Pueblos within Pueblos: Tlaxilacalli Communities in Acolhuacan, Mexico, ca. 1272–1692

Abstract

Benjamin D. Johnson’s work centers the heretofore overlooked tlaxilacalli as the object of study over the course of four centuries of momentous change and transformation, revealing the dynamism with which tlaxilacalli responded to broader imperial transformations during the Aztec and early colonial eras. His argument complicates our thinking about the nature of tlaxilacalli, traditionally glossed as geographically bounded barrios, or neighborhoods, in contemporary Spanish documentation but, in his estimation, far more appropriately seen as complex networks knitting together locality, kin, and obligation, both economic and spiritual. Tlaxilacalli were, in his words “face-to-face human networks” (3) that formed the “bedrock of empire. When they shifted,” he argues, “the entire [imperial] arrangement shook” (4).Johnson structures his treatment to highlight tlaxilacalli flexibility and responsiveness to local conditions and struggles and attempted imperial impositions. His narrative progresses chronologically while managing at the same time to emphasize specific themes that emerged ascendant over the four centuries covered in his study. The earlier chapters are heavily dependent on two early colonial Acolhua codices—Vergara and Asunción (ca. 1543–44)—essentially land surveys that allow an understanding of the granular aspects of tlaxilacalli. Here and elsewhere Johnson stresses the centrality of macehualtin—commoners—and their concerns, rather than the elite actors and concerns more frequently favored in existing scholarship. This refocusing is perhaps Johnson’s most important contribution.The core chapters (3–6) explore how tlaxilacalli were “remade” through demographic loss, physical mobility, environmental degradation, and political jockeying from the mid-sixteenth century to the final years of the seventeenth. This period witnessed the increasing Hispanization of Acolhuacan, as Spaniards and Spanish practices, beliefs, and economies increasingly penetrated the native world. Johnson treats Tetzcocan Juan Bautista Pomar, himself descended from native lords yet firmly embedded in the Spanish world, as a particularly significant agent of Hispanization. Yet for all the changes wrought by ecological changes, hunger, demographic decline, and external and internal challenges to local autonomy, tlaxilacalli persisted as nuclei of local power, their hierarchies of authority that structured community from the household level (calli) upward to the level of the local “lordly speaker” (teuctlatoque) remarkably still intact. By the mid-seventeenth century tlaxilacalli had in some cases reinvented themselves as legitimate pueblos (altepetl) in their own right.Johnson paints a picture of surprising resiliency and flexibility at the community level, a resiliency sustained amid the chaos and uncertainty of imperial impositions, demographic loss, profound environmental transformations, and political change. Throughout, at least in the case of Acolhuacan, tlaxilacalli persisted with their hierarchical structures and functions intact, even as the traditional nobility weakened in the face of unsettled circumstances. One question lingers in this reviewer’s mind: is what Johnson finds in Acolhuacan the norm across central Mexico, or are its experiences unique? Without sources comparable to those Johnson relied most heavily on—notably the exceptionally rich Codices Asunción and Vergara, and the well-documented activities of Juan Bautista Pomar, a major actor in late sixteenth-century Acolhuacan—we may never fully know, but he certainly sets the bar for further studies on tlaxilacalli beyond this small corner of Mesoamerica.