The Aztecs at Independence

Scholars have yet to understand well the role of indigenous people in Mexican independence. In her question-provoking new study of several Metepec altepetl in the Toluca Valley, Miriam Melton-Villanueva starts with Eric Van Young’s view that the Nahua kept themselves in a traditional holding pattern, maintaining a local identity, reproducing their culture as though there were no crisis. Van Young found 50–60 percent of independence insurgents were indigenous, but many central Mexican indigenous communities remained royalist.1 Which of the Toluca Valley communities made the choice to join or not join the Mexican insurgency and why? Regardless of the title, The Aztecs at Independence, Melton-Villanueva has other concerns in mind. She works “to glimpse an understanding of the world as lived by people who left us their ideas, instead of comparing them to outside concepts (especially European hierarchies so commonly assumed)” (15). Her remarkable discovery in a parish archive of more than 150 wills dating from 1799 to 1832 (the majority in Nahuatl), which she terms the “Independence archive,” has given her a rich source base to explore this local world. Given the sources, the decision to pursue a deep local study makes sense methodologically; however, the wider colonial and independence context is thus closed off. Nahua escribanos (notaries) wrote these wills for a local audience on paper without royal seal, and the sources never made it into the national archives. What is more, the wills are a boon to the advancement of the New Philology. Gauging the value of these documents with the late James Lockhart’s assertion that Nahuatl writing went into swift decline in the 1780s, Melton-Villanueva states that these Nahuatl-language documents “were not supposed to exist” (18).With such a large data set from the same time and place, Melton-Villanueva has explained exactly how these indigenous communities functioned with more detail and nuance than is usually possible with scattered documents. From her painstaking philological analysis and her tracking of individual notaries, a society in the truest sense, with all its parts functioning in a system, comes into view. The author’s most significant finding is that the fiscales, indigenous church officials, continuously reinvigorated a stable, intergenerational local institution of self-government. Their lay-church organization, which Melton-Villanueva terms the fiscalía, ran parallel to the indigenous town council, or cabildo. Positions in the cabildo and the fiscalía were of equal social status, and adult males cycled through both, usually the cabildo first, serving in each position once only. In one jurisdiction, the fiscalía was apparently more important than the town council, with a staggering 89 percent of adult males participating in the fiscalía of a parish that had only a visiting secular priest. This pattern places religion at the heart of indigenous autonomy. All the while, we see the constant presence of the notaries who preserved linguistic conventions through formulaic, archaic language in wills, passing these on to their sons and sharing them with notaries in other altepetl. Paradoxically, Melton-Villanueva argues, the lack of linguistic change is evidence of a stable institution of notaries who actively stuck to conventions to preserve their culture. One wonders, however, how significant the culture of antiquated formulas and phrasings was. Does the archaic English of modern-day wills say anything significant outside of the narrow professional culture of lawyers and notaries?In a beautifully written final chapter, the author explains how the act of making, writing, and executing a will was a community ritual linking the generations through the mutual obligation to care for household land. Each parcel was associated with a Catholic saint, which provided a way to differentiate household land within the community. Catholic devotional names, such as Nuestra Señora de Dolores, were almost never repeated. And although the wills were formulaic, the ritual of the will was all about activity, revitalization, and remembrance. In this and earlier chapters, Melton-Villanueva communicates with historical empathy, compassion, and imagination how close-knit these communities were. She argues convincingly that the “cellular” organization of the altepetl was in a sense a radical form of direct, participatory democracy. Power was structured horizontally not hierarchically. She leaves us with the lasting impression that this is not just a colonial dinosaur that lasted into independence but also, in fact, a lesson for today’s society. While the book is very thought provoking on a global humanistic level, one is left wondering what this independent, self-governing, and egalitarian altepetl tells us about how indigenous people viewed Mexican independence. Perhaps some indigenous communities already had independence

Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · History · Latin American history and culture

• The Other Rebellion

  Kenneth Maxwell, Eric Van Young•Foreign Affairs•2002

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