Indian Congregations in the New Kingdom of Granada: Land Tenure Aspects, 1595–1850

1957 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orlando Fals-Borda
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Case History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
New Kingdom ◽  
Native Population ◽  
Partial Failure ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Religious Training

IN their essays on the congregation of Indians in New Spain, Lesley Byrd Simpson and Howard F. Cline advanced information on the general characteristics and legal bases of this royal policy. Essentially, the kings of Spain wanted to gather the Indians into towns for purposes of religious training and in order to facilitate fiscal and political administration. According to Simpson and Cline, the application of these laws in New Spain toward the latter part of the sixteenth century was largely ineffective and, apparently, the congregation program affected only a small portion of the native population. One of the main reasons for this partial failure was the fact that the Indians already had villages, and it was very difficult for them to move to newly established locations. The documentation of these socio-political processes is avowedly incomplete; investigators have not gone beyond 1606 and have not examined the intrinsic land tenure implications. Except for a case history presented by Cline in 1955, other social aspects of this policy have hardly been studied.

Alonso de Zorita: Early and Last Years

1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-513
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Vigil
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
The Masses

Alonso De Zorita’s career as a Spanish judge in the Indies in the years 1548–1556, though not as well known as the career of Bartolomé de las Casas and other pro-Indian reformers, merits serious study. The arrival of Zorita and his subsequent actions as an administrator and legist represent one example of the serious efforts of the Crown in the 1540’s to impose royal control over a quasi-feudal class of conquerors and pobladores which had from the early sixteenth century entrenched itself in the New World. Moreover, Zorita was not only a jurist who attempted to implement the New Laws of 1542–43, but an inspired humanitarian who took an active interest in the native civilizations of the New World and questioned the relations that had evolved and created “a Hispano-Indian society characterized by the domination of the masses by a small privileged minority…” His ardent defense of the Indians against the charge that they were “barbarians” included a relativist line of argument that anticipated Michel de Montaigne’s celebrated comment that “everyone calls barbarian what is not his own usage.” In addition, his inquiries into native history, land tenure and inheritance laws may be considered “in effect exercises in applied anthropology, capable of yielding a vast amount of information about native customs and society” and is an example of what Europe saw or failed to see in the sixteenth century when confronted with a strange new world.

On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Case History ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archaeology Of Knowledge

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

Opposition to the Third Mexican Council

1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-149
Author(s):  
Stafford Poole
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
The Third ◽  
Civil Authority

The study of the opposition to the Third Mexican Council of 1585 provides a fascinating picture, not only of the determined efforts to undo the work of the most important ecclesiastical meeting of colonial New Spain but also of the various hostilities and animosities, intrigues and rivalries, that were at work in New Spain toward the end of the sixteenth century In the Third Council, the bickering of secular and religious priests, the opposition of bishops to the exorbitant privileges of the religious orders, the encroachments of the civil authority into the domain of the ecclesiastical, and the determination of clerics to defend their privileges and jurisdiction, all converged on the questions of (1) should the Council be permitted to publish its decrees and (2), once published, could they be put into execution?

Epilogue, as Prologue

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-182
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
The Past

This concluding chapter looks at the discovery of a perplexing set of documents created in New Spain. Referred to as títulos primordiales, or primordial titles, the sources described the founding of Indigenous communities in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The títulos resonate strongly with other colonial documents of futuremaking and the shared ways of relating to time surveyed throughout this book. The Indigenous authors of the primordial titles engaged in a radical act of situating themselves in time: they marshaled the resources of the past, the resources of memory, and the resources of tradition to achieve goals in the present and craft diverse futures. Sometimes they presented their assembled resources as a narrative of the sixteenth-century present, at other times in the form of history or chronicle.

scholarly journals Sixteenth-century Mexican Monasteries and Art. An Anthropological Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-124
Author(s):  
Monika Brenišínová
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Monastic Architecture ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

Abstract This paper deals with sixteenth-century Mexican monastic architecture and art. Mexican monasteries were constructed all over the territory of New Spain (1635-1821) in relation to the need to evangelize the native American populations. The article discusses the place of this architecture and art in the historiography of the history of art taking into consideration the changes of paradigms and putting particular emphasis on anthropology and its approaches. In terms of method, it is interdisciplinary and combines synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

A Social Welfare Organizer in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Don Vasco de Quiroga, First Bishop of Michoacán

1957 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
†M. M. Lacas
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Central Mexico ◽  
The World

No tourist who visits central Mexico will fail to pay a visit to the world-famous lake of Pátzcuaro. This beautiful and placid lake, with the several islands which dot its surface and the surrounding hills that frame it, formed, in olden times, the hub of the Michoacán Kingdom. Even today, it is the main habitat of the peaceloving Tarascan Indians who cluster around it and, partly at least, live on its abundant fish. An ancient author tells us that the word Michoacán means “fishing place,” and that the main occupation of the early Indians was the mild art of fishing, so opposed to the war-like activities of their neighbors to the east, the cruel Aztecs.

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