The república de indios: elected Indian magistrates and the law of the cacicazgos

Spanish law gave every Indian town in the Americas its own indigenous alcalde, and towns above eighty households two alcaldes and two regidores, all of them Indians of that town, each year's officers electing the next. The same code ordered that pre-conquest lords keep their lordships, that towns dispossessed of the right to elect their caciques be restored to it, and that no Spaniard, black, mestizo or mulatto live in an Indian town. Every one of those rules also cost the Indians something.