Place-Based Knowledge, Acculturation, and Resilient Ecologies: The Longue Durée of Indigenous Microhistories in Tlaxcala, Mexico

Historical texts reveal complex battlegrounds in which the people of Tlaxcallan—a pre-Hispanic state resisting the imperial expansion of Triple Alliance, a colonial province of New Spain, now one of Mexican states—strove to maintain control over land, environment and various kinds of resources. Abundant archival records also show how the Indigenous inhabitants protected and secured essential assets and components of their well-being, embedded in local knowledge and collective sociocultural practices. In this paper I argue that stories of resilience and resistance were not limited to struggles for land and that they crossed ethnic boundaries. Available records also extend to defending traditional ritual practices and ways of healing as components of local well-being. Since economic, climatic and demographic crises of turbulent colonial times affected Indigenous, mestizo and Spanish residents of the province, the inhabitants of the province also forged cross-ethnic alliances directed against abusive landowners. Together, these testimonies attest to long-term ecological resilience reflected in the capacity to respond efficiently to adverse factors, for recovery and socio-cultural continuity. Tying together different threads of microhistories across a longer period of time, distinct places and available documentary genres in Nahuatl and Spanish makes us aware of an enduring historical process in which some of the battles were won and some were eventually lost. This is even more salient if we acknowledge that the aftermath of these apparently remote historical processes continues to unfold to this day. In the long-term perspective, the erosion of the traditional economic base, ethnic identity and linguistic practices in the second half of the twentieth century, can be seen as the aftereffect of social, economic and acculturation processes set into motion during the colonial period.