Territory and Power in the Imperial Frontier of Northern New Spain: Contesting the Limits of Colonial Law to Defend Pueblo Autonomy in the Mayo Valley of Sonora

Among the Yoreme-Mayo pueblos of northwestern New Spain territory was closely entwined with community identity and self-governance, livelihood, and ancestral ties to nature in these semiarid lands on the southern boundary of the Sonoran Desert. Rivalries over territory, resources, and political ascendancy were part of the fabric of village life in this region for centuries before the Spanish entradas, but the advances of colonial institutions and Spanish mining and agricultural enterprises beginning in the seventeenth century intensified and complicated the sources of interethnic conflict. This paper analyzes the ways in which the Yoreme peoples of the Province of Ostimuri framed their defense of territory within colonial law and jurisprudence, even as they tested its efficacy to protect their resources and their corporate identity as a pueblo. It draws on archival cases of land entitlement and territorial disputes as well as ethnohistorical and ethnographic literatures that illustrate both colonial entanglements and contemporary legacies of these richly documented historical processes.