Tarascans under Spanish rule: How one town stayed Indian while its neighbor became mestizo

 

By Joel Thurtell

Twelve kilometers east-southeast of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, four wooded volcanic peaks roughly bound the east end of a moderately fertile, flat, well-watered valley.

On a long slope descending to this plain sits Cuanajo, a large[1] Tarascan town. Before the conquest, Cuanajo was near the geographic and political center of the Tarascan empire[2], but after the sudden collapse of Tarascan political organization in the 1520s, and with the gradual disintegration of cultural identity in peripheral areas, the Tarascan cultural area shrank towards its center, leaving Cuanajo a lone Tarascan outpost among many former indigenous communities. An enclave set out from the rest of Tarasca, Cuanajo now is the southeast frontier of the modern cultural area[3]. Cuanajo is high, at nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, and cold all year long.

Eight kilometers east-northeast and somewhat lower, at the edge of a wide, arid savannah, lies Tupataro, a mestizo community of about 1,000[4]. Although both village sites date at least from shortly after the conquest[5], and the inhabitants of both places were described as Indians as late as the end of the eighteenth century, their respective cultures now are very different.

Physically, Cuanajo and Tupataro are very dissimilar. The Spanish grid pattern dominates Cuanajo. The old camino real, or royal highway, leads in from the north, dividing the town into two barrios, San Miguel and San José. The highway empties into the plaza, south of which looms the large sandstone church.

East of the plaza is a long, low adobe building which houses the municipal offices and the elementary school. Running east and west and fronting the church is Morelos, on which the federal Office of Rents is located. Most secondary streets run on a parallel with one of these two main streets.

In Tupataro, the adobe church and some government offices face the plaza, but the church is only unlocked on Sunday, and the government offices open irregularly, it at all. The real center of town seems to be the cluster of two or three small shops that sell general supplies, including beer and soda pop. Unlike Cuanajo, there is little activity on the square, and the grid pattern is amply complemented with disorder in street layout.

Although adobe is exclusively used for house construction in Tupataro, and is gradually edging out the trojes  (log cabins) in Cuanajo, the towns look very different. In Tupataro, houses face the street in a solid brown line, as they do in most mestizo towns. In Cuanajo, while the pattern of the streets reflects Hispanic form, the house lots center on the ecuaro, or house lot garden. Lots are walled in with stone or adobe and they enclose a hewn timber – or increasingly adobe – house, sheds, perhaps a clay oven, and the ecuaro. The ecuaro frequently consists of an orchard of apple, pear, cherry and other fruit trees, as well as the more common crops such as maize, wheat, and squash. From the street, most parts of the house lot are visible over the wall. In Tupataro, the streets are lined on either side with the blank wall of adobe house fronts set side by side and flush against the street. There are no orchards in Tupataro.

The quality of the soil varies between Cuanajo and Tupataro. At Cuanajo, it has more sand and less clay, erodes less readily, and retains moisture through the dry season. There, farmers can plow and seed as much as two months ahead of the summer rains. At Tupataro, the clay bakes and cracks under the hot winter sun; long, deep fissures open up and all moisture evaporates. The land cannot be seeded until after the rains begin in late May or early June, shortening the growing season and exposing a coverless topsoil to the erosive ravages of daily summer downpours[6]. The land around Tupataro is an orange moonscape of pits, gullies, and perilous ravines, covered with inches of dense, choking dust in the winter, oozing a sticky slippery, clotted clay muck in the summer. In contrast, Cuanajo is green and moist even at the height of the dry season[7].

At Cuanajo,, an ancient carpentry industry complements the agricultural base of the economy. Although lumber is in increasingly short supply, a complex of factors centering around the recent arrival of electric power lines has stimulated many carpenters to mechanize their shops and specialize in making furniture as a tull time, year-round proposition. Cuanajo also has a healthy weaving industry, dominated by women, who make the finest cloth belts (fajas) in the entire Tarascan area. The woven belt is a very important part of the traditional Tarascan costume; it holds up the long, heavy, black pleated wool skirts the women wear. A few men in town weave the gabanesthat men wear and the blankets that everybody sleeps under.

In nearby Tupataro, no industry supplements the modest ejido holding, and the people are very poor. In comparison, the Cuanahenses are affluent. They are also culturally conservative. While the people in Tupataro are indistinguishable from other rural mestizos, the people in Cuanajo are thoroughly Indian. Most people in Cuanajo speak some Spanish, but everybody speaks Tarascan. Tarascan is the language of home and hearth, of family, warmth, and intimacy. Spanish is the language for contact with the outside; it is the language of business. In Spanish, it is proper to lie.

In Cuanajo, the women wear the traditional Tarascan costume, the black skirts with fajas, wide cotton or velvet sparons of pink, yellow, green, blue, or red, and embroidered blouse and a dark rebozo.. They weave lengths of green, yellow, or pink yarn into their long braids so that their hair flops in two straight black lines down the back. Women walk barefoot and are proud of it. The mestizas of Tupataro are easily distinguishable from the Indias of Cuanajo because they lack the distinctive Indian dress. Cuanajo men, on the other hand, are nearly indistinguishable from their mestizo counterparts. They wear leather sandals, huaraches, with soles from old tires, khanki trousers – sometimes white cotton calzones – a khaki work shirt, and a gaban, or wool poncho, topped off with a Michoacán sombrero.

In Tupataro, the people are strongly Catholic. In Cuanajo, they only think the are. The church in Cuanajo belongs to the Indians, rather than the Indians to the church. The priest is considered a turista – a happy union of the Tarascan tures – for foreigner – with the Spanish word for tourist. All outsiders are tourists. The priest, who has served firve years in Cuanajo, lives an insular life. While he is respected, he is isolated; his influence with the outside is used when needed, but he is never made privy to the native ritual performances, and he is consulted on matters dealing with the sacraments as if he were a witch. The brujos are said to make a good living in Cuanajo. Nobody bothers with witches in Tupataro.

Cuanajo is politically conservative. During the nineteen-twenties, the town supported the Cristero revolution in defiance of the Calles government’s attempt at suppressing the Catholic clergy. Although no orthodox Catholics, the Indians in Cuanajo reacted against outside meddling with what had become a central communal institution – the village church. Tupataro rose to arms against the same government, but not in defense of the ancient clerical authority: Tupataro fought for the ejido land the Mexican revolution had promised.

There is a definite divergence of interest between these two towns. At the root of this cleavage is land. Cuanajo’s interest is to preserve the status quo, if not improve upon it, because she dominates the most and best of the lands around. In the late 1940s, a small firefight erupted between opposed groups of farmers from Tupataro and Cuanajo. The issue was a disputed land right. In the mid-sixties, the so-called “famosos hermanos Suarez” moved into Tupataro. With a questionable government appointment as a rural militia, they began a systematic campaign of extortion, murder, rape, and mayhem. Cuanajenses who knew the brothers looked on them as thoroughly evil beings. Although life in Tupataro was disrupted and many people were forced to leave town, others joined the Suarez brothers, seeing a chance to turn the tables and for once dominate the countryside. But the brothers went too far. They raped two Indian girls from Cuanajo. The girls’ relatives trapped two of the brothers in an arroyo, knocked them off their feet with shotgun blasts, worked them over with stones, and finished them off with cow-prods; when a third Suarez was killed in nearby Huiramba, the remaining brothers fled and the status quo ante was restored.

But tension remains. In the summer of 1971, the proposed road that would have run through Tupataro to connect Cuanajo with the paved highway to Morelia was re-routed to by-pass Yupataro when the people there refused to have any part of it. Apparently, they resent their secondary status. The road is clearly not intended for Tupataro, but solely for the convenience of Cuanajo, where the carpenters want easier access to their markets. The Cuanajo elders and Jefe de Tenencia along with the priest, who also serves Tupataro but lives in Cuanajo, were chiefly responsible in negotiating for the road. More or less neglected, the people of Tupataro try to ignore the new road, which runs within sight of their town. Pointing to the rutted old trail into town, a Tupataro womn told me, “es bien andable” – it’s sufficiently walk-able.

In terms of the relationship between these towns, the past and present are only slightly different aspects of the same phenomenon – the basic relationship between Cuanajo and Tupataro. While Tupataro long ago reached the end point in her long process of mestization, the issues and anxieties that exist between the two towns have not changed since the beginning of the colonial period, when both towns were completely Indian. In other words, mestization occurred as a process within a system of equilibrium and as a result, though not a necessary nor foreseen result, of this system.  Cuanajo was in a position of power which derived from her economic independence from both the Spanish and Tarascan worlds. In that way, she remained a part of the Tarascan world, upon which she was culturally dependent, while dominating, economically and politically, the Tarascan communities surrounding her. Cuanajo dominated and drove them right into the Spanish world.

Two conditions were necessary to put Cuanajo into this position of dominance: her geographic position, isolated and situated at the center of a moderately fertile valley marginal to the Spanish hacienda system, and political hegemony vis a vis the neighboring Tarascan settlements. The conjunction of these preconditions with the civil congregacion of the early seventeenth century ensured that Cuanajo would be the first – and last – Indian community in the area to profit from the redistribution of lands.

As chief town in the area, Cuanajo took the lead in application for land. Officially, Cuanajo was not the cabecera; both villages were on  record as of pueblo status, independent of each other, electing their own Indian officials, and administerd as separate sujetos of Pátzcuaro, the nearest Spanish town, and cabecera. At least as far as Spanish officials were concerned, this was true, and in the ecclesiastical sphere, parish registers were kept in the same books for “los pueblos de Guanaxo y tupataro.”[8]

Practically, the relationship between the two towns fell short of parity. The curate of Cuanajo and Tupataro was appointed vicariously by the secular parish priest in Pátzcuaro. He lived in Cuanajo (note from 2011: it appears that a priest was not assigned to live in Cuanajo until the 1660s), although at least by the end of the eighteenth century, he periodically celebrated mass in Tupataro. For ceremonial functions such as marriage and baptism, the Indians of Tupataro had to walk into Cuanajo[9]. For parish organization then, the center of gravity was in Cuanajo, and the equality that appeared in the parish register titles was a fiction that made the curas themselves uncertain. One baptismal entry notes two padrinos as “Indios del barrio de Tupataro.”9

Although the ecclesiastical record is self-contradictory, the working of church organiation was a more accurate map of the towns’ relative statuses than the testimony of civil administrators. Like the priests, civil officials demonstrated a confusion about the kind of jurisdiction that existed, but unlike the church, the civil government maintained no permanent, pervasive institutional organization that would reflect the hierarchal reality. A judge visiting Cuanajo to survey the land in 1715 referred to “el Pueblo o Varrio de Tupataro”[10], revealing his own uncertainy about the relation of the towns. Faced with conflicting versions of the reality of power relationships, the visiting Spaniard found difficulty in relinguishing the abstract standardized model that should have fit the situation. Yet he was clearly uncertain how to describe Tupataro in political terms, for if the place wa s pueblo, it would haave been directly subject to Pátzcuaro, while the word “barrio” ties the place first to Cuanajo, and the line of authority would then run through Cuanajo on its way down to Tupataro from Pátzcuaro. While confused and contradictory, the Spanish view suggests the existence of another, non-theoretical reality.

The Indian view was the only unambiguous one. Using existing Spanish political terminology, Indian leaders in both towns described what for them was political reality: the subordination of Tupataro to Cuanajo. When they applied for land in 1601, the described themselves as “el Pueblo de Quanxo, y sus dos hestancias nombradas San Miguel y tupataro….”[11] When the Indian officials of Tupataro sued the leaders of Cuanajo for a piece of land in 1689, they acted in the name of the “Varrio de Tupataro.” The Indians in both towns understood clearly the political dominance of Cuanajo.

In addition to the political, economics was an important component of Cuanajo’s dominance. The Suma de Visitas (ca. 1548) lists Cuanajo as a town consisting of two barrios[12]. Cuanajo was growing wheat and maize on irrigated land. (Note from 2011: So C had land before 1601!) There is no mention of Tupataro, but when Bishop Vasco de Quiroga assigned crafts to various towns in Michoacán in the sixteenth century, it is noteworthy that Cuanajo received a superior trade. Cuanajo was to engage in carpentry, specifically the manufacture of beds and boxes for sale in Cocupao (now Quiroga) and Valladolid (now Morelia), while the men in Tupataro were instructed to make wooden shingles[13]. Thus, in Tupataro, they knew how to make and market one thing – the wooden shake shingles that were used in roofs all over Mexico. But the carpentry industry in Cuanajo was characterized by greater flexibility; a carpenter’s skills are more refined than a shinglemaker’s, he commands better wages, and is capable of making a variety of items for sale in urban markets.

Economic flexibility within their major craft specialization helped the trade to endure and even made it a profitable occupation, but nonetheless, carpentry was second to agriculture as a source of income. The carpenters were farmers who spent the time after fall harvest in their shops, building inexpensive pine furniture that could be slapped together and marketed quickly before time came to plow in spring. Agriculture was fundamental to Cuanajo’s prosperity, and the acquisition of suitable and sufficient land was the town’s most critical concern. An adequate and secure supply of timber and field was necessary for Cuanajo’s development.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Cuanajo was in possession of a huge tract of land, much of it mountainous, rocky and gully, but including plenty of good timber land and poor-to-good farm land. By 1715, Cuanajo held 21 ½ cabellerias, or a total of 2,257.5 acres. Of this, 6 cabellerias were wasteland, but the remaining 15 ½ cabellerias of tillable land were equivalent to 1,627.5 acres[14]. While the wasteland was worthless for faraming, it no doubt provided some lumber and firewood. In fact, the size of Cuanajo’s communal lands was notorious. An inspection ocular of ca. 1800 cited the great extent of Cuanajo’s lands and recommended that her possessions be reduced so that Tupataro’s holdings could be increased. In the late eighteenth century, Tupataro was a depressed town of miserable stake huts covered with shingles. When the two towns’ properties were surveyed in 1715, Tupataro’s land measured two cabellerias, or about 210 acres[15].

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Indians of Cuanajo were on the offensive as contestants for land rights. The source for information relating to their holdings is the official record of the Juez Commissario in Cuanajo’s suit against the a Jesuit colegio in 1715. An hacienda belonging to the Jesuits bordered on the north of Cuanajo’s lands; 1 ½ cabellerias were at issued, and although they lacked title to this piece of property, the Cuanajenses continued to cultivate it while the matter was going through the court. The court required a presentation of all land titles and survey of all of Cuanajo’s lands. This record shows that Cuanajo’s aggression towards the Jesuits in 1715 was only one in a long series of similar and hitherto successful attempts at increasing the size of her communal holdings at the expense of her immediate neighbors, Indian and white alike.

A combination of methods acquired for Cuanajo a huge holding by the end of the seventeenth century. Through congregacion, inheritance, outright purchase, and, it appears, squatting. Cuanajo assembled an

extensive, but unified, tract of land. In 1601, the Indians of Cuanajo applied to the viceroy on behalf of themselves and the Indians in their two estancias for a congregacion of land, citing their lack of any land and the presence of sufficient land close by, as well as the inconvenience suffered by the town’s carpenters, who had to travel two leagues to fetch lumber. By 1603, the land was re-distributed to the Indian applicants, but subsequent testimony reveals that the Indians of Cuanajo retained for themselves all but a tiny bit of the worst land. A small piece, badly watered and heavily clay, went to Tupataro.

In 1673, the hospital in Cuanajo inherited a piece of land[16] from Dona Mariana de Castillexa in recognition of “many and good works received of staid Indians.” The gift, in a place called Siquiripu Tzenguangacho Opopeo, bordered on Cuanajo’s communal lands, as well as those of Tupataro, and afforded the farmers of Cuanajo an opportunity to pre-empt their neighbors, In 1689, the prioste and Indians of Tupataro brought the Indians of Cuanajo to court in order to be re-possessed of land they claimed they ahd possessed since the time when they were pagans. This field, measuring two fanegas of seeding in maize, or about seventeen acres[17], was returned to Tupataro on the grounds that it had always been within the village and formed part of its limits. The Indians of Tupataro won their case, but they only succeeded in regaining what was theirs in the first place. Their position was strictly defensive. As in the case with the Jesuits in 1715, the Cuanajenses had dispossessed the rightful owners and required a court order to be removed.

Several times, the Indians of Cuanajo purchased land from neighboring haciendas. In 1677, they paid Miguel de el Corral, a neighboring hacendado and vecino of Pátzcuaro, 200 pesos for a medio sitio of land possess by Don Joesph Ventura de Arisaga y Alejaldre[18]. In 1690, the daughter and heiress of Don Manuel de las Heras sold them a piece of land adjoining Pupataro. This land, called San Joseph, cost 110 pesos[19]. Through both of these purchases, Tupataro’s physical boundary with the hacienda system was partially replaced with a closer connection with an aggressive and comparatively affluent Indian neighbor responding forcefully to the pressure of rising population[20]. The ability to pay cash for land and to sustain aggressive court battles (in the case of the Jesuits, at least, against a wealthy foe), is a sign of Cuanajo’s economic prosperity, a prosperity based on the possession of land and increasing dominance of natural resources. Cuanajo was a society based on expansion. The pressure on the Tarascan society of Tupataro was becoming unbearable.

 

Meanwhile, Cuanajo augmented her holdings. In 1705, she added a cabelleria (105 acres) bought from the hacienda of Juana Nunez de Prado. It appears that Cuanajo acquired an ojo de agua (eye of water) incidentally with this purchase[21]; with control of the surrounding land went control of other resources, most importantly, the water supply. While Spniards possessed rights to the water at Canacucha south of Cuanajo, and also to the stream at Tupataro, at Cuanajo, the water was controlled by the Indian inhabitants; moreover, after 1705, the town had an additional source of water in the ojo de aqua acquired from the de Prado hacienda. Control of the water supply was important, as was dramatized in the plight of the heirs of Don Joseph Beltran Vicente, who claimed the rights to the water at Tupataro, then possessed by other Spaniards (1743). The Beltran Vicentes had once established amill there, but had never formalized their title. In 1743, the mill lay in ruins, and the stream had been diverted to irrigate the dry plain of Curumendaro north of Tupataro[22]. The Indians in Tupataro were never consulted in the matter of the water they depended on.

 

 

 

 

Limited to a little more than two hundred acres, Tupataro lacked a physical buffer between herself and the double threat of Hispanic cultural influence emanating from the haciendas, and the encroachments of Tarascan ecnomic imperialism approaching from Cuanajo. In fact, the aspect is one of slightly receding hacienda influence and expanding Indian power (from Cuanajo) in the seventeenth century. Threatened from within her own cultural sphere, as well as from the Spanish side, Tupataro developed in a role of dual subordination. It was impossible for Tupataro to support her own expanding population from her meager resources. The oinly resource in Tupataro was labor, which could have been sold in three possible markets: migration to Michoacán hot country to work on sugar plantations; labor in the fields owned by Cuanajo or day work as jornaleros in the carapentry shops there; and labor on the haciendas. All three no doubt occurred, but it is the influence of the last alternative that was most significant for the alteration of Tupataro’s culture. Dependent even for lumber upon outside Indians[23], the Indians of Tupataro turned increasingly to Spanish society.

Dependence and subordination describe Tupatero’s end of the relations Cuanajo:Tupatero and hacienda:Tupatero. The most obvious features tody, minus the haciendas, are the perseverance, with modifications, of Tarascan traditional values in Cuanajo and the total loss of an Indian identification in Tupataro, where mestization was probably complete by 1900.

When the towns are looked at separately as population settlements whose inhabitants have approximately the same progenitors, Cuanajo appears to have maintained cultural continuity, while in Tupataro cultural differentiation occurred. When they are studied as two settlements in relation to each other and to the surrounding Spanish community and labor exchange institutions, continuity also appears to exist in the inter-relation of the towns, that is, the system within which Cuanajo has for centuries dominated its poor neighbor. Mestization then appears as one result of the conditions by which the system operates.

The system of dominance and dependence which conditioned the relations between Cuanajo and Tupataro can be dated conservatively from the outset of the seventeenth century. This system was progressing in tandem with the regularization and legitimization of the hacienda complex. The legal framework which was constructed to stabilize and make permanent the haciendas, in addition to the legal privileges already enjoyed by the republicas de indos, presented Indian communities with opportunities to aggrandize their land holdings through processed that were legally binding; thus, Cuanajo could not only increase her communal lands, but also, by gaining proper title, ensure that those lands would remain in her hands. This was ot utmost importance not only as protection against the machinations fo Spanish land grabbers, but also as legitimization of the original congregacion of 1601-03, which by rights ought to have been fairly divided with Tupataro but instead was formalized and thus perpetuated almost entirely in the hands of Cuanajo. Finally, this legal framework ws of no use unless sufficient land for congregacion had been available originally, as well as sufficient money, time, and will to pursue cases through the courts. In Cuanajo, all of these conditions were present, and sufficient to allow the town to restabilize by expanding moderately under the pressure of increased population towards the end of the seventeenth century[24].

When, exactly, did fecundity increase? This factor may well account for the expansionism in Cuanajo’s formula for stabilization.

For Cuanajo, the seventeenth century was a period of stabilization and retrenching after the tremendous losses of population through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries[25]. The acquisition of great amounts of land early in the seventeenth century ensured an adequate agricultural base to support the population, and a ready supply of lumber in the mountain forests roundabout guaranteed the independence of the woodworking industry. They felled, hauled, and worked the wood themselves, and only at the point of selling the product was contact with Spaniards in the market towns necessary.

Geographically isolated and economically independent of the Spanish sector, and politically superior to the surrounding Indian communities, Cuanajo was in a position to use the best aspects of hispanic society and reject or transform the rest. Increasing population stimulated Cuanajo to direct energy through Spanish legal channels in a continual and almost always successful campaign to augment communal land holdings.

What was a stimulus for Cuanajo was an increasingly painful tension in Tupataro, relieved only by migration and increasing dependence and proximity not only to a powerful Indian neighbor, but with the most lasting cultural consequences, to the nearby haciendas. The haciendas were the medium through which Spanish culture was transmitted to Tupataro.

The central questions about the relationship between Cuanajo and Tupataro are functional:

— How was Spanish culture transmitted to Tupataro?

— How, when, and where did Tupataro’s Tarsacan identity begin to disintegrate?

— How did Cuanajo transform Spanish institutions to make them support traditional Tarascan culture?

— To what extent did population pressure condition Cuanajo’s expansionist behavior?

— Did the Indians of Cuanajo use Spanish institutions like ritual compadrazgo, marriage and baptism to strengthen their social and economic connections to the Spanish world?

— In what ways were the Indians of Cuanajo able to employ Spanish rituals in ways that reinforced Tarascan culture?

— In the appearance of ritual compadrazgo in Tupataro, do we see indications of eroding Indian culture?

— Do we see people in Cuanajo seeking other Indians for marriage partners?

— Do we see people in Tupataro marrying non-Indians?

(This information will have to come from baptism registers, as I have no data from marriage registers.)

— Do any of these indications appear to be accelerated by events such as epidemics and consequent mortality?

— Can I use conversion of Tarascan to Spanish surnames as indicator of loss of Indian culture?