How incipient colonies create territory: The textual surveys of New Spain, 1520s-1620s

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 288-299

  Hunter, Richard ^a   Sluyter, Andrew ^b  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

^b LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Colonial period; Content analysis; Land surveying; Mexico; Ranching; Territory

Indexed keywords

COLONIZATION; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; POLITICAL HISTORY; POLITICAL POWER; RANCHING; SEVENTEENTH CENTURY; SOCIAL HISTORY; TERRITORIALITY; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

MEXICO [NORTH AMERICA];

BOS; OVIS ARIES;

EID: 80052405117     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2011.01.005     Document Type: Article

References (93)

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5. While the AGN Mercedes section contains the vast majority of land grants and the AGN Tierras section the bulk of documents related to land disputes, other archives also contain relevant documents, some duplicative of those in the AGN but others unique. The Library of Congress Kraus Collection and Newberry Library Ayers Collection each contain an errant volume of mercedes. Various other archives preserve a scattering of mercedes, such as Mexican notarial archives and the Regla Papers at Washington State University, Pullman, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.
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11. Craib, Cartographic Mexico (note 4); Craib, The archive in the field (note 7); Aguilar-Robledo, Contested terrain (note 5).
12. Although the Crown required surveys for land uses other than pastoralism, we focus on surveys for estancias exclusively because in both study areas they were common throughout the Early Colonial Period, estancias represented the vast majority of territory awarded through viceregal land grants, the two types of estancias (sheep and cattle) reflect the economic differences of the study areas, and content analysis of surveys for a common land use can better reveal meaningful changes that arose over time in the act of surveying.
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38. Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (note 31), 14.
39. See for example AGN Mercedes Vol. 11, ff. 38v.-39, Vol. 12, ff. 9v.-10, 57; AGN Tierras Vol. 2587, exp. 4, n.p., Vol. 2697, exp. 10, ff. 306-316v. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico, Indios Vol. 5, exp., ff. 940, 241v.-242.
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42. ANX Protocolo Vol. 1600-1608, f. 415v.; G. Bermúdez Gorrochotegui, El Mayorazgo de la Higuera, Xalapa, 1987, 77.
43. AGN Mercedes Vol. 6, f. 205.
44. AGN Mercedes Vol. 7, f. 111; AGN Tierras Vol. 2697, exp. 11, f. 319.
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48. B. Landau, Multiple geometric representations of objects in languages and language learners, in: P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel and M.F. Garrett (Eds), Language and Space, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 317-364; C. Vandeloise, Are there spatial prepositions?, in: M. Hickman and S. Robert (Eds), Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, Amsterdam, 2006, 139-154.
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51. I. Bernal, Relacion de Tequixquiac, Citlaltepec y Xilocingo, Tlalocan 3 (1957) 289-309; W.H. Dusenberry, The Mexican Mesta: the Administration of Ranching in Colonial Mexico, Urbana, 1963, 99.
52. See for example AGN Mercedes Vol. 7, ff. 272v.-273, Vol. 9, ff. 5-v., 114v.-115, Vol. 10, ff. 245-246v., Vol. 13, ff. 132v.-133, Vol. 18, ff. 240v.-241, Vol. 21, ff. 110v.-111.
53. AGN Mercedes Vol. 23, ff. 113-v.
54. B.M. Tomaszewski and M.E. Smith, Polities, territory and historical change in Postclassic Matlatzinco (Toluca Valley, central Mexico), Journal of Historical Geography, 37 (2011) 22-39.
55. Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (note 31), 295-300, 363-367.
56. AGN Mercedes Vol. 12, ff. 118-v.
57. M. Aguilar-Robledo, Contested terrain: the rise and decline of surveying in New Spain, 1500-1800, Journal of Latin American Geography 8 (2009) 23-47.
58. AGN Tierras Vol. 2704, exp. 30, ff. 253v.-254.
59. Hunter, Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape (note 6); Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape (note 6), 108-115.
60. AGN Mercedes Vol. 19, ff. 81-v.
61. AGN Mercedes Vol. 23, ff. 113-v.
62. See for example AGN Mercedes Vol. 10, ff. 61-v., Vol. 12, f. 56v., Vol. 14, ff. 125-126, Vol. 19, f. 30.
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64. AGN Mercedes Vol. 23, ff. 87v.-88.
65. See for example AGN Mercedes Vol. 3, ff. 115-v., Vol. 6, ff. 213v.-214, 249, Vol. 8, ff. 190-v., Vol. 9, ff. 60v.-61, 91v.-92, Vol. 10, ff. 45v.-46, Vol. 12, ff. 20v.-21, 153, Vol. 14, ff. 161v.-162v., Vol. 20, ff. 22-23v.
66. AGN Mercedes Vol. 12, ff. 209-v.
67. Hunter, Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape (note 6).
68. K.W. Butzer and E.K. Butzer, See among others The sixteenth-century environment of the central Mexican Bajío: archival reconstruction from colonial land grants and the question of Spanish ecological impact, in: K. Mathewson (Ed.), Culture, Form, and Place: Essays in Cultural and Human Geography (Geoscience and Man 32), 1993, 80-124; A. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications, Lanham, 2002; R. Hunter, Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape: land grants in sixteenth-century New Spain, Historical Methods 43 (2010) 1-13.
69. AGN Mercedes Vol. 33, ff. 115v.-116v.
70. AGN Mercedes Vol. 13, ff. 41-v.
71. AGN Mercedes Vol. 12, f. 57.
72. R. HunterLandscape Change in Colonial Mexico:People, Sheep the Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Valle del Mezquital, doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2009, 130.
73. AGN Mercedes Vol. 5, ff. 253-v.
74. See for example AGN Mercedes Vol. 8, ff. 190-v., Vol. 9, ff. 279-280, Vol. 13, ff. 81v.-82, Vol. 14, ff. 80v.-81v., Vol. 15, ff. 191-192, Vol. 17, ff. 116v.-117, Vol. 22, ff. 76-v.
75. ANX Protocolo Vol. 1600-1608, f. 414; AGN Mercedes Vol. 2, f. 321.
76. Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (note 31), 276; Hunter, Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape (note 6).
77. A.H. Siemens, Oriented raised fields in central Veracruz, American Antiquity 48 (1983) 85-102; W. Barrett, Jugerum and caballeria in New Spain, Agricultural History 53 (1979) 423-437.
78. Barrett, Jugerum and caballeria in New Spain (note 68), 426.
79. See among others Craib, Cartographic Mexico (note 4)
80. R.B. Craib, The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico's agrarian reform, Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 411-420
81. B.E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, Chicago, 1996
82. P. Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857, Austin, 2001; Aguilar-Robledo, Contested terrain (note 5).
83. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape (note 6).
84. W.A. Low, W.J. Müller and M.L. Dudzioski, Grazing intensity of cattle on a complex of rangeland communities in central Australia, The Australian Rangeland Journal 2 (1980) 76-82; A.W. Illius and A.G. O'Connor, On the relevance of nonequilibrium concepts to arid and semiarid grazing systems, Ecological Applications 9 (1999) 798-813.
85. G.R. Edwards, J.A. Newman, A.J. Parsons and J.R. Krebs, The use of spatial memory by grazing animals to locate food patches in spatially heterogeneous environments: an example with sheep, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 50 (1996) 147-160.
86. N.T. Hobbs, Large herbivores as sources of disturbance in ecosystems, in: K. Danell, P. Duncan, R. Bergström and J. Pastor (Eds), Large Herbivore Ecology, Ecosystem Dynamics and Conservation, Cambridge, 2006, 261-288.
87. Melville, A Plague of Sheep (note 14), 160; Hunter, Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape (note 6).
88. AGN Mercedes Vol. 26, ff. 161v.-162v.
89. A. Galton, Qualitative Spatial Change, Oxford, 2000, 156-157.
90. Craib, The archive in the field (note 7), 420.
91. Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La Plata, Argentina, Libro de Mercedes de Tierras, 1580-1635.
92. Tulane University, Special Collections, New Orleans, Louisiana, Louisiana Land Grants, 1753-1769; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Special Collections, Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, especially the Carlos Trudeau Papers, Pintado Papers, and Survey Collection.
93. The study of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism because of the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form part of the process through which territory comes into being. While many studies have therefore focused on the history of instrumental surveying and cartography in New Spain, roughly equivalent to present-day Mexico, between the seventeenth and twentieth century, the textual surveys of the sixteenth century that helped to bring the initial colonial territory into being have gone largely unstudied. Content analysis of textual land surveys included in sixteenth-century viceregal land grants for sheep and cattle ranches demonstrates variation in references to distance, direction, and borders that begins to reveal a process of negotiation among local actors and centralized state power that was contingent on environmental, economic, and demographic differences between highland and lowland landscapes. Keywords Mexico Colonial period Territory Land surveying Ranching Content analysis With the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form 'part of the process by which territory becomes,' the effort to understand the emergence of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism.1