As they revisit the Spanish conquest of the Americas, historians have come to understand the role, and often the complicity, of indigenous elites. Indigenous military leaders marched to victory alongside Spanish conquistadors; indigenous governors collected tribute, marshaled labor, and with those under their control built the colonial state in Latin America. Perhaps “built” is not the best word here, because the political state, both before and after the conquest, was designed to enrich the ruling castes—indigenous elites were charged with maintaining as much as building. Benton's fine first book joins this important historiographic tide. It offers a microhistory of the altepetl of Tetzcoco (later spelled Texcoco), a city-state that dominated the eastern part of the Valley of Mexico and whose history is often overshadowed by the better-known Tenochtitlan to the west, occupying what is now Mexico City.
In six chapters, Benton reconstructs the history of the ruling family of Tetzcoco to argue that, rather than being unseated by the conquest, these elites played an important role in the governance of the polity until about 1564. The descendants of the famed pre-Hispanic ruler Nezahualcoyotl (r. 1431–1472) and his son Nezahualpilli (r. 1472–1515) not only served as the tlatoani of Tetzcoco until 1564, but they also enjoyed revenues from estates that had been assembled before the conquest to support the ruling family. Chapter 1 sorts out the complicated fortunes of the family during and after the conquest; many died during the conflict or as a result of the epidemics that were sweeping through New Spain.
Chapter 2 turns to the period of relative stability from 1540 to 1564, when Tetzcoco was ruled first by don Antonio Pimentel Tlahuitoltzin (r. 1540–1545) and then his nephew, don Hernando Pimentel Ihuian (r. 1545–1564). Key to don Antonio's success was his public acceptance of Christianity and his close relationship with the Franciscan friar Motolinía (Toribio de Benavente, ?–1565). In addition, he was resolute in defending the rights of his family to hereditary lands, often in the Spanish law courts. His nephew inherited his political skills and understood the need to operate within new colonial hierarchies, as his petitions to the Spanish king attest.
Chapter 3 turns from officeholding to landholding. After offering a synopsis of changes in land tenure over the sixteenth century, Benton presents a close examination of a few law cases from the late 1700s to demonstrate the legal tactics that the elite of Tetzcoco used to protect their property from incursions by Spanish colonists. His sensitivity to the role that elite women played in building the colonial social order by contracting marriages to desirable partners, sometimes Spaniards and sometimes other indigenous elites, is demonstrated in Chapter 4. This chapter also includes case studies of two famous offspring of inter-ethnic marriages, both of them historians: don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Juan Bautista de Pomar. Today, Ixtlilxochitl is inseparable from Tetzcoco because of his histories of the altepetl and its ruling family, but Benton demonstrates that he actually spent very little time in the region—and that his one-month stint as its ruler (juez-gobernador) was a disaster.
In contrast, Pomar was deeply integrated into the Tetzcocan community and ended his life as a wealthy landowner. “Mestizo” and “indigenous” have often been constructed as oppositional categories: mestizos win, indigenes lose. However, Benton's fine-grained parsing of Pomar's affairs shows things differently. An (indigenous) aunt would leave property to her (mestizo) nephew Pomar because, as she wrote in her will, he “has shown me much love and continues to do so” (117). In the end, family ties mattered more than ethnic labels.
Chapter 5 returns to politics, tracing the role of elites in Tetzcoco's local government. After the death of don Hernando Pimentel in 1564, family members began to quarrel over property, spending their days in court and their money on lawyers, leaving the altepetl adrift. They were not the only indigenous family under financial pressure—a drop in tribute revenues meant that indigenous elites across New Spain were clawing each other to stay on top. Post-1564 Spanish efforts to control the leaky pipe of tribute monies put indigenous officeholders on a set salary, and the Spanish jailed them for not extracting expected dues from the ever-diminishing numbers of macehualtin (peasants). Small wonder then that elites retreated from the public sphere. As Benton shows, over a few decades, the high elites of Tetzcoco had the properties that once supported political officeholders privatized, they cut the ties to the large network of dependent kin, and they largely excused themselves from public life. Unburdened of these expensive responsibilities, a few elites in Tetzcoco were able to hold onto their estates into the nineteenth century.
Students of the period will appreciate Benton's ability to toggle between marquee history (the fall of Tenochtitlan, the plague of sheep) and the smaller dramas unfolding in Tetzcoco, particularly within the palace walls. The book makes the most of the sometimes scant historical sources for the period and offers nuanced readings of better known ones. Notable is Benton's attention to female experience: a close parsing of female testimony from the famous 1539 trial of don Carlos Ometochtzin leads him to argue that it was not idolatry that brought the lord down but his “predatory sexual conduct” among the women of his own family (44).
The genealogical charts and tables and the appended prosopography are very helpful in keeping track of the large family that Nezahualcoyotl engendered and tracing their connections. Cambridge's list price ($99.97) will make this too expensive for most students; a paperback edition would (and should) find eager readers in the advanced undergraduate and graduate classroom.
