Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain

Abstract

Art historians have shown a great deal of interest in Indigenous conceptions of space and place and their representations of such in pictorial documents. Another, heretofore largely unrelated line of research in history has examined Indigenous uses of the colonial court system to protect their rights. In this new monograph, Ana Pulido Rull unites both these topics, examining how Mexican Native communities made maps and employed them as evidence in court battles to defend their lands from Spanish depredations. What results is perhaps the most revealing study yet not only on such maps but also on how Native Mexicans manipulated colonial law to protect communal claims.The initial chapters describe how the Spanish empire developed a system of land grants, or mercedes de tierras, to distribute Indigenous lands to Spaniards. Indians in central New Spain (Mexico) began to oppose the mercedes by presenting their own maps showing that such grants were unjust or harmful to their communal welfare. In doing so, Indigenous maps became accepted, and even requested, by Spanish judges as permissible evidence. Afterward, Pulido Rull proceeds to the core of her work: examinations of maps used to oppose mercedes (or to defend them when they favored Indigenous land claims). She also examines the transcriptions of testimony from these cases, to see to what extent such maps worked in protecting Indigenous territory, and how such litigation came to be resolved.The most fascinating aspect of her research methodology, yielding the most revelatory results, is her use of infrared light imaging and ultraviolet light photography to examine the preliminary sketches, revisions, and previous versions that lay hidden underneath the maps. Through such a technique, she reveals that these maps went through several changes that corresponded to changes in the arguments and legal strategies of litigants. The Indigenous legal representatives of their communities would alter maps to strategically appeal to Spanish law or to cast doubt on the allegations of their Spanish opponents, often in ways that did not accurately correspond to the topography of the landscapes in question. These maps, hence, rather than being timeless expressions of Native territoriality, were cleverly crafted with the intent of swaying Spanish judges.Her study also brings to light new information on Indigenous participation in the colonial legal system in general. This aspect should appeal particularly to historians of Latin America. Pulido Rull's combing through colonial case files reveals that the resolutions of many of these quarrels over land either were never recorded or appeared suddenly with little or no explanation. This, along with other telling signs in the documentary record, implies that there were considerable extralegal (and often illegal) negotiations between Native community representatives and Spaniards. The final word in many a legal dispute came down to backroom dealings only implied in the archival corpus. Ultimately, Pulido Rull finds that even if the Native peoples of New Spain did not always succeed in defending their lands in court (and many times they did not), their use of maps was creative, ingenious, and, more often than not, effective.Her treatment of preconquest cartography and justice, however, is unfortunately largely descriptive and uncritical, using modern language with little discussion of the risk of anachronism. She takes at face value information from nostalgic colonial histories that hearkened back to an unrealistically idealized preconquest justice system suspiciously similar to that of the Spaniards (but reportedly free of corruption), replete with Aztec imperial “judges,” “courts,” and “petitioners” (p. 2). Particularly glaring is her unquestioned use of the term map to describe traditional Mexican Indigenous pictorial representations of land. As Pulido Rull herself briefly notes, Indigenous people had no word entirely equivalent to the European category of map, and it is unclear if their ostensibly similar documents exactly corresponded to Western maps. Art historians have noted this, though Pulido Rull largely sidesteps this noteworthy matter by averring that, whatever their differences, Indigenous and Western maps had a “correspondence in meaning” (p. 75).Nevertheless, the book excels in its innovative treatment of colonial Mexican Indigenous mapping for legal ends. Moreover, Pulido Rull's work furnishes further evidence that mapmaking in any culture, contrary to Western notions, is never a truly objective process, something that scholars studying maps from other societies have also recently noted. Pulido Rull furthermore provides another example showing that Indigenous knowledge, rather than being simply exotic or inconsequential trivia made by peripheral people, was sought after and utilized by Europeans. Consequently, this work will appeal to not only art historians or other specialists of Mexico and Latin America but any scholar of cartography or Indigenous peoples.