{
  "id": "segunda-audiencia-de-nueva-espana",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The Second Audiencia of New Spain (1531-1535) and its junta on the treatment of the Indians",
  "summary": "The court sent from Spain to try the first Audiencia of Mexico and to govern until a viceroy came. Under its president, the bishop Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, twenty-five people were sentenced in 1532, the royal orders imposing death for enslaving Indians were published, and a junta cut personal service, banned carrying loads, ordered wages paid and had Indian towns elect their own alcaldes. The friar who calls the president a father to the Indians also records the towns objecting to him.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "new-spain",
    "mexico",
    "colonial-law",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "labour",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "encomienda"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "new-laws-of-1542"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juicio-de-residencia"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hernan-cortes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "antonio-valeriano"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-para-el-tratamiento-de-los-indios-1513"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Second Audiencia of New Spain?",
    "Who was Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal?",
    "Were the judges of the first Audiencia of Mexico punished?",
    "When did Indian towns in New Spain begin electing their own alcaldes?",
    "Was Indian forced labour restricted before the New Laws of 1542?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The replacement court was appointed by the empress, governing in the absence of Charles V, and its personnel were chosen deliberately. She named as president \"D. Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenleal, obispo de Santo Domingo, y encargó la eleccion de los oidores al obispo de Badajoz, presidente de la Chancillería de Valladolid, recomendándole escogiera personas de probidad y ciencia\". The bishop of Badajoz named the licenciados Juan de Salmerón, Alonso Maldonado and Francisco Ceinos, and last Vasco de Quiroga, later first bishop of Michoacán.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Its first instruction was judicial rather than administrative: that the new judges \"examinasen la verdad de los cargos que se hacian á los individuos de la primera audiencia, y hallándolos fundados, mandasen á estos á España con sus procesos\". Nuño de Guzmán did not wait for it, leaving on the expedition to Michoacán and Jalisco in the course of which he had the Cazonci put to death after stripping him of his treasure.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The trials produced convictions in numbers and money: \"en el año de 1532 se sentenciaron veinticinco y salieron condenados á pagar cuarenta mil pesos\". The figure is Alamán's, taken from his reading of the period's papers, and it is given here with that provenance attached rather than as an archival count.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The president had the standing royal orders on Indian slavery published in the colony, which is what made them operative: he had them proclaimed, \"por las cuales se impuso la pena de muerte á los que los hiciesen esclavos, ó cometiesen violencias en los pueblos pacíficos\". Publication, not enactment, is the act recorded - the penalty already existed in law and was being ignored.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "A standing junta was constituted to authorise orders remedying abuses, and its measures were about labour. Personal service was much reduced; using Indians to carry loads was prohibited; \"se les declaró tan libres como los españoles\"; they were not to be compelled to work in the workshops, and when they did so voluntarily their wages were to be paid; and encomenderos were required to swear to treat them well and in a Christian manner.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The same junta put elected magistrates into Indian towns, which is the origin of the indigenous cabildo as a standing institution: \"se dispuso que en sus ciudades y pueblos eligiesen anualmente alcaldes y regidores que administrasen la justicia, como se hacia en las poblaciones de españoles\". The parity with Spanish towns is stated in the text itself.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The junta's membership is named, and it mixes the church, the orders, the court and the conquerors: the bishop of Mexico Juan de Zumárraga, the guardian and the prior of San Francisco and Santo Domingo each with two religious, the marqués del Valle - Cortés himself - the four oidores, the alguacil mayor Proaño, Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia, and the citizens Orduña and Santa Clara. Encomenderos sat in the body that was cutting encomendero labour rights.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The public works of the same government are recorded in the same passage: water brought to the Tlatelolco quarter and public fountains formed in the others, and a new town founded between Mexico and Veracruz to secure communications - the city of Puebla, entrusted to the oidor Salmerón and to Fray Toribio de Benavente, Motolinía - explicitly so as not to settle Spaniards in Tlaxcala, \"por no causar molestia á los indios\". The propagation of useful plants was encouraged, and Franciscan beatas who had arrived with the marquesa del Valle were directed to teach girls to dress and spin hemp and flax.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "An independent sixteenth-century judgment on the president survives in Mendieta, who calls him \"verdadero padre y aficionado á los indios, gobernando esta Nueva España, y entendiendo con celo de su bien y provecho de ellos en la obra de repartir la doctrina y fundar monesterios de todas las órdenes que á la sazon habia\". The witness is a Franciscan and therefore an interested one, which is why the claim is stated with the affiliation attached.",
      "sources": [
        "mendieta-historia-eclesiastica-indiana-libro-iii"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The same passage carries the cost, and it is a cost imposed on the Indians the president was praised for favouring. Reassigning the doctrinas among the orders meant taking towns from the friars who had raised them, and the towns came to the president to object: he told them that the new priests were of the same condition and would teach the same doctrine, and to every such reason \"respondian que no estaban contentos sus corazones\". Asked why, they answered that the Franciscans went poor and barefoot as they did, ate what they ate, sat on the ground with them and spoke to them with humility. The reform went ahead over that objection.",
      "sources": [
        "mendieta-historia-eclesiastica-indiana-libro-iii"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What the period did not do belongs in the record with what it did. Encomienda and tribute continued; the declaration that the Indians were as free as the Spaniards was a rule about personal service inside a system of compulsory tribute, and the labour question returned to the crown a decade later in the New Laws of 1542. The anchor source is also a nineteenth-century historian and an apologist for the colonial administration, writing in Mexico in 1844 with a case to make about the quality of Spanish government, which is why every claim resting on him alone is held at or below 0.75.",
      "sources": [
        "alaman-disertaciones-1844-tomo-i"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English accounts of Indian labour law in New Spain jump from the Laws of Burgos to the New Laws of 1542, and the government that sat between them - the court that actually tried the first Audiencia and ran the colony for four years - is usually a sentence about Nuño de Guzmán being recalled. This object gives that interval its contents from an 1844 Mexico printing opened page by page: the instruction to try the previous judges and ship them home with their processes, twenty-five sentences in 1532 and forty thousand pesos in fines, the publication of the death penalty for enslaving Indians, and a junta whose measures are listed one by one - carriers, wages, the oath required of encomenderos, and the annual election of alcaldes and regidores in Indian towns on the same footing as Spanish ones. It then puts a sixteenth-century Franciscan beside the nineteenth-century historian, and uses him for the counterpoint rather than the compliment: the towns that came to the president to object when their friars were changed, and the answer that their hearts were not content. The limits are stated in their own claim - encomienda untouched, and an anchor source with a case to make.",
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-12",
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  "jsonld": {
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    "name": "The Second Audiencia of New Spain (1531-1535) and its junta on the treatment of the Indians",
    "description": "The court sent from Spain to try the first Audiencia of Mexico and to govern until a viceroy came. Under its president, the bishop Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, twenty-five people were sentenced in 1532, the royal orders imposing death for enslaving Indians were published, and a junta cut personal service, banned carrying loads, ordered wages paid and had Indian towns elect their own alcaldes. The friar who calls the president a father to the Indians also records the towns objecting to him.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/segunda-audiencia-de-nueva-espana",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-12",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Megicana desde la época de la conquista que los españoles hicieron a fines del siglo XV y principios del XVI de las islas y continente americano hasta la independencia, tomo I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=LdtkAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA261"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia eclesiástica indiana, obra escrita á fines del siglo XVI — libro III, the pages on the president Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal and the reassignment of the doctrinas among the orders",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=e0Aa0Glxa6UC&pg=PA252"
      }
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The Second Audiencia of New Spain (1531-1535) and its junta on the treatment of the Indians"
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}