The European Clothes of an Elite Zapotec Woman in 18th-Century Coyotepec Oaxaca

In 1720, seventeen-year-old Maria de la Cruz Dionisio lay on her deathbed in the indigenous town of Coyotepec, Oaxaca. In the presence of local Zapotec governing officers, she requested that her uncles sell some of her European belongings in order to pay for masses upon her death. Later part of a lawsuit over lands she had bequeathed to her uncles, this native language testament provides evidence of the increased flow of European luxury goods into indigenous communities at the beginning of Bourbon rule. Likewise, it shows these goods’ impact on the religious behaviors of elite native peoples. This paper explores the role that Zapotec and European commodities played in the local and globalized circuits controlled by Spanish merchants during the era of Bourbon reforms. During the period, Spanish trade in this southern Mexican region heavily involved the production of cochineal and textiles manufactured by Zapotec and Mixtec communities in and around the Central Valley of Oaxaca. Elite Zapotecs such as Maria had access to luxury goods such as textiles from Northern Europe embroidered in the Castilian tradition and brought to Oaxaca by Spanish merchants. Conversely, Spaniards interested in indigenous imports such as cacao, featherwork, and Mesoamerican art took these items to Europe as fascinating evidence of the “exotic” people of the so-called New World. New commercial networks instigated by transpacific Spanish trade had notable effects on indigenous communities, and many of these transactions were often recorded in Zapotec. In the same way that vast language and cultural differences were no barriers for indigenous-Spanish exchange, oceans did not pose a great challenge to the participation of indigenous society in evolving trade networks of Europeans. This paper sheds light on the cultural, social and religious choices that connected early eighteenth-century indigenous communities to the church and state of colonial Mexico.