The Caciques of Tecali: Class and Ethnic Identity in Late Colonial Mexico

Abstract

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in Tempe, Arizona, November 10-13, 1994. Research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Frederic Hicks and Stephen Perkins for their comments on the meeting paper, and Perkins, Michael Barton, and Julia Hernandez de Chance for their help with the transcription and tabulation of Tecali's marriage records. Special thanks go to two anonymous HAHR reviewers. The following abbreviations are used for archival material: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI); Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico City (AGN); Archivo General de Notarfas del Estado de Puebla (AGNP); Archivo Municipal de Cuauhtinchan (AMC); Archivo Municipal de Tecali (AMT); Archivo Parroquial de Tecali (APT); Archivo Judicial de Puebla, microfilm collection of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City (AJP-MNAH); and Archivo Judicial de Tecali in the same microfilm collection (AJT-MNAH). 1. The term cacique, of Arawak origin, was widely used by Spaniards in the New World and was initially applied to successors of pre-Hispanic rulers or ruling families. Principales could be relatives of caciques, successors of the pre-Hispanic second-echelon nobility (such as the Nahua pipiltin), or political officeholders and their successors. Pedro Carrasco, transformaci6n de la cultura indigena durante la colonia, Historia Mexicana 25 (1975), 182. 2. The classic conceptualization of caciques as brokers can be found in Eric R. Wolf, Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: American Anthropologist 58 (1956), 1065-78. Important substantive contributions on sixteenth-century Mesoamerican caciques and Indian village elites in general are numerous. Special influences on the present research include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-181o (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964); Delfina E. L6pez Sarrelangue, La nobleza indigena de Pdtzcuaro en la e'poca virreinal (Mexico City: UNAM, 1965); Ronald Spores, The Mixtec Kings and Their People (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1967); idem, The Mixtecs in Ancient and Colonial Times (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1984); William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1972); Carrasco,