Ceremonies of Possession in Indigenous Boundary Lands in Colonial Mexico

Boundary markers were used to demarcate territorial boundaries between communities in both Mesoamerican and Iberian societies. Prior to the Spanish conquest, Mesoamerican ethnic states and smaller communities delineated the boundaries of their territory through reference to features of the landscape like cliffs, caves, and bodies of water. In the Iberian world, stones and crosses etched the territorial limits of municipalities and communities into the landscape. After the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, Indigenous communities channeled Mesoamerican and Iberian legal traditions for marking territorial boundaries to produce new meanings and practices linked to colonial justice. They used stones and crosses to connect communal territory to local history and sacred features of the landscape while signaling Spanish legal notions of possession. This paper draws upon visual and textual evidence in Indigenous maps, lienzos, primordial titles, and land disputes to reconstruct ceremonies of possession in the boundary lands between Indigenous communities. I will focus on how Indigenous subjects combined material objects (boundary markers), space (boundary lands), and legal performances (boundary walking and surveying) to make claims to property and resources. By training our eye on the materiality of colonial Indigenous custom and law, we can move beyond disciplinary and cultural biases that fixate on text (writing on paper) as the grist for legal processes to show how global legal orders were built from the ground up as much as imposed from above.