Conquering Creoles: Power, Transculturation, and the Limits of Empire in New Spain, 1521-1625

Lindsay Christine Sidders

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto

Lindsay Christine Sidders

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History

University of Toronto

2021 Abstract

This dissertation examines conquering creole consciousness through the voluminous pastoral and ethnographic writings of Mota y Escobar (1546-1625), a first-generation elite criollo of Hispanic descent, who served as Bishop of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia (1598-1607) and Tlaxcala-Puebla

(1608-1625). His generation, the first of the conquistador descendants, believed themselves entitled to extend and naturalize conqueror power as a form of perpetually inheritable privilege, in order to continue the construction of empire and cement their own place within it. Mota y

Escobar’s cohort enjoyed the returns of their parents’ and grandparents’ institutionalization of

Hispanic domination but experienced the Crown’s efforts to claw back the mercedes (rewards) that undergirded this naturalization.

Mota y Escobar’s writings exemplify the ways in which creole power was made through transcultural agents who used Iberian epistemological constructs alongside distinctly novohispano goals, desires, and affect to assert their natural right to rule the colony. As mobile and strategic cultural agents, these creoles banded together around a sense of entitlement as the legitimate inheritors of New World wealth and power, and as the most effective conquerors, creators, and interpreters of New World order.

Bearing out Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s vision of New World cultural transformations as processes of exchange, loss, and creation (transculturation), this dissertation shows criollo power as articulated and negotiated through colonial bureaucracy, reproduced through the rhetoric of whiteness, and managed through the practices of slavery, patronage, and wealth accumulation. It highlights Mota y Escobar’s efforts as a transcultural agent to communicate his sense of his place in the imperial structure using a language that moved flexibly between what was European and what was novohispano. To naturalize Hispanic control, power had to be made and remade constantly in the colony of New Spain, and conquering creoles like

Mota y Escobar laboured to transform and translate European cultural codes into novohispano order.

Conquering creoles revelled in their domination and marginalization of other racialized groups in

New Spain, all the while romanticizing the criollo relationship to colonial space. A detailed examination of a member of this generation helps illustrate the logic of violence upon which criollismo was built.

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Acknowledgments

From coursework to the final days of revisions on this dissertation, I have benefitted and grown from the material, intellectual, and emotional support of innumerable people at the University of Toronto. The opportunities and experiences I have had over the course of this doctoral program have shaped my research and vision of the world, and I am immensely grateful for the privilege of education, travel, and community.

My supervisor, Melanie Newton, recognized and fostered the direction of my intellectual curiosity when the ideas and words were unformed. She showed me the tools, shared her resources, and taught me more than History. I am so grateful for her patience and empathy, her time and knowledge, and the example she sets every day for what it means to be a historian, educator, and mentor at all levels.

My committee encouraged and supported me with compelling questions, constructive feedback, and gentle nudges that inspired deeper reflection and clearer articulation of my ideas. My thanks to Herman L. Bennett for his thorough and generous reading and questioning of my research and writing. I appreciate his prompts to think deeply about power and textual analysis as method. Peter Blanchard read many early drafts with enthusiasm and always had time for conversations about my work. I am grateful for his attention to detail and determination to get me to say what I really mean. I also benefitted from the expertise of Joanna Blanchard in a trying time: thank you for going above and beyond. Tamara Walker asked questions of my research that helped me think through the complexities and implications of the major themes of this work. She has been generous with her time and feedback, and I am grateful for her expertise and always prescient suggestions.

Ken Mills encouraged me to look at pastoral visitation records, which brought me to the writings of the subject of this study. He read many drafts and conference papers in the earliest years of this project and I appreciate his input and direction.

My research and writing were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Department of History, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. I also thank the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta for their material support in my pursuit of a doctorate.

Thank you to the archivists and librarians who helped me locate and view records in Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. An archivist in Mexico City literally pulled me out of a building during an earthquake as I sat frozen and confused over a manuscript!

I have been fortunate to have had mentors across many fields in the Department of History. Carol Chin offered invaluable encouragement and shared writing strategies and resources. Steve Penfold was curious and enthusiastic about my research and brought much needed humour and levity. I appreciate the support and guidance of Nicholas Terpstra, Nhung Tuyet Tran, Mark Meyerson, Thomas Lahusen, Paul Cohen, Luis van Isschot, E. Natalie Rothman, Mairi Cowan, W. Christopher Johnson, and Doris Bergen. In addition, I thank the administrative staff without whom the Department would not run. David C. Johnson, my MA supervisor, has been a supporter from afar. I also want to thank Caroline Pye and Alyson Waite at the Rotman School of Management and Bev Lewis, formerly an administrator at the Faculty of Arts and Science, for the financial opportunities they offered me during my program. I am grateful to Natalie Oletjen and Matt Kavaler at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies for many years of friendship and intellectual support. The graduate student union, CUPE 3902, fought hard for invaluable resources and I am so appreciative.

I thank the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) and its Director, John Sullivan, for the opportunity to study classical and modern Nahuatl. I am especially grateful to Saby Cruz de la Cruz for her one-on-one instruction, which required infinite patience. Tlazcamati temachtianimeh. My time training with IDIEZ was some of the most inspiring and enjoyable of my program. I met many wonderful scholars who have become friends, particularly Heather Allen, Nicole Hughes, and David Colmenares. I also had the honour of being a student alongside María Elena Martínez at IDIEZ; her work is foundational for my own and she was a generous and funny historian who is greatly missed.

I appreciate the administrative, security, and caretaking and cleaning staff of the Gerstein and Robarts libraries at the University of Toronto who worked thanklessly during the pandemic to ensure students had a safe space to work. These frontline workers became welcome familiar faces during a difficult and lonely time. I thank the librarians for their labour to maintain the normal functioning of the library so that students could access books and services.

Thank you, Helen Reilly and Kinsey Lewis, for deep listening. v

The support of friends and colleagues has been essential. I met Bethan Fisk the first day of our program and she has been an unwavering ally and confidante, even when I myself wavered. I admire her intellect, tenacity, and compassion and I could not have written up in the pandemic without her near-constant encouragement and advice. Matthieu Vallières has been a joyful source of intellectual provocation and dark humour. Spirit Rose Waite’s friendship is a blessing and her empathy is my model. Susan Benson-Sokmen brought me coffee and listened patiently in the very last days. Adleen Crapo went down etymological rabbit holes with me and made sure I was eating enough. Kirsten James was a fervent cheerleader. Leah Wotherspoon sent thoughtful care packages.

I have had the backing of so many friends throughout the many years of this degree, including: Justin Aikens, Dale Barbour, Sebastiano Bazzichetto, Kate Brennan, Amanda Brooks, Lucas Campo Vernay, Sandy Carpenter, Stephanie Cavanaugh, Jessica and Frank Cesario, Shenella Charles, Dionne Cheong, Véronique Church-Duplessis, Jessica Copley, Stephanie Corazza, Karen Cousins, Andrea Day, Sanchia deSouza, Alayna Dueck, Bret Edwards, Charlene Ellis, Carli Eger, Mónica Espaillat Lizardo, Aidan Flynn, Sylvia Gaspari, Allison Graham, Caitlin Hathcher-Gladney, Amy Huras, Stacy Hushion, Nadia Jones-Gailani, Alex Logue, Victoria Loucks, Vojin Majstorović, Meaghan Marian, Rosie Masemann, Pascal Massinon, Ryan Masters, Vanessa McCarthy, Steve McClellan, Jon McQuarrie, Peters Mersereau, Kenny Moss, Chris Murch, Nisrine Rahal, Amy Ratelle, Frances Reilly, David and Amanda Robinson, Natalie Rodrigues, Julia Rombough, Dan Rosenthal, Elizabeth Shaw, Kate Shearer, Reyna Schindel, Rachel Stapleton, David Stiles, Elisa Tersigni, Catie Thompson, Lilia Topouzova, Sarah Tracy, Emily Vallières, Caleb Wellum, Nickol Walkemeyer, Megan Westgarth, Mike Wilcox, Rachelle Williams, and Susan Zakaib. Many thanks to members of the Latin American, early modern European, and Caribbean reading and discussion groups. I also want to shout out the amazing women I met in Wendy C. Ortiz’s “Writing on the Edge” memoir-writing workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2017: I felt accepted and seen.

Jeremy Augustine’s arrival in my life in the last throes of this work has been a fatefully wonderful surprise. He has provided laughter and love in a time of pandemic and stress.

Finally, thank you to my family. My dad read drafts enthusiastically and cares for Mexico as much as I do. My mom cheered me on with emojis and baked brie. Courtney and Brittany have

vi been fierce advocates and challengers. Thanks also to my brother-in-law, Kenton, for gif-based support. My aunt Nancy deserves special thanks as well for her serenity and care for me while I have lived away from immediate family. Without their support, none of this would be possible.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents ...... viii

List of Figures ...... x

List of Abbreviations ...... xii

Introduction ...... 1

Historiographical Contribution ...... 9

Sources and Methodology ...... 25

Structure and Organization ...... 29

Chapter 1 Constructing Conquistador Power and Criollo Inheritance ...... 36

Creole Son ...... 41

The Mexico City Cabildo: Creating the Institutional Colony ...... 57

Landed Power and Intergenerational Affluence ...... 64

The Encomienda in New Spain ...... 72

The Petition for Perpetual Encomienda ...... 78

Chapter 2 A “Lie of the Indies”: Place and Wonder in Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia ...... 95

Interrogatorios and Relaciones: Collecting and Writing American Knowledge...... 100

The Rupture of Novohispanidad ...... 114

Deploying Wonder ...... 121

Creolizing Collection ...... 131

Chapter 3 The Républica that He Wanted: Order and Whiteness in Tlaxcala-Puebla ...... 145

Distinguishing American Spaniards ...... 149

The Rhetoric of Whiteness ...... 161

Saving Whiteness ...... 172

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Reproducing Whiteness: Money and Motives ...... 180

Enslavement and Mastery ...... 189

Gifting Nobility ...... 201

Chapter 4 “God remedy it”: Mobility, Ethnography, and the Visita in the Diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla ...... 209

The Visitation Genre ...... 213

Writing the Visit ...... 222

To Conquer, Command, and Possess ...... 229

Landscapes of Slavery and Resistance ...... 236

White Sociability and Proximity to the Metropole ...... 246

Distance and Metropolitan Hispanism ...... 252

Epilogue ...... 262

Bibliography ...... 280

Archives and Collections ...... 280

Published Primary Sources ...... 280

Internet Primary Sources ...... 283

Secondary Sources ...... 284

List of Figures

Figure 1: Map of New Spain, 1671 ...... 34

Figure 2: Close up of Map of New Spain, 1671 ...... 35

Figure 3: Baptismal record of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar 18 May 1546 ...... 42

Figure 4: Informaciones de oficios of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar...... 46

Figure 5: Map of Plaza Mayor (Plaza del Zócalo) of Mexico City, 1562 ...... 65

Figure 6: Anonymously hand-drawn map of Nueva Galicia, 1550 ...... 97

Figure 7: First page of Council of the Indies’ interrogatorio of 1604...... 103

Figure 8: Dedication page of the Descripción geográfica ...... 107

Figure 9: Dedication and prelude page of the Descripción geográfica, including Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s signature (bottom fs. 72v) ...... 109

Figure 10: Modern fishing net “gate” in Chamatla, Sinaloa in the same style as those described by Mota y Escobar in his writing about this pueblo in the early seventeenth century...... 136

Figure 11: Frontispiece of the sermon performed by Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa on December 15, 1619 ...... 164

Figure 12: Mota y Escobar’s entry regarding Juana de San Ildefonso, April 17, 1616 ...... 177

Figure 13: Mota y Escobar’s record of a purchase of houses from the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco ...... 187

Figure 14: Memoria (recto) of enslaved persons owned by Bishop Mota y Escobar, August 1, 1610...... 195

Figure 15: Memoria (verso) of enslaved persons owned by Bishop Mota y Escobar, August 1, 1610...... 199

Figure 16: Itemized list of gifts or donations Mota y Escobar provided to his nephew ...... 203 x

Figure 17: Amozoc visit entry (28 September 1609) in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records ...... 225

Figure 18: Cuamochtitlan visit entry (27 December 1610) in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records ...... 227

Figure 19: Condensed visit entries for the year 1624 in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records ...... 228

Figure 20: Lines struck out of the Tezizitepec (4 December 1610) visit record ...... 229

Figure 21: Statue of Gaspar Yanga in the modern pueblo of Yanga, Veracruz ...... 243

Figure 22: Cuadro completo of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar hanging in the Capilla de San Ildefonso, Puebla...... 270

Figure 23: First page of the modern Spanish passport, memorializing the route of the Santa María...... 273

List of Abbreviations

AGI Archivo General de Indias AGN Archivo General de la Nación de México AHN Archivo Histórico Nacional de España BM British Museum BNE Biblioteca Nacional de España JCB John Carter Brown Library

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Introduction

When Pope Alexander VI authorized the colonization of the Americas and conversion of its Indigenous peoples by Spain and Portugal in 1493, he characterized the document, Inter Caetera, as “our exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, investiture, deed, constitution, deputation, mandate, inhibition, indult, extension, enlargement, will, and decree.”1 Recalling the dispensations of the Crusades, this bula gave the Iberian kingdoms and their agents Christian license to conquer and evangelize with an assumed “innate and absolute superiority over all other peoples because of divine endowment.”2 In his 1975 book, The Invasion of America, Francis Jennings wrote that the descendants of these invaders sent by peninsular monarchs would “secularize the endowment to claim it from nature instead of God, but would leave its absolute and innate qualities unchanged.”3 This latter process – the institutionalization of conqueror entitlement, the naturalized passing on of the “will” and right to dominate, from God to Pope to Crown to conqueror to conqueror’s descendant – is at the crux of this study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain.4

This dissertation focuses on the earliest generations of conquistador descendants in New Spain, conventionally called criollos (creoles). As highly mobile and strategic cultural agents, these creoles banded together around a sense of entitlement as the legitimate inheritors of New World wealth and power, and a firm conviction that they were the most effective conquerors, creators,

1 The Bull Inter Caetera, May 3, 1493, in European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies, eds. Charles O. Paullin and Frances Gardiner Davenport (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917-1937) 1:61-63. 2 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 5-6. 3 Jennings, The Invasion of America, 5-6. 4 Luis N. Rivera writes that the “European discovery of the ‘Indies’ became, in short, an event of expropriation, legitimated by reasons and symbols of a theological and religious nature…the genesis of modern Christianity as a world phenomenon.” A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 12. The author’s italics. This entitlement was legislated by colonial law as well. Title six of volume one of the Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Indias on the Patronazgo Real de las Indias states: “The right of Ecclesiastical Patronage belongs to us in all the Estado of the Indias, by having discovered and acquired that New World, built and endowed in it the Churches and Monasteries at our cost and of our Señores Reyes Católicos our ancestors, as conceded to them by the Bulls of the Supreme Pontiffs…” Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Indias (Madrid: Madrid: por Julian de Paredes, 1681) 1:fs. 21r.

1 2 and interpreters of New World order. To these elite criollos, the Crown owed them this inheritance by virtue of their forebears’ accomplishments and ensuing rewards, and they asserted that Hispanic control and authority could only be assured through their central participation in colonization. Naturalization, as a process that makes natural, inevitable, and invisible that which is culturally, politically, and socially constructed, was the goal of these conquering creoles in order to ensure their continued power.5 Aggrieved by Crown policy that sought to retrieve and recentre imperial power in the late sixteenth century, these creoles set out to institutionalize Hispanism in order to extend the rewards of conquest and take what they understood as their rightful place atop the colonial hierarchy.

The criollo goal to construct a naturalized order that protected and reproduced privilege and power inherited through conquest was supported by what Verena Stolcke has termed “racialist” notions transplanted to and extended into the Americas from the metropole. The sexual exploitation of Indigenous and African-descended women by colonizers created a social situation that was seen as threatening to the Hispanic order. Hispanic elites adapted and “put into service” the language and logic of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, and raza, race, both of which served to justify conquest and colonization and preserve their power in the New World.6

In Iberia, from the sixteenth century, the concept of raza as a negative and hereditary “quality” or stain carried by blood through the generations was well established. Raza was tied to political and social meanings that gave legitimacy to discrimination against conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) and moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity).7 To have raza meant to carry and pass on the stained lineage (Jews, Muslims, heretics, or penanced persons) of your ancestors indefinitely. To be pure of blood (limpio de sangre) meant that one was free from race (sin raza), effectively an Old Christian, and passed on an unstained lineage to subsequent generations as

5 For use and analysis of this concept through a feminist lens, see Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, “Naturalizing Power,” in Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, eds. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1-22. 6 The “Crown, the Church and the conquerors, both secular and religious, with the myriad of interests that motivated them, possessed (apart from their greed) a world-view that mediated their project of colonizing and exploiting the new territories and its peoples,” Verena Stolcke writes. “Invaded Women: Gender, Race, and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 275-276, 278. 7 These conversions were both voluntary and compelled by force depending on the time and place.

3 long as the line did not come into contact with raza. In theory, those who could demonstrate purity of blood through the generations would reap political, social, and economic rewards. In New Spain the concept of raza evolved to encompass cultural, phenotypic, and civilizational difference, expanding the concept to include the ‘stain’ of Indigenous and African ancestry. Through the deployment of these ideological concepts, difference and sameness were essentialized, made hereditary, and naturalized.8

The concept of sin raza, the absence of stain (read as sin), was adapted in the Americas to signal lineage purity that could only include white, old Christians of European descent. As hereditary traits, the status of having raza (being racialized) and being sin raza were reproduced through the bodies of women, which made natural what was in reality a constructed racial system of “scrupulous and subtle” social distinctions.9 This racial system, constructed by conquerors who deemed themselves to be without race, reproduced power and privilege through naturalized racial terms. By claiming Hispanism and institutionalizing it within the local context, these elite creoles sought to ensure their place within a power structure deeply rooted in processes of “racialist” naturalization.

This system of racialized privilege did not simply come into existence at the time of conquest and remain unchanged and unchallenged over time across the colonial period. At pivotal moments in colonial history, conquerors and their descendants had to rearticulate or defend key elements of this structure of privilege in response to perceived threats to their power, whether such threats emanated from the Old World or from within the colony itself. This dissertation explores how conqueror descendants responded to one such existential challenge, which originated in the Crown’s efforts in the late sixteenth century to prevent the encomienda – a system of Indigenous exploitation that was foundational to conqueror descendant wealth and power – from becoming the basis of a perpetually colonial landed aristocracy. This particular shift in Crown policy that sought to limit conqueror descendant power was viewed anxiously by criollos as a loss of sin raza status, as privilege was tied to religious affiliation, whiteness, and the exploitation of Indigenous labour. In addition to terming these elites ‘criollos’ and

8 Stolcke, “Invaded Women,” 276-279. 9 Stolcke, “Invaded Women,” 279.

4 novohispanos, I use the terms ‘Hispano-creoles’ and ‘American Spaniards’ in this dissertation to signal the definition of a rooted American Hispanism that this group initiated in response to anxiety over the loss of their encomienda privileges.10

Across four chapters I pose and answer the following main questions: how did descendant claims to institutionalize conquest and Hispanic rule manifest themselves in their discourse and practices? How was Hispanism and Hispanic power interpreted and constructed by this early cohort of criollos? If conquistador power was legitimized by papal “endowment” and Crown privilege, how did conquistador descendants seek to ensure their own “mandate” to rule? I answer these questions through close analysis of the voluminous pastoral and ethnographic writings of one such descendant, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar (1546-1625), a first-generation elite criollo who served as Bishop of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia (1598-1607) and Tlaxcala- Puebla (1608-1625).11

Through Mota y Escobar’s representative example, this dissertation argues that criollo power was made through transcultural agents who deployed Iberian epistemological and institutional constructs alongside distinctly novohispano experiences, goals, and desires in order to assert their claims to a natural right to rule the colony. I argue that Mota y Escobar was a transcultural figure who represented the “disadjustment and readjustment” of Hispanic culture that accompanied New World conquest.12 He participated in the creation of novohispano configurations that assimilated and appropriated cultural knowledge from the local surroundings in order to maintain and root criollo power. Mota y Escobar’s writing also reveals that transculturation involved a Hispano-creole ethnographic approach to knowledge that sought to illuminate the distinct insider/outsider cultural location of the elite creole ethnographer through

10 In using these terms, especially ‘criollo’ and ‘creole,’ I am conscious of their equally important significance in relation to Afro-creoles in the colony of New Spain and throughout the Americas. See Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 11 Throughout this dissertation I will refer to this figure as “Mota y Escobar,” “the Bishop,” and “Bishop Mota y Escobar.” 12 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 98.

5 his strategic collection, collation, and interpretation of the people, flora, fauna, and landscapes of New Spain.

Transculturation, a theoretical frame for understanding “extremely complex transmutations of culture,” was developed by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his 1940 ethnographic historical analysis of tobacco and sugar in Cuba (Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar).13 In his investigation of Cuban history, he observed that cultural transitions did “not consist merely in acquiring another culture” (acculturation), but involved cultural “loss or uprooting” (deculturation), and the creation of “new cultural phenomena” (neoculturation).14 The narrow focus on the phenomenon of acculturation, he argued, actually obfuscated the full complexity of the dynamics of colonization in Cuba. For Ortiz, transculturation explained relations of power and cultural “counterpoints” that resisted neat description and analysis, which enabled him to show the multidirectional give and take of cultural collision.15

Ortiz’s framing of transculturation and his conceptualization of cultural contact and exchange as processual, non-linear, and tumultuous are helpful in exploring elite creole cultural formations in early colonial New Spain.16 The theory offers an expanded framework for examining forms of identification that defy colony-metropole binaries and cultural compartmentalization. Further, transculturation provides a lens through which to view the process of constructing imperial hegemony in a situation of limited direct metropolitan control, as was the case in New Spain. Elite creoles’ interpretations of Hispanism and their efforts to institutionalize and naturalize its tenets were in tension and conversation with the realities of New Spain. These elites perceived a diminished connection to Hispanic power due to the loss of hereditary rewards, which prompted a redefinition of their Hispanism within the local circumstances. This redefinition was made real through elite criollo attitudes towards and relations with Indigenous peoples, women, enslaved peoples of African descent, the Crown and royal bureaucracy, free people of colour, and poor

13 Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 98. 14 Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 98, 102-103. 15 Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 97-98, 100. 16 Silvia Spitta notes that while Ortiz viewed his theory as being applicable to any encounter between at least two cultures, transculturation must be continually redefined for specific contexts. Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1995), 6.

6 whites.17 The transculturated order that these elite men envisioned and enacted is referred to as novohispanidad (novohispano order) in this dissertation. While elites did not have a monopoly on cultural influence in the colony, they possessed immense institutional power to use violence, appropriation, and exploitation in order to impose their vision on others. We can view the ways in which such men engaged with the continuous deculturation, acculturation, and neoculturation taking place in early colonial New Spain by examining Mota y Escobar’s discursive articulations alongside his material practices of enslavement, enclosure, patriarchy, and wealth transfer and accumulation.

Mota y Escobar’s generation of creoles was born and grew up at a time when colonial New Spain was being built on the foundations of Hispanic conquest and colonization. This study opens in 1521, the year that Tenochtitlan suffered its final military defeat, and the process of colonization began in earnest.18 This dissertation outlines these criollos’ early formulations of distinction and difference as novohispanos at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Elite criollos argued that they were conquerors and creators, just as their parents and grandparents had been, and I focus on this early generation in order to disaggregate their efforts at power construction at this crucial, understudied period. Mota y Escobar’s writing and career illuminate and reveal one early creole’s efforts to embody and naturalize the genocidal action and power constitutive of the logic of conquest. As an exceptional yet representative member of this elite group, his example provides evidence of a burgeoning descendant awareness that relied upon the quotidian exercise of institutional power to accomplish its goals. This study concludes then, in 1625, the year of Mota y Escobar’s death in Tlaxcala-Puebla.

17 For scholarship that explores these dynamics, see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); J.I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975); Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016). 18 Following sixteenth-century usage and Matthew Restall’s lead, I do not put an accent on “Tenochtitlan”; in Nahuatl, the pronunciation is uninflected. See Restall, “Preface,” in When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (New York: Ecco, 2018).

Conquering creoles like Mota y Escobar worked to transform and translate European cultural codes and Castilian institutions into novohispano order, specifically through their efforts to perpetuate the encomienda (grants of Indigenous tribute) and the institution of slavery, assert their knowledge of and authority within the New World, and reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. This was a broad historical process that becomes clearer through the study of specific actors in their contexts. In this study of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, I show how one elite criollo used and extended his personal power as part of the ongoing process of systematizing and naturalizing Hispanic order, logic and privilege. This logic was meant to perpetuate itself through a seeming universality or natural-ness that would render elite power incontrovertible.

This dissertation shows that the first generations of elite Hispano-creoles had a distinct political consciousness that arguably foregrounded the political project of criollismo of the later colonial era yet differed from that later reformist and, ultimately, pro-independence elite project in crucial respects. This early Hispano-creole consciousness emerged in response to a moment in history when changing imperial policy created anxiety among these Hispano-creoles about the security and hegemony of the Hispanic Catholic Empire in New Spain. In this period, conquering creole consciousness expressed itself through articulated and practiced constructions of belonging, rootedness, and authority organized under the aegis of whiteness. Mota y Escobar and his generation sought to define themselves as ‘stakeholders’ in and protectors of white Hispanic culture and defenders of Iberian imperialism. As stewards of and participants in Hispanism and conquest, they argued that they occupied a crucial insider/outsider location to rule over New Spain without being culturally and racially absorbed by it. They sought imperial approval and acknowledgement of this status, an indication of their strong commitment to the metropole and empire.

I build on the small body of scholarship that recognizes the early generations of Hispano-creoles as foundational to later manifestations of criollo consciousness. However, much of this scholarship focuses on the later colonial era. “Conquering Creoles” stands out as a book-length study of how the first generations of New World-born conquering creoles – which included Mota y Escobar – worked to construct the illusion of the ‘natural’ authority and superiority of Hispanic whiteness in New Spain through specific colonizing institutions. For them, the construction and reproduction of whiteness was necessary to tether criollos to the metropole. In this early colonial

8 era Hispano-creoles like Mota y Escobar sought acknowledgement and approval of their unique role as defenders of whiteness and its institutional protection in order to facilitate the metropole’s projection of its authority within the colony. Like the criollo men of Mota y Escobar’s era, later generations of mid-seventeenth century elite Hispano-creoles would also claim guardianship of an idealized Indigenous history and culture, while asserting and privileging membership in Hispanic civilization through whiteness. In contrast, however, while these men of a later era sought imperial acknowledgement, they no longer sought imperial approval. Eventually, they rejected the formal institutional connections to Spain that were so central to the worldview of Mota y Escobar’s generation, a step that earlier Hispano-creoles could likely not have imagined.

This dissertation examines the “power in the story” of novohispanidad in New Spain, by illuminating criollos’ violent vision of colonial domination with mindful reflection on my own narrative power as a historian.19 Over the course of its chapters, this dissertation allows Mota y Escobar to emerge as a complex historical actor embedded in relationships of kinship and community, while emphasizing how inextricably tied these relationships were to the process of building, exercising, and extending an exclusionary racialized social hierarchy for the benefit of the Bishop and his elite class. I have been particularly aware of the inherent possibility for histories of whiteness to reinscribe colonial narratives of patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler innocence.20 As a historian, I seek to present Mota y Escobar with an empathy that all historical subjects deserve but I do not tell this story to condone, romanticize, or continue his project. Rather, I have tried to use historical methodologies of analysis and research in an effort to uncover, disrupt, and remember the legacies that this era of conquest has left for Mexico. It is

19 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2015), 1. 20 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein argue that settler colonialism as an analytic formation is “potentially a manner of colonial unknowing,” of reinscribing the “aggressively made and reproduced, affectively invested and effectively distributed” ignorance and disavowal of the colonial past. “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 435. For but one example of scholarly reinscription of colonial narratives, Trevor Burnard has been criticized for his denial of the agency of enslaved people in his exploration of white slaveowners in Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). See Dayo Nicole Mitchell, review of Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World by Trevor Burnard, Journal of British Studies 45, no. 1 (2006): 169-171 and Chris Evans, review of Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820, by Trevor Burnard, Journal of Southern History 82, no. 4 (2016): 902-903.

9 important to examine conquering creole power, ideologies, and views of the world in order to reveal the process and context of their creation. In so doing, we can deconstruct their constituent parts and denaturalize their seeming universality. To quote Haitian-American historical anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”21

I also do not seek to romanticize the violence and racist paternalism that structures the cultural exchange captured through the theory of transculturation, and I analyze Mota y Escobar’s discourse and practices with a sensitivity to the wider context of racialization, genocide, enslavement, and patriarchy which he actively sought to institutionalize. Elite criollos such as Mota y Escobar saw their (supposed) loss of privilege as unjust because they understood power and domination to be an inherent right of their imagined superiority, divine favour, and masculine conquering culture. Mota y Escobar’s narratives are conqueror’s narratives: the history I tell here revisits the conquest and colonization of New Spain through his writings without validating or excusing the terrifying vision contained therein. In writing such texts Mota y Escobar arguably sought to seduce his reader – officials in the metropole, in the first instance – to share in his fetishization of difference and naturalization of the ethnographic gaze. His sense of wonder about New Spain, which comes through forcefully in his writing, was likely genuine; however, it was a fascination inseparable from a destructive desire to seize possession, to conquer, and to entrench his position at the apex of an unequal and violent colonial order.

Historiographical Contribution

This study builds on scholarship of the colonial Hispanic Americas that examines criollismo or criollo consciousness, histories of the early colonial Church, and social histories of early colonial New Spain. This project has benefited from and engages with interdisciplinary research that explores colonialism, writing, knowledge collection and creation, and histories of whiteness and settler colonialism in the Americas. The earliest descendants of the conquerors – the people who form the subject of this study – did not identify themselves as criollos. Elite whites began to

21 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, xix.

10 apply this term to themselves in approximately the 1640s, some decades after Mota y Escobar’s death. Nevertheless, following the conventions of the field, I use the term criollo(s) in this dissertation in conjunction with Hispano-creole(s) to refer to Hispanic-descended individuals of the early generations. The absence of this term from their self-ascriptions speaks to the particularly ambivalent location of these early descendant generations as they struggled to assert their central place in the colonial hierarchy. Following the late sixteenth-century dismantling of the system of encomienda rewards enjoyed by their conquistador forebears, these elites began to imagine and forge a distinct consciousness that did not yet have a name or a distinguishable political project of criollismo.

From the early seventeenth century to approximately the century’s mid point, the term criollo was applied pejoratively to this group by metropolitans. On the origin of the term criollo, Bernard Lavallé quotes an illuminating passage by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616):

It is a name that was invented by the negros…It means among them un negro born in the Indies; of those born [in Guinea] they consider themselves to be more honest and of higher quality for having been born in their homeland than their children because they were born in another’s, and parents are offended if they are called creoles. The Spaniards, by resemblance, have introduced this name into their language to name those born [in the Indies].22

Mota y Escobar and other slaveowners used this term to refer to American-born people of African descent in this period, borrowing the original pejorative sense Garcilaso de la Vega noted. Of the Iberian appropriation of this term, Lavallé remarks that peninsulars sought to dismiss the Hispano-creoles and group them with “the dominated of the colonial world.”23

“Long before the end of the sixteenth century,” Lavallé writes, “the main lines of the Peruvian creole claims were configured and in a definitive way.” Thirty or forty years after the arrival of

22 Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales (Ia. parte, lib. IX, cap. XXX) quoted in Bernard Lavallé, Las promesas ambiguas: ensayos sobre el criollismo colonial en los Andes (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Péru, Instituto Riva-Agüero, 1993), 19-21. 23 Lavallé, Las promesas ambiguas, 19-21.

11 the first Spaniard in Peru, he continues, “everything was ready to make the coming centuries the theatre of the long and sometimes contradictory struggle of criollismo.”24 Most scholars agree that, by the early seventeenth century, this group had forged a distinct vision of grievance, entitlement, and ambition, even if they would not begin self-identifying as criollos until later. Despite these important historiographical observations, detailed, specific study of creoles in the period from the late sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century is limited, first, because of the perception of the linear progression of ideological development, the “aspects of the Creole project that remained constant across time and regions,” and, second, because this generation did not leave many textual traces behind.25 This dissertation builds on the interdisciplinary work that does exist, and expands and provides nuance to its implications.

In their respective studies of novohispano creole poet Francisco de Terrazas (<1549-1580?) and novohispano creole chronicler Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza (1545-1610), literary scholars Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons and Ylsa Campbell write that these men both moved between worlds and genres with ease and purpose, and sought to assert themselves as authorities on New Spain.26 Of De Terrazas’s poem Nuevo mundo y conquista, Cabrera Pons writes that the poet constructs a “nascent America” as “a territory that only makes sense as part of western history”; De Terrazas wrote of an America born in New Spain in the aftermath of conquest, just like the Hispano- creole.27 In Campbell’s reading of Dorantes de Carranza’s 1604 Sumaria Relación, she remarks that although the author told the viceroy that his relación would be an index and list of the writings of conquerors, there is a series of illuminating “digressions,” such as poems, anecdotes, and letters that illustrate the author’s intent to provide more than simple information.28 For example, Dorantes de Carranza inserted the poetry of creole De Terrazas alongside details of the conquistadores who arrived with Cortés, bringing together a history of conquest and a literary

24 Lavallé, Las promesas ambiguas, 42. 25 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America,” American Literary History 17, no.3 (Autumn, 2005): 424. 26 Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons, “El Nuevo mundo y conquista de Francisco de Terrazas en la construcción de una historia criolla de la Nueva España,” Andamios 12, no.29 (Sep./Dic. 2015): 141-160 and Ylsa Campbell, “De la crónica a la ficción: La Sumaria relación de Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza,” Literatura mexicana 13, no. 1 (2002): 11-26. 27 Cabrera Pons, “El Nuevo mundo y conquista de Francisco de Terrazas,” 154. 28 Campbell, “De la crónica a la ficción,” 13.

12 novohispano retelling of it to create a wholly new narrative.29 In my study of Mota y Escobar’s writings, I find similar discursive strategies being deployed. I go beyond examining his representational strategies in his writing, connecting them to his material, quotidian practices of rule that rooted his Hispano-creole logic and vision of the world.

In his analysis of what he termed “patriotic astrology,” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra writes that the colonies were “laboratories of modernity” where seventeenth-century “learned colonists,” or creole scholars, “invented forms of modern racism,” through their “obsession with creating homogenizing and essentializing categories.” 30 The present dissertation supports Cañizares- Esguerra’s assertion, locating the complex construction of whiteness in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Cañizares-Esguerra examines ideas about astrology and bodies while I examine practices of ideological naturalization and reproduction but, read together, both of our analyses suggest the criollo creation of a sophisticated racializing discourse.

Written in the mid-1970s, J.I. Israel’s Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 identified what Israel believed to be the greatest tension in seventeenth-century New Spain—the complex alliances and struggles between bishops, secular clergy, Crown bureaucrats, and mendicants regarding the evangelization and pastoral care of Indigenous peoples. These conflicts overlapped with creole-peninsular disputes, influencing rural and urban life and contributing to class-based animosities. Mota y Escobar figures in Israel’s work tangentially as he was a creole bishop but, in this dissertation, this struggle between Church, Crown, and bureaucracy gains greater depth and nuance as I examine the intersection of Mota y Escobar’s official role with his class, race, and gender position.

The male descendants of the conquistadores have been the subjects of a long historiography that has struggled to understand and define the “identities” and “imaginations” of the men who formed an influential elite group throughout the colonial era and became the independentistas of the nineteenth century.31 Their distinct awareness or consciousness has been conceived in many

29 Campbell, “De la crónica a la ficción,” 16. 30 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 35-36. 31 Scholarship on creoles in the colonial Hispanic Americas tips heavily towards examinations of criollos rather than criollas. Criollas do appear in the historiography in the study of enclosure and nuns. See Monjas y beatas: la

13 overlapping ways. Bernard Lavallé has written of the manifestation of a “colonial spirit” among Peruvian Hispanic-descended criollo elites. André Saint Lu described this “conscience créole” in colonial Guatemala as a “spirit of possession,” while Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has preferred “ancien régime logic” when discussing New Spain. David A. Brading terms later colonial manifestations of creole consciousness in Mexico “creole patriotism.” 32 Much of the work on creole group consciousness examines the period from the mid seventeenth-century to independence, focusing on the intellectual movement and components of ‘nationalist’ thought, criollos’ responses to peninsular prejudice, as well as their assertions of intellectual equality with and superiority over their metropolitan counterparts in both lay and religious spheres.33

My investigation of Mota y Escobar builds on these scholarly insights while asserting that a distinct “spirit” and “logic” of conquest was institutionalized in the early colonial era. This study’s analysis of the earliest generations as ‘conquering creoles’ captures the central role of militarism and localism in their perceptions of themselves, their class, and the colony and empire in which they held so much power and privilege. In using this term, I also hope to capture the concern with conquest’s futurity inherent in the early Hispano-creole vision. In his 1995 essay exploring the etymology of the term conquista, Charles Gibson writes that, from the thirteenth century onwards, the term conquest “could refer not simply to territories already acquired but to those still to be acquired, and to the right or privilege of acquiring them…Conquest as right of

escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana siglos XVII y XVIII, eds. Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto L. (México: Universidad de las Américas-Puebla: Archivo General de la Nación, 2002). 32 Lavallé, Las promesas ambiguas, 23-24; André Saint Lu, Condition coloniale et conscience créole au Guatemala, 1524-1821 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1970), 24; Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 424; and David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 33 In addition to the work cited above, see Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Procesos de construcción de las identidades de México: de la historia nacional a la historia de las identidades: Nueva España, siglos XVI-XVIII, ed. Perla Chinchilla (Ciudad de México: Universidad Iberoamericana, Departamento de Historia, 2010); Peggy K. Liss, Mexico under Spain, 1521-1556: Society and the Origins of Nationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: Empires and Sequels, 1450–1930 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). For a spectrum of literary perspectives on creoles that span the colonial era and include a variety of geographies, see Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, eds. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Agencias criollas. La ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas, ed. José Antonio Mazzotti (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000). For an examination of the late seventeenth-century ecclesiastical and patriotic writings of Jesuit creole Francisco de Florencia, see Jason Dyck, “The Sacred Historian’s Craft: Francisco de Florencia and Creole Identity in Seventeeth-century New Spain (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2012).

14 future acquisition, side by side with conquest as an act of military domination, is to be found among the earliest meanings of the term in Spanish history.”34

The militarism and violence implied in the early modern concept of conquest was appreciated by contemporaries. Felipe II’s 1573 set of royal ordinances for new “discoveries and settlements” ruled that conquista as a term was not to be used, since relations between españoles and indios “will be conducted with all the peace and charity that we desire.” Felipe’s ordinance further observed that “we do not want the name to give any occasion or pretext for using force or injury against the indios.” In place of conquista, “pacification” should be used, the Crown decreed.35 By terming these criollos conquering creoles I acknowledge the violence of their project at a historical moment when imperial authorities hoped to obscure that reality.

Part of the explanation for the relative lack of scholarship on early colonial creoles may lie in the fact that, although they possessed significant power as first-generation descendants, they did not leave behind a large archive of published texts that intervened in broad intellectual debates about novohispanidad, unlike later generations.36 However, as this study reveals, they did explicitly seek to shape such conversations and their influence can be read in unpublished or underutilized imperial records, such as municipal and judicial reports and petitions, financial accounting, sermons and speeches, and other bureaucratic records commissioned or required by the Council of the Indies and the Crown. Through this cohort’s access to and participation in institutions of colonial and imperial political power, these records reveal the often-quotidian nature of efforts to shape and naturalize domination.

34 Conquest is a Latin cognate. Gibson notes: “The prefix signifies association, joint action, or intensification. The root infinitive is quaerere, meaning ‘to seek, search, ask, collect, or acquire.’ In classical Latin the combined form, that is, the prefix with the verb, signified ‘to conduct a quest, or to make a thorough search.’ The original meaning relating to search or quest brings conquest closer to discovery than we had realized.” “Conquest and So-Called Conquest in Spain and Spanish America,” in The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed, ed. Ursula Lamb (Aldershot, Hampshire, Great Britain; Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1995), 112, 117-118, 125-126. 35 “Ordenanzas de Su Magestad hechas para los nuevos descubrimientos, conquistas y pacificaciones—Julio de 1573,” Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, sacados en su mayor parte del Real Archivo de Indias, eds. Joaquín Pacheco y Francisco de Cárdenas and Luis Torres de Mendoza (Madrid: Imprenta de M.B. de Quirós, 1864-1884) 16:152. 36 Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 424.

In particular, there is a cohort of criollo bishops in New Spain who have received little attention by scholars of creole consciousness.37 The under-studied writings of one such bishop, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, the subject of this study, open a significant window onto this elite world. In this dissertation I read the life trajectory and official and unofficial writings of Mota y Escobar with the aim of understanding his self-representation within a broader frame of cultural exchange and group identification. These men did not necessarily craft polemical treatises or publish natural histories or chronicles for a broad audience; instead, they wielded authority as mobile and well-resourced agents of the Crown, rhetorical power as preachers, economic power as elite religious figures in growing dioceses, and moral authority as learned leaders of the Catholic order of the colony. Through the representative example of Bishop Mota y Escobar, this study provides an important bridge between the fomentating of criollo group awareness engendered by perceived loss of privileges, and the later articulation of the self-conscious criollismo of the mid- seventeenth century and beyond.38

Through this analysis of Mota’s y Escobar’s writing, my research also contributes to early colonial church histories that explore the so-called “spiritual conquest”—the institutionalization and transplanting of Catholic systems and structures to New Spain, the evangelization and conversion of Indigenous peoples, and the engagement of people of African-descent with Hispanic Catholicism.39 My research further illuminates the bureaucratic side of Hispanic

37 They include: Dominican friar, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa (b.1542-d.1633), Antequera (Oaxaca); Augustinian friar, Juan de Zapata y Sandoval (b.1545-d.1630), Chiapas; Juan de Cervantes (b.1553-d.1614), Antequera (Oaxaca); and Baltazar de Covarrubias y Múñoz (b.1560-d.1622), Antequera (Oaxaca) and Michoacán. 38 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper provide a useful roadmap for analysing the broad process of group formation without essentializing this process through the word “identity.” They lay out an approach to analysis of group formation as the process of coming to share a “categorical attribute,” which leads to shared definitions of a common “predicament,” followed by the manifestation of “understandings of [shared] interest,” and finally, “readiness to undertake collective action.” “Beyond ‘identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 9. For an analysis of the rhetoric of later creole writing through one of its most representative personalities, see Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise (Cambridge [England] and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 39 The classic work that coined this term is Robert Ricard, La "conquête spirituelle" du Mexique. Essai sur l'apostolat et les méthodes missionnaires des Ordres mendiants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523-24̀ a 1572 (Paris: Institut d'éthnologie, 1933). See also William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico; Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Catholic colonialism as it explores the figure of the bishop as a locally-situated informant for the Crown and the Council of the Indies. This project builds on colonial church histories that examine the life and writings of religious figures in order to assess their distinct visions, agendas for reform and influence.40

Only theology scholar Magnus Lundberg has Mota y Escobar at the centre of his analysis of ecclesiastical history. Lundberg’s work examines Mota y Escobar as an exceptional figure in the colony but does not situate him in his wider class context, nor does he examine Mota y Escobar’s Guadalajara writings in his study, remarking that they “include little news about the ecclesiastical state of the diocese.”41 “Conquering Creoles” is the first study to consider this bishop as representative of his class at a crucial cultural moment, using the lense of ethnography to examine his official writings for Crown and Church about local church business and religious communities, the lives of ordinary people and their interactions with the natural world, and his vivid portrayals of everyday elite life in this era of emerging Hispano-creole group formation.

Their clear prose, rich detail, and wide scope of content, have made Mota y Escobar’s Guadalajara and Tlaxcala-Puebla pastoral writings useful for scholars as “basic sources of information about novohispano life.”42 Mota y Escobar discussed political administrative structures, lay and religious jurisdictional boundaries, Indigenous peoples and their communities, enslaved and free people of colour, and the climate, topography, and flora and fauna of the territories, to name only a few areas of focus. Several scholars have transcribed and published parts of Mota y Escobar’s major manuscripts with introductory, biographical, and genealogical remarks,43 while others have examined his writings for information on specific themes in the

40 See Emily Berquist-Soule, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Stafford Poole, Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571–1591 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); and Antonio Rubial García, “St. Palafox: Metaphorical Images of Disputed Sainthood,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800, eds. Allan Greer and Jodi Blinkoff (New York; London: Routledge, 2003): 235-251. 41 Magnus Lundberg, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar: Ambición y Santidad en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI y XVII,” in Virreinatos II, eds. Lillian von der Walde M. and Mariel Reinoso I. (Mexico: Grupo Editorial Destiempos, 2013): 84. 42 González Jácome, “Introducción,” 14 and Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia, 140. 43 For introductions to and transcriptions of Mota y Escobar’s writings, see Alba González Jácome, “Introducción,” in Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar: Memoriales del obispo de Tlaxcala: Un recorrido por el centro de Mexico a principios del siglo XVII, ed. Alba González Jácome (México: Tlaxacala Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2013): 1-23 (hereafter cited in text as Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de

17 history of New Spain, such as enslavement, Catholicism, and political disputes.44 J.H. Parry concludes his study of sixteenth-century New Galicia writing that the “only justification for breaking off the story of New Galicia arbitrarily at the end of the sixteenth century lies in the fact that a remarkably complete and instructive account of the province was written just at that time. The sixth bishop of Guadalajara, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, was a great traveller.” Parry further notes that Mota y Escobar’s account confirms the records of the Audiencia (viceregal high court), Parry’s major source base, concluding that colonial society in New Galicia was “top heavy.” 45 Israel uncritically quotes Mota y Escobar’s Guadalajara writings in his discussion of the “friction” between Spaniards (he includes creoles here) and people of African-descent in seventeenth-century New Spain.46 Taking a more critical stance but neglecting an interrogation of whiteness, Israel quotes the Bishop in a passage that discusses the similarities between Iberian and novohispano bodies, locating him in broader creole arguments about sameness. Specifically, Israel notes that Mota y Escobar commented on the similarity between Castilians and those born in Zacatecas in “sharpness of mind and strength of body.”47

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva’s recent study of urban slavery highlights Mota y Escobar’s status as a significant urban slave-owner as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, noting that the Bishop bequeathed a family he owned (the Mesas) to the Jesuits on his death. Sierra Silva uses this as evidence of the

Tlaxcala); Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, “Introducción,” in Descripció n geográ fica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo Leó n: por Alonso de La Mota y Escobar, ed. Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (México: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1940): 9-20; Antonio Pompa y Pompa, “Advertencia,” in Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León by Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, ed. Antonio Pompa y Pompa (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, Instituto Jaliesciense de Antropología e Historia Colección Historica de Obras 1993) (hereafter cited in text as Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica); and Juan Pablo Salazar Andreu, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar (1607-1625),” in Obispos de Puebla: Período de los Austria (1521-1700) ed. Juan Pablo Salazar Andreu (México: Editorial Porrúa, 2005): 119-128. 44 See Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 79, 111, 118, 149, 156, 165; Magnus Lundberg, Church Life Between the Metropolitan and the Local Parishes, Parishioners, and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico (Orlando: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011), 79-116; John Frederick Schwaller, “Tres familias mexicanas del siglo XVI,” Historia mexicana 31, no. 2 (1981): 171-196; John Frederick Schwaller and Constance Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family: The Mota Clan of Burgos and Mexico City,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 411-436; Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 81, 87, 90, 92; and J.H. Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia in the Sixteenth Century: A Study in Spanish Colonial Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 140, 185-195, 203. 45 Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia, 185. 46 Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 81. 47 Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 90.

18 link between Catholic governance in Puebla and male religious orders. Further, Sierra Silva discusses the demands for enslaved coachmen (cocheros) in the ecclesiastical centre of Puebla, remarking on Mota y Escobar’s reliance on enslaved labour, specifically his enslaved cochero Pascual, to perform his pastoral duties. Sierra Silva also mentions Mota y Escobar’s participation in exacerbating social fears of anti-slavery rebels (maroons led by Gaspar Yanga) in the first decade of the seventeenth century in his reflections on Spanish fears of uprisings and what Sierra Silva terms “racial vengeance.”48 In my reading of the Bishop’s records, I examine his relationship to and writings about the system of slavery as reflective of his attempts to define and construct a vision of novohispano order that asserted allegiance to empire and whiteness. I expand on Sierra Silva’s analysis by illuminating the individual role of the Bishop in perpetuating the logic of enslavement, while also using Mota y Escobar’s archive as a slaveowner to show slavery’s importance to criollo self-awareness. This included the use of enslavement as a part of the elite gift economy, which helped extend, build, and project Hispano- creole authority and power throughout the colony by reproducing wealth and the structure of the racial caste system.

A significant work focusing on Mota y Escobar and his extended family is in the transatlantic work of John Frederick Schwaller and Constance Mathers, who trace the “Mota Clan” from Burgos in Iberia to Mexico City. They compare the methods used by the two Mota branches to hold power and wield authority on both sides of the Atlantic. These two sides were strategic in their accumulation and transfer of wealth, focusing on the entailed estate. Whereas the Burgos wing had enough wealth to create several entails for several children, the Mexico City Motas only entailed one estate that was passed down to the eldest son, Mota y Escobar’s brother. Schwaller and Mathers also remark that when Mota y Escobar’s father left Spain he “apparently never looked back,” as there is no evidence of “correspondence, business dealings, or visits” between the two branches of the family. This is exceptional for Iberian transatlantic families in this era, the authors note.49 The lack of ties possibly points to the strategic construction of family rootedness in New Spain by Mota y Escobar’s father and mother, perhaps a relevant influence on Mota y Escobar’s own apparent commitment to New Spain.

48 Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico, 79, 149, 155-156, 165. 49 Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 411-412, 434-435.

My research has benefitted from this scholarship and seeks to expand its analyses and conclusions. I show that while the Bishop’s writings focused on and describe a great breadth of themes and topics, they were strategically composed as a reflection of the author himself. I consider the expectations and context of the audience in my analysis of Mota y Escobar’s discursive articulations alongside his own goals and purposes in constructing these narratives. While Sierra Silva integrated the pastoral visitation records and financial accounting of the Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript in his work, I examine these records of enslavement, wealth accumulation, enclosure, and family wealth transfer as material practices of whiteness and elite criollo ideology. “Conquering Creoles” critically reflects on the quotidian making of power and views the Bishop’s religious role as a crucial tool in his effort to ensure a place for himself and his lineage within the imperial governance of New Spain. Arndt Brendecke writes that every initiative undertaken by Spanish imperial institutions to acquire knowledge “was recognized by contemporaries as an opportunity for bringing their own interests into play.” The question of colonial knowledge then, he argues, “should be viewed in the context of political communication and social practice.”50 Mota y Escobar was a learned and strategic writer and Crown agent, familiar with intellectual conventions and authoritative texts, including a range of classical works, that circulated at the time. He crafted narratives with the purpose of being recognized and appreciated by the metropole as a voice of Hispano-creole authority. In his official and quotidian episcopal writings examined in this dissertation, it is clear that Mota y Escobar was confident that he could work for the Empire and his class simultaneously.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra analyzes the eighteenth-century “debates” that asked, “upon whose sources and authority to write the history of the Americas?” He concludes that a “form of patriotic epistemology emerged that highlighted the limited ability of outsiders ever to comprehend the history of America and its peoples.” Mota y Escobar’s efforts to demonstrate his indispensability to the metropole through his work as a transcultural intermediary is a particularly early seventeenth-century manifestation of key aspects of this creole consciousness. His writing sought to assert authority by building discursive and epistemological bridges between metropolitans and colonials. Metropolitans as “outsiders” could comprehend the

50 Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 6-7.

Americas if they would only recognize that creoles were the legitimate and ideal inheritors of the rewards of conquest, stewards of the system of colonial republics, and translators of New World knowledge. In some ways, the patriotic discourse that Cañizares-Esguerra describes for the eighteenth century signals the failure of Mota y Escobar’s seventeenth-century strategy.51

In my examination of the writings of Mota y Escobar, I build on scholarship that examines narrative construction, colonial writing, knowledge collection and creation, and ethnography.52 Mota y Escobar understood the power (and history) of the written word to build and claim authority and he believed himself to be an ideal imperial informer. Through his descriptions of life in Indigenous communities and experiences on the roads over mountains, through valleys, and across rivers, he endeavoured to demonstrate to his Crown audience the extensive scope of his gaze and the depth of his command of New World knowledge. He was strategic in his recounting of maroons, Indigenous nobility, his enslaved labourers, impoverished españoles, and the white elite of his class, constructing what he thought to be an indisputable narrative of creole possession and control, illuminating the transcultural nature of his experience. He had a particular fondness for descriptions of animals, alive and dead, and he provided ethnographic interpretations of Indigenous people and elite whites interacting with them in specific and suggestive cultural contexts. In his narratives of elite white sociability, he wrote himself as a masculine conqueror of bulls and terrain and as a capable hunter of New Spain’s native wild game. When Indigenous people interact with animals in Mota y Escobar’s writing, they are experts harnessing the natural world, but they are also a composite part of the landscape. His writings imply that the full significance of Indigenous quotidian activities can only be rendered legible, and the possibilities for profit and usefulness deduced, by a knowledgeable, local insider/outsider like himself, on hand to translate such information for a distant metropolitan audience.

51 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6, 8-9, and chapter four. 52 See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 1991); Covadonga Lamar Prieto, “Narrativa novohispana del XVI: un intento de clasificación,” in Edad de oro cantabrigense: actas del VII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas del Siglo de Oro, ed. Anthony J. Close (Vigo: AISO; Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2006): 385-391; and Rolena Adorno, “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1992): 210-228.

In his accounting records, Mota y Escobar provided evidence of how men of his class sought to reproduce the power of patriarchal and patrilineal conquistador lineages, even those who were clergymen barred from having legitimate biological offspring. He was deeply invested in preserving the Mota family’s criollo power through the accumulation, bequest, and distribution of property, the exploitation and reproduction of human property, and the manipulation of money and material wealth through dowry donations, mortgaged loans, and gifts. He sought to reproduce patriarchal power by paying for the dowries of white girls in danger of being ‘lost,’ and contributed to Hispano-creole networks across the colony by using property transactions to support criollas. These institutionalized and naturalized tools of class, race, and caste power are concrete manifestations of efforts to extend the legitimacy of domination and possession into the future. Through an examination of these records, my work answers Stolcke’s call for social histories of colonial New Spain to centre analysis of institutionalized structures of race, gender, and class.53

Naturalization is, arguably, a state-building tool, used by elites to construct a hegemonic order that forecloses the possibility of resistance and inhibits the ability of people to understand fully, question, and disentangle the structures that oppress them.54 While it should not be overstated, recent social histories of colonial New Spain have demonstrated that this quest for naturalized hegemony was unsuccessful. Herman L. Bennett has argued that there existed a “strategic awareness” in Afro-creole communities of ways to challenge their marginalization through legal mechanisms, religious rituals and rites, and selective appeals to absolutist protection.55 Writing about class in Mexico City, R. Douglas Cope has shown that the racial caste system did not have a “concrete reality” in “plebian life,” and that elite-plebian “relations had to be constantly renegotiated and hammered out daily in thousands of implicit contracts with members of the plebe who were not passive, alienated, or crushed by feelings of racial inferiority and

53 In 1994 Stolcke wrote that “the colonial project involved, at enormous human cost, the imposition of the political principles and spiritual and social values of the metropolis upon the autochthonous population. Just how these cultural values were themselves transformed in the process of colonization has however, not yet been sufficiently investigated.” “Invaded Women,” 274-275. The author’s italics. 54 It should be noted that not all imperial and colonial entities desire hegemony or consent to their rule by the subjugated. Some, like the British Raj, are content to use coercion over persuasion. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 55 Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 3.

22 worthlessness.”56 María Elena Martínez remarks that there was no “single, transhistorical racism but rather different types of racisms, each produced by specific social and historical conditions…. The historian’s task,” she notes, is to “excavate its valences with particular cultural and temporal contexts, study the processes that enable its reproduction,” and analyze its rearticulation and reconstruction over time.57

This study’s analysis of Hispano-criollo power alongside the construction of whiteness in New Spain contributes to scholarship that examines the historical development of “ideologies of ethnicity” or “blood ideologies.”58 The study of whiteness in the Hispanic Americas tends to focus on the later colonial era when the racial caste system (sistema de castas) was more deeply institutionalized, its “explicitly racial criteria crystallized.”59 María Elena Martínez’s Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico was foundational in showing the transformation and translation of Iberian notions of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) into the Spanish Americas sistema structure, providing evidence of concrete institutional efforts to make raza (race). She takes special consideration of religion, gender, and sexuality in the production of purity discourses, and the linkages of these concepts with “patriotic discourses” of the later colonial period. Utilizing Inquisition records and casta paintings, she notes that over the course of the seventeenth century, purity discourses came to be connected with whiteness, gaining strength over the eighteenth century.60 In my study, I provide

56 R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 163-165. 57 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 19. The author’s italics. See also Max. S. Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Zü rich; Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 11-39. James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares- Esguerra make a similar call for deeper context and contingency-based research in “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 2011): 181-208. 58 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 121 and Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, “Editorial,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, 2. For an examination of how the casta system evolved in its integration of concepts like ethnicity and blood, see Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chapter 3. 59 Stolcke, “Invaded Women,” 279. See Mara Loveman, “Whiteness in Latin America: Measurement and Meaning in National Censuses (1850-1950),” Journal de la société des américanistes 95, no. 2 (2010): 207-234; Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Gema R. Guevara, “Inexacting Whiteness: “Blanqueamiento” as a Gender-Specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century,” Cuban Studies 36 (2005): 105-128. 60 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 224.

23 greater nuance to her arguments about the seventeenth century, as I show that ideas about whiteness were central to Hispano-creole efforts to distinguish themselves, institutionalize their link to Iberia, and naturalize their right to rule in this period, using pastoral writings and accounting records.

My research explores the entrenchment of patriarchal power and its relationship to segregationist and exclusionary social practices, which supported notions of purity, divine favour, and whiteness in early colonial New Spain. Reproductive considerations were some of the first concerns of the conquistadores, and rhetoric surrounding whiteness and race in New Spain hinged on policing sexuality in order to define community boundaries. Mota y Escobar’s father ensured that his daughters married fellow Iberian conquistadores or entered convents. Marriage alliances and access to elite conventual life secured Hispanic power. When criollos argued for the perpetuation of colonial rewards like encomienda, they emphasized the relationship between wealth and access to servile labour on the one hand, and the imperative to uphold the racially segregated community structure of the repúblicas on the other. Hispanic-descended men could ensure the purity of white women by their enclosure in institutional settings that observed racial hierarchies and perpetuated ideological connections between women’s sexual purity, morality, and whiteness. Churchmen like Mota y Escobar ‘rescued’ white girls from ‘contamination’ by placing them in convents and supporting the power of convents through donations and loan arrangements.

My work is in conversation with settler colonial studies, which problematize “most directly…the enduring continuity of colonial relations of power,” in Anglo American (and other) colonial spaces, usually from the eighteenth century onwards.61 It is a field of critical inquiry that has tended to focus on the North Atlantic, the former dominions of the British Empire, and Israel- Palestine. The term “settler” is not typically used in the context of the Hispanic Americas or in the early colonial period but the figure of the criollo or conqueror descendant does in some ways fit into the concept. Patrick Wolfe defines settler colonialism as “a colonialism that seeks to

61 Stephanie E. Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism, the Hemispheric Americas, and Chattel Slavery,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July, 2019): 409. See David R. Roediger’s work on whiteness and class power in the modern United States, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).

24 eliminate Native societies,” and operates with a “logic of elimination.”62 This logic includes actions that “disrupt Native sovereignty,” such as “officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations.”63 The “invasion at the heart of settler colonialism,” Stephanie Smallwood explains quoting Wolfe, “is a structure not an event.”64 The arguments of this dissertation show criollos to be in active support of this eliminationist, structural, and epistemic vision. In Smallwood’s bid to assert the use of the concept in research of the early Americas, she writes that the “settler colonialism concept disturbs the familiar comparative framework that too easily figures the república de los indios, mestizaje, and other phenomena of Spanish colonizing as less objectionable than their English correlates, and it helps us to understand disruption and disavowal of Native dominion as inherent to European colonizing across the hemispheric Americas.”65

While my research shows descendant power to line up with Wolfe’s conceptualization of the consequences of settler colonial action, I examine the origins of a sense of consciousness and power that was distinct to the Hispanic Atlantic World and emerged at a much earlier period than is usually considered in the field of settler colonial studies.66 As Allan Greer has noted for New France, Euro-descended populations in the early colonial era benefitted from Indigenous knowledge and needed their participation in the colonial system.67 In regards to New Spain in particular then, whether it was the religious mandate to evangelize or the expectation of Indigenous peoples’ labour as perpetual tribute, there was a place, however discriminatory, for

62 Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 388. 63Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism,” 388 and Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism,” 412. 64 Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism,” 388 and Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism,” 409. 65 Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism,” 412. 66 Nancy Shoemaker acknowledges the temporal issue bound up in settler colonial studies, writing that by “shifting attention away from settler colonialism's consequences to query its origins, scholars could test the theory's applicability in a wider variety of settings and refine it.” “Settler Colonialism: Universal Theory or English Heritage?” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July, 2019): 369. 67 Allan Greer, "Settler Colonialism and Empire in Early America," The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 383–90

Indigenous populations in the building of colonial order. As such, settler colonial studies’ tendency to emphasize the desire to eliminate Indigenous peoples does not quite fit early colonial New Spain.68 Alyosha Goldstein has argued that settler colonialism is embroiled in capitalist, imperial, and colonial institutions and practices and as a result it has shifted “from accommodation to annihilation to inclusion.” This shift resists easy binaries between “settler” and “native.”69 This critique, which comes from an analysis of the United States, is applicable to the context of New Spain especially in the later colonial era as Hispano-creole ideology sought to absorb an idealized Indigenous culture. As such, while I support the disruption of comparative framing argued by Smallwood, I do not use the term ‘settler colonial/ism’ in this study and use the terms criollo and Hispano-creole to signal Euro-descended populations.

Much of the early colonial scholarship that does contend with whiteness does so by examining the experiences and actions of free and enslaved people of colour and mestizos as they grappled with pro-slavery, racist, and colonizing legislation and social structures.70 This work is important in understanding the operation of the sistema de castas in the lives of those whom it sought to control but as I outlined earlier, the construction of whiteness occurred parallel to the construction of the casta system. Through the study of the Hispano-creole Mota y Escobar I will demonstrate that the construction and reproduction of a particular form of whiteness was foundational in establishing the ideological conditions for the ongoing conquest and colonization of New Spain.

Sources and Methodology

Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that “the materiality of the socio-historical process…sets the stage for future historical narratives.” While the grievances of conquering creoles were well established by the turn of the seventeenth century, their claims to nobility, exceptionalism,

68 In his analysis of the concept from the perspective of North American borderlands history, Samuel Truett argues that settler colonialism “preserves the blind spots of frontier history.” He emphasizes the limitations of European empires on the ground and their multifarious agendas and goals. “Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 436. 69 Alyosha Goldstein, “Toward a Genealogy of the U.S. Colonial Present,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 9. 70 See Vinson III, Before Mestizaje, 56, and chapter three, and Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

26 knowledge, authority and superiority, and legacy had to be made and remade by individual creoles. For Hispanic colonization to appear inevitable, consistent, and natural inside the colony, the institutions of Hispanism (and by extension novohispanidad) had to be embedded within colonial culture. The successes and failures of this process can be ascertained by uncovering and acknowledging the silences present in the artifacts of history; one must “expose when and where power gets into the story” as the “production of traces is always also the creation of silences,” Trouillot remarks. Further, he notes that the “bundle of silences,” created by such “traces” is “the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.”71

Through historical ethnography and the reconstruction of networks and biographies, I investigate criollo efforts to silence the labour, constitutive parts, and systematized violence that was necessary for the construction of novohispano order and culture. The integration of anthropological and literary techniques characteristic of these methodological approaches into social and cultural history enables the deconstruction, analysis, and interpretation of the formation of criollo novohispanidad within its particular historical context. In its focus on Mota y Escobar this thesis responds to anthropologist Eric R. Wolf’s recommendation that “[w]herever possible we should try to identify the social agents who install and defend institutions and who organize coherence, for whom and against whom.”72 To track power, Trouillot remarks, we must expand the “chronological boundaries of the [historical] production process.”73 To that end, the setting for the emergence of elite creole grievance and entitlement opens this study. I analyze the earliest municipal records of the Mexico City town council (1524) to illustrate the rapid initial colonial state-building that was essential to conquistador power and privilege. I introduce Mota y Escobar and trace his extended family through administrative, genealogical, and pastoral records that illustrate our subject’s social location and investment in the logic of conquest.

In the chapters that follow, I analyze Mota y Escobar’s extensive seventeenth-century writings, putting them in conversation with printed and archival documents that illuminate expressions of

71 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 25, 28-29. 72 Eric R. Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 67. 73 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 25.

27 descendant awareness. This analysis is supplemented by sociolinguistic interventions, using the 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by the Castilian priest Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, a contemporary of Mota y Escobar, in order to bring greater clarity and nuance to central concepts of the period.74 Attention to the subtleties of early modern written language provides unexpected insights into possible context that is less obvious to the modern reader and opens a window onto the broader historical context.

History, Trouillot argues, “as social process, involves peoples in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality.”75 Across this dissertation I consider Mota y Escobar in these capacities, as they overlap and conflict with as well as accentuate one another. The Bishop’s own apparent awareness of himself as an agent, actor, and subject within the setting of the Hispanic Empire is central to his writings, especially those commissioned or required by Church and Crown. The “process and conditions” – Margarita Zamora’s “pragmatics” – of the production of Mota y Escobar’s personal narratives are central to making visible the constructed-ness and institutionalization of power.76

The bulk of my analysis in this dissertation is based on the writings of two manuscripts created by Mota y Escobar in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The first is the Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Galicia, Vizcaya y Leon (Geographic description of the kingdoms of Galicia, Vizcaya, and Leon), a Crown-commissioned ethno-geographic treatise in the early modern cosmographia or relación geográfica genre.77 This manuscript was commissioned by the

74 Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006). María Elena Martínez draws on Covarrubias Horozco’s dictionary in Genealogical Fictions to make sense of contemporary concepts and terms, particularly those regarding race, nature, and gender. 75 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 23. 76 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 25 and Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4. 77 BM, Ms.13964 (Descripcion [sic] geographica [sic]), fs.72r. This manuscript is contained in the bundle known as the Kingsborough Codex; its location at the BM is no longer explicitly listed on the BM’s online catalogue entry for Ms.13964 but I have confirmed that it is still held there. James Hamill, Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, the British Museum, ‘"Descripcion [sic] geographica [sic]" Ms. 13964,’ email message to author, December 19, 2014 and July 27, 2018. I thank Mr. Hamill for sending me images of the frontispiece and other folios to view. Throughout the dissertation I cite the published transcription as: Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica.

President of the Council of the Indies, who requested that the Bishop of Guadalajara complete a relación (description, appraisal, or summary) of the diocese based on the 1604 Council-provided questionnaire.78 The second manuscript is pastoral, known by the title Mota y Escobar gave it on the frontispiece: Aquí se halla en este libro luz y razón de todas las cosas que [h]e hecho en la administración de mi obispado de Tlaxcala (In this book one finds the light and reason for all the things that I have done in the administration of my bishopric at Tlaxcala).79 Written between 1608, when Mota y Escobar entered the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla as Bishop, and his death there in 1625, the bulk of this text is pastoral visitation records (visitas pastorales). However, it also includes pastoral and personal accounting, inventories of human beings and personal possessions, and notations on professional and personal donations and gifts.

In addition to my focus on the two major manuscripts created by Mota y Escobar, I consulted records from the Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico)80, Archivo General de Indias (Spain)81; Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain)82; Biblioteca Nacional de España83; and the John Carter Brown Library.84 I accessed printed transcriptions of Mota y Escobar’s writings, Crown orders, colonial legislation, and the 1597 petition to the Crown from the collections of Mexican historians and bibliophiles and educational institutions in Mexico (Instituto Nacional de

78 BM, Ms.13964, fs.72r. See S. Poole, Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Phillip II (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). 79 BNE, Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698 (Aquí se halla en este libro luz y razón), fs. 1v (imagen 3v), accessed December 1, 2020, http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000039751&page=1. Hereafter cited in text as BNE, Mss.6877. 80 I consulted records from the Jesuits (Jesuitas); land records and donations (Mercedes), Indiferente Virreinal (miscellaneous viceregal materials); viceregal government (Gobierno Virreinal); viceregal notaries (General de Parte); royal orders (Reales Cédulas Originales y Duplicados); and entailed estates (Vínculos y Mayorazgos). 81 I consulted records from the Audiencias of Mexico, Charcas, Guadalajara, Panama, and Quito; Council of the Indies (Patronato, Justicia, Contaduría); and House of Trade (Contratación). 82 I consulted records from the Council of Orders (OM-Caballeros Santiago and OM-Expedientillos) and the Inquisition of Mexico. 83 Mota y Escobar’s Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript is held here: Aquí se halla en este libro luz y razón de todas las cosas que [h]e hecho en la administración de mi obispado de Tlaxcala (In this book one finds the light and reason for all the things that I have done in the administration of my bishopric at Tlaxcala). 84 The 1619 sermon performed by criollo Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa, is held here: “Semon [sic] que predico el illustrissimo y reverendissimo señor D. Fr. Ioan de Bohorques, maestro en sancta theologia, y obispo de Guaxaca, en el octavo dia de la insignes fiestas que la sancta iglesia de Tlaxcala, y su illustrissimo prelado el señor D. Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, hizieron a la concepcion de la Virgen SS. María, predicole a 15. deziembre, dia que la orden de S. Domingo, celebró la fiesta co[n] insigne aplauso.”

Antropología e Historia, Instituto Jaliesciense de Antropología e Historia, Colegio del Tecpam de Santiago, and Secretaría de Educación del Estado de Tlaxcala). I also consulted genealogical and pastoral archival collections digitized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.85

Structure and Organization

This dissertation highlights Mota y Escobar’s efforts, as a transcultural agent, to communicate his sense of his place in the imperial structure using a language that moved flexibly if haphazardly between what was European and what was novohispano. Imperial aims often clashed with the Bishop’s goals, and his cultural representations and material practices reveal an engagement with the local that often precluded metropolitan desire, awareness, and legibility.

Chapter one introduces Alonso de la Mota y Escobar and his family through baptismal and genealogical documents, records of “méritos y servicios,” benefice petitions (informaciones de oficio), Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) files, and other pertinent imperial administrative records. The chapter goes on to illuminate the culture and system of rewards that facilitated the construction of the conquistador, indio, and criollo descendant in the earliest years of colonization in New Spain. I argue that the Iberian system of mercedes, rewards won through the conquest, defined the structural development of Hispanic control in New Spain. My analysis focuses on the records of the Mexico City municipal council, which provide details of the consolidation of these rewards by conquerors and their family members. I draw upon records from the Council of the Indies and Audiencia de Mexico to support my examination. When the Crown reasserted its sovereign right to the rewards of colonization, an early Hispano-creole sense of anxiety emerged about the ability to naturalize Hispanic power and class dominance. This anxiety found expression in a petition to the Crown from 1597 that involved the participation of the Mexico City municipal council and Audiencia. In their opposition to the Crown’s new policies, the municipal council and Audiencia collected testimonies from powerful novohispano men of the conqueror-descendant class, who feared the loss of their families’

85 I consulted the Church’s digitized records of the books of pastoral baptisms of “españoles” in Mexico City and Puebla between 1536-1547 and 1576-1694 (“Bautismos de Españoles: 1536-1547” and “México, Puebla, registros parroquiales, 1545-1977”).

30 encomienda privileges. The tone, central arguments, and concerns of these Hispano-creole men, including Mota y Escobar, emerge forcefully in their witness testimony during their questioning.

In chapter two, I examine the Bishop’s responses to Crown directives (real cédulas and instrucciones), and the questionnaires and protocols of the Council of the Indies (interrogatorios and ordenanzas). These responses informed his creation of the Guadalajara ethnographic manuscript (Descripción geográfica), the focus of this chapter’s analysis. Through study of the Crown’s expectations for the collation of colonial information and Mota y Escobar’s strategic redirections in his responses, most notably an appeal to mortal enchantment and wonder, I argue that the writings of the Descripción geográfica were meant to persuade the Crown of his crucial location as the nexus of imperial understanding of New Spain. He was not simply a bureaucrat or conduit for the passage of colonial knowledge—he was the necessary interpreter of it for metropolitan comprehension.

Chapter three explores the concept and construction of the república de españoles as a vehicle for expanding creole ideology and realizing its application across colonial society. This chapter examines how Mota y Escobar and other early generation criollos adapted Iberian sociopolitical concepts to the context of New Spain in order to build a new colonial order ruled by a Hispanic- creole elite class. I argue that as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar saw himself as a creator-builder of this new colonial Hispanism and used the tools of his professional role and resources of his lineage to accomplish his exclusionary goals. My analysis returns to the 1597 petition to the Crown examined in chapter one. In this chapter, I use that 1597 evidence to examine the language of distinction that Hispano-creoles (and their allies) used in their defense of their class. This language exemplifies how criollos borrowed from Iberian epistemology but adapted it to the specific colonial context. I examine witness complaints about the itinerant nature of Iberian merchants and analyze testimony that articulated the link between upholding Hispano-creole privilege and the maintenance of a segregated racial order.

This developing rhetoric of Hispano-creole whiteness was institutionalized by the Catholic Church, and in chapter three, and I explore an example of its logic through analysis of a 1619 sermon given by criollo Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa, in Mota y Escobar’s diocese. In this sermon, the sacred and transformative action of Columbus’ merchant vessel Santa María is tied to New World exceptionalism and whiteness, in contrast to previous

31 critiques of peninsular itinerancy. The Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript’s pastoral and accounting records figure prominently in this chapter as I discuss Mota y Escobar’s efforts to reproduce whiteness through engagement with convents, dowry payments for the enclosure of criollas, and the clarifying anecdotes that accompany these texts. The Bishop also used money and gifts to perpetuate his power and structure the colonial order. I explore the implications of records that listed wealth transfer through the purchase of property, granting of mortgaged loans, and gifting of specie and material objects to family and for the fostering of Hispano-creole networks. I investigate Mota y Escobar’s deployment of claims to innocence in order to morally purify his transactions and sacralize his intentions and goals.

The creation of a white supremacist order relied on the further institutionalization of slavery in New Spain and in chapter three I look at Mota y Escobar’s records of his human property. Slavery was a crucial component of the order Hispano-creoles endeavoured to create and direct, and it was a constitutive part of the overall ‘project’ of colonization in the Hispanic Atlantic world. As Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar was the enslaver of at least forty-three people, including twelve children. He sought to naturalize the enslavement of African-descended people through his ownership of women and their children, and his brutal treatment of his enslaved labourers illuminates his dedication and commitment to racialized power through practices of mastery. In the form of a memoria, a memorandum intended to preserve memory, the Bishop showcased his wealth and authority through his ownership of human property. In his use of enslaved labour he sought to signal his position of cultural superiority. Slave-owning was a way to both produce and perform class status in the colony, and when contrasted with other accounting records in the manuscript, this list illuminates the lack of moral ambiguity about racialized slavery within elite novohispano society.

In the final chapter of this dissertation, I use visita pastoral records from the Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript to show how Mota y Escobar wrote himself as a culturally mobile figure in order to demonstrate his power as a rooted mediator between colony and metropole. I explore the Church’s and Crown’s directives and expectations for the visita genre through an analysis of Tridentine canon law and colonial legislation (Patronato and derecho indiano), revealing the latter’s tolerance for the distinct voices of prelates. Through an analysis of his ethnographic vision, I argue that Mota y Escobar turned the exercise of recording the visita entries into an opportunity to project a conquistador relationship to New Spain’s people, places, and things. His

32 class interests were expressed through cultural flexibility and this chapter explores how Mota y Escobar represented himself as both an insider and an outsider to Hispanism, illuminating the new configuration of novohispanidad, which tied the Hispano-creole to empire and New Spain without being absorbed by either.

To conclude my study, I examine the afterlives of Mota y Escobar in an epilogue based on Jesuit and Carmelite hagiographic records. I show how these institutions projected the Bishop’s power into the future and I also illustrate the limits of that projection as his generation failed to attract the acknowledgment that they sought from the Crown. The efforts of transcultural agents like Mota y Escobar to bridge Iberia and New Spain in order to secure local elite interests within the imperial framework failed. As the seventeenth century progressed criollo ideology transformed in order to continue its pursuit of naturalized power in ways that began to be more autonomous from Crown authority.

As a study of the ethnographic writing of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar but also a historical ethnography of Hispano-creole cultural development, the vocabulary of domination is reproduced here in order to reveal the relationship that language has with assertions and projections of power. Political anthropologist Audra Simpson writes, that to “speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes still are known.” This interlocutory role, she notes, “accorded with the imperatives of Empire and in this, specific technologies of rule sought to obtain space and resources, to define and know the difference that it constructed in those spaces and to then govern those within.” Interlocution required the “methods and modalities of knowing…categorisation, ethnological comparison, linguistic translation and ethnography.”86

As an observer and interpreter (historical ethnographer) of Mota y Escobar, I have thought carefully about my use of him as a lens into the world of New Spain’s Indigenous and Black people and attended to the ways in which Mota y Escobar’s subjectivity and goals structured how he saw and wrote about New Spain. “Being ethnographic is really a rather strange way of being in the world that attempts to approximate [the] naturalness…of everyday observation,”

86 Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, 'voice' and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 67.

33 writes anthropologist Raymond Madden. But the observation of others is “saturated with power, politics and history” and the “interrogative boundaries” of the ethnographer are context specific. Therefore, Madden notes that ethnographers should examine “the ways in which we develop an ethnographic gaze, and do so critically and reflexively, such that we may be aware of the context for the production of our visions and their representations.”87 With this in mind, I have preserved early modern colonial language within quotations to keep the original sense of the writing and not obscure its often pejorative tone and meaning, but I have used modern, and hopefully more respectful language in my own interpretative prose. I have capitalized Indigenous and Black in order to acknowledge the reality of modern discrimination, erasure, and systemic violence that is a legacy of conquest and colonization. Colonial New Spain was one of the earliest places in the Americas where these concepts and terms were imposed on people without their consent. Even as the descendants of colonized people have transformed these terms from a source of dispossession into a source of community identification and resistance, their ongoing use as categories of elite and state violence is the direct result of the racializing order investigated in this dissertation.88

87 Raymond Madden, Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 96, 98-99. For more reflection on the politics of the “ethnographic gaze,” see Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, Basic Books 1973). For a history of the early modern Eurocentric “ethnographic gaze,” see Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). 88 Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) historian Maile Renee Arvin has written of her choice to use the lower-case form of Indigenous and Black when referring to colonial and racial ideologies that were imposed upon people and communities. I have chosen to use the upper-case form to recognize the ongoing existence of white supremacist structures that discriminate, marginalize, and perpetuate racist violence. Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 241n3.

Figure 1: Map of New Spain, 1671 Source: John Ogilby and Arnoldus Montanus, Nova Hispania, Nova Galicia, Gvatimala (London: John Ogilby, 1671), accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004629012/.

Figure 2: Close up of Map of New Spain, 1671 Locations pertinent to this study highlighted in yellow, from left to right: Nueva Galicia, Guadalajara, Mexico (City), Tlascala (Tlaxcala), [Puebla de] Los Ángeles, Las vera cruz (Veracruz). Source: John Ogilby and Arnoldus Montanus, Nova Hispania, Nova Galicia, Gvatimala (London: John Ogilby, 1671), accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004629012/.

Chapter 1 Constructing Conquistador Power and Criollo Inheritance

The brutal military conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521 by a group of Iberians with their Indigenous allies contributed to a process of epistemological transformation that Tiffany Lethabo King has called “conquistador humanism.”1 King writes that this humanism pivoted on the invention of the “ideal version of the human” and was expressed in discourse in which European men “wrote and represented themselves” as conquerors.2 In a razed and reordered Tenochtitlan-Mexico City, marauding Iberian men became conquistadores through the Hispanic system of mercedes, favours or rewards, which apportioned them encomiendas, political posts, and properties that enabled the inscription of their new status on the landscape, in the records of municipal administration, and through the marginalization of non-Europeans in the colony.

According to conquistador logic, these rewards of conquest marked Crown indebtedness for their services and ‘sacrifices,’ which had facilitated the expansion of the Hispanic Catholic Empire. The conquerors’ descendants believed that they represented their conquistador ancestors and imagined this payment to be perpetual. Criollos argued that they had inherited a mandate and right to naturalize the power accumulated through mercedes, most crucially in the early colonial era, through the encomienda, which institutionalized the dispossession and exploitation of

1 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 16. Of Tenochtitlan’s conquest and the events that followed, Matthew Restall has written: “What we must contemplate are battles comprising hours of casual slaughter, massacres of civilian populations, each side driven by what they have witnessed to commit their own atrocities, internecine violence, mass mutilations of prisoners, entire towns butchered or enslaved, families torn apart, women raped or forced into long-term sexual slavery, an apocalypse of violence striking the center and then devastating one region after another in waves lasting decades… Within what was in effect the genocidal Spanish-Aztec War, there occurred micro-genocidal moments. In town after town – Cholollan, Tepeaca, Quecholac, Cuauhnahuac, and even Tenochtitlan itself – the slaughter of combatants was followed or accompanied by the massacre of civilians and the enslavement and often deportation of survivors, most notably young women and children. The impact of such attacks on these communities was catastrophic and permanent (genocidal in effect) and tinged even with a hint of deliberate destruction (genocidal in intent). For rightly perceiving that there were millions of indigenous Mesoamericans, Spanish captains were willing to obliterate certain communities knowing that there were hundreds of others.” When Montezuma Met Cortés, 314– 317, 328-329. 2 King, The Black Shoals, 16. King notes that Aníbal Quijano developed the term “coloniality” to signify a “new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive.” “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000): 552. See also Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).

36 37

Indigenous peoples. Entitlement to this inheritance was an assurance of continuing conquistador status and all its privileges.

This chapter examines this process of constructing conquistador power through the representative example of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s immediate and extended family. It outlines the sixteenth-century historical context of the power and privilege that conquistador families like the Motas accumulated through this process. The chapter concludes with an examination of conqueror descendant arguments against the perceived loss of these rewards at the end of the century. This chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow, demonstrating the rapid and nepotistic institutional construction of Hispanic power following the conquest and the anxiety and concerns of Mota y Escobar and his descendant generation as they saw their inheritance threatened by Crown intervention.

The formulation of an Atlantic World logic of conquest, as a reoccurring process of distinguishing conquerors from those whom they subjugated, was initiated by Portuguese slavers on the coasts of western Africa in the fifteenth century, where Christopher Columbus first honed his skills.3 Transatlantic slavery, as a key pillar of imperial sovereignty and might, was the catalyst for, and a perennial boon to, the narrative of the conqueror.4 In the context of the Hispanic Atlantic world, this narrative was fuelled by the entitlements granted through conquest

3 See P. E. H. Hair, “Columbus from Guinea to America,” History in Africa, 17 (1990): 115-118; Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969); and King, The Black Shoals, 19, 40. In a similar vein, David Wheat argues that the Portuguese slave trade and slavery in the Spanish Caribbean in particular are part of a unified history. Laura Benton and Toby Green both argue that a Pan-Atlantic legal pluralism was crucial in the shaping of colonial identities and mentalities, linking Africa with the Americas from the fifteenth century; Green’s article looks at legal “travelling concepts” within the broad Atlantic world. See Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/ Omohundro Institute, 2016); Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Green, “Baculamento or Encomienda? Legal Pluralisms and the Contestation of Power in the Pan-Atlantic World of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Global Slavery 2, no. 3 (2017): 310-336. 4 See Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves and King, The Black Shoals, 23. Colonial Mexico, New Spain, was the first American slave society and home to the largest free black population until the nineteenth century. Herman L. Bennett, “Writing into a Void: Representing Slavery and Freedom in the Narrative of Colonial Spanish America,” Social Text 93, vol. 25, no. 4 (2007): 70.

– territory, institutional power, domination over Indigenous peoples – and such mercedes relied upon continued violence and efforts to dehumanize Indigenous and African-descended peoples.5

The complexity of the Hispanic concept of merced is detailed in Sebastían de Covarrubias Horozco’s 1611 Tesoro de la language castellana o Española:

…it is a courtesy used particularly in Spain…it is a common [courtesy made] to an honoured man, and then it is [understood] properly as the word merit, that is a person deserving honour, we call it merced. Mercedes[:] the gratitude and gifts that Princes [give] to their vassals, and those that señores [give] to their servants (criados)6

Mercedes were rewards that reaffirmed vassalage and established subjecthood, acknowledged deferential service or aid, and awarded merit or honour. They were part of the system of distributive justice used by absolutist European kingdoms, like Castile and Aragon, to entice and encourage elite military service, personal loyalty, travel expeditions, and trade negotiations during the medieval and early modern periods. When Columbus first spotted Guanahani in the fall of 1492, he began crafting a narrative of “discovery” that would both justify the mercedes promised to him by the Catholic Monarchs and inspire even greater future privileges.7 The

5 Throughout the colonial period, there was anxiety amongst peninsulars and Euro-descended people regarding the potential for unity among Indigenous people, enslaved people, and free people of colour. An early record from the Mexico City cabildo provides a hint of this fear: on 14 June 1527 an order was made that “no negro is able to have esclavos nor chickens nor any other thing that is a thing of the indios because it [does] great damage to the Spaniards and naturales de esta tierra.” Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro de Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de Mé xico, (México: Impr. y Litografía del Colegio del Tecpam de Santiago, 1871), 123. 6 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1272-1273. 7 The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (Agreement of Santa Fe), signed on April 17, 1492 formally established the voyages to the Americas as a Crown enterprise legally binding the monarchs and Columbus as business partners. The text of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, was a contract contingent on the voyage’s outcome—all parties had committed themselves to a “highly speculative venture.” While most of the specific terms of the agreement remained to be worked out, the pact between the Crown and the sailor-merchant, Columbus, asserted for the latter the hereditary titles “Admiral,” “Viceroy and General Governor” of any islands and mainlands that would be “discovered or won” in “the Ocean Seas…in the service of Our Highnesses.” Further, the capitulación text stated that “any and all commodities, whether pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and any other things and goods of any kind, name and manner whatsoever, to be bought, exchanged, found, and won within the limits of this Admiralty” shall be divided between Columbus and the Crown at a one to nine ratio, minus the costs associated with acquiring the above-mentioned items. “Preface” and “General Introduction,” in Repertorium Columbianum, Vol. II: The book of privileges issued to Christopher Columbus by King Fernando and Queen Isabel: 1492-1502, eds.

39 principle of distributing favours (repartimiento de mercedes) to the aristocracy was established in Castile from the thirteenth century, but like Columbus, the conquerors of New Spain were not typical representatives of the high nobility and sought to elevate their social status on the grounds of ‘merit,’ specifically through conquest.8

In the early years of conquest in New Spain conquistador Hernando Cortés appropriated the power to grant mercedes in the form of grants of Indigenous tribute.9 The Crown subsequently gave other conquerors the power to distribute encomiendas, as well as to award land and political appointments to one another in the construction of the colony.10 In so doing they gave concrete shape to their class. As the privileges granted through conquest transformed marauders into conquistadors, they also institutionally homogenized the peoples of Mesoamerica into naturales and indio/as, a categorization that complimented conquistador ordering of New Spain through the merced of encomienda. The Crown retrieved this power by the mid-sixteenth century but struggled to (re)assert its sovereignty and authority into the seventeenth century.

This chapter argues that the concept of merced significantly defined sixteenth-century structural development in New Spain. The transfer of an absolutist Crown tool of reward to New World conquerors and settlers initiated a regime of reward in New Spain that formed the basis for a collective sense of conqueror and settler class entitlement to power and wealth, a class consciousness that was meant to be naturalized through transfer to their descendants. Criollo

Luciano Formisano and Helen Nader (Berkeley: California University Press, 1996), xviii, 3, 21. See also Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters, Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (New York: Mathuen & Co., 1986), xiii. 8 Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), 40. 9 María Elena Martínez clarifies that the “encomienda was not technically a feudal institution, first, because it did not involve land grants and second, because it did not imply civil and criminal jurisdiction over the tributary population. Recipients were given the right to extract tribute and labor from their assigned native subjects and in return were expected to care for their spiritual and temporal well-being, but all indigenous converts were first and foremost vassals of the Crown of Castile.” Genealogical Fictions, 124. Following sixteenth-century usage and Restall, I use “Hernando” rather than “Hernán.” See Restall, “Preface,” in When Montezuma Met Cortes. 10 A brutally destabilizing system for the Indigenous inhabitants of the region, Wendy W. Kramer, George Lovell, and Christopher H. Lutz write that in the particular case of Guatemala the institution of encomienda accompanied conquest itself, and it was used as a means of rewarding early Iberian explorers and exploiters of the area. Further, Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz argue that the creation of encomiendas in Spanish America formalized power relations and consolidated conquest culture. "Encomienda and Settlement: Towards a Historical Geography of Early Colonial Guatemala," Yearbook-Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers 16 (1990): 67, 69-70.

40 consciousness in sixteenth-century New Spain was not expressed using the language of criollismo that would emerge distinctly in the mid-seventeenth century; instead group awareness and unity arose as a defense of the culture and system of mercedes and entitlement established in the earliest years of colonization.11 These Hispano-creoles saw themselves as inheritors of the privileges of the conquest; as first-generation conquering creoles they were uniquely placed to consolidate a process of conquest that was yet incomplete. They believed that imperial success depended on them, and it was essential for the Crown to acknowledge and acquiesce to their needs and grant their entitlements. Criollos of conquistador descent claimed access to Indigenous wealth and labour and to ownership of enslaved men and women, the latter signalling connection to the broader imperial world as well as local (colonial) structures of domination.

I detail the role of conquistadores in establishing possession through the formation of government; securing colonial rewards for their service; negotiating and organizing access to and control over land; and determining the status of non-European-born peoples who resided in the colony. These elements made up the crux of colonial novohispano power. Mota y Escobar’s family played a significant role in shaping the municipal civic institution, working to construct a Hispanic governance system and urban structure over the ruins of Tenochtitlan and the broader valley. The control of government and land ensured the ability of conquerors and early settlers to assert their needs and desires, goals, and visions for the new colony. Their descendants saw the extension of that power to themselves and their lineage as just and inevitable. The circuitous legacy of contact violence, nepotism and patronage, arranged marriage, and the assumption of superior social and political status as the natural extension of conquest, informed Mota y Escobar’s official defence of the actions and attitudes of his ancestors.

By exposing the foundations of conquistador power, this chapter introduces and explains Mota y Escobar’s broad and normalized ties to authority and privilege in New Spain. It shows these ties to be extensive, enabling him to move through the colonial world, making demands and choices for his life with ease and comfort. Testifying before the Real Audiencia (high court) in 1597 as

11 See Brading, The First America; Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity”; Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, eds. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989, 1987); and Peter B. Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

41 part of a petition for perpetuating the encomienda, Mota y Escobar asserted the indebtedness of the Crown to the conquistador class and argued for the institution’s necessary continuation, which maintained the promises of creole inheritance (and his own power).12 This testimony, alongside that of other elite Hispano-creoles and their peninsular allies, shows Mota y Escobar as a member of a distinct generation with a clear, cohering awareness. The statements of other influential creole witnesses help draw out Mota y Escobar’s logic and vision, illustrating the widespread elite interest in (white) creole hegemony in the colony. These criollos combined the rhetoric of descendant prerogative with expressions of existential suffering and honour-based anxiety to assert their claims to rightful inheritance and their ability to naturalize Hispanic power in the colony.

Creole Son

Born in Tenochtitlan-México City in 1546, almost a generation after the destruction of the Mexica-Aztec political structure, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar was baptized on the 18th of May of that year (see figure 3) by the first Archbishop of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Juan de Zumárraga.13 I refer to him using both his paternal and maternal surnames although he does not seem to have adopted his maternal patronymic, Escobar, until becoming bishop of Guadalajara in 1598. He is named as Alonso Ruiz de la Mota in several archival documents of the late sixteenth

12 The Audiencia was a colonial tribunal that wielded executive and judicial authority and reported to the Council of the Indies and the Crown. 13 Tenochtitlan fell to a combined Spanish and Indigenous military force in 1521. Tenochtitlan was the altepetl (translated loosely as city-state) of the Mexica Indigenous people, a distinct ‘ethnic’ group of the broader Nahua Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. They spoke Nahuatl, like many of the surrounding altepeme (plural of altepetl). Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325 and by the early fifteenth century it was the dominant political and economic power in the central valley of Mexico, subjugating other altepeme by warfare, prisoner-taking, and tribute collection across Mesoamerica. See Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Ross Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); and Visión de los vencidos: relaciones indígenas de la conquista, ed. Miguel León-Portilla (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1961). “Bautismos de Españoles: 1536-1547,” l. 1, fs. 170r (image 170), digitized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints, accessed November 3, 2020, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z-RHKQ- B?cc=1615259&wc=3P65-MNP%3A122580201%2C125329801. For more information on the first Archbishop, see José Mallea-Olaetxe, “The Private Basque World of Juan Zumárraga, First Bishop of Mexico,” Revista de Historia de América 114 (July-Dec. 1992): 41-60 and for a collection of Zumárraga’s personal letters and other writings, see Don fray Juan de Zumárraga: primer obispo y arzobispo de México, ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1947).

42 century.14 Neither his brothers nor sisters used both the paternal and maternal surname. The historical record does not provide an explanation for this difference, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that he sought to associate himself with both branches of his conquistador lineage for their significant social and political capital.

Figure 3: Baptismal record of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar 18 May 1546 Source: “Bautismos de Españoles: 1536-1547,” l. 1, fs. 170r (image 170). See footnote 13.

Mota y Escobar’s family came from the Old Castile region of northeast Spain. The future cleric descended on his paternal side from Burgos and on his maternal side from Tordesillas via Vizcaya (the modern Basque region). In October 1496, Columbus travelled to Burgos with a group of captured Indigenous peoples from the Antilles and mules loaded with gold objects from his first voyages to the Indies.15 There he received instructions from the Catholic Monarchs for his third voyage. He then travelled south and began recruitment efforts in the area around the departure port, Seville, sending town criers to Galicia, Vizcaya, Burgos, Guadalajara, and Toledo to announce the offer of free land and citizenship (mercedes) for any recruit.16 Mercedes offered by Columbus enlivened the imaginations of Castilians hoping to enhance their lineage’s honour and status. It is probable that Mota y Escobar’s father and grandfather heeded Columbus’s call during this time, as did many of the Iberians responsible for the military overthrow of

14 AGI, Mexico, 109, l. 10, fs. 159v (2) and AGI, Mexico, 109, l. 10, fs. 150r-150v. 15 Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64 and Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes cató licos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel, ed. Cayetano Rossel (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Madrid: Imprenta de los Sucesores de Hernando, 1914), 600, 78. 16 Repertorium Columbianum, 52. See Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Tenochtitlan.17 Mota y Escobar’s paternal ancestors in the Americas may have participated in one or more of the Caribbean military campaigns before the Mesoamerican mainland expedition alongside men such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Hernando Córtes.

With mercedes at stake, it was crucial in the early period that conquerors be distinguished from each other in terms of service. Robert Himmerich y Valencia analyzed the language of sixteenth- century Mexico City municipal administrative records and parsed out four classifications of ‘settler’ types used to assign land within the viceregal capital: primero conquistador, conquistador, poblador antiguo, and poblador. A primero conquistador (first conqueror) was a member of Hernando Cortés’s original expedition (Cozumel and Veracruz). Of approximately four hundred members only two hundred survived and one hundred and thirty-five became landowners in New Spain. A conquistador (conqueror) was a member of subsequent Cortés-led expeditions who took part in the military confrontation at Tenochtitlan. The number of survivors of this confrontation is estimated at four hundred to six hundred members, of whom approximately three hundred and sixty have been identified, and one hundred and seventy-eight became landowners. A poblador antiguo (old or ancient settler) was a European or European- descended resident of the Indies prior to the fall of Tenochtitlan who moved to New Spain within the first decade of settlement. Thirty-two of these people received landowner status. A poblador (settler) was a European who arrived in New Spain between 1521 and 1550 and had no previous residence in the Indies. One hundred and fifty-eight of this class became landowners. Some of these landowning settlers performed military service in New Spain, some purchased land, some had high social status, but most married encomenderas, landowning women (likely daughters of conquistadors). These figures suggest that five hundred and three European or European- descended people formed the core colonizing propertied class in the earliest decades of New Spain’s construction as a result of their participation in New World conquests, their relationship to Hernando Cortés himself, or their Old World social status.18

17 Between 1493 and 1519, 18 percent of total Spanish emigration came from Old Castile, second only to Andalusia at 39.7 percent. This percentage stayed relatively stable from 1520 to 1550, dropping by only .7 percent in 1550. Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 18-21; Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 425; and Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies Until 1600,” Hispanic American Historical Review 56, no. 4 (November 1976): 585. 18 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 5-8.

On the basis of Himmerich y Valencia’s classification system, Mota y Escobar’s father, Jerónimo Ruiz de la Mota Zárate, and maternal grandfather, Francisco de Orduña Loyando, were conquerors, and his extended family were settlers.19 Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza, contemporary of Mota y Escobar and creole son of a conqueror himself, wrote that Ruiz de la Mota was the captain of a brigantine stationed in Texcoco under the command of naval pilot Julián de Alderete (of Tordesillas)20 and the greater command of Hernando Cortés during the final battle for Tenochtitlan.21 The records are unclear on when Ruiz de la Mota arrived in the New World or if he participated in the early years of Cortés’s mainland expeditions to Cozumel and Yucatán.22

All churchmen had to submit a benefice petition (informaciones de oficio) to the Crown in order to be considered for religious posts across the New World.23 These documents listed academic qualifications and genealogical data and were made in order to persuade the Crown of the applicant’s suitability for a beneficed (endowed) post. In Mota y Escobar’s 1574 información to the Crown (see figure 4), he characterized his deceased father as “Captain of a brigantine in the conquest of the city of Mexico,” a “gentlemen of well-known hidalgo,” a “person of great

19 For the 1584 méritos y servicios document of Francisco de Orduña see AGI, Patronato, 78B, n.1, r.12. An entry in the Real Academia de la Historia suggests that Ruiz de la Mota was the “maestresala” de Diego Colón,” accessed October 28, 2020, http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/32620/jeronimo-ruiz-de-la-mota. 20 Julián de Alderete became one of the first treasurers/accountants (tesorero) of the Mexico City caja (treasury). Francisco de Orduña was also involved with the early financial accounting of the colony. AGI, Contaduría, 657 contains the earliest accounts from 25 September 1521 to 16 November 1531. 21 Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación de las cosas de la Nueva España: con noticia individual de los descendientes legítimos de los conquistadores y primeros pobladores españoles, ed. José María de Agreda y Sánchez (Mexico City, 1902), 195, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, accessed November 3, 2020, http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080017626/1080017626.html and José María Vallejo García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado: su proceso de residencia en Guatemala, 1536-1538 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2008), 198. 22 Ruiz de la Mota had two brothers: Alonso Ruiz de la Mota, a cleric who also journeyed to New Spain, and Juan de la Mota. Little is known of either. Mota y Escobar’s father’s parents were Pedro de la Mota and Leonor de la Peña, both of Burgos. AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp.5586, fs. 16r-19r, 20r. 23 This document type resembles and borrows from the Spanish Inquisition’s purity certification procedure (to retain a probanza or certificate of purity or become a “familiar” of the Holy Office), which was extended to the American colonies in the 1570s. One key difference between this benefice petition and the purity certification was that noble ancestry was not required for ecclesiastical or beneficed posts and so these información documents were “less demanding.” Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 65-71. This document type also resembled relaciones de méritos y servicios records. See Murdo L. MacLeod, “Self-Promotion: The Relaciones de Méritos y Servicios and Their Historical and Political Interpretation,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 25-42.

45 quality,” and a “good and loyal vassal.”24 He wrote that “like the Marqués del Valle [Hernando Cortés], the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and the other governors of their time, his [father’s] duties were taken up with the utmost quality offered in this land, of which he always gave very good account.”25 In this same petition the Bishop wrote that his father was visitador general (inspector general) for the Marqués del Valle and the Viceroy.26 Here, Mota y Escobar refers to his father as a high nobleman (hidalgo) but in the seventeenth-century genealogical document collected for his nephew’s application to a military order, where such a title would have been highly useful, Ruiz de la Mota is not titled in this way. Therefore, it is likely that he assumed high nobleman status following the conquest and via privileges he received as a result.27 Martínez writes that most “explorers, conquerors, and first colonists had to settle for hidalguía americana, a mostly de facto noble status marked by tax exemptions, coats of arms, and preferential treatment with regard to accessing land, cabildo offices, and the post of corregidor [chief magistrate].”28 As we will see, from the early creole perspective, it was crucial that this americana noble status, together with the distinct privileges of encomienda, be passed down through the conquerors’ lines of descent as it legitimized their claims and naturalized their power.

24 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 3). 25 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 3). 26 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 14). I have not found any evidence to substantiate the latter claim. 27 In Mota y Escobar’s 1574 benefice petition (AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (imagen 3)) he uses the phrase “cavallero notorio hijodalgo” to describe his deceased father. But in Antonio de la Mota y Portugal’s Crown-collected prueba document for his application to the Knights of Santiago military order (AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp. 5586), the title is not used and would have been a significant boon to Mota y Portugal’s claims. Himmerich y Valencia writes that the retention and succession of an encomienda often gave conquerors high noble status, while Martínez writes that in Spanish America “the crown did not intend to use reports of merits and services to dispense noble titles. Breaking with the Reconquista tradition of granting the status of caballero or hidalgo to those who made significant contributions to the colonizing and christianizing mission, it issued only a handful of noble titles during the sixteenth century (thirteen to members of Pizarro’s first expedition to Peru.)” The Encomenderos of New Spain, 230 and Genealogical Fictions, 126-127. 28 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 126-127.

Figure 4: Informaciones de oficios of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar Source: AGI, Mexico, n. 53 (image 3).

This benefice petition also provides details of how the public reputations (fama) of conquistador leadership could be used as political capital in Mexico City following 1521. Witnesses testified before a notary in order to back up Mota y Escobar’s genealogical testimony and lend credence to his fitness and desirability as a religious figure. Many of these witnesses held prominent and influential positions in the religious and political life of the colony. Melchor de la Cadena, the rector of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México (University of Mexico) and maestre escuela (member of the church council) in Michoacán, testified that “many responsibilities” were attributed to Ruiz de la Mota, “like, items related to justice,” while Fray Bartolomé de Ledesma, prior of the Dominican monastery of Mexico City, testified that he had known Mota y Escobar’s father for ten years and that he was of great wealth.29 Hernando Ortiz de Hinojosa, a professor of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Mexico, testified that he had known Ruiz de la Mota for more than twenty years as he and Mota y Escobar “had grown up together.” He testified that

29 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 8-10).

Ruiz de la Mota was known to hold encomienda grants and the position of municipal court justice (alcalde ordinario) in the city.30 Priest Alonso de Pareja confirmed that Ruiz de la Mota was “treated as one of the conquistadores” by the people of Mexico City, a revealing statement that suggests that particular social protocols governed interactions with the conquistador class.31 At the conclusion of the benefice petition, Mota y Escobar testified: “I plead that your Highness, having consideration of the services of my father and my own merits, you will grant me the merced of one of the dignitaries or canon [positions] in the Santa Iglesia de Mexico or [Puebla] de los Ángeles when they become vacant.”32 He implied in this súplica that his father’s mercedes and honour ought to affect his own future in a significant way.

Mota y Escobar’s mother, Catalina Goméz de Escobar, was a “natural of Tordesilla[s]” and she married Ruiz de la Mota sometime between 1527 and the 1539 birth of their first child (Antonia).33 The daughter of Francisco de Orduña, it is not clear when she arrived in the Americas but she was named after her maternal grandmother and maternal great-grandmother (both named Catalina Goméz de Escobar).34 Both ancestors had been maids to Carlos V’s mother, Juana (la Loca), her grandmother was appointed in 1527, and her great-grandmother had been in the position since 1517.35 In his petition, Mota y Escobar noted that both of his parents died before 1574.36

30 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 11-12). 31 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 16). 32 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 3). 33 García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, 198-200; AGI, Contratación, 5536, L.2, fs.58 (4); AHN, OM- Caballeros_Santiago, exp. 5586, bloque 1, fs. 5r and bloque 2, fs. 3r. See M. Nettel, Los testigos hablan: la conquista de Colima y sus informantes (Colima: Universidad de Colima, 2007), 281. Antonia de la Mota’s baptismal certificate is held at the Archive of the Sagrario Metropolitano in Mexico City and it is dated August 6, 1539. Her padrinos (godparents) were Gutierre de Badajoz and Francisco de Orduña, Antonia’s maternal uncle and grandfather, accessed November 3, 2020, http://en.geneanet.org/archives/actes/view/?idacte=2095324. 34 García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, 199-200 and AGI, Contratación, 5536, l. 2, fs.58. 35 García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, 200. Queen Juana was born in 1479 and was queen of Castile in 1504 and Aragón from 1516. She married Felipe (the Handsome) in 1496. After his death in 1506, Juana remained queen of the united kingdoms of Castile-León and sat as co-monarch when her son, Carlos I of Spain (Carlos V, Holy Roman Emperor), took the throne in 1517. She died in 1555 in Tordesillas. See Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen, eds. María A. Gómez, Santiago Juan-Navarro, and Phyllis Zatlin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008). 36 AGI, Mexico, 212, N.53 (image 3).

Mota y Escobar had seven siblings: two brothers and five sisters. His brother, Antonio de la Mota, married criolla María Manuel y Portugal, daughter of the royal treasurer, Fernando de Portugal.37 As the first-born son, Antonio inherited the family’s substantial encomienda holdings when Ruiz de la Mota died. He held various positions in municipal government throughout his life. Another older brother, Pedro, was also an ordained priest in Mexico City but did not want a parish curate job because, as noted by the Archbishop in 1575, “he has to be able to eat.”38 His sister Luisa de la Mota was the Abbess of the Convent of la Concepción in Mexico City and another sister, Antonia de la Mota, married criollo Luis Pérez del Castillo, grandson of the conquistador Martín López.39 A third sister, Mariana de la Mota married the conquistador Alonso de la Nava, and they had at least one son, who was baptized in July 1577.40 Scholars have not been able to locate his last two siblings, Catalina and Isabel, in any historical records.41 What is known of his siblings confirms their participation in colonial governance, lay and religious, and the broader ties they made by marriage with conquistador and creole individuals in the colony.

Mota y Escobar’s maternal grandfather, Francisco de Orduña, who also took part in the military conquest of Tenochtitlan, arrived with Francisco Salcedo in 1521 and acted as a notary (escribano) for Hernando Cortés in Texcoco before the final assault.42 A 1524 document suggests that, in addition to working closely with Cortés, he did accounting work for pilot Julián de Alderete, and it is probable that De Orduña was aboard one of de Alderete’s vessels, possibly

37 AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp.5586, fs.10r; Schwaller, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 431; and AGI, Contaduría, 876, n.2. Antonio sometimes used the surname de Orduña. 38 “Carta-Relación del arzobispo de México D. Pedro Moya de Contreras, remitiendo al rey D. Felipe II reservados informes personales del Clero de su Diócesis. México, 24 de Marzo de 1575,” in Cartas de Indias: Prelados XXXVII (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1877), 203. 39 AGI, Patronato, 79, n.1, r.4, fs.2 and BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 44v (image 47). Mota y Escobar wrote that he received word of his sister Luisa’s death during his first visit in 1609, while in the community of Hueyotlipan; he calls her “Luisa de la Encarnación” and he “entrusted her to God.” 40 This baptismal record for Alonso de Nava de la Mota is held at the Archive of the Sagrario Metropolitano in Mexico City and it is dated July 20, 1577, accessed November 3, 2020, https://en.geneanet.org/archives/actes/view/?idacte=2095284. 41 Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 429. 42 Francisco Salcedo seems to have arrived at Veracruz from Cuba during Pánfilo de Narváez’s failed expedition to stop the unauthorized expedition by Hernando Cortés in 1520. It is probable Francisco de Orduña arrived on the mainland during this same failed expedition, which would have put him at a social disadvantage. Many from this expedition were relatives, countrymen, and followers of Diego Velázquez de Cuellar, governor of Cuba and archenemy of Cortés. García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador,198 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 26, 172, 208-209, 235.

49 even the same one as Ruiz de la Mota.43 He was of the professional class (notaries, medical practitioners, and accountants) and he was considered a conquistador by his peers.44 On 16 August 1526, Cortés wrote and signed a libramiento, order of payment, in favour of De Orduña, further affirming their close relationship.45 De Orduña’s role in the conquest enabled him to have an influential role in the early exploration, settlement, and governance of New Spain. He was an early magistrate on the Mexico City and Guatemala cabildo and by 1540 he was a magistrate in Puebla as well.46

Through a Casa de Contratación document, we know that De Orduña’s three eldest daughters, Isabel, Leonor, and Luisa, left Seville for the Americas in July 1527 on a boat piloted by Cristóbal Cerezo de Padilla, a familiar of Christopher Columbus and his son, Diego.47 De Orduña’s mother and father-in law, Juan de Ledesma and Catalina Gómez de Escobar, joined them on the seven to eleven-week transatlantic journey.48 Curiously, De Orduña's first wife, Isabel (Leonor) de Orduña, his daughter, Francisca de Orduña, and Mota y Escobar’s mother Catalina do not appear in this record, suggesting that they journeyed earlier or later.49 This same Contratación document notes, however, that Cristobal de Ledesma, brother of De Orduña’s first wife, was also present in Seville and left Iberia with his nieces. Securing the required licenses for travel and paying passage from place of residence to Seville and then Seville to the New World destination was an expensive undertaking, and the fact that five of De Orduña's immediate

43 AGI, Contaduría, 657, n.1. This document states that in De Alderete’s name, Francisco de Orduña gave an accounting of his captain’s treasury before the treasurer, Alonso de Estrada, and the accountant, Rodrigo de Albornoz, on May 6, 1524. This document outlined the collection of the “first [royal] fifth” and the rights of the Crown. 44 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 27-28, 274. 45 Hernando Cortés, “Libramiento a favor de Francisco de Orduña (1526),” in Colección de manuscritos de Bruno Pagliai, (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2018), accessed January 29, 2021, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/libramiento-a-favor-de-francisco-de-orduna-931248. 46 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209. 47 José María de la Peña y Cámara, “Nueva lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colón en 1492,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 170, no. 2 (mayo-agosto 1973): 303. Cristóbal Cerezo de Padilla testified during the legal disputes that resulted from Columbus’s 1492 voyage; here he provided crucial testimony that three men who claimed to be crewmembers during the first voyage were actually on later voyages. 48 AGI, Contratación, 5536, l.2, fs. 58 (4) and Nettel, Los testigos hablan, 281. 49 I have not been able to locate any document confirming their arrival in the Americas.

50 family were able to come so early in the colonial chronology reveals the significant level of wealth and privilege from which Mota y Escobar descended on his mother’s side.50

Mota y Escobar’s extended family history illustrates further the transatlantic networks created at contact and the significance of the two families – De la Mota and De Orduña – in novohispano politics and history. His grandfather, De Orduña, would marry a second time in Puebla to Catalina Vélez Rascón de Guevara, nicknamed La Rascona (“the Quarrelsome”), and they would have five children, Inés de Velasco, Francisco de Orduña, Catalina Vélez de Orduña, Lope Vélez de Orduña, and Luisa Vélez de Orduña. La Rascona’s first husband was the first conqueror Bartolomé Hernández de Nava, and they had seven children before her second marriage to De Orduña.51 A daughter of Vélez Rascona’s from her first marriage married Martín de Segura, the nephew of the third Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Franciscan friar Martín Sarmiento Ojacastro.52

The web of transatlantic familial power continues with Mota y Escobar’s great-uncle, Martín de Orduña, Francisco’s brother. A merchant, trader, and/or slave trader (mercader) living in Seville in the early sixteenth century, he was also involved in New World affairs; there are multiple documents attesting to his “promise” to provide aid for the governance of the provinces of Rio de la Plata in the mid-sixteenth century (although he and his partner reneged on this promise).53 Mota y Escobar’s first cousin once removed (his paternal grandfather’s nephew) was Doctor Pedro Ruiz de la Mota, Bishop of Palencia and Badajoz in Castile in the early sixteenth century.54 He was appointed chaplain and almoner to the future king Carlos V in 1511; he became Bishop of Badajoz in 1516 and was transferred to the see of Palencia in 1520.55 Dr. Mota, or maestro

50 Mark A. Burkholder explains that licensed passengers to the Indies were persons who had “some means, had access to credit, had passage paid by the Crown” or had an established relative already in the New World. Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulars? (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 8. Mota y Escobar’s maternal grandfather’s parents were Juan López de Barriga and Inés (Inéz) de Velasco, both of the Basque Country (Vizcaya). García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, 198 and Nettel, Los testigos hablan, 281. 51 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 172. 52 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, ed. Guillermo S. Fernández de Becas (México: Instituto Bibliográfico Mexicano, 1965), 322. 53 AGI, Justicia, 728, n.4; AGI, Justicia, 1153, r.2; AGI, Justicia, 1132, r.3; and AGI, Justicia, 825, r.3. 54 Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 416. 55 AGI, Justicia, 1170, n.2, r.2 (image 5); “Desiderius Erasmus- Letter 1273 (April 21, 1522),” in The Correspondence of Erasmus, Volume 9, eds. Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors and James M. Estes (Toronto:

Mota as he was sometimes known, was a very powerful man in the early Hapsburg court, serving Felipe I (“the Handsome”), Emperor Maximilian, and Margaret of Austria in the first decade of the sixteenth century, taking part in embassies to France (1510) and England (1512, 1514, 1521), and receiving correspondence currying Hispanic favour from Erasmus in April 1522.56 There is also evidence that he sat on the Council of the Indies for a time.57 He served on the Council of Flanders in 1517 and remained a member of the royal council until his death in September 1522.

It seems that the Bishop’s father, Ruiz de la Mota, discussed his powerful relative, the Bishop of Palencia, with his comrades on the road to Tenochtitlan before the fall of the city. A mid- sixteenth-century chronicler of the conquest, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, wrote that Ruiz de la Mota gave a long speech about his connections in the Spanish court in the company of Cortés, convincing him that Ruiz de la Mota would be an asset in the conquest and in any administration after.58 However, Cervantes de Salazar was not a witness to conquest, arriving in New Spain after 1521, and his account was not written until 1560. Schwaller and Mathers call the rise of the Bishop of Palencia Mota a “once-in-a-lifetime event,” and the Ruiz de la Mota family probably benefitted from this relation in the colony.59 While other conquistadores very likely had influential connections to the Spanish court as well, it was not typical to have a relative in such a significant political position. This feature may have distinguished Mota y Escobar’s family from other conquistadors and influenced the descendants’ political power as well.

As for Mota y Escobar himself, his early childhood and adolescence remain obscure, with the exception of a few rich clues. He was among the earliest students to receive a bachiller from the University of Mexico in the early 1570s.60 In the 1574 benefice petition, Father Bartolomé de

University of Toronto Press, 1989), 59-61; and Desiderius Erasmus, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, eds. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas Brian Deutscher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 2:468. 56 “Desiderius Erasmus- Letter 1273 (April 21, 1522),” in The Correspondence of Erasmus, 59-61 and Contemporaries of Erasmus, 2:468. 57 AGI, Justicia, 1170, n.2, r.2. (image 5). 58 Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1971) 2:135 cited in Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 426. 59 Schwaller and Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 423. 60 The intent to found a university in New Spain was first set down in a royal order of Carlos V on 21 September 1551; this directive ordered that the Real Hacienda, the royal purse, provide funding each year for the University’s establishment. The royal order of Felipe II of 17 October 1572 gave royal approval for a “Real Universidad,”

Ledesma, Master of Theology, “Prime Professor” of the University of Mexico, attested that Mota y Escobar had been a disciple of his “all of the time that the said Alonso de la Mota had heard Theology.” He further testified that Mota y Escobar was very capable and that he “had taken advantage of the said capability, the goal of which was to become more [able],” and he had always seen him dedicated to his studies.61 This same witness attested that Mota y Escobar had completed his courses and would graduate from the faculty of Theology in some days. “[H]e is a cleric of the Gospel,” Father Ledesma said, “anyone of grace and dignity, [like] Your Majesty, would be served of what he does, to be beside him, because he will know how to govern and administer very well as…he is, a careful person, of good inclinations, free from all vices to which other people are usually inclined.”62

The new Archbishop of New Spain, Pedro Moya de Contreras, ordained Mota y Escobar a secular priest in mid 1574.63 In a 1575 list compiled by the Mexico City cathedral and signed by Archbishop Moya de Contreras, all secular clerics of the archbishopric were noted: of one hundred and fifty-six men, eighty were criollos, sixty-eight were peninsulares, and eight were of unspecified birth. The prominence of creoles in secular religious positions would be a feature of governance for the early colonial era.64 In this record, Archbishop Moya de Contreras provided a

conceding it all the “privileges, extensions, and immunities” of the Universidad de Salamanca. The creation of the University, the first Western European-style educational establishment in North America, and the second in the Hispanic American colonies, was formally and publicly proclaimed by Real Cédula de Privilegio in Mexico City on 3 April 1573. Cristóbal Bernardo de la Plaza y Jaén and Nicolás Rangel, Cró nica de la Real y pontificia universidad de Mé xico, escrita en el siglo XVII (México: Talleres Gráficos del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 1931) 1:7. The first university was the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, founded in 1551. Villella notes that “the Royal University in Mexico City was originally established in the 1550s to secure the loyalties of the restive conquistador-encomendero class by providing dignified careers in the Church and crown bureaucracy for their children. Blood strictures preserved the cachet of grados (graduates) by preventing the development of a meritocracy that could threaten the creoles’s supremacy. Due primarily to this link between lineage and education, those who boasted of bachelor’s degrees (bachilleratos), law degrees (licenciados), and doctorates (doctorados) did not merely signal erudition, but also membership in an elite caste born, as it were, to wield authority.” Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, 231-232. 61 AGI, Mexico, 212, n.53 (image 9-10). 62 AGI, Mexico, 212, n.53 (imagen 9-10). 63 AGI, Mexico, 212, n.53, (image 1) and “Carta-Relación del arzobispo de México,” 203. 64 Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 15-16.

53 brief but frank observation about each prelate. At age 26, Mota y Escobar, he wrote, was “of very good comprehension,” and was “more than diligent.”65

Mota y Escobar was a highly successful creole churchman, the likes of whom were very rare throughout the colonial period. His achievement was very likely a consequence of his status as a first-generation descendant of conquerors. Once ordained, Mota y Escobar began his career as a novohispano clergyman. His choice of posts over the course of his long career makes it clear that he preferred to stay in New Spain, perhaps as a result of the political potency of his two surnames in that kingdom and his comfort within it. Before being elected Bishop of Guadalajara in 1597, Mota y Escobar was nominated for and/or elected to ten separate ecclesiastic positions across the Hispanic Atlantic World, although he accepted and held only three, all in central New Spain.66 He sat his first required oposición, competitive exam, in 1575 and won the beneficio (benefice or religious post) at the mines of Pachuca.67 It seems unlikely that he actually took up this post as he departed for Spain sometime between 1576 and 1577. A few years later in 1579, he graduated as a Doctor from the Colegio de San Antonio de Portacelli de Sigüenza and was elected tesorero (treasurer) of the cathedral of Michoacán in the same year.68 He most certainly did not fill this post as he did not return to New Spain until 1583 and is next referred to in the documents as the deán (chief canon of the cathedral chapter council) of Michoacán, a position he occupied upon his return.69

65 “Carta-Relación del arzobispo de México,” 203. 66 He was elected Bishop of Guadalajara in 1597 but was not consecrated until 1598. Information on the ecclesiastic nominations can be found in: AGI, Panama, 229, l.1, fs. 130v-132r; AGI, Panama, l.1, n. 92; AGI, Quito, 1, n. 58; AGI, Quito, 1, n.52; AGI, Guadalajara, 230, l. 2, fs. 83v-84v; AGI, Charcas, 1, n. 70; AGI, Indiferente, 739, n. 323; AGI, Indiferente, 744, n. 246; and AGI, Indiferente, 449, l. A1, fs. 39r (109) (image 96). 67 Lundberg, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” 80, 85 and Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 209-211. Lundberg notes that oposición or concurso exams were done before a tribunal of ecclesiastics after a cleric expressed a desire for a parochial post. Candidates were questioned about their language skills (Latin and Indigenous languages pertaining to the post) and moral theology in order to ascertain the best fit for the specific parish. For more information on the creation of the oposición system in late sixteenth-century New Spain, see John F. Schwaller, The Church in Colonial Latin America (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000), 50-51. 68 M. Casado Arboniés, El Colegio-Universidad de San Antonio de Portaceli de Sigü enza en la Edad Moderna: estado de la cuestió n, historiografía y fuentes (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2010), 129; AGI, Indiferente, 739, n.187. See AHN, Universidad de Sigüenza-Colegio de San Antonio Portaceli, 1476-1836. 69 AGI, Mexico, 1091, L. 10, fs.150r-150v. This royal order, dated 31 March 1583, addressed to the Bishop of Michoacán Juan de Medina Rincón y de la Vega, asked that Licenciado “Alonso Ruiz de la Mota” be installed as a cathedral canon on his return to New Spain aboard the flota of Captain Antonio Manrique (in progress at the time of the order), despite the fact that his official letter of presentation seems to have expired. Because of the timing of this

Shortly thereafter Mota y Escobar was elected deán of Puebla, where he remained from 1583 until October 1592, when he was elected deán of the cathedral of Mexico City. Before settling into the position of deán in the archdiocese, he was elected Bishop of León, Nicaragua in 1594, which he declined. In the year 1596 he was nominated Bishop of Michoacán (not elected) and was elected Bishop of both Panama and Popayán, posts he declined.70 He remained deán in Mexico City until October 1597 when he was elected the first creole Bishop of Guadalajara (also known as Nueva Galicia).71 He did not journey to Guadalajara until sometime between 1598 and 1600.72 The Mexico City town council record from 15 May 1600 notes an agreement made by council to write to the Crown regarding the death of Archbishop Alfonso Fernández de Bonilla in order to request a new archbishop pronto. The same council item then requests that a “summary of merits” be made of four clergymen, one of whom was Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, then Bishop of Guadalajara. This suggests that Mota y Escobar, aged 54, was under consideration for the position of Archbishop of New Spain.73

In 1604 Mota y Escobar was asked by the President of the Council of the Indies to complete a tour of the diocese of Guadalajara (guided by questionnaire) and he began travelling and writing the undated Descripción geográfica manuscript. Following his election to the bishopric of

order alongside other archival evidence, I believe this Alonso is the same Alonso of this study, with the addition of “Ruiz,” his father’s surname, into his own surname. The deán was a member of the Cathedral Chapter (cabildo eclesiástico). This position alongside the other twenty-six prebendados of the Chapter (5 dignidades: deán, arcediano, chantre, maestrescuela, tesorero; 10 canónigos; 6 racioneros; and 6 medio-racioneros) were elected by the Crown and aided in the day-to-day operations of the cathedral and greater diocese. See John Frederick Schwaller, The Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 13-19. 70 AGI, Panama, L. 1, fs. 130v-131r; and Lundberg, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” 80-84. 71 AGI, Guadalajara, 230,l. 2, fs. 84r-84v. 72 Antonio Tello, Libro Segundo de la Crónica Miscelánea en que se trata de la Conquista espiritual y temporal de la Santa Provincia de Xalisco (Guadalajara: Imp. de la República Literaria de Ciro L. Guevara y Compañia, 1891), 717. 73 “6087 Acta del 15 de mayo de 1600,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo de la Ciudad de Mé xico, siglo XVI, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (México: Fondo de Cultura Econó mica, 1970), 926. The other three clergymen were: Juan de Cervantes, governor of the archbishopric; Doctor Lobo Guerrero, Archbishop of New Granada; and Alonso Peralta, inquisitor of New Spain. All three of these men were witnesses alongside Mota y Escobar in the 1597 petition to the Crown on the state of the encomiendas, detailed later in this chapter. The first criollo Archbishop of New Spain, Feliciano de la Vega Padilla, was born in Lima, Peru and held the position between 1638 and 1640. The first criollo novohispano-born Archbishop was Juan Alonso de Cuevas y Davlos, who held the position for only seventeen months between April 1664 to September 1665.

Guadalajara, this flurry of nominations and elections ceased until he was elected to what would be his final post, Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla.74 By 1606 he had been promoted to the position of assistant to the Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, an elderly (peninsular) Diego Romano y Govea, and on the latter’s death after thirty years as Bishop in 1607, Mota y Escobar became Bishop himself, taking possession on 8 May 1608. He held this post until his own death on 16 March 1625 in Puebla at the age of 79.75

There were at least four other creole bishops in New Spain in this particular mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth century period. They include: Dominican friar, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa (b.1542-d.1633), Antequera (Oaxaca)76; Augustinian friar, Juan de Zapata y Sandoval (b.1545-d.1630), Chiapas77; Juan de Cervantes (b.1553-d.1614), Antequera (Oaxaca)78; and Baltazar de Covarrubias y Múñoz (b.1560-d.1622), Antequera (Oaxaca) and Michoacán79. This moment of creole episcopal presence was short-lived and distinct. From the founding of the diocese of Guadalajara (1548) to Mexican independence (1821) there was a total of twenty-eight bishops of the diocese; five appear to have been born in the Americas (Mota y Escobar being one of them). From the founding of the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla (1525) to independence there

74 Francisco Antonio Lorenzana and Alonso de Montú far, Concilios provinciales primero, y segundo, celebrados en la muy noble, y muy leal ciudad de Mé xico: presidiendo el Illmo. y Rmo. señor D. Fr. Alonso de Montú far, en los años de 1555, y 1565. Dalos a luz el Ilmo. Sr. D. Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, Arzobispo de esta santa metropolitana iglesia (México: En la imprenta de el superior gobierno, de el br. d. J.A. de Hogal, 1769), 340, accessed November 3, 2020, https://archive.org/details/conciliosprovinc00cath. 75 AGN, Jesuitas, vol. III, exp 24, transcribed in Obispos de Puebla de los Ángeles en el periodo de los Austria (1521-1700): algunos aspectos políticos y jurídicos, ed. Juan Pablo Salazar Andreu (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, 2005), 138 and BNE, Colección de documentos referentes a la historia eclesiástica y civil de América española, Tomo 3, recopilados por Juan Díez de la Calle, oficial segundo de la Secretaría de Nueva España, Mss/3048, fs.20r-20v (image 25-26). Juan Díez de la Calle wrote about the episcopal tenure of Mota y Escobar from folios 20r- 25r (image 25-30). 76 See David Tavarez, The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2011), 104-106. 77 See Oswaldo Alejandro Sánchez Soto, “Novohispanidad y buen gobierno en Fray Juan Zapata y Sandoval” (PhD diss., Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 2012). 78 See Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador, Carrera, linaje y Patronazgo: clérigos y juristas en Nueva España, Chile y Perú, siglos XVI-XVIII (México, D.F.: Centro de Estudios Sobre la Universidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México : Plaza y Valdés, 2004), 258. 79 Los occidentes de México (siglos XVI-XIX): el archivo, instrumento y vida de la investigación histórica, ed. Celina Guadalupe Becerra J. (Guadalajara, Jalisco, México: Editorial CUCSH, Universidad de Guadalajara, 1997), 172. Villella discusses the complex eighteenth-century “creole lore” of seventeenth-century so-called Indigenous hidalgo bishops (“cacique Indians”) in Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, 234-241.

56 were twenty-four bishops of the diocese; Mota y Escobar was the first creole in the role and there were only three others. There is no complete scholarly study of these criollo churchmen despite the infrequency with which creoles were appointed to these significant positions.

During his tenure in Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar was instrumental in the early careers of the next generation of criollo priests. In 1607, the Bishop created and became closely linked to the Jesuit-led and creole-focused Colegio Angelopolitano de San Ildefonso de la Companía de Jesuitas in Puebla.80 He sponsored the graduation of creole friar Hernando Martín as he received his Master of Sacred Theology from the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México on 12 June 1613.81 Further, as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar consecrated two other Mexican- born clerics, Bishop Juan de Cervantes of Oaxaca, and Bishop Juan de Zapata y Sandoval, who was both Bishop of Chiapas and Santiago de Guatemala (Guatemala).82 In the late sixteenth- century testimony that Mota y Escobar gave to the Audiencia, which will be discussed at length in the final section of this chapter, he argued that “the sons and descendants of the conquistadors,” are “in each one of their professions…noble and virtuous people…now in arms, now in letters, now in religion, now in ecclesiastical ministries.” It is very just, he continued, “that Your Majesty give them merced and honour them, giving them ecclesiastical and secular offices.”83 He spoke for himself and for a generation of Hispanic-descended men who believed that power in New Spain flowed naturally to them and was tied righteously to their hopes, desires, and historical privileges.

80 Alonso Marañón, Pedro Manuel, Manuel Casado Arboniés, and Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, Las universidades de Alcalá y Sigü enza y su proyecció n institucional americana: legalidad, modelo y estudiantes universitarios en el Nuevo Mundo (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1997), 180. 81 Grados de licenciados maestros y doctores en artes, leyes, teología y todas facultades de la Real y Pontificia Universidad de Mé xico, etc ed. Guillermo S. Fernández de Recas (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1963), 45. 82 Hierarchia Catholica Medii et Recentioris Aevi: IV (1592-1667) (Monasterii Sumptibus et typis librariae Regensbergianae, 1935), 85, 148, 199. 83 The Bishop reiterated item nine of the cabildo questionnaire, which asserted that the descendants of conquerors were noble people. Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar in Epistolario de Nueva España: 1505-1818, ed. Francisco de Paso y Troncoso (Mexico: Porrúa, 1940) 13:52, 72.

The Mexico City Cabildo: Creating the Institutional Colony

The Mota family – immediate, extended, and by marriage – secured influential positions in the municipal government of Mexico City, contributing in no small measure to the direction, texture, and face of governance in the central political and economic core of the colony. “Merits and services” (méritos y servicios) documents sent to the Crown established the basis for mercedes and increased the likelihood of a position in the colonial government. Mota y Escobar’s family contributed to establishing an order that made conquistador privilege concrete and visible. Through the institution of the encomienda specifically, they intended to pass on the fruits of their mercedes to their descendants, thereby naturalizing the latter’s claims to power. As a result, possession and receipt of Crown gratitude and compensation through mercedes were a crucial scaffolding for the early colonial creole elite experience.

Specific institutions regulating early colonial government, land, and land grants anchored creole power in New Spain. The cabildos, or municipal councils, in general, legislated for both the city and the rural territories (often Indigenous-governed) surrounding the municipality, which mirrored Old World urban-centred political organization.84 The encomienda was a grant of an Indigenous polity to a person, known as an encomendero/a, who could collect tribute (often commodities and service) and expect Indigenous labour, in exchange for military protection and religious instruction; it was not a land grant but often the encomendero would receive title to land near the Indigenous polity that he had been granted.85 “Encomienda was a possession, not a property,” Charles Gibson remarked, “ and [it] gave rise to an encomendero class bent on making itself a hereditary colonial aristocracy.”86 Hernando Cortés made the first assignments of encomienda in New Spain without explicit Crown authority and by 1523, when the Crown sent an order prohibiting the institution, it was already well established in the valley. Subsequently, municipalities, governors, the Audiencia, and the Viceroy, all favourable to conquistador class interests in the early period, took over this jurisdictional authority.87

84 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 4. 85 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 58. 86 Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 58-59. 87 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 4 and Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 59.

With the probable exception of Cortés and his class of conquerors, no officials or courts were ever fully convinced of the legal right and moral virtue of ordering tribute collection and labour from the Indigenous peoples.88 Soon after the collapse of Tenochtitlan, however, Cortés began assigning solares and huertas, urban house lots and suburban plots for orchards, gardens, or vineyards respectively, to his comrades; the Mexico City municipal council soon took over this role, assigning the above land parcels and estancias, estates, rural land parcels for livestock or agriculture.89 Land ownership was a crucial early stage in establishing the basis for conquistador entitlement and power.

An understanding of the extra-legal development of the land-granting system requires an explanation of the municipal council of Mexico City and the multiple roles and responsibilities assumed and held by its members. The early years of settlement on the ruins of Tenochtitlan were chaotic and the colony’s first administrators were its conquerors, mostly soldiers, sailors, merchants, and mercenaries. The Crown had a difficult time asserting its authority, and often its orders were not obeyed. Conquistadores were empowered to make a range of independent decisions in the early colonization period. The Mexico City cabildo records shed a great deal of light on those early years in colonial rule. The political careers of Mota y Escobar’s father and grandfather exemplify the influential roles that conquistadors played at the local level in establishing the institutional colonial government.

At the first meeting of the Mexico City municipal government at Cortés’ Coyoácan home on 8 March 1524, “in the great city of Tenochtitlan,” Francisco de Orduña, Mota y Escobar’s grandfather, acted as scribe, recording the earliest business of the government. De Orduña’s is the first voice on the page. He wrote that seven men met to speak about “the things of Government and [accomplishments] for the public good and these persons of use judged, and gave their petitions in order to ask for land” and all of those present answered “before me.” This record goes on to list the men who asked for land parcels both urban and rural, often requesting

88 Eric A. Anderson, “The Encomienda in Early Philippine Colonial History,” Asian Studies Journal 14, no. 2 (1976): 25 and G. Michael Riley, “Fernando Cortés and the Cuernavaca Encomiendas, 1522-1547,” The Americas 25, no. 1 (July 1968): 5-6. 89 Riley, “Fernando Cortés and the Cuernavaca Encomiendas,” 5 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 4.

59 specific sites located beside the lands of men who were also conquistadores or early settlers. Some asked for “citizenship” (pedir ser vecino) and others asked for title to build houses.90

These first acts of government reinforce what is already understood about early colonization across the Americas—the ordering and possessing of land, territory, and tribute were of the utmost importance. Almost three years had passed since the Mexica-Aztec had surrendered their city and the records illustrate that a fair amount of organization had taken place already: roads had been built and certain areas of the city had become associated with European settlement. On 15 March 1524 the cabildo noted that the blacksmiths and labourers of the city had charged “great and excessive prices” for their work and, consequently, the government made a list of the expenses, including four tomines for a key to the treasury chest; several door knockers (big and small) for two pesos and eight tomines total; a French saw for seven pesos and four tomines; and hammers, nails, and rods for many pesos and tomines.91 The subsequent entries for 1524 deal with a wide variety of items, like meat rationing and planning for celebrations of victories over the King of France.92 The records tell us that the early years of governance were hectic, as a small group of men made quotidian but foundational decisions for the city, the colony, and its inhabitants without much oversight from the Crown. In this early period, Cortés had a great deal of authority (as Marqués del Valle), approving expeditions into new territories and carving out large tracts of land and tribute for his own enrichment.

Between 1528 to 1560, Ruiz de la Mota received appointments (nombramientos) to the following positions on the Mexico City municipal council: conquistador, magistrate (alcalde), municipal court justice (alcalde ordinario), rural and common grazing land magistrate (alcalde de la mesta), councilman (regidor), record-keeper (tenedor de bienes de difuntos), and general lawyer (procurador general).93 He held the position of alcalde ordinario seven times. This is the

90 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 3-4. 91 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 4-5. For a discussion of sixteenth-century currency in New Spain, see Martin L. Seeger, “Media of Exchange in 16th Century New Spain and the Spanish Response,” The Americas 35, no. 2 (1978): 168-184. 92 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 6. 93 J.F. Schwaller, “Alcalde Vs. Mayor: Translating the Colonial World,” The Americas 69, no. 3 (2013): 394-396. This article provides an illuminating examination of colonial governance structures, their development and evolution, and their precedents in medieval and early modern Castile.

60 political role he occupied most often as a citizen (vecino) of Mexico City and it afforded him great power.94 In fact, Ruiz de la Mota held the position of municipal court justice more times than any other man in sixteenth-century New Spain.95 No evidence suggests that Ruiz de la Mota was a trained lawyer (letrado) but the appointment of lay justices was common at the municipal and provincial governance levels, whereas at the kingdom-level most magistrates were trained and accredited lawyers appointed by the Crown.96 Municipal judges of all types collected local taxes, enforced royal law, and heard a limited number of legal cases.97

Municipal appointments granted Mota y Escobar’s father the power to represent and shape the conquered territory according to the vision and goals of the conquistador class. Ruiz de la Mota was first named a councilman on 1 January 1528. These councilmen elected all of the municipality’s remaining officers.98 On 1 May 1528 De Orduña was named a councilman.99 On 9 March of the same year, Ruiz de la Mota was named legislator or representative (diputado) of the municipal body.100 Further, he was named and elected municipal magistrate for the first time on 1 January 1530, rural magistrate on 1 January 1538, and record-keeper on 3 January 1542. In these various and overlapping positions, he dealt with issues relating to the encomienda and the labour of Indigenous peoples in the late 1530s, as well as flood control and repairs to water- damaged streets in the colonial centre in the mid-1550s. He was also signatory to correspondence

94 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 8, 71. Vecino had a loose meaning but was usually someone who owned or maintained a house and property in a given location (usually a Spanish town), had been in the area a year, and had indicated an intention to stay; one could be a vecino of more than one city. 95 Schwaller, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family,” 429. 96 Schwaller, “Alcalde Vs. Mayor,” 393-394. The three levels of colonial government were Kingdom, Province, and Municipality; the highest courts of justice (and judicial appointments) were court of appeal or Audiencia (alcaldes de crimen), provincial legislatures or governorships (alcaldes mayores), and town council (alcaldes ordinaries and alcaldes de la mesta), respectively. 97 Schwaller, “Alcalde Vs. Mayor,” 393. 98 “195 Acta del 1 de enero de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 38 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 4-5. Himmerich y Valencia writes that cities (ciudades) often had twelve councilmen (according to their municipal charters). 99 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 146. 100 “202 Acta del 9 de marzo de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 39.

61 sent to the Crown in the early 1540s, which set out arguments for the “security and longevity of New Spain.”101

Ruiz de la Mota was a trusted and probably well-known individual in the urban community. On 2 May 1530 he was tasked with writing to the King to ask him to forego charging the municipality the quinto real (royal fifth) because it was deemed harmful to the city’s financial status; on the other hand, the cabildo asserted that it was able to pay the Catholic tithe.102 On 13 January 1533, the council argued that there was not enough material to send documents to the King using public mail runners. It asserted that “two conquistadores and two settlers” should be elected to deliver “dispatches, confidential information, and petitions” to the government building and Ruiz de la Mota was one of those named to perform this task.103 On 16 October 1537 Ruiz de la Mota was given the keys to the safes or chests containing all the city’s “writings,” which would have included land deeds, wills, Crown letters, manuscripts, and other irreplaceable items.104 On several occasions, Mota y Escobar’s father was ordered by the council to perform visits: on 30 June 1542 he was urged to finish an appraisal of merchants that he had begun and eleven days later he was ordered to begin an assessment of the jurisdiction’s mills with a scribe.105 In two other municipal council entries, Ruiz de la Mota was sent to take account of livestock, meat, and butcher shops for taxation and distribution purposes.106 In 1558 the caja or treasury of the municipality was housed in Ruiz de la Mota’s (and, presumably, Mota y Escobar’s) home.107

In addition to holding conquistador-cum-hidalgo (noble) status, this access to government structures and systems bolstered the status and prestige of Ruiz de la Mota’s family name, which

101 AGI, Mexico, 1088, l. 3, fs. 206v; AGI, Patronato,181, r. 29; AGI, Patronato, 181, r. 6; “300 Acta del 1 de enero de 1530,” “855 Acta del 1 de enero de 1538,” “1086 Acta del 3 de enero de 1542,” and “2115 Acta del 27 de marzo de 1555,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 55, 149, 179, 303. 102 “328 Acta del 2 de mayo de 1530,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 60. 103 “543 Acta del 13 de enero de 1533,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 98. 104 “846 Acta del 16 de octubre de 1537,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 147. 105 “1117 Acta del 30 de junio de 1542” and “1120 Acta del 11 de julio de 1542,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 185. 106 “2139 Acta del 6 de septiembre de 1555” and “2275 Acta del 29 de marzo de 1557,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 306, 328. 107 “2357 Acta del postrero día de febrero de 1558,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 339.

62 enabled his direct descendants to gain admission to lay and religious governing roles as well. His eldest son, Antonio, held multiple positions in the treasury and municipal government in Mexico City and his daughter, Luisa, was the abadesa of the Convent of la Concepción in México City.108 His daughter Antonia’s spouse, Luis Pérez del Castillo, served as alcalde mayor of the provinces of Hueypochitlan, Tula, and Ávalos, and as corregidor (municipal administrator) of the province of Xalacingo.109 His grandson, Antonio de la Mota y Portugal, became the alcalde mayor (municipal mayor or justice) of the province of Tlalmanalco and teniente de capitán general (lieutenant military general) of Puebla.110 Of course, his other son, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, was bishop of two large and significant dioceses.

Mota y Escobar’s maternal grandfather had a similar trajectory, but a shorter career, in the cabildo because he moved to Puebla in the 1540s. On 3 February 1531, De Orduña was named main lawyer/justice (procurador mayor) of the city.111 In this role, De Orduña voiced his opposition to a request made by a union of merchants, tailors, and shoemakers to appeal the tariffs and taxes on their items in the markets of the city. In the same meeting of the cabildo, De Orduña was commissioned to rebuke a lesser lawyer/justice (procurador menor), reminding him to “take special care” in the adjudicating of the business of the City and “serve the cabildo well or he will not be the procurador menor.” It was also ordered that De Orduña draw up a report about how much water was required by the people of the city.112 On 13 November 1528, he was named by the cabildo to receive the (notoriously corrupt and brutal) President of the Audiencia and Governor of Pánuco, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, in Veracruz, acting as a representative of both the municipal council and the city itself.113 On 8 March 1531, De Orduña and three others were commissioned by the cabildo to draft the municipal reports that needed to be sent on to the

108 AGI, Mexico, 259, n.29; AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp.5586, fs.10r; AGI, Mexico, 259. n.277; AHN, OM-Expedientillos, n.517; and BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 44v (image 47). 109 AGI, Mexico, 261, n.164. 110 AGI, Mexico, 259, n.29; AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp.5586, fs.10r; AGI, Mexico, 259, n.277; and AHN, OM-Expedientillos, n.517. 111 “384 Acta del 3 de febrero de 1531,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 70. 112 Traducció n paleográ fica del segundo libro de Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de Mé xico, (México: Impr. y Litografía del Colegio del Tecpam de Santiago, 1871), 91. 113 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 176.

King.114 Two of De Orduña’s daughters married members of the Mexico City cabildo, including Catalina, Mota y Escobar’s mother. Three others wed prominent individuals in the city, thus establishing and cementing his family’s future status as important colonial agents and actors.115 One example of such institutional presence is Francisco de Santa Cruz, Isabel de Orduña’s spouse, who held the Mexico City cabildo position of regidor eleven times, alcalde ordinario once, and alcalde de mesta once.116

It is difficult to overstate the immense organizational, juridical, and political impact these conquerors had in these earliest years.117 The reality of their conquest was all around them: the city still had vestiges of its former Empire, and what was destroyed – the great Mexica-Aztec pyramids and ceremonial centre – was used to build up the new Hispanic grid and its Spanish- style buildings. The city also contained the dead and dying Mexica Indigenous people (and other groups), those who perished in the military conquest and those who died by violence or disease after. Their bodies had to be disposed of and the cabildo records hint at the problem and the ‘solutions’ Europeans availed themselves of: on 3 April 1527 it was ordered that the bodies of the Indigenous dead must be interred “under the earth” and not thrown in “the laguna nor in the streets nor in any other part where [they will] smell”—under penalty of ten pesos.118 The men who wielded this quotidian power were cementing a physical and epistemological legacy that would last at least three hundred years. In the 1520s, conquistador domination was a potent source of desire, envy, and anxiety within the honorific cultural tradition of the Iberians.119

114 “393 Acta del 8 de marzo de 1531,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 72 and Traducció n paleográ fica del segundo libro, 97. 115 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 70-71. 116 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, Table 16, 73. 117 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra writes: “Despite repeated statements to the contrary, from its inception the Spanish empire was highly decentralized, built from the bottom up, not the other way around. The unit upon which the empire was built was the city council. Both the empire and Creole consciousness were built on the back of municipios and vecinos.” “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 433. See also Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 118 Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 117. 119 For an in-depth examination of the “limits of racial domination” in mid-colonial Mexico City, see Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination.

Landed Power and Intergenerational Affluence

A seat at the colonial governing table also ensured that Mota y Escobar’s family would reap the land-granting rewards of conquest. Mota y Escobar’s father received his first parcel of land, an urban or suburban orchard or garden (huerta), by “donation” from the Mexico City cabildo on 4 April 1528; this land was located near the important pre-contact Mexica site at Chapultepec.120 He was granted a second orchard on 30 April 1529 and a third on 5 July 1538 on Tacuba Street (see figure 5), just steps from the core of the city, today’s zócalo.121 Ruiz de la Mota received two encomiendas in the 1530s, which included title to seven estates near the communities of Chapa (de Mota) and Jilotepec, and a second smaller grant at Mitlantongo in south central New Spain.122 On 18 September 1538 Ruiz de la Mota petitioned the Crown (alongside many other conquerors) to allow his wife and children to inherit his encomienda privileges contrary to Carlos V’s 1536 order requiring their succession to the Crown.123 This petition was granted and on 1 April 1598, the cabildo of Mexico City recorded that Ruiz de la Mota’s eldest son, Antonio, held title to Chapa and Mitlantongo and with 975 and 175 Indigenous tributaries respectively, the family received yearly tribute worth several thousand pesos.124

120 “209 Acta del 4 de abril de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 40; Traducción paleográ fica del primer libro, 154. 121 “258 Acta del 30 de abril de 1529” and “891 Acta del 5 de julio de 1538,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 48, 154; Traducción paleográ fica del libro cuatro de Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de Mé xico (México: Impr. y Litografía del Colegio del Tecpam de Santiago, 1874), 134. Enrique Semo notes that as “early as the second half of the sixteenth century, Cervantes de Salazar wrote that in Tacuba Street the houses, without exception, were splendid, all built “at great expense as befits such noble and opulent residents.” A considerable quantity of valuable jewels, clothes, and furniture, predominantly of foreign origin, invariably figured in testamentary inventories of wealthy Mexicans.” José Durand, “El lujo indiano,” Historia Mexicana 6, no. 1 (1956), 62, 64 quoted in A History of Capitalism in Mexico: its Origins, 1521-1763 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 100. 122 The official record (dated 1550) of these grants specifies that seven estancia sites for livestock were granted in these regions. AGN, Mercedes, vol. 3, fs. 144 and AGN, Mercedes, vol. 8, fs. 30r-30v. The community of Chapa in the State of Mexico is called Chapa de Mota to this day. 123 AGI, Mexico, 1088, l. 3, fs. 207r (4) and “Real cédula de Carlos I sobre la tasación de los tributos de indios y la sucesión de encomiendas, 26 mayo 1536,” in Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810. Volumen I (1493-1592), ed. Richard Konetzke (Madrid: Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, 1953) 1:171-174. 124 “Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula y a pedimento de la ciudad, sobre el estado en que se encontraba la sucesión de las encomiendas de indios y la conveniencia de hacer el repartimiento perpetuo--Mexico, 17 de abril de 1597,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 35, 40; “830 Acta del 8 de junio de 1537,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 144-145; and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 230. See also R. Brambila Paz, “Congregaciones del Siglo XVI en Chapa de Mota, Estado de Mexico,” Revistas 6, no. 1 (2008): 42; F. Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, ed. L.B. Simpson, trans. A. Eustis (Berkeley:

Figure 5: Map of Plaza Mayor (Plaza del Zócalo) of Mexico City, 1562 Depicting the Iglesia Mayor (centre), the foundation for the cathedral (right of centre), Tacuba Street (top left) and San Francisco Street (middle left), the canal (bottom), and multiple imperial government buildings (Casas Reales at bottom right; others left side of the page). Source: AGI, MP-Mexico, 3.

The Mexico City cabildo records also tell us that Ruiz de la Mota owned sheep, horses, cows, and other livestock although the records do not indicate the quantity. Mota y Escobar’s father showed his branding equipment to the cabildo on 2 August 1532 and the original record contains a drawing of the brand.125Antonio de la Mota, the eldest son, inherited the properties of Ruiz de la Mota after his death around 1560. The Crown gave Antonio permission to establish his own mayorazgo (right of primogeniture or entailed estate document) in 1578, the year of his eldest son’s birth. This rarely permitted transformation made the grant transmittable from generation to generation, through a “straight male line.”126

University of California Press, 1963), 119-120; Schwaller, “Tres familias mexicanas del siglo XVI,” Historia Mexicana 31, no. 2 (octubre-diciembre 1981): 173-174. 125 Traducció n paleográ fica del segundo libro, 202, 204. This information was collected by order of the cabildo. 126 AGI, Mexico, 1091, l.9, fs.23v-26v and Hugo G. Nutini, The Wages of Conquest: the Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 164.

Francisco De Orduña held even more significant land parcels in central New Spain as accumulated rewards for his colonial service. The list of donations is long: the first urban land grant was issued by the Mexico City cabildo on 15 April 1524; the second plot was granted by the same body on 22 May 1524; the third was granted near the Dominican monastery on 5 February 1528; the fourth was a grant for an orchard near the cabildo building on 13 March 1528; and the fifth plot was granted 30 October 1528.127 On 28 August of 1528, he received a donation of “lands for orchards” with the “condition of buying them if they belonged to the indios.” This implied that if De Orduña’s donation was Indigenous-owned land, he had the choice to purchase it so this was not a traditional “donation.”128 It is unclear what the power dynamic between the conquering cabildo and the Indigenous community would have been in this scenario.

In 1526 Francisco de Orduña was assigned half the tribute (in encomienda) of the communities of Yautepec and Tepoztlan alongside another conqueror. In 1551 this region had an astonishing 5,500 tributaries. The original claimant of this territory was Hernando Cortés, who would recover this tribute region in 1531 with the settling of his disputes with the Crown over the creation of the Marquesado del Valle grant.129 In 1528 De Orduña acquired his greatest “donation” of land: ten estates in the Igualapa-Ometepec-Suchistlaguaca (Xochistlahuaca) region. These territories and consequent tributes were shared with Francisco de Herrera, a settler.130 The assignment of more than one encomendero to a specific encomienda acted to satisfy the Crown’s ambition of breaking down the accumulating power of these faraway

127 “6 Acta del 15 de abril de 1524, ”“10 Acta del 22 de mayo de 1524,” and “231 Acta del 30 de octubre de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 9-10, 44 and Traducción paleográ fica del primer libro, 8, 147, 150. 128 “226 Acta del 28 de agosto de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 43. 129 Cortés claimed to have forty-one encomienda grants in 1524 and reported an income of 42,800 gold pesos. His holdings were drastically reduced when he left for Honduras (1524-1526) and acting governors took over leadership of the colony. When the first Audiencia arrived in 1529, he lost more grants. He travelled to Spain between 1528 and 1530 and was awarded twenty-three encomiendas in perpetuity (the Crown grant of the Marquesado del Valle, with 23,000 tribute paying Indigenous peoples). Himmerich y Valencia writes that it is highly likely that Cortés collected tribute from far more Indigenous people than the grant permitted; in 1569 the income of the Marquesado was 86,000 pesos, wealth taken from 60,903 Indigenous tributaries. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 146, 208-209. 130 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209.

67 landowners.131 Despite sharing the wealth garnered by these encomiendas, Mota y Escobar’s grandfather became an influential and extremely rich man.

In 1531, in lieu of the grant recovered by Cortés, De Orduña became sole encomendero of the Santiago Tecalli region (including the communities of Yautepec and Tepoztlan), near Puebla.132 He also served as governor of Santiago de Guatemala from 1529-1530, awarding himself encomienda land in Chichicastenango, Guatemala in August 1529. Despite being governor for only one year, De Orduña exercised great local and regional power: he would grant ten compatriots encomienda lands as well.133 Similar to Ruiz de la Mota, De Orduña petitioned the Crown to pass on his encomiendas to his descendants. Like many encomenderos of his generation, De Orduña had no sons at the time and in August 1538 the Viceroy received the Crown’s blessing to allow De Orduña’s nephews to inherit in the event that he had no sons upon his death.134

De Orduña and his family lived off the income from the Santiago Tecalli encomienda. In 1548 this area had 3,830 Indigenous tributaries and by 1598 it had 4,042, the fourth largest holding in tribute-payers across the kingdom.135 In his 1610 visit of the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Bishop Mota y Escobar visited Santiago Tecalli in early November and noted that it had become “a pueblo of the Crown” but “was the encomienda of my grandfather…[one] of the first conquistadors that arrived with Hernando Cortés.”136 At the time of his death, Mota y Escobar’s grandfather also owned an estate in Villa Rica, which had 24,000 head of sheep; another estate with pigs; a sugar factory near Xalapa; and two pastures near Coatepec and Cofre de Perote in

131 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 83. 132 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209 and Mercedes Olivera, Pillis y macehuales: las formaciones sociales y los modos de producción de Tecali del siglo XII al XVI (México: Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del INAH, 1978), 124, 214, 220. 133 Between 1524 and 1548 Santiago de Guatemala had eleven different governments, which used the institution of encomienda as a means of political patronage and privilege. This involved the (re)allocation of the tribute of approximately one hundred indigenous communities to many different encomenderos depending on the governor in charge. Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz, "Encomienda and Settlement,” 67, 69-70. 134 AGI, Mexico, 1088, l. 3, fs. 135r-135v. 135 The encomienda had passed to María del Castillo in 1598; it is probable that this is the daughter of De Orduña’s daughter Inés de Velasco and her spouse Bernardino del Castillo. “Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 40 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209. 136 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 47r (image 49).

68 east central New Spain.137 Into the late seventeenth century the De Orduña branch of the Bishop’s family enjoyed great affluence: “In 1669, when Doña Juana Josefa Orduña Loyando y Sousa of Xalapa married don Juan Velázquez de la Cadena from Mexico City, her family offered a dowry of 30,000 pesos in cash, slaves, and other goods.”138

Arranged marriages were a critical strategy for gaining new wealth and extending the conquerors’ landed power, as well as this network of privilege, across the whole colony and to their descendants. Mota y Escobar’s extended family already held major tracts of land as a result of Ruiz de la Mota’s land ownership. However, De Orduña’s grants and the latter’s successful matchmaking of his daughters with other conquistadors may have been a greater factor in Mota y Escobar’s inherited wealth. On 30 October 1528, conquistador, settler, and miner Gutierre de Badajoz, the spouse of Francisco de Orduña’s daughter Francisca de Orduña (Mota y Escobar’s aunt), was given land in Mexico City that was “owned by Moctezuma in Soconochachaque [sic], on Tatelulco [sic] street going to Tacuba [street].”139 De Badajoz also held the encomiendas of Tacolula and Huehuetlan and acquired the nearby encomienda of Nexpa initially assigned to Antonio de Guadalajara in 1531.140 Francisco de Solís Barraza y Orduña (Mota y Escobar’s first cousin and son of his maternal aunt Leonor de Orduña and her spouse Pedro de Solís Barraza), became encomendero of the towns and peoples of Acolman following the death of De Solís Barraza the elder.141 The Acolman encomienda had 1,221 Indigenous tributaries in 1598 and did not revert to the Crown until 1680.142 Further, Mota y Escobar’s maternal step-aunt, Inés de Velasco, married Bernardino del Castillo, who inherited some of Francisco de Orduña’s lands in dowry, becoming a second-generation encomendero of the towns and peoples of Igualapa.143

137 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 322. Also see J. Hirschberg, “A Social History of Puebla de los Angeles,” (Ph.D diss., University of Michigan, 1976), 405n92,n505,n103. 138 Danielle Terrazas Williams, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 75, no. 3 (2018): 534. 139 “231 Acta del 30 de octubre de 1528,” in Guía de las actas de cabildo, 44. 140 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 125. 141 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 320. Francisco de Solís Barraza y Orduña was also a recognized noblemen of the order of Calatrava. 142 Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 39 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 245. 143 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 320-321 and Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209.

Diego de Villanueva, the father of Mota y Escobar’s maternal step-aunt, Augustina de Villanueva y Guzmán (married to Mota y Escobar’s maternal step-uncle, Francisco de Orduña), was encomendero of Quechula; in 1598 this encomienda had 1,255 Indigenous tributaries and the encomendero was named Nicolás de Villanueva, a relative.144 Mota y Escobar’s maternal step-grandmother, Catalina Vélez Rascona, inherited half of the tribute of her father’s encomienda of Zapotitlan in 1525. Vélez Rascona’s father, García Vélez, was a conqueror himself and by 1570 this encomienda at Zapotitlan had 2,000 tributaries.145

The 4 September 1626 mayorazgo document of Mota y Escobar’s maternal step-uncle, Francisco de Orduña, tells us that he was the primary inheritor of the De Orduña lands. Francisco the Younger had become the inheritor of Francisco the Elder’s estate at the time of his death and he in turn passed on the wealth and property to his son, Diego Hurtado de Orduña.146 This transfer of encomienda grant in mayorazgo (entailed estate) was permitted by the Crown on both the maternal and paternal sides of Mota y Escobar’s family; María Elena Martínez writes that this significantly expanded privilege was rarely indulged.147 Francisco the Younger passed down the following assets that had been inherited: the principal houses in Puebla (“in the street called Rascona…next door to Iñigo Carrillo Altamirano and…Alonso Gutierrez”); an estate on the flatlands of Ozumba, called “la Noria”, with 24,000 sheep; a ranch at Villa Rica, in old Veracruz region “that passes the River Atoyac”); an estate with 1,500 pigs; a cavalry of 14 horses in the jurisdiction of Tepeaca; a factory near San Manuncio; a sugar mill that was called San Pedro de Buena Vista; a pasture at Coatepec; and another pasture at Cofre de Perote, which contained a “large chapel.”148 In his first visit to the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla in 1609, Mota y Escobar went to the sugar mill called San Pedro de Buena Vista and noted that he confirmed 574 neophytes in the faith (criaturas), “negros e indios.”149 These criaturas were a combination of

144 Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 36 and “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 322. 145 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 172. 146 In late 1608 Diego Hurtado de Orduña was given royal approval for and extension of “one more life” on the encomienda de indios that he held at the time. It is not clear when he made this request. AGI, Indiferente, 449, l. A1, fs. 275r-275v. 147 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 127. 148 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 322. 149 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15v (image 18).

70 the descendants of African-descended enslaved people and Indigenous labourers, illustrating how populous the region was and the large numbers of inhabitants who were forced labourers. In the early seventeenth century, the sugar mill had more then one hundred and twenty slaves on site.150

In the early eighteenth century, the inheritor of De Orduña’s estate was able to pass down more than 1,907,140 pesos and coins of precious metals (tomines de oro común) in addition to hundreds of pieces of land, livestock, and mills.151

Francisco de Orduña took care in his mayorazgo document to attribute his family’s past, contemporary, and future status to noble blood, effectively erasing the violence, exploitation, and nepotism that all but assured his family’s ‘success’ in New Spain. He wrote:

we have ancient nobleza de linage and limpieza de sangre, by the mercy of God and we want to conserve it in our descendants and successors of this inheritance, we urgently request now and for always that the male successors of it and each one, marry with noble-women, recognized communally for their limpia and noble birth as well as being of honest and loyal reputation in virtue and seclusion (recogimiento).152

This quote illustrates the anxiety of a first-generation criollo, Mota y Escobar’s contemporary, who believed his family’s “inheritance” was “urgently” threatened by the taint of ignoble and non-Christian blood. This statement asserts the natural privilege and power of the De Orduñas by using reconquista-era Castilian tropes that equated moral righteousness and legitimate authority with ideas about genealogical (racialized) purity, which will be discussed at length in chapter three of this dissertation. The writer urges his male descendants to be vigilant of the virtue,

150 Gilberto Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa, siglo XVII, (Xalapa, Ver., México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1995), 329. In 1679, a free mulata slave owner vecina of Xalapa, Polonia de Ribas, noted in her will and testament that Capitán Don Antonio Orduña Loyando, a relative of Mota y Escobar’s and owner of this sugar mill, owed her money. Polonia de Ribas is the subject of Terrazas Williams’ article, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’,” 543. 151 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 326. 152 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, 323.

71 cleanliness, and reputation of their female partners in order to prevent the possibility of genealogical pollution, which would signal the end of the De Orduña’s natural claim to power. In reality, as I have demonstrated, the De la Mota and De Orduña entitlement to privilege in New Spain was premised on their own efforts to construct a power structure that accommodated their vision of the Crown’s indebtedness to them. Francisco de Orduña asserted his family’s genealogical nobility – won through mercedes – and purity in a document that passed on wealth and power in the form of land and tribute won by conquest and subsequent mercedes. The document obscured the ongoing violence and bureaucratic efforts that conquistadors and their descendants employed to maintaining the legal and political institutions that made these initially tenuous mercedes seem like a self-reproducing legacy of inherited wealth, power, and privilege—the supposedly natural result of elite criollo nobility and purity.

Wealth and property were also passed down and accumulated by the priests of the family. Mota y Escobar himself had a great deal of material and liquid wealth at the time of his death. When he died in his role as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla in 1625, the Jesuits noted that he had donated 20,000 pesos, his hacienda lands at La Chiauhtla-Alfonsina (“valued at 60,000 pesos by the treasury”,) and an accumulated wealth of 100,000 pesos to support the Colegio Angelopolitano de San Ildefonso of the Companía de Jesuitas in Puebla.153 The hacienda of La Chiauhtla- Alfonsina was located in the valley of Atlixco, west of Puebla, and was purchased by Mota y Escobar in May 1615 through a censo (debt) arrangement with Isabel Martínez de Castro Verde, that will be outlined in greater detail in chapter three.154 The Jesuits further noted that Mota y Escobar donated the following “treasures”: four long tapestries with the family’s coat of arms on them; a “fine upholstery”; sixteen canopies of “taffeta” with “textured stripes,” with “black down [fur or hair] with borders of brocade and [an] embroidered coat of arms,” and with purple down [fur or hair] with brocades; a gilded silver candlestick; a gold cup; his library; three enslaved people “for a limited time”; a statue of San Ildefonso; and a marble statue of the Bishop

153 AGN, Jesuitas 64, vol III-24, exp.2, 1v., exp.3, fs.1v and AGI, Mexico, 1092, l. 14, f.156v-157r. Part of the original building of the hacienda of Alfonsina still stands and is used as a restaurant and special event location: https://www.facebook.com/pg/laalfonsina/posts/?ref=page_internal (accessed February, 16, 2021). 154 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r-250v (image 253-254).

72 himself.155 The power and great wealth of these two branches of Mota y Escobar’s family illustrate the possibilities for material and political advancement and authority that were attached to the conquistador class status, but also points to how much there was to lose if the descendants lost their claim to the legal entitlements to land and labour.

The Encomienda in New Spain

Many scholars have noted the crucial socio-legal foundation built by the regime of reward, its most significant symbol being the institution of encomienda.156 This early subjugating system forged the exploitative patronage relationship between the Indigenous population and white Europeans that became one of the central underpinnings of negotiation and structural power in elite Spanish colonial society.157 Indigenous people in encomiendas were not chattel slaves, and therefore, not property, but these two institutions of servitude operated in parallel and shared similarities that facilitated white novohispano dominance.158 Further, European conceptions of encomienda labour were mapped onto pre-contact Nahua labour and tribute structures in order to exploit pre-existing networks between Indigenous communities.159 However, the labour demanded of Indigenous peoples via the encomienda was radically different from any pre- contact system, and new and extreme levels of violence and exploitation characterized the

155 AGN, Jesuitas 64, vol III-24, exp.2, 1v. and exp.3, fs.1v and Eduardo Merlo Juárez and José Antonio Quintana Fernández. Las iglesias de la Puebla de los Angeles, tomo I (Puebla, Pue., México: Secretaría de Cultura, 2001), 89- 93. 156 See Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: the Beginning of Spanish Mexico (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966); Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,“ in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, eds. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 51-95; Stuart B. Schwartz, “New World Nobility: Social Aspirations and Mobility in the Conquest and Colonization of Spanish America,” in Social Groups and Religious Ideas in the Sixteenth Century, eds. Miriam Usher Chrisman and Otto Gründler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1978), 23-37; and Green, “Baculamento or Encomienda?”; Kramer, Lovell, and. Lutz, “Encomienda and Settlement,” 67-72. 157 Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain, viii. 158 Evidence that enslaved populations and tributary Indigenous peoples were conceived of as within similar systems of servitude comes from the Mexico City cabildo records. On 14 June 1527 the Mexico City cabildo appointed two new “field sheriffs”; they were given the task with finding “the negros esclavos and indios that were absent from their pueblos and [the] house[s] of the caciques or señores.” For each Indigenous person they returned they would receive a half peso, and for every enslaved person they found they would receive four pesos. Traducció n paleográ fica del primer libro, 123. See also Green, “Baculamento or Encomienda?,” 316 and Fernando Santos Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 7. 159 Green traces this borrowing in “Baculamento or Encomienda?,” 318.

73 colonial institution.160 The colonial legal distinctions made between encomienda and enslaved labourers were many but the protections offered to Indigenous people within encomienda were often ignored by encomendero-colonists and mine and plantation owners in the interests of extraction and profit.161 The encomienda was an institution that provoked powerful emotions on both sides of the Atlantic, serving as a touchstone for descendants as they expressed anxiety about their own place in the ‘New World.’

As an institution, the encomienda facilitated the corralling of Indigenous peoples into communities for extraction and evangelization; it increased the power of colonizers to compel Indigenous people to work for them via the authority of the Crown; and it became a potent symbol and tool to manage creole descendants’ entitlement to land and people. The encomienda structure and purpose reconfigured networks of Indigenous community relations and literally transformed their living space with the introduction of livestock, large estates and plantations, and the outright theft of pre-contact communal lands. This form of merced provided the financial resources to settle and order the land and transformed opportunistic and sometimes treasonous middlemen into nobles. This contract made between conquistadors and the Crown – that Indigenous peoples’ labour and tribute would be payment for conquest – was the means and instrument through which elite descendant power was to be naturalized in perpetuity.

The perpetuation of the mercedes of encomiendas, granted and permitted by the Crown in the early sixteenth century, is at the crux of elite creole descendant claims to authority in the colony of New Spain. Encomenderos – Mota y Escobar’s family included – retained, and lived in large populated homes (casas pobladas) with gardens in the cities, even though their estates and encomiendas were located in overwhelmingly Indigenous-inhabited provinces and were mostly rural.162 As I have outlined, the colony was governed by municipal councils stacked with encomendero-class magistrates and officials in the early sixteenth century, and the subjugated Indigenous hinterlands between them were controlled and connected to the cities via these same

160 Green, “Baculamento or Encomienda?,” 318. 161 Green, “Baculamento or Encomienda?,” 316. 162 Himmerich y Valencia lists Guadalajara, Ciudad Michoacán, Colima, Zacatula, Valles, Pánuco, Veracruz, Coatzacoalcos, Antequera, Villa Alta, and Puebla as the other urban centres (outside Mexico City) that acted as ‘home bases’ for encomenderos. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 35, 53.

74 encomenderos, in negotiation with Indigenous leadership (caciques).163 The cabildo of Mexico City, connected intimately to both the archdiocesan cabildo and the University of Mexico, spoke for the colony in communication with the metropole and its representatives (the Audiencia) and constituted a concentrated space of Hispanic institutions and culture.

By 1518-1519 the King was convinced that the encomienda must be abolished, having read a report from several high-ranking ecclesiastics, which argued that the encomienda was against the good of the Kingdom, the Empire, the Crown, reason, Theology and Philosophy, God and the Church, and the Indigenous peoples themselves.164 However, news of Cortés’ landing in Mexica- Aztec imperial territory, in what would become known as New Spain, temporarily stalled the Crown’s active opposition. In his May 1522 letter to the Crown, Cortés alluded to the ongoing discussions regarding the encomienda and gestured toward the Crown’s direct funding of the conquistadores rather than the imposition of the encomienda system. Cortés wrote that he had already instituted an encomienda system, claiming that this was because of delays in the Crown’s decision making: “I found myself almost forced to place the caciques and naturales of these parts [within the authority] of Spaniards.”165 The Crown wrote to Cortés on 26 June 1523 and revoked all encomienda mercedes that Cortés had made because the Indigenous people of New Spain were not subjected people but free and could not be granted in encomienda outside official channels; they were to be treated as vassals of the Crown and pay tribute in recognition of such.166 Cortés received the letter but did not disseminate it and wrote back that without the encomienda the Spaniards would have no means of support. The Indigenous people had been liberated by the Europeans, who were helping them convert to Catholicism through the encomienda, he argued; further, the Indigenous people could not pay tribute to the King because they did not have currency and because then the conquerors would have nothing for their sacrifices.167 More than two years later, on 4 November 1525, the Crown issued a set of

163 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 35. 164 Silvio Arturo Zavala outlines these reasons in great detail in La encomienda indiana (Madrid: Centro de estudios históricos, 1935), 31-34. 165 Zavala, La encomienda indiana, 41. 166 Walter V. Scholes, The Diego Ramirez Visita (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1946), 28 and Zavala, La encomienda indiana, 45-47. 167 Scholes, The Diego Ramírez Visita, 29.

75 instructions to the residence of Cortés, stating that the encomienda system could continue. By 5 April 1528, the Crown’s instructions to the First Audiencia permitted its members to assess the land and grant encomiendas in New Spain.168 Following this order, the Mexico City cabildo, stacked with many conquistadors, started issuing official encomiendas to its members and other vecinos.

During the 1530s, the Crown, via the Viceroy, attempted to control the administration of the encomienda instead of legislating its abolition. The colonial government required that tax and tribute schedules be approved, that changes be granted before implementation, and taxes be based on the quality of land and historical tribute payments.169 Until the promulgation of the New Laws in 1542, the tug-of-war between the various parties persisted, and while the Crown sent many cédulas attempting to assert its authority over the powerful conquistador landowners and their allies, only small changes to taxation and tribute payments occurred.170 In the years leading up to the promulgation of the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda, or rather the taxation system it enforced, was understood by all ruling parties to be a fixture of the colonial government, which had to be continued in some form if the Europeans were to retain their territories and subject

168 Scholes, The Diego Ramírez Visita, 29; Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain, 1929, 90-91, 97-98; and Vasco de Puga, Provisiones, cédulas, instrucciones de Su Magestad…desde el año de 1525 hasta este presente de 63, ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (México, 1878) 1:47-53. 169 The members of the Second Audiencia (circa 1531) were dedicated to checking excesses of the encomenderos. This second court tried to balance the political and economic interests of multiple and overlapping colonial parties: the Crown, clergy, and Indigenous caciques. Indigenous nobles, specifically the Nahua hereditary nobility of the Valley, did not acquiesce their own sovereignty but brought suits before the Audiencia to argue for the continuation of their pre-contact rights. The Second Audiencia saw the arguments of these surviving Nahua heirs as a potential on-the-ground counterweight to encomendero power. In the mid-sixteenth century, this Audiencia was directed by the Crown to learn all it could about the ancestral landed estates of New Spain’s pre-contact Indigenous nobility so that it could work with historical antecedents of tribute payment. This system of pre-contact hereditary lordship was Hispanicized, sometimes by Indigenous peoples themselves, for purposes of justifying political hierarchies and using legible power structures to assert authority over Indigenous populations. The Spanish often called these cacicazgos, but that term was appropriated from the Caribbean island context and does not translate well into the Valley of Mexico. The Nahuatl concept of pillalli, noble lands, seems more appropriate, but even then scholars are not fully clear on what this institution meant in practice. Through this process and others like it throughout the colonial period, the legal status and rights of Indigenous hereditary lords were assimilated and analogized to the system of Spanish hidalguía (nobility), a significant departure from Indigenous conceptions of hereditary lordship. The family of Moctezuma and the lords of Tlaxcala were prime examples of this. For a discussion of pre-contact Nahua land ownership and understandings of land, specifically the teotlalli (temple lands), pillalli (noble lands), and calpulli (community lands), see chapter two in Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession, 29-36; Villela, “‘For So Long the Memories of Men Cannot Contradict It’,” 699, 711; Scholes, The Diego Ramirez Visita, 37; and Peter B. Villella, “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala,” The Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 2- 4. 170 Scholes, The Diego Ramirez Visita, 31-39.

76 populations in the Americas.171 For the metropole and the colony, the Indigenous people by their labour and taxation were the key, the only practical solution, to continuing the colonial project.

The New Laws of 1542-1543 set up rules that began the encomienda’s gradual abolition, legislating that encomienda would not become an inevitable, hereditary right.172 The Laws re- stated that Indigenous people were vassals of the Crown and that all encomiendas held by persons who were not first conquerors had to be relinquished to the Crown immediately. No more encomienda mercedes were to be granted. When the incumbent conquistador died, his tributary holdings were to revert to the Crown; conquistador heirs would be provided for out of the tributes received by the Crown from the Indigenous peoples. No European was to have authority over any newly acquired territories or the Indigenous populations that inhabited them. Tribute taxation was to be lowered to a rate below pre-contact levels.173

These Laws were neither fully implemented nor complied with by the colonial governments for the duration of the colonial period. Many encomienda grants were renewed by the Crown upon petition by the descendants of conquistadors, Ruiz de la Mota’s and De Orduña’s included, and in a 1597 petition to the Crown witnesses complained that new encomiendas had been approved for non-conquistador-descended settlers.174 Despite efforts to revert territory and tribute to the Crown over the next half century in New Spain, by the seventeenth century, the debate was contentious and ongoing and many conqueror class families still held land and collected tribute as established in the early colonial period.

The great spread of conquistador-encomendero power via multiple estates and encomiendas carved up the landscape in a semi-feudal Castilian manner. Although encomiendas were grants

171 Scholes, The Diego Ramirez Visita, 39. 172 “The New Laws of the Indies,” Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks, accessed January 18, 2021, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1542newlawsindies.asp. 173 “The New Laws of the Indies,” Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks, and Scholes, The Diego Ramirez Visita, 39. For more information about pre-contact tribute arrangements within the Mexica-Aztec Empire, see Información de 1554 sobre los tributos que los indios pagaban a Moctezuma, ed. José Luis Rojas (México, D.F.: Ciesas, 1997); The Essential Codex Mendoza, eds. Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997); Elizabeth Hill Boone, Aztec Imperial Strategies (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996), 41-42. 174 Cabildo questionnaire item eight in Epistolario de Nueva España, 51.

77 that recognized and rewarded acts of historical conquest and possession, the encomienda was also an institution that perpetually re-enacted and rewarded possession. Encomiendas had the devastating effect of extracting wealth and labour from Indigenous communities, which delegitimized traditional leaders and impoverished whole communities, fortifying their status as subjugated populations.175 Encomiendas within seventy-five miles (three days’ journey) of the encomenderos’ place of residence were usually closely administered and supervised by their owners. These grants enabled the effective use of Indigenous populations for personal tribute service in support of the casa poblada.176 Himmerich y Valencia estimated that about 52% of the encomiendas (three hundred and ninety-seven grants) held between 1521-1555 were in this category; he argues that the accessibility of these encomiendas made them “more exploitable and therefore more valuable.”177 Encomiendas located more than three days travel away required a resident administrator or extended periods of residence for effective management.178 Ruiz de la Mota’s encomiendas at Chapa and Jilotepec were less than seventy-five miles away from Mexico City, while Mitlantongo was more than two hundred miles away.179 Mota y Escobar’s grandfather’s encomienda lands of Yautepec, Tepoztlan, and Santiago Tecalli were also less than seventy-five miles away from Mexico City; Igualapa, Ometepec, and Suchistlaguaca were more than two hundred miles away.180

Throughout the colonial period, encomenderos – as a class and as individuals – routinely found themselves in conflict with other groups, classes, and individuals. Disputes pitted the Crown against the encomendero class; encomendero against encomendero; and Indigenous populations

175 Peter B. Villella, “ ‘For So Long the Memories of Men Cannot Contradict It’: Nahua Patrimonial Restorationism and the Law in Early New Spain,” Ethnohistory 63, no. 4 (2016): 698. 176 Himmerich y Valencia defines the casa poblada as “a large estate headquarters, preferably managed by a Spanish wife, where a number of relatives, guests, and Spanish employees were maintained, catered to by a staff of black slaves and [Indigenous] servants.” The Encomenderos of New Spain, 316. For more information on the casa poblada, see Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, ““La casa poblada de los conquistadores,” in La familia en el mundo iberoamericano (México: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 327-360. 177 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 52. 178 Encomiendas located 75-150 miles away represented 25% of the total analyzed in this study (767 grants); encomiendas located 151 plus miles away represented a bit more than 20% of the encomiendas. Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 52, 54. 179 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 230. 180 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 208-209.

78 and caciques against their assigned encomendero. The Crown and the colonial government of New Spain corresponded frequently about the institution, requesting information and recommendations from churchmen, civil government officials, and administrators inside Iberia and in the overseas colonies. The debate hinged on a few crucial issues: conquistador power and its strength vis-à-vis the metropole; the definition, treatment, and evangelization of the Indigenous populations; and tribute and taxation.

Resolving these matters involved the physical and metaphorical crossing of time and space. Encomienda entitlement mobilised historical justifications that traced genealogical and noble status across the Atlantic, in the Caribbean islands, and across the territory of New Spain.181 In its correspondence and attempts to regulate the institution and conquistador power, the Crown struggled to find answers to the most crucial early colonial questions: What was the shape of the Old World institution of encomienda in a New World of ruthlessly ambitious conquerors, complex Indigenous societies, and unknown landscapes and resources? How was the Crown to balance conquistador-Hispano-creole demands with the Hispanic Empire’s religious mandate (from Rome) to protect and convert Indigenous peoples, while generating the funds to sustain the Empire? How was Madrid to appease its own marauders but maintain its authority and make its presence and sovereignty known and felt in the colonies? These are questions that go to the heart of Spanish debates and struggles with colonization throughout the era of colonial rule in New Spain. The constantly evolving and contentious relationship between Indigenous peoples and European and European-descended peoples affected all institutions, systems, and structures that were built after Columbus’s landfall and continued into the future of the American colonies.

The Petition for Perpetual Encomienda

Between 21 December 1597 and 4 March 1598 criollo and peninsular witness testimony was collected by the Audiencia in response to a Crown order requesting information about the state of the encomienda in the colony of New Spain. This testimony was collected using an interrogatorio (questionnaire) with “allegations and questions” created by the Mexico City

181 See Villela, “ ‘For So Long the Memories of Men Cannot Contradict It’.”

79 cabildo.182 Bound together with other pertinent materials, this petition to perpetuate the encomienda was sent to the metropole and provides a clear illustration of late sixteenth-century elite creole visions of the ideal and proper colonial future.183

In his testimony, Mota y Escobar utilized the rhetoric of conquistador class superiority, historical memory and legacy, and descendant frustration and suffering in order to argue for continued inheritance in the form of land and Indigenous peoples’ tribute. He was explicit about what he saw as the inevitability of the large-scale death and decline of the Indigenous populations of New Spain—a line of argument that sought to placate Crown concerns about the treatment of its Indigenous subjects under the encomienda system. He warned in no uncertain terms that conquistador accomplishments and consequent privileges were the political and economic scaffolding that maintained the viability of the colonial project overall—a mode of argument he would use throughout his life’s writings. Without guaranteed acknowledgment of conquistador class sacrifice in the colony via the perpetuation of their lineage privileges, he argued, conquistador descendants would be justified in their feelings of alienation and abandonment by the metropolitan authority. In response to the cabildo’s questionnaire, Mota y Escobar, not yet bishop, made bold pronouncements about his class’ expectations for their place in the colonial memory and the imperial power structure. He articulated what was at stake for the Crown if it did not meet these expectations.

As earlier sections of this chapter have outlined, the transformation of marauders into conquerors into propertied elites was swift and purposeful in New Spain. Scholars have identified 506 encomenderos, including Mota y Escobar’s family members, who were granted a total of 822 encomiendas as official and unofficial mercedes during the first generation of the Spanish

182 Notificación of Antonio Maldonado, oidor of the Audiencia, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 53. Hereafter, I refer to this document as the 1597 petition to the Crown. 183 This action from the Mexico City cabildo followed a 1564 petition from the conquerors and first colonists that remarked on their expectations for the “prize of perpetuity,” (AGI, Mexico, 168) and a 1567 letter that asked that the encomenderos be able to entail their grants and consolidate their estates (mayorazgos), enabling them to petition for noble titles (AGI, Mexico 1, n. 275); a 1575 order from Philip II “discreetly” extended the encomiendas to a “third life.” (AGI, Indiferente 1530, n.7). Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 127.

80 presence between 1521 and 1555.184 By the late 1590s, 450 encomiendas are accounted for in the Audiencia’s report to the Crown.185 The Mexico City cabildo-created questionnaire asserted that while 1,000,000 Indigenous tributaries had been “entrusted” to encomenderos during the tenure of Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza y Ulloa between 1568 and 1580, no more than 400,000 Indigenous tributaries remained alive at the time of the petition to the Crown due to “the regular cocolistlis and pestilencias.”186 Most witnesses in this petition showed little if any concern for this mass Indigenous death, outside their testimony as eyewitnesses to it; in fact, they would use this catastrophic demographic collapse to bolster their claims to guardianship over the Indigenous people as the reward of conquest.187 Despite reporting that the number of encomenderos had declined overall throughout the sixteenth century, with Indigenous tributaries still totalling 209,753 at the turn of the new century, the power of this class was still significant and omnipresent in the colony.188

184 Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 3, 52-54, 310n22. See the author’s “Methodological Essay” on pages 298-304 for details of the many primary and secondary sources he consulted to ascertain these numbers. 185 Epistolario de Nueva España, 34-48. Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza’s 1604 Sumaria relación de las cosas de la Nueva España estimated that of the original 1,326 conquistadores (of New Spain), the descendants numbered 109 sons, 65 sons-in-law, 479 grandsons, and 85 great-grandsons, a total of 738; Dorantes wrote that only 196 of those 1,326 conquistadores remained living in New Spain at the time of his writing. “And it amazes me greatly,” he lamented, “that [these 1,326 conquistadores who] were the core [or central stabilizing body, tronco] and beginning of these generations and families, do not have a greater number” of descendants. The son of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, one of the four (of six hundred) survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’s infamous Florida expedition (1527- 1536), Baltasar Dorantes was, according to Anthony Pagden, “the criollo elite's most impassioned champion” in the early colonial period.” Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación de las cosas de la Nueva España, 234 and Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 56. 186 Epistolario de Nueva España, 49. This was stated in item three of the cabildo questionnaire. The catastrophic loss of life experienced by Indigenous peoples across New Spain in the sixteenth century was due to disease, drought, starvation and overwork, all exacerbated by the policies of encomenderos and Spaniards. “The epidemic of cocoliztli from 1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico”; “The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 killed an additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remaining native population.” Rodolfo Acuna-Sot, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and Matthew D. Therrell, “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 4 (2002): 360. For contemporary and scholarly estimates of the Indigenous populations of New Spain during the sixteenth century, see The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, eds. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 112, 120; Acuna-Soto et al, “Megadrought and Megadeath,” 360-362; and Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), “Las diez plagas de las Indias,” Grandes desastres de la ciudad de México, ed. Hector de Mauleón (CDMX, México: Ediciones Atrasalante, 2017). 187 Augustinian Bishop of Cebu (Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Filipinas) and novohispano creole, Pedro de Agurto, is an exception. I discuss his response to this question below. 188 Epistolario de Nueva España, 34-48.

At the end of the sixteenth century the Crown was still unsatisfied with the direction of the encomienda in the Indies. Felipe III was worried about the accumulated power of colonials that could not be controlled from Madrid and the effect of continued exploitative labour and tribute- collection practices on the Indigenous populations of the American territories. The judges of the Viceroyalty’s highest court, the Audiencia, interviewed witnesses in Mexico City in response to two royal orders that were sent to New Spain in October 1595 requesting information about the encomienda and its succession patterns.189 As this chapter has demonstrated, conqueror status, political authority, and land-owning and encomienda-wielding power were intimately linked. The cabildo of Mexico City, stacked with conquistador and Hispano-creole class magistrates, took this request as an opportunity to make a strong argument for the perpetuation “without limit or restriction of lives [of] the mercedes and encomiendas of the said indios” held by the descendants of conquistadors and first settlers.190 Cabildo official, Juan de Arbear, argued for the “benefit” of making the labour component of the encomienda, the repartimiento, “perpetual,” thereby asserting that the institution continue to exist indefinitely to reward and sustain conquistadors and their descendants.191 The cabildo created a questionnaire and chose the witnesses; the 1595 royal orders had specified only that “a very private relación with [the Audiencia’s] judgement (parecer)” be sent to Spain.192

The Audiencia sent four “notebooks” to the Council of the Indies, which contained cabildo official statements, multiple colonial petitions, copies of the royal orders, the questionnaire, witness testimonies, and lists and accounting of encomiendas, encomenderos, and their respective tributaries. It was received, all one hundred and thirty folios, in Madrid on 28 June 1599.193 In the judgment of the Audiencia, written by peninsular intellectual Fernando de

189 Epistolario de Nueva España, 6-7. These orders are dated 11 October 1595 from Canpillo, Spain and 28 October 1595 from El Pardo Palace, Spain. 190 Parecer of Baltasar Mejía Salmerón, alguacil mayor of Mexico City, and Jerónimo López, vecino and regidor, in name of the cabildo and regimiento (majority) of Mexico City, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 5. 191 Parecer of Joan de Arbear, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 3. 192 Cédula 11 October 1595, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 6-7. 193 This material – “the interrogatorio of questions, argument (alegación), and memorial of notes” of the petition – is published in four sections numbered 745, 746, 747, and 748 in Epistolario de Nueva España, 3-165. Quote from parecer of Baltasar Mejía Salmerón, alguacil mayor of Mexico City, and Jerónimo López, vecino and regidor, in name of the cabildo and regimiento (majority) of Mexico City, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 6.

Villegas, it is stated that the “legitimate descendants of the said conquistadors and settlers and their successors [are] dispossessed of the rewards (gajes) and mercedes” recognized by Carlos V; De Villegas called the descendants of the conquistador class “the poorest and most needy people in the kingdom,” and asked that the Crown “commiserate” with them and provide them “mercy” with its “generous hand,” recalling the language of distributive justice.194 The conquest of New Spain had been at the conquistadors’ “cost and honour, spilling their blood, and [by] delivering [New Spain] to the King and señor natural [they proved to be] loyal vassals,” De Villegas wrote.195 It seemed to be an unusual implementation “of natural and positive law that the nephew or son of the conquistador that represents [the latter’s] person and services by right of blood would be dispossessed,” he remarked.196 This suggests that conquistador-Hispano-creole power was understood as the past, present, and future of the colony from the perspective of its creole and peninsular representatives—the efforts of the early conquest period to naturalize conquering class power through descendent privilege had succeeded.

In a pointed and exhaustive section, De Villegas provided the Crown with a breakdown of all that the conquerors accomplished in the conquest of New Spain. I quote it here at length to showcase the author’s polemical style and to highlight elite beliefs about themselves as heirs to conquest. He wrote that the famous and great services and deeds in war made by the conquistador

..to discover, conquer, vanquish and win this empire and new world, [involved] suffering…such excessive tasks and dangers of hunger, thirst, fatigue and wounds, deaths and bloodshed, freeing the naturales from the power of the devil, eliminating idolatry and human blood sacrifice in which criaturas were killed with such rigour and cruelty, a thing never seen, read nor heard in people

194 Parecer of Fernando de Villegas, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 11. On the concept of distributive justice, see Nino Vallen, “’What Distributive Justice Requires:’ Negotiating Empire and Local Orders in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century New Spain,” Revista de Indias 80, no. 278 (2020): 101-129. Brendecke writes that distributive justice was “not merely a way of legitimating inequality in estate-based societies but also an incentive to spur outstanding achievements.” Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 38-41. 195 Parecer of Fernando de Villegas, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 11. 196 Parecer of Fernando de Villegas, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 12.

today of the world, and the said conquerors planted the holy Catholic faith with the preaching of the Gospel, and today it is so entrenched among the naturales, and especially having offered the said kingdom after winning and putting it under the Royal Crown of Castile…[by] their will as good and obedient, faithful and loyal vassals…and such great expansion…of all your kingdoms and señoríos, all at [the conquistador’s] expense and honour without taking any salary or stipend [from] Your Majesty, and through the referred services, made in winning this kingdom, it has been [at such a] scale that Your Majesty connected those [territories] that he has and possesses in the Philippines, and the expenses of conquering the Philippines has been with the fruits and rents and exploitation of these kingdoms of New Spain…197

In this extended passage a judge of the highest judicial body in New Spain reminded the Crown of the local and wide-reaching consequences of the conquest of New Spain. He did so in order to persuade Madrid that the conquerors and their descendants were owed indefinitely and that their continued power and influence in the colony were legitimate and just. Therefore, the Audiencia’s judgement acted as a memory aid and historical narrative that normalized the demands of the heirs. It summed up the testimonies of the witnesses, Mota y Escobar’s included, and added the weight of law and bureaucracy to their claims and descriptions. This writing also gives explicit shape to Tiffany Lethabo King’s “conquistador humanism” in its articulation of who the naturales were and how the conqueror transformed them by his supposed superior moral vision of the world, installed through the process of conquest. The described irrationality and cruelty of the pre-contact Indigenous person is juxtaposed with the sacrificial and rational nature of the conquistador, drawing a distinction or “limit” to what King referred to as the “ideal version of the human.”198

197 Parecer of Fernando de Villegas in Epistolario de Nueva España, 12. 198 King, The Black Shoals, 15-16.

While the judgement of the Audiencia was a crucial component of the petition from the perspective of the Crown, the individual testimonies provide insights into individual elite creole perceptions, illuminating their generation’s vision for the future of New Spain. Of the twenty-six total witnesses, all of them men, twelve were first-generation creoles of New Spain and thirteen were peninsulares; the average age of the witnesses was fifty-one, the youngest respondent was forty years old (Dominican friar Hernando Bazán), and the oldest was approximately seventy- four (Juan de Saavedra).199 The Audiencia interviewed Mota y Escobar in the Mexico City cathedral on 26 December 1597 in his capacity as deán.200 The other witnesses also held influential positions, such as bishop-elect of Guatemala (Hernando Ortiz Hinojosa), Archbishop of New Granada and apostolic inquisitor of New Spain (Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero), professor of the University of Mexico (Juan de Salcedo), chantre of the Mexico City cathedral (Alonso Larios de Bonilla), governor of the estate of Hernando Cortés (Martin de Santa Cruz), and royal scribe (Antonio de Contreras). Seven of the twenty-six were listed simply as vecinos of Mexico City.201

The cabildo questionnaire guided the proceedings and Antonio Maldonado, member of the Council of the Indies, and judge of the Audiencia, was present at the dispositions. A senior scribe, Hernando Jaramillo, transcribed the testimonies; they are filtered through Jaramillo’s pen but the voices of the various witnesses may be ascertained by the significant differences in their responses. The first questions asked the witness to provide basic information: if they knew and recognized the public magistrate (Licenciado Núñez de Morquecho, fiscal) facilitating the testimony; whether they had knowledge of the conquerors and first settlers of New Spain, their merits and services, their sons and descendants; the “encomiendas de indios” that existed and those that had been vacated, and the overall state of the succession of the institution.202 The other nine items were assertions and questions that the witness was prompted to confirm, deny, and/or provide additional comment.203 These items provide an illuminating glimpse into the agreed-upon

199 Epistolario de Nueva España, 57-165. Witness testimony begins at page 57. 200 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 55. 201 Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 51-95. 202 “Interrogatorio de la ciudad,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 48. 203 “Interrogatorio de la ciudad,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 48-52.

85 assumptions, arguments, and interests of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century elite Hispano-creole perspective:

2…the encomiendas that were distributed to conquerors has remained barely a quarter [of what they were after being] vacated and placed in the Royal Crown [over the course of 75 years] and…[there are not even twenty persons] in the second [line of succession] and [when they die] those who [are set to inherit] in the third [line will not give encomiendas to] their children but they are put in the Royal Crown.

3…[of] more than a million indios tributarios that were [entrusted during the time of Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza (1568- 1580)] only 400,000 [remain, at cost to the Crown] as a result of the regular cocolistlis [sic] and pestilence.

4…almost all the profit has been consumed [because the Indigenous people have declined in such great numbers] and Su Majestad has committed [to put them into] doctrinas…[but] it would be helpful to give the burden of these encomiendas to the children and grandchildren of the conquistadors in renumeration for the services of their parents and grandparents.

5…the descendants of the conquerors are poor and needy as they are lacking the encomiendas and the memory of the service of the conquerors to Your Majesty is lacking and reducing people to this treatment [will encourage] some to leave the kingdom to seek his life.

6…those who have come and attend to the service of Your Majesty on the occasion of [the presence of] enemies are the children and grandchildren of conquistadores especially those that have encomiendas and they are the best armed and they support your

need and the ending of the encomiendas has prevented them [from assisting].

7…great damage to the Royal Purse as well as to the public good follows from encomiendas being [vacant] without encomenderos and this damage is greater than the benefit that follows from being [appropriated by] the Royal Crown, because with the income the encomenderos were [making they were] supporting their brothers, mothers and relatives, etc.

8…many grants of empty encomiendas [are given] to newcomers who are not relatives of conquerors, leaving many grandchildren and descendants of conquerors poor.

9…the descendants of conquerors are noble people.204

In his testimony, at age fifty-two, Licenciado Mota y Escobar is noted by the scribe as confirming each item, testifying that encomienda grants were a “very necessary and useful thing” for the Kingdom.205 To satisfy the first assertion, he acknowledged that he was acquainted with the fiscal and knew “by sight” a great majority of the conquerors and early settlers; further, he had “news” of the merits and services that the conquerors had made for the Crown through the “printed histories.” 206 Mota y Escobar signalled his knowledge of the writings of conquerors, although it is not clear precisely which ones he meant.207 No writings of conquistadors were published in New Spain in the sixteenth century and the 1556 censorship law of Philip II prohibited the printing of books about the Indies without the Council of the Indies’ approval,

204 “Interrogatorio de la ciudad,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 49-52. The tenure of Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza of New Spain was 1568 to 1580. Assertion ten is omitted because it is answered throughout the preceding assertions; it read: “Item…all the aforementioned is public and well-known [in] public voice and fame.” 205 Testimony of Alonso Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71. 206 Testimony of Alonso Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 63. 207 See Magdalena Chocano Mena, “Colonial Printing and Metropolitan Books: Printed Texts and the Shaping of Scholarly Culture in New Spain, 1539-1700,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 69-90 and Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI; primera parte : catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 a 1600 con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones, precedido de una noticia acerca de la introducción de la imprenta en México (Mexico: Librería de Andrade y Morales, Sucesores, 1886).

87 limiting the colony-metropole exchange.208 It seems probable that he would have known the letters of Cortés, published in Spain between 1522 and 1523, and Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias, la conquista de Mexico, published in the early 1550s.209 These ethnographic, millenarian, and polemic writings, formed an early core of New World descriptions and testimonies that influenced those writers that followed. Many of the tropes that Cortés and López de Gómara utilized in their depictions of New Spain and the New World can be seen in Mota y Escobar’s later ethnographic writings.210 He was a witness to and student of the lives of these men and was well informed of what he believed to be the Empire’s debt owed to the early conquistadors, which would have given him an air of confidence and authority as he went on to argue on behalf of his class.

Mota y Escobar asserted that encomiendas were given in “compensation” for the services of conquest and he acknowledged that while he had “encomendero brothers and nephews and cousins[,] sons and grandsons of conquistadores,” these facts would not stop him from telling the truth of what he knew.211 Another creole witness, archdeacon of the Mexico City cathedral and future bishop of Oaxaca, Juan de Cervantes, similarly disclosed his relationship to the conquistador class, testifying that he was the nephew of Leonel de Cervantes, “first conqueror of this New Spain,” the son of Juan de Cervantes “conqueror of the province of Pánuco…and first settler in this said city of Mexico,” and the brother of Leonel de Cervantes, who “today possesses an encomienda of pueblos de indios.”212 The “truth” of what these parties knew, in their

208 J. M. de Bujanda, “Literary Censorship in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association Study Sessions 38 (1971): 55-56. 209 Iberian Books: Books Published in Spanish Or Portuguese Or on the Iberian Peninsula Before 1601, ed. Alexander S. Wilkinson (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), 152, 453. 210 The poetry and writings of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar and Juan de Cárdenas were both published in sixteenth-century Mexico City. They are not explicitly narratives of conquest but Mota y Escobar may have had access to them as well. Cervantes de Salazar’s Diálogos and Túmulo Imperial de la gran ciudad de México were published in Mexico City in 1554 and 1560 respectively. Juan de Cárdenas’ Primera parte de los problemas, y secretos marauillosos de las Indias was published in Mexico City in 1591. García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, 47, 97-98, 329 and Dictionary of Mexican Literature, ed. Eladio Cortés (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 169. 211 Testimony of Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 63. 212 Testimony of Juan de Cervantes, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 73. Mota y Escobar consecrated De Cervantes as bishop of Oaxaca in May 1609.

88 influential colonial posts, backed up by Old World expectations of medieval contractual obligations, bolstered claims of legitimacy precisely because of their self-interest.

In replying to assertion three, which emphasized the ‘natural’ decline of New Spain’s Indigenous populations, Mota y Escobar asserted that there had been a “great number” of Indigenous tributaries in New Spain during the tenure of Viceroy Enríquez, and although the latter had “prepared for this sickness with great strength” the Indigenous people continued to die steadily for more than twenty years. In the future, Mota y Escobar testified, “there will always be fewer [Indigenous people] as a result of continual sickness and cocolistli pestilence [that] never ends amongst these naturales.”213 The inclusion of this point in the list of assertions signalled the Mexico City cabildo’s comprehension of one of the perennial critiques of the encomienda as an institution: it facilitated and quickened the death of the Crown’s Indigenous subjects. Here the cabildo and its chosen witnesses countered this point by attributing Indigenous death to natural causes and arguing that the collapse of the population was inevitable and could not be stopped. Peninsular Dominican friar Hernando Bazán was more direct: the “indios naturales are people so fragile and miserable…for lack of understanding and reason they allow themselves to be consumed and finished.”214 This implied the natural weakness of Indigenous constitutions and bodies, a constant refrain of the entire colonial period.

Mota y Escobar’s ominous prediction sought to encourage the reader to forego concern because the “continual sickness” would eventually take the entire population. It also implicitly asserted that illness and disease were solely responsible for the death of the Indigenous peoples and that the colonial government had worked very hard to prevent their mortality, as the Crown had consistently urged. However, one creole witness, the first Bishop of Cebú (Philippines) Augustinian friar Pedro de Agurto, provided an additional explanation for the widespread death of the Indigenous peoples. The “vexations and mistreatments” faced by the Indigenous people in their “personal service” in “mines and farms,” has also caused and continues to “cause” the population to be “consumed and finished.” If “God does not remedy it” within a “short time” the

213 Testimony of Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 69-70. 214 Testimony of Hernando Bazán, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 84.

Indigenous people will be “finished,” he testified.215 De Agurto went on to argue however, that if the descendants of conquerors lose their encomiendas, they would also lose “the nobility and reputation (fama) of their parents and ancestors that won this kingdom of New Spain.”216 The problem of the encomienda then was not its existence but rather those bad encomenderos who mistreated the Crown’s most vulnerable subjects. In his invocation of God in his reply, De Agurto shifted responsibility away from the Crown, thus providing another angle to the argument of the inevitable and predestined fate of the Indigenous peoples: it was God’s will.

Outside their argument that the encomienda in New Spain was a just reward for conquest, these men also positioned the institution as an aid to and tool for the broader colonization of New Spain. On this point, King writes that it “is important to note that the defining and distinguishing aspect of the colonization of the Americas and other settler states is genocide, not settlement or settlers.”217 M. Bianet Castellanos writes that the “logics of dispossession and elimination, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects.”218 In their testimonies in reference to assertion three in particular, the indifference to the widespread death of Indigenous peoples is clear. The encomienda stripped wealth from reordered Indigenous communities (reducciones), often required daily, sometimes long distance, travel, upended pre-contact social and kinship structures, and involved violence and bad labour conditions. The construction of the “indio” vis- à-vis the encomienda led to further structural exploitation and oppression throughout the colonial era. By calling out to God and asserting that the Indigenous peoples ‘allowed’ themselves to be “consumed,” this structural marginalization committed by Europeans and their descendants against Indigenous peoples through conquest was elided and Indigenous death naturalized.

The cabildo also recognized the Crown’s limited resources in assisting the descendants of conquistadors and used this to articulate the reciprocal nature of the encomienda. Assertion four

215 Testimony of Pedro de Agurto, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 58-59. 216 Testimony of Pedro de Agurto, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 60. 217 King, The Black Shoals, 57. 218 M. Bianet Castellanos, “Settler Colonialism in Latin America,” American Quarterly 69, no. 4 (December 2017): 778. For further discussion on Latin America as a “settler state,” see Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (April 2007): 269-289.

90 recommended that shifting the burden of Catholic indoctrination from Crown to encomendero would be “useful.” In reply, Mota y Escobar argued that if the encomiendas were permitted to be passed on in perpetuity, then the children and grandchildren of the conquerors could take on the burden of providing for the evangelization and protection of the declining number of Indigenous tributaries: “it would be useful to respect [this, so that descendants] do not resort to [asking] Your Majesty” for the funds to convert and protect Indigenous people.219 For Mota y Escobar, the descendants of conquerors were the critical population for the defense of both the Catholic colonial and the imperial project.

It seems incongruous that Mota y Escobar argued for natural and inevitable Indigenous decline on the one hand and asserted the encomendero’s desire to physically protect and spiritually nourish Indigenous tributaries on the other. His cousin, creole Diego de Santa Cruz de Orduña, “citizen of this said city,” provides a clue to the logic of this argument in his own testimony. According to Santa Cruz de Orduña, the “naturales would be conserved and augmented in their health and life by the good treatment…of the children of the conquerors…those born and raised in this land…[who] would defend and protect them [as the descendants] naturally love them.”220 Beyond implicitly positing that the descendant conquistador class would be better encomenderos than their forebearers or peninsulares, Santa Cruz de Orduña asserted that it was in the former’s nature to love and protect the Crown’s Indigenous subjects because of their birthplace in the New World. Connection by birth to the land itself naturalized creole affective feelings of paternal love and care towards Indigenous people. Juan de Cervantes echoed this belief when he testified that the “royal conscience” regarding the doctrina (evangelization) would be “discharged” if those “born in this said land” carried out “almost all of the administration of all this land” and had it in their “charge.”221

According to this line of reasoning, it was natural that descendants would protect the Indigenous subjects of the Crown and “imitate” their ancestors in defending the Crown’s colonial

219 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 70. 220 Testimony of Diego de Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 77, 82. 221 Testimony of Juan de Cervantes, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 77.

91 patrimony.222 The “sons and grandsons of conquistadors of this land behave in the style of noble people and viceroys and they govern communally, helping with all the things [necessary for] the defense and service” of the Kingdom, Mota y Escobar testified. He warned that, if the encomienda was not conserved, “the zeal that they have always had and currently have to conserve it…will shift…”223 This assertion of a colonial goal rooted naturally in birth and the familial inheritance of the duties of conquest was striking in its articulation of creole consciousness and creole desire and capacity to “govern communally.” It was both an announcement of group loyalty to the Crown and empire and a compelling declaration of growing Hispanic-descended but American-born strength and power. Already, in the first century of contact in New Spain, these men expressed the nascent sense of white creole entitlement and grievance that would threaten Crown allegiance in the long run. If the encomiendas were “perpetuated,” Juan de Cervantes asserted, “the descendants would be better employed in the service of Your Majesty and would have [the ability] to continue the services of their fathers and ancestors.”224 The descendants were also conquistadores, these witnesses urged, if provided with the same tools, resources, and privileges as their ancestors.

If these arguments caused concern for Crown officials, such fear of the collective and “communal” power of creoles would have been warranted. It must have been obvious that this military preparation and willingness to defend the Empire could easily be turned against imperial authority. In his response to question six, which reminded the Crown that the descendants were the most “stimulated” to support imperial defense, Mota y Escobar remarked: only “the sons and grandsons” of conquerors “use and profess to have arms and horses in their houses” and “train regularly” with them, which was “a necessity” with items of war—“the rest of the people only deal with their contracts and goods, which fits badly with military concerns.”225 Juan de Cervantes provided a concrete example in his testimony: the descendants of conquistadors confronted the entradas of the English at the port of San Juan de Ulua, the port of Panuco, and

222 Testimony of Diego de Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 81. 223 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71. 224 Testimony of Juan de Cervantes, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 76. 225 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71.

Acapulco, and fought them off “with neither request nor payment from the Royal Treasury.”226 Santa Cruz de Orduña agreed: the descendants show great “affection” and “obligation” to their King and Lord and do not “forsake” the colony like “people of negotiation and commerce” who simply return to Castilla with their profits.227 Descendants were a martial class of dedicated, prepared, experienced, generous, and ambitious colonial agents; they were not overly concerned with their ‘personal’ businesses but had imperial goals and preoccupations.

In their argument to extend the encomienda indefinitely, the Mexico City cabildo, the Audiencia of New Spain, and the elite class asserted the justness of the Crown’s perpetual gratitude and effectively demanded that Indigenous people be sacrificed as the payment owed for the debt. These Indigenous people should provide funding and labour to the descendants of conquistadores “in perpetuity,” as the grants were necessary to “satisfy and pay” for the “services of conquest” and the continued defense of the Empire, Mota y Escobar testified.228 By conserving the encomienda, he argued, the Crown would give the families and descendants of conquistadores what they needed to “sustain themselves” and the Kingdom. He argued that the conservation of this entitlement was directly related to the conservation of the colony itself, which, he testified “was of equal interest to the Crown.”229 Conquistadors had won the Kingdom with their “generosity” and “loyalty” and they had “conquered and placed it [within] the Crown of Castile.”230 They had, argued Mota y Escobar, risked their personal reputations and honor for the Crown’s imperial ambitions. Without the encomienda “in infinitum,” like the “succession of the mayorazgos of Castilla,” descendants would become dependant on the Crown, their honour diminished by a lack of self-sufficiency, and their conquest of land and souls taken for granted.231

While the constant reiteration of these same points likely made a strong impression on the Crown, the hints of “communal” discontent, dissatisfaction, and resentment likely had a greater

226 Testimony of Juan de Cervantes, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 75. 227 Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 80. 228 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 70. 229 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71. 230 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71. 231 Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 82. The notary recorded Santa Cruz de Orduña using the phrase “in infinitum” in response to question eight of the questionnaire.

93 effect. Question eight of the cabildo’s questionnaire asserted that “newcomers” were being granted “mercedes of tribute” while the descendants were poor. To be “dispossessed and robbed” of encomienda, Mota y Escobar responded, would “engender profound pain in the soul” and constitute a “just complaint” against the metropole: these emotions were “impossible to stop” unless the Crown stopped “abandoning them.”232 This “is a thing of great worth and necessity,” Mota y Escobar argued, and “Your Majesty is given to understand it with sincere [and good faith] truth.”233 Mota y Escobar’s cousin agreed: the dispossession of the descendants caused a “pain and feeling,” hurting “all who see it”; if the “laudable name and memory” of the conquistadors is not preserved by this institution’s continuation this kingdom will “fall” with “great ruin,” he prophesized.234 In other words, if the Crown lost the loyalty of the descendants by a lack of attention and concern for their needs, the Hispanic Empire in the Americas would collapse. The Empire itself was built on trust and accommodation between Crown and conquering families and these remarks from creole conquistador-descendants tell us that they believed, or at least wanted the Crown to believe, that the power to maintain Hispanic authority and sovereignty actually resided in their class alone. The Empire existed because the creoles enabled and permitted it.

Mota y Escobar’s interview, like those of the other creole witnesses, clearly articulates the material and emotional investment in creole power shared by the elite of New Spain, no matter their lay or ecclesiastical status. In the end the Crown did not legislate a perpetual encomienda based on this late sixteenth-century petition, but it did extend the “lives” of particular encomiendas on an individual basis, as it had done for decades. This petition, while making veiled threats and explicit prophecies, and having the support of New Spain’s highest judicial body, did not persuade the Crown of the necessity of the expansion of the encomienda. As I outlined in an earlier section of this chapter, elite creole descendants, like the family of Mota y Escobar, continued to accumulate wealth and power despite the eventual loss of their encomiendas. But the anxiety they had about their potential loss of status and affluence and corresponding loss of authority and power, persisted.

232 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71-72. 233 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 72. 234 Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 78, 82.

This chapter examined the construction of novohispano conquistador status and power through the system of mercedes, and the efforts and arguments of creoles to secure perpetual claims to that status and power in order to naturalize their class’ domination into the future. In introducing the figure of elite creole descendant, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, and his extended family, this chapter has argued that the concept of merced initiated the sixteenth-century structural development of the colony, which laid the groundwork for conquistador descendant accumulation of privilege and power. Alongside the broader imperial entitlement to hold slaves, the elite descendants expected that the contract made between their ancestors and the Crown, through the merced of encomienda specifically, would enable the creation of a political reality of continuing conquistador power as represented by their class.

Mota y Escobar was a highly educated creole priest of considerable mobility and resources, studying and serving in the elite institutions of both the Americas and the Spanish kingdoms. His relationship to the landscapes and systems of New Spain was mediated through his ancestor’s brutal military success, the apportioning of Indigenous peoples, and a claim to a birthright of perpetual entitlements based on his own rootedness as a creole son, born at the site of conquest. The importance of the experience of a figure like Mota y Escobar, whose own words reveal his sense of the debt that the metropole owed to his class, resides in his illumination of an early creole awareness arising in defense of conquest entitlements. Mota y Escobar’s broad and normalized ties to influence and authority in the colony were the result of the inter-generational institutionalization of conqueror status and the inheritance of conquistador power. However, the Crown’s rejection of perpetual encomienda was viewed as a threat to the future of elite creole entitlement and provoked an anxiety about continued class dominance in New Spain. By examining the early seventeenth-century writings of Mota y Escobar, the rest of this dissertation will excavate and uncover the strategies and modalities, discourses and practices, that he activated in his attempt to assert his status as a conquering creole, shedding light on an extraordinary but also, as this chapter has demonstrated, a representative figure of his time.

Chapter 2 A “Lie of the Indies”: Place and Wonder in Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, Bishop of Guadalajara, Mota y Escobar, travelled to the community of Tecpatitlán, northeast of the episcopal capital, as part of a knowledge collection project he was commissioned to complete involving the large northern frontier diocese and kingdoms of Nueva Galicia (see figure 6), Nueva Vizcaya, and Nueva León.1 Of this community, he wrote that the Indigenous people raised three different types of deer. The reader learned that they would remove the rennet from the stomachs of young fallow deer (gamitos) and sell it to españoles living on nearby estates to make cheeses. “I don’t dare put down the [number of rennet units sold] here, because [the readers] in Castile could designate my speech a lie of the Indies, but I say that it is a great quantity…,” he remarked.2

In this subtle but illuminating comment, the Bishop gestured to the ambivalence of his own position as a privileged and powerful, yet creole and colonially situated, imperial intermediary. Whatever he claimed to witness in the colonies faced the likelihood of incredulity and incomprehensibility in the metropole, requiring him to act as a translator with a foot in both worlds. Yet too much of an effort to translate New World wonders into metropolitan certainties risked falling into the chasm of epistemological difference between colony and metropole, provoking the same incredulity and distrust. Either way, his concerns that any quantification of this spectacular rennet collection might be dismissed as a “lie of the Indies” highlights his anxiety about the tenuousness of metropolitan trust in him and his awareness of the potentially serious consequences of disjunctures between imperial expectations and colonial results. In his refusal to provide a quantitative answer to a question of colonial assimilation and exchange, the

1 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 55-56. Mota y Escobar was elected bishop of the diocese in 1597 and left the position in 1607-1608. The diocese of Guadalajara was part of Nueva Galicia, which was a composite part of the Kingdom of New Spain. The provinces (kingdoms) of Nueva Vizcaya (approximately modern states of Chihuahua and Durango), Nueva Galicia (approximately modern states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Zacatecas), and Nueva León (approximately modern states of Nueva León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Texas) were administrative territories or kingdoms of New Spain. The Audiencia of Nueva Galicia was established at Guadalajara in 1548 and had jurisdiction over the city and diocese of Guadalajara. See Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993) and Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia. 2 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 55-56. My italics.

95 96

Bishop’s writing passed from useful imperial data to a qualitative colonial promise that sought to remind his audience in Castile of their absolute reliance on him as an information agent, a novohispano creole bishop. Yet in this instance and others, his writings failed to arouse the Crown’s trust in him as a reliable creole translator and to get his audience in Spain to share his sense of wonder about this world that he, as a conquistador descendant, had inherited.

This chapter examines Bishop Mota y Escobar’s approach to and completion of the 1604 joint Crown-Council of the Indies knowledge collection project, which was to be guided by a questionnaire with three hundred and fifty-five items of inquiry. The genesis of this project can be traced to the early sixteenth century, and its stated purpose was to collect geographic, administrative, ethnographic, and historical information about the Hispanic American territories for their greater comprehension (and use) in the metropole. This writing, like Columbus’s fifteenth-century letters, Ramon Pané’s 1498 account of the Indigenous people of Hispaniola, or Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s sixteenth-century chronicle of the military conquest of Aztec-Mexica Tenochtitlan, required cultural translation for European intelligibility.3 The mediator of this translation negotiated the line between foreign and familiar according to the context of and expectations for the writing and their own self-interest. Theorizing about the rhetoric of the marvelous, imaginative, and wondrous in the early modern world, Stephen Greenblatt asks: “What function of the imagination can erect absolute difference at the point of deepest resemblance?” His answer is “wonder,” as it “effects the crucial break with an other that can only be described, only witnessed, in the language and images of sameness.”4 In other words, the

3 Rolena Adorno outlines and examines Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s struggle with being taken seriously as an independent eyewitness to and therefore an authority on the military conquest of the Mexica-Aztec. He feared that his readers would take his accounts as fiction because they seemed like tales in a novel of chivalry. Further, he took issue with the way the “official” historians and writers of the realm (Francisco López de Gómara, Gonzalo de Illescas, and Las Casas) had appropriated and rewritten his work and he wrote that he was “an idiot without letters.” Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ed. Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María (Madrid, 1982) chapter 151, 384 and chapter 212, 658, quoted and cited in “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 49:2 (1992): 210, 212, 218-219. For a discussion of the late medieval and early modern European practice of cultural comparison and translation across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, see Andrea Bachner, “Cannibal Translations: Cultural Identity and Alterity in Early Modern China and Latin America,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 146-174. 4 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 1991), 134-135. Covadonga Lamar Prieto asks a similar question and presents a similar answer: “How can the author convey to us that breath of unreality that imbues all his daily acts? Through the insertion of fictional elements. That is, the author represents his life and his self-consciousness through reality, but also fantasy.” Further, she remarks, “It is enough to read a passage randomly by Bernal or a fragment of Cabeza de Vaca and we will

97 power of the marvellous can be harnessed by explaining difference through a language of affinity. This chapter relies on Greenblatt’s theorization of wonder to explore the Bishop’s seventeenth-century colonial reporting as cultural translations that deployed wonder in an effort to effect influence and authority.

Figure 6: Anonymously hand-drawn map of Nueva Galicia, 1550 This map shows the Pacific coast of Nueva Galicia and is oriented West-East, rather than North-South. It shows Guadalajara in the centre right using a grid image. In the left top corner, multiple groups of Indigenous peoples of the region are depicted. These groups were homogenized and derogatively called chichimecas, a Nahuatl word adopted and loosely translated as barbarians by Spaniards. The Chichimeca War between Spanish colonizers and multiple Indigenous groups occurred between 1550 and 1590.5 Source: AGI, MP-Mexico, 560.

understand that the limits between tangible and evanescent are not defined.” “Narrativa novohispana del XVI: un intento de clasificación,” in Edad de oro cantabrigense: actas del VII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas del Siglo de Oro (Vigo: AISO; Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2006): 386. 5 For more information on this collectivizing term and the groups it may have included, see Charlotte M. Gradie, “Discovering the Chichimecas,” Academy of American Franciscan History 51, no. 1 (July 1994): 68. Frances Kartunnen offers a definition of the term chichimeca as “a person from one of the indigenous groups of northern Mexico considered barbarians by Nahuatl speakers...This has both a negative ‘barbarous’ sense and a positive ‘noble

As a representation of New Spain’s diocese of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia, Mota y Escobar’s construction of the Descripción geográfica manuscript was, for him, an exercise in balance. He had to prove his own authority and preserve his requisite status as a local colonial agent and keen eyewitness but he also had to provide useful, comprehensible information about the colony to the metropole.6 His strategy was to resist official instructions and direct his own reporting methodology, arguing that his way was the most logical for the context. In order to counter any criticism of insubordination, he couched his vision in the language of mortal enchantment. This enchantment or wonder was useful for him insofar as it permitted him to provide an interpretation of novohispano wonders; and, yet, he understood that the emotional response to the wonderous could not be fully controlled. Thus, he deployed wonder by emphasizing its instability and its sacred status. This strategy could also deflect metropolitan suspicion of his claims and avoid censure regarding his performance of the task, which was, in effect, a contingent cultural translation. However, what emerged from his witnessing of and writing about the diocese was neither comprehensible nor useful within the bounds of the Crown/Council directive because his work represented a wholly new knowledge that was meant, ultimately, to satisfy his own ends as a conqueror seeking to negotiate his own relationship with a world that he saw as his inheritance. Further, he approached the project with a view to naturalize his own claims to a perpetual right to rule. These goals were not shared in the metropole.

Mota y Escobar culturally translated himself as a person apart from and deeply enthralled by New Spain, and his assertion of a subjectivity that was based on a self-recognition in, and an estrangement from, the New World and its Indigenous peoples seems to have been ignored in Madrid. The directions of the metropole to quantify the colony purposefully elided the agent’s ability to be seen in his completion of the task; Mota y Escobar sought to demonstrate his crucial location as a decoder of the colony, a goal that could not be approached using the official

savage’ sense…It is possibly derivationally related to chichi, ‘to suckle’.” An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 48. 6 Ralph Bauer presents an adjacent argument in his investigation of Chilean creole Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán’s 1672 Cautiverio feliz y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del Reino de Chile. “Imperial History, Captivity, and Creole Identity in Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán’s Cautiverio feliz,” Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 59-82.

99 directives. He argued that he was more than a conduit for the passage of power and information: he was the nexus to imperial understanding of the novohispano context.

If we return to early seventeenth-century Tecpatitlán, we see that, simultaneous to the Bishop’s goal of establishing Crown familiarity with and dependence on figures like himself, the task also revealed his anxiety. He probably understood that, in withholding the practical data the Crown desired, he might provoke a metropolitan reaction, not of wonder, but anger, incomprehensibility, and fear. If we look a bit more closely at the meaning of the Bishop’s phrase “lie of the Indies,” we can contextualize its meaning within seventeenth-century religious and educated parlance. In his 1611 Castilian-language dictionary, Covarrubias wrote that to lie, mentir, was not only to tell a falsehood, but to do so maliciously, spitefully, or mischievously (maliciosamente); for a person to be maliciosa, they had to act out of malicia, malice, which he tells us is the quality of having bad intentions.7 To lie was to act out of self-interest, and its relationship to telling or writing, in this case, was central to Mota y Escobar’s situation. He had to walk a fine line between wonder as illumination and wonder as threatening, sinister, and deceptive.

The phrase “lie of the Indies” recalls the many instances of painful New World deception and insubordination: Columbus’s exaggeration of the wealth of the Indias Occidentales, Cortés’ usurpation of Crown power and authority, the Avila brothers’ treachery, and Bartolomé de las Casas’ writings that claimed to expose conquistador (and analogously, Spanish) cruelty.8 In his writing then, while the Bishop sought to convince the Crown of his distinct and essential position as a colonial agent by invoking wonder as illumination, he had to balance this goal with overtures to metropolitan loyalty—he had to bring what was local and exciting inside the colony, to a credulous but wary audience outside the colony, without eliding or overstating the significance of the colonial perspective. Mota y Escobar had good reason to believe that he might

7 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1272, 1228. Thanks to Lucas Campo Vernay and Adleen Crapo for their help with translation. In his 1604 treatise Historia eclesiástica Indiana, Jerónimo de Mendieta wrote that in Mexica-Aztec lore the ‘first man’ did not have anything but his armpits and above, which was “fiction and lie.” Jerónimo de Mendieta, “Capitulo IV,” in Historia eclesiástica Indiana, ed. Francisco Solano y Pérez-Lila (Madrid: Atlas, 1973), 1, paragraph 25. 8 See Shirley Cushing Flint, “Treason or Travesty: The Martín Cortés Conspiracy Reexamined,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 23-44 and see Juan Suárez de Peralta’s contemporary account: La conjuració n de Martín Corté s y otros temas, ed. Agustín Yáñez (México: Universidad Nacional Autó noma, 1994).

100 not be taken seriously as a chronicler of colonial information. Using the context of the Bishop’s phrase, we can imagine that he believed that by some combination of New World exaggeration, self-interest, and/or ignorance, the metropole might well suspect that falsehoods and lies emanated from their Atlantic colonies. Mota y Escobar understood that his audience might view him as a person representing a fabricated vision because his subjective location limited and (over)determined his range of observation. Such representatives of the colonies were not always trusted as faithful or useful conduits of imperial knowledge.

In section one, I explore the official expectations regarding the collection of information using the 1604 Council of the Indies’ interrogatorio (questionnaire) and Mota y Escobar’s unsolicited and resistant response to them. Section two looks at medieval and early modern understandings and scholarly interpretations of the marvellous and wondrous, and outlines the Bishop’s approach to wonder as a strategy and tool, illuminating his recognition of it as a useful “function of the imagination.”9 Section three departs from the theoretical and methodological goals and intentions of Mota y Escobar and looks at the anecdotal results of his work, which demonstrate the gap between the Bishop’s intentions and the consequent representational productions in Spain. This chapter reveals and examines Mota y Escobar’s strategies for presenting himself as a trustworthy purveyor of colonial knowledge in order to compensate for his own anxiety about metropolitan suspicion and doubt about his location as a son “of the Indies”.

Interrogatorios and Relaciones: Collecting and Writing American Knowledge

In a real cédula dated 11 March 1530, the Castilian Crown requested that the judicial authorities of Hispaniola collect information on “all the qualities and things of th[e] island…[in] a brief and true relación.”10 This was the first official instance of what would become a conventional

9 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 134. 10 Document 1, Madrid, 11 March 1530, “Real Cedula a la Audiencia de la Española…,” in Cuestionarios para la formació n de las relaciones geográ ficas de Indias: siglos XVI/XIX, eds. Francisco de Solano and Pilar Ponce (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centro de Estudios Históricos, Departamento de Historia de América, 1988), 3. Hispaniola was the name applied by Columbus to the island shared by the modern nation- states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was called Quisqueya or Bohio by the Taíno people who lived there prior to the arrival of Columbus. It is the site of the first Indigenous genocide in the Hispanic Americas. See Russell Schimmer, “Hispaniola,” Yale University Genocide Studies Program, accessed February 16, 2021, https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/colonial-genocides-project/hispaniola.

101 imperial knowledge-collecting practice in the Hispanic Atlantic World. Greater institutionalization of the process occurred during the reign of Felipe II when the Council of the Indies, under President Juan de Ovando, undertook as one of its main goals the standardized collection and archiving of New World knowledge through the use of a questionnaire. In the July 1573 “Rules for the formation of a book of the descriptions of the Indies,” the Council of the Indies, ordered the colonies to “make inquiries, descriptions and accounts of all the state of the Indies and of each thing and part of it…for the good governance of the State of the Indies.”11

The “Rules” document blended methodological procedure with directions on specific areas of focus. In Pilar Ponce Leiva’s analysis of this document, she writes that of the one hundred and thirty-five “chapters,” only twenty-seven items are questions, while one hundred and eight items are dedicated to an enumeration of destinations and the system that ought to be followed in the reporting of responses.12 The twenty-seven questions were designed to facilitate a better metropolitan understanding of and ability to govern the Indies.13 This project, which envisioned the creation of reference books, was never completed but the motivation at the crux of the undertaking, to collect knowledge on the Indies, resulted in the creation of many reports under various names: descripciones geográficas, descripciones de la tierra, relaciones topográficas—a broad corpus that was holistically termed the relaciones geográficas in the nineteenth century.14 One editor and compiler of this corpus, René Acuña, wrote that these reports, the majority of which were written during the final third of the sixteenth century, constituted “a gigantic effort of the Spanish Administration [to direct] the discovery and inventorying of their possessions, goods and tributary sources, on this vast [American] continent.”15

In 1577 the King sent another cédula to the colonies for distribution to the various provinces and cities of the viceroyalties. He remarked that the Council of the Indies had asked the Crown

11 Document 7, El Escorial, 3 July 1573, “Ordenanzas para la formación del libro de las descripciones de Indias,” in Cuestionarios, 16-17. 12 Pilar Ponce Leiva, “Los cuestionarios oficiales ¿Un sistema de control de espacio?,” in Cuestionarios, lxxxi, xxxiv. 13 Document 7, “Ordenanzas,” in Cuestionarios, 16-17. 14 Francisco de Solano, “Significación y tipología de los cuestionarios de Indias,” in Cuestionarios, xvii. 15 René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Tlaxcala (México: UNAM, 1984), 9.

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“many times” to make an order for information collection, and he obliged, mandating that a gathering be undertaken as “it seemed to be a very convenient thing to order a general description…the most clear and true that is possible.”16 The Crown reiterated its desire that all responses be “brief and clear” multiple times and asked that agents should respond to each question “by their numbers.”17 In 1604 the President of the Council of the Indies, Pedro Fernández Ruiz de Castro (Count of Lemos), signed off on a revised and greatly expanded interrogatorio that contained three hundred and fifty-five queries (see figure 7).18 Its heading directed its readers and agents to “satisfy the following questions, having inquired in each pueblo, with accuracy and care.”19 This is very likely the questionnaire that Bishop Mota y Escobar was sent in his Council commission to make a descripción geográfica of his diocese of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia as it is the only one issued during Ruiz de Castro’s tenure as President and the undated manuscript is dedicated to him. It is also likely that Mota y Escobar had read the 1573 Council “Rules” and 1577 cédula described above, as these items would have been kept together in the city’s caja (safe or chest) and may have been included in the paperwork the Council provided him as a guiding precedent.

16 Document 9, San Lorenzo, 25 May 1577, “Cédula, instrucción y memoria para la formación de las relaciones y descripciones de los pueblos de Indias,” in Cuestionarios, 79-80. 17 Document 9, “Cédula, instrucción y memoria,” in Cuestionarios, 79-81. 18 BNE, Mss/3035, “Interrogatorio para todas las Ciudades, Villas y Lugares de Españoles y Pueblos de Naturales de las Indias Occidentales, Islas y Tierra Firme: al cual se ha satisfacer, conforme a las preguntas siguientes, habiendolas averiguado en casa pueblo con puntualidad y cuidado,” in Ordenanzas de la Hacienda Real, fs. 46-53 (images 52-59). Hereafter cited in text as BNE, “Interrogatorio para todas las Ciudades”. The royal cosmographer, Andrés García Céspedes, collaborated with the Conde de Lemos on this questionnaire and historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso suggested that Céspedes had reviewed all returns on the 1577 interrogatorio and sought to remedy “the defects in topical coverage.” The timing may have coincided with a major assimilationist removal of Indigenous towns into “civil congregations” between 1603 and 1605. Papeles de Nueva España, ed. Francisco del Paso y Troncoso (Madrid, 1905) 4:269. 19 Document 14, “Interrogatorio,” in Cuestionarios, 97.

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Figure 7: First page of Council of the Indies’ interrogatorio of 1604 Source: BNE, Mss/3035, “Interrogatorio para todas las Ciudades, Villas y Lugares de Españoles y Pueblos de Naturales de las Indias Occidentales, Islas y Tierra Firme: al cual se ha satisfacer, conforme a las preguntas siguientes, habiéndolas averiguado en casa pueblo con puntualidad y cuidado,” in Ordenanzas de la Hacienda Real, fs. 46r (image 52).

Cédulas and Council questionnaires in this vein continued to be issued for the entirety of the colonial period in the Spanish Americas. The evolving nature of the questionnaire form allowed the Council of the Indies to target specific areas of perceived ignorance, necessity, and interest. The geographical “curiosity” of the early years of colonization was running out and the need for information was tailored to facilitate “an improvement in government and greater use of [the colony’s] resources, ” Pedro Pérez Herrero has written of the extended 1604 questionnaire.20 Similarly, Silvia Vilar has examined the questionnaire and compared it to earlier versions, arguing that the updated length and format of this version was an effort to elicit concise,

20 Pedro Pérez Herrero, “Los cuestionarios y la política economía,” in Cuestionarios, lvii.

104 numerical, and quantitative answers.21 The 1573 and 1577 versions appeared in short paragraph form and often did not use such interrogatives but stated a premise using “if,” or stated an item without any questioning language at all. For example, number sixteen in the 1577 version reads: “In all the pueblos de españoles and de indios give the [location] where they are populated, if it is mountainous or a valley, or bare land and flat, and the name of the land, or valley and nearby [landmarks]...”22 By contrast, the 1604 questions were short and to the point using the interrogatives “what” and “how many.” María M. Portuondo has noted that the new questions only “halfheartedly” requested geographical information, focusing instead on economic, communications, and demographic themes.23 There was no interest in the region’s history or Indigenous inhabitants and when the queries were related to natural history, they pertained to the potential for extractive use of the region’s resources.24

The 1604 questionnaire breaks up each paragraph of the previous versions into its composite parts, suggesting that the Council wanted greater attention and precision given to each individual aspect. If the 1577 questionnaire asked its agents for information in a more thematic organization, like that of geographic location as illustrated above, the 1604 questionnaire has more than forty separate questions related to each pueblo’s geographic traits in one section, which often mixed geographic inquiries with agricultural, commercial, and climatic information.25 For example, “What is the distance of the pueblo to the mountains[?] What kinds of trees are grown in them[?] What acorn or wild fruit is in the trees[?]”26 These questions sought to collect quantifiable information about “untapped sources of wealth” for administrative

21 Silvia Vilar, “La trajectoire des curiosités espagnoles sur les Indes: Trois siècles “d'interrogatorios” et “relaciones”,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 6 (1970): 258-267. 22 Document 9, “Cédula, instrucción y memoria,” in Cuestionarios, 83. 23 They did not request maps either. María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 292. 24 Portuondo, Secret Science, 293. 25 The 1604 questionnaire “simplified, split, and augmented” the 1577 schedule according to Howard F. Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1648,” in The Handbook of American Indians, ed. Howard F. Cline (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1972) 12:229. 26 It is typical of such documents not to use question marks. Document 14, 1604, “Interrogatorio,” in Cuestionarios, 102.

105 decision-making as the Crown was concerned mainly with increasing its revenue at this time.27 Portuondo writes that the 1604 questionnaire marked a “complete rupture” with the sixteenth- century “humanistic cosmographical heritage” of earlier Council knowledge collection efforts.28

In his approach to this huge task, taken up sometime between 1604 and 1608, Mota y Escobar clearly preferred the earlier style of collection. He often did not provide “brief” responses, nor did he answer each item in order “by their numbers,” nor did he simply respond to “what” and “how many”: his descripción was theorized, ordered according to his own desires, and written in narrative (anecdotal) form. It included a dedication proem that conceptualized and reflected on the task, followed by ten “preludes” to the body of the text. The official metropolitan directives and rules emphasized practical concerns, such as who had the legal authority to make these accounts, and how the accounts were to be delivered and subsequently used and archived by the Council and regional governments. Authorities expressed no interest in the creators’ judgments of the project, nor their reflections on empire, nor their pontification on the nature of knowledge.29 Crown and Council meant for this inquiry to yield information that could be perused quickly and efficiently, in a numbered, easily digestible form. In this respect, Bishop Mota y Escobar often tested and crossed the boundaries of his task. He was not interested in the simple completion of the questionnaire. The Bishop seems to have seized upon this task as an opportunity to demonstrate his place within the hierarchy of a system of colonial power that, at all levels, professed to seek deeper comprehension of New Spain in order to better direct and manage it for metropolitan gain.30

27 Portuondo notes that from the early seventeenth century the Council of the Indies had been under pressure from the Duke of Lerma, Crown favourite Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, to increase colonial wealth-generation for the metropole. Secret Science, 293. 28 Portuondo, Secret Science, 295. Brendecke writes that as the need for information increased in the early seventeenth century, “greater importance was attached to what was mediated…the media would have to be evaluated itself in between the sovereign and his subjects, and in this way they determine the communicative and epistemic opportunities available to the ruler.” This is evident in the conscious revision of the 1604 questionnaire for what was believed to be greater quantitative ends. Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 6. 29 Document 7, “Ordenanzas,” and Document 9, “Cédula, instrucción y memoria,” in Cuestionarios, 16-74, 79-81. 30 In the course of his study, which examines the relationship between empirical information and imperial rule in the Hispanic early modern empire, Brendecke argues “every initiative undertaken to acquire knowledge was recognized by contemporaries as an opportunity for bringing their own interests into play…Efforts at describing the Spanish- American territory, for example, were not always initiated by the center. To some extent, it was the subjects themselves who took the initiative…information arriving via the periphery does not simply increase knowledge at

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The Bishop began the Descripción with a dedication (see figure 8) that acknowledged the crucial role of the President of the Council of Indies within absolutist Hispanic imperial rule, while simultaneously articulating the limits of the same absolutist power. “Natural reason” advises that the Principe (Prince) and the cabeza (head) of government must be one, in order to govern in “uniformity,” he wrote.31 “It is also advisable” that the head be supplied with “various relaciones” from others and by this shared knowledge “a manner of [governing] that in form it is [O]ne, and in effects[, is] as varied as the demands of the subjects.”32 The implication in this is that the Council of the Indies is the body that supplies these relaciones. A Prince must rely on subordinate counsel, Mota y Escobar suggested, because he could not be both “person” and governing “system.” The ancient Greeks saw Proteus, a mythological marine shape-shifter, who could be as “frightening as a lion, generous as a lamb, searing as fire, [or] refreshing as water or snow” as a symbol for rule but they were incorrect, the Bishop noted.33 These disparate “properties” were necessary for “prudent” leadership but manifesting them required collaboration as Princes were not gods.34 It was true that a Prince and his Council must be able to shift dramatically and exactingly in the manner of Proteus, the Bishop reasoned, as their subjects were not “one” but many, and their demands and needs were varied. However, these two human authority figures needed and relied on each other for “uniform” rule because imperial power worked best when it was reciprocal and systematic, he suggested.35 Knowledge of “everything” –

the center; that information also shapes this knowledge, and not infrequently in the interest of the periphery, which is able to help shape what the center sees and does not see.” The Empirical Empire, 6-7, 13, 16. The author’s italics. 31 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17. Brendecke comments on the early modern motif of the “king as head” in chapter two, section three of The Empirical Empire. 32 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17-18. Mota y Escobar explicitly names the Council as the “head” when he writes, “Your Excellency President and head of the universal government of all the Kingdoms of Your Majesty,” in the middle of the dedication text. 33 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17. 34 Felipe II was called “el prudente” by his contemporaries. This could translate as “the prudent one,” “the clever one,” “the cautious one,” or “the hesitant one.” The Christian medieval tradition praised wisdom (sapientia) and prudence (prudentia). Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 17, 22. 35 Brendecke argues that as the Spanish empire grew in the sixteenth century, “the share of what the ruler knew directly and personally kept shrinking, while the need to impart information kept growing.” He also writes: “In many early modern treatises on the art of government, it is recommended that the ruler have knowledge at his command. The kind of knowledge these theories have in mind, however, is simultaneously determined and restricted by the tasks of ruling. It includes above all the ability to distinguish between the correct and the erroneous, to surround oneself with the right advisors, exercise justice, and pursue forward-thinking policies. It does not involve acquiring as much knowledge as possible, in the sense of accumulating empirical information. Rather, it has to do

107 lacking knowledge of “no one” – was the “private privilege of the God-Head,” the Bishop continued, and the “common law of men” was to ignore “most” things, lacking knowledge of the things they could see and “much more” things they could not.36 From this ignorance and sightlessness, what is “born very clearly,” is the “great need that human Kings have to be informed of the qualities of their distant kingdoms, and vassals, to make them present in the best way possible,” to govern them with “equality[,]…justice…grace and mercedes.”37

Figure 8: Dedication page of the Descripción geográfica Source: BM, Ms./13964, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, fs. 72r. Photo courtesy of James Hamill, email message to author, December 19, 2014.

with an integral concept of education and prudence, with normative models, and with experience, with everything that can lead to a reliable and correct decision.” Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 6, 22. 36 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17. Omniscience was discussed as a divine attribute, not expected of mortal kings, from at least Augustine. Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 22. 37 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17. My italics.

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In light of Mota y Escobar’s testimony in the 1597 petition to the Crown, the 1604 dedication is striking in its emphasis on reminding his readers of the limits of absolutist power, the distance between the colonies and the metropole, and the Crown’s reliance on “information” to make subjects and colonies present as the only way to ensure just governance. In other words, the Bishop was suggesting that the Crown needed knowledge of the colony’s qualities, as described by the informed, in order to correct natural oversights and errors within the imperial relationship. In his explicit mention of mercedes in the dedication, Mota y Escobar included a reference to the structuring regime of reward established in the early colonial period as discussed in chapter one. These articulations read as a statement of good faith that is a far cry from the accusatory and forceful tone of his 1597 testimony. However, the two follow one another in that in the 1597 petition to the Crown the creoles argued that the qualities of conquistadors and their descendants were taken for granted, which, they argued, would lead to resentment and the possible collapse of imperial rule in New Spain. In this dedication, Mota y Escobar wrote that, because the Prince is not a god and cannot know or see all, he needed reliable informants to guide him to more equitable governance by making “present” that which could not be easily seen or understood. The Bishop seems to have seen the 1604 questionnaire as another opportunity to speak on behalf of himself and his class (see figure 9).

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Figure 9: Dedication and prelude page of the Descripción geográfica, including Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s signature (bottom fs. 72v) Source: BM, Ms./13964, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, fs. 72v-73r. Photo courtesy of James Hamill, email message to author, December 19, 2014.

The opening statements of the dedication, however, appear writer-less and dispassionate. If it was true that Mota y Escobar saw himself as one of the Crown’s informers, it is not yet explicitly suggested. The Bishop himself is virtually absent from the narrative; there is no use of first- person pronouns or action. Instead, as the narrative unfolds, the Bishop demonstrated his comprehension of the project and its benefits for both Prince and colony in a passive style. The Roman emperors used agents to understand “their diffuse empires, services, heroic deeds, qualities and particular conditions of their vassals,” he remarked, and they used their “compendiums” to govern with the “laws and means for the better conservation and expansion” of their territories.38 Such references to the Roman Empire marked the prelate’s learnedness and credibility and positioned Hispanic imperialism as the descendant of that empire’s expansive

38 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17.

110 influence. Recalling the Castilian Crown’s leadership of the Holy Roman Empire and Carlos V’s militarist zeal, Mota y Escobar also sought to tether the information-collection task to ideas of conquest and possession:

In order to lay siege to a city, in order to know how to launch its assault …captains of war usually make the most of the shape of the city, where it is known [to be] the weakest and the strongest, the easiest and the most difficult…it will be as prudent for a Prince to obtain a faithful compendium describing the properties of his kingdoms, its subjects’ tendencies, virtues, practices and services…[all] that which brings out the good of them, results in good for their King, more happy and prosperous vassals make a more prosperous and powerful Señor.39

In order to know the object of “assault,” the intricate details of the target’s nature must first be known. By drawing an analogy between the Crown/Council project and a military conquest, the Bishop argued that knowledge was a prize to conquer and possess. His metaphor also recalled the conquest of the capital of New Spain—a process of possession that was still ongoing in frontier regions.40 Mota y Escobar’s conceptualization of imperial knowing as a strategic and military effort whereby the “shape” of the kingdom would be unveiled recalled the actions of the conquistadors and his own father’s piloting of a brigantine on Lake Texcoco during the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan. As a conquistador’s descendant, he presented himself as someone with the background and vision of a conqueror who could bring that heritage and outlook to the task of information collection.

Although the questionnaire was geared toward understanding space, resources, and administrative structures, Mota y Escobar added to these emphases, writing that knowing the “tendencies, virtues, practices and services” of the King’s vassals was also crucial for good governance. These regions “are as distant [from Spain] as they are contrary modes” of being, he

39 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17. 40 See The Presidio And Militia On The Northern Frontier Of New Spain: A Documentary History, 2 volumes, eds. Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer, S.J. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).

111 argued, in a manner betraying his own sense of proximity to his subject matter.41 Transitioning to more direct and self-implicating language, the Bishop noted that he knew of “Your Excellency’s sacred zeal” to govern “in a Christian manner,” remarking that he had been “enlivened to obey” by making a compendium of the Kingdoms of Galicia, Vizcaya, and Leon, with “distinct news of them and their inhabitants,” so that a “more true judgement and government” of them was possible. In a bracketed side note to this statement, Mota y Escobar wrote: “it is necessary that [Your Excellency] be the one to give a greater clarity of things.”42 Here is where the Bishop positioned himself vis-à-vis imperial hierarchical rule: he would provide “distinct” information to the Council in order to give “greater clarity” of the things of Guadalajara to the Crown. He was a necessary agent supporting the Prince’s effort to make Guadalajara as “present” as Galicia, Vizcaya, and Léon. This dedication was a narrative that asserted the “natural” order of colonial governance: King, Council, and a creole intermediary class of “enlivened” and obedient but necessary and uniquely informed servants. Read alongside the Bishop’s creole preoccupations, it becomes clear that this structure posits a further naturalization of criollo power: the Hispano- creole informer provides crucial colonial knowledge to the Prince’s head, contributing to the “unity” of Hispanic rule, and the further “conservation and expansion” of imperial power in the region.

As the digression continued into the various preludes before the body of the text, Mota y Escobar carefully maintained for himself the right to narrate the landscape and its peoples using his subjective discretion. “I will describe the districts, towns, climates, waters, mountains and valleys of these three Kingdoms,” he wrote, “and the qualities, conditions, and occupations of the people that inhabit them.” “I have unworthily possessed [them],” he demurred, “I have imperfectly administered them, I have visited all of them at least the most populous…and I will try to conform the account with the questionnaire [when] I am able.43 His writing would not conform “exactly” in all the Indigenous towns, he cautioned, as many of them did not have the things the interrogatorio “asks” and when they did, they are “the same in all” and “will be said

41 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 17-18 42 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. My italics. 43 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18.

112 in a single entry” to avoid “painful repetition.”44 What the Bishop meant by this is not clear but it is possible that he did not describe all the small Indigenous towns he visited as they resembled each other. The manuscript alternates between long and short entries but each town that is mentioned received a cursory description, even if only how many leagues it was from the previous town. Without a clear explanation of his methodology in writing or not writing these towns, his proprietorship of the information was all the more apparent.

Furthermore, in the Bishop’s view, as explained in his ninth prelude, the formulaic constraints combined with the broad content that was required made for a tedious discursive undertaking. He remarked that although he had been ordered to respond to each question separately in each location along the way, he found this to be of “great inconvenience.”45 If he obeyed these instructions, he argued, the relación would be “too heavy” and “more prolific” than the Decades of Livy (at forty-two volumes). Thus, he qualified, it seemed best practice to group similar questions together in paragraphs and sections, moving from one kind to another in order that the overall description be “tolerable” and “linked together” in a narrative manner.46 If an item of the questionnaire was “not satisfied,” that would “be a sign” that it did not apply to the location under treatment, which would save the account from repetition.47 Further, he argued, “although dividing the [work] by chapters makes them smoother to read,” it was not appropriate in this context because provinces and the “continuity of places” had no distinction: “I will do [what’s] possible so that there are stops and rests for the reader.”48 “I enter” this work, he wrote, “condemning and excusing myself…all the more[,] I feel[, as I am] the first one to try it.”49 While it was clear that it was of great importance that the account be readable and, thereby, usable, he was careful to present himself as “imperfect” but singular in his thoroughness and effort. His disregard for metropolitan instructions suggests an attitude of self-importance and entitlement that diverged from his strategic professions of humility.

44 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. 45 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 22. 46 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 22. 47 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 22. 48 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 22. 49 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18-19.

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The Bishop’s urge and drive to make his account readable and coherent on his own terms is consistent with a more narrative genre rather than a relación geográfíca. 50 Although he argued for a space tied together first by the demands of empire, his decision to meet his task by thematically organized exposition rather than by number as directed, adds emotion and other literary elements to his writing, which, as we shall see, often served to intensify the wonder and distinction of his anecdotes. The Bishop wrote this way purposefully to encourage his audience’s interest in and ultimate use of the material and the informer himself. While he was not the first bishop of this territory, in his manner of accounting for it, he made a case for being its sense- maker, its supreme organizer and witness. Mota y Escobar’s Descripción geográfica often seems more like the account of a traveller, ethnographer, or chronicler than the bureaucratic accounting of people, places, and things it was designed to be. Each location is connected to another in various ways, sometimes physically by road, path, or measured leagues, and other times by trade, by the similar practices of the town’s Indigenous population, or by the identity of the first European to come in contact with it. He absorbed each location experientially, writing them as a way of bringing them within view, of making stable the chaotic and nascent parts of early seventeenth-century northern New Spain, which was certainly not the goal of the metropole. He created a distinct characterization of the diocese and everything within it by making sense of it through the intersecting, blending lenses at his disposal; he made present what he saw, appreciated, and enjoyed, instead of making what was present accessible for imperial intelligence and use. He linked the territories and populations within the Hispanic Catholic order using the categories and logic of Hispanism. And yet, by his narrative style and particular perspective, he also seemed to argue that the novohispano diocese was a place where European metropolitan knowledge and experience reached their limits. He sought to use the opportunity of the task to make himself seen, to assert that his distinct subjective location was irreplaceable, and to describe the particular qualities of his birthplace for their greater governance.

50 For examples of the various narrative modes and methods used in the creation of the relaciones geográficas, see Heidi V. Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World, eds. Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, (Farnham, Surrey, England: Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

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The Rupture of Novohispanidad

If the prelate ultimately sought to provide a better lens for viewing creole men like himself and New Spain, it is possible that his final product had the exact opposite effect in the metropole. His divergence from the project’s directives may have resulted in his work being viewed as tedious and incomprehensible. As Arndt Brendecke reminds us: “it is not enough to declare the Europeans’ desire for knowledge as an act of exercising power, to conflate ‘description’ with ‘mastery’ and enter it under the category of ‘epistemic power’.”51 The Bishop’s writings, regardless of how well-suited and dedicated he believed he was to the task, demonstrate the instability of the colonial-metropole flow of information. He did not provide clear or concise avenues for official comprehension or use. The following examples illustrate the Bishop’s rupture with the intended goals of the task and his pursuit of an alternative purpose.

Early in the Descripción geográfica manuscript, Mota y Escobar described arriving in the “famously” fertile valley near the pueblo of Tlala.52 Wheat and maize grew in abundance here and he noted that there were “five or six farms.” He then related the following story, which he claimed was told to him by the Indigenous peoples of the pueblo:

in the time of their gentilidad…a great horde of giants came to the western part of this valley. These giants [were] of very monstrous stature and the [Indigenous people] say that there were 400 of them, but not one female giant was among them; their arrival in this valley caused such fear in the naturales that some ran away and those that remained gave the giants tribute in the form of a certain quantity of women only for eating and many times they were not sufficient…[T]he indios also say that because the giants did not bring women [with them to the valley] they had committed

51 Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 9. He references Gayatri Spivak’s classic article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988): 24-28. 52 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 35

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an ugly sin and in punishment the valley became flooded with a great avenue of water that consumed all the giants. 53

He broke from the story here and withdrew into an authenticating analysis:

How true this account is, we do not know, but we have seen by our own eyes the bones of their graves [and they are of] incredible size and when assembled we see a thigh bone seven hands long and a kneecap that when dipped in the sea is like a communal water container in size and we see other bones today of this same proportion.54

By providing information about the production of foodstuffs in the region, Mota y Escobar’s writing fit within the boundaries of his assignment, but in his pivot to description of Indigenous histories and an elaboration on what else was present in the valley, it is difficult to conceive of how this content would have been welcome to metropolitan readers.

And yet, the central characters were familiar if the location was foreign.

Giants were staples in medieval and early modern European imagination and lore about the unknown and the exotic. The biblical giants, Gog and Magog, appeared in classical, medieval, and early modern discourse as symbols of otherness and foreignness. Stories associated with

53 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 35- 36. The “ugly sin” that the Bishop seems to be referencing here is sodomy. See Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, ed. Pete Sigal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America, ed. Zeb Tortorici (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2016); Pete Sigal, “Queer Nahuatl: Sahagú n's Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites,” Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 9-34; and Zeb Tortorici, Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham : Duke University Press, 2018). 54 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 35- 36. Greenblatt shares a similar anecdote in Marvelous Possessions, providing an analysis of Herodotus’s attempts to quantify how many Scythians there are in his Histories using an artifact, a bowl. He writes: Herodotus “sets what he has heard against what he has personally seen, the artifact carefully situated in the landscape. But what does this witnessing actually tell us? The eye is apparently more reliable than the ear, but the object of the eye’s attention is only meaningful in the context of a story told to the historian by ‘the natives.’…he [does not] mention the interpreter who presumably acted as go-between…Herodotus himself witnessed the truth…because the historian has deduced the truth from the cultural artifact and has initiated the reader into his deductive method. Moreover, Herodotus gives the reader who cannot, of course, personally view the evidence two ways to orient himself in relation to that strange artifact: by comparison…and by figures…[this] offers the comfort of placing the unfamiliar in a familiar context [and] suggests at the same time the marvelous…” Marvelous Possessions, 124-128.

116 them provided a sense of cultural solidarity and orientation, as the two giants represented an “alien force” that prompted the forging of a bond between people and their local landscapes.55 To early modern Europeans, giants were a “monstrous race” and their defeat represented the triumph of civilization over the “grotesque.”56 Furthermore, in early modern Spanish discourse, the biblical giants were used as metaphors to comment on lineage, purity, and calidad (quality or complexion). In his influential late fifteenth-century treatise, Nobilario vero (Of True Nobility), Castilian Fernando Mexía noted that the intermarriage of two different bloodlines (that of Seth and Cain) led to the populating of the earth by their progeny – giants – which brought wickedness, barbarity, and destruction. Giants were symbols of impure blood and corrupt civilization and their expunging from the earth marked a return to stability.57 In contrast to the giants, Mota y Escobar noted that the people of the Indies had survived the flood, which implied a divine favour and approval of their existence and actions by a Christian God.

In his account, Mota y Escobar provided eyewitness testimony – he had seen the bones himself – thereby legitimating what he recorded to be Indigenous understandings of landscape and territory, sex and gender, and divine punishment. He allowed Indigenous entry into an established European trope and marked himself as the one who recognized and facilitated it. In so doing, he implicitly made a similar argument to Las Casas in his Historia Apologética: the Indigenous populations had an ancient, intuitive knowledge of Judeo-Christianity.58 Mota y Escobar argued that giants were a common enemy of Old World Christians and pre-contact Indigenous peoples. Both civilizations had fought and obliterated this existential threat and, in recording this story without demonizing or valorizing it, he collapsed the space between European and non-European folklore, demonic myth and legitimate history, and civilized and uncivilized. All the while, he situated himself as key interlocutor and a new ‘discoverer,’ writing

55 Victor I. Scherb, “Assimilating Giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no.1 (2002): 59-60. 56 David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995), 51. 57 Fernando Mexía, Libro intitulado nobilario perfetamente copylado y ordenado por el onrado cavellero Hernando Mexia, veinte y cuarto de Jaen (Sevilla, 1492) 1:48 cited in Christina H. Lee, The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 27. 58 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, in Obras escogidas, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1958) I:429 and II:126.

117 and capturing Indigenous stories in the familiar genre of the European traveller, yet uniquely able to do so precisely because he was, as a novohispano traveller, not fully an outsider.

In the above example, the Bishop used European ideas to bridge the gap between what was familiar to his audience and what was foreign in order to bolster his authority and resolve any doubt about his subjective location. Yet, at the same time, in the notation that follows, we see an example of Mota y Escobar symbolically decentring Iberian imperial foundation narratives, privileging Indigenous New World origins stories to move between what was Iberian and what was “of the Indies.”

Mota y Escobar began his task at the centre of the diocese in the city of Guadalajara. Item ten of the 1604 interrogatorio requested information on the “escudos de Armas” (coats of arms) of the region’s pueblos; the Bishop responded directly but unconventionally.59 He wrote that the shield of the city had “two wolves climbing an oak tree, which the ancients said they saw when they selected this site to populate it.” This event, the Bishop noted, signalled to the ancient Tonaltecans the great “value” of the location.60 This might have been unremarkable except for the fact that, following the military defeat of the Tonaltecans in the 1530s, a site near the altepetl (city state) of Tonallan was renamed Guadalajara to memorialize the peninsular hometown of the brutal military leader, Nuño Beltrán de Guzman.61 In a letter from Carlos V, dated 8 November 1539, a Hispanic shield and emblem (escudo de armas) was proclaimed and described for the city: “two lions of their colour, in a springing-off position, and near their [front paws] a gilded pine tree, highlighted in green, in a blue field, and a frame of seven coloured crosses in a field of

59 BNE, “Interrogatorio para todas las Ciudades,” fs. 46r (image 52). 60 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 24. 61 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 24. The Tonaltecans were an Indigenous people who lived at and near the site of Tonallan before the arrival of the Spaniards. The tlatoani of Tonallan at the time of contact was Cihuapilli and she pledged obedience to the Castilian Crown when Nuño de Guzmán took possession of the region in late March 1530. Cihuapilli (“noble women” in Nahuatl) was baptized and received the name Juana Bautista. In 1533 the city of Guadajalara was moved from a site in modern Zacatecas to Tonallan, and then it was moved two more times until its final relocation at the site where Mota y Escobar resided. The community was renamed Santiago de Tonalá and became part of Nueva Galicia. The region had five doctrinas led by Augustinians in the early colonial period. Nahuatl is still spoken by inhabitants of the modern community of Tonalá, which is part of the metropolitan zone of Guadalajara, Jalisco. See Diana Michele Negrín, “Colores Mexicanos: Racial Alterity and the Right to the Mexican City,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014), chapters three and four and May N. Diaz, Tonalá: Conservatism, Responsibility, and Authority in a Mexican Town (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1966).

118 gold, and a closed helmet, and a green flag with a Jerusalem cross of gold, placed [in the helmet by] spear, with its tails and branches [turning into] foliage of blue and gold.”62

Mota y Escobar makes no mention of this official shield, yet it seems highly unlikely that, as the Bishop of Guadalajara and the highest-ranking member of the church hierarchy in the region, he would not have been familiar with most if not all official insignia. The escudo and its symbols and signs were of social and political significance in the early modern Hispanic Atlantic world. The shield gave status, legitimacy, and authority to its wielder and in the colonial context, the symbols contained on the shield reinforced the inclusion of the kingdom of New Spain in the greater Hispanic Empire. The multiple religious and profane Old World images and colours communicated concepts and emotions to those within the orbit of European power. The shield’s ‘audience’ were those who had the skill set to read it accurately: those lawyers, soldiers, bureaucrats, bishops, and royal officials who were in proximity to power.63

Of course, the shield not only appealed to those with varying degrees of political power and cultural literacy but also to those without the means to fully interpret it. For the powerful, the shield implicated them in a higher plane of authority; for those who had a narrower window of control, the shield was a reminder of their subordination. Mota y Escobar’s description of the Guadalajara escudo seems to widen the space for interpretation: the vehicle of communication (the shield) remained, and yet, wolves are not lions and an oak tree is not a pine tree. These differences could be illegible or negligible, depending on to whom one is speaking.

In reporting back to the metropole, did the Bishop make the deliberate choice to exclude the official shield description in order to include a conventional Indigenous origin story in the bureaucratic history of this community? The sentence that follows the shield description may provide a hint. Mota y Escobar remarked that Guadalajara,

62 AGI, Guadalajara, 230, n.1 (image 3). 63 For a discussion of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century escudos de armas of caciques, see María Castañeda de la Paz, “Filología de un "corpus" pintado (siglos XVI-XVIII): de códices, techialoyan, pinturas y escudos de armas,” Anales del Museo de América 17 (2009): 88-91; María Castañeda de la Paz, “Central Mexican Indigenous Coats of Arms and the Conquest of Mesoamérica,” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (2009): 125-161; and Robert Haskett, “Paper Shields: The Ideology of Coats of Arms in Colonial Mexican Primordial Titles,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 99- 126.

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is a city of Your Majesty built with neither help nor Royal status (situación Real), Your Majesty has only [provided] the donation of the title of city and its distance from Mexico [City] where the Viceroy resides is eighty leagues.64

In other words, it was a city of the Hispanic Empire but it was built by the locals for the locals’ benefit, at some distance from viceregal authority. It existed in a space between metropole and colony, with Indigenous roots and history. These locals who built the city were early conquerors and settlers, their descendants, free and enslaved people of African descent, as well as Indigenous people who lived in pueblos outside the city proper.65 Therefore, the story of the shield – a story relaying information about foundations, belonging, and place – seems to have functioned as some accommodation of both European and Tonaltecan sign-systems, qualified by the purposeful highlighting of the construction of the city by conquerors and their descendants and the replacement of the Tonaltecans. This clarifying remark then might imply the usurpation of Indigenous knowledge for the purpose of indigenizing Guadalajara’s European-descended population to emphasize distance from the metropole.

Like his use of classical references in the manuscript dedication and his application of the mythology and meaning of giants in Tlala, Mota y Escobar’s discussion of the shield of Guadalajara shows him attempting to communicate the people, places, and things of the Indies as both familiar and foreign to his metropolitan audience. His discursive choices were informed by a desire to be an influential and informative agent of empire and this drive was complicated by local relationships, curiosity and wonder, creole desires, and official bureaucratic expectations. Sometimes a wolf appeared as golden as a lion, and a pine tree dropped acorns instead of pine

64 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 24-25. 65 The Bishop noted that there were one hundred and seventy-three vecinos who lived “continually” in the city, and that with women and children there were “more than five hundred personas españoles.” He remarked that this place was populated originally (circa 1531) with “first settlers” and encomenderos but following the deaths of the Indigenous people and the “lack of metals,” these first families were slowly “finished,” and “newly arrived people from Spain” had “succeeded them” and settled. In the reino overall, he wrote that there were twenty-six encomenderos de pueblos de indios “none in the first life, all in the second and third,” (creole descendants). He does not specify how many Indigenous people lived in these exploited communities. He also wrote that there were “mulatos and negros esclavos” that numbered more than five hundred, “without [counting the] free others of this lineaje that also serve.” Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 24-25.

120 cones but the medium – the page and the man – remained the same, providing coherence and definition when necessary. He was the linchpin of exchange.

The transculturated image of the escudo rejected absolute Spanish claims to New Spain; as Greenblatt writes, “it is destruction that gives the Spanish possession of the [Mexica-Aztec] empire”66—the Bishop’s writing retrieved pre-contact history as it was told to him and reinstalled it within colonial Castilian sign systems. In his telling, Indigenous narratives blend with Castilian mythology and representational technology to create something as yet unnameable. These two narrative digressions demonstrated both an exclusionary possession – these stories do not apportion power to the Indigenous people – and an insider collaboration – the collecting of local knowledge in its local context – a space that creoles could distinctly occupy.

In his hopeful approach to this project, Mota y Escobar shared his vision for colonial governance and attempted to demonstrate how his own subjective location within the colonial hierarchy could contribute to this governance. These stories or anecdotes were neither quantifiable nor administratively useful within the context of the 1604 interrogatorio.67 In articulating his belief that the instructions were not ideally suited for the task, Mota y Escobar wanted his audience to know that he was shaping the significance of the events, people, and places he described based on an experiential knowledge. In his writings then, we see a divergence between what was asked of him and what he deemed important for metropolitan consumption.

The result was a cultural translation that neither emphasized novohispano difference nor highlighted opportunities and vulnerabilities for metropolitan use, but assimilated Guadalajara- Nueva Galicia into Hispanism and vice versa. This need for interpretation and interpreters was the precise issue the metropole sought to avoid. For the Bishop, emphasizing this need was

66 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 133-134, 139. 67 The 1604 version of the Crown/Council questionnaire yielded very few responses. Portuondo writes that in a 1636 inventory only thirty-one responses were identified, fourteen from South America and seventeen from New Spain. Overall, this version of the collection project, ostensibly designed to expand the Crown/Council’s knowledge and fill in gaps left by previous versions, led to very little metropolitan enlightenment. Secret Science, 292 and Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1648,” 12:230. This 1636 inventory was made by Antonio León Pinelo and Cline provides a transcription of these items in Appendix E, pages 240-242. Mota y Escobar’s manuscript is not listed but a vaguely titled item, “Papeles tocantes a la Nueva Galicia” is. However, it is doubtful that Mota y Escobar’s manuscript was contained in this inventory under León Pinelo’s possession as all of these items have disappeared and most are from the late sixteenth century.

121 designed to demonstrate his indispensability, but he was not so confident that he did not foresee challenges to legibility. In his anticipation of this issue, the Bishop sought to frame the problem of translation within the bounds of an Old World preoccupation: wonder.

Deploying Wonder

In an effort to be seen, Mota y Escobar drew out and included extended stories and reflections from his travels that he probably thought communicated awareness, discernment and insight, and illustrative comparison. Reflecting on Columbus’s letters to the Crown, Stephen Greenblatt writes that the anecdote is “the principal register of the unexpected and hence of the encounter with difference that is at once initiated and epitomized by Columbus’s marvellous landfall in an unimagined hemisphere.”68 The anecdote or short narrative story, Greenblatt explains, is the most important product of a culture’s “representational technology,” and it can act as a mediator “between the undifferentiated succession of local moments and a larger strategy toward which [anecdotes] can only gesture.”69 This characterization is useful for thinking about Mota y Escobar’s writings in the Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia manuscript as it seems to align with his own thinking about coherence and readability. The Bishop resisted the metropole’s desire for decontextualized quantitative data, and argued instead that paragraphs and thematic groupings focused at the community (pueblo) level were more apt for his vision of the task. In making narratives, “the assumed coherence of the tale helps pull the reader past the awkwardness of incommensurable positions and silenced voices,” Greenblatt writes.70 Mota y Escobar constructed narratives rather than the expected and desired lists perhaps because he understood at some level that reader discomfort, confusion, or “awkwardness” drew attention away from the writer’s presence, message, and authorial direction.

The result of this method is a body of writing, of witnessing, that moves between locations seamlessly, coming to rest at unexpected and unpredictable times and places in a conscious effort to narrate novohispano distinction, or in Greenblatt’s conception, a “purely local knowledge.” The “European dream of possession rests on witnessing,” Greenblatt writes, “a witnessing

68 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 2-3. 69 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 3. 70 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 61.

122 understood as a form of significant and representative seeing.”71 Opening a window onto the prelate’s vision of his task, Greenblatt argues that such a local knowledge, “an absolutely singular, unrepeatable, unique experience or observation, is neither desirable nor possible, for the traveler’s discourse is meant to be useful, even if the ultimate design in which this utility will be absorbed remains opaque.”72

While the Bishop intended for his narration and anecdotes to communicate singular realities and suggested the indispensability of his own perspective, he did not anticipate that his writings showcased a distinctly new knowledge that was incomprehensible to metropolitan authorities. In fact, to facilitate understanding, Mota y Escobar called attention to a mode of communication with deep Old World roots, revived and renewed in European contact in the Indies, that of wonder and the marvellous. Wonder “was an absolutely central concept” to the Renaissance age of return, redefinition, and reimagining, scholar Peter G. Platt writes.73 If the Renaissance was a moment of intellectual appreciation for and appropriation of the classical past in Western Europe, it was just as much a moment of nostalgia, cultural curiosity and inquiry, and “astonishment.” Platt sums up Aristotle’s vision of wonder, used by Renaissance-era commentators, as a feeling “generated by a difficult problem,” which is “dissipated by a solution to that problem.”74 A result of “ignorance and surprise,” the problem could be solved with investigation through reason, Aristotle had argued.75 By contrasting emotion or feeling with reason, this widely-held perspective asserted that there was no overlap between these two constructed binaries, and interpretations or explanations of marvellous phenomena were rational consequences of knowledge.76 If a person or peoples had no capacity for rational thought, they would, according to this line of reasoning, remain in a state of childlike wonder indefinitely. However, reason is a complex epistemological network of a particular society’s priorities and

71 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 122. 72 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 3. 73 Peter G. Platt, “Introduction,” in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 15. 74 Platt’s summary comes from his readings of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Poetics. “Introduction,” 15. 75 Platt, “Introduction,” 15-16. 76 Frank Costigliola, “Reading for Emotion,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, eds. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 358-359.

123 perspectives, and, thus, what is considered marvellous and wondrous could be managed and manipulated by such knowledge codes and those who wielded them in writing and/or rhetoric.

If we return to the anecdote that opened this chapter, we recall that Mota y Escobar was aware of the affective potential for his collected experiences and observations to evoke a sense of the marvellous and wondrous about the diocese. The rennet of Tecpatitlán was of a quantity beyond any enumeration or full description that might be believed in Spain; in his acknowledgement of this marvel he imagined himself as the Castilian reader, astonished and bewildered, and, finally, suspicious. In his telling of the anecdote, with his own authoritative voice asserting that the quantity was in fact great, he refused to rationalize or make known the marvel of the rennet, thereby hoping to calm the reader’s unstable feeling of wonder—he simply gave the reader no other option but to trust him as the witness. In so doing, he hoped to illuminate the unique phenomena of New Spain, preserve and solidify his authority, and foreclose the possibility for critique and suspicion. We see then the Bishop’s conceptualization of wonder as a New World inevitability, a strategic tool, and a “shield.”77 It is difficult to ascertain if Mota y Escobar appreciated the discursive danger of this approach – to remind his readers that their “grasp of the world” was “continually…incomplete” – but it is certain that he understood the captivating power of a wondrous anecdote.78

Platt writes that in 1587 the Italian philosopher and literary theorist, Francesco Patrizi, listed twelve different “sources” of the marvellous: “ignorance, fable, novelty, paradox, augmentation, departure from the usual, the ‘exceeding-natural,’ the divine, great utility, the very exact, the unexpected, and the sudden.”79 Meanwhile, Covarrubias Horozco noted in 1611 that maravillar, to marvel or wonder, “is to be amazed viewing the effects and ignoring the causes.” His definition borrows from the Aristotelian view outlined above that separates an emotional response from an intellectualizing one. He also noted that to “make or to say marvels” is to communicate “things that cause admiration for being extraordinary or unusual.”80 In the

77 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. 78 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 24. 79 Platt quotes Francesco Patrizi, La deca ammirabile 6, in Della poetica, ed. Danielo Aguzzi-Barbagli, (Firenze: Nella Sede Dell’istituto Palazzo Strozzi, 1969-71) 2:305, 367 in “Introduction,” 16. I have used Platt’s translation. 80 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1242.

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Renaissance and early modern period then, maravilla, wonder, was understood to be provoked by an experiential distance and a lack of intellectual scaffolding (or ability) to process its meaning. Platt argues that, in addition to this period being one that attempted to contain wonder by rationalization or knowledge, wonder was also conceived as having the power to push forward “the frontiers of intellectual and aesthetic experience.”81 Wonder was “its own end” and a “challenge” to “epistemological certainties and aesthetic wholeness”; it could alter “ways of knowing and perceiving the world,” reflecting a diminishment of desire and capacity to “bring reason to bear upon it.”82

In Mota y Escobar’s Descripción writings, we see both facets of the concept of wonder and the marvelous played out. In the first vein, through the emotional appeal of wonder, as intimately tied to the unknown, the foreign, and the perplexing, Mota y Escobar understood himself to be in the ideal location to translate the foreign, and therefore marvellous, into useful and revealing colonial knowledge. The Bishop saw himself as a crucial reporting agent of the colonial community in its distinct arrangement, recalling the arguments of Benedict Anderson and Barbara Rosenwein who write that communities are forged and melded by emotion and imagination.83 In earlier sections of this chapter, we explored the theoretical and methodological ways in which this goal was pursued. Here we disentangle the ways in which Mota y Escobar confronted the problem of the marvelous in approaching the task. He used Renaissance and early modern logics surrounding maravillas to insert himself into a position of control and influence in contravention of the metropolitan suspicion regarding people “of the Indies.” If he could not prevent the writing of such unknowns that might prove unintelligible (and suspicious) to the metropole, at least he had the authorial control and colonial experience to bring the wondrous into the measurable, into order.

And yet, the Bishop’s use of wonder also demonstrates Platt’s interpretation of Renaissance and early modern wonder as epistemologically explosive, as powerful enough to prevent one’s

81 Platt, “Introduction,” 15. See Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 82 Platt, “Introduction,” 15-16. 83 See Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

125 capacity to understand. In what follows, we examine Mota y Escobar’s acceptance that wonder was inevitable in his writings and his promise to tame and order it for the reader. Further, we will unravel his assertion that wonder could resist comprehension and facticity because of its connection to man’s nature and the sacred. Thus, he argued, it would be a mistake to condemn error and ignorance as malicious. What he did not anticipate was the potential of his own wonder to diminish the reader’s capacity and even desire for comprehension.

The Bishop himself alerted the audience to the inevitability of discomforting wonder in his writings. In the dedication he remarked that “in preparation for the unfortunate style” of his “little work,” he carried with him the “shield” of Pomponius Mela (d. ca. 45 CE). “Speaking of [his own geography, Mela] declared [that] to record foreign names, and so too people and places [made] a work incapable of eloquence and an enemy of flow,” the Bishop wrote.84 Mela was a Roman writer of De Chorographia (The Chorography), whose work blended geography and ethnography. His stated objective was to understand the puzzling, wondrous ordo (order) of the world through narration and imagined mobility.85 Not much is known about Mela’s life but his geographic treatise was transcribed and circulated in the medieval period, and widely read in the early modern period. He was from Hispania Baetica, a Roman territory in Iberia, in the community called Tingentera, which scholars think might be the modern-day site of Algeciras.86 They have remarked that Spain is described more than any other region in Mela’s work, suggesting his fondness for and fascination with his place of birth.87 It is unclear when precisely the manuscript was written but scholars are sure he was writing during the reign of the emperor Claudius (41-54 CE) and estimate that he was probably writing between 43 and 44 CE based on

84 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. 85 Chorographia comes from the Greek khôrographia, designating a written description of a region or district. F. E. Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela's Description of the World, ed. and trans. F. E. Romer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 10, 26, 28-29. 86 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 1. 87 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 10 and Mary Ella Milham, “An Introduction to the Renaissance Tradition of Pomponius Mela,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis: proceedings of the Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Amsterdam 19-24 August 1973, eds. P. Tuynman, G. C. Kuiper, and E. Kessler (Munchen: Verlag, 1979), 789.

126 statements he made in The Chorography.88 Mela’s is the only known work of ancient geography in Latin before Pliny’s Historia naturalis (77-79 CE).89 Pliny cites Mela by name in more than ten volumes of the Historia, including all four of the geographical books (3-6), as do other ancient writers, such as Juvenal and Servius; through these authorities, intellectuals of the medieval and Renaissance periods would have known Mela’s name and ideas even if they had not read the work itself.90

Mela’s work is connected to the “age of discovery” and ‘encounter’ with the Americas in a number of disparate ways. The first treatise to suggest that the East Indies could be reached by sailing west, Pierre d’Ailly’s Ymago mundi, written around 1410, contained information taken from Mela’s work although it does not cite him by name; both Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci read this work.91 Famous Castilian lexicographer Antonio de Nebrija wrote an introduction to a 1498 edition of Mela, prepared by the physician Francisco Núñez de la Yerba, reflecting the wide professional interest in Mela’s writing.92 The Portuguese captain Pedro Álvares Cabral brought his own heavily-annotated copy of The Chorography with him on his southern voyage to Brazil in 1500; this voyage also included participation by the Spanish physician and astronomer Joan Faras, who would become the first translator of Mela into Spanish in the 1490s.93

Mela’s interpreters have divided his work into three categories of analysis: the general overview, the precise and detailed examination, and the imaginary narrative. Of the one hundred and twenty-one manuscripts of Mela’s work that survive, one hundred and seventeen date from the

88 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 2-3 and Catherine M. Gormley, Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “The Medieval Circulation of the De chorographia of Pomponious Mela,” Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984): 267. 89 Gormley et al, “The Medieval Circulation,” 267 and Mary Ella Milham, “Oporimus, Olivarius and Pomponius Mela,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 80 (1980): 133-143. 90 Gormley et al, “The Medieval Circulation,” 268-269. 91 Gormley et al, “The Medieval Circulation,” 312. 92 Milham, “An Introduction to the Renaissance Tradition,” in Acta Conventus, 789. 93 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 28-29. Cabral’s “well thumbed” and autographed copy of this work is in the Huntington Library, Ms.87547, Pomponius Mela, Cosmographia sive De situ orbis, ed. Francisco Nuñez de la Yerba (Salamanca: Nebrissensis Gramática, 1498), accessed November 9, 2020, http://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1512799.

127 fifteenth century or later, revealing a surge in early modern preoccupation with this work.94 In the second half of the sixteenth century alone, thirty editions of Mela’s work were printed in various European languages.95 In all, Mela is concerned with providing a “description of the known world,” which if studied with “attention [,] repays the effort” in its illustration of its “puzzling arrangement.”96 Of Mela’s work, F.E. Romer explained that De Chorographia was “paradoxically, both an embodiment of the world’s puzzle and the solution to it”—the ordo, order, of the narrative both brings together and becomes the ordo of the world.97

By invoking Mela in his writing, the Bishop aligned himself with this influential observer of the world with a strong tie to Spain. By shielding himself with Mela’s caveat about “flow” and the foreign, the prelate drew an analogy between his work and The Chorography’s: it was of equal difficulty and importance. For Mela, the foreign-ness and singularity of the work required that foreign names be repeated by necessity, which caused “perplexity and [did] not sound kindly to the ear,” the Bishop paraphrased.98 Pivoting to comment on his own project, Mota y Escobar reassured the reader that “what does not delight in style” will be replaced by a “diversity of new things” that “always please in their first view.”99 Such a framing served to remind the reader of this author’s hopeful expectation that the final product would please and benefit the Crown and his Royal Council, while also pre-empting critique. Ineloquence, “perplexity,” and cacophony were repositioned as “new” and “diverse,” and, like Mela and his work, Mota y Escobar believed that the wonder this disorder and unfamiliarity provoked would inspire and inform rather than produce revulsion. Combined with his distinct method for collection and narrative construction, the Bishop wanted to make seen (make “present”) the complex puzzle of his diocese and wrote

94 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 29n46. Piergiorgio Parroni, Pomponii Melae De chorographia libri tres ; introduzione, edizione critica e commento a cura di Piergiorgio Parroni, (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984) lists the manuscripts (pg. 55-81) and printed editions (pg. 83-93) that survive. There are 121 manuscripts and 150 printed editions. 95 Milham, “An Introduction to the Renaissance Tradition,” in Acta Conventus, 790. 96 Pomponius Mela, “Book 1: Around Our Sea—from the Pillars of Hercules to the End of Asia,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 33. 97 Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 10-11. 98 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 5. 99 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18.

128 his work with the intention of capturing it.100 His stated use of Mela as a “shield” suggests that he saw the foreignness of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia as analogous to the foreignness of the Mediterranean world of Mela. Their goals seemed similar to the Bishop, as he too would use words and exposition to translate wonder and the unknown into order for outsider comprehension. If his writing were to become as influential to the Crown’s vision of the colonial world as Mela’s was to the classical and early modern world, it seems likely that he would not have objected.

And yet, in the Bishop’s acknowledgment of the inevitable presence of marvels and wonders in his work, he had to accept and gird himself against criticisms of self-interest, dishonesty, and error that could accompany the wondrous. In Greenblatt’s analysis of Columbus’ writings he argues that Columbus had a keen sense of how a narrative framing of the marvellous could be useful in his self-interested claims to hereditary rights (mercedes). Use of a rhetoric of the marvellous and wondrous allowed Columbus to inject imagination, desire, and promise into a shifting discourse of self-interest that relied on the juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign, the known and unknown.101 Columbus understood the “special significance of the experience of wonder” as a discursive strategy “in service of the legitimation process,” as wonder stood “for all that could not be securely held, all that resisted appropriation,” remarks Greenblatt.102 Columbus, as the communicator of the marvellous, could then assign his own interpretation or definition to any sign with an unstable meaning. He used the malleability of wonder in the cultural lexicon to direct its meaning and get what he wanted. Greenblatt writes that for Columbus to affirm the “‘marvelous’ nature of the discoveries” was to make good on his claims.103 In the end, Columbus’ promises were not wholly fulfilled and the Crown’s disappointment in its witness (and others like him) may have influenced the institutional shifts within the imperial bureaucracy that sought to better collect the colonial knowledge it desired using an extensive questionnaire.

100 Unlike Bishop Mota y Escobar, however, Mela drew all the information in De Chorographia from the books and maps of others, not from his own experiences. “Mela’s reader is separated by time and space from places and events mentioned in his text, but it is the purpose of Mela’s narrative journey to give the reader a feeling of immediacy and familiarity.” Romer, “Introduction,” in Pomponius Mela’s Description, 21-22. 101 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 73. 102 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 73-74. 103 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 74.

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The Bishop understood that a cultural translation of the wondrous must be approached with a humility that signalled disinterestedness.

Returning to the dedication proem of the Descripción, following his declaration of obedience to the task – “I have been enlivened to obey your mandate” – we observe the Bishop’s performance of a rhetorical bow to its significance:

Of this little work (obrilla) I am only able to promise Your Excellency that which Cicero did to Atticus…I shall try to meet your wishes…but I don’t promise anything for certain. It is a big undertaking. However, I shall take care, following your admonition, to have some work to show you for this visitation away from home.104

Quoting Cicero’s 59 BCE letter to Atticus, wherein the former accepts the latter’s urging to write a geographic treatise, Mota y Escobar communicated a sense of wonder and care paired with an implied self-doubt, associating himself with the influential classical writer and orator’s significant cultural cache. Mota y Escobar would not promise that his “little work” would yield results but he could promise that his time away from “home” would contain evidence of an effort to meet the Crown’s “wishes.”

This doubt was strategically linked to wonder in order to imply competence and innocence, which Mota y Escobar signalled in the first prelude to the manuscript. He remarks:

To make a Descripción geográfica of any part of the world [is] always an arduous, difficult, and bold thing…Pliny [tells us that]

104 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. Emphasis in the original. Mota y Escobar mis-remembered or altered the original lines Cicero wrote to Atticus in early April 59 BCE. One word that stands out in Mota y Escobar’s version is “visitationis,” which translates as a visit of inspection or the action of visiting. Cicero uses the term “peregrinationis,” or travelling, pilgrimage, sojourn. It seems likely that Mota y Escobar switched Cicero’s word to make the quote more applicable to his own situation and task. Mota y Escobar wrote: “Dabo operam ut tibi satisfaciam, sed nihil polliceor opus magnum est, sed tamen ut iubes, curabo ut istis ñre [sic] visitationis tibi opus extet.” Cicero’s original is: “De geographia, dabo operam ut tibi satis faciam; sed nihil certi polliceor. magnum opus est. sed tamen, ut iubes, 4 curabo ut huius peregrinationis aliquod tibi opus exstet.” Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Cicero to Atticus,” in Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 1:144-145. Thanks to Julie Andersen-Cohen and Rachel Stapleton for their aid in locating this citation.

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there is no mistake more worthy of pardon than the one committed in this case, [because truly] the man begotten without wonder is ignorant and errs.105

With this reference to Pliny, Mota y Escobar argued that the possession of wonder, which connoted an awareness of human limitations, was crucial for beginning and completing work without arrogance. The work may be “arduous,” “bold,” and “difficult” but as long as the author is “begotten” with maravilla, he cannot fail at his task, whether by ignorance or error (or malicious intent). He suggested that he was a trustworthy servant of the metropole because he was raised to possess wonder. At the same time, he deployed wonder’s undefinable and sacred quality to make his work impenetrable to criticism: wonder itself was wondrously flexible.106 These inclusions in the introductory materials to the manuscript are further evidence of his anxiety about trustworthy representation. The Bishop’s gloss of Pliny signalled to the reader the seriousness and grandiosity of his intent and emphasized the difficulty of the task, which consisted of both in its completion and its reception. Nothing could be “promised” for certain, and a “mere mortal” ought to be “pardoned” for not knowing.

For Mota y Escobar, the marvellous and wondrous were recognized and invoked to make good on promises of crucial colonial knowledge from a crucial colonial agent. Moreover, he deployed them in order to excuse himself from any errors of fact in his writing which, however innocently made, could be understood in Spain as a self-interested “lie.” His anxiety to be seen as both authority and fallible mortal necessitated that he cloaked himself in rhetoric that could do both. Wonder, as the unknown undertaking, as the foreign, was both muse and antagonist: it intimidated and inspired, perplexed and enraptured. In all of his writing around the benefits and dangers of wonder, the Bishop always sought to project control. He used the dedication and

105 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 18. The original section of Pliny that the Bishop references reads: “I treated of the position and the wonders of the earth, of the waters, the stars, and the proportion of the universe and its dimensions. I shall now proceed to describe its individual parts; although indeed we may with reason look upon the task as of an infinite nature, and one not to be rashly commenced upon without incurring censure. And yet, on the other hand, there is nothing which ought less to require an apology, if it is only considered how far from surprising it is that a mere mortal cannot be acquainted with everything.” Pliny, “Introduction—Book Three,” in The Natural History of Pliny, eds. and trans. John Bostock and Henry T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), accessed November 9, 2020, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001.perseus-eng1:3.0. 106 For a succinct summation of the various “paths” the rhetorical use of wonder could illuminate for medieval and early modern “voyagers,” writers, and travellers, see Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 135.

131 preludes to the Descripción to demonstrate his clear-eyed vision of the task, its pitfalls and pleasures. In so doing he sought to cement his own eye-witnessing as authoritative, wise, and cautious; he understood that to see and represent was “to secure the truth of what might otherwise be deemed incredible.”107 The final section of this chapter investigates the anecdotal results of his “difficult” work.

Creolizing Collection

Mota y Escobar approached the metropolitan knowledge collection task in a manner he believed had recognizable and legitimating precedents in the goals and concerns of influential Old World writers and authorities (Mela, Cicero, and Pliny). His method had design and purpose and he was cognizant of the affective pressure of wonder and its possible effects on his work’s reception. In this final section we look closely at the broader results of his work and examine the cultural movement of the Bishop’s projections and representations. The Bishop made conscious efforts to close the gap between colony and metropole and infuse novohispano wonders with the meaning and order he wanted the metropole to comprehend; he attempted to illuminate affinities between the metropolitan and colonial worlds, emphasizing his position as the crucial nexus between them. His stories of the people, animals, places, and things of his colonial home contained a logic of their own, outside what the Crown/Council anticipated or desired to read and understand. In most instances, Mota y Escobar’s carefully chosen anecdotes reveal an enthusiasm for Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia that was unsolicited and proved unintelligible to its intended audience.

What the Bishop’s writings reveal is a distinctly Hispano-creole fascination, a centring of New Spain above all else, when he had explicitly declared in his dedication that he sought to be the Empire’s eyes and make present the colony for administrative imperial and royal purposes. If the metropole desired a quick illumination of their possessions, the colonial vision expressed here asserted a local colonial complexity that must be slowed down and “thickened” for useful comprehension. Mota y Escobar sought to provide such an analysis of New Spain for the metropole in order to be understood as an indispensable figure within the colonial hierarchy. He

107 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 122.

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(mis)judged this kind of ethnographic analysis to be necessary for colonial governance within the confines of this specific project. In the end, the Bishop’s “thick” descriptions of New Spain were markers of his own cultural location.108

In Mota y Escobar’s vision, New Spain could not be observed in its complexity without a translator. The ideal translator could and would collect and collate knowledge that often resided at the edge of commensurability, without tipping over into an untamed wonder, adjoining fiction and self-interested exaggeration. What he produced, this cultural translation, is an exposure of the Bishop’s unwillingness or inability to reject fully self-recognition in supposed novohispano alterity. The Crown desired a dispassionate, wholly estranged and numerical accounting of New World possessions, and Mota y Escobar delivered a “thick description” overflowing with transcultural self-expression. This expression did not reject the discourse of conquest; as a conquering creole, the Bishop viewed himself as controlling that which he described.

Turning to the body of the Descripción geográfica, there are many instances of the Bishop simply using the word “marvellous” or “wondrous”/”wonderful” (maravilloso) to describe a variety of phenomena and things around the region. When he travelled through Nueva Vizcaya, he remarked on the “marvellous vinegar” its vecinos could make, and noted that the town of Durango, the seat of the regional government structure, was located in a “wonderful” location near unused “plains and powerful hot springs.109 Durango had a “perpetual spring of marvellous water” and he described the climate near the communities of San Bartolomé and Santa Bárbara as “wonderful.”110 In the Villa de Xerez, the Bishop wrote that the land “marvellously” (maravillosamente) produced “all the fruits of Castilla and all types of vegetable.”111 In these

108 Ethnography is “a kind of intellectual effort…an elaborate venture in” thick description, Clifford Geertz argues (following Gilbert Ryle). Further, Geertz writes, “culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described.” Thick description, as a mode of analysis (interpretation), is the effort to make intelligible “structures of signification” to then “determine[e] their social ground and import.” Further, Geertz writes: “…anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot…They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are “something made,” “something fashioned”—the original meaning of fictiō—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely “as if” thought experiments.” The Interpretation of Cultures, 6, 9, 14-15. See also Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, 2 volumes (London: Hutchinson, 1971). 109 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 82-83. 110 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 85, 87. 111 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 63.

133 instances, Mota y Escobar signalled his own comparative position without revealing the specific meaning of the descriptor, thereby disabling any other interpretation that could evoke ambiguity.

He also wrote briefly and abruptly of New Spain’s singular wonders without using derivations of the word maravilla. Near the episcopal seat at Guadalajara, the Bishop visited Tzaqualco (Zacoalco), writing that there were springs “where dark and extremely hot mud flows that is a really rare thing in the world, and the mud flows with such noise, like when a pan [has a lively] boil…”112 Here he uses a familiar analogy to invite the reader into a shared cultural experience, collapsing the distance between colony and metropole but simultaneously emphasizing the distinction of his “really rare” experience. As he journeyed east toward Real de Topia, a region/pueblo near the Pacific coast, the Bishop noted that there were “sixteen leagues of unpopulated land because the mountain range is the roughest that is known in the world.”113 This statement was transparently hyperbolic because, in the preludes, he wrote that he had no “instruments” to measure elevation and that “this defect” will not be “of consideration for the Prince who governs because what he wants most…[is] to know the number of his towns and vassals.”114 The Bishop expressed his own awe of the place of his birth without attention to the task at hand. At Ixtlaguacan (Ixtlahuacan) he took special notice of the quince fruit, writing that “they are the best that is known in the world.”115 Again, this statement is unquantifiable and outside the purview of the answers requested in the questionnaire. These rhetorical events simultaneously emphasized Mota y Escobar’s specific experience of New Spain and his cosmopolitanism, accentuating his authority as a qualified observer and arbiter of New Spain’s exceptionalism—yet, as with much of his writing, this observation was a sharp diversion from the task at hand.

There are other instances where the Bishop demonstrated his sense of wonder at the knowledge and expertise of the Indigenous people and the abundance of the landscape in long passages that

112 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 31. My italics. 113 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 54. My italics. This range, the Sierra Madre Occidental, is 1500 kilometres long and 240 kilometres wide. For a collection of Indigenous Nahua perspectives on the Sierra Madre Occidental translated from the original Nahuatl, see Mitos y cuentos nahuas de la Sierra Madre Occidental, eds. and trans. Konrad Theodor Preuss, Mariana Frenk, and Elsa Ziehm (México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1982). 114 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 19. 115 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 59.

134 are extraordinary within the Guadalajara manuscript. In Chiametla (Chametla), a “maritime site,” only “a league and a half,” from the Pacific Ocean, on a “fast-flowing river that they call Chiametla,” the Bishop described the “mode,” “timing,” and form of local Indigenous fishing by using narrative exposition that builds audience suspense and curiosity, while communicating his own great excitement and awe:

They wait and pay attention to the waxing of the moons in November, December, and January of each year, in those [months] when the ocean swells and flows into the river of this land and together with the water a great quantity and diversity of big and small fish enter and spawn in the river, and communally they enter at night and cannot navigate but by the depth of the water; the [Indigenous people] are such experts that, [putting their ear] to the surface of the water they feel and perceive the noise that the fish make in the depths of the river when passing through. And at the time that the school of fish are going up, the indios hold a great calm silence, and when they recognize that the school wants to go back with the waxing ocean, they [are ready to] chase with thatched nets that they had very close by, with that they divide all the river bank to bank, and [the net] arrives and touches down to the depths to the land and they bind it strongly…These thatched nets are made with thick and strong reeds, and are together and attached with one another so that if one is not in the water it does not strain one thing by the others, and so when the ocean ends its waxing it returns with much haste to the gulf and natural place, it takes with it the water from the river and together that great abundance of diverse fish that has risen, and when they come to the gate and barrier the water passes through leaving all the imprisoned prey, that with the drain of the river remain almost dry. And this is one of the most beautiful sights…and natural things

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[that] can happen, because seen here are the many trapped caimans, sharks, swordfish…(see figure 10)116

This description of intimate Indigenous knowledge of the land and sea was apparently intended to highlight the skill and ingenuity of the community’s Indigenous people, without any attention to the imperial goal of ‘civilizing,’ or assimilating, or quantifying. This anecdote does not overtly attempt to appropriate or possess. It shows Indigenous people as integrated and working with their environments but does not empty out the singularity of their process, which would leave a space where European presence could enter the scene and imprint whatever it likes.117 This natural phenomenon captivated the Bishop. In his reading of the scene, the Bishop illustrated the fact that, like Old World peoples, the Indigenous people observed the natural world in order to take advantage of its resources. They made tools to increase the efficiency of their actions and planned for the future. Mota y Escobar noticed and chronicled difference and wrote it as wondrous but did not mark it as irrevocably “alien.”118 The Indigenous people “feel and perceive” the water and fish in order to assess the timing of their actions; they “hold a great calm silence” and “recognize” the desire of the fish to return to the ocean (assess their vulnerability) and implement their fine-tuned, practiced capture. By their ingenuity, Mota y Escobar was able to view the “the many trapped caimans, sharks, swordfish” and he was grateful for the experience.

116 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 43-44. 117 Greenblatt elaborates on this discursive strategy when he notes that in their writing about non-Europeans, Columbus and Díaz del Castillo articulated “radical differences that make renaming, transformation, and appropriation possible…for a moment you see yourself confounded with the other, but then you make the other become an alien object, a thing, that you can destroy or incorporate at will.” Marvelous Possessions, 135. 118 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 135.

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Figure 10: Modern fishing net “gate” in Chamatla, Sinaloa in the same style as those described by Mota y Escobar in his writing about this pueblo in the early seventeenth century. Source: Photo taken by Jose Manuel Mintaño Castillo on Google Images in January 2016, accessed November 10, 2020, https://goo.gl/maps/C2YGHZoT32Jww4iB9.

Mota y Escobar’s writing was still strategic however, suggesting that the Indigenous people of Chametla were “experts” of New Spain’s “natural” logic. He used the term “natural” twice in this account: the water of the ocean “returns” to its “natural place” and the whole affair, he told the reader, is “one of the most beautiful sights” of “natural” phenomena that “can happen.” As Mota y Escobar observed this event, he was the one to stand outside the natural and write it; this wondrous spectacle reanimated the attitude of creole entitlement to New Spain’s natural resources by collapsing landscape and people. Of Jan van der Straet’s engraving “America” (circa 1600), which depicts Amerigo Vespucci’s landing, Peter Hulme writes that the “single allegorical character” of ‘America’ “figures a strategy of condensation…combin[ing] the terms ‘native’ and ‘land’ to create an identity that dissimulates the existence of any relationship at all between the two at the moment of their encounter with Europe…The gesture of ‘discovery’ is at the same time a ruse of concealment.”119

119 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, xii (figure 1), 1.

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Mota y Escobar’s wonder was not a suspension of a desire for conquest, functioning as it did as a prompt for conceiving of the order of the universe (the great chain of being).120 It is significant that he commented on the “beautiful” sight of captured and “imprisoned” fish; instead of marvelling at the beauty of the “quantity and diversity of big and small fish” that entered the river, his wonder was reserved for the action and result of capture and possession (and conquest technology). This particular story thus emphasised the potential for exploitation of Indigenous labour and knowledge, as well as exploitation of a bountiful landscape, even if it did not provide the quantifiable evidence requested by the metropole. Mota y Escobar’s enthrallment with the whole event and the people undertaking it was inextricably tied to his sense that he belonged to this place and had power over these people as Bishop and colonial agent at the top of what he believed to be the cosmic order. He seemed to revel in his storytelling and descriptive power, which, like his contemporary, Jesuit José de Acosta, blended philosophy and moral theology.121 In combination with other events he chronicled, this account seems to indicate that Mota y Escobar was entertained and empowered by human engagement with control over the natural,

120 The great chain of being was a philosophy of classification. Following Greek natural philosophy, there were four basic elements in the creation of the universe: air, water, earth, and fire. These elements were “complemented” by the “Christian trilogy of the chain of being.” Of José de Acosta’s outlining of the “natural” configuration of the Indies,” in Natural and Moral History of the Indies, book four, Walter Mignolo writes that “the natural order of things, inscribed in God’s creation of the universe, was an ascending order that moved from the inanimate (rocks, minerals) to plants to animals.” Man, or “rational animals” were atop animals in this thinking, and “culture” (literacy, politics, economy) and religion “were both subsumed under the moral dimension and differentiated from the natural.” “Introduction,” in José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan, trans. Frances López-Morillas (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2002), xxiv, xxvii. For an examination and history of the theory of the great chain of being from antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Edmundo O’Gorman writes that the “natural” and the “moral” of Acosta’s title is “not only the cut between two worlds, but their independence, because, in the end, we are in the presence of a double consideration of the human, that is placed as much in the sphere of the Natural as in the Moral. In the first case…the consideration of the human is focused from the point of view of his vegetative and sensitive nature…in contrast, in the second case, man is centrally envisioned as being endowed of exceptional quality of ability to determine and act freely according to reason. In sum, the Moral World is, in the thinking of Acosta, the world of human will, or in other words, and using an anachronistic and perhaps undefinable term, but for us very expressive, is…the world of culture.”“Estudio Preliminar,” in José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, en que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales, plantas y animales dellas: y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes y gobierno, y guerras de los Indios, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (México: Fonda de cultura económica, 1940), xxxv-xxxvi. The author’s italics. 121 Mignolo, “Introduction,” in José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, xviii. Of Acosta’s work, Mignolo remarks: its greatness “lies in its conceptualization of the ‘‘Indies’’ within a larger philosophical picture. Its feebleness lies in its assumption that Amerindian knowledge did not count in the same way that the Greco-Latin tradition did.” Mota y Escobar’s writing similarly dismissed Indigenous knowledge (as fascination) while bringing it within a broader European epistemological framework.

138 whether it be the moon’s cycles, the “waxing” of the ocean, or the swordfish.122 This account served to arouse wonder and indicated Indigenous peoples’ natural domination of and synchronicity with their environment. For the Bishop, their knowledge and labour were his inheritance as authoritative observer and creole descendant within the greater colonial hierarchy of control. As ever, the excitement of this anecdote had no purposeful use for the imperial authorities for whom it was destined.

Throughout the Descripción, it was the natural world that most fascinated Mota y Escobar. Early in his writings, the Bishop chronicled a journey to Navito on the Pacific coast. The Bishop’s time in this small community was chronicled over two folio pages and more than one of those pages was spent observing just one activity of the Indigenous peoples in great detail. “[A]ll indios born on [its] shores were great swimmers…doing things in the water that if you do not see [them,] they cannot be believed,” he remarked.123 This short sentence revealed the wonder and possessiveness of the quotidian that filled the pages of Mota y Escobar’s account of Navito. This was a community where the Bishop seemed to feel both wonder and belonging—neither reading nor simply acknowledging the aquatic proficiency of the Indigenous population from afar would suffice: this small, local world had to be witnessed in order to “be believed.” He took pleasure in being the writer of this world despite the fact that it was not in fact “belief” or evidence of New Spain’s wonder that the Crown was looking for. It desired usable data that did not require interpretation.

Mota y Escobar did not stop at that brief remark on Navito. His record suggests that he spent time in the community, watching, taking notes, and remembering. The sense that his enthusiasm for the task of writing ran alongside a subtext of enthralment with and deep interest in Navito’s inhabitants is best illustrated by his own words, quoted here at length:

in particular, [the natives] do one [thing] with great facility with the alligators and crocodiles that are very abundant in all the rivers in great quantity, and that is that they dive into the depths of these

122 An element of King’s “conquistador humanism.” 123 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 46-48.

139

rivers and they go into the caves and caverns where the crocodiles live and they move [close] to them without any fear and show them affection and…they throw a rope around the neck and the indios ascend again, swimming, and…[they] pull them by the tail…bring them on land, where they play with them, exhausting them like a toro, and [the crocodiles] make their attacks, although slowly. Other indios climb on them like knights [while] in their caves, and hitting them with sticks[,] they make them go to the surface and they travel on them in the water as if they were travelling by horse…[In] order to [confirm] the skill and spirit of these indios, I will give [an example of] which many witnesses have affirmed. [When] una india was washing on the shore of the river in the presence of her spouse, an alligator arrived and [took her by] her arm and carried her into the deep [water] and in the same instant her spouse chased after her and having reached the alligator, hit at him with such strength, that he [dropped] the woman from his mouth and threw her on land [, having] shattered her arm; and of great fame are these incredible moments as they occur a lot in these rivers.124

What did the Bishop hope to convey to his royal audience with this extended and specific writing of this “incredible moment”? When Mota y Escobar wrote about the skill and “spirit” of the Indigenous people in their contact with reptiles, what imperial goal was being approached, and what could this digression reveal about places like Navito where events like this “occur a lot in these rivers” all over the New World? Sentiments of danger, desire, anxiety, and exhilaration accompanied each investigation of unknown yet familiar territory, and in his role as informant, Mota y Escobar attempted to relate these evocative moments in order to demonstrate the singularity of the territory he believed was his to possess, enjoy, and control. His story further invoked the marvellous by writing of Indigenous people as being able to complete superhuman

124 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 46-48. The Bishop used both “lagartos” (alligators) and “cocodrilos” (crocodiles) in his account; he did not know precisely what animal he was writing about.

140 feats, like staying under water for long periods of time. His task, however, was neither to construct affinities between colonials and metropolitans nor to provoke Old World appreciation.

In writing this account, the Bishop ushered the native population into the great chain of being, further contributing to early modern conversations about rationality, the human, and civilization.125 Mota y Escobar reported that Indigenous people were imperial subjects of cunning and intelligence, capable of out-maneuvering a reptile like a matador does a bull at the Iberian bullfight.126 This was not writing that demonstrated the need for civilizational reform, as the Crown desired; rather, this writing suggests affinities between the two locations by shifting Indigenous peoples’ practice into frameworks of European entertainment and sport. His writing did not draw out difference through a language of sameness but articulated the “hidden links” between what Greenblatt calls seemingly “radical opposed ways of being” and ushered in an “acceptance of the other in the self and the self in the other.”127

Following his description of reptiles and Indigenous people in action, Mota y Escobar turned the archosaur animal into an object of proto-scientific knowledge:

The description of this animal and of its characteristics and how it grows is written very well by Diódoro Sículo [Diodorus Siculus], [in his treatment] of the animals that are reared in the Nile, and all of those [same characteristics] I have verified [by my own eyes] in this land. It is very ferocious in its composure, very ugly to see, very repulsive in its colour, like the negro [who is] very tanned; it has a snout and head very similar to a wild boar; the teeth and molars are in number each row of 15 to 17 and [there are] as many

125 See Miguel de Asúa and R. French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005). 126 Greenblatt would call this scene a “crisis of representation,” which provoked the Bishop to turn to the shared “language” of the bullfight. Of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s description of the Spaniards’ first glimpse at Tenochtitlan in The Conquest of New Spain, Greenbaltt writes: “The absolutely other cannot be conveyed at all, cannot perhaps be even perceived, but [it] can at least gesture toward this other, marked with signs of fantasy, unreality, enchantment.” Unlike Díaz del Castillo’s description though, Mota y Escobar does not construct a boundary between the two resemblances. See the discussion of Díaz del Castillo’s writings in Marvelous Possessions, 132- 133. 127 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 135.

141

on the top as on the bottom,[but] of different forms[:] some sharp with the end to cut and others smooth in order to chew[. In] the end of the snout…it has two fangs and great teeth and in the same jaw [both] high and low[,] it has holes like buttonholes[.When] opening the mouth the teeth on top enter the buttonholes of the lower jaw and the two on the bottom[,] the buttonholes of those of the top…having shut the mouth these four teeth [are] two fingerbreadth [long], and so it is impossible to escape these teeth, when this animal shuts its jaws. Commonly it has a tail and body three yards of length and those that are very big [measure] at four [yards]. Its smell is of musk, although it is not very pleasant, the tonsils can be taken out…and placed in a chest where there are clothes, [and] they give a nice smell, although it does not last.128

For Mota y Escobar, knowing the secrets of this animal was clearly important. He articulated his knowledge of the ancient Greek authorities, drawing on references that would have been familiar to his audience. Like the ancient Mediterranean historians, Mota y Escobar asserted his power over the landscape, its places, its peoples, and its animals through a discourse that was officially sanctioned for the purposes of furthering empire as it was directed from Madrid. Certainly, his comment on the “repulsive” colour of the reptile and his comparison of it with a Black person mobilized representational practices that drew on far-flung, racialized imperial ‘knowledge’ in order to categorize, contain, and control. The violent comparing and contrasting of animals and human beings as demonstrated here runs parallel to the increasing institutionalization of the casta (caste) structure.129 Nevertheless, the Bishop’s sense of wonder with New Spain’s ephemera was not sanctioned or legitimated by the Crown and was likely viewed as indulgent

128 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 46-48. Early modern Europeans were amazed by and often did not like the appearance of reptiles they encountered in the Americas. De Asúa and French relate the story of Columbus’ first encounter with an iguana (“serpent”), which was compared to crocodiles and other lizards. Columbus ordered an iguana be killed, skinned, and salted for shipment to Spain. The authors write that Andrés Bernáldez, the historian and archbishop of Seville who wrote the History of the Catholic Kings, which included material from Columbus’ first voyage, called the iguana the “most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw.” Andrés Bernáldez, History of the Catholic Kings, in The Four Voyages of Columbus, ed. Cecil Jane (New York: Dover Publication), I: 120-123, 150 quoted in De Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 3. 129 I will discuss the sistema de castas (caste system) in greater detail in chapter three.

142 and indecipherable.130 An accounting of how many animals were present in the community might have met the demands of the task. His throwaway argument that the reptile’s teeth had a role in contributing to the material needs of the colonial enterprise was perhaps a reluctant return to his assigned task. For those long journeys by flota (fleet), crocodile tonsils could be extracted (undoubtedly by an enslaved person) to sweeten the smell of tucked away garments, but it was the very last point Mota y Escobar made in this lengthy reptilian foray. This writing sought to position this creole prelate as an agent of deeply local knowledge that required interpretation through Old World paradigms.

Finally, the Bishop approached his most recognizably creole preoccupation in the account that follows. Near the mines of Todos Santos, near Santa Bárbara, in “the valleys and fields” of Nueva Vizcaya, an “extraordinary and oversized type of deer” was killed that “we could call horse deer,” because their antlers “were more than a yard (vara) in height,” the Bishop wrote. Their hides were “very large” and the Indigenous people who had not succumbed to Hispanic domination (los indios bárbaros) treated them with “more perfection than the lamb’s wool of Navarre.”131 These “leathers are so thick on their side that with four or five they become as strong as the finest elk (anta), which all the Spaniards and soldiers that journey through this kingdom use and they are much lighter and easier to carry [and wear] on the body than that of elk.” Also, he continued, there were other animals “somewhat larger than foxes,” whose skins served well in the linings of clothes, but “although they are very hairy and [provide] much protection, they have rough spots and so they are not well esteemed.”132

In this account, the Bishop asserted that rebel Indigenous peoples, who were not subjects of the Crown, worked with animal hides more perfectly than Castilian wool workers. It is unclear where Mota y Escobar got this information: had he seen the Indigenous people treating the hides? Had he only experienced the hide quality? Had he heard about the quality from people

130 Kay Anderson, “‘The beast within’: race, humanity, and animality,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 18 (2000): 303. 131 David J. Weber writes that the term indios bárbaros was used to signal unconquered Indigenous people: “Early in the colonial period…[t]he words encompassed Indians who lived in sedentary non Christian societies with recognizable heads of state, governmental structures, and religion.” Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 15, 282n56. 132 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, 88. My italics.

143 living in the area? He also asserted that metropolitan imported wares, “finest elk” hides, were inferior and unnecessary because New Spain contained the fauna and people to generate a better product to protect “Spaniards and soldiers” who ventured to and moved about the colony. Using European standards of quality, like weight and ease of use, the Bishop argued that New Spain could provide a better product for Europeans in the colony than could Europe. There is a pride and excitement in this writing that could not have been shared by the Crown reader; trade and ties of dependence between Iberia and New Spain were crucial in maintaining imperial power in the Indies. Self-sufficiency was a creole preoccupation, not a metropolitan one. He went on to describe an additional animal hide of the land that, while imperfect by European standards – too hairy with rough spots – provided “much” protection from the elements. This account demonstrates the process of affective and discursive transition from enchantment and admiration – “extraordinary” animals – to possession and use – “leathers so thick.”

The 1604 questionnaire’s inquiries, its three hundred and fifty-five bite-size preguntas, were supposed to be easier consumption for efficient administrative use. Like Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s triumphant conquistador chronicle, the imperial project of knowledge collection was supposed to be what Greenblatt calls an “enterprise…fanatically dedicated to swallowing the whole vast land mass and all of its peoples.”133 However, in this instance, what was intended to be a continuation of Columbus’s drive to dominate and possess, inventory and catalogue, was confounded by a non-Indigenous American’s distinctly creole connection to his place of birth. Mota y Escobar could not, in the end, make present the colony for the Prince’s benefit; he could only make seen a nascent criollo will to power that desired metropolitan recognition and relation.

This chapter has examined Mota y Escobar’s metropole-commissioned writings from his tenure as the Bishop of Guadalajara in the first decade of the seventeenth century. An exploration of these writings alongside the Crown’s and the Council of the Indies’ directions and expectations for the collection of New World knowledge by interrogatorio in 1604, brings into focus the divergence of the creole Bishop’s goals from the imperial centre. When the metropole requested brief, mostly quantitative responses, Mota y Escobar invoked the qualitative wondrous to assert

133 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 136.

144 his voice and vision and avoid disappointment, distrust, and criticism. He desired to create and shape an affinity between the two locations but his anecdotes, overflowing with detail that required interpretation, were not what the metropole wanted nor thought it needed in order to govern and exploit its American possessions effectively.

A creole curiosity, enthrallment, and desire for domination and control imbued the stories of animals and nature that the Bishop told and directed the ways in which he declared he would tell them. These assertions of discursive ordering came from Mota y Escobar’s attitude of entitlement and exceptionalism, as a descendant of conquerors and local colonial agent—a novohispano natural. This latter distinction will be drawn out in greater detail in the following chapter as intellectual efforts to assert authority in the transcultural writings of the Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León became concrete action and practice in the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla. Where Mota y Escobar acknowledged (at least in theory) his symbiotic role as a servant of the Council of the Indies in his Guadalajara writings, as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla he would play a direct role in shaping novohispano order within the colony. Claims to singular understanding of the complexity of novohispano marvels, most often represented through the labour and knowledge of Indigenous people, turned to practices of claiming and defining novohispano cultural superiority through whiteness, slavery, and segregation as will be shown in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 The Républica that He Wanted: Order and Whiteness in Tlaxcala-Puebla

In late March 1617, in his role as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar entered an accounting notation in his pastoral notebook that diarized a debt arrangement he had made with the Puebla cathedral chapter. He received 20,000 pesos in censo (a mortgaged debt arrangement) for all his “possessions and properties” in the city. Of this situation, which provided him with liquid capital in exchange for annuities, he wrote: “I clarify that it has not been my intent to enrich or accumulate finances for greed, but…to make a pious establishment in the service of God and [for the] enlarging of the república that I would like.”1 Here the Bishop referred concretely to his plans to use his wealth and episcopal power to expand the commonwealth of Spaniards, the república de españoles, physically, spiritually, and politically in New Spain’s “second city.” This notation demonstrates the Bishop’s identification of the república as a site for the extension of his own elite Hispano-creole vision. Further, it reveals his commitment and ambition to build a lasting institutional infrastructure for the reproduction and “enlarging” of that vision. The republic of Spaniards was where novohispanidad (novohispano order) was to be constructed and rooted. As I will show in this chapter, the institutional order of this physical and ideological space was still in the making, open to creative input and definition by creoles like Mota y Escobar who were invested in translating Old World preoccupations and structures into local colonial contexts.

From the mid-sixteenth century, the official imperial desire to construct and maintain a juridical world of separate civilizational or development spheres for its colonial subjects was pursued. Colonial society in New Spain was split into “two separate commonwealths…one Spanish, the other indigenous,” the república de españoles and the república de indios. Martínez writes that this system was “one of the most distinctive aspects of Spanish colonial rule,” and a legal miniature of the broader notion of República used by the Crown and others to refer to the colony more broadly (República of New Spain).2 The república de indios was created by the violent

1 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250v (image 254). Mota y Escobar used the lowercase ‘r’ república in this entry. 2 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 5, 92. In a spring 1528 cédula from Carlos V to the most important secular and religious administrators of New Spain, the King gave his instructions for the organization of Indigenous peoples as tributaries and subjects. He wrote: “Know that We are wishing to provide and order the things of the República of New Spain as better and more convenient to the service of God Our Lord and to the conversion of the indios to our

145 146 corralling of many distinct Indigenous peoples into homogenized communities (pueblos de indios) with legal and religious structures designed to subject, Christianize, and collect tribute.3 It was an environment of “disruption and disavowal of Native dominion” and a reminder of Castilian domination.4 Its counterpart, the república de españoles, was not an exclusively Spanish and Spanish-descended domain but rather a space to pursue Hispanic interests, reinforce Hispanic cultural codes, and uphold Hispanic hegemony.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the creole elite of the República of New Spain – the first- and second-generation inhabitants of the república de españoles – had clear ideas regarding the maintenance of the established order. They believed that Indigenous people were central to the order of the colony, just as the Crown did. But in contrast to the mercantilist vision of the Crown, where all profit would flow one way to the metropole, these Hispano-creole elites imagined a sharing of the process of extracting wealth from the Indigenous peoples. In his witness testimony in the 1597 petition to the Crown, creole Bishop-elect of Guatemala, Hernando Ortiz Hinojosa, argued that the loss of the conquistador descendants’ privileges would cause “great damage to

Holy Catholic Faith and [for] good treatment of them, and [for] the growth [of their] population.” This early colonial articulation acknowledged the Castilian Crown’s vision of New Spain as a distinct territory and sociopolitical entity, a República within the Hapsburg Empire. Over the course of the colonial period, the Crown sought to assert its omniscient sovereignty over this entity through the creation of institutional bureaucracy and knowledge collection schemes, and the assertion and protection of claims to order religious and secular colonial governance structures. Carlos V, “Información recibida en la Real Audiencia de México…,” in Epistolario de Nueva España, 23. Covarrubias Horozco’s 1611 entry for “República” is very brief: “res publica, libera civitas, status, liberae civitatis,” republic, free city, state, free state, respectively. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1405. 3 Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism,” 411. Martínez writes that the república de indios “encompassed the establishment of separate civil and ecclesiastical institutions and a distinct theological-legal status for the native population, as well as the recognition of their right to live in semiautonomous communities with their own rules and lands…The existence and reproduction of native towns not only facilitated the siphoning of tribute to royal coffers but enabled placing their population under the tutelage of the crown and the church, thereby strengthening the relationship between the Spanish state and indigenous communities. This relationship, which was cast as voluntary and contractual and was constantly invoked in legal procedures for validating indigenous political and economic claims, strongly shaped central Mexican communal histories and notions of blood among native elites.” Genealogical Fictions, 120, 284. On the differences between pre- and post-contact Indigenous land formations, see Arij Ouweneel, “Altepeme and Pueblos de indios: Some Comparative Theoretical Perspectives on the Analysis of the Colonial Indian Communities,” in The Indian Community of Colonial Mexico: Fifteen Essays on Land Tenure, Corporate Organizations, Ideology and Village Politics, eds. Arij Ouweneel and Simon Miller (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990), 1-40. 4 Smallwood, “Reflections on Settler Colonialism,” 411.

147 the república.”5 This notation was a lament but also a warning, playing on both resonances of the word in the Iberian transatlantic conversation.

The creole elite largely lost the struggle to institutionalize the encomienda, which created an anxiety about their ability to maintain their class status and power in colonial society. With the understanding that the repúblicas were the metropolitan and colonial mechanism for assessing and constructing order and generating wealth, creoles endeavoured to create the colonial republic that they envisioned through quotidian practices that articulated and reproduced the legitimacy of their rule. To do this and gain the acknowledgment of the Crown, they sought to connect themselves to metropolitan Hispanism and emphasize their exceptionalism as men born in New Spain using already established Iberian epistemological constructs. I call this new order novohispanidad or colonial Hispanism.6

This chapter shows that the making of novohispanidad was not a “natural identity,” but was, like other ideological manifestations of whiteness across the Americas, “constructed, acquired and reproduced through a series of discourses and material practices.”7 Creoles made an argument for their own importance in constructing and maintaining this order, with a focus on defining colonial Hispanism as both similar to, yet distinct from, peninsular cultural group formation. This chapter draws upon Mota y Escobar’s individual writings as representing and extending this ideology from his position as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, one of the highest religious positions in the colony of New Spain.8 I argue that the Bishop saw himself as a creator-builder of this new

5 Testimony of Hernando Ortiz Hinojosa in Epistolario de Nueva España, 64. This witness is the uncle of Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa, whose 1619 sermon is discussed later in this chapter. 6 The term ‘colonial Hispanism’ has a broader Atlantic world resonance but here I use it to speak of Hispanism adapted to the colony of New Spain in particular. 7 Cecily Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries of Gender, Race and Sexuality in Barbadian Plantation Society,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 2 (2003): 197. 8 The Bishop of Puebla’s ecclesiastical power was second only to the Archbishop of Mexico. Puebla was founded in 1531 and was intended as a “Spanish town” on the camino real between Mexico City and Veracruz. The Indigenous altepetl of Tlaxcala was located in the same valley, and according to Franciscan friar Toribio de Motolinía, Tlaxcalans built the city of Puebla as the most prominent allies of the Spanish in the conquest of the Mexica Memoriales, ed. Nancy Joe Dwyer (Mexico City, 1996), 363–368.

148 order and he used the collective rhetoric of his class and the personal tools of his station to accomplish his expansionist goals.9

I return to the witness testimony of the 1597 petition to the Crown discussed in chapter one, as creole attitudes towards encomienda and Indigenous peoples in this document also included self- conscious efforts to define themselves. Threatened by what they interpreted as a loss of entitlements, elite creoles – religious figures, government administrators, and vecinos – also advanced a series of arguments articulating Hispano-creole or Spanish American exceptionalism. The chapter begins with these arguments, including Mota y Escobar’s, which emphasized creole intimacy with the colonial landscape and dedication to imperial concerns about cultural segregation. This section includes a discussion of the sistema de castas, or caste system. Elite Hispano-creoles utilized colonial epistemological adaptations of Iberian concerns with blood purity (limpieza de sangre) and raza, race, to assuage their anxieties about class power and to manage perceptions of difference within the colony.

The sistema came to operate with what Martínez refers to as a “whitening logic” that associated whiteness with Spanishness and hinged on patriarchal reproduction and protection, and the propagation of purity as a moral imperative.10 The chapter continues with an examination of the Catholic Church’s role in institutionalizing this logic, analyzing the 1619 sermon given by a member of the Dominican order and fellow Hispano-creole Bishop of Oaxaca Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa. This sermon illustrates the intersection of the language of criollo exceptionalism and whiteness. Aside from the fact that Bohórquez was, like Mota y Escobar, another creole and bishop in New Spain, this sermon is particularly relevant to a study of Mota y Escobar because it was delivered in the cathedral of Puebla during his tenure as Bishop. This sermon advanced arguments regarding New Spain’s special role in Castilian domination across the world through explicitly religious and racialized rhetoric in celebration of the Immaculate Conception. The sermon links Columbus’ arrival in New Spain with a sacred transformative

9 By the term station I mean both Mota y Escobar’s formal religious position as bishop and his inherited wealth and connections as a member of the conquistador descendant class. 10 María Elena Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004): 485n13.

149 power, which endowed the land (and its Euro-descended people) with a moral purity, a whiteness, that had to be reproduced in order to fulfill God’s will.

In order to attach themselves to Hispanism and therefore power, the discourse and practices of elite creoles had to support ideological whiteness and its reproduction through the “protection” of the bodies of white women, the transfer of wealth and capital to other Hispano-creoles across the colony, and a dedication to racialized slavery and its uninterrupted perpetuation. The second part of this chapter examines Mota y Escobar’s practical and institutional efforts to support this ideological framework of moral, gendered, and racialized purity through his engagement with convents and enclosure, money and property, enslavement, and the reproduction of nobility and status as revealed by the pastoral accounting records from Tlaxcala-Puebla. The Bishop’s institutionalization of patriarchal and racialized power was crucial in enlarging the república of his class, and shoring up Hispanic power in the colony overall. In so doing, he sought to naturalize the presence and strength of white Hispano-creole authority.

Distinguishing American Spaniards

As outlined in chapter one, the main thrust of the testimonies of elite creoles in the 1597 petition to the Crown was the argument that descendants’ encomienda entitlement should be preserved in perpetuity. The services and sacrifices of the conquistadors – those “good and obedient, faithful and loyal vassals” of the Crown – should be remembered and rewarded forever, as the returns of the conquest of New Spain had facilitated the expansion of the greater Hispanic Empire into the Philippines and the Pacific world.11 In addition to this focus on the issue of the encomienda, the creole and peninsular witnesses of the 1597 petition articulated a vision of the distinctions and particularities of the colony and the colony-born with an implicit comparative reference. These creoles (and their peninsular supporters who testified on their behalf) had to demonstrate their connection to Hispanism and Old World nobility in order to demand noble treatment while simultaneously underlining their exceptional status within the kingdom in order to maintain Hispano-creole power. Thus, they laid out the arguments for the legitimacy of a conquistador- descended creole aristocracy and reminded the Crown of the presence of a group of elite creoles

11 Parecer of Fernando de Villegas, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 12.

150 in the colony. They played upon what they believed were metropolitan anxieties about imperial ruin and presented themselves as the ideal guardians and creators of Hispanic order.

Crucially, their arguments utilized Iberian notions of naturaleza, nación, and calidad—broad Mediterranean concepts of belonging and status used by many European kingdoms to think about and justify exclusionary governance, warfare, and enslavement.12 Sherwin Bryant provides a concise explanation of the nuances and interrelationship of these terms, writing that habitats, “or naturaleza, acted upon human bodies, producing distinct characteristics used to identify individuals as naturales of a particular geographic zone or habitat. Chief among those characteristics was physiognomy,” meaning the “calidad, [or] complexion, and overall health of naturales.”13 “Ultimately,” Bryant writes, “this early modern science of physiognomy insisted that it was possible to ‘read’ and distinguish an individual’s character and qualities through personal features of complexion, language, bodily marks, and other physical symbols understood as peculiar to specific environments…Castilians used ‘color’ to ‘read’ habitat and calidad.”14 Bryant notes that, whereas:

naturaleza provided a method of reading people in relation to geographic origins, nación indexed geopolitical origins, or nation. Nation was a nonpejorative reference to sovereign claims over individuals that indexed practices, laws, and legal cultures within a given sovereign territory15

Therefore, he remarks, to speak of one’s nation was an “attempt to read, mark, and govern subject peoples in relation to corporeal affiliations.” Nation was not unlike naturaleza, as it also referenced political and cultural practices that framed geographic and religious belonging.16

12 Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press., 2014), 48. 13 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48-49. 14 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48-49. 15 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48-49. 16 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48-49.

151

Elite creoles used this developing discourse of belonging to habitat and nation to highlight novohispano distinction and exceptionalism. The language of group subjectivity would arguably have been recognizable to Crown readers. Yet, metropolitan recognition of American Spanishness was fraught because elite creoles were claiming a right to institutionalize their own novel kind of New World power in order to exercise thoroughly Old World entitlements outside of direct and complete Crown control.

Using the lexicon of the peninsula but turning it against peninsulares, creoles argued that New Spain was threatened by mobile actors without colonial affinities. Creole Cristóbal de Vargas Valadés lamented that many “houses have lost the name and nobility of their fathers and ancestors of this kingdom because in order to support themselves they must leave them and go to other parts to look for a remedy” and today, most “people of this city of Mexico and [this] kingdom are traders (tratantes) and foreigners (forasteras) that have come from Castilla and deal in merchandise,” returning to “their birthplace (su natural)” once they had made profits.17 It is notable that Vargas Valadés’ statement associated “foreigners” with “Castilla” and signalled a conceptualization of New Spain as a distinct kingdom and nation within the Empire. He also suggested that the kingdom had an identifiable Hispanic-descended noble “native” population struggling to maintain its fragile and hard-won reputation and properties in the face of incursions from metropolitan upstarts.18 Such “traders and foreigners” used New Spain as a “source of

17 Testimony of Cristóbal de Vargas Valadés, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 94-95. Vargas Valadés testified that he was the descendant of conquerors in New Spain. Covarrubias Horozco writes of “forastero”: “he who is not of the same place nor the same land…extranjero (foreigner).” Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Española, 919. Martínez remarks that “foreignness” in Spanish political theory signalled treachery because such persons had no “natural love” for the places they visited. She notes that Black people were also considered foreign in the colonial Americas and when this was combined with their forced migration (lack of consent to the Crown of Castile), they were believed to be likely to side with Spain’s enemies. “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 489. 18 This may have also been a reference to Iberian conversos who had become enriched by the Carrera de Indias (“navigation and commerce between Spain and its colonies”) who returned to the peninsula, and received government positions and noble titles, and married into ‘Old Christian’ aristocracy, beginning in the late fifteenth century. Martínez notes that the Carrera “became a promising track to wealth, public office, and ennoblement,” and there was significant popular resentment regarding this “commercialization of nobility.” Genealogical Fictions, 78. Thompson notes that a quarter of all patents of nobility purchased from the crown from the mid-sixteenth century to the early sixteenth century (nineteen of seventy-seven) were purchased by men or their descendants who had spent time in the Americas. Most claimed title based on military service but many also acquired noble title through involvement in the Carrera trade. I.A.A. Thompson, “The Purchase of Nobility in Castile, 1552-1700,” Journal of European Economic History 8, no. 2 (1979): 347. James S. Amelang has noted that Thompson’s data set for this claim was quite small (“The Purchase of Nobility in Castile, 1552-1700: A Comment,” Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 1 [1982]: 219-226).

152 fortune,” remarked creole vecino Agustín de Bustamente. The descendants of conquistadores did not have the ability to sustain themselves (without encomienda), he continued, so they “left their lands and naturaleza that is this kingdom and they go to search [for a way] to be able to support [themselves], [and] it is a shame to see the need” they experience.19 These witnesses paint an overall picture of a displaced and transient atmosphere within the colony.

Creole vecino (and cousin of Mota y Escobar) Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña observed further that, unlike the descendants of conquerors who have “affection and feelings of loyalty” to the kingdom and empire, these foreigners “forsake” New Spain and return to Castile. Hispano- creoles “support and defend the said kingdom” because they are “people with so much love that they will serve and defend it for [His Majesty’s] particular interest.” In addition, Santa Cruz de Orduña testified, they protect the kingdom “as a thing so natural” because of their ancestors’ sacrifices and “servicios” to win it.20 Hispano-creoles were not only loyal to empire as faithful subjects but because their lineage was connected to the land by hardship and service, which made criollo feelings of affection for the kingdom natural.

The assertion that Castilians were foreigners in New Spain with stronger ties to their “birthplace” than the colony would have been legible to metropolitan agents through their understanding of the concepts of naturaleza and nación, but since the colony was a possession of Castile, this line of thinking was complicated. Creoles were arguing that with perpetual encomienda, they could and would “indigenize” Hispanism better than the mercantilist agents of Castile and, therefore, better unify and defend the Empire. Further, their arguments assumed that the official mercantilist vision of the Crown could be reconciled with colonial profits staying within the colony as they were suggesting a revision of the economic system of the Empire in which revenues were shared. This assertion of local sovereignty and strong municipal authority had a long history in Iberian governance and is one of the principal reasons that scholars argue for the incompatibility of mercantilism with early modern Spanish political development (and hence, its supposed failure). Regina Grafe has argued that Spanish notions of “political representation and participation” clashed with mercantilist policies because they were “perceived as a

19 Testimony of Agustín de Bustamente, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 109. 20 Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 80-81.

153 disenfranchisement and were resisted for sociopolitical reasons because they interfered with where sovereignty and power were located, how they were legitimized, and the way in which they were practiced.”21 The Crown struggled with the paradoxes of fiscal and socio-political integration of its territories (peninsular and abroad) for the entire colonial era and no doubt recognized the danger and Old World logic of the creoles’ perspective.

This perspective was rooted and invested in membership in empire and Hispanic culture and used the fear of territorial loss to urge the necessity of a colonial aristocracy. Criollos reminded the Crown of their loyalty and attention to the colony’s “public good,” recalling the essence of República, but warned that, in the words of Santa Cruz de Orduña, “this New World is being reduced to people of negotiation and commerce (gente de trato y comercio).”22 Such people did not go to defend the “North Sea” (the Gulf of Mexico) when the English arrived nor did they help pay for the defense of the ports. The only people with the “nerve” and “great spirit (ánimo)” to defend New Spain were creole descendants, testified Mexican creole Luis de Moscoso Alvarado.23 This broad defense of the colony would not be possible without “the fruits of the said encomiendas that our fathers had and put into the Royal Treasury,” and because the encomienda was not being renewed indefinitely the kingdom was in danger. Specifically, De Moscoso Alvarado testified there was a “great quantity” of “negros and mulatos and mestizos” that put the colony at risk.24 Race mixture and a dearth of white people in the colony were an existential threat to the kingdom, he seemed to argue. An elite descendant class supported by the “fruits” of encomienda would be dedicated to and capable of maintaining order.

The novohispano men drew a moral contrast between their interests and character and the interests and character of “people of negotiation and commerce.” Such people “reduced” the quality of the whole Hispanic New World because of their transience, while the descendants of conquistadors maintained or increased its status by their natural affinity for the colony as a result

21 Regina Grafe, “Polycentric States: The Spanish Reigns and the “Failures” of Mercantilism,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, eds. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 242, 246. 22 Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduna, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 80. 23 Testimony of Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 100. 24 Testimony of Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 100.

154 of their lineage and virtue. Civilizational status and noble status were collapsed so that the elite creole class effectively argued that their wealth and nobility protected the civilization of the kingdom within the Empire, the republic of Spaniards. The financial incentives of (Castilian) merchants exceeded their priority to maintain the colony for the greater Hispanic good, these men argued.

Peninsular witnesses attested the same thing. They charged that the people of goods and merchandise do not “profess more” than to “acquire money” and return home, in the “contrary” spirit of conquistador descendants.25 These witnesses affirmed that the creole spirit or character was disinterested in the broad business of trato (tratar) – the ‘hands on’ negotiation of “buying and selling merchandise” – but were instead fully entitled to reap the landed and titled rewards of feudal service, as manifested in encomienda.26 For these elite creoles, wealth in the form of specie was an emblem of the meeting of extra-economic goals; in the early colonial era, a “title of nobility was more valuable than capital…Wealth and ostentation were more important sources of social status than ownership of productive capital,” as Enrique Semo has observed.27 Merchants and men of commerce used bullion and specie to expand their businesses and innovate (exploit) in order to make greater profits, the “primitive accumulation” step necessary for the Castilian Crown to pursue its interests in Europe and abroad.28 This worldview clashed with the elite creole vision of the extension of the encomienda as an institution to generate a

25 Testimony of Fray Juan de Guzman, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 104 and Testimony of Don Juan de Guzman, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 90. These are two separate witnesses with the same name; I have preserved their titles here in order to differentiate them. The peninsular witnesses had varying professions and roles in the colony such as Archbishop of New Granada, provincial of the Dominican order, vecino, canon of the Mexico City cathedral, member of the council of merchants (Consulado), municipal official (alcalde ordinario), governor of the estate of Hernando Cortés, and regidor. Most of these were not related to “business and commerce,” but the unspecified vecinos and member of the Consulado might have been figures like the ones the descendants were criticizing here. 26 Covarrubias Horozco defined “tratar” in two separate entries: first, “to touch something with the hand, and by allusion it is said to treat business, to put the hands in it”; and second, “to negotiate buying and selling merchandise, of which the dealer and the deal [are] the negotiation.” Regarding the latter definition, he goes on: “To have a good deal, or a bad deal, to negotiate with truth, or with deceit. Double deal, deceit in disguise. Treating one is having knowledge with him and conversation. Woman of bad treatment, one who is not chaste, and enclosed.” Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Española, 1486-1487. 27 Semo, A History of Capitalism in Mexico, 69. 28 Semo, A History of Capitalism in Mexico, 69.

155 landed Hispanic-descended class, which in turn guaranteed the preservation of the kingdom and empire by those with inherited, naturalized, and “native” affection for both.

The prevalence of this juxtaposition of creole descendants and mercantile “foreigners,” throughout the 1597 testimonies suggests a concerted effort to link imperial service and memory of that service to a naturalized affection for the landscape of the kingdom and to a dedication to preserving the place of the kingdom within the Hispanic Empire. In his testimony Mota y Escobar, then deán of the Mexico City cathedral, argued that the “sons and nephews of the conquistadors of this land…behave in the style of noble people,” but there were men that “only [paid] attention to trade and merchandising” because their “hearts and spirits” have “short roots” in the land and the Empire. They “attend only to their particular interests and having achieved them with ease,” they return to their homelands “because this was their ultimate goal.”29

This critique further reveals the equating of creole descendants with “noble people,” and people of commerce, trade, and negotiation with a temporary and self-interested collective. Mota y Escobar drew a connection between nobility and affinity with land; he suggested that elite creole “hearts and spirits” attached themselves to physical landscapes and metaphysical entities, like empires, in the inherent nature of nobles.30 He insinuated that the “roots” of the descendants in New Spain were long and deep – alluding to notions of lineage and genealogy – which engendered in the “sons and nephews of the conquistadors” an attention to wider interests than simply their own. Such long “roots” signalled cultural codes that emphasized established lineage as morally superior, like the Old Christian archetype; this translated into an enhanced dedication to the kingdom and metropole. Self-interest rather than self-sacrifice was a threat to the Hispanic possession of the New World, he insisted.

Further in his testimony, Mota y Escobar added that only the creoles had the resources and experience necessary for “war” against the Empire’s enemies as “the rest of the people only deal with their contracts and goods and [are] a bad fit with military things.”31 The Crown should

29 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 70-71. 30 Covarrubias Horozco defined the verb naturalizarse (to become a natural) as “to become natural of some kingdom by privilege,” an understanding that Mota y Escobar seems to deploy here that was crucial to Hispano- creole claims overall. Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 1307. 31Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 70-71.

156 recognize that creoles’ purity of intent and martial dedication to imperial goals signified superiority and a natural propensity to wield power. The descendants of conquerors “ought to be paid and remunerated…Your Majesty [must] understand this with straight-forward truth.” Instead, he complained, the results of the “services” of the conquistadors were being used to “gratify foreigners and upstarts [within] this kingdom.”32 In the view of Santa Cruz de Orduña, these men of commerce simply did not possess the “bond” to New Spain that the descendants did because it was not their “land and own patria.”33

The similarities in creole testimonies indicate that this argument – that fealty to easy wealth and fortune rather than empire was rampant in the kingdom – was broadly accepted as a means to persuade the Crown as to the efficacy of perpetuating a landed noble class in New Spain. Wealth accumulation untethered from a personal, familial connection to conquest, these witnesses suggested, was a threat to the Crown’s primary interest in the preservation of the Empire. Thus, these men argued, a crucial corollary interest of the Crown should be the maintenance of an elite creole class in New Spain, whose distinct and singular characteristics should give shape to the novohispano república de españoles.

Outside explicit complaints regarding merchant self-interest within the colony, this late sixteenth-century appeal to the Crown also commented on the broader social effects of the heirs’ loss of wealth and income. In the questionnaire created by the cabildo for this purpose, item five explicitly asserted that the descendants of the conquistadores were “poor and needy” because they had lost their entitlement to their ancestors’ encomienda lands and Indigenous labour.34 Peninsular Archbishop of Nueva Granada and inquisitor of New Spain, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero, remarked that “by their need and poverty” the descendants of the conquerors, would be compelled to go and reside in the pueblos de indios, passing their lives with “great work and misery to sustain themselves,” also taking advantage of the “sweat and work” of the Indigenous peoples. The lack of encomiendas and ensuing poverty caused the death of “the memory of the

32 Testimony of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 71-72. 33Testimony of Diego Santa Cruz de Orduña, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 80-81. Patria, Covarrubias Horozco wrote in 1611, was the “land where one was born.” As the above discussion suggests, this identification with birthplace mattered to the creoles. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Española, 1349. 34 Epistolario de Nueva España, 49-52.

157 said conquistadores and nobleza of this said city [of Mexico].”35 In other words, if the wants and needs of criollos were not met by Crown support and rewards, there would be a collapse of the distinction between the two repúblicas on which the socio-economic and civilizational order depended, as conquistador descendants would be compelled to mix with, oppress, and exploit the Indigenous peoples for their own survival. The nobleza of Mexico City would be lost. It is significant that a peninsular witness made this argument as it asserted that a civilizational and cultural bond existed between metropolitan Hispanism and elite creole culture.

Lobo Guerrero’s comments reflect a broader argument of the 1597 petition to the Crown, namely that the encomienda institutionalized racial hierarchies that empowered the descendants to fulfill their natural role as caretakers of the Indigenous populations. Most of the creole sons did not admit that their ancestors had any willful role in the decline of the Indigenous populations, but they did make the case for their class’s distinct paternal feelings towards native peoples, as described in chapter one.36 Secure access to mercedes would prevent an inevitable situation of exploitation and ensure the protection of vulnerable Indigenous subjects, they argued. The threat of exploitation played on the Crown’s stated obligation and commitment to take care of Indigenous subjects and foster the growth of their populations. Indigenous peoples, their labour, tribute, and existence were the main point of tension between elite creoles and the Crown: they were the just prize of conquest for the former and the justification for colonial domination for the latter. By the late sixteenth century both interest groups agreed on the need for separate spheres for indios and españoles and this influential peninsular witness articulated the reality of future ruin and racial mixture without guarantees of creole privilege. Lobo Guerrero’s point demonstrated that peninsulars and creoles shared a sin raza status that protected the nobility of the colony and the Empire by extension.

This point also assumed that it was abnormal for conqueror descendants to be expected to perform substantive labour and it was not morally acceptable for them to live lives of “misery” in the república de indios. For the intended inhabitants of this república, misery was to be

35 Testimony of Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero, in Epistolario de Nueva España, 66-67. 36 One creole witness, the first Bishop of Cebú (Philippines), Augustinian friar Pedro de Agurto, did testify that Indigenous people suffered “vexations and mistreatments” as a result of “personal service” in “mines and “farms” of Spaniards and the Spanish-descended. Testimony of Pedro de Agurto in Epistolario de Nueva España, 58-59.

158 expected, this inquisitor seems to suggest. Using the other arguments of this petition, the witness argued that as noble people, the sons of conquerors were representatives of Crown power, and a lack of república distinction was a dilution of that power and the purity upon which it relied. While the Crown sought to make more obedient subjects of the creole descendants, the argument for continued encomienda was an argument for shared metropolitan-colonial power. This vision of the world argued that labour and misery, ownership and happiness, were measures of class and civilization, and should remain so.37 This testimony further demonstrates that elite creole men saw the maintenance of separate repúblicas, civilizational segregation, as the proper way to order colonial life. The financial security of the creole nobility was essential for that order to be maintained.

By examining the individual witness statements of creoles and peninsulars within the 1597 petition to the Crown, we get a sense of the collective conquistador descendants’ view of who they were in relation to the Empire. The testimonies articulated five overlapping arguments, which illuminate the beliefs creoles had about themselves, the anxieties they felt, and the threats they believed existed. These points mimicked Castilian notions of idealized noble culture but engendered distinct contextual changes that demonstrated developing colonial race thinking and group formation. They asserted that conquistador descendants were “noble people” living in a distinct kingdom within the Empire. Following that, they argued that the Hispanic-descended population of the kingdom of New Spain was nativized by conquest and birth. “Foreigners” (who included peninsulares) and “easy money” were a threat to the kingdom and empire, they warned, which contrasted sharply with the natural “patriotic” affinity criollo descendants had with the landscape of the colony. Importantly, the witnesses indicated that elite creole power prevented

37 This concern recalls metropolitan anxieties. Martínez notes that concerns about social status intersected with those of race in late sixteenth-century Spain. The Inquisition’s purity certification procedure put emphasis on whether a candidate for a religious post or their family had been involved in “vile or mechanical trades”; in 1602 the Suprema (Supreme Council of the Inquisition) urged inquisitorial tribunals to ensure that their members “were pure of blood and of good social standing” but also “to protect themselves from infiltration by “new money.”” Martínez writes that like “other early modern Spanish institutions, the Holy Office tried…to reinforce aristocratic privilege at the expense of merchants, artisans, and other members of the incipient bourgeoisie.” In a footnote, the author remarks that this “exclusivity” was extended to the American tribunals: in 1604 the Mexican Holy Office and other colonial tribunals were ordered not to accept “any butchers, shoemakers, bakers, and in general anyone that had been involved in ‘vile or mechanical’ trades or that descended from such individuals.” Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 64n9, 310.

159 the collapse of the Crown’s desired segregated order of two civilizational repúblicas, which maintained claims to legitimate Hispanic domination.

Colonial criollos were bound together by claims to, first, the perpetual inheritance of rewards gained by the conquistadores (land, Indigenous labour, and socio-political power) and second, a distinct, rooted, and affective relationship to the American landscape (including the cultural landscape of servitude and slavery). The possession of encomienda rights had given a straightforward shape to creole groupness: without it, greater effort was required to bind creoles together to continue advancing their power.38 If the elite creoles could not assure class status and power through naturalized conquest privileges that institutionalized the exploitation of Indigenous populations, they could invest in and deploy another measure of Old World Hispanic authority: purity of blood. Through arguments integrating Iberian notions of naturaleza, nación, and calidad, creoles demonstrated their awareness of Iberian epistemologies of belonging and status.39 Scholars Torres, Martínez, and Nirenberg have termed such ideologies that exist across the early modern Americas as “grammars of difference.”40

This late sixteenth-century period marked not only the collectivizing of creole assertions of distinction and a natural right to rule, but also the adaptation by pre-contact Indigenous nobility of Hispanic notions of “hereditary rights,” as well as the steady growth of the importation of kidnapped Africans through the transatlantic slave trade in New Spain.41 Tied first to religious

38 Rogers Brubaker argues that in order to understand ethnicity and “ethnic conflict,” we should not consider the group as an “entity,” but rather we should examine “groupness as a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable.” “Ethnicity without groups,” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (2002): 167-168. 163-189. 39 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48. 40 Torres, Martínez, and Nirenberg, “Editorial,” 2. 41 For more information on the legal actions of the first postconquest Indigenous nobility to assert ancient lineage, see La nobleza indígena del centro de México después de la conquista, eds. Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2000). Peter B. Villella explores the various ways that “ambitious native elites in Mexico, particularly in the eighteenth century, opportunistically adapted and naturalized the language of limpieza de sangre so as to claim its power for themselves.” This discourse did not always benefit these native rulers, he cautions: “By broadening purity to encompass their own racial, social, and religious condition, caciques necessarily expanded the scope of impurity as well, and therefore their vulnerability to rivals.” ““Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2011): 636. Cope writes that the years 1660-1720 mark the period of “greatest maturity and stability for the sistema de castas: its formative years lay behind, while its decline and dissolution were yet to come.” The Limits of Racial Domination, 7.

160 affiliation, peninsular limpieza logic was transferred but reimagined, transformed, and adapted in order to ensure lineage privilege within the respective repúblicas. The sistema de castas was a hierarchical system of classification based on proportions of “Spanish, native, and black blood” that was intended to be observed and upheld within the republic structure. Hispanic purveyors of the system imagined mixture between Spanish and Indigenous blood as a “redemptive process” that would whiten with the “progressive infusion” of Old Christian blood.42 This logic also maintained Hispanic hegemony by reifying whiteness as the absence of raza, and as pure and divinely favoured.43 The sistema tried to prevent non-white casta unity while providing the basis for cohesive whiteness.44 Elite creole arguments were reproduced within the reason of the sistema de castas: it initiated and operated on a logic based on ideological conceptions that tied place, culture, religion, class, and civilizational “status” to blood and lineage, which was indexed by somatic difference.45 The division of two separate civilizational spheres and the Crown’s recognition of pre-encounter Indigenous noble status within the república de indios ensured that “blood would continue to have a privileged place within the colonial order of symbols.”46 As such, the sistema de castas mapped onto the system of republics and provided justification for first, the segregation of Indigenous people from people of Hispanic descent, and, second, the continued enslavement of people of African descent in the colony, which buttressed claims to white superiority and domination.

42 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 483, 485. 43 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 485n13. 44 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 2, 129 and “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 513-515. 45 Of the mobility of enslaved subjects within this system in the setting of colonial Quito, Bryant writes that “movements within empire were governed through colonial assemblages of territoriality, corporeality, culture, politics, and religion.” These “assemblages” shaped race and were not simply ideological, he argues, but “proved to be a colonial governing practice.” Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 47. On the perceived threat and lived experience of mestizos and other castas (plebians) in mid-colonial Mexico City and the modification and rejection of elite racial ideology by these groups, see Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination. 46 Martínez goes on to write that the “official recognition of Indian purity, its transformation into a precondition for certain privileges and corporate rights, had deep implications for colonial Mexico’s constructions of “race” and “caste.” Together with the recognition of native nobility, it made blood matter, especially among caciques and principales; and it discouraged mixture, particularly with “black blood.”” Genealogical Fictions, 121. Villella argues that Indigenous elites (pipiltin in Nahuatl) were active participants in “creole patriotism” and blood discourse throughout the colonial era in order to legitimize and ensure the continuation of the privileges they received as noble people. He uses the term “historical ventriloquism” to discuss this phenomenon. He writes that they played a key role “within the development of Mexican creolism, as they enabled and validated the selective appropriation of American history that characterized the creole patria.” Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, 52-55, 302, especially chapters two and five.

161

The Rhetoric of Whiteness

If the republics were imagined as the physical space to nurture Hispanic belonging through naturaleza and nobleza, then they were also the place where notions of civilizational order were to be reproduced and maintained. The rhetoric of upholding civilizational difference through upholding the sistema structure of race on the one hand, and whiteness on the other, had to be made sacred within the elite creole world of the republic. Mota y Escobar and others of his class used their power to entrench a reproductive discourse that harnessed the sistema’s “whitening logic,” and saw themselves as creators of an order that protected and reproduced white domination. As an influential religious figure, Mota y Escobar could use the institutional reach of the Catholic Church to project and fortify class ideology.

Here I examine the words of another influential creole bishop, Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa, as he proselytized arguments of novohispano exceptionalism and distinction in a sermon given in the cathedral of Puebla in December 1619, during Mota y Escobar’s episcopal tenure.47 It provides evidence of the projection of a discourse of purity and “whitening” that was likely already circulating in elite creole society. Like the 1597 testimonies, this early seventeenth-century sermon laid out an elite creole vision of representative and rooted Hispanism; unlike the petition, however, it is presented through the religious rhetoric of Marianism and an interpretation of the Immaculate Conception.48 The

47 Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa (b.1572-d.1633) was Bishop of Oaxaca from 1617-1633. His parents were criolla Isabel de Hinojosa and Jerónimo Cataño Bohórquez, a merchant of Mexico City. Bishop Bohórquez was born in Mexico City in 1572 and joined the Dominican order in 1586; he was named Bishop of Venezuela in 1610 and Bishop of Oaxaca in 1617. His family had ties in Oaxaca that went back to the conquest. In 1624, he founded the mayorazgo de Valdeflores for the continuation of his lineage and its privileges can be traced into the twentieth century. Clara Inés Ramírez González, Universidad y familia en Nueva España. Hernando Ortiz de Hinojosa y la construcción de un linaje. Siglos XVI y XVII, con un epílogo hasta el XX (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2013), 73- 75, 103-105. 48 The sermon’s printing was approved by the Inquisition and completed in Mexico City by Juan Blanco de Alcazar on 9 January 1620. JCB, “Semon [sic] que predico el illustrissimo y reverendissimo señor D. Fr. Ioan de Bohorques, maestro en sancta theologia, y obispo de Guaxaca, en el octavo dia de la insignes fiestas que la sancta iglesia de Tlaxcala, y su illustrissimo prelado el señor D. Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, hizieron a la concepcion de la Virgen SS. María, predicole a 15. deziembre, dia que la orden de S. Domingo, celebró la fiesta co[n] insigne aplauso.,” fs. 1r, 15v, accessed November 26, 2020, https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:578163/. Hereafter cited in text as JCB, “Semon.” For comparison with later colonial sermons given on the Virgen de Guadalupe, see Nueve sermones guadalupanos (1661-1758), ed. David A. Brading (Chimalistac, Ciudad de México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 2005).

162 audience would have consisted of peninsular and creole elites and very likely their enslaved labour, and the symbolism, language, and references of the sermon are reflective of this atmosphere.49

This fiesta of the Immaculate Conception was a celebration of lineage, purity, and creation as it memorialized the Holy Spirit’s “generation” of Mary, “without spot or shadow of original sin,” and stressed the figure of Mary as the crucial mediator between the Old Testament (Judaism) and God’s plan for the future (New Testament).50 Bishop Bohórquez explained that God’s “first rays of grace” struck Mary, “in order to manifest a world clean [from] the stain of original sin.”51 The three goals of the sermon were to characterize the Holy Spirit’s act, illuminate the essence of Mary’s divinity, and instruct the parishioners on how to gain Mary’s “favour” in their own lives.52 The conspicuous subtext of this event, however, was to insinuate an analogy between the Immaculate Conception and the creation of the New World, to idealize the virtue and value of female purity, and to create and maintain racial hierarchies by tethering purity and cleanliness, God’s grace, and immortality to whiteness. While this sermon claimed to be a celebration of God’s benevolent decision to create a world without sin, it also acted as an argument for legitimate conquest and the strict observance of the gendered and racialized order as upheld by creole ecclesiastical elites. It placed great emphasis on Mary as a reproducer of sinlessness and purity and argued that her body contained the essence of divine favour and the future of the Hispanic Catholic community. This discourse of cleansing, whitening, and reproduction operated within the broader logic of the sistema de castas, which allowed for the genealogical purification of Indigenous people through mixture with Spanish blood.53

49 I thank Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva for pointing me to the first Mexican provincial council’s decrees headed by Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar in 1565-1566, which instructed Spaniards to bring their “negros, and servants (pajes)” into churches to hear mass and sermons. Concilios Provinciales primero y segundo, 72. 50 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 3v-4r. For an exploration of the issue of Mary’s conception in early modern Spain, see Rosilie Hernández, Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 51 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 2v. 52 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 3v-4r. 53 Martínez notes that this redemption narrative “faintly echoed the notion Jesus took on the sins of humanity in order to purify it.” This sermon suggests that this whitening narrative is echoed more clearly in the notion of Mary’s Immaculate Conception than the narrative of Jesus’ sacrifice. “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 485.

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On 15 December 1619 creole Bishop Bohórquez gave his sermon in the cathedral of Tlaxcala- Puebla (see figure 11). “The Universe is elated, God and the creatures are elated, and all of them make a pledge in this solemn [moment] of the clean conception of our divine Señora, María Virgin,” Bohórquez announced to the congregation.54 The mid sixteenth-century meetings of the Council of Trent institutionalized the performance of sermons during mass as a means to encourage homogeneity of belief, to assert the correctness of the established social hierarchy, and to order and control parishioners through forceful and repetitive rhetoric. Subsequently, the sermon was a crucial medium of knowledge creation and instruction across the Catholic world.55 Sermons were intended to “instruct, entertain, and persuade” the congregation and unify them in Catholic thought and practice.56 They were also an opportunity to bring local concerns into conversation with broader Catholic goals and encourage local populations to see themselves implicated and represented in broader systems and worlds.

“Our Prelate,” said Bohórquez, referring to his host Bishop Mota y Escobar, “you follow in name, zeal, and devotion a liv[ing] portrait of the great Alfonso [VI, conqueror of Toledo], [and] by Your Grace I speak of New Spain’s illustrious glory.”57 Alfonso VI (1065-1109), King of Leon and Castile, Christian conqueror of Toledo, was one of the first Iberian monarchs to be concerned with crusade outside the peninsula; he was a staunch Islamophobe and a militant supporter of the expansion of “western Christendom.”58 His rule furthered the sacralization of acts of war and the rise of a crusading ideology. Historian Carlos de Ayala argues that Alfonso “knew how to exploit the idea sketched out by his father Ferdinand that the “reconquest” was rather more than a local legitimating discourse…[it was] a declaration of Christian holy war that turned its proponents into authentic champions of Christendom.”59 This analogy to a medieval peninsular crusading king reflects elite creole pride in and memory of their conquistador

54 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 2r. 55 Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Introduction,” in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, eds. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv-xvi. 56 Cruz and Perry “Introduction,” in Culture and Control, xv-xvi. 57 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 2r. 58 Carlos de Ayala, “On the origins of crusading in the Peninsula: The reign of Alfonso VI (1065-1109),” Imago Temporis Medium Aevem 7 (2013): 227. 59 De Ayala, “On the origins of crusading,” 228.

164 ancestors’ dual accomplishments of conquest for empire and God. Bohórquez’s praise suggested that Mota y Escobar had inherited Alfonso’s militant Christian zeal as part of his “illustrious” novohispano lineage and proposed a vision of the Bishop as a conqueror in his own right. The tone of the sermon as militant, triumphalist, and transhistorical is set within these first introductory statements.

Figure 11: Frontispiece of the sermon performed by Bishop of Oaxaca, Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e Hinojosa on December 15, 1619 Source: JCB,“Semon,” fs. 1r.

Following his introduction, Bohórquez began the sermon by immediately reminding the audience of their own place and responsibility within the world being described in the sermon. Of the polyphonic singing the congregation would perform at various intervals, he requested that the “Hierarchy of Wise Cherubim” light up the “noble [Puebla] Ciudad de los Ángeles” with their brilliance. With a tone of urgency and theatricality Bishop Bohórquez asked the “angelic choir,” consisting of both the congregation and the Angels, to:

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interrupt the air, already [filled] with devout applause, [and] sweet empha[tic] smooth music, spread the seashells [and bring out] pearls, scatter the waters with scent and ambergris, bleed the land[,] draining the treasure [from] its veins, [so that we can offer] the precious stones of its entrails, and all together, Pope, King, Prelate, Government, City, Religious, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, conjured in love, command the fiesta of la Limpia Concepción…60

In this dramatic passage, the Bishop of Oaxaca asked for divine help so that the congregation might use their voices (labour) to “spread…scatter…bleed,” and drain the “treasure” of “the land,” and offer it to the altar of empire and the Heavens to celebrate God’s cleansing of Mary’s sin.

This language used the early modern lexicon of health and bodies, with the latter having to be bled and drained via the veins in order to purge disease and restore the balance of the body’s humours.61 The land was like a body and the parishioners had the divine power and duty to heal, the Bishop asserted, on behalf of the full political hierarchy of their world. “The hands of human Angels of this land are not lacking,” he continued, “your pearls, treasures, and gemstones, like

60 JCB, “Semon” fs. 1r-2v. Thanks to Lucas Campo Vernay for help with this translation. It is very likely that the women of the convent of the Limpia Concepción, discussed later in this chapter, comprised many of the choir’s singers at this event, as there was collaboration between the two institutions. Women who could not afford dowries for entry to the convent could have the requirement waived if they were “sonorous” singers. The case of Mariana de San José y Machuca is examined in Cesar D. Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies in Novohispanic Convents,” Journal of the Society for American Music 13, no. 2 (May 2019): 151-153. Geoffrey Baker has described elite manipulation of the sounds and silences of the urban landscape in the colonial Spanish American city as the creation of a “sonic metropolis”. Polyphonic music was used for the veneration of saints, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, and the profession of vows by Spanish descended women, and contributed to the “resounding city” as a hierarchical enterprise. The music that the Bishop of Oaxaca may be eliciting here is the early modern villancico, which was a form of “mass communication” or a “sermon in music.” The text was in the vernacular and they were performed with multiple voices, choirs, and instruments. Cesar D. Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 145-147 and Geoffrey Baker, “The Resounding City,” in Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America, eds. Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1-20. Citing Aurelio Tello, Archivo Musical de la Catedral de Oaxaca (Mexico City: CENIDIM, 1990), 42–50, Favila notes that there are four extant villancicos composed by Puebla’s seventeenth-century chapel master, Gaspar Fernández (1570–1629), surviving in a deteriorated manuscript at the Oaxaca cathedral. For a discussion of conceptions of angels (and demons) in the New World, see Angels, Demons and the New World, eds. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 61 Eduardo Galeano used this violent imagery in the title of his anti-colonial text Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (London: Serpent's Tail, 2009).

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Stars in the Sky, you all devote yourselves, [because] this is the fiesta of hands, it is also [the fiesta] of languages, of eloquence, sermons, and worship that with the sovereign style of this place, has sounded.”62 Poblanos in the cathedral were joined in song by angels, their integrated melody bringing forth all the bounty of the Kingdom of New Spain, which in its violent wrenching from the land and sea assimilated the interests of the Pope and the friars, the metropolitan authorities and the colonial alcaldes, and the four worldly elements.63 As a fiesta of “hands” and “languages,” labour and speech were tied to this sacred event as ways of both honouring God’s act and mimicking it. Foreshadowing the lesson on God’s cleansing and purifying of Mary’s body and alerting us to parishioner comprehensibility of this metaphor (and this doctrine), Bohórquez’s striking series of commanding exaltations reiterated the theme of conquest and sacrifice, as well as the tone of militancy.

The first task of the sermon was to show the importance of Mary’s cleansing, her lineage and her presence as a guide to Columbus’s first voyage. The Bishop of Oaxaca wove a complex metaphor involving wheat, kneading, and bread in order to articulate genealogical passage and purity. Wheat was an Old World transplant and the region of Puebla in central Mexico was the primary wheat-producing area of the colony, with most haciendas in the region owned by creoles.64 “Celestial Spouse, your belly is like a mound of wheat enclosed by lilies, this word, belly, signifies the Mother of the Saintly Virgin [Mary], her Parents, all her Ancestry and Lineage…the lilies manifest the Purity of the Saintly Virgin,” he declared.65 Lineage, enclosed in the virgin body and surrounded by purity manifested in white lilies, conjured up a vision of

62 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 3r. 63 This language also recalls the theory of the great chain of being. 64 Of this region of New Spain, between 1625 and 1637, the Dominican friar Thomas Gage wrote: “…the valley of Atlixco…is a valley much mentioned in all those parts, for the exceeding great plenty of wheat that is there reaped every yeer, and is the chief sustenance and reliefe of Mexico and all the Townes about. In this Valley are many rich Townes of Spaniards, and Indians, but we shunned to enter into them, and went from farme to farme out of the high-waies, where we found good entertainment of those rich Farmers and Yeomen, who bare such respect unto the Preists, that truely they thought themselves happy with our company.” Thomas Gage, The English- American, his travail by sea and land, or, A new svrvey of the West-India's containing a journall of three thousand and three hundred miles within the main land of America (London : Printed by R. Cotes, 1648), 84-85, accessed May 9, 2020 from the Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice Database, http://go.utlib.ca/cat/11845977. Italics in the original. 65 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 4r. “Thy belly is like a mound of wheat, set about with lilies,” Bishop Bohórquez quoted from Songs 7:2.

167 protection and surveillance. This mound of wheat, consisted of twelve sprigs, “the twelve sons of Jacob,” and from these sprigs “God extracted various grains, David, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon and the other ancestors of Christ our Redeemer,” and made “Virginal dough…clean flour” and kneaded it into the conception of the “Mother of God, from which the Bread of Life was formed.”

In other words, the body of Mary’s mother was a mound of wheat, protected and enclosed by (white) lilies, which were manifestations of the Holy Sprit. This wheat became Mary, who conceived Jesus, the “living bread of Heaven,” who was made of his ancestors and grandparents to taste of “the death of sin.”66 Further, Bishop Bohórquez stated, this “wheat signifies abundance,” and “all of the persons contained in this Gospel of the mound of wheat are called the Holy Spirit, because of them the abundance of the Heaven and the earth arrives for us.”67 Body and spirit were contained in this bread:

it first began with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and at the end it finished with Jesus and Mary; it is like to take in the hands the sprigs of wheat, and on the feet, two ships of the bread of Heaven because [Columbus’s] ship Santa María Virgen, gave its contents [, it was] this bread of the angels [and] Christ our Redeemer…is given to us in the bread of life…[Mary t]his divine Lady, Mother and Virgin, is like a merchant ship, which brings its bread from afar: this bread of hers, is Christ…God brought him from far away…68

Europe was clean and the Americas had been sinful; Columbus’s ship, the Santa María, guided by all the descendants of Mary and Joseph, was both mercantile vessel and a cleansing agent that mimicked the Immaculate Conception. It is not clear if the “contents” or “bread” referred to here

66 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 4r-4v. 67 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 4v. Mary E. Giles writes that among “the many icons associated with fertility are sheaves of wheat. The sheaves of wheat symbolize the miracle of the grain by which the ancient goddess and later the Virgin Mary assured the fecundity of the fields.” “The Discourse of Ecstasy: Late Medieval Spanish Women and Their Texts” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville, FL : University Press of Florida, 1996), 322. See also Pamela C. Berger, The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 68 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 5r-5v.

168 are the Europeans or the goods of Europe (or both) but either way, these objects were representatives of the pure lineage of Mary arriving in an unclean New World in order to purify it.

God’s grace made the bread that the ship carried: divine favour brought this pure cargo, which resulted in a mercantilist relationship with Spain as the Santa María was a merchant vessel.69 This complicated mixing of doctrine, metaphor, and historical events made a potent argument for divine intervention in the Americas and it further asserted God’s protection of Mary’s pure lineage, as well as the Holy Spirit’s blessing of the female body as the site of enclosure for all “blood” and honour manifested in and represented by the sprigs of wheat.70 Mary’s lineage (analogized to Hispanic lineage through the merchant ship) was exceptional. The positive association made regarding mercantile exchange and its support of the Republic and república contrasts sharply with the references made to merchants and people of business and commerce in the 1597 petition to the Crown discussed earlier. Mercantile exchange as a process of cleansing is emphasized here while in the creole arguments of 1597 the men who engaged in acts of commerce were viewed as disloyal to the colony (and by extension the Empire). The Holy Spirit animated the merchant vessel for the benefit of the universal Hispanic Catholic Church, in contrast to the view that merchant men were animated by greed for their own benefit and did not support the colony or Hispanic hegemony.

The Bishop of Oaxaca was not suggesting that the parishioners could approach Mary’s sanctity, but his second and third points sought to explain her body as an emblem of purity and cleanliness and encourage her emulation by the Catholic audience. Repeatedly tying the concepts of purity and actions of cleansing to a literal and metaphysical “whiteness,” as both an absence of sin and

69 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 5v. Focusing on the later colonial era, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra writes: “The idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’ has often been attributed to British American Creoles, but Mexican Creoles first coined the trope. Through prefigurative readings of the Bible, Creoles gave their history and institutions cosmic significance. Prefiguration was a key historiographical resource in the intellectual toolkit of the Creoles, allowing them to demonstrate that, far from being merely developments at the margins of the Catholic world, events in their homelands held extraordinary universal import.” Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 431. 70 Jennifer L. Morgan flags the following “advice” from a church “father” on reproductive heritability and property: “Thomas Aquinas writes, “If a man sows on another’s land, the produce belongs to the owner of the land. Now the woman’s womb in relation to the seed of man is like the land in relation to the sower.”” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Questions on God (1265–74), www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa, quoted in “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (2018): 4.

169 presence of divine favour, demonstrates the manipulation of Castilian religious purity discourse into a discourse of race.71

When he arrived at his second point, the Bishop stated that the Virgin Mary was an “innocent and pure lily,” engendered by the blood of Adam, and “whitened by divine grace,” more “pure than milk.”72 Further, cups made of ivory (vasos de Marfil), he stated, were named by the Holy Spirit as “the belly and Virginal Entrails.” They embodied vessels of lineage (like a mound of wheat), because of “three reasons.” First, like the “pure flesh” of Mary, the colour of “ivory white” is “Celestial” and “free of the corruption of time and of sin.” Second, an ivory cup is “incorruptible and pure” because it is taken from a “virtuous elephant animal, clean and so brave,” whose enemies are the “fierce Serpents of the world”; elephants “tear them apart” without injury to themselves, just as Mary’s “divine valour” “smashes the head of the serpent beast.” And third, elephants observed the “new moon” cycle and entered a “clean and crystalline” river when the moon was about to show itself and made demonstrations of “worship,” just as Mary did at the “moment of her conception [when] the Celestial Moon of Glory showed itself to her.”73

References to ivory and elephants remind us that the intended audience of this sermon were wealthy poblanos, consumers of luxury goods acquired through oceanic trade, with privileged access to travellers’ narratives about wondrous, exotic animals exploited as part of that trade. They tell us also that the writer and speaker of this sermon was similarly invested. The main

71 On the theme of absence as part of defining status, Villella writes “in both law and practice, honor was usually defined in the negative: Honorable people were those untainted by dishonor and shame, meaning illegitimacy, vulgarity, and immorality... [H]onor was no single thing, but rather the absence of a wide variety of disqualifiers, only a minority of which one might actually control.” Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, 229-230. 72 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 9r. 73 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 7v-8r. The blood of Christ, wine, would also presumably be carried in the ivory cup being “theorized” here. De Asúa and French note that in the low Middle Ages, literature about animals and morals (like Aesop’s Fables and the eleventh-century Physiologus by Theobaldus) were collected in bestiaries (compendiums of beasts), which also featured images of animals. “From these sources, a new erudite genre developed,” they write, “that of the works ‘on the nature of things’ or medieval ‘encyclopaedias’, which consisted of systematic compilations of knowledge about the three kingdoms of nature and were conceived as tools for preachers, who could draw upon them to find examples to enliven and illustrate their sermons.” Bohórquez may be drawing from this medieval ecclesiastical tradition in his inclusion of elephants. De Asúa and French also note that Pliny’s Naturalis Historia contains a description of an “epic battle” between an elephant and a snake. A New World of Animals, xiv, 6.

170 purpose of this rhetoric, however, was to argue that Mary’s womb, like the triangular trade relationship between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, was a vessel that produced “ivory white” (el Marfil blanco) flesh, symbolizing immortality, incorruptibility, virtue, courage, and devotion.74

Good “philosophy,” Bishop Bohórquez continued:

says that there are two kinds of blood in the human being. One is coloured and runs through the veins. The other is white, that of the breasts is born, because when the coloured blood spreads throughout the whole body, it arrives at the breasts, in their natural heat…the coloured blood returns white and this is milk…[W]hite blood, milk, is called grace…Of the sinful coloured blood, it has been formed, and conceived of all of Adam’s progeny…created dark red in the colour of Original sin…75

Thus, he argued, the Immaculate Conception signified the overall “whitening” of Mary with “supernatural cleanliness” by the “heat of divine Grace.”76 References to breast milk within purity discourses were, according to Martínez, one of the “main metaphors of cultural and biological contagion” in Iberia, where they were a “clear sign” of women’s bodies becoming “symbolic territories in which community boundaries were drawn.”77 The connection between whiteness and milk is made clearer by an observation the English Dominican friar Thomas Gage (1603-1656) made on his visit to Mexico City in 1648. While commenting on ritual spectacles that showcased Hispanic domination through the outfitting of enslaved people in “exquisite” clothing, practices that form part of what Tamara J. Walker has called an “aesthetic of mastery,” Gage wrote:

74 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 7v. 75 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 9r. 76 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 9r. The phrase used is “…blanqueola con limpieza sobrenatural...” 77 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 55-56, 138.

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Two thousand coaches, full of gallants, ladies and citizens, to see and be seen…the gentlemen have their train of blackamoor slaves…waiting on them in brave and gallant liveries, heavy with gold and silver lace, with silk stockings on their black legs…who with their bravery and white mantles over them seem to be, as the Spaniard saith, “mosca en leche,” a fly in milk.78

This Castilian colloquialism, mosca en leche, also captures the potential for the corruption of whiteness by an external threat, by sin, or what was implied as the opposite of whiteness: darkness or blackness.

In this sermon, the Bishop of Oaxaca used Marian exceptionalism and Mary’s popularity to emphasize women’s bodies as sites of lineage regeneration and to pair whiteness with moral virtue and the absence of sinfulness. Mary was an example of the potential for cleanliness and purity, and her likeness and mythology were represented in many mediums across the colonial period. Further, it is crucial to situate this reproductive discourse within the contemporary context of racialized slavery and cohering novohispanidad. Whiteness – carried by belly, bread, and ship – closed the distance between the divinely favoured Christian Castile and the American landscape of sin and represented the continuity of Hispanic power. Guardianship of whiteness, as it was encouraged in this sermon, was replicated in the logic of enslavement. The rhetoric of whiteness was also the rhetoric of favour and freedom, tied to their colonial opposites: stain and enslavement.

The final section of the Bishop of Oaxaca’s sermon was instruction on how parishioners should “use” Mary for “our remedy.”79 “We” must have an “interior fiesta in the soul” to receive Mary’s blessing, he argued. “Our first enemy in this treacherous world is our ostentation, deceits, lies and vanities, and scandalous lives,” the Bishop said; “we have to look to Mary because she is our Protector. Cloud without original sin, that rains Grace on the soul, fire that illuminates our souls,

78 Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 65, quoted in Tamara J. Walker, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 32. 79 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 3v.

172 and lights the darkness. Loyal intercessor that defends us from the world, demon, and flesh.”80 Overall, this creole Bishop argued that Mary was a perfect moral model, and her cleansing by God an exceptional event that precipitated and contributed to the construction of the Hispanic Empire in the New World. If we return to Bohórquez’s introduction, to his invitation to the angels to aid the poblanos in purifying the kingdom by delivering up its treasures, we can see that these acts of seeming devotion to empire were also calls to mimic the purging of sin from the body politic, so that it might come closer to emulating God’s purification of Mary. God’s favour and Mary’s light (purity) illuminated the way for Columbus’s ship and each parishioner had a part to play in maintaining this favour and recreating God’s intended order in the kingdom.81

The Bishop of Oaxaca’s rhetoric of purity, whiteness, and community cleansing only made sense within an environment feared to be impure, sinful, and heterogenous. Borrowing from Old World anxieties about a lack of religious conformity and unity as a signal of community decay, ruin, and insignificance, the transition to a sistema de castas that emphasized civilizational and racialized difference in New Spain required the addition of a whitening discourse that reified the sanctity of the female body and a practice that ordered its sexual potential and precluded racial mixture.

Saving Whiteness

The rhetoric of whiteness and whitening was accompanied by practices that policed its reproductive logic and signalled the symbolic and real power relations at stake.82 As bishop, Mota y Escobar supported criolla- and Spanish-only convents and “rescued” criolla orphans by enclosing them to protect Spanish honour and purity. He acted to protect and enclose white women, thereby saving their whiteness from corruption, in accordance with prescriptions of an

80 JCB, “Semon,” fs. 14r-15v. 81 For a reading of creole discourses of the mestiza Virgin of Guadalupe, see Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 420-421, 426, 429. 82 Kristine Ibsen, “The Hiding Places of My Power: Sebastiana Josefa de la Santisima Trinidad and the Hagiographic Representation of the Body in Colonial Spanish America” Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 251.

173 elite paterfamilias and a hegemonic ideology of white superiority.83 “Protection is often a hidden form of control,” Verena Stolcke writes. The Church’s concern with protecting moral virtue was sexual control: “the salvation of the soul depended upon the submission of the body.”84 Further, the progression of white girls through the various stages of taking up the habit was a “nuptial” spectacle of “elite religiosity” in the community—a symbol of the sacrifice of their bodies to God for martyrdom.85 Their profession as “brides of Christ” was a process of both “initiation and exclusion, ” as they were ushered into an exclusive community of elite white women that acted as a sanctuary to reduce anxieties about racial corruption.86

Bishop Mota y Escobar entered Puebla de los Ángeles, the seat of the diocese of Tlaxcala- Puebla, on 8 May 1608. Later that year he made a mortgaged debt contract (censo) in favour of Puebla’s Convento de la Limpia Concepción, for 4,000 pesos against his “principal homes” in Puebla “at a[n interest] rate of 20 pesos per 1000” or five percent per annum. This money borrowed from the Convent never actually left the Convent’s coffers. He had three “nieces” who had entered the convent in October of 1608: the daughter of Pedro de Nava, and two daughters of María de Godoy and Alvaro de Grado. Mota y Escobar used the loan and 848 additional pesos to pay for their food and dowries.87 In an undated entry, the Bishop further clarified that he gave

83 Hispanic and Hispanic-descended women who were not enclosed were also expected to live a life of honest isolation to avoid accusations of impropriety and possibilities for impurity. See Susan Migden Socolow, “Iberian Women in Old World and New,” in The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5–15. James M. Córdova examines the role of nuns and novohispano spirituality in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s creole discourse in the mid- to late seventeenth century, writing that “Creoles—eager to distinguish themselves on the world stage—emphasized their providential destiny and pointed to its symbols, one of which was the spiritually eminent nuns of New Spain, whom Sigüenza y Góngora established as the historical successors of the cihuatlamacazque of Aztec Mexico. This strategy drew upon particular elements of the pre-Hispanic past to bolster parallel elements of the colonial present in establishing a history of religious excellence in Mexico. Furthermore, this parallelism allowed the past to be articulated in a manner that was useful to Creoles: that is, as a myriad of events and historical figures that, when interpreted through a Christian framework, set a foundation for New Spain's greatness. This comes across in Sigüenza y Góngora's account in which the full historical value of New Spain's nuns is achieved when related to their impressive, but imperfect, predecessors: the cihuatlamacazque.” “Aztec Vestal Virgins and the Brides of Christ: The Mixed Heritage of New Spain's Monjas Coronadas,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 191. 84 Stolcke, “Invaded Women,” 281. 85 Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 147, 149. 86 Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 145. 87 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 275r (image 278). The Convento de la Limpia Concepción (sometimes known as the Convento de la Purísima Concepción) was the second convent founded in New Spain, formally established in 1593, following the Convento de San Jerónimo in Mexico City in 1586.

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“2,000 pesos in dowry [through censo] to Juana de Santa Paula daughter of Alonso de Grado for her profession in the convent of la Concepción of this city…I gave it for love of God and to put her in [this condition] as a pubescent.”88

It is likely that the Bishop’s contribution was in addition to the funding of the girls’ parents. The Conceptionist convents were some of New Spain’s “largest, most luxurious, and wealthy cloisters” and dowries ranged from 3,000 pesos in the seventeenth century to 4,000 pesos by the end of the eighteenth century. Many families in New Spain took out loans and mortgages to make sure their daughters could profess in these prestigious institutions.89 Mota y Escobar’s indebtedness doubly supported Puebla’s major convent for Spanish and creole women: the convent would collect annuities from the Bishop’s properties and be compensated for the nieces’ enclosure. His contribution ensured that his kin network received privileged access to the significant institutional power of la Limpia Concepción, assured these girls’ “cleanliness,” and helped maintain the Convent’s presence and prestige in the community.

Hispanic power was built on constructing and maintaining legible caste coding, which, as this chapter has demonstrated, included class status, roots to one’s place of birth, divine design, cleanliness/whiteness, and other highly ambivalent markers. The segregated enclosure of unmarried girls and women of all castas helped preserve this order, which stabilized and naturalized patriarchal control and casta hierarchies and categories.

This process was enabled by institutions that did the work at the local level. Mota y Escobar’s practice of putting money and women from his familial network into convents demonstrates that his “economic and spiritual motivations are indissociable,” to borrow from Kathryn Burns’s work on the “spiritual economy” of nuns.90 In her study of convent culture in seventeenth- century Peru, Burns argues that the convent locutorio was a “crucial site of articulation of the

88 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 265v (image 269). 89 Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 144n4. See also Asunción Lavrin, “The Role of Nunneries in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46, no. 4 (November 1966): 375. 90 Kathryn Burns, “Nuns, kurakas, and Credit: The Spiritual Economy of Seventeenth-Century Cuzco,” Colonial Latin American Review 6, no. 2 (1997): 193. See also Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, (Durham, North Carolina : Duke University Press, 1999), 3.

175 economic and the spiritual,” through which “men, women, and credit circulated at high velocity.” Ultimately, she argues, convent spiritual economy was “all about the production and reproduction of a distinctly colonial society.”91 Bishop Mota y Escobar’s participation in credit systems for the purpose of providing dowries for young creole women bears out Burns’ thesis and illustrates the creative and productive (procreative) power he wielded. It “made good sense for elite families, via their daughters, to marry convents. The spiritual benefits were obvious: a daughter or kinswoman in the convent would constantly offer prayers for the salvation of her extended family,” Burns remarks. Further, “the material benefits might be substantial, too…[T]he convents were in the business of providing credit from their dowry funds, and having one's daughter in the convent no doubt increased one's chances of competing successfully for a portion of the available loans.”92

In the records of his engagement with convents and criollas, Mota y Escobar figured himself a benevolent guardian of creole honour. On 17 April 1616, a young woman named Juana de San Ildefonso took up the white veil and became a professed novitiate in the Convent of La Limpia Concepción.93 The Bishop tells the following story about her (see figure 12):

I was passing a street one day and saw a very beautiful doncellita, shabby and broken… [an] orphan, and instantly God gave me a spirit of which [I knew], this beautiful orphan girl [had been lost] by great poverty, and this spirit helped [and] I put her in religion [via] the convent…and I [have been] waiting for [her to become 16 years old,] the age of profession.94

91 Burns, “Nuns, kurakas, and Credit,” 185-186. 92 Kathryn Burns, “Nuns, kurakas, and Credit,” 191. The author’s italics. 93 The “profession ceremonies, in which young women offered themselves to Christ in spiritual marriage, were a musical treat for Novohispanic society, as people filled the convent churches to catch a glimpse of these occasions,” writes Cesar D. Favila. “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,”143. 94 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 275v (image 279). Socolow writes that white women in colonial Latin America were often referred to as “doncellas” or “niñas” no matter their age. The Women of Colonial Latin America, 67.

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He noted that he gave her 600 pesos for food and 2,000 pesos in dowry via censo, a large amount for an unknown and unconnected member of the community.95

This notation demonstrates the Bishop’s dedication to the twinning of religious mission and the corporeal appraisal and subsequent controlling of others, characteristic of the colonial Church. He was disquieted by her situation, which was directly but implicitly expressed as related to her beauty and youth (coded in casta terms). She had been “lost,” – to poverty and potentially contamination and sexual impurity – but the Bishop found her, a not-so-subtle nod to patriarchal notions of discovery and possession. Novitiate status required that women give up their free will once they had “employed it” to enter the convent.96 This passage does not communicate any intent on the part of Juana de San Ildefonso—the Bishop had scooped her up and made the choice for her and that is the story he wanted to tell. “Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency,” Anne McClintock writes: women are imagined as “passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language…reason,” and in this case, protection.97 Mota y Escobar took up the role of the father-protector-creator and, in providing the resources for her dowry, he became her patron, a relationship of unequal power that re-inscribed his power as necessity.98 Further, once in the convent, Juana would have been expected to become obedient to the abbess, and Conceptionist rule; if she became a fully professed nun of the black veil, Juana would be understood as consummating her “chaste, pure marriage” to Christ on the day of profession. It marked the completion of the Bishop’s act to save her purity.99

95 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 275v (image 279). 96 Favila. “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 150. 97 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 30. 98 It was common to provide orphaned girls with a modest dowry in colonial Latin America but this payment was not modest. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 119. 99 Favila, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 150-151, 161.

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Figure 12: Mota y Escobar’s entry regarding Juana de San Ildefonso, April 17, 1616 Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 275v (image 279).

A similar situation apparently transpired in August of that same year. The Bishop noted that the cantor of the church cabildo, Agustín de Salazar, came to his house and told him that Capitán Agustín de Sotomayor, “mi sobrino,” had a daughter – “natural doncella huerfana of age” – who through the great poverty of her parents was at “risk” of becoming “lost,” and he asked the Bishop to “remedy” the situation.100 “And putting my eyes only on the service of God I wished to dedicate this doncella to him,” following which the Bishop put her in “a state of religion and

100 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 276r (image 279).

178 virginity in the Convent of la Limpia Concepción” where she became a novitiate on the 24th of September later in the year. He paid 100 pesos for her food. He paid another 2,000 pesos for her dowry in 1617 via a censo on a farm in Atlixco that Pablo Luis de Medina had sold him.101 The effort made to protect these girls’ corporeal and spiritual purity illustrates how a woman’s body could represent both a “symbolic map of the ‘civilized’ and the dangerous terrain that had to be colonized.”102

In this case, Mota y Escobar noted that he had an established kin relationship with the young girl he supported via his dowry donation. This “native maiden/virginal orphan” was in danger because her parents could not offer her a ‘proper’ criolla upbringing. As previously discussed, the Bishop had particular ideas about Crown efforts to limit the power and wealth of early creole families, which manifested themselves in conversations and debates about the institution of the encomienda and Indigenous labour. He noted the disorder and un-naturalness of creole poverty and feared the threat that it posed in terms of the contamination of elite whiteness. In his records about the donation for the cantor’s niece, Mota y Escobar recalled the relationship of immaculate grace between God and Mary as he dedicated the “doncella” to the former; the notion that spiritual cleansing could be accomplished through cloistered obedience and commitment – a labour of segregation and moral vigilance – mapped onto casta discourses of corporeal cleanliness. He argued that, like the pieces of property that he used for liens and loans during this same period, his efforts to ‘save’ women were all made in the service of God and the episcopal mission inherent in his role. It is worth noting that final acceptance into the novitiate required approval from the bishop (and the majority of nuns), reminding us that Mota y Escobar was a key arbiter of all proposed enclosures in the convent based on purity requirements.103

101 In 1616 the Bishop took out another censo in favour of la Limpia Concepción for 2,700 pesos against his newly acquired estate, Alfonsina, in the valley of Atrisco. He did not elaborate on the reason for this mortgaged debt but the record is nestled between Juana’s story and this one, perhaps suggesting that this debt was also for dowry payments. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 275v-276r (image 279). 102 Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal territories: The body enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 133. 103 Favela, “The Sound of Profession Ceremonies,” 151.

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Early colonial priests, nuns, and bishops understood the complexities and machinations of what Foucault later called “biopower” long before he wrote about the concept. In addition to attempting to direct the beliefs and practices of lay marriage and sexuality, these religious figures of the colonial Church sought to create and propagate the conditions that supported the “genealogical fictions” of Hispanic imperial supremacy.104 Bishop Mota y Escobar facilitated and sustained the enclosure of criollas in the Convento de la Limpia Concepción in Puebla in order to put them in “a state of religion and virginity,” a phrase that asserted the essence of conventional ideas about the proper characteristics of Hispanic-descended women and girls in the colony overall: obedience to Hispanic men and chastity outside of marriage.105 His self-reported actions demonstrate that the construction of whiteness in Puebla was “mediated through the triad of gender, class and sexual relations” that were “contingent on social, economic…and political processes.”106

As “symbols of power for men and vehicles of their reproduction,” Martínez writes, “women's bodies – their wombs, really – were at the center of the racialized order and, in particular, of the struggle between blackness and whiteness.”107 Becoming a nun ensured that women would not marry below their rank nor would they engage in behaviour that could contaminate or sully their families’ honour and reputation.108 The Bishop understood enclosure as his duty to not only God but also to his class in order to keep whiteness intact, so that Hispanic hegemony remained clear and present. “Once the religious woman had professed,” Ibsen remarks, “her body never again left the convent, even after her death,” a considerable comfort for a creole prelate concerned with building, modelling, and maintaining power.109

104 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 105 The Bishop used this phrase in an entry about the daughter of Capitán Augustín de Sotomayor, dated August 1616. BNE, Mss/6877, fs.276r (imagen 279). 106 Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,”196. 107 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 514. 108Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 19. 109 Ibsen, “The Hiding Places of My Power,” 251.

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Reproducing Whiteness: Money and Motives

The rhetoric surrounding wealth in the colony tied money, accumulation, and exchange to moral goodness and innocence, character traits that white creole men in the secular and religious realms argued belonged to white Hispanics. In Bishop Bohórquez’s sermon in celebration and emulation of the Virgin Mary following her Immaculate Conception, he asked that the collective voices of poblanos and angels wrench the riches of New Spain from the soils and seas for the benefit of all that fell under the imperial umbrella. These resources of the land were the legitimate spoils of divinely inspired conquest, signalled God’s favour and approval, and acted as gifts for honouring Mary’s clean and pure example. Mary’s concentrated lineage, kneaded into bread, had guided Columbus’s ships across the Atlantic and her very nature was like that of a merchant ship, the Bishop said. She carried the tools to establish Hispanic order, which transformed the Americas into a space of Hispanic hegemony. Therefore, the colonial wealth generated by this order was morally clean and rightfully belonged to the corporeally and spiritually pure.

This section examines Bishop Mota y Escobar’s use of the censo financial arrangement to acquire productive property, approach his personal spiritual and redemptive goals, establish “rhetorical moves to innocence” and entitlement, and support creole world-building.110 For many creoles, including Mota y Escobar, wealth accumulation and social advancement were natural and innocent results/rewards of conquest, and the material wealth of conquest that accrued to individuals as well as the Church facilitated the shaping of a new colonial order.111 This rhetoric also tied moral character and money to landscape and patria. When the Bishop wrote that he engaged in debt contracts in order to enlarge “the república that I would like,” in the notation that opened this chapter, he betrayed his desire to affix this rhetoric to novohispano reality. In

110 This concept comes from Indigenous Studies in Anglo North America. Laura McKinley writes about the settler’s “rhetorical moves to innocence” and “entitlement” in her critique of the Canadian government’s apology to Residential School survivors. “Conquest through benevolence: The Indian Residential School apology and the (re)making of the innocent Canadian settler subject,” (MA thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 2014), 7, 9-10. For an analysis of modern instances of settler moves to innocence, see Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40. 111 Of New Spain, Semo writes that a “study of the course of capital reveals a process that transformed capital into feudal fortunes instead of one of accumulation and sustained growth. The largest share of profits went into luxuries, sumptuous buildings, titles of nobility, dowries for daughters who withdrew into convents, donations to the church, social gatherings, and gambling.” A History of Capitalism in Mexico, 100.

181 this way, claims of personal sacrifice and loyalty mirrored imperial assertions of providence, humility, “civilizing,” and divine favour. As the “director” of and authority on sacred belief and practice in the diocese, the Bishop had the platform and justification to use his material wealth to direct and control the creation of a creole-centred society in the name of the Catholic faith. His vision of a white, patriarchal, and politically powerful creole elite was mapped onto his stated spiritual goals, which simultaneously reproduced his desired social order and the colonial ideology of whiteness.

As noted in chapter one, Mota y Escobar had amassed a significant material and liquid fortune by the time of his death at age seventy-nine in 1625. He donated an accumulated 180,000 pesos in specie and property to the Jesuits’ Colegio de Ildefonso in Puebla, which supported creole education efforts in the city as the Company did throughout the New World.112 The pastoral manuscript of his time in Puebla illustrates how he used this wealth to construct and expand the socio-political world order he envisioned. It contains personal and professional accounting ledgers alongside “clarifying” prose that explained the financial exchanges. This writing was intended for future religious figures of the diocese for their reference and reverence, and, as such, he was performing his pastoral duty and self-fashioning, using a logic that exposes the ways in which the material and the sacred blurred into one another. Wealth accumulation and generation could be washed or forgiven of their sinful resonances if the motive and goal were presented as innocent, redemptive, and pious. In this way, the actions of Mota y Escobar as an individual mirrored the broader creole and peninsular-shared narrative of Spanish colonialism.

On 18 April 1613, Isabel Martínez de Castro Verde petitioned the Viceroy in Mexico City, asking him to recognize an order of “aid” approved by the former Viceroy, which would help her financial situation in the Valley of Atlixco as a “poor widow” with “four daughters.”113 In order to keep up her properties and provide for her daughters, De Castro Verde, widow of the Spanish nobleman Jorge Mejía de Peralta, asked that she be provided a pension for his imperial service.114

112AGN, Jesuitas 64, vol III-24, exp.2, 1v., exp.3, fs.1v and AGI, Mexico, 1092, l.14, fs.156v-157r. 113 AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, caja 3755, exp. 59 (images 1, 4). Thanks to Kristie P. Flannery, Alex MacNair, and José Manuel Querol in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberia Network on Facebook for paleographic and translation assistance with this document. 114 AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, caja 3755, exp. 59 (images 1, 4). Jorge Mejía de Peralta (Jorge Mexia y Peralta) was corregidor of Coyoacán from 1585 to 1589. See AGI, Mexico, 218, n.1 for Mejía de Peralta’s informaciones. For

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It was very important that De Castro Verde be able to provide dowries for her daughters so that the honour of the family be upheld and their marriages be socially equitable, or better yet, upwardly mobile.115 The Viceroy would have appreciated this necessity although it is not clear if he approved De Castro Verde’s request. Nevertheless, it seems De Castro Verde still required additional funds a couple of years later, as she sought to take advantage of colonial credit structures that gave her access to liquid wealth. On 20 May 1615, Mota y Escobar, as Bishop, purchased “Doña” De Castro Verde’s hacienda, called La Chiauhtla-Alfonsina (La Alfonsina), for 20,500 pesos with an additional 8,053 pesos lent through a censo arrangement (28,553 pesos total).116 This mortgaged debt arrangement enabled the lending of money without charges of usury, which was forbidden by Crown and Church.117 Mota y Escobar agreed to “lend” De Castro Verde the money and in return he was given a guarantee of annuities from her property.

Over the course of this arrangement, the payment owed to De Castro Verde for her estate was spread between herself, and her two daughters, Estefania de Castro Verde and Margarita de Castro Verde. A portion of the Bishop’s “debt” was also sold to a relative of Margarita’s husband in Oaxaca, and Mota y Escobar paid him as well.118 The payments that went to De Castro Verde’s daughters were likely dowry payments: in 1615, Estefania received 2,876 pesos and Margarita received 3,567 pesos, while their mother received 1,600 pesos.119 Helping

more information on this official, see AGI, Patronato, 293, n.5, r.5; AGI, Indiferente, 739 , n.395; AGI, Contratación, 5788, l.1, fs.161-161v; and AGN, Gobierno Virreinal, Reales Cedulas Duplicados, vol.D2, exp. 435. Isabel Martínez de Castro Verde had been widowed previous to her marriage to Mejía de Peralta. She was married to Pedro de Castro Verde and the daughters she names are from this previous marriage. 115 For a discussion of elite widowhood in colonial Latin America, see Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 75-76. 116 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r, 253r (images 253, 256). The Bishop used the honorifics “Doña” and “Señora” for De Castro Verde in his writings. This indicates that she was probably a white elite Hispanic-descended woman. By the time of the Bishop’s purchase she had married a third time, to Barnabé Calvo. 117 Vilches, New World Gold, 31. 118 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r-253r (images 253-256). Estefania (de Castro Martínez) was baptized and christened on 25 August 1596 in Santa María de la Natividad, Atlixco. “México, Puebla, registros parroquiales, 1545-1977,” l. 1, fs. 55r (image 106), digitized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed November 16, 2020, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939J-9T9W-BY?cc=1837906&wc=M8GR- QPD%3A163504801%2C163732802%2C166512401. 119 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 252v-253r (image 256). For a discussion of the importance of dowries in colonial Mexico, see Asunción Lavrin and Edith Couturier, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women’s Socioeconomic Role in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790,”Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 2 (May 1979): 280– 304 and Asunción Lavrin, “In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth

183 widowed creole women maintain their property and secure dowries for their daughters supported creole class purity and reproduction in much the same way that the Bishop supported cloistered creole women.120 The corridos, or accrued revenues, were small: in June 1615, Mota y Escobar received 156 pesos and in February 1616 he received 171 pesos.121 Title to the property was the real prize; when it was appraised by the royal treasury at the time of donation in 1625, La Alfonsina was “valued at 60,000 pesos,” 31,447 pesos more than Mota y Escobar had paid De Castro Verde ten years earlier.122

This complex financial set-up was perfectly legal in colonial New Spain and the Church was one of the biggest lenders or censualistas throughout the viceregal period. However, in this case, the Bishop used his own personal finances and he claimed individual title to the haciendilla.123 In his payment of censo debts to the white De Castro Verde family, the Bishop supported the status quo of the social hierarchy and provided a dowry that enabled social climbing; either way, he maximized the generative action of the censo: he gained property and contributed to the expansion and maintenance of the república that he wanted.

Mota y Escobar also used this particular censo arrangement as an opportunity to tell and concretize a story about himself. “God chose me as bishop,” he wrote in the spring of 1615, and God’s “divine providence moved me to establish some stable work [in] his service, and [for] the good of the republic and [for] virtuous and poor subjects.”124 Linking the material with the social and the moral, the Bishop clearly saw that these categories were entwined in intimate ways. By implying that the property was both a debt “repayment” for and a reaction to God’s

Centuries,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 23–59. 120 Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 68. 121 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 252r-252v (images 255-256). 122 AGN, Jesuitas 64, vol III-24, exp.2, 1v., and exp.3, fs.1v. 123 It seems that the purchasing of this hacienda went through the Puebla cathedral cabildo as the Bishop noted that the deán bought the title for him. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r (image 253). Thank you to Juan José Ponce Vázquez and Manuel Barcia for paleographic assistance. For more information on the development of the Church as the leading moneylender in New Spain, see Linda Greenow, Credit and Socioeconomic Change in Colonial Mexico: Loans and Mortgages in Guadalajara, 1720–1820 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983); María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, El crédito a largo plazo en el siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995); and Semo, A History of Capitalism in Mexico, 95. 124 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r (image 253).

184 intervention/will, the additional benefits of the acquisition (for the “good” of the republic and its subjects) are connected to divine approval. This statement provides a window onto both the motivation and ambitions of the Bishop as he imagined them: these actions were to be read as reflections of his own moral standing and social awareness.

By dedicating the hacienda to subjects of the republic both “virtuous” and “poor,” the Bishop connected the two characteristics, suggesting that an affinity existed between them. Either the subjects were the virtuous poor or the república contained both the morally righteous and the poor, both of which implied a correlation between wealth and moral status. This was a persistent theme in the Bishop’s testimony throughout his life as he presented himself as an innocent and therefore morally “clean” actor, even as he owned slaves, argued for the inevitability of Indigenous mass death, and used and reproduced intergenerational wealth made through violence and conquest. In fact, in the continuation of the March 1617 censo record that opened this chapter, Mota y Escobar used these terms in a less ambiguous manner: he made the censo for the expansion of the república that he wanted and for the “good of virtuous poor persons.”125

The notion that wealth brings an individual or empire closer to God, that God wills wealth accumulation, and that spiritual ends justify violent and unjust means was meant to legitimize continued colonial violence and social stratification. Colonial law and custom prevented non- noble Indigenous peoples from owning private land or assuming substantial debts, and made it difficult for other casta groups as well. Official and legislative exclusion and prohibition were obscured by the elite to protect their claims to legitimate domination.126 The virtuous poor trope existed in order for men like Mota y Escobar to perform acts of charity and piety, which reinforced their belief in God’s favour of their class and thereby sanctioned the actions, attitudes, and behaviours of colonizing enterprises and individuals. An indebtedness to the conqueror class, that was manifested in exclusion, tribute, and labour, maintained the manufactured poverty of the colonized as an excuse for continued domination. Destitution could be virtuous only if it was total, in imitation of Christ, or an acknowledgement of sinfulness, as in the case of saints or

125 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250v (image 254). 126 Semo, A History of Capitalism in Mexico, 69. See Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008).

185 mendicant friars. In 1622, the Bishop wrote that he was “inspired by God” to build a hospital in Puebla “to cure these indios natel as [they are] people so poor and destitute of all human help.”127 This hospital was “good work ordered and referred to the satisfaction of the penalties for my many merited sins,” he clarified.128 Providing medical relief to the impoverished Indigenous peoples of Puebla could enable the cleansing of the Bishop’s sins, the payment of spiritual debt. At the same time, it enabled him to engage in ostentatious wealth accumulation and continue to enjoy the privileges and luxuries of his class position.

The transactional essence of the Bishop’s writing highlights the contours of the spiritual economy in early seventeenth-century Tlaxcala-Puebla. In the form of an intertextual “clarifying” notation, of the Alfonsina “purchase” Mota y Escobar wrote:

To clarify, I did not buy this real estate in order to augment my fortune and neither for profit because it is true that from my childhood I never had greed for a fortune because God made me with no greed…I only bought this hacienda in the spirit to set up something in the service of God, whose feet I dedicate [it to]…I offered this haciendilla like [Our] Señor [offered] the whole world, [he who] is responsible for all of creation and dominion[,] I pray to his Divine Majesty to receive this small thing of my simple soul so that your Kingdom [on earth] begins…I bought it [but] I am able to say that it was never mine, because later I [will] transfer and donate it to God.129

Mota y Escobar was clearly anxious to present the capital exchange as an innocent act with pious intent yielding purely spiritual dividends. This point of clarification asserted that God had acted on the soul of the Bishop and “made” him without greed. In his reference to his childhood “fortune,” which he claimed with a personal pronoun, the proclaimed lack of greed obscures the demands and actions of conquistadors and creoles, and sixteenth-century criticisms of them in

127 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 130r (image 133). 128 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 130r (image 133). 129 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250r-250v (images 253-254).

186 both the metropole and colony. The actions of the conquerors and their descendants were noble and self-sacrificing, as they consistently argued, not sinful and self-interested. The Bishop freed himself from the moral failing of greed and presented his action as but a “small thing” from a “simple soul.” The wealth he used to purchase the estate was of no consequence because it was cleansed by moral virtue, humility, and sacrifice. His actions could not be sinful, he argued, because the goal and motive were pure and simple, like a child’s. In referencing the act of placing the hacienda property at God’s feet, the Bishop also recalled the cleansing actions of Jesus in the Bible. The Bishop’s claims to innocence, humility, and sacrifice served to counter any charges of self-interest, in a situation that involved the exchange of a large sum of money, annuity payments, and title to agricultural land.

This narrative also pivots on themes of creation and social ordering. The literal acquisition of property became figurative as it acted as a payment toward and aid on the road to salvation; meanwhile the literal financial support handed down to subjects of the república, Estefania and Margarita, might be viewed as a self-conscious mimicking of God’s singular power at Creation. The censo was both debt paid and credit earned; value called in and potential distributed. Mota y Escobar likened himself to the Christian God, prostrated himself before him, and analogized his actions to God’s biblical world-creation. These words aimed to bring the Bishop’s actions to the level of God’s: in his benevolence, Mota y Escobar too intended to provide potential, possibility, and power to a subject or subordinate “creation.” He “offered” the haciendilla as God gave the “whole world” the gift of “creation and dominion”; the Bishop spread his wealth to other creoles and indicated that he intended to grant the land to God’s representatives on earth “later.” These representatives would continue the Bishop’s mission, of serving God and empire.

While he presented himself as a figure who, like God, created, he also positioned himself as subordinate to God’s desires. He was divinely chosen to be a bishop; it was neither his choice nor his birthright—it was God’s will acting on the world. By making such claims Mota y Escobar asserted a close intimacy with God, a theme present throughout his writings. In another censo from the late 1610s, the Bishop purchased “some houses” in Mexico City from the “S.C. de Santiago,” which could be the church at the famous Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, for 36,000 pesos to “donate to God.” In an undated marginal notation beside this entry in his hand, he remarked “I sold these houses [for] 33,000 pesos because God does not want anything

187 founded in his service” (see figure 13).130 This comment revolved around a logic in which the creator was also the obedient one created. According to this line of argument, which was central to imperial Spanish expansionist rhetoric, God had chosen Isabel and Ferdinand (and Columbus) to “reclaim” Iberia, “discover” the Americas, and bring its peoples into His Kingdom. The chosen must construct a Catholic order to maintain God’s favour, expand His influence, and save Christendom from sin and evil. Hispanic intimacy with God protected the Empire from criticism; Hispanic intent was innocent and pure, as the Catholic Monarchs had no choice but to obey the call.

Figure 13: Mota y Escobar’s record of a purchase of houses from the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250v (image 254).

Before the donation of the property, Mota y Escobar acted upon the estate and shaped it in his vision. He had a religious caretaker of the property as he was an absentee landlord: in 1615 the Bishop sent one Padre Antonio 1000 pesos, 210 varas of “royal blue” fabric, and four “pieces of sinabafa” or imported silver threaded fabric from the Low Countries (via the Persia region), which were probably intended as adornments for the dwellings on the property.131 These items, “provision for the maintenance of La Alfonsina,” were delivered by an enslaved person whom the Bishop owned, “mi mulato Juan, driver.”132 In 1622 Mota y Escobar also purchased “chunks

130 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 250v (image 254). 131 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 247r (image 250). Thanks to Frances Reilly and Amir Massoud Farahmand for help with tracing the Portuguese word “sinabafa,” which comes from the Farsi word “simbaft.” 132 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 247r (image 250).

188 of land” adjoining this “small hacienda” for “sowing,” with its irrigation waters “entering and departing,” for 7,000 pesos.133 In July of 1623 he sold a “chunk” of the Alfonsina land with a fruit-bearing tree on it for 2,750 pesos.134 These arrangements were not done with the “spirit to increase my finances,” the Bishop wrote, “but for greater increase of the qualities of the pious work…later I [will] donate [it]…as God knows.”135 The Alfonsina haciendilla was clearly meant to be productive and generative although he does not provide specific details of the hacienda’s intended use. It was a property to be bequeathed as a financial and spiritual legacy. It remained in Jesuit hands until the 1770s, when it was auctioned off and purchased by a Mariano Ximenez Caballero and Margarita Rodríguez.136

In the spiritual economy of Puebla, as elsewhere in the New World, the wealthy could purchase prayers for their souls (capellanías) and materials for good works and charity, and often had connections to other elite members of colonial society (like the De Castro Verde family). Through the Alfonsina purchase and by the logic of the spiritual economy, Mota y Escobar had gained access to future spiritual rewards while claiming child-like innocence and moral righteousness. He wrote that he used his own “fortune” to gain title to a property that “was never” his; such writing and language obscures the web of benefits drawn from the action. He planned to donate the land, “as God knows,” which demonstrated the Bishop’s selflessness in his relationship with both God and any subsequent episcopal figure who might consult his notebook. By donating to the Jesuits, the land would benefit creole-centred activities into the future. As we have seen, a transactional worldview of ‘sacrificial’ action and reward permeated early colonial Hispanic culture and was linked to a vision of ‘natural’ order and an entitlement to political power. In the colonial novohispano context, a continuation of conquistador world-building power was associated with the regime of reward and this record illuminates Bishop Mota y Escobar’s complex but conventional efforts to justify, build, maintain, and augment structures of creole class power in Puebla and the greater diocese.

133 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 251r (image 254). 134 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 251r (image 254). 135 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 251r (image 254). 136 AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, Colegios, caja 1134, exp. 004 and AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, Tierras, caja 5751, exp. 068.

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Enslavement and Mastery

In his episcopal notebook, Bishop Mota y Escobar went to great lengths to justify and morally purify the accumulation of landed property and wealth that he pursued in his efforts to construct his desired order. By contrast, the records of his ownership of human property do not contain any similar defenses. As a slaveowner, Mota y Escobar increased his personal and familial prestige, wealth, and status without any discursive “clarifications” on his purpose, a silence that illustrates the deeply rooted institutionalization and naturalization of racialized slavery within white elite society.137 He gained access to resources and symbolic capital through the exploited labour and attempted dehumanization of other human beings, and he did not deem it necessary to elaborate on his actions. This absence, when ‘viewed’ in comparison with the Bishop’s notations regarding his landed possessions, reveals the disquieting seamlessness between morality and slavery.138 Such an epistemological order took great effort and consideration to construct and maintain; as Bennett writes: “Slaves and thereby slavery continually had to be made.”139

As a member of the creole elite and a highly influential religious figure in the colony, Mota y Escobar benefitted from violent deracination, an imperative of the functioning of the slave trade, and actively participated in it on the ground in the colony.140 The kidnapping and enslavement of

137 For an analysis of how Columbus utilized hegemonic European ideas about natural slavery and inferiority in his writings, see Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus, 170-173. 138 For a discussion of the Independence-era shift in language regarding morality and enslavement, and its turn against the metropole, see Peter Blanchard, “The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 499-523. 139 Bennett reminds us, however, that “slavery alone did not define the experience of most people of African descent.” He urges historians of the Spanish Americas to investigate the “specific relations of domination” that constituted the historical process of making slaves and slavery. “While institutional and patriarchal authority shaped the contours of [African and Afro-creole] existence,” Bennett writes, “power did not monopolize the ways in which people of African descent defined their daily or even ritualized lives.” “Writing into a Void,” 71, 73. 140 Orlando Patterson argued that by a process of “natal alienation,” enslaved Africans were made to give up their own histories and the possibility of passing them down to descendants; “Alienated from all “rights” or claims of birth, [the slave] ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order,” he wrote. Martínez, writing about colonial New Spain, added that the Catholic Church intensified this process through its campaign to Christianize enslaved people, which she argued was also an effort to “destroy their previous sense of selves, to negate their past.” Morgan, writing in the context of the English Atlantic world, adds a further related point that resituating “heritability was key in the practice of an enslavement that systematically alienated the enslaved from their kin and their lineage. Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement.” Despite this process, Patterson writes, the enslaved person still experienced and shared social relations, as the extensive historiography of enslavement in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean attests. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University

190 people of African descent to serve as labourers for the colonial elite in New Spain (and elsewhere in the Americas) was accomplished through the alliance of early modern lay and religious power and Iberian cultural logics of just war and conquest/reconquista.141 Further, the colonial sistema de castas and its use of overlapping concepts of nation, blood purity, sovereignty, and nature collaborated with colonial institutions like the Inquisition to justify race- based slavery. “Racially constituted slavery pointed…to a fragmented sovereignty constituted through, and upon, bodies ascribed as black, unworthy, and morally threatening to the body politic.”142 Within the “colonial matrix of power,” Sherwin K. Bryant writes, “enslaved subjects merited a specific kind of governance and structured specific forms of authority,” which buttressed elite individual claims to power and provided the tools to shape it.143 Racial slavery as a tool to govern was the “quintessential colonial practice to establish populations and territories as non European/nonwhite.”144

By a document dated 1 August 1610, the Bishop wrote that he was the enslaver of twenty-six men and boys, and eighteen women and girls. Twelve of these forty-three people were children enslaved by virtue of their mothers being bonded or accompanying their mothers into the Bishop’s charge—Diego, the youngest, was one year old.145 Fourteen people were noted as being

Press, 1982), 5 and chapter two; Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 492; and Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem,” 1. People of trans-Pacific world descent were also enslaved and forcibly relocated to the Hispanic American territories, including the kingdom of New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tatiana Seijas outlines the diverse nature of the Manila-based slave trade, writing that it included native Filipinos (in an adapted continuity with pre- Hispanic systems), peoples from the Indian Ocean World living under Portuguese imperial control, and native Muslims in Mindanao and other islands of the Philippines Archipelago (which they called moros). Seijas writes that a “royal decree from 1574 specifically outlawed indigenous slavery in the Spanish Philippines, but the exigencies of conquest and the colony’s distant location delayed abolition for well over a century.” Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36 and chapter two. See also Seijas, “The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish Manila: 1580–1640,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2008): 19-38. 141 Herman L. Bennett provides a detailed explanation of this phenomenon in ““Sons of Adam”: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject,” Representations 92, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 19-21, 23, 26-28. 142 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 51. 143 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 46. 144 “Early modern slavery as a colonial practice proclaimed, and dialectically produced, Europe and Euro-colonial sovereign claims by marking the subjects of Guinea through casta/nación/naturaleza.” Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 48, 51. The author’s italics. 145 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva generously shared his unpublished translation of these folios with me and I am very grateful. I have used his translations. Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, email message to author, June 15, 2020. For a discussion of the broader context of slavery in the city of Puebla, see

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African born (bozal, with ethnonyms/naciones bran, biafara, bioho, chocho, conga), European- born, or possibly born in the Pacific world (Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia) (chino/as), and the remaining twenty-nine people had been born in the Americas (criollo/as, creoles).146 Among the men, Francisco was a tailor, Juan was a farrier, and Juan Pascual was a coachman; it is likely that many of the women and girls were domestics in the Bishop’s personal service and the cathedral chapter.147 Although most of his bonded staff did not have skill sets or professions attached to their entries, the three men listed above provide illustrative examples of the type of crucial labour extracted by the system of enslavement; the elite and non-elite of the colony would have paid a significant sum of money for the essential expertise of these men. Slavery was a means to showcase one’s wealth and status and keep it intact for one’s own life and heirs. The slave was a “key icon of a well-ordered Spanish American society,” compelled to provide services that kept the system intact.148

Transatlantic slavery existed in the colony of New Spain from first contact. “Marked as utterly alien,” Bryant writes, “Africans entered the Americas not as property, capital, or labor per se, but as people identified by the sovereigns of Castile as having ‘black’ territorial origins, dubious ‘national’ affiliations, as well as physical and moral qualities that legitimized their

Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico. The names and ages (if listed) of the men and boys are as follows: Francisco, Francisco Carmona (“viejo,” old), Gaspar, Pedro, Francisco, Gaspar, Francisco, Mateo, Felipe, Melchor, Francisco Dionisio, Andres, Juan Pascual, Juan de Guadiana (“mozo,” boy), Juan, Juan (12), Clemente (10), Diego (1), Jacinto (7), Geronimo (4), Francisco (20, “moceton,” robust youth), Nicolas, Juanillo, Juan Ximenez (20), Juan (25), and Alonso. The names and ages (if listed) of the women and girls are as follows: Catalina, María, Catalina, Juana Penda, Catalina (“vieja”, old), Catalina (3), María, Petronilla (7), Ana, Isabel, Catalina, Luzia, María (14), María Escobar, Dominga (7), Pascuala (4), Luzia, María. María was branded with the Bishop’s name, which is why I believe she may also be the “María Escobar” referred to in the record. Appendix B of Sierra Silva’s Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico contains a transcription and translation of the 1633 testament of Francisco Carmona, one of the Bishop’s slaves. It is not clear when Francsico became legally free. See pages 207-209. 146 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). The term chino/as had many meanings across populations in the colonial era in New Spain. It could mean a person from the Pacific World but it could also be a mixed casta person of various “types.” See Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 147 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 247r, 266r-266v (images 250, 269-270). On 15 June 1615, Mota y Escobar used his enslaved coachman, Juan, to deliver provisions for maintenance to the hacienda Alfonsina in Atlixco. He sent 1,000 pesos, two “piezas” (pieces) of blue wool of 210 varas, and four “piezas” of European fabric (sinabafa), worth 98 and 14 pesos respectively. 148 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 81.

192 enslavability.”149 In 1570, there was an estimated 20,000 Black people, free and enslaved, in central New Spain. A sixteenth-century report sent to the Crown noted that the number of enslaved people in Mexico City, Puebla, Veracruz, and rural Tlaxcala-Puebla (200 estancias) was 8,000, 500, 500, and 400, respectively. The peninsular and Hispanic-descended population was noted as being 8,000, 800, 300, and 300, respectively.150 By 1595, a report by Pedro de Vega to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition estimated that there were 10,000 slaves and 1,500 free people of African descent in Mexico City; for Puebla, he estimated 2,500 enslaved people and 3,000 obraje workers, which consisted of “many” people of colour and the Hispanic descended.151 The population of African-descended people rapidly increased between 1595 and 1622 and the Kingdom received almost half of the estimated 104,205 people who were kidnapped and imported to the Americas during that time, most of them coming from Angola and the Congo via the port at São Paulo de Luanda.152 By the end of the sixteenth century, New Spain had one of the largest populations of free and enslaved people of African descent in the Americas and it continued to grow until the end of the Iberian union of Crowns (Portuguese asiento period) in 1640.

The largest importations of the whole colonial period occurred during Mota y Escobar’s tenure as bishop of Puebla: approximately 2,970 in 1608; 6,271 in 1609; and 3,020 in 1610.153 By 1646 the creole African descended population, which Bennett writes was mostly “free and comprised of mulattoes,” numbered 116,529 people and the largely African enslaved population numbered 35,089 people.154 The slave trade did not collapse after 1640 (at the end of the union of Crowns),

149 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 47. 150 AGI, Indiferente, 1529, n .41. See also Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 501; Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 14-17, 28; Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 21-22. 151 AHN, Inquisción de México, l. 1049, fs. 54r-57v. 152 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 504 and Tatiana Seijas and Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market in seventeenth century Central Mexico,” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 2 (2016): 320. 153 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 504. Martínez writes that the numbers decreased from 1611-1615, but sharply increased again from 1616-1621. 154 Herman Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 27. Bishop Mota y Escobar’s maternal family owned many slaves and had great accumulated wealth into the seventeenth century. Terrazas Williams noted that “when doña Juana Josefa Orduña Loyando y Sousa of Xalapa married don Juan Velázquez de la Cadena from Mexico City [in 1669], her family offered a dowry of 30,000 pesos in cash, slaves, and other goods.” Further, Terrazas Wiliams has found evidence that a member of Mota y Escobar’s extended family owed Polonia de Ribas, a free mulata slave owner vecina of Xalapa, money at the time of her death

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African-descended creoles sustained the market into the second half of the seventeenth century, and slavery was still integral to the urban and rural economies of central Mexico at the turn of the eighteenth century.155 In their systematic investigation of notarial records from Mexico City and Puebla from 1600 to 1700, Seijas and Sierra Silva found that the number of African slaves brought into the region in the second half of the seventeenth century was underestimated in colonial historiography and that market demand was consistently high.156

Purchasing and owning slaves required substantial financial resources. Ownership of forty-three people, thirty-one of whom were adults, was a significant investment and placed Mota y Escobar amongst the top urban slaveholders in the colony. Seijas and Sierra Silva write that the average price of an enslaved person categorized as “negro,” whether born in the Americas or Africa, was between 340 and 400 pesos throughout the seventeenth century. They found that slave-owners paid progressively lower prices for enslaved people categorized as of mixed descent (mulatos), suggesting that enslavers placed higher value on people of darker skin colour, whom they presumed, from their phenotypic characteristics, to be of solely or predominantly African ancestry. In the early 1600s, slaves categorized as mulato/as sold for over 370 pesos, but by 1700 they were being sold for a little more than 300 pesos. Those captives aged 20-29 years were in the highest demand and were the most expensive in the Central Mexican market. Enslaved people in their 30s were “skilled journeymen, overseers, and wet nurses” and were purchased at a mean price of 358 pesos. Seijas and Sierra Silva find that pricing patterns of the market overall reveal a steady rise in the value of an enslaved worker from their birth, to a peak before the age of 30, and a depreciation at 40 years of age.157

The Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript contains Mota y Escobar’s inventory list outlining the names, ethnonyms, castas, gender, marital status, ages, and other miscellaneous details of the bonded people he owned (see figures 14 and 15). He used the language of the slave trade in this pastoral

in 1679. Terrazas Williams remarks that the family member, Capitán don Antonio Orduña Loyando, was the owner of the sugar mill San Pedro Buenavista, which at one point had more then 100 slaves on site. Terrazas Williams, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’,” 534, 543. See also Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, Historia de Jalapa Siglo XVII, 329. 155 Seijas and Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market,” 307. 156 Seijas and Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market,” 307-308. 157 Seijas and Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market,” 321-324.

194 document to, first, memorialize and quantify his wealth – the signifiers attached to each person assigned legible contemporary value – and second, to keep track of the lives and relations of his forty-three human possessions, which enabled him to record his knowledge of and mastery over them. The Bishop used the term memoría (memorandum) to order this list, a Latin-derived word that Covarrubias Horozco explained in terms of something established or made to preserve memory, providing the examples of hospitals and pious works named for ancestors, and mayorazgos (entailed estates).158 It was a word or concept tied to remembrance, the future, and property with or of symbolic value. The list of people is centred on the page under the subheadings “negros,” “mulatos esclavos,” “negras esclavas,” and “mulatas y chinas esclavas.” In the left margin, the Bishop made undated notes of the fate of the individual or their change in legal status or owner. In the right margin he made undated notes describing and elaborating on the physical appearance, skill set, and/or other miscellaneous comments about the enslaved person.159

Bennett writes that enslaved individuals in Mexico City “represented both labor and symbols of the status of their owners.” Similarly, writing about slave-owning women of colour in colonial Veracruz, Terrazas Williams remarks that being “known as a slave owner could establish or reaffirm one’s social capital” and enabled a person to be “self-determining.” “As juridical subjects, currency, mobile capital, and people caught up in a complex web of material and spiritual capital, slaves became intrinsic to Spanish colonial establishment…[as] African slavery offered a method of producing and performing wealth and status in society,” Bryant writes in the context of colonial Quito.160 Of course, the Bishop had many avenues through which to flaunt his social, political, and economic capital as a white elite creole man, but as has been shown, he had a life-long anxiety about class status and a determination to expand his class’s power through

158 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1269. 159 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). 160 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 18; Terrazas Williams, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear,’ ” 539, 553; and Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 19. Of slave-owning women of colour in colonial Veracruz, Terrazas Williams noted that owning human property enabled one to be “self-determining.” While it was more significant and extraordinary for women of colour to be “self-determining” within the casta-stratified society of colonial New Spain, this attribute is useful for thinking about all people who owned other people and speaks to what was valued within the casta structure. Freedom to self-determine was crucial within this system of caste division.

195 writing and record-keeping opportunities.161 This particular record of his slaveownership, two full folio pages, announced his affluence and power to metropolitan and colonial readers, while his use of slave labour in the diocese of Puebla was a “mark of [cultural] distinction.”162

Figure 14: Memoria (recto) of enslaved persons owned by Bishop Mota y Escobar, August 1, 1610

161 Terrazas Williams, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’,” 539. 162 Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “Portuguese Encomenderos de Negros and the Slave Trade within Mexico, 1600– 1675,” Journal of Global Slavery 2, no. 3 (2017): 229.

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Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r (image 269).

While Mexican notarial documents, like records of slave sales, have been assessed as atomizing “communities and individuals into disposable individuals,” a list like the one made by Mota y Escobar was intended to leave evidence of a world of mastery. The marginal and relational notations especially illuminate the specificities of this violent controlling and ordering. These pages project his power to observe, name, categorize, label and possess; it was as a living document that was updated as this world shifted and changed over time. Bryant writes that enslaved Africans were, among other things, “signifiers of sovereignty,” and in the case of the Bishop, this record left a testament to his personal freedom and his will to dominate.163 The list provides evidence of three main tendencies in Mota y Escobar’s assertion of mastery: he gifted his bonded staff to kin and within kinship networks; he used violence and torture to communicate his ownership in the form of branding some of his slaves; and he embraced the reproductive imperative of the slave trade and the dynamics of the slave market as 40 percent of his enslaved human property were offspring of enslaved women, many of them under the age of fourteen. “Slavery sat at the nexus of civil governance, commerce, and religious discipline,” Bryant explains, and in the figure of Bishop Mota y Escobar and his slave-ownership we see these vectors embodied.164

Mota y Escobar noted that he gave his enslaved staff away as gifts in simultaneous acts of economic and symbolic wealth and status transfer.165 He gave Felipe to his almoner (limosnero), and gave Francisco Dionisio and Juan Pascual to his nephew, Antonio de la Mota y Portugal.166 To a distant relative, Fernando Portugal, he gave Juan de Guadiana, and to one Doña Catalina, he

163 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 63. 164 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 81. 165 On 23 April 1610, Mota y Escobar noted that he had created a “letter of obligation” in favour of Cristobal de Arcos, the beneficed priest of the pueblo of Yagualica in the archdiocese, in the quantity of 5,954 pesos. He wrote that if he died before he could repay this debt, “all of his possessions and slaves were charged to [Cristobal]” because it had been a “very good friendship.” The Bishop wrote that he had paid off this debt by 20 May 1612. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 291r (image 294). 166 The Bishop later noted the date of his gift to Antonio de la Mota y Portugal as October 1612. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r, 280r (image 269, 283).

197 gave Juana and Petronilla, Juana’s young daughter.167 The practice of giving an enslaved person away as a gift, helped produce and replicate ideologies of race and structures of casta governance at the collective level, and functioned as a tool of status-passing among individuals.168 As an influential religious figure, Mota y Escobar may have seen such acts as charitable and pious, as he did with other commercial endeavours discussed in this chapter.169

Branding was a tool to humiliate and torture the enslaved person, a strategy to communicate control and possession to other masters, and a method of marking, constituting, and governing the bodies of the enslaved for “the elaboration of imperial power.”170 As a juridical act of domination, Bryant writes, branding facilitated the colonial incorporation of African and African-descended people as both “black” and “slave.”171 The Bishop noted that he had branded Melchor on the face with his religious title and paternal surname: “Bishop Mota.” Juan Pascual, Juan Ximenez, and María were all branded with Mota y Escobar’s name in an unspecified location on their bodies.172 Through branding the Bishop helped in the “forming, expanding, and legitimating [of] the race relation of governance that slavery installed,” thus contributing to his vision of himself as a creator of colonial order.173 He aided in the naturalization of what Bryant calls “the European colonial horizon” that constructed “Africa as slave territory and Africans as slaves unless proved free.”174

167 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266v (image 270). 168 Bryant writes that “to account for blackness, slavery, and processes of racialization at the level of governance and formation of an early modern state…analysis requires a complex engagement with the dialectics of slaving, slavery, and everyday life. It requires attention to the very colonial practices that were ultimately productive of racial governance and ideologies of race.” I understand the gifting of human property as one such practice. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 51. 169 As noted in chapter one, at the time of the Bishop’s death in 1625 he gave three enslaved people to the Jesuits at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Puebla “for a limited time.” The names of these individuals are not provided in the hagiographic record, AGN, Jesuitas 64, vol III-24, exp.2, 1v., and exp.3, fs.1v. See Merlo Juárez and Quintana Fernández. Las iglesias de la Puebla, 89-93. 170 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 51. 171 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 52. 172 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). Luzia is recorded as being branded but it seems to have been by a previous owner, as was Francisco Dionisio who was branded with the name “Francisco Madaleno.” The Bishop also noted that Juan and Juan de Guadiana were both branded with an “s and nail.” 173 Bryant writes that such a legitimating practice “made licit an otherwise illicit trade in people that the Spanish monarchs and local priests enslaved knowing they had not been acquired through a just war.” Rivers of Gold, 52. 174 Bryant argues that the reading “marking, treating, and baptizing [of] black bodies came to signify not only individual ownership but also political and commercial ownership. These were “ceremonies of possession” that all

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As this chapter demonstrates, Mota y Escobar’s vision was preoccupied with the future legacy of himself and his class. With this future focus, it is not surprising that the Bishop of Tlaxacla- Puebla was aware of contemporary slave market trends as he owned four enslaved women with a total of eighteen children among them. “On and within their bodies, the enslaved carried the fantasies of both slavery and the colonial regime,” Bryant writes. The fantasies within the reproductive discourse of the Bishop and his class were expressed in part through Marian rhetoric but were violently played out in the legislation of enslavability and the practices of the slave trade. “Atlantic slavery rested upon a notion of inheritability,” Jennifer L. Morgan writes and “thus relied on a reproductive logic that was inseparable from the explanatory power of race.” Morgan further notes that regardless “of the rate of reproduction among the enslaved – which remained low in all early American slave societies – the ideological solidity of those slave societies needed reproducing women.”175

Europeans deployed as they endeavored to transform people into commodities. Brands confirmed the king as sovereign of both slavery and regional market economies.” Referencing specifically Patricia Seed’s Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 1998), Bryant is critical of historiography that has ignored slavery as a key marker and maker of Castile’s possession and domination of the Americas. Rivers of Gold, 52, 63. 175 Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem,”1.

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Figure 15: Memoria (verso) of enslaved persons owned by Bishop Mota y Escobar, August 1, 1610 Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266v (image 270).

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The thirteenth-century Castilian legal code, the Siete Partidas, specified that children born to enslaved women were legally enslaved themselves.176 This legislation became colonial law and Seijas and Sierra Silva’s research into the dynamics of the seventeenth-century central Mexican slave market (Mexico City and Puebla) indicates that enslaved children were of considerable value within urban society, often labouring within convents, textile mills, and artisan workshops. According to Seijas and Sierra Silva, “the commercialization of enslaved children, especially American-born youths, is the most surprising finding” in their study of slave sales of more than 6,000 individuals from 1600 to the turn of the eighteenth century; more than 800 children appear in their sample.177 Children also served as meaningful status symbols in elite households.178 Bishop Mota y Escobar owned María Escobar, Juana Penda, Ana, and Luzia, and their children. Juan (12), Clemente (10), Diego (1), Nicolas (?), Juanillo (?), Dominga (7), Pascuala (4), Luzia (?), and María (?) were María Escobar’s children; she was married to Juan, who was also enslaved by Mota y Escobar. Jacinto (7), Catalina (?), Catalina (3), and Petronilla (7) were Juana Penda’s children; she was married to an unnamed “free mulato.” Isabel (?) and Alonso (?) were Ana’s children; Ana was married to Gaspar, and the Bishop noted that he had owned the latter first, writing in the right-hand margin of the list that he had purchased Ana at an undated time. María (14) was Luzia’s daughter, and no spouse is listed.179 Although it cannot be ascertained if the Bishop purchased these families together or if these children were born into slavery in Mota y Escobar’s household, the slave-owning prelate would clearly have increased his wealth (and his heirs) through the owning, possible renting out, and future sale of these children.

Unlike some other slave owners, Bishop Mota y Escobar did not use any sentimental language in these notations that might indicate any special affective relationship between himself and his bondspeople.180 In fact, in the case of Francisco, the tailor mentioned earlier, Mota y Escobar

176 Book IV, Title XXI, Law I, Las Siete Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio (Madrid: La Imprenta Real, 1807), accessed December 11, 2020, http://fama2.us.es/fde/lasSietePartidasEd1807T1.pdf. 177 Seijas and Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market,” 309, 321. 178 Seijas and Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the slave market,” 321. 179 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). 180 See Terrazas Williams, “ ‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’ ” for a discussion of the use of such language in records made by Polonia de Ribas, a slave-owning woman of colour.

201 wrote the words “great thief and traitor” next to his entry.181 He maintained emotional distance throughout his writings while simultaneously recording his significant involvement in the intimate lives of the people whom he enslaved. This mirrored and perhaps deliberately mimicked the detached nature of the imperial sovereign’s relationship to his subjects. There was an attempt to signal discursive benevolence through these folio pages as a list of human beings was categorized, inventoried, and narrated for the purpose of memorializing wealth and mastery. The system of racial slavery constituted part of a colonial order that viewed domination as divinely favoured and viewed whiteness as indicative of nobility, freedom, and purification. Mota y Escobar’s slave ownership communicated a sense of loyalty to that system and his behaviour towards his human property projected his commitment to its sustenance and reproduction.

Gifting Nobility

The Bishop transformed economic capital into the social and symbolic capital of nobility and privilege by gifting and “helping” the main heir to his father’s mercedes, his nephew, Antonio de la Mota y Portugal. This form of intergenerational transfer of wealth and corresponding class capital was an important method of ensuring the future privileges of Mota y Escobar’s extended family and lineage and of reproducing colonial structures.

Mota y Escobar’s eldest brother, Antonio (Ruiz) de la Mota, was the first son of conquistador Jeronimo Ruiz de la Mota, inheriting his property through the right of primogeniture at the time of Ruiz de la Mota’s death in 1569. In 1578 Antonio and his wife, María Manuel y Portugal, both creoles, received royal permission to establish a mayorazgo, or entailed estate, that would pass on the family land and goods to subsequent heirs.182 Between 1597 and 1622, their eldest son, Antonio de la Mota y Portugal, received “help” from his uncle, Bishop Mota y Escobar, in the form of luxury goods, human property, and cash gifts totalling some 23,260 pesos and 4 tomines.

181 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 266r (image 269). 182 AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp. 5586, bloque 1, fs. 5r and AGI, Mexico, 1091, L.9, fs. 23v-26v. Probable descendants with the surname “Ruiz de la Mota y Portugal” held important positions in the colonial government into the late eighteenth century. See AGN, General de Parte, vol. 20, exp. 130.

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The “help” Mota y Escobar gave to Mota y Portugal enhanced the family’s broader status, affirmed the “purity” of their lineage, reproduced their class power and confirmed their nobility in New Spain’s most politically and economically important cities. The record that the Bishop left behind of this socorro further asserted the Bishop’s position as a benevolent person and recreator of class order (see figure 16). The Bishop’s contributions to his nephew’s lifestyle, aesthetic, and social status were meant to mark and communicate his honour and freedom and, by extension, signal their family’s embodiment of elite hispanidad and, thus, their legitimate place in the colony’s caste hierarchy.183 This patronage was highly visible and legible and Mota y Escobar’s notation of its manifestations also reveal the network of elites to which his family belonged.

In an undated bulleted list in the later folios of his Tlaxcala-Puebla pastoral manuscript, the Bishop wrote: “I have helped [he socorrido] don Antonio de la Mota with the following [donations].”184 The verb socorrer was defined by Covarrubias Horozco (circa 1611) as “to help and remedy some thing that is detrimental or dangerous: and if [the thing] is not done with much haste, it does not merit the name of socorro.”185 An urgency is implied in the use of this verb and in this context, and could suggest either that Mota y Portugal was in financial straits or that he required help in order to present a particular social and economic status within the república for a specific purpose.186 Whatever the reason for this urgency, Bishop Mota y Escobar generously obliged, providing a record of how wealth could be used to project an image of prestige.

183 In her discussion of self-fashioning through elegant clothing among especially enslaved people in late colonial Lima, Tamara J. Walker writes that “luxurious material goods provided a language for expressing [elite Spanish] wealth and status… they sought to embody ideals of cleanliness and good taste.” “‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (2009): 387. 184 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r (image 283). 185 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1446. 186 A 1691 suit was concluded that reaffirmed Antonio de la Mota y Portugal as the heir to Antonio and María’s mayorazgo. The lawsuit may have deprived the family of assets during a time, which could explain the wealth transfer chronicled in this account. AGN, Vínculos y Mayorazgos (115), vol. 138, exp. 4. The suit was between Alonso de Algava Tenorio and his wife (“and the others”) and the descendants of Antonio Ruiz de la Mota in Mexico City.

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Figure 16: Itemized list of gifts or donations Mota y Escobar provided to his nephew Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r (image 283).

The Bishop sent his nephew luxury goods for his movement around New Spain. In the records it is clear that the Bishop’s nephew travelled back and forth from Mexico City to Puebla regularly and had a home in each location. He sent a horse named Febo, that he valued at 1,000 pesos, and on another occasion he sent a “gilded black velvet carriage…new unused,” that he purchased from a Don Francisco Perez de Salazar (1,100 pesos), and included two mules (150 pesos).187 He also gave Mota y Portugal ostentatious furnishings for his home and family, including: a “great new dais carpet” with 12 cushions of crimson velvet in the style of Damascus (800 pesos); wall-

187 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r, (image 283).

204 hangings in yellow taffeta (94 pesos); and a “fine” tapestry with the “history of Julius Caesar” on it (2,000 pesos).188 The former items mobilized the appearance of wealth, and the latter signalled worldliness, taste, and historical acumen when the family entertained. When Mota y Portugal’s son was born, his uncle sent 1,500 pesos for the purchase of a small woven basket (canastilla) for the newborn, “hand made” by one Francisco de Rosales.189

The Bishop seems to have had a staggering amount of specie at his disposal to present gifts and offer his nephew access to wealth that signalled unencumbered affluence. The money was recorded as having a specific purpose from the Bishop’s perspective and it was usually to enable travel and offer hospitality that created and maintained relationships and appearances. Mota y Portugal was in Puebla in 1618 when the Bishop gave him 400 pesos to travel to Mexico City on “secret” business to meet with an unspecified “agent,” an acquaintance of the Bishop’s.190 On two other occasions, Mota y Escobar gave Mota y Portugal a total of 1,294 pesos to travel between Puebla and the viceregal capital and pay for accommodation along the way.191 The prelate gave Mota y Portugal 400 pesos to house the Marqués del Valle in Puebla in an undated notation, signalling their family’s proximity to a very significant political force within the colony and the Empire more broadly. In another instance, the Bishop noted that Mota y Portugal had entered Puebla with the Marqués de Guadalcázar, Diego Fernández de Córdoba y Melgarejo, Cabellero de Santiago and Viceroy of Mexico (1612-1621) and Peru (1622-1629) in October 1612.192 The final entry in this ledger was dated 3 March 1622 when Bishop Mota y Escobar sent Mota y Portugal 1,000 pesos for “rent” on the latter’s home in Mexico City.193

Furthermore, Mota y Escobar clearly understood the power of embodied opulence as markers of affluence, authority, and Old World nobility and honour. He sent his nephew a “dress with silver trim” that cost him 500 pesos, and when he was Bishop of Guadalajara, he sent 1,000 pesos to

188 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280v-281r (image 284). 189 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r (image 283). Canasta is described by Covarrubias Horozco as a small basket or woven vessel for carrying things like vegetables or fish (or a baby?). Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 424. 190 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280v (image 284). 191 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280v (image 284). 192 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280v-280r (images 283-284). See Guillermo Villena Lohmann, “Los Fernández de Córdoba: un linaje preponderante en el Perú en el siglos XVI y XVII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 45 (1988): 167-240. 193 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 281r (image 283).

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“adorn his person” at his wedding.194 He made a 2,000-peso “payment” for the upkeep of the “habit” of the Caballero de Santiago (Knight of the Order of St. James), a title that Mota y Portugal “expects” to be granted, the Bishop wrote. Mota y Portugal was granted the Iberian noble title of Caballero de Santiago on 29 October 1619; no one else in his family possessed this honorific metropolitan title for at least three generations.195 On 25 April 1620, Mota y Escobar sent another 3,070 pesos for the outfit, his largest single cash donation.196 This outfit marked Mota y Portugal and his family as Old Christians of pure and clean blood or lineage, and would have been a relatively rare sight in the colony. Members of the Order of Santiago were supposed to be noble of birth rather than noble by privilege. The granting of this title also signalled martial masculinity and a commitment to the militant defense of the Castilian Crown and Catholic Church.197

In the twelfth century the Order of St. James was created as a military religious order that blended monasticism with chivalry and pledged to defend Catholicism against Muslims. Knights of the Order of St. James were considered crusaders aided by saints. Knights of this Order assumed a large role in the reconquista and it became the largest, most prestigious, and richest order in Castile. St. James was the patron saint of all soldiers and would have been a highly significant figure for the Spanish conquistadors.198 The habit of the Santiago Knight was distinct and recognizable to metropolitans and elite creoles in the colony, marking Mota y Portugal as a defender of Iberian hegemony and Catholic order.199 Writing of elite Spaniards in late colonial Lima, Walker notes that “luxurious material goods provided a language” for expressing wealth and status.200 Maintenance of the Santiago habit in combination with the various material fineries

194 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r (image 283). 195 AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp. 5586, bloque 4, fs. 1r. He also held the title of alcalde mayor of Xichú near the mines of Guanajuato in 1646. AGN, Reales Cédulas Originales y Duplicados (100), vol. D50, exp. 72. 196 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 281r (image 284) and AHN, OM-Caballeros_Santiago, exp. 5586, bloque 4, fs. 1r. 197 L.P. Wright, “The Military Orders in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Spanish Society. The Institutional Embodiment of a Historical Tradition,” Past & Present 43 (May 1969): 39. 198 Joan Myers, Donna Pierce, and Marc Simmons, Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 14-16. 199 Perhaps it was the nephew’s determination to demonstrate his deservedness of this title that the Bishop referred to when he implied the urgency of his aid. 200 Walker goes on to argue that luxurious clothing contained important social meaning for enslaved people in colonial Lima as well. Their consumption and distribution of property, like items of dress, “while also finding ways

206 sent by the Bishop to his nephew demonstrates how patronage could help build, bolster, and share this language.

Many of these objects and specie had to be moved between the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla and Mexico City, where Mota y Portugal’s primary residence seems to have been. Much of the labour required to transport these gifts would have been assigned to and accomplished by the Bishop’s bondspeople. Moreover, the prelate used his enslaved human property as gifts, and he lent them out as circulating family property as well. He gave his nephew access to five bonded persons, which, as an extension of familial wealth and prestige, provided free labour and contributed to the reproduction of the caste order of the colony. From Zacatecas, likely when the prelate was bishop of Guadalajara, he sent his nephew a Black man named Nicolas Guineole.201 In 1612 Mota y Escobar gave Mota y Portugal an enslaved man named Francisco Dionisio, whom the Bishop listed as negro ladino criollo.202 In an undated notation, Mota y Escobar sent Juan Pascual, his enslaved and branded driver, to Mexico City where Mota y Portugal facilitated his sale to the Archbishop of Mexico for 500 pesos.203 Both Franciso Dionisio and Juan Pascual had been Mota y Escobar’s human property since August 1610. When Mota y Portugal was leaving Puebla for the capital sometime in 1619, the prelate gave him his “criado,” Gaspar; it is not clear if Mota y Portugal was using Gaspar as a temporary labourer or if Gaspar had been given as a permanent gift.204 In 1620, the Bishop sent an enslaved African woman named María Biafara to Mota y Portugal.205 As Bryant writes, enslaved people of African descent were “simultaneously many things—foundational concerns of governance, signifiers of sovereignty, and possessions of royal majesty.” In other words, like the habit and title of Knight of Santiago, enslaved property connected their enslavers to the metropole and the secular and religious structures of imperial order. “In raw economic terms,” Bryant continues, enslaved people “had always been property owned and enclosed within the pater’s domain (an estate permeable to the

to satisfy [their] obligations to [their] owner[s] without always appearing to perform visible work, seemed to undermine the very logic of chattel slavery in Lima.” “ ‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’,” 385, 387, 397. 201 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 281r (image 283). Mota y Escobar wrote that he purchased Nicolas for 500 pesos. 202 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280r (image 283). Mota y Escobar wrote that he valued Francisco at 400 pesos. 203 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 280v (image 284). 204 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 281r (image 284). 205 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 281r (image 284). Mota y Escobar wrote that he valued María Biafara at 420 pesos.

207 intrusion of the pope and crown),” which signalled loyalty to these same entities. Finally, he writes, enslaved people “had been commodities, circulating as cash and capital capable of leveraging wealth and status while demonstrating honor and even piety.”206

The early modern gift economy was an intricate system of reciprocal ties and networks: it “softened” relations among people of the same status and prevented the closure of that status.207 Of sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis writes that gifts “were to express sentiments of affection, compassion, and/or gratefulness, but they were simultaneously sources of support, interest, and advancement.”208 The goal of gifting was to create bonds and receive the benefits of these bonds. In colonial New Spain, the economies of distributive justice, mercedes, and gifts intersected as mercedes granted through the system of distributive justice became gifts passed down through the generations. The legibility and visibility of the Bishop’s patronage and gifting to his nephew increased the political and social prestige and power of the descendants of the Ruiz de la Mota family in Puebla and Mexico City and tied them to both Iberian and colonial forms of nobility.

This chapter examined early articulations of elite creole white novohispanidad and the institutional practices that were applied to support this ideological framework through the representative writings of Mota y Escobar. The república de españoles was the site where this order was institutionalized but the epistemological infrastructure of white superiority depended on the solid boundaries of cultural difference upheld by the segregation of the república de indios and the violence of the system of racialized slavery. In order to distinguish themselves as American Spaniards and guardians of Hispanic order, elite creoles in late sixteenth-century New Spain used the language of belonging and status to assert their exceptional location in the colony-metropole relationship. They embraced a rhetoric of whiteness that tied into their own vision of their Hispanic lineage and invested in practices and ideologies that supported this vision of power, affluence, and privilege. Bishop Mota y Escobar methodically recorded his efforts at república creation, patriarchal protection, and mastery, reproducing and sharing

206 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 63. 207 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 9. 208 Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, 22.

208 signifiers of white superiority. In chapter four the complicated connection of novohispanidad to metropolitan Hispanism is further explored as the Bishop chronicled his agility at cultural movement and communication, which to him, signalled the ideal characteristic of colonial authority.

Chapter 4 “God remedy it”: Mobility, Ethnography, and the Visita in the Diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla

On 9 November 1609, Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla Mota y Escobar made a notation in his pastoral visitation notebook that illustrates pointedly the connection between conquest and the ethnographic. He wrote that he left the Hospital de Perote near the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range and moved through malpaís, an arid volcanic area, where “giant deer” were raised: “in this land they call [the deer] pardos, for being more than other usual deer…I left [my hut] twice to hunt and I killed a single deer, very beautiful.”1 The Bishop noted that he shot the deer on the side and “so much blood came out, that it made me sick to my stomach, and then I threw up so much that I was well cleansed to enter the tierra caliente, where I heard that Kings were purged for pleasure rather than need.”2 This record, involving movement between extreme landscapes, fascination with difference, conquest and domination, and Indigenous knowledge, introduces the central themes of Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visita writings. In this striking cultural translation, the prelate’s desire to project authority and power premised on rootedness and cultural mobility is illustrated. He sought to articulate his proficiency as insider and outsider to the two Hispanisms that existed for him and his class, and as such, communicate that he was the ideal mediator between colony and metropole.

This chapter examines Mota y Escobar’s self-reported movement and mobility in his efforts to relay evidence of the legitimacy of creole claims to power, authority, and trust in the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla. In his second episcopal role as Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla (1608-1625), Mota y Escobar was required by canon and imperial law to perform annual inspections (visitas pastorales) of the diocese and create a relación of these visits for the information of the Crown

1 This word was also a casta term. Walker clarifies that it was “a generic term referring to African-descent men and women, often with the connotation of mixed ancestry.” “ ‘He Outfitted His Family in Notable Decency’,” 389. For a discussion of the relationship between the perception of racial difference and bureaucratic classification of that difference in the context of early colonial Nueva Granada, see Joanne Rappaport, “ ‘Asi lo paresçe por su Aspeto’: Fisiognomía y construcción de la diferencia en la Bogotá colonial,” Tabula Rasa 17 (2012): 13-42. For further studies that focus on the lives of men and women classified in this way in the colonial archive, see Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness and Vinson III, Before Mestizaje. 2 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 12v (image 15). Thank you to Lucas Campo Vernay, Bethan Fisk, Alejandro García Reidy, Miguel Martínez Ceja, Juan José Ponce Vásquez, Ximena Romero Contla, and Leah Wotherspoon for their invaluable aid with translation of this difficult passage.

209 210 and Council of the Indies. Although this was an explicitly religious and episcopal responsibility, Mota y Escobar’s visita records blur the distinction between archival genres. While there are ecclesiastical reflections characteristic of this visitation type, the Bishop broadened the scope of his task, drawing on previous experiences of knowledge collection: the 1604 Council interrogatorio and consequent Descripción geográfica. In chapter two I outlined Mota y Escobar’s strategies to demonstrate his usefulness as an authority on New Spain that departed from official goals and desires. In contrast, in this writing task, Mota y Escobar found Crown goals to align with his own interests. The pastoral visit was articulated in colonial law as a means through which the King and Council of the Indies could assert Patronato rights and ensure that the interests of the Empire were being protected, namely Indigenous peoples’ lives and souls. This colonial adaptation to an Old World institution suited Bishop Mota y Escobar’s ambition to project himself as a figure competent in manoeuvring between what was Old and what was New for the benefit of Hispanic imperialism.

This chapter will show that in the task of the visita pastoral, Mota y Escobar activated his ethnographic gaze, translating the quotidian of the diocese for the outsider while conquering, possessing, and experiencing it enthusiastically as a privileged insider. The Bishop, as a Hispano-creole, sought to argue that knowledge was “inseparably connected to local contexts” and local people, and the tool of the visit as it had evolved colonial in its form, provided the perfect opportunity.3 In chapter three I demonstrated that the Bishop’s creole class cohort, interviewed for the 1597 petition to the Crown on the encomienda, stressed this point in their statements, giving shape to early developing novohispanidad consciousness as rooted in their location in colonial territory. This chapter will show how Mota y Escobar made this awareness discursive in ethnographic writing within his expressly religious reflections as well.

Ethnographic writing “has a long premodern history and can be found wherever and whenever discrete cultural groups have moved across their borders to collide with customs and mores at variance with their own and had the means and motivation to record those differences,” writes

3 Arndt Brendecke, “Informing the Council. Central Institutions and Local Knowledge in the Spanish Empire,” in Empowering Interactions Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900, edited by Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu (Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 237.

211 medievalist, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi.4 Such writing was not called ethnography contemporaneously but is identifiable by use of terms like descriptio, description, itinerarium, journey, and travels. This lexicon suggests the extent to which ethnographic writing “coupled with other genres of travel, including geography, topography, cosmography, pilgrimage, crusade, ambassadorial reports, and missionary reports, in the medieval period, as indeed, it would continue to do so until the modern era,” Khanmohamadi remarks.5 The ethnographic approach to viewing and writing implied a distinction or difference between the observer and observed, and asserted the significance and meaning of culture and civilization. Ethnography was a crucial source of knowledge for Europeans in the medieval and early modern periods but this method of noticing and writing difference and diversity served to accumulate cultural data that required translation. It required mediators and translators who could bridge the gap between insider meaning and outsider comprehension.

By the early seventeenth century, the Hispanic Crown prioritized colonial knowledge it could use for extractive purposes. It had gone bankrupt three times (1560, 1575, and 1597) and imperial competition was ever increasing in Europe and in the Pacific and Atlantic worlds.6 Despite the seeming alliance between Mota y Escobar’s class goals and the Crown’s imperial goals, the metropole still desired information it could use to exploit better the colonies and undergird its hold on its possessions. In the visita requirement, the Crown wanted to know about the rootedness of Hispanic Catholicism in the lives of its most valuable assets, Indigenous peoples. It was neither looking for information about its agents’ rootedness nor their arguments for their indispensability through cultural flexibility. The Crown used the familiar language of merced to incentivize useful religious-minded relaciones, but in the pastoral records of Mota y Escobar we see the logic of the regime of reward inspiring self-interested, ethnographic exposition in search of imperial recognition and approval.

The disconnect between Crown desire and the writings of the creole Mota y Escobar illuminate a larger gap in the imperial visions of metropolitans and colonials. The Spanish Crown imagined

4Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another's Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 3. 5 Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another's Word, 3. 6 See A.W. Lovett, “The Castilian Bankruptcy of 1575,” The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (Dec., 1980): 899-911.

212 the American territories as symbols of Hispanic Catholic divine favour and political power, as well as a constant source of wealth and nourishment. By contrast, early Hispano-creole ideology imagined the Iberian colonies as embattled sites of inheritance, rewards, and entitlements, which, if and when collected, would secure creole domination at the top of the class and casta hierarchy within a new but firmly imperial society constructed by and for them. Connection to Hispanism and empire was fundamental to shaping the hierarchy in the early colonial era, which is why figures like Mota y Escobar sought to be seen, understood, and accepted as crucial translators of civilizational data by metropolitan agents. Bishop Mota y Escobar veered away from his instructions in Tlaxcala-Puebla because it was through descriptive and mobile means that he could assert his rootedness in and affinity for both the imperial centre, Spain, and the periphery, New Spain, thereby persuading the Crown of his crucial location within the colony-metropole symbiosis.

I begin my analysis by exploring the adaptation of the Old World episcopal visit (legislated at Trent) into colonial law and the ways in which these goals diverged as a result. The new vision invited prelates to include their own voices in their pastoral writings, which provided the ideal “communicative setting” for a creole like Mota y Escobar.7 The sections that follow illustrate his approach to writing the visit and communicating his own class interests through his entries. I examine the Bishop’s projection of a conquistador mentality that possessed and commanded simultaneously, and his discursive defence of the colonial order that immobilized the many for the benefit of the few. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the Bishop’s self-reported cultural movement between Hispanism and novohispanism as he sought to bolster creole claims to natural power, authority, and metropolitan trust.

7 I borrow this concept from Brendecke, who writes that the “communicative setting…designates the communicative structure of conditions facing” actors, and the “epistemic setting…denotes the setting of conditions within which a specific person or office could ‘know something’.” “Such a historical setting analysis, places neither ideas, procedures, nor media at the start. It centers actors and describes the options these actors have for communicating, acting, or knowing.” The Empirical Empire, 7.

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The Visitation Genre

An examination of the genre known as vistas pastorales will aid in our understanding of the prelate’s role and responsibility as bishop in the novohispano diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla. The transplant of the Old World episcopal visitation into Derecho Indiana, mediated through the strictures of the Real Patronato (Patronazgo Real de las Indias) or Royal Patronage, encouraged the Bishop to (re-)deploy his ethnographic eye in his approach to the writing of the royal visit records, which suited his own goals and interests.8 Bishops were responsible for meeting their religious responsibilities dictated by canon law, but New World bishops were tasked with maintaining Castilian hegemony as well. Through colonial law, the Crown asked its episcopal agents to be both insiders and outsiders to the colonial setting.

In theory, the episcopal pastoral visitation was a tool to observe and inspect Catholic parishioners; perform foundational religious rites, especially confirmation; and represent broader Catholic power across a jurisdiction. For the episcopal figure, the visit was simultaneously his right, duty, and means “‘to know in order to govern’.”9 In order “to know,” the bishop as pastor (shepherd) observed and collected data on the state of religious life to examine, correct, and uphold Catholic order, a fulfillment of his role as “shepherd to the flock,” and as a representative of the institutional Catholic Church and cathedral chapters. He was to provide lay consolation and liturgy and take note of the concerns of all church officials and parishioners. In performing the visita, the bishop observed the practical sacred or local religion, operating in and around prescribed canon law. Ideally these experiences would be utilized to govern the parishioners more effectively and in closer accordance with doctrine. In the local record produced during or following a visit that was tailored to pastoral circumstances, an “ecclesiastical geography” was

8 Osvaldo F. Pardo provides a succinct explanation of this concept: the “Patronazgo or [Real] patronato (patronage) was the authority granted by the papacy to the Spanish crown to control all ecclesiastical affairs in the American territories, including church revenues and ecclesiastical appointments, as well as the power to veto papal bulls.” Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 76n23. 9 Pilar Pueyo Colomina, uses the title of Cecilia Nubola’s work on early modern Italian visitations as an instructive entryway into considerations of the institutional visit more generally. Pilar Pueyo Colomina, "Propuesta metodológica para el estudio de la visita pastoral” in Memoria Ecclesiae XIV-XV, ed. Agustín Hevia Ballina (Oviedo: La Asociación, 1999), 479. She cites Cecilia Nubola, Conoscere per governare: La diocesi di Trento nella visita pastorale di Ludovico Madruzzo (1579–1581) (Bologna, Italy: Mulino, 1993).

214 traced, as María Milagros Cárcel Ortí argues in her work on Iberian visitas.10 There were, of course, significant variations in method, form, and content of the record from one diocese to another.

Following Martin Luther’s challenge to established Catholic hegemony between 1517 (Ninety- Five Theses) and 1521 (Edict of Worms) and the cascade of reformers that followed him during the Reformation, episcopal presence and visitations became more officially prescribed and took on a more aggressive edge. In the twenty-third and twenty-fourth sessions of the Council of Trent, 15 July 1563 and 11 November 1563 respectively, theologians addressed reformers’ criticism of ecclesiastical hierarchy and the power and authority of bishops, and made specific recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of “pastors” of all Catholic churches.11 These sessions reaffirmed the importance of mobile ecclesiastics against challenges to Catholic order in both centres and peripheries by emphasizing enhanced vigilance over parishioners.12

In particular, episcopal responsibility to be an upstanding “shepherd” to the “flock” was reiterated. For example, session twenty-four, chapter one of the prescriptive section called “Decree on reform” that followed all Council writings, stated that:

a prudent and enlightened attention is necessary in order that in the house of the Lord there be nothing disorderly and nothing unbecoming, much more ought we to strive that no error be committed in the election of [the bishop] who is constituted above all grades. For the state and order of the entire household of the Lord will totter if what is required in the body be not found in the head.13

10 María Milagros Cárcel Ortí, Visitas Pastorales y Relaciones ad limina. Fuentes para la Geografía Eclesiástica (Oviedo: Asociación de Archiveros de la Iglesia en España, 2007). 11 Session twenty-three and session twenty-four in Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978). 12 John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1495-1563: An Essay with Illustrative Documents and a Brief Study of St. Ignatius Loyola (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 89. 13 Session twenty-four, chapter one, “Decree on reform,” in Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent.

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This rather direct reference to historical mistakes and the symbol of the diocese as a “household,” with the paternal “head” influencing and guiding the “body,” urged greater caution in the choice and election of bishops because they were invested with stabilizing power at multiple levels.

If the goal of the Counter Reformation was to root out “anathema,” the physical act of visiting the diocese and its parishioners was the crucial tool to survey and accomplish desired Catholic reform. In chapter three of session twenty-four the theologians remarked specifically on the institutional pastoral visit, declaring that:

bishops must without fail visit their diocese personally or, if legitimately impeded, through their vicar general or visitor…The chief aim of all these visitations will be to ensure sound and orthodox teaching and the removal of heresies, to safeguard good practices and correct evil ones, to encourage the people by exhortation and warning to the practice of religion, peace and blameless life, and to make any dispositions for the benefit of the people that place, time and opportunity may suggest to the wisdom of the visitors…[A]ll those mentioned above who are concerned in visitations are charged to embrace all with fatherly love and Christian zeal; and with this view being content with a modest train of servants and horses, they shall endeavor to complete the said visitation as speedily as possible, though with due carefulness...14

This passage articulated the belief that a more consistent and authoritative Catholic presence and consequent surveillance of parishioners would “ensure,” “safeguard,” and “encourage” orthodoxy and the legitimacy of Catholicism (and thereby the Pope) in the face of Protestant

14 Session twenty-four, chapter three, “Decree on reform,” in Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils Volume Two: Trent to Vatican II, “Council of Trent”, ed. Norman P. Tanner S.J., (London, UK and Washington, USA: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), 761-763.

216 threats. Recognition and correction of error and heresy were the goals of this episcopal consciousness, constituting a crucial aspect of the Council’s directions on reform. The reminder that the visit should be both speedy and duly careful, speaks to a desired efficiency that required a “modest” entourage, which expanded the episcopal presence and, thus, vision. No mention is made of whether or not a record should be made of the visit; this was left to the provincial councils’ discretion in Europe.

This concept of the reformed episcopal visit could only be useful to the Church if the occasion was charged with concrete displays of power and authority. In chapter ten of the same “Decree on reform” in session twenty-four, the members provided a further articulation of practical episcopal power:

That the bishops may be better able to keep the people whom they rule in duty and obedience, they shall in all those things that concern visitation and the correction of the morals of their subjects, have the right and authority, also as delegates of the Apostolic See, to decree, regulate, punish and execute, in accordance with the prescriptions of the canons, those things which in their prudence shall appear to them necessary for the emendation of their subjects and for the good of their dioceses. And in these matters, where it is [a] question of visitation and correction of morals, no exemption, inhibition, appeal or complaint, even though submitted to the Apostolic See, shall in any manner whatsoever hinder or suspend the execution of those things which shall have been commanded, decreed or adjudicated by them.15

This section affirmed the figure of the bishop as a “delegate” of Rome and provided what reads as an unlimited authority to “decree, regulate, punish, and execute” during a visitation, on behalf of the “Apostolic See.”

15 Session twenty-four, chapter ten, “Decree on reform,” in Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent.

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“The Council of Trent lent a new impulse to the pastoral visits,” writes José Pedro Paiva; the colonial visitations built off of this renewed significance and the Hispanic Crown tailored them to acknowledge and accomplish imperial ends.16 With the translation of Rome’s Tridentine reforms into the colonial American setting, episcopal mediation between the prelate and the pope for the “order of the entire household” and “correction of morals” became written mediation between the prelate and the Spanish Crown to support the maintenance of empire. Felipe II incorporated the Council of Trent’s legislation on episcopal visits on 5 August 1577, in title seven, law twenty-four of the Collection of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies (Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Indias), a living collection of jurisprudence initiated by Carlos V.17 It stated that each prelate of the Indies should “personally inspect all of [his] diocese and examine the state of the doctrinas, the preaching of the Holy Gospel, and the conversion of souls, and administer the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation” in accordance with canon law and “our Royal laws.”18 Visits should be done with the aid of “moderate familiars” who will not “bother” the Indigenous people with excessive demands of hospitality so that they are “persuaded that [the visitation] is in service of God and abhorrence of greed.”19 Significantly, the law went on to require that the prelates make a “distinct, clear and particular” account (“relación”) of all the “places and doctrinas of their districts,” to be sent to the Crown. This account should explain “what things were remedied” and “which [things] it would be good for our Council of the Indies to have entera noticia of.”20 This archival task, which ought to be characterized by both particularity and clarity, was fundamentally ambiguous and seemingly

16 José Pedro Paiva, “Pastoral Visitations in the First World Empires (Spain and Portugal in the 16th and 17th Centuries): A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Early Modern History 24, no. 3 (2020): 240. 17 Felipe III updated his father’s law on 22 February 1608 and 22 August 1610, and Felipe IV further updated it on 22 January 1635 and 12 April 1641. Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo séptimo, fs. 35r. 18 Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo séptimo, fs. 35r. Doctrinas were parishes or missions constructed exclusively for the indoctrination of Indigenous populations. They were separate from but a composite part of the repúblicas de indios. For a recent study on the institutionalization of this segregated religious sphere in New Spain, see Ryan Dominic Crewe, The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521-1600 (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019). For an architectural and geographical outline of the sixteenth-century doctrinas of central New Spain, see Robert H. Jackson and Fernando Esparragoza Amador, A Visual Catalog of Sixteenth Century Central Mexican Doctrinas (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). 19 Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo séptimo, fs. 35r. 20 Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo séptimo, fs. 35r.

218 open to individual discretion. This contrasts with Tridentine decrees that gave no instructions on the creation of a written record, unless an “appeal or complaint” was forwarded.21

This law assumed the fragility of Indigenous Catholicism and the need to demonstrate continually Hispanic benevolence in order to repair subject-ruler relations. It required that the prelate have a wide vision and keen noticing eye, attuned to what the Crown demanded and implicitly understanding what the colonial bureaucracy, the Council of the Indies, ought to know. In essence, this legislation asked bishops to be both insiders and outsiders in their dioceses, seeing local issues in order to remedy them and thinking like a lay metropolitan royal servant in order to inform the Council. Further, the concept of entera noticia, “full notice” or “full knowledge,” provides a useful window into Crown intention and direction for the episcopal visit. In his examination of the concept, Brendecke concluded that entera noticia was not a directive of scope but rather a postulate of utopian “political due diligence” and a “high degree of watchfulness” and it “became a kind of leitmotif of colonial administration.”22 It was a commonly used phrase and concept in early colonial bureaucracy and royal administration, appearing in the Instrucción para hacer las descripciones outlined in a cédula real of 1533 and in Juan de Ovando’s Council of the Indies instructions from the late sixteenth century.23 This goal of the visit in the Americas was intended to bolster the Crown’s claims to understanding, knowledge, and awareness of its overseas colonies and subjects.

In its blending of political and religious expectations the Recopilación’s law also provided a clear illustration of the privileges acquired through the Real Patronato, underscoring the Spanish Crown’s view that bishops were crucial social, political, and religious intermediaries in the governance of colonial subjects and the endurance of Hispanic domination. The royal right to ecclesiastical patronage was rooted in medieval tradition in the peninsula, as popes provided concessions to the Crown as a result of the long “reconquest” era.24 “The right of the Patronazgo

21 Session twenty-four, chapter ten, “Decree on reform,” in Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. 22 Brendecke, “Informing the Council,” 239. 23 Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 3 and José Pardo-Tomás, “Making Natural History in New Spain, 1525-1590,” in Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, ed. Helge Wendt (Edition Open Access, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2016), 33. 24 Joel Morales Cruz, The Mexican Reformation: Catholic Pluralism, Enlightenment Religion, and the Iglesia de Jesús Movement in Benito Juárez’s México (1859–72) (Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 45.

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Eclesiastico belongs to us in all the Estado de las Indias,” title six of the Recopilación stated: “this New World was discovered and acquired, built and supplied at our cost and our ancestors los Señores Reyes Católicos, [it was] granted to us by the Bulls of the Supreme Pontiffs…for its preservation.”25 The Crown jealously guarded this privilege, and prelates of the New World were to understand themselves as colonial agents first and representatives of the Catholic Church in Rome second. This created an unresolved tension between the secular and regular (mendicant) clergy in the colony.

The Recopilación emphasis on the doctrinas, conversion, and “remedies” marked out the particular colonial setting and the crucial link that tied Hispanic imperial legitimacy to the evangelization of Indigenous people. Episcopal power and regular clergy would be in conflict with one another during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries about jurisdictional issues related to the missions. The regular orders understood themselves to be papal representatives, whereas the secular clergy and episcopal administration were subordinate to the Crown as a result of the Patronazgo (and Recopilación). The missionary pushback against the Crown’s power to appoint and direct Catholic governance in New Spain began during Felipe II’s reign and culminated in the early to mid-seventeenth century, as secular religious power continued its ascendancy.26

The task to convert and evangelize justified Hispanic colonization and kept the Crown’s coffers full through tribute collection, although Castile was almost always indebted beyond its annual tribute importation numbers. The demand that remediation be reported on paper to the Crown, and the goal of entera noticia be kept in mind, suggests that visitation relaciones were a part of the colonial reward (merced) economy. Through colonial law bishops were promised the eye of the King, giving them a space to distinguish themselves and assert their individual merit. Rather than implementing reform to counter the Reformation as in the Old World visitation, the Hispanic colonial visit was an opportunity to remedy lapses in Hispanic Catholicism for the service of perpetual empire. Universal Catholicism was not the most pressing issue targeted by

25 Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo seis, fs. 21r. 26 Morales Cruz, The Mexican Reformation, 45, 47-48.

220 the Crown; instead, the Crown aimed to maintain Hispanic imperial hegemony in order to maintain Iberian leadership of the universal Church.

Reform and remedy as concepts had overlapping resonances. In 1611, Covarrubias Horozco defined reformar (to reform) as follows: “To again give form to a thing that has been spoiled and changed of its being and condition.”27 To remedy, remediar, he wrote, was “to help something that was going wrong” and to “give remedy” was “to repair some damage.”28 To reform was to assume a completed change, tethered to past “spoil,” a static target altered from one thing to another; to remedy was to acknowledge ongoing “damage,” the perpetual threat of something “going wrong,” a malleable and malignant state of uncertainty and anxiety. The focus on remediation in colonial legislation followed Hispanic rhetoric and its representation of Indigenous peoples of the Americas as in a constant state of ambivalence, like the contemporary discourse about children. An emphasis on the perpetual threat of the supposedly capricious nature of the Indigenous peoples suited the needs of both the Crown and the governing classes of peninsulares and elite criollos, who made up the top tier of the religious hierarchy for the entire colonial era. It also encouraged a shift in the gaze of visitors from one of punitive surveillance to one of comparative ethnography. Through its laws, the Crown seemed to be interested in understanding and measuring vacillating civilizational change and the ability of its agents to assert Hispanic Catholic order. In colonial legislation, the margin of difference was being measured rather than the proximity and adherence to sameness, as was advised in Tridentine law.

The Crown further indicated its goal of focusing episcopal vision within the institution of the visit in law thirteen of title seven, which stated that “in their visits” prelates must ensure “the education, teaching and good treatment of los Indios.” This law, first introduced by Felipe II on 7 May 1582, stated: “Los Indios are unfortunate persons, and are of such a weak nature, that they are easily bothered…and our will is that they do not suffer humiliation, and have proper remedy and protection, by whatever means possible.” Archbishops and bishops were responsible for observing and upholding the Crown’s paternal obligation to its Indigenous subjects the

27 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1398. My italics. 28 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1402. My italics.

221 legislation asserted. Having seen evidence of the remedies that the prelates’ “intelligence and prudence offers, for greater and better fulfillment of our will…[w]e request and charge,” that:

they mandate…whatever is suitable to avoid the oppression and disorders that los Indios suffer, and ensure that they are indoctrinated and taught with care, charity, and love proper to our Holy Faith…[I]n addition the Prelates will fulfill their ministry in the most essential [aspects] of their Pastoral office. [W]e offload our conscience, being yours, so that they will assure [attention to] what matters and [what] we desire…[I]t is [in this] matter we will consider ourselves the most obliged and [thus,] well served, we [will] return to it and re-order it repeatedly, and [also order] that they give us notice of the fruits and good effects, resulting from their vigilance.29

The “will” and “conscience” of the Monarch was divested to these prelates, and in the task of observing and remedying the situation of Indigenous subjects, the Crown considered itself “well served” by its religious agents. Through this legislation, the Crown stressed that it would be vigilant in its appraisal and demand for this emphasis and direction and “re-order it repeatedly.” Damage to the Indigenous populations of the New World was damage to the Empire, and without using the explicit language of mercedes, the Crown implied reward and favour for fulfillment of “what matters.”30

Officially, the record created of the visit was meant to articulate the “fruits and good effects” of what one saw and subsequently remedied. This articulation was, for the religious figure, an opportunity to enhance his own prestige and status and perhaps be rewarded for his “service.” The episcopal visit, as an institution of the Patronazgo, was yet another facet of the regime of reward, the system of mercedes, tied to an old concept of surveillance that Brendecke has

29 Recopilación de las leyes, tomo primero, titulo séptimo, fs. 33r. 30 This is support of Brendecke’s assertion that the “Spanish colonial empire expanded a network of political trust.” “Informing the Council,” 246.

222 explained as “an idealized precondition of justice.”31 Unlike the mercedes of the early conquistador period, however, the rewards for spiritual service were ambiguously defined. While promotion to higher ecclesiastical office was certainly an option, sacred rewards and celestial favour were the more likely compensation that awaited the colonial clergy.

Bishop Mota y Escobar sought material rewards for his family and his class throughout his life, but he also sought spiritual rewards for himself, imagining and hoping both to be perpetual. The task of the visit provided an ideal opportunity for a man who thought of himself as an informer of novohispano reality and agent of imperial awareness within the context of a lay and religious merced economy.

Writing the Visit

The physical act of the visit and its recording in the relación form were designed and understood to serve divergent but related goals from the perspective of the Crown. Bishops were expected to travel through their districts meeting the Tridentine and colonial goals of the visit; however, the records they were required to send to Spain were not intended as an explication, narration, or itinerary of events but rather a summary of their fruitful efforts at “damage” control and their judgement of important colonial matters for the Council of the Indies—that is, the episcopal contribution to the project of entera noticia, “full knowledge.”32 The explicit command that a visit record be created for this dual use links it directly to the relaciones geográficas corpus outlined in chapter two. Like the relación geográfica, a visitation record charted geographic space as the Bishop travelled through it, recording the “places and doctrinas” of the repúblicas. In some colonial visits it seems that a questionnaire was utilized to regulate the event but Mota y Escobar does not refer to one and the records of his visits do not follow, or at least are not

31 Distributive justice (the system of mercedes) “idealizes permanent observation by political authorities,” Brendecke writes. It turns “this ideal of constant observation into a precondition for airtight inspection of subjects’ achievements and loyalties, for their adequate award, and thus for just rule.” However, he remarks, in practice, “the Crown had neither an interest in nor opportunities for guaranteeing this kind of comprehensive observation.” “Informing the Council,” 237 and The Empirical Empire, 41. 32 In practice, these two seemingly distinct items were both filtered through the Council before reaching the Crown, as it was the Council that sifted through all colonial communications, and eventually would send condensed summaries of American “news” to the King. Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, 95-100.

223 written as following, a ritualized or even conventional order of activities and procedures.33 It is more likely that he performed the visitations of Tlaxcala-Puebla with his particular ethnographic application of the 1604 Council-provided questionnaire in mind, effectively blending the two distinct genres of colonial writing.

The goals of these two genres overlapped in the sense that they both sought to account for New World difference for the benefit of Hispanic hegemony. While the directions asked for quick and efficient quantitative data as the means to explain the material resources of Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, and Nueva León in the Guadalajara manuscript, qualitative data focused on remediation was the intended means to contend with the spiritual (and tribute-paying) “resources” of the colony in the Tlaxcala-Puebla visitations. Mota y Escobar, as a self-interested creole agent of the Crown seeking material and celestial rewards, seems to have preferred the independence and flexibility of the qualitative because it enabled the amplification of his own subjective location and the possibility for rewards. While the directions and questionnaire provided by the Council of the Indies for completion of the Guadalajara manuscript encouraged and actively sought the erasure of the observer in the relation of information, Mota y Escobar resisted this demand for objectivity. The visitation genre provided the Bishop with a space to insert himself—in fact, it invited him to. In his visitas pastorales records, Bishop Mota y Escobar illustrated novohispano life and order with a complexity that foregrounded his particular knowledge of the diocese. He argued for his own capacity and ability as a creole by asserting power over the landscape and both distancing himself from and drawing closer to Catholic Hispanism, effectively drawing out the distinction of his criollo location.

Mota y Escobar’s records read as anecdotal descriptions of people, places, and things, resembling the Descripción geográfica entries. This ethnographic discourse illustrated New Spain’s similarities with and differences from the peninsula for a metropolitan audience. He used this register to mark out the civilizational reality of the colony as he saw it. In a majority of the entries, the local agriculture and animals, topography, climate, economic activity, and waters receive attention and bring a vibrant quality to the record. This kind of detail makes it difficult to

33 See Las visitas pastorales de Mazapil, 1572-1856, eds. Valentina Garza Martínez and Juan Manuel Pérez Zevallos (México, D.F.: CIESAS, Inst. Zacatecano de Cultura, 2007).

224 efficiently sift through the Bishop’s prose for information pertinent to the task required of him. One imagines this sifting would have been as difficult for a seventeenth-century member of the Council of the Indies as it is for a historian in the twenty-first century. His writing communicates an intimate knowledge of the territory and obscures the official goals of the writing.

In Izucar in early July 1610, Mota y Escobar noted that the pueblo of one thousand Nahuatl- speakers was:

very hot and sickly. [The landscape] gave very good fruit of the land, it is of beautiful and fertile pastures, it has in its site the river that comes [from] Atrisco, of famous water, it carries some trout, catfish and thin little fish, white…[The Indigenous people] harvest maíz, garbanzo, melón and vegetables; they raise many good birds and excellent little goats.34

Sometimes he did not even report any significant ecclesial pastoral activity in a community but simply left note of the setting. In early December 1610, the Bishop wrote of Atoyac: it is “hot, unhealthy, of many bugs. There are cochineal, fish and fruit; I didn’t go into it, there being very bad roads.”35 In other cases he highlighted the unique products of the landscape, writing, Tlatlauhquitepec has “a great abundance of apples of many differences [that grow] at varying times of year…There is one kind of them that [the Indigenous people] call vedadas that is white…and very tasty and healthy.”36 In the case of the Tlatlauhquitepec entry, Mota y Escobar also noted that its climate and topography “resembled the land of Vizcaya,” using both comparison and distinction in this record.37

Mota y Escobar identified his travels as “visit,” “journey” (jornada), and “trip” (viaje),38 and the records appear contiguously from folios 7r to 92r of the greater Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript. The

34 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 45v (image 48) 35 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 56r (image 58). 36 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 10v (image 13). 37 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 10v (image 13). It is not clear if the Bishop is referring to peninsular Vizcaya or Nueva Vizcaya. 38 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 81v, 15r (images 84 and 18, respectively).

225 writing appears in a steady hand with complete sentences, using the conventional abbreviations and shorthand of the time. The hand matches the Bishop’s autographed note on the frontispiece of the notebook.39 Each record is transcribed in the centre of the page with a wide margin on both the left and right sides; there are stylistic bullet-points, (see figure 17), breaking up the record into varying long and short paragraphs that often begin with action: “I visited,” “I confirmed, ” “I preached,” or with a description of the location, “This pueblo has…,” “In this pueblo there is….” He noted the events of each day in primarily past tense Castilian, with Nahuatl and other Indigenous language words (like cacique) used on occasion.

Figure 17: Amozoc visit entry (28 September 1609) in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 7r (image 9). Interestingly, today, this community is called Amozoc de Mota (Puebla).

Although it is difficult to be certain, it is likely that the prelate crafted these entries in the evening of the day in question. It is also possible that he sometimes recorded his remarks several days following the events of a particular day depending on a variety of factors such as how preoccupied or tired he was. He may also have used his free and bonded staff to remind him of the events. Whichever was the lived reality, it is clear that the records were written to appear contemporaneous with the events or experiences.

39 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 1r (image 3).

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The discursive format mirrors the ledger-style entry used in later folios in the episcopal manuscript that note financial transactions. In the right margin the Bishop noted the leagues travelled between entries in Arabic numerals and the quality of the road in abbreviated form: “b.c.” for buen camino, good road, and “m.c.” for mal camino, bad road.40 In the left margin he noted how many criaturas (neophytes) he had confirmed in the location, using Arabic numerals in conventional Spanish style (see figure 18). This format of juxtaposed condensed and open space drew attention to the numbers, as he quantified his physical travel and the new Catholic subjects in an easily legible way, but also highlighted the abundance of the centred prose section. Clearly, the Bishop intended that this specific numerical information be available for quick appraisal, but he also includes it in prose within the entry, the number and the caste categories of that number often adjacent to one another. The sum of leagues travelled, and people confirmed could be computed quickly without a close reading. Mota y Escobar rarely completed the math on how many people were confirmed in a visit to facilitate quicker communication of this information, even though these numbers were related to Crown tribute and spatial colonization and were of importance to the metropole.41

40 He also wrote “m.b.c,” for muy buen camino. See figure 18. 41 In his very final visit entry on 5 January 1624, the Bishop calculated 684 confirmations over the short twelfth visit to four locations. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 92r (image 94).

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Figure 18: Cuamochtitlan visit entry (27 December 1610) in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 58r (image 60). This is very likely the community of Huamuxtitlan (Guerrero).

Each individual record is marked out by a stylized settlement name (e.g. Atocpa) and/or land/labour type (e.g. Ingenio de Matamoros) and transitions to a new year are noted and underlined. He also sometimes noted the number of the visit within the series (“fourth departure to visit”).42 The entries are detailed and extensive until the beginning of the ninth visit in November 1620 when the entries become visibly shorter and condensed, many of which consist only of the date, type of location, and number of people confirmed (see figure 19).43 Over the fifteen years of visita records made by Mota y Escobar, he reflected on similar themes of language and communication; moral models and good leaders (vice and virtue); religious jurisdiction and the boundaries of power; conversion and evangelization; landscape and environment; and ancestors and community history. Later sections of this chapter will examine these themes in greater depth.

42 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 65r (image 67). 43 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 83r (image 85). For an example of brevity see BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 91v (image 94): “Tezguatlan: En 31 fui a este pueblo doctrina de dominicos confirme a 154 personas.”

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Figure 19: Condensed visit entries for the year 1624 in Bishop Mota y Escobar’s visitas pastorales records Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 92r (image 94).

Finally, a close inspection of his records clearly reveals that the Bishop believed he was writing for the eyes of the Crown/Council. This is especially apparent in his frequent complaints about his inability to do his job and be of service in the way that he imagined the Crown desired.44 In this way, the visit was an opportunity for self-interested communication. On 8 July 1610 at Tepapayeca, a “pueblo de encomendero,” Mota y Escobar noted that the Nahuatl-speaking doctrina was led by Dominican friars, and remarked “I don’t know how they administer, because Su Majestad does not want us, the bishops, to know it, that which [would give] us great honour.”45 In the manuscript, the words “Your/His Majesty” are struck out of this record; it is unclear when this was done and by whom but the ink appears to be the same as the prose itself. Similarly, on 4 December 1610, in the pueblo and Mixtec doctrina of Tezizitepec, the Bishop complained: “I did not visit the tabernacle, font nor sacristy, because in the house of the [Domincan friars] it is a very useless act…until Su Majestad supplies [advice] on what is most

44 Other instances in which it is clear that the Bishop is directing his writing to the Crown include identifying a pueblo as “of Your Majesty” (de su Majestad) rather than “of the Crown” (de la Corona), which was typical, BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 10r (image 12). 45 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 45v (image 48). González Jácome provides a transcription of this sentence in Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, 84.

229 suitable to do when making a visit of the religiosos.”46 The latter section of this passage is struck out of the manuscript (see figure 20). These direct and acerbic appeals invoking the Crown make plain that these records were likely intended as the formal relaciones rather than a preliminary record before the creation of the official summary. In the moment of transcription, the Bishop asserted that episcopal dishonour and ineffectuality be officially recorded and passed on as an important component of the visit record. The fact that they are ‘erased,’ possibly by Mota y Escobar himself, suggests their overall impropriety for the intended reader’s eyes.

Figure 20: Lines struck out of the Tezizitepec (4 December 1610) visit record Source: BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 53v (image 56). To Conquer, Command, and Possess

The Crown’s adaptation of the episcopal visit widened the purview of the genre. Asked to think and observe like a member of the Council of the Indies, Bishop Mota y Escobar took liberties in creating his records, writing more like an early peninsular chronicler of the Americas, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo, than a secular clergyman. He certainly included information pertaining to the typical duties of the episcopal visit but what stands out most from the records is their rich, purposeful detail. Through this quotidian detailing, a spirit of colonial adventuring, of

46 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 53v (image 56). González Jácome provides a transcription of this sentence in Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, 95-96.

230 conquering, commanding, and of possessing immerses the reader in the singular vision of the writer. This narrowed perspective suited the interests of Mota y Escobar as he used the visit record to articulate and illuminate what mattered most to him as an elite novohispano creole man. In so doing, he sheds light on contemporary hegemonic beliefs about power and on his own definition and projection of what it meant to be powerful. Simultaneously, he obscured and diminished those facts that detoured from this construction of personal power. In particular, he glossed over the reality of the fact that his power depended on the labour of others.

Bishop Mota y Escobar considered his movement around the diocese an integral part of the visit record. The entries often begin with a record of departure. Under the heading “Micantla,” the Bishop began: “On 5 January [1610] I left [the] estancia [de las Córdobas] and went to eat at the ranch of Colipa and there are four leagues of flat road and we ate and drank beautiful water and I entered Micantla to sleep[. It was] four leagues of bad road and I passed more than twenty rivers…”47 In this case the prelate chronicled his movement and stops between locations in a detailed itinerant manner, writing of them as a composite part of his visit to the intended destination of Micantla. In other cases, the departure and arrival were noted, and the narration focuses on a description of the location. For example, under the heading “Matlatlan,” the Bishop wrote: “On 2 February [1618] I came to this pueblo, [I travelled] three leagues, the indios [speak] the Mexican language, [it is] attached to the doctrina of Orizaba, there are more than three- hundred married citizens, the road is very busy, it has some Spaniards as citizens.”48 In both cases and throughout the visit writings the practical details of travel were omitted. He did not note how he knew the route, who was leading the group, what items he carried with him, or what “vehicles” facilitated the journey. The focus is on a rhythmic explanation of his personal action and observations.

Sometimes the records chronicled day trips in which the Bishop left the diocesan centre at Puebla, arrived in a community, confirmed hundreds of people, and returned to his home in a dizzying flurry of activity that is flattened in the writing. On 13 July 1610, Mota y Escobar left for Teopantlan at a distance of two leagues, confirmed four hundred and six criaturas, and

47 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 26r (image 28). 48 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 81v (image 84).

231 returned to the ciudad de Puebla; on 8 August of the same year, he arrived in Totomehuacan, a league away, and “departed to study a sermon for the day of Assumption, and I preached in the Cathedral and, on the road, I confirmed four hundred and fifty four neophytes.”49 In order to perform these confirmations a significant amount of time must have been spent stationary, seated or standing in a parish church, but the record emphasizes the prelate’s apparent nimbleness and ability to accomplish many episcopal goals in many different locations. The remark that he performed this crucial Catholic rite “on the road” implied a command of the territory and its population that enabled him to sweep across the terrain, transforming its inhabitants into Catholic subjects in an almost supernatural manner.

In the extended anecdote that follows, the physical movement of the Bishop and the typical conventions of his writing become clearer. The narrative flow is unbroken; there is consistent momentum across multiple record section breaks (locations). The physical traversing of territory is sometimes quick but could also be slow and measured, as the detail of the travel, punctuated by adjectives, description, and personal asides, is meant to draw the reader into the experience and perspective of the writer, accentuating his importance as an informer.

On the 30 December 1609, during his first visit as Bishop, Mota y Escobar reported that he (and his party) left Old Veracruz and arrived in the Indigenous Totonaca doctrina of Cempoala (Zempoala), some two leagues northwest. In his pastoral notebook, he wrote that there were eight married Indigenous couples in the community. When Cortés and his “consorts” arrived here, the Bishop remarked, there was “a great number of vecinos, and now, there is no more than what I said.”50 Indigenous land had been “converted” into cattle ranches (estancias de ganado mayor), he wrote, “although already they are all ruined and lost to the thorny forest and thefts that have occurred.”51

The next day, on the last day of the year, they travelled four leagues north on “good road” to Rancho de Palmas. They passed the “Cempoala River,” now the Actopan River, and he noted that its water was “fast-flowing and very fresh…beautiful.” He ate at this ranch and remarked in

49 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 46r-46v (images 48-49). 50 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 25r-26r (images 27-28). 51 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 25r-26r (images 27-28).

232 his notebook that there was a “large number of mosquitos xexeenes,” or midges, which “exhausted” him “greatly.” After he completed his meal, the entourage travelled another four leagues north to the more mountainous region of Laguna Verde on the Gulf of Mexico. “Here, I slept and gave mass on the first day of the year [1610], in this depopulated [area],” he wrote, adding, “there is a spring of very exquisite water, and I rested the day of the Circumcision.”52

On 2 January 1610 they departed for Rancho de Tortugas, another three-league journey, where the Bishop ate, followed by another four-league trip to the Estancia de las Córdobas, located on the Gulf in an area with “many lagunas where there is much fish and some rivers.” “I was at this estancia for three days,” he noted,” because it rained and we were left without mass by [the] lack of an altar”; the river swelled, they could not travel, and they could not perform the celebration of the sacrament. He noted that this estancia had many “deer, rabbits, and chickens of the mountain (gallinas del monte).” “I killed a great quantity of all,” he remarked bluntly, “also, I killed an alligator (lagarto) in the river,” and under the light of the moon, for two nights, he wrote, “we killed more than twenty chickens of the mountain” in the grove where they slept.53

From Cempoala to Rancho de Palmas to Laguna Verde to Rancho de Tortugas to Estancia de las Córdobas, the Bishop confirmed only thirty-six people and he did not examine any church buildings, the behaviour expected of any churchmen, or the evangelization of any Indigenous peoples. Even though this was supposed to be a record of an episcopal visit, the emphasis was not on pastoral care or even colonial oversight but rather on the travels and travails of an explorer. Further, in just three days the sixty-three-year-old prelate reported that he had moved through seventeen leagues, approximately seventy kilometres, of novohispano territory.54 He moved around large swaths of territory without any mention of the practical and necessary logistics. His use of the first-person singular pronoun implied that he travelled alone; the voice

52 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 25r-26r (images 27-28). 53 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 25r-26r (images 27-28). Chickens of the mountain or gallinas del monte are probably a reference to the chivizcoya or Dendrortyx barbatus, which lived in this area historically. They are sometimes known as tree partridges or wild hens. In 2000 the species was listed as “vulnerable” to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Claudio Mota Vargas, “Las míticas gallinas de monte, un enigma para la ciencia y un reto para la conservación,” Ciencia 68, no. 3 (julio-septiembre 2017): 50-55. 54 Roland Chardon, “The Elusive Spanish League: A Problem of Measurement,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60, no. 2 (1980): 295.

233 switched to the first-person plural pronoun when he was/they were stranded by the swollen, unnamed river at Estancia de las Córdobas.

While his writings project a sense of effortlessness and solitude in this detailed recounting of travel, Mota y Escobar’s mobility was supported and made possible by people, some bonded, who were mentioned very rarely in his visita narratives.55

Physical movement relied on the essential labour of unacknowledged persons, rendering such labour extraneous and unremarkable in the Bishop’s vision and record-keeping. The full corpus of visit writings tells us that on his episcopal visits he travelled with at least one enslaved person and at least one other (compensated) religious figure, usually a visitador, a cleric who could help perform the religious tasks required. Additionally, horses carried the prelate and his supplies but the unremarkable nature of this condition of travel meant that he largely ignored mention of these animals. In one instance, Mota y Escobar wrote that he tried to pass through a “dangerous” road near Hueitlalpan and because it was very “slippery,” he dismounted and walked through “on foot”; “I walked five leagues this day,” he noted pointedly, revealing the irregularity of this form of movement.56 Despite the fact that the reader of the account would have understood that human and animal aids were present to help him make such journeys, the absence of the explicit recognition of an entourage, staff, and beasts of burden in this writing, facilitated by passive language and personal pronoun use, emphasized his self-direction and command of the physical roads of the diocese, which signalled his overall authority across the landscape.

In the extended account above, intended to be read in linear order, the Bishop’s mobility was hindered by water, which provided an opportunity for leisure, as his chronicling of the hunt of the region’s animals was written in a pleasurable and boastful tone. The hunting of animals with other European or European-descended people tied him to Hispanic notions of sociability and high-status leisure activities that will be explored in greater detail in a later section of this chapter.57 His killing of an “alligator” recalls his ethnographic accounting of Navito’s Indigenous

55 The bonded and free staff that certainly helped him in his Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia travels do not appear at all in the Descripción geográfica. 56 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 31r (image 33). 57 See Marcy Norton, “Going to The Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2021), 58-83.

234 peoples’ engagement with reptiles in the Descripción geográfica. An alligator was an exoticized and strange animal in the Western European imagination and his record of an alleged slaying signalled a wider conquest of and familiarity with the territory. His obstructed movement by the swollen river enabled this transcultural moment of cultural engagement with Hispanism and novohispanism.

The central goal of the ecclesial visit is barely legible here. There was no remediation of what the Crown had called “oppression” in the Recopilación, and while the Council of the Indies might have been interested in the progress of conversion of Indigenous lands into European-style ranches, the Bishop reported the failure of this effort. The landscape and the colonial realities of theft “ruined” the transplant. He offered no solution, marked the situation as “lost,” and continued his travels.

In addition to noting his conquest and possession of the landscape, Bishop Mota y Escobar’s entries were inspired by natural histories and ethnographies of the New World and he sought to signal his awareness of these genres and collect and distribute information about novohispano curiosities for the Crown and Council. Of his episcopal visit to Tonala in modern Oaxaca state on 16 December 1610, Mota y Escobar wrote that the climate was “hot and unhealthy, there are mosquitos, scorpions, and bats. I was distressed this night, of the heat, and I had a great burning in my urine, [a] thing that I have never had until today, at sixty-four years of age.”58 Two days later he entered the pueblo and Mixtec doctrina of Tzilacayoapan; as was his typical practice, he outlined the economic products of the Indigenous people, writing that the Mixtec merchants sold “cochineal, maíz, birds and these rocks of hijada sangre…and also, others that they call fumarias, that are stained of white and black, like pied Neopolitan [horses].”59 While visiting the cleric Nuño Vásquez in Olinala some ten days later, the Bishop wrote that he gave the priest fifty reales “so that he would send me birds of Castilla [and] he gave me five or six piedras de hijada, which are worth as many reales.”60

58 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 55v-56r (image 58). 59 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 56r-56v (image 58). 60 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 58v (image 61).

235

Here, Mota y Escobar told a story of physical and cultural estrangement, fascination, discovery, and affinity. The climate of this tropical region was inhospitable and threatening – the heat “distressed” him – and he experienced a genital discomfort he had not experienced before. The intimate nature of the Bishop’s disclosure is hard to reconcile with the visitation genre of writing. Read together in a linear fashion, we view the vacillation between a cultural insider and outsider perspective that accentuates rather than flattens the prelate’s voice.

In his attempted identification of the rocks, the Bishop named them as both “rocks of the side” or flank (ijada), and “rocks of blood,” two types of medicinal stones used by Indigenous peoples of the Indies. “Two stones of great virtue have come from New Spain,” the Sevillan doctor, Nicolás Monardes noted in his 1574 Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales.61 Piedras de sangre, bloodstone, aided in stopping blood flow if dipped in cold water and held with the right fist: “The indios use it this way and in the same way we use it here [in Spain].” Piedras de ijada, commonly called jade, had “marvellous effects” on the expulsion of “[kidney] stones,” if put on the “arm” or worn in a “bracelet,” Monardes remarked.62 As if trying to contribute to such a work of natural history, Mota y Escobar described another type of stone that the Mixtec people sold by comparing its colour to the famous spotted horses of Naples.63 He noted that the Mixtec called them “fumarias,” a Castilian word invoking the quality of smoke, suggesting that the Bishop had captured a language translation occurring at the local level. He remarked that they were worth as much as birds of Castile. Presented as both fascination and discovery, invoking early modern Hispanic attention to horses and horse- breeding as imperial preoccupations, the Bishop signalled his knowledge of assimilated

61 BNE, R/9108, Nicolás Monardes, Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Sevilla: En casa de Alonso Escrivano, 1574), fs. 22v-23v (images 60-62), accessed January 29, 2021, http://www.bne.es/es/Actividades/Exposiciones/Exposiciones/exposiciones2016/BibliotecaIncaGarcilaso/Seleccion/ obra05.html. 62 BNE, R/9108, fs. 23v (image 62). 63 See Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, “Renaissance Menageries: Exotic Animals and Pets at the Habsburg Courts in Iberia and Central Europe,” in Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, eds. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007), 427–455.

236

American knowledge – he had acquired the piedras that could cure his urinary issue – and his desire to provoke a similar epistemic incorporation through an ethnographic illustration.64

Landscapes of Slavery and Resistance

Although the Bishop sought to present himself as superior, self-possessed, and independent as he moved through the diocese, the reality was that he required the aid of enslaved people and parishioners in order to carry out his duties successfully. In early July 1610, he visited the springs of San Baltasar in the outskirts of Puebla, where he “spent the day alone and sad” because he “suffered from pain in [his] side.” He sent “un negro mío bozal, Mateo Bioho,” to get a cure in Atlixco more than five leagues away.65 He does not record when Mateo returned but clearly this enslaved man was performing an essential task that required his own mobility and knowledge of the territory. Mateo had probably completed tasks like this in the past and this action tells us that he was a captive of significant value within the logic of slavery. Forced and compelled movement characterized the Atlantic slave trade and while this record signals Mateo’s essential accumulated knowledge, it is also a reminder that physical mobility had a complicated relationship to freedom in the colony. This notation about Mateo highlights the Bishop’s possession of human property and the ways in which he could control and command the legal movement of bonded persons. Bondedness accentuated the illusion of Mota y Escobar’s unfettered and ‘triumphant’ mobility.

In another rare mention of the presence of other people who accompanied him on his journey, Mota y Escobar compared their inability to his divine favour and skill. On Saturday the 16th of January 1610, the episcopal entourage left Santa María Yohualtlacualoyan, nestled atop a mountain range in modern Veracruz state, and the Bishop noted: “I passed” over the hill, “which is the most difficult to pass of the many [slopes] that are known, due to [the amount of] mud and obstacles that it has, without there being fifty steps of dry land.”66 Although “some of la compañía fell,” he remarked, “God delivered [and] I neither fell nor did I dismount and I passed

64 See Kathryn Renton, “Defining “race” in the Spanish Horse: The Breeding Program of King Philip II,” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, eds. Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 104, 122. 65 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 45r (image 47). 66 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 28r-28v (images 30-31).

237 into a place of refuge, thanks to his divine majesty.” “I went to sleep at Teciuhtlan,” he wrote, having endured “six leagues of the worst road that I have ever travelled.”67 This was the only instance in his visit writings when he used the term compañía, company or accompanying group, to refer to his free and bonded staff as a unit. The word implied a large group, reflecting its use to refer to military units or members of the Society of Jesus, and emphasized his singularity as the sole person to stay upright on horseback through the mountain passing.68 This record is a reminder that members of the episcopal entourage suffered hardships through this travel in order to ensure Mota y Escobar’s personal comfort. Travel was hard work for those tasked with ameliorating the Bishop’s labour. Here he chronicled (probably hyperbolically) his triumph over the geography of New Spain and his superior capacity and spiritual connection over that of the “company,” contributing to the broad colonial necessity to justify one’s respective social positions and assert power and resilience.

The limited mobility of the Bishop as he aged hindered his ability to complete his colonial tasks and increased his reliance on his bonded staff and the graciousness of parishioners. During the eighth visit to the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla, at a stop in Coatepec in Veracruz in late December 1617, the Bishop, at age seventy-one, wrote that he had arthritis in his left hand but managed to confirm forty-nine criaturas “nevertheless.”69 In this notation Mota y Escobar attempted to project a selflessness and willingness to sacrifice his personal health for the colonial cause. He wrote that he slept that night at the nearby Estancia de La Punta, remarking that at this estate he “found a fat and old mulato…of little courtesy and, excessively inept (torpe).”70 This writing does not seem to serve any purpose at all in the narrative. He mentioned that he stayed at the Estancia for two days and that his slave, Juanillo, “of bad attitude,” bled him twice a day, which soothed his “pain and inflammation.” The Bishop noted that Juanillo had removed more than twelve ounces of blood.71 The expertise and forced intimacy insinuated in this specific writing

67 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 28v (imagen 31). 68 The Bishop uses this word with both applications in his visit writings. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 24r-24v (images 26- 27). 69 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 78v (image 81). Mota y Escobar noted that on 16 December 1610 he turned sixty-four years old, making him seventy-one in 1617. BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 56r (image 58). 70 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 78v (image 81). 71 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 79r (image 81).

238 signals the broad array of skills enslaved people had and the close relations they were compelled to keep with their enslavers.

Despite the (strained) hospitality of the free man of colour at the Estancia and Juanillo’s (forced) aid, Mota y Escobar criticized both individuals in the visit records. This entitlement to politeness, relief and support, and feigned delight and happiness, demonstrates the high expectations Mota y Escobar had of his supposed subordinates, whether familiars or strangers. In his logic, the labour of social “inferiors” were a composite part of his self-reliance; the Bishop considered these individuals as extensions of himself. This was the case especially in the case of Mateo and Juanillo but extended to other groups within the colonial hierarchy as well.

If the Bishop aimed to project the spirit and mentality of a conquistador, as he moved triumphantly through the multifarious landscape, commanding bonded labour, he also intended to write himself as a dedicated protector of the colonial order. This socio-political order was characterized by the juxtaposition and intersection of the dichotomies of freedom and enslavement, movement and immobility, and whiteness and blackness. Unfettered physical movement in and around the Hispanic New World was a marker of social and political power, reserved for white Old Christian elites, and the subversion of this logic was viewed as threatening, dangerous, and destabilizing. The European slave trade in Africa sought to use kidnapping and immobilization with forced migration to deracinate and dehumanize captives. Freedom was defined against and within this violent system, while systems of racialization sought to legitimate and justify it. Marronage, the act of flight from slavery, upended this order in the Americas and created anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic. European and Hispano-creole power and profit derived in large part from coerced labour and the epistemologies of difference upheld by slavery. In his record of an encounter with Gaspar Yanga’s rebels – engaged in a maroon war against colonial authorities for more than thirty years in New Spain – Mota y Escobar asserted his defense of the main tenets of Hispanic colonialism, most especially slavery.

239

There were many slave insurrections and acts of small (petit) marronage in sixteenth-century New Spain, as there were across the New World.72 However, Yanga’s maroon movement is the only documented example of a successful attempt by formerly enslaved people to secure their freedom and have it sanctioned in law in the colony of New Spain.73 The first insurrection was a conspiracy that Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza characterized as a plot, involving the whole enslaved population, “to kill all the Spaniards and rise up to take the land.”74 It was violently quelled in 1537 by the execution of the alleged leaders.75 Two more alleged revolts in the 1540s struck fear into the colonist population and a number of restrictive decrees were enacted, including prohibiting the sale of arms to Black people, forbidding public gatherings of more than three enslaved people without their masters, and a night curfew in Mexico City.76 Following these measures a “widespread wave” of slave insurrections took place in the period 1560-80 in the northern mining regions, which spread into the “quadrangle” between Mexico City, Zacatecas, Pánuco, and Veracruz.77 Viceroys regularly wrote to the Crown requesting aid, and a series of decrees between 1571 and 1574 laid out a fugitive slave code and a system for controlling and surveying the enslaved population.78 The revolts continued and a viceregal order

72 See Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 73 David M. Davison remarks that it is likely that similar incidents of maroon success occurred but were not recorded. “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1650,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46, no. 3 (1966): 250. 74 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to the Crown, December 10, 1537, Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, sacados en su mayor parte del Real Archivo de Indias, eds. Joaquín Pacheco y Francisco de Cárdenas y Luis Torres de Mendoza (Madrid: Imprenta de M.B. de Quirós, 1864-1884) 2:198-199. 75 Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala, ed. Alfredo Chavero (México, Oficina tip. de la Secretaría de fomento, 1892), 264. 76 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to the Crown, December 10, 1537, Colección de documentos inéditos relativos, 2:199-201 and Lope de Samaniego to the Crown, December 10, 1537, Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de Hispanoamérica (Madrid, 1932) 1:85-87, the latter cited in Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 243-244. 77 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 244. He also notes that a list of some of these revolts is in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519-1810 (México, 1946), 210 and Norman F. Martin, Los vagabundos en la Nueva España, siglo XVI (México, 1957), 120-124. 78 Davidson writes that the decrees declared that slaves “absent from their masters for more than four days were to receive fifty lashes; those absent for more than eight days were to receive one hundred lashes “with iron fetters tied to their feet with rope, which they shall wear for two months and shall not take off under pain of two hundred lashes.” The death sentence was to be applied to all those missing for six months, although this penalty was reduced at times to castration.” “Negro Slave Control,” 245.

240 of 1579 alleged that the entire settled area of the colony outside the capital was engulfed by the “contagion.”79 In the final decades of the sixteenth century, the eastern sugar regions between Orizaba and Veracruz became the epicentre of marronage. After more than forty years of white Hispano-creole anxiety regarding slave flight throughout the colony, in the earliest years of the seventeenth century maroon activity was so “successful” that the royal highway (camino real) between Mexico City and Veracruz was deemed unsafe for commerce and travellers.80

In this excerpt from the visita, Mota y Escobar sought to demonstrate his commitment to both slavery and the joint metropolitan-colonial desire for ensuring the continuation of Hispanic- centred hierarchy and order. On 3 December 1609, he wrote that he left the pueblo of Chocamán, stopped to eat at the estate and hacienda of one Francisco Pérez, and travelled north to Huatusco, where he slept for the evening.81 In the early hours of 4 December, two vecinos of Puebla, very likely white creoles, arrived at the inn where they apparently woke the Bishop.82 They were merchants travelling by carriage between Mexico City, Puebla, and the Caribbean port at Nueva Veracruz and they related a story of their travels in a bid for aid. Mota y Escobar retold their story in his visita notebook.

The poblanos had been travelling toward the port city of Veracruz when a “tropa of [rebel] negros came out with the moon,” and attacked their ten carriages. Mota y Escobar noted in the margins of this record the words, “Negros cimarrones,” or “wild fugitive Blacks,” a colonial pejorative euphemism for formerly enslaved African and African-descended peoples who had escaped captivity and established maroon or rebel settlements.83 “They took from the carriages,”

79 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 245. 80 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 246. See Andrés Perez de Ribas' account in AGN, Historia, vol. 31, fs. 31-48. See also Guadalupe Castañon González, “Yanga y cimarronaje en la Nueva España” in Esclavos rebeldes y cimarrones, ed. Javier Laviña (Madrid: Fundación Hernando de Larramendi, 2011), 69-96; Octaviano Corro, Los cimarrones en Veracruz y fundación de Amapa (México, 1951); and Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico, 155-159.

81 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 18v-19r (image 21). 82 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 18v-19r (image 21). 83 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 19r (image 21). Jean-Pierre Tardieu locates the first use of the term cimarrones in municipal paperwork from Santo Domingo (capital of Hispaniola) in December 1531. The paperwork established a patrol to pursue “cimarrones.” Tardieu, “Cimarrôn-Maroon-Marron, note épistémologique,” Outre-Mers: Revue d‘Histoire 94, no. 350–351 (2006): 240.

241 the Bishop wrote, “robbed the treasure box (caja) [of] approximately 100 pesos,” “took two married indias,” and murdered the vecinos’ twelve-year-old brother.84

Mota y Escobar wrote that he waited for daybreak, prepared his “servants (criados) and animal herd” for an “order of war,” and made haste to the location of the raid “more than two leagues ahead,” suggesting he travelled west toward the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range. He noted that “as they said,” the young boy was dead “with his intestines out and his throat slit,” and the treasure box smashed to pieces and robbed. He encountered the spouses of the kidnapped Indigenous women who told him that a weaning child (criatura de pecho) had also been taken. He remarked that he made arrangements for the boy’s corpse to be interred at the chapel of the estate of Hernando de Rivadeneira.85 “And later,” he wrote, “I [sent] a messenger to the Viceroy, with the notice of the incident” but he did not inform any soldiers or any other people nearby. Having sent his visita entourage away in possible anticipation of violence, he noted that he had been able to “follow” their travels but that the events and detour had “impeded my condition and work and the suffering and duress it caused me was not little, seeing the great cruelty with which the young innocent boy was taken.”86

This entry detailed an event at the end of a decades-long anti-slavery rebellion, under the leadership of Gaspar Yanga (sometimes Ñanga), an African who claimed to be a descendant of royalty from the Bran nation in the Senegambia region of Northwestern Africa.87 He is called the “first liberator of the Americas” by the people who live today in his namesake community of Yanga, where a statue of the leader stands (see figure 21).88 The attack or raid described by the

84 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 19r (image 21). 85 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 19v (image 22). For information on the De Rivadeneira family, see Thomas Hillerküss, “Blanquear apellidos: los Oñate-Salazar y el papel de los Rivadeneyra, de Medina de Rioseco, en el virreinato de la Nueva España del siglo XVI,” in Genealogía, heráldica y documentación, eds. Amaya Garritz Ruiz and Javier Sanchiz Ruiz (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2014), 41-76. 86 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 19r (image 21). 87 Jane Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements in Spanish America and Brazil,” in Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, eds. José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-LaFrance (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 175 and Frank “Trey” Proctor, “Slave Rebellion and Liberty in Colonial Mexico,” in Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, eds. Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 24. 88Charles Henry Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas: The Editor's Notes / “El Primer Libertador de las Americas”: Notas del editor,” Callaloo 31, no. 1 (2008): 1-2. This volume is a special edition of Callaloo, called

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Bishop occurred on merchant vehicles travelling the camino real, which connected the broader Atlantic to Mexico City, the silver-mining cities in northern New Spain and, via more informal or tributary routes, the Manila galleons at the port of Acapulco on the Pacific coast.89 The first mountaintop settlement site of Yanga’s rebel group was southwest of modern Jalapa in Veracruz, north west of what is today Huatusco, where the Bishop had received the poblanos. This area is mountainous, separating the dry Central Valley from the lowlands that continue to the coast, and that rugged geography helped thwart colonial authorities’ attempts to pursue the maroon guerillas.90 The mountainous region surrounding Citlaltépetl (Star Mountain), Mexico’s highest volcanic peak, was the staging ground for Yanga’s initial skirmishes with colonial authorities and many raids took place in this frontier space.91 This region had two camino routes from Puebla to Veracruz and it is not clear from the Bishop’s notation where precisely this robbery took place.

Yanga, Mata Clara and Nearby Villages: Africa in Contemporary Mexico, and it is focused on the legacy of Yanga, the maroon settlement he fought for and founded. It consists of interviews with community members and “focuses on black people in Yanga, Mata Clara, and nearby villages” in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. This town evolved from the first site of the free town that the rebels requested and were granted in the peace settlement established between themselves and the colonial entity in 1609 (originally called San Lorenzo de los Negros). Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas,” 1-2, 4-5 and Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 250. Davidson notes that in 1698 an Italian traveller named Gemelli Careri visited the town and testified to its prosperity. See John Francis Gemelli Careri, “A Voyage Round the World,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Awnisham Churchill (London, 1745): IV, 520-521.) 89 The port of Veracruz is approximately 195 kilometres east of Zacatepec, the closest pueblo to where the Bishop slept. The city of Veracruz is 104 kilometres east of the modern city of Yanga, 272 kilometres east of Puebla, and 387 kilometres south-east of Mexico City. 90 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 246. 91 Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements,” 173, 175. Landers, borrows from Igor Kopytoff’s argument that “Africa was a “frontier continent” with a long history of vast and often crisis-induced population movements which forced Africans repeatedly to create “new social order in the midst of institutional vacuum.” She notes that maroon communities across the Atlantic were similarly constructed through “ethnogenesis,” cultural mobility, and borrowing. See Igor Kopytoff, The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 3-88. This volcano-mountain is also known as Pico de Orizaba in modern Mexico.

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Figure 21: Statue of Gaspar Yanga in the modern pueblo of Yanga, Veracruz Source: Photo taken by Ivanna Azamar Vasquez and published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Although the historical specificities of this palenque (maroon) community are murky, most historians agree that Yanga and a group of enslaved Afro-Mexicans escaped from sugar plantations near the city of Veracruz in 1570. They settled in the rugged region of Orizaba and lived in a self-sufficient, “well-ordered” town from that time until the beginning of the

244 seventeenth century.92 The account of a Jesuit priest who accompanied one of the Spanish expeditions reported that the community had over sixty households, and had dedicated resources to agriculture, fortification, and animal husbandry, in addition to effective banditry. The Jesuit also noted that Yanga’s house was very large, positioned in the centre of town at the foot of a large tree, and had a sentinel’s tower built on top.93

Raids on camino carriages were typical throughout these years, but the violence increased around 1608-1609, when white hacienda owners in the region demanded the attention of colonial authorities as they argued that their own system of chattel slavery was threatened by the presence of a free Black population in the area.94 In 1609 Viceroy Luis de Velasco responded by sending a militia unit under the command of Capitán Pedro Gonzalez de Herrera with the supervision and aid of priest Juan Laurencio to eradicate the palenque and its inhabitants. The colonial militia destroyed the physical structures of the palenque but their forces could not apprehend Yanga nor the palenque’s military commander, Angolan runaway, and “warrior,” Francisco de la Matiza, nor any members of the maroon community.95 Raids increased at this time on the caminos because Yanga’s group needed supplies to sustain themselves. Sensing that the colonial forces were not making headway, sometime in late 1609 the Viceroy sent a diplomatic mission of Franciscan Alonso de Benevides and a regidor of Veracruz, Capitán Manuel Carrillo, to negotiate a peace treaty with Yanga.96 It was likely during this crucial time that the Bishop’s involvement occurred.

92 Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas,” 4 and Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements,” 175. For comment on Yanga’s Catholicism, use of Catholicism, and integration of African religious practices, see Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements,” 176 and Jeroen Dewulf, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America's Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 118. 93 “Relación de la misión a que fue enviado el P. Juan Laurencio, acompañando a una escuadra de soldados que salía a la reducción de negros forajidos y salteadores,” in Andrés Pérez de Ribes, Crónica y historia religiosa de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de México en Nueva España (México: Impr. Del Sagrado corazón de Jesús,1896): I, 282-294, cited in Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements,” 176. See also Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 247. 94 Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas,” 5. 95 Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas,” 6. 96 Rowell, “The First Liberator of the Americas,” 6 and Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 249-250. Yanga sent the Spaniards a list of eleven conditions for peace, which included freedom for all those living in his town prior to 1608, legal recognition, exclusion of Spaniards from the town except on market days, and the founding of a recognized church. He also asked that his heirs become governors of the town after him. Yanga’s terms were

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In his description of the raid, the Bishop told the reader a great deal about what he valued and believed about the colonial order. In his retelling of the events, the Bishop insinuated both maroon ‘barbarism’ and proficiency. He analogized the behaviour and movements of Black maroon members to nocturnal predators, calling them a “horde” or “troop” (tropa), and noting that they appeared at “moonlight.” He further described the dead white boy’s body as having experienced excessive, animalistic violence – "his intestines out and his throat slit” – that aimed to inspire fear and humiliate, emphasizing the “great cruelty” apparently meted out to the youth. This language acknowledged the unity and order of the rebels, which asserted the danger and threat they posed, while emphasizing their supposed animalistic attack on the body of the boy.

By establishing the grave threat of the maroons, Mota y Escobar could accentuate his own alertness to the seriousness of the danger; his ordered and quick thinking; and his ability to take charge of the situation, both in the moment and in his correspondence with the Viceroy. He knew precisely what course of action to take, demonstrating a paternal attitude as he sent his “dependants” away from harm, and travelling to the scene of the incident to assess it with his own eyes. The scene “was so, like they said,” he informed the reader, but only by his own witnessing did he discover the kidnapping of an Indigenous infant, a Catholic criatura and future tribute-payer, as well. He believed that his presence at this scene as an authority figure, a witness, and a scribe was crucial, indispensable, and pragmatic. With continued anxiety and tensions in the colony regarding marronage existing well into the seventeenth century, this writing asserted the prelate’s allegiance to the colonial order and his affective connection to it.97

The full record illustrates the Bishop’s articulation of the levels of disorder threatening colonial hegemony, which aligned with contemporary Spanish and colonial fears of slave rebellion across New Spain. Marronage disrupted the economic functioning of the colonial centre, its merchants, and the metropole (robbing the caja). The maroons disrespected the segregated racialized and gendered systems of reproduction, relationship-, and community-building (the kidnapping of

accepted in 1618 by Spanish authorities and the free black town was formally created. This document is located in AGN, Mexico, Commissary of Veracruz to the Inquisition in Mexico City, Inquisición, vol. 283, fs. 186-7, as cited in Landers, “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements,” 176. 97 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 251. Davidson notes that between 1609 and 1612 many rumors circulated in Mexico City of large plots of marronage.

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Indigenous women), and mocked the sanctity of life and preservation of innocence (murder of the white boy). And, they flouted peaceable settlement and productivity towards imperial- building ends (raiding, marauding, and robbing) and refused to consent to enslavement.98 These oppositions to colonial order had a “disturbing effect on the society of the conquerors.”99 For Mota y Escobar, these status quo conditions were important to his own class’ power and place in the colony, and threats to this order provoked anxiety, written as “suffering” here. The final line in the entry emphasizes innocence, and by extension, whiteness: “seeing the great cruelty with which the young innocent boy was taken,” he wrote, it impeded “my condition and work, the suffering and duress it caused me was not little.”100 Such a threat to colonial logic, to an order that to Mota y Escobar’s mind was correct and just, offered him the opportunity to assert how seriously he was committed to the functioning of the colony and the consolidation of Hispanic power, and how he naturally belonged to the upper echelons of that power structure.

White Sociability and Proximity to the Metropole

The evidence shows that the Bishop viewed himself as a creator and protector of the colonial order. The visit writings provide an avenue through which to demonstrate Mota y Escobar’s enjoyment of his own class and race privilege. It enabled him to enter spaces of concentrated Hispanic power and leisure, where he could indulge in and enjoy the comforts of white community membership, and participation in elite white European and Hispano-creole culture.

During his first visit to the diocese in mid-November 1609, Mota y Escobar entered a sugar- producing region in modern Veracruz state where he visited three sugar plantations over the course of three days: Ingenio de Matamoros, Ingenio de Don Andrés de la Higuera, and his own family’s Ingenio de Francisco de Orduña.101 The Bishop’s compositions of these entries present them as locations of leisure and beauty, gossip and sociability, and extraordinary affluence. Mota y Escobar remarked that he had confirmed a total of 837 people at the plantations, the

98 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 241. 99 Davidson, “Negro Slave Control,” 252. 100 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 19r (image 21). It should be noted that the Bishop expressed no such distress regarding the reported kidnapping of the Indigenous child. 101 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r-16r (images 17-18).

247 majority enslaved Africans, African-descended people, and Indigenous people, but he noted that he had handed off his other visitation duties to his visitador, Bachiller Ayala.102 These duties included moving around in the mills and assessing the people and buildings. This was a rare occurrence; he took time off in order to occupy the space with its owners. Still, he observed and entered the churches, houses, and offices of these plantations in order to describe them. Matamoros had “dammed water in a large pond,” “elegant dwellings and offices” and “a very good and well adorned church,” the Bishop wrote.103 At De la Higuera’s plantation there was a “mighty river” with a “magnificent bridge [with] a single arch and strong stonework,” and a “resourceful house [and] generous office space”; the mill had a “great supply of slaves” and the “altar and sacristy were neat and tidy,” he noted.104

Other than the former notation about the large number of enslaved labourers who were present and his record of confirmations, the Bishop did not comment on the actual work or labourers on the sugar plantations. It is clear by the numbers of racialized neophyte Christians present at, and living near, these locations that the labour force was large and that the wealth they generated enriched the Hispanic owners, ensuring they lived in luxury. Mota y Escobar enjoyed the shaping and controlling of the landscape and its resources, the beauty of the physical structures, undoubtedly constructed by non-Hispanic people, and the enslavement of human beings that ensured Hispanic comfort and pleasure.

Having delegated his more cumbersome visitation tasks to his visitador, the Bishop was able to converse with and counsel the plantation owners. At Matamoros, he wrote that he “learned from Juan Díaz Matamoros” that this owner was “in conflict” with his son-in-law, Andrés de la Higuera, and mother-in-law, Doña María, the former of whom owned the neighbouring ingenio.105 They had neither spoken nor visited as a result of “annoyances between relatives.” “I spoke to one party and then to the other,” he remarked. “I repaired them, [I] plead to God that

102 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r (image 17). 103 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r (image 17). 104 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15v (image 18). 105 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r (image 17).

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[the reconciliation] lasts longer than the sun in the winter,” he wrote wryly.106 This shared confidence and bit of pastoral gossip was recorded in the visit records to show the Bishop’s special attention to these powerful Hispanic vecinos. He did not note the provision of such intimate personal counsel to any other party in the visit writings; this work was not part of an episcopal mandate. This record was a deliberate discursive attempt to demonstrate his care and affinity for propertied, important colonial settlers. It also projected a sense of white Hispano- creole trust, recognition, and candor: Juan Díaz Matamoros was comfortable enough with this white creole Bishop to detail his disputes with his daughter’s spouse and in-laws. He made special note that he had confirmed Matamoros’ nephew, the son of his brother “don” Francisco de la Higuera.107 Mota y Escobar’s writing aimed to show his investment in preserving good relations amongst the white elite and in constructing deeper personal connections with them. The Bishop left traces of his intimate knowledge of and belonging to elite society in such records.

This accounting of Hispanic sociability and connection was also written into the records in more ostentatious ways. Following his stop at Matamoros’s mill, the Bishop journeyed to the mill of Andrés de la Higuera, the son-in-law. He wrote that he was received by the landowner a league from the house, “with many people on horseback” and “in the road was a herd of cows and bulls.” The “mulatos” made “good passes” on the bulls, he remarked, and so “in order not to be hesitant (boquiseco), I shot a spotted toro” and he “twirled” and collapsed dead.108 The inclusion of an ambiguous reference to “the mulatos” of the mill owner’s entourage and their skill in bullfighting technique draws attention to the Bishop’s expressed sense of pride and willing participation in this macho display of aggression. It also implied a competitive element that drew on whiteness and white supremacy and assumed Hispanic superiority as he noted only the colonial caste category of these men and not their relation to the mill or the landowner. They remained nameless; only their social location was made legible within Hispanic ordering.

106 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r (image 17). The final line in this entry, “plega a Dios que dure más que el sol en el invierno,” is struck out in the manuscript. It is unclear when this was done or by whom. González Jácome provides a transcription of this sentence in Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, 35. 107 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15r (image 17). 108 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15v (image 18).

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Further, the occasion of the Bishop’s visit was written here as a leisure or a social opportunity that Mota y Escobar understood as a member of the Hispanic colonial noble class. He recognized the “good passes” of these amateur bullfighters, and through his notation communicated his own acumen and cultural belonging. This act, in which Mota y Escobar described the injury and death of the animal with a cartoonish “twirl,” was written in such a manner that the Bishop was at the centre of an elite pastoral spectacle as honoured guest and powerful colonial agent. He was welcomed to the mill with this distinctly Iberian leisure activity and chronicled himself as aptly performing masculinized strength and dominance.

Bullfighting and dominance over exoticized animals appear often in Mota y Escobar’s writings and pointed the royal reader to the prelate’s cultural proximity to the metropole and its Hispanism. Unlike the intimate pastoral bullfight at de la Higuera’s mill described above, the Bishop also actively participated in the more typical public corrido (bull run). In January of 1611 in the community of San Luis in modern Guerrero state, the Bishop wrote that he stayed for “two days, of great heat; in the fiestas, a bull ran, I shot him, he twirled, [and] he fell dead.” 109 Here the reader is ushered into the scene of celebration and suspense, which ends swiftly in a grotesque show of normalized animal torture. The writing placed the Bishop at the centre of celebrations (on the occasion of the Epiphany), when the full community would have been expected to be present, and the prelate and this corrido would be understood as symbols of Hispanic power.

For Hispanic and European observers and readers, this event also signalled the dominance of the Castilian monarchy and the writer’s support of the Patronato principles as the bullfight or bull- run was a distinctly Hispanic socio-political ritual. Pope Pius V forbade the bullfight on pain of excommunication in the 1567 papal bull De salutis gregis domini (On the Health of the Lord’s Flock) but Felipe II had not permitted the text of this bull to be published in Spain.110 Consequently, De salutis gregis domini also lacked salience in New Spain. This papal order asserted the grave danger bullfights posed to a Christian’s soul, stating:

109 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 60r (image 62). 110 Adrian Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 147. This papal bull is officially called Super prohibitione agitationis Taurorum & Ferarum, & annulatione votorum & iuramentorum, super eisdem pro tempore interpositorum.

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As we consider how very opposed these exhibitions are to piety and Christian charity…we prohibit, under pain of excommunication, that all princes, ecclesiastical as well as lay, royal, or imperial, permit these bullfights. If anyone dies in the ring, let him remain without ecclesiastical burial. We also prohibit the clergy, secular as well as regular, from attending such spectacles, under pain of excommunication. We annul all oaths and promises to run bulls which have been made in honor of the Saints.111

Subsequently Popes Gregory XII, Clement VII, and Innocent XI all backtracked slightly on Pius’s broad prohibition and clarified that religious persons should not attend bullfights or runs. However, the Spanish kingdoms never fully accepted these modified directives either. At the height of the reigns of Carlos V and Felipe II, bullfights were standard in every type of royal celebration including weddings, royal births, baptisms, peace treaties, and military triumphs.112 The bullfight had a long history on the peninsula that predated the reconquista and the union of crowns. After the Siete Partidas law code was promulgated in the thirteenth century, the bullfight became an exclusive aristocratic game “given to the public” in celebration.113 It was the gift of spectacle. In these highly politicized bullfights on the peninsula, each event was “invested with carefully constructed” symbolic performances about the “glory of the monarch…imperial rule…political power…social prestige and display, and…the nation,” writes Adrian Shubert.114

In the final instance of bull fighting in the visit records, leisure, comfort and sociability intersect and weave through the linear narrative. On 27 December 1617, during his eighth visit, Bishop Mota y Escobar spent two days of “singular joy” in Cuetlachitla (Veracruz) with his “best

111 Shubert translates Julián Pereda’s quotation of Pius V’s bull in Los toros ante la Igelsia y la moral, (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1990), 41-43 in Death and Money, 147. 112 Shubert, Death and Money, 147, 181. 113 Carrie B. Douglass, “ ‘toro muerto, vaca es’: An Interpretation of the Spanish Bullfight,” American Ethnologist 11, no. 2 (1984): 245. 114 Shubert, Death and Money, 181.

251 friend,” the royal treasurer, Juan Bermúdez de Castro, who was about to depart for Spain.115 Mota y Escobar stayed in the community for three days total and confirmed twenty-seven Spanish, Black, and Indigenous criaturas. He observed that the “most beautiful river of water in the world” ran through Cuetlachitla.116 On the last day of the year 1617, the Bishop travelled to the Hispanic-owned Estancia de Riaño, located between the pueblos of Cuetlachitla and Tlalincoyan. His single-sentence entry of his stay at the Estancia is terse and visceral: “I arrived to eat and sleep at this estate, I killed three bulls with three small blows, there was no official work to do.”117 The violence and occasion of the event is expressed demurely, but in its brief starkness and the surrounding exposition of friendship, religious confirmation, and fascinated observation of the natural world, it illuminates the full socio-cultural life of the prelate for his reader.118 This writing was intended to be read by the metropole, however, and the Bishop may have exaggerated his ability. It should be noted that the Bishop was aged seventy-one and self- reportedly suffered from arthritis in his hand at his recording of this event.

The transfer of the highly ritualized spectacle of slaughtering bulls from Madrid to the estates and mills of Tlaxcala-Puebla demonstrates Mota y Escobar’s belief that symbolic power resided in these spaces, just as it did in the plazas of Spain. His participation in the ritual as the Bishop of the most important Spanish-created settlement in New Spain tied him explicitly to stubbornly- held and openly-enjoyed Hispanic traditions. The action asserted a transoceanic kinship and dedication to the concept of Patronato Real, so crucial to the Hispanic Empire’s imagining of itself and the Crown’s directives in creating the visit record. Spain’s political sovereignty was sacred, as the theory and practice of Patronato asserted. He related these events as distinctly colonial settings, but they were also personally important to him. In the 1609 record that opened this section, Bishop describes his maternal grandfather’s mill, called San Pedro de Buenavista, one league away from De la Higuera’s mill, where he stayed for two days, visited with family, and was “healthy.”119 He remarked that a new hacienda was being built on the land during his

115 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 79r-79v (image 81). 116 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 79v (image 82). 117 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 79v (image 82). 118 A document that summarizes events that occurred in Mexico City in 1522, 1526, and 1537 may contain the first bull-running occurrence in New Spain: AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, exp. 4, caja 6455, sin fecha. 119 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15v (image 18).

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“trip,” and that he received a visit from another mill owner, Alonso de Villanueva, who asked him for a favour.120 He wrote this account as a member of the white elite at home.

Of the three occasions of bullfighting that Mota y Escobar noted in his Tlaxcala-Puebla manuscript, two of the three occurred on estates owned by people of Spanish descent.121 The fact that the Bishop made note of these events in his episcopal notations, a Catholic institution, implied that, for Mota y Escobar, when elite Iberian culture and papal wishes diverged, the cultural connection between colony and Castile came before the desires of Rome. His notations reveal how he brought Castilian tradition to various locations in New Spain and used it as an anchor to power. The settings he described were tableauxs for landed conquistador and Hispano- creole power and legacy to be performed and maintained. As stages for ritual animal humiliation, they imbued the landscape with the prestige and gravitas of monarchical power. These estates and mills were spaces of familiarity and comfort, connection, and leisure for Mota y Escobar. He wrote himself as a man at home with metropolitan Hispanic culture, and a respected and connected representative of that culture in the colony.

Distance and Metropolitan Hispanism

The Bishop positioned himself as an insider to metropolitan Hispanism, writing about his participation in Hispanic practices and spectacles and demonstrating comfort within Hispanic spaces with elite Hispanic people. In contrast, he also projected a vision in which being Spanish, European, or a mendicant was a threat to the stability of empire through the exploitation and neglect of the resources of the colony, especially the lives and souls of Indigenous people. As part of their argument for the continuation of the institution of encomienda, representatives of the early creole class asserted their unique paternal bond with New Spain’s Indigenous population, which intersected with the “deep roots” of creoles within the landscape, as discussed in previous chapters. In alignment with this argument that he helped build many years before, in Mota y Escobar’s visita writings, he distanced himself from metropolitan Hispanism in favour of identification with something more ambiguous and slippery. He emphasized the impoverishment

120 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 15v (image 18). 121 The Bishop uses the term españoles to refer to these people, which means they could be peninsulars or Hispano- creoles.

253 of the Crown’s “miserable” Indigenous subjects by actors with ties to Europe rather than to the colony. The former, he argued, were greedy, impious, and insubordinate. Additionally, the Bishop made judgments about class difference that intersected with ideas of the nación or casta and further illuminated his strong identification with nobility and aristocracy.

Of particular note is the animosity the Bishop expressed toward mendicants or regular (cloistered) clergy. Creoles entered the secular clergy in greater numbers than the regular clergy and tended to have important roles in cathedral chapters, the ecclesiastical counterpart of the municipal cabildos where lay creoles often held influential positions.122 By the end of the sixteenth century New Spain’s creole secular clergy likely outnumbered their peninsular counterparts, and there were considerable obstacles to broad creole membership in the mendicant orders, including securing a means to lifelong financial support and high levels of education.123 Further, the regular clergy were more connected to Europe and Rome and, as a result of their early evangelization efforts, had greater influence in doctrinas and with the Indigenous populations more broadly. This conflicted with the Patronato and subordinated the secular clergy to the mendicants in matters of Indigenous governance. Mota y Escobar, as a secular creole Bishop, was therefore doubly invested in critiquing these fellow religious men as powerful European influences and a rival source of predominantly non-creole authority in the colony.124

In these critiques it is clear that the visit mandate that specified that bishops identify and remedy “oppression and disorders” faced by Indigenous peoples intersected well with a vision of creole guardianship. Bishop Mota y Escobar’s investment in creole power rested uneasily alongside his rather contingent commitment to the project of Hispanic civilization. His loyalty to the Crown remained intact, as long as the Crown gave his lineage its due in terms of land and servile labour. Hispanic civilization was the gauge through which he measured colonial life and behaviour, yet his writing revealed a lack of identification and a certain disavowal of actual españoles in New Spain. With close examination, we can observe a strong class element to Mota y Escobar’s vision of Indigenous people and the españoles that lived alongside them. His criticisms recall the

122 Mota y Escobar himself began his religious career as the deán of the Mexico City cathedral cabildo. Merrim, The Spectacular City, 15-16. I discussed this stacking of the municipal cabildo in chapter one. 123 Merrim, The Spectacular City, 15-16. 124 Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 86-87, 89.

254 warning issued in the 1597 petition to the Crown about the potential for the collapse of the repúblicas if descendants were not adequately compensated and supported.

Throughout much of the Bishop’s writings, the diocese’s españoles acted as a foil to his Hispanism. In 1609 in the village of Tlalsocoapa, the Bishop remarked that there was a wealthy, propertied Spanish population but the town had “the poorest sacristy around”; it “is very typical of españoles in the Indies, to [show] little piety in the things of the divine cult,” he stated irreverently.125 Unlike the Bishop, these españoles did not use their wealth to support the Church materially and they were not doing their part to uphold the moral order of the colony as elite members of it. His phrasing of this critique seems to place him outside this group. Did he not see himself as a Spaniard in the Indies? It is clear that this broad judgment acted as a sharp contrast to his own piety as a Spaniard in the Indies but it muddies Mota y Escobar’s identification with Hispanic culture.

In a visit to Tlaxcala in March 1614 the Bishop reflected on the “diminished” state of the Crown’s former Indigenous allies in conquest, the Tlaxcalans, writing: “The greed is more alive than in the Florentines, the excess punished little by their superiors, whose mouths close with gifts of money, a thing highly monstrous and what is worse is that neither there [, in Europe,] nor here, is there hope of a remedy.”126 The “superiors” he referred to were peninsulars, Iberian- descended, and/or mestizo friars, parish priests and/or colonial administrators. He added that the lay European-identifying population was similarly morally compromised. He noted that he “found great vice in the sensual [excesses] of the españoles [here and] there is no español in this place that is not cohabitating and, all are so united, that there is no witness that wants to say so.” He did not mince words: “The [Spanish] people are poor, lazy, and immoral; and they [possess] as many indios as they want…and [the Spaniards] have no secular justice with whom to fear, no

125 BNE, Mss/6877, fs. 8v (image 11). The Bishop noted that this community “of two encomenderos” was called San Juan de los Llanos in Castilian. 126 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 71r (image 73). In the manuscript there are several lines in this entry that are crossed out. It is unclear when this was done or by whom. They are transcribed by Federico Gómez de Orozco and Alba González Jácome in their publications of the visita records. Federico Gómez de Orozco, “Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” in Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia 6, no. 1 (1945): 279-281, accessed November 30, 2020, https://revistas.inah.gob.mx/index.php/anales/article/view/7042. And Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, 126.

255 less is there ecclesiastical justice, they live as gentiles.”127 This latter remark brought to fruition the warnings in the 1597 petition to the Crown regarding Hispano-creole exploitation of Indigenous people if the former lacked the wealth to support (and segregate) themselves. Further, secular and ecclesiastical justice were referenced here to make a point about the disorder of some colonial communities and the outrageous behaviour of the leadership within Indigenous parishes, headed at the time by peninsulares, non-elite creoles, and regular clergymen.

The Bishop singled out the mendicant friars for some of his harshest criticisms and rebukes. Mota y Escobar noted the absence of mendicant friars from their assigned communities because they had travelled to Acapulco to buy (and then sell) wares that were coming to port via the Manila galleon.128 In one instance, he remarked that the Prior of Tlapa had brought back five loaded mules from his travels.129 This Prior, an Augustinian, who was responsible for many doctrinas in the region of the Mixteca Alta in modern day Guerrero state, could not be found when the Bishop arrived. Mota y Escobar drew a correlation between this friar’s absence and the bad state of the Indigenous people: “I discovered these indios badly indoctrinated, savage, and ignorant of the law of Christians…[T]he fault [does] not [lie], in my estimation, only [with] the indios.”130 By noting this in the official record Mota y Escobar intended to smear the friars’ reputation as part of his ongoing struggle for power with them. Here we can tease out the Bishop’s class and religious visions intersecting, as he believed the secular clergy, with deeper ties to the Spanish Crown and to the creole colonists of the colony, were the best protectors of the Indigenous population of New Spain.131 Israel writes that the mendicants argued that the secular clergy would “subject the [Indigenous] population…to the desires of their lay cousins and friends,” while creoles like the Bishop asserted that the friars, like other foreigners, were opportunistic and greedy actors.132

127 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 71r (image 73). This entry does not provide information about who is cohabitating with whom. The Bishop seems to be highlighting the lack of official marriages in the community. 128 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 57r, 57v, 59v, 60r (images 59, 60, 62). 129 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 59v (image 62). 130 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 57v (image 60). 131 Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 52. 132 Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 52. Israel used the term “Indians” here and I have chosen not to replicate it.

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In some cases, the Bishop projected the cynical attitude that the Crown was as helpless as he was to stop these malevolent agents. In the Franciscan doctrina and pueblo of Xalapa, Mota y Escobar noted he did not give “noticia” of his arrival to anyone and he was not “received by the Justice nor least by the friars.” The following day he visited the church and still he was not greeted or welcomed by the friars. “I did not visit the sanctuary, baptismal font, or the sacristy, because,” Mota y Escobar remarked, “it seemed pointless work” and occasioned laughter from the friars. This doctrina was “very insufficient, mostly for the indios,” he noted. They were not preached to, “they believe in their customs,” and all of the Indigenous people and Spaniards “live in continual drunkenness.” “God remedy it,” the Bishop wrote, “it is only you that are able to do so.”133

In these notations, he distinguished himself from españoles and friars, and sometimes he included a discursive version of an exasperated prayer. In the 1614 account of Tlaxcala, Mota y Escobar exclaimed: “the things of episcopal power are in [the hands of friars], in a way that it is necessary to plead to God a lot, [for him] to put his miraculous hand in [this situation] because the Pope is far away and the King [is] badly informed.”134 He understood himself to be “other” than these españoles, and sometimes an informer on them, yet he never names himself as clearly criollo either.

His distancing from Europeanness (or foreignness) sometimes occurred next to a highly nuanced instance of affinity with New Spain’s Indigenous nobility or elites. In the city of Tepeaca in the modern state of Puebla in 1613, Mota y Escobar wrote: “I found the indios of this doctrina very broken, because of how they live, most of them, in houses [in the service] of españoles.”135 He continued on the subject of employment and labour, lamenting that,

it is a very pitiful business to see how fallen is the nobility of these poor indios principales, dismissed from their land and vassals, unhappy, poor, depressed and dispossessed of that which God and

133 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 14v-15r (image 17). On the continued ambivalent nature of clerical creole representations of Indigenous peoples into the later colonial era, see William B. Taylor, “ ‘…de corazón pequeño y ánimo apocado’: Conceptos de los curas párrocos sobre los indios en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII,” Relaciones 39 (1989): 5-67. 134 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 69v-71v (images 73-74). 135 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 66r (image 68).

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natural law has given them. …The españoles live by the fields of wheat and maize and, the indios as farmhands[,] reapers[,] and peons; and, like this, the state (estado) and population of the indios is destroyed…[T]hey have in their [greater] república so many humiliations of all estados de gentes, they run away escaping to the houses of the Spanish farmers, where they are protected by the other thousand benefits that [Spanish] pueblos [provide].136

His description of these Indigenous nobles – “unhappy, poor, depressed and dispossessed” – bears a striking resonance with the ways in which the group of creoles described their class’ state to the Crown in the 1597 petition. The reference to “natural law” here suggests that for Mota y Escobar, the natural order of things was that noble people supported by land and vassals should lead their communities. Therefore, the Bishop seemed to draw an implicit connection between the post-conquest generation of Indigenous nobles and the conquistador descendants—both were “disposed of that which God and natural law has given them.” As Peter B. Villella argues, Indigenous elites actively pursued legal rights to ancestral and patrimonial land following the collapse of the Mexica-Aztec political structure and emphasized their “ancient roots,” which resonated with “the patriotic longings of many creoles.”137 Villella notes that even in the early colonial era, creoles “associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico’s new ‘native’ leadership, and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.”138 In this entry we can observe an example of this affinity-making and appropriation by a first-generation elite creole man.

Mota y Escobar also invoked Indigenous nobility in order to comment on the deterioration of Indigenous culture since conquest and make a point about generational inheritance. In describing the former greatness of the Tlaxcalans in 1614, he wrote: although “the reputation of [the Tlaxcalans] is very great in the world, their poverty is today the main [attribute] that is known [of them because] of the bad government of the Principales naturales, by their little capacity for

136 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 66r-66v (images 68-69). 137 Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, n.p. 138 Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity, n.p. See also Cañizares-Esguerra, “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 420-437.

258 understanding, honour and talents, [and] their continual inebriation.”139 He went on to observe that “the mortality rate of [the Principales naturales] has been very [high]; and, so, today maceguales govern.” He pointed out that the absence of the elite Tlaxcalan class left a power vacuum, leaving only “maceguales,” the Nahuatl term (macehualli) for common people, to govern. He completely elided the reason for Indigenous mortality while alluding to an inverted and ‘unnatural’ class hierarchy. Finally, the Bishop remarked that,

the earthly state of the indios is notably diminished. And, I judge that the spiritual is [needed] more than ever, because the ancient ministers (los ministros antiguos) are finished and the moderns (los modernos), I understand, lack the spirit of the elders (los viejos); and, so, they govern and administer justice with the spirit of mozos [juveniles].140

When the Bishop described life without the presence of Spanish parishioners and mendicant friars, he painted a picture of idyllic Indigenous life. In the community of Tzoncoliuhcan in 1610, the Bishop wrote glowingly of segregated Indigenous villages under the jurisdiction of the Crown (de la Corona), that is, secular clergy. He described the Nahua Indigenous peoples that lived in this pueblo as “very sincere, well treated and calm; no español comes between them.” He preached to them and reported that they had “curiosity in the sacristy and, limpieza.” 141 He reported that the village without Spaniards was interested in purity. Is Mota y Escobar himself a “Spaniard” as referenced here? As an occasional and official interloper in the village, he did not seem to see himself as having any responsibility for the deprivations of the Indigenous community. This statement supported the creole desire for segregation that shielded whiteness and upheld the idealized casta and república order.

139 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 69v (image 73). 140 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 69v (image 73). 141 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 50r (image 52). This reflection could be insinuating the Bishop’s belief in the desirability of elite Indigenous leadership within the pueblos de indios. Of creole vision of Indigenous communities of the “mature colonial order,” Cañizares-Esguerra writes that they seemed to be “homogenous collectives of wretched commoners. From this perspective, the Creole clerical project appeared as one of restoration, a return to simpler times in which virtuous Indian nobles had embraced the teachings of the Church.” “Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity,” 426.

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How Mota y Escobar envisioned himself and who he believed himself to be in relation to these “Spaniards” is difficult to discern when official casta terms are consulted. In documents relating Mota y Escobar’s genealogical history, he is consistently called a “natural” or native, of New Spain. This was also the word used to refer to Indigenous peoples, alongside the more pejorative indios. His rare use of the terms criollo and gachupín further complicate an assessment of his own vision of himself within the castas. He used each term exactly once in his visita writings. On 24 November 1610, the Bishop arrived in Teguacan, and noted that “los prietos had very large haciendas here, criollos de aquí, they are already dead, the vecinos shedding few tears.”142 Prieto here could be a casta term for a dark-skinned person or it could be a family name. González Jácome chose the latter meaning in her transcription (los Prietos).143 Her interpretation seems correct, as a couple paragraphs later in this entry, Mota y Escobar wrote that he sent notices of a visit to “Alavés” and “Aº Prieto,” neither of whom he mentioned again.144 This A. Prieto then seems to have been a person in a position of authority. The Bishop may have been using criollo here to signify white colonists, but his notation has a negative connotation or sarcastic edge. This tone distances the Bishop from these criollos de aquí.145

His use of gachupín does not provide any clearer conclusions. On 3 December 1617, at seventy- one years of age, Bishop Mota y Escobar entered the pueblo and doctrina of Cuauhtichan for the first time.146 He wrote that the Franciscan Guardian of the Nahuatl-speaking mission, “fray Rodrigo Cabo, cachupin…received me muy hidalgamente.”147 The term cachupin, or gachupín, denoted an Iberian Spaniard newcomer in the late sixteenth century and took on a more pejorative slant in the mid-seventeenth century.148 The Bishop’s signaling of this man’s foreigner

142 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 51r (image 53). 143 Mota y Escobar, Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, 93. 144 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 51r (image 53). 145The Bishop used the term criollo extensively when he referred to enslaved or free people of colour. In the memoria the Bishop created of his human property discussed in chapter three, the following entry appears under the subheading “blacks”: “Gaspar criollo de Compostela ladino soltero” (Gaspar, creole, from Compostela [diocese of Guadalajara], ladino [Hispanized], single.) BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 266r-266v (images 269-270). 146 BNE, Mss.6877, fs. 77r (image 79). 147 BNE, Mss.6877,, fs. 77r (image 79). 148 Israel writes that the creole author, Juan de Cárdenas, defined this term as newcomer in his 1591 Problemas y Secretas Maravillosos de las Indias (Madrid, 1945), 170-171, and Israel notes that this is how it was used in contemporary documents. On the term’s use as an insult, Israel remarks that Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora reported

260 status could be related to Cabo’s reception of him muy hidalgamente, in the manner of a noble. Or, because the wording is ambiguous, Mota y Escobar might have been noting that this gachupín acted in the manner of a noble towards him. The Bishop was either mentioning that he was recognized by the friar as proximate to elite Spanishness or making a remark about recognizing the newcomer’s elite Spanishness. Either way, the Bishop’s use of the term seems to mark out a class difference when compared with the term español. Mota y Escobar used all these terms and does not identify concretely with any of them. His class and noble lineage as a conquistador descendant together formed a sense of self-identification that remained constant in his writing.

The ambiguity of the term and concept of español in Mota y Escobar’s early seventeenth-century writing points to his lack of identification with a broad and inclusive Hispanic cultural group. The Bishop’s Hispanism was an incomplete construction that did not yet have a name. In his world both the terms criollo and español could have undesirable connotations. He seemed to accept the term natural as a useful descriptor as he used it in his 1574 benefice petition (“natural de la Nueva España”), but it does not appear in any of his subsequent writings.149 Perhaps that is because the benefice petition was a document type that blended together the Old World genre of the probanza, certificate of purity (Old Christian), and the New World records of méritos y servicios that outlined qualifications for mercedes.150 If we return to this benefice petition discussed in chapter one, the language and logic the Bishop used are illustrative of a sense of identification that he would hold on to his whole life. “I plead to your majesty,” Mota y Escobar wrote, “in consideration of the services of my father,” a Capitán in the conquest, “hijodalgo,” and “person of great calidad,” that “you will grant me the merced” of dignitary or canon in the churches of Mexico City or Puebla de los Ángeles. In so doing, “your majesty will unload your

that during the 1692 Mexico City riot, the crowd of majority non-white, non-Hispanic peoples shouted, “Death to the Spaniards and gachupines!” It seems likely that the transition to an insult happened before this tumult but it is unclear when and what group of novohispanos began adopting this usage. Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 36-37, 58. 149 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 1). 150 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 65-71 and MacLeod, “Self-Promotion: The Relaciones de Méritos y Servicios,” 25-42.

261 royal conscience.”151 Read through the logic of a discourse of naturalized lineage inheritability that blended class and race status, we can see Mota y Escobar’s vision of himself as an inheritor of his father’s calidad and his “services” in conquest, which were not separable “facts.” This inheritance, legitimized by his birth in New Spain, in his view, translated into power and privilege, complicating his identification with those whose descendants had not won the land for empire but were connected to it by cultural or civilizational claims. He was a conqueror, a natural of a new Spain, and he spent his life attempting to build an order that institutionalized his class as natural and legitimate rulers.

Through an examination of the Bishop’s pastoral notations this chapter has presented physical and cultural movement as central to the prelate’s projection of a creole authority rooted within American contexts for imperial ends. Mota y Escobar’s deployment of the ethnographic gaze within the genre of the visita demonstrates his adaptation of Crown requirements to showcase his expertise, knowledge, and conquistador vision, all within the purview of his religious responsibility. The Hispanism that emerges from his writings is one of comfort within the ambivalence of the insider/outsider status, which he constructed and wielded with purpose and precision.

In the epilogue to this dissertation, I consider the legacy of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, the one he sought to fashion and the one that exists today. I examine another bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, whose unquestionable loyalty and connection to the metropole made him a symbol of sacred authority on both sides of the Atlantic. The afterlives of these two bishops reveal the evolution and legacy of criollismo, white supremacy, and the structural casta system in New Spain and modern Mexico.

151 AGI, Mexico, 212, n. 53 (image 1).

Epilogue

Throughout his life and writings, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar expressed anxiety about the future of the Empire, the república, and his personal legacy—concerns that were entangled with one another in his vision. In this dissertation I have outlined the transcultural discursive strategies and material practices that the Bishop deployed in order to institutionalize Hispanic control and by extension, naturalize criollo power in the colony. At the centre of his efforts to cement his class’s authority was his desire to ensure a personal legacy. His writings illuminate his individual ambition throughout his career to be understood as learned, useful, obedient, and pious. He sought his own institutionalization as a benevolent figure within the future/history of New Spain. Because of his patronage of religious institutions in Puebla and their desire to associate with him, there exist traces of the success of this goal, despite his ultimate overshadowing by another episcopal personality, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. The afterlives of Bishop Mota y Escobar provide evidence of his capacity and freedom to direct his future narrative. Moreover, these traces illustrate the ability of power to project and reproduce itself into the future by institutional means and labours. And finally, the surrounding historical context casts light on the cultural and political struggles that foreshadowed the Empire’s fracturing.

In their 1630s hagiography “Brief relation of the laudable life and death of the Señor Don Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” the Jesuits wrote that in his last testament (March 1625), Bishop of Puebla Mota y Escobar “ordered” that his heart and tongue be removed from his body and placed “between the bodies” in the catacombs of the convent and monastery of the Carmelitas Descalzos (Discalced Carmelites) of the city.1 Understood as a “new” order in central New Spain, alongside the Jesuits, Mercedarians, and Discalced Franciscans (in contrast to the “old” orders, Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, who had arrived shortly after the conquest and set up and attended to the doctrinas), the Discalced Carmelites established urban enclaves that served peninsular and criollo/a populations.2 Tridentine support of the Carmelites (however

1 The AGN dates this manuscript to 1631, but the creators did not include an official date. “Breve relación de la loable vida y muerte de el Señor Don Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, obispo que fue de Tlaxcala,” in Obispos de Puebla, 135. The original manuscript is located at the AGN in Jesuitas III-24, no. 5. 2 Jessica Ramírez, “Fundar para debilitar. El obispo de Puebla y las órdenes regulares, 1586-1606,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 49 (Jul-Dic 2013): 40-41.

262 263 inconsistent) also lent the order “an ultramodern aura.”3 Founded in Puebla in 1601-1604 with the help of the Jesuits and under the tutelage of the poblano episcopacy, the male and female Carmelite institution supported the empowerment of the secular clergy, which in turn bolstered the power of the secular clergy’s predominantly creole ranks.4 Episcopal control of this order, particularly the female branch of it, signalled local control and the patriarchal protection of white women from within the colony; as I have argued in this dissertation, these were also criollo concerns.

The 1616 establishment of the female order of the Carmelites in Mexico City gives greater cultural context to the Bishop’s request. Inspired by the reformist writings and actions of Teresa de Ávila, the Carmelite convent in the viceregal capital was established by a criolla, Mariana de la Encarnación, and a peninsular, Inés de la Cruz, who broke away from the Conceptionist convent (Jesús María de México) in Mexico City because it was not orthodox enough.5 However, the ecclesiastical establishment, including that of the episcopacy in Puebla, argued that the goals of this new female institution were too different from the pure “spiritual archetype” of De Ávila.6 Critics argued that the new convent would stray too far from the Iberian norm upheld by the colonial authorities who directed the Conceptionist convent. But this criticism seems to have been related to political struggles and anxiety about authority, power, and change within the colony, as indicated by the fact that criollas from the Conceptionist convent accused Sor Mariana of siding with the “gachupinas” who desired the reform, like Inés de la Cruz.7

Peninsulars were attempting to wrest control and force change that departed from the Spanish ideal, these colonials argued. These women and men, criollas of the Conceptionist convent and their ecclesiastical allies (and directors), believed themselves to be the guardians of the status quo, upholding the conventual orthodoxy of the original Iberian institution. However, the

3 Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 17. 4 Ramírez, “Fundar para debilitar,” 42-43 and Asunción Lavrin, “Santa Teresa en los conventos de monjas de Nueva España,” Hispania sacra 67, no. 136 (2015): 506-507. 5 Tudela, Colonial Angels, chapter two. 6 Tudela, Colonial Angels, 33-34. 7 Mariana de la Encarnación reported this herself in her 1641 chronicle Relación de la fundación del Convento Antiguo de Santa Teresa. Tudela, Colonial Angels, 28.

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Conceptionist convent was firmly in local control and fear of the loss or transfer of this control seems to have been the real heart of the issue. (Criollo Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora would later write a patriotic history of New Spain centred on this convent).8 Following support from the Viceroy’s wife (a peninsular) and Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna (another peninsular), however, the convent was approved.9 In order to counter criticisms of difference or, paradoxically, what Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela has called, “New Worldliness,” accommodations had to be made. For example, a new rule was added to the novohispana Carmelite’s vows: the nuns would have to promise not to drink chocolate, a food viewed as too americano.10 In essence, it was feared that a convent founded by spirited women critical of the established conventual (patriarchal) order might threaten the greater balance of power in the república.11

Once established, as feared, the Mexico City convent became embroiled in a long struggle to attain greater autonomy by requesting the transfer of its spiritual direction to that of the European Order, rather than that of the episcopacy. Those nuns who wanted the latter were pejoratively called gachupinas by those who favoured continued alliance with and supervision by the colonial authorities. As the second highest ecclesiastical authority in the kingdom, the Bishop of Puebla, Mota y Escobar, would have been aware of this power struggle. In the late seventeenth century the poblana Carmelites would join the struggle of their Mexico City sisters and appeal to the Council of the Indies and the archbishop. However, both the Council and the archbishop declined to change the nature of their direction. The Carmelite nuns of New Spain would not escape episcopal control of their Order for the entirety of the colonial era.12

8 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Parayso occidental: plantado y cultivado por la liberal benéfica mano de los muy catholicos y poderosos reyes de España, nuestros señores, en su magnífico Real Convento de Jesús María de México: facsímile de la primera edición (México, 1684) (México: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995). For an analysis of this manuscript from the perspective of creole historiography and New World baroque representational forms, see Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza Y Góngora. 9 Lavrin, “Santa Teresa en los conventos,” 507. 10 Tudela, Colonial Angels, 33-34. 11 Tudela writes that the “enclosed nun comes to symbolize the honor of contesting power groups in the Indies and that her story becomes the reflection of their histories and the projection of their imagined futures.” Colonial Angels, 28-29. 12 Lavrin, “Santa Teresa en los conventos,” 508-509 and Tudela, Colonial Angels, 28.

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If we return to the Bishop’s post-mortem request then, we can see that his goals were both personal and political. If one of his last acts was to demand that traces of his interior body be left amongst the subterranean dead of this recently established, urban, Hispanic-attending, episcopal- controlled but controversial religious order, he sought to bolster his personal sanctity and assert possession of the order as a local, secular bishop. He requested that his heart, representing love and deep feeling, and his tongue, representing preaching and language, be physically located in an institution that supported elite Hispanism, local control, and patriarchy in Puebla. In terms of his personal stake, this action approximated the transfer of spiritual power and divine communication that Catholic relics are thought to facilitate in the institutions and communities with which they are shared.13 As both bishop and creole, Mota y Escobar had an interest in maintaining local influence over the Carmelite institution even after his own death and he attempted to do so in the language of Catholic piety and exceptionalism. This item in the Bishop’s last testament suggests that he thought his organs and, by extension, his person, were invested with rare sacred power: it suggests that he thought he should be considered for sainthood.14

A 1732 history of the first one hundred years (1604-1704) of the poblano convent of these Carmelitas Descalzos provides evidence that there was, in fact, an active effort to raise Mota y Escobar to the status of a holy person. In part one of his three-part institutional history, informed by the writings of the nuns themselves, criollo poblano priest and historian José Gómez de la Parra wrote that he would outline the “marvelous happenings” of the convent’s founding century.15 In the tenth chapter he related a series of apparitions in which Bishop Mota y Escobar had come to Mother Isabel de la Encarnación between the years 1631 and 1632 to request aid for

13 The bones of the widely revered (peninsular) holy man Gregorio López (1542-1596) were housed in the Carmelite convent in Mexico City, which conferred great power and authority on the nuns there. Tudela, Colonial Angels, 18. 14 Interestingly, the Mexica-Aztec were also known to endow the heart with spiritual power and famously extracted them for use in their sacred practices. 15 José Gómez de la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, del muy religioso convento de Sr. S. Joseph de religiosas carmelitas descalzas de la ciudad de Puebla de los Ángeles, en la Nueva España, el primero que se fundó̂ en la América septentrional, en 27. de diciembre de 1604. goverando este obispado el illustrissimo señor doctor d. Diego Romano, quien lo erigió̂ , y fundô , en virtud de breve apostólico de n.m.s.p. Clemente VIII. Que con la suscripción de capítulo 25. del libro 12. del tomo tercero, de la reforma de los descalzos de Nuestra Señora del Carmen de la primitiva observancia, hecha por santa Theresa de Jesvs, en la antiquis sima religion, fundada por el grande propheta Elias (Puebla de los Ángeles [Mex.]: Viuda de Miguel de Ortega, 1732), fs. 12.

266 his soul that was in purgatory. De la Parra wrote that, first, the Bishop asked her to say the oration of the Holy Shroud (Santo Sudario—a venerated relic) for his soul. Then, the spectral Bishop requested that the whole religious community “take him up in their prayers and exercises.” De la Parra noted that the nun requested that the community ask “our Lord” for “the Soul of Señor Mota, to whom this Convent owed works and actions and [who was] the most beloved Father.”16

Still, De la Encarnación was puzzled by the Bishop’s request, and asked him: “How is it possible, that your Lordship has need of prayers, the Compañía de Jesús having said so many masses for your soul?” He replied with “great feeling” that he had not been invoked by these masses because “God Our Lord applied them [to] the Souls of my congregations and subjects.” The nun invited the monks of the monastery to say masses with “great urgency,” and De la Parra wrote that with that, “the Venerable Mother saw the soul of Señor Mota leave, from a very deep hole or pit, where he was suffering, and came to hold his Purgatory amongst the nuns of this convent, attending with the community all the conventual ceremonies which the nuns enacted.”17

Sometimes, the historian remarked, Mota y Escobar would not appear/attend if even one nun was missing from these ceremonies, which was, De la Parra wrote, a “a great recommendation to continue the inviolable attendance of the functions by the Community.”18 At these ceremonies, the Bishop would bow to the image of the Virgin Mary and during the saying of the Gloria Patri he would prostrate himself such that his head was almost on the floor. The nuns felt that “all these circumstances offered resplendent light which illuminated us to correct our careless mistakes, and to excite [us] with fervour [for] our sainted and sacred offices.”19 Following all this, De la Parra wrote that Bishop Mota y Escobar appeared to Mother de la Encarnación,

submerged in a deep lake of pure and clear waters…[B]etween the sands, Señor Mota could be seen, like a little fish, and beginning to emerge showing his head and the other parts of his body, in the

16 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 125-126, 129. 17 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 126. 18 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 126. 19 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 127.

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clothing of a bishop, and a black shawl, but when he started to leave the waters [,] his clothing was bleached, in the left hand the pastoral crozier and crowning his head the mitre, entirely whiter than snow; being already on the shore, was seen…the most fragrant roses, odiferous flowers, and aromatic lilies being so excessive the fragrance that the Venerable Mother remained transported and beside herself at perceiving it; Señor Mota was going among this pleasing hanging garden to the point where he reached a spacious and leafy field, where there were Twelve Venerable Men, all arrayed in white, and with long white beards, who, greeting Señor Mota, and taking him by the hand the two eldest took him and conducted him through this [field] as if in a procession, to the point where she lost sight of him.20

The Venerable Mother understood that “this place was Paradise.” And finally, when all the nuns had gathered in the choir to begin the Vespers of the Feast of the Conception, De la Encarnación saw Señor Mota, “very beautiful (hermosísimo), enter, wearing all white with a choral cape, a crozier, and mitre,” and he said that “he had come to say goodbye,” and “he asked her, that on his behalf she thank the Mother Prior, and also the entire community, for all the many things that they had done for his soul, and that in heaven, he would reciprocate and repay the great good they had all done for him.”21 De la Parra noted that the Bishop’s soul had been in purgatory for seven years. “Señor Mota was an exemplary Bishop and most loving Father of his children, and most vigilant Pastor of his sheep,” De la Parra wrote. The Bishop had instructed them and directed them “with the example of his substantial virtues,” and aided them with “abundant alms.” Mota y Escobar had perpetuated “his benefice [in founding] the most illustrious Colegio de San Ildefsonso of the Compañía de Jesús for the utility and help of the youth,” and he died, De la Parra remarked, “with recognized reputation of saintliness, and adorned with the prerogative of a virgin.”22 Bishop Mota y Escobar would plead “to the divine majesty [for the

20 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 127-128 21 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 128. 22 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 129.

268 nuns’] growth and gains in the temporal and spiritual, being no small recommendation of the holiness of this convent,” De la Parra remarked.23

While this convent did not require as excessive a dowry as other convents in New Spain, like all other convents the Carmelites required proof of limpieza de sangre, meaning that only those sin raza, of Old Christian Hispanic descent, could profess as nuns.24 In this eighteenth-century narrative retelling of a seventeenth-century nun’s experience, De la Parra wrote that these white nuns from mostly elite families had a sacred mediator in Mota y Escobar and that they materially benefitted from their actions to help his soul. Such apparitions would have been known in the community when they occurred in the 1630s. De la Parra’s narrativization for an eighteenth- century elite, learned poblano audience resurrected and reinscribed this story in the community consciousness, enhancing the reputation of the convent and likely prompting additional material benefits, like charitable donations (money and enslaved labour) and an increase in professing women.

The detail with which these apparitions are described suggests that Mota y Escobar’s name and reputation had power and authority in the elite poblano community into the 1630s and possibly the early eighteenth century as well.25 The reader of a hagiographic text was supposed to learn from its narratives and in this case, the reader would (re)learn about the actions, “saintliness,” and virginity of the Bishop and his fondness and protection of this particular convent.26 New World convent hagiographies were, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela argues, “histories of the cultural values in the colony.”27 Thus, Mota y Escobar became a lingering example of novohispano piety within the colony’s cultural and spiritual history, and a politically and economically important ally in Puebla. Through his posthumous relationship with the Carmelites, Mota y Escobar worked with Hispano-creoles, the Carmelite nun and a historian, to project into the future the

23 De la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo, fs. 130. 24 Joan C. Bristol, “'Although I am black, I am beautiful': Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla,” in Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, ed. Nora E. Jaffary (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 71. 25 For information about the extraordinary story of an enslaved African woman who requested and became a Carmelite nun of this convent on her deathbed in 1678, see Bristol, “'Although I am black, I am beautiful',” 67-79. 26 Tudela, Colonial Angels, 12. 27 Tudela, Colonial Angels, xv.

269 power he commanded in life. Together, they constructed a narrative meant to reproduce the institutional privilege and religious authority of the convent itself in the community and continue the naturalization and perpetuation of white elite power in New Spain.

This worked in tandem with Mota y Escobar’s patronage of the Jesuits in Puebla: he donated 20,000 pesos, material objects, and the hacienda Alfonsina, and he founded the Colegio Angelopolitano de San Ildefonso, which operated in Puebla until the expulsion of the Order in 1767.28 In his allusion to Mota y Escobar’s reputed saintliness, De la Parra sought to instrumentalize and institutionalize the Bishop’s image to gain the benefits it allotted. As a sacred pillar of the community and greater New Spain, Mota y Escobar as an institutional figure of divinity could endow the convent with spiritual power in the long term. The Bishop’s command to be apportioned in the manner of a saint suggests that he was similarly invested in this effort in his lifetime.

Despite these efforts the conquering criollo Mota y Escobar would not be canonized and he would not figure prominently in the history of New Spain (see figure 22). His life and writings are virtually unknown in the professional and public historical consciousness of colonial Mexico despite his significant efforts to work for empire and leave records and traces of his social, cultural, and religious vision. By the 1640s another episcopal figure, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, had arrived in Puebla from Spain and would quickly eclipse the memory of Mota y Escobar as the secular church’s most powerful torchbearer for the pro-imperial and self-aggrandizing criollo cause in Puebla and New Spain.29

28 AGN, Jesuitas III-24, no. 3, unfoliated. For discussion of this college’s finances from the late seventeenth century to the expulsion, see James D. Riley, “The Wealth of The Jesuits in Mexico, 1670–1767,” The Americas 33, no. 2 (Oct. 1976): 226-266. 29 Israel writes that Palafox y Mendoza “is probably the most interesting, and arguably the most important, single figure in seventeenth-century Mexico.” He was the illegitimate son of a widowed noblewoman of Zaragoza and an Aragonese marquis and as a result, he was entirely dependent on royal favour for his advancement. Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 200.

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Figure 22: Cuadro completo of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar hanging in the Capilla de San Ildefonso, Puebla Source: Photo courtesy of Mtro. José Antonio Efraín Bravo Méndez, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, “me doy por bien servido.” Email message to author April 23, 2018.

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Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, peninsular Bishop of Puebla (1640-1649), an “illegitimate” son, shared many core objectives with Mota y Escobar. He believed that the Crown’s “natural” allies and agents were the territorial nobility, viewing the Hispanic Catholic Empire as a union of relatively autonomous kingdoms.30 Like Mota y Escobar, Palafox y Mendoza wrote patronizingly about the virtues of the Indigenous populations in New Spain and criticized españoles for their spiritual laxity.31 Unlike Mota y Escobar, his writings were published and found an audience in the metropole. The peninsular Bishop sought to enhance the power of the local secular clergy and the integrity of the imperial system, and he pursued a program to advance and cultivate the education, knowledge, and authority of the criollo elite.32 Significantly, Palafox y Mendoza launched an “open attack” on the mendicant regular clergy, and between 1640 and 1641 he ejected them from thirty-seven of their doctrinas, split the benefices, and installed at least one hundred and fifty secular clergy in their place.33 This swift action was met without official reprisal. Perhaps Mota y Escobar’s complaints about the regular clergy fifteen years earlier could have been remedied by such local action rather than continued frustrated appeals to the Crown. A notorious quarrel with the Jesuits about the tithe, creole appointments, and religious jurisdiction would end Palafox y Mendoza’s career, evidence of the deteriorating capacity of the Crown to protect its Patronato rights against local interests heading into the eighteenth century.34

Recalled to Spain in 1649, Palafox y Mendoza became a symbol of monarchial authority and empire, and by the eighteenth century he was being hailed by Crown and Church as an inspiration for the defense of the Crown’s authority in the colonies.35 Palafox y Mendoza’s most staunch New Spanish allies, the Carmelites, published a collected edition of his copious written works after his death in 1659, presenting him as a saint, and by the late eighteenth century, the

30 Brading, The First America, 230. 31 See Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Virtues of the Indian /Virtudes del Indio, ed. Nancy H. Fee (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009). 32 Brading, The First America, 228-251. 33 He did allow the friars to remain in their parish churches however, and he used the opportunity to build additional churches for the newly appointed secular clergymen. No other bishop in New Spain followed Palafox y Mendoza’s lead but his actions anticipated the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms. See Brading, The First America, 235-236. 34 Brading, The First America, 241-247. 35 Brading, The First America, 250.

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Bourbon Crown of Spain was also promoting his writing and canonization.36 The Carmelites – an order that saw itself as a New World steward of Old World Catholicism and which was aligned with the secular clergy, episcopacy and criollo interests – kept Palafox y Mendoza’s vision alive in Puebla, institutionalizing him as a figure of enlightened reform and imperial connectedness.37

In his time Palafox y Mendoza was a polarizing and well-known transatlantic figure; in the centuries after his death, he would become an entrenched personality within colonial history and a Catholic beato (blessed one).38 In June 2011, his relics arrived in Puebla, where they were received by Archbishop (of Puebla) Víctor Sánchez Espinosa, who called out to the long-dead prelate: “This new presence…is for us an eloquent sign of your valuable intercession, and an effective encouragement…in this wonderful and complex hour that we have been living, [and] we accept the challenge of building Puebla and the Nation that God wants and we all long for.”39 Quoting Palafox y Mendoza’s seventeenth-century biographer, peninsular Gregorio de Argáiz, the Archbishop said that when “Don Juan de Palafox died…he was promoted to a second Puebla de los Ángeles.”40 Palafox y Mendoza, unlike Mota y Escobar, is remembered (and mythologized) as a builder and leader of Puebla and through a process of creolization, his controversial historical action in New Spain was projected into the nation-building future of modern Mexico. He is an Iberian intercessor to God for its people. This process is an example of what Edmundo O’Gorman has called “the progressive Americanization of the Hispanic (ser hispánico) originally transplanted to the New World.”41 Palafox y Mendoza is a redemptive force, just like the Santa María, Columbus’ merchant vessel that brought “the bread of

36 Brading, The First America, 250-251 37 Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 205. 38 Palafox y Mendoza was also visitor-general of New Spain in 1640 and acting Viceroy of the colony for five months in 1642 after he facilitated the recalling of the Duke of Escalona. Palafox y Mendoza charged the Viceroy with being preferential to Portuguese merchants following the dissolution of the union of the two Crowns. Palafox y Mendoza was also offered the archbishopric but he declined. Brading, The First America, 229-230. 39 Victor Sánchez Espinosa, “Reliquias Del Beato Juan De Palafox y Mendoza,” Pontificio Seminario Palafoxiano, accessed January 8, 2021, http://www.seminariopalafoxiano.org/historia/juan-de-palafox/reliquias. 40 Gregorio de Argáiz, Vida de Don Juan de Palafox, Sumario noveno, n. 8, quoted in Sánchez Espinosa, “Reliquias Del Beato Juan De Palafox y Mendoza.” 41 Edmundo O’Gorman, “Meditaciones sobre el criollismo,” in Memorias de la Academia Mexicana 21 (1975): 90.

273 life…from afar”: they are two enduring symbols of an early modern sacred vision of colonialism that the modern nation of Spain also celebrates (see figure 23).

Figure 23: First page of the modern Spanish passport, memorializing the route of the Santa María. The subsequent pages of the passport depict the migratory paths of animals using the same iconography as this image, drawing an analogy between instinctual migration and the first Columbus voyage. The series of images naturalizes European “migration” to the Americas. Source: Photo courtesy of Lucas Campo Vernay. Email message to author November 12, 2020.

The imperial recognition and Mexican institutionalization of Palafox y Mendoza contrasts with the failure of Mota y Escobar’s transcultural vision and strategy in securing criollo power in the colony. Bishop Mota y Escobar, throughout his life, wanted the acknowledgement and permission of the Crown to assume his natural place as one of the rightful rulers of New Spain. This logic extended and derived from the system of mercedes and distributive justice he believed his class was entitled to, but also deserved, as conquerors in their own right.

Throughout his writings, criollo Mota y Escobar represented his cultural flexibility and creativity through a transcultural process of negotiating loss, engaging in appropriation, and constructing new forms of racial, social, and cultural domination. Unlike the “baroque” criollismo that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century that more assertively appropriated Indigenous culture as constitutive of a distinct criollo sensibility, Mota y Escobar’s transculturated Hispanism relied on a robust connection to the metropole. He projected a vision of Ibero-creole novohispanization

274 through rule over and a unique affective relationship with the landscape and its Indigenous peoples, but he firmly rejected any sense of himself and his class as people whose novohispanization stemmed from anything that might resemble mestizaje.42 He sought to act as a dialectical bridge between Iberia and New Spain, aware of and negotiating the complexities of meeting local goals within the imperial framework. However, the Crown neither understood nor appreciated this effort.

The peninsular Bishop Palafox y Mendoza had no need to build affinities between colony and metropole. He was always, as one scholar has written, an “imperial visitor in the New World.”43 He was not a threat to Crown sovereignty and, in fact, through his inattention to local contexts and complexities, he proved himself to be an unequivocal agent of imperial authority. His absorption into the post-Independence cultural landscape of Mexico signals the triumph of later colonial elite narratives of novohispanidad. By accepting and accentuating an exaggerated binary of the European and Indigenous categories, criollo ideology from the mid-seventeenth century to Independence made itself the proud heterogenous product of the two, always within the logic of historical winners (conquerors) and losers (conquered). The whitening logic already in operation in the early part of the seventeenth century saw its success in this vision of criollismo: this whiteness became the guardian of an Indigeneity rooted firmly in the past, violently divorced by the realities of contemporary Indigenous peoples and indifferent to their erasure, assimilation, and genocide. In the national period, this explicitly racialized order morphed into a discourse of mestizaje that reified cultural mixture while hiding its white supremacist origins. Throughout these phases into the present day, the Hispanic, ser hispánico, maintained his self-constructed superior status, acting as the emblem and mediator of civilization sin raza through the long,

42 Solange Alberro writes that the baroque aesthetic was characterized by “the accumulation and juxtaposition of objects of diverse origins.” The criollismo that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century absorbed this principle, accumulating knowledge of European and Indigenous cultures and juxtaposing them within the figure of the criollo. “The heterogeneity of the whole” provided “the coherence.” “Barroquismo y criollismo en los recibimientos hechos a don Diego López Pacheco Cabrera y Bobadilla, virrey de Nueva España, 1640: un estudio preliminar,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 8, no. 4 (1999): 446, 452-453. See also José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica (Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975). 43 Brading, The First America, 251.

275 violent institutionalization of Hispanic order.44 Beato Palafox y Mendoza is such a figure. As a mediator to Spain and to God, his commemoration would help guide modern Mexican society in the reproduction of white Hispanic power and civilization, as he himself had done without ambivalence in the seventeenth century.

In this dissertation I have explored the origins of criollo ideology in New Spain, and the violence upon which it was built. Despite the absence of institutional memory of his writings and career, Bishop Mota y Escobar’s life and legacy exemplified this racialized and gendered violence. As an elite white creole in the colony, he possessed significant power to appropriate, disrupt, direct, and destroy the cultural and material lives of innumerable people. He saw himself as a conqueror, a discoverer, and a creator of a new – but old – order. In chapter one I outlined the role of the encomienda and mercedes as the institutional underpinning of conquistador entitlement. First-generation creole conquerors saw themselves as the inheritors of a contractual relationship with the Crown based on the perpetuation of encomienda rights. The granting of mercedes and fulfillment of this contract occurred side by side with the building of a political apparatus with conquistadores at the helm. The institution of slavery was an equally foundational structuring practice of conquistador power and connection to Iberia and Hispanic civilization. These systems replicated and reproduced mercedes logic as the conquerors granted each other land and political positions across the colony and used racialized violence to legitimize their claims to racial superiority and entitlement to land and servile labour.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the Crown viewed the power of the conqueror class in New Spain as a threat to its sovereignty and authority and attempted to discontinue the encomienda. Crown efforts to end the system of Indigenous labour exploitation in the colony was never fully successful. Nevertheless, conqueror descendants, criollos, experienced a loss of wealth and power (their supposed rightful inheritance). Early criollo group formation emerged in defense of the system of Crown rewards and in a vision of themselves as legitimate heirs to their forebearers’ authority as representatives of conquest and Hispanism. The 1597 petition to the Crown was a crucial moment in which they joined together to argue that the Crown owed them

44 In their study of social stratification in colonial and modern Mexico, Hugo G. Nutini and Barry L. Isaac note that in the twentieth century “the more European an individual appears, the more likely he or she is to rise socially.” Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 127.

276 the same mercedes as had been granted to their conquering ancestors. They had inherited from their conquistador fathers and grandfathers the duty to continue the still-unfinished process of conquest and they were best placed to construct lasting Hispanic hegemony in the New World. They had a unique right and capacity to naturalize Hispanism in the New World for the benefit of the Empire, reproducing the conqueror logic across successive generations. They could only fulfill this duty if the Crown acquiesced to their need for mercedes, specifically the encomienda, in perpetuity. The familial network of property, wealth, and political power established in the early colonial decades explains Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s normalized ties to privilege in the colony. His class’ forceful rhetoric in the 1597 petition to the Crown in support of perpetual encomienda illustrates their drive to maintain the political and economic power of their predecessors.

The Crown did not implement perpetual encomienda, thereby foreclosing the possibility of the development of a territorial nobility of conqueror descendants in New Spain. In chapter two I examined the Bishop’s writing, in his response to the Council of the Indies’ 1604 request for knowledge about the diocese of Guadalajara through an interrogatorio, as an important expression of conquering creole class anxiety about their imperiled claims to nobility. Mota y Escobar’s ethnographic writings in the finished manuscript of the Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, illuminate the creole fascination with the novohispano landscape. The manuscript also reveals Mota y Escobar’s strategic efforts to assert a particularly creole comprehension and translation of New World phenomena for the benefit of empire. He deployed the rhetoric of wonder and the marvellous, utilizing Old World literary and textual authorities to both situate himself and to avoid criticism of his methods. Rather than simply provide quantitative responses to the Crown’s queries, Bishop Mota y Escobar related qualitative narratives that required cultural interpretation, which emphasized the necessity of creole colonial agents like himself as cultural and political intermediaries between Crown and colony.

In the Guadalajara writings (1604), Mota y Escobar appealed to the Empire to recognize both his distinct capacity to root and represent Hispanism in the colony and his exceptionalism as an interpreter of New World order. In chapter three I analyzed the concrete actions that Mota y Escobar took to assert his class’s right to rule and bring order to the república de españoles. As Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mota y Escobar’s actions contributed to the construction and

277 institutionalization of white, masculine power in significant and long-lasting ways. First, I returned to the 1597 petition to the Crown to draw out the language of exceptionalism used by Mota y Escobar and his class to distinguish themselves as American Spaniards. By tying themselves to Iberian concepts of nobility, rootedness, and culture through whiteness, criollos represented their class as stewards of Hispanic civilization and purity, and guardians of the racialized republic system.

Chapter three continues with a close reading of criollo religious rhetoric in the form of a sermon, which demonstrates the role of the Catholic Church in institutionalizing Hispano-creole power and vision. This sermon, given by a criollo bishop from Oaxaca, linked Mary’s sinlessness to the purity of the Columbian arrival and the transformative power of the whiteness of those aboard the Santa María merchant vessel. This rhetoric illustrated a gendered narrative of white superiority tied to divine favour, extractive and reproductive power, and the transformation of sin and “stain,” which provided a guiding coherence for white supremacist thought within the building of the sistema de castas structure. This discourse of sacred and transformative whiteness and purity was institutionalized and naturalized through quotidian, material practices pursued by elite Hispano-creole men, like the Bishop. In order to protect and reproduce whiteness and, by extension, criollo power, Mota y Escobar personally used his office and his own financial means to facilitate the enclosure of white women and the distribution of capital among criollo families across the colony, including to female-headed families whose race and class superiority was endangered by poverty. In his writings about these efforts, he clarified his motives as moral, asserting the innocence and selflessness of his convictions to construct solid boundaries of cultural and racial difference between whites and others. Such religious institution-building and financial dealings were meant to maintain the racial purity of the elites who ruled the república de españoles.

The Bishop pursued mastery as a marker of authority and power by owning many enslaved persons. Slavery was a crucial component of the socio-political order that Hispano-creoles sought to maintain and naturalize. In order to naturalize the enslavement of African-descended people, the Bishop owned women and their children, and used his record-keeping to showcase his control in the form of a memoria list. In owning human property, he performed his class status and loyalty to empire and through his right to subject them to brutal treatment and violence, he signalled his power and freedom to the community. The creation of a white

278 supremacist order relied on slave ownership and the use of enslaved labour, and in Mota y Escobar’s practice of gifting enslaved persons to other whites in the colony, he further highlighted his benevolence and class position. The institution of slavery helped construct, define, and uphold the sin raza status of whites across New Spain.

In the final chapter, I examine the Tlaxcala-Puebla visita writings (1608-1625) as strategic articulations of an ideological newness and cultural flexibility. In these writings, we can observe Mota y Escobar projecting his cultural mobility as insider and outsider to metropolitan Hispanism to communicate his ideal location as a mediator between colony and metropole. Rather than being representatives of the pope in the New World as Tridentine law prescribed, bishops were expected to be the eyes and ears of the Crown and Council of the Indies. This positioned the required colonial record of the visitation within the regime of mercedes. Bishop Mota y Escobar exploited this fact as he used his ecclesiastical position to demonstrate creole entitlement to mercedes, showcasing his expertise, knowledge, and conquistador vision within the purview of his religious responsibility.

The criollo focus on rootedness in land and its connection to power and authority is highlighted here as Mota y Escobar used an ethnographic mode to record his mobility in the diocese. Mota y Escobar’s visitations were narratives of possession and domination as he swept through the diocese in comfort through the unacknowledged efforts of his enslaved staff and by his capacity to move seamlessly in and through white social spaces. These self-representations sought to project natural power and authority, and assuage metropolitan trust, and are often written in great detail that was not of a religious nature. These narrative anecdotes reveal his defense of the colonial order but also his ambivalent identification with colony and metropole. Through descriptive and ethnographic means, the Bishop demonstrated his affinity for both the local world and the imperial centre, communicating a new subjective location that he thought would persuade the Crown to share its power.

On his deathbed in 1625, Mota y Escobar sought to maintain a presence within the colony. This personal desire mirrored his class’s desire to naturalize Hispanic power through their lineages into the future. This invisible presence and power would maintain Hispanic domination through the perpetual logic of conquest and possession. Instead, a Crown preference for an unambiguous dedication and connection to Hispanism would prevail and lead to the transformation of

279 criollismo into something unimaginable to Mota y Escobar’s generation. It would claim power through absorption of the land and the history of the colony’s Indigenous peoples into its political project. While Bishop Mota y Escobar failed to convince the Crown of the usefulness of agents like himself, he succeeded in institutionalizing forms of domination that adapted the new to the old Hispanic epistemological order in material ways. His transcultural vision laid the groundwork for the continued violence of the Hispano-creole project in New Spain and Mexico.

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