Justice on the Mountain: Travel, Security, and Native Authority in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Objective/Context: This article analyzes how long-distance travel and struggles over highway security shaped the relationship between Native communities and Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Oaxaca’s Villa Alta district during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Methodology: I engage in a close reading of criminal cases of murder and theft on a treacherous stretch of the Camino Real to show how Native people took on significant risk to travel great distances in pursuit of their interests. I follow with an examination of eighteenth-century legal reforms aimed at curbing banditry and analyze civil and criminal records to show how colonial officials used the reforms to create Native patrols tasked with highway security. Originality: Long-distance travel and highway security represent aspects of Indigenous life in colonial Mexico underappreciated by historians, even though they were vital to the material and political concerns of Indigenous individuals, clans, and communities in mountain regions like Villa Alta. By reading legal records against the grain, I demonstrate how Indigenous people used legal and extra-legal means to control movement on mountainous stretches of imperial roads. My analysis reveals jurisdictional competition among native authorities, and Spanish civil and ecclesiastical officials as they sought to control imperial space. Conclusions: Long-distance travel and jurisdictional struggles between and among Spanish and Native authorities produced violence and competition over highway security. By incorporating Native communities into the colonial security apparatus through the creation of Native patrols, colonial officials more fully subordinated the authority of the region’s Native governments to their own.