The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850
416
The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850
416eBook
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Overview
Guardino makes extensive use of archival materials, including judicial transcripts and newspaper accounts, to illuminate the dramatic contrasts between the local politics of the city and of the countryside, describing in detail how both sets of citizens spoke and acted politically. He contends that although it was the elites who initiated the national change to republicanism, the transition took root only when engaged by subalterns. He convincingly argues that various aspects of the new political paradigms found adherents among even some of the most isolated segments of society and that any subsequent failure of electoral politics was due to an absence of pluralism rather than a lack of widespread political participation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822386568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2005 |
| Series: | Latin America Otherwise |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 801 KB |
About the Author
Peter Guardino is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857.
Read an Excerpt
THE TIME OF LIBERTY
Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850By PETER GUARDINO
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3508-5
Chapter One
Society, Economy, and Politics in Colonial Antequera
For most of the colonial period the city of Oaxaca was known as Antequera. Antequera, home of roughly 18,000 individuals in the middle of the eighteenth century, was situated at the junction of three of southern Mexico's most fertile valleys. By 1750 these valleys were shared, often grudgingly, between landed Indian villages and small estates owned by Spanish or Creole families. The strategic location of Antequera, however, also gave it access to several mountainous zones where hundreds of Indian villages predominated. The city served as an administrative and commercial center for these varied rural areas.
The city was tied to the country in various ways. The bishop who served as spiritual leader for the entire province lived in Antequera. This man wielded important spiritual influence and significant, though often informal, political power. The city also was the seat of a corregidor, a Spanish official who governed parts of the surrounding valleys. Rural people often came to town to pursue lawsuits or contract lawyers to make arguments in the corregidor's court. Although the Spanish colonial apparatus did notdirectly employ many people, it did make the city an attractive site for commercial activities, which, as in many early modern cities, were more important than direct production. The city's elite directed the most prominent commercial network. These Spanish and Creole merchants channeled the labor-intensive goods produced by the province's indigenous majority into wider markets. The cooperation of individual royal officials allowed merchants to control this trade. Yet, as important as these merchants were, they shared commercial activities with other social groups. Peddlers traveled to village markets throughout the province, offering better prices and taking payment in cash. Antequera also hosted the largest of the weekly markets that tied together the different Indian communities of the valleys. Antequera's market, held on Saturdays in the city center, was a meeting place for city and country. Villagers, including some from adjacent mountainous districts, could sell their surplus of crops and handicrafts and buy the items they needed. For villagers, Antequera was the place to buy fireworks or rent costumes for patron saint celebrations. In the city they could also contract specialists who aided in these celebrations, created religious objects, or decorated sacred spaces. The city's population included fireworks makers, musicians, gilders, silversmiths, and painters. Some rural people immigrated to the city, although in the second half of the eighteenth century the rate of immigration was slow.
A few elite families dominated the social landscape of the city much as their imposing mansions dominated the geography of the city's center. These prominent families earned the bulk of their wealth through commerce, but some also maintained landed estates in Oaxaca's valleys. They cultivated ties to colonial officials in the different districts of the province. Officials were able to maintain commercial monopolies in their districts, lending indigenous producers cash, tools, and work animals in exchange for the right to buy products at fixed prices. One lucrative product was cochineal, a dyestuff produced by indigenous males who cultivated special species of cacti, seeded them with insect larvae, and then laboriously collected and dried the mature insects. Cochineal was in great demand both in New Spain and in Europe, where it provided the bright reds of popular fashion. A second lucrative good was coarse cotton cloth, produced by indigenous women in mountain districts, especially Villa Alta. This textile was an important item in regional markets and clothed much of the region's population. It was also popular in the mining districts of central and northern Mexico.
The urban population of Antequera produced tools, furniture, shoes, cloth, and clothing. The latter two categories were particularly prominent in the late colonial period. Urban textile production increased dramatically in the 1740s and soon the city boasted hundreds of working looms and tailor shops. Earlier in the century some wealthy members of society had owned obrajes, large textile workshops staffed by bound labor. However, by the middle of the century master artisans who employed apprentices and journeymen produced most textiles, along with many other urban products. Antequera's guild of cotton weavers was incorporated in 1757, and it joined over a dozen other guilds in the city.
The available documentation makes it easier to enter into the cultural and social worlds of Antequera's elite than to enter those of the mass of the population. Clearly the members of the elite took care to preserve their sense of difference from the rest of society. They built imposing mansions near the city center and financed the even more impressive religious buildings for which the city is still known today. The wealthiest of these families preserved the family holdings in mayorazgos, preventing partible inheritance from dissipating their patrimony. Elite families also controlled the town council, whose posts were all either inherited or bought from the Crown. These families seemed to perceive themselves as Spaniards surrounded by a sea of darker people. They were often headed by immigrants from Spain who married Creole women but taught their Spanish nephews how to run their businesses. They also took care to preserve their limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, which they needed to demonstrate in order to assume important religious posts or inherit seats on the town council. Limpieza de sangre was generally demonstrated through the testimony of prominent friends of the family. For example, Geronimo de Alemán, royal constable of the city, testified on behalf of Don Ignacio Nicolas de Lazarte in 1737 that Lazarte's mother was a product of the marriage between a Spaniard and a prominent Creole, and his father Don Juan de Lazarte was
from the city of San Sebastian, Province of Guipusio, hijodalgo [hidalgo, noble, son of something] of known home and house lot, due to which his father and other ancestors obtained the honorary posts of that place, and said Don Juan has been Alcalde Ordinario of this city with great acceptance of the whole population, showing through his very upright actions his nobility, cleanliness, and descent from old Christians, free of all bad race, showing the same his wife Doña María Antonia with her virtue and modesty, and her Christian behavior, arranged so publicly. Everything in this statement is known and no one is ignorant of it.
Clearly there is something formulaic in this incantation, but formulas can also tell us much about those who invoke them. The concept of purity of blood had originally developed in Iberia on religious grounds as a means of placing officials above suspicion of covert Jewish or Muslim belief. Yet the emphasis in Lazarte's statement is on the connection to Spain and to prominent families there, and the absence of any blood tainted by origin in Africa or America.
Readers familiar with the growing literature on the concept of honor in Latin America will not be surprised to know that elite families, and those that aspired to elite status, took their honor very seriously. They struggled to prevent their daughters from marrying men considered to be less than honorable, or at least not financially eligible for elite status. They also went to court when they felt others had insulted them. In 1797 Don Rosendo Antonio Monteagudo tried to pay a servant's debts to José García, the baker the servant had previously worked for. García threatened to kill Monteagudo for being a "liar," an insult that led Monteagudo to take him to court. In 1765 Doña Josepha de Aguero, widow of Don Mathias Joseph, became involved in an angry argument with her business partner Don Manuel de Cossio. She accused him of calling her a "filthy pig" that he wished "the devil to take in body and soul." She leveled criminal charges, asking the judge to punish him for "shaming himself with people of the quality and distinction that I have." Such clashes over honor were closely related to the elite's position in a multiethnic, socially stratified society. This relationship can be seen clearly in the complaint of Doña Isabel de Lorenzana, wife of Don Pedro Antonio Gaytuzzo, against Pioquinto Vacas in 1754. She had sought to defend one of her servants against his mistreatment, but Vacas insulted her, telling her to "screw herself." When she answered that "only mulattos and low people used that term," he called her a "mulata bitch, vile and very low person." After he refused to apologize she took him to court, saying, "In this city my nobility and that of my husband Don Pedro are well known, such that no one can allege ignorance because they are public and notorious" and "the injuries, verbal or physical, done to noble persons should be punished severely, especially when the aggressor is a person of low sphere and quality." As Anne Twinam points out, "honor was profoundly important because it rationalized hierarchy, the division of Hispanic society between a privileged few and a deprived majority." In her words, although other social groups in Latin America "might have their own versions of honor ... only colonial elites reserved it exclusively for themselves."
Exactly who was it that the city's elite defined their honor against? One group of importance was the province's indigenous population, scattered in hundreds of villages. Another, more immediate, group was the plebeian population of the city itself. The elite often viewed the behavior of this group as distasteful, disorderly, and dangerous. In 1762 Spaniard Manuel Nieto de Silva y Moctezuma, "decent and reputable person," accused of carrying arms illegally, responded that he did so "for his defense as a gentleman, given that there are so many lazy and vagabond people in this city, who assault anyone at any hour of the day or night." Responding to the elite's concerns, in 1776 Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli commiserated with them about "harmful effects brought by the idle life which your wretched plebeians are given to" and went on to lament the fact that plebeians insulted and obstructed the town officers who sought to control them. However, elite descriptions of the mass of the population are generally vague as well as fearful. Moreover, they can give us no clues about how the members of the "plebe" saw themselves and their social world.
The common people of cities like Antequera are very difficult to research because few documents provide information about them. In fact, despite our prejudices to the contrary, we know much more about the lives of indigenous peasants than we do about plebeians because indigenous peasants were much more likely to bring disputes before the judicial system. Lacking both property and the tight web of obligations that governed indigenous peasant life, plebeians almost never became involved in civil court cases. Most legal petitions brought to the courts by plebeians stem from criminal cases, and the petitioners are often the accused.
Still, the testimony of witnesses in criminal cases, and the identity of those witnesses, provide clues about the lives and concerns of the urban poor. These documents strongly suggest that plebeians did not share the elite's preoccupation with race. In the streets of Antequera individuals of different ethnic identities and economic positions conducted economic and social transactions or bustled past one another on urgent business. The plush fabrics and capes of the relatively wealthy mingled with the simple "shirt and pants" of peasants. Indians who lived in the valley villages or further a field entered the city to work, to sell and buy, and to see authorities. The plebeians who resided in the city were racially heterogeneous, and many plebeians were of mixed or indeterminate race. They included Indians who had immigrated to the city from the mountains and valleys of the province, the descendants of slaves brought from Africa, and many people with mixed Indian, African, or Spanish genetic and cultural heritage. There seems to have been no effective residential segregation in the city. Several neighboring villages were being gradually absorbed into the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These villages retained traditional village governments but were usually called suburbs or barrios in the documents. They remained centers of Indian population and were often first ports of call for immigrants from other indigenous villages, but mestizos and mulattos also lived there and some Indians lived in the more central neighborhoods of the city. In court cases it was common for witnesses from several racial categories and occupations to testify about the same events even when they took place in residential neighborhoods. The list of witnesses and participants in a 1769 brawl in the Barrio de los Alzados includes Joseph Lorenzo de Orozco, a mestizo porter; Juan Ramos, a cochineal peddler; Indian Manuel de la Trinidad, a tanner; Indian María Dominga Ruiz; and Juan de Antonio Jesus, a mestizo tanner. The poor of different racial backgrounds and occupations seem to have lived more or less elbow-to-elbow.
Witnesses in criminal cases and even people dictating their wills did not generally identify individuals by race. Often they did not know the last names of their neighbors, but identified them through their parentage, occupation, or nicknames like "Lightning" and "Worst." For instance, when the mestizo Obaldo Antonio Savedra dictated his will in 1765, he was owed many small sums by people such as "Dionicio the Silversmith, Francisco the Candle maker, Bartholo the Candle maker, Antonio the Mason," and so on. Witnesses oered similar forms of identifying people in criminal cases, for instance "Bernarda the Chocolate-maker." For most plebeians, race was an abstract category that was only recorded or even assigned to them when they were called as witnesses or married. As John Chance has shown, there were very high rates of racially mixed marriages in the city. Clearly the social and economic networks of the mass of Antequera's population stretched beyond racial categories. It is striking, for instance, that in 1764 Carpio Antonio de Matos, a mestizo dealer in building supplies, would choose "Vicente de Zarate alias Concepción ... free pardo resident of this city, master button maker" to execute his will. Retail merchants and master artisans seem to have associated freely with people of various races and occupations. To the extent that racial hierarchy was important to the hegemony of the colonial state, that hegemony was limited in urban Antequera. Elite visions of racial hierarchy simply did not resonate with plebeian Antequerans.
In general, the documents suggest that Antequera was divided between a relatively small elite that stressed its racial identity and many people of more modest means who rarely thought about race at all. Connections between these groups appear to have been tenuous. The mercantile elite seems to have been oriented outward, culturally toward Spain and economically toward the villages of the province, where they worked through Spanish officials and associates. Although R. Douglas Cope has argued that Spaniards and Creoles in colonial Mexico City enjoyed extensive patronage connections with plebeian clients, that does not seem to have been the case in Antequera. Various convents and confraternities owned much of the urban real estate that plebeians rented, and the mercantile elite seems to have avoided investment in urban rental property. Moreover, they did not lend money directly to the city's population, although they did make some loans to shops which in turn allowed purchases on credit. Instead, most people of modest means turned to their peers for loans. Certainly many poor Antequerans worked in the homes and shops of master artisans we might think of as middle-class, but this latter group did not share the wealth and worldview of the elite mercantile families. Both the lack of direct economic connection between elite and plebeians and their dramatically different perspectives about race would have significant consequences when government came to be based on popular elections in the early nineteenth century.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
1. Society, Economy, and Politics in Colonial Antequera 19
2. Society, Economy, and Political Culture in Colonial Villa Alta 40
3. Bourbon Intentions and Subaltern Responses 91
4. Loyalty, Liberalism, War, and Independence 122
5. Oil and Vinegar: The Construction and Dissolution of Republican Order in the City of Oaxaca 156
6. The Reconstruction of Order in the Countryside 223
Conclusion 275
Notes 293
Bibliography 369
Index 395