Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T11:47:24.569Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making Order Out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Politics in the Spanish Colonial Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Lauren Benton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Jurisdictional fluidity was a central feature of early modem Iberian law, and jurisdictional tensions were exacerbated by overseas conquest and colonization. Contests over the legal status of conquered peoples featured both jurisdictional jockeying among colonial factions and widespread preoccupation with the symbols and rituals marking cultural and legal difference. This article examines the dynamics of jurisdictional politics in seventeenth-century New Mexico, where church and state officials carried on a bitter feud over legal authority during most of the century. Rather than viewing this contest as either transparently political or a mask for deeper processes defining hegemony, the article argues that seemingly dry legal distinctions were the focus of passionate and persistent struggle precisely because they merged institutional and cultural concerns of missionaries, settler elites, and Indians. The analysis leads to broader, more speculative claims about the role of jurisdictional fluidity in creating an “orderly disorder” that spanned diverse regions within Spanish America and, more broadly, across colonial regimes in the early modern world.

Type
Symposium: Colonialism, Culture, and the Law
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Spring 2001 , pp. 373 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2001 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benton, Lauren. 1994 Beyond Legal Pluralism: Towards a New Approach to Law in the Informal Sector. Social and Legal Studies 3:223–42.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren 1996. From the World Systems Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in Global Theory. Journal of World History 7(2):261–95.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren 2000a. Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State. Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(3):563–88.Google Scholar
Benton, Lauren 2000b. Jurisdictional Complexity as Institutional Order: The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World, 1400–;1800. Journal of World History 11(1):27–56.Google Scholar
Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabba, Homi. 1984. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October 28:125–33.Google Scholar
Borah, Woodrow. 1983. Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Brundage, James. 1995. Medieval Canon Law. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Castañeda Delgado, Paulino, and Hernández Aparicio, Pilar. 1989. La Inquisición de Lima. Vol. 1. Madrid: Demos.Google Scholar
Chaterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Clendinnen, Inga. 1987. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–;1570. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cope, R. Douglas. 1994. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–;1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Cutter, Charles R. 1986. The Protector de Indios in Colonial New Mexico, 1659–;1821. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Cutter, Charles R. 1994. Community and the Law in Northern New Spain. Americas 4: 467–80.Google Scholar
Cutter, Charles R. 1995. The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–;1810. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Dillard, Heath. 1984. Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–;1300. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Farriss, Nancy. 1968. Crown and Clergy in Colonial New Mexico, 1759–;1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege. London: Athlone.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Greenleaf, Richard. 1965. The Inquisition and the Indians of New Spain: A Study in Jurisdictional Confusion. Americas 22:138–66.Google Scholar
Greenleaf, Richard 1990. Historiography of the Spanish Inquisition: Evolution of Interpretations and Methodologies. In Perry and Cruz 1990.Google Scholar
Gutierrez, Ramon. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–;1846. Palo Alto, Calif: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hackett, Charles Wilson, ed. 1937. Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, trans. Adolph, and Bandelier, Fanny. Vol. 3. New York: Carnegie Institution.Google Scholar
Harvey, L. P. 1990. Islamic Spain, 1250–;1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Myra Ellen. 1966. Taos Pueblo and Her Neighbors. New Mexico Historical Review 41(2):85–114.Google Scholar
Kagan, Richard. 1981. Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–;1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kellogg, Susan. 1995. Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Klor de Aha, Jorge. 1990. Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline. In Perry and Cruz 1990.Google Scholar
Lynch, John. 1992. The Institutional Framework of Colonial Spanish America. Journal of Latin American Studies 24:69–81.Google Scholar
MacLachlan, Colin M. 1988. Spain's Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mecham, J. Lloyd. 1966 [1934]. Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Mills, Kenneth. 1997. Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–;1750. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Moreno de Los Arcos, Roberto. 1990. New Spain's Inquisition for Indians from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. In Perry and Cruz 1990.Google Scholar
Muldoon, James. 1979. Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–;1550. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Parry, J. H. 1948. The Audiencia of New Galicia in the Sixteenth Century: A Study in Spanish Colonial Government. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, and Anne, Cruz J., eds. 1990. Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Phelan, John Leddy. 1960. Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy. Administrative Science Quarterly 5:47–65.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan. 1990. Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography. Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:383–408.Google Scholar
Scholes, France. 1937. Church and State in New Mexico, 1610–;1650. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Scholes, France 1942. Troublous Times in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Seed, Patricia. 1995. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–;1640. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Serulnikov, Sergio. 1996. Disputed Images of Colonialism: Spanish Rule and Indian Subversion in Northern Potosí, 1777–;1780. Hispanic American Historical Review 76(2):189–227.Google Scholar
Stern, Steve. 1982. Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism's Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1971. The Moral Economy of the English Crown in the Eighteenth Century. Past and Present 50:76–136.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Williams, Robert A. 1990. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar