Plotting Indigenous Stories, Land, and People: Primordial Titles and Narrative Mapping in Colonial Mexico

Abstract

Spanish Crown policies of the colonial period in Mexico brought waves of forced indigenous reorganization ( congregacion ) and legal processes of formalized distribution and titling of lands ( composicion ). Both threatened and at times negated indigenous land rights and by extension corporate unity. At the same time, the Spanish court system provided a venue for indigenous peoples to advocate for themselves and contest encroachment of their territories. In this context, many indigenous communities of Mexico brought forth indigenous-language alphabetic and pictographic manuscripts—today known as titles—as evidence of their rights to lands. Through an analysis of the Nahuatl-language primordial title of San Matias Cuixinco, this essay offers a systematic analysis of the culturally specific ways in which the stories in primordial titles worked together to ensure the indigenous people's survival as a coherent socio-political unit vis-a-vis their land base. Emphasis is placed on the context in which titles were produced and circulated, the material form they took due to cultures in contact, and a consideration of the underlying conceptual framework— (i)ixiptlatl complex, cellular principle, and macehua —that would have made these manuscripts meaningful to the people who created them.