In 1787, a group of Indians from the town of Almoloya, part of Apan in the Intendancy of Mexico, aired their grievances against several prominent local leaders. The petitioners claimed that their predominantly Indian community was plagued by a group of free-colored people who were masquerading as Indian nobles, or caciques, and enjoying privileges to which only those with noble lineage were entitled. One of these was exemption from the economically onerous and socially stigmatized royal tribute that had symbolized the relationship between the Spanish monarch and free-colored subjects since the sixteenth century.Footnote 1
To prove that the suspected were indeed tributaries, those lodging the complaint turned to lineage. They named more than a dozen people who lived as caciques, adding that those same individuals were “mixed with blacks and mulatos and should be registered and pay tribute with those of that class.” Despite their attempts to fashion themselves into caciques, the accused families had not erased from communal memory the occupations, castes, and places of origin of various ancestors, all of which could determine reputation, or calidad. Members of the Sánchez family, the petition claimed, were “grandchildren of a negro shoemaker called Martín.” The Granillos were “descendants of Juan Granillo, married to a known mulata servant.” The list of possible free-coloreds was exhaustive.Footnote 2
These “notorious mulatos” had gained exemptions awarded by the Spanish monarchy to Tlaxcalans who had served in Spanish conquests more than two and a half centuries before. Throughout the colonial period, descendants of Tlaxcalans could claim exemption from the tribute and other taxes, as well as land rights and a legal status distinct from those of free-coloreds and other Indians.Footnote 3 This concern with the mixture of Indian and African blood resonated where Tlaxcalan, Nahua, or other Indian groups enjoyed place- and genealogy-specific tribute privileges.Footnote 4 Apan bordered Tlaxcala, making the presence of Tlaxcalans in Almoloya entirely feasible. But to preserve such a status, the complainants reasoned, the Tlaxcalans should have pursued marital unions that preserved a lineage “without degeneration from the class of Indians or mestizos de españoles,” a caste category specifying a Spanish father and an Indian mother.Footnote 5 How, wondered the Almoloya petitioners, could people with a publicly reputed line of free-colored ancestors possibly prove a Tlaxcalan genealogy?
The “pure Indians” of Almoloya, as they called themselves in their initial petition and subsequent documents, relied on genealogy to stake their claims. The petitioners upheld proof of ancestry as a prerequisite for exercising privileges, a legal argument favored by Indian elites at the time.Footnote 6 The use of the term “degeneración” in the petition drew on an older rhetoric of purity as well as hereditary concepts that would become popular in the nineteenth century.Footnote 7 The repeated references to the “mixed nature” and “inferior calidad” of these individuals undermined their authority as caciques.Footnote 8 Indeed, cacique status was predicated on publicly regarded and written genealogies. These ideas rested on the genealogical concept of limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, which had risen to prominence as a form of communal memory following mass conversions of Jews in medieval Iberia.Footnote 9 In New Spain, limpieza de sangre would evolve to equate genealogical impurity with the presence of African ancestry as well.Footnote 10 Pitting the idea of an inferior, mixed, and mulato calidad against Indian purity, the petitioners used the language of genealogy to upend local hierarchies.
The case of Almoloya shows the prominent place genealogy took in disputes involving local privileges, rivalries, and migration from the 1780s to the 1800s. Ordinary people who engaged in those disputes were well aware of it. In Almoloya's surrounding jurisdiction, between 1781 and 1788 the number of mulato tributaries nearly doubled, while the number of Indian tributaries dropped by 10 percent.Footnote 11 On a register made at the end of the year 1800, no caciques were listed at all, though 407 Indians and 21 mulatos were registered as reserved from payment.Footnote 12 The Almoloya caciques failed to prove their genealogy and thus became (or had always been, in the eyes of their accusers) lobos (people of African and Indian ancestry), mulatos, and negros, reputations which were only confirmed by the immigrant status of some families.Footnote 13 These were not the only free-coloreds to exercise Tlaxcalan-like privileges.Footnote 14 Nonetheless, the Almoloya families’ reliance upon a Tlaxcalan genealogy was found to be untenable. Across New Spain, Bourbon authorities had begun to strip privileged groups of their claims to Tlaxcalan ancestry, which embodied not only colonial privileges but a more generalized “cultural and military superiority over other ‘Indians.’”Footnote 15 A weak genealogy, coupled with a Bourbon desire to streamline tributary groups and dispense with privileged status, forced the accused families to forfeit their privileges.
The disgruntled accusers succeeded in ousting alleged immigrants, mulatos, and lobos from their positions as caciques with rights to use communal property and authority over local affairs. In spite of the ruling, conflict continued into the next decade.Footnote 16 Accusations surfaced that these non-Indians had refused to pay for their use of Indian lands and had reacted violently to the change in their status. In 1790, Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes, second count of Revillagigedo, ruled that former cacique Juan José Espinoza be jailed along with his wife, their son, and son-in-law, for throwing stones at the tribute collector. The same fate awaited Domingo Martínez, who had attempted to strike the alcalde. Other men and women resisted the imposition of free-colored status by refusing to leave lands they had planted as part of the Indian community. The targeted families made a public display of their anger and refusal to comply. Women in particular were accused of disturbing the peace and spreading gossip in order to further inflame emotions in the town. In the midst of the scandal, some of the accused maintained that they were not free-coloreds. One official snidely wondered if their continued insistence represented a kind of “sleepless hope of new regeneration from which the mulato can never escape.”Footnote 17 In the eyes of colonial authorities, these families had joined the tributary class, one that united castes and qualities under the shameful burden of tribute.
For families like those accused in Almoloya, being or becoming a free-colored tributary represented a social and financial burden that would mark future generations as both taxpayers and people of African descent. This article shows how petitioners attempted to circumvent the application of free-colored tributary status within their families. At the core of the discussion was genealogy, an underlying principle that informed tributary status in the minds of bureaucrats and ordinary people. Tributary status could be proved or disproved, depending on oral and written testimony regarding reputation and ancestry. Petitioners who challenged free-colored tributary status, most of them adult men, took a variety of strategies to establish genealogy, drawing on ideas concerning gendered honor, calidad, marriage and reproduction, and local histories. As they “consciously engaged in forms of casta-like genealogical mathematics,” patriarchs separated certain lines of descent in order to shield family members from free-colored tributary status.Footnote 18
These petitions were sites of definition of family, as well as tributary status, and what constituted it. Among bureaucrats, contemporary debates about tributary status incorporated and reinterpreted concepts of heredity, physiognomy, genealogy, and calidad. High-ranking officials in the Real Hacienda eventually decided that genealogy would stand as the defining feature of tributary status. Because genealogy was a central framework for self-definition and bureaucratic categorization within the tribute regime, the use of this concept continued to mark interpretations of calidad, gender, and family into the nineteenth century.
Calidad and the Meanings of Tributary Status
Calidad was the focus of many petitioners who disputed their own tributary status or that of other families. Tributary status was closely related to caste, calidad, and class, ideas that undergirded a colonial regime deeply invested in revenue expansion and social categorization. The results of inclusion on a tribute register were economically and socially damaging for entire families and future generations. Lineage, and its regeneration or degeneration, was the basis of tributary status that would be passed on to future descendants. Free-colored tributaries could expect a regular charge of tribute monies by a collector; registration on a list of people considered free-colored, copies of which were sent to Mexico City; the memory in the community of the family having paid tribute; and loss of the caste and calidad that the family might have possessed prior to the registration. The social consequences of tributary status were of especially great concern for many petitioners focused on calidad and genealogy, as qualitative data explored in the following sections will show. The vocabulary of calidad allowed people to express their distaste for tributary status as an affront to their social position within colonial hierarchies.
Caste heavily influenced calidad. The caste system operating in New Spain categorized people based on blood purity and genealogy, and attached behavioral, moral, and phenotypic characteristics to people with mixed ancestry. By the late-colonial period, secular discourses driven by economic developments in the colony fused with earlier religious explanations of caste and the qualities it reproduced.Footnote 19 Studies of the caste system published during the mid-twentieth century proposed that caste differences were rooted in physical traits that came to constitute a complex taxonomy of terms starkly dividing colonial society.Footnote 20 A more recent trend in scholarship acknowledges inherent instability and flexibility within the caste system, without denying that negotiations of this system of social classification had limits dependent on color and enslaved status.Footnote 21 While these negotiations allowed individuals some mobility, the widespread use of caste terms to increase individual or familial status or discredit that of others ensured the influence of the caste in legal and social contexts.Footnote 22
Tributary status was explicitly linked to words indicating caste, calidad, and class in petitions for exemption. Substitutions among the phrases “tributary quality,” “tributary caste,” and “tributary class” suggested that these designations were mutually dependent, even circular. A recent study has suggested a degree of interchangeability between caste, calidad, class, condition, and even markers of ethnicity.Footnote 23 By the logic of tribute, the same people who comprised the tributary class would evidence tributary qualities and belong to a tributary caste. Bourbon reformers sought to implement a clearly bifurcated structure that would subsume notions of caste, class, and calidad under the categories of tributary and non-tributary. Thus, tributary status could not be separated from these related social markers in the late-colonial system of classification; fluidity in one kind of terminology destabilized the others. Like its malleable predecessors, calidad brought with it opportunities for both self-definition and bureaucratic categorization. Ordinary people might ascribe different meanings to color, caste, or calidad based on social or institutional context.Footnote 24 Furthermore, tributary status was fundamentally ambiguous in its definition because of its links to other unstable categories like caste, gender, and legitimacy.Footnote 25 The tribute regime built upon standing vocabularies of caste and calidad and incorporated Bourbon ideas about the qualities of being poor or wealthy, Spanish or casta. By subsuming labels of caste and calidad, tributary status came to represent a hybrid of characteristics drawn from many social and legal categories, much like calidad itself.
The transition to calidad as the defining element in considering tribute disputes and petitions occurred in the eighteenth century. Petitioners and their legal representatives often associated calidad with both caste and class, reflecting a growing focus on socioeconomic status as a social marker. By the eighteenth century, tributary vocabulary had thoroughly incorporated calidad, a marker of reputation that described color, caste, occupation, and ancestry, among other characteristics. Calidad could combine with categories of caste (calidad de mulato), labor and class (calidad de maestro), and tribute (calidad de tributario). In disputes of tributary status, the word could also designate official capacities (calidad de juez) or temporality (calidad de por ahora). Calidad condensed caste and socioeconomic status, making this social marker an ideal corollary for tribute.
Thus influenced by reputation, lineage, occupation, and physical features, calidad mapped onto many of the terms used to construct the caste system. In the eighteenth century, calidad was “an inclusive impression reflecting one's reputation as a whole.”Footnote 26 As colonial authorities and ordinary people began to use this term to describe appearance, reputation, and occupation in the same phrase, this approach to classification combined elements of class and caste.Footnote 27 Beyond physical appearance, calidad was also based on behaviors and stereotypes that indicated a person's behavior and judgment.Footnote 28 The changing impact of religion on calidad within Inquisitional and ecclesiastical contexts has provided new insights into the influence of calidad on public reputation and gendered honor.Footnote 29 People who lacked access to a Spanish calidad could claim honor based on gendered performances of piety.Footnote 30 One of the aims of the present study is to bring tributary status into a broader discussion of calidad in New Spain as a concept that could have a variety of meanings dependent on institutional contexts. Recognizing that calidad had heritable and performative aspects helps us trace the connections between calidad and tributary status represented in legal disputes in which ordinary people revealed their opinions on the meanings of lineage, marital choices, reputation, and free-colored subjecthood.Footnote 31
Petitioners who contested their free-colored tributary status were acutely aware of the meanings of genealogy and calidad within the tribute regime and community politics. The social consequences of a rumored or confirmed tributary status rendered registration and payment a public disgrace. Since Spaniards, mestizos, and elite Indians did not pay tribute, a tributary status indicated the presence of an Indian commoner or African calidad in a family's lineage or marital ties. Even mistaken registration among tributaries with a mulato or negro calidad fueled gossip and damaged reputations. Some petitioners used calidad to insult their neighbors and to imply tributary status, while others employed similar genealogical tactics to protect their families. As the potential economic effects of tributary status lurked in the background, arguments about lineage and calidad dominated petitions requesting exemption from free-colored tribute in the late eighteenth century.
Though many petitioners feared the damage a tributary status would do to their social reputation, this categorization had tangible economic consequences as well. Tributary status could have a lasting impact on the economic future of a free-colored family, depending on its residence and its members’ occupations. In cities, tributaries were likely to be artisans, apprentices, or part of the working poor who typically had a low or unpredictable income, and for them tribute was a great imposition.Footnote 32 Miners fared better, because they were often exempt from tribute or had easy access to specie, yet their work was as low-paying as that of their counterparts in cities and agricultural regions.Footnote 33 Farmers represented a large part of the tributary free-colored population, but their rural communities lacked the tax-relief measures available to Indian pueblos in times of economic hardship—Indians could request a temporary exemption from tribute payments in times of extreme need. Poverty was a common theme in requests for exemption filed on behalf of Indian towns, but a similar petition could come from families of free-coloreds as well.Footnote 34 Royal tribute extracted resources from the most vulnerable sectors of urban society and ensured the continued productivity of rural areas to benefit the crown. The economic burden of free-colored tribute was heavy, and social stigmas only compounded its weight.
The meanings of tributary status were based on public performances of calidad, one of them being payment and registration within the tribute regime. Even the act of payment had a genealogical element: petitioners often called witnesses to attest to the fact that, for generations, no one in the family had ever been seen paying tribute in the community. Tributary status was based on written and reputational genealogies as well as behaviors like the act of paying and the public announcement of a tributary list by a collector. In this way, tributary status mirrored calidad as a social marker, as it was based on appearance as well as family actions and behaviors, past and present. This lineage of payment or nonpayment would bolster a petition to resolve tributary status in favor of a petitioner, as long as friends and neighbors were willing to attest to a long tradition of nonpayment in previous generations.
The petitions for exempt tributary status encapsulate the fundamental constructs of lineage and privilege evident in colonial Spanish America. Tribute exemption arguments reveal the “archival and genealogical practices” that characterized multiple kinds of petitions in the Spanish Atlantic.Footnote 35 Preserved in legal petitions are the voices of ordinary people as well as bureaucrats and their diverse ideas about lineage, the proof of limpieza de sangre, requests to officially change one's caste under the gracias al sacar, and the tribute exemptions discussed here. Though they shared commonalities with other proceedings based on genealogy, cases that addressed tributary status were specifically associated with an economic burden based on colonial obligations of free-colored and Indian subjects. Those seeking an exempt tributary status relied on notions of purity, lineage, and colonial privileges, the very themes that undergirded Spanish colonial governance and regulated the interactions between the crown and free-colored subjects. The tribute regime, which spanned more than two hundred years, provided a means for Spanish rulers to profit from and incorporate free-coloreds as members of colonial societies.
Free-Colored Tribute in New Spain
As the centerpiece of Spanish Atlantic trade and effective colonial taxation, New Spain became the “tax jewel” of the empire, especially after 1780.Footnote 36 Spanish royal tribute was one of many taxes levied on Indians and free-coloreds in New Spain as part of a sophisticated ecclesiastical and civil tax regime.Footnote 37 New Spain was the greatest source of royal tribute revenue from free-coloreds, though free-coloreds in Peru also left evidence of payment.Footnote 38 Even so, the tribute that colonial authorities collected from free people of African descent was an insignificant source of total revenue, it further entrenched caste and calidad as social categories. By enforcing tribute on free-colored and Indian families, the crown asserted the similarities between Africans and Indians as its vassals with specific obligations. The tax reduced the uncertainties surrounding free-colored status within a colonial legal system that excluded them from the two republics, one of Spaniards and another of Indians. For the rapidly expanding populations who were neither Spanish nor Indian, colonial authorities implemented tribute as another notch on a “sliding scale of inferiority” among Spanish imperial subjects.Footnote 39
The transition from slavery to freedom was often the basis for royal tribute. As one anonymous author proposed in the 1550s, the king could expect tribute in exchange for “sustaining [the Indians] in justice and Christianity.”Footnote 40 Similarly, the early presence of African slavery in Spanish America provided justification for free-colored tribute, a price paid for what lawmakers described as “living in peace and justice, having passed through slavery, being free.”Footnote 41 By the eighteenth century, this population of perhaps 300,000 encompassed negros, who were mostly or entirely of African lineage born in Africa, the Americas, Iberia, or elsewhere; mulatos, who had some African ancestry, but could also have European or Indian blood; morenos and pardos who were “brown” or “dark”; and less common castes of people with African and Indian ancestry, such as lobos, chinos, and coyotes.Footnote 42 Tribute laws incorporated this complex set of caste categories to contain the growing free population and retain its ideological connections to slavery. Monarchs and tribute officials fixated on what they saw as the potential of free-colored individuals to be grouped and economically exploited, if not as slaves, then as tributary units.
The basic unit of tribute was the family.Footnote 43 Though royal tribute has often been termed a head-tax, it actually counted units of married “whole tributaries” and “half tributaries” (the latter included unmarried people) and those married to exempt individuals. When Philip II created the tax in 1572, he specifically addressed the issue of intermarriage between Indians and African slaves or free-coloreds.Footnote 44 The following year the king issued a law stating that any offspring from such marriages “should pay tribute like the other Indians, even if they say they are not.”Footnote 45 This law and others reveal the already prevalent reproductive unions between Indians and Africans in New Spain.Footnote 46 The family would remain the basic unit of taxation, and the source of genealogical information for tribute privileges, as well as obligations.
Tribute privileges and obligations defined who paid tribute and for what reasons. The tribute regime was distinctive in that it linked taxation with caste, but free-colored tributary status was also based on age, place, military status, and occupation, any of which could indicate a privileged status and thus different treatment. Although women who were widows or had never married could be counted as tributaries, local custom dictated the application of the practice.Footnote 47 Throughout the colonial period, a tributary subject could be Indian or African (or both), male or female, rural or urban, as long as he or she provided income to the crown.
The last four decades of the eighteenth century saw intensifying reforms in Spain and its empire, particularly in finance and commerce in the colonies. Of critical significance for tribute was the restructuring of administration under the Ordinance of Intendants in 1786, which provided new procedures for creating registers of tributaries and collecting their payments. How effective these reforms were for centralizing power and extracting colonial resources has been a matter of debate among historians of Spain and Spanish America for decades.Footnote 48 Although the tribute regime had become markedly byzantine and conservative by the late colonial period, bureaucrats did engage in lively discussions concerning the nature of genealogy and its importance for tribute registration and collection.Footnote 49 As colonial institutions matured, tribute continued to inspire disagreement, especially when it came to devising an exact method for identifying free-colored tributaries. Enlightenment ideas, mixed with older concepts like blood purity, underpinned a series of reforms, legal decisions, and bureaucratic practices through which the colonial regime identified and categorized free-coloreds.
Genealogy and calidad would prove fundamental to the reforms and renovations of the tribute regime of the eighteenth century as bureaucrats extended its reach. Where tributary identities crystallized, colonial administrators could draw individuals into a system of taxation based on their connections with other tributaries by blood or marriage. From the late sixteenth century onward, free people of African descent in New Spain would provide more royal tribute than free-coloreds in other parts of the Spanish Empire.Footnote 50 Among the thousands of people subjected to free-colored tribute at the end of the century, a few hundred contested this tax status using petitions and lawsuits. By the eighteenth century, colonial authorities and ordinary people had begun to rely on calidad in discussions of free-colored social positions and obligations as tributary subjects or privileged vassals.
Seeking Tribute Exemption
Petitioners for exemption provided evidence of non-tributary ancestry, through a combination of blood ties and masculine honor. Free-colored men across New Spain had successfully petitioned for privileges usually reserved for Spaniards and mestizos, such as bearing arms or tribute exemption among militia companies. Both of these precedents established the possibility for free-coloreds of petitioning using the tropes of masculine honor and service.Footnote 51 Free-colored militiamen requesting exemption often stressed their roles as providers and patriarchs to needy women and children.Footnote 52 Many petitions for exempt tributary status based on calidad took on a decidedly patriarchal tone, with men defending the honor and interests of their wives, children, and future generations. The following paragraphs examine two cases of individual petitions and two cases of petitions on behalf of large groups of men from frontier towns. Legal representatives certainly influenced the writing of these documents, but the labels people chose to use in legal documents allow us glimpses of their understandings and perceptions of self and others.Footnote 53 When tributaries sought exemption, they and their legal representatives constructed genealogical, legal, or social resources that could expunge tributary status. An exempt genealogy connected a family to ancestors—usually men—who had possessed a non-tributary calidad, nobility, or privileges granted by colonial authorities.
The process of disputing free-colored tributary status became more structured and centralized in the late eighteenth century, and thus leads us to a wealth of information about tribute disputes in Mexico City after 1786. Evidence for the following analyses is drawn from petitions and other legal documents that discussed tribute exemption after the visita of José de Gálvez (1765–71). Most of the specific quotations are drawn from the years 1780 to 1800. Of these cases, 18 were requests from free-colored militiamen and their representatives for tribute exemption based on their service to the crown.Footnote 54 Sixty more cases originated with individuals, families, and sometimes entire towns. At least 43 of these cases resulted in exemption. Other decisions have been lost or separated from the cases themselves. For this reason, the focus of this article is on the language and logic of the cases, rather than on predicting their success in securing exemption for petitioners.
Petitions followed a set of procedures that changed multiple times in the eighteenth century and drew on centuries of Iberian and Ibero-American precedent. In Castile, individuals could gain royal tax exemptions through pleitos de hidalguía, which rested on genealogy and nobility.Footnote 55 In a pleito, which was uncommon in tribute exemption petitions in New Spain, tributaries might accuse local officials or bureaucrats of poor administration or of using tribute for personal vendettas. Petitions, in contrast to pleitos, occasionally complained of an overzealous official, but these types of accusations maintained the kind of deference inherent in their genre. Cases for tribute exemption often took the form of a petition to the viceroy. The initial documents would be received and then supplemented with additional evidence. Intendants and local magistrates testified in administrative matters pertaining to the collection and registration of families and individuals. Copies of these proceedings then went to the Real Hacienda in Mexico City. Accountants, as well as tribute administrators, made frequent appearances in these disputes. Finally, the fiscal of the Real Hacienda was also consulted, as his recommendations were central to the functioning of the tribunal that oversaw royal accounts.Footnote 56
The Ordinance of Intendants reorganized colonial administration in 1786, limiting the powers of the viceroy and creating new units of territorial division. Under the direction of Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes, second count of Viceroy Revillagigedo, the Ordinance for the Formation of Visitations, Censuses, and Rates of Tributaries of New Spain (1793) aimed to further reform and standardize the processes of collecting tribute and allowing tribute exemptions for Indians and free-coloreds. One of the key changes for tribute petitioners was the introduction of the tribute commissioner as any person who had gained the “confidence” of the subdelegate.Footnote 57 These commissioners had no power to change tribute registers once they were completed—the authority to approve, redact, and archive lists rested with the accountants of the Real Hacienda. Thus, although it was local reputation that often determined tributary status, the power to alter it in writing rested exclusively with bureaucrats in the capital.
The process of proving one's calidad in a tribute petition relied on written documentation of lineage as well as public reputation. On behalf of individuals or groups, petitions for exemption gathered together documents that established genealogies, usually a combination of marriage and baptismal records and previous tribute registers. Community opinion could be estimated through witness testimony, which yielded the tributary genealogy of an individual or family as perceived by others. However, a calidad based on witness testimony was inherently unstable, as it depended on the personal opinions and the calidad of the witness. Proofs of genealogy were not guaranteed over time, and labels designating caste, calidad, limpieza de sangre, and tributary status were not always permanent. During a case, some individuals or families could be granted tribute relief for a time (“con calidad de por ahora) until higher authorities had time to review the case thoroughly.”Footnote 58 Thus, tribute exemption could be temporary and unstable, and repeated legal proceedings were necessary to achieve the long-term desires of the petitioner.
Tributary Status in Flux
This kind of instability in administration directly affected petitioners’ perceptions of justice and honor. In 1786, a vecino of Cuernavaca calling himself don Nicolás Gerardo Zedano asserted that he and his wife doña María Josefa Ortiz were “known and reputed” to have Spanish ancestry in their community “without there ever having been anyone to doubt their calidad” or tributary status.Footnote 59 Though the phrase “without a doubt” appears repeatedly in the petition, the basis of the case was the confusion surrounding the tributary status of the couple, who had been registered as mulato tributaries in 1785 and 1786. To clarify the situation, Zedano presented a battery of witnesses from Cuernavaca and beyond. These included numerous creoles, a peninsular Spaniard, and the Indian governor, as well as the parish priest and the alcalde mayor, all of whom named the petitioner as a Spaniard. None of the witnesses so much as mentioned that the Zedano family had been registered among the mulato tributaries, perhaps opting to avoid this designation even in the petition that would have reversed it. The Zedanos appeared to be a well-connected family with ties to prominent community members and a solid reputation as non-tributaries.
The procedure for obtaining tribute exemptions required communication between bureaucrats in the capital and local officials, a tenuous connection that could deteriorate over time. Following their initial petition, the couple obtained a temporary exemption from the Real Hacienda, only to be registered again as tributaries by a different agent of the Real Hacienda in 1789. This action forced the alcalde mayor, who had earlier testified in Zedano's favor, to charge him royal tribute. Aware of the alcalde's predicament, Zedano observed that the official was forced to ignore “the certification which I showed him because once I was registered and counted in the tasación, the amount of my tribute would have to come from his own pocket.” In his florid description the episode was “not only not conforming to justice, but diametrically opposed to it.” The petitioner asked that his name and that of his wife be “erased” from the list in question, and that a note be placed “in the margin which will convey the reason for erasing us and so that we may not be registered again.”Footnote 60 Only in 1792 did the Real Hacienda reaffirm the exemption, demonstrating the uncertain situation in which even successful petitioners often found themselves and their families.
The petition of another resident of the Valley of Mexico to remove himself from a free-colored tribute register was unsuccessful because he failed to provide admissible evidence. Vicente Pérez Abreu, a vecino of Coyoacán, brought his complaint in 1799 to address his registration, in spite of his parents’ being “free of any bad race.” This use of the term “raza” rather than “casta” showed the petitioner's perception of the permanence of a free-colored status and its irreparable damage to blood purity—Jewish ancestry was similarly known as a “bad race.”Footnote 61 The complainant supposedly had “no idea” why the commissioner had registered him “among the tributaries, having no proof that I or my ancestors had been subject to the contribution. . . being of Spanish calidad.”Footnote 62 Pérez Abreu returned to his town of origin, nearby Xochimilco, submitted ecclesiastical documents, and presented witness testimony on the part of Spaniards from the community in favor of his case. However, the fiscal for the Real Hacienda believed the information lacked proper certifications. At this point, the burden fell on Pérez Abreu to resubmit his case with the proper corrections, a process likely to prove costly and time-consuming. His case hung in the balance, his tributary genealogy recorded in official records until it could be erased by orders from Mexico City. Pérez Abreu conveyed his shock and dismay at being registered as a mulato by a commissioner who did not seem to know his reputation and lacked justification to demand payment of the tax.
The Tribute Commissioner and Local Reputations
The figure of the commissioner as ignorant and greedy outsider was one that petitioners frequently evoked in disputes of free-colored tributary status. Confrontations between the official and potential tributaries could encompass entire communities. Frontier regions produced petitions decrying the commissioner's disregard for the genealogies of particular families or towns. In the Huasteca, large groups of petitioners constructed genealogies based on place as well as current calidad. The petitioners were aware of their importance for colonial defense and trade in the region, which was agriculturally productive yet politically volatile.Footnote 63
The following two examples are drawn from a region in the Huasteca, the valley of Metztitlán, a fertile, majority-Indian area that provided agricultural products for the mines at Pachuca.Footnote 64 Metztitlán was a profitable tribute-producing region, with more than 14,000 pesos charged in 1788.Footnote 65 In addition, towns within the Metztitlán area were tied to regional trade routes for moving goods within the Huasteca and on to interior cities.Footnote 66 Potential tributaries in the Huasteca used their strategic and economically strong position to their advantage. Residents rejected their status as tributaries, proposing instead non-tributary genealogies based on the combination of ancestral privileges and calidad. The concept of privilege based on a variety of “qualities” surfaced in tribute cases, as the meanings and permutations of the word “calidad” allowed petitioners to use it rather generously. The most prominent examples of such arguments involved men claiming to be the descendants of conquistadors. These arguments could prove compelling in Mexico City, and some were decided favorably.
Petitioners from the subdelegación of Metztitlán, today in the state of Hidalgo, provide two examples of these types of successful arguments at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1796, residents of San Agustín Metzquititlán offered proof of tribute exemption, citing how “our ancestors personally assisted in the conquest with their arms and horses,” language that placed the petitioners on the same footing as conquistadors and their descendants.Footnote 67 Legal representatives often used phrases penned by the Augustinian Fray Juan Zapata y Sandoval, who had argued in 1609 that privileges be dispensed to men of Spanish descent who supported colonial rule “at their own expense” and “with their strength and industry.”Footnote 68 Thirty-seven cases, in which more than 90 men were represented, claimed an automatic exemption based on calidad and ancestral ties to the conquistadors of the Sierra Gorda and New Santander. Spaniards, castizos, and mestizos, these men sought recognition of their genealogies of service and calidad in the hope that these would lead to exemption. The result was an overhaul of the 1796 free-colored register, although only 27 of the original petitioners were confirmed as exempt and struck from the register.Footnote 69 Complaints arose following these decisions, stemming from the perceived ignorance of the commissioner, a community outsider, who had mistakenly categorized many families as mulato or Indian. Furthermore, this commissioner did not respect the place-specific privileges that villagers perceived as their designated compensation for the participation of their ancestors in expensive and dangerous frontier conquests and settlement.
The effort to dismantle the inflated tributary list of San Agustín Metzquititlán began with a group of formulaic petitions from male heads of household. Luis Antonio de Torres, a literate descendant of a Spanish man and a castiza, filed such a petition on behalf of himself and his two sons José and Vicente to remove them from the mulato register. With the testimony of witnesses, Luis Antonio tried to establish his own status as a Spanish man, buttressed by a lack of family history of paying tribute, and the calidad of his wife Felipa. Luis Antonio's witnesses were themselves men involved in the larger dispute over the accuracy of the new register. The first witness described Luis Antonio as the child of a Spanish man and a castiza and Felipa as a Spanish woman, thereby making José and Vicente Spanish as well. A second witness called Luis Antonio's parents a Spanish man and a mestiza, making Luis Antonio a mestizo. A final witness described Luis as a mestizo by virtue of being the child of a castiza and a Spanish man. According to this witness, his children were also mestizos.Footnote 70 Only the first witness described here adhered to the progression that supposedly allowed individuals to become Spanish by blood and thus exit the caste system. The witnesses did not agree on the precise caste of Luis Antonio, yet to these men, the technicalities of the caste system were not the real issue. Rather, their focus rested on tribute as a dividing line between privilege and obligation. As long as Luis Antonio and his family could preserve a mestizo, castizo, or Spanish calidad, they could avoid paying tribute. Though Luis Antonio believed his reputation had been threatened, he and his sons were eventually listed as non-tributaries who had never been registered.
In the same sub-delegation, a petition came from the town of Molango, where hundreds of people sought to establish their “privileged calidad” based on service, caste, and limpieza de sangre. Following a 1797 case before the Real Audiencia, residents of Molango had gained a temporary exemption from tribute because of their “special merit” for having maintained colonial control in the face of the “frontier with the Mecos.”Footnote 71 Attacks or threats by hostile Indians had created a necessity of allegiance between subjects and government, and the residents of Molango had risen to the occasion. The conferral of tributary privileges was one way to create such a reciprocal relationship; after all, the people in Molango had been called upon at a time when uprisings were occurring in the Sierra Gorda region.Footnote 72 In 1798, as petitioners described, there came a reversal, in the person of a “malicious” commissioner who targeted “all the families of the town of Molango, intending to obscure in the most ignominious way the origin and birthplace of the families that have given certified proofs of their limpieza de sangre.”Footnote 73 Having established their military necessity and geographical importance, the residents submitted genealogical proofs of calidad for their legal representative to compile.
The investigation conducted by the Real Hacienda and in Mexico City and local officials in Molango resulted in the creation of multiple lists of people based on tributary status and further organized by family unit. Among these were married couples and unmarried men concerned about their potential status as mulato tributaries. The threat to reputation was so great that 122 people who had never been registered as mulato tributaries provided proof that they were not mulatos, lest they be accused later on. An additional 80 people registered in 1791 as mulatos could not provide evidence of another calidad. A third group of 29 people registered as mulatos in the same year managed to gain an exempt calidad in the wake of investigation and petitioning. The tributary lists reflect the familial nature of bonds of tribute. Men were recorded with their wives, or their brothers in the case of unmarried men. These people attempted to gain privileges due inhabitants “as children of Spanish men married to Spanish women, Indians, mestizas, or castizas.”Footnote 74 A non-tributary calidad was the priority, though at least two men defined themselves as Indian tributaries who had been registered as mulatos. With the consultation of branches of the Real Hacienda, Viceroy Félix Berenguer de Marquina approved the petition in 1801. This victory for the residents of Molango undermined the authority of the commissioner, an outsider who in 1798 had infringed on the fiercely protected privileges gained through their genealogy.
In all these cases, tribute commissioners provoked frustration, confusion, and outrage among residents who claimed a calidad exempt from royal tribute. With the implementation of the Ordinance of Intendants, genealogy became simultaneously the preferred method of proving non-tributary calidad and a flexible criterion commissioners could use to inflate tribute registers. Commissioners, as representatives of an overarching Bourbon project to expand revenue collection, were charged with dissolving colonial privileges that had structured relationships between authorities and subjects for centuries. Because they were paid based on the amount of tributes collected, commissioners had little incentive to honor communal memory of privilege or local interpretations of calidad. Indeed, when an entire community accused a commissioner of disregarding long-standing privileges and failing to evaluate calidad accurately, the ensuing investigations often found numerous cases of mistaken identity. The methods for evaluating tributary status were based on ecclesiastical records and witness testimony, but the most influential was a previous tribute register. Witnesses repeatedly addressed the idea that no other commissioner had recorded an individual or family, casting doubt on the new commissioner's reasons for doing so. In the cases of Metzquititlán and Molango, investigations revealed worries that commissioners would attempt to register individuals who had never been part of the free-colored tributary group in the past. These community outsiders, it was felt, did not value the reputations of the families and the lineages that would become tributary in the event of registration.
No Shared Blood: Marriage, Adoption, and Spreading Tributary Status
Late-colonial reforms and debates surrounding the construction of tributary genealogy had a strong influence on how families attempted to limit the effects of tributary, free-colored lineage. Bourbon lawmakers explicitly limited the extent to which exogamous marriages could be beneficial for tributaries. The Ordinance of Intendants of 1786 proposed a new system of counting Indians and free-coloreds that eliminated the half-tributary category among unmarried men and exogamous couples. By eliminating the advantage of not doing so, this measure would supposedly remove barriers to tributaries marrying, but the imposition of a single tax rate met with opposition from the Real Hacienda.Footnote 75 If either parent were a free-colored tributary, the status of the children would follow that lineage. A subsequent 1793 ordinance dictated that mulato and Indian men would pay half the rate of tribute if they married exempt women, but their children would still be listed on the register of tributaries.Footnote 76 Such children would retain their father's calidad, due to the presence of African blood in their lineage. The apparent even-handedness in considering maternal or paternal bloodlines in determining tributary status in such cases points to the expansion of the tribute regime: neither maternal nor paternal lineage would undo the designation of free-colored tributary status.
Attitudes about marriage and reproduction provided the foundations of Bourbon tribute policy. The Royal Pragmatic promulgated in New Spain in 1778 criticized “unequal” marriages between people of different calidades, with specific reference to free-coloreds.Footnote 77 Parents and guardians could petition authorities to declare a potential marriage invalid due to concerns about differences in calidad.Footnote 78 In tribute disputes, the marriages in question had often already given rise to tributary offspring. The patriarch did not so much seek to contest the marriage itself on grounds of calidad but rather to separate himself and his family from any one member's marital choice that might threaten familial reputation. In such petitions, male family members privileged their own position by acting as interpreters of the tribute regime, declaring the actions of younger female members unrepresentative of the family's calidad. This disapproval of marriage choices reflected a Bourbon criticism of freedom of choice in marriage, wherever such a marriage might unite people deemed ill-suited for each other on the basis of their tributary status and calidad.
The meanings of lineage and marriage for tribute dominated a 1797 case presented by a man from Zacatlán de las Manzanas, a town near the regional trading hub of Tulancingo in the Huasteca. When José Agustín González Muñiz returned after a long absence to the town where he was raised, collectors demanded he pay royal tribute. Fearing that his name would be recorded among the mulato tributaries, he anticipated the “prejudice” that would affect his children and grandchildren, who still enjoyed the “good reputation, religious education, and good customs” of a Spanish family.Footnote 79 If it were assigned a free-colored calidad in the tribute regime, the family would no longer retain its strong associations with good behavior.Footnote 80 Furthermore, the future of his descendants would become uncertain because of a single act of tributary registration.
Aware of the consequences of his own registration and payment, González Muñiz began to petition for his removal from the list of mulato tributaries using an argument based on genealogy. Adoption played a central role in the life history that he constructed and supported with witness testimony. The words he and his legal representative chose to describe his status reflected the strategies they had chosen to establish his calidad by genealogical means. The petitioner described himself as a “huérfano” (orphan), a term that allowed him to construe his childhood as one without parents but not without lineage. He rejected the possibility of claiming he was truly without known parents, or an expósito.
The status of a person without a confirmable lineage, a foundling, became an attractive alternative to other petitioners unable to formulate convincing non-tributary genealogies. In 1794, Charles IV extended new privileges to people of unknown parentage, people who had been “expuesto” or deposited, like Agustín González Muñiz, in adoptive homes.Footnote 81 Though he might have been eligible to claim this status, Agustín avoided defining himself as an expósito. He cited that he had been raised in the home of his godmother, where he was originally placed as a baby. While he was still a young child, his godmother doña Antonia Coronela had died, leaving him under the care of the Morgado family. His adoptive mother, Juana Morgado, was a mulata from a family of what one mestizo community member disparaged as “negritos.”Footnote 82 Because the Morgados were publicly known to be mulatos, the petitioner speculated that his residence in their house “must have been the motive” for his inclusion among members of that “same calidad.”Footnote 83 González Muñiz related this aspect of his childhood as an episode rather than an identity. Instead of leaving his calidad in doubt, as an expósito now had the ability to do, the petitioner did not bind himself to his adoptive past. He turned to community memory of his biological father to distance himself from the Morgados’ reputation.
In the process of claiming calidad, González Muñiz brought together multiple terms that corresponded to tributary status, chief among them genealogy. The petitioner described the bond between himself and his adoptive mulato relatives as tenuous, claiming it did not define his tributary status. Rather, he presented a genealogical narrative of ties with people of Spanish ancestry, rather than a social description of his own life. He first claimed to be a castizo mistakenly registered within the tributary “class of mulatos.” He requested he be “excluded from this caste” in the eyes of the Real Hacienda and on the “General Count and Tributary Register of this jurisdiction of Zacatlán.” Promising that witnesses “would give account of [his] lineage and calidad,” he then offered a description of his “sanguinidad,” an unusual word evoking the importance of blood in the transference of tributary status.Footnote 84 In this petition, “casta” and “clase” were bureaucratic definitions associated with becoming a mulato tributary. In contrast, the terms “sanguinidad,” “linaje,” and “calidad” were the building blocks of genealogy and, therefore, the bases for a potential exemption. González implied that the depth of calidad, lineage, and blood is more significant than that of labels on tributary lists. Similarly, he claimed that his genealogical relationships to his Spanish father, whom he never knew, outweighed his adoption into a mulato family.
Although the petitioner seemed to have no current social relationship with his biological parents, he was determined to make a genealogical argument for his non-tributary status. Witness testimony eventually revealed the name and calidad of González Muñiz's biological father, a master gunsmith of Spanish lineage. When an orphan's parents were known to the community, the calidad of the child was no longer doubtful. This kind of “blend of public and private information” was already common in other petitions to confirm legitimacy and lineage.Footnote 85 Relying on the unwritten public reputation González Muñiz enjoyed as the illegitimate child of a Spaniard, witnesses in the case repeatedly asserted that ancestry mattered in determining tributary status, suggesting that the caste of González Muñiz's adoptive parents had little direct impact on his calidad. These witnesses did not doubt that the petitioner's calidad should be passed from his biological parents. In the context of these arguments, Spanish genealogy and calidad shared an immutable feature that even deep familial bonds with mulatos could not negate. Since this logic had served to gain González Muñiz an exemption, he used the same ideas about inherent qualities and blood lineage to construct the genealogies of his daughters, though not clearly to their advantage.
Following his successful petition, Agustín González Muñiz went on to challenge the uncertainties surrounding his descendants’ calidad. Although tribute registers from previous years did not show Agustín or his wife as tributaries, their daughters were registered as mulatas, creating confusion about the reputation and tributary status within the family. The elder, Bernabela Antonia, had contracted a first marriage to a tributary Indian with whom she had four children. In the eyes of her father, this alliance lacked what one historian has called “strategic conjugality.”Footnote 86 Bernabela remarried, choosing a mestizo, as did her younger sister María Josefa. The local Indian governor testified that he did not understand why the two sisters had been registered, unless it was because of their father's adoptive upbringing in a mulato household.Footnote 87
While González Muñiz's reputation had benefited from his publicly reputed lineage, his daughters suffered the stigma of tributary status not because of their relationship to him but because of their relationship to each other. In January 1799, the commissioner who had created the contested register the year before appeared in Mexico City to explain how he had made his decisions regarding whom to record in Zacatlán. He claimed he had never registered the family patriarch, but he did confirm that he had registered Bernabela Antonia as a mulata. To the commissioner, Bernabela's past registration as a free-colored tributary justified placing her name on the new register. Although Bernabela explained to him that “she was Spanish because her father was,” the commissioner asked neighbors and local officials, but “could not determine the truth.” Only a few community members claimed to know her calidad. As for Bernabela's sister, the commissioner saw her as a tributary by virtue of being “sister of Bernabela by father and mother.”Footnote 88 In the commissioner's mind, the uncertainties surrounding Bernabela's calidad automatically spread to her sister owing to their similar genealogies.
Determining who had the authority to assign tributary status was a fundamental issue as the investigation into the family developed. González Muñiz approached the commissioner asking that his family be expunged from the tribute register “because his daughters and grandchildren were as Spanish as he and his ancestors.”Footnote 89 When the commissioner informed him that the list could be revised only by the Real Hacienda, González Muñiz pointed to the confirmation of his own non-tributary status by the Real Audiencia. “I the father of these [daughters] already proved my calidad in the ways provided by the Royal Ordinances,” his petition stated, underscoring his patriarchal role as protector and guardian.Footnote 90 Positioning himself as an expert on tribute within the proceedings, he declared that he would evaluate which of his grandchildren would inherit the familial tribute exemption. By his genealogical calculations, María Josefa's children should not be registered because the combination of her castiza genealogy and her husband's mestizo genealogy gave the children enough Spanish blood to enjoy exemption. If both sisters were castizas, then Bernabela's children from her marriage to an Indian would become tributaries because they were not mestizos by technical definition. This careful attention to the designations of blood indicated González Muñiz's understanding of the repercussions of Bernabela's choice of marriage partners. Her past reproductive choices resulted in the permanent obligation of her children to pay royal tribute. Her father saw that obligation as the consequence of his daughter's disadvantageous marriage to an Indian, a union which would mark an entire branch of the family as tributaries.
While most of the case focused on genealogy and its proofs apart from physical appearance, a brief statement at the end of the document shows how visual perception and lineage were related in evaluations of tributary status. For Bernabela and María Josefa, eligibility for exemption rested on the reputations of their father Agustín and their deceased mother Francisca de la Cruz, daughter of a Spaniard and a cacica. Though Francisca's genealogy was known in the community, the parish priest stated that she had died prior to his installment and that he therefore “did not see her aspect which she manifested related to her calidad.”Footnote 91 This is the only explicit reference to phenotype in the case, and it did not come from the petitioner himself. The priest was willing to draw on established notions of physiognomy (which predated calidad), as well as genealogical evidence and testimony.Footnote 92 His interest in “seeing in order to know” reiterated the complex nature of calidad, a social marker dependent upon everyday interpretations and individual opinions. But for the González Muñiz family the case could not hinge on Francisca alone; they understood tributary status as a familial matter, deeply rooted in genealogy, rather than a condition that could be isolated to one individual.
Once an exogamous marriage took place, it could be nearly impossible for a family to set itself apart from the choices of a single member. The 1799 case of Cristóbal Martínez and his family, from Tenango in Chalco, southeast of Mexico City, illuminates the effects of marriage on a non-tributary reputation. Warning the oidores in the capital that an overzealous magistrate was on the loose, Cristóbal Martínez complained that his family had been unfairly targeted in the tribute commissioner's attempt to expand the local free-colored register. The petition dealt with a legal connection by marriage, portraying it as temporary and quite different from the deeper bonds of blood between parent and progeny. Martínez stressed that he and his brother were of Spanish descent, and that his brother had married his wife's sister, also reputed to be Spanish. The dual familial and marital connections between wives and husbands ensured, Martínez stated, that “all the children that he and I procreated are legitimate Spaniards.” However, because his niece Mónica had married a lobo, since deceased, the commissioner wanted to register the entire family as mulatos. Martínez argued that Mónica's husband, whatever caste he may have possessed before he died, did not “share at all in our blood.” Mónica did not “have any succession” of children who would now be part of the family, effectively truncating this line of descent.Footnote 93 By this logic, Mónica's free-colored association was purely legal and could not affect a non-tributary genealogy. In spite of the petitioner's assertion that he did not have the funds to solicit the necessary ecclesiastical documentation to prove his calidad, the case was referred to the subdelegate for further review, pending receipt of more documentary proofs.
Patriarchs in the cases discussed above distanced themselves from free-coloreds within the institution of marriage and upheld genealogy as the determining factor in tributary status. For Agustín González Muñiz, being the illegitimate child of a Spaniard was preferable to being the adopted child of mulatos. As the natural son of a Spanish father, González Muñiz could not claim all the prestige associated with his father, a master gunsmith, but he could avoid the reproductive and genealogical implications of tributary status. In contrast, Mónica's marriage to a man of questionable tributary status and free-colored calidad jeopardized not only her own standing in the eyes of tribute officials but that of her entire family. If children had resulted from the union, the addition of free-colored ancestors to the Martínez family would have fundamentally changed its “blood.”
Physiognomy and Genealogy
Marriage and reproduction, and the genealogical and legal ties they created, far outweighed physiognomic interpretations of tributary status among petitioners. Nevertheless, many bureaucrats believed visible characteristics were inextricably linked to tributary status, though this viewpoint mixed and matched ideas based on heredity, physiognomy, and genealogy as well. The tradition of judging the caste or noble lineage of an individual by sight was not new and often depended on dress, material possessions, and behavior.Footnote 94 When lineage was unknown or unclear, these behavioral and visible factors were important determinants in tributary decisions during the late years of the century, resulting in confusion regarding the distinctions between mulatos and Indians by sight.Footnote 95 Certain officials in Mexico City began to apply concepts of heredity to the transmission of tributary markers such as dark skin, impelled perhaps by a growing consensus in European scientific and medical communities that human biological heredity could be used as a “causal, explanatory notion.”Footnote 96 The growing use of expressions like “color de pardo,” sometimes cited indicating the increasing importance of phenotype for determining status at the end of the colonial period,Footnote 97 influenced the tribute regime but did not displace genealogical thinking. Even as racial thinking permeated the tribute regime, tributaries and authorities continued to rely heavily on genealogy as the most effective way to determine tributary status. Differences of opinion within the Real Hacienda continued to be possible because ordinances, even as late as the early nineteenth century, did not specify exactly what constituted the tributary calidad.
Debates about the tributary status of foundlings or illegitimate children often reflected the intrinsic connections between tribute and caste, calidad, class, and color. In 1794, a royal decree granted unprecedented and ambiguous privileges to the expósitos, including the ability to claim non-tributary status and to be treated as if they had honorable Spanish lineage.Footnote 98 Royal paternalism, combined with Enlightenment thought, inspired the Charles IV to include these foundlings as legitimate and potentially productive.Footnote 99 Such radical reforms in favor of people of unknown parentage upset local hierarchies and worried elites and bureaucrats in New Spain and beyond.Footnote 100 In response to the decree, accountant Juan Ordóñez of the Real Hacienda in Mexico City argued that all free-coloreds, regardless of expósito status, would continue to pay tribute “because they are plebeians” with certain obligations to the crown. He believed class to be the overriding factor in determining tributary status. Simply because someone had no genealogy did not mean that he or she could avoid the obligations associated with being a vassal. Ordóñez observed that “to know [the calidad] of all the foundlings in which there is a frequent mixture of Spaniards, Indians, and mulatos, seems impossible.” Ordóñez favored a strategy that privileged color and class in the absence of genealogical proofs. He recommended that the monarch not grant exemptions to “expósitos who are black in color, who do not leave any doubt about their calidad. . . and those who in their color, hair, and features are known as mulatos or another of the castes that result from a mixture of blacks.”Footnote 101 This language of physiognomy had appeared in Spanish America before the caste system took root, and its popularity within the tribute regime spanned more than two centuries.
Not all bureaucrats approved of this method of categorization, however, and there were those who opposed what they saw as outdated thinking. Another official in the Real Hacienda identified only as “Beltrán” (perhaps Joseph María of the same surname) issued an equally strong opinion accusing Ordóñez of advocating a system of tributary identification based on a backward school of thought. Beltrán insisted that those opposed to physiognomic thinking had proven that “the extrinsic features of the body do not coincide with the qualities (qualidades) of the soul.” Beltrán was outraged at the notion that “the color of the face, the lack of a beard, the toughness, straightness, or curliness of the hair demonstrate that the expósito is a child of Indians or blacks or mulatos or comes from other castes.” He understood the paradox of calidad, tributary status, and the law. To this end, he challenged his opponents, “And shall it be lawful that calidad be doubtful and the imposition of tribute certain?”Footnote 102 The competing views of officials at viceregal and local levels about the meanings of color, physical features, and lineage for tributary status indicated that a system intended to split the society along clear-cut lines had instead made way for an even more tangled matter of identifying who was who in the caste system.
Significant to this discussion and embedded within it was a case that contested the tributary status of an expósito in Mexico City. The case involved a hodgepodge of appeals to gendered honor, service, and class, interwoven with contemporaneous debates surrounding expósito status. José Francisco Prieto, a literate master blacksmith, requested an exemption as a subject “numbered in the class of good men.” His petition did not confirm or deny allegations that he was free-colored. In fact, he admitted that it was “impossible to prove [his] calidad” because he was adopted. He based his argument on the notion of a tributary class, which the petitioner associated with the “inferior rank of plebeians.”Footnote 103 Such people lacked the skill he exercised as a master in his trade, an economic position that distanced him from the working poor. He bolstered these arguments in favor of his honor by claiming the status of an expósito raised by a free-colored militiaman, himself exempted from tribute. Since Prieto could not formulate any blood lineage for himself, he constructed a parental connection to an exempt free-colored man. Downplaying blood and focusing on adoptive non-tributary parentage, the petitioner and his representatives hoped that blood lineage would be rendered irrelevant.
Those opposed to the exemption were unmoved by Prieto's appeal to honor and upbringing and instead focused on his lineage. The case found its way to tribute administrator Juan Domingo Lombardini, who was nearly always unsympathetic to exemption claims. Even if the petitioner did not know his biological parents, Lombardini asserted that “in spite of being a foundling it is undeniably clear from his presentation, color, and exterior characteristics that [his parents] are pardos or other castas.”Footnote 104 Lombardini was convinced that exterior characteristics were clear markers of tributary status, an inherited condition that could be tracked through its physical manifestations. The petitioner's physical presentation confirmed his blood lineage, overriding any of the privileges supposedly accorded to expósitos based on the mystery of their calidad.
Fortunately for Prieto, the judges of the Real Hacienda ruled in 1801 that all expósitos be exempt from tributary responsibilities. The resolution rested on the idea that “the basis of color is very fallible for determining the castes of expósitos.”Footnote 105 However, the fact that expósitos could be “decent plebeians” did not disrupt the overall tributary structure. These individuals were not without calidad; they were simply of a caste and genealogy indeterminable under the law. The resolution reaffirmed the extent to which free-colored and Indian subjects could potentially improve their social status without altering their tributary category.Footnote 106 The fractured opinions of the bureaucracy showed the coexistence, however contradictory, of multiple theories of calidad based on blood or visible characteristics or both. The range and diversity of these theories gave petitioners many ways to construct genealogies or marshal other evidence to distance themselves from tributary status without referencing physical characteristics.
For some bureaucrats, the master blacksmith José Francisco Prieto was defined more by his color than his prestige as a master tradesman. Although he presented himself using terms of class and calidad, he initially encountered a judicial audience more interested in his appearance than his reputation. Certain tribute officials were willing to allow physical characteristics to take priority over an individual's local reputation and community understandings of lineage and calidad. However, color and appearance did not satisfy bureaucrats at the highest levels of government, who were searching for a fixed, rational method of identifying tributaries. Seeking to close the loopholes free-coloreds exploited in the tribute regime, Bourbon high courts refused to acknowledge color, a characteristic with the potential to become as subjective as caste itself, as the basic tributary marker. Accountants and bureaucrats probed the implications of the 1794 royal decree by mixing new ideas about heredity with entrenched desiderata of genealogy, purity, and caste. The question eventually reached the Council of the Indies, which approved the Real Hacienda's resolution in 1802 with the caveat that it “not circulate in the Indies as a general ruling.”Footnote 107 The Council upheld the continued importance of these “diverse practices” entailed in counting and registering tributaries of different castes. In New Spain, most authorities continued to favor genealogical proof, already prevalent, as the preferred method of identifying tributaries.
By the late eighteenth century, the imposition of tributary status as a genealogical marker had begun to stabilize the meanings of being free-colored for the purposes of the Bourbon colonial regime. The lens of tribute thus distilled prior categories into a single recognizable term that could be exported across the Atlantic. Caste and calidad had become unattractive to lawmakers searching for a method of efficiently and quickly judging tributary status. One of the underlying problems was the inability of bureaucrats to decipher tributary status to each other's satisfaction: some believed tributary status could be determined by color, while others favored a genealogical approach. Though color often played a role in determining position within the caste system, administrators in the tribute regime did not all view physical aspect as the most reliable indicator of status. They debated, and ultimately upheld, the early modern belief that the body was a changeable expression of difference.Footnote 108 Genealogy had long served as a tool to negotiate subjective interpretations of physical features. The Real Hacienda of New Spain would eventually find color and physical appearance insufficient for determining tributary status.
Conclusion
Tributary caste, tributary class, and tributary quality existed in concert, arguably with little consensus as to their precise meanings. Their shared significance and intelligibility derived from genealogical underpinnings and became a self-sustaining mechanism for drawing families into the tributary category. All three markers could be manipulated to achieve genealogical goals, whether in the words of a determined petitioner or a scrutinizing official. For bureaucrats, identifying tributaries using genealogy appeared less subjective, and long remained an established method of tracing ancestry and privilege. People registered as free-colored tributaries looked to genealogy also, but as a method of defining their privileges within the colonial regime. One historian has argued that creole elites could not “imagine their kingdom without recourse to ideas of lineage and purity.”Footnote 109 Cases for tribute exemption show the extent to which these ideas also mattered to non-elites attempting to avoid tributary status. It can be said that at this most basic level petitioners and judges agreed that genealogy was the cornerstone of tributary status.
Being part of the class of tributaries or non-tributaries depended on the status of one's ancestors. Whether this genealogical method could be supplemented with interpretations of color and certain physical features remained a point of contention, while genealogy retained its position as an indispensable personal and legal marker in New Spain. The late eighteenth century was a time of changing attitudes and rhetoric about the authority of genealogy, calidad, and color in determining social categorization. Against this trend toward innovation and diffusion, petitioners for exemption from tribute promoted free-colored tributary status as the outcome of genealogical characteristics, rather than physical ones. Of the hundreds of individuals involved in tribute disputes examined for this study, no petitioners argued that color alone should be the central or deciding factor in proving a specific lineage or an exempting calidad. Among cases that reached the higher levels of bureaucracy in the capital, genealogy evidently seemed to the petitioners a stronger basis for appeal than physical characteristics.Footnote 110 Those seeking to avoid tribute payment did so using the same vocabulary of genealogy and privilege that tribute officials used to subjected others to this tax. In an era of political change in New Spain, conserving established genealogical means of determining tributary status served to unite most petitioners with the bureaucrats who judged them. Both sides were wary of depending on phenotypic vocabularies for authority in defining calidad.
The family histories recounted in disputes of free-colored tributary status did not necessarily seek to create a pure and prestigious ancestry, but simply to distance some or all family members from a specific financial obligation. In this way, these stories of genealogical negotiation differ from such processes as the proof of limpieza de sangre. Petitioners employed genealogy as a tool to negotiate the obligations of their subjecthood, which may or may not have resulted in genealogical purity. The only thing absolutely essential for many of these petitioners was to rid the family of the stain of tribute. As they presented the petitions, ordinary people articulated their positions within their own families, towns, and a larger colonial hierarchy of calidad.
Genealogy satisfied Bourbon lawmakers while providing a culturally sanctioned vocabulary of self-authentication that was familiar to ordinary people. Tribute complaints evoke deeply ingrained popular ideas about the interdependence of marriage and family, reproduction and gender, and calidad and lineage. To contest their tributary status, families relied on genealogy to help them document marital and reproductive relationships that would show the family's tributary lineage in a favorable light and thus promote the calidad of the petitioner as well. In the context of tribute, people presented themselves not as an assortment of physical characteristics, but as participants in and inheritors of an ongoing family history.
