Indigenous peoples in pre-Hispanic Mexico developed complex relationships with their surroundings that transcended utilitarian purposes. Land, water, forests, mountains, and the lifeforms within them formed an intricate web of relationality for Indigenous societies, while the names and wisdom contained within landscape features connected the present to the storied past. Three centuries of Spanish rule brought profound transformations to theses varied landscapes, most notably the concentration of dispersed Indigenous communities into planned church villages (reducciones), the introduction of foreign crops and livestock, and the imposition of Spanish law and legal norms around land ownership and property use. This last change was disruptive to Indigenous environmental practices and landholding patterns, but it also created an opening for Indigenous individuals, leaders, and communities to negotiate with or challenge Hispanic officials, settlements, and enterprises and their efforts to claim or alter the land and its resources.

This panel explores the intersection of Indigenous environmental practices with Hispanic law and legal systems in the Spanish Empire, especially colonial Mexico, between the 16th and 18th centuries. As the conquest decades faded and the first Spanish viceroys attempted to establish a stable legal order over this vast new territory, they turned to medieval law codes from home to balance their intent to exploit the wealth of fertile fields, grazing lands, and precious metals with the complex and layered ancestral claims of the Indigenous nobility and corporate groups. In turn, Indigenous peoples frequently embraced Spanish law to defend, maintain, or even expand their hold on land and natural resources. Lawsuits, petitions, and contracts all offered avenues through which Indigenous peoples could use the language and understandings of the conquerors to uphold their patrimonies. This process of mediated contestation conveniently moved much of the colonial friction into the nonviolent sphere of the courts, but it also meant that Indigenous litigants reshaped Spanish law in subtle ways.

This panel aims to raise a number of questions pertinent not just to Mexico, but to the study of environmental transformation and law in imperial spaces more generally: how did imperial regimes attempt to impose order on foreign landscapes and peoples? What happened when colonial aspirations clashed with the reality of peoples rooted generationally to places they have heavily altered and vehemently claimed? How did Indigenous peoples shape imperially-imposed systems of law and land occupation through their resistance, negotiation, and adaptation strategies? And lastly, what do such stories reveal about the production of hegemonic power, its ability to endure and subsume conflict, and the myriad meanings such systems of power can contain?

Each panelist approaches these questions from a different regional and temporal perspective, with an emphasis on varied resources such as water, forests, and commons. Together they hope to foster a rich conversation with the audience about how human-environmental systems should be considered both historically and in the context of power structures.