The American Society for Ethnohistory

Spanish Justice and the Indian Cacique: Disjunctive Political Systems in Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec
Author(s): Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Ethnohistory, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer, 1992), pp. 285-315
Published by: Duke University Press
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SpanishJustice and the IndianCacique:
Disjunctive Political Systems
in Sixteenth-Century Tehuantepec

Judith Francis Zeitlin, John Carter Brown Library,

and Lillian Thomas, Brandeis University

Abstract.Analysisof a I553 complaintlodgedby two sets of TehuantepecIndians

againsttheircacique,Don JuanCortes,underscoresdivergentjuropoliticalcon-
ceptsbroughtby SpanishandZapotecactorsto theearlysixteenth-century colonial
world in which they interacted.AlthoughDon Juansurvivedthis particularchal-
lenge to his traditionalauthority,the incidentsignalsthe beginningof a lengthy
processof culturalredefinitionfor the IsthmusZapotecs.

In the Lienzo de Guevea,' an early sixteenth-centurynative codex from the

Tehuantepec region of southern Mexico, a column of eight figures repre-
senting pre-Columbian Zapotec princes rises above a pyramid denoting
the kingdom's original seat of power, the Oaxaca Valley town of Zaachila.
The figures tell of significant transitions in the history of the Zaachila dy-
nasty: the generational transfer of political power from father to son and
the physical relocation of the dynasty to a new capital on the Pacific coast
at Tehuantepec. Identified by name in hieroglyphic inscriptions and Latin
letters, seven of the princes are seated on jaguar-skin cushions, attired in
the mantle and peaked hat of Zapotec royalty. At the head of the column,
the figure of Cosijopi, the last king, appears again, this time sitting on a
Spanish chair and wearing a hat, shoes, pants, and a cloak. His new name,
as well as his new clothes, marks a third political transition recorded by
the lienzo (document painted on cloth): the Hispanicized incarnation of
Cosijopi as Juan Cortes.
Juan Cortes is the baptismal name adopted by the young ruler of
Tehuantepec shortly after he allied himself with the Spanish forces follow-
ing the defeat of Tenochtitlan. Like other native rulers who cooperated
with the establishment of the Christian king's dominion, Don Juan en-

Ethnohistory 39:3 (Summer I992). Copyright ? by the American Society for

Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-i80i/9z/$i.5o.
z86 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

joyed a privileged relationship with the Spanish Crown, which permitted

him to continue as ruler of Tehuantepeclong after Hernan Cortes secured
the strategic area as part of his private domain, the Marquesado del Valle
de Oaxaca. Many of his traditional enemies were defeated, and, although
portions of his former tributary domain were lost, the Zapotec king was
able to retain control over the towns and villages scattered across the vast
coastal plain. By an arrangementthat the Crown permitted only in select
cases in which the native ruler had been especially helpful to the Span-
ish conquerors, Don Juan continued to receive much of his income from
tribute paid him directly by subject towns in the province. He petitioned
for and was granted the right to ride a horse and to wear the Western-
style clothing depicted in the lienzo; he was even permitted to bear arms
(Zeitlin 1984). But despite his seemingly advantageous adaptation to Span-
ish rule and apparent emulation of a hidalgo's lifestyle, the Tehuantepec
cacique ended his days in disgrace. In 1563he died on the return journey
from Mexico City, where he had failed to defend himself from accusations
that he had encouraged and participated in pagan idolatries (Burgoa I989
[1674]: 358-59).
The life of Cosijopi is in many ways illustrative of political change
in early colonial society. As Don Juan Cortes, he both witnessed and
embodied the process of political transformation, particularly the early
accommodation and later breakdown that characterized the relations be-
tween many indigenous groups and the Spaniards.Groups like the Isthmus
Zapotecs accepted Spanish domination readily, apparently viewing it in
the familiar terms of pre-Columbian warfare, in which the price of tribute
and military support was exacted with little interference in the internal
political and religious affairs of the subordinate society. Cosijopi himself
was the child of a marriage contracted between the Zaachila king Cosi-
joeza and a member of the royal family of Tenochtitlan, both the marriage
alliance and the succession of its offspring to the throne constituting a typi-
cal pattern of Triple Alliance domination, in which the infusion of Aztec
blood substituted for more direct forms of administrativecontrol (Gibson
1971: 390).
Spain, however, was not interestedin following pre-Columbianmodels
of imperial organization, and native culture became subjected to increas-
ingly stressful demands under the heavy hand of Spanish colonial rule. The
resulting transformation of indigenous social and political institutions in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has already commanded consider-
able scholarly attention, both with regard to identifying general processes
of institutional change (Carrasco 1961, 1973; Gibson 1955, I966; Borah
1983; Liss I975; Wolf 1957) and from the regional perspective of under-
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec z87

standing specific patterns of indigenous cultural adaptation (Chance 1978,

I989; Gibson 195z, 1964; Farriss 1984; Spores 1967, 1984; Whitecotton
1977; L6pez Sarrelangue1965).
The fate of the Tehuantepec cacique might do little more than exem-
plify already well-established processes of cultural change in New Spain
were it not for an incident late in his life that throws additional light on the
disjunctive relationship between indigenous and colonial political systems.
In 1553 Don Juan Cortes faced a series of humiliating legal proceedings
against him triggered by Indian accusations of wrongdoing. Both a writ-
ten transcript of oral testimony carefully recorded by the official Spanish
notary and pictorial drawings offered by the Indian complainants have
survived, and their study offers us a rare opportunity to view Indian per-
ceptions of the changing world of early sixteenth-century New Spain. It
is an instant in a temporal trajectory of profound cultural change during
which we see the clash of Zapotec and Spanish values rekindled by the im-
position of apparently benign political forms. Although Cosijopi survived
the immediate threat posed by these accusations and the social discontent
that fueled them, the events of I553 forced him into a confrontation with
the colonial authorities that demonstratesthe fundamentalincompatibility
of Zapotec and Spanish concepts of justice.
The anthropological axiom that different cultures have different ways
of looking at the world has special relevance in the plural societies forged
by European colonialism. Paul Bohannan (I964: II) describes colonial-
ism as involving "working misunderstandings,"the juxtaposition of two
culturally distinct ways of perceiving the world at large and the power sys-
tem through which the colonizing and the colonized peoples interact. The
result of contact between the two viewpoints is not common understand-
ing, according to Bohannan (ibid.: 13): "There were two sides and neither
really knew the 'codes'-the connotations of word and deed-in which
the other group perceived the situation, valued it, communicated about
it, and acted." Instead, there was "a more or less fortuitous confluence of
some aims and purposes" that characterizedthe working misunderstand-
ing (ibid.).
In the case of colonial New Spain, such misunderstandingswere per-
petuated by superficial similarities between Spanish and native culture and
organizational structure, similarities that nowhere proved so confounding
as in the arena of religion and worldview. Determined to eradicateall forms
of pre-Columbian demon worship, Catholic clerics found to their dismay
that Christian precepts and moral teachings, however sincerely espoused
by their native converts, were continually undermined by idolatrous back-
sliding (Berlin 1988; Serna 1953). As argued persuasively in recent studies
z88 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

of colonial Nahua religious discourse, the concepts of Christian ortho-

doxy were interpreted even by willing converts according to an indigenous
logical code that gave pre-Columbian order and meaning to a new uni-
verse of Catholic saints and ritual observance (Klorde Alva I982: 354-56;
Burkhart I989: 187-88).
While juropolitical institutions might seem to carry a less weighty
ideological burden than religious practices, in fact both Spanish and in-
digenous polities legitimized their authority in culturally distinctive terms
relating the world of human affairs to the perceived cosmological order.
That these legitimizing principles remained hidden behind the practical
business of maintaining social harmony deferred a direct attack on indige-
nous political values by the colonizers comparable to their brutal assault
on native religion. After three decades among the fragile chiefdoms of
the Caribbean, the Spanish conquerors were pleased to recognize in the
hierarchical Mesoamerican city-states a social order similar to their own.
Initially, these correspondences in sociopolitical structure facilitated the
proliferation of Spanish-Indian alliances embraced by each side for what
in the long run proved to be incompatible purposes.
Shortly before 1553, the Spanish Crown had shifted the terms under
which the Indian communities of the Isthmus retained their political au-
tonomy by imposing an Iberian model of town government, an event that
triggered the crisis in "working misunderstandings"revealed in the crimi-
nal complaints brought against the Tehuantepecruler. But while Don Juan
Cortes struggled to preserve the accommodation he had forged years be-
fore, other factions within Zapotec society found in the new political
structure an avenue for relieving social and economic strains. It would
be left to another postconquest generation to resolve these tensions and
achieve a stable realignment of Zapotec institutions and values to Span-
ish rule. Meanwhile, the imprisonment of a once-powerful native ruler
through the agency of his own subjects is an image that underscores the
complex repercussions of the creation of colonial hegemony. By focusing
on the events of 1553and the culturally distinctive sets of institutions and
values in which Indian and Spanish actors were enmeshed, we hope to elu-
cidate the stresses that conditioned subsequent Zapotec reinterpretations
of the political order.

The Criminal Complaints against the

Tehuantepec Ruler
In the fall of 1553,Don Juan Cortes was in jail in Tehuantepec,awaiting the
outcome of a series of legal procedures brought against him under Spanish
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec z89

colonial law. Don Juan, cacique and gobernador (governor) of Tehuante-

pec, was undergoing a residencia secreta, a formal investigation into the
conduct of officials normally instigated at the end of an officeholder's term.
Sometime after the start of the residencia, two separate criminal com-
plaints were drawn against Don Juan by Indian residents of Tehuantepec.
Although the transcript of the residencia has not been located, records of
the two cases heard by the Spanish alcalde mayor (district magistrate and
judge), Pedro Pacheco, are preserved in Mexico's Archivo General de la
Naci6n.2 They comprise eighteen folio pages of Spanish manuscript re-
corded by the official notary, Diego de Trinino, and two additional pages
in the hand of Don Juan's advocate, Rodrigo Cortes. The five pages of
native-style drawings, or pinturas, recorded with this document include
one folio illustration of the incident described in the complaint registered
by three Mexican Indians (Fig. i) and four sheets of maguey paper submit-
ted by the Zapotec litigants, three with rows and columns of hieroglyphic
representations of tribute commodities and one depicting forms of punish-
ment meted out by native officials (Figs. z-5). Since these cases refer to the
residencia secreta and one incorporates testimony from the proceedings,
they can be used to reconstruct Don Juan's complicated legal situation.
On 3I October 1553 four Zapotec-speaking men from Tehuantepec
charged Don Juan and Domingo Goma, their barrio's tequitlato, or tribute
collector, with taking excessive tribute and diverting it to their own pur-
poses. Three days later three other Indian residents of Tehuantepec, who
spoke Nahuatl and were referred to as "Mexicans," accused Don Juan of
ordering them to be beaten and nearly killed in a dispute over work on
one of the town's irrigation canals. Don Juan had been accused by his own
subjects of criminal behavior.
The residencia was initiated at the end of what was probably Don
Juan's first two-year term of office as gobernador of Tehuantepec, an office
that during his lifetime continued to be merged with his cacicazgo (heredi-
tary title and estate). Until 155I documents referredto him only by the title
of cacique; Don Juan's acquisition of the new title of gobernador in suc-
ceeding references indicates that the Crown had added Tehuantepecto the
growing list of Indian communities among which it established cabildos,
or town councils, which were to be self-governing bodies in the Span-
ish model. Among Indian communities the cabildo was elected by male
members of the nobility and, in a concession to the former autonomy of
indigenous city-states, was headed by a native gobernador, whose claim to
office rested in these early years on his rights as hereditary lord.
An integral part of the Spanish bureaucraticstructure, the residencia
was an exhaustive examination of the conduct of an important official,
2.90 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

Mw ?;~rt

.......

~~~~~~~~~~~~~i
...........~

iii-:

---::::::-
:I?

Figure i. Acculturatedcolonial manuscript-styledrawing presentedby three

MexicanIndianresidentsof Tehuantepecin theircriminalcomplaintagainstDon
Juan Cortes. Original drawingsmade on Europeanpaper with Europeanink
and published as C6dice Num. 29 in Archivo General de la Naci6n (AGN) 1933.
Reproduced by courtesy of the AGN.

Spaniard or Indian, during which the juez de residencia, or appointed in-

vestigator, often just the official replacing the incumbent but in this case the
Spanish alcalde mayor, gathered and examined all complaints of miscon-
duct. Witnesses were called, and their testimony to a standard, numbered
list of questions was carefully recorded by the Crown's notary; the residen-
cia judge submitted his findings to the Audiencia. Meanwhile, the official
accused of impropriety usually awaited judgment in the confines of the
local jail. If the outcome was negative, he could be fined, ordered to re-
pay injured parties, or otherwise punished for misconduct. Apparently,
Don Juan's privileges did not exempt him from the usual procedures of
the Spanish justice system, in which all but the high nobility suffered the
consequences of presumed guilt.
Political Systems in Sixteenth-Century Tehuantepec z9I

:: ::

Figure 2. Depiction of abuses suffered by Zapotec complainants under Don Juan

Cortes. Native-style drawing executed on maguey paper with huizache (acacia)
ink (AGN, HJ, leg. 450, exp. i, cat. no. 3125). Reproduced by courtesy of the AGN.

iy/ i, i ; a^A
K E:::. S . .

Figure 3. Maguey paper account record of tribute paid in money to Don Juan
Cortes (AGN, HJ, leg. 450, exp. i, cat. no. 3122). Reproduced by courtesy of the
AGN.
z9z Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

Figure4. Maguey paper account recordof tributepaid in money to Don Juan

Cortes (AGN,HJ, leg. 450, exp. i, cat. no. 3123). Reproduced by courtesy of the
AGN.

The Zapotec commoners Andres Tine, Domingo Tio, Alonso Pica,

and Bernardino Gualopa brought charges of excessive tribute demands
against Don Juan and the tequitlato Domingo Goma, using native-style
pinturas to indicate the quantity of blankets, cacao, and money that they
had been forced to hand over.3Speaking through two interpreters, one of
Zapotec-Nahuatl, the other of Nahuatl-Spanish, the Indians complained
of being worn out from tribute demands so high that they were destroying
all the commoners of the town; this tribute, they suggested, was going to
finance Don Juan's personal expenses. That others did not voice similar
complaints, they asserted, was due to the Indians' great fear of Don Juan.
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 2-93

Figure5. Magueypaperaccountrecordof tributepaidin money,mantas(lengths

of cotton cloth), and other goods to Don Juan Cortes (AGN, HJ, leg. 450, exp. I,
cat. no. 3124). Reproduced by courtesy of the AGN.

Domingo Goma testified on io November. Claiming that he had acted

only on the orders of Don Juan and other noble officials, he gave a com-
plicated account of the goods taken from the four complainants, saying
that part was owed from a previous assessment, part was cacao improperly
hoarded by one of the commoners, and another part had been demanded
by the church. The alcalde mayor ordered Domingo Goma imprisoned
until the case could be reviewed. Four days later he ordered his release,
saying that the matter was being pursued in the residencia.
Meanwhile, another charge had been brought against Don Juan by
Hernando Ticulteca, Juan Cautiztaque, and Martin Cocoliloque, vecinos
z94 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

mexicanos (Mexican, i.e., Nahuatl-speaking Indian, residents) of Tehuan-

tepec. On 3 November they charged through the Nahuatl-speaking in-
terpreter that about seven months earlier two Indians had beaten them
severely with sticks on Don Juan's orders, then had dragged the naked and
unconscious Ticulteca to an irrigation canal and had begun to bury him on
the spot. Only the arrival of another Indian, Luis de Velasco, who ordered
them to stop, had saved the man from certain death. All this, they claimed,
Don Juan had commanded because of his hatred and enmity ("odio y ene-
mistad") for Mexicans. The complainants asked that Don Juan be ordered
to pay them reparations and be otherwise punished.
The events of this case had also been a subject of investigation in
the residencia. Apparently, Don Juan had made a confession regarding
the beatings, which he later recanted, saying that it had been given under
duress and fear of being whipped. Noting this, the alcalde mayor, Pedro
Pacheco, ordered that the residencia testimony concerning the canal inci-
dent be collected and placed in the record of the criminal complaint. On
15 November the complainants presented two witnesses on their behalf,
the alcalde Francisco Pimo and Alonso Zaa, a worker who had been sent
to bring the Mexicans to the irrigation site. Their testimony, along with
excerpts from the residencia testimony of two additional witnesses, the
tequitlatos Sebastian Yupre and Domingo Ca, was duly entered into the
record by the scribe Diego de Trinino. All agreed that Don Juan had been
present at the canal at the time of the beatings; one witness said that he had
heard that Don Juan had ordered the punishment, but the others claimed
not to know if Don Juan himself was responsible for it. In excerpts from his
own residencia testimony, Don Juan confirmed that he had been present at
the irrigation project but denied having ordered the beatings, saying that
he had heard that it was Domingo Goma, the tequitlato overseer, who had
punished the Mexicans.
It would be interesting to know how Pedro Pacheco interpreted the
evidence presented to him in the two cases, but there are no rulings. On
17 November both complaints were withdrawn by the Indians, who, in
similar language in each case, said that they were dropping the charges for
the sake of peace and harmony ("por bien de paz y concordia") and not for
fear that justice would not be done ("no por themor de falta de justicia").
But despite the withdrawals, the proceedings were not quite over. One
more entry, dated 23 November, is included in the tribute case. Written in
a different hand from that of the official scribe who produced the rest of
the document, it is signed by a Rodrigo Cortes, who submitted a plea on
behalf of Don Juan, whom he represented as advocate ("orador y defen-
sor"). The author responded in the first-personvoice of his client, denying
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec z95

all charges and petitioning his release from jail, because the complaints
had been dropped. Although we do not know the immediate outcome of
this petition or the findings of the residencia secreta, Don Juan retained
the title and office of gobernador until shortly before his death in I563,
after which it passed to his son-in-law, Pedro Pimentel (AGN, M, vol. 7, fol.
Io8v), while his two sons retained patrimonial rights to land and com-
moner labor (AGN, M, vol. 6, fol. 418). In the case at hand, it is clear that
Don Juan availed himself of the enormous power of his traditional role to
effect a behind-the-scenes termination of the formal proceedings.
If, at least on the surface, neither the criminal complaints nor the resi-
dencia successfully challenged Don Juan's rule or the indigenous political
structure, why should we regard these cases as anything more than incon-
sequential suits whose primaryvalue is the ethnographic glimpse they pro-
vide of soon-to-be-lost pre-Columbian practices? It is our belief that this
conflict has more serious implications for the demise of native government
than the outcome of the suit alone indicates. We findinstead that, coming so
soon after the institution of Spanish governmental forms in Tehuantepec,
the hearing of these disputes before the Spanish alcalde mayor marks an
important early confrontation between Zapotec and Spanish ideas about
political authority and opposing conceptions of the responsibility of the
native ruler. Because of the asymmetrical balance of power between the
two parties, this opposition inevitably led to the underminingof the indige-
nous system, whatever the momentary success of the cacique's assertion
of personal power may have been. Moreover, the very existence of these
challenges to the ruler's exercise of authority points to profound changes
in the relationship between commoners and the elite within native soci-
ety, changes already under way barely thirty years after the conquest of
Mexico.

The Tehuantepec Case and Early Colonial

Political Change in New Spain

It was not the intent of the Spanish colonial enterprise, at least not at first,
to meddle in the internal juropolitical affairs of Mesoamerican city-states.
Although elaborate native tributary networks were quickly dismantled
into their autonomous town-subject community nodes, the intent of the
conquistadors and early agents of the Crown who replaced them was to
position the colonial government at the receiving end of surplus revenues
and labor generated by an already efficient indigenous sociopolitical struc-
ture.4Native rulers like Don Juan who had submitted peacefully to Spanish
rule were recognized by the Crown, which gave them formal en perpetuo
z96 JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

titles, allowed them to continue to assert political control over their own
people, and made them responsible for meeting local tribute demands. In
this respect, Don Juan was treated in much the same way as he would have
been had the Zapotecs been conquered by another Mesoamerican state of
the time. That the Zapotec political system could not long withstand the
dislocations caused by conquest, depopulation, and congregaci6n (forced
aggregation of dispersed Indian settlements) or the abuses occasioned by
individual greed is clear from the social realities of later colonial New
Spain. But changes in Crown policy during CharlesV's lifetime that called
for the creation of Indian cabildos unintentionally hastened the restruc-
turing of relationships between elites and commoners, a restructuring far
more important than the native proclivity to equate pre-Columbian and
colonial offices and officeholders would suggest.
Although native governments were shown greater tolerance than
native religious practices, inevitably neither could survive Spain's view of
its own culture and society as an embodiment of divine will and natural
law. Just as Spaniards viewed the Bible as explicitly determining Catholic
precepts and rituals, so they saw divine creation as implicitly determining
the social order and customary laws by which they and other Europeans
lived. To the extent that indigenous Mesoamerican society was ordered on
similar hierarchical principles of inherited station and serviced legitimate
social needs, Spanish political theorists such as Francisco de Vitoria (1917)
saw it as an example of proper order or the perfect state, despite the Indi-
ans' ignorance of Christ (G6ngora I975). To the extent that pre-Columbian
society institutionalized practices such as idolatry, human sacrifice, canni-
balism, and other behavior contrary to the Spaniards'idea of natural law,
it was seen as illegitimate, irrational, and requiring the intervention of the
Catholic king and his agents. In the extreme position taken by Juan Gines
de Septlveda (194I), the Spanish war of conquest was justified not only
as a means of bringing such heinous pagan practices to an end and easing
the spread of Christianity, but as a proper means of subjugating a race
destined for enslavement because of its natural inferiority.
The tension between conflicting views of how well indigenous soci-
ety fit ideal Spanish models persisted throughout the early colonial period,
but in practice the Crown was less content to tolerate confusing deviations
from the familiar model of proper polity, the Spanish cabildo, or town
council, which it sought to impose on Indian town government through-
out New Spain (Borah 1983: 33-34). The purpose of this change was not
just the integration and rationalization of colonial administrative units
but, as Gibson (1952: 103) notes, the political acculturation of the native
community as well. For groups such as the Zapotecs, who had peacefully
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 297

submitted to the conquistadors, the imposition of cabildo represented a

more radical political intrusion than the initial imposition of Spanish rule.
The cabildo so constituted was to be the institution of self-rule in each
Indian town. Its memberswere elected annuallyor biennially by male mem-
bers of the native nobility; the main officerswere the gobernador, alcaldes,
regidores (municipal councillors), and alguaciles (town constables). Some
Indian cabildos were established in areas of major conquest-related dis-
ruption as early as the I5zos. Elsewhere the process was more gradual,
as in Tlaxcala, where an early cabildo staffed by hereditary indigenous
officeholders gave way to an elected form in the I54os (ibid.: 103-4). In
Tehuantepec we see a slightly later unfolding of the same process, with
cabildo offices first mentioned after I550. The position of gobernador did
not become an elected office limited to a single two-year term until after
Don Juan's death.
The simple imposition of Spanish designations for Indian officials did
not intrinsically change their stature in the community or the duties they
performed. In the Tehuantepeccomplaints, for example, we see these offi-
cials supervising communal labor service through traditional structural
roles. Similar data from other areas in New Spain illustrate how Indian
officeholders continued to fulfill traditionally important jobs unimpeded
by Spanish concepts of their official duties (cf. Haskett 1987 on Cuer-
navaca; Cline 1986 on Culhuacan). But while the pre-Columbian officials
derived their political authority from the ruler, whose power and right
to rule was legitimized by the supernatural world, that of their colonial
counterparts was legitimized by the king of Spain. Though elected from the
town's nobility, these officials, particularlythe Indian gobernador, received
their authority from the Crown. Ultimately, this official, like his Spanish
counterpart, was responsible to the Crown for upholding the principles
of good government, which in early sixteenth-century humanistic politi-
cal theory were subsumed under the idea of justice (Fernandez-Santamaria
I977: 69). The Crown reserved for itself the right to review the decisions
and conduct of Indian and Spanish officials alike with reference to what
it considered universal ethical standards, holding those of highest respon-
sibility, as Don Juan was surely surprised to learn, subject to the onerous
review proceedings of the residencia.

Traditional Concepts of Political Authority

in Zapotec Society

To appreciate the far-reaching impact of the cabildo system on Isthmian

political organization, we must first sketch the fundamental concepts of
z98 JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

the indigenous structure it replaced. From the perspective of traditional

cultural values in Zapotec society, Cosijopi's position as hereditary ruler
presumed a quite different set of principles regarding his legal and politi-
cal authority. Most fundamental among these differences was the position
of the ruler as absolute monarch. In preconquest times, the coquitao, or
great lord (the Tehuantepec king was paramountruler among the Zapotec
principalities of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries), had complete
control over his subjects, as well as over any conquered peoples within
his domain. As sixteenth-century informants of the Relaciones geogrdficas
from several Zapotec-speaking cabeceras (head towns) reported, there was
no law except what the lord ordered them to do (Whitecotton 1977: I39).
This power derived from the ruler's inherited position. The descen-
dant of former rulers, the coquitao communicated ritually with his de-
ceased ancestors, who, because of their exalted position in death, acted
as intermediaries for the mortal community with the supernatural world
of spirits and life forces that bounded it (Marcus I983b: 348). Since all
the noble lineages, the tijajoana, were collateral branches from the central
trunk of the royal family, members of the nobility as a class shared in this
supernaturally sanctioned authority. Early colonial Zapotec terms glossed
for the Spanish suggest that authority (autoridad) derived from the ances-
tors (guelanagola, "propertyof the ancients")and was a quality associated
with the nobility (guelajoana, "propertyof the nobility").5
Authority carried with it the control of power through law and edict,
glossed in Zapotec as tichapea, which derived from the word for "speech."
The ruler was the supreme determinerof law, the huetogotichapeatao, and
the judgment he rendered equated with the execution of justice, given in
Zapotec as guelahuetogoticha, "propertyof the judge."That the enactment
of law and judicial review were primary functions not only of the ruler
but also of the high-ranking officials who assisted him is underscored by
the repeated offering of huetogoticha (judge) as one of the Zapotec terms
equivalent to the Spanish offices of alcalde, juez, corregidor (governor of
an administrative district), and gobernador.
As both lawgiver and judge, the Zapotec ruler would seem to have
been in a position to exercise arbitraryand dictatorial powers over a hap-
less populace. In actuality, his discretionary privileges were limited to do-
mains that carried traditional expectations of commoner obligation, and
the limits to which those obligations could be stretched were finite. After
all, law in Zapotec society-like that of other late Mesoamerican states-
consisted not of codified statutes or even of a large body of newly en-
acted decrees from the reigning monarch. Rather, it was customary law,
the tichapeagolaza, or ancient ways and rites.6Law was considered to be
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec z99

embodied in the person of the ruler, but that law included traditional ideas
about the ruler's duty to act for the good of the community.
One of the ruler's primary responsibilities was to render proper ser-
vice to the spiritual forces upon which the community depended. Although
there was a hierarchy of priestly specialists, the ruler participated person-
ally in many ritual observances. In the secular sphere, he was responsible
for the material well-being of his people, which he saw to through the orga-
nization of public works projects that increased agricultural productivity
and enhanced the image of the community as a place of importance. Mili-
tary encounters with other kingdoms fulfilled a personal and communal
agenda, for their successful outcome added wealth and wealth-producing
lands to the ruler's patrimony, raised the town's prestige, and eased the
tribute burden levied by a burgeoning class of nobles.
Commoners (Zapotec peniqueche) supported the ruler and the rest
of the nobility through goods levied in tribute. The Tehuantepec Relacion
geografica description of pre-Columbian tribute practices includes luxu-
ries like gold dust and jewelry, precious stones, feathers, jaguar skins, and
cotton clothing among the goods provided to the ruler; the restricted use
of these items by the nobility further enhanced their status. Foodstuffs,
including turkeys, corn, chile, beans, honey, deer, fish, and fruit, and all
manner of forest products complete the list (Caso I928: I69). Since the
Zapotec term for "tribute," chijna, was also the term for "labor," such
a list by itself fails to convey the underlying principle of communal trib-
ute obligations, which seems to have been based on labor demands for
specific kinds of production or procurement, rather than on a tax of prod-
ucts per se. While particular items were normally rendered to the ruler
by his subjects, several of the Relaciones geograficas, including that of
Tehuantepec (Paso y Troncoso I905: 48; Caso I928: 169), refer to these
as "presents" in contrast to tribute. Labor service was also required of
the commoners for public works, military draft, and the maintenance of
the ruler's household. All tribute labor was organized through the town's
numerous residential wards, which were overseen by their own collaba-
chijna, or tribute collector, usually referredto in postconquest documents
by the equivalent Nahuatl term, tequitlato.
In 1553 much of the traditional Zapotec political organization con-
tinued to function beneath the Spanish governmental structure so recently
imposed, and its basic features can be seen in incidents described in the two
complaints brought before the alcalde mayor, Pedro Pacheco. Although
Spanish names for offices (and the Nahuatl tequitlato) are used throughout
the document, the roles these individuals play follow traditional structural
principles. The presence of Don Juan Cortes dominates the incidents by
300 JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

the very nature of the complaints drawn against him, but the document
indicates that a hierarchyof officials was responsible for implementing the
day-to-day business of government. At the very top was a small group of
high-ranking nobles, including Don Juan's son-in-law, Don Pedro, who
formed a kind of council. The mayordomo, or chief administrator of the
town, is named in the second complaint, and Zapotec glosses for the term,
collabachijna quihui, which C6rdova described as the "mayordomo mayor
de un sefor," indicate that this person was in charge of tribute assessment
and collection. Tequitlatos assigned to each barrio were responsible for
collecting tributes from individual households and for organizing and over-
seeing labor drafts, such as the irrigation canal construction that forms the
basis for the Mexican complaint. At the work site itself, one of the tequitla-
tos was designated overseer, but two high-rankingprincipales (members of
the indigenous nobility) were present as well, Francisco Pima and Luis de
Velasco. Pima was the alcalde in charge of the project; Velasco's position
as a person of authority is suggested by his role in stopping the beating
given to the Mexicans.
The circumstances that caused the complainants to petition Pedro
Pacheco arose out of activities that themselves were a legitimate function of
native government, the drafting of labor for communal service and the ex-
traction of goods in tribute by the cacique through the political hierarchy.
In both the irrigation canal project and the matter of tribute collection,
barrio-based tequitlatos are the instrumental agents, requisitioning the
work force from each residential ward and collecting tribute assessments
on a household-by-household basis. Neither set of complainants questions
the right of the ruler to issue demands for labor or tribute goods. Not even
the Mexicans bringing charges against Don Juan in the second case dis-
pute his authority to command participation, although their recalcitrance
is what appears to have led to the beatings. Prior difficulties alluded to
by one of the witnesses suggest that Mexican compliance with communal
labor demands had long been a troublesome matter. In the case at hand,
the only issue requiring adjudication is that of excessive punishment. Simi-
larly, the Zapotec commoners in the other case charge Don Juan and the
tequitlato Domingo Goma with exacting excessive tribute and with divert-
ing it to illegitimate functions; they do not question their obligation to pay
tribute or the role of native officials in its collection.

Spanish Justice and the Indian Cacique

When Don Juan assumed the titles of cacique and gobernador of Tehuan-
tepec, he was drawn into a juropolitical system that bore superficial simi-
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 30I

larities to the one with which he was familiar, but that was based on
alien concepts. That Spanish ideas about the nature of power and justice
were fundamentally different from those of indigenous rulers such as Don
Juan, and that both sides failed to realize how wide the gap between their
understanding of one another was, is made clear in these cases. Powers
and responsibilities that had once been fused in a single person-had been
considered inherent in the individual and his position-were now disar-
ticulated into abstract concepts that separated the spiritual and material
worlds, then splintered and scattered throughout a bureaucracythat dis-
tinguished branches of government, official duties, rules, and individuals.
We catch just a glimpse of Don Juan's reactions to this situation
through the criminal charges brought before the alcalde mayor. Don Juan
never testified personally in either case; his voice is heard in the proceed-
ings only through the statement he issued through his Spanish procurador,
or advocate, Rodrigo Cortes. Clearly distressed to find himself in jail, Don
Juan even confessed at one point to some of the charges against him, a
confession he later withdrew, stating that he had made it for fear of being
whipped. Such an abrupt, if temporary,reversal of station was part of the
job for a Spanish official under a legal system that presumed guilt rather
than innocence before trial.
Both the accusations and imprisonment were unthinkable for a natu-
ral lord, however. Don Juan could not have foreseen that his actions
would be scrutinized by outside parties, because he believed himself guided
by the moral authority vested in him by ancient tradition. Even though
rulers frequently relinquished some political and economic autonomy to
more powerful lords under the expansionist regimes of late pre-Columbian
times, rarelydid the conqueror interferewith the internalfunctioning of the
subject state's government unless he deposed the local ruler (Hassig I988:
I7-18; Berdan I982: I03). The terms of conquest and capitulation had
changed dramatically with the arrival of the Spaniardsand the imposition
of colonial rule.
The Spanish concept of good government and its instruments, the ca-
bildo organization and residencia proceedings of the case at hand, rested
on the philosophical precepts that the political community existed to safe-
guard the interests of all sectors of a society, a function embodied in the
all-important concept of justice, and that political power was vested in
the sovereign for the purpose of making laws and judgments that would
safeguard justice internally (Fernandez-Santamaria1977; Sanchez Agesta
1959). Although the doctrine of the absolute monarch gradually crept into
Spanish political theory in the latter half of the sixteenth century, at the
onset of colonial rule officials of the state, even the king himself, from
3oz JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

whom all authority emanated, were sworn to uphold the law and were held
accountable for their actions (G6ngora I975). These laws, moreover, were
considered, not to have originated from the direct intervention of God in
the affairs of men, but to be of secular origin; that is, they were positive
laws created by society for the purpose of maintaining justice, itself man-
dated by natural law (Fernandez-SantamariaI977). As such, most laws
were subject to scrutiny under the lens of justice, as its agents were; neither
was absolute or beyond ordinary human review, unlike the supernatu-
rally revealed laws of traditional Zapotec society and the divinely vested
lawgiver and judge, the coquitao.
Borah (1983: 39-40) also stresses the importance of accountability
in the Spanish political system when discussing the establishment of New
Spain's Indian court:
A . . . Spanish conception, which had especially far-reaching conse-
quences, was that of appeal against the acts or decisions of judicial
and administrative officials; indeed, that any person, however high
his status, including the monarch himself through his agents, could
be brought into court. It is unlikely that pre-Conquest Indian society
had this concept except in highly restricted and attenuated form. For
the Spanish, on the other hand, the idea of appeal and accountability
Waspart of the very fabric of the state.
Such accountability implies a curtailing of power. Authority that must ac-
count for itself is restricted, and in the system in which Don Juan had
been placed, the demands for accounting were frequent and the avenues
for such demands open to many. The system worked in other ways to re-
strict authority. Personal judgment was subordinated to strict adherence
to rules. Don Juan was required to collect the tribute that was set by the
Spaniards, not the amount he judged correct, not an amount that corre-
sponded with circumstances at the time of collection. The requirements
of this system were usually specific and inflexible. Officials at Don Juan's
level were executors, not policymakers.
Any power residing in an official role was also curtailed by the struc-
ture of the system. By spreading authorityvertically and horizontally across
an extensive bureaucracy, structured by networks of hierarchy, redun-
dancy, and cross-cutting jurisdictions, the colonial system was designed
to make the accumulation of power difficult. As Indian gobernador, Don
Juan was subordinate to the officials appointed by the Marques, to agents
of the Crown, to the resident Dominican friars and their superiors in the
church hierarchy, and ultimately to the Audiencia. In actuality, the differ-
ent branches of delegated authority within the system frequently engaged
in power struggles, and this might mean that the gobernador had several
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 303

people telling him what to do. The confusion caused by these overlapping
domains is evident in the 1553 complaint, when the tequitlato Domingo
Goma testified that some of the money he collected went to purchase
cochineal and cloth demanded by the church treasurer.
From the perspective of the Spanish system of justice, did Don Juan
commit crimes of physical abuse and financial exploitation of the Indians
in his charge? We cannot say for certain what the outcome would have
been had the proceedings continued, but clearly the alcalde mayor took
the charges seriously. The Mexican Indians' complaint implies that an at-
tempt had been made to murder one of them at Don Juan's command, an
offense that would have required the highest judicial review. Don Juan's
traditional role, however, was that of supreme judge; he had possessed the
power of life and death over all his subjects.
Charges of excessive tribute demands were commonplace throughout
colonial New Spain, where Indian officials were in the habit of levying
ad hoc assessments (derramas) for special expenses, and a good portion
of the assessment might find its way into their pockets (ibid.: 51-52).
The establishment of cabildo government in formerly subordinate com-
munities could vest unfamiliar powers in officials newly tempted to ag-
grandize themselves. However unlikely it may be that a pre-Columbian
ruler as powerful as Don Juan used postconquest tribute as an unaccus-
tomed means of financing personal luxuries, an accusation that both he
and his tequitlato denied, there are other signs that legitimate tribute levies
were creating economic pressures within the Tehuantepec community at
this time.
High mortality rates experienced in repeated early sixteenth-century
epidemics had by midcentury reduced the number of tribute payers in
the province to about one-third their probable preconquest total, a demo-
graphic decline not quickly matched by lower levels of tribute exacted by
the Marques (Zeitlin I984: 74-75). In February 1552 Don Juan and the
Tehuantepec Indians brought suit before the Audiencia against agents of
the Marques for forced labor service and excessive tribute demands during
the construction of a sugar refinery (Zavala I982: 257). At the same time
that he was challenging the secular bureaucracy,the cacique acceded to
Dominican desires to erect a large church and convent headquarters for
their ministry. Although it was not graced with as many fine architectural
details as some sixteenth-century Dominican structures,the sheer size and
unusual solid-brick construction of the convent suggest that it took a sub-
stantial toll on the labor and finances of the tribute-paying community
for the few years prior to the building's acceptance by the order in I555
(Mullen 1975).
Whether Don Juan was innocent of the charge of excessive tribute
304 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

demands, had made the levies in response to special circumstances, or had

simply siphoned off some portion of the tribute, his actions were legiti-
mate under a pre-Columbian system that granted the ruler the preroga-
tive to assess what was necessary for the polity's welfare. Though both
Zapotec and Spanish concepts of political authority emphasized the impor-
tance of protecting the community, they differed in an important way. For
the Spaniards, protection was to be found in the system; it was achieved
through laws, abstract concepts, and judicial procedures. For the Zapo-
tecs, protection was embodied in the person of the ruler,who alone had the
supernatural authority to make decisions safeguarding the community's
well-being.

Signs of Decaying Political Authority within

the Indian Community

Thus far we have argued that the imposition of the cabildo and the two
sets of Indian complaints that arose out of its residencia proceedings con-
stituted a crisis in the "working misunderstandings"that had permitted
a traditional Indian political system to function during the early years of
Spanish colonial rule. In the events of I553 it was made clear to the Zapo-
tec leadership that the trappings of Spanish colonial government were not
simply prestigious adornments like the Western clothing Don Juan and
others acquired; for the first time Indian leaders were forced to account
for their actions in terms of the Spanish code of official conduct. It was an
important early stage in a lengthy process of recasting Zapotec political
ideas into an imposed organizational form.
Given the power of the Crown to direct the course of political change
among Indian groups, what is still surprising is the rapidity with which
native people appealed to the Spanish authorities for redress of their griev-
ances. In the cases heard by Pedro Pacheco, the actions taken by the Mexi-
can complainants seem the more understandable.We have little contextual
data relating to the role of these outsiders in the community, although
the existence of a Mexican barrio with its own tequitlato suggests that
the three men were part of a larger foreign community. The Hispanicized
nature of the drawing they presented (Fig. i) conforms to certain formal
properties of what Donald Robertson (I959: 4zff., 65) identifies as the
"acculturated colonial manuscript style," a style influenced by the West-
ern paintings and drawings used in catechism instruction in missionary
schools of central Mexico. Probably recent transplantsto the Isthmus, the
three Mexicans resented being compelled to participate in Zapotec labor
and tribute drafts. The men could expect no sympathetic hearing of their
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 305

grievances from Indian authorities, and the fact that they turned to the
Spanish system is not surprising.
The case of the Zapotec commoners bodes more of a threat to the
community's political structure, however, particularly if we accept their
claim that they representthe voices of many unhappy tributariestoo fearful
to speak up for themselves. Traditionally,these commoners had no means
to complain of injustices committed by the ruler, who was both lawgiver
and judge; there was no outside appeal process until the Spanish institu-
tionalized one. And while the complainants in this case present themselves
as seriously aggrieved by the onerous burden of tribute demands, a com-
plaint we can take at face value in light of the tribute conditions discussed
above, there is another agenda behind the litigiousness of sixteenth-century
Indians. The colonial legal system and its local representative, the alcalde
mayor, constituted a highly visible new forum in which to improve one's
situation. Increasingly, society's victims and opportunists alike made use
of it.
The rapidity with which commoners grasped the essentials of the
Spanish judicial structure challenges the notion held by theorists such as
Ong (I967, 1977) and Goody (I968, I977) that literacy confers more ad-
vanced mental capabilities. The French semiotician Tzvetan Todorov has
incorporated this idea into his provocative treatise on the Spanish Con-
quest, in which he holds indigenous social orientation and symbol using
as cultural deficits responsible for the Indian defeat. Todorov (1984: 8o)
terms writing "an index of the evolution of mental structures" and be-
lieves that the natives' lack of literacy prevented them from responding
effectively to new experiences. Since Mesoamerican cultures differed in the
extent to which their use of writing approximated that of sixteenth-century
Europeans, Todorov finds them differing in predictable directions in their
ability to resist Spanish control but similar in their ultimate capitulation to
the literate conquistadors.7
The illiterate natives of Tehuantepecand other areas of Mesoamerica
had no trouble, however, grasping the nature of the new judicial system
and using it to advance their own interests. But ratherthan rely on the "su-
perior" written record made by the Spanish notary, however instrumental
that record was to the functioning of the colonial judicial system, both sets
of Tehuantepec complainants produced their own case records, in the form
of the five pages of pinturas attached to the official transcript. Not merely
illustrations of events whose oral explication is paramount, the pinturas
had the same quality of evidence as the notary's transcription, and they
were referred to in the course of oral testimony. They are not writing, they
did not record speech, but they did provide a widely accepted record of
306 JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

eventsandwere seen by the Indianlitigantsas a persuasiveformof proof.

Whilethe Spanishjusticesystemrequireda writtentranscriptthatcouldbe
reviewedand evaluatedby agentsfarremovedfromthe courtroomscene,
unlike the pinturas,which requiredinterpretationby informants,these
Indiansseemlittleimpressedby truewritingas a superiorsymbolicsystem
of communication.
Whatthis case demonstratesis not the Tehuantepec commoners'fail-
ureto respondto the literateinstitutionsof Spainbuttheiracuityin assess-
ing the benefitsof Spanishideasof justiceandpoliticalaccountability.
That
these Indianswerewillingto step outsidethe boundariesof theirfamiliar
culturalcode reflectsseveralthings:the timingof the introductionof the
Spanishsystem to Tehuantepec,the extremeeconomicpressuresplaced
on individualhouseholdsby the natureand quantityof tributedemands,
and, perhapsmore significantly,the erosionof social bonds upon which
the very fabricof Zapotecsocietydepended.In the Basinof Mexico the
social disruptionmirroredin el pleitismoindigena(Indianlitigiousness)
was noted by the astute mid-sixteenth-century judge of the Audiencia,
Alonso de Zorita (I942: 43):
The suits have broughtabout great upheavalsin the provincesand
towns and great confusioneverywhere.... In all New Spainthere
is no agreementon a singlematterbetweenthe classes,becausethe
commonershavelost theirrespectfor theirlordsandnoblesandhave
risen againstthem and no longergive themthe obediencethey once
did. Yetsuchobedienceis verynecessaryfor good governmentamong
the Indians.(Translated by Borah1983:41)
On the local provincialscene, the sentimentsof the Audienciajudgeare
echoed in the I564 complaintmade by Bernardode Alburquerque,the
Oaxacabishop,that recentchangesin tributestructurehadboth deprived
the Indiannobilityof necessaryincomeanddonemuchto disruptthe foun-
dation of Indiansociety (GarciaPimentel1904: 6z, 68). The issue that
confrontedMesoamerica'snativegroupswas not literacybut the power
of the dominantgroup to restructurethe very natureof social relations
throughits imposedpolitical,economic,andculturalinstitutions.8
It mightappearthat the Zapoteccommoners'readymanipulationof
the Spanishsystem'sopportunitiesfor individualjusticeis at odds with
our contentionthat politicalrelationshipsbetweenthe rulingelite and the
colonial governmenthad been based on "workingmisunderstandings,"
that Don Juandid not fullycomprehendthe threatthat the cabildoform
posed to his authorityuntil he found himself facing criminalcharges.
Sahlins(1985)presentsa similardivergencebetweenthe actionsof kings
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 307

and commoners in the more overtly symbol-laden early encounters be-

tween eighteenth-century Hawaiians and the English Captain Cook. We
would include pre-Columbian Zapotec and other Mesoamerican states
with the Hawaiians among the societies Sahlins terms "heroic polities":
hierarchically organized societies that vest in the person of a divine king
and in his actions the fate and structural relationships of the society as
a whole. In such societies, elite and commoner actors bring into the real
world different self-interests as well as different levels of cultural aware-
ness. The elite, in Sahlins's (I985: 35ff., 51) view, are actively concerned
with the interpretation of preternaturalcontingencies, while commoners
live lives based on customary norms and received understandings. To the
extent that their actions take place within a familiar social universe, the
experience of individuals from both groups tends to reinforce and replicate
traditional cultural precepts and structural relationships. When, however,
historical circumstances interjectonto the stage of social interaction actors
not bound by the same cultural norms, unforeseen events trigger novel and
hierarchically divergent interpretationsof their significance (ibid.: I38).
These new meanings have the capacity to alter the structuralrelation-
ships between social groups. In the particular historical events we have
been analyzing, the residencia proceedings and criminal trial brought to
the surface interpretations of the colonial experience that differed greatly
among the Mexicans and Zapotec commoner and ruling elite groups. Don
Juan, however, retained sufficient authority and the practical means to
stifle commoner dissatisfaction through an intact, if weakened, traditional
social structure.
Ten years later another confrontation between the colonial juropoliti-
cal system and traditional Zapotec practice had a different outcome. In
events that, unlike the 1553criminal proceedings, were incorporated into
the mythic history of the Isthmus Zapotecs recounted by the seventeenth-
century Dominican historian Francisco de Burgoa (I989 [1674]: 353-59),
Don Juan again was taken into custody and tried for criminal acts. This
time the charge was heresy; the cacique was accused of violating his bap-
tismal oaths by resuming the coquitao's role of supreme priest in ancient
pagan rites. Assisted by the elderly high priests of Mitla, the most sancti-
fied Zapotec town, Don Juan was observed conducting animal sacrifices
at one of many nightly ceremonies that had drawn large numbers of Indian
participants to his palace in the weeks before his arrest. Burgoa's account
gives no suggestion as to the particular religious observances celebrated
through this notorious idolatry, but the excuse reportedly offered by Don
Juan-that having complied with Spanish demands for tribute, silver, and
gold, he was persuaded that his people would be left alone to live accord-
308 Judith Francis Zeitlin and Lillian Thomas

ing to their own law ("los dejarianvivir en la ley que tenian"; ibid.: 356)-
recalls our early theme of "working misunderstandings."
We might well consider this excuse, if actually uttered, a disingenu-
ous, even manipulative, statement from a ruler who had lived most of his
adult life under Spanish Catholic subjugation. Although we suspect that
Don Juan had finally been apprehended in an ongoing clandestine cere-
monialism, these activities were demanded by the ruler's structural role
in Zapotec society, which required his continued intermediacy between
the spiritual world and the community. The ensuing confrontation with
colonial law was inevitable, but this time Don Juan was more adept at
exploiting the religious and political bureaucracy.Refusing to be judged
by the Dominican friars whom the bishop dispatched to Tehuantepec,Don
Juan took his case for review before the highest representatives of the
Crown. After a year of protracted litigation in Mexico City, however, the
Audiencia found him guilty and stripped him of political office and patri-
monial income. His death on the return trip to Tehuantepec marked the
tragic end of the heroic polity in Isthmus Zapotec culture, stretched and
strained as it had been in the last ten years to accommodate to the realities
imposed by Spanish hegemony.

Conclusions

The 1553 complaints came at a turning point in relations between Span-

iards and Indians on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.Before Don Juan found
himself in jail, his adaptation to Spanish rule seemed successful, even
somewhat advantageous, initially, but the imposition of cabildo govern-
ment destroyed any remaining illusions. The new model of government
was based not just on principles of bureaucraticefficiency favored by the
Crown but on a fundamentally different concept of authority and justice.
From Don Juan's perspective, this development must have seemed like an
abrupt change in the rules of the game, a change that called for renewed
efforts to maintain the traditional structuralrelationship between the king
and his people. From the Spanish perspective, it was rational, even com-
monsense, rooted in fundamental precepts of divine will and natural law
that they, in the ethnocentrism common to all human societies but legiti-
mized in sixteenth-century political theory, thought universal. Inevitably,
the conquerors would attempt to impose their model of society on the
conquered.
Don Juan, who had been and continued to see himself as supreme
lawgiver and judge, confronted in these proceedings a system that made
him the executor of foreign laws, subject to the judgment of others. While
PoliticalSystemsin Sixteenth-Century
Tehuantepec 309

he was able to circumvent a hostile ruling in this instance by asserting his

traditional political authority behind the scenes, a clandestine performance
of the ruler's traditional spiritual role in the end forced his political ca-
pitulation. Changes in outward appearancewere not enough to satisfy the
conqueror, and the transformation represented in the Lienzo de Guevea
proved to be an illusory one.
Don Juan's fate is paralleledby the corrosion that penetrated the struc-
tures supporting the pre-Columbian sociopolitical system. The Spaniards'
extension of their concept of justice certainly aided those who had had no
recourse under the old system. These changes helped create a more indi-
vidualistic Indian society dominated by principaleswho saw their fortunes
linked to the favor of Spanish officials and to the opportunities provided
by the developing colonial economy, rather than to traditional statuses
and values, and by upwardly mobile commoners who used the Spanish
legal system and the favor of the Catholic friars to advance themselves. A
century after Don Juan's death, such developments were to spark a vio-
lent confrontation between the people of Tehuantepec and the colonial
bureaucracy,and a further restructuringof social relationships.
All these changes can be seen as part of the unfolding process by
which Isthmus Zapotec society recast its inherited cultural values accord-
ing to the realities of the colonial world. That it was able to do so time and
time again attests to the resiliency of the Isthmian social fabric. What we
gain from examining historical events like the i553 criminal proceedings
against Don Juan in the light of these received values is an appreciation
for the stresses that provoked cultural reinterpretation-as Sahlins (I985:
153) has expressed it, "the significance that transforms a mere happening
into a fateful conjuncture."

Notes
We would like to expressourappreciationto severalindividualswho readearlier
draftsof this articleandofferedhelpfulcommentsand suggestions:GeorgeCow-
gill,JeffreyGould,RobertHunt,JoyceMarcus,BrinkleyMessick,RobertZeitlin,
andthe anonymousreviewersof Ethnohistory. Wealone,of course,areresponsible
for any remainingfactualerrorsor interpretiveobstinacies.
i Althoughtheoriginalof thisnative-stylelandregistermaydateto 1540,presently
it is knownonlythroughtwo latercopies,firstdescribedandanalyzedby Eduard
Seler (I960 [I908]). More recent interpretations of the genealogical, political,
and ceremonialcontentof the lienzo,as well as comparisonsamongits distinc-
tive versions, have been offered by Joyce Marcus (I980, I983a), John Paddock
(1983), and Joseph Whitecotton (I990). Like other cadastral records initiated
underthe tenureof New Spain'sfirstviceroy,Antoniode Mendoza,this docu-
mentvalidatedlandtitlesfromSantiagoGueveaby fixingtheIsthmianmountain
3Io JudithFrancisZeitlinand LillianThomas

community'sgeographicalboundariesand establishingits long-standingfealty

to the hereditaryrulerof Tehuantepec.
z The transcriptof the criminalproceedingsis preservedamongthe recordsof
the Marquesado, "1553 querella criminal contra Don Juan" (AGN, HJ, leg. 450,
exp. i). One of the fivenativepinturasaccompanying
the Spanishtranscripthas
been publishedalong with a partialtranscriptionof the MexicanIndiansuit
(Archivo General de la Naci6n 1933; see Fig. i); a copy of the pintura illustrates
Covarrubias1967: zo4. While this drawing,like the Spanishtranscripts,was
executedon Europeanpaperin Europeanink, the fourpinturassupportingthe
unpublished Zapotec complaint (AGN, HJ, leg. 450, exp. I, cat. nos. 32zz-z5)
were drawnon magueypaperusingan ink madelocallyfromthe huizachetree
(see Figs. z-5). Our discussionof the criminalproceedingsis basedupon our
own transcriptionandtranslationof the Hospitalde Jesusfile.
3 As one of us has discussedin a recentpaper(Zeitlin1989), a comparisonbe-
tweenthe Zapotecpinturasandthe transcribedSpanishtext of the commoners'
complaintshows that the specificchargesregardingthe quantityand types of
goods paid in tributeand the natureof punishmentsmetedout by the cacique
were lost in the many-layeredtranslationprocess.
4 As Mario G6ngora (1975: 46) infers from the conqueror'ssecond letter to
CharlesV, Corteshimselfinitiallyforesawthe continuanceof thevariousrealms
of the Indianmonarchs,each exercisingsovereigntyin his own domain but
swearingfealtyto the Spanishemperor.
5 Mid-sixteenth-century Zapoteclinguisticdatawerecompiledby the Dominican
friar Juan de C6rdova (194z [I578]), who served as vicar of the Tehuantepec
conventtwo yearsafterDonJuan'sresidenciasecreta.Workingfromwhatseems
to be a substantiallysimilarZapotecdialectbutusinga differentorthography,a
laterCatholicclericcomposedhis own instructionalvocabulario(JuntaColom-
bina 1893),perhapsas late as the mid-eighteenth century.The two dictionaries
aresemanticallycompatiblein the terminologydiscussedhere.
6 In foundingjurisprudence on customarylaw, the Zapoteclegalsystemdiffered
little from Spanishand other Europeanlegal codes. Wherethey diverged,we
argue,is in theirreferenceto the moralauthoritybehindlaw. SergeGruzinski
(1988: z9-3I) has also raised this issue with respect to the ancient Nahuas' lack
of emphasison enactedlaw, which he contrastswith Spanishpracticeand its
underlying"juridico-discursive"
modelof power.FortheNahuas,likethe Zapo-
tecs, powerwas a divineforcebestowedon the nobilityas a class by the gods
themselves.
7 For example, Todorov (I984: 80) claims that the completely illiterate Incas be-
lieved "firmly"in the divinenatureof the Spanishinvaders,while the Mayas,
with a partiallyphoneticwritingsystem,were neverso deceived.This argu-
ment, however,ignoresboth Todorov'sown attributionof the mistakeniden-
tity legendsto postconquesthistoricalreinterpretation
andthe actualextentof
armedresistanceamongdifferentIndiangroups,with the Incarebellionprovid-
ing a particularlytellingcasein point.
8 MarcelloCarmagnani(I988: 89ff.),in his historicalreflectionon the rebirthof
indigenouscommunityidentityin late colonialOaxaca,makesa similarpoint
regardingthe sacredassociationbetweenhereditaryrulersandthe community's
socialandgeographicalspacein pre-Columbian times.Thesixteenth-century de-
Political Systems in Sixteenth-CenturyTehuantepec 3II

struction of the cacique's religious role, he contends, enabled later communities

to reappropriate their own territorial resources.

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