Merida’s Maya Cabildos in the Age of Independence: Language, Landholding, and the Law, 1790–1830

The last decade of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth century ushered in major changes to one of most venerable and stable institutions of Spanish rule in Yucatan, the Maya cabildos that preserved a degree of self-rule at the pueblo and barrio level during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. During the final decades of the eighteenth century, longstanding challenges to Maya urban government intensified as an ever greater percentage of traditionally indigenous barrios’ inhabitants were no longer Maya and the city’s main Spanish cabildo’s assertions of jurisdictional precedence became increasingly aggressive. The first three decades of the nineteenth century brought even more changes, altering the structure of the councils first with Spain’s Constitution of 1812 and later with the consolidation of independence from Spain in 1821. Yet in spite of these drastic changes, Maya municipal officials maintained some jurisdictional authority during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Using court cases and notarial documents, this paper examines Maya adjustments to a changing legal landscape, from the late Bourbon era to independence, especially in questions of presiding over land sales and efforts to keep barrio property in indigenous hands. While ladinoization, the adoption of Spanish language, came late to Yucatan as a whole, urban Maya cabildos and indigenous barrio residence adopted Castilian earlier and produced Spanish-language documents more frequently than their counterparts in the countryside. This linguistic adjustment, along with the alliance-building with non-Mayas as a means to sustain their authority, are two of the primary strategies when their traditional authority was being eroded by the end of the colony, the focus of this paper.