Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial Mexico: Survival and Acculturation Strategies of Native Peoples in the 16th Century

In 1521, Spanish conquistadors and their indigenous allies succeeded in toppling the Aztec state, beginning an era of European domination over the Americas. The consequences of this violent upheaval were traumatic for indigenous peoples, impacting the social organization of their communities, their economies, and their political autonomy. The Spanish viceregal government in Mexico had, in particular, enforced Christianization and the encomienda (a system of forced labor and tribute) onto indigenous communities and city-states in Mexico and Latin America. These projects separated families, led to violence against indigenous peoples, and threatened the autonomy of indigenous communities. The Spanish justified their oppression through scholastic philosophy which privileged the written word, thereby also diminishing the intellectual and moral status of indigenous peoples in European eyes. However, Mesoamerican pictography is not only robust, but also capable of absorbing new influences, as exemplified by the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (1552), a pictographic history of the Nahua city-state of Tlaxcala composed by Tlaxcalan peoples for the purposes of petitioning for legal rights, and the Relación de Michoacán (1539-41), an ethnographic manuscript created with the assistance of indigenous Purepecha artists to settle a land dispute in the Michoacán region against Spanish encomenderos. Both documents are notable in that they represent a form of selective acculturation to the visual language of Europe, incorporating Christological influences, the visual language of European heraldry, and otherwise modified formats to make their arguments accessible to a European audience. In this way, the indigenous nobility was conscious of the dialectical relationship between European visual language and traditional Mesoamerican pictography. The unique colonial product created by this dialectic was effective in making a case for the political, social, and economic autonomy of indigenous communities and states, as evidenced by the successes achieved with the Lienzo and the Relación.