Gender, Genealogy, and Tribute Exemption in Bourbon New Spain

This paper explores cases from central Mexico in which Afromexicans and Indians approached eighteenth-century courts with complaints regarding their tributary status.  Often using detailed genealogies to claim exemption, these individuals and families eschewed markers that law and custom linked to tributary status. Self-presentation was central to these cases, which depended on articulations of individual and family reputations. Gender also played a pivotal role in the reproductive implications of tributary status, which was based on caste and lineage. However, by the end of the colonial period, the absence of genealogy could serve as a strategy for some orphans who used their “unknown” caste to try to manipulate their tributary status in court.  As a group, these cases bring to light viceregal, as well as local, preoccupations with the tribute system and its implications for identity-making.  By the end of the eighteenth century, the fluidity of caste had made a variety of institutions, including tribute, tricky to enforce.  The reformed tribute institution emerges as a Bourbon attempt to reinforce colonial hierarchies dependent on links between genealogy, caste, and gender.  Yet, legal ambiguities within the tribute system continued to yield diverse outcomes for those free-coloreds and Indians who defined their own tributary status in court.