(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2016-12-14) Jones, Owen H.
The present article examines the functions of indigenous advocates whose position as ward leaders (chinamitales) in K’ichee’ societies existed in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and continued into the colonial nineteenth century in Guatemala. This was a hereditary legal and administrative position that elites in K’ichee’an society enjoyed as a result and reward of military conquest in the Pre-Columbian era. Chinamitales advocated for the inhabitants of their wards who were both elites and non-elites in land disputes and in criminal matters. They persisted in indigenous communities from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century as officially unrecognized legal advocates who participated in tribunals in indigenous communities at the local level and advocated for their constituents before their indigenous town councils. They also acted in a similar capacity as the indigenous municipal council, making last testaments, nominating candidates for local town council elections and positions in the church laity, collecting tribute, and choosing laborers for the repartimiento. Their advocacy spilled over into colonial judicial proceedings at the regional and high court levels when disagreements arose within indigenous communities over land disenfranchisement and whenever they sensed that the indigenous municipal council was not protecting their interests.
(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2016-12-14) Connell, William F.
This essay will discuss the unusual rise to power of don Bartolomé Cortés y Mendoza Axaycatzin, who was appointed by viceroy Cadereita to serve as governor of Mexico Tenochtitlan in 1636 without mandate from the community. He had previously served as governor in Puebla de los Angeles—the most Spanish city in seventeenth century Mexico, which had no original native communities before the arrival of Europeans. The paper will explore the problem of native jurisdiction at times when tribute collections fell. It will also explore how names can signify political authority. Axayacatzin, Cortés, Bartolomé, and Mendoza all signified political status for Europeans and perhaps were assumed to connote authority and status to Tenochca and other native peoples resident in Mexico Tenochtitlan at a time when the city’s indigenous population was becoming increasingly diverse.
(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2016-12-14) Dueñas, Alcira
This essay examines important changes in the jurisdiction of the Republic of the Indians in late colonial Peru by problematizing the concept of possession and usufruct of communal lands in the Indian towns after 1777, when the Bourbon set the sub-delegate courts to replace the former court of the corregidor. The 1784 and 1803 Ordenanzas de Intendencia displaced more firmly the jurisdictional authority of the indigenous Cabildo and its ability to influence the organization of the town’s spatial order. The indigenous Cabildos’ legal advocates and judges waged in court a systematic defense of communal property and created a new sense of community in the urban setting. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, a rather sophisticated lettered culture anchored in the jurisdictional potential of the republic of the Indians and with a long tradition of legal struggles and legal writing revealed itself. Defying the legal authority of the sub-delegate, the council offered a tacit response to the Bourbon project of political control of the pueblos, in an effort to salvage the last vestiges of community that still remained in the Lima valley’s towns at the end of the colonial experience.
(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2016-12-14) Cunill, Caroline
In Spanish Colonial America, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula at the same time, different jurisdictions intertwined in the same space. By way of consequence, the complex political organization of the New World was composed, at the local level, by the Indian and Spanish Councils, the doctrines, and the provincial structures called corregimientos. Although the officials of those institutions received precise instructions, in which the Spanish Crown defined and limited their functions, tensions were common between the Indian governors, the clergymen, the Spanish Councils’ officeholders, and the Spanish provincial magistrates, or corregidores. The present article will analyze a series of lawsuits that occurred in sixteenth century Yucatan and in which those authorities were implicated, in order to highlight not only the nature of the jurisdictional conflicts, but also the modalities of their resolution at stake in the Spanish Empire’s courts of justice. Special emphasis will be put on the jurisdiction of the Maya Councils with the objective of better understanding the scope of indigenous agency in Spanish Colonial America. We argue that the local control on the one hand, and the legal representation on the other, were key elements in these processes.