The alcabala that stopped at the frontier: how Nueva Vizcaya argued its way out of the sales tax, and why its Indians paid no tribute
The sales tax of the Indies ran from two per cent in 1575 to six by 1640. It never reached Nueva Vizcaya. A governor's report of 1672, recited in a royal cedula of 1678, told the crown that more than eight hundred thousand pesos had been traded there in forty-two years without alcabala, that the province held over seventy thousand Indians paying no tribute, and that the settlers bore the cost of discovery and defence themselves. The exemption held as custom into the 1730s.
Why this wins its question: The alcabala is normally described in general terms as the sales tax of the Indies, at six per cent from the mid-seventeenth century, and the tribute is described as the universal head-tax on Indians. Both statements are wrong at the northern edge of New Spain, and the documents that show how they became wrong are quoted nowhere in reach. This object supplies them from four pages of a 1742 chronicle: the crown's own recital, in a cedula of 1678, of a governor's tally of eight hundred thousand pesos traded in forty-two years with no alcabala and seventy thousand Indians paying no tribute; a second governor's cost-of-defence and oversized-measuring-rod argument of 1673 that the crown accepted; the resulting three simultaneous rates in one empire; and the statement, from a lawyer of the audiencia, that on the frontier the crown ordered by repeated cedulas that Indians be given food and clothing rather than taxed. It also prints, on the same page, that same author's reason for the policy, which is that the frontier should stop being one.
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 rate history is stated in one sentence and it is the frame for everything else. Page 312 records that the alcabalas were established in America from the year 1575, being first a two per cent, afterwards a four, and lastly having reached six. Page 313 gives the occasion of the last step: to fund the armada de Barlovento and for its last increase, the viceroy of New Spain was ordered to procure, with mildness, to raise that alcabala as far as a six per cent. The tax was therefore not a fixed imperial levy but a rate raised in stages against named naval expenditure, and the pages that follow are about the places where the raise did not arrive.
Guadalajara paid before it was asked, and the crown put the fact on record. Page 313 quotes the clauses of a cedula the author dates 4 August 1640, in which the king thanks the city: that although in the orders sent for the disposition of the armada de Barlovento this kingdom seemed not to have been comprehended, the loyalty of this city could do more than the opinion of not being comprehended, and it submitted to the two per cent more in the alcabala over the four that were paid before, and they gladly submitted to its payment for this city and the whole kingdom. Mota Padilla adds that four years after that cedula a general one issued to the other provinces, and that because Guadalajara had already submitted it had nothing to do with her. The printed dates of the two documents do not agree with the four-year interval he states, and this entry reports them as printed rather than repairing either.
Nueva Vizcaya was left out, and page 313 gives the reason in the crown's own recital rather than the author's. It records that the territory of Nueva Vizcaya, though subaltern to the audiencia of Guadalajara, was a distinct government; that the alcabalas were introduced in Galicia as in pacified country, leaving those of Vizcaya exempt from them; and that, wishing to report only what is certain, the author takes the text of a royal cedula dated 4 March 1678 in which the king states he had been informed by the governor of that kingdom, Francisco Gomez, in a letter of 22 November 1672, of the following: that the kingdom of Vizcaya began at Durango and ended at San Jose del Parral; that there were several mining camps, San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco del Oro, San Bartolome; that there were many haciendas; that more than eight hundred thousand pesos were traded without alcabala being paid in more than forty-two years of its settlement, which was not by conquest; that to the south lay the camps of Topia and San Andres Guanacevi and the mines of Rosario; that along the same line of Sinaloa and Sonora, for sixteen years past, the camps of San Juan, San Francisco, San Ildefonso de Ostimuri and Santa Ana were settled without paying alcabala; and that the province had more than seventy thousand Indians who paid no tribute and had no superior other than the fathers of the Society of Jesus.
A second report argued the case in cost terms and won it. Page 314 records that the king ordered the audiencia to inform him of the reasons of convenience or inconvenience that might be weighed for introducing the payment of alcabalas and tributes, and that the author could not find that report but found another made by governor Antonio de Oca y Sarmiento in a letter of 22 January 1673. Its argument was that no alcabala was paid in Vizcaya because ever since Durango was settled its settlers had gone on discovering mines at the cost of their fortunes and even of their lives, resisting the invasions of unsubdued Indians; that whenever the governor made a campaign he took one man at the cost of each merchant; that from Parral to Sinaloa was two hundred leagues and thence to Sonora and the Pimas as far as the sea, where it bordered California, more than a hundred; that in those distances many mines had been discovered and were worked at all risk, from which more than a hundred thousand marks of silver were tithed at the Durango treasury with certification; and that the measuring rod used in Vizcaya was larger than that of the whole kingdom, whose excess redounded in public benefit and was worth more than the alcabala could amount to, so that no innovation should be made. The author's comment is that the report, as being so rational, appears to have deserved acceptance.
The exemption then survived as custom for roughly six decades, and the author gives the figures for what replaced it. Page 314 records that the kingdom was left with the custom of not paying alcabala until a few years before he wrote, when two per cent came to be paid; that tributes were not paid even in his own day; that the alcabala was so little that it did not reach ten thousand pesos in Nueva Vizcaya, and that only for a few years past, because only two per cent was charged there; that those entering Guadalajara with goods from Sonora and Sinaloa, who were very few, paid little more; and that the six per cent was therefore paid only in the kingdom of Galicia and in the provinces of Rosario. A single empire is here running three sales-tax rates at once across contiguous territory, and the boundary between them is the line of settled war.
The tribute exemption was wider than Nueva Vizcaya and was not a lapse but a policy, and the fiscal direction ran the other way. Page 319 records that the royal tributes paid by Indians were not collected in many pueblos of Nueva Galicia, such as those of the province of Nayarit, still understood to be in conversion and administered by missionary fathers of the Society of Jesus; that such pueblos, having been maintained with arms in hand to contain them, enjoyed and still enjoyed the privilege of frontiersmen and paid no tribute; that neither did the Indians of the provinces of Sonora, Sinaloa, Vizcaya, the kingdom of Leon, Coahuila, Texas and New Mexico pay it; and that because many unsubdued rancherias remained among them and the missionaries sought to draw them with gentleness, it was held convenient not only not to impose tributes on them but rather to contribute to them, sustenance and clothing being many times given, so that they should be domesticated, his Majesty having so charged in repeated royal cedulas. The same page adds that the missionaries did not use up the alms assigned for their maintenance but worked the land with the few reduced Indians they had, both to teach them and to have provisions with which to attract the others.
The counterpoint belongs in the object because the same page carries it. Page 319 gives the author's own explanation of why Mexico was richer in the tribute branch than Vizcaya and Galicia: that it came of being more populated by Spaniards, which is the means by which the Indians of New Spain are subject and do not have the hostilities that those of Vizcaya and Galicia have, and that those would without doubt attain the same tranquillity if the land were more peopled. The exemption is thus described by its own reporter as a stage in a programme of settlement, not as a permanent immunity, and the tranquillity it aims at is the subjection of the exempt. The same author elsewhere in this book argues that the northern Indians should have been reduced with a military hand. Read against claim six, that is the honest shape of the thing: a real and repeatedly ordered fiscal forbearance towards frontier peoples, held by an administration that regarded it as provisional and wanted the frontier to end.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 312, 313, 314 and 319 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. No original of the cedulas of 1640 and 1678, of the letters of 1672 and 1673, or of any treasury account was consulted for this entry, and the Archivo General de Indias is not reachable from where it was written, so every date, figure and quotation is reported as a chronicler set it down decades later and a nineteenth-century society printed it. The printed dates of chapter LXI are internally inconsistent, as claim two says. Nothing here establishes when the two per cent was actually introduced in Nueva Vizcaya, whether the seventy thousand figure of 1672 was a count or an estimate, whether the tribute exemption was ever revoked, or what the exempt provinces contributed instead through the mining duties the same author describes.