Kinship, Ethnicity, and the Development of Many Indio Categories in Spanish Legal Practice

A growing number of historians have studied, in recent years, the construction and use of the legal category of the indio in the derecho indiano – or Spanish Law for the Indies. Most of them agree that the actions of indigenous individuals and communities shaped the indio category in a way that empowered the indigenous peoples of Spanish America. There has been less attention, however, put on multiethnic communities of indigenous peoples, mostly because it is assumed that indios presented litigation either as individuals or as tightly knit communities. But what happened when communities filed litigation against one another, and in cases pitting a multiplicity of ethnic groups? This paper will focus in the city of San Luis Potosí to bring to the limelight the complexity of the indio category across the Spanish imperial world. A mining city situated in the near north of New Spain where over ten ethnic groups converged to benefit from the silver and gold bonanza from the late sixteenth century on, San Luis Potosí witnessed the interactions of a diversity of legal actors: a Spanish visitador general, oydores from Mexico City, local economic and political elites, missionary orders, Tarascans, Guachichiles, Otomies, and the famous Tlaxcalans. All of these actors competed to determine the status of specific indigenous groups, hereby contributing to developing an imperial framework of subcategories to the large indio one. Looking at how the three neighborhoods of Tlaxcalilla, Santiago, and Montecillo built their genealogies and historical memories for territorial litigation, this paper will show how kinship and ethnicity intertwined to form specific groups of indios out of diversity.