Papers, Property, and Posterity: The Estate Records of Nahua Noblewomen in Coyoacan and Xochimilco, New Spain

This paper examines the richly abundant cacicazgo, or entailed estate, records of two of central Mexico’s most esteemed Nahua dynasties, the Guzmán and Cerón y Alvarado families of Coyoacan and Xochimilco. The papers of these cacicazgos are among the most comprehensive and complete of their kind to have survived in the archives. They run to hundreds of manuscript folios and consist of documents of many different kinds, Nahuatl and Spanish, alphabetic and pictorial, the hastily scribbled and the lavishly illustrated. Because the sources have often survived with the records of litigation, we have the rare opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes, seeing how Nahua noblewomen, or cacicas, were involved in the making of notarial and legal records. Even though they seldom, if ever, wrote the documents themselves, cacicas harnessed the law and dealt with a range of authority figures—from town council officers to friars and the highest officials of the Spanish colonial system—to produce and preserve their invaluable estate records, among them affidavits, bills of sale, house plans, property titles, rental agreements, genealogies, last wills and testaments, petitions, and depositions.

The records show cacicas making it possible for documents to be created, amended, annulled, implemented, and ratified. At times, we can observe cacicas describing the content, meaning, and significance of their sources. In one case, we can observe a young woman interpreting, in Nahuatl, a pictorial document that she had inherited from her mother. Many of the sources which cacicas so carefully prepared and so assiduously preserved had to do with matters of property ownership. Ultimately, cacicas played a vitally important part in managing, expanding and securing their families’ estates, so much so, arguably, that their papers would not have survived today were it not for their skills as intermediaries and as the co-authors of their texts.