The Bureaucratic Conquest of the Mixe of Villa Alta

This paper asks how the Spanish Crown “conquered” and dominated an indigenous group – the Mixe of the colonial district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca – without military conquest. Most scholars of the region acknowledge that the mystery of the “bloodless conquest” of the Mixe lies in part in the Dominicans' spiritual incursion into the region. What has been less studied is a process of bureaucratic/administrative control of the Mixe region facilitated by the use of Nahuatl, the language of Central Mexico and the official lingua franca of New Spain during the early colonial period. Dominicans were purveyors of Nahuatl. But so too were the Indian conquistadors of Villa Alta, Central Mexican indigenous allies of the region's Spanish conquerors. My paper focuses on the career of Joseph Ramos, a descendant of the Indian conquistadors, and the first “indigenous” Interpreter General of the district. Ramos served in the post from 1685-1709. As a descendant of Indian conquistadors, Nahuatl was his mother tongue, and he was the interpreter of choice for dealings with the Mixe (whose language was Mixe). Court documents reveal that Mixe municipal officials used spoken Nahuatl to communicate with Spaniards, and Mixe scribes used written Nahuatl to produce official court documents such as wills. Ramos, in partnership with local Mixe interpreters, used Nahuatl as an intermediary language to translate court testimony given in Mixe. Using Ramos' career as a window onto the administration of the Mixe zone, I explore how the region's ethnically and racially diverse Nahuatl speech community – Dominican friars, creole/mestizo petty traders and bureaucrats, Indian conquistadors, and Mixe elites – effected bureaucratic domination. This shadow regime persisted into the eighteenth century, about two centuries after Spanish had become the official language for dealings with Indians in most regions of New Spain.