The American decrees of the Cortes of Cádiz, 1810-1811
In its first year the besieged parliament at Cádiz declared the dominions of both hemispheres one nation whose overseas natives held rights equal to peninsulars', forbade anyone in ecclesiastical, civil or military authority to afflict an Indian in person or property, and extended exemption from tribute to the indios and castas of all America. The same decrees excluded the castas from the land of the pueblos de indios and drew Indian community funds into a war loan.
Why this wins its question: The Cortes of Cádiz reach English-language accounts as the constitution of 1812 and a debate about American representation; the decrees that actually changed the legal position of indigenous and mixed-descent Americans are cited at second hand when they are cited at all, usually as "the Cortes abolished Indian tribute in 1811". This object quotes the official collection printed by order of the Cortes: the one-nation-both-hemispheres formula of 15 October 1810 with the amnesty condition attached to it, the 5 January 1811 prohibition that names its own subject as innumerable vexations and forbids affliction of the Indian by anyone in ecclesiastical, civil or military authority on any pretext however rational, the order to read that decree from every American pulpit on three consecutive days and hand it to the cabildos de indios, and the 13 March 1811 decree extending exemption from tribute to indios and castas across America. It puts the price in the same frame rather than in a footnote, because the document does: the article that excludes the castas from the land of the pueblos de indios is the next line of the same decree, the ban on repartimientos is a re-enactment of a ban that had already failed, and the decree of the previous day channels the cajas de comunidad de indios into a twenty-million-peso war loan.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The first American measure came three weeks after the Cortes opened. Decreto V of 15 October 1810 is headed "Igualdad de derechos entre los españoles europeos y ultramarinos" and confirms and sanctions "el inconcuso concepto de que los dominios españoles en ambos hemisferios forman una sola y misma monarquía, una misma y sola nacion, y una sola familia, y que por lo mismo los naturales que sean originarios de dichos dominios europeos ó ultramarinos son iguales en derechos á los de esta Península". The declaration is of equality among the natives of the dominions; it is not a statement about the castas, whose position the later decrees settle differently.
The same decree pairs the declaration with an amnesty, and the condition attached to it shows what the Cortes were buying. Its heading continues "olvido de lo ocurrido en las provincias de América que reconozcan la autoridad de las Cortes" - an oblivion of what has happened in those American provinces that recognise the authority of the Cortes. Equality was proclaimed in the same instrument that offered terms to a continent already in insurrection.
Decreto XX of 5 January 1811 is headed "Se prohiben las vexaciones hechas hasta aquí á los indios primitivos" and opens by stating the abuse rather than the remedy: the sovereign attention of the Cortes has been called very particularly to "los escandalosos abusos que se observan, é innumerables vexaciones que se executan con los indios primitivos naturales de la América y Asia". The legislator's own account of the state of affairs in 1811 is that the vexations were innumerable.
Its operative clause reaches every rank of authority and every kind of excuse. Viceroys, presidents of audiencias, governors, intendants and the other magistrates are ordered to apply themselves with particular care to cutting out such abuses at the root, "prohibiendo con todo rigor que, baxo de ningun pretexto, por racional que parezca, persona alguna constituida en autoridad eclesiástica, civil ó militar, ni otra alguna, de qualquier clase ó condicion que sea, aflija al indio en su persona, ni le ocasione perjuicio el mas leve en su propiedad", and the Cortes declare that any infraction of this solemn declaration of the national will merits their displeasure and a most severe punishment. The same decree orders the protectores de indios to discharge their charge of defending the Indians' personal liberty, privileges and exemptions.
The decree also specifies how it was to reach the people it protected, which is rarer than the protection. The Cortes order it circulated to all the parish priests at every point of America and Asia, so that after being read on three consecutive days at parish mass they pass it to each of the cabildos de indios, and the Indians thereby learn of the paternal solicitude with which the whole nation represented in the Cortes occupies itself in the happiness of each of them. A statute published in Spanish from a pulpit to communities governed in their own languages is a real publication mechanism and a limited one, and the decree provides for no translation.
Decreto XLII of 13 March 1811 makes the fiscal change general. Having examined the decree of the previous Council of Regency of 26 May 1810 and the bando by which the viceroy of New Spain, Francisco Xavier Venegas, published it in Mexico on 5 October of the same year, the Cortes approve the exemption from tribute granted to the Indians in that decree and enact "que la expresada gracia de la exêncion de tributo sea extensiva á los indios y á las castas de las demas provincias de América". The head tax that had defined the fiscal status of indigenous people since the sixteenth century is abolished by statute for the whole of Spanish America.
The cost is written into the same decree, in the article immediately after. Article II provides "que la gracia del repartimiento de tierras de los pueblos de los indios no se extienda á las castas": the mulattoes, blacks and others whose loyalty the viceroy's bando had rewarded with exemption from tribute are excluded from the land. The Cádiz settlement relieved the castas of a tax in one clause and confirmed their exclusion from the land base in the next, and both clauses are signed on the same day by the same deputies.
Article III of the same decree attacks the forced-sale system that had survived every previous prohibition, ordering that the royal orders and dispositions forbidding the justices to trade in the district of their respective jurisdictions "baxo el especioso título de repartimientos" be complied with in the greatest rigour. That the Cortes had to re-enact the ban in 1811, a quarter-century after the intendancy ordinance of 1786 carried its own penalty for the same abuse, is evidence of how little the earlier prohibitions achieved.
The economic decree of the day before shows the war pulling the other way. Decreto XLI of 12 March 1811, on promoting American agriculture and industry by reducing the burdens that impede it, suppresses the duty on the shops called pulperías and allows the manufacture and sale of aguardiente mezcal freely in the viceroyalty of Mexico; but in the same articles it keeps the recent increase of two reales on every pound of tobacco and of two per cent over the six charged as alcabala, both assigned to the capital and interest of the twenty-million-peso loan opened in New Spain, and provides that to fill that loan faster the propios and cajas de comunidad de indios may place in it the sums the communities, towns and villages voluntarily give. Relief of imposts and the mobilisation of Indian community funds for the war are articles of one decree.
What this source establishes is what was enacted at Cádiz, not what was obeyed in America. The volume is the official collection printed by order of the Cortes at the Imprenta Nacional in 1813, covering 24 September 1810 to 24 September 1811; by then much of the mainland was at war and the decrees reached royalist administrations only. Whether tribute collection actually stopped, whether the vexations decree was read from the pulpits, and where the repartimiento continued are questions for viceregal and audiencia records this corpus has not opened, and no claim here asserts an outcome.