Ihuan Yehhuan Tlacuauh Tlamauhtiah in Ichcapixqueh. “And the Shepherds Are Inspiring Great Fear”. Environment, Control of Resources and Collective Agency in Colonial and Modern Tlaxcala

Abstract

This chapter explores selected aspects of Tlaxcalan history, showcasing the complexity of human–environment relations that have been affected both by climate change and by colonization and postcolonial domination. I explore historical texts in Nahuatl and Spanish that reveal complex battlegrounds upon which the Tlaxcaltecah strove to maintain control over land and environment, protecting essential components of their well-being and rights within the context of colonial domination. The analyzed sources illustrate the resistance to Spanish settlement and different forms of dispossession, coping with climatic and economic challenges, resisting the expansions of haciendas, securing land and water rights or defending traditional ritual practices. Tying together the common threads of microhistories across longer periods of time, different places and available documentary genres, not only attests to Indigenous agency but also makes us aware of a longer historical process in which some of these battles were won and some were eventually lost. Many of the historical phenomena traced in early modern Tlaxcala can also be linked to contemporary developments, including massive heritage language loss and environmental challenges.

Introduction

During my research stays in Tlaxcala, I had the honor and pleasure to meet Doña Rosaria, who is a healer in the town of San Miguel Xaltipan, part of the municipality of Contla de Juan Cuamatzi, known in colonial times as San Bernardino Contla.¹ In 2017, during our language revitalization field school organized in collaboration with this community, she generously agreed to share her knowledge of plants and healing with the participants at our event, including a young Nahua healer from a community in the region of Texcoco. I continued my conversation with her in the summer of 2019 and at that time she revealed her sense of loss regarding the changing local environment and the key resources necessary to continue with traditional healing practices:

Ce quitemoa …….nochi in medicina ye ocuparohuaya para ce mopahtiz, non (nimi)tzonilhuia in tlamacaz, itztohyatl, mirto, topoya tlen onon occe totzoniltac (tzotzoniztatl) axxan can? Cah yocmo cah, ye opoliuh. Nin zurcoz nochi oyeya yenoz de xihuitl pero ahorita para ce mopahtiz ce quitemoti ihtec in atlauhtl pero yocmo cah quimin den oyeya nican, yocmo cah.

One looks for it …. [but] all of the medicine that was being used in order to cure people, that which I tell you would be given to people, itztoyatl, myrtle, topoya (tlalchichinolli; Tournefortia mutabilis), this other [herb] tzotzoniztatl, where are they now? They are gone, they have already disappeared. These furrows were all full of herbs but now if you want to cure yourself you have to go and look in the ravine. But it is not as it used to be, [the plants] aren’t here anymore.

The sense of loss permeates the history of Indigenous communities right from the first encounters with the Europeans. As the Native people of the Americas confronted the outsiders, they suffered a broad array of injuries. They both resisted and fell victim to violence, oppression and forced assimilation; they acted to counter the loss of their autonomy, land and economic base; they engaged in unending and ultimately not always successful struggles to preserve their beliefs, social order, land, resources, language, local knowledge, ways of healing and intimate connections to nature and the environment. The case of Tlaxcala in Mexico shows that no group was exempt from this long-term struggle and loss, no matter what their arrangements and relationships with the colonizers were. Moreover, the present situation of the Native peoples of the Americas cannot be disentangled from their colonial history as it, in fact, transcends the conventional “end” of the colonial period, with numerous forms of colonialism continuing until the present day.

Scholars often share the view that the position of Tlaxcallan² under Spanish rule was privileged in the sociopolitical stage of early New Spain (e.g., Baber, 2005, 2011; Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 2; Navarrete Linares, 2019; Sullivan, 1999, p. 55), and in some ways, it was indeed. Unlike many other pre-Hispanic political organizations, the native state of Tlaxcallan was granted special royal privileges and considerable political autonomy in recognition of their martial and political alliance with Spaniards during their war with the Aztec Empire, and then of their participation in numerous conquests in southern and northern areas of Mesoamerica. Importantly, the territorial and to a certain degree sociopolitical and economic integrity of their preconquest state—complex altepetl (see Lockhart, 1992)—was preserved. Its land could not be given in encomienda to individual Spaniards as the inhabitants enjoyed the status of being “free vassals” of the king (e.g., Baber, 2005, pp. 103–105).³ The privilege of March 13, 1535, placed the Tlaxcaltecah perpetually under royal authority, giving them important legal leverage to protect their land claims and territorial integrity (Baber, 2011, p. 50). Many of these early privileges and legal acts were elevated to the status of royal laws through their incorporation in the Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias of 1681 (Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 414). These laws recognized the Tlaxcaltecah as “the first who in New Spain received the holy Catholic faith and declared obedience to us” and whose request to “keep their ancient customs” should be secured by means of the royal provision.⁴ In addition, the law not only guaranteed that their governors must be Indigenous, as in other altepetl in New Spain, but also that this position was closed to external functionaries coming from outside of the province; as royal subjects, the Tlaxcaltecah were also granted the option of writing directly to the king, without any obstruction from the authorities of New Spain.⁵ Moreover, in 1585 the king issued a tribute exemption, and although in reality, the province had paid various taxes since the sixteenth century, this original immunity was invoked by local elites as an important argument in legal struggles and in political rhetoric (Gibson, 1967, pp. 160, 170–181; Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 418; Skopyk, 2020, p. 105). One of the key components of the early colonial discourse of the Tlaxcaltecah was that of claiming the status of allies and winners during the Spanish conquest (Navarrete Linares, 2019).

These and many other legal acts and arrangements with the Crown notwithstanding, Tlaxcallan was in many ways as precarious as other repúblicas de indios in New Spain. The highly dynamic and complex colonial reality exposed them to a number of external pressures and threats—political, economic, legal and religious—from right after the Spanish conquest. As recently argued by Bradley Skopyk, “This society coped with the most severe climatic shift of the Holocene: the Little Ice Age. The impacts of disease, famine, cold, drought, or even excessively wet weather triggered social and biological responses that transformed colonial society with little regard for class, ethnicity, or subregion. […] When the ground that fed and clothed society moved, humans had little choice but to respond” (Skopyk, 2020, p. 209).

Indeed, the ruling elites, community leaders and individual community members did not remain passive during any single part of the colonial period and beyond. The form of Indigenous government, both at the central level of the Tlaxcallan cabildo and in the organization of numerous towns subject to it, tirelessly engaged in internal and external politics, maintaining, readjusting and expanding spaces of collective responsibilities and collective action. Facing these challenges, they forged diverse strategies, which are reflected in the rich corpus of Nahuatl and Spanish documents. These embrace municipal records and an abundance of legal documentation that reflects the everyday concerns and affairs of Indigenous inhabitants of this state. Their language, Nahuatl, was an inherent part of the struggle to maintain their autonomy and protect their province, flourishing as the medium of negotiation, complaint, call to action, law-making, economic and busInéss activities and in multi-faceted administrative and official documentation. They built on a long and successful tradition of political, military, economic and cultural resistance to the expansion of the Aztec empire before the Europeans appeared on the Mesoamerican scene and have continued to resist external pressures under Spanish rule and beyond.

The long-term trajectory just mentioned becomes even more clear if we acknowledge that this history is not only about the past. And this is not just because, as historians, we take part in an “unending dialogue between the present and the past” (Carr, 1987[1961], p. 30) and we “always ask questions from the point of view of the present” (Carr & Lipscomb, 2021, p. 13); it is also because the aftermath of apparently remote historical processes continues unfolding to this day. Therefore, striving to offer a longue durée view of Tlaxcalan history from the specific point of view of strategies aimed at the protecting of land and associated resources, I attempt to make the connection between past and present facets of the same longer narrative. In order to do so, I complement this study with selected contemporaneous anthropological and sociolinguistic data, including insights gathered during several years of field research in Tlaxcala. It is through the voices of today’s Tlaxcaltecah that we can better understand, on the one hand, why local knowledge and language are at risk and being lost, but, on the other, how access to such vital resources relates to the well-being of community members. While attempting to grasp a long-term temporal perspective, this study is not a systematic overview of the processes in question; rather, it builds on the key Nahuatl sources from the sixteenth century and selected microhistorical records from the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The emphasis on human agency has been a particular focus of microhistory that has brought into sharp focus the lives, decisions, motivations and actions of past individuals seen “not merely as puppets on the hands of great underlying forces of history, but they are regarded as active individuals, conscious actors” (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013, p. 34). The voices and actions of the Indigenous people today complement those of their ancestors living and acting in the same communities in the past.

Protecting the Territory

Directly after the first phase of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, or more precisely after the war waged by Spaniards, Tlaxcaltecah and other local allies of Cortés against the Mexihcah and their supporters, the altepetl of Tlaxcallan retained much its autonomy and was initially little affected by political control and Christianization (Fig. 3.1). The situation started to change after the arrival of the first Franciscans and the establishment of a temporary convent in a palace belonging to one of the rulers. Soon the instruction of the local youth from noble families (often against the will of their parents) began, leading thereafter to a violent upheaval and persecutions of “idolaters” and culminating in the execution of several Tlaxcaltecah leaders (Gibson, 1967, pp. 29–37; Lopes Don, 2010; Martínez Baracs, 2008, pp. 113–120; Olko & Brylak, 2018). Even though religious, political and economic forms of control over the province were strengthened in the decades that followed, it was also during this time that the structure and prerogatives of local government were consolidated, taking the unique form of a municipal council and a huge electing body composed of over 200 nobles (Lockhart et al., 1986, pp. 1–3).

Fig. 3.1

© Joanna Maryniak

Map of Tlaxcala showing the localities mentioned in this chapter.

Right from its first preserved records onward, the Indigenous cabildo maintained a very clear position that foreigners, except for the Franciscans and the Spanish corregidor with his retinue, were unwelcome in the province. Accordingly, the policy pursued was to exclude them from living in the Tlaxcallan territory entirely. In the council minutes for August 8, 1550, we read that tiquixpantizque yn visorey ynic techmocneliliz ayac totlah yezqui español vel quiçazque (“we should propose to the viceroy that he grant us the favor that no Spaniard be among us and they leave entirely”; fol. 65v–66; Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 76). Regarding Indigenous settlers from other altepetl in Central Mexico, it was made clear in 1547 that they should perform the same public duties as local commoners (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 30).

This policy of the Indigenous government of excluding Spanish intrusions was, in fact, supported by the Crown, officially at least, as reflected in a number of royal provisions issued between 1535 and 1586, making grants of land in the Tlaxcallan territory void. Yet Spanish officials and colonists repeatedly violated this rule as many grants of land followed from the 1530s onward. Pursuing their own economic benefits, individual colonists also managed to defy the Crown’s policy, as well as the efforts of the Indigenous government to block land sales to foreigners (Gibson, 1967, pp. 79–85). This happened despite the fact that cabildo did have some success in abolishing Spanish estancias (e.g., Actas de cabildo, fol. 98; Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 53), but this was a short-term success. By 1585, the king and viceroy recognized the validity of grants to Spanish land owners in Tlaxcallan (Gibson, 1967, p. 84).

The main legal means for increasing the Spanish presence was the purchase of Indigenous land. The royal order of 1535 allowed the Spaniards to acquire lands from local owners if the latter made the sale of their own free will (Gibson, 1967, pp. 85–86). Again, quite early on, the Native cabildo tried to stop this process, first in May 1553 by prohibiting nobles from selling their lands under the threat of dispossession and eviction (fol. 93v–94v; Lockhart et al., 1986, pp. 85–86; Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 183), justifying these drastic measures with reference to the growing impoverishment of the nobility and the rise of wealth among commoners. This is an early sign of the growth of internal-community conflicts and tensions between the nobility and commoners as the colonial economy developed. Then in April 1562, the municipal council made it clear in its decree that no resident of the province, regardless of social status, should sell land to the Spaniards, for they should live in their own cities and not in Tlaxcallan at all: yn cabildo quinnauati yn ixquichime Tlaxcalan tlatoque pipiltin yuan nochi tlacatl ipanpa ayac quinamacaz ysolar yn nican ypan ciudad amo quinnamaquiltiz españolme yehica amo yz totzalan nemizque oncah ymaltepeuh ciudad de los Angeles yuan Mexico (Actas de cabildo, fol. 149v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 197) (“The cabildo orders that all the Tlaxcallan rulers, nobility and all the commoners are not to sell their house lots here in the city, they are not to be sold to Spaniards because they are not to live among us, they have their city in Puebla de los Angeles and Mexico”). Since purchases made from Indigenous people by Spaniards were often below the market value, the Crown ordered that sales were to be announced at auction for thirty days before the transaction, but this, too, proved to have a limited impact on the social reality (Gibson, 1967, pp. 86–87). This is clear through microhistorical insights into early colonial processes of land sale and the ongoing dispossession of local land owners (e.g., Acocal, 2020, pp. 211–223).

The efficacy of counteractions undertaken by the Native government was circumscribed not only by the scale of disobedience among Natives and Spaniards but also due to the huge population decline as a result of devastating epidemics, the growing debts of Indigenous land owners and the sizeable amount of abandoned land that became available as a consequence. After initial incursions, Spaniards rapidly increased in numbers in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, while the Native population constantly declined. As in other regions of Mexico, deadly epidemics took their toll in Tlaxcallan in 1520, 1532, 1545, 1575–1579, 1585–1588, 1595 and later on, accompanied by other disasters, especially famine (Gibson, 1967, pp. 141–142, 188; Martínez Baracs, 2008). The 1520 epidemic reduced the Indigenous population from some 350,000 down to 250,000 or less; then in 1545, roughly 50% of people died, reducing the number of inhabitants to ca. 150,000. The 1576 epidemic was the last year with high-magnitude mortality (ca. 48,000 dead), to be repeated only in the 1690s (ca. 40,000) and in the 1730s (ca. 50,000), reducing the total population to levels as low as just over 50,000 immediately after the periods with the heaviest death toll, to ca. 100,000 in the periods of temporary population increase; at the end of the colonial era the population was only 75,000 (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 77–78; Fig. 8). In a parallel way, the initially marginal but bustling Spanish community grew steadily, oriented toward the expanding city of Puebla and specializing in cattle and sheep herding, textile production and transportation, and gradually becoming more and more significant for the province’s internal economy, social life and politics (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 31). It is also impossible to overestimate the impact of extreme pluvial anomalies, including the excessive rainfall, floods, frosts and drought that occurred from 1541 to the mid-1580s and that were also behind “an unparalleled and sustained eighty-year socioecological crisis” (Skopyk, 2020, p. 32), perhaps even directly contributing to the scale and severity of the epidemics (Skopyk, 2020, p. 34).

Collective Threats and Losses

The considerable efforts of the Tlaxcallan cabildo were invested into stopping the spread of Spanish estancias or livestock enterprises and summer pasturing; the employees of Spaniards, especially their shepherds, were perceived as violent, destroying crops and stealing from and terrorizing people. Another essential threat was the forced resettlement or congregaciones of the Indigenous population into more compact settlements, more closely following European models, a policy pursued by the Spanish Crown as a response to depopulation and the need for control over the Native subjects and their Christian instruction. Such resettlements of people implied not only the abandonment of households and ancestral cultivated land but also, paradoxically, a greater exposure to epidemics as well as a threat to existing social structures and tribute obligations (Sullivan, 1999, pp. 38–39). The Tlaxcaltecah strongly and successfully opposed these relocations, even if some concentrations of more dispersed settlements indeed occurred in different parts of the province as early as the sixteenth century (Acocal, 2020, pp. 110–111). Formal congregations were greatly delayed in the region in comparison to other parts of New Spain, even into the first decade of the seventeenth century. One of the most expressive testimonies comes from a 1560 cabildo session (Actas de cabildo, fol. 136r–136v) as it conveys “the feared effect of uprooting on the ordinary individual” (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 104) and envisions a combined disastrous effect of the two parallel threats:

A great deal of suffering and affliction will result from it (vel miec netoliniztli netequipacholly ye mochivaz). […] They will leave behind their houses and all they take care of: their edible cactus fruit, their cochineal-bearing cactus, their American cherry trees, their maguey, and their fruits, sweet potatoes, sapotes, chayotes, and quinces, peaches, etc., and then also the household fields which they clear and cultivate, and their dogs and turkeys […] Where will he cultivate if they are entirely lost to him? And if he thus leaves behind his maize, chia, or cactus fruit, and his burial grounds, who will guard them for him? And the shepherds are inspiring great fear; (they wander about the grasslands) all over Tlaxcala. And even though commoners are there now, sometimes (the shepherds) beat them and take their children from them; sometimes they snatch their daughters away, and they take their turkeys, mats, etc., from them. (Lockhart et al., 1986, pp. 104–105)

The members of the Indigenous government expressed their deep concern about the loss of cultivated fields with all the local plants and fruit that would remain behind, while resettled commoners would have to establish their homes elsewhere. The harm was aggravated by the abandonment of burial grounds, which implied not only leaving these places with no protection or care but also the loss of vital links with the ancestors that would be disastrous for individual families and whole communities. Notably, Indigenous officials linked this threat to another peril: the various kinds of violence committed by Spanish shepherds invading Indigenous countryside and cultivated fields. After the first successful attempts at the expulsion of Spanish-owned cattle and sheep, in the second half of the sixteenth-century herders kept coming, spreading all over Tlaxcallan  through grants, concessions, land seizures and transactions. According to the legal framework applied in New Spain, stock-raising depended not on exclusive property rights, but on access for grazing to the so-called baldías, or unused wasteland, as well as community or privately owned land, provided no crops were currently growing there (Greer, 2018, p. 254; Radding, 1997, pp. 175–176).

The 1550s saw the adoption of the policy of seasonal restrictions regarding the entering of cattle into the province of Tlaxcala (only to be waived at the end of the century) as well as areal limitations excluding cattle from within half a league of Indigenous fields and from trespassing on public lands before harvest (Gibson, 1967, p. 85). Despite this legal protection of Indigenous land and resources, Spanish cattle, especially before the harvest season, caused constant turbulence and severe damage to the local people, their establishments and resources. The environmental conquest and colonization have been extensively documented in the Valley of Mezquital with the expansion of pastoralism, which contributed to domination over the Indigenous populations and vast areas of rural land (Melville, 1999). In the words of the Tlaxcallan cabildo members recorded in 1562, y nican agustar yc quichiua espanolme cenca yc motolinia maceualli (“the pasturing that the Spaniards do here causes great harm to the Native people”; fols. 155r–155v). As vividly described by Gibson, “houses were forcibly entered and ruined; public works were damaged; whole pueblos were destroyed; and boundaries that had been made were overrun. In 1594 one of the largest towns of the province, Hueyotlipan, was temporarily abandoned by the Indians after the destruction of its nopal and fruit crops by roving cattle” (Gibson, 1967, pp. 152–153). Also in other regions of Mexico, the relationships between local people and herdsmen became increasingly violent during this time (Melville, 1999, p. 122, 134).

Another profound change in the economy of Tlaxcallan, driven by Spanish trade and replete with far-reaching consequences, was cochineal production. Though known in preconquest times, it massively increased in response to the demands of external markets opening through the city of Puebla (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 79; Skopyk, 2020, p. 83). By the mid-sixteenth century, the cochineal industry was booming to the extent that in 1552 the cabildo attempted to forbid the cultivation of the cochineal cactus for fear of the “idleness” it causes: cenca tetlatzocuitiya ipanpa aocmo tlayznequih maceualtin (“it makes commoners very lazy because they do not want to till the land anymore”) and of impending famine (yntla quizaqui mayanaliztly tlen cualoz (fols. 85r–85v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 128) (“if the famine comes, what will be eaten?”). This catastrophic vision—no doubt enhanced by scary memories of the devastating epidemic and its aftermath, famine, that had decimated the area of Tlaxcala in the previous decade—was further elaborated in 1553 (fols. 91r–93v). In its reaction to growing social tensions between nobles and commoners driven by new economic opportunities, the cabildo set limits on cochineal production. Indigenous officials expressively affirmed that the local social, economic and moral order was in jeopardy due to the accumulation of wealth of commoners active in the cochineal trade and acquiring luxuries not appropriate for their social standing, as well as feasting, consuming alcohol, succumbing to moral decline and failing to provide their service as providers of food staples. Not only was their “idleness” and dedication to cochineal causing many fields to turn into a grassy wasteland, wreaking havoc and threatening an impending famine but it also resulted in many sins committed against God through their non-attendance at mass and their pervasive drunkenness.

uh niman vel xohxocomiqui vel yvinti yn cepan ynçiçiuauan yn canpa mohololoua oncan vehvetzi vel yhivinti miec yn oncan mochiva tlatlacolly/ çan ya yeh ytech quiça yn nochiztly / / no ·yehuan nochiznecuiloque aocmo tlayznequi yn manel cequin cuemeque aocmo tlayznequi ça yeh quixcaviya yn nochiztli quitemoua. (fol. 92r–92v).

And then they become entirely inebriated and senseless, together with their wives; they fall down one at a time where they are congregated, entirely drunk. Many sins are committed there, and it all comes from cochineal. Also these cochineal dealers no longer want to cultivate the soil; though some of them own fields, they no longer want to cultivate; they do nothing but look for cochineal”. (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 83).

While it is true that cochineal production caused a considerable contraction of land use by Indigenous farms, it should also be seen as an adaptation to the changing climate and economic demand. And it was also climate—not the cabildo’s efforts—that turned out to be the dominant factor in the decline of cochineal production in Tlaxcallan. It began to fall after the 1576 epidemics, in the coldest decades of the Colonial Mexican Pluvial (Skopyk, 2020, p. 67, 85). In part, the threats associated by the cabildo members with cochineal production were seen as derived from establishing improper relationships with Spanish merchants and consuming their product: Castilian wine. Thus, in addition to the demoralizing impact of cochineal trade, the contact with Spaniards posed serious moral and social threats, including public drunkenness, which was associated with both local and foreign beverages: vino hano nican octly miec tlacatl ya neci teixpan yn uel iuintiua (fol. 164v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 217), “It seems that many people do indeed get drunk publicly with wine and local agave drink”, complained Indigenous officials in 1566. On that occasion, the cabildo forbade the drinking of wine in public, making fInés mandatory and putting in jail drunkards of any social standing, with the help of public officials, including watchmen and constables.

Individuals of Spanish and mixed origin could also be seen as a potential source of moral decline for the Indigenous inhabitants of the province. A document composed in 1557 focuses on a “woman of bad living” (mujer de malvivir):⁶Juana Ramirez, mestiza, was expelled by the alcalde mayor Francisco Verdugo and moved to the city of Mexico because her way of life presented a very bad example for the Native people. According to a similar order from 1581,⁷ the Native people of Tlaxcallan requested the alcalde mayor to implement the viceregal order of removing from the city four mestizos currently held in prison for being “men of bad living and bad examples for the Indigenous people”. They were to stay at least four leagues from the city and, if the order was violated, be punished with 200 lashes each. Thus, while, despite many efforts of the cabildo, the Tlaxcaltecah were not able to stop Spanish civilian intrusions, they did not cease in their legal actions against what they perceived as threats to the integrity and well-being of their society.

It has been claimed that the legal arguments of the Tlaxcaltecah “were creative stories that were influenced by the rhetorical norms and political culture of Castile” and while they contained “elements of truth and recognizable descriptions of reality” they should be viewed as “artifacts of human creativity, first and foremost”, reflecting “native people’s ingenuity and agency” (Baber, 2011, p. 57). However, the complaints, alarming diagnoses and even denunciations expressed by the Tlaxcaltecah need to be cast in the direct spotlight of the catastrophic and recurring crises affecting the inhabitants of the province from the onset of the colonial period and begetting profound social and economic upheavals: extreme depopulation, waves of famine and “cataclysmic” climatic changes whose status as “historical facts” historians simply must recognize (Martínez Baracas, 2008, pp. 257–259; Skopyk, 2020). In fact, royal privileges improved local affairs only to a very minor degree: orders prohibiting Tlaxcaltecah labor and personal service in the city of Puebla, banning Spanish settlements and estancias and controlling monopolies were constantly violated (Gibson, 1967, p. 169). Emerging obrajes (manufacturing workshops) became the places of exploitation of the local population despite royal legislation aimed at counteracting the abuse. The Spanish-owned obrajes in the province included closed workshops (obrajes cerrados) where Tlaxcaltecah workers were practically imprisoned. In addition, both the forced and voluntary involvement of local people in the obrajes reduced the number of people engaged in agriculture, whereas the development of the city of Puebla itself contributed to the depopulation of Tlaxcallan (Sánchez Verín, 2002, pp. 43–54, 79).

Moreover, the content of the official petitions and legal suits takes on a different perspective when illuminated by the proceedings of the cabildo, recorded in Nahuatl for the internal needs of the ruling class of the altepetl. As much as they are replete with traditional rhetorical tools relating to perceived threats and the needs of the community, this layer of historical records underpins and shores up the concrete measures and actions undertaken by the Indigenous government. Their goal was to address, contain and counteract threats and forge favorable solutions in the new reality by means of the available resources and structures, very much in accordance with the contemporary understanding of agency (Giddens, 1984; Sztompka, 1991). And indeed, the policies and fears of the Indigenous cabildo were no doubt perspicacious and far-sighted; the multi-faceted effects of Spanish infiltration into the province proved disastrous for local land-holding, control over resources and linguistic-cultural assimilation, both in the mid- and long-term perspectives.

Other Early Responses

The responses of Indigenous authorities and residents of the province to both threats and opportunities emerging from the contact with Spaniards were by no means limited to legal actions and legal rhetoric. While the influx of Spanish cattle herders and their animals eventually slipped out of the control of both local and Crown authorities, an important strategy was aimed at protecting the environment and preventing damage to Indigenous settlements and fields, especially in key moments of the agricultural production cycle. In February 1548, the cabildo decided to expel the sheep from the wetlands where Indigenous people would sow amaranth and chili: chiyauhtently ca quizazque yn ichcame ypanpa yn zan cuel toca maceoaltzintly zan cuel quitoca auhtly yuan chilli quitepeua yuan quequeza tonalchilli (Actas de cabildo, fol. 10v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 51) (“The sheep are to leave the wetlands because the commoners will soon be planting, they will soon sow amaranth, they will scatter chili seeds and plant dry-land chili”).

Struggles over containing the negative impact of the presence of Spanish cattle spiraled into conflicts between the colonists and the local people, who resorted to their own retributive responses. Although in 1548 the Spanish corregidor issued an order obliging the local government to build a corral for cattle and horses caught consuming or destroying Indigenous crops so that the animals could be retained until released to their owners (Actas de cabildo, fol. 12v), the Tlaxcaltecah would slaughter roving cattle and sell their meat. In response, in 1568, the viceroy Martín Enriquez banned all slaughter houses in Native communities, only excluding pork under appeal, and then allowing more exceptions for towns which also housed friars and other Spaniards (Gibson, 1967, p. 153). However, daily interactions followed their own course as the rigidity of legal regulations gave way to the more practical retributive responses of the Indigenous people. An archival testimony of 1582⁸ reveals the incident of three oxen that were caught devastating Indigenous fields in Apizaco. A man named Francisco Martín put them in safekeeping so that the Indigenous people would not kill the roving animals; he only let the owner, Francisco López, retrieve them when the latter had recompensed both the losses to the Indigenous people and the rescuer’s work of saving the animals’ lives.

While striving to limit the harm done by Spanish cattle, the altepetl also owned significant numbers of sheep. In December 1547, the municipal government ordered the sale of 580 sheep and to inquire about how many sheep were currently held in the wetlands of Amalinalco (Actas de cabildo, fol. 3v; Celestino Solís et al., 1984, p. 42). This evidence attests to the careful management of resources in economically profitable ways. Although foreign intrusions were recognized as a source of threat, the economic exchange and imports provided essential opportunities that the Indigenous people could not ignore. An important factor in play could also have been the need to solve the problem of the huge amount of unused land, which increased after the drastic demographic declInés in 1545 and in 1576–1578. Rearing livestock made it possible to avoid falling under the dreaded tierra baldías category that threatened ownership titles (Skopyk, 2020, p. 47). Thus, quite early on, the cabildo began to explore and exploit such new resources, engaging in novel economic enterprises, including buying sheep, in a conscious effort to secure sufficient food supplies in these times of climatic anomalies and epidemics that brought about depopulation, famine and growing areas of wasteland.

Accordingly, three years after the traumatic epidemic of 1545, the cabildo decided that planting wheat on the fields belonging to the altepetl was an important opportunity to “multiply” its property (Actas de cabildo, fol. 12v: yn atltepetl ycuentla motocaz Castilla cently yuan yn nican cently ynic momiequiliz atltepetl ytlatqui; “Wheat [lit. Spanish corn] will be sown along with local corn on the fields of the altepetl so that its property will be multiplied”). This strategy required entering into arrangements with Spaniards to manage herding and to provide expert support in new agricultural investments involving European plants (Lockhart et al., 1986, p. 31). This happened in 1549 (fols. 30v–31r), when a Spanish expert was hired for two years in order to take care of the cabildo’s sheep and teach Tlaxcallans about breeding, as well as wool and cheese production. In 1550, the Indigenous government obliged the Spanish corregidor to find a knowledgeable Spaniard to herd the city’s sheep, pastured over the plains of Amalinalco (fols. 55v–56r), while another foreigner was recruited to supervise agricultural works and the sowing of wheat in Chicueimalinalco, in the same region (fols. 95r–95v). This was not just a short-term strategy of assimilating and making a profit from newly available resources: evidence from the end of the seventeenth century reveals that rates of Indigenous draught animal usage were equal to or higher than those found on the majority of Spanish estates (Skopyk, 2020, p. 114).

The Tlaxcaltecah successfully employed intimate knowledge of their natural environment for agroecological adaptations, developing new niches of agricultural production and farming. As convincingly argued by Bradley Skopyk, based on local environmental knowledge they were able to develop and maintain an active and creative response to the changing social ecologies and the adverse climate change associated with the Colonial Mexican Pluvial, with its excessive cold and humidity: “native communities in central Mexico acted as the primary sites of ecological creativity, assembling knowledge and skills for cultivating native and exotic plants and animals to form new, and successful, agrosystems that defy the binary native and non-native” (Skopyk, 2020, p. 19).

Communities’ Stories of Resilience: Legal Battles in the Latter Part of the Colonial Period

Along with the troubling climatic and demographic change, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries power shifted from the central government of Tlaxcallan to elected town functionaries at local levels. At the same time, the significant number of Spaniards living in the area resulted in Spanish pressure on the Indigenous authorities and the emergence of a separate Spanish jurisdiction that was not envisioned in the original sixteenth-century organization of the province. The duality of power spurred conflicts and debilitated the Indigenous cabildo (Martínez Baracs, 2008, pp. 352–502). Between 1590 and 1610, “caciques sold vast quantities of land to Spaniards and thereby created a new rural geography that interspersed Spanish haciendas with indigenous lands” (Skopyk, 2020, p. 116). This new socioeconomic and ethnic landscape resulted in growing pressure on Native land and other resources, despite the fact that the Indigenous population was still vulnerable to devastating epidemics and very much reduced when compared to the pre-Hispanic and early colonial periods.

I began this paper with a quote from the interview with Doña Rosaria, a healer from the municipality of Contla, formerly San Bernardino Contlan. This place is well-attested in the archival record, which offers glimpses into the collective actions of local people in the past. Thus, for example, the year 1688 witnessed a major legal struggle by the representatives of San Bernardino Contlan against Francisco and Diego González Gallardo, his son. These Spaniards and hacienda owners from Santa Ana Chiauhtempan allegedly sowed barley and cleared trees on community land located on the lower slopes of the sacred mountain, the volcano Matlalcueyeh (known today as Malinche), and bordering with the barranca of Quauhtzincola.⁹ The barrio of Quauhtzincola was located on the wooded slopes of the mountain, in the area corresponding today with San Felipe Cuauhtenco. This forested mountainous area at the southeastern edge of the town of Contlan is clearly seen in the late colonial map of Tlaxcala (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3).

Fig. 3.2

Colonial map of Tlaxcala, courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

Fig. 3.3

Matlalcueyeh, courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

With the support of the town attorney (procurador por el comun y naturales del pueblo), the Natives presented their petition in the Audiencia court in Mexico, arguing that land recently restored to Francisco and Diego González Gallardo in another legal dispute with Contlan had been illegally extended to what was the property of the town. The Spaniards invaded the area and began to clear the trees, thus damaging the community’s livelihood and limiting the local people’s access to the monte, the wooded slopes of Matlalcueyeh, which provided them with firewood and other natural resources.¹⁰ As a result, the people of Contlan secured a royal provision prohibiting the two Spaniards’ usage of this land, including cultivation and the extraction of trees, thus leaving it under Indigenous control and restoring unrestricted access to the mountain to the community.

The hacienda owners rejected the accusation in January of 1689, contesting the Indigenous ownership of the land in question. In turn, the community of Contlan responded in May 1689 that the foreigners “have entered this mountainous piece of land, plowing it and clearing trees to extract what belongs to our community, having been inherited from our ancestors”.¹¹ Moreover, they convinced the Tlaxcallan authorities to imprison the Spaniards for crimes and violence against the town. Several Indigenous witnesses presented their testimony through the translator, attesting to having seen Francisco and Diego Gonzalez entering their land, clearing and sowing it, thus causing the local people a “violent dispossession” (violento despojo). In response, Don Diego de Arcos y Rivera, the teniente general de Tlaxcala, proceeded with the imprisonment of the accused: Francisco Gonzales was indeed arrested but his son could not be found. However, the hacienda owner argued that the land in question was part of another dispute with the community and hence not in their legal possession. He also asked to be released from prison because of his health issues and advanced age.

At that point the teniente general resumed the case, admitting more witnesses and agreed to release the Spaniard with bail. In the course of the litigation, Francisco Gonzales accused the people of Contlan of being “trouble-makers and instigators who go around pursuing lawsuits without legal basis or right”¹² and claimed to have worked on the land for two preceding years without any objections from the local people. Indeed, some Spaniards testified in favor of the hacienda owner, stating that they had seen him working this parcel in 1688 and 1689 without complaints from the community and that it formed part of the disputed land in the Real Audiencia court. Nonetheless, a number of Indigenous witnesses confirmed that this piece of land was separate from that under litigation. In the testimonies they referred explicitly to their intimate knowledge of local territory (“por el conosim<ien>to que tiene de ellas”), an important detail that the notary decided to record each time. The authorities of Tlaxcallan, headed by the Spanish teniente, recognized the validity of the Indigenous claims, refusing the hacienda owner the possibility of appeal as they considered his claims groundless. The documentation of the case in the archive of Tlaxcala ends with the request of Gonzalez Gallardo to the Real Audiencia in Mexico City to revoke the royal provision conceded to Contlan and to transfer the documents to the court of appeal.

The legal regulations for New Spain maintained the principle of equal access for both Indigenous people and Spaniards to unoccupied forests (monte) and grasslands for foraging, firewood collection and hunting (Greer, 2018, p. 254). In the case of the disputed land, the court case implies that its possession was strategic to the community, probably not only because of the access to the forest, as claimed in the legal arguments, but also for cultivation purposes on the lower slopes of the volcano. There were already many Spanish ranchos located on the slopes of Matlalcueyeh at that time, including in the area around Santa Ana Chiyauhtempan (Skopyk, 2020, p. 122), so the pressure on Indigenous land was growing. In a responsive adaptation to adverse climate conditions, farmers in Tlaxcallan developed large-scale cultivation of maguey (agave) plants on hilltop terraces for the purposes of the pulque production that was booming for most of the seventeenth century. But this form of land management turned out to be destructive to the environment: in the long term this cultivation strategy, combined with violent climatic anomalies, caused serious erosion problems. The Crown’s withdrawal of tax exemption for pulque production additionally contributed to the decline of maguey cultivation, field abandonment and mass landslides, as well as both desiccation and flooding (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 123–129).

Maguey cultivation was also vital in the area of San Bernardino Contlan and this community was responsible for violent pulque riots in 1680, opposing the abolition of the tax exemption (Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 389). The legal struggle for land on the slopes of Matlalcueyeh that unfolded in the same decade confirms that hilltop cultivation areas and forest resources were vital for the community. Its residents showed particular determination in their collective action against Spanish intruders: we can only speculate as to whether the crisis of pulque production was among the factors that contributed to the community efforts undertaken to secure the vital resources of the town. What we do know, however, is that Contlan and other towns in Tlaxcallan were entering into turbulent times that made their economic and demographic situation very precarious, especially in the subsequent two decades.

The importance of monte, or wooded land adopted for local farming and settlement, is also salient in the history of San Toribio Xicohtzinco, located in the lower area of Río Zahuapan where it joins the upper basin of the Atoyac River. In 1720, the Indigenous people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco brought a charge against a mulatto, Francisco Antonio, who was the slave and mayordomo of the infantry captain, Juan de Torres.¹³ They accused him of closing the town’s points of entry, and of beating and threatening the Indigenous community members who tried to pass. As for physical abuse, the slave knocked a local constable (topileh), Joseph Marcos, to the ground with a horse and beat him up. On a Sunday morning, he then whipped another topileh, Juan Thomas, when the constable was on his way to attend mass. The mayordomo also tried to shoot him with a musket, but others intervened. The Natives managed to put the mulatto in prison for the duration of the legal proceedings, while the judge made sure that Don Juan de Torres did not leave the town during the course of the trial.

Juan Thomas, the topileh who had suffered violence at the hands of the slave of the hacienda owner, stated in his testimony that the community possessed a map and writing proving that from time immemorial they had had “the usage and custom” (el uso y costumbre) of carrying out commercial activities on the roads that the mulatto and his owner had closed. This, according to this official, violated the laws of the Indies, which guaranteed free access to public roads. Indeed, the map preserved as part of the legal documentation features not only the land of the community, but also all the roads, where they lead to and even who is in charge of maintaining them (Fig. 3.4). The dimensions of the town, which is identified with the church, are specified, as is the area with individual houses called quauhtla, or “monte”, probably a wooded area adapted for residence, and the official responsible for it, the quauhtlatlalpixqui. It also contains a short genealogy going back to Don Luis Xicotencatl (Fig. 3.5). Below him is a person called Tecpaxochitzin Maxixcatzin, also mentioned in documents from the local archive in Xicohtzinco as one of the women who donated land to the town (Macuil Martínez, 2017, p. 100).

Fig. 3.4

Map of San Toribio Xicohtzinco, AHET, Fondo Colonia, Siglo XVIII, Serie Administrativa, año 1720–1722, Caja 56 Exp. 41. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

Fig. 3.5

Genealogy accompanying the lawsuit between San Toribio Xicohtzinco and hacienda owners, AHET, Fondo Colonia, Siglo XVIII, Serie Administrativa, año 1720–1722, Caja 56 Exp. 41. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala

We learn more about the meaning of this imagery from the Nahuatl text on the reverse side of the page. According to this late colonial rendering of local sixteenth-century history, when the viceroy Don Diego de Mendoza¹⁴ arrived, the rulership began in the town and was established precisely by Don Luis Xicotencatl. He also divided the land and assigned it to local rulers along with the tlahuiztli—the insignia in form of a heron device. The establishment of the cabildo followed and its officials were elected on a yearly basis. The rulers and officials were to keep yn tlahuistli motocayotia astatetl (“the insignia called heron” [literally: “heron stone”]) along with the rights to the land referred to as both tlalli and quauhtla (“land and forest”), also depicted in the document. This corresponds with aztatototl xicotzinco axcatl, a strange non-possessive construction apparently meaning “the heron bird, the possession of Xicohtzinco”, found in the genealogy section. It was indeed the pre-Hispanic insignia most closely identified with the Tlaxcallan altepetl and also became its main heraldic device in the colonial period. By highlighting this association, the people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco not only argued for the legitimacy of their town and titles to land but also attempted to link it to the very core of the Tlaxcallan altepetl as a source of legitimacy, including on the symbolic and visual level. The document was supposedly made 25 years after the arrival of the Viceroy Mendoza (1535), who confirmed the rights of the town so that their borders would never be questioned. Orthographic details, however, leave no doubt about the late colonial date of this manuscript, which is roughly contemporary with the legal suit.

By now it is clear that the whole fight was not about roads: the roads were only a means to open access to community’s land. In response to the presentation of the pictorial and textual documents and to substantiate his own claims, the hacienda owner brought in much earlier legal documentation that he had received from his causantes, the persons from whom he derived his own rights to the hacienda. According to this evidence, on June 22, 1682, in the presence of the Indigenous authorities of Tlaxcallan, including the governor, the land was measured 500 varas¹⁵ from the church in San Toribio toward each of the cardinal directions. The borders were marked with crosses and maguey plants. During the process, two neighbors intervened. They pointed out a contradiction based on the alleged circumstance that the land around the church belonged to Doña Ana de Anzures and her hacienda. However, the authorities assured that the measurements were correct from the legal point of view. To confirm this, all of the community members threw stones in an act of taking possession. The legal basis for the ceremony was provided by the royal decree of 1567, which determined the legal status of the so-called land por razón de pueblo (“by right of township”; called fundo legal, or “legal basis”, in the nineteenth century), specifying its perimeters at a minimum distance of one thousand varas that should be kept between an Indigenous town and the nearest private estate (the center being measured from a church or hermita) and setting the town center with five hundred varas in each of the four cardinal directions (Wood, 1990, p. 118). A significant change came with the 1684 ordenanza of the Real Audiencia that gave actual possession to the Indigenous people of the land contained within a radius of 500 varas, measured from the most peripheral construction in the town (Castro Gutiérrez, 2015, p. 77). This was only two years after the process started and a year before it officially ended.

The hacienda owners appealed this decision. They brought the following argument: there was no church, but only una hermita constructed by an Indigenous woman on a little piece of land that belonged to her. Along with other people, she then obtained permission to celebrate holy mass there. So, according to the Spaniards, the Indigenous people of the larger neighboring town of Santa Inés Zacatelco in fact tried to establish a separate town based on this hermit shrine. The hacienda owners also claimed that San Toribio Xicohtzinco did not have a governor, alcaldes or other officials, nor a sufficient number of houses; in fact, there were only five houses and that it was a subject settlement of Santa Inés Zacatelco. However, Xicohtzinco’s existence is confirmed in the census of 1556–1557 (Gibson, 1967, p. 131). Around 1554, it had an iglesia de visita dependent on the convent of Tepeyanco, which in 1646 shifted under the jurisdiction of the doctrina of Santa Inés Zacatelco (Gonzáles Jácome, 2008, p. 266). In response to the allegations of the hacienda owners, the community made a legally valid argument that there is a general altepetl of Tlaxcallan and its governor is also the governor of all towns and sujetos in the province, including San Toribio Xicohtzinco. However, the Audiencia decided to restore the land to the hacienda owners in 1685, although they would not be able to execute the decision for years. The community opted to ignore the decisions coming from Mexico City. Ironically, the decree of 1687 by king Charles II extended the lands surrounding and pertaining to any Indigenous center by another one hundred varas in each of the four cardinal directions from the last houses and called for eleven hundred varas to the nearest estate; in other words, all settlements became entitled to the land por razón de pueblo, not only head towns with a governor or a church but also all sujetos (Goyas Mejía, 2020, p. 79). This meant that the case made by the people of Xicohtzinco was perfectly justified even if they did not modify the original claim of taking the location of their church as the point of reference. Later on, the decree of 1695 revoked the “last house” rule, ordering that the six hundred varas be measured from the principal church in each town (Wood, 1990, p. 118), but local claims were made in accordance with this general rule.

We do not have information regarding what happened after that, until the next trial in 1720, when the community brought the case against the slave of the hacienda owner. We know, however, that across New Spain communities’ interest in securing the legal endowment por razón de pueblo gained new strength after the legal revisions of 1687, although not without opposition from land owners. Their efforts continued even after the less favorable ruling of 1695, also invoking the legal acts as a means to restore the possession of land that had earlier been lost (Wood, 1990, pp. 118–122). When the people of Xicohtzinco restored the case, the owner at that time, Juan de Torres repeated the same argument that had been successful forty years before, entirely ignoring the fact that the legal circumstances had changed. He stated that “It was not for any other reason that they were expelled and their houses demolished, than that they were illegally built on the land of the hacienda that today is mine”. In the same way, he says, they do not have any rights to roads “because they have nowhere to enter and from nowhere to leave, so for what purpose do they need them?”.

The community responded in 1721 that access to the shrine was fundamental because “this is the way to the church of this parish where the mass is celebrated on Sundays […] and it is necessary for the divine worship”. Moreover, “today the parish is composed of eighty families, which is sufficient to form a town”. What is more, according to their argumentation it was in the best interests of the Crown that “the native people have land to sustain their families and contribute to the royal tribute and responsibilities toward the church”. Accordingly, the people of Xicohtzinco challenged whether defending the Spanish hacienda owner was indeed in the best interests of the Crown: “What is the utility of an individual who with his rancho causes harm to the poor indios, mistreating them as we have documented?” As had happened with the previous litigation with Doña Ana de Anzures, Don Juan de Torres also died during the process. The documentation ends with his son Don Joseph de Torres asking for an appeal. The individual hacienda owners died and changed during the course of the litigation, while the community persisted with its claims, actions and occupation of the land they considered their own.

We can speculate about how much the progressing climatic, environmental, socioeconomic and demographic changes could have contributed to the Indigenous determination to secure the monte area for their settlement and probably also for cultivation. The time period during which the long-term battle between the people of San Toribio Xicohtzinco and Spanish hacienda owners took place was harsh: in 1691 a huge climatic crisis began with disastrous frosts, while epidemics, hunger and cold weather persisted until 1697, only to be followed by hard years of drought, forcing many people to emigrate to Mexico City (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 123–125). While depopulation deepened due to repeated waves of epidemics, there were also other factors affecting the socioeconomic strength and structure of Indigenous settlements. The long-term colonial project of congregaciones gained some success not earlier than in the first decade of the seventeenth century, but it wasn’t until 1749 that the Tlaxcallan cabildo announced that the resettlement has been completed because people had abandoned their lands and homes in the “hills and ravInés”, a process that reinforced the division between center/periphery and infield/outfield (Skopyk, 2020, p. 87). However, as the concentration of centralized Indigenous towns increased, they suffered from a growing encroachment of Spanish estancias and haciendas that made it difficult for Native settlements to expand in moments of demographic rise, as, for example, in the case of San Juan Ixtenco, which was forced to establish the satellite community of San Pedro Cuauhtla in 1681 (Martínez Baracs, 2008, p. 460). This seems to be a paradox considering that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a huge percentage of land in Tlaxcala remained unused or underused (Skopyk, 2020, p. 103), but what Indigenous people fought for in the eighteenth century was quality, well-watered land or areas safe for settlement.

In the case of Xicohtzinco, the litigation makes it clear that this wooded land was crucial for the community, probably because the valley land was insufficient, too greatly transformed by geomorphological processes or too prone to inundation, as it was located in the area of confluence of the Zahuapan and Atoyac Rivers. The flood frequency of the Zahuapan in Tlaxcala increased from 1650 and especially in the period 1700–1774, while sand sedimentation affected low-lying agricultural fields; the situation was especially alarming downstream of the city of Tlaxcallan. The town of Nativitas, located between the city of Tlaxcallan and Xicohtzinco, was at the mercy of the unpredictable waters of the Zahuapan, which destroyed bridges and buildings and flooded land and roads, including the camino real between Tlaxcallan and Puebla (Skopyk, 2020, pp. 136–148). Encroached on by Spanish hacienda owners and affected by climatic anomalies and diseases, the people of Xicohtzinco struggled for their rights and for the integrity and well-being of their community through persistent collective action. Eventually, in 1741, they managed to purchase the hacienda, but were forced to sell it two years later because they lacked a sufficient workforce due to the epidemics of 1737 (Gonzáles Jácome, 2008, pp. 266–267).

The microhistorical insights into the struggles undertaken by Tlaxcaltecah communities show that the premonitions of the Indigenous cabildo in the sixteenth century regarding the adverse impact of Spanish settlers on the Native population, land and natural resources were indeed right. In this late colonial era, replete with disasters and socioeconomic challenges, the struggle over vital resources was often linked to the activities and abuses of Spanish land and cattle owners. At much the same time as the two cases just discussed, on the other side of the volcano Malintzin, where it descends toward the town of Huamantla, housing not only an Indigenous but also a growing Spanish and mestizo population, a water crisis developed in 1705.¹⁶ According to the denouncement, Cristóbal and Gabriel Báez, mestizos from the hacienda of Andrés Báez, caused serious damage to the pipes that brought water from the mountain’s springs to the town, causing it to “suffer from many calamities because of the lack of water”.¹⁷ The mestizos filled the aqueduct with plants so that water would not descend to Huamantla, but redirected its flow to feed their own cattle. As a result of the investigation, the people of the hacienda were imprisoned, fined 25 pesos for the aqueduct repair costs and obliged to make sure that neither they nor other hacienda workers would cause any damage to the water pipes in the future but that they would respect the use of this important resource by the residents of the town. Indeed, climatic anomalies and provincial authorities’ inadequate political and administrative crisis management, as well as the economic and demographic challenges of that turbulent period, affected Indigenous, mestizo and Spanish residents of the province, sometimes creating space for cross-ethnic alliances directed against abusive landowners.

Traditional Knowledge, Healing, Language and Well-Being

But stories of resilience and resistance are not limited to struggles for land. They also extend to defending key traditional practices and ways of healing as components of local well-being. For example, Spaniards were astounded by the Native custom of regular sweat bathing and scandalized by the fact that women and men bathed together. In the oldest known dated document in Nahuatl, a 1543 act against idolatry from Tlaxcallan, “those of us men who bathe themselves together with women, those who bathe themselves in public” are listed among the abominable sinners subject to persecution (Olko & Brylak, 2018). Such baths, performed in steam houses (temazcalli), had crucial ritual, purifying and curative functions. It was essential to keep the ritual equilibrium of female and male participants in this liminal place. Spaniards had a hard time eradicating this custom. One example of Indigenous resistance to the Spanish attempts to eliminate this fundamental practice comes from 1706. It is a criminal case that followed the reissued decree, announced in public plazas in the communities,¹⁸ prohibiting joint female–male sweat baths under severe penalties. The Natives rebelled against this prohibition. Indigenous laborers of the hacienda of Masegualpa, after receiving this warning from a Spanish official who found them cleaning a temazcalli, became extremely angry (se alteraron), to the extent that they started a commotion (se yvan juntando con alboroto), chasing away the intruder, who later filed a complaint against them.

As this eighteenth-century archival document shows, Spaniards met with persistent local resistance from the Native people with regard to their obedience to this prohibition. Today, the temazcales persist in numerous Nahua communities and are often to be found in Tlaxcalan households. However, according to local women from San Miguel Xaltipan in the municipality of Contla, keepers of both the Nahuatl language and intimate knowledge of traditional healing, “before all people would bathe in the sweat bath” (achto nochi omotemaya de temazcal), including small children, who “would take sweat baths, but not anymore” (ometemaya ahorita yocmo), but in the present day just a few of them are taken to temazcales (motema, pero zan cequi, occequi yocmo, “they take sweat baths, but only some, others not anymore”). The lack of continuity of traditional practices—expressed by the oldest community members—is accompanied by the sense of loss of natural resources. As signaled at the beginning of this text, many herbal plants used in healing and grown in and around the town have disappeared, while community members are more and more reluctant to rely on traditional knowledge transferred across generations: Yocmo catqui in xihuitl de non achto, den achto oyeya pero miec xihuitl itech in tlalli (“The herbs of the past are gone, before there were many plants [growing] on the land”); yocmo cah quimi in achto, achto oyeya miec xihuitl tlen timopahtiayah (“there are not [plants] any more like as in the past, earlier there were many herbs that we used for curing”); yopolihqueh, yopoliuh ihuan non tanto cualimeh, cualli in pahtli (“they have already disappeared, it is gone and they were so good, good medicine”).

The loss of crucial healing rituals and natural resources assuring individual and collective health and well-being is accompanied by the shift to Spanish and reluctance to learn the language of the grandparents: “They do not want to learn” (Amo quinequih zalozqueh), the elders repeatedly say about their grandchildren. And yet, our most recent research shows that speaking Nahuatl is related to speakers’ well-being in Contla; surprisingly, when compared across four different Mexican regions where this Indigenous language is still spoken, the effect is the strongest in the most urbanized and assimilated region of Contla, despite the fact that it suffers from the deepest loss of the heritage language and of the traditional knowledge conveyed in it (Olko et al., 2022).

Summary and Conclusions

It has been argued that the rhetoric of the Tlaxcaltecah employed in their colonial-period petitions and court documents reflects their high-level ability to forge skillful strategies and formulate effective legal arguments, but does not necessarily reflect their “lived experience” or “a native reality” (Baber, 2011, p. 42). However, when confronted with the internal sixteenth-century records of the Native cabildo, along with the disastrous demographic, climatic, environmental and socioeconomic data, the voices of the inhabitants of the province struggling to protect their land, resources and well-being can be viewed in a much sharper and more dramatic light. The mid- and long-term consequences of processes set into motion in the early colonial period, such as the increasing role of Spanish landholders, also proved that the concerns and sinister prognoses of the Native government were not exaggerated. However, both the Tlaxcallan elites and the commoners were by no means passive observers of the calamities and challenges that became an inadvertent part of their daily reality. As aptly summarized by Skopyk, “even in the context of sickness and death, the pluvial fueled a creative and productive response by local communities as they sought to protect resources and find ways to profit from the changing ecology” (Skopyk, 2020, p. 34). The pressures and threats that initially manifested themselves in the first decades after the arrival of Spaniards continued across the colonial era, but the Tlaxcaltecah were able to use a number of strategies to protect their land and their well-being.

Colonial legal battles show that collective threats generated collective responses. Local resilience was grounded in the ability to maintain and mobilize social networks for action. While in the sixteenth century, the response was at the level of the cabildo, of Tlaxcallan, later on the struggle became decentralized, with local communities taking on a number of initiatives and strategies to safeguard their own resources. Both leaders and community members actively and resourcefully protected essential assets and components of their well-being, responding not only to abuse and violence but also to climatic and epidemiological challenges. And despite all the complexity and magnitude of challenges, they have been able to keep much of their traditional economy and industries, as well as their language, cultural practices and forms of organization, until the second half of the twentieth century, and in some aspects until the present day. Social approaches to agency developed in the context of contemporary societies emphasize the dualism of the “individual” and “society” or “structure” that is both “enabling and constraining” (Giddens, 1984, p. 162, 169), while social actors are seen as reproducing or transforming social systems through praxis (Giddens, 1984, p. 171; see also Sztompka, 1991). The history of Indigenous people in the colonial period reveals a demonstrable collective and social level of agency and resilience based on the ability to mobilize social networks for support and action, grounded in traditional power structures, even if channeled through specific groups of actors. The latter could be the cabildo, composed of local nobility or town representatives acting in the name of whole communities, as seen in the cases of San Bernardino Contlan and San Toribio Xicohtzinco.

Many legal steps turned out to be of little effect, and some adverse processes were ultimately unstoppable. However, historical texts reveal complex battlegrounds upon which the Tlaxcaltecah strove to maintain control over land, environment and various kinds of resources. It is through these texts that we can see how the Indigenous inhabitants of this particular territory protected essential assets and components of their well-being that were embedded in traditional concepts of power and local knowledge. When seen separately and in their own contexts, particular historical documents do attest to Indigenous agency but often do not immediately make us aware of a longer historical process in which some of these battles were won and some were eventually lost. Yet this can be seen when one ties together the common threads of microhistories—some of which are discussed in this paper—across longer periods of time, different places and available documentary genres; and it is even more salient if we acknowledge that the aftermath of these apparently remote historical processes continues to unfold to this day. Thus, there is no contradiction between the longue durée approach to history and microhistory (Frankopan, 2021, p. 25), as only together they provide the necessary bridge between past and present. In the case of Tlaxcala, the erosion of the traditional economic base, accompanied by accelerating assimilation to the dominant Spanish/Mexican culture, can be seen as socioeconomic and sociocultural processes set into motion in the colonial period and related to land ownership, control of natural resources and acculturation processes.

Modern communities in Tlaxcala have suffered intense and prolonged discrimination, forced assimilation and an accelerated language shift to Spanish (e.g., Hill & Hill, 1986; Nutini & Isaac, 2009; Robichaux, 2005). The loss of language and profound changes in ethnic identification are accompanied by the loss of traditional knowledge and of environmental resources such as medicinal plants. The ongoing urbanization processes and changes in local economy, including farming methods, are often perceived today, especially by elder community members, as threats to their well-being and as direct causes of health problems affecting the Indigenous population. As shown in this paper, the sense of loss can be traced back to the sixteenth century, even if the partial nature of our evidence often leaves us with a history of silences, gaps and erasures. This reminds us that “the remembrance of absence, of loss that endures, a void from which we can still learn” (Hicks, 2021, p. 114) should be recognized as an inherent part of Indigenous history.

Tlaxcalan history is yet another example of the deep intertwining of human action and environmental change, with nature playing an active role in historical processes. It showcases the complexity of human–environment relations that have been affected both by climate change and by colonization and postcolonial domination. Intimate links with the environment, and especially with sacred mountains such as Matlalcueyeh/Malintzin, have marked crucial relationships that continue to be perpetuated in local communities through healing practices and story-telling (e.g., Nava Nava & Cuahutle Bautista, 2015). And not unlike in colonial times, the Tlaxcaltecah today continue to face ongoing threats to the integrity of their communities, the control of resources, a healthy environment, cultural survival and a local, relational sense of well-being.