. Nevertheless, the upper end of the lower classes was Spanish
while non-Spaniards who achieved the greatest economic success were
mostly mestizo and castizo, a Spanish/mestizo mix (Cope 1994: 24,
19). Cope argues that class rather than race characterized colonial Mexi-
can society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in part
because mestizos were found among the elite and Spaniards among the
poor. His evidence could also support the conclusion, however, that
racial ideologies did form a barrier to black, mulatto, mestizo, and
Indian advancement, making the elite class almost exclusively Spanish.
Perhaps a closer examination of the caste attitudes of Spanish plebeians
would have helped to resolve this question.
121 Population estimates are suspect due to the nature of the data—particu-
larly the fluid ways in which people were classified and the ways in
which we understand those classifications—but these indicate more or
less equal numbers of blacks/mulattoes (slave and free), Spaniards, and
mestizos by the middle of the seventeenth century, with each group
comprising about 140,000 persons (Aguirre Beltrán 1972: 219; Israel
1975: 21–22, 27). As noted, the Indian population experienced a ‘‘de-
mographic collapse’’ from probably 25 million people in the precon-
quest period to between 1 million and 1.5 million people by the middle
of the seventeenth century.
122 Pagden 1987: 69, n. 65.
123 Arendt 1966: 98.
124 Arendt 1966: 99.
125 Arendt 1966: 98.
126 MacLachlan 1988: 8; Liss 1975: 8–9. Conversion of blacks, in particu-
lar, presents an interesting contrast to the situation in the later Anglo
colonies, where slaves were deliberately kept unbaptized as a way of
keeping them culturally separate from, and therefore subordinate and
less menacing to, their masters (Jordan 1977: 184–85).
127 Benton 2002.
128 Benton 2002: 86, 84; Kellogg 1992, 1995; Borah 1982. Benton seems to
argue that state-dominated law did not fully emerge until the nine-
teenth century in ‘‘high’’ colonial contexts (2002: chap. 4). Yet the Mex-
ican evidence she presents suggests that such domination was already
prominent there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (2002: 81–
86).
129 Perry 1999; Root 1988.
130 Corrigan and Sayer 1985: chap. 3.
131 For instance, focusing on the revolutionary period, Knight draws on
Corrigan and Sayer’s work to highlight the broad processes of cultural
change that took place in Mexico beginning in 1760. He remarks that
‘‘over the long term, Mexican development seems to display some struc-
tural features that are strongly reminiscent of England’s ‘cultural revolu-
tion’ ’’ (1994: 59).
132 Here I refer the reader to Corrigan and Sayer’s work (1985), and to

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 Cohn and Dirks’s observation that ‘‘culture is implicated in state proj-
ects’’ but not in overly deterministic ways (1988).
133 Liss 1975: 10.
134 agn, rcd vol. 15, exp. 178, f. 140, 1645.
135 Cope 1994: 18, 22, 91.
136 The overwhelming flow of new laws and regulations from various
sources eventually caused legislative chaos and repeated attempts to
consolidate legal authority throughout the seventeenth century. These
reforms mostly failed (Lhöest 1992).
137 Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 68.
138 Peyote was perhaps the most prestigious and widely di√used of all
indigenous medicinal and magical plants (Aguirre Beltrán 1963: 140–
62). Considered a ‘‘god’’ and used in pre-Hispanic indigenous rituals,
during the sixteenth century it was identified with aspects of the Chris-
tian pantheon (Quezada 1984: 89–90). It was the most consistently
outlawed of all Indian medicines, for the inquisitors believed it was
used to ‘‘uncover robberies and divine other hidden future events which
is superstitious activity and against the purity and sincerity of our Holy
Catholic Faith’’ (agn, Inq vol. 333, exp. 35, 1619). Peyote came to have
its place in the colonial pantheon as a divination tool used by Indians to
find mundane lost objects and missing persons for non-Indians. Pulque
was an indigenous fermented alcoholic beverage produced from the
maguey cactus. It was periodically banned by colonial o≈cials in an
e√ort to curb what they perceived to be excessive Indian drunkenness.
139 Headed by an attorney general for Indians ( procurador general de indios)
and an assessor, the General Indian Court was established in 1592 to
ease the judicial process and lower costs for Indians otherwise routinely
forced to pay exorbitant fees to various Spanish personnel. The best
sources on the General Indian Court continue to be those of Borah
(1982, 1983).
140 District political o≈cials (corregidores and alcaldes mayor) along with
municipal magistrates and local judges were responsible for maintain-
ing order in their jurisdictions (del Refugio González and Lozano
1985). As Borah discusses, the viceroy would not have been able to
handle hearing all Indian cases. Therefore, suits involving small value
continued to be heard in local courts (1983: 99).
141 The viceregal system was introduced in 1535 as the Crown consoli-
dated its authority over settlers (MacLachlan 1974: 18; McAlister 1984:
192–93). The viceroy was always an ‘‘authentic noble’’ (Lockhart and
Schwartz 1983: 104–5) and because of this either a native-born ( penin-
sular) Spaniard or the son of one.
142 Borah 1983; del Refugio González et al. 1985. These cases are identified
in the notes as Indios.
143 Cases from these two courts are identified in the notes as Criminal and
Civil.
144 The audiencia reviewed decisions of local magistrates, was a court of the
first instance in the capital and the surrounding area, and appointed

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 agents beyond. The audiencia also heard appeals, but this responsibility
was not in force for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(MacLachlan 1974: 23).
145 Borah 1983: 96.
146 Cases from this court are identified in the notes with the abbreviation
bn (Bienes Nacionales).
147 The viceroy intervened in disputes between inquisitors and other judges,
and also controlled the funds the crown sent to support the various
tribunals. Relations between viceroys and inquisitors were generally
poor, as were relations among the inquisitors themselves.
148 Inquisition cases are identified with the abbreviation Inq (Inquisicíon).
Initially, New Spain’s Inquisition operated informally with friars and
bishops acting as inquisitors. Because it su√ered clerical abuses of
power, internal bickering, and general disorganization, toward the end
of the sixteenth century Philip II established two tribunals—one in
New Spain and one in Peru—to be sta√ed with apolitical prosecutors.
Excellent sources on institutional and social aspects of the Mexican In-
quisition include Greenleaf 1962, 1965, 1969 and Alberro 1979, 1981a,
1987, 1988.
149 Cited in Klor de Alva 1991: 14; Alberro 1981a: 100. Klor de Alva (1991)
argues that the shift away from inquisitorial punishment for Indians
was due to the recognition that its selective methods were ine√ective in
eliminating the ‘‘minute illegalities’’ that were the stu√ of Indian de-
viance from Spanish social norms. What was required was a system of
indoctrination and retraining led by priests and secular o≈cials. In Peru
such a system produced large-scale and violent extirpation campaigns
(Mills 1994: 26–27). In Mexico, perceived links between Indians and
the devil actually strengthened during the seventeenth century. (Cer-
vantes 1991, 1994: chap. 1).
150 In general, blacks avoided the most serious heretical charges but were
subject to accusations of blasphemy, including witchcraft. In addition,
punishment for them was sometimes more severe than that called for in
o≈cial guidelines (Palmer 1976: 149; Alberro 1979).
151 Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 59.
152 Alberro 1981a: 86. In addition to hechicería, the less common term
brujeria is typically also translated as ‘‘witchcraft.’’ Henningsen main-
tains a distinction in early modern Spain between brujería (which he
identifies as witchcraft in the form of demonology and the witch’s Sab-
bat) and hechicería (wizardry). He equates the latter with African
witch doctors, whose primary task was to provide anti-witchcraft reme-
dies by using material things to counteract the supernatural power of
brujo/as (1980: 10). The Spanish inquisitors, Henningsen adds, were
typically more interested in punishing brujo/as than hechicero/as. Al-
berro also distinguishes between colonial Mexican brujos/as as the per-
petrators of psychic acts that cannot be real and hechiceros/as who
killed their victims with magic and used concrete things to do so (1974:
343–44). Like Henningsen’s distinction, Alberro’s rests on Evans-

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 Pritchard’s classic separation of ‘‘sorcery’’ and ‘‘witchcraft’’ because, for
the mid-twentieth-century Azande among whom Evans-Pritchard did
fieldwork, witchcraft was an inherited, physical trait, a ‘‘substance’’ that
enabled the witch to perform harmful, psychic acts, while sorcery, or
black magic, was the performance of magical rites with ‘‘bad medicines’’
(Evans-Pritchard 1976: 176). Evans-Pritchard’s witch/sorcerer dis-
tinction has informed subsequent studies, which have also engendered
a certain distortion of Evans-Pritchard’s original intentions (Turner
1967: 118–19). In the colonial Mexican context the distinction seems
mostly irrelevant, as Alberro elsewhere writes, because the two systems
were inextricably intertwined (Alberro 1987: 93). The hechicera was
both innately predisposed to evil and used material things to achieve
her ends, as, in fact, did the European witch herself (Mair 1969: 27,
230; Monter 1976: 17; Thomas 1971:chap. 14; R. Martin 1989: 3 for
other contexts). Practices considered classically witch-like such as par-
ticipation in the Sabbat, intercourse with the devil, and consuming
people ‘‘from within’’ were classified as aspects of hechicería in New
Spain, and often arose in the course of a trial alongside more typical acts
of ‘‘sorcery’’ such as the use of herbs and powders to tame a lover. A
series of Inquisition trials involving three Spanish women and a castiza
(mestizo/Spanish woman) collectively accused of hechicerías, embustes
(lies), superstitions, and ‘‘invoking the devil’’ demonstrate the colonial
melding of di√erent traditions and the variety of acts that fell under the
hechicería rubric. The women confessed to, and accused each other of,
taking peyote. They also conjured a black cat outside at night; recited a
variety of chants; divined with fava beans, lime, maize, coal, and bread;
and attracted men by bringing them ‘‘through the air’’ (agn, Inq vol.
206, exps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 1593). Elements of this complex repertoire clearly
had distinct origins: for instance, peyote consumption and divination
with maize were Indian practices (Quezada 1984: 78–86) while conjur-
ing the black cat—which might have been a ‘‘familiar’’ (a low-ranking
demon), or the devil himself—and flying through the air are aspects of
the classic (European) demonic Sabbat, which was not all that com-
mon in New Spain, nor prominent in Spain, Italy, or England. (See
Henningsen 1980 and Kamen 1985 on Spain; R. Martin 1989 on Italy;
Thomas 1971 and Macfarlane 1970 on England.)
In my view, the term brujería in New Spain seems to have referred to
something quite precise: an amalgamation of flying, as in the classic
Sabbat (one text refers to a mulatto brujo who flew out of jail, for
instance), and indigenous nagualismo, in which a person’s animal ‘‘dou-
ble’’ performed supernatural acts. Hechicería seems to have referred to
everything except this flying/nagualismo combination. It was therefore
a much broader category. Examples of seventeenth-century brujería are
found in agn, Inq vol. 297, exp. 5, 1612; vol. 478, exp. 18, 1612; vol.
439, exp. 3, 1654,; vol. 316, exp. 35, 1617; vol. 342, exp. 12, 1622; vol.
459, exp. 6, 1658; vol. 619, exp. 3, 1672; vol. 516, exp. 556, 1673.
153 Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 64–65, citing Larner 1982; Perry 1999:43–44.

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154 Alberro 1981a; Greenleaf 1969: 162–71; Peters 1988: 99. Trevor-Roper
points out the similarities between persecutions of Jews and witches in
Spain and in other European countries, but also notes that these per-
secutions seem to have alternated—that is, Jews and witches were not
the same, although both categories rested on social noncomformity and
the persecutions themselves were interchangeable (1967: 110–11). Ele-
ments of Judaizing are sometimes present in colonial Mexican witch-
craft narratives. This does not mean that ‘‘witches’’ and ‘‘Jews’’ were
interchangeable. Indeed, they were persecuted separately in Mexico as
well as in Spain.
155 On witchcraft in early modern Spain see Sánchez-Ortega 1992; Caro
Baroja 1964; Henningsen 1980; Kamen 1985; Perry 1990.
156 In Spain, sixteen tribunals oversaw a territory of little more than five
hundred thousand square kilometers while the Mexican Inquisition,
which was a single tribunal, covered almost 3 million square kilometers
of Spanish territory in Central America, Mexico, New Mexico, Yucatán,
and the Philippines (Alberro 1988: 23).
157 Alberro 1988: 30–68; MacLachlan 1988: 32.
158 Alberro 1981a: 86; 1987, 1988: 192–96; Behar 1987a: 42; Cervantes
1994: chap. 5.
159 For instance, Stern 1995: 109.
160 This point is made throughout this book and also by Cervantes 1994:
37–38; 1991: 27.
161 Bienes Nacionales includes several trial transcripts concerning Indian
‘‘idolatry’’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Others are in the
process of being located and recorded (Moreno de los Arcos 1991). My
perusal of the documentation did not uncover Indian involvement with
members of other castes. Therefore, I did not use it.
162 Greenleaf 1965; 1978; Borah 1982, 1983; Moreno de los Arcos 1991;
also Kagan 1981: 250.
163 As Kagan notes for Spain, ‘‘the labyrinthine state of Castilian law had its
institutional analogue: an array of law courts and legal tribunals so
bewildering that lawsuits regularly became lost in a confused jurisdic-
tional morass’’ (1981: 32). The Crown might also have deliberately
established interdependent overseas political and administrative entities
to provide an e√ective check on its o≈cers’ New World powers (Gutiér-
rez 1991: 96).
164 Borah 1982: 283.
165 Palmer 1976: 88–89; Sweet 1978: 97. Slaveholders were obliged to feed
and clothe their slaves and were discouraged from engaging in excessive
cruelty (agn, rcd vol. 30, exp. 1378, f. 477, 1683). The judiciary’s role
was sometimes complicated by the fact that justices themselves were
slaveholders, and thus were torn between protecting their bureaucratic
turf and the vision of justice they were meant to uphold, and acknowl-
edging the realities of the slave system (Alberro 1979).
166 For example, agn, Criminal vol. 685, exp. 4, 1622.
167 The ubiquity of the documentation on witchcraft itself reflects the

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 state’s interest in it. (The prominence of the Inquisition material in the
agn, and the scrutiny given it by contemporary researchers, also re-
flects recent concerns with culture and subalternity.) Although the his-
tory and organization of the agn, today housed in Mexico City’s old
panoptical penitentiary, is beyond the scope of this book, Dirks reminds
us that archives themselves require ethnographic analysis, for their his-
tory and organization—indeed, their very existence—reflect state cate-
gories and concerns (2002).
168 agn, Inq vol. 517, exp. 13, 1674. In Spain, as in Mexico, the Inquisition
often clashed with diocesan courts and with the king’s magistrates
(Kagan 1981: 250).
169 This was true as well in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain
(Kagan 1981). In both places, moreover, witchcraft was just as ubiq-
uitous as litigation.
170 An Edict of Grace was typically declared to allow people to confess
voluntarily, or to denounce others, within a period of thirty or forty
days, on pain of excommunication if they did not. Several of the records
cited here are actually collections of denunciations and confessions
gathered following Edicts of Grace.
171 For instance, many people—such as the Spanish woman cited above
who complained about slave marriages—felt the need to confess their
blasphemy. Confessions sometimes came years after the initial crime
was committed. One can only speculate as to why this might have been
so, but it suggests that the decision to confess was deeply entwined with
other, often unstated, aspects of people’s lives. Some voluntary con-
fessions might, of course, be read as attempts to forestall accusations
from others. But many seem to have been confessions of conscience.
172 Benton 2002: 137, 149, 127–66. For New Spain this point is most
explicitly made by Kellogg 1992: 40, n. 11; 1995; see also Haskett
1991a: 474.
173 On this point see Benton 2002: 148–49, 130–31.
174 See also Stern 1982; Kellogg 1992, 1995; Foucault 1980; Darien-Smith
1994: 131; and Merry 1990 on the hegemonic function of judicial systems.
175 Indian litigation was rampant throughout the Americas (Benton 2002:
99; Borah 1982, 1983; Kellogg 1992, 1995; MacLachlan 1988: 48; Stern
1982).
176 I did not systematically track these cases, but an early one can be found
in agn, Inq vol. 38, exp. 6, 1537. A much later volume is full of such
denunciations (agn, Inq vol. 435[1], fs. 76 and 78, f. 216; vol. 435[2],
f. 337, 1650). Hoberman notes that many Portuguese conversos, whose
ancestors had fled Spain and who were allowed to emigrate to the New
World in the early seventeenth century, joined the trading community
and became ‘‘a vulnerable and controversial group within colonial so-
ciety’’ (1991: 17). Many of these conversos had fled first back to Spain
before heading for the New World. As Silverblatt writes, ‘‘the flight to
Spain fed a burgeoning Iberian stereotype, found both on the continent

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 and in the New World, that all Portuguese, like all New Christians, were
Jews’’ (2002: 99).
177 For example, agn, Inq vol. 356, exp. 25, f. 27, 1626, in which a ‘‘Man-
dinga’’ slave denounces another slave; and agn, Inq vol. 612, exp. 8,
1669, in which a black slave denounces a mulatto servant.
178 Following Merry (1990), Lazarus-Black defines ‘‘legal consciousness’’
as ‘‘the way people understand and use law’’ (1994: 269, n. 4). Her
study of black slaves and colonial courts in the British Caribbean is
significant for its conclusion that blacks used courts to express their
rights and to resolve internal disputes (1994: 259), and for its assertion
that legal consciousness and practices became hegemonic (1994). Un-
like Lazarus-Black, however, I do not see subaltern use of the judiciary
as evidence of resistance (also Darien-Smith 1994).
179 Dedieu o√ers insight into how to evaluate texts from the Spanish In-
quisition by emphasizing that scholars of these texts, and therefore of
the societies that produced them, must distinguish between the dif-
ferent kinds of texts produced by the Inquisition and between di√erent
aspects of a single text (1980, 1986). Most important for our purposes
are trial records. As Dedieu points out, each stage of a trial produced
particular kinds of writing and attendant distortions. Genealogies and
life histories, for instance, were solicited according to a standard ques-
tionnaire with open-ended questions regarding the defendant’s up-
bringing, religious orthodoxy, family members, occupation, place of
birth, and residence. This information was taken down with precision
by a scribe, who acted ‘‘like a tape recorder.’’ Similar care was taken with
the testimony of the defendant, plainti√, and witnesses, according to
Dedieu, who considers such testimony to be the most elaborated and
the ‘‘rawest’’ source of information for the modern scholar (1980: 907–
8). This testimony was sometimes recorded in the third person and
sometimes in the first, depending on whether it consisted of answers to
inquisitors’ questions (third person) or initial complaints by the actual
individuals and their testimony regarding conversations that they were
involved in or they overheard (first person).
180 Also R. Martin 1989: 222.
181 Her possessions included the boarding house, clothing, and jewelry,
and the slaves who conferred prestige by performing the manual and
domestic tasks typically relegated to women and non-Spaniards. One
was worth a considerable sum, Adriana pointed out, because she was a
‘‘good washer and [knew] how to cook an ordinary meal.’’ The notary
listed which items she could have in prison, including 100 pesos for
sustenance. Other things were given to her as she requested them, and
these requests were also noted with comments like the following: ‘‘The
Señor Inquisitor told Christobal Muñoz de Mancilla, the warden of the
secret prisons, that Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera be able to choose two
shirts from the clothing that he had in his power, and that it be noted in
the book where her clothing is listed.’’

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182 Appeals, however, could drag the process out (also R. Kagan 1981: 47–
48).
183 An example can be found in agn, Inq vol. 444, exp. 4, 1659.
184 The act of searching one’s conscience was meant to cleanse one’s
thoughts. The link between purity of mind and purity of blood should
not go unremarked.
185 Physical evidence ranged from Indian pictographic manuscripts (Borah
1983: 241; Gruzinski 1993: 28–29) to evaluations by justices and out-
side professionals, including doctors, of a plainti√ or defendant’s condi-
tion. For instance, the inquisitors who examined the tatooed arm of a
mestizo accused of consorting with the devil noted with precision the
tatooed images as well as the sore the mestizo seemed to have created
through his attempts to eradicate those images before the inquisitors
had the chance to see them (chapter 6); and the doctor who examined
the aforementioned Domingo de la Cruz testified to the alcalde mayor
about the extensive injuries the Indian su√ered at the hands of the two
mulattoes, including raw flesh and swollen testicles.
186 In Mexico torture seems to have been employed only in the most se-
rious cases of heresy. I have come across only one such case, and the
crime in question, which concerned slaves running messages back and
forth for their imprisoned masters, who might have been suspected
Judaizers, was political rather than religious (agn, Inq vol. 396, exp. 3,
1642). Torture was also uncommon in Spain, and confessions gained in
this way were not considered valid (Kamen 1985: 174; Tedeschi 1987).
187 Textile workshops often functioned as prisons, as confinement to an
obraje was standard punishment for a criminal o√ense. More generally
obrajes were sites for the maintenance and reproduction of a range of
hierarchical relationships: between the state and criminals, masters and
slaves, parents and children, husbands and wives; in short, between
those with authority and those without. Once confined, people some-
times could not escape. An o≈cial visit to an obraje in Coyoacán under-
taken in 1660 by Andrés Sánchez de Ocampo, an audiencia o≈cial,
documented the presence of four mestizos (including one condemned
for a crime, one paying o√ a debt and now enslaved against his will, and
one who entered voluntarily for a wage and was subsequently kept
against his will); nine mulatto slaves (including three condemned for
crimes); four free mulattoes (including one condemned for a crime,
one unjustly enslaved, one whose free black father put him there, and
one female married to a slave of the boss); eleven Indian males (includ-
ing five condemned for crimes and three paying o√ debts); at least five
Indian females (including several who claimed they were ‘‘treated like
slaves,’’ one married to a mulatto slave of the boss, and one once locked
in by her husband but now free to come and go); one free black (put
there by his black slave father); two male black slaves and one female;
and a number of young apprentices, caste unspecified, sent by their
fathers for disruptive behavior. Of all the groups, it seems that the

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 Indians had the most liberty and the fewest complaints (Archivo Gen-
eral de la Nación 1940).
188 In one capital punishment case a mulatto from San Juan, Puerto Rico,
Fernando Rodriguez de Castro, was convicted of impersonating a
priest, abducting a black woman, and escaping once from the Inquisi-
tion’s custody. He was ordered garroted ‘‘until he dies naturally’’ and
then burned ‘‘until he turns into ashes and is obliterated from memory’’
(agn, Inq vol. 275, exp. 14, 1605). In another, the mulatto Juan de la
Vega was put to death along with several cohorts for same-sex sexual
practices in Mexico City in 1658 (Gruzinski 1986; agi, México, Corre-
spondencia Virreinal, Leg. 38, no. 57-B, 1658). And eleven Indians, two
mestizos, one mulatto, and one Spaniard were ordered put to death for
their participation in the Mexico City riot of 1692 (Cope 1994: 157).
189 Henningsen 1980: 22.
190 One early punishment consisted of ‘‘two hundred lashes’’ (agn, Inq
vol. 38, exp. 5, 1537). This was a common sentence for many o√enses
throughout the period under investigation here, but it was likely for-
mulaic since such excess would certainly kill the o√ender. See also agn,
Inq vol. 206, exps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 1593; agn, Inq vol. 523, exp. 3, 1686.
191 Also R. Martin 1989: 84; Dedieu 1986: 189 n. 89.
192 Also Dedieu 1986: 165; 1980: 902–5.
193 See for instance Le Roy Ladurie 1979; Ginzburg 1985, 1982; R. Martin
1989; Henningsen 1980.
194 Ginzburg 1989: 160; also R. Martin 1989: 80; Dedieu 1986: 161.
195 Le Roy Ladurie 1979: vii.
196 Such as Rosaldo 1986: 78–79.
197 Peters makes the important point that ‘‘inquisitions’’ never constituted
a coherent category. There was no ‘‘single, all-powerful, horrific tri-
bunal, whose agents worked everywhere to thwart religious truth, intel-
lectual freedom and political liberty’’ (Peters 1988: 3). Instead, a variety
of inquisitorial institutions operated to rout heresy from the thirteenth
century on at di√erent times and in di√erent parts of Europe and its
colonies, and they should not be confused with each other (Peters
1988). One therefore has to study inquisitions, as well as other judicial
contexts, as forums in which the issue of power was worked out on
many di√erent levels depending on the social and cultural contexts in
which they operated. Recent studies have tried to do just that for a
variety of inquisitions in Europe and the New World (Alcalá 1987;
Haliczer 1987; Henningsen and Tedeschi 1986; Kamen 1985; R. Martin
1989; Peters 1988; Perry and Cruz 1991).
198 Mallon 1994: 1506–7; also Adorno 1993.
199 Authorities also had to contend with this issue in Spain, where many
people did not speak Spanish (Castilian) (Dedieu 1980, 1986).
200 Translators were also provided for German, Flemish, French, and En-
glish speakers (Alberro 1988: 60). Although such considerations were
not extended to bozal slaves, Africans were separated from their native

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 linguistic communities and would have had to learn Spanish in order to
communicate with Spaniards as well as with Africans of other cultural
groups.
201 Borah 1982: 284. The general tendency to summarize was balanced by
the fact that notaries were paid by the page for their work (which could
nevertheless result in oversized, rather than in more, letters).
202 Borah 1983: 62; Heath 1974: 12; Lockhart 1992: 320.
203 Streamlining judicial processes for Indians initially meant allowing
cases to proceed on oral testimony, but this was in practice all but
impossible because written records were required for the various bu-
reaucratic procedures (Borah 1983: 250).
204 With respect to this issue, scholars of the Spanish, Italian, and Mexican
Inquisitions have directly contended that the claim that inquisitors fab-
ricated accusations and trials has not withstood critical scrutiny (Tedes-
chi 1986; R. Martin 1989; Dedieu 1980: 906–8; Alberro 1988). For
Mexico, Alberro has noted in addition that inquisitors often went to
great lengths to expose testimony fabricated by plainti√s, which was
costly but, as we have seen with respect to Ana María de la Concepción,
might only be punished with a fine (albeit a considerable one of 200
pesos) (1988: 145).
205 Gruzinski 1993: 4.
206 Hanks 1986.
207 Texts written in Nahuatl by Indian nobles included titles regarding
community boundaries and histories, annals, local litigation, wills, and
deeds of sale and purchase (Lockhart 1991, 1992). While Lockhart
(1992) in many ways downplays the impact of colonization on in-
digenous peoples, he quite convincingly uses such texts to trace subtle
changes in indigenous thought and expression over a several-hundred-
year period as contact with Spaniards became increasingly unavoidable.
Because Kellogg does the same thing with Spanish-language texts con-
taining Indian testimony (1995), the evidence does not seem to sup-
port Lockhart’s position that Nahuatl texts tell us about one world
while Spanish texts tell us about another (1991, 1992).
208 Readers interested in the original Spanish texts have access both to the
archives in Mexico City and to my dissertation, which includes Spanish
transcriptions of many of the texts cited here (Lewis 1993).
209 Sayer 1994: 374–75.
210 Taussig 1987: 288.

2 the roads are harsh

1 agn, Criminal vol. 234, exp. 3, 1643. Angelina is not mentioned in the
course of the narrative.
2 The comadre relationship is between a child’s godmother and his
mother. It is part of a wider system of fictive kinship (compadrazgo) with
roots in Catholic ritual. The system establishes relationships between

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 parents and godparents based on their mutual obligation to a child.
Godparents, in turn, are to be accorded respect by both those children
and their parents. In Mexico, compadrazgo has traditionally been bound
up with religious and social honor. Although Ingham points out the risks
of reducing the institution to a utilitarian function (1986: 89), it can also
play a role in overcoming economic di√erences in that having fictive kin
of a higher status than oneself is generally desirable, for godparents have
financial obligations to their godchildren. Cope makes the excellent
point that during the colonial period, Spaniards drew on their Indian
fictive kin ‘‘to recruit a new generation of indigenous workers’’ (1994:
92–93, 95; also Nutini and Bell 1980).
3 Dirks 1992a: 5.
4 Pagden 1982; Todorov 1984; Robert Williams 1990.
5 The most visible mendicant order in Mexico, and the first to arrive (in
1524), was the Franciscan. Twelve Dominicans followed in 1526 and
came to form the second most visible presence. Augustinians arrived in
1533 and the Jesuits in the 1570s. The classic work on the earliest mis-
sionaries is Ricard (1966). Recent works that accomplish more sensitive
cultural analyses of the missionizing process include Burkhart 1989; Cer-
vantes 1994; Klor de Alva 1988; Phelan 1970; Trexler 1984; and Clendin-
nen, who reminds us that missionaries are as much ‘‘subjects for wonder
and analysis’’ as the ‘‘natives’’ on which ethnohistorians traditionally
focus (1982: 27).
6 Gruzinski 1993: 3.
7 Klor de Alva interprets Sahagún’s work in the context of the postmodern
anthropological concern with the problem of representing the other. He
designates Sahagún ‘‘the first modern anthropologist’’ who produced the
‘‘first modern ethnographic fieldwork and narrative’’ (1988: 35) as he
systematically collected data on Nahua culture, society, and history. In
addition, Klor de Alva’s insightful observation that the invention of
modern anthropology was ‘‘waiting to happen’’ (1988: 37) links the
birth of the discipline to the rise of colonialism in the sixteenth century
(1988: 42).
8 Phelan characterizes the Franciscans as empirical and eclectic (1970: 10).
Inspired by More’s Utopia and St. Augustine’s City of God, and influenced
(as was the Dominican Las Casas) by an Erasmian theology that stressed
tolerance, skepticism, and liberalism, the Franciscans were concerned
with ‘‘this-worldly’’ political reform that would restore the Primitive
Church in its original and uncorrupted form (Maravall 1949: 207–8).
For the Franciscans, a new era was dawning in New Spain: together the
friars and the Indians would build the City of God (Phelan 1970: 91).
Following the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, who called for a ‘‘total
adhesion to God’s love’’ in preparation for the apocalypse (Ulloa 1977:
150), the Dominicans were more other-worldly. For them, the perfection
of religious life was achieved through the integration of theology and
evangelization (Ulloa 1977: 21). Unlike the Franciscans, their intent was
not to replace a corrupt religion with a renewed one. It was to find an

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 ‘‘uncorrupted natural substance’’ beneath outward manifestations of evil.
This substance and substratum—pure Christianity—provided for them
the necessary link between the New World and the Old. For the Domini-
cans, unlike for the Franciscans, then, New Spain did not present an
opportunity for a new beginning. It was simply a New World extension
of Old World Christian history. Todorov characterizes this contrast in the
following way: ‘‘we might see Durán and Sahagún as two opposing
forms of a relation, somewhat as one used to describe the opposition of
our classic and romantic: interpenetration of contraries in the former,
separation in the latter’’ (1984: 227). Durán, the Dominican, fused the
Indians with the sacred past, as a lost tribe of Israel (Duran 1964: 3;
1971: 63, 389, 419, 422). He suggested that the Mexica god Quetzalcoatl
had been the apostle St. Thomas, whose endeavors to educate the In-
dians in the ways of Christianity were discouraged by their ‘‘rude, incon-
sistent, rough [and] slow’’ characters (1971: 59). Due to this apostle’s
presence, however, the groundwork for Christianity’s rebirth in the New
World had already been done. The Conquest, then, was providential.
Moctezuma could not deflect Cortés’s invasion because divine will fa-
vored the conquistadors (Sandoval 1945: 66). The conversion of the
Indians, like the Conquest itself, was necessary and unavoidable. Instead
of connecting Indians to the Old World Christian past, Sahagún and
other Franciscans likened the Indians to the Old World profane past
typified by the Greeks and the Romans and stressed similarities between
Indian peoples and the Greek and Roman ‘‘barbarians’’ of Europe (1969,
2: 53). According to Sahagún, the Mexica gods Huitzilopochtli and
Quetzalcoatl were like Hercules (1969, 1: 43, 278); the fire god Xiuh-
tecutli was ‘‘another Vulcan’’ (1969, 1: 56). In the typical manner of
Greeks, Romans, and other barbarians, Sahagún wrote, the Indians were
religious innocents. They could not be held accountable for their prac-
tices, for they had never known God and therefore stood outside the
Christian tradition. ‘‘I have always had the opinion that the Gospel was
not preached [here],’’ Sahagún wrote, ‘‘because nothing has ever been
found; everything contradicts it. There is so much idolatry that I cannot
believe that they have ever had the Gospel preached to them’’ (1969, 3:
358). Indigenous New Spain was ‘‘sterile,’’ he wrote, and it was di≈cult
‘‘to cultivate where the Catholic faith has thin roots and where hard work
bears little fruit’’ (1969, 3: 355).
9 Sahagún 1969, 3: 149.
10 López-Austín 1974.
11 Cited in Phelan 1970: 61.
12 Cited in Maravall 1949: 205.
13 Borah 1983: 29–30; Maravall 1949; Phelan 1970.
14 Rama 1984; Solano 1990.
15 MacLachlan 1988: 29; Liss 1975: 6.
16 On the internal dynamics of colonial Indian communities see P. Carrasco
1961; Cline 1986; Gibson 1964; Gruzinski 1989, 1993; Haskett 1991b;
Lockhart 1992; Ouweneel 1995.

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17 MacLachlan 1988: 28; Mörner 1970a; Bonfil Batalla 1987: 121; Borah
1983: 86.
18 Liss 1975: 43.
19 Wade 1997: 30.
20 Borah 1983: 83.
21 Lockhart 1991: 15–16.
22 These are found in the Ordenanzas, Mercedes, General de Parte, Reales
Cédulas Duplicadas, and Indios branches of the agn. See also Mörner
1967: 45–48; 1970a; Mörner and Gibson 1962; Borah 1983: 31–32.
23 agn, Indios vol. 4, exp. 742, 1590.
24 agn, Indios vol. 3, exp. 51, 1590.
25 agn, Indios vol. 6 (1), exp. 495, 1593.
26 agn, Tierras vol. 48, exp. 6, 1593.
27 agn, Indios vol. 9, exps. 277 and 279, 1620. Although Indian women
were not legally required to labor in mines and on haciendas, they were
vulnerable to involuntary servitude in public industries as well as to other
forms of abuse (see Haskett 1991a: 451–52 on women in the Tasco
mines). An Indian named Juliana, for instance, related how her daughter
Maria was being held in the house of a Spaniard, where she had been put
by a friar. She had fled, but the friar had caught up with her and confined
her and her child to an obraje where she was ‘‘su√ering’’ (agn, Indios
vol. 2, exp. 596, 1583). In the late seventeenth century, northern hacen-
dados aided by their overseers and servants were said to be taking Indian
women and children by force to Mexico City, where they sold them like
slaves (agn, Criminal vol. 22, exp. 104, 1689). Some violence against
women, of course, was sexual. One proceeding describes how a Spanish
corregidor, among other abuses, habitually forced ‘‘young and good-
looking’’ Indian girls to sleep with him (agn, Criminal vol. 12, exp. 6,
1646). Another tells of a mulatto who had ‘‘stolen’’ an Indian woman
from her village, taking her by force from her husband (agn, Inq vol.
368, f. 248, 1604). Yet another tells of an Indian woman abducted by a
Spaniard, a mestizo, and a mulatto (agn, Civil vol. 1776, exp. 66, 1648).
But there was little justice for women—whether Indian or Spanish—and
rape (violación or estupro) seems to have been a criminal o√ense only if
the woman (or girl) was a virgin (see Castañeda 1989: 75–87). Rape in
these texts is presented as an incidental event, alluded to or described in
the context of other expressions of control.
28 agn, Indios vol. 11, exp. 485, 1640.
29 agi, México, Correspondencia Virreinal, Leg. 20, no. 9, 1578.
30 agn, rcd vol. 2, exp. 459, f. 260, ca. 1585.
31 See, for example, agn, rco vol. 6, exp. 232, f. 529, 1619; vol. 25, exp. 68,
f. 240, 1693. agn, rcd vol. 26, exp. 146, f. 150, 1668; vol. 30 exp. 1261, f.
355, 1676.
32 agn, rco vol. 19, exp. 33, fs. 75–76, 1682; vol. 20, exp. 100, f. 5, 1685;
agi, México, Correspondencia Virreinal, Leg. 20, no. 9, 1578. Emphasis
added.
33 This witness also calls repartimiento by its Nahuatl name, coatequil.

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34 agn, Criminal vol. 219, exp. 11, 1634; also Haskett 1991a.
35 agn, Criminal vol. 219, exp. 11, 1634.
36 Lockhart 1992: 206; Cintrón Tiryakian 1979; Zavala 1988.
37 Israel 1975: 47–57. In the mid-seventeenth century there were about
three thousand mendicants and six thousand ordained priests in New
Spain (Israel 1975: 48, nn. 93, 95).
38 Israel 1975: 49–52.
39 agn, rcd vol. 52, f. 22v, 1644.
40 Gage 1958: 45.
41 Gage 1958: 39.
42 agn, rcd vol. 52, f. 22v, 1644.
43 Gibson reviews the o≈cial sixteenth-century instructions to priests re-
garding their conduct and duties (1964: 114–15).
44 Ololiuque, the seed of the coriander plant, was one of the most impor-
tant medicines in the indigenous repertoire. Like peyote it could produce
supernatural visions. Another name for it, signifying its more mystical
character, was cuexpaltzi (Aguirre Beltrán 1963: 130–37; Quezada 1984:
92–93).
45 agn, Inq vol. 510, exp. 133, 1625.
46 agn, rco vol. 2, exp. 43, f. 78, 1644.
47 In Nahuatl culture the seizing of the warrior lock, a single strip of hair on
an otherwise shaven head, was a formal sign of submission, and warriors
expelled for o√enses had their heads shaved ‘‘into the tonsure of the
tamene, or carrier, the lowliest of Mexica occupations’’ (Clendinnen
1991: 115–16, 118). Perhaps this priest was aware that hair held some
significance to this Indian.
48 agn, bn vol. 542, exp. 9, 1693.
49 agn, bn vol. 596, exp. 13, 1682.
50 By the sixteenth century, reason had become the pursuit of rational
knowledge as knowledge of God’s goodness. This was not unconnected
to Aristotelian ideas linking reason to the overcoming of passion, for all
rested on perfection, however defined, as the pinnacle of creation (and
Lovejoy links the Platonic Idea of the Good to the ‘‘God of Plato’’ as well
as to the ‘‘God’’ of Aristotle [1936: 5, 42]). During the Enlightenment
‘‘reason’’ would come to counter rather than to reinforce Christian faith
and a ‘‘rationalist’’ would become an unbeliever (Becker 1932: 8). Lloyd
(1984) traces the ways in which reason—however construed—has been
defined as male and valued, while ‘‘feminine traits’’—principally identi-
fied with nature—have been understood as inferior.
51 Liss 1975: 39; Borah 1983: 30.
52 Burkhart 1989: 17; Clendinnen 1982: 43; Borah 1983: 30.
53 Sahagún 1969, 3: 161.
54 Gutiérrez 1991: 75–76.
55 The debate, during which Sepúlveda and Las Casas never actually met
face to face, has been treated extensively in the English-language scholar-
ship (Hanke 1959, 1974; Phelan 1969, 1970; Pagden 1982; Todorov
1984) and much has been written on Las Casas and his work (Friede and

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 Keen 1971: 603–16). Sepúlveda’s work has been published in many
Spanish editions but never fully translated into English (although long
excerpts can be found in Phelan 1969).
56 In the Spanish view a ‘‘barbarian’’ was someone who spoke Spanish
badly or not at all, was unable to write, did not obey Spanish law or
behave according to Spanish custom, lacked reason and was ‘‘merciless
and cruel’’ (Covarrubias [1611] 1984: 194).
57 Phelan 1970: 65.
58 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 109.
59 The view of indigenous technology as inferior often manifested itself in
the physical symbols of conquest. As Valerie Fraser writes in reference to
Andean colonial society, ‘‘Inca architecture [was] often described as hav-
ing primor [skill] and artificio [workmanship], but never arte . . . Each
individual [Spanish] church . . . exemplified the Art of Architecture and
represented the triumph of civilization over the skillful but nevertheless
essentially barbarous buildings of the Indians’’ (1986: 330–31; also Pag-
den 1982: 73).
60 Phelan 1970: 65.
61 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 85, 123–135. Covarrubias defines inhumana as
‘‘the cruel one; he who is not a man, but a wild beast’’ ([1611] 1984:
737).
62 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 1, editor’s n. 1; Pagden 1982: 109–18.
63 For instance, Pagden 1982: 110, 145.
64 Phelan 1969: 63.
65 On this point see Pagden 1982: 119; Todorov 1984: 161; Zavala [1935]
1992: 32.
66 Las Casas [1552] 1992: 30, emphasis added. Despite his belief that
Christianity should ‘‘receive all nations’’ and not reduce any to ‘‘servitude
on the pretext that they are slaves ‘by nature’ ’’ (cited in Martínez 1971:
309), Las Casas also made distinctions, and not only initially between
Indians and blacks. For instance, apart from arguing that Indians were
reasonable people whose hearts, if not their minds, were in the right
place, he argued that Aristotle’s ‘‘barbarian’’ was a misconstrued idea—
Aristotle was himself a ‘‘pagan,’’ he had insisted to Charles V. This was
not because barbarians did not exist, but because the category failed to
distinguish between those who had achieved the partially civilized cul-
tural level of the Inca and the Aztec, and those who had not, such as the
Caribbean tribes that Columbus encountered and the nomadic ones of
northern Mexico.
67 Las Casas [1552] 1992.
68 On this point see Pagden 1982: 42. During the Enlightenment the con-
cept of nature would take on characteristics similar to those associated
with passion or animal instincts. Nature became both ‘‘pre-social’’ and
good (as in Rousseau’s ‘‘State of Nature’’) as well as an explanation for
the inferiority of women, whose special relationship with nature (a rela-
tionship that can be traced all the way to the Greeks and beyond) also
devalued nature (Bloch and Bloch 1980; Lloyd 1984).

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69 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 83.
70 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 101. Sepúlveda further likened the di√erences
between Indian ‘‘rudeness’’ and Spanish ‘‘civility’’ to di√erences between
‘‘monkeys’’ and ‘‘men’’ (ibid.: 101). In Spain animal metaphors were
frequently employed as invectives condemning non-Christians (Root
1988: 30; Boase 1990: 18). In the New World similar invectives de-
humanized non-Spanish populations such as ‘‘wild’’ nomadic Indians
(Behar 1987b: 116) and runaway black slaves (cimarrones). As noted,
animal types such as mulato, coyote, and lobo also surface in the sistema de
castas nomenclature, applied, of course, to non-Spaniards.
71 Pagden further notes Sepúlveda’s ‘‘acerbic’’ language and his use of ‘‘im-
ages of inversion, commonly reserved for witches and other deviants’’
(1982: 117). Colonial witchcraft was considered a practice of women
and Indians, who, as discussed in chapter 5, were also linked through the
metaphor of the witch.
72 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 85, 107.
73 Sepúlveda [1545] 1941: 107. Sepúlveda’s belief in this female-like cow-
ardice stemmed from what he had read about the conquest, in particular
about the Mexica lack of resistance to the invaders. Moctezuma’s alleged
passivity when confronted with the conquerors seems to have contrib-
uted to Sepúlveda’s disdain. ‘‘Having had news of Hernan Cortés’s ar-
rival and his victories, and of the wish he had to come to Mexico to meet
with him,’’ wrote Sepúlveda, ‘‘[Moctezuma] tried everything to avoid it,
but not being able to, filled with terror he received in his city Cortés and a
small number of Spaniards’’ (ibid.).
74 Pagden 1982: 44; also Silverblatt 1987: 176.
75 Adorno 1989: 225–26.
76 Stepan 1990: 55, n. 11.
77 For example, de la Cadena 1991; Hendrickson 1991; Stephen 1999.
78 Fernández 1994; Zamora 1993: 152–79; Montrose 1993.
79 As discussed in Fernández 1994: 977.
80 As Kagan notes for Spain (1981: 10).
81 Lavrin 1978: 40–41; Behar 1987a: 35; Liss 1975: 98–99.
82 As Seed (1988: 7) notes. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Prag-
matic Sanction, a late-eighteenth-century Crown directive, tried to en-
force race/caste distinctions by legislating parental rights over the mar-
riage choices of their children (Seed 1988; Martínez-Alier 1989; Stolcke
1991; chapter 7 below).
83 Kellogg 1992, 1995.
84 Cascardi 1992: 237; Franco 1989: xiv; Perry 1992: 7.
85 Lavrin 1989: 10.
86 Sánchez-Ortega 1992: 197; Perry 1992.
87 Seed 1988: 63; Perry 1990: 58–59; Martínez-Alier 1989: chap. 1.
88 Lavrin 1978: 26; Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1987: 117; Behar 1987a: 39.
89 Lavrin 1978: 40. Religious enclosure could also be liberating insofar as it
freed women from the burdens of ‘‘womanhood,’’ and some women
‘‘preferred to become nuns rather than wives’’ (Perry 1990: 89). Nuns

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 learned to read and to write, and the intensity of their religious experi-
ences also produced potentially subversive ‘‘visions’’ (Perry 1990: 82–
84; Franco 1989).
90 Cited in Perry 1990: 47. In seventeenth-century Spain other kinds of
enclosed spaces in the form of Magdalen or ‘‘halfway’’ houses were
available for those wanting to leave prostitution, and jail, yet another
form of enclosure, awaited ‘‘incorrigibles’’ who insisted on practicing
outside the confines of a brothel (Perry 1990: 135).
91 Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1987: 114.
92 Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1987: chap. 6; Lavrin 1978: 30.
93 Hanke observes that in the New World all Spaniards became caballeros
(gentlemen), and when native labor was in short supply, they com-
plained to the king (1959: 14). Cope reminds us, however, that by the
late sixteenth century a class of impoverished Spaniards who had to
labor for a living had already come into existence (1994: 22–24).
94 bnah, Archivo Histórico, Colección Francisco de Paso y Troncoso,
Leg. 113, no. 418, 1554.
95 agi, México, Correspondencia Virreinal, Leg. 25, no. 26-A, 1603. In-
dians, wrote the seventeenth-century Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano y
Pereyra, have to be ‘‘made to work, because they have always been
notably lazy.’’ Cited in de la Peña 1984: 188.
96 MacLachlan 1988: 48.
97 Boyer 1989: 252–53. Most later colonial Mexican violence against
women, including homicides, came from primary male relatives, espe-
cially husbands (Stern 1995: 60–69).
98 Zavala (1988: 209) notes that in Mexico overseers would often go to
considerable lengths to catch runaway Indian workers. Taussig’s anal-
ysis of the political economy of extreme ‘‘terror’’ and Indian responses
to it concerns a much later Latin American context (1987: chaps. 1–3).
99 agn, Indios vol. 6 (1), exp. 262, 1591.
100 agn, Inq vol. 619, exp. 1, 1672.
101 As discussed in chapter 5, men who were ‘‘tied’’ were unable to have
intercourse with women at will. Typically, they were able to perform
with only one woman, who would then be identified as the witch.
102 Lavrin 1978: 27.
103 Franco 1989: xiv.

3 la mala yerba

1 agi, México, Correspondencia Vierreinal, Leg. 27, no. 52, 1608. An

Aragonese priest used the same nature metaphor to describe another
class of infectious undesirables: sixteenth-century moriscos (Root
1988: 130–31).
2 Israel 1975; Cope 1994: 6, 20; Mörner 1967: 30–31; Bonfil Batalla 1987:
125. Pagden contends that blacks had ‘‘no place on the social map at all’’
(Pagden 1987: 69), while others reduce them to the Spanish or Indian

Notes to Pages 62–67 215

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