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FAMSI © 2002: John Monaghan |
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The Indigenous Nobility and the Reinscription of Mesoamerican Codices Preliminary Findings Preliminary findings based on the research funded by FAMSI can be divided into four sections: The historical impact of the Villagómez family on Southern México. Information on Villagómez family genealogy has been published by Caso (1962; 1966) and Smith and Parmenter (1991). I also have in my possession a manuscript Villagómez genealogy produced by Mary Elizabeth Smith, who kindly sent it to me in response to a query (Smith, n.d.) A copy of a Villagómez family tree made by a member of the family was in the possession of the late Barbro Dahlgren (Caso, 1962). By using sources that have not been consulted by previous researchers, namely the baptismal, marriage and death records from the Mixteca microfilmed by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and deposited in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, I have been able to build on this earlier work. Preliminary analysis of this data reveals two areas of confusion surrounding the Villagómez family tree. First, by the late colonial period there were several different branches of the Villagómez living in the Mixteca region. The problem is that sometimes distinct branches are mixed together (as in Caso’s 1962 and 1966 genealogy) and sometimes family continuity is not recognized since a branch may be identified with surnames other than Villagómez (although family members would sometimes attach a grandparents or great-grandparents’ Villagómez surname to their own). My preliminary findings indicate that by the 1700s, two distinct cacicazgo lines developed, each using the Villagómez surname. One was based in Acatlán, Puebla, while the other was based in Suchitepec and Tequistepec, Oaxaca. By the eighteenth century, the Acatlán line split again, with one branch, later known by the Aja surname, based in Acatlán and Puebla City, with the other, using the Villagómez surname, based in the district of Silacayoapan, Oaxaca. In the nineteenth century, the Suchitepec Villagómez also divided, with one branch remaining centered in Suchitepec, and the other on holdings in Petlalcingo, Puebla area. In the late colonial period, the Acatlán Villagómez accumulated a wide array of properties, partly through direct inheritance and partly by asserting their genealogical connections to the heirs of cacicazgos who had not left direct descendants. This often involved drawn out court battles. The nature of the relationships between these various branches of the family await further investigation. A second area of confusion in the Villagómez family tree has been created by the fact that a number of Villagómez men were named Martín Carlos or Martín José, and were related as father-son, or grandfather-grandson, or uncle-nephew. Since they may have been alive at the same time, and since they hold many of the same properties and share residence, it is not always clear whom a given document is referring to. Moreover, since the second given name is sometimes not used in the documents, even more confusion is created. This is a crucial point and demands close examination, since the eighteenth century was the apogee of Villagómez power and influence, and it appears that discussions of the Villagómez have conflated the actions of distinct individuals. The fact that we can trace Villagómez family connections from the present day back to the ancestors who lived hundreds of years before the conquest raises the question of whether or not the Villagómez were aware of their long and distinguished pedigree. Evidence suggests that they were. In the 1860s, one of the Ajas (either Sabino or Leonardo, members of the Acatlán Villagómez branch of the family), was able to assert he was related to an early ruler named Carlos de Austria, whose Precolumbian name was probably Ya cua (Monaghan, n.d.). Also, one Villagómez family member, a priest named Uriel Villagómez Amador, of the Suchitepec Villagómez, created his own genealogy, that was apparently quite deep (Caso, 1962). The memory of ancient ancestry is related to the strategic use of genealogical information in the colonial period. The institution of the cacicazgo, which, in Spanish jurisprudence, was a type of entailment (or mayorazgo), specified that property and titles were to be handed down in a single line of descent, and these properties could not be alienated from the family. This was designed to preserve family lines by making unbroken pedigrees necessary to access wealth. Members of the indigenous nobility would go through the legal proceedings to acquire entailments, and some even designed their own coats of arms. The close association of wealth with descent in the entail was such that the direct family connections asserted by individuals in probate and other records seeking to establish their rights to property sometimes do not match the information recorded for them in their earlier, baptismal records, which show instead that their connections were less direct. But even though the institution of the entailed estate provided an underpinning for a developed ideology of descent, the fact that Villagómez family members could assert connections to specific individuals separated from them four hundred years who can tentatively be independently identified from other sources, indicates that they had access to a corpus of documents dating from the early colonial and Precolumbian periods, and moreover, they were aware of, and even proud of their indigenous heritage, since many of these assertions came after the entailed estate was abolished by Mexican law. Villagómez Family Properties in the Nineteenth Century. The following is a list of Villagómez properties, including the dates these properties were alienated, and the name of the seller or the last Villagómez to hold title. This information is important since it aids in tracking the origin of pictorial manuscripts (see the discussion of the Colombino-Becker below). Properties are listed as towns and hamlets, whose inhabitants paid the Villagómez rents. The Villagómez would also rent lands to ranchers and would sometimes exploit favored agricultural areas directly, such as the sugar hacienda of Tianguistengo and Rancho de Ramales, Puebla. Although many Villagómez properties were sold in the Nineteenth century, the family also sold properties during the colonial period. For example, in 1632 Gregorio de Villagómez sold cattle ranches in Puebla. However the vast majority of sales took place in the Nineteenth century, after the entail was abolished by the Mexican state (see below). The last of the large Villagómez holdings were expropriated in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Aja Villagómez (Acatlán):
Silacayoapan Villagómez
Suchitepec Villagómez
Petlalcingo Villagómez These properties roughly total 60,000 hectares. The Villagómez Collection of Mixtec Manuscripts. One of the most interesting aspects of Villagómez family history is their collection of illuminated manuscripts. Moreover, while some of these manuscripts were in their possession, they were annotated and altered in important ways. Villagómez family members were also key players in the transfer of these manuscripts to European collectors, to national museums and to farming communities in the Mixteca. We thus have a unique opportunity to understand the processes by which manuscripts written in the native style were conserved and changed during the colonial and early national periods. The following manuscripts can be historically documented as belonging to Villagómez family members, in several cases as late as the second half of the nineteenth century:
Codex Colombino-Becker (Becker portion).
Codex Tulane.
Mapa de Xochitepec. The following manuscripts may have been owned by Villagómez family members. Each of them appeared in Puebla City in the mid-Nineteenth century, just like the Becker portion of the Colombino Becker and the Mapa de Xochitepec, and several are associated with Villagómez properties.
Codex Dehesa.
Colombino portion of the Colombino-Becker.
Codex of Yanhuitlán.
Codex Becker II, Vienna portion. Why would the Villagómez have given up these rare manuscripts? In the first half of the nineteenth century Codices such as the Colombino-Becker had not yet become art objects. Rather they were viewed as ancient supports for land claims. With this in mind there appears to have been three ways that these documents left the hands of the Villagómez. First, even though most of the Mixteca is in Oaxaca, the region straddles Puebla and Guerrero, and people in general had stronger ties to the large and dynamic city of Puebla than to the smaller and less developed City of Oaxaca. Many of the regional elites maintained houses in Puebla City, they sent their children to school there, and some even made Puebla their principal residence. The Villagómez were no exception. Petra Aja, for example, rarely if ever left Puebla City to visit the Mixteca, and her mother, Alejandra Villagómez, was wed in Puebla City. All the manuscripts listed above appeared in Puebla in the nineteenth century. Moreover, many of these end up in the hands of Puebla City lawyers, who often sold them to collectors. The first path these documents traveled thus appears to be from the Villagómez, to Puebla City lawyers, to collectors. Lawyers would have had access to these documents since they were the ones who represented the Villagómez in land disputes and in the sale of properties. Records indicate that the Villagómez deposited documents with their attorneys, and that the family (as is true of farming communities and others) often had trouble recovering documents once litigation ended. It may be that the lawyers knew there was a market for these documents among European collectors and later museums, and either with the permission of the family, or on their own, sold the manuscripts, perhaps even as a way of recovering legal fees. It is doubtful that a family such as the Aja Villagómez would have simply "given" the documents to their lawyers, or would have been unaware of their significance, especially a man such as Leonardo Aja (who probably owned the Becker portion of the Colombino-Becker). Leonardo Aja was an urbane, sophisticated individual who occupied a very important position in the Puebla State government. A second path these documents may have traveled could have been a more direct sale by cacique families to collectors, with lawyers possibly serving as intermediaries. Many cacique families fell on hard times in the nineteenth century. Although social unrest, war, economic downturns, the high cost of litigation and mismanagement all played a role, a key factor in this distress was the abolishment of the entail in the 1830s. When this occurred, cacique families such as the Suchitepec Villagómez began to divide family assets evenly among heirs, instead of transferring the entailed assets to one individual. The Suchitepec Villagómez were prolific in the late colonial to the twentieth century, averaging six adult children per generation. As the considerable assets controlled by this branch of the family were divided and subdivided with the passing generations, by the early twentieth century the Villagómez descendants held very small plots of land, almost indistinguishable from the amounts held by the descendants of their cacicazgo’s tenants. There was thus a strong economic motivation to sell anything of value, and documents such as the Mapa of Suchitepec could have fetched a good sum for a family member farming a small plot of land or working as a tailor in Huajuapan de León. The third way these documents appear to have left the control of the Villagómez has to do with their steady sale of lands in the nineteenth century. In the colonial period and the nineteenth century the transfer of land was accompanied by a transfer of documents that support a title. Even in the case of the sale of relatively small ranches, the seller might turn over to the buyer a land-grant document that is hundreds of years old. Pictorials and maps, which were legal documents supporting title, were also turned over. This is one of the principal reasons why so many farming communities end up with pictorial documents that were originally made for the nobility. By buying cacique land, they also acquired the cacique titles. Private individuals, such as Spanish immigrants to the Mixteca in the nineteenth century who bought up many cacicazgo properties, could also have ended up with manuscripts, which they either kept or transferred. The Historical Impact of the Villagómez Family in Southern México. Beginning as early as the late eighteenth century cacique families sold properties to investors and communities of tenant farmers. Although the whole idea behind entailed estates was that they would preserve a noble line by prohibiting their alienation, caciques were able to petition the colonial government to alienate it in the case of need, usually to pay off debts. Also colonial officials simply looked the other way when such sales took place (Taylor, 1972). Finally caciques often had some property that was not covered by an entail which could be sold or left to others besides direct descendants. After Mexican Independence and the coming to power of the first Liberal governments, the entail was legally abolished. From this point on the sale of cacique property steadily increased, and the actual transactions are well documented. In the 1830s there were three in the Mixteca, in the 1840s there were six, in the 1850s there were nine, in the 1860s there were twenty-five. All told, by 1954, there were sixty-two documented sales of land by cacique families to farmers in the Mixteca. The Villagómez accounted for many of these sales. The Aja Villagómez are responsible for the largest number of transactions, since they held the most land. Between 1838 and 1868 they made at least thirteen sales, nine to farming towns and four to individuals. One consequence of this was that by the 1930s, when the agrarian reform was implemented and all large properties in the region were expropriated and redistributed, the Aja Villagómez no longer had significant holdings in Acatlán, the Suchitepec Villagómez owned around 5000 hectares in Suchitepec, and the Petlalcingo Villagómez owned a few thousand hectares around Saltrillo, Puebla. At this point it is not clear to me how much land the Silacayoapn Villagómez managed to conserve. Taken together, the sales of properties by the Villagómez, along with sales by other cacique families, represents a massive transfer of land, and if we add all them together we reach a figure somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 hectares. To put this into some perspective, during the first twenty-three years of the Agrarian reform, including the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas, 725,000 hectares were redistributed in the ejido program for the entire state of Oaxaca (Arellanes Meixueiro, 1999). So a substantial land redistribution had been going on in the Mixteca long before the Revolution, and it had been taking place through the mechanism of the market. Caciques sold to two social groups. On the one hand they sold to a new class of entrepreneur, often immigrants from Spain, who aimed to establish large scale agro-industrial enterprises on their new estates (such as sugar haciendas and massive goat-herding operations), but who often continued the same rental arrangements as previous cacique owners. On the other hand, caciques sold their properties to former tenants, who joined together in what has been characterized as a kind of joint-stock company, or sociedad agrícola, to make the purchase. Each member of the sociedad would contribute to the enterprise, and then receive shares in proportion to the amount they contributed. Since they were often not able to come up with the entire purchase price, they would mortgage the property, often to the cacique. This process thus turned thousands of landless tenants into property owners. The consequences of this cannot be underestimated. Not only did it relieve the agrarian pressures that caused so much havoc in México in the first half of the twentieth century, and create new forms of peasant social organization, but it also created a large group of small property owners, who were among the first to mount a successful electoral challenge to the Institutional Revolutionary Party in southern México. This began in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the Agrarian reform Secretariat attempted to collectivize small holder properties. To this day the Mixteca, particularly the Mixteca Baja, is one of the few rural regions in México that consistently supports the conservative National Action Party (PAN). |
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