The Cacicas of Teotihuacan: Early Colonial Changes to Local Rule

Among the Nahuas of prehispanic central Mexico, tlatoque, or rulers, were exclusively male. While the Mixtec or the Maya further south may have submitted to female leaders at various points in their histories, the Nahuas seem not to have allowed women to rule. But this changed very early in the colonial period. Indeed, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the indigenous town of Teotihuacan in central Mexico was headed by two women, in turn. These women, doña Francisca Verdugo and her daughter doña Ana Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, were called cacicas—an Arawak term for ruler brought to central Mexico from the Caribbean by the Spaniards—and they possessed and administered the Teotihuacan cacicazgo, or entailed lordly estate. They were cacicas in their own right; their titles and status did not depend on their husbands.

Drawing upon archival documents, this presentation examines the lives of these Teotihuacan cacicas with particular attention to the ways in which their experiences are reflective of larger changes taking place in this period to the structure and function of native noble society and the changing role of women within this society. For although their titles and estates derived from prehispanic and immediate post-conquest native tradition and institutions, these women were far different than the native women and men who led Teotihuacan before and during the conquest. They were both, for instance, married to Spaniards. Moreover, they did not participate as directly in indigenous government in Teotihuacan as their forebears, since they spent much of their time not in Teotihuacan, but in Mexico City. Finally, they were on the vanguard of a revolution in ethnicity and race among indigenous nobles. The hereditary native nobility, as these cacicas demonstrate, was experiencing a great deal of change in this period, and women were at the forefront of these changes.