Natives, Legal Culture, and Gender: Mexico City’s Institutions of Authority in the Late Eighteenth through Nineteenth Centuries

What was the impact of Independence and nineteenth century federal reforms on the native population of Mexico City? As the largest city in the newly independent Mexico, Mexico City reveals the multiple levels of living at the center of a vibrant political, ecclesiastic, social, legal, and economic network connected to even the most remote areas of present-day North and Central America. As an administrative center both before and after Independence, Mexico City’s governing institutions were constantly registering and trying to control the prevalent gendered, cultural, and legal customs among its residents, which gives us many rich sources of archival information. In the nineteenth century, life in the city also marked over three centuries of adaptation, negotiation, and manipulation of the city’s social, political, and legal institutions by, among others, its indigenous residents. In this era, urban “Indians” indicated clearly non-indigenous influences in their daily behavior, making the details of their activities almost indistinguishable from those of “Mexicans.” Their criminal denunciations, trial testimonies, and legal argumentations place them alongside “citizens” and reveal legal customs and gendered practices, this paper argues, that are commonly associated with viceregal Latin America. This presentation thus focuses its analysis on a late-eighteenth through nineteenth century legal culture evidenced in litigation over a variety of judicial matters (land disputes, homicide, vagrancy, domestic violence, and adultery) involving male and female native residents of Mexico City.  The participation of men and women in the variety of criminal and civil suits examined also allows for an examination of changing gender relations and legal customs that denote the significant social impact of nineteenth century federal reforms.