TAXING BLACKNESS: TRIBUTE AND FREE-COLORED COMMUNITY IN COLONIAL MEXICO by Norah Linda Andrews A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May, 2014 Abstract Royal tribute from free people of African descent, though an insignificant source of revenue for the Spanish Crown, defined community, family, and reputation (calidad) for the purposes of the colonial regime in eighteenth-century Mexico. “Taxing Blackness” uses royal tribute registers to show how bureaucrats and local officials delineated communities around shared financial obligations. By defining tributaries in relation to one another—as spouses, children, or neighbors—bureaucrats used tributary status to distinguish free-colored communities and genealogies from those of Spaniards, Indians, or other people of mixed ancestry. In theory, these methods would lead to more efficient collection, though this goal proved elusive. The dissertation compares these quantitative data with petitions from free-coloreds for tribute exemption in which individuals and families interpreted and deployed ideas about lineage and privilege to improve their economic lives and reputations. This approach peels away the layers of meaning in calidad, a description of reputation ubiquitous in the eighteenth century. This dissertation finds that the majority of free-colored tributaries were people with families whose livelihoods and reputations depended upon satisfying colonial obligations, including royal tribute. Genealogy, privilege, and calidad characterized tributary subjecthood in the eighteenth century. Readers: Ben Vinson, III, Gabriel Paquette, Sara Castro-Klarén, Franklin Knight, and María Portuondo ii Preface My interest in Afromexico began in Mérida, Yucatán, in the bookstore of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in 2006. I was studying abroad as a junior at Wesleyan University and was considering possible senior thesis topics. I picked up Melchor Campos García’s Castas, feligresía y ciudadanía en Yucatán: Los afromestizos bajo el régimen constitucional español, 1750-1822, published by the university in 2005. Until then, I did not know anything about the history of Africans and their descendants in Mexico. I took that book to the beach town of Tulum in Quintana Roo, where I read it in a hammock. Under the direction of Ann Wightman, I turned this chance meeting with Afromexican history into a senior thesis on the marriage choices of free-coloreds. Research for my senior thesis, “Marriage Patterns among Afromestizos in Mérida and Campeche from 1789 to 1822,” led me to the work of Ben Vinson, III. His scholarship inspired me to continue to investigate the opportunities—as well as the restrictions—for free-coloreds to define themselves within an oppressive colonial regime. In graduate school, I have truly enjoyed the archival approach to Afromexican history my adviser has taught me, as well as our countless fruitful discussions on this topic. This dissertation has benefitted from many members of my intellectual community. I thank my adviser Gabriel Paquette for his enthusiasm for and dedication to my development as a scholar. I have had the invaluable opportunity to learn from my teachers and mentors in graduate school, including Sara Berry, Richard Kagan, Franklin iii Knight, and Philip Morgan. Finally, I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their attention to my work. My archival research in Mexico and Spain would not have been possible without the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the form of a Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources through The Council on Library and Information Resources. I also received travel grants for pre-dissertation work in Mexico City from the Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins. I am also grateful for the George and Sylvia Kagan Graduate Fellowship from Johns Hopkins. My colleagues in Latin American history, Atlantic history, and Gender history have contributed their fresh ideas, thoughtful critiques, and time to my dissertation. I have gained insight from members of the Latin American History Workshop and the Gender History Workshop at Johns Hopkins, as well as the TePaske Seminar in Colonial Latin American History. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues Linda Braun, Will Brown, Cathleen Carris, and Joe Clark for their suggestions. My family has helped me become the kind of scholar and person I want to be. I am thankful for the support of my mother Charron and my brother David during graduate school. I thank my father William for setting examples of excellence and purpose in scholarship. Over the years, some people have observed that my work has commonalities with that of my father. I consider this very high praise. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Preface iii List of Tables vi List of Figures and Maps vii Introduction. Privilege and Obligation 1 Chapter 1. Loyalty, Tribute, and Calidad on the Near-Northern Frontier 36 Chapter 2. Free-colored Tributary Status and Procedure in Central Mexico 69 Chapter 3. Mapping Community on the Free-colored Tribute Register 113 Chapter 4. Imperial Knowledge and the Expansion of Tribute, 1768-1807 152 Chapter 5. “He Did Not Share at All in Our Blood”: Lineage and Disputed Tributary Status 197 Conclusion 224 Appendices 238 Bibliography 241 Biography 258 v List of Tables 1 Free-colored Tribute Payments in San Luis Potosí for 1653-4, 1689-90, 55 1692-3 2 Free-coloreds and Indians in the Jurisdiction of San Luis Potosí, 1711 61 3 Combined Free-colored and Laborío Tribute Collected in Acatlán and 97 Piastla for the years 1739 to 1743 4 Free-colored Tribute in Acatlán and Piastla, 1737-1743 98 5 Number of Individuals on Tribute Registers by Caste, 1739-1743 99 6 Marital Statuses of Tributary and Exempt Castes, 1739-1743 101 7 Rates of Population Change, 1739-1743 101 8 Repeated Registration, 1739-1743 103 9 Repetition of Tributary Names Across Five Registers, 1739-1743 104 10 Repeated Records as a Percent of Total Endogamous and Exogamous 106 Couples 11 Caste Fluctuation in Three Couples, 1739-1743 107 12 Marriage Patterns among Caste-constant Couples, 1739-1743 108 13 Phrases Relating Free-coloreds by Blood, 1774-1807 115 14 Organization of Eighteen Tribute Registers 124 15 Spatial Distribution of Heads of Households 158 16 Gender Distribution of Households in Rural and Urban Areas 160 17 Castes of Exogamous Partners 162 18 Distribution of Exogamous and Endogamous Marriages by Register 163 19 Non-mulato Free-coloreds and Marital Partners 171 20 Children in Female-headed Households 174 21 Indian and Mulato Tributaries, 1769-1788 188 22 Free-coloreds as a Percentage of Total Tributaries in 1788 189 23 Free-colored Tributaries in Eight Jurisdictions, 1769-1788 190 24 Total Charged from All Tributaries in Pesos, 1768-1788 191 25 Estimated Payments from Mulatos, 1768-1777 192 26 Free-colored Tributaries as Percent of Total Tributaries in 1794 and 1805 193 vi List of Figures and Maps Map 1 Locations of Case Studies Examined in Chapter 2 71 Figure 1 Formulario de las Matrículas de Tributarios 150 Figure 2 A selection from a 1786 register from Aguatlán using an alternate grid 151 Figure 3 Selection from the “Estado general” from the Provincia de México 195 Figure 4 Selection from the “Estado general” from the Provincia de México. 196 vii Introduction: Privilege and Obligation This dissertation examines the late-colonial characteristics of a tax on free-colored subjects levied between 1572 and 1810 in Mexico. The royal tribute that colonial authorities collected from free people of African descent, though an insignificant source of revenue, indicated the presence of communities and families. The tribute regime tracked free-colored social structures and local economic networks as potential sources of colonial wealth and knowledge. Where tributary identities crystallized, colonial administrators could draw free-coloreds into a system of taxation based on their connections with other tributaries. Free-coloreds, in turn, defined themselves in relation to tribute, either as taxpayers with property and families, or as exempt by virtue of their service or privilege. From the late-sixteenth century onward, people of African descent in New Spain would provide more royal tribute than free-coloreds in other parts of the Spanish Empire. By the eighteenth century, colonial authorities and ordinary people had begun to rely on markers of tributary status in discussions of free-colored social positions and obligations in colonial Mexico. Tribute registers, combined with the instructions for their creation, were a kind of official reference book about Afromexican calidad in the eighteenth century. The men who created lists of tributary families had, for centuries, situated free-colored individuals and how they supposedly lived and associated with others in their communities.1 Bourbon administrators wanted to know who lived together in order to count tributary 1 Philip II issued a decree in 1577 calling for a free-colored tribute register “with their names and people with whom they live.” See Libro VII, Título V, Ley III, in Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 4 vols. (Madrid, Julián de Paredes, 1681; Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1973). 1 units and certify calidad at the local level. Registers mapped kinship and family relationships as part of an administrative “management of reality.”2 Distilling complex social ties and local hierarchies required a heightened Bourbon administrative offensive. The result was a nascent method of formalizing knowledge in the second half of the eighteenth century. The proliferation of tribute registers, and especially their translation into printed grids, was part of a larger process in which states placed increasing value on numbers. In the sphere of Atlantic administration, in particular, the efficiency of data collection, the centrality of numeracy, and the need for visual representations such as charts were on the rise at the turn of the nineteenth century.3 For peninsular and colonial administrators, seeing tribute through a grid, chart, or table (mapa) fundamentally changed the portrait of tributary community.