{
  "id": "abad-y-queipo-coleccion-de-escritos-1813",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Abad y Queipo, Coleccion de los escritos mas importantes (Mexico, 1813)",
  "summary": "A volume printed in Mexico City in the middle of a civil war, collecting what a bishop-elect of Michoacan had written to the government since 1799. It asks the king to abolish tribute on Indians and castes, to strike the legal infamy of the castes, and to divide crown and community land among them - and argues that the protective privileges of the Indians had become the instrument of their harm. Its title page says it is published against the insurgents.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "law",
    "new-spain",
    "castes",
    "reform",
    "printing",
    "enlightenment",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cajas-de-comunidad-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-ordenanza-de-intendentes-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "decretos-de-cadiz-para-america-1810-1811"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "solorzano-politica-indiana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "consolidacion-de-vales-reales-en-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What did Abad y Queipo write about the castes of New Spain?",
    "Did anyone inside the colonial church ask for the abolition of Indian tribute?",
    "What was the legal infamy of the castes in New Spain?",
    "Were the legal privileges of the Indians thought to protect them?",
    "What did reformers in New Spain propose before independence?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The volume used here has the title page \"COLECCION DE LOS ESCRITOS MAS IMPORTANTES QUE EN DIFERENTES EPOCAS DIRIGIO AL GOBIERNO D. MANUEL ABAD QUEIPO, OBISPO ELECTO DE MICHOACAN\", with the imprint \"MEXICO: En la oficina de D. Mariano Ontiveros, ano de 1813\" and the line \"CON SUPERIOR PERMISO\".",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The book announces its own polemical purpose on that same title page, which is the first thing to know about it. The writings were composed, it says, \"movido de un zelo ardiente por el bien general de la Nueva Espana y felicidad de sus habitantes, especialmente de los indios y las castas\", and they are given to the light \"en contraposicion de las calumnias atroces que han publicado los cabecillas insurgentes, a fin de hacerle odioso con el pueblo, y destruir por este medio la fuerza de los escritos con que los ha combatido desde el principio de la insurreccion\". A reform brief of 1799 is being reprinted in 1813 as a war document by a man who had been fighting the insurgency in print.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The demographic frame is stated in round numbers. New Spain, the text says, was composed with little difference of four and a half million inhabitants, divisible into three classes - Spaniards, Indians and castes. \"Los espanoles compondran un decimo del total de la poblacion, y ellos solos tienen casi toda la propiedad y riquezas del reyno.\" The other two classes, making the nine tenths, divide into two thirds of castes and one third of pure Indians.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The most unusual argument in the book is that the protective law had turned into the injury. Indians, it says, are disabled by law from making a subsisting contract or binding themselves for more than five pesos, \"y en una palabra de tratar y contratar\", so that it is impossible they should advance in instruction, better their fortune, or take a step to rise out of their misery. Solorzano, Fraso \"y los demas autores regnicoletas admiran la causa oculta que convierte en dano de los individuos todos los privilegios librados a su favor\" - and the writer's answer is that the cause of the harm lies in the privileges themselves: they are \"una arma ofensiva con que un vecino de otra clase hiere a su contrario por ministerio de los indios, sin que jamas sirva para la defensa de ellos\".",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "On the castes the language is harder and the diagnosis is legal. \"Las castas se hallan infamadas por derecho como descendientes de negros esclavos. Son tributarios, y como los recuentos se executan con tanta exactitud, el tributo viene a ser para ellos una marca indeleble de esclavitud que no pueden borrar con el tiempo, ni la mezcla de las razas en las generaciones sucesivas.\" Many, the text says, would by colour, features and conduct rise into the class of Spaniards were it not for this impediment, by which they remain sunk in the same class: infamed by law, poor, dependent, without convenient education.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The prose then does something the reader of an eighteenth-century Spanish bishop may not expect, and it should be quoted rather than paraphrased, because it is both an indictment of the caste order and an example of the contempt inside it: of the castes so described, the text says \"Delinque, pues, con exceso. Pero es maravilla que no delinca mucho mas, y que haya en esta clase las buenas costumbres que se reconocen en muchos de sus individuos.\" The crime is attributed to the legal condition, not to the people; the sentence still assumes their excess.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The remedies are listed in order and they are radical for 1799. \"Lo primero, la abolicion general de tributos en las dos clases de indios y castas. Lo segundo, la abolicion de infamia de derecho que afecta las referidas castas; que se declararan honestas y honradas, capaces de obtener los empleos civiles que no requieran nobleza, si los mereciesen por sus buenas costumbres. Lo tercero, division gratuita de todas las tierras realengas entre los indios y las castas. Lo quarto, division gratuita de las tierras de comunidades de indios entre los de cada pueblo.\" Then an agrarian law on the model of Asturias and Galicia, letting the people open the uncultivated land of great proprietors on leases of twenty or thirty years free of alcabala, at a just valuation in case of disagreement and on condition of enclosing it, with the intendants judging in the first instance and appeal to the Audiencia; free permission for all classes to settle in Indian pueblos and build there paying for the ground; and adequate salaries for all territorial judges.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Two of those seven proposals cut the other way, and the object states it because the document does not. Dividing the community lands among the members of each pueblo, and admitting settlers of all classes into the Indian pueblos, would dissolve the corporate landholding and the residential separation that the republica de indios rested on. They are the same two measures that nineteenth-century liberal legislation in Mexico carried out after independence. Whether the outcome would have been protection or dispossession is not settled by this text, which argues only the first half; the claim here is that the proposals were double-edged, not that their author foresaw or intended the second edge.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The book also praises the colonial church as the Indians' advocate, which is an interested claim from a bishop-elect and is recorded as such. The first bishops and doctrinal curas, it says, \"eran sus defensores contra las opresiones de los encomenderos, hacendados y alcaldes mayores, asi en las Reales Audiencias como en el Supremo Consejo de Indias, y ellos motivaron muchas de las reales cedulas que los favorecen\"; and of Vasco de Quiroga, first bishop of Michoacan, that to him is owed the foundation of most of the Indian pueblos of that bishopric and of all its hospitals, that he set in each pueblo its particular craft with the pueblos depending on one another so as to establish communication and commerce among them, and that \"su memoria se conserva todavia en el corazon de los indios despues de cerca de tres siglos\".",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What this source is and is not: a wartime edition of a churchman's petitions, printed with superior permission in 1813 to defend its author's reputation against the insurgent leaders he had excommunicated in print. It is good evidence of what he wrote and asked for, and poor evidence of anything it asserts about the world - the population figures, the tenth of the population holding almost all property, the church's record as defender - none of which is independently verified here. Nothing in the pages read shows what the government replied, or whether any of the seven proposals was acted on before the Cortes of Cadiz took up tribute and caste disabilities a decade later.",
      "sources": [
        "abad-queipo-coleccion-escritos-1813"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts reach Abad y Queipo, when they reach him at all, as a paradox in a sentence: the bishop who denounced the misery of the castes and then excommunicated Hidalgo. What he actually wrote is quoted at second or third hand, usually one line about the tenth of the population owning almost everything. This object works from the 1813 Mexico printing opened page by page and puts the four things that make him worth reading in the same frame: the seven remedies as he numbered them, including the general abolition of tribute and the striking of the castes' legal infamy; the argument, unusual in any century, that the Indians' protective privileges had become a weapon used through them rather than for them, with Solorzano named as the authority who had noticed the effect and missed the cause; the sentence on tribute as \"una marca indeleble de esclavitud\"; and, given equal weight, the title page saying the collection is published against the atrocious calumnies of the insurgent chiefs, the contempt sitting inside the same paragraph as the indictment, and the two proposals - dividing community lands, opening the Indian pueblos to settlers of all classes - that would later be carried out with results this document never contemplates.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-14",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/abad-y-queipo-coleccion-de-escritos-1813",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Abad y Queipo, Coleccion de los escritos mas importantes (Mexico, 1813)",
    "description": "A volume printed in Mexico City in the middle of a civil war, collecting what a bishop-elect of Michoacan had written to the government since 1799. It asks the king to abolish tribute on Indians and castes, to strike the legal infamy of the castes, and to divide crown and community land among them - and argues that the protective privileges of the Indians had become the instrument of their harm. Its title page says it is published against the insurgents.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/abad-y-queipo-coleccion-de-escritos-1813",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-14",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Coleccion de los escritos mas importantes que en diferentes epocas dirigio al gobierno D. Manuel Abad Queipo, obispo electo de Michoacan",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=Q9OMpxrfO0YC"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Abad y Queipo, Coleccion de los escritos mas importantes (Mexico, 1813)"
  }
}