The Cacicas of Mexico City: Indigenous Leadership under Bourbon Rule

When it came to governing the growing and diverse populations of the Kingdom of New Spain, indigenous presence and engagement with Spanish institutions was especially influential in the development of social and legal practices in the administrative capital of the viceroyalty. There is no doubt, however, that in the urban metropolis the structures put in place to disseminate and strengthen Spanish domination over the indigenous did in fact also have a negative impact on native culture. Yet, those same structures of domination would allow native men and women to develop and maintain a social and legal culture that was simultaneously a part of and distinct from dominant Spanish institutions in Mexico City. This presentation discusses the legal activity of native community leaders in order to analyze legal culture in eighteenth century Mexico City. Of specific interest are cacicas, female native lords. Like her male counterpart, a cacica functioned as an official authority figure in native zones of the city, adapting Spanish institutions of power to her local contexts. Despite a climate of imperial decline in the eighteenth century characterized also by large-scale royal designs for bureaucratic change in Spanish America, cacicas practiced authority in the city and in so doing their actions reveal a distinctive legal culture among urban natives as well as the limits of cacicas’ authority in the city. While the cacicas of the city enjoyed the privileges of high status among their native subordinates as well as the authority to adjudicate at the local level over an array of mundane complaints, they certainly did not possess, in style or size, the cacicazgos of their 16^th century predecessors.