Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America
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Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822394013 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 712 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
John Tutino teaches the history of Mexico and the Americas in the History Department and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940, and a co-editor of Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.
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Making a New World
FOUNDING CAPITALISM IN THE BAJÍO AND SPANISH NORTH AMERICABy JOHN TUTINO
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4989-1
Chapter One
Founding the BajíoOtomí Expansion, Chichimeca War, and Commercial Querétaro, 1500–1660
THE BAJÍO WITNESSED unprecedented encounters, enduring conflicts, and transforming changes in the sixteenth century. Once a place of towns and cultivators in Mesoamerica's classic past, it was little inhabited and minimally cultivated around 1500. Mesoamerican states fought each other and mobile Chichimecas in a prolonged frontier stalemate. Then, beginning in the 1520s Mesoamericans, Europeans, and Africans arrived from the south, settled the basin, and reconstituted power, production, and culture. The foundation of Querétaro led a historic process. Otomí lords and cultivators built the town, irrigated nearby lands, and began new trades. After silver was found to the north at Zacatecas in the 1540s, Spaniards and their African slaves, Otomí and other Mesoamericans, and vast droves of cattle and sheep invaded the Bajío and the lands stretching north and west. Decades of conflict followed, as Chichimecas resisted and adapted to invasions and opportunities. Spaniards aimed to rule and profit. Yet they relied on Otomí and other native allies to fight Chichimecas, and on Mesoamericans and Africans to build a new economy. European power was uncertain and native subordination was long contested in the early Bajío.
Deep in the American interior Querétaro saw the creation of an Atlantic amalgam of Mesoamericans, Europeans, and Africans. Otomí leaders were surprisingly powerful; Otomí cultivators controlled the best, irrigated lands. Europeans struggled to assert dominance. Africans labored, yet increasingly became free. Immigrant Mexicas, Tarascans, and Otomí came and negotiated new ways of work. Spaniards promoted an Atlantic economy and an Iberian regime, yet they had to negotiate indigenous subordination and African service. Around 1600 a nascent commercial economy, an emerging labor market, and a multicultural society consolidated at Querétaro—the base of an expansive, commercial Spanish North America. Warrior entrepreneurs, Otomí and Spanish, led that foundation. The colonial state was among the many forces shaping early Querétaro and the Bajío, but rarely the most powerful. Officials struggled to favor Spanish allies, fill regime coffers, and mediate among diverse people and interests in times of economic opportunity and persistent conflict. That crucible forged an unprecedented Atlantic economy and New World society.
Before regimes and societies there are geographies. The Valle de los Chichimecas, now the Bajío, lies north of the volcanic axis that links the eastern and western Sierras near Mexico City. Between the Sierras the northern basin and plateau country is potentially fertile, thanks to ancient volcanic soil. Yet the region is dry, and ever drier farther north; every year summer rains give way to winter droughts that periodically last all year. Diverse regional mixes of altitude, soil quality, and moisture set the contexts of historical settlement. The Bajío favored human occupation. While the basins around Mexico City lie 2,200 meters and more above sea level, the Bajío plains sit at 1,600 to 2,000 meters, creating warmer climates. Rainfall is typical of the Mexican highlands, averaging 600 to 700 millimeters a year, mostly in summer. Rivers give the Bajío its great potential. The Lerma originates in the high, cold, and wet Toluca basin west of Mexico City. It flows north through rugged uplands to emerge near Acámbaro and descend into the Bajío. The Río Querétaro begins east of the city for which it is named in mountains beyond the Amascala basin. Perennial springs increase its flow as it falls through the canyon at San Pedro de la Cañada. It passes through Querétaro, flows west to be joined by the stream blessed in the colonial era by Our Lady at Pueblito, gains strength from springs at Apaseo, then joins the Río Laja near Celaya. The Laja begins north of Dolores, flows south by San Miguel, descends through the basin at Chamacuero (now Comonfort), then drops to join the Río Querétaro in the core Bajío basin at Celaya. West of Celaya the combined flows of the Querétaro and Laja enter the Lerma—which becomes the Santiago. Farther west the Turbio River descends from the north around León to add more water, before the great Lerma-Santiago passes into Lake Chapala. Exiting, it cuts through the western Sierra to the Pacific. Broad fertile basins watered by rivers define the Bajío.
On the Frontier of Mesoamerica
Despite that potential, the Bajío was little settled around 1500. It lay at the northern edge of Mesoamerica, a civilization of intensive cultivation, markets, and organized religion, all sustaining cities and states in conflict. To the north lived peoples whom the Mesoamericans called Chichimecas, mobile hunters and gatherers, warriors resistant to life under state powers. Mesoamericans met Chichimecas in the Bajío, leaving the rich basin a contested frontier, a buffer separating—and linking—peoples in conflict.
The Bajío had once lived the historic trajectory of Mesoamerican agricultural, urban, political, and religious development. Chupícuaro culture flourished between 500 and 200 B.C. along the Lerma River in southern Guanajuato. Its people cultivated, made fine pottery, and built stone temple platforms at ceremonial centers. From A.D. 300, contemporary with the rise of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, towns and irrigated cultivation extended north through the Bajío to reach Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. The great northern outpost of classic Mesoamerica was at La Quemada, near Zacatecas. The eastern Bajío, from San Juan del Río through Querétaro to San Miguel and Dolores, was home to many small centers and cultivators who sustained them. Archeology argues links to the imperial metropolis at Teotihuacan. Simultaneously, Teuchitlán north of Lake Chapala ruled as a city of monumental buildings and intensive irrigated agriculture, exerting power across the western Bajío. Through the classic era from A.D. 300 to 900 the Bajío was settled and cultivated, home to diverse peoples within the Mesoamerican political and cultural complex.
The great city of Teotihuacan began to decline after 650. La Quemada fell around 900. Yet while the imperial centers of Teotihuacan and La Quemada struggled, a ceremonial and political center rose between 600 and 900 at Plazuelas, strategically set where mountains looked over the western Bajío basin. Mesoamerican ways persisted in the Bajío, and revived around 1000 with the rise of the Toltec state at Tula, in the Mezquital basin to the southeast. The Toltec presence was strong around Querétaro, its regional center at the village now called Pueblito (a key religious site in colonial times). Smaller Toltec settlements were west of Querétaro at La Magdalena and east at La Griega. Yet the Toltec imprint in the Bajío never matched the earlier role of Teotihuacan. There were settlements along the Río Laja near San Miguel and a few outposts in northern Guanajuato. By the 1200s Tula had fallen—and the Toltec centers in the eastern Bajío were in decline.
After the fall of Tula, Otomí communities cultivated across the Mezquital and regions to the west around Xilotepec and north toward the Bajío. Settled and sedentary cultivators, the Otomí had come centuries earlier from regions near the Gulf. They had lived subject to Teotihuacan and then Tula. Often denigrated as primitives, sometimes praised as warriors, they worked the land and fought in their rulers' armies. They proved historic survivors. After the fall of Teotihuacan and Tula local Otomí states negotiated times of conflict and political dispersal. Their polity at Xilotepec only fell to Mexica power in the 1480s. Other Otomí negotiated with the Tarascan regime to the west, seeking advantage in the border zone where the Mexica fought Tarascans for state primacy, while Chichimecas held strong just north in the Bajío.
From the 1200s to the early 1500s the Bajío was a contested frontier. Most of the basin was home to the hunting, gathering, sometimes cultivating, and often warring nomads whom Mesoamericans maligned as Chichimecas. They were not one ethnic or linguistic group. The Mexica, Nahuatl speakers who ruled the great city of Tenochtitlan, claimed Chichimeca roots. When they aimed to rule beyond the Valley of Mexico in the 1400s, they drove northward toward the Bajío and their ancestral homelands. They had little success, and denigrated resistant Chichimecas as savage barbarians who would not bow to state powers. A broader meaning of Chichimeca emerges: warriors who ruled, or would not be ruled.
Through the fifteenth century the Mexica marshaled vast armies driven by a religious ideology of sacrificial necessity to assert power and demand tribute from subject lords and cultivating communities—mostly in regions east and south of their island city of Tenochtitlan. Yet Mexica power was always contested, limited, and unstable. The paramount warlords of early-sixteenth-century Mesoamerica never conquered Tlaxcala and Cholula to the east. They were blocked to the west by a Tarascan regime set on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro at Tzintzuntzan. Within Mexica domains power was negotiated in shifting alliances. As México-Tenochtitlan rose it turned former allies at Texcoco, Tlacopan (Tacuba), and elsewhere into dependents. Conquered peoples resisted, leading to reconquests, new challenges, and uncertain powers. As the sixteenth century began, Mesoamerica was a zone of war, shifting alliances, and contested rule; rising states and established lords asserted religious legitimations while competing to claim work and goods from towns and rural communities. In all that Mesoamerica was not unlike the Europe that would soon send its own warlords with religious legitimations (and commercial goals) into the Mesoamerican crucible.
Through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth Mexica and Tarascan regimes competed to rule the Bajío; both sent dependent Otomí peoples to settle there. Around 1500 Tarascan frontier power focused at Acámbaro, at the southern edge of the Bajío. The northern thrust of Mexica claims focused on recently conquered Xilotepec. While fighting each other in a frontier stalemate, the Tarascan and Mexica regimes struggled to rule the Otomí peoples who populated the northern margins of Mesoamerica. That left most of the Bajío to Chichimecas. Some were hunting and gathering nomads, minimally clothed, living in caves. Others were mobile cultivators, living in small clusters of huts that Spaniards called rancherías. Four groups can be identified in and near the Bajío. Along its western margins Guachichiles roamed the dry hills from the Lerma River, through the Altos de Jalisco, across the Tunal Grande of San Luis Potosí, and north toward Saltillo; Guamares occupied the western and central Bajío, north of the Tarascan outposts, from the Lerma north to San Felipe and east to San Miguel; Jonaces lived deep in the rugged Sierra Gorda of eastern Guanajuato and northern Querétaro. All three groups were nomadic hunter-gatherers and mobile warriors skilled in fighting with bows and arrows.
Pames were different. Linguistic kin of the Otomí, they lived in the southeastern Bajío basins around Querétaro, the eastern uplands near Xichú at the edge of the Sierra Gorda, and south toward Ixmiquilpan in the northern Mezquital. Pames cultivated and traded with the Otomí who lived subject to Nahua rule, and with Tarascans at Acámbaro and Yuriria. If nomadic, hunting and gathering Guachichiles, Guamares, and Jonaces, and settled, cultivating Pames were all Chichimecas, the meaning of Chichimeca becomes clear: they were people living free of state power and ready to fight to remain independent.
As the sixteenth century began, the Bajío was a frontier with a long and complex history. It had lived eras of participation in the state-centered, sedentary, cultivating ways of Mesoamerica; recent times brought rule by independent and mobile hunters and gatherers. Mesoamericans and Chichimecas fought and traded. War and trade created knowledge and conflict. People and goods moved back and forth across a frontier that also moved. When Europeans arrived the frontier was contested across the southern Bajío. The Tarascans at Acámbaro aimed to rule and settle Otomí around Yuriria and Apaseo; the Nahua lords of Xilotepec tried to extend Mexica power through outposts of Otomí settlers around Tlachco—later Querétaro. Settlers subject to Mesoamerican states were expected to defend the frontier, cultivate maize and cotton, and weave mats that they paid as tributes. Still, neither the Mexica nor Tarascans ruled the frontier. The southeastern Bajío remained home to independent Pame cultivators; nomadic Guamares and Guachichiles ruled the central and western basin and nearby uplands; Jonaces held strong in the Sierra Gorda.
Otomí Querétaro, 1520–1550
The Spanish-Tlaxcalan conquest of Tenochtitlan, the center of Mexica rule, set off fundamental changes in the Bajío. Mexica power collapsed. Tarascan rulers resisted briefly and then negotiated uncertain alliances with the newcomers. Spaniards scrambled to assert sovereignty, challenging each other while struggling to rule diverse indigenous peoples. In the Bajío competing Spanish forces claimed sovereignty over Nahua lords at Xilotepec and Tarascans at Acámbaro. Meanwhile two salients thrust north beyond the limits of Mexica and Tarascan rule. Spaniards led by Nuño de Guzmán drove northwest into Jalisco with infamous violence, taking slaves wherever they went. Simultaneously, Otomí lords and settlers drove north with Franciscan allies to assert independence and promote settlement around Tlachco-Querétaro. In the Bajío "Spanish" occupation began as Otomí expansion.
When don Fernando Cortés and his freebooters invaded Nahua domains, forged alliances with outlying city-states, and conquered the Mexica at Tenochtitlan from 1519 to 1521, they collapsed the structures of power, alliance, and war that shaped Mesoamerica. They brought smallpox and other Eurasian diseases that devastated a population previously untouched and lacking immunities. Cortés and his native allies destroyed the most assertive state in Mesoamerica in two years. The first smallpox epidemic came in 1520, amid that conflict, killing about a third of the population and leaving survivors scarred to remind all of its deadly assault. Smallpox facilitated conquest and Spanish rule. Together they assaulted truth. Warlords from unknown lands, serving unseen sovereigns and an unimagined God while untouched by devastating plagues, claimed to rule. The powerful fell; their gods failed; people died. Truth became false; the unimagined became real. In the 1520s Mesoamerica, long a domain of instability, became a place of incomprehensible death, conflict, uncertainty, and for a few, opportunity.
Vastly outnumbered in lands and among peoples they barely knew, Spaniards aimed to rule by adapting Mesoamerican ways of lordship. The encomienda grants that organized early Spanish sovereignty gave to favored Spaniards the right to take tribute in goods and labor from native lords and their people. Under encomiendas indigenous production, social ways, and tributes would persist, to the extent possible amid depopulation and demands for Christianization. Some encomienda grants recognized native lords in place at conquest; some deposed ruling Nahuas, Tarascans, and others and replaced them with lords recently displaced in indigenous conquests. Otomí lords often found Spanish conquest a way back to power, subject to Spanish overlords.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan, Cortés awarded Xilotepec in encomienda in 1522. With rule and tribute collection uncertain on the northern frontier, the grant changed hands until it settled with Juan Jaramillo in 1523. Jaramillo, however, faced persistent challenges to his right to take tribute from Xilotepec's dependents at Tlachco (Querétaro). Otomí resistance and Spanish challengers limited his powers. It was the Otomí Connín, later baptized don Fernando de Tapia, who led expansion into the Bajío, according to sources that his power shaped. By the 1550s he ruled an Otomí community entrenched at Querétaro.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Maps ixPrologue: Making Global History in the Spanish Empire 1
A Note on Terminology 27
Introduction: A New World: The Bajío, Spanish North America, and Global Capitalism 29
Part I. Making A New World
The Bajío and Spanish North America, 1500–1770
1. Founding the Bajío: Otomí Expansion, Chichimeca War, and Commercial Querétaro, 1500–1660 65
2. Forging Spanish North America: Northward Expansion, Mining Amalgamations, and Patriarchal Communities, 1590–1700 121
3. New World Revivals: Silver Boom, City Lives, Awakenings, and Northward Drives, 1680–1760 159
4. Reforms, Riots, and Repressions: The Bajío in the Crisis of the 1760s 228
Part II. Forging Atlantic Capitalism
The Bajío, 1770–1810
5. Capitalist, Priest, and Patriarch: Don José Sánchez Espinosa and the Great Family Enterprises of Mexico City, 1780–1810 263
6. Production, Patriarchy, and Polarization in the Cities: Guanajuato, San Miguel, and Querétaro, 1770–1810 300
7. The Challenge of Capitalism in Rural Communities: Production, Ethnicity, and Patriarchy from La Griega to Puerto de Nieto, 1780–1810 352
8. Enlightened Reformers and Popular Religion: Polarizations and Mediations, 1770–1810 403
Conclusion: The Bajío and North America in the Atlantic Crucible 451
Epilogue: Toward Unimagined Revolutions 487
Acknowledgments 493
Appendix A: Employers and Workers at Querétaro, 1588–1699 499
Appendix B: Production, Patriarchy, and Ethnicity in the Bajío Bottomlands, 1670–1685 509
Appendix C: Bajío Population, 1600–1800 529
Appendix D: Eighteenth-Century Economic Indicators: Mining and Taxed Commerce 549
Appendix E: The Sierra Gorda and New Santander, 1740–1760 559
Appendix F: Population, Ethnicity, Family, and Work in Rural Communities, 1791–1792 573
Appendix G: Tribute and Tributaries in the Querétaro District, 1807 609
Notes 617
Bibliography 665
Index 685