Translating Land Possession in Colonial Indigenous Lands

Organizer & Chair: Alcira Dueñas. Ohio State University, Newark.

Cutting-edge historiography on Early Modern empire building has slowly begun to acknowledge the interventions of indigenous corporate and individual agents in that formative process. This panel expands the scope of this subject by looking deeply into multiple iterations of Iberian rituals of law that contributed to establishing the legal order of lands and tenure in the daily lives of indigenous pueblos and other territories. The larger focus is on the interaction of indigenous subjects and Iberian law and the ways in which those subjects modified, adapted, and contradicted it, and ultimately produced a legal sphere from the ground up. Land possession ceremonies, visual inspections, and boundary-making practices –ubiquitous legal rituals that connected people, land, and Spanish law– were key to the production of layered sovereignty in colonial Spanish America. Whether elaborate or perfunctory, these ceremonies are richly represented in the colonial archive. They bolstered the authority of the Spanish king and the indigenous municipal officers, the subjecthood of the territory’s possessors, and the interplay of colonial jurisdictions.

These legal rituals were important, regardless of the complexity of their performativity. Beyond their value and function as customary procedures, these legal performances offered a stage for the performance of possession where indigenous peoples expressed their own perception of social order and community reciprocity. In the process, they intervened in the discourse of boundary-making, giving local meanings to the notion of communal ownership or, in alternative forms, signaling concerns about native autonomy in the land. Panelists examine how constructions of ethnic spaces and land normativity were shaped, by either indigenous subjects or/and the state, during visual inspections (vistas de ojos and deslindes), ceremonies of possession, landscape mapping, land surveys, and boundary marking practices.

More pointedly, the panel also explores how semi-sovereign indigenous communities bolstered royal sovereignty with the periodic re-inscriptions of territorial boundaries and communal ownership, simultaneously identifying the potential of these performances and discourses to rephrase symbolically the notion of possession and its spatial representation. The papers include a broad geographical expanse of colonial spaces from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina.