The Motions Beneath: Indigenous Migrants of the Urban Frontier of New Spain

Abstract

In this well-researched book, Laurent Corbeil offers the story of how a complex mix of indigenous migrants from central areas of Mexico moved beneath the structures of colonialism and actively contributed to the creation of a flourishing economy and society during the first forty years of the city of San Luis Potosí. In sorting out these multiethnic northward migrations, concepts of mobility and identity thread through his analysis.How does this study fit into a larger narrative that has highlighted the migrations of many thousands of indigenous peoples to New Spain’s northern frontiers from the sixteenth century onward? To date, the two most documented patterns of this migration involve indios conquistadores, who accompanied early Spanish expeditions and homogenous Tlaxcalan “colonies,” financed by the crown to assist Spaniards in acculturating the north’s mostly nonsedentary natives. A third pattern concerns the migrants who filled the labor demands of the silver mining economy that evolved in sparsely populated areas. Although this manifestation of heterogeneous migration was actually the most massive in terms of overall numbers, it has only recently begun to be studied in its enormous complexity. For example, in Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1806 (2016), Dana Velasco Murillo examines multiethnic migrants to New Spain’s primary silver city over the longue durée, demonstrating how they shaped semi-autonomous communities by adapting Spanish institutions like the cofradía to protect their interests.Focusing on a shorter time span, Corbeil also addresses the more substantial and relatively neglected history of labor migration by detailing how multiethnic indigenous migrants re-created communities and identities in San Luis Potosí. Although an organized contingent of Tlaxcalans arrived there in 1591 to help incorporate local Guachichils, Corbeil shows that this type of corporate migration, in which ethnicity was the primary marker of identity, was atypical in San Luis Potosí. Many other factors, most especially mobility, influenced how indigenous people created affiliations and identified themselves. They arrived primarily as individuals or in small groups from over a hundred communities of origin and included Tarascans, Nahuas, Otomis, Cocas, Tecuexes, and Cazcans among others. In many cases they had made stops along the way, through a variety of landscapes, contacts, and languages.In San Luis Potosí itself, indigenous people interacted across a conurbation, or tight networks of distinct, yet interdependent communities. Drawing on a painstaking reading of a variety of sources, including local parish and criminal records, Corbeil shows how mobility across worksites where labor teams were not ethnically homogeneous facilitated contacts and economic ties that gave individuals multiple affiliations. Daily encounters in drinking establishments, commercial activities, and craft production also encouraged interethnic relations. Catholic marriage and baptism created extended family bonds. Contacts could also foment enmities that played out in drunken brawls and other violence. After the first twenty years, even as newcomers continued to arrive, the children of migrants constituted a core population that was consolidating indigenous social structures and hierarchies. Formerly loosely organized pueblos and barrios de indios developed official discourses and corporate identities to defend themselves against Spaniards, as competition for land increased. These corporate identities were based more on living spaces than origin or ethnicity and, according to Corbeil, contributed to creating some stability in the transition from mining to other productive economic activities.A study that goes beyond the early years will no doubt reveal other structures and changes in social organization as well as specifically gendered contributions to the developing conurbation. Nonetheless, this microcosmic reading of the early socially heterogeneous, disorderly past of San Luis Potosí is filled with individual stories and insights that demonstrate the complexity of social relations and individual affiliations among indigenous peoples who were dynamically involved in creating a productive and flourishing economy and society, however socially differentiated. The book adds significantly to a trend that addresses gaps in our understanding of how Mesoamericans influenced the development of New Spain’s north.