Courtroom Methods in Mexico

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv:2 (Autumn, 2014), 163–186.

BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW Amos Megged Between History, Memory, and Law: Courtroom Methods in Mexico While anxiously scanning heavily laden, voluminous court records, historians of the early modern era usually encounter a repetitive pattern in responses to an interrogation; plaintiffs, defendants, and other interested parties largely gave the same answers to the same assortment of questions. The witnesses almost always confronted a legally determined interroga- tory, established upon a determined protocol, with a certain number of standardized questions, according to precise procedural objectives. Their responses, often seemingly blurred and “empty,” either added almost nothing to the questions or merely repeated verbatim what was already said in previous depositions. Neverthe- less, modern scholars can use this evidence to determine variations in the testimony, ªrst by checking the interrogatorium for the kind of information supplied by the questions and any hints about preferred responses and then pursuing the sources for more information. Scholars should also look in the witnesses’ responses for original, uncontaminated views of events, through individual deviations from the common schema. By employing such a method- ology, this article distills certain “cognitive schemata” from the variegated testimony delivered in the Spanish colonial court of the Audiencia, arguing that the pattern established by speciªc verbal and nonverbal constructions reveals telling predispositions among both individuals and communities. Firsthand testimony is the most signiªcant. The mental shreds and remnants of past experiences are the objects of such an inquest, not a reconstruction of the past in itself. Testimony is a multifaceted restructuring of occurrences, never an endeavor to represent a “true past.” For example, informants may well have shaped their testimony to “win their case.” The objectives of lawmakers often concerned heavy political, judicial, and economic contexts, and

Amos Megged is Associate Professor of Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, University of Haifa. He is the author of Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica (New York, 2010); editor, with Stephanie Wood, of Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance (Norman, 2012). © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00683

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 164 | AMOS MEGGED those of witnesses represented, implicitly or explicitly, political and societal interests. Such testimonies were obviously produced to shape history. Nevertheless, because the informants were themselves participants in the events and the episodes as reconstructed, the information that they provide is welcome, since it would otherwise be absent from written sources. Employing a case study of Mesoamerican cultures under Spanish rule during the sixteenth century, this article shows that despite restrictive legal conditions, pervasive “cognitive schemata” are detectable within courtroom testimony. But we must take into close consideration the cultural circumstances that surround it. In early colonial Mexico, deponents’ testimony was the product of a distinct cultural exchange, involving both Spanish and indigenous participants, that was embedded within a particular colonial context involving two distinct systems of writing and rhetoric. The translation, as well as transliteration, of these accounts from one or sometimes two native languages into Spanish entailed substantial changes. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the massive manipulation and intrigue of the native leaders lurking behind the legal scenes, requiring that we distinguish what witnesses were able to recall and what they were determined/instructed to hold back from the Spanish judges. Nor can we ignore the fact that modes of recalling and recording the past underwent profound changes as a direct outcome of the imposition of an alphabet culture.

mesoamerican logographic writing systems The pre- Cortesian writing systems gradually adapted to Western conventions of alphabetic writing. But, as recent studies in Mesoamerican ethnohistory—including this article—demonstrate, much of their traditional character endured despite the heavy inºuence of Span- ish Christianity. How these sustained contexts affected the transmission, form, and content of memory reconstruction in this society is, therefore, an extremely important question. This distinctive cultural exchange, the converging of two distinct systems of writing and rhetoric, is crucial to an understanding of the notion of “cognitive schemata” introduced above. In the pre-Cortesian Maya writing, logograms and syllable signs were combined to form a whole sentence. By comparison, postclassic Aztec writing in central Mexico employed ideographic symbols and phonetic principles through the rebus principle. Aztec

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 165 name-glyphs, for example, combine logographic elements with phonetic readings. The stylized toponyms, however, were pictograms that had no association to phonetics. In the Aztec Mexico Basin, the oral and ritualistic enactments that formed the core mechanism of how societies recorded and remembered were inseparable from the written documents. The most common vehicle for the memory of past events, developments, and changes before the shift into written Nahuatl or Spanish was what is usually called “narrative pictography”—a graphic/pictorial representation docu- menting information according to interpretation, thereafter supplemented and re-afªrmed by oral testimony.1 Narrative pictography did not transfer the exact wording of a message, only a pictorial representation, transcending the barriers of distinct languages. As Lockhart argues, “The visible artifact was thus only a part of the total communication, which proceeded on two partially independent tracks. The pictorial part could convey some things that were beyond spoken words and had the ability to pass through time unchanged, but the oral part carried much of the burden of narration, formulation, and conceptualization. ...For this and other reasons, the genres of Nahuatl documents before the conquest diverged substantially from their nearest Spanish equiva- lents.”2 Because all of the elements that were absent from the direct visual representation were lost, particularly any abstract ideas, narration had to be accompanied by standardized ideograms that identiªed the various personalities and places. In his article about the change that the indigenous languages underwent during colonial times, Restall emphasizes that the complete replacement of the pre-conquest tradition by alphabetization was far more rapid in the lowland Maya areas than in the Mixtec, Nahua, and Otomi areas, because the Maya did not have a purely pictographic tradition. 1 Camillia Townsend, “The View from San Juan del Río: Mexican Indigenous Annals and the History of the Wilder World,” Medieval History Journal, XIV (2011), 323–342; Federico Navarrete, “Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books,” in Elizabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton (eds.), Their Way of Writing, in Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America (Washington, D.C., 2011), 175–196; Walter Mignolo, “On the Colo- nization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and Dis- continuity of the Classic Tradition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV (1992), 301–330. 2 James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indigenous Population of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992), 332–339, 326–392.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 166 | AMOS MEGGED Mixtec pictography was even more deeply entrenched than that of the Nahuatl; it remained unchanged for a longer period of time. However, Restall does not account for the more intensive contact in the central area among the Nahua than in the Mixteca area— another reason for the delay in adaptation and change.3 the native lawmaking process on the eve of spanish colonial rule In Mexico, memory building or reconstruction processes depended critically on commemorative performances, oral recitations, and traditional forms that largely endured the colonial changes. The memorialized discourses of the elders (huehuetlahtolli), delivered as part of traditional law-making procedures, lasted well into the midcolonial period. In Molina’s sixteenth-century Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary, the entry “pohua” is given the three-fold meaning of “counting,” “relating a judicial process,” and “a history.” Lockhart adds that “the word also meant ‘to relate, recount, give an account of,’ hinting at the oral recital that accompanied a pre-Conquest document, interpreting and ex- panding on it.” In pre-Hispanic times, a formal speech was closely associated with ritual practice. Bernardino de Sahagún’s Book 8 of the Florentine Codex provides direct instructions about how to “converse appropriately with others,” in a style and context similar to those included in ritualistic chants, which featured modes of repetition and similitudes. Examples of these forms abound within the corpus of the Cantares Mexicanos.4 Before the Spaniards arrived, the customary setting in which narrative transmissions of of law took place was the local ruler’s court. At the center of the altepetl (the ethnic state), the tlahtoani (ruler) presided over the tlatocaicpalpan (the ruler’s tribunal), or the tlacxitlan (court) consisting of judges from the local nobility. These judges often summoned experts (“convocation” in Nahuatl, omotenehuque, means “they have called, they have nominated”) to

3 Matthew Restall, “Heirs to the Hieroglyphs: Indigenous Writing in Colonial Meso- america,” Americas, LIV (1997), 239–267. 4 John Bierhorst (ed.), Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford, 1985); Alonso de Molina, Aquíi comiença un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana, ed. Manuel Galeote (Málaga, 2001); Bernardino de Sahagún (ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble), General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex (Santa Fe, 1950); Townsend, “View from San Juan del Río,” 328; Lockhart, Nahuas. On repetition and similitude, see, for example, Michael W. Swanton, “El texto Popoloca de la Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca,” Relaciones, Estudios de historia y sociedad 86 (2001), XXII, 117–140.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 167 explain or elaborate matters that were unfamiliar to the court. The Franciscan friar, Motolinía (Fr. Torbio de Benavente) describes this council in the town of Texcoco as consisting of six sets of two judges, each of whom was responsible for six large territories. Two supreme judges and the local ruler were entrusted with the matters of law. The consultations occurred within a period of ten to twelve days. In addition to court trials, they covered the more general aspects of the politics and management of the altepetl. The court procedure lasted eighty days, the period between general consultations, headed by twelve judges (consulta general).5 Prior to the Spaniards, the local judicial system in the town of Totolapan in the present State of Morelos, Mexico, for example, had been administered by a council of four judges nominated by the supreme ruler (hueytlatoani). These judges were regularly informed of unusual or abnormal occurrences or wrong-doings by the tequitlato (local tax collectors) of each ward or barrio (tlaxilacalme); miscreants were brought before them for sentencing. Those convicted retained the right to appeal to the supreme authority, or tlahtoani, who, “having substantially learned of the circumstances surrounding the case, could then revoke the sentence.” The proceedings were recorded by scribes/painters (tlacuiloque), who also turned the names of the witnesses into painted anthropo- nyms. Messages and instructions were delivered at the native ruler’s court during this customary law-making procedure.6 This framework also served far broader didactic purposes that coincided with political processes, as exempliªed in texts belonging to the particular towns and ethnic groups. In Townsend’s words, “The production of written texts and the associated public performances often worked to underscore or contest or amplify the signiªcance of current political arrangements.” During the early

5 Townsend, “View from San Juan del Río”; Jerome Offner, Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco (New York, 1983), 56. For the “Eighty-Day Council,” see Juan de Torquemada, Monarchía Indiana (Mexico City, 1943), II, 355. Eighty days also comprises the period during which the Tenochca examined potential allies for their loyalty. During this probation period, rulers had to remain in their palaces, and their temples had to remain closed. See Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica Mexicana (México, 1980), 403–406, on the instruction given to the lords of Tenantzinco. 6 “Relación geográªca de Totolapa,” no. 89, in Relaciones Geográªcas del siglo XVI- México (Mexico City, 1984), III, 159–165 (hereinafter rg); Alonso de Zurita, “Breve y sumaria relación de los señores y maneras y diferencias que había de ellos en la Nueva España y de otras provincias y sus comarcas,” in idem and Joaquín García Icazbalceta (eds.), Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México (Mexico City, 1941), 103.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 168 | AMOS MEGGED 1500s, in accord with pre-Columbian custom, the tlahtoani presided over the teuctlahtocaicpalli, literally, the “throne of the judges,” or over the tlacxitlan comprised of judges from the local aristoc- racy. Elders appeared as witnesses to recite from memory the past traditions and accounts of their predecessors; the resulting con- ºicting testimonies were then resolved by the local ruler. Material evidence came in the form of cadastral histories that scribes brought from the local archives, and a notary recorded the entire procedure. The ancient maps were then spread out to reveal the multifaceted history contained in these records to public view and for explica- tion by local specialists. The pictorial contents, which contained instructions on how to perform procedures, inherit rules, and di- vide lands, were based on earlier experiences and legal precedent.7 On the eve of the Spanish conquest, the archives in almost every town or ethnic state in the Mexico Basin contained texts or cadastral maps recording secular and sacred affairs, both past and present; glyphic imprints of pre-Columbian tribute quotas; and labor recruitments. Because the royal council in Spain was especially concerned with the unlawful continuation of the servicio personal as a common practice, as well as with the excessive demands for tributes, mayordomos and alcaldes (stewards and local magistrates) were instructed to exhibit the registers of the tributes levied on the various barrios before a Spanish judge of the Audiencia in Mexico City. The contents of such “paintings” were usually displayed in lawsuits between various towns. Visual aids routinely served towns and individuals to conªrm historical antecedents. In the famous lit-

7 Townsend, “View from San Juan del Río”; Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, II, Book 14, Chapter 7, 546. For Texcocan legal procedure, see Offner, Law and Politics, 299–301. In Fran- cisco del Paso y Troncoso, Papeles de Nueva España, segunda serie (Mexico City, 1905), V, 15– 45 (Relación Geográªca de Tepeaca 1580), the elders of the town describe this legal practice: “In Pagan days, the natives governed themselves thus: they had as leader their own native lords, and they appointed four judges called tecuhtlatoque, ...,andthese four set together in a hall and they heard and adjudicated the demands and quarrels that were brought before them; when one of the judges died, the lord named another one in his place, and they served in their ofªces through life; they were always noblemen, kinsmen, or very close to the house of the ruler, and they carried out justice in this manner: the litigants brought paintings of the land, or houses over which they had disputes, or in the case for which they were asking justice, and this was determined usually with both parties being present and witnesses testifying to ªnd out the facts, and this procedure was oral, as there was no writing to record what was being said, only the said paintings, which put the delinquents and the crimes they had committed with the witnesses that saw them. The judges and their ministers wore no distinguishing insignia; their prisons were made of sticks, as cages with guards [italics added].”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 169 igation concerning the central Mexican native town of Tepetlaoz- toc and the acts of violence committed by the local Spanish encomendero (colonist granted the privilege of enlisting labor and receiving tribute), for example, Judge Quesada ordered the local lords to exhibit their “paintings” and ordered one to be “translated and interpreted.” These pictorial renderings redeªned the new order of things. They altered current relationships with the Spanish ruler and captured old traditions in their customary forms, legiti- mizing persistent afªliations between former allies, reformulating or ending alliances with former indigenous sovereigns, and settling ongoing disputes about lands and other resources. As Marcus wrote, they also served as “a manipulated history in which the facts [were] altered to meet successive rulers’ changing political and ideological needs.”8

the native judicial process within the audiencia From the early 1530s, when the native traditional legal process was only partially in the hands of the Spanish colonial court, and despite the transformations that had taken place under Spanish colonial rule, many of the lawsuits presented at the Audiencia in Mexico City by various communities in the Mexico Basin began with customary, pre-Columbian, legal procedures in the presence of a local native ruler.9 Evidence indicates that traditional law-making activity still lingered in many indigenous towns of the Central Plateau of Mex- ico. In 1566, for example, don Antonio Cortés, the indigenous governor of Tacuba (Tlacopan), and his fellow lords ªled an appeal in the court of the Audiencia that their town be incorporated within the jurisdiction of the royal crown and thus be exempted from paying tributes. The appeal began with a list of the twelve presiding judges of the Supreme Council of Tlacopan—don Jerónimo de Aguila heading the list—the seven tequitlato, as well as thirty others from the local nobility, who were not in ofªce (“hijos dalgo”). In such towns, legal customs and judicial procedures were still maintained at the lowest levels of native litigation, func- tioning as an important framework in which both oral and pictorial

8 Offner, Law and Politics; Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton, 1992), 33. 9 Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley, 1983), 274.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 170 | AMOS MEGGED means of communication continued nearly undisturbed, and even ºourished.10 Native rulers of the former ethnic states envisioned the Span- ish Audiencia as offering new opportunities for turning long- lasting historical conºicts to their own beneªt. Experience may well have taught them that the royal ofªcials nominated by the Spanish king to serve as judges in the Audiencia of Mexico were incompetent interpreters of complex native reality and history. Moreover, they could afford to extend their lawsuits endlessly, bringing into court hundreds of witnesses and resorting to trial and error in the attempt to reach a desired outcome. Local rulers and elders probably rehearsed their appearances at the Audiencia, per- mitting all of the prospective witnesses to collaborate on testimonies that, once set to print, would become canonical with the passing of time. Discrepant testimony would be disregarded. As Gibson rightly noted, there were far more lawsuits between native towns than between indigenous nobles and Spaniards. Likewise, during the ªrst half of the sixteenth century, the Audiencia heard complaints from at least thirty towns dispersed within the ªfty ethnic states that existed in the Mexico Basin during the late Aztec Empire period. Because the growing number of native appeals placed a heavy burden on the Spanish colonial courts, reform became a central issue for legislators in Spain as well as for public ªg- ures in Mexico.11 mesoamerican writing and alphabetization in the court Native leaders counted on Spanish judges not being able to deci- pher the writing that they presented in court. Cadastral histories and lienzos (texts painted on large strips of cotton that were still in use into the late nineteenth century) brought into the Audiencia were viewed as acceptable tools for interpreting or re-interpreting former claims in the colonial court. Scribes and notaries employed such texts, and their accompanying alphabetized interpretations, as mne- monics to “make the following witnesses’ memory more lucid.”12

10 “Don Antonio Cortés, cacique, y los demás principales del pueblo de Tacuba, sobre que se ponga el dicho pueblo en la corona real y les conmute los tributos en otras partes, 1566,” Justicia, leg. 1029, no. 10, Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereinafter agi). 11 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964), 50–54. 12 “Don Martín Mayaque, indio, governador y cacique del pueblo de Tixtlan y los principales del dicho y en sus nombres, y Martín De Ircio, como defensor (en quien estaba

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 171 The use of this kind of visual content is shown in the testimony of Juan Ibantlal, the tecpoyotl (town crier) of Mayanalan, on December 25, 1540. As he observed the native pictorial shown to him, Ibantlal recalled a morning in 1535 when “he saw a number of senior notables, men and women, arrive from Oapan at his town.” He had heard that a few days earlier, another delegation of lords from Oapan had arrived in town “to arrange the betrothal between Oapan’s supreme ruler and Ana Consuchis, the daughter of don Alonso Taxtetl, Mayanalan’s governor.” He then saw these men and women “discuss[ing] the act of drawing up the marriage con- tract as well as the wedding arrangements with doña Luisa, Ana’s mother, and the local ruler’s wife.”13 The slow but subsequent change in ritualized procedures—as well as in standardized testimony—to conform with Spanish conventions of speech and writing had a signiªcant effect on how Spanish colonial courts formulated and delivered their legal cases. This shift also inºuenced which past events were to be highlighted and which to be disregarded. This point is complementary to Kellogg’s suggestion that “wills themselves were an instrument of cultural change, being part of the shift in the cultures of legal practices and gender structures.’’ Communicating pictographic writ- ings through the mediation of an interpreter at different levels of the judicial discourse—transmission, translation, and veriªcation of testimony—became a legitimate form of legal expression and exchange. As part of the veriªcation process of the pictorials presented, the court notary would add a translator’s interpretation of the native nobles’ allegations. An account in pictograms was usually transcribed into an alphabetized form, layer by layer.14 An example of such a proceeding is entitled, “Lo que hurtó Magariño de los indios” (“what Margariño had seized from the indig-

encomendado), Alonso de Paredes, Alvaro Ruiz y Martín de San Juan, contra Diego Xaramillo y Cecilia Lucero su muger, vecinos de la ciudad de Mexico, y en sus nombres, y Sebastian Rodríguez, sobre: pedir el cacique, gobernador y principales a tratarte a Xaramillo de volviese y dexarse libre la estancia de Xilpacingo (Chilpacingo) que les habia tomado injustamente por ser anexa del tiempo imemorial al pueblo de Tixtlan y les paga del importe de los tributos que habian dejado de haber con lo que puede producir la dicha estancia hasta ser reintegrados y las costas que de eso origen” (1537–1561), Justicia, leg. 127, fol. 427r, agi. 13 Justicia, leg. 127, 1537–1561, fols. 603r–604v, agi (Juan Ibantlal’s testimony). 14 Mignolo, “On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages,” 301–330; Lockhart, Nahuas, 326–327, 330–364; Susan Kellogg and Restall, Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes (Salt Lake City, 1998), 293.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 172 | AMOS MEGGED enous population”). In August 1567, the lords of Tenayocan presented their case before the Audiencia, and on September 15, 1567, the local scribes of Teocalhuyacan, who initiated the allegations, provided an account of the pictograms that they had drawn. Al- though the lords of Tenayocan refused to elaborate beyond the “facts” already recorded in the paintings, the Spanish translations of the pictograms usually contained a number of elements not consid- ered important to the Spanish court, though perhaps signiªcant in indigenous jurisprudence and process; sometimes translated documents bore no relation to the subject under litigation at all. There- fore the ªnal version presented in the Spanish courtroom was subject to strategic editing. In comparison with the ªnal text, the intermediary text in the Tenayocan affair was a translation or transcription of the pictograms into a verbal form—a perfect example of how pictorial writing was supplemented in the native court of law by oral testimony. On September 12, 1567, Julian de Salazar, the juez de residencia (a judge entrusted with reviewing the completion of a royal command) of Magariño summoned the majordomos of the local church to produce a translation of the painting concerning Magariño’s deeds in their town: “In the town of Tlacalnepantla- Teucalhuyacan, the reviewing judge took testimony of what the local lords have drawn in their presented ‘paintings.’ With the help of a translator, Francisco Ramírez, the testimony was extracted from Pedro de Gante, Juan Cano and Miguél Yancas, and Andrés Ehecatl, all of them justice ofªcials [alcaldes] of the barrios of Santa María, San Francisco, and San Lorenzo. The witnesses swore by God’s name and by the name of Mary and by the sign of the cross....Through the interpreters, they explained the meaning of the paintings and their transcription . . . one of the majordomos of the church, Pedro Damiel, was made to sign in their name.” De Gante testiªed that the paintings were a living testimony from the barrios of San Francisco, Santa María, and San Lorenzo, and that he had been present when Magariño [the encomendero] and Castillo, the translator, “had taken away all the commodities described in the paintings.”15 The context of the report demonstrates the grievances in their different aspects, as well as the entire process of recording and rec-

15 Patronato, 181, R.2, agi.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 173 ollecting these events, which had taken place long before the case reached court. They are likely to have been based upon a juxtapo- sition between cognitive structures present in Nahua traditional linguistic forms and the already present Spanish forms of presenta- tion. As late as the 1560s, the parties to civil lawsuits concerning land and inheritance in Tlaxcala, for example, would still bring ge- nealogical illustrations and lienzos showing the lineage and seniority of their Chichimec ancestors, and the partition of their patrimony.16 During the 1560s, the issue of whether or not to continue using the visual modes of writing and recording had already erupted into an internal debate among the indigenous nobilities throughout the different areas of Mexico. By the 1560s and 1570s, legal modes of representation in the Audiencia were giving rise to a new culture based on alphabetical memory, in the form of wills and land titles, as opposed to oral and pictorial modes. One of the best examples of the hybridized use of pictures and alphabetical texts during this period was the Códice Cozcatzin (1572). This codex retains a large number of Nahua pictograms (representations of objects and actions) depicting native insignia, land parcels, and households, as well as ideograms (qualities, attributes, or concepts associated with the object depicted). Pictograms for toponyms were given alongside their Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and a Spanish text. The pivotal lawsuit about the inheritance of the supreme rule of Tilantongo in the Mixteca Alta area offers a rare glimpse of this debate and the deliberations about the threat to traditional forms of memorializing legacies under colonial rule. The position endorsed by indigenous nobles, such as Don Felipe de Austria, in the Mixteca Alta area of southwestern Mexico, leaned heavily on the past. In contrast, don Diego de Mendoza, don Felipe’s ardent foe in this matter, advocated the ‘‘progress’’ bestowed by the Spanish conquest and Christianity; so far as he was concerned, only what the alphabet and Christianity had contributed to indigenous cul-

16 Thelma Sullivan, Documentos Tlaxcaltecas del siglo XVI en lengua náhuatl (Mexico City, 1987). Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps (Norman, 1973), demonstrated how three examples of pre-Columbian and early colonial Mixtec pictorial manuscripts—the Códice Colombino, the Lienzo de Jicayán, and the Lienzo de Ocotepec—were transformed into legal, alphabetic documents. They were presented in court as part of a litigation about land. In their later versions as legal documents, they still retained some of the glyphic annotations and toponyms that indicated boundaries (122–147, 170, 336–337).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 174 | AMOS MEGGED ture was worth saving. In March 1568, don Felipe, represented by his attorney in the Audiencia, produced a series of pre-Columbian pictorial records in defense of his claim to patrimony, which entailed the sovereignty of Tilantongo and of Tepozcolula. The pictorial records, dating back to the fourteenth century, depicted the ruling genealogies of the Mixteca Alta, indicating the customary rules of succession inscribed in the eleventh century (Codex Nuttel) and the order of seniority among the different polities in the area (these visual records in the form of a códice, later known as the Bodleian Codex, were deposited by Edward King, Viscount Kings- borough, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford).17 Don Felipe proposed a compromise with don Diego, who happened to be the husband of the senior heiress, that established two complementary systems for recalling the past, with a forty-year time lapse separating the two—a strategy known in Roman law as memoria contrarii, that which exceeded a forty-year span. One system relied upon records that belonged to pre-Columbian times and the other upon Mixtec events and customs that were no longer observed on account of not being Christian or Spanish. Beyond this period lay what was adopted and internalized by the following gen- erations as inseparable from their cultural memory, what “they were accustomed to memorize”—mos maiorum, “the ancestors’ sayings.” Nearly two years later, in March 1570, don Diego also referred to the pictograms, or visual records, as tools for recalling order, descent, and inheritance, but he linked their use to self-interest, pagan practices, and “false memories.” Despite the powerful rhetoric of don Felipe and the convincing pictorial evidence of his ancient genealogy, the Audiencia stripped him of his inheritance and trans- ferred the estate to don Diego. His triumph in this affair had exten- sive cultural ramiªcations. For the contemporaneous native nobility, it presaged that the traditional mode of using and combining oral and visual forms of representation/writing to record and me- morialize the past was gradually giving way to a Spanish-European orientation, even if at this point adopted merely as rhetoric.18

17 Tierras, vol. 24, exp. 6., fol. 12v, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereinafter agn). 18 On the local ethnic Mixtec ramiªcations of this particular case, see Kevin Terraciano “The Colonial Mixtec Town,” Hispanic American Historical Review, LXXX (1999),1–42.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 175 native “cognitive schemata” in the spanish colonial court Deviations, variations, and contradictions within and across testimonies in legal proceedings often reveal patterns of cognitive constructs shaped not only by self-interest but also by cultural pre- disposition. In her penetrating study of the lawsuit in 1553, among the distinct Cholultecan, Nahua, and Pinome lineages in Cuauhtinchan, Mexico, for example, Townsend brought to light the “cellular” nature of the testimony, heavily impacted by pre- Columbian allegiances and animosities that originated as early as the fourteenth century.19 In a similar vein, one of the major goals of this article is to distinguish pervasive schemata in the court records that guided, as well as constructed, the verbal expressions of native litigants, above and beyond standardized legal procedure and style. Easily identiªed in the testimonies of the witnesses are focal cultural tropes that establish the more monolithic nature of certain contexts. For example, the attitude of the indigenous elite in the Valley of Toluca toward Spanish conquest vis-à-vis the previous Aztec conquest shows a strong presence of cognitive schemata that serve as coping or defense mechanisms. They helped the local elders in the Valley of Toluca to reconcile these different conquests into a coherent plot of the past that attempts to overcome fragmentation and chaos. Calli’s Testimony before the Audiencia This article openly en- dorses the ethno-ethnohistorical angle, grounding histories in the cultural contexts in which they originate. In Sahlins’ words, “Cul- tural categories are actualized in a speciªc context of the interested action of the historic agents and the pragmatic of their interac- tions.” Accordingly, in the lawsuit of 1558 to 1609 concerning who constituted the rightful authority in the Valley of Toluca, the testimony of indigenous dignitaries before the Audiencia, such as Juan Calli of Capuluac, characterized the Spanish conquest of Hernán Cortés within a continuum of past conquests, laden with familiar principles and categories. In Calli’s recapitulation, the Cortés conquest was merely a repetition of previous states of subjection, subordination, and chaos that native peoples had already experienced under the Aztecs, as well as earlier powers. The cogni-

19 Townsend, “Glimpsing Native American Historiography: The Cellular Principle in Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Annals,” Ethnohistory, LVI (2009), 625–650.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 176 | AMOS MEGGED tive modes by which Calli and his peers dealt with the similarities and differences between various conquests and subordinations are traceable in verbal components that, when linked, establish repeated patterns and thus create schemata that are meant to deal with the transformations that took place under colonial rule.20 The “task” faced by the native witnesses was essentially to consolidate and re-build schemata from both new and old modes of rulership. The narrative of Calli contains several elements germane to such schemata. Beginning with the ªrst acts of the Spanish conquest, it reºects a clear-cut accommodation of the new Spanish rule by establishing its raison d’etre. Because Calli, like many of his peers in Capuluac, decried the forced labor that Capuluac was obliged to provide the Aztec royal city of Tenoch- titlan, he regarded the Spanish conquest as liberating (he was about thirty-nine years of age when it happened). As he told the presiding Spanish judges, “They [the people of the city] all came out to receive the Spanish Marqués with gifts of turkeys and ºowers, to free themselves of the burdens of the past.” Calli then deliberately merged the legacy of the Spanish conquest by Cortés with that the Aztec conquest of the Valley of Toluca (1475/76) by King Axayacatl (r.1469–1481). According to his version of the main events, in 1526, after Cortés had returned to the area, Tuchcoyotzin, the local ruler, apparently adopted the same strategy as had his grandfather in dealing with Axayacatl and his son Motecuhzuma. Tuchcoyotzin pleaded before Cortés to be recognized as the supreme lord and governor of the Valley and to be provided with local aides to help him enforce law and order there. In return, the Marqués would be granted all of the produce of these lands, which would be bequeathed to his seat of power in the town of Coyoacan. When Cortés offered to make Tuchcoyot- zin “a dignitary over these lands,” Tuchcoyotzin responded that he was already “an overlord and a dignitary.” What he wanted, but did not receive, were “tax collectors and magistrates who would obey [him] and help him to tax the local populace.” Calli further recounted Cortés’ grand entrance into the palace

20 Marshall Sahlins, “The Return of the Event, Again; With Reºections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa,” in Aletta Biersack (ed.), Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology (Washington, D.C., 1991), 37– 99; Ingo Z. Schroder, “Violent Events in the Western Apache Past,” in Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schroder (eds.), Anthropology of Violence and Conºict (New York, 2001), 143–158.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 177 of Calixtlahuaca and Tuchcoyotzin’s submission to him: “Great lord, all my subjects have forsaken me. Do what you wish with me, as I wish to become a Christian.” At Quetzalcoatl’s temple in Calixtlahuaca, in the presence of many Spaniards and Indians (including Calli), Cortés baptized the naked and kneeling Tuchcoyot- zin with holy water and ritually dressed him in Spanish garments, making him, in Calli’s wording, a “true Christian.” Calli then viv- idly described the Franciscans’ act in 1524 of erecting the ªrst church in the Valley and, signiªcantly (see below), the old granaries (cuexcomatl), as well as the founding of the town of Toluca via the merging of several dispersed settlements around Calixtlahuaca. Pre-Christian practices still lingered in the worship of stone idols, which necessitated the intervention of, and cooperation between, the town elders and the Franciscans to put an end to it.21 The references in Calli’s testimony to the indignities that the natives suffered ªrst under the Aztecs and later under the Spaniards demonstrates the deep cultural heritage of these conquests in the Valley. They testify further to how the Ca-Chimal dynasty, initiated by Axayacatl in Calixtlahuacan, had forsaken its local subjects and dependents, evicting and humiliating most of the Matlazintla nobility and priesthood. When the Spaniards arrived, they burned the royal granaries and replaced them with a pig farm. The estab- lishment of the granaries assumed a prominent place in the collec- tive “cognitive schemata” of the Valley’s inhabitants, given their association with boundary-marking ceremonies. Tochtli’s Testimony before the Audiencia Baltazar de Vergara Tochtli, native lord from the town of Metepec, another of the no- table senior witnesses, was about twenty-seven years old in 1551 when his father told him about Axayacatl’s conquest of the Valley in 1476. His recounting of Ca-Chimaltzin’s infamy and Axayacatl’s invasion, in the typical monolithic pattern of “conquest” and “submission,” re-creates the disdain with which Ca-Chimaltzin and his heirs were treated by the Valley’s inhabitants after the Spaniards assumed control. It also fully explains why some of these lords at that time might have opted to present/produce an account that ºattered the Crown. The Valley’s lands and yields had never really belonged to the dynasty in Calixtlahuaca but to the king of Tenochtitlan and the supreme lords of the Triple Alliance, which

21 HJ, vol. 458, leg. 277, no. 2, fol. 30r, agn.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 178 | AMOS MEGGED was comprised of the three major ethnic states—Tlacopan, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlan—that ruled the Aztec empire. This version, as others, might well have been deployed to gain Spanish favor in the form of tax exemptions, ofªces, or better land alloca- tions.22 In 1548, Tadeo de Niza de Santa María of Tepeticpac, with thirty other local nobles, wrote a competing version of this history, purportedly comprised of eyewitness reports, to show Tlaxcalan’s participation in the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan. A copy of the manuscript was sent to King Charles V in Spain, obviously to obtain compensation, but it is now lost. Two years later, Tlaxcala presented a pictorial counterpart of this written work—a yaot- lacuilolli (war painting)—to the king of Spain. Now known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, it depicts Tlaxcalan troops, represented by three warriors, battling a Matlatzinca leader named Chimalpiltzintli, a stand-in for Tuchcoyotzin. The substitution likely marks an attempt to create resonance with Ca-Chimaltzin, Tuchcoyotzin’s grandfather, who sided with the Aztecs in the conquest. Also in the picture is Cortés on a horse chasing away the bewildered Matlatzincas. This depiction reºects the intertwining of two conquests—the Aztec and the Spanish (see Figure 1). At the bot- tom of a page in the Códice Azcatitlan (1570) is a glyph that shows “Matlatzinco” being conquered by the Aztec Axayacatl, without a Spanish reference; the Matlatzinca net-glyph appears above its place-name. Another glyph shows Toluca, “the Place Where the Head Is Inclined,” followed by that of Xiquipilco, “the Place of the Eight Thousand,” with a copal (incense) burner.23

cognitive constructs versus deviations As explained above, the strong presence of cognitive schemata in the narratives of local elders signiªes an attempt to produce a coherent plot of the past to

22 In Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Essential Codex Mendoza (Berkeley, 1997), fols. 10r–10v, the towns conquered by Axayacatl—Toluca, Metepec, Calimaya, Cuitlahuac, and Capuluac—are indicated by a glyph that shows smoke rising from a burning/ demolished temple. Diego Basalenque, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Matlatzinca vuelto a la Castellana (Mexico City, 1975; orig. pub 1640). 23 Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford, 1967), 146; Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (trans. and ed. Luis Reyes García y Andrea Martínez Baracs), Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala (Mexico City, 1995), 31–32; Berdan and Rieff, Essential Codex Mendoza.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 179 Fig. 1 The Conquest of the Matlatzinca (Lienzo de Tlaxcala)

overcome fragmentation and chaos. The question is, as Conner- ton asks, “How far back must you go in taking account of the memory of past injustice, in wiping clean the historical record of illegitimate acts? To construct a barrier between the new beginning and the old tyranny is to recollect the old tyranny.”24 The story of Ca-Chimaltzin, Axayacatl, and the Aztec invasion ªts perfectly into Nahua cognitive schemata regarding norms of conduct in times of war. In the account of the Aztec foray against the Matlatzinca in the Valley of Toluca in 1476, written by the Aztec chronicler Tezozomoc, Axayacatl rigorously instructs his generals to “refrain from killing many, but take them captives in- stead and leave them behind.” Both Tezozomoc and Diego Durán, the Dominican chronicler, tell of the surrender and submission of Ca-Chimaltzin, the appeal of the Matlatzinca to pay their tributes and dues directly to the king, and Axayacatl’s public sacriªce of the

24 John Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York, 1987), 9.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 180 | AMOS MEGGED Toluca priests in his renovation ceremony of the Sun temple in Tenochtitlan. The story of Axayacatl taking the city without bloodshed is in accord with the tenet that under certain circumstances, violence against other groups was inappropriate and in others, it was to be expected.25 Key Terms within the Cognitive Schemata Two verbal components and one nonverbal one recur regularly in the witnesses’ depositions as cognitive constructs. The ªrst word is a Nahuatal term, ypilchan—apparently adopted into the Matlatzinca language— meaning “his lordly house,” referring to relatives of the great ruler, locally installed; the pairing of pilli and chantli in Nahuatl, means “noble home, residence” (according to Molina’s dictionary). Wit- nesses often used it in the expression “ypilchan Axayacatl,” which indicates that Axayacatl established his permanent hold over the Valley by placing his lords and their noble houses as overseers (the calpixqui in Atenco and Metepec) there and by erecting abodes that symbolized his local rule. The principal house established by Axayacatl was apparently in Miltepec, southeast of Calixtlahuaca, below the Toluca mountain range.26 Basalenque’s Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Matlatzinca vuelto a la Castellana (1640) contains the following entries: ni muchpuetzi (“the abode of lords, or, lordly abode”), huebu benumi (“[that of] the priv- ileged”), nebehodita (“the founders of the town”), ypinu pybeyehe (“a prince, a king”), and imuthuthochi huebeyehe (“the king’s private property”). The repeated use of these verbal components is also embedded in the wording of seventy-ªve-year-old Francisco Hernández’s response to the thirteenth question in a hearing of 1589 about the legitimacy of Tuchcoyotzin’s rule over the nearby communities of the Valley surrounding Toluca: “[T]he lands where the Villa de Toluca stands at present, were lands that

25 Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España (Mexico City, 1967; orig. pub. c. 1587), II, 267–280; Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica Mexicana, 417–420. 26 Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua. René García-Castro—Indios, Territoria y Poder en la Provincia Matlatzinca, La Negiciación del Espacio Político de los Pueblos Otomianos, Siglos XV–XVII (México City, 1999), 56—assumes that these were noble houses inhabited by the recently arrived Mexica lineages, similar to those in the Mexico Basin belonging to a lesser category than the tecalli (pilcalli) that were given to kin of the ruling lord. See also “David contra Goliat: o de cómo la pequeña comunidad de San Mateo Atenco venció jurídicamente al gran Marquesado del Valle en los siglos XVI–XVII,” in idem and María Teresa Jarquín Ortega (eds.), La Proeza Historica De Un Pueblo: San Mateo Atenco En El Valle De Toluca. Siglos VIII–XIX (Mexico City, 2006). “Petición Española, 1594,” HJ, legajo 277, cuaderno no. 3, expediente 2, fol. 837r, agn; García-Castro, Indios, Territoria y Poder, 78.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 181 Axayacatl, King of Mexico, had taken for himself and ypilchan, that were for his royal house.” Eighty-year-old Andrés de Santa María repeated the same for- mula: “After he had pronounced himself the supreme lord [of this Valley], King Axayacatl appropriated for himself and as a ypilchan, meaning, ‘principal house,’ the lands and their distinct boundaries and boundary markers, as they were recognized up to the present and which are known as the ‘lands of Cacalomacan,’ and on these lands is today one of the communities by that name, Cacalomacan.”27 The second common verbal component in the testimony is in petlatl, in icpalli, a diphrasism in Nahuatl that refers to the throne and hence metaphorically to rulership. Diphrasisms are linguistic forms composed of two or more juxtaposed lexemes, the meaning of which is not derived from the sum of the parts but is altogether new. Petlatl, woven mats, were among the earliest symbols of power and authority in Mexico and other Mesoamerican cultures, dating back to the classic period (c. 300 c.e.). As metaphorical expressions and pictorial conventions, they appeared on monuments during the classic and postclassic periods. One pro-Marquesado witness, eighty-year-old Jerónimo Ramírez Quisan, said that in 1528, the Mexica inhabitants of the estancias of San Miguél and San Bartolomé Tlaltelolco were still paying their tributes directly to Tuchcoyotzin, and later to his son, not to the Aztec royal city of Tenochtitlan: “They were making petlatles and icpales for them, which are seats on which the rulers of this town used to sit in those days.” Thus, he provided conªrmation of the by-then consolidated rule of Tuchcoyotzin and his son, with the Marqués’ backing. The strategic mention of the mats was meant to solidify their claims to authority.28 This witness’ response to another question in the counter- interrogation concerning the suitability of Tuchcoyotzin’s rule suggests that the ceremonial offering of gifts at the Toluca rulers’

27 HJ, leg. 70, exp. 4, 1589, primera parte, fol. 38v; vol. 458, leg. 277, cuaderno 20, no. 3, fol. 33r, agn. 28 HJ, vol. 458, leg. 277, no. 2, fol. 854r, agn. Other examples of diphrasisms are yn tihuehue, in tiyllama (you elderly man, you elderly woman, meaning “ancestors”); in atl in tepetl (water, hill, meaning “city,”); in mitl yn chimalli (arrow and shield), in cueitl in huipilli (skirt, blouse, meaning “woman,”). For the utilization of metaphors and diphrasisms in Nahuatl, see Katarzyna Mikulska Dàbrowska, “Secret Language in Oral and Graphic Form: Religious- Magic Discourse in Aztec Speeches and Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition, XXV (2010), 325–363.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 182 | AMOS MEGGED feet, especially on feast days, to acknowledge their uncontested sovereignty. His point was that they recognized an old obligation of fealty to Tuchcoyotzin but that they owed nothing more in the way of tribute to the royal city. The Role of the Aztec Royal Granaries within the Cognitive Sche- mata The granaries entered the various testimonies as symbols of rightful jurisdiction. In a series of Audiencia hearings (1573/74) concerning the lawsuit between Atenco and the town of Toluca against Don Martín Enríquez, Viceroy of New Spain, indigenous Atenco delegates contested the allegations of Martín Cortés that Atenco had always been part of his inheritance. They maintained that their independent boundary markers had last been established in 1505, alongside the ªrst granaries that were formerly erected by Axayacatl on their territory: “They were working day and night, using torches to illuminate the area. Round, wooden quahuitl [pole; land measurement], ªve-meters tall [“a trés brazas”; braza ϭ 1.67 meters] were then erected on the sites. On top of each of these poles, the lords of each of the towns then tied, in accordance with the ancient Chichimeca custom, large, white, grass bundles (tlalpilli [“a bundle,” “a tangle of branches”]). Basalenque, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Matlatzinca vuelto a la Castellana (1640) contains the telling entry ni theumí (“the cord with which one ties”).29 Because the Matlatzinca-Toluca nobility regarded the Mazahua and Mexica peoples as ex-allies and vassals of the Tenochca subjugators, they treated them with disdain throughout the period following the Tenochca conquest of the Valley and later under the new Spanish rulers. Their tale of association with the Tenochca might was deeply ingrained in the cultural heritage of this Valley. Their witnesses recalled how the Ca-chimal dynasty, crowned by Axayacatl in Calixtlahuacan, had forsaken its local subjects and dependents and humiliated most of the Matlazintla nobility and priesthood. The overall cultural-cognitive schemata traceable within the witnesses’ testimony concerning this alliance is centered on the royal granaries (cuexcomatl), established in several

29 Escribanía de Cámara, 161a, (1576), fols. 304v–305v, agi. A Spanish deputy-Corregidor of Toluca was held in prison at that time for having induced the Indians of Toluca to provide false testimony regarding the presumed subjection of Atenco to Toluca. Escribanía de Cámara, 161a (1576), fols. 228v, 226v–227r; “El governador y pueblo de San Mateo Atenco, contra Hernando Cortés segundo Marqués del Valle...1576,” Escribanía de Cámara, 161a, 1576, fol. 228v, 226v–227r, agi; Basalenque, Arte y vocabulario.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 183 towns by Axayacatl of Tenochtitlan c. 1474/75, during the prelim- inary conquest of the area.30 Axayacatl erected for his allies in the Valley of Toluca twenty large granaries within the town of Atenco. He also nominated one of his dignitaries, a Mexica lord, as overseer (calpixqui), in charge of receiving, calculating, registering, and guarding the maize har- vested in the four plots in these granaries. The Atenco litigants described the calpixqui as assisted by locally assigned administrators. Axayacatl’s royal granaries often received mention far beyond the Valley of Toluca. In the Aztec version of “state” memory, granaries often served as gifts of condolence. Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, a Tenochca historian, wrote that Axayacatl gave wooden granaries in Atenco, Metepec, Tlacotepec, Tepamaxalco, Calimaya, and Tenango to his elder sister, Chalchiuhnenetzin, after her husband, Moquihuix, the ruler of Tlaltelolco, had had left her in rags, starving “by the grinding stones.”31 The wooden granaries also appear prominently in the witnesses’ testimony about the political, socio-economic, and ethnic power relations of subordination and dependence in the Valley before and after the Spanish conquest. Between 1589 and 1598, eleven of the twenty-eight ªrst-hand testimonies presented in the Audiencia concerning the lawsuit speciªcally mention these royal granaries as lieu de memoire. Furthermore, three of these witnesses, all around eighty years old, referred to Tuchcoyotzin’s burning of the royal granaries as, by far, the most memorable incident of those times. Although they do not provide an explanation for this act, it was clearly Tuchcoyotzin’s attempt to demonstrate his contempt for Aztec sovereignty and his alliance with the new Spanish rule.32 Another major witness, Diego Jacobo, told the court that he

30 “Conquest of Tlaltelolco,” in Codex Chimalpahin, II, 43–45. 31 Tezozomoc, Crónica Mexicayotl (Mexico City, 1975), 117–119. Compare Sahagún, Flor- entine Codex, Book 8, Chapter 17, 51–77, about what a good ruler did: “And if a lowly woman made bold to greet the ruler, he likewise granted and accorded her a shift, a skirt, a place for her to sleep, what she might drink and eat—grains of white maize, beans, and ama- ranth seed.” 32 We have solid afªrmation of this fact about the calpixqui in Pedro de Buena Ventura’s testimony of 1598, second part. The witness who was of Mexica descent still resided during the early 1540s in the barrio of San Bartolomé Tlatelolco near Toluca, but because of persistent harrassment from Tuchcoyotzin, he and four companions moved to Capuluac, where they were outside Toluca’s jurisdiction, and within what had presumably been a local Mexica “stronghold” since the Mexica calpixqui’s days. HJ, leg. 70, exp. 4, second part, fol. 4v; HJ, leg. 277, cuaderno No. 3, 7 October 1598; exp. 4, primera parte, fols. 30r–32v, agn.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 184 | AMOS MEGGED was present at the burning. He saw Tuchcoyotzin’s son, who, as Jacobo interpreted it, apparently orchestrated the act. Andrés de Santa María began his historical reconstruction of the events with the royal granaries in Capultitlan (Transªguración), which, he said, “were made of wood and crammed with supplies of maize when they were burned to the ground by the noble heirs and direct descendents of its founder, Ca-Chimaltzin of Calixtlahuaca.” Pedro de Gante, another witness, traced the burning of the granaries in yet another town in the lands of Cacalomacan to the year 1542, when he saw ªrsthand the inhabitants of Toluca who carried out the act. Distinguishing Time Spans in the Courtroom Testimony In his article about the nature of the Aztec codices, Navarrete claims to recognize “different chronotopes”: “Even within the Mexica codices, we can identify two clearly different chronotopes, that is, two different ways of organizing time and space. The ªrst chronotope corresponded to the migration period before the foun- dation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, while the second chronotope corresponded to what can be called the imperial period, after the foun- dation of that city, when the Mexica had a ruling dynasty and later became an imperial power.” In accord with Navarrete’s ªndings, the cognitive schemata within the courtroom testimony examined herein also evinces ªxed spatiotemporal patterns, closely related to traditional cycles of time and to major historical events that affected the entire area, especially certain towns, between 1474 and 1519.33 The encounter between, and subsequent conjunction of, the Aztec hegemonic tradition and its local variations is well attested in the court discourse. The consequences of the Mexica invasion on local power relations between the different towns and ruling ethnic states function as the basis for a cognitive interweaving of the Aztec and Spanish conquests, thus enabling the native population to plead and negotiate within a familiar frame of reference. Centering on particular historical episodes that had shaken as well as shaped the Valley before the Spanish conquest, such re-asserted formulae conªrmed and reconsolidated traditional oral/visual representations that refer to two distinct time spans, each serving a particular purpose. The ªrst time span covers the period between 1474 and 1490,

33 Navarrete, “Writing, Images, and Time-Space,” 177.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 185 when the Valley of Toluca came under the direct rule of the Aztec rulers—Axayacatl, his brother Ahuycotzin, and Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, Axayacatl’s son. The second period, between 1520 and 1551, begins with the powerful and symbolic baptism of Tuchcoyotzin at Calixtlahuaca by Cortés’ priests after which Tuchcoyotzin was re-instated as the local governor of Toluca. The ofªcial story tells of Gonzalo de Sandoval’s conquest of the prov- ince in 1521 aided by Otomi armies, followed by the arrival of the ªrst Spanish settlers and the submission of the nearby towns to the new rule centered in the Villa de Toluca. At this point, the narrative highlights the close historical similarity between Tuchcoyot- zin’s allegiance with the Spaniards in 1520 and the earlier decision of Ca-Chimaltzin, his grandfather, back in 1474, to side with Axayacatl. The ofªcial story continues with Tuchcoyotzin’s re- inforcement of law and order in the Valley and in its towns, leading to Cortés appointing him “overlord” of these lands. Then, in 1526, comes the founding of the ªrst Franciscan monastery on the out- skirts of Toluca, at a site facing Axayacatl’s former royal granaries (cuexcomatl), followed in 1542 by the burning of these granaries. The mass baptism of the entire population of the valley coincided with the founding of the new Villa of Toluca. This second epoch in the witnesses’ testimony culminates, symbolically, in 1551 with the dramatic denunciation of Tuch- coyotzin to the Franciscan friars at the Toluca monastery, presumably by his traditional foes in revenge for his family’s historic col- laboration with the Aztecs. The charges against Tuchcoyotzin were incest with his daughter and idolatry. The Franciscans took Tuchoyotzin away to Mexico City where he was detained at the Franciscan monastery, c. 1548, never to return.34 The charges against Tuchcoyotzin and the actions taken against him were likely the work of the Spanish Crown to rid the area of a thorn in its side. The great epidemics that ravaged the Val- ley between 1576 and 1581, and between 1595 and 1597, when the Toluca court proceedings were at their climax, provide an epitaph for this discourse. In 1598, three months before the last stage of the Toluca lawsuit re-opened in the Audiencia, Miguel García Me- rino, an alguazil de las sementeras (a steward in charge of day workers in the corn ªelds) near Toluca, and his grandson admitted their

34 HJ, legajo 277, cuaderno No. 1, fol. 41v, agn (testimony of Francisco de Santiago).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 186 | AMOS MEGGED guilt to the Spanish judges after being identiªed as instigators of unrest by some of the inhabitants of the towns where they posted a notice to solicit witnesses on behalf of the Spanish Crown. Diego de Los Angeles put them in stocks on the public plaza of Toluca and tortured them. The style of narration in this document clearly cherishes its Nahua characteristics, translated into Spanish but otherwise maintaining its original form of address. The confession and its public proclamation undoubtedly served Toluca’s endeavor to demonstrate that agents from Mexico City were directly responsible for the tension and subversion in the subject towns.35

This article about the Mexican colonial court of the Audiencia shows historians of the early modern era how to salvage “cognitive schemata” from court testimony. A deep reading of witnesses’ testimony uncovers distinctive speech formulas, nonverbal cues, and conceptual constructs that throw additional light on the intentions and goals, as well as the cultural predispositions, of communities and individuals.

35 In the same year as the Crown’s maneuvers against Tuchcoyotzin, as part of the litigation in the Audiencia by Doña Isabel Motecuzoma about her parental patrimony, sixty-year-old Pedro Izcuen, Tuchcoyotzin’s interpreter from Toluca, testiªed about Axayacatl’s possessions in the Valley of Toluca, inherited by Ahuitzotl until 1502, and therefore by Motecuzoma. Privilegios en lucha, la información de Doña Isabel Moctezuma (Mexico City, 1998), fol. 93r. García-Castro, Indios, territorio y poder, 194, fn. 53, cites a document stating that in 1555, Pedro Cortés, the cacique-governor of Toluca was granted 100 hanegas of maize from the common plot by the colonial regime to compensate him for his services. HJ, vol. 458, leg. 277, no. 2, ibid., fol 405v, agn: “Queja de Miguel García, Pedro de San Sebástian, Miguel de San Juan y José, 6/6/1598.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021