"El Estricto Apego a la Ley": Liberal Law and Communal Rights in Porfirian Patzcuaro William Roseberry Department of Anthropology New School for Social Research New York, New York USA Not for citation. This is a rough draft of a first attempt to make sense of some material I am still gathering, some of which I am just beginning to analyze. The material will change; the argument may change. Please. Paper prepared for the 1998 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Chicago 1 "El Estricto Apego a la Ley": Liberal Law and Communal Rights in Porfirian Patzcuaro William Roseberry New School for Social Research In this paper, I explore some of the legal dimensions of liberal law and procedure in late nineteenth century Mexico, especially with regard to the status of indigenous communities and collective rights. I am in the early stages of research on the local structuring and consequences of the nineteenth century liberal reforms in Patzcuaro, Michoacan.1 By liberal reforms I do not refer 1 In physical terms, the Patzcuaro region is defined by a large lake in the highlands of Michoacan and the pueblos along its shores and on its islands. This is an ethnically complex region of Purepecha indigenous communities, mestizo towns and ranchos and a few haciendas. In the lake basin itself, indigenous pueblos were numerous and relatively close to each other, competing for land, forest, and pasture with other pueblos and medium-sized haciendas, which themselves dated from the early colonial period. At the start of the reforms, an agricultural economy was devoted primarily to grain and livestock production for local and regional markets, and indigenous pueblos developed craft specializations for the same markets. The relatively flat lands around the lake were also the centers of Spanish and mestizo settlement and commercial and administrative power. The mountains surrounding the basin, and especially to the south and west into the Tarascan meseta, were relatively remote, wooded, wild places (that is, not subject to routine state administration), home both to indigenous pueblos and the few large haciendas in the region. I should say something about my definition of Patzcuaro as a region. Politically, the Patzcuaro District included most of the area just described (plus Zacapu, which falls outside the region as defined here; minus some of the towns along the northern and eastern shores of the lake [San Andres, San Jeronimo, Santa Fe, and Quiroga, though boundaries and designations changed -- for example Tzintzuntzan was sometimes included as a dependency of Quiroga and sometimes as a municipality within Patzcuaro District], which were part of Morelia District for much of the period). Socially and economically, there are a variety of forms of slippage that make straightforward definition difficult. First, a number of villages along the lake developed close relations, and controlled resources, in the highlands, especially those to the south, west, and north. The highland communities of Opopeo, Santa Clara, Zirahuen, Huiramangaro, San Juan Tumbio, and Pichataro were included in the Patzcuaro District, and entered into relations with lakeside communities and with highland haciendas owned by residents of Patzcuaro (and more distant cities). But they also bordered other highland towns such as Nahuatzen and Sevina that were part of Uruapan District. The most important town in the region, Patzcuaro, to the south of the Lake, exercised greatest influence on those pueblos closest to Patzcuaro. Quiroga to the northeast could easily fall within the sphere of influence of Morelia, the state capital. The pueblos on the north and west shores of the lake could be drawn into the orbit of Zacapu, and so on. For the present, I define the region to include the Lake and the surrounding ranchos and haciendas, including some extension to the highlands, especially to the south and west, and the flatlands to the east. This is roughly congruent with the political boundaries of the Patzcuaro District, which in 1864 included the municipalities of Patzcuaro, Erongaricuaro, Santa Clara, Zinzunzan, Zacapu, 2 solely to the Reforma itself but to a complex series of legal initiatives, both federal and state, across the nineteenth century, culminating in a series of proceedures and processes that formally abolished collective rights and identities by the 1880s. The laws were designed to abolish corporate forms of landed property (e.g., Church holdings and land held collectively by indigenous communities), to abolish the vestiges of corporate privileges and monopolies (fueros) and estamental hierarchies created during the colonial period, and to create a nation of formally equal citizens. These reforms were intertwined: the elimination of indigenous community landholding was intimately connected with the elimination of indigenous identity (as a status within an estamental hierarchy) and the formation of citizens. Minimally, as a state project, then, the liberal reforms were intended to abolish ethnic (and other) forms of community and introduce a state community of (individual) citizens, based on private forms of landed property. Ideally, the estamental hierarchy would give way to a class hierarchy, and ethnic communities might make way for the national community. Setting aside the land question for the moment, and concentrating on the more cultural and political dimensions of these changes, we see dimensions that were not simply a "state project" but were intimately connected with the formation of both state and nation, dimensions that appealed to indigenous and nonindigenous villagers and attracted popular support. This popular liberalism, which involved the rejection of colonial monopolies and caste divisions and postulated the formal equality of citizens before the emerging state, has recently received considerable attention. But the formal equality of citizens was inseparable from the land question. The abolition of the indigena as a caste and of indigenous communities as separate corporations and republicas under protectionist control and owing special tribute required the introduction of new forms of property within communities. But communities were differentiated entities at the end of the colonial period, and differently situated individuals and unequal stakes in both the privatization of lands and the establishment of equal rights under the law. The land question was intimately connected with cultural and political questions, in ways I explore here. and Cocupao (later Quiroga, which was subsequently included in the Morelia District [Archivo Historico de la Ciudad de Patzcuaro {AHCP} caja 100-C, exp. 6]). For practical purposes, I drop Zacapu from my definition of the region and include Quiroga. 3 In this essay, I examine the problem of collective identities and rights under liberal law, or under a set of rules and procedures that would deny the collective status of any group of citizens. By the the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the complex of distinct reforms had come together and could be seen to have been consolidated: indigenous communities no longer existed as juridical entities and lacked legal standing before the courts; communal forms of landholding had been abolished and indigenous communities were under unambiguous orders to divide, survey, and register their holdings as individually owned pieces of property (a process known as reparto); and individuals and communities who might once have identified themselves in public documents as indigenas or comunidades indigenas now referred to themselves as ex-indigenas or an ex-comunidad or extinguida comunidad indigena. More commonly or routinely, they referred to themselves as vecinos of a particular pueblo or as ciudadanos. As indicated, some of these changes of status and language were welcomed and advocated by indigenous and nonindigenous villagers in various parts of Mexico. My concern here is the relationship between changing notions of individual and collective status and a process of privatization. The reader will note that I have been inconsistent: I have said that communities no longer existed as juridical entities, yet I have continued to use the word "community" in describing the general situation. This is precisely the problem and paradox I wish to explore here. Formally, the communities were abolished; practically and substantively, they continued to exist as landholding entities throughout the Porfiriato. Repartos were piecemeal and contested; most were not finalized until the first decade of this century, and some were still in process at the outbreak of the Revolution. In an attempt to make some sense of this paradox, I will explore two broad issues. First, I examine the formal and substantive dimensions of legal process in Patzcuaro -- the many gaps that existed between legal precept and legal practice. Second, I consider some dimensions of the repartos themselves -- the resources available to state actors imposing repartos, strategies used by community representatives to defend community resources, and the points of rupture within communities that the repartos sometimes exposed. Before entering into a discussion of these more general issues, three are three preliminary problems that require review. First, since the title of this session is "Conflictos etnicos locales y rucursos juridicos en Mexico," I need to indicate the ways in which the conflicts that characterized this period were -- and were not -- "ethnic." Second, I discuss the structure and status of indigenous