"Permanence and change in Mexico City's viceregal court, 1535-1821 (original) (raw)
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To rule their vast new American territories, the Spanish monarchs appointed viceroys in an attempt to reproduce the monarchical system of government prevailing at the time in Europe. But despite the political significance of the figure of the viceroy, little is known about the mechanisms of viceregal power and its relation to ideas of kingship. Examining this figure, The King's Living Image challenges long-held perspectives on the political nature of Spanish colonialism, recovering, at the same time, the complexity of the political discourses and practices of Spanish rule. It does so by studying the viceregal political culture that developed in New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the mechanisms, both formal and informal, of viceregal rule. In so doing, The King's Living Image questions the very existence of a "colonial state" and contends that imperial power was constituted in ritual ceremonies. It also emphasizes the viceroys' significance in carrying out the civilizing mission of the Spanish monarchy with regard to the indigenous population. The King's Living Image will redefine the ways in which scholars have traditionally looked at the viceregal administration in colonial Mexico.
Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City
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In circa 1550, an indigenous mapmaker painted a watercolor of viceregal Mexico City and its environs. The Uppsala Map has long been a source for examining social life in the Basin of Mexico, yet its description of the city has been one less studied. This essay scrutinizes the mapmaker's graphic commentary on the viceregal capital. In particular, it studies how a narrative figure's corporeal expressions and optic interest presented the city for examination. A formal analysis of the map suggests that the city's traza (urban plan) was not spatially unitary, a point underscored by the actas de cabildo, or municipal decrees, mandated. These demonstrate anxiety over spatial irregularity, which in the opinion of the city council threatened the city's policía (the virtue of living a Christian way of life within an ordered settlement). Lastly, this essay situates the Uppsala Map within the cartographic milieu of the Spanish Atlantic world through a study of cartographic elements that closely resemble those found in Alonso de Santa Cruz's 1542 world map.
Half Real: Presence and Absence in Mexico's Juzgado General de Naturales
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This article centers on the materiality of Indigenous legal interactions with the viceroy in the special colonial court, the Juzgado General de Naturales, which was located, at least ostensibly, inside the viceregal palace in Mexico City. The partial destruction of the palace during a riot in 1692—a year that roughly bisected Spanish colonial rule in Mexico— serves as a focal point for exploring the dynamic history of personal encounters and physical space in the viceregal jurisdiction from the court's founding in the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. It surveys the architectural features of the palace, traces the viceroys’ disappearance from audiences with Indigenous subjects at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and charts native petitioners’ own growing reliance on proxies and papers rather than appearances in the court. By focusing on physical presence within the Juzgado’s operation, the court reveals itself as a space of absence and abstraction a...
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The Mexico City main square, officially named the Constitution Square, popularly known as Zócalo, is a potent political and urban cultural space delimited by a representative power architecture. It is also a stage for artistic performances and socio-political demonstrations. However, its configuration is based on Mesoamerican and Iberian urban traditions, which became a unique transcultural experience. Thus, the monumental colonial Mexican Plaza Mayor, apowercenterconstitutedinthefirsthalfofthe16thcentury, anticipated, in material and symbolic aspects, the Modern Spanish Plazas Mayores, formed from the second half of the 16thcentury as an iconic monument of imperial order. This article aims to demonstrate the Mexico City Plaza Mayor's transcultural aspects and connections with the Modern Spanish Plazas Mayores project, focusing on the Amerindian contributions to Western culture.
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 43:4, 2020
By the early seventeenth century, petitioners at the royal court in Madrid who claimed descent from the Inca rulers of Peru, the Aztec rulers of Mexico, and the Nasrid emirs of Granada found ways to acquire noble status and secure rights to their ancestral lands in the form of entailed estates. Their success in securing noble status and title to their mayorazgos (entailed estates) rested on strategies, used over the course of several generations, that included marriages with the peninsular nobility, ties of godparentage and patronage, and military service to the crown. This article will examine the networks formed in Madrid between roughly 1600 and 1630 when the descendants of the Inca and Aztec rulers interacted with peninsular noble families at court, obtaining noble status and entry into the military orders and establishing their mayorazgos. Their strategies for claiming nobility show striking parallels to those adopted by the Morisco nobility, and one aim of this article is to suggest how knowledge of such strategies circulated among families both at the royal court in Madrid and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Au début du XVII e siècle, à la cour de Madrid, des pétitionnaires affirmant être les descendants des souverains incas du Pérou, des aztèques du Mexique et des émirs nasrides de Grenade trouvèrent des moyens d'accéder au statut de nobles et de garantir, sous la forme de biens inaliénables, leurs droits sur les terres ancestrales. S'assurer le statut de noble et le droit à ses mayorazgos (biens inaliénables) reposait sur des stratégies, employées pendant plusieurs générations, telles que la création de liens de parrainage et de patronage, une politique de mariage avec la noblesse péninsulaire et le service militaire. Cet article examine les réseaux formés à Madrid entre 1600 et 1630 lorsque les descendants des souverains incas et aztèques interagirent à la cour avec les familles nobles de la péninsule, au fur et à mesure qu'ils obtenaient le statut de nobles, qu'ils entraient dans les ordres militaires et qu'ils établissaient leurs mayorazgos. Il y a de surprenantes ressemblances entre les différentes stratégies qu'ils mirent en oeuvre pour revendiquer un titre de noblesse et celles qu'adopta la noblesse morisque dans le même but. L'un des objectifs de cet article est de suggérer comment ces stratégies et la connaissance de ces stratégies circulaient entre familles à la cour royale de Madrid ainsi que dans les cours vice-royales de la Nouvelle-Espagne et du Pérou. I n 1623, Miguel Venegas de Granada, a member of the Morisco (Christianized Muslim) elite, published a verse chronicle that commemorated the festivities held in Madrid, marking the engagement of the Prince of Wales, the future 1. Miguel Venegas de Granada, Relacion de las admirables y protentosas [sic] fiestas que el Quarto Filipo, Rey de entrambos mundos, y de las Españas, hizo por su Real persona, siendo las mejores que hasta oy se han visto, ni oydo dezir eternamente, por festejar los felicissimos y dichosos desposorios del serenissimo Principe de Gales, y la serenisima Infanta doña Maria (Madrid 1623). Reprinted in Relaciones poéticas sobre las fiestas de toros y cañas, book 3, Biblioteca de The Hispanic Society of America (Valencia: Artes Gráficas Soler, S.A., 1972). All translations in this article from the original Spanish are my own. 2. Venegas de Granada, Relacion: "el alto Venegas / don Luis, a quien la fama / inmortaliza sus hechos / con acciones soberanas. / Bien muestra en su Regia sangre / que el Principe Lusitania / Egas Muñiz, dio Venegas / mil años a nuestra España. / Donde produzen los Reyes / de mi estirpe y mi Granada, / pues por altos casamientos / emparentaren las casas. " No line numbers are given in this edition. 3. Venegas de Granada, Relacion.
Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650-1755
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Empire of Justice introduction Corruption today is a crucial concern for Latin America, and many nations have relatively clear definitions of the crime on the books. Yet corruption in the Spanish empire from roughly 1492 to the early 1800s differed. Theologians, legal experts, and laypeople debated the meaning and boundaries of corruption, and the limits of gift giving and bribery were malleable to some degree. Jurists weighed various judicial sources to assess the crime, as the crown was not the only authority producing rules. Instead, Spaniards appreciated the Roman and the canon (Church) law and their manifold interpreters. Their doctrines had to conform to natural law, which was essentially reason, as past generations understood that notion. In addition, the maxims revealed in the Bible coexisted with the royal mandates, such as the Law of the Indies (law for Spanish America), and the local customs, including the indigenous traditions. Latin American historians have always paid attention to canon and royal law and local customs, though English-speaking Latin Americanists have preferred focusing on social practices. Scholars, largely outside the United States, have also analyzed the actions of social networks composed of patrons and clients. Their contributions have greatly advanced our knowledge about justice in New Spain (colonial Mexico), although they have often overlooked the working of the law. Meanwhile, legal scholars have skillfully traced changing judicial concepts but often neglected their application in trials "on the ground." 1 This chapter focuses on the shifting definition of legality, because the Roman and canon laws (leges) constituted a crucial part of justice and were not strictly speaking theology. In Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 262, Herzog modifies this view in that in "all these dynamics, law mattered to an enormous degree." According to Yannakakis, The Art of Being, 118, "decisions of individual local magistrates rather than judicial precedent and previous case decisions determined the enactment of justice," and "justices ruled based on specific enactment or codified clause." Owensby, Empire of Law, 45, maintains that there were three main aspects of justice, the "derecho … the legal order ensuring 'good government,' the published ley, and the customs"; while Bianca Premo, "Custom Today: Temporality, Customary Law, and Indigenous Enlightenment," HAHR 94, no. 3 (2014): 355-380, traces innovations among the customs. Legal scholarship on the European ius commune is vast and often high quality; just to cite a few examples,