The Textual Surveys of New Spain, 1520S–1620S
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Louisiana State University Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons Faculty Publications Department of Geography & Anthropology 2011 How incipient colonies create territory: The ext tual surveys of New Spain, 1520s–1620s Andrew Sluyter Louisiana State University, [email protected] Richard Hunter Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/geoanth_pubs Recommended Citation Sluyter, Andrew and Hunter, Richard, "How incipient colonies create territory: The ext tual surveys of New Spain, 1520s–1620s" (2011). Faculty Publications. 22. http://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/geoanth_pubs/22 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Geography & Anthropology at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 288e299 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg How incipient colonies create territory: the textual surveys of New Spain, 1520se1620s Richard Hunter a,* and Andrew Sluyter b a Geography Department, State University of New York College at Cortland, 138 Old Main, Cortland, NY 13045-0900, United States b Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 227 Howe-Russell Geoscience Complex, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-4105, United States Abstract The study of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism because of the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form part of the process through which territory comes into being. While many studies have therefore focused on the history of instrumental surveying and cartography in New Spain, roughly equivalent to present-day Mexico, between the seventeenth and twentieth century, the textual surveys of the sixteenth century that helped to bring the initial colonial territory into being have gone largely unstudied. Content analysis of textual land surveys included in sixteenth-century viceregal land grants for sheep and cattle ranches demonstrates variation in references to distance, direction, and borders that begins to reveal a process of negotiation among local actors and centralized state power that was contingent on environmental, economic, and demographic differences between highland and lowland landscapes. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Mexico; Colonial period; Territory; Land surveying; Ranching; Content analysis With the recognition that land surveys and maps not only among local actors, centralized state power, and specific represent territory but form ‘part of the process by which terri- landscapes.4 tory becomes,’ the effort to understand the emergence of colonial Recent research on colonial New Spain, now Mexico, has raised surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the questions about how that process might have operated during the history of European colonialism.1 In general, surveyors employed first century of colonization. The use of instruments to survey land their specialized training in the use of instruments such and associated cadastral cartography emerged only in the 1630s, as transits and compasses to take field measurements and about a century after Hernán Cortés and the other conquistadors convert them into cadastral and smaller-scale maps that made established the colony.5 Moreover, surveying went into decline in territory ‘legible’ to the colonial administration.2 The boundaries the first half of the nineteenth century, shortly after Mexico became surveyors established, both abstractly on paper and concretely on politically independent from Spain. A variety of factors contributed the landscape with posts and other monuments, enabled ‘places to that late start and sudden decline, including the high cost of to appear and be named’ so that settlers could establish who and surveying, the latent boundary disputes that surveying tended to where they were: ‘the act of settling was not a matter of marking antagonize rather than resolve, and the upheaval of the revolu- out pre-existing boundaries, but one of establishing symbolic tionary war in the 1810s and its aftermath. Meanwhile, research on enclosures.’3 As a social process that helped colonial territory land use during the Early Colonial Period (1521e1620) has revealed come into being, surveying modulated the complex interactions that despite the late start of instrumental surveying, the Spaniards * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Hunter), [email protected] (A. Sluyter). 1 J.B. Harley, Rereading the maps of the Columbian encounter, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992) 522e536. 2 J.C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, 1998. 3 P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Essay in Spatial History, London, 1987, 158, 168. 4 R.B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: a History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, Durham, 2004; J. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London, 1996, 158. 5 M. Aguilar-Robledo, Contested terrain: the rise and decline of surveying in New Spain, 1500e1800, Journal of Latin American Geography 8 (2009) 23e47. 0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2011.01.005 R. Hunter, A. Sluyter / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 288e299 289 were nonetheless able to distribute much land during the first The Mercedes Section of the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) century of colonization.6 in Mexico City preserves the vast majority of the mercedes of New While many aspects of surveying and cadastral cartography Spain.12 When those textual surveys proved inadequate to prevent during the seventeenth through twentieth century have received boundary disputes, the courts sometimes ordered a cartographic attention, the sixteenth-century surveying that helped to bring rendering to better understand the dispute and reach a verdict.13 the initial colonial territory into being has gone largely unstudied The Tierras Section of the AGN preserves many of those maps and and remains only generally understood.7 Spaniards and, to other court documents. The research that has drawn on those a lesser extent, native communities received viceregal land documents thus far has mainly used them to understand early- grants known as mercedes for sheep ranches (sitio de estancia colonial land use and its environmental consequences.14 None of para ganado menor, hereafter sheep estancia) and cattle ranches those studies has focused specifically on understanding the actual (sitio de estancia para ganado mayor, hereafter cattle estancia). act of surveying involved in the emergence of colonial landscapes They also received mercedes for farmland, lime kiln sites, inns, compartmentalized into plots linked to the identities of specific and other land uses. In general, the viceregal government settlers. brought those land parcels into being within the larger colonial The study of sixteenth-century surveying must employ territory by relying on non-specialized local officers who different methods than those appropriate to the study of the inspected each land grant and produced a textual survey of its instrumental surveying that began in the 1630s. Studies of the location. Those incipient surveyors did not require specialized later period can examine a suite of instruments such as training in geometry, use of instruments such as transits and compasses and transits, instruction manuals, professional compasses, or translation of field measurements into cadastral schools, and cartographic techniques.15 An investigation into the maps. Instead, the general skills involved included an ability to earliest period of surveying must, in contrast, execute a textual read the landscape, estimate distance and direction, and write analysis of the mercedes. Such content analysis of the texts of the survey report. a large number of mercedes for estancias should reveal patterns Similar, and similarly understudied, phases of textual surveying that demonstrate how surveying varied in relation to environ- are evident during the colonization of other parts of the Americas mental differences such as highland versus lowland, economic by the Spaniards, French, and British during the sixteenth through differences such as sheep versus cattle ranching, and demo- eighteenth centuries. The land grants made at the founding of graphic differences such as dense native settlement versus sparse Buenos Aires in 1580 and for half a century thereafter relied on native settlement.16 While viceroys issued colony-wide ordi- textual descriptions.8 Land grants in Louisiana during the French nances as if such variations were immaterial, other studies have period include textual surveys similar to those of New Spain; not demonstrated their impacts on the construction of colonial until the Spanish period, in the late eighteenth century, do territory, as in the case of the coastal lowlands versus the Andean instrumental surveys and property maps begin to appear.9 The highlands of the Viceroyalty of Granada, now Colombia.17 Such same situation prevailed in British colonies such as Virginia and variations begin to reveal the interactions between bureaucrats Jamaica during