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The Indian Map Trade in Colonial Oaxaca
Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation
Authors Hidalgo, Alexander
Publisher The University of Arizona.
Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this materialis made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona.Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such aspublic display or performance) of protected items is prohibitedexcept with permission of the author.
Download date 26/02/2021 18:50:58
Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/301765
THE INDIAN MAP TRADE IN COLONIAL OAXACA
By
Alexander Hidalgo
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2013
2
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation
prepared by Alexander Hidalgo
entitled The Indian Map Trade in Colonial Oaxaca
and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
____________________________________________________________Date: 06/13/13
Martha Few
____________________________________________________________Date: 06/13/13
Bert Barickman
____________________________________________________________Date: 06/13/13
Stacie Widdifield
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s
submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and
recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
____________________________________________________________Date: 06/13/13
Dissertation Director: Kevin Gosner
3
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an
advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library
to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without permission, provided that
accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended
quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by
the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her
judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other
instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author
SIGNED: Alexander Hidalgo
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not be possible without the support of Alan Sweedler. Stephen
Colston, Paul Ganster, Jim Gerber, Pat Huckle, Matthew Kuefler, and especially Ramona
Pérez at San Diego State University provided critical guidance that led me to Arizona. At
the University of Arizona (UA), I wish to acknowledge financial support from the Group
for Early Modern Studies, the Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee, the
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Graduate College, and the History
Department. I also wish to thank the Fulbright Commission, the Library of Congress, the
American Historical Association, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between
Spain’s Ministry of Culture and US Universities for support to carry out extended
research. My appreciation to the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas at El Colegio de
México for hosting me, and to Juan Pedro Viqueira for serving as my sponsor while I
conducted research in Mexico City. Funding from the Ford Foundation and from the
UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry allowed me to prepare my results.
I owe the most to my professors who have consistently demonstrated a dedication to their
students I can only hope to emulate. Bert Barickman’s incisive questions and detailed
commentary have always pushed me in new directions. Stacie Widdifield played a key
role in this project providing critical guidance and feedback. Martha Few has been a
fierce ally, an encouraging mentor, and a great role model. I am fortunate to have worked
with Kevin Gosner, my advisor, whose dedication, support, and disposition have made
my doctoral work a truly remarkable experience. I would also like to thank Helen Nader,
Linda Darling, Dale Brenneman, and Michael Brescia for their support. Thanks to Dana
Leibsohn, Stephanie Wood, Barbara Mundy, Emily Umberger, and John F. López with
whom I have bonded over all things cartographic. My appreciation to Ramón Gutiérrez
and David Robinson for their generous support. Matt Furlong, Cory Schott, Rob Scott,
and especially Ryan Kashanipour, Max Mangraviti, and Ignacio Martinez have made this
journey invigorating on so many levels.
My thanks to the Guzmán and the Vallejo families for hosting me in Mexico City, and to
Anthony Mullan, Richard Headly-Soto, Mary Lou Reker, and Aleksander Mesa for their
hospitality while I researched in Washington, DC. My appreciation to Enrique, Socorro,
and Carlos Carrillo who have shown me there are no limits to the kindness one can offer
others. Thanks also to Enrique Carrillo, Jr. and Gaby Alvarez for their support. My
family, José Luis and Guadalupe Sánchez, John and Lety Focareta, Bella Floridia, Alexis
and Eric Villegas, and Bianka León, has carried me during the rough patches. Juan Carlos
and Lidia Rodríguez, Alfonso and Sandy Carrillo, Clemente Villegas, Asela Castaños,
Pato and Faride Gómez, and Fausto Castañeda have enriched my life in countless ways. I
would have never followed this path had it not been for the encouragement of my mother,
Mariza Sánchez, who taught me to dream, to work hard, and to pay attention to the
universal language that binds us. My daughters, Alys, Siena, and Chiara, inspire me every
day with their joy and their laughter. Finally, I want to share credit of this project with
Gabriela Carrillo, my partner in life, with whom I hold the strongest bond of all.
5
In memory of Emma
6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
INTRODUCTION: MAPS, AUTHORITY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . .10
CHAPTER 1: THE TRAIL OF FOOTSTEPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
CHAPTER 2: CARTOGRAPHIC MATERIALS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
CHAPTER 3: AUTHENTICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
CHAPTER 4: A TRUE AND FAITHFUL COPY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166
CONCLUSION: A FINAL REMARK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
APPENDIX A: THE MAP OF SANTA CRUZ XOXOCOTLÁN (1686) . . . . . . . . . . 212
APPENDIX B: FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
7
LIST OF FIGURES
1. Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th century . . . . .213
2. Diagram of Maps located in Mexican and US archives (1570s-1600s) . . . . . . .214
3. Diagram of Maps located in Mexican and US archives (1610s-1740s) . . . . . . .214
4. The Valley of Oaxaca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .215
5. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .216
6. Painter-scribe (detail), Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (aka Codex Vienna), c.
15th century, f. 48 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .217
7. Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco,1580 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
8. Ordered pair detail, Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580 . . . . . . . .219
9. Large/great altar logograph, Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580. .219
10. Coming of age scene, Codex Mendoza, f. 60, c. 1541 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
11. Folio 3v, Codex Yanhuitlán, c. 1550s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .221
12. Map of San Miguel Cuestlahuaca, 1582 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222
13. Albrecht Dürer, “The Holy Family with Two Angels,” c. 1503 . . . . . . . . . . . . .223
14. Map of Guaxilotitlán, 1586 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .224
15. Map of Santa María Guelacé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya, and Santa Cruz
Papalutla, 1778 [1690] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
16. Detail, Map of Santa María Guelacé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya, and Santa
Cruz Papalutla, 1778 [1690] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .226
17. Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene, 1617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
18. Relación Geográfica Map of Tehuantepec, 1580 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228
19. Map of Tzanaltepec, Tonaltepec, and Oztutlán, 1580 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
20. Map of Tlapanaltepeque, 1585 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .230
21. Map of Tlapanaltepeque, 1586 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .231
22. Map of Ixtepec and Zixitlán,1598 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
23. Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene and Cuestlahuaca,1590 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
24. Map of Tepenene, 1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
25. Map of Tolcayuca, c. late 17th/early 18th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235
26. Map of Teposcolula, 1590 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
27. Paper detail, Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco,1580 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
28. Map of Cuquila, 1599 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .238
29. Patch of paper detail, Map of Cuquila, 1599 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
30. Map of Mistepec, Chicaguastla, and Cuquila,1595 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
31. Map of Santa Ana and Santa Cruz, 1591 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
32. Detail, Map of Santa Ana and Santa Cruz, 1591 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
33. Map of Teotitlán, 1583 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243
34. Ink detail, Map of Teotitlán, 1583 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
35. Verso, Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene, 1617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245
36. Key, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th century.246
37. Town detail, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th
century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247
8
LIST OF FIGURES – continued.
38. Father Crespo’s Hacienda, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María
Atzompa, c. 18th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
39. San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María
Atzompa, c. 18th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
40. Map of Miltepec, 1617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
41. Map of Justlaguaca, 1609 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .250
42. Map of Tlaxiaco and Cuquila, 1588 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251
43. Map of Cuscatlan, 1607 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
44. Map of Zimatlán and Ocotlán, 1686 [1639] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
45. “Ojo” detail, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .254
46. Relación Geográfica Map of Amoltepeque, 1580 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
47. Cataloguing inscription no. 1, Relación Geográfica map of Amoltepeque, 1580 . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
48. Cataloguing inscription no. 2, Relación Geográfica map of Amoltepeque, 1580 . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
49. Céspedes annotations, Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepeque,1580 . . . . . . .257
50. Disputed land near Xoxocotlán, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .258
51. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán with interpretive key, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
52. Certifying gloss no. 1, Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
53. Certifying gloss no. 2, Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
54. Map of Xoxocotlán, 1718 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .261
55. Cut piece, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, c. 18th
century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .262
9
ABSTRACT
This dissertation analyzes the practice of making indigenous maps and their circulation in
Oaxaca from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Indian maps functioned as
visual aids to distribute land for agriculture, ranching, subsistence farming, and mining,
they served as legal titles to property, and they participated in large-scale royal projects
including aqueducts and assessments of human and natural resources. Map production is
examined from four distinct vantage points including social networks, materials and
technology, authentication, and reproduction. In each case, maestros pintores--native
master painters--collaborated with a host of individuals including Spanish officials,
scribes, merchants, ranchers, farmers, town councils, caciques and lesser lords, and legal
professionals to visually describe the region's geographical environment. Indigenous
mapping practices fostered the development of a new epistemology that combined
European and Mesoamerican worldviews to negotiate the allocation of natural resources
among the region's Spanish, Amerindian, and mixed-race communities. This work
stresses the role of Indian painters in the formation of early modern empires highlighting
the way mapmakers challenged Spanish ideals of visual representation instead re-
envisioning spatial relations according to local and regional concerns.
10
INTRODUCTION:
MAPS, AUTHORITY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
All maps state an argument about the world.
―Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps
The meeting with the mayor and the three councilmembers from Santa María
Atzompa, a municipality in Oaxaca’s rich central Valley, was scheduled for a late
afternoon in the summer of 2006. Besides conducting my own research in the region, I
was invited to help design a project led by the Center for Latin American Studies at San
Diego State University where I had just earned a Master of Arts degree. The project
involved the rehabilitation of Atzompa’s historic archive, a summer initiative to support
the preservation of the community’s past, generating research opportunities for advanced
undergraduates and graduate students. During the meeting with Atzompa’s
representatives to gauge the extent of their collection, the mayor opened a drawer from
his desk and pulled out what looked like a bulky piece of cloth. What he proceeded to
unfold was a rather large painted map (Figure 1) which he said had belonged to the town
since time immemorial. The map, he told us, was a community treasure and had been
passed down from mayor to mayor for generations along with a book of titles dating from
the eighteenth century. As I struggled to contain my excitement, I was struck by my
incredible luck. The vibrancy of the colors and the positioning of geographical elements
around the page seemed odd but fascinating. Over the next few days, I had the
opportunity to take digital images of the map and the book of land titles with my camera.
Weeks later, I found myself in Tucson starting the doctoral program in Latin American
History at the University of Arizona where I faced the task of writing a major research
11
paper. I proposed to write one on the painted map. I was curious about its use but also
its material condition. What skills did the individuals who made maps use and how did
they learn? Who was their audience and why were maps needed? Why was their
physical appearance so striking? Who benefited from maps?
My dissertation in many ways is a response to this initial set of questions, an
analysis of the production, use, and circulation of indigenous maps in Oaxaca from the
late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. I argue that indigenous mapping fostered
the development of a new epistemology that combined European and Mesoamerican
worldviews to negotiate the allocation of land among the region’s Spanish, Amerindian,
and mixed-race communities. Maps played important roles in the definition of spatial
boundaries functioning as visual aids to assign land for agriculture, ranching, mining, and
subsistence farming, in legal disputes when deployed by litigants as evidence, as visual
aids in infrastructure projects such as aqueducts, and in assessments of human and natural
resources. My analysis centers on four distinct aspects of the map trade including the
participation of social networks, the application of materials and technology, a map’s
legibility and authentication, and the practice of reproduction. Indian maps challenged
Spanish ideals of pictorial representation by envisioning spatial relationships according to
local concerns. In my interpretation of maps, I have drawn from a range of fields
including cultural history, art history, the histories of cartography and science, and
ethnohistory to explain the significance of mapmaking within wider debates about
colonialism, technology, literacy, artistic innovation, and the environment.
12
That indigenous people made maps often surprises learned and popular audiences.
In fact, native maps circulated widely throughout New Spain from contact and into the
eighteenth century. Officials and painters described them as pinturas, or paintings, a
term that addressed the representation of the elements found in nature, “an imitation of
something visible delineated on a flat surface, not simply in relation to its shape, but also
in relation to its color and other features,” according to an early modern Spanish source.1
The term pintura acquired a more expansive meaning in central New Spain where it
described a range of visual sources that included not only sketched maps drawn by
scribes and officials, but more complex political genealogies, tribute records, and ritual
manuscripts produced by natives across Mesoamerica. While not articulated with a
separate term until the late seventeenth century, a specific genre of pinturas best
described as maps gradually developed to represent the geographical environment.
Maps fulfilled the needs of authorities interested in identifying towns, lands,
boundaries, rivers, and roads as they divided and exploited their domains. Individuals
used them to petition officials for land and to protect personal and corporate interests.
This reliance on indigenous maps signals a significant but often overlooked aspect of the
history of New Spain with far reaching implications for the understanding of colonial and
post-colonial societies. Although based in relationships of unequal power, the interaction
between painter and authorities marks an important site of contact where local
geographical knowledge informed representations of the natural world, imperial policies,
1 Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y
calidad, con las phrases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de
la lengua (Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia Española, por los herederos de Francisco del Hierro,
1737), 278.
13
distribution of land, and notarial culture. Michael Baxandall’s analysis of early Italian
Renaissance painting offers a useful model to consider the commission of maps. He
proposes that, “A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. On one
side there was a painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making. On the
other side, there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to
make it, and after he made it, reckoned on using in some way or other.”2 While
individuals in Italy commissioned paintings largely as luxury goods to enhance their
status, in Oaxaca map commissions informed more utilitarian efforts associated with land
tenure and its exploitation. Over time, people often endowed some maps with great
authority, communal treasures used to recount local histories during ritual celebrations
and to defend town patrimony under threats of encroachment. Although marked
differences exist between Renaissance patronage and indigenous cartography, the process
by which maps entered into the public record also witnessed the “deposit of social
relationships” between those involved with the commission and use of indigenous maps.
Oaxaca’s great ethnic diversity, peoples’ strong ties to land, and the region’s rich
pictorial writing tradition make it possible to closely examine the development of
indigenous mapping during the colonial period. From the 1570s through the 1600s
painters in the Mixteca, Tehuantepec, Sierra Norte, and coastal regions made maps to
petition or regularize land, to dispute boundary claims, to seek social privileges, and even
to supply geographical information for royal efforts to account for their vast holdings in
2 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of
Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1.
14
the New World (Figure 2). This period of map production coincided with a realignment
in the Spanish and Indian populations that adjusted spatial boundaries as a result of
resettlement campaigns in the sixteenth century.3 The generous number of maps
available for this period contrasts sharply with the limited amount located between 1610
and the 1670s. The pattern mirrors population decline in important centers of activity,
primarily in the Valley of Oaxaca. Antequera’s tributaries, natives who paid a forced tax
to Spanish authorities, fell from 8,000 in 1570 to a little over 2,000 by 1646. In the
Cuatro Villas, a 1570 census recorded 7,052 tributaries but only 849 by 1643.4 As the
native population recovered from the late seventeenth century onward, a scatter of maps
every few years suggests indigenous cartographic practices sometimes informed spatial
practices that included surveying, ritualized boundary walking, and witness testimony
(Figure 3). Officials introduced the term mapa, or map, and the combined term, mapa y
pintura (map and painting) during this period to describe indigenous pictorial records
focused on spatial representation.
3 William Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972),
21, 26-27, 37; Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1993), 51-52, 90-91, 159; Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui
History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 2001), 119-21; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs
Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press,1964), 28, 54, 282-86; and James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and
Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 44-46, 415-416.
4 Gerhard, 51, 93.
15
Sources and Methods
Based on archival research conducted in local, state, and federal archives and
libraries in the US and Mexico, this study analyzes the relationship between colonialism
and cartographic practices in the southern Mexican region of Oaxaca. The Archivo
General de la Nación (AGN), the national archive in Mexico City proved to be the richest
depository for this project, housing hundreds of pictorial records from across
Mesoamerica, often accompanied by written manuscripts that helped contextualize a
map’s use.5 A sample of five dozen maps drawn from the AGN that have never been
systematically analyzed and many of which remain unpublished informs the range of
activities that surrounded the making of a map. The Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra in
Mexico City as well as the Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca and the Archivo
General de Notarías housed at the Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa in Oaxaca City
enhanced the scope of the project in unique ways providing a mixture of maps, civil
records, and criminal cases that textured my understanding of mapmaking. The
collection of responses and native maps from the Relaciones Geográficas, a sixteenth-
5 A rich body of bibliographical work guides first-time users and seasoned veterans in examining the vast
holdings of the AGN. The multi-volume Catálogo de ilustraciones (Mexico City: Archivo General de la
Nación, 1979-84) and its online equivalent found at http://www.agn.gob.mx/mapilu/ both proved
invaluable resources. For indigenous pictorial records also see, Joaquín Galarza, Códices y pinturas
tradicionales indígenas en el Archivo General de la Nación. Estudio y catálogo (Mexico City: Libreria
Madero and Amatl, 1996). The following catalogs and indexes on land and ethnohistorical sources for the
study of Oaxaca facilitated my research in the archive: Límites, mapas y títulos primordiales de los pueblos
del estado de Oaxaca: Índice del Ramo de Tierras, ed. Enrique Méndez Martínez and Enrique Méndez
Torres (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nacion, 1999); Enrique Méndez Martínez, Índice de
documentos relativos a los pueblos del estado de Oaxaca (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología
e Historia, 1979); Documentos para la etnohistoria del estado de Oaxaca: Índice del Ramo de Mercedes
del Archivo General de la Nación, ed. Ronald Spores and Miguel Saldaña (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Publications in Anthropology, 1973); and Colección de documentos del Archivo General de la
Nación para la etnohistoria de la Mixteca de Oaxaca en el siglo XVI, ed. Ronald Spores (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology, 1992).
16
century Spanish survey of the New World in the Benson Latin American Collection at the
University of Texas at Austin and many chronicles, natural histories, geographical
treatises, vocabularies, and orthographies at the Library of Congress served to
contextualize the technology and knowledge involved in the production of maps. After
returning to Tucson from extended research to focus on writing, Google Books proved an
indispensable tool to locate a surprising number of rare treatises that would have
otherwise required expensive research trips abroad.6
Historians have typically regarded maps as simple visual finding aides without
much concern about their cultural value. J. B. Harley, a leading twentieth-century
scholar of cartography remarked that “historians have tended to relegate maps―along
with paintings, photographs, and other non-verbal sources―to a lower division of
evidence than the written word.”7 Harley’s claim mirrors the attitudes of intellectuals in
other fields who have historically argued for the primacy of alphabetic over pictorial
writing, an element used to justify imperial expansion in the New World.8 Likewise,
discussion about cartography rested for generations in the notion that mathematical
precision and topographical accuracy represented the most salient qualities in a map, a
truthful way of understanding spatial relationships. Mark Monmonier’s classic How to
Lie with Maps (1991) dispelled many of the claims traditionally made about their veracity
6 This tool is not
without pitfalls. See Robert Darnton’s widely circulated, “The Library in the New Age,”
in The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008.
7 Harley, 34.
8 For critiques of this paradigm, see Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,
Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Elizabeth Hill
Boone, “Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge,” in Writing without Words: Alternative
Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994).
17
by examining the varied strategies used by modern cartographers to manipulate data on
maps. Not that this fact had been lost on historical actors.
“[A map] depends entirely on the will of those who make it and those who
commission it,” exclaimed Diego Fernández de Cordoba somewhat deridingly after
inspecting an indigenous map in 1688. As the representative of a Spanish landholder
embroiled in a dispute with a Mixtec town in the Valley of Oaxaca, he rejected the notion
that a map could serve a legal purpose, especially when written titles did not accompany
it. That Fernández articulated such an insightful view of maps is reminiscent of Harley’s
idea that maps represent space “in terms of relations and of cultural practices,
preferences, and priorities. What we read on a map is as much related to an invisible
social world and to an ideology as it is to phenomena seen and measured in the
landscape.”9 Space acquired significance when individuals endowed specific expanses of
land with meaning. In other words, people selected and then isolated certain spaces
defining a use for them recognizable by different groups of people.10
In colonial Oaxaca,
land held great social, economic, and ritual value. Defining it included measures such as
ritual boundary walking, witness testimony, and record-making that involved officials,
translators, notaries, caciques, Spanish ranchers, and witnesses of assorted backgrounds.
Harley’s provocative ideas, themselves a response to postmodern thought and the
cultural turn of the late twentieth century, inspired a generation of scholars to think about
9 Harley, 35-36.
10
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA, and Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 16.
18
maps as multifaceted objects that brought together people, tools, and knowledge.11
Fernández’s proposition is also suggestive in at least two other respects. For one thing, it
indicates a fairly obvious bias against maps and native pictorials, records deployed by
lords and political officers of indigenous towns to acquire land and privileges with
varying rates of success. Less transparent is the fact that Fernández’s proclamation
corresponds to strategies used by lawyers to discredit an opponent’s evidence, a measure
that sought to exploit weakness very much as it does today in our modern courtrooms.
Yet the charge against maps in colonial Oaxaca did not always meet the stereotypes
portrayed by critics, individuals who stood to lose from their acceptance in the courts of
New Spain. Authorities, in fact, regularly turned to pintores, indigenous painters, to
describe local geography for matters concerning the division and exploitation of land.
Visual analysis represents the most useful tool to examine the content of each
map. The identification and classification of cartographic signs helped to define the
range of elements used to describe spatial relations. Painters focused on the illustration
of human settlements including towns, ranches, and villages as well as geographical
features such as mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. Roads paved with footprints and
hoof marks to indicate human and animal travel connected settlements to one another
aligning regions in a visual format. Animals and people, when represented, provided a
11
See for instance, Christian Jacob, “Toward a Cultural History of Cartography,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996):
191-198; Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-
1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed:
Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ricardo
Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making
and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2005). Also see Kapil Raj’s Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge
in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (London: Palgrave, 2007), esp. Chapter 2.
19
reference to the types of activities individuals engaged in to work the land. A second
aspect of the analysis included the identification of a map’s written elements. A
paleographic study of alphabetic writing in Spanish, Nahuatl, Mixtec, or Zapotec found
on most maps reflects the intervention of scribes and authorities when inspecting the
contents of a map to legitimate its content. It also revealed the intervention of painters
seeking to establish authority over space and its visual representation. A third focus
considers the materiality of native maps including an analysis of colors, ink, binders, and
support materials such as paper, brushes, cloths, and vellum. The material condition of
maps, that is, the selection of organic and inorganic ingredients used to make them, plays
an important role in the way we think about indigenous pictorial records. Never would
we confuse a sixteenth-century Spanish landscape, a Portolan chart to track maritime
voyage, or the plan of a city with an indigenous map. This rarely discussed aspect of
indigenous pictorial activity, and the focus of the Chapter 2, raises questions about
technical matters associated with the production of maps.
The study of materials and technology informs a rich and evolving historiography
associated with indigenous mapmaking in colonial Mexico. Major studies of native
cartography have carved important paths to understand shifting modes of pictorial
representation during the sixteenth century as well as the historical context and political
conditions under which maps were made.12
These works have enriched our
12
Serge Gruzinski, “Colonial Indian Maps in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: An Essay in Mixed Cartography,”
Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 46-61; Dana Leibsohn, “Primers for Memory:
Cartographic Histories and Nahua Identity,” in Writing without Words, and “Colony and Cartography:
Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in
Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);
Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones
20
understanding of native painters and their role as mediators between authorities, towns,
and individuals in the early colonial world, but they have stopped short of mentioning the
presence of mineral and natural materials used to make maps. In most respects, the
responsibility of investigating Mesoamerican material technology used in pre-Colombian
and early colonial pictorial documents has fallen under the purview of conservators and
textile experts who have established useful parameters to measure the types of elements
used in native pictorial activities including mapmaking.13
Two recent edited works have
featured contributions that showcase indigenous material technology originating in
central Mexico during the sixteenth century.14
The work of art historian Diana Magaloni
Kerpel, a unifying thread in both volumes, draws effectively from the use of conservation
Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and “Mesoamerican Cartography,” in The
History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Artic,
Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998); and Alessandra Russo, El realismo circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la
cartografía novohispana, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2005).
13
See Mary Elizabeth Haude, “Identification of Colorants on Maps from the Early Colonial Period of New
Spain (Mexico),” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 37 (1998): 240-270; Sylvia Rogers
Albro and Thomas Albro, “The Examination and Conservation Treatment of the Library of Congress
Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 29 (1990): 97-115;
Leticia Arroyo Ortiz, Tintes naturales mexicanos: Su aplicación en algodón, henequén y lana (Mexico
City, 2008); Teresa Castelló Yturbide, Colorantes naturales de México (Mexico City, 1988); and H. G.
Wiedemann and A. Boller, “Thermal Analysis of Codex Huamantla and other Mexican Papers,” Journal of
Thermal Analysis 46 (1996), 1033-1045. Compare Arthur Anderson’s “Materiales Colorantes
Prehispánicos,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 4 (1963): 73-83; and Carmen Arellano Hoffmann, “El escriba
mesoamericano y sus utensilios de trabajo: La posición social del escriba antes y después de la conquista
española,” in Libros y escritura de tradición indígena: ensayos sobre los códices prehispánicos y
coloniales de México, ed. Carmen Arellano Hoffmann, Peer Schmidt, and Xavier Noguez (Toluca and
Eichstätt: El Colegio Mexiquense and Katholische Universität, 2002).
14
The collection of essays in Colors between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de
Sahagún, ed. Gerhard Wolf, Joseph Connors, and Louis Waldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2012) covers important aspects of the study of pigments associated with Sahagún’s work including the
redaction of botanical treatises, painters and techniques, and the circulation of materials across the Atlantic.
Those in Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule, ed. Mary
Miller and Barbara Mundy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) inform the making of the Beinecke
Map, a complex pictorial record made on native bark paper held at Yale University.
21
practices, historical analysis, and visual interpretation to examine the relationship
between materials, colors, and usage.15
Authorities and individuals commissioned maps with specific goals in mind.
While many maps have been separated from their original dockets, others have not.
Extant sources reveal a relationship between the division and distribution of land and the
practice of making maps. Grants of land, titles, disputes, complaints, surveys, and
testimonies inform the commission, use, and circulation of maps across a wide range of
social networks that often extended beyond the location where they were originally made.
These documents referenced the parties involved in dividing space, including: individuals
or indigenous town councils represented by political officers seeking or defending land;
Spanish officials, especially regional judges known as alcaldes mayores and corregidores
who presided over commercial, civil, and criminal affairs; lawyers; notaries; translators
drawn from the Spanish and Indian worlds; and witnesses. This rich cast of characters,
all of them involved in shaping spatial relationships, formed part of the region’s
manuscript culture where maps circulated.
Print technology transformed the way audiences gained access to knowledge
during the early modern period but it did not eliminate the production of manuscript
sources, especially in the Iberian world.16
Fernando Bouza’s insightful work on Spain’s
15
See Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “The Traces of the Creative Process: Pictorial Materials and Techniques in
the Beinecke Map,” in Painting a Map; and “Painters of the New World: The Process of Making the
Florentine Codex,” in Colors between Two Worlds. My thanks to Barbara Mundy for suggesting these
sources.
16
The spirited debate in the pages of the American Historical Review between Elizabeth Eisenstein and
Adrian Johns on the print revolution hinges on the transition, but not replacement, of manuscript copying
versus mechanical reproduction. “Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?” AHR 107 /1
22
Golden Age highlights the rich array of literary, notarial, philosophical, religious, and
scientific manuscripts that circulated across a broad social spectrum reaching literate as
well as semi- and non-literate audiences.17
More importantly, it suggests the interrelated
histories of print and manuscript traditions, not the replacement of one over the other. In
scientific activities involved with exploration, Spanish authorities often chose to produce
manuscripts rather than to print their findings in order to protect state secrets from rival
European powers. A new generation of scholars, mostly historians of science, has made
convincing arguments for Iberian scientific achievements especially in botany and
cartography, subject areas suppressed by a northern European rhetoric that portrayed the
Spanish empire as conservative and backward.18
Other forms of manuscript sources
including official correspondence between important religious and political figures, as
well as personal letter writing with established salutations, textual conventions, and
themes facilitated communication across the Iberian world.19
(2002). Also see Eisenstein’s influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. I-II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), and Johns’s The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
17
Fernando Bouza, Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Marcial Pons,
2001); and Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain, trans. Sonia López and
Michael Agnew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
18
See Padrón, The Spacious Word; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of
the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Antonio Barrera-
Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006); María Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New
World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); and the collection of essays in Science in the Spanish
and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula de Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin
Sheehan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
19
Rebecca Earle, “Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas 62 (2005): 17-46; Bouza,
Corre manuscrito, 137-213.
23
An important aspect of the development of manuscript culture in Spanish
America involves the circulation of records produced by indigenous people, especially in
New Spain. Art historians of Mesoamerica and early colonial Mexico have examined the
transition between pictorial and alphabetic systems of writing, the implications of non-
alphabetic literacy among Indian societies in the Americas, and the supposed collapse of
indigenous knowledge brought on by Western learning.20
James Lockhart’s philological
approach to the study of Nahuatl records from central Mexico has served as a model to
write about the experiences of Amerindian groups from New Spain.21
Studies of native
pictorial records known as títulos primordiales have emphasized the creative responses of
Indian towns lacking proper titles to falsify manuscripts in order to safeguard land.22
20
See George Kubler, “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Colombian Art,” Essays in Pre-
Colombian Art and Archaeology, ed. Samuel Lothrop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), and
Donald Robertson, “The Pinturas (Maps) of the Relaciones Geográficas, With a Catalogue,” in Handbook
of Middle American Indians Vol. 12, Part I, vol. ed. Howard F. Cline (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1972), hereafter cited as HMAI. Compare Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, xix; and
Alessandra Russo, El realismo circular, 19.
21
See Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, and an earlier collaboration between Arthur Anderson,
Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart, eds., Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Other important works within this strand of scholarship
include Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century
Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Robert Haskett, Indigenous Rulers: An Ethnohistory
of Town Government in Colonial Cuernavaca (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991);
Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997); and Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca. For historiographical discussions of the
New Philology see Restall, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” Latin
American Research Review 38 (2003): 113-134, and “Heirs to the Hieroglyphs: Indigenous Writing in
Colonial Mesoamerica,” The Americas 54 (1997): 239-267. Compare Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
“Renaissance Mess(tizaje): What Mexican Indians did to Titian and Ovid,” New Centennial Review 2
(2002), 269-70.
22
See Paula López Caballero, ed., Los títulos primordiales del centro de México (Mexico City:
CONACULTA and Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2003); Enrique Florescano, Historia de las historias de
la nación mexicana (Mexico City: Taurus, 2002), and “El canon memorioso forjado por los títulos
primordiales,” Colonial Latin American Review 11/2 (2002): 183-230; Xavier Noguez and Stephanie
Wood, eds., De tlacuilos y escribanos: Estudios sobre documentos indígenas coloniales del centro de
24
While Spaniards and other Europeans controlled print culture in Spanish America, in
New Spain, Amerindians actively participated in manuscript culture as purveyors of
ritual, geographical, and botanical knowledge, but also as artists and scribes.
Forging Memories
For the various ethnic groups in Oaxaca, including heavy concentrations of
Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Nahuas but also Chocho, Cuicatec, Chatino, Mazatec, Trique,
Mixe, Zoque, Huave, and Chontal peoples, the Spanish conquest signified a radical
realignment of culture and space. Forced resettlements known as congregaciones during
the sixteenth century and a series of epidemics that struck in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries altered the social and political configuration of Indian landholdings
in many regions of Oaxaca.23
Natives, referred to by Spaniards as indios (Indians) or
naturales (natives), organized themselves in social groups led by caciques, hereditary
lords, and lesser nobles described as principales. The ethnic state, known among Mixtecs
as ñuu and among Zapotecs as yetze, formed the basic unit of organization, each one
controlling specific areas of land where individuals contributed crops and service for the
benefit of the unit. The Spanish-imposed repúblicas de indios, a blanket term based on
México (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1998); Robert Haskett, “Paper Shields: The Ideology of Coats
of Arms in Colonial Mexican Primordial Titles,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 99-126; and Lockhart, The
Nahuas, 357, 360-364, and 410-418. A limited number of titles have been identified for the Oaxaca region.
See Lisa Sousa and Kevin Terraciano, “The ´Original Conquest’ of Oaxaca: Nahua and Mixtec Accounts of
the Spanish Conquest,” Ethnohistory 50 (2003): 349-400; and María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, “El
título de San Mateo Capulalpan, Oaxaca. Actualidad y autenticidad de un título primordial,” Relaciones:
Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 122 (2010): 21-54.
23
For resettlements in the Valley of Oaxaca, Gerhard, 51-52, 90-91, and 159; and Taylor, 21, 26-27, 37.
For the neighboring Mixteca region, see Terraciano, The Mixtecs, 119-21. On congregaciones in the
Valley of Mexico, see Gibson, 28, 54, and 282-86; and Lockhart, The Nahuas, 44-46 and 415-16.
25
the Castilian principle of municipal government used to describe the political jurisdiction
of an Indian town, only partially coincided with the range of the ñuu or yetze which
incorporated elements of the sacred.
Land played a pivotal role in the development of society in New Spain. During
the sixteenth century, the Crown, Spanish colonists, secular authorities, and the regular
orders made advances on land previously used by the native clergy and the ruling elite.
In central Mexico, officials reassigned property, confiscated possessions, and limited
cacique holdings reducing the amount of indigenous land in the region,24
Officers from
the altepetl, primarily principales and often also caciques, administered lands held in
common maintaining careful records, and dividing and assigning plots as needed.
Cacicazgos, entailed estates held by generations of leading notables, suffered
compression as a result of Spanish policies, labor drafts, and the seizure of land by other
natives. During this period, caciques across central and southern Mexico enjoyed the
labor of commoners that worked land to support the office.25
In the Valley and the
Mixteca, caciques held considerable land as well as access to labor even though a general
decline in wealth defined many cacicazgos.26
Some caciques used this period of change
to expand their holdings while limitations in laws governing entailed Indian estates
allowed caciques to rent lands from their cacicazgos rather than selling them.27
24
Gibson, 264.
25 Gibson, 265.
26 See Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 150; Terraciano, 230-231; and Taylor, Landlord and
Peasant, 35.
27
See Taylor, 44.
26
The Mixtec informants from Cuilapa who in 1580 gave an account of their history
to Fray Agustín de Salazar claimed to have arrived to the Valley of Oaxaca in great
numbers three hundred years before as a result of marriage alliances between leading
nobles.28
The informants made a point to emphasize that Mixtecs originated in the
northwest mountains known as the Mixteca Alta, not in the Valley, a traditional Zapotec
domain.29
They used the Mixtec place name, Yuchaca, instead of the more commonly
used Nahuatl one, Cuilapa, a practice no doubt reflective of social and political shifts
since the imposition of Nahua authority in the region beginning in the mid-fifteenth
century. The Mixtec informants’ reading of the landscape reflects Andrés Reséndez’s
notion of “carving spaces” out of land. He argues that when settling the US-Mexico
borderlands during the first half of the nineteenth century, Anglos, Mexicans, and Indians
“subscribed to alternative mental maps and admitted several geographical readings” that
allowed each group to negotiate its presence in spite of state efforts to impose its own
geographical agenda.30
A similar process took shape in the Valley where competing
interests among Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Nahuas, and Spaniards clashed against imperial
policies producing highly charged and long-lasting encounters over land.
28
Relación de Cuilapa (1580), Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, 1577-1585, Benson
Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter BLAC), Folder
XXIV-10.
29
The Dominican Antonio de los Reyes identified the Mixtec spoken in Cuilapa with the one from
Yanhuitlán, a powerful head town in the Mixteca Alta. See his Arte en lengua mixteca (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University, 1976 [1593]), vii.
30
Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16.
27
In Oaxaca, rich traditions of pictorial writing and record making in the era
preceding the arrival of Europeans contributed to an active participation of Nahuas,
Mixtecs, and Zapotecs in the Oaxaca’s manuscript culture.31
While the use of pictorial
manuscripts as legal devices did not enter formally into law until 1643, Indian codices,
maps, and lienzos had served as testimony of civil and commercial transactions, as
curiosity items for patrons in European courts, and as the site of exchanges in geographic
and ritual knowledge since the early sixteenth century.32
Although the output of native
pictorial records waned in the seventeenth century, they continued to circulate within the
local and regional court system, and in the hands of individuals and town governments.
This practice allowed people of various backgrounds, especially Spanish officials and
notaries but also interpreters and witnesses of various ethnicities as well as clerics, to
come into contact with pictorial manuscripts fostering a limited, but practical, knowledge
of conventions and style.
Spaniards spread their own roots into Oaxacan soil. In 1529, portions of the
Valley came under the authority of the Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, a title held by the
31
See Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); John Monaghan, “The Text in the Body, the Body in the
Text: The Embodied Sign in Mixtec Writing,” in Writing without Words; Terraciano, The Mixtecs, 15-65;
and Sousa and Terraciano, “The Original Conquest.” For Indian manuscripts in general, see Donald
Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial
Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Hoffman, Schmidt, and
Noguez, eds., Libros y escritura de tradición indígena; Serge Gruzinski, La colonización de lo imaginario:
Sociedades indígenas y occidentalización en el México español. Siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1991), esp. 15-148; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side, 87- 96; and Lockhart, The
Nahuas, 326-418.
32
See Florescano, Historia de las historias, 241; Thomas Cummins, “From Lies to Truth: Colonial
Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural Translation,” in Reframing the Renaissance; Eloise Quiñones
Keber, “Collecting Cultures: A Mexican Manuscript in the Vatican Library,” Reframing the Renaissance;
and Mignolo, The Darker Side, 188-197.
28
heirs of Hernán Cortés to whom the crown bestowed a seigniorial grant. The estate
included separate holdings in central Mexico and Oaxaca and its heirs maintained the
right to appoint alcaldes mayores and collect revenue from the property they held. The
Cuatro Villas del Marquesado de Oaxaca, an alignment of four towns under Cortés’
authority (Figure 4) included Etla, Tecuilabacoya, Huaxyácac (later Oaxaca), and
Cuilapa, the latter hosting at least two thirds of the combined residents. A villa was
smaller than a city (ciudad) but larger than a village (aldea) usually enjoying some
privileges including self-government. In the 1520s when Cortés quarreled with his rivals,
Spanish colonizers in the Valley secured a royal sanction authorizing the establishment of
the Villa of Antequera, controlled by an independent town council known as a cabildo
which included a representative of the crown. By 1532, royal authorities granted
Antequera the status of a city, serving as the Spanish seat of power in the region during
the rest of the colonial period. Together with Oaxaca, they functioned as twin cities in the
region.33
By the seventeenth century, several generations of criollos, American-born
Spaniards, along with recent Iberian migrants populated Oaxaca. “Illustrious gentlemen
cultivated [this land] for the Church’s gardens,” wrote the Dominican Francisco de
Burgoa in his Geográfica descripción, a natural and social history of Oaxaca published in
1674.34
Burgoa, a criollo born in Antequera praised the work of sixteenth-century
33
Gerhard, 48-52, 88-91.
34
“De varones insignes, que la cultivaron para jardines de la Iglesia,” Francisco de Burgoa, Geográfica
descripción de la parte septentrional del polo ártico de la América, y nueva iglesia de las Indias
occidentales, y sitio astronómico de esta provincia de predicadores de Antequera Valle de Oaxaca (Mexico
City: En la imprenta de Juan Ruíz, 1674), 2; Biblioteca Francisco Burgoa (BFB).
29
missionaries in their battle against idolatry. He described the region before the arrival of
the Spaniards as “murky domains, a pit of darkness and [the] shadow of death,” a
reference to the Christian belief that Satan had enjoyed unlimited control over the
spiritual care of people in the Americas.35
Burgoa’s metaphor about the ominous
landscape also represented a statement of geographical possession. In the friar’s view,
his Dominican forbearers had established a deep bond with the natural environment
through their spiritual work, one which entitled them to enjoy the bounty of the New
World. Their painstaking labor navigating the region’s rugged terrain to gain Indian
converts, administer sacraments, and preside over ecclesiastical matters―a way of life
familiar to Burgoa―allowed the missionaries to increase their geographical knowledge
while developing strong ties to the land. The lived experience of his ancestors, one that
included elements of the built environment, natural landscapes, and the formation of
social relationships permitted Burgoa to idealize a common past among the region’s
Spanish inhabitants highlighting its unique contribution to the empire.
Unlike most of the Dominicans he wrote about, Francisco de Burgoa was a native
of Oaxaca. In his Geográfica descripción Burgoa noted that Antequera hosted close to
two thousand Spanish citizens known as vecinos, “many of them noble, [and also
various] ancient families of Old Christians,” that is, those untainted by Jewish blood.36
Vecindad, formal membership in a Spanish municipality, carried with it a set of
privileges including the use of common land, participation in political affairs, voting
35
“Regiones lóbregas, abismo de tiniebla, y sombra de muerte,” Burgoa, 2.
36
The original passage reads, “muchos Nobles, y Casas antiguas de Cristianos viejos,” Burgoa, 6.
30
rights, and commercial opportunities but also obligations such as payment of taxes,
contributions for public expenses, participation in militias and submission to local
authority.37
These rights and obligations also bound individuals to communities. Early
settlers with “fond memories [of Andalusia],” remarked Burgoa, “succeeded in
persuading the others to name [the city Antequera] to distinguish it from Oaxaca, [its
name] in the Mexican language.”38
Burgoa concerned himself not only with tracing the
Christian origins of Antequera, but with plotting its exact location on a mathematical
grid. He offered its position to his readers as “a little over seventeen degrees North, ruled
by the sign of Capricorn in the House of Saturn exalted in Mars” to emphasize the
qualities of leadership imbued under this astrological configuration.39
Burgoa praised the
Valley’s aromatic flowers, its lush landscapes, and its natural wealth including cochineal,
a valuable red dye harvested by local farmers from cactus plants. Displaying Christian
ties to the Old World allowed the Dominican to position Antequera as an important and
honorable member of the Spanish Empire while locating the region on a geometric plane
allowed him to possess it in name of the Church.
Spaniards settled primarily in major urban areas across Oaxaca during the
sixteenth century including Antequera, Teposcolula, and San Ildefonso de Villa Alta
37
See Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 6.
38
Scribes and other Spaniards such as Burgoa who produced written records referred to Nahuatl,
Mesoamerica’s lingua franca, as lengua mexicana. The original passage reads, “muy afecto sus memorias,
y pudo persuadir a los demás el nombre [Antequera] para distinguir el de Oaxaca, que es de la lengua
mexicana,” Burgoa, 6.
39
The location of Antequera reads: “ . . . en poco más de diez, y siete grados a la parte del Norte, reconoce
para el dominio, el signo de Capricornio, y exaltación de Marte,” Burgoa, 6.
31
though the number of colonists in Oaxaca was consistently small during the colonial
period. Terraciano notes that little opportunity to prosper economically limited migration
to Oaxaca, a region with “no great mines, few haciendas, and no obrajes (Spanish-run
textile enterprises).”40
During the first half of the century, the crown awarded
encomiendas, grants of Indian labor and tribute, to individual Spaniards in Oaxaca who
used them to mine for gold but also to extract cacao, cloth, dyes, maize, and cotton.
Encomenderos, holders of an encomienda, played prominent roles in local power
relationships that also included Christian clerics, regional judges, and native caciques
from whom they wrested power. The gradual elimination of the system of encomienda
during the second half of the sixteenth century, a planned effort on the part of the Crown
to limit the ambitions of local strongmen, contributed to a heightened interest in land
during the seventeenth century that continued into the eighteenth. Spaniards also
controlled the legal mechanisms imposed by imperial authority to ensure social order.
Bureaucrats, alcaldes mayores, corregidores, scribes, lawyers, and a host of other officials
worked and lived in Oaxaca forming social networks with the rich cast of natives,
Africans, Europeans, and individuals of mixed-race ancestry known as castas.
The Map Trade
This work is divided into two main parts. The first pays particular attention to
native painters and their capacity to make maps. Chapter 1 analyzes the social context in
which painters developed their unique skills. The use of footprints on maps, a common
40
Terraciano, 339.
32
cartographic symbol drawn from the Mesoamerican pictorial canon applied by painters to
denote roads and travel, serves as a motif to trace the training and activities of these
important figures. Chronicles, land dispute records, and criminal cases inform an
examination of their preparation with friars and native elders, their interactions with
Spanish officials and bureaucrats, their ventures into agriculture, their participation in
political affairs at the local level, and the visual strategies they applied to convey spatial
relations. The ability to speak Spanish, an essential tool to communicate with royal
officials who inspected and validated maps, placed them in unique positions of power to
shape discussions about boundaries and authority.
The production of maps extended into the material realm, painters tasked with
selecting and preparing a variety of organic and inorganic ingredients to illustrate their
products. Chapter 2 analyzes this under-examined aspect of indigenous mapmaking to
enhance our understanding of a painter’s technical skills. Material technology highlights
the way Indian painters incorporated botanical and geographic knowledge including the
selection of plants and minerals in their natural state, the ability to recognize quality
materials from adulterated products if acquired at a market or from an individual or a
store, and the capability of mixing natural and synthetic elements to prepare for use. A
sample of maps from various regions in Oaxaca as well as land disputes, criminal cases,
trade records, and botanical histories shed light on the movement of ingredients such as
rocks, plants, roots, insects, and soil as they found their way from the physical world to
the hands of an Indian painter who skillfully transformed them into paper, colorants, ink,
33
and binders. The application of natural elements witnessed the circulation of materials
and dyeing techniques in the process contributing to the distinct style of Indian maps.
The second part of this dissertation examines the lives of maps after their creation.
When a painter finished a map, it typically passed through the hands of a royal official
tasked with authenticating its content. Chapter 3 examines the practices of authorization
developed by Spanish officials who inspected Indian maps within the Spanish courts.
Scribes and regional judges known as alcaldes mayores developed specific tools to read
and comment on the maps introduced by Indian painters including keys, systems of
organization that assigned numbers or letters to identify a map’s elements, and written
labels used to describe geographical features. Keys typically appeared written on the side
of maps though on occasion officials wrote them on separate folios forging a relationship
for the reader between image and text. An official’s participation, visible on a map’s
surface in the form of descriptive labels about distance and place, corrections and
annotations, certifying texts, and signatures played an important role in defining a map’s
form and function but more importantly, it validated its use in the local and regional
courts. Their written glosses stand out in part because of the use of iron-gall ink, the
material of choice for those in the business of writing legal manuscripts. These practices
took place in an increasingly competitive social environment where individuals and
corporate entities vied for access to land, wood, water, and other natural resources.
While royal officials authorized the use of native maps as visual evidence, lawyers and
litigants often regarded them with distrust.
34
The last quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed a modest surge in
mapmaking after a dramatic decline at the beginning the 1600s. The fourth and last
chapter uses a land dispute and a copied map made by a native cacique in 1686 to
contextualize changes and continuities associated with the production of indigenous maps
during this period. An interest in land for agricultural development and cattle ranching
generated competition for natural resources while authorities pushed policies to tax its
use. Native towns and individuals in Oaxaca adjusted by strengthening community ties
with elders, procuring titles and bills of sale for property, and turning to old maps that
described property boundaries and political borders. The use of old maps, pieces often in
disrepair and scarred with the passage of time called for the intervention of skilled
painters who could reproduce their content. Just as their predecessors before them,
painters mimicked old pictorial traditions reinventing, adapting, and improvising visual
signs to fit the needs of contemporary audiences. Maps contributed to social memory
practices including ritual boundary walking and witness testimony that sought to
establish a connection with the past in order to legitimate use of land in the present.
35
CHAPTER 1:
THE TRAIL OF FOOTSTEPS
The entire world’s greatness, no matter how large you paint it,
lies at the feet of a man who measured it.
―José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las indias (1590)41
Acosta’s words memorialized the great scientific and technological leaps in the
Hispanic world during the sixteenth century. His comments, at once a compliment to
exploration, cartography, and colonization were also meant as a warning about the
fallibility of human beings and the inherent biases of those who represented aspects of the
terrestrial globe: no matter how large the world was painted, individuals could only see
what lay below their feet. In colonial Oaxaca, generations of indigenous painters
primarily of Mixtec, Zapotec, and Nahua origin represented land and spatial boundaries
for a variety of purposes and for a multitude of audiences. They, too, were limited by
what they saw below their feet not to mention the cultural assumptions that undergird
their world view. In their efforts to support petitions of land, defense cases against
encroachment, and descriptions of individual property and political boundaries, painters
applied a range of skills used to make maps.
In the Valley of Oaxaca in early October 1686, a painter by the name of Domingo
de Zárate, a native lord from the Mixtec ñuu of Xoxocotlán, accepted a commission to
copy an old map (Figure 5). Antonio de Abellán y Carrasco, the alcalde mayor of the
Cuatro Villas del Marquesado, an alignment of the four principal towns in the heart of the
41
José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, en que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y
elementos, metales, plantas, y animales dellas: y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y gobierno, y guerras de los
indios (Sevilla: Juan de León, 1590), 17.
36
Valley, commissioned the map from Zárate following a request from two political
officers of Xoxocotlán to duplicate it. The copy would take the place of the original map
in support of a suit against a Spanish landholder. In recognition of its unique pictorial
content, the alcalde mayor mandated that a master painter replicate the map, “que se
trasunte por un maestro pintor,” a task delegated to Zárate. The painter turned up with
officers from the Mixtec town three weeks later to present the tattered original and its
copy to the alcalde mayor. The intervening time between the map’s commission and its
formal introduction into the notarial record marks a significant moment not considered in
the records, one of careful examination, access to an old pictorial record, and knowledge
to procure and make materials to paint.
The ancient map served as a testament to the pictorial skills of an earlier
generation of painters and it informed Zárate’s own abilities. In the process of making
the map, the master painter acquired thick coarse linen fabric that served as the surface on
which to paint and he prepared a medium brown pigment that colored the copy’s
backdrop. Next, he mixed a series of earth tones including green, crimson, and dark
brown with which to illustrate a range of mountains that straddled the western boundaries
of Xoxocotlán. Zárate carefully detailed place sites, physical structures, and natural
resources in pictorial fashion later adding geographical names and written descriptions in
Mixtec next to some symbols.42
In effect, the map described the landscape in Mixtec
terms, Zárate conveying authority through an assortment of cartographic signs and
written language.
42
Full transcriptions, translation, and interpretation of this map appear in Chapter 4 and Appendix A.
37
Scattered across the page connecting settlements to one another, Zárate painted a
series of roads with footprints to signify movement. Feet imprints used in pre-Colombian
codices symbolized journeys, a reminder that a great lord once embarked upon a quest of
marriage or to wage war in an effort to preserve a lineage and to expand domains. The
use of feet acquired new meaning during the last quarter of the sixteenth century when a
new generation of painters adapted its use to make pictorial records, most notably
community and regional maps used to petition and to defend land. A dearth of maps in
the decades following 1610 suggests a temporary pattern of stability in matters related to
land in part brought on by continued population decline in major urban areas. Painters
revived old motifs when authorities and town councils called on them to paint maps that
followed the local tradition, a response to new policies on land and increased population
growth. Don Domingo’s use of footprints and of strategies reminiscent of logographic
writing used a century earlier was no mere coincidence. During the map’s inspection on
October 25, Zárate presented his copy for inspection. On the map’s bottom right hand
corner, an unconventional certifying gloss appeared, it read in part, “I copied this map
based on the original given to me; [I made it] according to the traditions of my art of
painting without damaging or diminishing a single thing.”43
Native painters who made
maps did not typically sign them instead surrendering the task of certification and
alphabetic writing to the scribes and officials who inspected and approved them. In this
case, Zárate assumed the role of certification normally reserved for a scribe exhibiting not
43
The original inscription reads, “Por orden del Capitan Don Antonio de Abellán . . . cupie [copie?] esta
Mapa según su original que se me dio sin estrepar [estropear?] ni disminuir cosa Alguna según se
acostumbra en mi arte de la pintura.” Map of Xoxocotlán (1686), AGN, No. 0625, Tierras, Vol. 129, Exp.
4, f. 249.
38
only pictorial skills used to copy the old map but knowledge of notarial protocols
displayed through written fluency in Spanish as well as Mixtec. But the most compelling
aspect of the passage is the fact that Zárate presented himself as a practitioner of a unique
form of expression, “mi arte de la pintura,” “my art of painting,” he said.
What did Zárate mean by his art of painting? Where and how did he learn his
trade? What kind of visual strategies did Zárate and others like him use to express spatial
relationships? Zárate’s declaration took place nearly eighty years after a marked decline
of native pictorial activity in Mesoamerica. What significance does his commission to
replicate the old map and his self-description as a maestro pintor have on our
understanding of indigenous pictorial traditions and the manuscript culture of New
Spain? In the Hispanic world, arte represented what sixteenth-century Spanish jurist
Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos defined as “a compendium and assemblage of well-tested
precepts and rules that through methodical and purposeful learning guide us towards a
worthy goal.”44
Zárate’s unusual declaration suggests he held a similar view of his own
pictorial tradition, one in which specific knowledge ordered the form and content of a
map. Perhaps he also understood his talent as huisi, the Mixtec term that described a
trade or profession, an activity developed through yodzatacundi, the act of painting.45
Painters in Oaxaca during the late sixteenth century through the early eighteenth century
44
The passage states, “El arte no es otra cosa, sino una recopilación, y congregado de preceptos, y reglas,
experimentadas, que ordenadamente, y con cierta razón, y estudio nos encaminan a algún fin y uso bueno.”
Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos, Noticia general para la estimación de las artes, y de la manera en que se
conocen las liberales de las que son mecánicas y serviles, con una exhortación a la honra de la virtud y del
trabajo contra los ociosos, y otras particulares para las personas de todos estados (Madrid: Pedro
Madrigal, 1600), 15-16, Library of Congress Rare Books (LCRB).
45
Francisco de Alvarado, Vocabulario en lengua mixteca (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista and
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1962 [1593]), 27, 168.
39
made maps drawing from visual strategies that included the organization of geographical
elements on the page usually in a circular fashion, the use of the center as a focal point,
the application of pigments and colors to form hierarchies, and the repetition of signs that
often carried various meanings for multiple audiences.
The use of foot prints, an important sign found on Mesoamerican pictorial records
across time, functions as a metaphor to examine the role of painters within colonial
society. Feet imprints establish an individual’s presence in a specific geographical
location suggesting movement within that space. On maps and pictorial records of the
late sixteenth century, feet accompanied an intricate system of roads through which
people and goods circulated. In some ways, footprints stand in for painters’ scouting
activities when they mapped a region, the traces they left as they reconnoitered an area.
In another respect, the ritual aspect of walking the boundaries played a key role when
taking possession of a piece of land and to recognize the limits of a settlement or town, a
moment certainly worthy of recognition on maps. Pictorially, each footprint design is
unique in itself providing an unofficial signature which helps to distinguish one painter
from another. These tracks support the development of a social profile of painters,
especially in consideration of the limited resources that tie individuals to maps. Why
could painters express spatial relationships to multiple audiences? Did knowledge of
regional geography including mountains, streams, rivers, mineral deposits, trees, and
other features facilitate communication with Spanish officials and native leaders? Where
and how did painters learn about plants, roots, soil, and insects and the proper way to
transform these ingredients into pigments, ink, and paper? Painters functioned as
40
intermediary figures between the Spanish and native worlds, forming part of several
overlapping sectors involved in the division of land and the allocation of privileges and
goods that generated the need for maps.46
Understanding of local politics, history, and
culture allowed painters to represent the interests of their mostly native clientele
responding to them but also to the Spanish officials who authorized the maps and other
pictorial manuscripts they made.
Typically from the upper strata of native society, painters participated in the
political and religious affairs of their communities and they held land, through private
ownership and customary rights as nobles, for agriculture which they often leased to
Spaniards and natives. Although painters seldom signed their maps, the few who did
enjoyed cacique status. Traditions of record keeping among cacique lineages may have
provided them access to pictorial sources that represented an important component of
mapmaking. It follows that the transfer of knowledge and skills to make maps may often
have taken place within familial units from elder to younger males, most likely from
father to son or from uncle to nephew. A cacique’s ability to speak Spanish, an essential
tool to communicate with royal officials who inspected and validated maps, placed
painters in a unique position of power to shape discussions about boundaries and
authority. Their patrons included native town councils known as cabildos, caciques,
Spaniards, and royal authorities. Scribes recorded the encounters between painters and
46
On intermediaries, intellectuals, and other cross-cultural individuals, see Berta Ares Queija and Serge
Gruzinski, ed., Entre dos mundos: fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1997); Alida Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native
Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008); and Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
(Berkeley: University of California, 1995).
41
alcaldes mayores according to notarial principles designed to regulate the relationship
between individuals and the Crown and its dependencies across the empire. Individuals
who made maps played an active role in shaping the region’s spatial relations as well as
its manuscript culture, a loose association between scribes, notaries, lawyers, clerks,
translators, caciques, and clerics involved in the production of written records.
The Art of Painting
Zárate’s words were rare considering the dozens of maps from Oaxaca and central
Mexico that remained unsigned. During the sixteenth century, Spaniards called native
pictorial records pinturas, a term used in Spain to designate visual sources that sought to
imitate nature’s proportions while describing the qualities of objects portrayed, their
makers designated simply as pintores or painters. Contemporaries in the European and
indigenous worlds of the period would have recognized distinctions in the use of the
term. A retablo painter, for instance, performed a very different service than a painter of
maps yet they were both described with the same word. Among Mixtecs, a painter-scribe
was known as ñahuisi tacu, “he whose craft is to write,” Zapotecs described these
individuals as huazee, and among Nahuas, they were known as tlacuilo. In the colonial
period, a gradual erosion during the sixteenth century of pictorial manuscripts as a
response to the introduction of alphabetic writing rendered these terms virtually obsolete.
In the Mixteca, native scribes, tay taatutu, learned not only to write in Spanish but also to
express their own language alphabetically, a practice adopted by Nahuas in central
Mexico and the Maya in Yucatan and Guatemala. The adoption of alphabetic writing
42
made painting an increasingly niche activity, a badge of honor for a select few with
access to knowledge and sources.
During the sixteenth century, painters made a range of pictorial manuscripts that
modern scholars have invariably labeled codices, lienzos, and maps. In most parts of
Mesoamerica, codices, screen-fold books prepared in a purely pre-Colombian style that
pictorially described historical events, cosmology, genealogy, and calendrics disappeared
by the second half of the sixteenth century under intense pressure from zealous Christian
clerics fearful of their religious content. Lienzos, genealogical and historical records
painted on large cloth surfaces utilizing certain Mesoamerican symbols, predominated
during the second half of the sixteenth century when indigenous nobles and caciques used
them to petition land, goods, and privileges. Regional maps, visual records that described
spatial relationships between neighboring settlements, traditionally supported the
allocation and retention of land in Oaxaca though on occasion authorities commissioned
them to support royal initiatives designed to measure natural wealth and water
infrastructure.
Extant maps suggest individuals turned to painters in greater numbers during the
last quarter of the sixteenth century when spatial adjustments took place after forced
resettlement campaigns led to spatial realignments in Oaxaca. Similar patterns of
mapmaking can be detected in central Mexico, and to a lesser extent, among Maya
peoples in the Yucatán peninsula and into Guatemala.47
Painters tapped into learning
gained through centuries of interaction through trade, writing, warfare, and dynastic
47
Gruzinski, “Colonial Indian Maps.”
43
alliances across Mesoamerica. An expression of this pattern of exchange includes what
scholars have described as the Mixteca-Puebla style, an interpretive model used to
analyze pottery, pictorial manuscripts, and religious iconography from the tenth to the
sixteenth centuries. The region that encompassed the Cholula area of Puebla and
northeastern portion of Oaxaca in south-central Mexico had a profound cultural impact
on the rest of Mesoamerica. The model included a well-defined aggregation of deities,
stylized picture-writing, and the use of a common fifty-two-year calendar cycle, its
influence stretching as far north as the US Southwest and to Nicaragua in the south. The
geometric precision with which artists defined their lines, the standardization of signs, the
use of vivid colors as decorative and symbolic components, and the exaggerated
representation of figures articulated important aspects of the Mixteca-Puebla style.48
Manuscript picture-writing constituted an important activity among ethnic groups
in Oaxaca and the art of painting flourished most prominently among Mixtecs and
Zapotecs. Vocabularies of native languages from the region made during the second half
of the sixteenth century to aid missionaries in the conversion process revealed a rich array
of words to express pictorial activity that often distinguished qualities associated with
painters. Mixtecs differentiated between huisicara, “the best scribe or painter,” huisica
nootacuta, “the one who best applies color,” and huijca dzicudusa tacuta, “the painter
48
The term was coined by archeologist George Vaillant in a series of essays written at the end of the 1930s,
“A Correlation of Archeological and Historical Sequences in the Valley of Mexico,” American
Anthropologist 40/4 (1938): 535-573. H.B. Nicholson expanded on Vaillant’s theme sharpening the unique
elements of the pictorial style in, “The Mixteca-Puebla Concept in Mesoamerican Archeology: A Re-
examination,” in Men and Cultures: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Congress of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, ed. Anthony F.C. Wallace (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1960), and “The Mixteca-Puebla Concept Re-visited,” in The Art and Iconography of
Late Post-Classic Central Mexico, ed. Elizabeth H. Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982).
44
with the best hand.”49
Zapotecs referenced the act of painting, tozèea, “painted things,”
nayye, but also “writing,” tozèeaquíchi, and “sacred writings,” tícha nachijño.50
References in Nahuatl, the lingua franca used throughout Mesoamerica, to a type of
scriptorium known as tlacuiloloyan, “place to write,” conceivably housed tlacuiloca
teachcauh, “head painter-scribes” who oversaw the work of others as they made pictorial
manuscripts, an act defined as tlacuiloliztli.51
Accounts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggest painters
during the pre-Hispanic period also migrated to other provinces contributing to the
movement of ideas and goods. Fernando de Alva Ixtlixóchitl, a mestizo (an individual of
Spanish and indigenous heritage) descendent from the last rulers of Texcoco wrote that,
There came from the provinces of the Mixtecs two nations whom they called
Tlailotlaques and Chimalpanecas who were also of the lineage of the Toltecs. The
Tlailotlaques had for their chief Aztatlitexcan, or according to the general history
Coatlitepan. They were skilled in the art of painting and making histories more than in
the other arts.52
A historian, Ixtlixochitl wrote his early seventeenth-century Historia Chichimeca, an
account of Mesoamerica up to the Spanish invasion of Tenochtitlan, based on native
49
Reyes, Arte en lengua mixteca, 11.
50
Juan de Córdova, Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca (Mexico City: SEP and Ediciones Toledo, 1987
[1578], 182v, 315v.
51
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica,
1944 [1571]), 120.
52
Robertson suggests Ixtlixóchitl may have drawn his insight about this connection from the Codex Xolotl,
an early sixteenth-century pictorial history, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 13.
45
sources held in his family for generations including the Codex Xolotl, an early colonial
historical-genealogical manuscript made on native bark paper.53
Pictorial histories and
genealogies were naturally tied to the ruling elite who took advantage of the genre to
record its activities in trade, warfare, and marriage alliances. A rich tradition of using
older pictorial manuscripts as models continued into the colonial period ensuring the
circulation of records and the continued practice of the art of painting.
Zárate’s written commentary on the 1686 map formed part of a pattern followed
by generations of painters that recognized their art as a unique instrument to capture
information about politics, history, and spatial relationships. The artist of the Codex
Vindobonensis (aka Codex Vienna), a pictorial manuscript made towards the end of
fifteenth century that related Mixtec history and politics, depicted a scribe (Figure 6)
holding a brush in his left hand in front of a stone vessel used to store pigments. The
frieze that supports the scribe suggests painters represented the scribal profession through
an association of elements, most notably the ilhuitl symbol in the form of two inverted
scrolls.54
The term ilhuitl, defined by the sixteenth-century Franciscan grammarian
Alonso de Molina as “observance of celebration, or any day of the week,” has been
adopted by archeologists and art historians to define one of several symbols that form
part of “celestial bands,” decorative banners which gave meaning to rituals typically
53
See Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 13. For a recent analysis of native manuscript production
in the Texcoco region, see Eduardo de J. Douglas, In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts,
Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2010).
54
H.B. Nicholson, “The Temalacatl of Tehuacan,” El México Antiguo VIII (1955), 110.
46
found on Aztec sculptures and ceramics.55
The ilhuitl symbol also represented the scribal
profession in codices, relief sculpture, and mural painting across central and southern
Mexico.56
During the colonial period, painters-scribes across Mesoamerica adapted to
change collaborating with the Catholic orders to illustrate religious themes embedding
elements of their own pictorial vocabulary in their commissions. The use of the ilhuitl
motif in mural paintings in the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco in the state of
Mexico allowed painters to express their authorship over painted work. In a detail of one
of the murals, a carefully painted song scroll includes glyph-like symbols of a shell, a
flower, and ilhuitl the latter represented by two inverted speech scrolls which closely
mirror those used in pictorial writing.57
In the Codex Vienna, a similar pattern of
symbols including a flower (right hand side) and a shell (center) illustrates the frieze that
supports the surface on which the painter/scribe sits. The third symbol directly below the
painter’s vessel on the farthest left may represent a variation of the double-scrolled
ilhuitl, complementing the frieze’s design.
The similarity in visual components and the pictorial setting in which they
appeared suggests painters drew from a rich vocabulary from across Oaxaca and central
Mexico which allowed them to generate collective expressions of their trade, embedding
pictorial and scribal activities within the broader social context of the period. Many of
55
Molina, 37v; Nicholson, “The Temalacatl,” 104-113.
56
Nicholson, “The Temalacatl,” 110.
57
Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Synthesis and Survival: The Native Presence in Sixteenth-Century Murals of
New Spain,” special issue, “Native Artists and Patrons in Colonial Latin America,” Phoebus 7 (1995), 16.
47
these traditions continued to inform pictorial manuscripts after Spanish colonization in
the sixteenth century when painters diversified their talents contributing to mural
painting, mapmaking, and scribal work. Because the audience and motivations shifted
with time, so did the symbols used to make the art of painting meaningful. In this sense,
painters adjusted their tools, constantly transforming and improvising new ways of
conveying messages especially when thinking about the native and Spanish audiences
that typically played a part in commissioning and reviewing their work. In another sense,
the art of painting symbolized a form of expression closely tied to indigenous identity and
social memory. By 1686 when Domingo de Zárate made his statement about the art of
painting, the ilhuilt symbol figuratively reemerged to illustrate the importance of pictorial
activity only this time the painter chose to convey his message as a set of words written
alphabetically on a map.
Generational Mapping
The assortment of maps made during the late sixteenth century reflects a
considerable sophistication in visual representation, the articulation of geographical
knowledge, and an understanding of the subtleties of spatial relationships in local and
regional environments. Yet the difference in style that separated some maps from others
raises questions: why did some painters include logographic writing while others only
roads and churches? Why did some artists draw buildings in three-dimensional
perspective and others depicted objects in flat, two-dimensional space? These traits
associated with the making of maps make suggests the participation of several
48
generations of painters guided by two forces, one rooted in tradition, the other in change.
Mapmaking formed part of a tradition of pictorial record-keeping passed down from elder
to junior but also heavily influenced by the introduction of European norms and culture.
During the sixteenth century, men across several generational groups gained access to
indigenous and European learning in very different ways influencing the tone and
character of each map. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a handful of painters
such as Domingo de Zárate described at the beginning of this chapter adapted the
tradition of earlier mapmaking practices to fulfill the need to reproduce older maps used
in litigation.
References that directly name painters or maps signed by them suggest
indigenous men of cacique or principal status controlled the art of painting.58
Certainly
Domingo de Zárate’s self-identification as a cacique supports this idea. From their
privileged position, painters had access to learning, land, and often, political control,
though their power varied from region to region. Wealth, also a variable matter not only
among caciques but commoners as well, created social differences among leading
notables who often competed for land, access to labor, and privileges with each other and
with Spaniards.59
In central Mexico, the encomienda system contributed to a decline in
the power of caciques reducing their estates and draining them of laborers. In the Valley
of Oaxaca and the Mixteca, caciques retained considerable land and for some time
58
Useful works to understand the role of painters include Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 25-58;
Dana Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography”; Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 61-89; Carmen Arellano
Hoffmann, “El escriba mesoamericano y sus utensilios de trabajo,” 220-234.
59
Lockhart, 94.
49
enjoyed the labor of commoners who worked it on their behalf. Complaints from
caciques after the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the commoner status of
individuals in competing political factions signal the challenges aimed at caciques while
suggesting the rhetoric used to defend traditional privileges and to discredit their
opponents.60
In the region of Tehuantepec along the Pacific Coast, Zapotec notables also
retained entailed estates mobilizing native labor for public works projects that allowed
caciques to play key roles in local affairs.61
Because of their leadership positions,
caciques performed a variety of activities including ranching, agriculture, trade, public
affairs, and scribal work while functioning as intermediaries between their communities
and Spanish authorities. Some practiced the art of painting.
Maps produced starting in the 1580s could have been made by a male belonging
to one of three broad generational groups that lived in Oaxaca during the late sixteenth
century. While some shared a common ethnic identity, each group shared certain traits
that influenced their representations of spatial relationships. The oldest group included
males born sometime between 1500 and 1519. These men survived the realignments
resulting from the Spanish conquest during the century’s middle decades and were in
their 60s and 70s by 1580 when a noticeable mapmaking pattern emerged. A second
group included those born from 1520 to 1539, a conquest generation that adjusted to the
evangelization campaigns, labor drafts, reduced power and authority as well as
punishment and humiliation that characterized Spanish-Indian relationships during this
60
See Gibson, 117.
61 Judith Francis Zeitlin, “Ranchers and Indians on the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec: Economic
Change and Indigenous Survival in Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69 (1989),
52-53.
50
early period. In their 40s and 50s, these individuals maintained in the 1580s the reins of
political and economic power in their communities administering lands, labor, and
tribute. A younger, third group born between 1540 and 1560, learned to embrace
Christianity and Spanish customs while maintaining strong ties to basic social units
known as ñuu among Mixtecs, yetze among Zapotecs, and altepelt among the Nahuas.
These complex autonomous and semi-autonomous states held physical territory delimited
by clear boundaries, a political structure, constituent units, temples and palaces, and an
organized labor and tribute-producing system.62
In most cases, painters represented these
social units and their boundaries in maps.
The repeated use of churches, roads, mountains, feet, rivers, and celestial objects
suggest indigenous painters across generations shared a common set of values they
knowingly expressed in their maps. The application of pictorial devices used in
Mesoamerican picture-writing, the introduction of elements drawn from European
culture, the interpretation of two- and three-dimensionality, access to pictorial
documents, and the use of new media such as rag paper influenced the manner in which
painters defined and portrayed spatial relationships in maps. At the individual level, each
painter applied these elements in varying degrees and in distinct ways reflecting their
personal choices but also exposure to different forms of learning. For instance, the map
of Teozacoalco (Figure 7) made in the southeast reaches of the Mixteca region in 1580, a
map representing historical lineages of rulers connected to the distribution of towns,
62
Terraciano, 347-48.
51
displayed considerable skills rooted in Mesoamerican pictorial traditions.63
The use of
ordered pairs (Figure 8) ascending from the bottom of the left hand side of the map
accounted for generations of royal couples that made up Teozacoalco’s political
genealogy. The painter also utilized the A-O calendar device used to identify dates,
architectural ornamentation symbolic of political authority, accoutrements of power
including headdresses and clothing, and feet to indicate travel.
Inside the map’s globe on the right hand side, the painter situated Teozacoalco,
the cabecera or head town in the central left surrounded by its thirteen dependencies or
estancias. A series of over forty place signs defined the boundaries of this jurisdiction
through the use of logographs, images that expressed words or ideas. In logographic
writing, painters used mountains, cacti, water, trees, plants, temples, people, weaponry
and other elements to represent words that assigned meaning to geographical markers and
towns. For instance, the painter for the Teozacoalco map applied a Mixtec logograph of
a man chiseling a stone temple (Figure 9) to describe, chiyo ca’nu, “large/great altar.”
The map’s circular encasement also included the representation of rivers and animals as
well as three ruling couples directly linked to Teozacoalco. Besides the new religion,
Spaniards introduced a host of animals that had transformed the natural landscape of
Mesoamerica. Horses and later oxen, swine, and sheep left deep imprints on American
terrain eroding stretches of land used as pasture sites. Native towns often complained to
royal authorities of cattle invasions from neighboring estates and of ruined crops. By the
second half of the sixteenth century, painters memorialized the Spanish presence in their
63
Map of Teozacoalco and Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepeque (1580), BLAC, Folder XXV-3.
52
maps with a simple but powerful gesture: they added hoof prints to the roads where
before only feet had traveled.
The specialized tools used to make the map of Teozacoalco could have only been
deployed by someone deeply versed in the Mesoamerican pictorial tradition. The map’s
detail reflected an intimate knowledge of history and geography, mastery over various
forms of visual representation including logographic writing as well as more technical
matters associated with the production of the vibrant colors used to give meaning to its
elements. Considering the use and application of these tools, it is conceivable an elder
master individually made or oversaw the production of the Teozacoalco map. Hernando
de Cervantes, the Spanish judge known as corregidor who petitioned the map,
specifically sought the guidance of leading indigenous elders to respond to the questions
in the questionnaire. Cervantes enlisted the help of Juan Ruíz Zuaso, the town’s bilingual
(Spanish-Mixtec) priest to facilitate an interview between a group of elder indigenous
males and the corregidor. When preparing his responses on January 9, Cervantes
credited his informants, noting, “We initiated a true and faithful report as best as we
could infer from the [testimony of the] oldest natives from said town and from what one
can visually survey.”64
We must treat Cervantes’ commentary with caution since Spanish
sources often clump ancianos (elders) and naturales (natives) together as if these groups
were homogeneous entities that followed unified goals to acquire land, status, and
privileges.
64
“Se comenzó a hacer relación cierta y verdadera según se pudo colegir de los más ancianos naturales del
dicho pueblo y por lo que por vista de ojos se puede entender,” Relación de Teozacoalco, BLAC, Folder
XXV-3.
53
A line separated those trained under the supervision of the friars from the elder
generation brought up under Mesoamerican customs, the former often viewing the latter
with distrust for their adherence to Spanish customs. In some instances, interests cut
across generations divided along Christian factions that supported missionary efforts and
traditionalist factions that sought to preserve native customs and rituals.65
In the case of
the Teozacoalco map, Cervantes’ testimony seems simply to ratify what is visibly
obvious: the map could have only been made by someone with great experience and a
sophisticated understanding of pictorial writing acquired through learning and practice.
How did painters in 1580 learn to produce such records? Elders represented the
last generation of elite men to have trained in astronomy, religion, calendrics, and writing
under the guidance of specialists in a native educational institution before the Spanish
conquest of the sixteenth century.66
The Dominican Juan de Córdova noted in his
vocabulary of the Zapotec language that “schools where they teach” were known as
yohotoatoceteni while “schools similar to Salamanca,” quechenoo quelahuecete, suggest
some attended institutions of higher learning. “Masters who teach a variety of things”
were known as huelèe, “learned masters,” pènihuechijñohuecocète, and the masters of an
art or trade, copèeche, an activity that implied the passing of knowledge from an
experienced master to a young novice. 67
In his Vocabulario en lengua mixteca, a
dictionary intended for evangelization published in 1593, the Dominican Francisco de
65
Serge Gruzinski, Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1550-1580,
trans. Eileen Corrigan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 34-36.
66
Boone, “Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words,” in Writing without Words, 60-4; and Sousa
and Terraciano, 352.
67
Córdova, 183v, 252v-253.
54
Alvarado observed similar patterns in the Mixtec language identifying schools as huahi
sadzaquaha and its instructors as yya yotasi tnuni huahi ñuhu. The general Mixtec term
for “master who teaches,” tay yodza ha ñaha, was distinct from ñahuisi, “master of an
art.”68
While this rich vocabulary is a reflection of the Spanish compiler’s own interests,
tools used by clerics to breakdown the same indigenous cosmology native teachers had
passed on for generations, it nonetheless allows us to consider the extent and importance
of conveying information related to the transmission of knowledge.
Painters from the eldest generation shared a direct connection to religious
institutions used in the pre-Hispanic period where pictorial writing thrived. Although
records from Oaxaca scarcely reference formal learning, a folio (Figure 10) from the
Codex Mendoza painted two decades after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 described
education for males in central Mexico when they reached the age of fifteen.69
In the
scene, a father, seated on a reed mat on the left hand of the page, addressed his two sons
as they each prepared to enter one of the two types of educational institutions available to
young Nahuas. Largely restricted to the male nobility, the calmecac, religious facilities
usually affiliated with individual deities (top right corner) trained priests and nobles who
would assume positions of leadership in matters of state. In the image, a tlamacazqui,
instructor-priests who taught at the calmecac, received the novice. On the bottom, the
second young man headed to a telpochcalli, “neighborhood schools” that trained the sons
of commoners in warfare. An instructor known as a teachcauh greeted the second young
68
Alvarado, 102v, 142v.
69
The Codex Mendoza, vol. 1-4, ed. Frances Berdan and Patricia Anawalt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
55
man. The painter for this coming of age scene marked the journey of both men with a
trail of footsteps to capture not only the physical aspects of movement but also the
transformative ones at the hands of their instructors. For one man, entry into a
disciplined and regimented environment dedicated to waging campaigns against enemies
and protecting Aztec interests across the empire. For the other, an excursion into an
environment of self-discipline and demanding rituals exemplified by the priest’s
appearance on the top, his dark stained skin, long black hair, and spilled blood over the
left ear symbols of the rigors associated with priestly life. Writing and painting was
concentrated precisely within these circles of ritual specialists who worked in the
interests of the state passing their knowledge to a limited number of youth in the most
developed areas of Mesoamerica. Spanish authorities quickly dismantled native
institutions of learning soon after the conquest intent on stamping out religious practices,
supplanting them instead with conventual schools that emphasized Christian doctrine and
Western culture.
Transition for the eldest painters of the 1580s to the institutions, laws, and culture
imposed by Spaniards in the first half of the sixteenth century represented a difficult
challenge especially in spiritual matters. Testimonials from the decades following the
subjugation of Oaxaca suggest native ritual practices continued under intense scrutiny
from Christian clerics, primarily Dominican, but also Franciscan, Augustinian, and by the
end of the century, Jesuit missionaries. To perform the rituals, individuals made
substances such as ink tied to the art of painting. An Indian slave identified simply as
Juan declared in 1545 before an Inquisitorial tribunal that Don Francisco, a native lord
56
from the important head town of Yanhuitlán in the Mixteca Alta, worshiped the old
deities in secret:
Since it wouldn’t rain, Don Francisco sent the priests to the woods to make charcoal.
When they brought it, they grinded it and made ink. Don Francisco undressed and
blackened himself saying, “I am no longer a Christian, I have returned to what I used to
be.” He then bled his ears while the others perfumed him with copal. He sent for many
quails and sacrificed them, calling the devil, and he asked his friends and relatives to do
the same.70
The slave’s motivations notwithstanding, the account vividly captures one aspect of
native ritual practices reminiscent of the themes articulated in the scene from the Codex
Mendoza. In one respect, the slave’s account referenced the ideological conflicts faced
by those who bridged the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods when forced to negotiate
droughts, disease, and punishment. For Don Francisco, the pressure of a drought pushed
him to revert to the ancient practices through an elaborate cleansing ritual. Black ink, an
element commonly made by painters to illustrate pictorial manuscripts, played a central
role in Don Francisco’s transformation. Don Francisco and his cohorts selected the right
wood, usually ocotl a species of pine, they burned it to make charcoal, returned it the
house and grinded it before applying it on themselves. It should come as little surprise to
find priests making ink since this group held considerable sway over pictorial writing
70
“Como no llovía, el dicho Don Francisco mandó a los papas que fuesen al monte, y hiciesen carbón y
traído lo molieron y hicieron tinta, y el dicho don Francisco se desnudó y se pintó de manera de tizne y
dijo, ahora ya no soy cristiano, sino como antes solía, y luego se sacrificó las orejas y se hizo sahumar con
copal y mandó traer muchas codornices y las sacrificó, y llamó al diablo y lo mismo mandó que hiciesen
sus amigos y parientes,” transcription in María Teresa Sepúlveda y Herrera, Procesos por idolatría al
cacique, gobernadores y sacerdotes de Yanhuitlán, 1544-1546 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia, 1999), 170; original in AGN, Inquisición, vol. 37, exp. 7, f. 167.
57
before the sixteenth century when it facilitated the diffusion of beliefs and practices
across Mesoamerica.71
A few years after the slave’s testimony, civil and religious authorities reached an
agreement with the caciques to build a sumptuous church and convent financed primarily
by the caciques and the town. A painter memorialized the occasion by producing a
manuscript no doubt commissioned by the caciques that negotiated the settlement. The
production of the Codex Yanhuitlán (Figure 11), a pictorial record made with black-
carbon ink on European paper, followed closely on the heels of the Inquisitorial trial that
threatened to weaken cacique power in this region of the Mixteca.72
One of the figures
represented in the codex, Don Domingo de Guzmán, known by his Mixtec name as sañuu
or 7-Monkey, stood trial before the Holy Office along with Don Francisco for idolatry.
The testimony from the case reveals existing conflicts between the Dominicans and the
local encomendero, but also regional rivalries between Yanhuitlán and neighboring towns
including Etlatongo, Nochixtlan, Jaltepec, and Suchitepec that sought to break from
under their status as a subject town of Yanhuitlan.73
Since there was no precedent on
either side for the type of document needed, the painter improvised a manuscript that
conveyed symbols of European authority including chairs, rosaries, clothing, and
religious themes with native place names and calendrics. The manuscript’s mixture of
ornate costumes, exaggerated proportions, and pictorial writing captured the work of a
71
Terraciano, 17.
72
Códice Yanhuitlán, ed. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno and Salvador Mateos Higuera (Mexico City: Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Museo Nacional, 1940), f. 3v.
73
Terraciano, 31-38, 274-278.
58
painter in the service of the native patrons who commissioned the pictorial and the
Spanish authorities involved in viewing and confirming the agreement.
The Conquest Generation
The arrival in the sixteenth century of European soldiers, clerics, adventurers,
notaries, officials, and entrepreneurs profoundly reshaped indigenous society in Oaxaca.
Swift negotiations by the native elite with Spanish forces in the early part of the century
in important centers of power including the Valley of Oaxaca and the Mixteca Alta
facilitated the retention of land and privileges for many nobles and towns while avoiding
bloodshed on the scale of central Mexico. Members of the indigenous elite served as
intermediaries between royal officials, clerics, and encomenderos, holders of native labor
grants, and their own communities supporting the collection of tribute, the distribution of
indigenous men to work Spanish enterprises, and the administration of local religious and
political affairs. While the eldest generation experienced these changes firsthand as they
were moving into adulthood, a new generation born at the same time as the Viceroyalty
of New Spain grew up, shaped by the instruction of Christian missionaries.
Dissemination of alphabetic writing and Spanish culture under the leadership of
Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries sought to turn natives into model
Christians who would then spread the Gospel in their communities. Missionaries
recruited and educated children of the native elite as part of their strategy to dismantle
indigenous cosmology, encouraging them to denounce their parents and elders should
they recede into the old rituals. Clerics across New Spain aligned juniors to their cause
59
often humiliating their parents in front of them to demonstrate the inefficiency of native
deities and beliefs.74
In Yanhuitlán, generational conflicts divided the region when elite
children under the care of the Dominicans denounced Don Francisco and others in the
1540s.75
Vocational and spiritual education of elite children allowed clerics to promote
their interests. In central Mexico, Franciscans founded the schools of San José de los
Naturales which focused on crafts and technical skills that included carpentry,
shoemaking, and also sculpting and painting, and Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco where children
studied European philosophy and religion learning to read and write in Latin and
Spanish.76
The introduction of alphabetic writing contributed to a tradition of Mixtec
scribes who wrote their own language starting in the sixteenth century and through the
end of the colonial period.77
Indigenous nobles recognized the importance Spaniards
placed on writing and record keeping regularly engaging authorities with written and
pictorial documents to negotiate tribute payments, petitions of land and privileges, and to
issue complaints.78
Before their suppression and eventual disappearance in the latter part of the
sixteenth century, these institutions educated males from native families from across
74
These practices were deployed by clerics across the Americas. See, for instance, Ramón Gutiérrez’s
analysis of Franciscan strategies of domination among Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, When Jesus Came,
the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991), 75-77.
75
Terraciano, 277.
76 Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 42-45; Gibson, 382.
77
Terraciano, 15.
78
For an example of complaints in the first half of the sixteenth century, see AGN, Hospital de Jesús, leg.
450, exp. 1, f. 3-6, and a series of accompanying pictorial documents, No. 3122-3125.
60
Mesoamerica to eventually serve in local affairs in their own towns; whether indigenous
families willingly surrendered their sons to the European friars is another matter. After
completing his studies at Tlatelolco, a Cuicatec lord named Francisco de Salinas returned
to western Oaxaca where in 1580 he formed part of a group that advised the region’s
corregidor on local history, geography, and culture during the compilation of responses
for the Relaciones Geográficas survey.79
Salinas’ indigenous background and European
training placed him in a unique position to communicate, in written and verbal form, with
royal officials.
Missionary orders used prints as well as canvas and mural paintings to explain
religious doctrine. In the seventeenth century, the Dominican Francisco de Burgoa
recalled the early efforts of individuals such as Gonzalo de Lucero who he identified as
the first Dominican to preach in Oaxaca. Burgoa glorified Lucero’s work noting,
He walked barefoot through the unconverted towns of the region, to preach to them in the
Mexican language which he knew well and was the one spoken within the towns
subjected to the Ministers of Emperor Moctezuma. This servant of God took with him
some rolled canvases with paintings of the principle mysteries of our Holy Faith.80
It was often elder and conquest-generation Indians who produced or helped produce the
canvas paintings and other visual sources used for indoctrination. The conversion
crusade undertaken by the missionary orders in New Spain amounted to what Serge
79
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 77.
80
“Saliendo a pie y descalzo por los Pueblos, todavía infieles de la Comarca, a predicarles en la lengua
Mexicana, que sabía muy bien, y era la general que corría en los Pueblos, que dependían, o comunicaban a
los Ministros del Emperador Montezuma, llevaba consigo el siervo de Dios unos lienzos arrollados con
pinturas de los principales Misterios de nuestra Santa Fe,” Burgoa, Geográfica descripción, 13.
61
Gruzinski refers to as a “war of images,” a campaign waged through the displacement of
pre-Colombian visual culture, particularly that of a religious nature, replacing it with
Christian imagery.81
Indeed Spaniards assaulted the New World with a visual canon that
included everyday items such as clothing as well as military objects including artillery,
steel swords, helmets, armor, and insignias. Crosses, rosaries, paintings, and prints gave
way to the construction of massive Christian temples designed to awe and inspire, the
materials used to build them drawn from the ruins of destroyed ancient ritual centers that
honored the old deities.82
By the latter part of the sixteenth century, Dominican churches
across Oaxaca could be spotted by residents and travelers from leagues away.83
Images,
reasoned religious authorities, facilitated the task of reshaping native understanding of the
cosmos.84
Painters captured these cultural transformations and ideological shifts in their
maps. About eighteen leagues north of Teozacoalco in the highland region of the
Mixteca Alta, a painter from the Cuestlahuaca region made a map (Figure 12) in 1582 to
petition a site of land for livestock for the town of San Miguel.85
Painted on paper with a
combination of green and yellow, the painter’s rendition of the landscape sought to evoke
81
Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), trans. Heather
MacLean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 34-48.
82
See Samuel Edgerton’s Theatres of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial
Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).
83
Robert Mullen’s Dominican Architecture in Sixteenth-Century Oaxaca (Tempe: Center for Latin
American Studies, Arizona State University, 1975).
84
Participants of the Third Mexican Provincial Council addressed the role of images in their discussions
about religious doctrine. See Manuscritos del Concilio Tercero Provincial Mexicano (1585), vol. I-II, ed.
Alberto Carrillo Cázares (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán and Universidad Pontificia de México, 2006).
85
Map of San Miguel Cuestlahuaca (1582), AGN, No. 1609, Tierras, vol. 2682, exp. 9, f. 8.
62
what the corregidor described as “unpopulated, broken, mountainous, and dry terrain.”
Alternating feet, a sign drawn from Mesoamerican pictorials to signal movement or a
journey, marked the presence of New Spain’s major artery, the Royal Highway, a road
that passed through San Miguel moving towards the livestock ranch which sat on the side
of a small hill. The church on the right, a symbol that stood in for the town of San
Miguel, reflected the painter’s attempt to represent depth and space, the use of three-
dimensionality no doubt a response to the circulation of European prints. Printed images,
mostly illustrations of religious scenes such as Albrecht Dürer’s, “The Holy Family with
Two Angels” (Figure 13), circulated across New Spain in and outside of convent walls
used by clerics to teach aspects of the Catholic faith. In both the map and the print, an
emphasis on the vaulted features of the church allowed each artist to project a sense of
depth through perspectival drawing and shading. Although it is difficult to determine
whether the painter of Cuestlahuaca viewed Dürer’s print of the Holy Family, his or her
attempt to portray depth and space in reference to architecture had roots in the circulation
in New Spain of religious imagery made in Europe.
In the process of identifying sites of land for ranching and agriculture, painters
made choices about the ways to portray the built environment, an assortment of physical
structures including churches, houses, corrals, and the occasional sugar mill that dotted
the landscape. Geographical elements such as mountains, rivers, lagoons, springs, trees,
plants, animals, and rocks played prominent roles in defining boundaries, their
representation on maps adjusting to changing stylistic conventions but also to a painter’s
access to elder advisors and pictorial documents. Their maps borrowed freely from both
63
ancient Mesoamerican logographic writing as well as from visual components such as
heraldry, seals, religious iconography, paintings, printed matter, and architecture that
accompanied Spanish colonization. Faced with multiple Spanish and indigenous
audiences, a native painter’s need to convey a message required, in James Scott’s words,
“an experimental spirit and a capacity to test and exploit all loopholes, ambiguities,
silences, and lapses available to them.”86
The system of castes in colonial society
reduced all relationships of power to the simple fact that regardless of social status,
Spaniards enjoyed mastery over the colonial world.87
The unequal standing of natives
when confronted with Spaniards, even for the most powerful caciques and noblemen,
served as a motivating factor to develop new tools to express spatial relationships. Over
time, use of the Spanish courts allowed native leaders to develop an intimate knowledge
of legal practices to participate in the defense of land. Painters navigated within these
delicate channels especially coming into contact with the royal scribes, jurists, and clerics
that dominated the region’s manuscript culture.
The period starting in the 1580s witnessed a defining moment when painters
learned to apply new techniques, gradually shifting from conceptual to perceptual
interpretations of the natural environment. Typically associated with European image
making, perceptual illustrations present elements of three-dimensionality and an illusion
86
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), 138.
87
Nancy Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 99.
64
of spatial depth while conceptual ones appear in two-dimensional, flat spaces.88
But the
maps do not suggest an abandonment or immediate replacement of one style over another
but rather the disposition of painters to try out new ideas. Churches, arguably the most
important buildings in colonial society, came to symbolize townships and they
represented the most recognizable cartographic element on any given map, a practice tied
to their role in daily life as the centers of power and social interaction across cities, villas,
and towns in New Spain. The relationship between the painter, the map’s patron, and the
authorizing official who inspected it over time led to a systematization of its use that
could be easily interpreted by various audiences: churches represented towns. This
simple premise allowed painters to communicate spatial relationships while developing
their own pictorial voice; as long as they were clearly depicted, painters could represent
towns by using a number of different styles and techniques. After all, it was the idea of
the church that could be thought of as a systematized element of mapmaking; its
representation could and did take on a variety of forms.
The painter of the map of Guaxilotitlán (Figure 14), a former Zapotec ritual center
northwest of Antequera in the Valley of Oaxaca, made a painting in 1586 for Domingo
Martín, an Indian notable from the subject town of San Felipe to petition a site for a
livestock ranch.89
Mountains frame the left and inferior edges of the map while two
roads emerge from the top right hand corner merging into a single artery toward the left
88
Ellen Taylor Baird, “The Artists of Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales: A Question of Identity,” in Work of
Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, ed. Jorge Klor de Alva,
H.B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Keber (Albany and Austin: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, the
University at Albany, SUNY, and University of Texas Press, 1988), 212.
89
Map of Guaxilotitlán (1586), AGN, No. 1726, Tierras, vol. 2702, exp. 2, f. 10.
65
bottom portion of the page; footprints and hoofmarks indicate travel. The painter used a
dark green shade to color a river with two tributaries that cut across the region. Along
with the roads and mountains, the painter’s style reflected native pictorial traditions yet
the most noticeable items on the map include the ten churches of various sizes scattered
across the page. Colored in deep crimson with gold and black outlines, the churches
represent Guaxilotitlán and the surrounding town sites. That the painter chose to depict
local settlements with a church instead of the more traditional teptl place-sign reflects the
transformation of indigenous pictorial expression.
A century later, religious buildings continued to serve the interests of indigenous
painters who used them to describe town sites. The painter of the copied map of Santa
María Guelacé (Figure 15), a Zapotec town southeast of Antequera, drew on this
technique to dramatic effect.90
The map was originally commissioned in 1690 to protect
the boundaries known as mojones of the Zapotec settlement and it possesses many of the
attributes of native mapmaking. The extant version of the map, a copy produced in 1778
by an unknown painter, supported Guelacé’s petition for access to coal and wood on a
southwest boundary that neighbored with a nearby ranch. The map drew the viewer’s
attention to the carefully detailed church in the center of the page. Around the church,
men engage in agricultural activities on town lands while women collect water by the
river west of the main church. Elsewhere, a man sleeps with his head on his knees and a
bag strapped to his back while an Indian in a tilma, a tunic with a strap over the shoulder
90
Map of Santa María Guelacé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya, and Santa Cruz Papalutla (1690 [1778]),
AGN, No. 0956, Tierras, vol. 1206, exp. 1, cuad. 8, f. 21.
66
typically worn by the male indigenous nobility, stands with a spear in his hand facing the
church (Figure 16). His much larger counterpart, an unclothed woman with dark waist
long hair walks commandingly over the landscape, her impressive figure twice as large as
any other human in the map. This unique picture of everyday life reflects labor patterns
and economic activities but also attitudes towards authority, in this case directed at the
church in the form of two natives subverting traditional social roles. While the original
map of Guelacé sought to define all town boundaries, the copy’s primary function rested
on defending a single mojón. The choice of cartographic symbols to represent human
settlements allowed the painter to appeal to Spanish sensibilities surrounding religion and
authority. Further, it suggests the degree to which European religious ideology had
penetrated native communities since churches represented centers of religious and
economic activity in small towns and cities across the Viceroyalty.91
Cacique-Painters
In the Mixteca Alta near Tepenene in the northwestern region of Oaxaca, the
cacique Don Domingo de Mendoza practiced the art of painting. In 1617, Mendoza used
his skills to make a map (Figure 17) in order to petition an estancia, a site for ranching,
for himself one league from Santo Domingo Tepenene, a subject town to the more
powerful cabecera, or head-town, of Cuestlahuaca.92
The map’s two main features, a
mountain in the form of an ancient temple on the upper left hand corner, and a church
91
See William Taylor’s, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
92
Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene (1617), AGN, No. 2225, Tierras, vol. 2812, exp. 11, f. 312.
67
traced with graph lines on the bottom right of the page, reflect Mendoza’s individual
approach to pictorial representation. Mendoza presented the map to the alcalde mayor,
who according to the scribe’s inscription on the upper right hand edge noted, “This map
was made by order of his lordship for the proceedings related to the cattle site sought by
Don Domingo de Mendoza.”93
In this instance, Mendoza served as both the painter of
the map and its co-patron along with the alcalde mayor, applying his pictorial skills to
negotiate a tract of land for himself.
Political and economic interests forced cacique-painters to develop cultural and
language skills to function within multiple social settings in the colonial world. In court
records from across the region, scribes frequently referenced ladino caciques, those who
spoke Spanish, highlighting their language skills and also often their Spanish clothing, a
symbol of prestige reserved for a select few.94
Attire allowed powerful members of
society to display their status and authority. In the Andes and Mesoamerica, sumptuary
legislation existed before the arrival of the Spanish, but the restriction of fabrics and dress
reserved for privileged groups relaxed with the introduction of Western clothing. During
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Amerindian nobles received special
privileges including exemptions from tribute, political appointments, and access to luxury
goods such as saddles, certain types of arms, weights and measures, and Spanish
93
“Esta pintura se hiso por mandato de su Excelencia en las diligencias acerca de las tiab[tierras?] que
pretende para sitio de estancia el cacique Don Diego de Mendoza,” Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene
(1617), AGN, No. 2225.
94 Despite their fluency in the language, many Indian ladinos in Oaxaca relied on interpreters who could
translate their words from their native languages into Spanish.
68
clothing.95
Recall that Don Domingo de Zárate, the cacique who copied the ancient map
of Xoxocotlán, wrote fluently in Spanish. But acculturation often came at a price. In the
Zapotec sierra, the term ladino “was at once descriptive, meaning bicultural, and
pejorative, connoting duplicity.”96
The capacity of ladinos to move between worlds
provoked suspicion among natives and Spaniards alike that feared abuse and trickery.
A painter required cultural awareness to maneuver within Spanish bureaucratic
channels and the structures of native cabildos. Individuals operating between these two
distinct cultural milieus required versatility in order to function in multiple social spheres,
an aspect of which included fluency in languages and intercultural negotiation skills.97
A
painter’s experience and mapping output varied in accordance to preparation, the strength
or weakness of regional pictorial traditions, the presence of Spanish officials and settlers,
and the individual’s interests in local affairs. Alida Metcalf observes that different levels
of participation mark the roles of intermediaries. Accordingly, some functioned as
“transactional go-betweens,” those who facilitated communication between individuals
and corporate entities including “translators, negotiators, and cultural brokers.” Others
shaped through “writings, drawings, mapmaking, and the oral tradition . . . how
95
See Ruth Lechuga, El traje indígena de México (Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1982); Arnold Bauer,
Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); and Ana María Presta, “Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman: Market Economy,
Clothing, and Identities in the Colonial Andes, La Plata (Charcas), Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth
Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (2010): 41-74; my thanks to Lisa Munro for pointing
me to this source.
96
Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 36.
97
I draw this idea from Oscar Martínez’s, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 20.
69
Europeans and Native Americans viewed each other.”98
In Oaxaca, painters blurred the
boundaries between these two groups developing unique pictorial tools to describe the
natural world. They gained experience to navigate the structures of Spanish power most
notably the bureaucratic streets lined with alcaldes mayores and scribes who approved
and certified everyday activities and documents including the use of maps. Many natives
practiced autodidactic learning to master elements of Spanish culture especially in the
manufacture of goods designed for local consumption.99
It seems fitting that an element
of this type of learning carried over into mapmaking. Combined with knowledge of the
region’s ecological environment, these skills allowed cacique-painters to interpret spatial
relationships for their patrons, their communities, and themselves.
Mapping Tehuantepec
The activities of the painter of Tehuantepec, an individual who made maps in a
remote region of southern Oaxaca along the Pacific Coast during the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, bear witness to the way individuals adapted their skills to communicate
to different audiences while providing a service rooted in local knowledge. Unlike
painters in the Valley or the Mixteca who made maps mostly to represent the interests of
native cabildos and caciques, the painter of Tehuantepec worked closely with Spanish
patrons. From the 1570s until the end of the century, royal officials sought the painter’s
services to describe spatial relationships in Tehuantepec generating over half a dozen
98
Metcalf, 9-10.
99
Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 40.
70
maps of different parts of the region.100
Most maps responded to the ranching boom that
took place during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that redirected
Zapotec, Zoque, and Huave land to Spaniards bold enough to negotiate the region’s
unique topography and extreme climate.101
The ranching expansion placed a burden on
the local ecology, forced an encroachment on native lands, and prompted complaints
from Indians when herds destroyed agricultural plots very much as it did in other regions
of Mesoamerica. Zapotecs, based in part on the strength of their social hierarchy,
maintained a tight grasp on irrigated lands developing a complex cropping system suited
to the region’s windy and arid climate.102
The Huave took advantage of their
geographical location on the coastal plain to retain lands but also the trade of shrimp,
fish, lime, and purple cloth in the region. Disease reduced the Zoque during the sixteenth
century to a fraction of its pre-contact estimates opening up land for Spanish ranching
transforming the local economy and culture.103
The maps made by the painter from
Tehuantepec document this period of Spanish expansion, one in which authorities sought
to define spatial boundaries through visualization. A close analysis of the maps from the
100
Map of Mistequilla y Tehuantepec (1573), AGN, No. 2378, Tierras, vol. 3343, exp. 4, f. 43v and 44;
Map of Tzanaltepec, Tonaltepec, and Oztutlán (1580), AGN, No. 1903, Tierras, vol. 2729, exp. 4, f. 107v y
108; Relación Geográfica Map of Tehuantepec (1580), BLAC; Map of Tlapanatepec (1583), AGN, No.
1964, Tierras, vol. 2737, exp. 25, f. 8; Map of Tlapanaltepeque (1585), AGN, No. 2391, Tierras, vol. 3343,
exp. 20, f. 8; Map of Tlapaltepeque (1586), AGN, No. 1965, Tierras, vol. 2737, exp. 25, f. 29; and Map of
Ixtepec and Zixitlán (1598), AGN, No. 2084, Tierras, vol. 2764, exp. 22, f. 302.
101
See Zeitlin, “Ranchers and Indians”; and Lolita Gutiérrez Brockington, The Leverage of Labor:
Managing the Cortés Haciendas in Tehuantepec, 1588-1688 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989).
102
Zeitlin, 51.
103 Zeitlin, 49-50.
71
painter of Tehuantepec suggests the choices made by individuals in an effort to convey
meaning.
The earliest example of the painter’s work dates to 1573 when alcalde mayor
Gaspar Maldonado commissioned a map for a land grant northeast of Tehuantepec near
Mixtequilla and Comitlán. To identify Tehuantepec, the seat of power in the region, the
painter used its logographic place-name, a jaguar resting over a hill, and a small Christian
church at its foot. A distinctive house structure with a rectangular base and entrance
covered by a triangular rooftop described a settlement in the center of the page. More
than any other cartographic symbol, this motif defined the painter’s trademark style, a
recurrent tool used to designate towns found on all of his maps.
In another commission, the painter of Tehuantepec portrayed a much broader
expanse of land. Juan de Torres de Lagunas, the region’s alcalde mayor, requested a map
(Figure 18) of the entire region from the painter in 1580 to complete a geographical
survey on behalf of the King of Spain and his cosmographer to measure New World
resources.104
Oriented to the east, the map offered a detailed view of the area’s aquatic
condition, a complex system of waterways, lagoons, and rivers tied to the Pacific Ocean
on the right hand side of the page identified as Mar del Sur, “The South Sea.” With the
use of the distinctive house structure, the painter identified the towns and settlements
situating Tuehuantepec in the center of the page identified by the jaguar hill place-name
similar to the one used in the 1573 land grant map. While the map from 1573 described
the relationship between two ranching sites in proximity to one another, the Relaciones
104
Relación Geográfica Map of Tehuantepec (1580), BLAC.
72
Geográficas map provided an expansive view of the landscape connecting roads and
rivers to multiple settlements. In both of these maps, the painter applied a logographic
character to describe the place-name of Tehuantepec and the use of feet to denote a road
or travel, elements drawn from the Mesoamerican pictorial catalogue. The difference in
maps recognizes the painter’s versatility to represent specific and general aspects of the
region as well as his disposition to generate unique maps tailored to the patron’s needs.
Torres de Lagunas sought the painter’s services a second time in 1580 to allocate
a ranching site for the native town of Tzanaltepec on the eastern portion of Tehuantepec
near Chiapas. This region suffered a steady population decline through the end of the
sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, though these demographic changes did not
deter Spanish ranchers from pursuing their objectives. The shortage of indigenous labor
prompted Spaniards to import African slaves to support their economic activities
transforming Tzanaltepec into a predominantly black enclave by the 1670s.105
On the
Marqués’ ranches in Tehuantepec, Africans and Afro-Mexicans held supervisory
positions and occupied the top ranching positions as vaqueros, or cowhands.106
Others
ran packs of mules that transported goods including the prized blue dye, añil, from
Guatemala to Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Veracruz, a topic discussed in the following
chapter.
For the commission, the painter of Tehuantepec made a map (Figure 19) that
situated the site of land marked with a rectangular horseshoe, a commonly used symbol
105
Brockington, 13-17; Gerhard, 266.
106
Zeitlin, 47.
73
to denote ranches and agricultural sites, near the center of the page flanked by two small
hills. The three buildings with the triangular top lined up along the vertical axis, and the
thick moss-like outline along the edge of each mountain bear the painter’s signature
pictorial elements. A river that flows horizontally separates Tzanaltepec from the site by
two leagues while a major road marked by feet that runs east to west provides the map’s
vertical axis. Each of the three towns depicted in the map, Tonaltepec at the top,
Tzanaltepec in the center, and Oztotlán at the bottom, were designated by the rectangular
structure with the triangular rooftop. Interestingly, from this point forward, the rest of the
painter’s cartographic output omits references of logographic writing. Considering the
strong technique displayed in the Relaciones Geográficas map of 1580, in some ways it is
surprising not to see more elements from the Mesoamerican canon in the painter’s later
maps. Was it necessary, for instance, to include a logogram for a Spanish audience? The
painter seemed to think it was not. One assumes the change took place as a result of the
artist’s willingness to adapt his pictorial skills to fit the audiences’ needs coupled with the
expectations of the patron for the finished product.
In the two maps (Figures 20 and 21) made for alcalde mayor Hernando de Vargas
in 1585 and 1586, the painter outlined major geographical features of the coastal town of
Tlapanaltepeque including treeless plains, mountains, streams, and roads as well as the
Pacific Ocean at the bottom of the page. Predictably, the use of a rectangular structure
with a triangular rooftop signaled the town of Tlapanaltepeque from where officials
measured distances to the desired sites of land. Neither of the maps included any traces
of logographic writing, though hoof marks continue to designate roads; yet even this most
74
visible element disappeared from the painter’s later maps (Figure 22). Over time, the
painter developed a simple but effective formula: a few well-placed structures and lines
combined with a discrete amount of color allowed officials to easily identify petitioned
sites, ranches, and towns within the region’s geographical environment. Armed with
pictorial skill and geographical knowledge, the mapmaker succeeded in fulfilling the
needs of five different alcaldes mayores that sought maps over a period of twenty-five
years.107
Circuits of Knowledge
In some regions of Oaxaca, the circulation of maps suggests individuals shared
their knowledge and work with each other. In Cuestlahuaca, painters such as Domingo
de Mendoza negotiated with royal officials with the support of maps. One made in 1590
(Figure 23) describes the site for a caballería, a measure of land of about 105 acres near
Tepenene petitioned by Francisco de Mendoza, another cacique from the region.108
The
painter represented the town with a small church in the left center portion of the map
where feet connected Tepenene with Concepción as well as the cabecera, Cuestlahuaca,
three leagues away. The two serpents facing away from each other below a large church
represent the place-name for Cuestlahuaca, “in the plain of snakes.” An arm extends
from a teptl place-sign to indicate the town of Tepenene. Mary Elizabeth Smith suggests
the separation of the church from the place-sign may reference the site of the town before
107
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 201.
108
Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene y Cuestlahuaca (1590), AGN, No. 1904, Tierras, vol. 2729, exp. 5, f.
117. I have followed Taylor’s measurement of caballerías, Landlord and Peasant, 259.
75
the Spanish congregaciones, resettlements, of the sixteenth century.109
Within
indigenous settlements, control of mapmaking remained largely in the hands of a select
few, typically caciques who made and stored maps and pictorial documents. Considering
the location where this map and the1617 map of Tepenene (Figure 17) circulated, it is
highly plausible Francisco and Domingo de Mendoza had a familial bond. Had this been
the case, it is likely the former transferred knowledge of the art of painting to the latter.
A decade later, another map (Figure 24) that recorded the petition of Don Juan de
Salazar for a livestock ranch near Tepenene reflected certain similarities to the 1590
map.110
On February 20, 1600 Salazar met in Tepenene with Felipe de Echagoyan, the
alcalde mayor of Yanhuitlán, to review the map. Oriented east, the map’s painter
incorporated traditional Mesoamerican iconography including a river along the center of
the page with sixteen houses on either side, a road with feet to indicate travel that reaches
the desired site, and the teptl hill that indicates the site of the livestock ranch where the
alcalde mayor inscribed the caption “aquí el sitio,” or “the site [is] here.” In the center of
the page, a church in three-quarter view represents the town of Tepenene while a sun at
the top of the page signals east. The celestial objects on the map, most notably depictions
of the stars, share a striking resemblance to the ones on the map painted in Tepenene in
1590 (Figure 23). Both maps include stars that share an outline contoured with medium
lines filled in with flat washes of color. Though other elements, including the use of the
teptl hill, differ from one another, the styling used to illustrate celestial objects suggests
109
Smith, 184.
110
Map of Tepenene (1600), AGN, No. 1812, Tierras, vol. 2719, exp. 23, f. 9.
76
familiarity with local visual practices and an adherence to the pliable nature of pictorial
record-making.
The circulation of maps and other pictorial records served to foreground the
elaboration of new maps. Cartographic activity of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries in many ways emulated the “mapping tradition” of the late sixteenth
century through the copying of maps.111
The reproduction of pictorial manuscripts
represented a primary means of transmitting spatial knowledge in Mesoamerica, the maps
of the late sixteenth century themselves a product of earlier models tempered through
decades of cultural exchange with Europeans. The practice of reproduction presupposes
a reliance on older documents in the process contextualizing the circulation of maps
across time.
When Domingo de Zárate described himself as a master who practiced the art of
painting in 1686, he unintentionally opened a curtain that veiled the continued practice of
pictorial record-making in Oaxaca. How did knowledge of painting circulate during this
later period? Mostly through oral means communicated from elders to juniors but also
visually through the circulation of pictorial records. Elders bore the burden of
transferring their knowledge to younger generations using pictorial records as didactic
devices. When identifying the painting used to legitimize the petition made by the Juárez
de Zárate brothers in 1690, Julian de Santiago, a seventy-year-old former political officer
111
Reinvention through reproduction in many ways characterizes the history and historiography of visual
culture, especially indigenous pictorial documents, in New Spain. See Clara Bargellini’s “Originality and
Invention in the Painting of New Spain,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821
(Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004); Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn, “Of Copies, Casts, and Codices:
Mexico on Display in 1892,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 29/30 (1996): 326-343; Baird,
222-226; and Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting,107, 112, 130, 132, 150, 185-86.
77
from Santa Catarina Ixtepeji confirmed the map belonged to the Juárez family. He told
authorities his knowledge stemmed from an oral exchange with seniors in his youth, the
scribe noting, “The elders have suggested it and explained it to him.”112
Sixty-year-old
Lucas de Santiago declared, “I know the map in which the origin and descent of those
named in this petition is the true and ancient one . . . I have heard it said by others, older
and more ancient than me.”113
Pictorial knowledge relied in large part on oral exchanges
between junior members of a town and the elders who taught them about their
community’s culture and history. The testimony of the two men suggests spaces existed
where individuals discussed and learned about the use and manufacture of pictorial
manuscripts and maps. Besides gaining specific tools designed to provide a valuable
service, access to this knowledge at the local level served to reaffirm social status within
elite circles of caciques and principales who led town affairs.
In some instances, elders used maps as mnemonic devices to recite the history of
their communities transmitting in the process important spatial and geographical
knowledge used to establish autonomy. Lucas de los Santos testified in 1691 on behalf of
the Mixtecs of Xoxocotlán about their ancient map (Figure 5) and the land titles in their
possession. The town used the map in the late 1680s and early 1690s to litigate against a
112
“Es el antiguo, y del que siempre se han valido para que los conozcan que han guardado en sus casas
para que se eternice la memoria y que se sepa que legítimamente son caciques y de buena sangre . . .
además de lo expresado se lo han dado a entender, y explicándoselo los antiguos,” AGN, Indiferente
Virreinal, Civil, exp. 23, no page.
113 “El Mapa en que se halla descifrada la descendencia y origen de todos los nominados en dicha petición
sabe es el antiguo y verdadero y el de la misma descendencia por que fuere de los que ha declarado como
indio viejo, y antiguo se lo ha oído decir a otros sus mayores, y más antiguos, y siempre ha visto lo han
tenido los de dicho linaje representando ser su descendencia, y origen sin haber habido cosa en contrario, y
que de haberla lo supiera este testigo, y no pudiera ser menos por ser anciano, y natural de dicha cabecera,”
AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, Civil, exp. 23, f. 4.
78
Spaniard over five acres of land. During an interrogation to establish the map’s
authenticity, de los Santos declared he had seen the map and had witnessed the town’s
elders reading it aloud. Likewise, thirty-eight-year-old Joseph de Santiago testified he
knew the map and had also heard elders reading from it. Yannakakis observes this
practice among Zapotecs noting, “Logographic descriptions punctuated pictorial
boundary maps, evoking boundary and place names for a prominent community elder
who, through oral exegesis, could interpret the visual representation, and publicly
rehearse the community’s history and the identity of its founding ancestors during
important days of the ritual calendar.”114
Orality and visuality played central components
of indigenous learning contributing to the production of maps in the region.
The Painter’s View of Local Conflict
Within indigenous settlements, control of mapmaking remained largely in the
hands of a select few throughout the late sixteenth century, typically powerful caciques
who stored maps and pictorial documents. A steep decline in the production of maps at
the beginning of the seventeenth century marked the end of a significant period of
indigenous mapmaking defined by a mixture of European iconography combined with
abstract renderings and traces of logographic writing. The surge in maps at the end of the
seventeenth century responded to increased pressure on the part of authorities to regulate
land tenure but also on enhanced competition for land from a recovering native
population as well as an increasingly land-driven Spanish minority. These forces pulled
114
Yanna Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices, and a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca,” The
Americas 65 (2008): 164.
79
individuals such as Domingo de Zárate, who copied the map of Xoxocotlán in the late
seventeenth century, in a variety of directions. In one respect, social interaction within
native towns was fraught with conflict. Caciques such as Zárate clashed with lesser
nobles and other caciques over political appointments, abuses of power, women,
territorial disputes, and tribute collection. While they often connected the Spanish and
indigenous worlds, caciques jealously guarded their privileges and goods, sometimes in
concert with ñuu interests but often in protection of family and individual wealth and
status. The second half of the seventeenth century witnessed a decline in cacique power
as well as a push from macehuales, native commoners, who made gains on political
appointments and traditional practices including the art of painting in spite of efforts by
caciques to limit their participation.
Such was the case in the painter Domingo de Zárate’s home town, Santa Cruz
Xoxocotlán, a powerful Mixtec settlement with a rich cartographic tradition in the
southwest reaches of the Valley of Oaxaca.115
Xoxocotlán in the 1680s serves as a
laboratory to examine another aspect of a painter’s social environment, one rooted in
rivalry, violence, and conflict. Although Zárate did not directly participate in the
following events involving a powerful cacique, the painter knew and lived among those
mentioned in the incident. Likewise, the presence of another painter, one of alleged
mixed-race heritage, suggests the way ethnicity played a role in defining social
relationships at the local level. Accusations and complaints from this episode shed light
on the gradual erosion of social and political roles in Oaxaca during the late seventeenth
115
See discussion of maps from Xoxocotlán in Chapter 4.
80
century, a period that witnessed increased population growth and competition for land. A
close reading of the events helps document important aspects of a painter’s social
environment providing a window into the opportunities and challenges they faced in
everyday life.
Screams of pain drew a crowd of onlookers sometime between seven and eight in
the evening on February 2, 1680. As people approached the center of Xoxocotlán, they
stumbled upon a gruesome scene. A naked man hung from the pillory, his bare body
savagely whipped by the native constable and the sheriff on the orders of Don Félix de
Mendoza, a thirty-seven-year-old cacique who owned cattle, maguey plantations, and
several houses, and who actively participated in the administration of town affairs.
Serving as the local judge, Mendoza punished Bartolomé de Zárate, a former political
officer of the town because according to him, he had carried on an improper relationship
with a married woman. Mendoza indicated an Indian named Juan de la Cruz complained
Zárate had taken his stepdaughter as a concubine. He told authorities Juan attempted to
persuade Zárate to end the relationship, a dangerous affair since the woman was married
and her husband absent, but his pleas failed. Afterwards, Juan sought Mendoza’s help
who proceeded to order Zárate’s arrest along with a penalty of two-dozen lashes.
The initial complaint and witness testimony made a month after the incident did
not mention Mendoza also punished another man that night. Fifty-year-old Marcial de la
Cruz, an Indian painter, suffered a similar fate as Zárate for supposedly entering into a
separate relationship with a married woman. Mendoza himself mentioned de la Cruz
81
during his first interview with authorities on March 30 two months after the beating had
taken place,
I declare that Bartolomé de Zárate and Marcial de la Cruz, natives of said town [of
Xoxocotlán], on the occasion of having corrected their bad behavior depriving them of
their liberty to prevent further offenses against God Our Lord, have in vengeance and
hatred stirred and instigated other natives from the town to seek legal recourse, as they
did, with the Real Audiencia. I have received news they were awarded a warrant against
me, [obtained] with a sinister report, slandering me with odd remarks and suggesting I
castigate and abuse them in other ways in order to remove me from the justice office I
hold, and to cause me expenses and torment.116
The scribe who wrote the report underlined de la Cruz’s name highlighting the
introduction of another, until then, unmentioned offender. But while Mendoza provided
a thorough explanation of his actions against Zárate, he did not offer any context for
those against de la Cruz except to say they mirrored Zárate’s. Supporting testimony for
Mendoza’s version of events did not clarify the matter. Pablo de la Cruz, a 60-year-old
Xoxocotlán native declared, “because of the complaint against Bartolomé de Zárate . . .
116
Original reads, “Y digo que Bartolomé de Zárate y Marcial de la Cruz, naturales de dicho pueblo con
ocasión de haberles corregido sus malos procedimientos en odio y venganza de no permitirles ni dejarles en
su libertad para cometer mayores delitos en ofensa de Dios nuestro señor inquietaron e instigaron a otros
naturales de dicho pueblo para que todos ocurriesen como lo hicieron al superior gobierno de donde tengo
noticia ganaron cierto despacho, contra mí con siniestra relación afectando calumnias muy extrañas de mi
proceder suponiendo les hago castigos y otras vejaciones, para con este pretexto amoberme, del oficio de
justicia que ejerzo y ocasionarme gastos y vejaciones,” Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca (AGEO),
Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 17-18.
82
[Mendoza] gave him twenty-four lashes in the prison’s courtyard, and for the same
reasons whipped Marcial de la Cruz, painter.”117
The connection between Mendoza, Zárate, and de la Cruz extended beyond this
incident of immoral behavior. As the case against Mendoza unfolded, deep fissures cut
across Xoxocotlán’s political landscape. In 1675, de la Cruz served on Xoxocotlán’s
cabildo in the post of fiscal, church steward. Along with two other officials, de la Cruz
supported Mendoza’s candidacy for gobernador, the highest political office within the
town council, for the following year. The appointment troubled many principales
including Juan de la Cruz, the same man Mendoza told authorities instigated Zárate’s
arrest. The principales opposed Mendoza’s appointment on the grounds that he
influenced the selection process in order to continue in office.118
The powerful cacique
had obtained a dispatch from the Real Audiencia that gave him the leverage to select a
body of his choosing to determine who would carry out the duties of public office in
Xoxocotlán.119
Since this action contravened usos y costumbres, traditional practices that
called for elders and previous officers to make the selections, several principales
retaliated by filing a formal complaint. Mendoza told authorities that in spite of their
accusations, de la Cruz and Zárate had supported his election noting, “[Your Lordship]
may recognize the hate and vengefulness with which the aforementioned have
determined to strip me of the staff, generating expenses [for me] and other hardships.
117
“Sabe le dio 24 azotes en el patio de la cárcel y por lo mismo azoto a Marcial de la Cruz pintor,” AGEO,
Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 30. The underlining represents a reader’s annotation.
118
See AGN, Real Audiencia, exp. 124.
119
Taylor also notes this pattern, Landlord and Peasant, 49.
83
Likewise, these [accusations] work against them since on other occasions Bartolomé de
Zárate and Marcial de la Cruz have selected and elected me for their alcalde because of
my good conduct and patronage.”120
Accounts of Mendoza’s behavior including his heavy drinking, intimidation
tactics, and violent punishments surfaced during the trial. Diego Juárez, a seventy-year-
old man who witnessed Zárate’s beating told officials Mendoza “was drunk on pulque as
he often is.” Francisco de Mendossa declared, “Don Félix says he punishes them so they
won’t commit public sins and to prevent concubinage yet he sets a bad example living, to
everyone’s shock, with a [married] Indian woman,” an affair he said Mendoza had
carried on for over a decade.121
On one occasion, Mendoza arranged for a butcher to cut
the ears off a man who had been whipped while riding an ass through the streets of
Xoxocotlán.122
After Mendoza’s arrest on January 21, 1681 Sebastian Vásquez, a
seventy-year-old resident of Xoxocotlán felt distressed during his testimony disclosing to
authorities he was “fearful for having made this declaration [against Mendoza] because
he threatened me and others many times,” a sentiment echoed by Francisco Martín.123
120
“Se reconocerá el odio y venganza con que los susodichos proceden intentando el quitarme la vara,
causarme gastos y otras molestias sino también el ser esto contra su propio hecho pues en otras ocasiones
los dichos Bartolomé de Zárate y Marcial de la Cruz, me han propuesto y elegido por su alcalde
experimentando [por] mi buen proceder y fomento, AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 28.
121
“Luego dice que los castiga por que no hagan pecados públicos ni estén amancebados siendo así que
habita con mal ejemplo y escándalo de todos lo está el dicho Don Félix viviendo mal con una india,”
AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 10.
122
AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 120.
123
“Declaró mediante dichos intérpretes que se hallaba temeroso de que por haber de hacer esta declaración
le había hecho muchas amenazas a él y a otros naturales dicho Don Félix,” AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg.
48, exp. 10, f. 70.
84
Fear gripped Martín a month later when he refused to ratify his testimony, plaintiffs from
Xoxocotlán noting on February 26, “he finds himself so frightened [at what Mendoza
might do to him], he dares not come.”124
Accusations and counter accusations about
manipulation, intimidation, and violence shed light on the pressure of private interests
over the limits of social relationships and political control.
In jail, Mendoza made two important declarations that further contextualize
rapidly shifting interests and unstable alliances among the local elite. On January 30,
1681, under mounting pressure from authorities who sequestered his goods, and residents
that continued to disclose his pastimes, Mendoza changed his story. He declared that the
true account began when, “Catalina de Mendoza, Bartolomé de Zárate’s mother, came at
about eight in the morning [on the day in question] to complain about her son because he
was not living a conjugal life with his wife but instead openly cohabited with a married
Indian woman.”125
She asked Mendoza to take Zárate to Father Mateo de Porras to
receive punishment to which he replied, “There is no need to go before the parish priest,
since I am alcalde, I can do it myself.”126
Don Félix told authorities he then visited
Zárate at his home where, “with good words,” he attempted to reprove the illicit
behavior; Zárate, visibly altered and with “an impudent tone (“voces muy
124
“Se haya tan amedrentado que no se atreva a venir a ratificarse,” AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48,
exp. 10, f. 120.
125
“Como a las ocho horas de la mañana Catalina de Mendoza madre de dicho Bartolomé de Zárate a
querellarse a este confesante del dicho su hijo porque no hacia vida maridable con su mujer por estar
amancebado públicamente con una india casada,” AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 90.
126
“Catalina de Mendoza le pidió a este confesante llevarse a dicho su hijo a la presencia del Padre cura
Fray Mateo de Porras para que lo castigase a que le respondió no había necesidad de ir ante dicho Padre
cura cuando lo podía hacer este confesante por ser alcalde,” AGEO, Alcadías Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f.
90.
85
descompuestas”), declared he would not leave his lover. In this statement, Mendoza no
longer relied on Juan de la Cruz, the aggrieved stepfather to support his actions. His
change of story reflected shifting allegiances since Juan de la Cruz added his name to the
list of officials from Xoxocotlán who pursued the complaint against the cacique.
Authorities also asked Mendoza about his involvement in the election of public
officials. He explained that, “Elections for political officers took place in Xoxocotlán
with the intromission of parish priests and the alcaldes mayores’ minions who against our
will voted for some Indian macehuales [commoners] who did not deserve it.”127
Because
of this, Mendoza attempted to limit the power of outside forces by petitioning a license to
restrict the participation of electors.128
Mendoza singled out “Bartolomé de Zárate and
his consorts” including the painter Marcial de la Cruz who he described as “an enemy of
mine.” The idea of the “undeserving” macehual reflected distinctions of wealth and
status articulated by caciques, a group increasingly threatened by advances on entailed-
estates and communal land and competition to control local affairs, using it to undermine
rivals.129
William Taylor notes that in the Valley, “Macehuales were elected to municipal
offices; and through commercial enterprise, marriage with principales, and the division of
principal estates, many commoners rose to a position of wealth equal to that of most
127
“Con ocasión de considerar que en las elecciones que se hacía en dicho su pueblo de oficiales de
república sucedía que por intervención de los padres doctrineros y criados de alcaldes mayores las hacían a
disgusto por entrometerse a dar votos algunos indios maceguales que no lo merecían,” AGEO, Alcadías
Mayores, leg. 48, exp. 10, f. 91.
128
Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 49.
129 Gibson, 156; Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 48-56.
86
nobles.”130
In a society ordered on the basis of race and privilege, Mendoza appealed to
an official’s recognition of tradition and status.
The case against Don Félix de Mendoza reveals the complexities of negotiating
political and economic power within native towns. Don Félix’s influence extended into
various sectors of colonial society including the lawsuit that generated the petition for
1686 copied map of Xoxocotlán (Figure 5) made by Domingo de Zárate, the master
painter. Some caciques such as Mendoza diverted funds from infrastructure projects,
handed out corporal punishment to rivals, altered usos y costumbres to influence political
appointments, and imposed derramas to generate funds. Their work was aided by
members of the lettered city including scribes and alcaldes mayores who prepared and
oversaw petitions and complaints, and by native elite that sought to retain the privileges
of their class while curbing the rise of commoners. The presence of Marcial de la Cruz,
an Indian painter of supposed macehual status at the center of Mendoza’s web, provides a
unique glimpse into social differences and the strategies used to limit cacique power.
Macehuales and lesser nobles sought recourse from the courts against abusive caciques,
failed to pay derramas, accessed positions of power including political appointments and
the art of painting, and mobilized community members. Together these elements
highlight the social environment in which painters developed and adapted to in the late
seventeenth century.
130
Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 49.
87
Conclusion
The trail of footsteps spread from the Valley of Oaxaca to the northwestern
mountains of the Mixteca and across the southwestern coast of the Pacific to Tehuantepec
in the east. A host of actors including caciques, native political officers, Spanish
landholders, and royal officials turned to pintores, indigenous painters who acquired
skills that allowed them to describe the natural environment in pictorial fashion, to fulfill
the need for maps in the region. The variety of maps reflect a pictorial diversity rooted in
local traditions but flexible enough to accommodate new ideas to fulfill the expectations
of patrons and royal officials. In their efforts to communicate with multiple audiences,
painters freely incorporated signs and ideas drawn from the Mesoamerican tradition also
using elements of European culture introduced by explorers, missionaries, colonists, and
civil authorities. Each painter who made a map or document belonged to social units
often producing them for members of the ñuu or for the corporate body as whole when
related to matters over collective property. Different generations of painters had access
to various types of knowledge that affected the signs and appearance of maps and other
pictorial records. Transmission took place traditionally from elders to juniors, and in
some cases from the regular clergy to the native elite who controlled pictorial and
alphabetic writing.
88
CHAPTER 2:
CARTOGRAPHIC MATERIALS
Visual representations take the place of something that is absent, and
they reveal, at the same time as they mask and conceal, relationships
and forms of understanding, making and transforming in the world.
―Gabriela Siracusano, El poder de los colores131
“It is the painter’s craft to know how to use colors, and draw and give meaning to
images with carbon, and to properly combine colors for grinding and mixing,”
commented Bernardino de Sahagún in the late 1570s about an Indian painter’s range of
skills. In his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, a history of Mesoamerican
culture compiled with the assistance of native informants during the second half of the
sixteenth century, Sahagún highlighted their “good hand” and their ability to paint
gracefully, to embellish, and to carefully consider the subject matter.132
The attention to
materials and craftsmanship observed by the Franciscan reflects an appreciation of the
tools and methods used by native painters―described by Spanish authorities typically as
pintores but known among Zapotecs as huazèe, among Mixtecs as ñahuisi tacu, and
among Nahuas as tlacuilo―to hone their craft.133
Material characteristics play an
important role in the way we think about indigenous pictorial records in contemporary
131
“Representaciones visuales ocupan el lugar de algo que está ausente y revelan, a la vez que disimulan u
ocultan, relaciones y formas de pensar, hacer e intervenir en el mundo.” Gabriela Siracusano, El poder de
los colores: De lo material a lo simbólico en las prácticas culturales andinas, Siglos XVI-XVIII (Buenos
Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 17.
132
“El pintor, en su oficio, sabe usar de colores, y dibujar o señalar imágenes con carbón, y hacer muy
buena mezcla de colores, y sábelos moler muy bien y mezclar. El buen pintor tiene buena mano y gracia en
el pintar, y considera muy bien lo que ha de pintar,” Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas
de Nueva España, vol. III, ed. Ángel María Garibay (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1977), 115. Hereafter
cited as HGNE.
133
Córdova, Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca, 315v; Alvarado, Vocabulario en lengua mixteca, 168; and
Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, 120.
89
discourse. Blanket terms such as lienzo to describe pictorials on cloth, maps to describe
those on paper, and codices those on animal skin establish parameters through material
features that define the range and content of the visual records. This rarely discussed
aspect of indigenous pictorial activity raises questions about technical matters associated
with the production of maps.
The relationship between mapping and materials is not always transparent.
Before painters committed symbols to the surface of a map, they prepared the substances
used to illustrate it. Painters, shrewd multilingual caciques often dressed in European
clothing accustomed to dealing with scribes and officials, made pigments by selecting
elements found in nature, converting them into working ingredients, and mixing them to
produce colorants, inks, and binders. This important but overlooked aspect of the history
of indigenous cartography defines a significant aspect of mapmaking that drew from
botany, healing science, and chemistry to transform the natural world into cartographic
materials. The knowledge applied reflects a deep engagement with plants and minerals
acquired through generations of learning. Knowledge, as James Secord has posited, sits
at the center of a dialogue between those who produce objects and their dissemination
among various groups of people at the local, regional, and global levels.134
Since all
objects reflect a similar pattern of communication, the study of materials informs a
broader dialogue about ethnicity, cross-cultural encounters, and imperial expansion that
shaped spatial relationships. These “relationships and forms of understanding,” as
Gabriela Siracusano describes them in the epigraph that launches this chapter, enhance
134
James Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 95/4 (2004): 654-672. I wish to thank Josep Simon for
pointing me to this source.
90
our ability to interpret indigenous cartography in a fuller context that accounts not only
with what is visible on a map but also what hides beneath its surface.
A pictorial analysis of the maps used in this study yields important clues about a
painter’s choice of materials. Most used three to five different colors in each map, a
practice that continued after the early seventeenth century when maps circulated in less
numbers. They achieved this diverse chromatic range through the mixture of plants,
minerals, roots, insects, fluids, and fruit that constituted the adhesives, ink, and colorants
used to make maps. Pintores favored colors such as green, brown, red, blue, and black
but applied others including yellow, steel gray, teal, and magenta. While color in
pictorial manuscripts of the pre-Colombian period had a close association with ritual and
politics, the practice of assigning meaning to specific tones suffered after the second half
of the sixteenth century when painters tailored maps to appeal to scribes and royal
officials more interested in establishing locations and boundaries.135
Some painters such
as the artist from Cuquila described below used a single color to illustrate their maps.
Alvarado identified monochromatic pictorials among Mixtec as dzo eeni nuu tacu,
“painting of one color.”136
The use of this convention existed in central Mexico as well
where twenty years earlier, Molina noted in his Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana that
monochromatic paintings were known as çancecni ycac tlacuilolli and çancecnic tlachia
tlacuilolli (“painting of a single color”).137
Although the precise context of
135
Serge Gruzinski, “Colonial Indian Maps,” 51-52.
136
Alvarado, 168.
137
Molina, 96.
91
monochromatic images remains obscure, terms such as these convey the significance
materials and color played in the art of painting to carry messages.
The growing interest in early modern materials, commodities, and technology
among historians of science and art has exposed the intimate relationship between learned
inquiry and practical experience.138
Siracusano’s El poder de los colores, an analysis of
materiality in Andean colonial art serves as a particularly useful model to consider
questions about the application of knowledge to produce pigments and other elements
used in mapping. Siracusano proposes that the diversity of materials of European and
New World origin available to artists in the Andes promoted experimentation with
ingredients and techniques contributing to the paintings’ unique character. Her use of
chemical analysis and early modern treatises on alchemy, art, metallurgy, botany, and
medicine to inform the circulation of knowledge and pigments among social networks
opens unique possibilities to contextualize intellectual exchanges and the technical
practices associated with visual culture. Questions about materiality suggest new paths to
examine indigenous learning in the natural sciences that contributed to the fabrication of
materials used to paint a map as well as the transformative influence of European ideas,
tools, and ingredients on pictorial records.
138
See Colors between Two Worlds; Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early
Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Science in
the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800; Paula de Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire
in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40/2 (2007): 209-239, and “The Science of
Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,” Journal of World History 17/4
(2006): 399-427; Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature; Siracusano, El poder de los colores; Merchants
and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula
Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); and Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship:
Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001).
92
Paper
From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, indigenous pintores used a
variety of mediums on which to map, adapting to changes in material technology and
access to goods. Dominican friar Francisco de Burgoa commented in his Geográfica
descripción (1674), a cultural and natural history of Oaxaca, that indigenous records were
made “on paper from the bark of trees and [on] tanned leather.”139
Alvarado noted the
terms dzoo ñee ñuhu and ñee tutu designated “paper on which the ancients wrote,” but a
limited number of pictorials made on “ancient” paper has made it difficult to gauge the
extent of papermaking practices in Oaxaca.140
Burgoa’s description points to the use of
paper made from the bark of the ficus tree described by Sahagún as amacuáuitl more
commonly known as amatl. When he described papermaking in central Mexico, Sahagún
observed, “There are in this land some trees they call amacuáuitl. Their bark is smooth
and their leaves very green. They are about the size of peach trees. They make paper
from the bark.”141
Francisco Hernández, the royal physician and naturalist who in the late sixteenth
century spent seven years in New Spain cataloguing native plants and their uses
described the process of preparing the bark to make paper. In his Historia natural de
Nueva España, the physician wrote,
139
“Y así mismo algunas historias pintadas, en papel de cortezas de árboles, y pieles curtidas,” Burgoa,
Geográfica descripción, 134.
140 Alvarado, 161.
141
Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Vol. II (Madrid, 1990), 967.
93
[They] only cut the tree’s thick branches, leaving the shoots. They are soaked in water
and left to steep in the rivers or streams overnight. The next day, the bark is stripped off,
and, after removing the outside cuticle, it is extended by pounding it with a flat rock
which is cut with certain grooves supported by an unpolished willow rod folded in a
circle in the form of a handle. The flexible wood yields; it is then cut into pieces that
when pounded once again with a flatter stone, easily join together and are [then]
smoothed. Lastly, they are divided in sheets of two palmos in length and approximately a
palmo and a half in width, [a size] that imitates our thickest and most common paper, but
these are smaller and whiter though much inferior to our smoothest paper.142
For Spaniards accustomed to writing with fine- and medium-tip quills, a “smooth” finish
on the surface of a sheet of paper gained it high praise allowing the ink and pen to flow
seamlessly. Considering the fibrous surface of amatl-based paper designed for various
types of paints applied with rabbit-hair brushes or fashioned out of animal bones, it is not
surprising to learn the physician favored the European kind. Hernández commented that
paper informed various aspects of ritual life including “wrapping and [is] very adequate
and useful among these western Indians [the Nahuas] to celebrate the feasts of the gods,
142
“Se cortan sólo las ramas gruesas de los árboles, dejando los renuevos; se maceran con agua y se dejan
remojar durante la noche en los arroyos o ríos. Al día siguiente se les arranca la corteza, y, después de
limpiarla de la cutícula exterior, se extiende a golpes con una piedra plana pero surcada de algunas estrías,
y que se sujeta con una vara de mimbre sin pulir doblada en círculo a manera de mango. Cede aquella
madera flexible; se corta luego en trozos que, golpeados de nuevo con otra piedra más plana, se unen
fácilmente entre sí y se alisan; se dividen por último en hojas de dos palmos de largo y un palmo y medio
aproximadamente de ancho, que imitan nuestro papel más grueso y corriente, pero son más compactas y
más blancas, aunque muy inferiores a nuestro papel más terso,” Francisco Hernández, Historia natural de
Nueva España, vol. I, in Obras Completas, vol. II (Mexico City: UNAM, 1959), 83-84; hereafter cited as
HNNE I. One palmo, a unit associated with the distance from the thumb to the little finger, measured
roughly 20.95 cm.
94
to prepare sacred garments, and to adorn funerals.”143
Papermaking activities across
Mesoamerica shared similar patterns of technology which survived into the eighteenth
century.
Amatl papermaking shared a strong relationship with pictorial manuscripts and
served to document history, genealogies, urban design, ritual, land tenure, and tribute
collection up until the late seventeenth century, though only a small number of
manuscripts, mostly land titles tied to historical events, circulated within local courts and
indigenous towns. The map from Tolcayuca (Figure 25), for instance, depicted the local
landscape in the state of Hidalgo.144
It belongs to a genre known as Techialoyan,
indigenous manuscripts usually made in central Mexico on amatl paper during the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a response to pressures on land. These type
of manuscripts, most of which sought to convey a sixteenth-century origin, were
produced as indigenous communities and caciques scrambled to comply with legislation
designed to regulate property.145
Amatl papermaking played an important role in their
143
Hernández noted, “[El papel] es propio para envolturas y muy adecuado y útil entre estos indios
occidentales para celebrar las fiestas de los dioses, confeccionar las vestiduras sagradas, y para adornos
funerarios,” HNNE I, 83.
144
Map of San Juan Tolcayuca (late 17th century), Library of Congress, Kislak Collection, not yet
catalogued.
145
See Donald Robertson, “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings with a Catalogue,” in Handbook of
Middle American Indians, Vol. 14, ed. Robert Wauchope and Howard Cline (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1975); Stephanie Wood, “Pedro Villafranca y Juana Gertrudis Navarrete: falsificador de títulos y su
viuda (Nueva España, siglo XVIII)," in Lucha por la supervivencia en América colonial, ed. David G.
Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987); “Don Diego García de
Mendoza Moctezuma: A Techialoyan Mastermind?” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 19 (1989): 245-268; “El
problema de la historicidad de Títulos y los códices del grupo Techialoyan,” in De tlacuilos; and “The
Techialoyan Codices," in Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory,
Provisional Version (e-book), co-edited with James Lockhart and Lisa Sousa (Eugene, Ore.: Wired
Humanities Project, University of Oregon, 2007) <http://whp.uoregon.edu/Lockhart/Wood.pdf> .
95
production, pintores striving to archaize the appearance of a map or a document in order
to establish a connection to the past that could support contemporary needs and threats.
Few amatl records survive from Oaxaca. The tribute record from Tecomastlabaca
(Tecomaxtlahuaca) in the Mixteca Baja, an indigenous pictorial made on native paper
suggests its maker used amatl, but the exact makeup of the paper is unknown. Don
Francisco de Arellano, a cacique from the Mixtec town, deployed the pictorial in 1578
against a group of terrasgueros (sharecroppers) over a parcel of land.146
Other indicators
such as the use of toponyms suggest individual settlements had ties to papermaking
activities in Oaxaca. Amatitlán in the Mixteca, “the place of paper trees,” describes a
relationship between papermaking and ficus, though the Nahua place name may have
reflected the priorities and knowledge of the Aztecs that controlled the area rather than
that of Mixtecs who may have described their place-name according to a very different
reading of the natural landscape.147
The place-sign tani juibeti, “hill of the penca [agave
leaf],” on the Zapotec Lienzo of Santiago Guevea made in 1540 identifies a center of
metl (agave) paper production in the Isthmus.148
In Tehuantepec, Zapotec tribute records
made on maguey paper during the sixteenth century include bundles of paper for
ceremonial use.149
146
The AGN describes this pictorial record as a codex and uses the original spelling of the town. Códice de
Tecomastlabaca, 1578, AGN, Mapoteca, No. 1692.8, Tierras, Vol. 2692, Exp. 16, f. 24.
147
On indigenous toponyms associated with paper or papermaking activities, see Arellano Hoffmann, “El
escriba mesoamericano y sus utensilios de trabajo,” 238-239.
148
Hans Lenz, El papel indígena mexicano (Mexico City: SEP-Setentas, 1973), 154-55.
149
Códice de Teguantepec, c. 16th century, AGN, Mapoteca, No. 3122, Hospital de Jesús, Leg. 450, Exp.
1, f. 3.
96
Materials used to make indigenous paper varied according to the availability of
certain plants, a situation usually conditioned by a region’s climate and geography. In
temperate and cold climates in Mesoamerica, individuals typically used fibers from
maguey to make paper while in tropical and warmer climates they used ficus and
mulberry bark.150
Alvarado noted daa cuiñe daa yata described “the fiber obtained from
maguey,” confirming the plant’s material served textile purposes.151
In his Vocabulario
en lengua çapoteca (1578), Juan de Córdova, a Dominican linguist noted quijchipevo and
quichiyagapeo expressed “paper of the land,” while quijchiyatii Castilla, “paper from
Castile,” recognized the European type used by Spaniards.152
Hernández recognized
maguey, a multipurpose plant used to build fences and roofs, for firewood, as plates, for
medicinal practices, for rope, and to draw thread for shoemaking and fabrics, also
supported papermaking.153
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the creole Jesuit
Francisco Javier Clavijero wrote a brief description about native papermaking practices
that incorporated maguey noting, “They would make it from the leaves of a certain type
of agave, pounded in the style of hemp, and later washed, extended, and smoothed.”154
A
range of materials were used to make paper that served as a support for pictorial activity.
150
Arellano Hoffmann, 239. Lenz notes that izotl, a fiber drawn from palm trees, served to make paper but
this material has been difficult to identify in extant pictorial manuscripts, 151.
151
Alvarado, 143 v.
152
Córdova, 300.
153
Hernández, HNNE I, 348.
154
Francisco Javier Clavijero, Historia antigua de Mejico sacada de los mejores historiadores españoles, y
de los manuscritos de los indios (Mexico City: Imprenta de Juan Navarro, 1853), 18.
97
The small number of visual records made on indigenous paper before and after
the arrival of Spaniards suggests this practice may have played a far less significant role
in Oaxaca’s regional mapmaking practices than it did in central Mexico. Instead,
surviving pre-Colombian and early colonial codices including the Féjérváry-Mayer,
Bodley, and Selden attest to the skills displayed by artists in Oaxaca to prepare deerskin
for writing.155
Alvarado noted the word ñee designated hide while ñee yehe and ñee
yechi meant “hide for tanning.” Ñee cuisi, “parchment,” was different from nee nicuita
and nee nidza cuita, both terms that indicated tanned leathers.156
In Zapotec, Córdova
observed quitimani meant “animal hide” and quitichibi, “animal hide without hair.”157
Sahagún noted that in central Mexico the thick bark of oak trees was used in the tanning
process but he did not provide a detailed explanation―perhaps it served as a dye, or
maybe as a makeshift brush to remove hair from the animal pelt.158
Painter-scribes used
deerskin “sewn together as a screenfold manuscript, so that each strip could be folded
back upon the next and viewed individually.”159
The Mixtec language accounted for
material distinctions in relation to pictorial manuscripts differentiating between “sacred
155
For detailed studies of these codices see, Interpretación del Códice Bodley 2858, ed. Alfonso Caso
(Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, 1960); Interpretación del Códice Selden 3135 (A.2),
ed. Alfonso Caso (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, 1964); and Codex Fejérváry-Mayer:
M 12014 City of Liverpool Museums, ed. C. A. Burland, Codices selecti, vol. 26 (Graz: Akademische
Druck- u. Verlagsanst., 1971).
156
Alvarado, 59, 166.
157
Córdova, 101-102.
158
Sahagún, Historia general, 966.
159
Terraciano, 16.
98
paper” (tutu ñuhu) and “sacred vellum” (ñee ñuhu).160
Screenfold books narrated
historical events, ancient genealogies, ritual and religion, and other aspects of life before
the conquest.
Native communities and individuals preserved pictorial documents such as maps
but also ancient hide manuscripts during the colonial period that often circulated during
ritual festivities or to support legal disputes. Sahagún noted that “in 1570, or thereabouts,
two clerics worthy of faith certified they viewed in Oaxaca, about sixty leagues away
from this city [of Mexico], that they viewed some very ancient paintings, illustrated on
deerskin, which narrated many things that alluded to the preaching of the Gospel.”161
Despite framing the incident as a triumph of the Catholic faith, Sahagún’s interest in
native technology and learning guided his explorations of indigenous societies of
Mesoamerica. As late as the eighteenth century, caciques from Tututepec in Oaxaca’s
Pacific coast cared for the Codex Colombino, a twelfth-century genealogical history
made on folded vellum. They used it in the early 1700s to support a dispute with
neighboring San Miguel Sola.162
But the introduction of European paper in the sixteenth
century reduced the use of deerskin for painting contributing to the transformation of
indigenous manuscript traditions. In spite of these changes, the Codices Porfirio Díaz,
160
Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient
Civilizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 60.
161
Original, “El año de setenta, o por allí cerca, me certificaron dos religiosos dignos de fe que vieron en
Guaxaca, que dista de esta ciudad sesenta leguas hacia el oriente, que vieron unas pinturas muy antiguas,
pintadas en pellejos de venados, en las cuales se contentan muchas cosas que aludían a la predicación del
Evangelio,” Sahagún, Historia general, 1061.
162
Los códices de México (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1979), 54.
99
Baranda, and Dehesa attest to the continued fabrication of deerskin to support
manuscripts as late as the seventeenth century.163
By the final decades of the sixteenth century, the most popular medium to make a
map was the European rag paper favored by Spanish scribes in Europe and America. Old
rags served as the main ingredient to make European paper from the late Middle Ages
through the end of the early modern period. In the thirteenth century, papermakers in
Spain and Italy developed specialized machines powered by hydraulic mills that
converted cloth into pulp. The most sought after type of paper in New Spain was the
superior de Cataluña, Catalan paper prized for its consistency and smooth surface though
high demand in both Spain and New Spain required the importation of Dutch, French,
and Italian paper.164
Out of the five dozen maps located for this study, ninety-three
percent of them were made on European paper, the remaining seven percent on various
unidentified cloth surfaces. The reçute or in plano size, a standard paper cut used widely
among scribal, legal and religious networks circulated widely in New Spain.165
Among
163
See Códices cuicatecos Porfirio Díaz y Fernández Leal: edición facsimilar, contexto histórico e
interpretacíon, ed. Sebastían van Doesburg (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2001); Códice Baranda,
ed. René Acuña (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1989); Códice Dehesa, largo: 5 metros 20 centímetros;
ancho: 17 centímetros; pintado por ambos lados; existente en el Museo Nacional de México (Mexico City,
1892); and Ana G. Díaz Álvarez, “El Códice Dehesa: Reflexiones en torno a un documento mixteco
colonial a partir de su análisis codicológico,” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 40/2 (2010):
149-165.
164
María Cristina Sánchez Bueno de Bonfil, El papel del papel en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1993), 18.
165
Sylvia Rogers Albro and Thomas Albro define the reçute (small) size of paper according to a Bolognese
papermaker’s stone from which Spain acquired paper; it measured 31.8 x 43.6 cm., “The Examination and
Conservation,” 99 and 106. Emma Rivas Mata notes that the basic sheet of paper known as in plano
measured 32 x 44 cm., “Impresores y mercaderes de libros en la ciudad de México, siglo XVII,” in Del
autor al lector: Libros y libreros en la historia, ed. Carmen Castañeda (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2002), 95 n.
63.
100
the Mixtecs, distinctions existed of the various types of paper available during the
colonial period including the previously mentioned ancient paper, vellum and also the
paper introduced by the Spanish. Ee huisi tutu, ee tnanu tutu, ee tutu caa tnanu, and ee
tutu nee all designated a sheet of paper while ee dzee tutu and ee vuisi tutu distinguished
the pages from a book.166
The use of European paper in native mapmaking―specifically
the reçute size―reflects a shift tied closely to the region’s demand for written
manuscripts which were used to petition and defend land during the late sixteenth
century.
European paper acquired a major role during the early Spanish settlement of
Oaxaca as a tool on which to inscribe authority and goods: scribes and officials allocated
natural resources, organized labor drafts, indoctrinated, made appointments to royal
posts, recorded tribute, and bestowed and certified property on paper. “Paper,” notes
José Piedra, “is far from being simply a static or passive surface that serves to display
words and worth.”167
Paper functioned as an object used to empower its holder hosting
an act of validation and accomplishment. Various efforts to secure a steady supply of
paper in central Mexico in the years following the fall of Tenochtitlán calls attention to
the medium’s importance in establishing colonial rule. Individuals such as Juan de
Zumárraga, the first Bishop of Mexico, petitioned King Charles V in 1534 not only for
the authorization of a printing press but for a paper mill as well. By 1538, Zumárraga
thanked the king for authorizing the press but noted somewhat demoralized, “Due to the
166
Alvarado, 125 v., 168 v.
167
José Piedra, “The Value of Paper,” Res 16 (1988), 102.
101
lack of paper, little progress [has been made] in terms of printing making it difficult [to
publish] the works that are ready here [in New Spain] and others that soon will be ready
to go to press.”168
The continual shortage of paper led entrepreneurs such as Hernán Sánchez de
Muñoz and Juan Cornejo to propose establishing a mill in Mexico City that would take
advantage of local materials. The Crown jealously guarded the right to award licenses to
individuals seeking to establish paper mills in the New World relying instead on the
hundred or so papermakers in Spain under royal sanction.169
After reviewing the
proposal in 1575, Phillip II granted the two men a patent to produce paper over the next
twenty years noting, “We have been made aware that you have found in New Spain
certain material from which to make paper in abundance and that you have made
experiments to confirm [the project’s viability].”170
Although the historical record does
not reflect the outcome of the venture, the example reminds us of the high premium
individuals placed on paper and the lengths they went to procure its supply. In Oaxaca,
Burgoa commented on the good quality of the paper used to write an indigenous
handheld book about traditional culture, “un libro de mano escrito en buen papel,” an
ironic statement considering the book caused a stir among Spanish clerics who were
168
Juan de Zumárraga to Charles V, 6 May 1538, in Cartas de Indias (Madrid: Imprenta de M.G.
Hernández, 1877), 786. University of Arizona Special Collections (UASC).
169
The decree of 1638 required the use of paper bearing the royal seal for official use prohibiting its
production to anyone without a license. See Hans Lenz, Historia del papel en México y cosas relacionadas
(1525-1950) (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1990).
170
“Para que por 20 años use la exclusiva de cierto modo para la fabricación de papel en esta Nueva
España,” June 8, 1575; duplicate in AGN, Reales Cédulas Duplicadas, Vol. 1, Exp. 18; transcription in
Sánchez Bueno de Bonfil, 51-53.
102
never able to identify its “secret” author. Shortly after clerics confiscated the book it
disappeared from a church where it rested in a safe with two locks. Burgoa commented
simply, “it vanished as if it were made of smoke.”171
The reçute folio partially defined the packaging of native maps which when
folded in half fit neatly into a scribe’s file. Notice the crease mark along the center of the
folio in the map of Teposcolula (Figure 26) made in 1590, a drawing made to petition a
site of land represented by a grid in the center of the page.172
The deterioration reflects a
common feature of native maps defined by their use over time. Indigenous and Spanish
vendors sold European paper during the sixteenth century when patrons commissioned a
majority of native maps. Sahagún noted that in the markets of central Mexico, sellers
offered various types of paper including the Spanish kind. “He who deals in paper,” he
said, “pounds it if it is from this land. He also sells the type from Castile which is white
or coarse; thin, wide, and long, or plum or thick, poorly made, lumpy, rotten, off- white,
grey.”173
In Oaxaca, it is possible paper could also be obtained in one of the region’s
major markets, weekly affairs that brought together goods mostly of local origin but also
Spanish items as well. In the Valley, the Villa de Oaxaca hosted a weekly market as did
171
The passage reads, “Hallose algunos años después, en este pueblo, después de bautizados, y que habían
aprendido algunos a escribir, un libro de mano escrito en buen papel, con historias en su lengua como las
del Génesis, empezando por la creación del mundo, y vidas de sus mayores como la de los patriarcas . . . y
este libro fue tan secreto su autor, que no se pudo descubrir ni rastrear, diciendo el que lo tenía que lo había
heredado, y lo peor fue, que guardado en la caja del depósito, debajo de dos llaves se desapareció, como si
fuera de humo,” Burgoa, 135-136.
172
Map of Teposcolula, 1590, AGN, No. 1711, Tierras, vol. 2696, exp. 21, f. 8.
173
“El que trata en vender papel, májalo si es de la tierra. También vende el de Castilla, el cual es blanco o
recio, delgado, ancho, y largo, o gordo, o grueso, mal hecho, gorulloso, podrido, medio blanco, pardo,”
HGNE, 143.
103
Mitla, Chilateca, Ocotolán, and Ayoquesco.174
The market of Suchitepec in the Mixteca
supplied residents from Yanhuitlán while other markets including “the great market
center” of Miaguatlán supplied a predominant Zapotec population in south central
Oaxaca.175
Some Spanish stores carried paper in their inventories. In addition to a wide array
of imported fabrics including damask, silk, taffeta, camlet, felt, ribbed silk (capichola),
Brabant linen, printed and semi-fine cotton as well as local silk from the Mixteca,
Captain Martín de Arce stocked 22 resmas (reams) of paper in his cloth shop in
Antequera in 1684.176
A resma consisted of twenty sets of paper known as manos, or
quires, of 25 sheets each. The scarcity of paper in New Spain is best described in
Antonio de Robles’ Diary of Notable Accounts, a chronicle that explored various aspects
of daily life in Mexico City during the second half of the seventeenth century. Robles’s
report of paper shortages in 1677 provides a vivid description of price fluctuation and
demand. In August, he noted one resma cost fifteen pesos and a mano cost six reales; a
few days later a quire reached one peso.177
In early December, word spread that 700
hundred resmas from Guatemala purchased at fifteen pesos each would soon reach
Mexico City. By the end of the month, merchants considerably raised prices prompting
Robles to note, “The cost of paper has gone up so high that a ream costs thirty pesos, a
174
Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 99, 103.
175 Terraciano, 249; Gerhard, 187.
176
Demanda puesta por Doña Ana Velázquez, viuda del Capitán Martin de Arce, contra Juan Martínez por
haberle robado ciertas mercancías, AGEO, Alcaldías Mayores, leg. 5, exp. 4.
177
Antonio Robles, Diario de sucesos notables (1665-1703), vol. I, ed. Antonio Castro Leal (Mexico City:
Editorial Porrúa, 1946), 220.
104
quire costs two pesos, and a folio one real . . . Many books have been taken apart to sell
the paper; many works are not being published and the presses are not operating.”
Incidentally, Robles’ account identified various styles of paper in circulation in New
Spain including quebrado (uneven, broken) which cost one peso per quire, the marca
mayor, a double-size folio typically used for larger works and maps sold by the sheet for
a real and a half, and the escrito (examination paper) which cost two and a half reales per
sheet or the more affordable six pesos and two reales per ream.178
Considering the low
supply and its high price, Arce’s inventory in Oaxaca suggests the merchant capitalized
on the demand for paper in the region.
The motivations behind the use of the reçute folio by indigenous painters likely
reflected a mixture of practicality and access as well as an expression of power where
pictorial elements associated with political legitimacy at the local level interacted on a
purely imperial surface. Consider the statement made by the elders from the Mixtec town
of Teozacoalco in 1580 when they presented their map of the region (Figure 7) to the
Spanish corregidor Hernando de Cervantes. Cervantes received instructions from the
Viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríques de Almanza (1568-1580) to respond to a royal
questionnaire that formed part of the Relaciones Geográficas. He enlisted the help of
Juan Ruíz Zuaso, the town’s bilingual priest to facilitate an interview between a group of
elder indigenous males and himself. Cervantes noted on January 9, “We initiated a true
and faithful report as best as we could infer from the [testimony of the] oldest natives
178
Robles, 228-229.
105
from said town and from what one can visually survey.”179
At some point after he
received the questionnaire’s instructions and before he sent his responses to Spain,
Cervantes commissioned a map from the natives of Teozacoalco and another from
Amoltepeque, a nearby town. The commission complied with the survey’s tenth question
which instructed officials to illustrate on paper a town’s layout including streets,
important buildings, churches and monasteries. In response to the questionnaire, Spanish
officials in New Spain often assigned this task to native painters.180
If the indigenous
cohort that spoke to Cervantes on January 9 delivered the map, the corregidor made no
mention of it in his relación, but this was not because he would have forgotten what he
saw.
At an impressive 176 x 138 cm, the map of Teozacoalco is perhaps the best
known example of the maps made for the Relaciones Geográficas.181
The map includes
Mixtec political dynasties, ordered pairs of rulers aligned on the left hand side moving
upward from the map’s bottom, and place-names and boundaries depicted on the circular
portion in the right hand side. The map has gained notoriety for facilitating the
decipherment of several pre-Colombian codices made in Oaxaca including the
Vindobonensis, Nuttall, Bodley, and Selden, a tremendous breakthrough for the study of
179
“Se comenzó a hacer relación cierta y verdadera según se pudo colegir de los más ancianos naturales del
dicho pueblo y por lo que por vista de ojos se puede entender,” Relación de Teozacoalco, BLAC, XXV-3.
180
Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 61-62.
181
Size led one nineteenth-century cataloguer to file the map simply as enorme, “huge,” a description still
used today in its current home at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas
Austin.
106
indigenous pictorial documents.182
Since the second half of the twentieth century the
map has served to illustrate continuities and changes in Mesoamerican writing systems
and pictorial techniques especially as scholars of colonial Mexico turned increasingly to
the study of indigenous-made sources after the 1980s. Less frequently noted are the
map’s considerable proportions and its material condition, aspects that contribute to its
message of authority.
The painter achieved its impressive size by binding sheets of paper together to
form a large rectangular surface on which to illustrate lineages and political relationships.
Any viewer can clearly notice the outlines where the papers are joined with glue, a
patchwork of nearly two dozen folios (Figure 27). Pintores applied adhesives made from
plants, copal, and rubber to join sheets of paper.183
The pseudobulbs of the tzacutli plant,
storage organs that grow between the stem and two lymph nodes typical among orchids,
served to prepare a resistant and durable solution. Tzacutli functioned both as a binding
agent when mixing it with other natural elements to make colors, but also as glue.184
Hernández noted tzacutli was valued for its “white, fibrous” roots which possessed strong
adhesive qualities.185
“The root is cold, humid, and viscose,” he noted, “you prepare with
it excellent, tenacious glue that Indians, especially pintores, use so that the colors adhere
182
Alfonso Caso famously wrote that the Teozacoalco map was “a key, a true Rosetta Stone for the final
interpretation of the Mixtec codices.” Caso, “El mapa de Teozacoalco,” in Obras: El México antiguo, vol.
8 “Calendarios, códices y manuscritos antiguos” (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional, 2007), 149.
183
Lenz, 77.
184
Fernando Martínez Cortés, Pegamentos, gomas y resinas en el México prehispánico (Mexico City:
Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1974), 15.
185
Martínez Cortés notes that even though Hernández refers to roots (raíces), the parts of the plants used to
make the binder are the pseudobulbs, 18.
107
firmly [to paper] and the figures won’t fade easily.” The physician described that the
parts were cut into small pieces then dried in the sun, grinded into powder and mixed
with cold water.186
Tzacutli also possessed medicinal qualities used to treat patients with
dysentery and other maladies associated with laxity.
The use of European paper to make the map of Teozacolaco is perhaps less
surprising than the fact the painter used so much of it. One can only image the reaction
of the Spanish officials when the Indian caciques unfolded the rather large pintura. Other
pictorial traditions in Oaxaca, most notably the lienzo genre from the sixteenth century
made on large cloth surfaces, resembles the size and content of the map of Teozacoalco.
Lienzos typically described genealogical information as well a geographical markers and
place names associated with indigenous settlements.187
The surfaces used to make these
large pictorials were known as dzoo cuisi (“lienzo; plain unornamented cloth”) and dzoo
yadzi (“lienzo; thin cloth”).188
Over time, mapmakers often chose to paint maps on larger
cloth surfaces and paper composites, but unlike the lienzo tradition, they rarely
represented genealogies and pictorial histories.189
The unique example of the
Teozacoalco map, an expression that tapped into traditional pictorial modes of
representation that expressed a relationship to the past through history and genealogy,
186
“La raíz es fría, húmeda y glutinosa; se prepara con ella un gluten excelente y muy tenaz que usan los
indios, y principalmente los pintores, para adherir más firmemente los colores de suerte que no se borren
fácilmente las figuras,” Hernández, HNNE I, 118.
187
Terraciano, 19.
188
Alvarado, 138.
189
See, for instance, the Map of Xoxocotlán (1686), AGN, No. 0625; Map of San Pablo Mitla (1730),
AGN, No. 0719, Tierras, vol. 489, 1ª. pte., exp. 1, f. 271; and the Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa
María Atzompa, c. 1700s, Archivo Histórico de Santa María Atzompa; map lost; author in possession of
digital images.
108
also channeled a message of authority and political legitimacy. If paper served to
undergird Spain’s imperial ambitions, it could serve to re-inscribe Mixtec authority as
well.
Ink
Indigenous painters in colonial Oaxaca made and used ink of various kinds to
illustrate maps that described spatial relationships. The painter from Cuquila, a head
town in the Mixteca Alta in northwestern Oaxaca prepared a blend of black ink, nduta
tnoo, in 1599 to draw a map of the region (Figure 28) for the Spanish scribe Alonso
Morán.190
The painter included two structures, a temple and a church, from where a
network of roads marked by footprints spread to other parts of the region. The arteries
connected Cuquila to Tlaxiaco, the region’s center of power to the northeast, to Ocotepec
in the south, and to Chicaguastla in the southwest and on to the Pacific Coast. An ocelot
enclosed in a bell-shaped hill appears inverted in the bottom section of the map
representing Cuquila’s place name, the town of the ocelot. Church, temple, and hill
include a black and white decorative frieze running along the bottom of each structure
consistent with pre-Colombian and early colonial pictorial writing.191
Likewise, the
190
Map of Cuquila (1599), AGN, No. 2463, Tierras, vol. 3556, exp. 6, f. 175. Cuquila was a small head
town known as a cabecera in the Tlaxiaco region of the Mixteca Alta with a rich pictorial tradition. Other
native maps from the Cuquila region include the Map of Tlaxiaco and Cuquila, 1588, AGN, No. 1692.9,
Tierras, vol. 2692, exp. 17, f. 8; Map of Tlaxiaco, Cuquila, and Mistepec, 1595, AGN, No. 1614, Tierras,
vol. 2682, exp. 17, f. 18; and the Map of Mistepec, Chicaguastla, and Cuquila, 1595, AGN, No. 0867,
Tierras, vol. 876, exp. 1, f. 122.
191
The Codices Bodley, Nutall, Selden, Colombino, Yanhuitlán, the Lienzo de Zacatepec, and the Map of
Teozacoalco (1588) all share this pattern in association with imperial buildings, temples, and place names.
Detailed studies on each of these manuscripts can be found in The Codex Nuttall: A Picture Manuscript
109
painter detailed a band of small cylinders below the church’s bell used to convey political
and religious authority, an element drawn from Mixtec architectural design.192
Two
rivers that flow diagonally across the page in parallel lines encase all three elements. A
combination of technical savvy and fluency in pictorial writing allowed the painter to
execute his commission for the scrutiny of the scribe’s watchful eye.
When the painter from Cuquila presented the map to local authorities, the scribe
used his own blend of ink to authenticate it. Written commentary on the front and back
of the map identifying roads and rivers, describing local climate, measuring distances
between places and counting the number of tributaries suggests the presence of another
hand involved in the inspection.193
The practice of authentication, an exercise between
painters, scribes, and regional judges to identify and annotate the contents of a map, gave
authorities the opportunity to review and to ask a painter questions in order to validate it
according to legal protocols. The patch of paper (Figure 29) on the map’s bottom left
hand corner, for instance, covered the original illustration used by the painter, a dual
church-temple motif, for a settlement of houses known as a casería. During the
inspection or sometime shortly after, the scribe placed the patch over the original
from Ancient Mexico, ed. Zelia Nuttall (New York: Dover Publications, 1975); Interpretación del Códice
Bodley 2858; Interpretación del Códice Selden; Alfonso Caso, “El mapa de Teozacoalco”; Códice
Colombino: Interpretación del Códice Colombino por Alfonso Caso. Las glosas del Códice Colombino por
Mary Elizabeth Smith (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, 1966); and Códice Yanhuitlán.
For the Lienzo de Zacatepec, see Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Mexico, 89-121, 264, 266-90.
192
James Kiracofe, “Architectural Fusion and Indigenous Ideology in Early Colonial Teposcolula: La Casa
de la Cacica: A Building at the Edge of Oblivion,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas
XVII/66 (1995): 45-84; and Terraciano, 160.
193
The handwriting on the front of the map is different from the writing on the back. One possible
explanation for this is that one individual, a corregidor perhaps, inspected the map’s symbols and
descriptions leaving the task of signing the map to Morán, the scribe. Another possibility suggests the
painter may have annotated his own map but this practice was a much rarer occurrence.
110
illustration preferring to visualize the casería with small houses spread out evenly
conforming to royal directives for the settlement of villages and towns. Spaniards
commonly used a solution known as iron-gall ink, a mixture of tannins, sulfates, and gum
from the Old World to write the alphabetic glosses that accompanied a map’s pictorial
elements. Iron-gall ink played a crucial role in the making of maps allowing scribes and
officials to codify and make them legible for others, and in preparation for their transition
into one of various archives where maps and documents rested for future reference.
Scribes visually transformed maps with the ink they used, a substance that supported the
task of authentication but which also contributed to a map’s unique material condition.
The painter from Cuquila preferred ink for his maps. He prepared a mixture of
ink in 1595 to paint a map (Figure 30) on behalf Pascuala de Rojas, a cacica who
petitioned for title to a livestock ranch from Spanish authorities.194
In Oaxaca, some
Mixtec women “held great wealth in land, houses, livestock, and movable property of all
kinds, were entitled to specific services from the population of the communities making
up their cacicazgos [entailed estates], and functioned as regional entrepreneurs.”195
The
painter placed Chicaguastla in the upper left hand corner, Mistepec in the upper right, and
Cuquila at the bottom serving as the map’s main reference point; the large oval in the
center of the page identified the site. Although the spatial configuration of the 1595 map
differed from the one made in 1599 (Figure 28), several elements tie both maps to the
194
Map of Mistepec, Chicaguastla and Cuquila (1595), AGN, No. 0867, Tierras, vol. 876, exp. 1, f. 122.
195
See Ronald Spores, “Mixteca Cacicas: Status, Wealth, and the Political Accommodation of Native Elite
Women in Early Colonial Oaxaca,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie
Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 186.
111
same author. The shape of the churches used to designate towns shared the painter’s
distinctive double-line contour and the same design for doors, windows, and bells. Roads
designated with a single line on both maps share identical feet that indicate travel while
the mountains, highly stylized renderings, all include similar nubs to indicate broken and
uneven terrain. Most importantly, the painter’s signature black ink facilitated the
description of regional landscapes. That the painter chose the same substance to draw the
1595 and 1599 maps serves as testimony of the skills required to consistently mix
materials, dexterity in this activity resulting from observation, practice, and “artisanal
innovation.”196
In colonial Oaxaca, ink circulated in various compositions allowing scribes and
painters to record alphabetic and pictorial elements onto a flat surface including paper,
vellum, and cloth. Hernández identified two types of ink made by painters in the
Mixteca. “Tetlilli or black stone,” he said, “is a soil extracted primarily from the region
of this New Spain known as the Mixtecas [sic]; it is sometimes used by painters to
produce said color.”197
Hernández noted a carbon-based mix made from an aromatic pine
known as ócotl also circulated in the region.198
“[Painters] also prepare among them,”
196
Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, “Introduction: Why Materials?,” in Materials and Expertise, 1.
197
“El tetlilli o piedra negra es una tierra que se extrae principalmente en la región llamada de las Mixtecas,
de esta Nueva España, y que usan a veces los pintores para dar dicho color,” Hernández, Historia natural
de Nueva España, vol. II, in Obras completas, vol. III (Mexico City: UNAM, 1959), 409. Hereafter cited
as HNNE II.
198
The use of Nahuatl as the primary unit to classify plants and minerals from New Spain reflects
Hernández’s preference for this widely spoken language, his careful research informed by Nahua
interpreters, painters, and healers. See José M. López Piñero and José Pardo Tomás, “The Contribution of
Hernández to European Botany and Materia Medica,” in Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and
Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández, ed. Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 124; and The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco
112
observed the physician, “another blend of black ink with the smoke of woodchips from
any pine tree known as ocotlilli (ócotl in the vernacular and from where the ink gets its
name).”199
When burned, the wood produced thick black smoke captured by painters in
clay jars until it condensed. They would then scrape the soot from the inside of the jars
forming small round balls that according to Hernández could be purchased at local
markets for individual use.200
Pintores incorporated other natural elements to make ink. Hernández pointed to
the use of two varieties of tlalíyac, a mineral extracted from the earth either as clods with
bits of silver and gold particles, or as black stones. He described them as “hot, dry, and
astringent [in] nature, and acrid in taste. The natives make ink out of them.”201
The
physician also mentioned nacazcólotl, the fruit of a tree formed in the shape of deformed
ears (“orejas torcidas”) noting, “Its nature is very astringent and somewhat dry. You
prepare with it very good ink.”202
During his travels in New Spain, Hernández responded
to a viceroyal mandate to investigate the devastating cocoliztli epidemic that swept
central Mexico in 1576. That same year, Sahagún and his native informants worked on
Hernández, ed. Simon Varey; trans. Rafael Chabran, Cynthia L. Chamberlin; and Simon Varey (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 78.
199
“Se prepara también entre ellos otra clase de tinta negra llamada ocotlilli con humo de astillas de
cualquier pino (ócotl en lengua vernácula y de donde la tinta toma su nombre),” HNNE II, 409.
200
HNNE II, 408-09.
201
“Ambos son de naturaleza caliente, seca y astringente, y de gusto acre. Los indígenas hacen tinta de
ellos,” Hernández, HNNE II, 407-08.
202
“Su naturaleza es muy astringente y algo cálida. Se prepara con él una tinta muy buena,” HNNE II, 65-
66.
113
the final stages of the Historia general in spite of the rising death toll.203
It was during
this period the informants shared with Sahagún the properties of various plants and
minerals including nacazcólotl. “There is in this land,” he remarked, “a fruit of a tree
which thrives in hot lands [and] that is not edible. This fruit is called nacazcólotl. If you
add copperas [ferrous sulfate] and other materials, you make very good ink to write.”204
But it was another blend called tlilliocotl that the Franciscan praised above others.
Sahagún called it “tinta del humo de teas,” wood-smoked ink, noting, “The natives make
ink from the smoke of wood and it is very fine ink; they call it tlilliocotl. They make it in
some jars called tlicomalli in order to distill it. It is worth the cost of many inks.”205
Its
fabrication mirrored the ocotlilli blend described by Hernández for the Mixteca. For
generations, ocotlilli ink and its variants had served as an essential component of
Mesoamerican ritual practices. Recall the testimony from the Indian slave named Juan
described in Chapter 1 who in 1545 accused a native lord from Yanhuitlán of covertly
worshiping the old deities; at the center of his testimony stood the fabrication and use of
black ink for ritual purposes.
203
See Martha Few, “Indian Autopsy and Epidemic Disease in Early Colonial Mexico,” in Invasion and
Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, ed. Rebecca Brienen and
Margaret Jackson (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007); Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “Painters of the
New World,” 49-52; and HGNE, 353, 356-57.
204
“Hay en esta tierra un fruto de un árbol que se cría en tierras calientes, que no es de comer; llámase este
fruto nacazcolotl, con el cual, y el aceche y otros materiales, se hace muy buena tinta para escribir,” HGNE,
342.
205
“Hacen estos naturales tinta del humo de las teas, y es tinta bien fina; llámanla tlilliocotl; tiene para
hacerla unos vasos que llaman tlicomalli, que son a manera de alquitaras; vale por muchas tintas para
escribir,” HGNE, 343.
114
In other parts of Mesoamerica, painters made ink using the bark of the
huitzquahuitl, a large tree of reddish wood native to Michoacán. According to Sahagún,
they would split the bark into pieces, grind it and place it in water until it turned deep
crimson. From this mixture, painters could obtain a bright red dye by combining organic
materials and a stone known as tlaxócotl, or they could obtain ink by mixing tlalíyac soil
and other unspecified elements.206
Tlaxócotl, described in Spanish as piedra alumbre
(alum stone), existed in great quantities and was an important ingredient in the mixture of
colorants.207
A variant of huitzquahuitl ink known as huitztecoláyotl incorporated
Brazilwood, a species of tree native to South America but also found in Oaxaca and
Morelos. Painters boiled the red dye from the Brazilwood with tlalíyac until the
substance thickened and the black liquid cooled.208
Dominican Francisco Ximénez
commented in his Historia natural del reino de Guatemala (1722) about a rich black soil
used in the Maya region to make black ink. “God has even blessed these parts with black
inks,” he said, “both to dye and also to write. In that mountain range of Zacapulas, next
to the town of Cuzal, there is a mineral in the form of black soil that just by crumbling it
in water produces the blackest ink to write. It is, however, necessary to add gum, without
it, [anything you write] will vanish because it is soil.”209
The rich array of natural
206
HGNE, 342-43.
207
HGNE, 343.
208
Maximino Martínez, Catálogo de nombres vulgares y científicos de plantas mexicanas (Mexico City:
Ediciones Botas, 1937), 354.
209 “Hasta de tintas negras, así para teñir, como para escribir, ha dado Dios minerales en aquestas partes. . .
En aquesta sierra de Zacapulas, junto al pueblo de Cuzal, está un mineral de tierra negra, que solo con que
se desborote en agua, se hace una tinta muy negra para escribir. Aunque es menester echarle goma, porque
115
ingredients used to make ink suggests painters applied a variety of techniques based on
the availability of sources.
The variety of inks is often clearly visible when examining indigenous maps. The
thin black lines used to define the visual elements in the 1591 map of Santa Ana and
Santa Cruz in southeast Oaxaca (Figure 31) reflect a luster not visible in the more opaque
and matted finish achieved by the ink of the painter from Cuquila.210
Originally prepared
to petition a site of land which was marked by an empty banner on the upper left hand
corner, the painter applied a range of colors to signify the elements on the map. Yellow
and charcoal colorants gave the mountains a moss green effect that contrasts sharply with
the stylized renderings of the artist from Cuquila. The road that connected Santa Cruz,
Santa Ana, and the new site was painted deep red while a river that flows across the page
encases the town of Santa Cruz in the upper right hand corner. The painter made these
colors drawing from the same botanical knowledge that guided the fabrication of ink.
The black outline from the painter’s ink contrasts sharply with the iron-gall ink used by
the scribe to inspect the map. The scribe’s intervention appears near the church of Santa
Ana where he added additional houses to the perimeter of the town (Figure 32). He used
a banner that included the name of the town, an element influenced by European mapping
techniques, as a space to include a comment about distance noting the site was located a
league away. The contrast of the two inks enhances our understanding of the painter’s
sola se borra como es tierra,” Francisco Ximénez, Historia natural del Reino de Guatemala compuesta por
el reverendo padre predicador general fray Francisco Ximénez, de la orden de predicadores escrita en el
pueblo de Sacapulas en el año de 1722 (Guatemala: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1967 [1722]), 343.
Thanks to Kevin Gosner for pointing me to this source.
210 Map of Santa Ana and Santa Cruz (1591), AGN, No. 0581, Tierras, vol. 56, exp. 5, f. 16.
116
pictorial intentions and the scribe’s expectations, its presence a visual reminder of
negotiations over land.
Recipes from the Old World
Spaniards in the New World had their own traditions for making ink that tapped
into centuries of experimentation and practical learning. In early modern Spain, carbon-
based and other unknown mixtures circulated with the popular iron gall inks, a
combination of tannins, vitriol, and gum. Late medieval and early modern Spanish
formulas for ink suggest the majority of users mixed the iron-gall variety. Knowledge of
ink circulated in manuscript form mostly through the writings of notaries and scribes who
scribbled mixtures in loose notes or who annotated recipes on the margins of a page.211
In print format, ink recipes appeared primarily in treatises on calligraphy and orthography
such as Andrés Flórez’s Doctrina christiana del ermitaño y el niño (1546) who published
a variation of a common recipe used throughout the Hispanic world,
Good ink is made from white wine and the common type from water; it is better if it is
puddle water. Add an ounce of mashed nutgalls to a pint of water and boil until a third
is dissolved. Strain, mix an ounce of copperas [ferrous sulfate] or better yet vitriol, and
add a quarter ounce of Arabic gum, stir well and move in strained lukewarm water.
Repeat as necessary.212
211
Antonio Mut Calafell, “Fórmulas españolas de la tinta caligráfica negra de los siglos XIII a XIX y otras
relacionadas con la tinta (reavivar escritos, contra las manchas y goma glasa),” in El papel y las tintas en la
transmisión de la información, Primeras jornadas archivísticas (Huelva: Diputación Provincial, 1994).
212
Andrés Flórez, Doctrina christiana del ermitaño y el niño (Madrid, c. 1546), in Mut, 160. Another
edition of this work was printed in Valladolid in 1552, see José Antonio González Salgado, “Contribución
117
The acidic quality of tannins, usually obtained from tree galls, produced a dark substance
when mixed with iron salts and diluted in water or wine; gum acted as a binding agent for
the mixture. Individuals obtained various lusters and shades of ink depending on the
ingredients which also include onions, pomegranates, sugar, and liquor.
Variations of Flórez’s formula circulated widely in the Hispanic world. Diego
Bueno, for instance, added sugar and six ounces of brandy to his mixture of galls, vitriol,
and gum.213
Others took advantage of the Atlantic trade incorporating new ingredients
into their recipes. Nicolás Monardes wrote in his Historia medicinal de las cosas que
traen de nuestras Indias, a compendium of curative plants from America published in
Seville in 1574, about a rich soil from the New World used to make ink. “Of the black
[soil],” he declared, “I can say someone sent me a small sample from which to make ink.
When diluted in water or wine, you can make fine ink to write well, and it has a blue hue
which makes it more pleasant to the eye.”214
Regional differences characterized the
production of ink that, according to Adrian Johns, “enjoyed no common chemical or
cultural composition.”215
But the differences depended less on the ingredients used to
al estudio de la ortografía en el siglo XVI: La reforma del padre Flórez,” Dicenda: Cuadernos de filología
hispánica 14 (1996): 149-158.
213
Diego Bueno, Arte nuevo de enseñar a leer, escribir, y contar príncipes y señores (Zaragoza: Por
Domingo Gascon, 1690), 26, in Mut, 165.
214
The original text reads, “De la [tierra] negra se decir, que me enviaron un poco para que de ella hiciese
tinta, la cual echada en agua, o vino se hace de ella muy buena tinta, con que se escribe muy bien, y es algo
azul que la hace de mejor gracia,” Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera parte de la historia
medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales que sirven en medicina (Madrid: En
casa de Alonso Escribano, 1574), 115v. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division
(LCRB).
215
Adrian Johns, “Ink,” in Materials and Expertise, 105.
118
make the composition than on the method of preparation. In his Arte sutilísima printed in
1553, Juan de Icíar instructed readers to place a solution of three ounces of crushed galls
into half a pitcher of rainwater under the sun for a period of two days after which one
should add two ounces of vitriol and set to rest for another two days.216
Ignacio Pérez
used the same ingredients but mixed galls, vitriol, and gum each in separate vessels with
water and wine letting them rest for a period of six days and stirring four to five times a
day. “You will then place a large cauldron over a good flame,” he said, “and you will
deposit the jar with the galls and let it boil for an hour,” a process he instructed should be
repeated for the contents of the other two containers.217
Despite these differences, the formulas suggest individuals valued certain
properties of ink including tone and durability which made the substance stand out. To
add luster, for instance, Icíar recommended boiling his solution moderately while adding
pomegranate peels.218
For writing on paper, José de Casanova recommended in his
Primera parte del arte de escribir (1560) using water, “it is looser, [and] it has less body
and strength,” but for parchment he suggested wine. “It is imperative it be wine,” he
declared, “for the black is better, it settles and endures more.” After describing the
mixture of ink prepared over a two week period without the use of fire, Casanova
remarked, “I have acquired experience with many recipes that circulate in written form
216
Juan de Icíar, “Recepta de tinta para papel,” in Arte sutilísima, por la cual se enseña a escribir
perfectamente (Zaragoza: Miguel de Çapila, 1553).
217
“Luego se pondrá una caldera grande, a buena lumbre, y se echará en ella la vasija donde están las
agallas y cocerá una hora,” Ignacio Pérez, Arte de escribir (Madrid: En la Imprenta Real, 1599), in Mut,
161.
218
Icíar, “Recepta de tinta para papel.”
119
and I have found none that produce better results than this one.”219
In some instances,
individuals even valued ink for its medicinal properties which helped to alleviate certain
ailments of the skin. Sixteenth-century Spanish physician and pharmacologist Andrés
Laguna provided a recipe for making the liquid substance noting, “Writing ink heals
puss-filled sores and burn wounds over which you must apply thick coats with water until
the sores granulate.”220
The advent of the printing press called for inks of different viscosities that would
function with typeset, woodblocks, and copper plates as opposed to quills and other
devices used to write by hand. Joseph Moxon, an English printer and mapmaker who
lived in the seventeenth century, praised Dutch ink, a substance that circulated in Spain,
for its varnish and described the method used to make it,
They provide a kettle or a cauldron, but a cauldron is more proper. . . . This vessel should
hold twice so much oil as they intend to boil, that the scum may be some considerable
time arising from the top of the oil to the top of the vessel to prevent danger. This
cauldron hath a copper cover to fit the mouth of it, and this cover hath a handle at the top
of it to take it off and put it on by. This cauldron is set upon a good strong flame iron
trivet, and filled half full of old linseed oil, the older the better, and hath a good fire made
under it of solid matter, either sea coal, charcoal or pretty big chumps of wood that will
burn well without much flame; for should the flame rise too high, and the oil be very hot
219
“Yo he hecho experiencia con muchas recetas que andan escritas y con ninguna he hallado tan buen
efe[c]to como con ésta,” José de Casanova, Primera parte del arte de escribir todas formas de letras
(Madrid: Por Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1650), 10.
220
“Sirve la tinta con que escribimos, a las llagas llenas de corrupción, y a las quemaduras del fuego: sobre
las cuales debe aplicarse espesa con agua, y dejarse hasta que las dichas llagas se encoren,” Andrés Laguna,
Pedacio Dioscorides Anazarbeo, acerca de la materia medicinal, y de los venenos mortíferos (Antwerp:
Juan Latio, 1555), 568.
120
at the taking off the cover of the cauldron, the fume of the oil might be apt to take fire at
the flame, and endanger the loss of the oil and firing the house: Thus they let the oil heat
in the cauldron till they think it is boiling hot, which to know, they peel the outer films of
an onion off it, and prick the onion fast upon the end of a small long stick, and so put it
into the heating oil: if it be boiling, or almost boiling hot, the onion will put the oil into a
fermentation, so that scum will gather on the top of the oil, and rise by degrees . . . if the
oil be hot enough, and they intend to put any rosin in, the quantity is to every gallon of oil
half a pound, or rarely a whole pound. The resin they beat small into in a mortar, and
with an iron ladle, or else by a handful at a time strew it in gently into the oil lest it make
the scum rise too fast; but every ladle-full or handful they put in so leisurely after one
another, that the first must be wholly dissolved before they put any more in . . . so that
you may perceive a great care is to keep the scum down: For if it boil over into the fire
never so little, the whole body of oil will take fire immediately.221
Moxon’s recipe repeatedly cautioned those attempting to execute it about the dangers
involved, “For the process of making ink being as well laborious to the body, as noisome
ungrateful to the sense, and by several odd accidents dangerous of Firing the Place it is
made in.”222
The author’s detailed description captures the challenges of producing the
black substance.
In Spain, printers used similar technology to produce a variety of inks, a practice
they exported to the New World. An inventory of printed works, machinery, and other
artifacts including typeset, boards, vellum, and paper made in 1557 for a shop in Burgos
221
Joseph Moxon, Mechanic Exercises, or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works (London: Printed for Joseph
Moxon, 1677), 77-79, LCRB.
222
Moxon, 75.
121
reveals some of the instruments used to make ink. Among the thousands of books held in
stock, 15,827 in all, Juan de Junta’s bookstore also included two cauldrons (one made of
bell-metal the other made of copper), a large stone to grind vermillion for red ink, two
inkwells, a special copper cask to make varnish, and a mortar and stone set to crush
various materials.223
Bookshops in Spain encompassed a broad range of activities
including wholesale distribution, bookmaking, and supplier of articles such as paper,
parchment, ink, and books.224
Ink also circulated in the domestic sphere under the care of
women who were tasked with producing it for use in the household.225
Early modern
housewives very likely purchased ingredients to make ink from peddlers or from more
established shops.
A rare example from a London advertisement published in the 1670s suggests the
manner in which individuals made and acquired writing ink during the early modern
period. Robert Pask, a stationer near the city’s Royal Exchange, printed an
announcement to promote his writing ink that highlighted its useful qualities,
Robert Pask Stationer, at the Stationer’s Arms and Ink-Bottle on the North side of the
Royal Exchange, London: Hath made a Choice Sort of Black Ink in Hard Balls, with that
Conveniency, that you may wear them about you, without any Damage to the Ink, or your
Linen. Cut a little of it into fair Water, or any Wine (except Red) and it will be
immediately fit to write with. It is brought to that Goodness, it is fit for Records. The
223
Inventory of Juan de Junta, originally in Archivo Histórico Provincial de Burgos, no. 5542 (1557), f.
100-134v transcribed in William Pettas, “A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Bookstore: The Inventory of Juan
de Junta,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 95 (1995), 29-188.
224
Pettas, 8.
225
Johns, 109.
122
longer you keep it in Ball, Liquid, or in Writing, the better it grows. The Price is Six
pence a Ball. And they are for Quality and Quantity cheaper than any other ink.226
Pask’s ad reveals issues associated with handling ink―staining, practicality, use over
time, and cost, all of which differentiated one product over another. The presence of the
so-called “black balls,” an ingredient likely made of soot and other minerals recalls
similar practices in the markets of New Spain.
Many of the printed recipes for ink including those by Casanova, Pérez, and Icíar
circulated in New Spain during the colonial period and scribes in Oaxaca used variants of
these mixtures to write documents, and on occasion, to make their own maps.227
In 1583,
the Spanish scribe Juan de Aragón sketched a map of Teotitlán in the southwestern region
of the Valley of Oaxaca (Figure 33) for a survey to allocate land.228
Aragón mapped a
largely isolated part of the region surrounded by mountain-ridges in the north and plains
and heavily forested mountains in the east. The scribe viewed the region from a
southwestern point near Teotitlán’s estancia on the bottom left corner, fanning the
region’s geographical features across the page creating a useful blank space in the center
on which to later inscribe the map. “And this is the true painting,” certified Aragón with
a flourish of his pen. The scribe used a variety of iron-gall ink to draw the map’s
components including the road to Tlacolula that ends at an estancia held by Teotitlán on
226
Robert Pask, “Advertisement,” original in British Library, Record No. E4:2[18b], accessed through
http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTIO
N=SINGLE&ID=226855015&ECCO=N&FILE=../session/1317868956_1222&SEARCHSCREEN=CITA
TIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=1&ENTRIES=1&HIGHLIGHT_KEYWORD=default on
October 5, 2011.
227
See José Torre Revello, “Algunos libros de caligrafía usados en México en el siglo XVII,” Historia
Mexicana 5/2 (1955): 220-227.
228
Map of Teotitlán (1583), AGN, No. 0560, Tierras, vol. 35, exp. 7, f. 11.
123
the left edge, as well as to annotate unused territory with the word baldíos. His choice
can be gleaned in the two holes along the map’s central axis (Figure 34) where blots of
ink concentrated burning through the paper over time, a product of iron-gall’s corrosive
effect.
Indigenous pintores incorporated the European ink into their own inventory of
materials. In 1617, Don Domingo de Mendoza, a native cacique from Tepenene in the
Mixteca Alta drafted a map (Figure 17) to petition Spanish authorities for a livestock
ranch known as an estancia a little over a league away from the main town. Mendoza
used a palate of three different colorants to define a triad of trees with vibrant red
blossoms and another trio with yellow flowers. The two most inconspicuous elements on
the map, the mountain in the shape of an ancient temple on the upper left hand corner
connected by a trail of feet to the church on the bottom right, did not incorporate color
but instead appear to be drawn with iron-gall ink. Notice the effects of the substance on
the page when the map is turned over (Figure 35). The lines of the pyramid-shaped
mountain, visible on the map’s upper right hand side, have seeped through the page
leaving noticeable traces comparable to the scribe’s certification on the left hand edge.
The map’s material condition suggests indigenous painters sometimes used a
combination of Old and New World substances to represent spatial relationships and the
natural environment much the same way they incorporated a mixture of Western
iconology and Mesoamerican cosmology.
124
Blue
Painters used other substances to draw and write. Consider the map of Our Lady
of the Rosary (Figure 1), the patroness of the Mixtec town of Santa María Atzompa in the
Valley of Oaxaca.229
The painter drew the map in a circular fashion over a large linen
surface (120 x 61 cm. approx.) depicting a series of boundaries associated with land
administered by the town’s cofradía, a religious confraternity. Visually, the map evokes
indigenous pictorial traditions in use during the late sixteenth century, but the
cartographic signs such as the illustration of buildings and the natural landscape suggest
its production dated closer to the early to mid-eighteenth century. A noticeable aspect of
the map’s origin includes the painter’s adoption of a key (Figure 36) to guide the viewer,
a practice seldom used in indigenous cartography during the late sixteenth century but
which came into practice a century later influenced by European systems of ordering
applied in maps and illustrations. Keys described mountains, rivers, plants, rocks,
dwellings, ranches, and other manmade structures as well as social and political
relationships between a region’s inhabitants. In both cases, the use of text functioned to
validate a map’s pictorial elements in order to establish spatial relationships. In the map
of Our Lady of the Rosary, the use of red and blue colorants not only illustrated the
pictorial elements but served as the ink used to write the key, a rare occurrence
considering most alphabetic text found on maps came from the hands of Spanish officials
that favored the iron-gall variety.
229
This map was held in the Municipality of Santa Maria Atzompa in the Valley of Oaxaca. Together with
a book of land titles tracing the ownership of an estate belonging to the town during the seventeenth and
eighteenth century, and another map painted in watercolor they formed part of the town’s historical records.
Since 2008, the documents have disappeared. The author has digital copies of all three items.
125
The map of Our Lady of the Rosary’s top left corner reveals the painter’s strategy
of representation, one that relied on the use of colors to rank social and political
relationships repeated in other parts of the map. The space includes the town of Atzompa
(Figure 37) which sits on a hill just below a bright red sun. Notice the painter’s use of
blue tones and shading to enrich the church’s profile, a combination applied to the two
adjoining buildings, the casa real, or noble house, and the casa cural, or curate’s home,
depicted next to the church as an indication of their importance in the local structures of
power. Throughout the map, important buildings were illustrated in blue to mark their
distinction from the brown community dwellings situated on the hills below―the
positioning on the canvas reinforced a difference in status.
In the map of Our Lady of the Rosary the visual schema described above defined
other components of the map. The painter used it to ascribe meaning to an agricultural
and cattle ranch designated as Father Crespo’s hacienda (Figure 38) as well as to
designate the town of San Lorenzo (Figure 39) where a church and a noble home sit side
by side. The absence of a curate’s house in San Lorenzo may point to the fact that the
community did not have a resident priest, a marker of distinction at the regional level
since clerics enhanced a town’s status.230
While it is tempting to establish a deeper
significance between color, ritual, and authority, the diversity in mapmaking during this
period renders this subject a highly speculative endeavor. To be sure, certain colors
including white, black, and red held ritual meaning in Mesoamerican society, but their
use on indigenous maps did not necessarily translate into a standard cartographic
230
Lockhart, The Nahuas, 208-210.
126
practice.231
Each map includes its own visual schema organized around a set of
principles defined by a patron’s needs and the painter’s skill.
Most mapmakers relied on a palette of three to four colors to accentuate their
maps. The choice of pigments used in mapmaking depended on the painter’s knowledge
of the plants and minerals, but also of local markets where semi-manufactured dyes
circulated. Indigo, añil in Spanish, a coveted blue dye that fed European textile markets
in the eighteenth century, has been found on maps made in late sixteenth-century New
Spain.232
The production of añil in the viceroyalty enjoyed some prosperity from the
1580s to the 1620s but declined in the seventeenth century due to protectionist policies in
favor of pastel production from Europe. During the second half of the eighteenth
century, the period when the map of Our Lady of the Rosary was made, vast sums of
capital from peninsular and Creole Spaniards in New Spain financed profitable dye
operations in Mexico and Guatemala.233
Harvesting the crop brought together small and
large-scale merchants and investors who financed and ran farms, Indian and low-wage
workers that provided labor, Spanish officials who inspected and approved shipments,
and ground and maritime transportation services that moved the product from one
destination to another.
Indigofera plants, the genus from which individuals extracted indigo dye, grew
abundantly in New Spain. Although major indigo production for overseas trade
231
See Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 59.
232
Haude, “Identification of Colorants,” 250-251.
233
Alicia del Carmen Contreras, Capital comercial y colorantes en la Nueva España: Segunda mitad del
siglo XVIII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996), 43.
127
originated in Central America in regions such as Santiago de Guatemala, Tegucigalpa,
Honduras, San Salvador, and San Vicente, areas in Mesoamerica including Michoacán,
Jalisco, Guerrero, Morelos, Puebla, Colima, Chiapas, and Tabasco also produced the blue
dye. In Oaxaca, indigo trees and shrubs thrived in places such as Guaxapa, Nochistlán,
and Teposcolula in the Mixteca, Nexapa in the eastern part of the state, Miaguatlán in the
south central region, Mitla, Antequera and the Cuatro Villas in the central valley, and in
Tehuantepec along the coast. These regions witnessed the propagation of species
including Indigofera suffruticosa, Indigofera cuernavacana rose, and Indigofera
thibudiana.234
A plant’s leaves served as the main component to make the blue dye. Hernández
noted xiuhquilitlpitzáhoac, a plant with long cylindrical stems (about “the width of [your]
little finger,” he said) and small red and white flowers produced the leaves known as
xiuhquílitl used to make the blue colorant tlacehuilli or mohuitli. To prepare the leaves,
Cut the leaves into pieces and add to a kettle or cauldron of boiling water, but after it has
cooled down and warm, or better (according to specialists) cold and without placing over
the flames. Stir it forcibly with a wooden shovel, and drain the dye-water slowly into a
clay vessel or jar allowing the liquid to pour through some holes it has at a certain
position to let the material from the leaves sit. This residue is the colorant. Dry it in the
sun, strain into a hemp bag and then form into small disks which harden when placed on
plates over hot coals; and finally, store and use them during the year. 235
234
Contreras, 123; Martínez, Catálogo, 33.
235
“Se echan las hojas despedazadas en un perol o caldera de agua hervida, pero ya quitada del fuego y
tibia, o mejor (según afirman los peritos) fría y sin haber pasado por el fuego; se agitan fuertemente con
una pala de madera, y se vacía poco a poco el agua ya teñida en una vasija de barro o tinaja, dejando
128
Sahagún emphasized xiuquílitl’s qualities noting “this indigo color produces a gleaming
dark blue dye, it is a valued commodity.”236
Not all species of indigofera produced the same vibrant tones. Hernández
described xiuhquilitlpatláhoac, a broad-leaved variety of indigo (añil latifolio),
instructing readers to use the same method described above “except,” he pointed out,
“this plant is inferior which is why I say nothing about its cultivation.”237
On a
commercial level, nearly two dozen varieties of indigo dye circulated within New Spain’s
networks including the prized tinta flor, sobresaliente, a medium grade dye, and the less-
refined, corte. Oaxaca benefited from its rich natural environment where indigo thrived
but also from its geographic location along the Royal Highway that connected Central
America, the richest indigo production zone in Spanish America, to the heart of the
viceroyalty. An important commodity for the European export market, it usually traveled
north from Guatemala where over one hundred harvesters from Central America
processed añil from its natural state into a dye.238
Production of the colorant flowed
towards Antequera, the Spanish seat of power in Oaxaca where it was collected and sent
to Veracruz via Puebla and Mexico City bound for Seville.
después que se derrame el líquido por unos agujeros que tiene a cierta altura, y que se asiente lo que salió
de las hojas. Este sedimento es el colorante; se seca al sol, se cuela en una bolsa de cáñamo, se le da luego
la forma de ruedecillas que se endurecen poniéndolas en platos sobre las brasas, y se guarda por ultimo para
usarse durante el año,” HNNE II, 112.
236
Sahagún, Historia general, 669.
237
HNNE II, 113.
238
Manuel Rubio Sánchez, Historia del añil o xiquilite en Centro América (San Salvador: Ministerio de
Educación, 1976), 67-74.
129
Roads and trails played a central role in colonial society allowing individuals and
goods to travel from one destination to another. Roads represent a major feature of
indigenous cartography appearing in a high percentage of maps made from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth centuries. Pictorial depictions of roads allowed pintores to situate the
viewer geographically, a town’s proximity to a major road a symbol of power. In the
map of Our Lady of the Rosary, roads function to define spatial relationships on a
regional scale. The Camino Real or Royal Highway, starts from the town of San Lorenzo
Cacaotepec on the bottom right hand corner and divides the map into two distinct
sections. The Camino de Etla then cuts across to the top of the map and effectively
creates a third distinct space anchored by the Cerro de Apastle to the right and the Cerro
Calichoso to the left. The presence of these two roads creates what Alessandra Russo
calls desdoblamiento, a technique used by early colonial artists to create a balance of
elements by placing them on the margins of the map.239
Notice how the Royal Highway
connects both the town of Atzompa on the top left corner and the town of San Lorenzo on
the bottom right. At the same time, the Cerro de Apastle and the Loma de Torcas
become anchors on the top right and bottom left respectively. Roads thread towns and
mountains providing a visual balance to the representation of space.
The history of cartographic materials must consider internal and regional
circulation networks that allowed painters to gain access to colorants. Roads served as
bridges between towns and small human settlements channeling people and goods
including indigo, cochineal, and achiote, elements used by painters to make maps. In
239
Russo, El realismo circular, 93-8.
130
some instances, individuals harvested these materials and then introduced them into
major marketplaces in Oaxaca. In other cases, materials entered through backdoor
channels outside of royal control. Consider the testimony of Juan de la Cruz, a forty-
year-old mulato from Tehuantepec, a remote corner along Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. De la
Cruz operated a train of forty mules and a mare with his brothers Bartolomé and Thomas
who were known as los perdidos, “the lost ones,” a reference to their ability to evade
problematic situations or perhaps because of their misguided behavior. On January 6,
1756 los perdidos agreed to transport one hundred zurrones (leather bags) of indigo dye
of various kinds from Guatemala City to Antequera in the Valley of Oaxaca, a four-
hundred-fifty mile journey across a series of treacherous mountains. When they finally
reached their destination on February 1, 1757, the scribe in Antequera who received the
shipment confirmed the quantity but noted a discrepancy in weight: “In terms of quantity,
the one hundred bags appear to be the same ones recorded in the shipping order dated
January 6, 1756; because of the weight [however], I can see a difference in volume.”240
Two days later, Don Francisco Joseph Moreno, a merchant from Antequera to who the
shipment was addressed complained to authorities about the missing ink and accused de
la Cruz and his brothers of failing to deliver the entire shipment.
Authorities caught up with Juan on February 5 sequestering the mule pack to
serve as collateral on his debt to the merchant from Oaxaca. In prison, de la Cruz told
authorities that on the journey from Guatemala somewhere between Thamassola and a
240
“Cuyos cien zurrones parece ser lo mismo que constan en el conocimiento de 6 de enero de 1756 . . . en
cuanto a su número, y no en cuanto a su peso por la falla que se percibe del adjunto peso,” AGEO,
Alcaldías Mayores, leg. 29, exp. 17.
131
place known as La Punta, his brothers and Manuel de Obregón opened the bags of indigo
with the intent to sell portions of its contents. Juan told authorities a squint-eyed Indian
from Thonala named Alejo purchased a good portion of the ink. Others who purchased
añil included a vecino from Ciudad Real named Bartolo Amola, and a gachupín, a
peninsular Spaniard, named Pedro Ponce from Chiapas. De la Cruz claimed that because
he sat at the head of the pack, he failed to see the exchange taking place and not until they
reached Tehuantepec did he learn from his brother what had happened. The Indian, the
merchant, and the gachupín likely functioned as retailers or wholesalers for local
consumption or perhaps to feed contraband ships travelling overseas.
Eighty years earlier, another mulato pack driver also named Juan de la Cruz
entered the Villa of Tehuantepec on March 7, 1681 with a loaded train. De la Cruz’s
arrival attracted the attention of Capitan Antonio de Arenas, a lieutenant judge known as
teniente de alcalde mayor, who set out to find the alcalde mayor to warn him of the
muleteer’s arrival. Arenas told the judge he represented Capitan Juan Ventura, a vecino
from Mexico City residing in Guatemala who contracted de la Cruz’s services to deliver a
freight of eighty boxes of tinta, a shorthand term used to describe indigo dye, to the port
of Veracruz. According to Arenas, de la Cruz failed to deliver forty-eight boxes of tinta
worth 720 pesos. The judge prepared a written document explaining, “Because there is
no public scribe in a forty-league radius, [I am] acting as a legal receiver to present this
petition and other demands,” a reflection of the region’s isolated environment.241
He
241
“Actuado como juez receptor por no haber escribano público ni real a más de 40 leguas en contorno
presento esta petición y demás recaudos; mando que se haga embargo a la recua y mulas de silla del dicho
mulato arriero . . . a quien se le reciba declaración de cuantas trae y hecha se le ponga en guarda que vaya
convoyando la dicha recua hasta la ciudad de Oaxaca para que después de haber entregado la carga que
132
ruled to sequester de la Cruz’s recua which included forty-eight pack-mules and seven
saddle mules with reins and seats. These examples capture practices that fell outside
royal control contributing to the circulation of natural dyes and colorants across southern
Mexico.
Conclusion
To make maps and pictorial records, painters applied sophisticated skills to
identify, collect, and transform plants and minerals into working materials. The
commission and use of maps to negotiate land attest to the range of material choices
available to indigenous painters to describe spatial relationships. The history of materials
reveals a deep understanding of the properties of plants and minerals, elements used to
create colors to embellish and give meaning to maps. Painters such as the artist from
Cuquila applied ink to great effect drawing from traditional Mesoamerican pictorial
techniques while incorporating materials introduced by Spaniards in the New World.
The diversity of methods and formulas used to make colorants, ink, and paper in Oaxaca
reveals the way knowledge circulated among individuals in towns and regions but also
across the Atlantic. In central and southern Mexico, painters shared their knowledge of
botany and the natural world with individuals such as Sahagún and Hernández who left
detailed records of their accounts. Together with dozens of extant maps that represent
lleva en dicha recua; el dicho guarda; procure que el dicho Juan de la Cruz no extravíe y esconda la dicha
recua; y de cuenta de ella,” AGEO, Alcaldías Mayores, leg. 53, exp. 22.
133
landholding, political boundaries, and petitions for unused property, these sources
provide valuable insight into the range of skills used to make maps in colonial Oaxaca.
134
CHAPTER 3:
AUTHENTICATION
Legal writing sustained the idea of empire.
―Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive
No one knows how long Gonzalo Messia de Magaña had to wait for his map
(Figure 40), perhaps not long at all.242
As corregidor of Guaxuapa in the Mixteca Baja, a
hot, dry, and weather-beaten region in the northwest, he received notification from the
Viceroy in late January 1617 about the petition of a royal grant of land (merced) by the
political officers of Miltepec to add to their corporate holdings. The instructions laid out
a series of steps to authorize the grant of land: a statement of the site’s purpose,
notifications to neighboring towns and settlements, identification of existing or potential
conflicts, the recording of witness testimony, and a physical visit to the land in question.
In preparation for the inspection, the instructions also requested Messia “make a map of it
[the site known locally as Ytlaumitepec] with clear annotations so that it is legible.”243
The map’s primary intent informed imperial aspirations focused on describing the
distance and relationship between the major settlements and the petitioned site of land.
The Viceroy requested a traslado, an authorized copy of the proceedings, to inform the
viceregal archive in Mexico City once the town received possession of the site; he
reminded the corregidor of the four-month waiting period to allow for any possible
complaints to surface. Maps made in Oaxaca had circulated for decades within local and
242
Map of Miltepec (1617), AGN, No. 1776, Tierras, vol. 2711, exp. 7, fs. 9v. y 10.
243
“Haciendo pintura de ello con sus anotaciones claras para que se entienda,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 2711,
exp. 7, .f. 2.
135
regional bureaucratic offices in the hands of scribes, alcaldes mayores, corregidores,
native officers, caciques, and lawyers who used them to inform petitions of various kinds
associated with land and its division.
Messia de Magaña visited Miltepec on Saturday May 13 to follow up on
Miltepec’s petition. In order to perform his duties, he needed the support of a scribe to
record and keep track of petitions, testimonies, and other public acts associated with the
granting of the merced but none was available in the region. To resolve this issue, he
appointed a scribe and recruited a Spaniard fluent in Mixtec and Nahuatl to serve as
translator. The following day, a Sunday, the three men waited for the announcement of
approaching festivities at the end of mass to notify those present of the petition of land
advising interested parties of the site visit scheduled for May 17. When the corregidor,
his support staff, and four witnesses arrived to the town to make the inspection, they
found a large crowd that included political officers and commoners from Miltepec as well
as the neighboring towns of Ixitlán, Suchitepec, Tequecistepec, and Guaxuapa that had
gathered to view the site. This public act, an important element of defining spatial
relationships in Oaxaca, allowed neighbors from the region to safeguard their boundaries,
limit aggressive expansion, and record and preserve its memory.
When the group reached Ytlaumitepec, they surveyed it. According to the
scribe’s account, the corregidor “called for the painter Domingo Hernández, to make a
map and description of the site, indicating the place where the community of Miltepec
has petitioned the merced; said map should be clear in every aspect including its
136
annotations and neighboring towns.”244
In the following sentence, the scribe confirmed
that, in fact, “said map was made in the presence of the corregidor who ordered it be
given its proper place in the proceedings.”245
On paper, the scribe moved from the act of
calling the painter and commissioning the map to signing and filing it in one fell swoop,
the two moments flowing seamlessly into one another without any gaps in time. In
reality, the space that separated them included a series of calculated steps that formed
part of the negotiation of spatial relationships in Oaxaca. The simple act of calling the
pintor during the vista de ojos, as site inspections were commonly referred, had required
planning, most likely a discussion between the corregidor and town officers facilitated by
the translator days earlier to assure the presence of a painter. According to the scribe’s
account, the painter made the map during the inspection which meant he visited the site
carrying various tools including one or several brushes, semi-prepared pigments to make
colors, and paper. The corregidor and those present then waited for the painter to finish
his rendition, a striking green and yellow maze of roads, stylized mountains, and
churches that brought together the region’s geographical elements in visual form. Once it
dried, the corregidor had the opportunity to inspect the map making clear annotations to
identify towns, roads, and natural features.
244
“En el dicho sitio de Ytlaumitepec, el dicho corregidor mando parecer a Domingo Hernández pintor
para que haga una descripción y pintura del sitio y puesto donde la dicha comunidad del pueblo de
Milltepeque pide se le haga merced, y que la dicha pintura sea con distinción en todo y sus anotaciones y
pueblos, circunvecinos,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 2711, exp. 7, f. 3.
245
“. . . la cual dicha pintura se hiso en presencia de el dicho corregidor y mando se pusiese en su lugar en
el proceso y lo firmo,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 2711, exp. 7, f. 3.
137
One of the most significant aspects of indigenous colonial cartography concerns
the practice of authentication, an exercise between painters, scribes, and officials to
identify and annotate the contents of a map. During authentication, officials had the
opportunity to review a pintura and to ask the painter questions about its elements in
order to validate it according to legal protocols. Scribes and officials actively engaged in
the mapmaking process leaving written traces of their actions on the surface of every map
they inspected. Their writing recognized towns and place signs and it appeared next to
rivers, trees, and rocks and also buildings and crosses. Officials aired potential conflicts,
measured distances, suggested pathways, and in some instances, added pictorial elements
in their efforts to make sense of the maps and their coded messages. Fraught with tension
due to differences embedded into the Spanish legal system that favored the European
minority, authentications made maps legible by relying on written formulas designed to
shape and classify individuals and their activities―indeed, as González Echevarría
observes in this chapter’s epigraph, legal writing supported the notion of empire. But
why would scribes and officials commission and use indigenous maps in the first place?
To what extent did they understand the maps they viewed? If officials disapproved or
distrusted pictorial documents as some evidence suggests, why did they continue to
inspect and accept maps until the eighteenth century?
The majority of maps made in Oaxaca from the late sixteenth through the early
eighteenth centuries bear written glosses from the scribes, alcaldes mayores, and
corregidores who inspected them. Painters controlled geographic and pictorial
knowledge as well as the tools needed to make maps but scribes and officials helped
138
define a map’s content to fit Spanish legal principles. Conferring sameness to maps
represented a scribe’s most important task designed to render documents legible to a
broad bureaucratic audience.246
“This is true and faithful,” they certified on countless
occasions after reviewing a map, branding it with their signatures in an act of possession
that sought to convey authority and truth in the state’s eyes. Certification represents a
pivotal moment in mapmaking permitting scribes to learn about the art of painting and
about a painter’s intentions; the process also allowed scribes to articulate and emphasize
the requirements imposed by the Crown. For painters, certification served as a forum to
verbally explain the content of their maps, manuscripts that carried expressions
associated with local and regional identities, training, access to sources, and the painter’s
individual style. The encounters served as sites to negotiate the allocation of land, the
fixing of boundaries, the confirmation of property holdings, encroachment, and surveying
allowing painters to properly explain the contents of a map. This moment represented an
opportunity for painters and patrons to direct the message of the map because once it
entered New Spain’s bureaucratic channels, they lost control over it.
While the trend in studies of mapped environments moves towards a
decentralization of maps from the state, this chapter highlights the way state efforts
promoted indigenous cartography, and how scribes and regional officials gradually
developed an understanding of visual representation assimilating and codifying it into an
evolving imperial archive. According to Daniel Lord Smail, “it has become de rigour to
246
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Have: Yale University Press, 1998), 2-3; and Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies:
Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10.
139
speak of state interest in and control over early modern developments in mapping,”
subjects that subordinate cartographic practices to the whims of rulers and their trusted
advisors.247
But what of indigenous mapping efforts that, while responding to colonial
rule, did so from distinctly local perspectives and with uniquely local goals in mind? I
propose that the authentication of maps marks a critical site of knowledge where social
actors contested and defined land and territorial boundaries in the process building a
mutual language of spatial representation with a distinct indigenous character.
The Notarial Culture of Maps
Maps circulated within the limits of the “lettered city,” an elaborate bureaucracy
designed and directed by letrados, individuals trained in law and liberal arts supported by
the work of scribes and regional officials who helped shape imperial design. In Ángel
Rama’s estimation, this “priestly caste” exercised power by controlling writing and the
Empire’s mediums of communication in Spanish American cities.248
The use of language
and writing to structure Spanish imperial activity in New Spain generated a steady
production of handwritten manuscripts detailing the activities of officials, explorers,
clerics, merchants, lawyers, and others involved in colonization.249
At the local and
247
Smail, 224.
248 Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996),
16. Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins have built on Rama’s analysis incorporating images, print
culture, architecture, and performance into the lettered city to explain the way individuals in the Andes
engaged with various forms of reading and the interpretation of language and information. Beyond the
Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). My
appreciation to Martha Few for bringing this source to my attention.
249
See González Echevarría; Mignolo, The Darker Side; Cummins, “From Lies to Truth”; Jorge Cañizares-
Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the
140
regional levels, scribes generated thousands of pages each year when individuals needed
to address authorities in writing for formal transactions that required a record. Along
with corregidores and alcaldes mayores who administered justice and collected taxes at
the regional level, scribes participated closely in the commission and authentication of
indigenous maps. Maps informed surveys commissioned by royal authorities, the
interests of individuals in land petitions and disputes who had to engage with the local
bureaucracy, and the needs of officials who asked for maps to describe sites of land.
Scribes and officials engaged with maps, annotating and codifying them to make them
legible for the immediate use of authorities but also in preparation for their transition into
one of various local or regional archives where documents rested for future reference.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the crown adopted a policy of selling
public offices in the New World including escribanías, scribal appointments, and
alcaldías mayores, regional judgeships, to generate income for the royal coffers. In
principle, the King designated royal scribes to perform their duties in any town or city to
fulfill the needs of government agencies across the viceroyalty. Public scribes
authenticated the acts of private citizens but were limited to a specific town or region.
The requirements for holding a scribal appointment depended on knowledge of the
written word and on individual qualities of honor valued in the Hispanic world including
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Padrón, The Spacious
Word; and Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010).
141
vecindad and an Old Christian background.250
In practice, authorities in America
appointed scribes on a regular basis who did not always meet the Crown’s standards. A
stream of reprimands from Spain between 1564 and 1669 accused the viceroys of failing
to scrutinize the selection of scribes “resulting in notable errors and invalidating
testimonies, investigations, and examinations.”251
In New Spain, regional officials such
as Gonzalo Messia de Magaña, the corregidor of Guaxuapa described at the start of the
chapter, sometimes appointed scribes in remote regions of the empire, in principle, to
meet the region’s demand. Since these officers covered various towns and settlements,
securing allies through scribal appointments―lucrative endeavors in themselves―could
facilitate the duties of public administration as well as open business opportunities down
the line.
Scribes recorded the public actions individuals wanted preserved according to
prescribed legal formulas. Patrons sought their services precisely because in matters of
law, their word was truth.252
Instructional manuals that circulated in the New World
allowed scribes to select from a range of templates to articulate sales, mortgages, wills,
leases, licenses, and other contracts.253
These state-sanctioned guides to learn the notarial
250
See Burns, Into the Archive, 13; and Juan Ricardo Jiménez Gómez, Un formulario notarial mexicano
del siglo XVIII: La instrucción de escribanos de Juan Elías Ortiz de Logroño (Mexico City: Universidad
Autónoma de Querétaro and Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2005), 18 n. 17, 21.
251
“Resultado venir los autos, pesquisas, y averiguaciones con notables yerros, y nulidades,” De los
escribanos de gobernación, Título Ocho in Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias (Madrid: Boiz,
1841), 179.
252
Burns, 2-3.
253
See Bernardo Pérez Fernández del Castillo’s useful catalogue of handbooks in Historia de la escribanía
en la Nueva España y del notariado en México (Mexico City: Colegio de Notarios del Distrito Federal and
Editorial Porrúa, 1988), 49-52.
142
arts did not, however, include “how to” sections on pictorial records from faraway places.
Instead, scribes, alcaldes mayores, and corregidores applied notarial techniques to the
authentication of maps focusing on identifying towns, roads, boundary markers, unused
lands, distance, and rivers relying on painters to point out relevant details. Their actions
responded to directions such as those that informed the merced petitions calling for maps
that clearly depicted sites and neighboring towns.
For all its color and unique design, the map (Figure 41) inspected by the scribe
Pedro Valades in 1609 for a livestock ranch near Justlaguaca in western Oaxaca followed
one simple rule: to describe the relationship between major settlements and a petitioned
site.254
In the map, the town appeared on the left hand side represented by a church
within a circular enclosure of mountains; Valades wrote underneath it, “Justlaguaca.” He
also identified the road with footsteps moving away from the town guiding the viewer to
the petitioned site known as Ixcotepec. Valades’ annotations reflect the manner in which
officials prioritized and ordered space, an itinerant practice dependent on movement,
walking or riding, tied to land, surveys, and boundary-making. In the back, the scribe
authorized the inspection noting, “The map and description, with the bearings it contains,
was mandated by the alcalde mayor who signed it himself along with said scribe.”255
Signatures afforded the bearers of maps juridical authority embodying and invoking the
signatory who attested to its contents. Signing implied several acts such as viewing,
254
Map of Justlaguaca (1609), AGN, No. 1271, Tierras, vol. 1871, exp. 11, f. 11.
255
“La cual dicha Pintura y descripción por los rumbos que en ella se contienen la mando hacer el dicho
alcalde mayor y lo firmo de su nombre con el dicho escribano,” Map of Justlaguaca, AGN, No. 1271,
Tierras, vol. 1871, exp. 11, f. 11v.
143
reading, writing, categorizing, and discussion in order to make sense of the contents of a
map.
Despite the unique pictorial quality of each piece, land grant maps in Oaxaca
tended to fulfill criteria centered on the identification of petitioned sites. The painter of
the map of Tlaxiaco and Cuquila (Figure 42) displayed a sophisticated sense of style
applying a palate of earth tones, shading, and three-dimensionality in his 1588
composition for a Spanish tavern keeper who petitioned a livestock ranch and two
caballerías from authorities.256
When the corregidor, Melchor de Godoy Sotomayor,
inspected the map, he identified the important Mixtec center of Tlaxiaco at the top of the
page represented by a church. The feet and hoof marks moving away from Tlaxiaco
towards Cuquila in the bottom led to the site of petitioned land marked with the word
sitio. The painter focused on representing the relationship between the two towns, the
land that separated them, and the road that connected them. Below Tlaxiaco, Godoy
translated the elements of the map into writing, noting the distance between the two
towns and the site of land. The corregidor commented on the nature of the land,
uncultivated and mountainous, “as is registered in this map,” and proceeded to sign it, the
ultimate act of authentication. In concert with imperial policies, Godoy’s attention on
places, distance, and land use defined his intervention, an act of authentication grounded
in the language of the state. The fact the corregidor turned to a native painter to fulfill a
petition of land for a Spaniard suggests one of the ways indigenous mapping informed
spatial negotiations across a broad social spectrum. Although the pictorial style of each
256
Map of Tlaxiaco and Cuquila (1588), AGN, No. 1692.9, Tierras, vol. 2692, exp. 17, f. 8.
144
painter helped generate distinct and often visibly striking maps, their content depended
on the needs of authorities usually interested in the location of specific plots of land.
On the rare occasion officials mapped their own locations, they usually did so
with this same task in mind. The corregidor Diego de Santa Cruz Olguín’s 1607 map
(Figure 43) described the site where Luis Quijada intended to establish a roadside inn
near the town of Cuscatlan in the northern region close to Puebla.257
Santa Cruz used few
pictorial details and as many words to convey his message.258
Santa Cruz’s quickly
sketched map included a small church representing the town, and two straight parallel
lines that stretched from one corner of the page to another in a diagonal fashion
representing the road from Puebla to Oaxaca. Although the top corner of the page where
the road ends is torn, one can imagine that some sort of symbol marked the petitioned
site. Even in this simple sketch, the corregidor made sure to annotate the map in order to
give it clarity. Common sense, a changing concept responsive to shifts in power
relationships and issues of representation and rights, guided an official’s actions when
faced with making or authenticating a map.259
When the priorities of late sixteenth-
century mapping, those centered on petitions for land and the execution of imperial
policy, shifted to issues related to defense of patrimonial lands by the late seventeenth
century, so too did common sense and the standards used to petition and measure maps.
257
Map of Cuscatlan (1607), AGN, Tierras, vol. 2682, exp. 4, f. 9.
258
Serge Gruzinski has described Spanish notarial maps as “extremely restrained, spare, and unadorned.”
“Colonial Indian Maps,” 57.
259
The trick, according to Ann Laura Stoler, is to distinguish between the things that could go unmentioned
in documents because they were public knowledge, those that remained unwritten because they could not
be conceptualized, and those which could simply not be stated. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3.
145
With more complex pictorial records and maps, some authorities made separate
records to guide the user. In 1558, the cacique Diego Cortés used a pictorial manuscript
to renegotiate a tasación for him and his brothers Bartolomé and Hernando. The tasación
served to determine which privileges Spanish authorities bestowed on some members of
the Indian nobility. Over the course of two days, the Valley’s alcalde mayor reviewed
the petition and interviewed a host of principales from Cuilapa about the Cortés brothers
and about a pintura Diego presented as evidence of his status. The extent to which some
officials in Oaxaca examined pictorial documents within the legal environment of the
region can be gleaned from this experience.
The public reading of the painting brought together native leaders―including
perhaps a painter or two―as well as Christian clerics who together with the alcalde
mayor examined its contents over the course of two days. On September 4, the alcalde
mayor remarked that having “seen the painting herein contained, and examined it with
the principales of this town and with its [Spanish] clergy, it was determined that the
macehuales [Indian commoners] depicted in this pintura were a gift of birth from his
father Don Luis.”260
The alcalde mayor’s declarations from the second day reflect the
consensus the parties reached concerning its interpretation. “There are 1,148 married
Indian commoners,” he said, “tributaries of the Marques del Valle; from the [illustrated
260
“Vido esta pintura aquí Contenida y examinada con los principales de este dicho Pueblo y con los
religiosos del se averiguo que los macehuales contenidos en esta pintura se los dio desde que nació Don
Luis su padre,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 243, exp. 4, f. 17.
146
figures] in the pictorial, it seems Don Diego is a tequitlato.”261
As a tequitlato, Cortés
could collect tribute on behalf of the Crown as well as the harvest of a plot of land from
the macehuales under his authority. Diego pushed his petition further claiming his older
brother, Hernando, “suffered extreme need,” for which he requested a stipend from the
“leftovers” in Cuilapa’s community chest, a fund used for a range of activities associated
with town affairs.262
The alcalde mayor remarked that since Cortés had a second tasación
with another set of Indian tributaries, he had “plenty to eat and [means] with which to
support himself, his home and family, and Don Hernando.”263
While it is not clear
whether the alcalde mayor granted the stipend, he did, in effect, authorize Diego Cortés’
petition recognizing his cacique status and his role as a tequitlato. The pictorial used by
Cortés possessed qualities associated with genealogical manuscripts as well as tribute
records. While the painting utilized to negotiate this petition was separated from the
document, one can gauge the way in which some officials viewed and inspected pictorial
records and the methods they applied to make them legible.
In other instances, the documents also reveal the way judges and scribes used
native maps during their boundary surveys. Such was the case with a group of Spanish
and indigenous officials who met on May 10, 1687 at the plaza of San Ana Zegache, a
Zapotec town in the southern portion of the Valley of Oaxaca. Led by Antonio de
261
“Parece en ella que hay mil y ciento y cuarenta y ocho macehuales casados tributantes al Marques del
Valle de los cuales por la dicha pintura parece que es tequitlato Don Diego,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 243, exp.
4, f. 17.
262
“Padece extrema necesidad; . . . de las sobras de la Caja de Comunidad de hoy en adelante [Diego pidió]
diesen para sustentación al dicho Don Hernando,” AGN, Tierras, Vol. 243, Exp. 4, f. 15-16.
263
“Con las cuales dichas dos tasaciones tiene bastantemente de comer y poderse sustentar el y su casa y
familia y Don Hernando su hermano,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 243, exp. 4, f. 15.
147
Abellán y Carrasco, the alcalde mayor of the Cuatro Villas del Marquesado, an alignment
of four principal towns in the Valley, the group headed west at daybreak aided by a
sturdy painted map (Figure 44).264
The map served as a navigation tool helping the party
identify geographical elements, ranches, and natural and manmade boundary markers
during a survey and demarcation (deslinde y reconocimiento) of nearby lands. The
property belonged to the Marqués, an absentee landlord consolidating his assets in the
region. Native political officers known as oficiales de república from Zimatlán and San
Pablo helped guide the group through a portion of the estate they contested. The alcalde
mayor of Chichicapa and Zimatlán, towns under the authority of the Crown not the
Marqués, and a deputy (teniente) for the city of Antequera, the Spanish seat of power in
the region also controlled by the Crown, accompanied the expedition. Though some
natives spoke Spanish, an interpreter travelled with the group to translate when necessary.
After walking nearly a league and a half, they reached the hacienda of Captain
Cristobal Ramírez, who produced a título y merced, a title and royal deed confirming the
limits of his property. The group remained on the hacienda long enough to compare the
deed to the property’s boundary markers after which point the scribe noted, “Guided by
him [the alcalde mayor] and the [native] informants, and the map’s demonstrations, we
264
Map of Zimatlán and Ocotlán (1686 [1639]), AGN, No. 3009, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4. The
AGN dates this map to 1639, but the certifying gloss on the back by Hernando Ortiz de Sepúlveda suggests
it was copied in 1686 from an earlier model made in 1639. The text reads, “Esta cotejado con su original
de donde se sacó en 29 de septiembre de 1686 años [It is compared with its original from where it was
copied on September 29, 1686].” The year “1639” appears in smaller lettering above the word, “cotejar.”
Two other copies of this map, AGN, No. 3039, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 146, exp 13, f. 33, and AGN, No.
3018, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 102, exp. 33, f. 24, are dated 1686 and 1734 respectively.
148
veered left leaving said hacienda until it was out of sight.”265
They headed south along
what the Indians from San Pablo considered their patrimonial lands. During this
particular leg of the journey, San Pablo introduced manuscripts including various autos
de posesión, formal edicts of possession they claimed verified their control of the land.
Abellán ordered the survey to continue in spite of their objections but asked the natives
from San Pablo to show him the boundaries described in the map. “Having mandated
that the land titles be incorporated into these proceedings, the alcalde mayor [also]
ordered that [the natives] guide him to the limits they know to be theirs including the sites
depicted on the map,” the scribe noted.266
Officials looked to the map to identify and
determine boundaries, the scribe referencing it another four times during the survey with
phrases such as “according to the map’s demonstration,” and “they fall within the map’s
delimitations.”267
Clearly, the native map played a key role in fixing spatial boundaries.
After individuals and towns transacted petitions with scribes and officials or when
a legal dispute ended, copies and original dockets including maps were scattered in
archives across Oaxaca and Mexico City. The law held scribes liable for safeguarding
the written records they produced, a responsibility that passed to another when a scribal
appointment was renounced. When Zimatlán addressed the court in the fall of 1686
about the impending survey of the Marquesa’s land that would affect their town
265
“Y guiados por él y los informantes y demostraciones del mapa dejando a mano izquierda la identidad
de dicho sitio,” AGN, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 117v.
266
“Dicho señor alcalde mayor mandando poner los instrumentos presentados con estas diligencias mando
que sin embargo de lo referido le guiasen a los términos que tienen por conocidos en que se incluyen los
sitios demostrados en el mapa,” AGN, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 117v.
267
“Según la demonstración de el mapa,” and “que todos caen en la situación de dicho Mapa,” AGN,
Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 118v and 119v.
149
boundaries, native officials directed royal authorities to a legal docket supposedly stored
in Mexico City:
Our ascendants and we have held some lands since time immemorial that fall within our
town’s eastern boundaries; [they] are named in our [Zapotec] language Guiyalana y
Secbichi [and are located] by some small mountains. The titles and maps to these [lands]
are in the Real Audiencia of this New Spain [to support] the dispute we had with the
natives from Santa María Magdalena. The survey your grace intends would seriously
damage and impair us, and with all due respect and reverence, we request your lordship
not prevent our grievance. We contradict this survey once, twice, and three times, and as
many as is necessary according to our rights and we petition that the titles be drawn [from
the Audiencia] for our defense.268
Seventeen members of the town council signed their names to the request. After
reviewing Zimatlán’s petition, a scribe or lawyer involved in the case wrote on the
margins of the page (Figure 45) a cautionary ojo, literally “eye,” to warn the reviewer.
The note reads, “Watch out as these titles have not appeared, only a merced without a
name, survey, or possession.”269
The incident exposes significant aspects of the use of indigenous maps in colonial
society. The town’s claim that the map and titles resided in Mexico City may have been
268
The orginal text reads as follows: “Nosotros hemos estado poseyendo de inmemorial tiempo esta parte y
nuestros ascendientes de unas tierras que caen de nuestro pueblo, para la parte del oriente nombradas en
nuestro idioma [q/g]uiyalana y Secbichi que son donde están unos cerrillos cuyos títulos y mapas están en
[la] Real Audiencia de esta Nueva España en el pleito que tuvimos con los naturales de Santa María
Ma[g]dalena y porque en el deslinde que se intenta hacer por Vuestra Merced somos sumamente
damnificados y perjudicados hablando con el acatamiento y reverencia debida requerimos a Vuestra
Merced no nos pare ningún perjuicio y contradecimos una dos y tres y las demás veces que decimos por
derecho deslindes con protestación de pedir sacar los instrumentos que conducirán a nuestra defensa ,”
AGN, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 104.
269 AGN, Hospital de Jesus, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 104.
150
false, an allegation implied by the reader who wrote on the margin, but it was not
farfetched. Maps presented by individuals, towns, and lawyers to local authorities were
typically routed to Mexico City for review by a magistrate at the Audiencia. In other
occasions, litigants and lawyers travelled to the capital to testify or attend hearings where
they presented maps to support their petitions. In 1687, for instance, the legal
representative of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Juan López de Pareja, presented an Indian map
to a judge (oidor) at the Audiencia for a dispute between the Mixtec town and a Spanish
captain. Lawyers for both parties and judges inspected the map before someone returned
it to Oaxaca, its place of origin, where it continued to inform the natives’ case.270
While
patrons used maps to define local spatial relationships, the maps formed part of a larger
network tied to the lettered city’s production of manuscripts. Those same individuals
who held a hand in reviewing and producing textual manuscripts participated in the
review and certification of Indian maps. The circulation of maps also opened the
possibilities of loss, misplacement, theft, and damage when individuals surrendered their
manuscripts over to notaries, royal officials, or lawyers as evidence. Even after their
initial production, Indian maps could continue to inform social and political relationships
across time.
Maps also circulated among caciques and their families and in small community
archives where the local elite jealously guarded their alphabetic and pictorial
manuscripts. The growth of indigenous archives in Oaxaca reflected an appreciation of
law and notarial practices used to petition authorities for privileges and goods, and also to
270
A full analysis of this case anchors a discussion of copied maps in Chapter 4.
151
defend corporate interests. When native officers from the remote outpost of Tehuantepec
along Oaxaca’s Pacific coast complained to the Viceroy in 1660 about the abusive
behavior of the alcalde mayor, their grievance made light of the fact they, too, stored
important papers that structured their rights and obligations. “No other alcalde mayor has
attempted [to extract so much tribute from us] until now,” they claimed, “because of the
many royal provisions we have in our archives which are obeyed by the other justices for
our protection.”271
The Juárez de Zárate brothers, caciques from Santa Catarina Ixtepeji in the central
Valley stored a map held in their family for generations. In 1690, they used the map to
petition the judge for a number of privileges accorded to individuals of their status
including the right to bear a sword and a harquebus, to use weights and measures, to use a
saddle and spurs for riding, to slaughter cattle, and the right to wear Spanish clothing.272
In the deposition, they introduced the map noting, “With all due formality of the oath [we
have taken], we present this map in which the lineage of our ancestors and the origin it
had from its beginning is deciphered, so that the witnesses can recognize it and declare
what they know.”273
Several witnesses confirmed the identity of the caciques and their
271
“No habiendo tratado ningún alcalde mayor de hacerlo desde el día de hoy, por muchas provisiones
reales que tenemos para ellos, las cuales están obedecidas por las demás justicias para amparo nuestro,”
Carta dirigida al virrey Duque de Albuquerque por la república de indios de Tehuantepec, in María de los
Ángeles Romero Frizzi, El sol y la cruz: Los pueblos indios de Oaxaca colonial (Mexico City: CIESAS,
1996), 256.
272
Testimonio en cuanto a la información de legitimación y mérito de Don Pedro Juárez de Zárate y su
hermano Don Domingo Juárez de Zárate caciques principales de Ixtepeji (1691), AGN, Indiferente
Virreinal, Civil, exp. 23.
273
“Hacemos demostración con la debida solemnidad del juramento del Mapa en que se haya descifrada la
descendencia de Nuestros antepasados, y el origen que tubo desde sus principios para que los dichos
152
map, one of them noting the map was “the ancient one, the one they [the Juárez family]
have always used to be known [which they have] stored in their homes in order to
preserve the [family’s] memory so that everyone can know they are legitimate caciques
of good blood.”274
Scribes and officials drew from notarial practices to define the parameters of map
authentication. The close interaction between authorities and individuals to negotiate
land, goods, and privileges generated petitions, complaints, testimonies, sales, auctions,
and surveys as well as maps. All played an important role in shaping spatial divisions in
Oaxaca. The making of a map brought together scribes, alcaldes mayores, and
corregidores to inspect and authenticate its content, creating what Kathryn Burns has
described as “a space where negotiations once took place, around the notarial template,
leaving traces of understandings that often belie the wording of the text.”275
The
practices of viewing and annotating maps had direct implications for land tenure
practices, establishing a tradition followed by later generations of natives deploying them
in matters related to land. The use of maps and titles owes part of its success to imperial
archival practices that sought to systematize record-making. That records were scattered
among family, local, and regional archives attests to the value placed by individuals in
record-keeping but also to the practice of copying, which facilitated the production of
testigos los reconozcan y declaren lo que supieren,” AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, Civil, exp. 23, no page
number.
274
AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, Civil, exp. 23.
275 Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 355.
153
legal papers, both of which carried notarial fees.276
These efforts contributed to the
circulation of notarial manuscripts within a culture of hand-written documents that
defined the Iberian world.
Pinturas and Empire
Maps served kings, ministers, and ranking officials across European imperial
bureaucracies to plot, describe, and possess lands known and unknown.277
They used
them to measure territory, trade routes, potential revenue, taxes, and mineral extraction,
and to design or redevelop infrastructure. Maps and the knowledge used to make them
represent one of the most significant developments of the early modern period.
Cartography represented geographical space using mathematics, allowing readers the
experience associated with viewing and possessing the territory represented on the
page.278
In New Spain, cartographic practices informed projects across the viceroyalty
that relied on maps to manage imperial affairs. In Mexico City, the scheme to drain the
lake in order to resolve the city’s devastating flood issues generated numerous maps from
engineers, architects, and surveyors working, though not always harmoniously, across
276
Bouza, Corre manuscrito, 31.
277
See the essays in Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of
Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
J.B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” in The
New Nature of Maps; and Portuondo, Secret Science.
278
See, for instance, David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the
Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5-24.
154
fields to try to bring an end to the problem.279
Strong bonds tied cartographic practices
and imperial administration and expansion.
Indigenous mapmaking in Oaxaca also responded to the exigencies of Spanish
rule. Attempts to administer New World domains generated surveys, expeditions, and
laws during the second half of the sixteenth century that led to spatial realignments,
measurements of ecology and culture, and record-keeping practices designed to capture
accounts of state. These efforts contributed to the commission and production of native
maps, an activity that combined pictorial skills and geographical knowledge with a
measure of cultural sensibility. Officials reviewed, interpreted, classified, and stored
maps adopting administrative measures to accommodate local manuscript practices.
Based on their continued use in the courts, the mid-seventeenth century witnessed a
policy change that sanctioned the introduction of maps by natives and indigenous towns
as evidence in legal settings.280
As a result, officials and scribes also turned to
indigenous pintores for maps. As authority figures and patrons, they sought the services
of native painters to describe spatial relationships and to comply with royal mandates.
Since no written policy guided the use of maps and pictorial manuscripts, authorities and
painters improvised. When the Relaciones Geográficas started to arrive in New Spain
during the late 1570s, officials turned to native painters for assistance to complete its
mapped portion.281
This unscripted yet seemingly coordinated moment illustrates the
279
See John F. López, “‘In the Art of My Profession’: Adrian Boot and Dutch Water Management in
Colonial Mexico City,” Journal of Latin American Geography 11/S (2012): 35-60.
280
Florescano, Historia de las historias, 241.
155
complexities of managing an overseas empire, the efforts to rationalize collected data,
and the choices made by officials to meet local realities. The turn towards painters and
their maps reminds us of the limitations of officials on the ground who relied on the
geographic knowledge of others that had a deeper understanding of the local
environment.
The Relaciones Geográficas formed part of a long-term agenda designed by the
king and his advisors to measure the extent of the empire and maximize its returns.282
A
cédula, royal decree, dated May 25, 1577 explained to officials in New Spain and Peru
that in order to “attend to their good government, it has seemed a proper thing to decree
that a general description be made of the whole condition of our Indies, islands, and their
provinces, the most accurate and certain possible.”283
The recently appointed Royal
Chronicler and Cosmographer Juan López de Velasco developed an instrument in the
form of a written survey that asked officials across the Spanish empire to respond to a
series of questions relating to the culture and geography of America. The chronicler-
cosmographer’s main task was to research and write histories and geographical treatises
281
See the following works: Howard F. Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-
1648,” in HMAI; René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Antequera, vol. 2 (Mexico City:
Universidad Autónoma de México, 1986); and Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain. The
relaciones topográficas, a similar effort in the Spanish peninsula, took place around the same time period.
See Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990); and William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
282
Phillip’s 1568 junta magna, a summit of high ranking civil and ecclesiastic officials, addressed issues
related to missionary practices, tribute collection, fiscal responsibility, labor assignments, land allocation,
and illegal trade. See Demetrio Ramos Pérez, “La junta magna de 1568. Planificación de una época
nueva,” in La formación de las sociedades Iberoamericanas (1568-1700), ed. Demetrio Ramos Pérez
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1999).
283
“Cédula,” in Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, Appendix A, 233.
156
of the Indies and López de Velasco intended the responses to his survey to inform the
most complete assessment of that portion of the world.284
He designed the survey with a
wide audience in mind that included governors, corregidores, and alcaldes mayores as
well as priests and town councils that could generate detailed written accounts known as
relaciones. Directions on format and dating instructed users to start with a fresh piece of
paper to “note a title of the account, [and] the day, month, and year it is made.” To keep
track of respondents and the survey’s circulation, López de Velasco asked respondents to
identify themselves and also the officials that made the instruction available.285
The
cosmographer’s attention to detail drew from the strong notarial tradition that
characterized record-keeping activities in the Mediterranean world.
As the questionnaires trickled into the various regions of New Spain, officials
turned to locals to help answer the survey. Instructions called for the use of native
informants, “persons knowledgeable of the things of the land,” who could discuss a
region’s history, politics, and rituals. Responses originated in central Mexico, Yucatán,
Guadalajara, Michoacán, Tlaxcala, and Guatemala. In Oaxaca, the rate of responses was
high.286
From 1579 through early 1581, authorities prepared forty relaciones reaching
284
Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 189.
285
“Primeramente, en un papel aparte, pondrán por cabeza de la relación que hicieren, el día, mes, y año de
la fecha de ella: con el nombre de la persona, o personas, que se hallaren a hacerla, y el del Gobernador, u
otra persona a que les hubiere enviado la dicha instrucción,” in “Instrucción y memoria de las relaciones
que se han de hacer para la descripción de las Indias,” printed instructions attached to a majority of the
individual responses returned to Spain, BLAC. See translation of instructions and questions in Cline, “The
Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, Appendix B, 233-237; and of the questionnaire in Mundy, The Mapping
of New Spain, Appendix B, 227-230.
286
Fifty four text responses originated in Yucatan, forty in central Mexico, twenty-three in Michoacán,
fourteen in Guadalajara, sixteen in Tlaxcala, and two and Guatemala. Twenty-two texts from Mexico,
157
across the region to Mixtec, Zapotec, Nahua, Chocho, Cuicatec, Chinantec, and Mixe
settlements.287
An important component of the survey included the mapping of
individual towns, coasts, and islands. “Make a map of the layout of the town, its streets,
plazas and other features, noting the monasteries, as well as can be sketched easily on
paper,” the cosmographer instructed respondents on item ten of the questionnaire.288
For
question forty-two he asked about “the ports and landings along the coast” requesting “a
map showing their shape and layout,” and on forty-seven he asked about islands close to
shore instructing respondents to “make a map, if possible, of their form and shape,
showing their length, width, and lay of the land.”289
From the cosmographer’s point of
view, maps would provide critical information about urban design, coastlines, and
infrastructure that would help plot a map of Spanish domains around the globe.
Across New Spain, authorities tapped into a pool of native artists, astute bilingual
caciques often dressed in European clothing accustomed to dealing with scribes and
officials. The reasons for turning to native painters reflect a series of choices derived
from a reading of the instructions, an estimation of the work involved, knowledge of the
Michoacán, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala have been lost, as well as another three unidentified texts.
See Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 196.
287
In other regions of New Spain including Guadalajara and Guatemala, officials responded to the survey
as late as 1585. Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 196.
288
Original reads, “Con la traza y diseño de pintura de las calles, y plazas, y otros lugares señalados o
monasterios como quiera que se pueda rascuñar fácilmente en un papel.” English translation follows
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, Appendix B, 228.
289
Item 42 reads, “Los puertos y desembarcaderos que hubiere en la dicha costa, y la figura y traza de ellos
en pintura como quiera que sea en un papel, por donde se pueda ver la forma y talle que tienen.” Item 47
states, “Los nombres de las Islas pertenecientes a la costa, y porque se llaman así, la forma y figura de ellas
en pintura, si pudiere ser y el largo y ancho.” English translation follows Mundy, The Mapping of New
Spain, Appendix B, 230.
158
region, and an official’s network of relationships with scribes, priests, and native
intermediaries. Scribes and officials of Mediterranean notarial cultures had developed
traditions of linguistic mapping during the later Middle Ages but maps of towns and
regions had not played a significant part in these practices.290
Not surprisingly,
authorities in New Spain seldom attempted to map a region and when they did, they put
on display their notorious skills as doodlers more than their geographical observations.291
More than disdain for visual images or lack of interest, most scribes, alcaldes
mayores, and corregidores were simply not prepared to render spatial relationships
visually. And while there is no doubt Spaniards prized writing and the power of the
written word, officials also recognized the value of local expertise and the importance of
obtaining the most precise information, available mostly through cooperation with
natives. Likewise, as Thomas Cummins has observed, “the invention of writing was one
of the key cultural differentiations that Europeans made between themselves and the
peoples of the New World, whereas pictorial images were something they held in
common.”292
Officials in New Spain generated dozens of responses, a majority of which
originated in the most populated regions in the central, near north, and southern regions.
Out of a total of ninety-one maps generated for the survey, a large percentage can be
traced to an indigenous hand. At least twenty-seven maps had their origin in Oaxaca, a
290
Smail, 2.
291
Smail, 1; Burns, Into the Archive, 68.
292
Cummins, “From Lies to Truth,” 153.
159
preponderance of them reflecting native ancestry.293
The maps formed part of the
region’s manuscript culture, a loose association of scribes, officials, clerics, translators,
caciques, and painters that produced records to obtain benefits, legitimate possession of
lands and goods, and petition requests.
What exactly did officials tell Amerindian painters who took on the task of
elaborating maps? What type of guidelines, if any, did they provide? In their contact
with mapmakers and other intermediaries, officials must have recited the items as they
appeared on the instructions leaving painters to sort out the details as they went along.
For painters, this communication established parameters of representation used to define
the content of a map but it also left them to creatively respond to the representation of
space resulting in a mixture of pictorial traditions. The use of European ideas and motifs
notwithstanding, the maps reflected Mesoamerican visual culture and identity. Hernando
de Cervantes, a corregidor in the Mixteca petitioned two maps in the region from local
pintores to inform the responses to his relación. The map (Figure 46) he received from
the painter of Amoltepeque marked the town’s boundaries through a series of logographic
place-names forming a half-moon that enclosed the town.294
Within the half-moon, a
church, the only visible symbol of European culture sat next to the place-name of
Amoltepeque, “hill of the soap plant,” on the right hand side. Below these two elements,
a ruling pair faces each other inside a palace decorated with the “overlapping feather-
293
Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 196.
294
This was one of two maps submitted with the Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepeque (1580), BLAC,
Folder XXV-3.
160
symbol” that designates a plain.295
A river, traced with straight lines, cuts across the
landscape on the right-hand side in a vertical fashion. True to form, Cervantes viewed
the pintura inscribing an alphabetic gloss below the church that identifies the main
population center in the region.
What motivated officials to delegate the task of mapping to natives? A
combination of factors contributed to the commission of native painters to make maps.
For one thing, the regional legal system devoted a considerable amount of its time to
presiding over matters related to land. Records of sales, leases, auctions, disputes,
boundary inspections, petitions, certifications, and testimonies filled local, regional, and
viceregal archives in Oaxaca and Mexico City. The region’s dependence on notarial
culture demanded strong knowledge of the law from indigenous leaders who used
alphabetic and pictorial writing as well as oral traditions to safeguard individual and
corporate assets. The importance of scribes, courts, and archives had not escaped the
attention of native elites across Mesoamerica. In Oaxaca, pictorial manuscripts of
various types circulated within local and regional bureaucratic channels establishing a
tradition that carried into the eighteenth century. In another respect, the act of
commissioning a map reflects an exchange based on the recognition of someone’s ability
to make a pictorial representation that considers the region’s geographical and political
space.
The cartographic output of the painter from Tehuantepec discussed in Chapter 1
bears a brief reprise here. This individual mapped a vast portion of land in that region
295
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 159-160.
161
during the last two decades of the sixteenth century working with five different alcaldes
mayores from 1573 to 1598. The maps from this painter not only reflect his individual
talent but also the Spanish authorities’ reliance on his expertise to describe and define the
micro-localities of Tehuantepec, and in one instance, to map the entire region. In their
majority, the maps informed a growth in ranching activities preceded by petitions from
Spaniards and natives who wished to access land. The maps share a similar composition,
use of cartographic signs, and application of color that make it easy to discern the
author’s signature style. In each case, the painter worked within official parameters
centered on the definition of sites in relation to settlements. For a commission from the
alcalde mayor Juan de Torres de Lagunas for the Relaciones Geográficas survey, the
painter set out to map the entire region of Tehuantepec (Figure 18). We can infer from
the detailed map presented to Torres de Lagunas that a discussion about its range
including major towns, roads, and rivers preceded its execution. In fact, the map’s detail
prompted the official to write a key assigning letters to its various features and then
preparing a separate written description he included with his relación.296
After completing the surveys, officials returned their responses to Mexico City
from where they made the journey back to Spain. On November 21, 1583 administrators
at the Council of the Indies in Seville turned over to López de Velasco three legajos, or
large bundles, of relaciones and maps to inform the King’s project.297
We can never
know how López de Velasco reacted when he first inspected the responses he had
296
Relación de Tehuantepec, BLAC, Folder XXV-4, f. 4v-6.
297
Cline included a Spanish transcription of the inventory of manuscripts and maps that were handed over
to López de Velasco in 1583. “The Relaciones Geográficas,” Appendix D, 237-240.
162
commissioned though perhaps we can anticipate a sense of disappointment about the
mapped portion of the survey. For one thing, a large quantity of the responses did not
include any maps. In another respect, the maps he did receive, a majority of which were
Indian-made, reflected at best a mixture of native and European pictorial traditions, at
worst an unreadable―to European eyes―visual portrayal of the New World landscape.
Whatever the case, the maps were inspected and catalogued under a file labeled
“Descripción y Población” presumably housed with the chronicler-cosmographer.298
On
the map of Amoltepeque, for example, two different inscriptions (Figures 47 and 48) bear
witness to their inspection in Spain. The first simply states “Amoltepeque” to indicate its
origin while the second indicates the name of the town as well as its assignation of a
catalogue number.
The file existed or originated when the King appointed Juan de Ovando y Godoy
as Visitor of the Council of the Indies in 1569.299
As Ovando’s secretary during the
restructuring of the Council two years earlier, López de Velasco was well positioned to
know about its existence, a matter compounded by Ovando’s support of the information-
gathering activities of the chronicler-cosmographer in later years. In 1596, a new
cosmographer, Andrés García Céspedes, re-organized the Descripción y Población file,
his work noticeable via his signature and multiple annotations (Figure 49) of regions,
ethnic states, bishoprics, and towns on the margins of many of the responses. Later
chroniclers such as Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas and the jurist Antonio de León
298
There is some debate about the identity of the cataloguer. The two likely candidates are López de
Velasco and Céspedes. See Cline, HMAI, 196.
299
Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 189.
163
Pinelo accessed material from the Relaciones Geográficas in the Descripción y Población
file for their own works on the Indies.300
Despite the use and circulation of the materials produced for the Relaciones
Geográficas, this unique and massive imperial effort has usually been described as an
unsuccessful venture. Howard Cline noted that, “little or no administrative use was
apparently ever made of them. With some few exceptions they seemingly lay untouched
in files until . . . the late eighteenth century.”301
Along similar lines, Barbara Mundy has
observed that, “When López de Velasco compiled a terse catalogue of the texts and maps
of the Relaciones that had arrived to Spain by 1583, he must have been afflicted with an
overriding sense of the project’s failure.”302
Admittedly, the king’s desire to produce the
most up-to-date atlas and chronicle of the Indies did not come to fruition under López de
Velasco’s leadership, but his goal of obtaining informed reports about his possessions in
the New World far exceeded any past efforts in this respect. If Phillip considered the
project a failure, he did not deprive López de Velasco of advancement in his professional
career, appointing the former chronicler-cosmographer as his private secretary in 1591.
In another respect, the Relaciones Geográficas mobilized a rather large bureaucratic
machine that in the case of New Spain relied on indigenous knowledge to fulfill the
request.
300
Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 194. Appendix E includes a Spanish transcription of the
manuscripts consulted by León Pinelo, 240-242.
301
Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas,” HMAI, 194.
302
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 27.
164
Conclusion
Painters in Oaxaca made maps drawing from regional traditions that by the 1570s
incorporated a mixture of symbols from the European and Mesoamerican pictorial
canons. From the 1570s to the 1600s, a large number of maps informed petitions for land
from individuals who sought royal grants for agriculture, livestock, and cattle-raising.
The use and circulation of pictorial documents of various kinds to negotiate aspects of
imperial rule associated with tribute, labor, rights and privileges, commerce, and land
presented challenges for local scribes confronted with their inspection. The simplicity
with which painters often portrayed spatial relationships responded in part to a need to
communicate to multiple audiences that included the scribes and alcaldes mayores
associated with the lettered city, but also caciques and indigenous towns who had a stake
in the acquisition and retention of land and other resources. Native pictorial manuscripts
continued to circulate in various forms after the sixteenth century as Indian painters and
scribes adapted styles, materials, and iconography to accommodate contemporary needs.
Whether or not most officials had any previous experience reviewing and
authorizing pictorial documents remains uncertain but they certainly did not shy away
from taking possession of a map through the use of their quills. In fact, their participation
transformed a map’s appearance forever, a reminder of the region’s dependence on the
officers of the lettered city but also a nod to local practice, an accepted part of conducting
business in Oaxaca. This type of interaction fostered new ways of communicating across
cultural frontiers fostering an exchange of symbols and representational techniques
applied in certain aspects of manuscript culture. Legal and notarial writing functioned as
165
the primary tools used to legitimize spatial practices―including the validation of
maps―though social memory and tradition also played important roles in this process
sometimes taking precedent against the written word. These activities were tied to spatial
routines including ritual boundary walking, surveying, witness testimony, mapping, and
naming designed to define and control the natural environment.
166
CHAPTER 4:
A TRUE AND FAITHFUL COPY
The natives of the town of Xoxocotlán . . . presented two maps,
one of them old, torn, and frayed with the passage of time,
the other copied and produced according to and as the ancient one.
― Francisco de Medina, a local scribe from Antequera (1686)
In the fall of 1686, Antonio de Abellán y Carrasco needed a map.303
As alcalde
mayor of the Cuatro Villas del Marquesado, Abellán oversaw a range of civil and
criminal cases involving the region’s Indian, Spanish, and African members. Abellán
mediated a case between a local Spaniard named Bartolomé Ruíz, and Santa Cruz
Xoxocotlán, a Mixtec town south of Antequera, the Spanish seat of power in the
region.304
The parties disputed ten measures of a livestock ranch known as an estancia de
ganado menor effectively under Ruíz’s control.305
On October 3, two political officers
from Xoxocotlán appeared before Abellán to present an ancient map they said described
all of the town’s land.306
The two men suggested the map would facilitate the alcalde
mayor’s impending survey of Xoxocotlán’s property but because of its physical state,
303
An earlier version of this chapter titled, “A True and Faithful Copy: Reproducing Indian Maps in the
Seventeenth-Century Valley of Oaxaca,” appeared in “Imperial Geographies and Spatial Memories,” a
special issue of the Journal of Latin American Geography 11/S (2012): 117-144.
304
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4.
305
A medida, or measure, equaled about one half acre. An estancia de ganado menor measured around
three square miles; the larger estancia de ganado mayor, or cattle ranches, measured close to seven square
miles.
306
They belonged to the town’s cabildo, the municipal council that administered local matters. The size of
each cabildo varied according to the size of each municipality. In 1691, Xoxocotlán’s cabildo included two
alcaldes, five regidores, two alguacil mayores, and a scribe. The town received a license in 1640 to elect
their own officials, a growing trend among Indian republics that sought independence from head towns
known as cabeceras as the native population recovered from epidemics, see Taylor, Landlord and Peasant,
30; Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 100-102.
167
“worn by the passage of time,” they petitioned a copy. Abellán evaluated the request and
commissioned the task to a maestro pintor, a master painter. Three weeks later officials
from the town accompanied an Indian cacique named Domingo de Zárate to meet with
Abellán to examine the copy he had made of the ancient map (Figure 5).307
Why was an
indigenous map used in a land dispute during the late seventeenth century and what did
the map’s audience have to say about those who commissioned and used it?
The story that unfolds in attempting to respond to these questions opens a unique
window into the spectrum of social networks in the Valley of Oaxaca. The first part of
this chapter overviews the region where the two Mixtec officials introduced the map, an
area with a high concentration of land disputes. A close reading of the case
contextualizes the commission and use of indigenous maps exposing political power
shifts, generational relationships, spatial practices, and legal strategies used to defend
land. These elements recall the “multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of
them superimposed or knotted into one another” described by Clifford Geertz in his
interpretation of culture.308
Geertz’s so-called “thick description,” an ethnographic
analysis to sort out the elements of signification among social groups, sought to find
meaning behind every day customs, gestures, and rituals. Drawing from this insight, the
case of Xoxocotlán, a lengthy docket of over three hundred folios and the copied map,
allows us to scrutinize the strategies used by social actors to engage one another and the
Spanish courts revealing the multiplicity of interests involved in the defense of land. A
307
Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán (1686), AGN, No. 625, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 249.
308
Clifford Gertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10.
168
visual analysis of the copied map followed by an examination of the map’s reception
within the legal circuits where it circulated reveal the advantages and limitations of
pictorial manuscripts in legal disputes. The copied map, a strategic representation of
space used to describe the town’s land as well as local social and political structures,
formed a unique aspect of spatial practices in the Valley.
The Setting
The seven-hundred-square-kilometer area of the Valley of Oaxaca is located in
southwestern Mexico and is dissected by three large mountain ranges (Figure 4). During
the colonial period, its rich soil, temperate climate, and thriving trade networks hosted a
diverse population that included Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Nahuas, Spaniards, Africans, and
mestizos, individuals of mixed-race ancestry. Unlike other regions of New Spain, Indian
towns and individuals retained control of two thirds of land in the region by the end of
the eighteenth century. This situation contrasts sharply with northern and central Mexico
where natives progressively lost territory to Spanish-dominated haciendas, landed estates
with a mixed economy of cattle and agriculture. William Taylor’s Landlord and Peasant
in Colonial Oaxaca is a basic text to understand land tenure patterns in the Valley region.
Writing in the 1970s, Taylor challenged the idea that haciendas functioned as the
dominant form of land tenure in Mexico, a notion advanced in François Chevalier’s Land
and Society in Colonial Mexico. Although haciendas existed in Oaxaca, Taylor argued
they were simply another type of land holding rather than the principal form of social
169
organization proposed by Chevalier. Later studies further contextualized regional
variances that challenged the hacienda model of an earlier generation of scholars.309
The Valley’s unique experience stemmed from a less violent conquest than
central Mexico, a smaller number of Spaniards in the region, and a more effective
enforcement of laws designed to protect Indians.310
Repúblicas de indios, the Spanish
term most often used to designate native townships, competed fiercely over spatial
boundaries contributing to the high rate of litigation in the region.311
These
“micropatriotic” efforts to protect social organization and defend land from ethnic rivals
characterized indigenous townships across Mesoamerica, a process also mirrored by
Spaniards in New Spain.312
Land held unique value in the Valley. It yielded basic foodstuffs including maize,
wheat, and sugarcane as well as variety of fruits and vegetables including beans,
avocados, maguey, onions, figs, and tomatoes. Land provided pasture for goats, sheep,
309
See Taylor, Landlord and Peasant and François Chevalier’s Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The
Great Hacienda, trans. Alvis Eustis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Also see James
Lockhart, “Encomienda and Hacienda,” in Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin
American History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market
in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), and “Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of
the Colonial Hacienda,” Latin American Research Review 18 (1983): 5-61. More recent scholarship has
drawn on Oaxaca’s unique land holding patterns to examine the role of native intermediaries in the
negotiation of power and natural resources in the region’s northern sierra, see Yannakakis, The Art of Being
In-Between, 131-157.
310
Taylor, 198.
311
Taylor, 82-89, 209-10. Also see Méndez Martínez and Méndez Torres, Límites, mapas y títulos
primordiales.
312
Robert Haskett, “Paper Shields,” 111.
170
cattle, horses, and swine and supplied wood for fuel and building materials.313
Spaniards
held haciendas, estancias de ganado mayor (cattle ranches), smaller livestock estates
known as labores, and estancias de ganado menor.314
In addition to farming and
livestocking sites, indigenous groups placed a high premium on land because of its ritual
value tied to cellular units of social organization known as ñuu in Mixtec communities
and yetze among Zapotec ones.315
Marcello Carmagnani suggests that in the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, land among Mixtecs and Zapotecs was tied to a revival of ethnic
values and political organization, efforts that sought to curb the effects of colonialism.316
“Territory,” he writes, “was conceived as something altogether sacred and earthly.
Sacred because it was the spatial dimension conferred by the gods to its children and
earthly because it was the human and geographical space capable of synthesizing the
fulfillment of everyday needs and the reproduction of future generations.”317
In the
Valley, residents competed across ethnic lines to secure local boundaries, revealing in the
process a web of interests that shaped spatial practices.
Maps usually entered the public record to facilitate claims to land. The region’s
rich manuscript culture, a coalition of scribes, clerks, lawyers, translators, mapmakers,
313
Taylor, 13-17.
314
Taylor, 111-140.
315
See Terraciano, 102-132; John M.D. Pohl, “Mexican Codices, Maps, and Lienzos as Social Contracts,”
in Writing without Words; and Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 20. The ñuu or ethnic state
formed the basic unit of organization for Mixtec societies in Oaxaca equivalent to the altepetl in central
Mexico. See Lockhart, The Nahuas, 14-47.
316
Marcello Carmagnani, El regreso de los dioses: El proceso de reconstitución de la identidad étnica en
Oaxaca. Siglos XVII y XVIII (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 13.
317
Carmagnani, 104.
171
and assorted Spanish and Indian officials, generated various types of handwritten
documents for individuals and corporate entities engaged in commercial and legal affairs.
Native lords and towns, the Church, Spanish landholders, and religious brotherhoods
known as cofradías all procured titles, boundary surveys, maps, testimonies, and auction
records to serve as evidence in matters related to land. A unique aspect of manuscript
culture in Oaxaca involves the circulation of indigenous maps, pictorials, and alphabetic
records written in native languages.318
Individuals relied on the use of manuscripts to
verify a claim, and on witnesses to legitimate that claim through memory. Both
manuscripts and memory worked in tandem to secure a favorable judgment, but were
themselves subjected to the power dynamics of each locality.
The Second Wave
In the late seventeenth century and into the 1700s, patrons including Indian towns,
caciques, alcaldes mayores, and Spanish landholders still petitioned maps from painters
such as Zárate primarily to litigate disputes over land. Between 1610 and 1670, the
number of maps located in the archives represents a much smaller amount than those
made in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. This shift paralleled dramatic
population losses in the Valley during the same period. While Antequera hosted in 1570
nearly 8,000 tributaries, natives who paid a forced tax to Spanish authorities, disease
reduced this figure to 2,000 by 1646. The Cuatro Villas reported similar losses. A 1570
318
Terraciano, 15-65; Monaghan, “The Text in the Body”; Smith, 1973; and Boone, Stories in Red and
Black.
172
census estimated a little over 7,000 tributaries but only 849 by 1643.319
Scattered maps
in the latter part of seventeenth century suggests indigenous mapping sometimes
informed spatial practices that included surveying, ritualized boundary walking, and
witness testimony. The surges responded to royal efforts to enforce legislation including
the Composición de tierras decree of 1631 for the parceling of land, and newer policies
such as the extension of the fundo legal, the minimum space allocated to each Indian
community, promoted in the 1680s.320
Authorities sought to generate funds and to
regulate land tenure in order to manage it more effectively at times reviving old rivalries
or provoking disagreements between neighbors that often led to litigation. Raymond
Craib has noted that “sharp lines of political and proprietary demarcation are neither
timeless nor natural. . . . The result of requiring villagers to precisely fix their borders
could often spur as many conflicts as it resolved.”321
While the majority of indigenous
maps made in Oaxaca date to the late sixteenth century, the tradition of making them
continued into the eighteenth.
Some patrons commissioned copies of earlier maps. Extant examples suggest
reproductions of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps were made mostly in the
central Valley after the 1680s, a pattern that continued into the late eighteenth century.322
319
Gerhard, 51, 93.
320
Royal authorities increased the fundo legal from 500 varas, roughly 1,375 feet, to 600 varas or 1,605
feet. AGEO, Alcaldías Mayores, leg. 62, exp. 12; Enrique Florescano, Historia de las historias, 241;
Taylor, 6-7, 68. Each vara equaled roughly 33 inches.
321
Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), 64-65.
322
In the AGN, examples of copies made in the Valley of Oaxaca include the map of Zimatlán and Ocotlán
(1636), AGN, No. 3009, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4; the map of Ocotlán and Zimatlán (1686), AGN,
173
Copies accounted for nearly half of the indigenous maps found after the late seventeenth
century. The copies themselves emerged as original productions that attempted to
capture the details of the model but that also reflected the painter and the patron’s
contemporary sensibilities and needs. In some cases, copies served as models for newer
commissions. Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn have argued that in late nineteenth-
century Mexico copies of sixteenth-century codices “became foundations for new
narratives” that allowed the state to portray an image of a powerful pre-Colombian past
bypassing the colonial context in which they were made.323
In the Valley of Oaxaca,
those who commissioned copies attempted to establish a continuous thread with the past
that often included negotiations with Spanish authorities in order to gain control over
land. This is a particularly salient feature of some títulos primordiales, indigenous titles
made to resemble sixteenth-century legal documents.324
Títulos circulated primarily
during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth as a result of the same pressures
on land that prompted the commission of maps.
No. 3039, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 146, exp 13, f. 33; Map of Ocotlán and Zimatlán (1734), AGN, No. 3018,
Hospital de Jesús, leg. 102, exp. 33, f. 24; the map of Xoxocotlán (1686), AGN, No. 625, Tierras, vol. 129,
exp. 4, f. 249; and the map of Santa María Guelaxé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya y Santa Cruz Papalutla,
(1690[1778]), AGN, No. 0956, Tierras, vol. 1206, exp. 1, cuad. 8, f. 21. At the Mapoteca Orozco y Berra,
see Xoxocotlán, 1718, MOB No. 1176-OYB-7272-A; 1660 original lost; 1771 copy lost, but image
available in Smith, 338. For the Mixteca, see the original Map of Guaytlatlauca, Tosatengo, Coaxochtla,
Mimichtla, Tisacovaya, and Socontitlán (1609), AGN, No. 2500, Tierras, vol. 3619, exp. 4, f. 7; and its
copy, the map of Guaytlatlauca and Socotitlán, made 1709, AGN, No. 0663, Tierras, vol. 254, exp. 2, f.
24bis.
323
Mundy and Leibsohn, 340.
324
For sources on this subject see n. 22 and 145.
174
Negotiating Landscapes
Individuals and corporate entities in the Valley often turned to the courts in
matters related to land. For a large part of the seventeenth century, Xoxocotolán and the
owners of a neighboring hacienda to the west of the town quarreled over the limits of five
acres of land defined by an assortment of trees (Figure 50). According to Xoxocotlán,
the five acres formed part of their patrimonial lands since time immemorial. Three
successive hacienda owners argued the five acres formed part of an estancia de ganado
menor sold by a cacique from Cuilapa to Francisco Muñoz de Tejada, a Spanish
landholder, to add to the property. Beginning in the 1640s, the town and hacienda
owners litigated on separate occasions over the course of fifty years for control of this
property. During each instance, the parties involved presented written evidence,
witnesses provided oral testimony, and officials surveyed the physical terrain resulting in
a verdict, followed by a break in litigation. Tensions usually resurfaced when a new
owner took over the hacienda property, each new tenant claiming the right to the estancia
including the five acres of land and contesting the limits declared by Xoxocotlán. The
records indicate the town relied on the testimony of elder Indian males and some
influential Spaniards to attest to the town’s claims. After decades of successful litigation,
Xoxocotlán lost the right to the five acres in the early 1680s when they failed to provide a
written title. The three phases analyzed below contextualize spatial practices used to
divide, to defend, and to assign meaning to the natural environment, all of which led to
the introduction of the copied map in 1686.
175
The Red Roses Tree (1643-1649)
In 1643, officials from Xoxocotlán complained to the courts about the Spanish
landholder Francisco Muñoz de Tejada. According to the complaint, Muñoz violently
expelled Diego Juárez, Juan Jacinto, and other Indians on September 24 as they cut wood
along a contested boundary northwest of Xoxocotlán’s church. Muñoz, they argued,
attempted to kill Juárez and the others with a spear and took away their axes humiliating
them and committing other, unspecified, offenses.325
Muñoz had also prevented
Xoxocotlán’s horses and oxen from grazing freely further angering the Indians and
causing the animals much harm. In order to prevent additional altercations, the officers
from Xoxocotlán petitioned Hernando Ortiz de Sepúlveda, the alcalde mayor of the
Cuatro Villas, to affirm the limits of their town’s land in a process known as amojonar, a
survey of natural and manmade boundaries to define property limits.326
Yanna
Yannakakis contends that “ritual boundary marking emerged as a particularly salient
spatial practice because of the degree to which indigenous people accepted Spanish
notions of property, in which firm boundaries were critically important.”327
Amojonar
comprised a key element to assign value to space in Oaxaca.
On September 28, the town’s political officers and other members of the
community along with Ortiz, Muñoz, and Nicolás Rodríguez, a bilingual scribe who
spoke Nahuatl, gathered at the top of a hill toward the western portion of Xoxocotlán’s
325
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 67.
326
Margot Beyersdorff, “Covering the Earth: Mapping the Walkabout in Andean Pueblos de Indios,” Latin
American Research Review 42 (2007), 130.
327
Yanna Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 164.
176
domains. The Indian officers pointed to a tree that blossomed with red roses (árbol de
rosas coloradas) and said it was the first boundary marker, or mojón. They led the group
southward down the hill stopping along the way long enough to rebuild an ancient
boundary stone (mojón antiguo) as they journeyed towards the next marker that skirted el
Camino Real, the King’s Highway. When they reached this ancient mojón―the source
of the conflict―the scribe recorded the following passage: “When we arrived at the
Royal Highway that comes from Antequera to the Villa of Cuilapa, we found another
stone mojón the Indians said was ancient and they placed a cross there. They asked the
alcalde mayor to witness the way they had arranged the markers.”328
This symbolic act
of possession sought to preserve both the boundary marker and the memory of its renewal
in written form. The act was designed to serve as a memory trigger allowing later
generations to reference it in their own disputes with neighbors.
Muñoz had purchased the estancia nine years earlier from Don Gerónimo de Lara
y Guzmán, a powerful cacique from nearby Cuilapa. Lara, a Spanish-speaking Indian
described as ladino who wore Spanish dress boasted, “for some of us, selling them is of
no consequence, there are many more lands that form part of our cacicazgo [entailed
Indian estate] which we farm and lease to others.”329
Caciques, native hereditary lords,
often held entailed estates but their power varied from region to region. When called to
testify about the limits of his estancia, Lara agreed with Xoxocotlán that the piece of land
328
The original transcription reads, “Hasta llegar al Camino Real que se viene de la Ciudad de Antequera a
la Villa de Cuilapa de donde así mismo pareció otro mojón de piedras que dijeron los dichos naturales ser
antiguo y allí pusieron una cruz y pidieron al dicho alcalde mayor se les diese por testimonio de cómo
habían puesto los dichos mojones,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 6.
329
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 20.
177
in dispute did not form part of the original sale. Five witnesses, including four Spaniards
and an Indian cacique, confirmed Lara’s reputable character and proper lineage swaying
the alcalde mayor to recognize the boundary claimed by Xoxocotlán. Except for Lara’s
testimony, no written title appears to have accompanied the Indian town’s defense of its
boundary, a fact not lost on Muñoz.
Muñoz urged the alcalde mayor to reconsider his decision. For Muñoz, the lack
of a written title placed the Indians of the town, not himself, at a disadvantage, a point he
made clearly in a deposition before a scribe on October 3, 1643. He asserted that his title,
a merced (royal land grant) issued in 1591 to cacique Juan Guzmán, a relative of Don
Gerónimo, specified the location of the estancia and he petitioned authorities to measure
the landscape.330
He further argued that “the Indians had not presented authentic proof to
confirm that the lands were theirs,” adding that, in fact, he was one of the first holders
(primeros poseedores) of the property, a testimony of time that sought to bind him to the
land.331
On the surface, Muñoz’s appeal fulfilled the key elements for a successful
lawsuit in New Spain, namely the presentation of an official title of ownership. In 1644,
330
A copy of the original document included in the case states that a merced was issued to “Don Juan de
Guzmán indio principal de la Villa de Cuilapa de un sitio de estancia para ganado menor de ella en la parte
y lugar que en lengua zapoteca dicen Tepeacatontze y en mixteca dicen Cuyen; una loma yerma que va a
dar unas tierras altas peladas que por la una baja una quebradilla y por las dichas lomas a sus lados están
unas quebradillas la cual por mi mandato y comisión fue a ver y vido Luis Suárez de Peralta, alcalde mayor
de la Ciudad de Antequera, AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 68-69. For the sale of the estancia to
Francisco Muñoz de Tejada, Guzmán’s heirs described the location of the property in more detail:
“Decimos que nosotros [The Guzmán caciques] tenemos y poseemos un sitio de estancia despoblado en
una loma yerma a la falda de un cerro alto en el pago que llaman Tepeacatonstui en términos de la Villa de
Cuilapa que linda por la parte del Oriente con tierras del pueblo de Xoxocotlán de esta jurisdicción y por la
parte del norte con unos cerros altos que son tierras realengas y por la del poniente con tierras del cacicazgo
de Mecatepeque y Huihui que son dos barrios de la dicha Villa de Cuilapa y por la del sur con tierras
patrimoniales del cacicazgo de Doña María de Mendoza cacique fue de la dicha villa,” AGN, Tierras, vol.
129, exp. 4, f. 19-20.
331
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 67.
178
judges at the Real Audiencia in Mexico City, the Viceroyalty’s highest judicial authority,
reviewed the case issuing an auto, an official sentence that instead confirmed alcalde
mayor Ortiz de Sepúlveda’s decision to uphold Xoxocotlán’s claim on the five acres of
land.
In Oaxaca, the notion of “time immemorial,” especially among fiercely
competitive ñuu, served to strengthen the bonds between individuals and place by
according first settlers a privileged status. Royal decrees issued in 1588 and again in
1594 stipulated that “estancias and lands awarded to Spaniards should not be detrimental
to Indians” embedding an element of time into the possession of land.332
Recourse to this
device, especially in the absence of a legal title, appealed to an official’s sense of
tradition calling into play the elements of custom and local rule.333
When the natives
from Xoxocotlán brought caciques and elder witnesses to testify on their behalf, they
sought to establish an ongoing relationship between the past and present that had a direct
bearing on land disputes by drawing from peoples’ collective memories. Collective
memories expressed a continual link to the past pliable by those who used them and
constantly in danger of disappearance.334
Muñoz’s claim as a first settler on the property
332
The section that regulated land tenure in the Recopilación de las leyes de los reinos de Indias includes
numerous edicts issued during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries instructing cabildos to
divide lands but to leave Indian lands untouched. That authorities reissued them on a regular basis reflects
the difficulties in upholding these prescriptions. Recopilación de leyes, 118-122.
333
The idea of “time immemorial” appeals to customary practices defined by publicly accepted guidelines.
Similar rhetoric appeared in early modern Spain when different social groups negotiated privileges and
natural resources with authorities. See Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain; and Richard Kagan, Lawsuits
and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
334
Susan Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review 102
(1997), 1373-1377; and Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoir,”
Representations 26 (1989), 9.
179
near Xoxocotlán sought to challenge the Indian’s own claim of time immemorial.
Indeed, memories played an important role in shaping the contours of the Valley of
Oaxaca’s spatial boundaries but they “represented a construct that masked competing
claims through the political domination of a particular group of elites.”335
During this
first moment of contention, a period that lasted roughly from 1644 through 1649, the
natives from Xoxocotlán successfully retained the property that bordered the neighboring
hacienda. They did so without a formal title, relying instead on powerful Indian
witnesses such as Don Gerónimo de Lara to support their claim.
Xoxocotlán v. Antonio Rendón (1649-1660)
Francisco Muñoz’s nephew inherited his uncle’s hacienda and sold it in 1649
prior to his death to another Spaniard by the name of Antonio Rendón, a treasurer for the
Church in Antequera. By 1655, Rendón made advances on the same portion of land
prompting Xoxocotlán to ratify the 1644 amparo, a document that protected the
boundaries defined during their litigation against Muñoz. According to their petition,
individuals under Rendón’s employ attempted to gain control of the land by sowing
maguey plants and allowing Rendón’s cattle to graze freely, a practice that greatly
damaged the natives’ parcels. Juan Pérez de Salamanca, Xoxocotlán’s attorney, stated
his clients held property that belonged to their community which they had possessed
since time immemorial.336
Pérez de Salamanca emphasized the Mixtec town’s
335
Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 173.
336
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 1.
180
relationship to the past by relying on the older manuscripts to establish a claim, especially
since they included a boundary survey that described Xoxocotlán’s mojones. The
importance of memory and manuscripts can be gleaned from a declaration provided by
the officials from Xoxocotlán two years later in 1657 while the case was still unresolved:
“[Our lands are] here marked and surveyed as is clearly evident from these documents we
present . . . We request you order the limits and boundaries of our lands be respected, and
to newly protect our borders with an amparo according to the aforementioned
manuscripts.”337
Clearly, to the natives from Xoxocotlán the fact that their mojones were
memorialized in written form in prior years acted as a shield to protect their property.
Manuscripts produced to defend land stand out as important sites that capture
collective memories revealing the way individuals interacted with the past. In the Valley
of Oaxaca, notaries recorded a range of experiences including petitions and complaints,
notification of witnesses, public announcements and auctions of land, presentations of
written, pictorial, and oral evidence, and land surveys to measure spatial extension.
Ultimately, the relationship between individuals, corporate entities and land was
ritualized and recorded in public acts of possession that brought together litigants,
townspeople, Spanish and Indian authorities, translators, witnesses, and painters to divide
any given estate in the region. In each of these cases, mastery of the past in oral and
written form supported the heavy burden of maintaining land in a contested environment
such as the Valley.
337
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 291.
181
In 1657, Spanish officials visited Xoxocotlán in order to inspect and protect the
boundary markers in dispute. In this case, political officers from the Indian town
engaged collective memories about their territorial limits through an examination of
written documents, but also by recalling the physical landscape which still bore evidence
of earlier boundary inspections. On October 25, 1657 officials from Xoxocotlán led
Spanish authorities as well as the hacienda’s custodian or mayordomo, Manuel de Leyva,
once again to the top of the hill towards the western flanks of the town where the survey
commenced. The scribe noted a pile of large and small rocks next to a set of trees that
included a wild fig and a crimson rose, the latter presumably the same one described over
a decade earlier during the inspection with Francisco Muñoz. After the alcalde mayor
protected (amparó) the boundary, the group followed southward until they reached
another group of rocks the Indians described as “the ancient mojón referred to in said
manuscripts.” 338
By highlighting the earlier encounter, the town sought to establish a
relationship between the boundary and the manuscript’s content to strengthen their claim.
The entourage passed a group of plum trees not mentioned in the previous survey on their
way to the last mojón, a cross on the edge of the Royal Highway erected by former Indian
officials during their boundary walk with Muñoz in September 1643. It is evident from
the day’s transcription that the representatives from Xoxocotlán and the Spanish officials
relied on the older manuscript and the memory of each mojón to confirm the limits of the
property. At the end of the day, the alcalde mayor protected Xoxocotlán’s lands with an
338
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 293.
182
amparo instructing the hacienda’s mayordomo not to trespass or let Rendón’s cattle graze
beyond the limits described in the document.
Three months later, on February 5, 1658 officials from Xoxocotlán returned to
Antequera to present alcalde mayor, Pablo Fajardo de Aguilar, a signed document by
New Spain’s Viceroy, Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, which ratified the earlier
amparo. Fajardo followed prescribed rituals and guidelines when handling the folios
noting, “having seen it, I took it in my hands, kissed it, and placed the letter from my
King and natural lord above my head to carry out [any orders] in compliance with His
Majesty’s wishes.”339
One year later, the natives from Xoxocotlán again petitioned an
amparo to protect their boundaries, this time their mojoneras had started to disappear.
Their request stated that their mojones had “deteriorated with time” but also that some
people were intentionally removing them to cause them harm. On May 5 1659, officials
from Xoxocotlán, Spanish authorities, and other assorted guests gathered again at the
hilltop with the fig tree and crimson roses to follow the trail of mojones that led towards
the cross on the edge of the Royal Highway. We may infer from the records that
Xoxocotlán’s amparo succeeded in thwarting Rendón’s encroachment allowing the town
some measure of control since the complaints stop in 1659. By the end of this cycle, the
town of Xoxocotlán had secured their boundaries through an amparo ratified in Mexico
City by the Viceroy. They had done so by deploying a combination of written titles and
collective memories tied to the natural world, the limits of their town, and their shared
political experience.
339
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 2.
183
The Plum Trees (1676-1692)
In 1676, ownership of the Muñoz hacienda passed to another Spaniard, a captain
named Bartolomé Ruíz. By 1680, Ruíz reclaimed the five acres, now planted with corn
and beans by a set of plum trees near the red rose tree identified in the previous survey.
When Xoxocotlán complained to the courts, Ruíz’s attorney, Diego Fernández de
Córdoba, argued that the five acres in fact formed part of his client’s property.
According to him, it was Xoxocotlán’s residents who had breached the boundary of the
plum trees, the halfway point between the hill with the crimson roses and the cross by the
King’s Highway. Ruíz’s attorney recognized that amparos, legal documents that
sheltered its holder under the law existed which protected the boundaries in favor of
Xoxocotlán, but he claimed the town had succeeded in retaining the land for so long
because of the “improper and impetuous ruling of the alcaldes mayores who against all
justice” protected the natives in the first place.340
This comment sought to discredit past
legal verdicts that according to the attorney reeked of complicity between Spanish
authorities and natives. Ruíz capitalized on the fact that Xoxocotlán had no legal title to
the land grounding his claim to it in the recognition of a legitimate bill of sale like his
own.341
Since he physically controlled the five acres of land in question, he believed the
340
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 81.
341
Ruíz’s traspaso, a transfer of rights and responsibilities from one individual to another, on November
16, 1676 included the transfer cost (1,300 pesos) and the mortgage (censo) on the property stipulating,
“Antonio Rendón otorga que traspasa el dicho sitio y tierras de labor y casas en el edificadas con todas sus
tierras, mercedes, pastos, aguas, y abrevaderos.” The parties agreed to survey the property in the near future
noting, “se obliga de entregarle un mandamiento [a Bartolomé Ruíz] para ajustar la medidad del dicho sitio
y estancia que se le despachó en virtud de los títulos,” but no such document accompanied the docket. Ruíz
did obtain the original merced awarded to Don Juan de Guzmán described in n. 315 as well as subsequent
transfer agreements, boundary surveys, and other related documents associated with the property, AGN,
Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 77-78.
184
lack of a proper title did not work against him. To resolve the dispute, the alcalde mayor
ordered both parties to present evidence of ownership in early 1682 including their legal
records and witnesses.
Xoxocotlán assembled a group of elder males, mostly Indian lords with ties to the
region, whom they called on to support their claim. It presented ten witnesses―eight
Indian men and two Spaniards―who testified about the boundaries that divided the lands
of the town from those of the Ruíz estate. Luis de San Juan, a ninety-five-year old
cacique agreed that the plum trees marked Xoxocotlán’s legitimate boundary; he knew
this, he said, because he attended the amparo described above when serving as a political
officer for Cuilapa. San Juan’s testimony presents a dilemma since the plum trees were
not mentioned during the 1643 boundary walk. It is possible Xoxocotlán’s council
members and Spanish officials chose not to reference the trees in writing but that local
residents identified them as a natural marker. An alternative explanation suggests, as
Ruíz’s attorney later commented, that San Juan lied to authorities in order to support the
town’s claims. Andrés de Velazco, another cacique from Cuilapa, testified that he
witnessed Ruíz’s son, Francisco, enter to the east beyond the plum tree mojones that
marked the property limits, ruining the Indians’ sweet potato fields. Velazco had
participated in an official boundary perambulation in 1657 and knew the borders well.
According to the scribe who transcribed his deposition, Velazco, San Juan, and several
other caciques who gave testimony wore Spanish clothing (traje de español) and spoke
Spanish, both symbols of prestige usually recognized in notarial records.
185
The testimony of the two Spanish witnesses also hints at the way interests shaped
testimony in the Valley. Juan de Almogabar, a thirty-eight-year old landholder,
reluctantly confirmed he had acted as a witness in a boundary survey during a former
dispute between Xoxocotlán and another property owner. When questioned if he knew
anything about the conflict between Ruíz and Xoxocotlán, he stated simply, “No, I know
nothing.” When asked about the relationship between Ruíz and the Indian town, the
witness said, “I only known that they contested [the estancia] this year.” But Almogabar
could not deny that during an earlier land survey he witnessed the boundaries “started at a
tree with crimson flowers leading to a triad of plum trees,” the same marker currently
under contention. Although he confirmed the boundaries, he made a point of
emphasizing he had witnessed Bartolomé Ruíz utilize the five acres of land in the past
and that this was the first time Xoxocotlán complained: “I have seen Antonio Rendón
[the hacienda’s prior owner] and then Bartolomé Ruíz sow beyond the boundaries but I
have never known the Indians to do the same or to contest [this boundary] until now.”342
Hardly the compelling testimony the Indians had hoped for. Weeks later, Xoxocotlán’s
legal counsel criticized Almogabar’s deposition suggesting he feared Ruíz and
deliberately provided false testimony. A second Spanish witness, Marcial de Molano,
also testified. Molano told authorities he knew the land belonged to Xoxocotlán because
he had witnessed a boundary survey presided by an alcalde mayor. Ruíz’s attorney,
342
The original reads, “ha visto que sin embargo de dichos mojones a sembrado cogiéndolos dentro el
dicho Antonio Rendón y después el dicho Capitán Bartolomé Ruíz sin que sepa que los dichos Indios lo
hayan hecho nunca ni contradicho sino es en esta ocasión,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 100.
186
Diego Fernández de Córdoba, later challenged Molano’s testimony suggesting the
witness had ulterior motives to verify Xoxocotlán’s claim.
Ruíz’s attorney brought together a group of individuals that included nine Spanish
men and one Indian from a range of trades including farmers, cattlemen, butchers,
scribes, and public officials. These witnesses emphasized their own connection to the
past and to the hacienda in order to establish a legitimate claim. The testimony of two
men, a Spaniard and an Indian cacique, added a layer of complexity to the suit when they
suggested Don Félix de Mendoza, a powerful cacique from Xoxocotlán with a penchant
for pulque and public displays of violence, also conspired to appropriate the five acres.343
Francisco de Medina, a local scribe from Antequera recalled that eight months prior to
his testimony he had assisted the alcalde mayor of the Cuatro Villas in giving possession
of lands to Simón de Chávez, another cacique from Cuilapa. Chávez was married to
Doña María de Guzmán, a descendent of the original holders of the merced land owned
by Ruíz and a relative of Don Félix; the couple sought to protect their assets. During the
survey, Chávez and Don Félix gathered in Xoxocotlán with a cadre of nobles and other
Indians to claim the land that bordered with Ruíz’s property. According to Medina,
Chávez and Guzmán intended to claim the entire estancia as part of their patrimony
before Bartolomé Ruíz met them at the boundaries to protest the claim. Medina testified
Ruíz challenged the two caciques asking, “How can you claim my estancia and lands that
were sold legitimately by your wife’s grandfather and which I posses with just title?”
343
AGEO, Alcaldías Mayores, leg. 48, exp 10. See discussion in Chapter 1, 78-86.
187
Chávez and Guzmán responded they no longer wished to take possession of the estancia
and proceeded to survey other parts of the cacicazgo.344
The final witness, a forty-eight year old Indian male in Spanish dress named Juan
de Aguilar suggested a conspiracy in Xoxocotlán to deprive Ruíz of his property.
Aguilar, a cacique from Xoxocotlán, assured the judge that the estancia, presumably
including the five acres belonged to Ruíz having passed down legitimately from
Francisco Muñoz. He stated that because he believed Ruíz to be the rightful owner, the
other native officials avoided and refused to speak to him lest he reveal the truth of their
schemes. Aguilar’s testimony exposed a clear rift within Xoxocotlán’s indigenous elite,
many of whom supported the powerful Don Félix. During the earlier dispute between the
town and Francisco Muñoz in the 1640s, officials from Xoxocotlán relied on assistance
from Don Gerónimo de Lara, a wealthy cacique from Cuilapa, to verify the limits of the
estancia. Following the same strategy to litigate against Ruíz proved more complicated
since Mendoza’s actions raised suspicion among his critics.
In a petition to the alcalde mayor in June 1682, Ruíz’s attorney, Fernández de
Córdoba claimed Don Félix de Mendoza had persuaded the witnesses to provide false
testimony in order to strengthen their case. He stated the witnesses testified at the behest
of Don Félix, “an enemy of mine, who for this occasion incited this conflict persuading
the other natives from the town to do it with his great authority as a powerful
344
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 401.
188
nobleman.”345
Fernández claimed Mendoza imposed derramas, forced payments that
exceeded Spanish demands for tribute, on Xoxocotlán’s residents and noted that
Mendoza’s father-in-law, ninety-five-year-old cacique Luis de San Juan and other kin
made up the great portion of Xoxocotlán’s witness list. The lawyer capitalized on the
tension between Xoxocotlán’s ruling elite arguing that Aguilar’s privileged position as a
mayordomo, a custodian of community lands or other town possessions, confirmed his
client’s testimony.
The picture that emerges from the testimony of these witnesses describes a
complex web of relationships tempered by competing interests in land and in some cases
leading to hostile accusations and open enmity. “The question of boundaries,” argues
Yannakakis, “became a fraught one in which local knowledge of land tenure on the one
hand, and of Spanish property law on the other, could be wielded as weapons by
indigenous elites acting as witnesses in pursuit of varied objectives.”346
In the Valley,
alliances took on various shapes that often pitted townspeople and lesser nobles seeking
access to resources against more powerful caciques looking to retain traditional rights and
privileges.347
The fact that Juan de Aguilar, an Indian notable, testified against Mendoza
and Xoxocotlán’s officials evinces the differences of indigenous interests and memory in
matters related to land. Fernández’s comments about Mendoza’s sphere of power
345
“Don Félix de Mendoza, principal del dicho pueblo de Xoxocotlán, enemigo de mi parte y quien por
dicha ocasión le movió dicho pleito persuadiendo a los demás naturales de dicho pueblo a ello con la
mucha mano que tenía como principal y poderoso,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 129.
346
Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 165.
347
In the Valley, 18 cases—political disputes from 1582 to 1762; land disputes, 12 cases from 1576 to
1814. See Taylor, Landlord and Peasant, 239.
189
suggests key Indian figures held influential positions in local affairs that threatened
Spanish and indigenous interests alike. Likewise, individuals such as Bartolomé Ruíz
played an active role in shaping the region’s spatial contours.
In Mexico City, judges at the Real Audiencia reviewed the case in September
1682 issuing a verdict in favor of Bartolomé Ruíz. In Antequera, the alcalde mayor
validated the disputed boundaries as described by Ruíz and warned the Indians not to
disturb the Spanish landholder’s possession.348
During this phase of litigation, Ruíz
secured the five acres of land under dispute near Xoxocotlán. Although this moment
marked a shift in the relationship between Xoxocotlán and the neighboring hacienda, it
did not deter the town from appealing the decision and further pursuing the claim. Four
years later, the Real Audiencia in Mexico City granted Xoxocotlán an appeal.349
The
introduction of the old map in 1686 and the subsequent commission of its copy were
directly related to the chain of events described above.
A True and Faithful Copy
The map of Xoxocotlán copied by Zarate in 1686 (Figure 5) emphasized the
town’s natural boundaries to legitimize the claims against Ruíz.350
Oriented to the west
(top of the map) towards the archeological site of Monte Albán’s southern range, an
important ritual center in Oaxaca’s central valley, the map’s upper portion includes a
348
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 415.
349
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 172.
350
Appendix A includes a full transcription and translation of the Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán’s two
dozen features.
190
chain of stylized mountains that extend downward on the right hand side. An ocelot
(Figure 51, No. 1) sits atop the mountain at the top left while a stylized tree with red-
feathered leaves stands on the right (Figure 51, No. 2). The ocelot suggests a symbolic
relationship with the mountain reminiscent of the place-glyph used in earlier indigenous
mapping to convey meaning, in this case describing Ocelotepeque, ocelot hill
(ocelotl=ocelot/-peque=hill). Mary Elizabeth Smith explains place signs as logograms,
“pictorial representations of a place-name in which the pictorial units are the equivalent
of one or more words.”351
Indigenous painters used logographic expression in local maps
throughout the sixteenth century but this practice declined by the early seventeenth.
The moon in the map’s top center (Figure 51, No. 3) suggests nightfall to indicate
the cardinal direction west. The second moon on the farthest right (Figure 51, No. 4)
appears to blend into the landscape perhaps as an attempt to evoke noo yoo, literally
“moon-faced,” a reference to the flower that gave the town its first Mixtec name. After
subduing the region in the late fifteenth century, the Nahuas rechristened the town
Xoxocotlán, the “land of abundant sour fruits” because of the many plum trees in the
region, a group of which defined the property under dispute. The presence of multiple
names reveals a layer of ordering used to assign meaning to social and political space.352
In Zárate’s copy, alphabetic glosses in Mixtec next to specific places (Figure 51, No. 9-
21) inscribed the landscape to fit Mixtec needs, a practice that as Barbara Mundy has
351
Smith, 37.
352
See, for instance, Marta Herrera, Santiago Muñoz, and Santiago Paredes, “Geographies of the Name:
Naming Practices Among the Muisca and Páez in the Audiencias of Santafé and Quito, Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Latin American Geography 11/S (2012): 93-118.
191
noted witnessed an attempt to control the blank spaces of a map but instead rendered
them virtually unreadable to their Spanish audience.353
On the map’s right hand edge, an unnamed town represented by a church (Figure
51, No. 5) connects to another town (Figure 51, No. 7) by a southern road marked by
footmarks, the pre-Colombian sign for travel, and hoof marks, a sixteenth-century device
that signaled the arrival of horses and beasts of burden in Oaxaca.354
A series of mojones,
or boundary markers (Figure 51, No. 8a-c), define the town’s borders along the road. A
mojón with a cross on the top (Figure 51, No. 8b) suggests it represents the boundary
described during the land survey conducted in 1643 when upon arriving at the Royal
Highway, officers from Xoxocotlán petitioned the alcalde mayor to witness their placing
of a cross on an ancient marker. Below this stretch of land lies the town of Xoxocotlán in
the center of the manuscript symbolized by a church. Zárate inscribed it “huee ñoho
Santa Cruz,” the “sacred house of Santa Cruz,” rather than Xoxocotlán. One may note
the use of a Catholic theme, “The Holy Cross,” a symbol that catered to Spanish
sensibilities about religion and the state but also to indigenous peoples’ incorporation of
Catholicism in their daily lives. Leibsohn argues that the use of the church sign occupied
a progressively privileged position on Indian maps, gradually replacing hill glyphs in the
sixteenth century.355
Churches, symbols laden with value across cultural spheres in the
colonial world, allowed officials to identify towns on maps while drawing attention to
353
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 175.
354
Though not mentioned on the map, the prominent size of each church and their positioning on the map
suggest the original painting described de Villa of Oaxaca and Cuilapa, to which Xoxocotlán was subject.
355
Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography,” 273.
192
indigenous spatial ordering.356
It is no coincidence that Zárate and the painter before him
situated the key town in the center of the map, to emphasize its importance. J. B. Harley
noted that such practices added “geopolitical force and meaning to representation” found
on maps.357
A partitioned area with a black and green border in the central left portion of
the map (Figure 51, No. 11) encases a series of boundaries, perhaps an attempt to indicate
the old map’s original purpose since none of them appear to have any direct relationship
with the Ruíz case. At the map’s bottom center, a bright orange sun signals east.
The map’s material condition played an important role in framing its message.
Zárate used a large piece of coarse linen fabric (88 x79 cm) and medium brown pigment
for the background combining white, green, red, and violet colors to define mountains,
streams, and buildings. His choice of materials reveals a distinct aspect of the map’s
message. As Harley has argued, “all maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such
as invocations of authority . . . and appeals to a potential readership through the use of
colors, decoration, typography, dedications, or written justifications of their method.”358
The 1686 map followed pictorial traditions that required the application of specialized
knowledge for the selection and preparation of organic and inorganic materials to paint, a
distinct aspect of indigenous cartography throughout Oaxaca and other parts of
356
Frances Karttunen argues that sacred directions (east, north, west, south, and center) represented one of
the most enduring aspects of pre-Hispanic culture during the colonial period, “After the Conquest: The
Survival of Indigenous Patterns of Life and Belief,” Journal of World History 3 (1992), 242. I find Louise
Burkhart’s assertion that the layout of native homes, “a microcosmic establishment of order, laid out to the
four directions with the fire at the center of the house,” reflected indigenous ideas of spatial ordering found
on maps, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1989), 59-60.
357
J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” in The New Nature of Maps, 157.
358
Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” 163.
193
Mesoamerica. The use of cloth and its size evoke a genre of native pictorial manuscripts
known as lienzos, painted genealogies and elite histories usually made on linen material
typically produced during the second half of the sixteenth century.359
Together, these
elements gave the map a unique visual presence that intentionally summoned the past.
Indigenous maps did not strictly depend on spatial precision, relying often on the
visual and symbolic elements that characterized their appearance. This rhetorical strategy
appealed to an earlier period, a time immemorial when pictorial documents carried legal
value in the Spanish courts helping native towns and individuals secure grants of land and
social privileges.360
Yannakakis has observed that in the Zapotec sierra in northern
Oaxaca, the importance of a native title “rested on its form―a title that straddled the eras
of their ‘gentility’ and colonialism and that legitimized political power and landholding
by virtue of both local lineage and royal authority―and not on its specific content.”361
In
the case of the map of Xoxocotlán, the actual site of the dispute, a mere five acres, was
not as relevant to the town as the fact that they controlled specific territorial boundaries
tied to a long line of nobles predating the arrival of the Spaniards. By deploying the map,
the town council attempted to reinforce this notion.
359
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer who recently pointed out the exceptions to this rule
including the Lienzo of Analco, Lienzo of Tlaxcala, and the Lienzo of Quauhquechollan, all of which deal
with the Spanish conquest. See Yannakakis, “Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in
the Lienzo de Analco,” Ethnohistory 58 (2011): 653-682; Travis Kranz, “Visual Persuasion: Sixteenth-
Century Tlaxcalan Pictorials in Response to the Conquest of Mexico,” in The Conquest All Over Again:
Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder
(Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010); and Florine Asselbergs, Conquered Conquistadors: The
Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, A Nahua Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala (Boulder: University Press of
Colorado, 2008).
360
See Cummins, “From Lies to Truth.”
361 Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 176.
194
In a highly unusual act in the cartographic process, Domingo de Zárate inscribed
two certifying texts at the bottom of each corner of the map. In the first (Figure 52) he
stated the alcalde mayor approved the map on 25 October 1686; his rubric appeared
below the inscription. The second gloss (Figure 53) reads, “By order of Captain Don
Antonio Abellán . . . I copied this map based on the original given to me; [I made it]
according to the traditions of my art of painting without damaging or diminishing a single
thing.”362
Mundy has observed that indigenous painters rarely signed their maps making
Zárate’s words the more revealing.363
For one thing, he understood the importance of his
trade, his art of painting, a visual system with a distinct form and style that required the
application of certain skills honed by masters in their craft. In another respect, Zárate’s
written glosses as well as Abellán’s earlier commission bear witness to an exchange of
services prompted by the demand for an indigenous map. At the end of the meeting,
Medina, the scribe, recorded the following in a separate folio:
I certify under oath that the natives of the town of Xoxocotlán, subject to the villa of
Cuilapa in this marquisate, presented two maps, one of them old, torn, and frayed with
the passage of time, the other copied and produced according to and as the ancient one by
Don Domingo de Zárate, cacique and a master of painting. [The map was] mandated and
licensed by Captain Don Antonio de Abellán y Carrasco . . . [to recognize] the borders
and boundary markers of this entire jurisdiction. Having seen and compared one with the
362
The original inscription reads, “Por orden del Capitan Don Antonio de Abellan . . . cupie [copie?] esta
Mapa según su original que se me dio sin estrepar [estropear?] ni disminuir cosa Alguna según se
acostumbra en mi arte de la pintura,” Map of Xoxocotlán (1686), AGN, No. 625.
363
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 62.
195
other, his lordship declared it true and faithfully copied and detailed, seemingly with the
same boundary signs and expositions as the old one.364
The scribe’s words accredited the relationship between the Indian master painter, the
native town, and the Spanish official in the process authenticating the map’s contents and
bringing the exchange of this service to an end.
The act of certification represents an important element of mapmaking in Oaxaca.
Certification legitimized the use of native maps in a court of law. The lack of a proper
certifying mark, usually in the form of a gloss and signature that verified the “true and
faithful” depiction of a site could render a map worthless from a legal standpoint. “What
is crucial,” notes Cummins of indigenous pictorial records in the sixteenth century “is
that a forum for the presentation of non-European evidence could be constructed so as to
be judged as ‘true.’”365
The copied map’s inspection in the late seventeenth century
suggests a degree a familiarity between scribe, painter, official and the use of pictorial
documents recalling legal practices from a century earlier.366
Admitting a map was an
important part of the process but it did not guarantee the owner a victory in litigation.
Judges in Oaxaca during this later period “valued the written text above both orality and
the image, especially where legal evidence was concerned.”367
In other respects judges
seemed to have grown accustomed to native pictorial records so much so they could often
364
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 176.
365
Cummins, 158.
366
Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico,” in Native
Traditions in the Postcoquest World, ed. Elizabeth Boone and Thomas Cummins (Washington: Dumbarton
Oaks, 1998), 149.
367
Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 166.
196
identify titles of dubious origin.368
For Xoxocotlán, the alcalde mayor’s certification
allowed the town to introduce the map into the proceedings.
The Copied Maps of Xoxocotlán
The 1686 map of Xoxocotlán has enjoyed little of the attention directed at the
more popular copied maps of Xoxocotlán made in 1718 (Figure 54) and 1771.369
All
three maps share some similarities yet the traces of logographic writing and the
representations of Monte Albán has drawn the attention of pre-Colombianists much more
closely to the 1718 and 1771 models than to the 1686 copy which has typically appeared
as a footnote to the other two maps.370
According to the two copied maps made in the
eighteenth century, an earlier model made in 1660 defined the town’s limits as a result of
a survey ordered and approved by alcalde mayor Francisco de Lagunas Portocarrero. The
western mountains of Xoxocotlán, an area that straddled the ceremonial site of Monte
Albán and also appeared in the 1686 map, included a series of animals and plants as well
as various military and ritual objects. The original painter used an adaptation of the
place-glyph, a Mesoamerican convention that combined a hill symbol with an animal or
368
On this point, see Sousa and Terraciano, 351.
369
Map of Xoxocotlán (1718), Mapoteca Orozco y Berra, MOB No. 1176-OYB-7272-A. Map of
Xoxocotlán (1771), lost; image available in Smith, 338.
370
Smith, 202-210; Maarten Jansen, “Monte Albán y Zaachila en los códices mixtecos,” in The Shadow of
Monte Alban: Politics and Historiography in Postclassic Oaxaca, Mexico, ed. Maarten Jansen, Peter
Kröfges, and Michel Oudijk (Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African, and Amerindian
Studies, 1998); and Maarten Jansen, Dante García Ríos, Ángel Rivera Guzmán, “La identificación de
Monte Albán en los códices Mixtecos: Nueva Evidencia,” paper presented at the VI Monte Albán
Roundtable Conference, Oaxaca, Mexico. Enrique Méndez Martínez and Enrique Méndez Torres recently
published the 1686 map with a transcription of the written glosses and a short passage of the court case
between Xoxocotlán and Bartolomé Ruíz. See Historia de Zaachila, Cuilapan, y Xoxocotlan: Tres pueblos
unidos por sus orígines (Oaxaca City: Instituto Cultural Oaxaqueno F.O.R.O., 2007), 432-440.
197
thing to express the name of a town. Below each glyph, the painter or a scribe wrote both
Nahua and Mixtec place names for every locality.371
Three warriors in loincloths—one
holding a club known as a macana and a shield, the other two holding a bow and arrow—
share the space with three clothed individuals. The teponaztle, a ceremonial drum, and a
noble woman wearing a quesquémil and holding a club sit atop the town of
Ocelotepeque, ocelot hill. After successfully identifying the town’s mojones, the scribe
returned the 1660 map to officials from Xoxocotlán.
The timing of this survey and the commission of the map came shortly after the
1659 amparo when Xoxocotlán litigated against Antonio Rendón. It seems likely native
officials feared another legal battle with Rendón or some other neighbor and decided to
add a map to their titles to strengthen their position in any future entanglements. A 1718
copy of the map (Figure 54) authenticated by a local scribe confirms Xoxocotlán used it
after its original commission. The map inspection confirmed the copy faithfully
resembled the model made in 1660. In 1771, the town commissioned another copy, this
time based on the 1718 model. A comparison of the two reveals they differed in several
ways. For instance, the painter’s choice of materials for the 1718 model included
watercolors and European paper while for the1771 copy its painter opted for oil over a
canvas sheet. The newer copy pictured more animals and flora including an assortment
of trees, shrubs, livestock, and a laborer caring for a herd on the upper right hand corner.
The brushed quality of the 1771 version injects an element of European landscapes not
noticeable in the earlier copy. While the written glosses on the 1718 map merely indicate
371
Mary Elizabeth Smith has argued the written glosses do not necessarily reflect the glyph sign used in
each case, 204-210.
198
place names, the scribe’s intervention in the 1771 copy focused on the map’s surface
where a certifying text just above the church of Xoxocotlán in the center, another to the
right of it, and a large cartouche at the bottom of the page traced the map’s lineage.
These written elements tied each copy to its earlier model confirming the relationship
between town and land. The comparison of the two pieces suggests nuances existed
between maps and their copies, variations that accounted for a painter’s pictorial choices,
a patron’s needs, and an official’s authority to legitimize documents.
The 1686 Map of Xoxocotlán in Circulation
The introduction of the map followed the Real Audiencia’s decision in 1686 to
grant Xoxocotlán an appeal on the verdict issued in 1682 in Bartolomé Ruíz’s favor. An
appeal meant mounting another full-scale inquiry including land surveys, presentation of
written evidence, and witness testimony. In preparation for the upcoming legal battle,
two regidores (councilmen) from Xoxocotlán presented the map to facilitate an
impending survey. They claimed the map described the town’s territorial limits, its
battered state impressing its age upon viewers and providing a unique memorial device to
its holders. But the copy does not indicate with any precision the location of the disputed
property. Instead, Domingo de Zárate, the map’s painter, represented a visual order from
a century earlier that described the town’s spatial boundaries.
Indian maps aroused suspicion precisely because they interpreted the natural
environment and its social relationships according to native traditions. In the case of
Xoxocotlán, Ruíz’s attorney questioned the officers’ use of the map stating that,
199
The reproduction of the map presented by the natives with the alcalde mayor’s
certification [and] its convenient comparison with the old painting, is useless. Without an
accompanying title, the map does not give, nor can it give [its holders] legitimate right
over land because it is an instrument that completely lacks the juridical authority to make
it valid; it depends entirely on the will of those who make it and those who commission
it.372
In fact, a decree issued by the crown in 1643 validated the use of pictorial documents, at
least theoretically, in New Spain.373
Still, most officials could not make sense of an
Indian map unless guided by a native painter who could explain its content. Yannakakis
has argued that patrons of indigenous maps and manuscripts lost control of their
reception “especially if the readers of the maps and texts did not share the cultural
assumptions and codes that the maps and texts expressed.”374
Accepting an indigenous
map into a legal proceeding allowed parties to make claims on land, but that did not
guarantee the map a favorable reception nor did all parties consider them appropriate
forms of evidence. Despite the fact that Abellán y Carrasco, the alcalde mayor, certified
the map and the copy’s inspection, the attorney’s comments challenged their authenticity.
After entering the public record, the 1686 map underwent further scrutiny in the
hands of attorneys, magistrates, and other scribes who had access to it during
Xoxocotlán’s appeal. Juan López de Pareja, the town’s attorney, introduced it as
evidence in Mexico City in the fall of 1687. By the time Ruíz’s lawyer petitioned the
372
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 184.
373
Florescano, Historia de las historias, 241.
374
Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 166.
200
Audiencia in 1688 to drop the native’s suit, he had also inspected the map noting, “As a
new copy it relies on the details of the ancient original that is not included [in the brief].
Even though [the original] could assist the natives [in their case], they refuse to exhibit it
without a clear reason.”375
Authorities in Oaxaca mentioned the map in 1691 where it
functioned as a guide during a vista de ojos, a boundary inspection, and a measurement of
land in March of that year ordered by the Audiencia.376
Weeks later, authorities
questioned witnesses for the native town about their knowledge of the five acres. Their
testimony foregrounds the map’s role at the community level where its introduction by
Xoxocotlán’s political officers and its use during the case by Spanish authorities served
to reinvigorate community ties and spatial boundaries.
Witnesses responded to questions about the location of the five acres and about
the parties involved in the dispute. During the interrogation, authorities referred all
witnesses to the map and the legal documents the town had collected over time. Six of
them, including eighty-year old Juan Pérez, declared they had seen the map. Jacinto
Gómez, a native from Atzompa who relocated to Xoxocotlán after marriage and several
others testified they had heard about the map. Two natives from neighboring San Pedro
Apostol testified they knew “[Xoxocotlán] had a mapa/pintura and titles,” both declaring
they had “seen them and heard them read aloud, and they included the [disputed] piece of
375
“Porque como nuevo trasunto supone la pintura del original antiguo que no se haya presentado, que
cuando pudiera aprovechar a dichos naturales, de necesidad precisa se reúsa exhibir,” AGN, Tierras, vol.
129, exp. 4, f. 184.
376
AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 197.
201
land.”377
The testimony of the last two witnesses suggests the map may have served as a
tool used by prominent elders to orally recount the history of the town during ritual
festivities and other important occasions.378
But which map did witnesses reference, the
original or the copy?
During the interrogation witnesses would have had access only to the copy
because of the frail state of the original, the reason given for commissioning the copy in
the first place. The two Indians from San Pedro, however, surely referred to the old map
in their testimony, especially since up to that point in time the copy itself circulated
primarily within the region’s legal channels. Others who had just heard about the map
confirmed its existence during the deposition. In both instances, the act of viewing the
“true and faithful” copy established a symbolic link with the past setting a precedent that
certified the town’s response to spatial threats regardless of the outcome of the case. The
interplay between witnesses, native officers, translators, and Spanish officials to define
the map’s use in a formal legal setting reveals the various stages of authentication, a joint
effort between social actors with diverse, often conflicting interests.
Wither the Plum Trees
On May 12, 1691, the alcalde mayor of the Cuatro Villas Gerónimo Fernández
Franco ordered a measurement of the disputed five acres. He solicited persons
377
The scribe recorded virtually the same response for thirty-eight-year-old Joseph de Santiago, “Por
constarle de que tienen mapa pintura y títulos que los ha visto y oído leer;” as he did for Lucas de los
Santos, “que sabe este testigo que los susodichos tienen mapa y títulos por haberlos visto y oídolos leer y
que en ellos se incluye este pedazo de tierra,” see AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 210-211.
378
Sousa and Terraciano, 351; and Yannakakis, “Witnesses, Spatial Practices,” 164.
202
knowledgeable in surveying, appointing two Spaniards with direct ties to the case. Juan
de Almogabar and Joseph Rodríguez, the two men selected, had both testified a decade
earlier during Xoxocotlán’s first embroilment with Bartolomé Ruíz. Even though
Almogabar had appeared on behalf of the native town, he had seemed reluctant to support
their claim eliciting a warning from Xoxocotlán’s attorney that the witness surely feared
Ruíz. Joseph Rodríguez, a scribe and former alcalde mayor, had testified for the Spanish
landholder questioning the timing of the Indian town’s suit. This obvious conflict of
interest went unmentioned by Fernández Franco, the ranking official on the case. Two
days later at seven in the morning, Spanish and native authorities, Ruíz, the surveyors, a
translator, and assorted witnesses met at the town’s church to initiate the inspection. The
alcalde mayor used a cordel, a rope that for the occasion measured 100 varas, assigning it
to Almogabar and Rodríguez to mark distances after which he mounted his horse giving
the order to begin the survey.
The group traveled west towards the old plum trees. When they arrived at the
spot, the trees had withered. According to the scribe, the roots on the ground provided
the only physical evidence of their existence,
We walked east to west nearly half a league from the town until we reached a
boundary marker for a maize field [that had been] recently harvested [“está en
rastrojo,” noted the scribe, “in stubble.”]. Both the natives and Captain Bartolomé Ruíz
said that was the location of the plum trees mentioned in the royal dispatch; you could
still find the trees’ noticeable roots.379
379
“Se fue caminando de oriente a poniente como media legua de distancia de dicho pueblo a llegar a un
paraje [de] tierras de sembrado de maíz que está en rastrojo en donde dijeron así dichos naturales como el
203
For Xoxocotlán, the remainder of the inspection seemed to reflect the loss of the trees.
Almogabar and Rodríguez determined the distance between the town’s last house and the
plum tree mojoneras measured 1,518 varas, well in excess of the fundo legal issued a few
years earlier.380
“From what has been seen and inspected,” wrote the scribe, “the alcalde
mayor finds that not only does the town possess the 600 varas mandated by the recent
Royal decree [real cédula], but it exceeds [the mandate] by 918 and one half varas.”381
This revelation seemed to weigh heavily on the alcalde mayor more than any argument
over an old boundary. By the end of the inspection, the official declared he found
Xoxocotlán’s petition vague and unfounded, with so much access to land, he couldn’t
understand why the Indian town would wish to penetrate the five acres of land. One year
later, the Real Audiencia ratified the five acres in favor of Ruíz absolving the Spanish
landholder from the accusations from the native town. The scribe who informed
Xoxocotlán of the formal verdict noted that they did not challenge the decision.
dicho Cap. Bartolomé Ruíz ser donde estaban los árboles de ciruelas que se contenían en dicho Real
despacho de que se hallaban todavía las raíces patentes de dichos árboles,” AGN, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4,
f. 213.
380 The decree directed officials in New Spain “to designate and give agricultural land to all Indian towns
from all the provinces of New Spain, not just the 500 varas of land surrounding the town. The distance
should be measured from the [town’s] last house, not from the churches . . . and not only will it be the
aforementioned 500 varas, but one hundred more to equal six hundred [‘se dé y señale generalmente a los
Pueblos de Indios de todas las provincias de Nueva España sus sementeras no solo las 500 varas de tierra
del rededor de la Población y que estas sean medidas no desde las iglesias, sino de la última casa . . . y que
no solo sean las referidas 500 varas sino 100 más a cumplimiento de 600’].” Authorities intended the
Royal decree to curb Spanish encroachment of Indian lands: “Se van entrando los dueños de estancia y
tienen la de los indios quitándoselas y apoderándose de ellas unas veces violentamente, y otras con fraude,
por cuya razón los miserables indios dejan sus casas y pueblos (que es lo que apetecen,” AGEO, Alcaldías
Mayores, leg. 62, exp. 12, 1687.
381
“Por lo que ha visto y reconocido dicho señor alcalde mayor halla que no tan solamente tiene dicho
pueblo las 600 varas de ordenanza y nueva Real cédula sino que le sobran 918 varas y media hasta dichos
mojones,” AGN, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 215.
204
Conclusion
To resolve conflicting interests, litigants were hard pressed to trace and document
the origins of their claims, a process that often included the presentation of a variety of
written and pictorial manuscripts as well as oral testimonies. In the case of Xoxocotlán,
the period from 1643 to 1649 suggests Spanish officials recognized oral testimony as an
appropriate form of evidence in a land dispute despite the presence of written titles in the
case. By the 1680s, the lack of a written title to verify ownership of land worked against
the town that then proceeded to introduce an old community map. By deploying a copy
of that map, Xoxocotlán sought to establish a connection with the past in order to
legitimate their use of land in the present. The copied map circulated across multiple
settings including town councils and the local and regional courts of Oaxaca and Mexico
City where it was scrutinized by a range of officials, legal professionals, and witnesses.
In Oaxaca, a growing interest in the occupation of land for agricultural
development and cattle ranching starting in the second half of the seventeenth century
generated competition for natural resources. Entry into a land dispute involved following
a set of rules and protocols including the use of scribes, cartographers and legal
professionals, topographical surveys, ritual boundary walks, and the deployment of
witnesses and manuscripts. Witnesses, especially elder Indian males functioned as
carriers of knowledge who played important roles in defining spatial boundaries. Spatial
boundaries relied on written titles but also included indigenous maps. Natives
demonstrated considerable shrewdness navigating Spanish legal channels, though as the
case of Xoxocotlán suggests, their efforts could sometimes go unrewarded.
205
CONCLUSION:
A FINAL REMARK
As a legacy of the colonial period, indigenous mapmaking represents a set of
experiences that left a deep imprint on the histories of local settlements across Latin
America. Legend has it that a man once strolled into Santa María Atzompa, a town in the
Valley of Oaxaca with roots that stretch as far back as the seventh century, with his sick
horse in tow. The traveler asked the townspeople for help to care for his horse but they
refused him assistance and the animal died shortly after. As retribution for their
behavior, the man cut off a portion of a map (Figure 1) that described the town’s lands, a
prized possession used as a symbol of local identity, an historical artifact, and at times, as
a legal instrument. In fact the map has a large piece (Figure 55) missing that stretches
from the center to the bottom right corner immediately below a key to the map’s
components. The defacement of the map, itself a violent action against a treasured
object, possesses a deep connection to the contested nature of land tenure. In the story,
the act of cutting symbolizes not simply the loss of land but the struggle associated with
accessing and defending it over time. This short but powerful anecdote circulates today
among residents of the town not in the pages of a Novohispanic notarial manuscript such
as the ones analyzed in the preceding pages.382
In many ways, it speaks to the challenges
faced by historical actors across time to divide and negotiate the land and the strategies
they developed to do so.
382
Jennifer Matthews, e-mail message to author, June 10, 2008.
206
Negotiating colonial rule included the effective use of the court system as well as
gaining fluency in alphabetic writing. Nahuas, Mayas, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs not only
learned to write with letters in Spanish but they applied the skill to express their own
languages. Writing served to record communal histories, petition authorities in civil and
criminal actions, and for local record keeping revealing the depth of change in systems of
knowledge within Indian settlements. The New Philology has shown that natives met the
rapid decline of pictographic writing with an equally significant increase in alphabetic
writing.383
This key period marks the transition from a system of pictographic
communication to an alphabetic one while witnessing the blending of symbols that
resulted from contact, a practice increasingly reflected in the production of Amerindian
maps.
Manuscript culture represented a strong aspect of the Hispanic world with roots
stretching into the Middle Ages, when practices to remember gradually shifted from oral
to written traditions. Across Spanish America, scribes, clerics and officials relied on
record keeping addressing issues of imperial administration in the Indies. Notarial
documents, manuscripts largely written by Spaniards for Spaniards to facilitate legal
matters, recorded the activities of the subjects of the viceroyalty. Officials and scribes
applied various social, administrative, and racial categories to make distinctions among
those mentioned. As Walter Mignolo proposes, alphabetic writing served as the most
important tool of power for Spain to dominate the New World. Royal officers,
bureaucrats, clerics, and explorers recognized their system of literacy as the epitome of
383
See Lockhart, The Nahuas, 331; Terraciano, The Mixtecs, 15.
207
civilization, especially when compared to the non-alphabetic ones used in Mesoamerica
and the Andes.384
The expression “reading against the grain,” a reference for the need to
contextualize the written elements in a source represents a constant reminder to question
the motivations of those whose voices we read, and to dig a little deeper into the
experience of individuals as they negotiated relationships.
The tension between cultural attitudes towards others and the realities of social
engagement in everyday life has been a central theme in this study. Consider the role of
Spanish scribes unfamiliar with native traditions. These individuals faced significant
challenges interpreting pictorial documents of various kinds to negotiate aspects of
viceregal rule associated with tribute, labor, rights and privileges, commerce, and land.
Despite their reservations, colonial officials, regional judges, and scribes during the last
quarter of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth sought the services of native
painters to map localities in order to assign land to natives and Spaniards alike, to award
privileges, and to comply with efforts to survey imperial domains in the New World.
They developed tools based on notarial protocols and common sense that allowed them to
make the maps legible, their annotations a permanent reminder of their participation in
the mapmaking process but also a useful guide for future readers. It was exactly this type
of practical experience that forced Europeans to challenge knowledge rooted in antiquity,
384
Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance.
208
to revise and establish new parameters with which to measure and interpret recent
findings, and the most effective one used to build empires.385
As a tool of empire, cartography allowed cosmographers, surveyors, engineers,
and officials to visually describe imperial domains. Maps, we know, encode a set of
principles designed to organize and describe but they are never value free windows into
spatial relationships. Maps, like any other document, carry the goals and attitudes of
their makers and patrons. In the case of indigenous maps, both historical actors and
contemporary scholars have leveled criticisms discrediting the practices of the natives
who made them. For an earlier generation of historians of cartography, maps
represented mathematical precision used to accurately determine the location of places
and boundaries; not until the late twentieth century did scholars of cartography formulate
cultural assumptions about the making of maps. For officials, lawyers, and those who
stood to gain from rejecting their validity in court, maps were biased manuscripts
designed to represent someone else’s worldview.
A painter’s experience took shape under a colonial regime faced with shifting
social conditions linked to military aggression, disease, evangelization, tribute extraction,
and forced labor. Throughout the sixteenth century, painters from different generations
executed a range of pictorial documents that illustrated family genealogies, recorded
tribute, described historical events, and mapped regions. Painters originated within the
upper echelons of indigenous society where their hereditary status afforded them access
385
See Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992), 4
209
both to European learning and customs, as well as traditional knowledge transmitted
primarily through oral means. The social units that ordered their lives featured
prominently in the maps they produced during the colonial period.
As practitioners of early modern botany and chemistry, painters have received
short shrift in narratives of a history of science deeply rooted in the activities of
Europeans. Recent studies in the field have demonstrated the importance of Iberian
achievements in cartography, medicine, botany, and astronomy, highlighting a vibrant
intellectual culture in Spain and Spanish America but they have barely scratched the
surface when it comes to contributions by indigenous people. By considering the skills
used to make a map, we learn that painters applied botanical knowledge to manufacture
the colorants and pigments that gave meaning to the region’s geographical features
including rivers, mountains, and flora as well as the built environment and its temples,
houses, and ranches. Painters in Oaxaca demonstrated versatility in their selection of
colorants adapting to the introduction of European materials such as paper and ink. A
map’s distinct material condition embodied indigenous identity, a feature that often
generated mistrust among the elaborate network of scribes, judges, lawyers, Indian lords,
landholders, and translators who controlled the production of handwritten documents
required to engage in commercial and legal affairs.
Painters adapted visual techniques to cater to the needs of officials and patrons
that sought to divide land in the region. Not unlike cultures in other parts of the world,
land represents a key focus of indigenous mapping. Individuals bestowed upon it social,
ritual, and economic value. Land included large pasture sites for cattle and livestock,
210
small tracts for household farming, shared properties between members of a corporate
group, and entailed estates controlled by nobles. Mapping formed one component of a
broad set of activities that combined Iberian legal and notarial principles, local
geographical and botanical knowledge, ritual practices, witness testimony, oral history,
and boundary walking used to define land.
By the eighteenth century, a shift in government and policies met the recovery of
a native population faced with a fierce competition for land. Much like their Habsburg
predecessors, Bourbon officials deployed scientific expeditions to assess natural and
human wealth, they developed a new geographical survey project to gauge demographic
growth and land tenure, and they attempted to curb the rise of local elites by restructuring
the organs of government. Bourbon policies often conflicted with local power structures
whose members faced exclusion from key administrative and judicial posts. The growth
of the population and the competition for land and resources mandated a more precise
system of representation to fulfill the needs that indigenous maps had once filled.386
In
this period, surveying by professional topographers and cartographers played a much
more significant role in the definition of spatial boundaries across the viceroyalty.
Despite these changes, indigenous mapmaking practices sometimes informed
territorial disputes, certifications of land, compliance with new ordinates, and the
occasional infrastructure project. During this time, painters reinvented older pictographic
conventions to fit contemporary social and political needs just as the earlier generations
386
Elías Trabulse, “Científicos e ingenieros en la Nueva España: Don Diego García Conde en la historia de
la cartografía mexicana,” in Una visión científica y artística de la Ciudad de México: El plano de la capital
virreinal (1793-1807) de Diego García Conde (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia Condumex,
2002).
211
from the sixteenth century had done to accommodate Spanish colonization. The use of
colorants continued to form an essential component of Indian mapmaking practices.
Technologies of replication based on ritual boundary walking, relationships between
elder and junior males, and collective memory practices ensured the circulation of maps
continued through the use copies. In effect, painters recast spatial relationships for their
Spanish audience according to local traditions and concerns challenging but also working
within the channels of a complex imperial bureaucracy.
212
APPENDIX A:
THE MAP OF SANTA CRUZ XOXOCOTLÁN (1686)
Map key, transcription and translation follows Figure 51:
1. Ocelotepec [Place of the ocelot]
2. Tree with red feather leaves
3. Moon (West)
4. Second moon; possible moon-faced hill
5. Villa of Oaxaca
6. Camino Real [The Royal Highway]
7. Villa of Cuilapa
8a. Double-mound boundary marker
8b. Boundary marker with cross
8c. Boundary marker with cactus
8d. Estancia
9. huee ñoho Sta crus [Temple of the land of Santa Cruz]
10. cuiti yuyucha noyoo [Xoxocotlán’s stone river hill]
11. cuiti Sn Mi[gu]el [Hill of San Miguel]
12. ñooyud[z]a hui [Irrigated land]
13. nodzahui coyho [Depleted water hole]
14. ñoho miniyu[yu] [Temple of the stone lake]
15. cu[?]a sie[?][ta] [N/A]
16. franco
martin [Francisco Martín]
17. cuiti meeñoo [Middle hill]
18. ñoho cheeni sanoho cahuandu qun [waiting on translation]
19. cuiti coo caa [Rattlesnake hill]
20. cuiti sacuaa [Deer hill]
21. This site most likely refers to Masatepeque, “deer hill” in Nahuatl; no nicaa ydzu,
“where there was dear” in Mixtec. Smith (1973: 210) notes a similar place sign on
the 1718 and 1778 maps of Xoxocotlán.
22. En Veinte y cinco de Octubre de 1686 años se aprouo esta mapa pr el señor
Alcalde mor
y lo rubrique [rubrica]
23. Por orden del captan
dn Antt
o de Abellan Al
de M
or de las quatro Villas del
Marquesado cupie [copie] esta Mapa según su original que se me dio sin estrepar
[estropear] ni disminuir cosa Alguna segun se acostumbra en mi arte de la pintura que
ba sierto y berdadero como co[n]stara por el original qnda[concuerda?] con esta y en
caso nesesario y antepongo el Juramento nesesso fh
o en Antequera octubre 25 de 1686
años Dn Domingo de sarate
24. Sun (East)
25. Stream [red line]
213
APPENDIX B:
FIGURES
Figure 1. Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th century.
Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca (map lost).
214
Figure 2. Maps located in Mexican and US archives, 1570-1609.
Figure 3. Maps located in Mexican and US archives, 1610-1740.
215
Figure 4. The Valley of Oaxaca. Map courtesy of David Robinson and the Maxwell
School of Syracuse University.
216
Figure 5. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico
City (AGN), No. 0625, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 249.
217
Figure 6. Painter-scribe (detail), Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (aka Codex Vienna),
c. 15th century, f. 48. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Austria.
218
Figure 7. Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580. Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
219
Figure 8. Ordered pair detail, Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580. Nettie
Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of
Texas at Austin.
Figure 9. Large/great altar logograph, Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580.
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin.
220
Figure 10. Coming of age scene, Codex Mendoza , f. 60, c. 1541. Bodleian Library,
Oxford University.
221
Figure 11. Folio 3v, Codex Yanhuitlán, c. 1550. Biblioteca Histórica José María
Lafragua de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.
222
Figure 12. Map of Cuestlahuaca, 1582. AGN, No. 1609, Tierras, vol. 2682, exp. 9, f. 8.
223
Figure 13. Albrecht Dürer, “The Holy Family with two angels,” c. 1503.
224
Figure 14. Map of Guaxilotitlán, 1586. AGN, No. 1726, Tierras, vol. 2702, exp. 2, f. 10.
225
Figure 15. Map of Santa María Guelacé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya, and Santa Cruz
Papalutla, 1690 [1778]. AGN, No. 0956, Tierras, vol. 1206, exp. 1, cuad. 8, f. 21.
226
Figure 16. Detail, Map of Santa María Guelacé, San Jerónimo Tlacochaguaya, and Santa
Cruz Papalutla, 1778 [1690]. AGN, No. 0956, Tierras, vol. 1206, exp. 1, cuad. 8, f. 21.
227
Figure 17. Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene, 1617. AGN, No. 2225, Tierras, vol. 2812,
exp. 11, f. 312.
228
Figure 18. Relación Geográfica Map of Tehuantepec, 1580. Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
229
Figure 19. Map of Tzanaltepec, Tonaltepec, and Oztutlán, 1580. AGN, No. 1903,
Tierras, vol. 2729, exp. 4, f. 107v y 108.
230
Figure 20. Map of Tlapanaltepeque, 1585. AGN, No. 2391, Tierras, vol. 3343, exp. 20,
f. 8.
231
Figure 21. Map of Tlapaltepeque, 1586. AGN, No. 1965, Tierras, vol. 2737, exp. 25, f.
29.
232
Figure 22. Map of Ixtepec and Zixitlán, 1598. AGN, No. 2084, Tierras, vol. 2764, exp.
22, f. 302.
233
Figure 23. Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene y Cuestlahuaca, 1590. AGN, No. 1904,
Tierras, vol. 2729, exp. 5, f. 117.
234
Figure 24. Map of Tepenene, 1600. AGN, No. 1812, Tierras, vol. 2719, exp. 23, f. 9.
235
Figure 25. Map of Tolcayuca, c. late 17th/early 18th c. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Library
of Congress.
236
Figure 26. Map of Teposcolula, 1590. AGN, No. 1711, Tierras, vol. 2696, exp. 21, f. 8.
237
Figure 27. Detail from Relación Geográfica Map of Teozacoalco, 1580. Nettie Lee
Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of
Texas at Austin.
238
Figure 28. Map of Cuquila, 1599. AGN, No. 2463, Tierras, vol. 3556, exp. 6, f. 175.
239
Figure 29. Patch of paper detail, Map of Cuquila, 1599. AGN, No. 2463, Tierras, vol.
3556, exp. 6, f. 175.
240
Figure 30. Map of Mistepec, Chicaguastla and Cuquila, 1595. AGN, No. 0867, Tierras,
vol. 876, exp. 1, f. 122.
241
Figure 31. Map of Santa Ana and Santa Cruz, 1591. AGN, No. 0581, Tierras, vol. 56,
exp. 5, f. 16.
242
Figure 32. Detail, Map of Santa Ana y Santa Cruz, 1591. AGN, No. 0581, Tierras, vol.
56, exp. 5, f. 16.
243
Figure 33. Map of Teotitlán, 1583. AGN, No. 0560, Tierras, vol. 35, exp. 7, f. 11.
244
Figure 34. Ink detail, Map of Teotitlán, 1583. AGN, No. 0560, Tierras, vol. 35, exp. 7, f.
11.
245
Figure 35. Verso, Map of Santo Domingo Tepenene, 1617. AGN, No. 2225, Tierras,
vol. 2812, exp. 11, f. 312.
246
Figure 36. Key, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th century.
Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca.
247
Figure 37. Town detail, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa, 18th
century. Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca.
Figure 38. Father Crespo’s Hacienda, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María
Atzompa, c. 18th century. Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca.
248
Figure 39. San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María
Atzompa, c. 18th century. Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca.
249
Figure 40. Map of Miltepec, 1617. AGN, No. 1776, Tierras, vol. 2711, exp. 7, fs. 9v. y
10
250
Figure 41. Map of Justlaguaca, 1609. AGN, No. 1271, Tierras, vol. 1871, exp. 11, f. 11.
251
Figure 42. Map of Tlaxiaco and Cuquila, 1588. AGN, No. 1692.9, Tierras, vol. 2692,
exp. 17, f. 8.
252
Figure 43. Map of Cuscatlan, 1607. AGN, Tierras, vol. 2682, exp. 4, f. 9.
253
Figure 44. Map of Zimatlán and Ocotlán, 1686 [1639]. AGN, No. 3009, Hospital de
Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4.
254
Figure 45. “Ojo” detail, 1686. AGN, Hospital de Jesús, leg. 85, exp. 4, f. 104.
255
Figure 46. Relación Geográfica Map of Amoltepeque, 1580. Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
256
Figure 47. Cataloguing inscription no. 1. Relación Geográfica Map of Amoltepeque,
1580. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin.
Figure 48. Cataloguing inscription no. 2. Relación Geográfica Map of Amoltepeque,
1580. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin.
257
Bishopric Viceroyalty Town “Cespedes” Ethinc states Region
Figure 49. Céspedes annotations, Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepeque (1580).
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin, Folder XXV-3.
258
Figure 50. Disputed land near Xoxocotlán, 1686.
259
Figure 51. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán (1686), with interpretive key. AGN, No.
0625, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 249.
260
Figure 52. Certifying gloss no. 1. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686. AGN, No.
0625, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 249.
Figure 53. Certifying gloss no. 2. Map of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, 1686. AGN, No.
0625, Tierras, vol. 129, exp. 4, f. 249.
261
Figure 54. Copied Map of Xoxocotlán, 1718 [1660]. Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra,
Mexico City.
262
Figure 55. Cut piece, Map of Nuestra Madre del Rosario, Santa María Atzompa
c. 18th century. Municipio de Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca.
263
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AHN Archivo Histórico de Notarías, Oaxaca, Mexico
LC Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
BLAC Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin
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