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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Nahuas at Independence: Indigenous Communities of the Metepec Area (Toluca Valley) in the First Decades of the Nineteenth Century A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Miriam Melton-Villanueva 2012 © Copyright by Miriam Melton-Villanueva 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Nahuas at Independence: Indigenous Communities of the Metepec Area (Toluca Valley) in the first decades of the nineteenth century by Miriam Melton-Villanueva Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor James Lockhart, Co-Chair Professor Kevin B. Terraciano, Co-Chair It had been believed that Nahuatl recordkeeping, the focus of a whole movement of central Mexican ethnohistory, had halted by 1800. The author then discovered a large cache of Nahuatl testaments from communities in the Metepec area in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the independence period. The present study, based on those materials, brings native- language ethnohistory a full generation forward in time and is the first to look at indigenous communities in the independence years from the inside. The continued production of Nahuatl testaments itself shows a cultural persistence; the content of the testaments shows most features of local life still operating much as before. The ii greatest surprise was that in the corpus women testators and property owners outnumber men, making up almost two-thirds of the total, thus reversing the traditional proportions. In chapters on writing, religious practices, the household complex, and non-household land, interrelated blocks of local sociocultural life are portrayed and analyzed against the background of Nahua life in previous centuries. Women are abundantly studied, and the role of the genders receives much attention through statistical comparisons and analysis of cases. Again the results are a surprise, for though women show evidence of a new prominence in matters of funeral rites, for the rest their role seems much as it had always been, and through their bequests they were well on the way to handing males their traditional predominance in property holding. The corpus contains collections from three communities that show micro-local dis- tinctions, featured in each of the chapters. Some of the testaments are in Spanish, which became predominant before 1830, but the texts are so dependent on Nahuatl phrases that they can be studied as part of the whole and show that the language transition at first had small effects on local culture. iii The dissertation of Miriam Melton-Villanueva is approved. Lauren Derby Claudia Parodi-Lewin John Pohl M.D. Teófilo F. Ruiz James Lockhart, Committee Co-Chair Kevin B. Terraciano, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv Dedicated to Lily Villanueva Rodríguez de Melton, my mother and in memory of Ronald Bryan Melton, my father en honra de todos nuestros antepasados v Table Of Contents List of Tables ix List of Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xii Vita xvii 1. INTRODUCTION 1 Metepec and the first steps with the documents 1 San Bartolomé 4 The corpus 12 The gender ratio 19 The historiographical context 22 The structure of this study 26 2. THE CULTURE OF WRITING: Testaments and Notaries at Independence 31 Nahuatl testament conventions and notaries 32 San Bartolomé 32 Yancuictlalpan 47 Ocotitlan 52 Testaments in Spanish 54 San Bartolomé 57 Yancuictlalpan 62 Ocotitlan 63 Totocuitlapilco 65 The Spanish testaments in perspective 66 Conclusion 67 3. LOCAL RELIGIOUS PRACTICES 69 Masses and responsory prayers 69 Women’s rites 70 Equivalent rites 73 “My priest” 74 Time 79 No rites, or rites in exchange 80 Burial traditions 83 Churchyard 83 Trees 87 Cardinal directions and family 89 Shroud 92 Bells 93 Household saints 97 Remembering the testator 107 Conclusion 110 vi 4. THE HOUSEHOLD COMPLEX: House and Solar 111 The House 113 San Bartolomé 114 Ocotitlan 121 Yancuictlalpan 122 A word on the household complex in the three localities 126 The Solar 127 San Bartolomé 128 Ocotitlan 130 Yancuictlalpan 132 A word on solares in general 134 Inheritance 134 San Bartolomé 135 Ocotitlan 144 Yancuictlalpan 146 Conclusions 148 5. NON-HOUSEHOLD LAND 151 San Bartolomé 152 Systems of measuring land 155 Traditional measurement in quahuitl 156 Measurement by grain sown 162 Measurement by money value 164 Location and description of lands 171 Saints and non-household land 176 Inheritance 178 Some other aspects of non-household land 183 Ocotitlan 185 Systems of measurement and sizes 186 Quahuitl 186 The fanega system 187 The reales system 190 Inheritance 192 Saints 195 Yancuictlalpan 196 Measurement and sizes of non-household land 197 Saints 199 Inheritance 200 Some conclusions 202 6. CONCLUSION 205 Research directions 210 A final word 220 vii Appendix 1. Lists of Testaments 221 1. San Bartolomé 221 2. Ocotitlan 225 3. Yancuictlalpan 226 4. Totocuitlapilco 226 Appendix 2. Notaries in the Corpus 227 1. San Bartolomé 227 2. Ocotitlan 228 3. Yancuictlalpan 228 4. Totocuitlapilco 228 Appendix 3. Sample Documents 229 1. Testament of Victoriana María, San Bartolomé, 1809 (Nahuatl) 230 2. Testament of Mariano Rafael, San Bartolomé, 1822 (Nahuatl) 234 3. Testament of Lugarda María, San Bartolomé, 1822 (Nahuatl) 240 4. Testament of Eleuteria Severiana, San Bartolomé, 1821 (Spanish) 245 5. Testament of Tiburcio Valentín, San Bartolomé, 1821 (Spanish) 249 6. Testament of Jacobo Santiago, Ocotitlan, 1810 (Nahuatl) 254 7. Testament of Feliciana Petrona, Ocotitlan, 1816 (Spanish) 258 8. Testament of Margarita María, Yancuictlalpan, 1810 (Nahuatl) 265 Bibliography 271 viii List of Tables Table 1.1. San Bartolomé Nahuatl Corpus Totals by Year and Gender of Testators 13 Table 1.2. San Bartolomé Spanish Corpus Totals by Year and Gender of Testators 15 Table 1.3. Yancuictlalpan Nahuatl and Spanish Corpus Totals by Year and Gender of Testators 16 Table 1.4. Ocotitlan Spanish and Nahuatl Corpus Totals by Year and Gender of Testators 17 Table 1.5. Totocuitlapilco Nahuatl and Spanish Wills by Year and Gender of Testators 18 Table 1.6. Nahuatl and Spanish-Language Wills in Four Altepetl 1799–1832 19 Table 1.7. Testator Totals by Gender In Four Altepetl 20 Table 3.1. San Bartolomé: Burial Naming Trees Grouped by Chronology 89 Table 3.2. Household Saints in the Present Corpus 100 Table 4.1. House and Solar in San Bartolomé 118 Table 4.2 House and Solar Owners, San Bartolomé 142 Table 4.3 House and Solar Inheritors, San Bartolomé Numerical Totals 143 Table 4.4 Gender of House and Solar Inheritors by Categories of Kinship, San Bartolomé 144 ix Table 4.5. House and Solar Inheritors, Ocotitlan 1809–1820 147 Table 5.1. Testator’s Portions of Non-household Land Valued in Reales, San Bartolomé 167 Table 5.2. Inheritor’s Portions of Non-household Land Valued in Reales, San Bartolomé 168 Table 5.3. Non-household Land Inheritance by Language and Gender in San Bartolomé Testaments 180 Table 5.4. Inheritance Patterns Compared San Bartolomé 181 Table 5.5. Sizes of Land in Ocotitlan 190 Table 5.6. Ocotitlan Multigenerational Inheritance, Non-household Land 193 Table 5.7. Non-household Land Inheritance Yancuictlalpan 201 x List Of Abbreviations TT Testaments of Toluca, ed. by Caterina Pizzigoni. sbt# Indicates a testament from San Bartolomé Tlatelolco. oco# Indicates a testament from Ocotitlan. yan# Indicates a testament from Yancuictlalpan. toto# Indicates a testament from Totocuitlapilco. The abbreviations for testaments are keyed to the lists of the corpus in Appendix 1. In the archive the documents are unorganized except for being in the same Caja; Appendix 1 contains a list for each community, giving each testament a number within that list. Thus in a footnote, sbt#89 means that one can find the document referred to in Appendix 1, in the list for San Bartolomé, where 89 will be seen to be a testament in Nahuatl issued in 1822 by Joaquín Benito and written by the notary Cipriano Gordiano. xi Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to UCLA’s intellectual lineage of Lockhart-Terraciano. I would not have become a historian were it not for the inspiration and support of my advisor Kevin Terraciano, whose research not only revealed the indigenous context of the Americas, but included women. Because I was studying Nahuatl in Chicano Studies, Kevin invited me to his weekly Nahuatl as Written workshop and suggested that I read The Nahuas After the Conquest. I never looked back: language became the window to times beyond memory. In this way I encountered James Lockhart not only as the father of a philological ethnohistory for early Mexico that guides us all, but soon after as a mentor who patiently allowed me to encounter my sources at my own level, during my various phases of growth as a scholar. From the time when I couldn’t understand a word of Tolucan Nahuatl, Jim believed in me. He took me under his wing, helping me to build an extensive corpus of transcriptions and translations, in which I didn’t really progress until I was done with coursework and could focus on it full time. In those early stages Jim had the foresight to invite me to seek out the help of Caterina Pizzigoni, who had already done much with Tolucan Nahuatl. This led to a natural collaboration. Chapter 2 and a portion of the introduction incorporate pages from my article (Ethnohistory 2008, Volume 55, Number 3: 361–91) written jointly with Caterina, who with her experience made a major contribution to it; and her Testaments of Toluca provided an indispensable eighteenth-century background for my work. Without Jim and Caterina’s partici- pation this extensive project would have been impossible. Skilled hands midwifed an empirical philological work by this humble story-teller without formal linguistics training.

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