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Puro tlaxcalteca? Ethnic Integrity and Consciousness in Late Seventeenth-Century Northern New Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Leslie Scott Offutt
Leslie Scott Offutt*
Affiliation:
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie New York
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“The pueblo of San Estevan de Tlaxcala is inhabited by pure blood Tlaxcaltecan Indians who founded it during the conquest of this country. . . . These Indians speak Spanish and are civilized.” So observed don Nicolás de Lafora, a military engineer accompanying the Marqués de Rubí’s inspection tour of New Spain's northern presidios, as he approached San Esteban and the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo, in present-day Coahuila, in June 1767. A decade later, fray Agustín de Morfi, chaplain to newly appointed commander general of the Provincias Internas don Teodoro de Croix, echoed Lafora's assessment, linking San Esteban's ability to preserve its privileges for the better part of two centuries to the community's pureza de sangre, preserved through the great care its residents took to avoid “mixing” with the castas (mixed races) that “infected” Saltillo.

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Articles
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The Americas , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 27 - 46
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Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2017 

“The pueblo of San Estevan de Tlaxcala is inhabited by pure blood Tlaxcaltecan Indians who founded it during the conquest of this country. . . . These Indians speak Spanish and are civilized.”Footnote 1 So observed don Nicolás de Lafora, a military engineer accompanying the Marqués de Rubí’s inspection tour of New Spain's northern presidios, as he approached San Esteban and the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo, in present-day Coahuila, in June 1767. A decade later, fray Agustín de Morfi, chaplain to newly appointed commander general of the Provincias Internas don Teodoro de Croix, echoed Lafora's assessment, linking San Esteban's ability to preserve its privileges for the better part of two centuries to the community's pureza de sangre, preserved through the great care its residents took to avoid “mixing” with the castas (mixed races) that “infected” Saltillo.Footnote 2

These comments from two mid-eighteenth century representatives of the Spanish crown suggest that, to outside observers at least, the Tlaxcalan community appeared ethnically “pure.” Further, in Lafora and Morfi's eyes, ethnic purity was a marker of superiority that set San Esteban Tlaxcalans apart from both the malas castas (literally, “bad races”) and the indios bárbaros (“barbarous” or “savage” Indians, here referencing the native populations living beyond Spanish control) of the frontier and Spaniards themselves.Footnote 3 But was this ethnic purity imaginary? Had San Esteban in fact maintained its corporate limpieza de sangre (blood purity) over the nearly two centuries since its founding? Were these outside observers repeating a widely accepted truth, or were they simply naïve?

This article steps back in time from the era in which Lafora and Morfi offered their assessments to the earlier decades of San Esteban's existence to explore how over the course of more than two centuries San Esteban's Tlaxcalan citizens crafted an image of ethnic “purity” that allowed the community to sustain its municipal autonomy against great odds. This autonomy lasted until the years after independence, when the pueblo was absorbed by the neighboring Spanish town of Saltillo. I examine a number of factors that came together in the mid- to late seventeenth century to enable San Esteban to shape and refine the ethnically homogeneous image it presented to the world, one that Lafora and Morfi seemed to accept uncritically when they encountered the Indian town in the 1760s and 1770s. The examination has taken me through parish records from San Esteban's parish church; civil documents housed in Saltillo's municipal archive relating to San Esteban's foundation, its disputes with Saltillo's cabildo and its citizens, and its role in frontier defense; a number of late seventeenth-century testaments of San Esteban residents recorded in Nahuatl and housed in that same archive; and a range of scholarly studies that treat the colonial north. I look in particular at manifestations of the community's conciencia de sí, its “sense of self,” evidenced at the corporate level as San Esteban took to court to defend the privileges secured at its founding. That conciencia is also apparent in the community's touting of its contributions to frontier defense, and in its provision of colonists for Tlaxcalan towns founded throughout northeastern New Spain between 1598 and the first years of the nineteenth century. I consider as well more mundane manifestations of San Esteban's conciencia de sí, visible in the daily interactions of San Esteban's citizens. In particular, I examine marriage choices and community affirmation at significant “life moments” that revealed how San Esteban's residents saw themselves as Tlaxcalans. San Esteban's conscious effort to deploy its vaunted ethnic integrity at critical points in its history was an essential part of its larger struggle to survive challenges—most notably those posed by Saltillo residents and officials—that threatened to compromise San Esteban's municipal independence, divest it of its resources, and ultimately erase both de facto and de jure the distinctly Tlaxcalan presence in the valley. The present study takes inspiration from the rich body of scholarship on the formation of Indian identities in colonial Mesoamerica that has emerged over the past few decades, as well as recent examinations of limpieza de sangre in New Spain that contribute to more nuanced conceptualizations of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. Considering the northern reaches of the colony more specifically, two recent studies of urban Indians and the formation of pluralist indio communities in sixteenth and early seventeenth century Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí shed light on the fluidity of northern societies at critical points in their development. Both Mexican and US scholars have contributed to an expanding body of work on Tlaxcalans in the north, revealing the extensive political and cultural influence they brought to bear on the development of New Spain's northeastern frontier.Footnote 4 This study of the creation, maintenance, and deployment of ethnic identity in San Esteban is part of a larger project focusing on community formation in what was arguably the most important and long-lived of the northern Tlaxcalan colonies, a study that further expands our knowledge of the Tlaxcalan diaspora and deepens our understanding of interethnic relations in the context of expanding Spanish authority on the edge of empire.

Corporate Identity and the Defense of Municipal Autonomy

Ethnic purity, whether fiction or fact, was critical to San Esteban's rhetorical arsenal as it endeavored to sustain its independent existence on the northern Mexican landscape. The town, separated from the Spanish settlement of Saltillo (f. 1577) by only an irrigation canal, was established as part of Viceroy Luis de Velasco's late sixteenth-century colonization project, which was intended to end the prolonged war between native peoples and Spanish travelers, soldiers, and settlers. Velasco proposed to create pueblos where the band peoples of the north—the infieles, as the parlance of the time had it—could be settled for the purpose of indoctrination in both the Catholic faith and the trappings of “civilization.” Civilization, not surprisingly, was defined in this context as settled lives focused on agricultural production—a way of life completely at odds with the strategies that native peoples had developed to survive in a harsh and punishing region. But Velasco had central Mexican models in mind, and turned to Tlaxcala, Spain's earliest ally, to recruit colonists for those pueblos. The 1591 agreement negotiated by the viceregal government with Tlaxcala's cabildo granted extensive privileges to Tlaxcalans willing to emigrate as colonists, privileges that set them apart from Spaniards and in a decidedly more advantageous position.Footnote 5 In the ensuing years, San Esteban clung, at times desperately, to those privileges. San Esteban's residents and Saltillo's Spaniards alike recognized that Tlaxcalans' claim to their exceptional position could not be sustained if the pueblo's ethnic integrity were compromised.

San Esteban's founders knew all too well how precious those privileges were and how vigorously their Tlaxcalan forefathers had fought for them in the decades after the conquest. The claims to privilege were rooted in the province's early strategic alliance with the Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés. Tlaxcalans, both individually and corporately, had waged a series of campaigns throughout the sixteenth century for royal recognition of their role as leales vasallos (loyal subjects), in the early years of the conquest and beyond.Footnote 6 The privileges granted to northern colonists in 1591 built on and expanded those earlier won by Tlaxcala itself.Footnote 7 The agreement guaranteed that Tlaxcalan colonists and their descendants in perpetuity would be considered hidalgos—exempt from tribute, personal service, and payment of the alcabala (sales tax). They were entitled to use the honorific “don” and permitted to ride horses “como si fueran españoles” and to bear arms. The crown in turn was obliged to provide food to the colonists for two years, and it mandated that no estancias de ganado mayor (cattle and horse properties) could be located nearer than three leagues from the pueblo and no estancias de ganado menor (properties for sheep and goats) nearer than two leagues. Most significant in sustaining the ethnic and corporate integrity of the community, Tlaxcalans were allowed to establish their own municipal government, one that excluded the interference of both Spaniards and other Indians. Spaniards were forbidden to take or buy land in Tlaxcalan settlements. Finally, both Spaniards and Chichimecas, the latter the very peoples Tlaxcalans were dispatched to pacify and civilize, were barred from living among Tlaxcalans.Footnote 8

Saltillo's beleaguered residents donated properties to be divided among the Central Mexican colonists, with a portion of those lands reserved for members of the band Indians the Tlaxcalans were expected to civilize.Footnote 9 The grants to San Esteban were roughly proportionate to the number of colonists relative to Saltillo residents (245 Tlaxcalans, compared to 55 Spanish vecinos, or citizens). San Esteban received three-quarters of the waters from Saltillo's main spring, as well as 36 caballerías of agricultural land (a caballería was 106 acres) and 87 solares, or house lots, for the establishment of the pueblo itself.Footnote 10 The pueblo thus began its existence under exceptionally favorable conditions, notwithstanding the unsettled circumstances that prompted its establishment in the first place. That Saltillo ceded to San Esteban the majority of the water flowing from the main spring and substantial amounts of land suggests that Saltillo's Spaniards initially welcomed Tlaxcalans; further, the act of ceding waters and lands could well be understood as affirmation of the rights and privileges articulated in the agreement. San Esteban's Tlaxcalans were clearly favored by the crown at this pivotal moment in the subjugation and pacification of the northeast, and Saltillo's Spaniards were not of a mind to contest that point in the difficult final years of the sixteenth century.But welcome and affirmation were short-lived, despite the necessity for the two communities to ally with each other in times of heightened tensions with native peoples of the north. Over time, San Esteban's autonomy inspired increasing envy and enmity on the part of Saltillo's citizens. As early as 1607, San Esteban found itself on the defensive against Saltillo and its citizens, involved in a series of court cases over the precise location of the boundary dividing the two towns. In the late 1620s and early 1630s the two communities went head to head over errant livestock damaging their respective crops, illicit requisitions of San Esteban waters by Saltillo's alcalde mayor, and access to firewood in the mountains ringing the valley in which the two towns sat.Footnote 11 Of particular interest in the issue of ethnic purity was a dispute arising in the mid 1670s over lands San Esteban claimed for itself. These lands had originally been set aside for the Guachichils, one of the non-sedentary Chichimeca peoples that the San Esteban colonists were charged with “civilizing.” Several hundred Guachichils and other non-sedentary peoples had been drawn to San Esteban at its founding; the numbers apparently held steady into the 1620s, but had declined to around 200 by 1666. Meanwhile, the Tlaxcalan population increased from fewer than 300 in 1591 to an estimated 1,600 in 1666, and 1,750 by 1675.Footnote 12 By the 1670s, San Esteban, faced with insufficient farmland and house lots to accommodate its growing population, was claiming Guachichil lands as its own, by virtue, they argued of having absorbed the band Indians so completely that the name Guachichil had been lost and “all had become Tlaxcaltecas” (“se perdió el nombre de dichos huachichiles por habernos vuelto todos tlaxcaltecas”). To San Esteban's cabildo, then, it was logical that Guachichil lands would fall to San Esteban's citizens, as descendants of those who had come north to pacify that group.Footnote 13

The 1677 acknowledgement of “ethnic absorption”—the cabildo stopped short of an explicit acknowledgement of mestizaje, or ethnic mixture—was, as one scholar has noted, a potential double-edged sword.Footnote 14 One could assume that by “all had become Tlaxcaltecas” San Esteban simply meant that Guachichils had so completely adopted sedentary ways that for all intents and purposes they were fully a part of the community, but one could just as easily assume, as at least some Saltillo residents were ready to do, that ethnic mixing had compromised San Esteban's integrity and thereby substantially weakened the pueblo's claims to privilege as a community of “pure Tlaxcalans.” In the short run, San Esteban's position seems to have prevailed over Saltillo's challenges: the viceroy ordered that lands originally assigned to Guachichils revert to San Esteban, and that houses the Saltillo encroachers had built on those lands be removed.Footnote 15

The privileges San Esteban repeatedly cited in its defense against intrusions from Saltillo's residents were intimately linked with the community's ethnic distinctiveness, its tlaxcaltequidad, a distinctiveness the crown affirmed in its very selection of Tlaxcalans as colonizers in 1591. Again and again, San Esteban asserted that identity as it contested Spanish efforts to compromise its autonomy. But the pueblo's response was not merely defensive, a resistance against Saltillo's encroachments: repeatedly, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, San Esteban emphasized its contributions as a community to maintaining (or restoring) peace on the frontier. As noted earlier, the crown originally conceived the Tlaxcalan colonization project as a means of strengthening Spain's hold on the north in the aftermath of a prolonged period of conflict with native peoples. Ideally, the example of Tlaxcalan farmers cultivating their lands would induce band peoples to take up peaceful sedentary lives. In fact, and not surprisingly, no such easy pacification was forthcoming, notwithstanding the presence of at least some “Chichimecas” in and around San Esteban in the early years of its settlement, as noted earlier. Rather, periodic hostilities over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pushed Tlaxcalans to take up arms to bring those hostilities to an end.

San Esteban was never reticent in touting its citizens’ involvement in these endeavors. The cabildo repeatedly referenced those contributions—the provision of both manpower and horses—in its ongoing efforts to assert the town's compliance with the 1591 agreement governing its founding. The community could not do otherwise. The 1591 concessions had granted rights and privileges to an ethnically distinct community of colonizers. To hold up its end of the deal, San Esteban sought to preserve that distinction, ensuring that no wedge could be driven into the façade of its ethnic integrity and thus compromise its municipal independence. San Esteban's readiness to emphasize its contributions reflected its consciousness of itself as an entity distinct from the Spanish, but one whose citizens' critical role, as ever loyal vassals of the crown, was to help to maintain a “Spanish” presence in the region. San Esteban's Tlaxcalans fulfilled that role in two ways: by joining in armed campaigns against native raiders, risking their lives and possessions in defensive and offensive expeditions, and by providing colonists for a series of Tlaxcalan settlements established from the late sixteenth century forward. In the process of strengthening Spanish control of the north, the Tlaxcalans strengthened their own presence as well.

Tlaxcalan engagement in a series of armed excursions against raiding Indians in the 1660s and 1670s allows us to consider how San Esteban met its obligation to provide regional defense. The last third of the seventeenth century saw increasing violence throughout the north, with rising anti-Spanish sentiment manifested in efforts to drive Europeans entirely from the region. While this hostility was most visibly manifested in the northwest and New Mexico—notably, in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680—the northeast also witnessed an upsurge in violence.Footnote 16 In such circumstances, San Esteban was expected to step forward, contributing men and horses to defend the region, and to root out “enemy Indians” whenever they struck or threatened to strike.Footnote 17 Generally, Tlaxcalan forces recruited for these excursions accompanied a Saltillo resident identified by a military title as a capitán or an alférez (ensign); often the San Esteban contingent was led by a Tlaxcalan similarly titled, perhaps a capitán, an alférez, a sargento, or a cabo (corporal). These were no professionally trained officers and soldiers; rather, forces were assembled as need arose, summoned either by San Esteban's governor or at the request of the capitán protector (San Esteban's Spanish protector) or alcalde mayor. They were relatively small, with the San Esteban contingent rarely numbering more than ten men.Footnote 18

The need to send the Tlaxcalans into the field was indeed great in the mid- to late 1660s. These years marked a transition from an earlier period of Spanish-initiated violence against band peoples (part of Spaniards’ efforts to pacify the region, of course, but also a means by which local Spaniards “recruited” labor) to one in which natives themselves took the initiative, forcing Spaniards into a defensive mode.Footnote 19 As Saltillo was compelled to respond to these provocations, so too was San Esteban. On one day alone—July 11, 1666—San Esteban dispatched three separate armed contingents in response to Indian incursions: ten men were sent to pursue a group that had stolen horses from San Esteban's caballada, the community's horse herd maintained for defensive expeditions. Five set off to search out a native leader, Nicolás Carretero, who had killed a local resident, and another eight scoured the roadsides for hostile Indians who had been attacking travelers.Footnote 20 Three years later, responding to the request of alcalde mayor Juan Antonio de Sarría, San Esteban jailed more than 80 Indians associated with Nicolás Carretero and his brothers. Twelve armed and mounted Tlaxcalans joined Saltillo Spaniards under Sarría's command to accompany the captives to Monterrey, some 50 miles to the northeast.Footnote 21 San Esteban forces routinely patrolled the surrounding countryside, endeavoring to keep enemy Indians at bay or at least to prevent them from harassing the two towns. Tlaxcalans and Spaniards normally ventured out together, but on at least one occasion San Esteban's governor, fearful that hesitation would cost the town its herds, hastily dispatched Tlaxcalans by themselves to disperse the Indian raiders.Footnote 22 Tlaxcalans helped to defend other northern settlements as well. In June 1667, when enemy Indians surrounded the Parras valley, roughly 60 miles to the west, San Esteban sent ten men, responding “in his Majesty's name and as loyal vassals” to answer alcalde mayor Diego de Valdéz's pleas for assistance. San Esteban's cabildo made a point of stressing that it lent its support at its own expense, leaving no doubt about the greatness of its sacrifice and value of its service to the defense of crown interests.Footnote 23 San Esteban's cabildo actively encouraged others to take note of and affirm its contributions to regional defense. In May 1665, for example, the council asked then alcalde mayor don Fernando de Azcué y Armendáriz to submit an account detailing the community's aid in repelling a series of Indian attacks in the region. Azcué y Armendáriz complied, noting that those Indian hostilities had resulted in deaths, thefts of horses and mules, and robberies of travelers. He reported the number of San Esteban participants, the manner in which they were deployed, the dire straits that had prompted crown officials to make an urgent appeal for San Esteban's assistance, and the many ways Tlaxcalans had proven themselves to be good soldiers and loyal vassals of the king. This account, apparently one of several written in this tumultuous period (and much more detailed than others collected in this file), represented a Spanish official voice brought to bear on behalf of San Esteban's interests, and it was favorably acknowledged by the provincial governor don Bartolomé de Estrada in a December 1682 response.Footnote 24 In repeatedly touting its contributions, San Esteban implicitly drew attention to its ethnic distinctiveness. Its contributions to sustaining a “Spanish” presence on the frontier were as a specific, ethnically defined community that was meeting its responsibilities under the 1591 agreement. Each record of San Esteban's role in northern defense (or offense), whether set down by San Esteban's cabildo notaries or by the crown or local Spanish authorities, further affirmed San Esteban's Tlaxcalan identity, and the town's fulfillment of the terms of its founding documents legitimized its existence as an independent entity.

San Esteban Tlaxcalans demonstrated their fealty as “good soldiers and loyal vassals” through their willingness to take up arms in defense of crown interests. In addition, they acted as loyal vassals through their service to the crown in colonizing the many northern Tlaxcalan settlements established from the late sixteenth century forward. From as early as 1598, with the foundation of Santa María de las Parras in the Laguna region west of the valley of Saltillo, and continuing until at least 1801, San Esteban acted as a “mother colony,” contributing hundreds if not thousands of settlers to as many as 15 new Tlaxcalan towns located west, north, and east of San Esteban proper.Footnote 25 The privileges granted to Tlaxcala in the early decades of the sixteenth century were carried north by the colonists after 1591, and extended to Tlaxcalans living in the towns founded by their descendants. Residents of those new towns touted their Tlaxcalan identity as eagerly as did the San Esteban Tlaxcalans. They claimed privileges on the basis of their origin in San Esteban, and argued that they were but the latest link in a chain that stretched through San Esteban all the way back to Tlaxcala itself. Generations of Tlaxcalan colonists created an increasingly intricate web of northern settlements that traced their origins ultimately to Tlaxcala proper.Footnote 26 At San Esteban's urging, those Tlaxcalan towns willingly lent their efforts to buttress San Esteban's assertions of its significant role in establishing and maintaining a “Spanish” presence (through its own determined Tlaxcalan presence) in this potentially wealthy and clearly vulnerable region.Footnote 27

In 1749, the cabildo of Nuestra Señora de la Purificación, in response to San Esteban's request, detailed more than a half-century of San Esteban's assistance to both Purificación and the Tlaxcalan pueblo of Nuestra Señora del Carrizal from which Purificación had sprung. The cabildo noted that in 1687, some 14 San Esteban families had voluntarily founded Carrizal, where for 28 years they “served Your Majesty as loyal vassals.” In 1715, at the request of don Francisco de Barbadillo Victoria, who had been dispatched by the viceroy a year earlier to address problems of northern defense, those 14 families moved on to establish Purificación. Purificación's cabildo called special attention to the role these Tlaxcalans played in the “discovery” of the Seno Mexicano (in effect, the further penetration of the region of present-day Tamaulipas and Nuevo León). They had voluntarily provided three armed and equipped soldiers, 12 horses, two outfitted mules, and a cow, all clear evidence of their commitment to advancing imperial interests in the north. Further, members of these families maintained a herd of 37 horses for use in frontier defense, and they also built the town's stone church.Footnote 28

Such certifications of San Esteban's contributions not only underscored its assertion of its critical role in frontier defense but also buttressed the later colonies’ claims to privileges originating in conquest-era Tlaxcala and expanded by San Esteban's founders in and after 1591. One northern community, the pueblo of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de la Candela, made explicit its connection with Tlaxcala proper. In 1725, Guadalupe sent a request to San Esteban for certification of its privileges (which it had apparently been requesting since its founding 28 years earlier!), in order to gain an exemption from the obligation to pay tithes and “first fruits,” Guadalupe's cabildo noted the “privileges and prerogatives” enjoyed by San Esteban and determined that Guadalupe's citizens ought to enjoy them as well. These privileges were, after all, theirs by right, since they were (through San Esteban) the lineal descendants of Tlaxcalans who had been awarded those privileges and prerogatives in the early years of the conquest.Footnote 29 Another community, San Miguel de Aguayo, claimed exemption from the alcabala in 1755, citing its connection to Tlaxcala proper through San Esteban, from which San Miguel had been founded in 1686.Footnote 30 For these small towns on the edge of empire, Tlaxcalan identity carried with it concrete economic advantages, and San Esteban was the critical source of that identity. As San Esteban, colonized from Gran Tlaxcala in 1591, preserved its privileges, so too could these northern descendants of San Esteban's settlers preserve theirs.Footnote 31 For later colonies, there was perhaps even more at stake. None of these towns could claim to be ethnically “pure,” as the primary colonists, the Tlaxcalans, had settled among various band peoples. Thus, they would have had even more pressing need to assert their ethnic distinctiveness in “mixed” towns—that, or be subjected as were non-Tlaxcalan natives to all obligations normally borne by Indians. If Spaniards could not easily differentiate (or were not willing to differentiate) Tlaxcalans from non-Tlaxcalan natives, the Tlaxcalans would be subject to tribute, tithes, labor restrictions, and the like.Footnote 32

Everyday Tlaxcaltequidad

Whether venturing out to battle or to colonize, San Esteban's Tlaxcalans carried with them an explicit understanding of their identity as “pure Tlaxcalans.” In both frontier endeavors they manifested outwardly a conciencia de sí that set them apart from both the Saltillo Spaniards they accompanied and the various non-Tlaxcalan native populations of the north. This Tlaxcalan distinctiveness was noted and affirmed by crown representatives throughout the period in question, and it allowed San Esteban to sustain its municipal independence despite regular efforts on the part of Saltillo's Spaniards, at least, to chip away at its autonomy.

What can we discern of inward manifestations of Tlaxcalan distinctiveness? As we speak of a corporate consciousness, a sense of self displayed on the macro level, can we as well speak of a more intimate sense of ethnic self? An exploration of some aspects of daily life in San Esteban allows us at least a partial answer to that question. Periodic violence and contention were woven into the fabric of everyday life for San Esteban's citizens. Threats of Indian hostilities, encroachment on town lands, appropriation of town resources by Saltillo residents, demographic pressures, and drought and disease were facts of life in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and indeed throughout the colonial era.Footnote 33 Nonetheless, a substantial part of San Esteban's existence was the daily “going about one's business,” performing the activities that marked the life of any community, even one on the far northern edge of empire.

Turning our focus away from the moments when Tlaxcalans in arms joined with Saltillo's citizens to defend the region, and away from the various petitions and statements generated by San Esteban and other northern Tlaxcalan settlements attesting to San Esteban's role in populating and “civilizing” the region, one finds more subtle ways of gauging a conciencia de sí that operated at the personal level. San Esteban Tlaxcalans shaped and reflected an intimate consciousness of who they were and, whether it was their intention or not, undergirded the cabildo's representation of San Esteban as puro tlaxcalteca. Two particular life moments—marriage and death—provide windows into the late seventeenth-century world in which San Esteban's citizens lived out their personal sense of self. Much as frontier defense and establishment of new colonies called attention to San Esteban's presence as a specifically Tlaxcalan entity, marriages too revealed a sensitivity and awareness of the community's tlaxcaltequidad.Footnote 34 They show us whether San Esteban couples chose partners from within their own ethnic group or looked beyond the local Tlaxcalan population. Given the intriguing phrase cited earlier, “all have become Tlaxcaltecas,” in San Esteban's 1677 claim to lands earlier allocated to Chichimecas, might we expect the late seventeenth-century marriage records to expose evidence of mestizaje? Ethnic homogeneity was perhaps the most critical component of the community's integrity, with San Esteban's privileged position resting upon its essential tlaxcaltequidad. Do marriage records bear out San Esteban's carefully cultivated image as an ethnically “pure” town? An examination of marriages recorded in San Esteban's parish in this period effectively puts to rest suspicions of widespread ethnic mixing. San Esteban couples demonstrated very high rates of endogamy. The record gives no hint as to how the priest performing the sacraments and recording the personal information of those receiving the sacraments weighed and judged the ethnicity of his charges, or whether he sought a self-description of ethnicity from those whom he married or from their godparents (padrinos) and witnesses. Regardless, what emerges is a remarkably consistent picture of ethnic coherence. Some surviving records are badly damaged or illegible, and entries vary in the level of detail. Some records include the ethnicity of spouses, names of parents and godparents, barrio of residence, and the like. Others contain only the partners’ names with a notation “ambos de nación tlaxcalteca.” However, the vast majority of entries have at least some indication of the subject's ethnicity, and taken together they suggest a community that was almost impervious to entry by non-Tlaxcalans.Footnote 35

Between June 1675 and October 1692, 140 marriages were entered in San Esteban's parish registry.Footnote 36 Only four of those marriages included grooms that were demonstrably non-Tlaxcalan—one a son of “Otomite” [likely Otomi] parents residing in Saltillo. Another was a child of Indians of unspecified ethnicity living in the “Coahuila mission” (likely San Francisco de Coahuila de la Nueva Tlaxcala, near Monclova, the community of origin for a few other grooms in this time period).Footnote 37 A mulatto groom originally from Mexico City lived in the pueblo of Santa María de las Parras, and a Guachichil man married a Guaguilan (Coahuiltecan) woman.Footnote 38 Six other unions included partners not specifically identified as Tlaxcalan but hailing from Santa María de las Parras, the first colony founded from San Esteban, in 1598. In at least one of those instances Tlaxcalan identity seems fairly certain.Footnote 39 Grooms in eight additional marriages were explicitly identifiable as Tlaxcalan and associated in one way or another with other northern Tlaxcalan settlements. Two of those eight were natives of San Esteban living in communities founded from San Esteban (one in San Francisco de la Nueva Tlaxcala, or San Francisco de Coahuila, the other in San Juan del Carrizal). A third man, residing in San Esteban at the time of his marriage, was the son of parents originally from San Esteban who had relocated to the Indian town of [San Francisco de] Coahuila. One of the grooms was a Tlaxcalan from San Sebastian del Venado, one of the six original 1591 colonies. Another, the son of “indios tlaxcaltecos,” hailed from San Francisco de Coahuila, and three were specifically identified as Tlaxcalans from Santa María de las Parras.Footnote 40 All the remaining marriage partners in that sample whose records bore ethnic labels, both men and women, were identified as San Esteban Tlaxcalans.

In the late seventeenth century, then, San Esteban residents were inclined to marry endogamously—not simply within their own ethnicity but within their own community—with the vast majority of San Esteban marriages joining together spouses from San Esteban. Slightly less than 13 percent of the marriages between 1675 and 1692—18 of 140—paired San Esteban residents with non-San Esteban partners, and only four of the latter were demonstrably non-Tlaxcalan. Further, the choices San Esteban women made to marry outside their community indicate the degree to which San Esteban was firmly embedded in the larger Tlaxcalan world of northeastern New Spain. Those choices suggest a continuing engagement in and fidelity to a regional Tlaxcalan identity. As we have seen, San Esteban residents actively seeded new colonies in the late seventeenth century, and continued to do so throughout the eighteenth, as demographic growth increased pressures on its finite resources and prompted out-migration.Footnote 41 Those colonies, then, were logical places for San Esteban residents to turn as they sought spouses. And San Esteban natives who had ventured out to other northern Tlaxcalan settlements on occasion returned home to find partners among San Esteban women. Few ethnic outsiders appear to have resided in San Esteban itself, at least as far as marriage records show. The Guachichil groom and his Coahuiltecan bride and the lone mulatto seem to be the only such “foreign” residents marrying in San Esteban in this period, and the mulatto groom resided in a community in which Africans and mixed-bloods lived alongside Tlaxcalans and northern band peoples. In short, late seventeenth-century marriage patterns seem to indicate that San Esteban residents were actively maintaining the town's ethnic cohesion. Their marriage choices suggested their consciousness of themselves as San Esteban Tlaxcalans enmeshed in a larger Tlaxcalan world that encompassed much of the northeastern frontier. Their individual choices served to further solidify San Esteban's corporate identity.

Marriage records from this period reveal another manifestation of the community's sense of itself—the phenomenon of “community witnessing” of a significant moment in the lives of individual Tlaxcalans. Community witnessing of testaments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is amply documented for central Mexico and Yucatan.Footnote 42 Such witnessing of testaments was characteristic of late seventeenth century San Esteban as well. But San Esteban marriages also offered a forum for community witnessing, and the public affirmation of a marriage signaled both the community's acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the marriage itself and its recognition of the tlaxcaltequidad of the marriage partners. There were 54 marriages recorded in the parish records between June 1675 and July 1681, all but one of which joined couples identified as Tlaxcalan.Footnote 43 Those records include specific references to the presence of the governor and cabildo in the celebration and witnessing of those nuptials; each of the entries also noted the presence as witnesses of a good number of residents of the community.Footnote 44 These events were clearly of interest to municipal officials and to neighbors and friends alike. The broader community came together to affirm the union of Tlaxcalan with Tlaxcalan, and in so doing to affirm that the marriages sustained the ethnic integrity of San Esteban.

Even more than marriage records, indigenous-language testaments were community documents, and thus lent themselves to community witnessing. James Lockhart and Matthew Restall have argued for Central Mexico and Yucatan, respectively, that the body of witnesses assembled to attest to wills, in particular the cabildo officers, were present to confirm community assent to the veracity of the content of those documents.Footnote 45 Although unlike parish entries San Esteban wills do not directly refer to ethnicity, they are nonetheless clearly “ethnic documents,” recorded in Nahuatl and thus locating the testators firmly in specific San Esteban tlaxilacalli/barrios. They also record affirmation by members of the indigenous municipal council—a clear marker of Tlaxcalan identity. Much as with marriages, witnessing at this key life moment suggested an intimate knowledge of the individual in question, with neighbor affirming the statement of neighbor. Further, this witnessing by the full (or nearly full) council signaled an acknowledgment of the testators’ place in San Esteban.

Between 1609 and 1699, cabildo officers, nearly always in the presence of other testigos, witnessed the writing of wills. Cabildo officers signed 58 of the 62 Nahuatl-language wills that survive from that period in Saltillo's municipal archive. The final section of these wills generally identified one or more personal witnesses by name, followed by the phrase “in the presence of all those in charge of justice” or a specific reference to nobles (pipiltin) or the municipal council as a whole.Footnote 46 On occasion the various officers were listed along with other witnesses, without specific reference in the text to “cabildo” or “justicia,” but their names and official positions were always listed at the end of the will, indicating that they were in fact standing as members of that corporate body and not simply as individuals to witness its terms.Footnote 47 Those officers then added their signatures and rubrics, as did the regular witnesses.

Cabildo officials, citizens elected yearly to represent San Esteban's five barrios, were clearly of the community. That they stood with the dying as those residents dictated their bequests suggests a community identity and solidarity not seen in the more bureaucratic practice of witnessing found in Spanish testamentary traditions. At the very least, the practice suggests a high degree of cultural cohesion, reproducing practices prevalent among Central Mexican Nahuas and Yucatec Mayas. The wishes of the dying were recorded in their native Nahuatl, with no interpreter in evidence. Such cohesion was an essential element in a broader sense of the community's tlaxcaltequidad, its sense of ethnic self. As that sense was manifested through San Esteban's contributions to the settlement and defense of the northeast, so too it was at work within the community, playing out in the most intimate of settings in the lives of its citizens.

Conclusion

In the latter years of the seventeenth century, San Esteban residents seem to have thought of themselves—and to have been thought of—as “puro tlaxcalteca.” Corporate conciencia de sí was deeply intertwined with ethnicity—a sense of distinctiveness rooted in the original late sixteenth century colonizing project that tapped Tlaxcalans precisely because of their long-standing history of support for the Spanish colonial effort, and the distinctive privileges granted to them as colonists. San Esteban's defense of its absorption of Guachichil lands in 1677, that “all had become Tlaxcaltecas,” might have translated in the minds of Saltillo's citizens as evidence of mestizaje, but it could just as likely testify to the ways Tlaxcalan identity—tlaxcaltequidad—could subsume others' identities within itself. Indeed, crown authorities affirmed as much. And the ethnic integrity that the cabildo touted in its regional representation of itself—in its defensive operations and its colonizing projects—seems to have been no less deeply embedded in individual consciousness. Throughout the seventeenth century, San Esteban residents, in their choice of marriage partners, maintained the ethnic cohesion of the community. The corporation, in the persons of “all those in charge of justice,” affirmed the marriages of its citizens and stood witness to the deaths of its members. San Esteban was indeed conscious of its ethnic self, and that consciousness undergirded its ability to sustain itself as an independent entity on the north Mexican landscape throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.

Whether or not San Esteban was in fact ethnically “pure,” it presented itself as such and did so consistently, speaking to a widespread internal perception of that purity. Lafora remarked in the 1760s on both the ethnic purity and the Spanish-speaking abilities of San Esteban and its citizens, and Morfi a decade later noted the care San Esteban's Tlaxcalans had taken to avoid contaminating that purity through ethnic mixing. Lafora and Morfi were both observing a community that drew upon a rich history of purposeful self-representation on both the corporate and the personal levels as an ethnically distinct community. Its ability to do so persuasively was grounded in the cultivation over nearly two centuries of a conscious Tlaxcalan identity, deployed regionally through defensive excursions that fulfilled the crown's expectations of the central role Tlaxcalan colonists would play in strengthening a Spanish presence on the frontier. San Esteban's Tlaxcalans were successful in founding colonies that bolstered European control at the edges of empire. This identity was no less grounded in the cultivation of a personal “sense of ethnic self” that is most clearly seen in marriage choice and community affirmation at critical moments in the lives of San Esteban citizens. San Esteban's ethnically pure “face” was no accident. What Lafora and Morfi beheld was a result of the conscious and successful efforts, in both the public and private realms, to sustain a Tlaxcalan identity in a region far removed from the Nahua heartland.

References

1. de Lafora, Nicolás, The Frontiers of New Spain. Nicolás de Lafora's Description, 1766–1768. Kinnaird, Lawrence, ed. (Berkeley: Quivira Society, 1958), 140 Google Scholar (emphasis mine); Alessio Robles, Vito, Coahuila y Texas en la época colonial (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1978), 407, 589.Google Scholar

2. The phrasing in the original speaks of “el gran cuidado de no mezclarse con la gente de castas de está inficionado el Saltillo.” de Morfi, Fray Juan Agustín, Viaje de indios y diario del Nuevo México. Noticia biobibliográfica y acotaciones por Vito Alessio Robles (Mexico: Bibliófilos Mexicanos, 1935), 245 Google Scholar. Morfi, a Franciscan, served as chaplain to don Teodoro de Croix during the latter's 1777-78 tour of those territories. Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas, 407, 423, 592–594.

3. “Blood purity” was of central concern to Spaniards as they encountered the peoples of the Americas, and particularly as Africans were introduced in increasing numbers after the mid-sixteenth century. See Elena Martínez, María, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Lafora's phrasing equates the ability to speak Spanish with the attribute “civilized.”Morfi's use of the concept of infection attests to the presumed ethnic superiority of the Tlaxcalan community. By the time Lafora toured the region there appeared to be a high level of bilinguality in San Esteban; however, interpreters remained a fixture in court cases at least through 1810. Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, Presidencia Municipal [hereafter AMS, PM], c59, e22, 1810.

4. See for example several of the contributions in Matthew, Laura E. and Oudijk, Michel, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007)Google Scholar, especially those by Oudijk and Restall and Matthew. María Elena Martínez traces shifts in conceptualizations of blood purity from religion-based anxieties that emerged in mid-fifteenth-century Spain to one developed in New Spain that reflected a preoccupation with ethnic and racial “contamination” threatened by indigenous and African peoples. Peter Villella looks more closely at native nobles’ appropriation of the discourse of limpieza de sangre to achieve or maintain power in particular local settings. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, especially chapt. 4, titled “Nobility and Purity in the República de Indios,” 91–122; Villella, “‘Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races’: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91:4 (November 2011): 633–663, and “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala,” The Americas 69:1 (July 2012): 1–36. Dana Velasco Murillo's recent monograph Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016) and Laurent Corbeil's dissertation “Identities in Motion: The Formation of a Plural Indio Society in Early San Luis Potosí 1591–1630” (PhD diss.: McGill University, 2014) highlight the complex processes of community formation in regions receiving substantial in-migration of indigenous peoples from central and western New Spain. David B. Adams's 1971 dissertation established the broad parameters of Tlaxcalans' presence in the north, and their presence in the northeast after 1591. See Adams, “The Tlaxcalan Colonies of Spanish Coahuila and Nuevo León: An Aspect of the Settlement of Northern Mexico” (PhD diss.: University of Texas, Austin, 1971). Las colonias Tlaxcaltecas de Coahuila y Nuevo León: un aspecto de la colonización del norte de México (Saltillo: Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, 1991) is a Spanish translation of the dissertation. Patricia Martínez explores Tlaxcalan identities in late colonial San Esteban in “‘Noble’ Tlaxcalans: Race and Ethnicity in Northern New Spain, 1770–1810” (PhD diss.: University of Texas, Austin, 2004). My article “Defending Corporate Identity on New Spain's Northeastern Frontier: San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, 1780–1810,” The Americas 64:3 (January 2008): 351–372, and the chapter “Women's Voices from the Frontier: de Nueva Tlaxcala, San Esteban in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, Schroeder, Susan, Wood, Stephanie, and Haskett, Robert, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 273–289 Google Scholar, examine aspects of late colonial interethnic relations in San Esteban.

Elisabeth Butzer's Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca: San Miguel de Aguayo (Bustamante, NL), 1686–1820 (Saltillo: AMS, Austin: Department of Geography & the Environment, University of Texas; Tlaxcala: Instituto Tlaxcalteca de la Cultura; and Bustamante: Presidencia Municipal de Bustamante, 2001) offers a detailed look at aspects of the economy and society of one of the colonies founded by San Esteban Tlaxcalans. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Andrea Martínez Baracs have both examined Tlaxcalan colonization in the north. See Sheridan, “‘Indios madrineros’: colonizadores tlaxcaltecas en el noreste novohispano,” Relaciones 92 (Autumn 2002): 77–106, and Martínez Baracs, “Colonizaciones tlaxcaltecas,” Historia Mexicana 43:2 (October-December 1993): 195–250. See as well Martínez Saldaña, Tomás, La diáspora tlaxcalteca: colonización agrícola del norte mexicano (Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 1998)Google Scholar. McEnroe's, Sean F. From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar studies the key role of Tlaxcalan colonists and their descendants in shaping concepts of community and nation in northeastern Mexico.

5. See Capitulaciones del Virrey Velasco favorables a los tlaxcaltecas para que emigren hacia el norte a fundar pueblos y ayuden a reducir a los chichimecas, AMS, PM, c11, e27, reproduced in Los tlaxcaltecas en Coahuila, Carlos Manuel Valdés Dávila and Ildefonso Dávila del Bosque, comps, Biblioteca Tlaxcalteca, 2nd ed. (San Luis Potosí: Colegio de San Luis, 1999), 71–81. The specific reference to infieles is on page 72 of the latter. Charles Gibson and Vito Alessio Robles both summarize the gist of the capitulations. See Gibson's Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952]), 183–184; and Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas, 124.

6. For a recent study of the Tlaxcalan nobility's efforts to secure these privileges, see Jovita Baber, R., “Empire, Indians, and the Negotiation for the Status of City in Tlaxcala, 1521–1560,” in Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, Medrano, Ethelia Ruiz and Kellogg, Susan, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011), 19–44.Google Scholar

7. Gibson discusses the crown's long-standing interest in Tlaxcalan colonization in Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, 181ff. The campaign for privileges is discussed in Gibson, 158–169, and itemized in his Appendix VII, “Royal Privileges Granted to Tlaxcala,” 229–234.

8. “Capitulaciones del Virrey Velasco favorables a los tlaxcaltecas . . .,” in Los Tlaxcaltecas en Coahuila, Valdés Dávila and Dávila del Bosque, comps., 71–81. Martínez Baracs argues that the only benefit to Tlaxcala itself was a slight reduction in the number of men owing personal service to the church in nearby Puebla de los Angeles, and notes that in 1592 Viceroy Velasco imposed on Tlaxcala payment of the servicio de tostón, a tax to offset the expense of religious wars in Europe. Martínez Baracs suggests that Velasco meant to humiliate Tlaxcalans for presuming to boast of their status and privileges as conquerors. In 1599, Tlaxcalan cabildo members were jailed and community properties embargoed for failure to pay the tostón. Martínez Baracs, “Colonizaciones tlaxcaltecas,” 211–212. See also Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, 176.

9. The Guachichils, Borrados, and Rayados were among those subsumed under the broad term “Chichimeca.” They were to live under the tutelage of Franciscan missionaries for a period of three years, until they were sufficiently inculcated with Spanish and Christian values. Sheridan, “‘Indios madrineros,’” 31.

10. The population figures come from Cuello, José, Saltillo colonial: orígenes y formación de una sociedad mexicana en la frontera norte (Saltillo: AMS, 2004), 57 Google Scholar, cuadro 2-1. While Sheridan mentions that three-quarters of the water was designated for San Esteban and one-quarter for Saltillo, she does not specify whether the allocation of agricultural land and house lots also reflected a three-quarter/one-quarter division, which seems entirely plausible. Further, it is not clear whether the lands designated for the settlement of band Indians were included within this allocation. Sheridan says only that the original plan was to establish a town of indios nativos in the vicinity of the Tlaxcalan settlement. Sheridan, “‘Indios madrineros,’” 31–32.

11. See Cuello, Saltillo colonial, 91–92; Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas, 396–397; Adams, “The Tlaxcalan Colonies of Spanish Coahuila and Nuevo León,” 237–267; and Susan Deeds, “Escaseses y disensiones: la historia de agua en el noreste colonial,” unpublished ms., 13.

12. Cuello, Saltillo colonial, cuadro 2-1, 57. Cuello locates as many as 1,200 Chichimecas in the Saltillo Valley in the period from 1577 to 1591, and suggests that at San Esteban's founding in 1591 some 600 fell within the pueblo's purview.

13. AMS, PM, c3, e7, 1677, in Temas del virreinato: documentos del Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, Silvio Zavala y María del Carmen Velázquez, recopiladores (Saltillo: Gobierno del Estado de Coahuila, 1989), 34. At issue most specifically was San Esteban's assertion that Spaniards were intruding in those lands by building houses, damaging San Esteban's interests as the Indian town struggled to provide resources for its own growing population. See in particular the case of Saltillo resident Alonso de Castro, who had allegedly laid claim to “mucha tierra” in the initial Guachichil grant and built a house on that property. AMS, PM, c3, e3, 1677.

14. Deeds, “Escaseses y disensiones,” unpublished ms., 16.

15. AMS, PM, c3, e7, 1677, in Zavala y Velázquez, Temas del virreinato, 34.

16. See Cuello, Saltillo colonial, 207–208.

17. In Saltillo colonial, Cuello focuses primarily on Saltillo's responses to the Indian threat and only cursorily refers to “Tlaxcalan allies from San Esteban” (207). San Esteban's certifications offer more detail on those allies, the numbers dispatched at particular points, and the various reasons San Esteban forces were mobilized. See in particular AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, 1666-1670.

18. Over a period of four years (from July 11, 1666 to August 31, 1670), 51 men participated in expeditions. Of those, 28 participated in one expedition, 12 in two, five in three, three in four, one in five, one in six, and one in seven. Among those who participated most frequently are the few who were identified by military title, suggesting that the core of experienced defenders was quite small. AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, 1666-1670.

19. Cuello, Saltillo colonial, 207. The unsettled conditions in Coahuila and Nuevo León are attested to by contemporary Bautista Chapa, Juan in his Historia del Nuevo Reino de León de 1650 a 1690, preliminary study and notes by Cavazos Garza, Israel (Monterrey: Gobierno del Estado de Nuevo León, 1990), 68.Google Scholar

20. AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, July 11, 1666. A year earlier Nicolás Carretero, with some 300 followers, had joined a Spanish force operating against hostile Indians in Nuevo León. Chapa, Historia del Nuevo Reino de León, 68. Cuello identified a Juan Carretero who in 1665 had allied with Spaniards and recruited hundreds of followers to join him in that alliance. By 1669, according to Cuello, Juan Carretero was involved in a widespread conspiracy planning a region-wide rebellion. Later references to Nicolás Carretero's “brothers” suggest a possible familial link between Nicolás and Juan Carretero. Cuello, Saltillo colonial, 208.

21. Relación de los servicios prestados a la corona por los tlaxcaltecas en funciones de Guerra, AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, November 15, 1669.

22. Relación de los servicios, AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, January 29, 1669.

23. Relación de los servicios, AMS, PM, c1, e32, d2, June 7, 1667.

24. Relación de los servicios, AMS, PM, c1, e32, d3, May 17, 1665, and December 22, 1682. This document and the previous three are included in a compilation of certifications requested from Saltillo's cabildo by San Esteban's cabildo in 1760. AMS, PM, c1, e32, d25, April 24, 1760.

25. Information on colonies established by San Esteban Tlaxcalans comes from a variety of sources. AMS, PM, c1, e32, d. 36–38 refers to the foundation of San Juan del Carrizal (1687), Nuestra Señora de la Purificación (1715), Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (1698), and San Francisco de Coahuila (or “de la Nueva Tlaxcala”) (1676). The best source for Santa María de las Parras (1598) is Sergio Corona Páez, La vitivinicultura en el pueblo de Santa María de las Parras: producción de vinos, vinaigres, y aguardientes bajo el paradigma andaluz (Torreón, Coahuila: Ayuntamiento de Torreón, 2004), chapt. 1. For San Miguel de Aguayo (1666), see Elisabeth Butzer, Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca. Both Cecilia Sheridan, “‘Indios madrineros,’” 37–38, and Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora tlaxcalteca, 83, list colonies founded by San Esteban Tlaxcalans.

26. Sheridan, “‘Indios madrineros,’” 38.

27. The potential wealth lay in mineral resources in areas of Nuevo León. Tlaxcalans were central actors in the exploitation of silver deposits in the vicinity of San Miguel de Aguayo (specifically at Boca de Leones). See Butzer, Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca, chapt. 3, 59–84 and elsewhere. See as well McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico, 37–43.

28. AMS, PM, c1, e32, d36, 1749. Barbadillo's work in northeastern Mexico is discussed in McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood, 63–70.

29. The document refers to the ‘tlascaltecas naturales’ of “Gran Tlascala de la Puebla de Los Angeles y a los que de ellos desienden,” AMS, PM, c10, e42, 1725.

30. Biblioteca del Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. Fondo de Documentación para la Historia del Noreste de México. Rollo 921. Camera Z. Bustamante, NL (San Miguel de Aguayo); Archivo Municipal, Documentos Diversos, Vol. 1, 1694-1775 (unnumbered document dated March 13, 1755).

31. McEnroe makes this point particularly well in From Colony to Nationhood, 40–41.

32. Santa María de las Parras and San Miguel de Aguayo are the best documented examples of “mixed” pueblos founded with a core group of Tlaxcalan pobladores from San Esteban. See Corona Páez, La vitivinicultura en el pueblo de Santa María de las Parras, 37–40; and Butzer, Historia social de una comunidad tlaxcalteca.

33. Cuello, in Saltillo colonial, argues that for the majority of Saltillenses, the period from 1650 to 1725 was one of involution, of increased impoverishment for all but the highest levels of society. San Esteban appears to have been less negatively affected by the economic troubles Saltillo experienced. In part, Cuello argues, this was due to San Esteban's ability to “shed” excess population through the founding of colonies and to the impact of epidemic disease in the 1690s (168). Regarding population growth in this period, see Cuello, 153–156, cuadro 2-1, “La población de Saltillo y San Esteban, 1577–1833,” 57. The Saltillo region suffered major droughts in both the 1660s and 1690s; see Villanueva-Díaz, José, Stahle, David W., Luckman, Brian H., Cerano-Paredes, Julián, Therrell, Mathew D., Cleaveland, Malcom K., and Cornejo-Oviedo, Eladio, “Winter-Spring Precipitation Reconstruction from Tree Rings for Northeast Mexico,” Climate Change, 83:17 (2007): 123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. fig. 3. For late eighteenth-century demographic and climatic challenges facing San Esteban, see my “Defending Corporate Identity,” esp. 365–374.

34. Marriage records from San Esteban survive from at least June 1675. I have utilized microfilmed records of the parish of San Esteban Protomártir, available from the Family History Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and cited here as Archivo Parroquia de San Esteban [hereafter APSE]. Marriages from 1675 through 1710 are included in Bautismos, Vol. 1, 1673-1710, and begin on fol. 123r. San Esteban's marriage entries generally recorded a couple's names, their barrios of residence, and the witnesses who affirmed the legitimacy of the union. While entries in the record were mediated by the parish priest, they nonetheless offer a means of understanding from inside San Esteban how its citizens viewed themselves in relation to peers, neighbors, and municipal authorities.

35. One caveat in focusing on marriage records for evidence of endogamy or exogamy in a particular community is that such records do not reflect the extent of ethnic mixture resulting from non-marital or extramarital unions. An examination of San Esteban's baptismal records between 1675 and 1681, however, reveals that virtually every hijo de la iglesia, or illegitimate child, brought to the baptismal font was identified as Tlaxcalan. The basis on which the priests determined the ethnicity of these infants is not known.

36. For the larger project of which this article is a part, I explore three periods—1675 to 1692, 1735 to 1750, and 1790 to 1810—chosen both for completeness of the corresponding marriage records and because these periods encompass moments of particular stress in San Esteban. At those times, the community contended with an uptick in challenges to its lands and waters, Indian raids, and in the middle period at least, with questions of precedence in public displays of authority. For this last, see Adams, “The Tlaxcalan Colonies of Spanish Coahuila and Nuevo Leon,” 237–267.

37. Marriages of Miguel Rodrigues, son of parents “de nación otomites,” and Juana Hernandes, “india tlaxcalteca,” Febuary 27, 1685; Simon Sireneo, son of “indios residentes en la misión de Coaguila,” and Francisca Theresa, “india tlaxcalteca,” January 10, 1690, APSE, Bautismos [sic], Vol. 1, 1673-1710. Peter Gerhard notes that a garrison was established in 1675 at San Francisco de Coahuila, and locates a Franciscan establishment there by early 1698. That it was a settlement comprised at least in part of Tlaxcalans is attested to in his later citation of it as San Francisco de Coahuila de la Nueva Tlaxcala; Martínez Saldaña unequivocally identifies the settlement as part of the “Tlaxcalan expansion from San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala.” See Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 329–332; and Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora tlaxcalteca, 83.

38. Marriages of Pedro de Avila, “mulato domiciliario del Pueblo de Santa María de las Parras, criollo de la ciudad de México” and Josefa, “india tlaxcalteca,” October 30, 1690, and Joseph, “de nación Guachichila” and Margarita, “de nación Guaguila,” June 6, 1675, APSE, Bautismos [sic], Vol. 1, 1673-1710.

39. Although Santa María de las Parras was officially a pueblo de indios, by the late seventeenth century it was in fact mixed, and included Spaniards and various castas (coyotes, mulattoes) in addition to its core Tlaxcalan population. Corona Páez notes that Parras's Tlaxcalans maintained strong ties to San Esteban through both migration and marriage. Corona Páez, La vitivinicultura en el pueblo de Santa María de las Parras, 39–40. The six Parras men who wed San Esteban women in the 1670s and 1680s thus could conceivably have been of mixed ethnicity. However, given the strong historic connections between Parras and San Esteban, evidence in Parras's parish marriage records of an influx of new residents from San Esteban beginning in the early 1660s, and Parras's successful assertion of its privileged status by virtue of its foundation as a colony of San Esteban, it is most likely that the Parras grooms marrying San Esteban women were in fact Tlaxcalan. We can safely deduce that the father of one of those six was Tlaxcalan; he was designated “don,” an honorific reserved to Tlaxcalans by virtue of the privilege of hidalguía included in the original capitulations of 1591. See APSE, Bautismos [sic], Vol. 1, 1673-1710, marriages of Antonio Hernandes,“indio natural del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras,” son of don Lorenzo Martín, “indio,” and Polonia María, daughter of don Bernardino Ramos, “indio” of San Esteban, February 4, 1688; Pedro Miguel, “natural y vecino del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras” and María “de nación tlaxcalteca,” February 6, 1679; Francisco Xavier, “natural y vecino del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras” and Luisa María “de nación tlaxcalteca,” February 13, 1679; Santiago Joseph, “indio natural del pueblo de las Parras” and Agueda, “india tlaxcalteca,” April 26, 1682; Diego Gerónimo, “indio natural del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras” and Agueda, “india,” February 4, 1688; Luis Redondo, “del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras,” and Úrsula, daughter of “indios tlascaltecos,” January 24, 1689.

40. APSE, Bautismos [sic], Vol. 1, 1673-1710, marriages of Francisco Daniel, “natural de este pueblo y domiciliario del pueblo de San Francisco de la Coaguila” and Luisa Theresa, daugher of “indios tlascaltecas,” January 26, 1690; Simon de Jesús, “natural de este pueblo y domiciliario del nuevo pueblo del Carrizal” and Rufina María, daughter of “indios tlascaltecas,” February 18, 1688; Francisco Xavier, son of “indios feligreses del pueblo de Coaguila y naturales de este pueblo,” and Theresa Marta, daughter of “indios tlascaltecas,” February 20, 1691; Pedro Morales, “de nación tlaxcalteca y vecino del pueblo de San Sebastián del Venado,” and Josepha Maria, “de nación tlaxcalteca,” October 10, 1678; Miguel Xabier, “del pueblo de San Francisco de Coaguila,” son of “indios tlaxcaltecos,” and Beronica Juana, daughter of “indios tlascaltecos,” January 30, 1690; Joseph Villegas, “de nación Tlaxcalteca y residente en el pueblo de Santa María de Parras,” and Magdalena, “de nación tlaxcalteca,” January 17, 1679; Pedro Gonzales, “indio tlascalteco del pueblo de Santa María de las Parras” (whose father is designated “don”), and María Juana (whose father is also “don”), daughter of “indios tlascaltecos,” January 10, 1689; and Salbador Juan, son of “indios tlaxcaltecos vecinos del valle de Parras,” and Juana de la Rosa, daughter of “padres no conosidos,” January 10, 1692. San Francisco de la Nueva Tlaxcala was founded in 1675, and San Juan de Carrizal in 1687, according to Martínez Saldaña, La diáspora tlaxcalteca, 83.

41. Cuello charts the population increase for both Saltillo and San Esteban from the late sixteenth century through the independence period, drawing data from a variety of sources. His figures reveal an increase in the Spanish sector relative to the Tlaxcalan over the course of the eighteenth century, with the most significant rebalancing occurring between 1791 and 1813. As San Esteban's population remained steady at around 3,000, the Spanish population jumped from around 6,000 to nearly 22,000. Cuello, Saltillo colonial, cuadro 2-1, 57, 61.

42. Lockhart, James, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 367, 370–371Google Scholar; Restall, Matthew, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 57–58.Google Scholar

43. This is a shorter time period than I treat in my examination of marriage choice above. From July 1681 through October 1692 references to cabildo officers as marriage witnesses cease, and each nuptial is generally witnessed by three individuals listed without official title. The practice of community witnessing resumes again between 1735 and 1750, which I explore in the larger project of which this article is a part. In that period the governor consistently appeared as a witness, joined frequently by an alcalde and occasionally the fiscal.

44. See for example the phrasing in the August 1675 marriage entry of Grabiel Francisco and Joana Christina, “ambos de nacion Tlaxca . . . selebrase este matrimonio en presencia del gobernador, alcaldes, cabildo y demas vecinos y naturales de este pueblo y doctrina.” APSE, Bautismos [sic], Vol. 1, 1673-1710, Aug. 27, 1675.

45. Lockhart, The Nahuas After Conquest, 367, 370–371; Restall, The Maya World, 57–58; Restall, “Interculturation and the Indigenous Testament in Colonial Yucatan,” in Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes, Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, eds. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), 150–151. See as well Pizzigoni, Caterina, Testaments of Toluca (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 31 Google Scholar and elsewhere (examples from numerous wills).

46. The phrasing differs slightly among three late seventeenth century wills. The phrase ymixpan in mochi justisiapixque, “in the presence of all those in charge of justice,” appears in Juana Isabel's 1659 testament, and a variant, ymixpantzinco omochiuh Justici, “it was done in the presence of all the justices,” appears in the 1676 will of Francisca. Elena Francisca's 1683 will makes specific reference to the cabildo as a body (omochiuh ymixpan cabildo yhuan yei testigos, “it was done in the presence of the council and three witnesses”). AMS, Testamentos [hereafter cited as AMS, T], c1, e54, 1659 (Juana Isabel); AMS, T, c2, e16, 1676 (Francisca); AMS, T, c2, e36, 1683 (Elena Francisca).

47. See for example Sebastián de Ramos's 1616 testament where, following the phrase “testigos yn imixpan omochiuh ynin testamento” (“witnesses in the presence of whom this testament was done”) the governor, two alcaldes, and two regidores sign, in addition to the notary. AMS, T, c1, e18, 1616.