The introduction provides the historical context behind the book. It also introduces conceptual terms that are central to the book – republic, vecino, ciudadano – and whose definitions have shifted since the early modern period. Subsequently, it examines Latin American historiography on race, political participation, and citizenship. Finally, it provides a chapter outline.

Chapter nine examines the lives and the characteristics of the first indios ladinos who broke bonds of servitude to establish themselves as vecinos in Santafé (de Bogotá) and Tunja, making use of evidence left behind by members of the urban native community in hundreds of notarial documents, including last wills and testaments, powers of attorney, and bills of sale. I document the process by which some native migrants could hope to become citizens (vecinos)– fully enfranchised members –of the Spanish city, while others were recorded as inhabitants (moradores) and temporary residents (estantes) with few(er) rights and privileges. In so doing, I reflect on the role that marriage, religion, property ownership, language, and dress played in conditioning membership in the urban fabric of the Spanish colonies. Mapping the social practice of citizenship (vecindad) against a web of royal law and legal jurisprudence serves to better understand how local practice in the New Kingdom of Granada fit within imperial frameworks.

Chapter six opens onto a tense confrontation that led the Spanish colonies in the New Kingdom the edge of civil war. As the colonial ideal of two ethnically-pure “republics” for Spaniards and for Indians had already begun to fracture, two indigenous communities identified the mestizo (mixed-ethnicity) sons of indigenous noblewomen as rightful successors to their outgoing caciques (indigenous chieftains). This decision inadvertently set off a chain of events that led to two decades of legal and political challenges. Through analysis of a cluster of legal cases involving aspiring caciques who were legitimate mestizo inheritors according to indigenous custom, this chapter explores the different bodies of law that informed Crown magistrates and administrators as they divided human communities and assigned their human subjects to categories and spaces. Here I also pay close attention to the legal implications of the rhetoric employed by different social factions as the legal cases in the colonies made their way to the Council of the Indies in Spain.

Chapter two examines how the foundations of Christian citizenship began to take shape in regional conciliar movements in Spain, coming into maturity with the Crown’s ratification of the Council of Trent in 1564. As the Christian republic of the Spanish Empire became more diverse, the Crown put its weight behind a legal revolution that would provide the Church with a more coherent set of policies. The Catholic Church conceived the Council of Trent (1545-63) as an answer to the Protestant Reformation and a device with which to effect a reform of the administration of the Church.The Spanish monarchy welcomed the Council’s reforms enthusiastically. However, the Spanish incarnation of Tridentine (adj., from Trent) reform was unique, in that it functioned as an instrument of political consolidation that provided the monarchy the tools necessary to create some semblance of uniformity within a growing empire.

Chapter five explores definitions of citizenship in jurisprudence, royal law, and municipal ordinance. Ecclesiastical statutes tended to shape policy for indios under the assumption that they were to be administered in their own “republic” (i.e. within their own pueblos, separate from Spanish settlements). This chapter highlights how the city of Santafé responded when numerous indios ladinos emigrated out of their pueblos and into the settlement of Santafé.

Chapter seven examines the political fallout that began in the 1570s, when the New Kingdom archbishop began to ordain dozens of mestizo priests in order to comply with the Crown’s mandate to place priests fluent in indigenous languages within native mission parishes (doctrinas), a change inspired by the Council of Trent’s encouragement for increased ministrations in the vernacular. Surprised to receive Crown instructions explicitly prohibiting the ordination of mestizos, in 1576 the archbishop emerged as a defender of the value and validity of the ordinations of individuals of mixed ethnicity. Yet the same archbishop resisted the promotion of a local mestizo to an elite position in the Santafé cathedral. This chapter examines how the complex motivations of the archbishop and elite ecclesiastics – as they sought to create a second-tier mestizo priesthood – were related to exclusivist discourses about “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre). The confrontation over the legal issue ultimately provoked the Crown into elaborating imperial law, which connected matters in the New Kingdom to concerns in Peru and elsewhere in the Indies.

The first chapter establishes the groundwork for thinking about social differences in society by reviewing the major political milestones that transformed multi-confessional medieval society. Reaching back to the first fourteenth century pogroms that drove Spanish Jews to convert en masse to Christianity, to be repeated again in the fifteenth century, the chapter explores how the terms “New Christian” and “Old Christian” emerged and later solidified as the primary divisions in sixteenth-century society.