The 600-varas land base of the pueblos de indios (New Spain, 1567-1695)
Every indigenous town in New Spain was entitled by law to a square of land measured outward for each cardinal point, and the size of that square and the point it was measured from were fought over for 130 years. A viceregal ordinance of 1567 set 500 varas; a royal cedula of 1687 raised it to 600 and moved the origin to the last house; a cedula of 1695, obtained by the Spanish farmers, moved the origin back to the church, which swallowed the town itself into the grant.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the fundo legal usually give one number - 600 varas - and a date, and stop. The number is the least interesting thing about it. This object gives the sequence the documents actually record: 500 varas by viceregal ordinance in 1567; 600 by royal cedula of 4 June 1687, measured from the last house, with the cedula reciting in its own words that Spaniards were entering Indian land "sometimes violently and other times by frauds"; the farmers' counter-petition, including their complaint that Indians built huts on farmland to manufacture a town entitled to its own measure; and the cedula of 12 July 1695 that kept the six hundred and moved the origin back to the church, absorbing the built-up area into the grant. It carries the compensation clause of 1695, the eleven-hundred-vara buffer to livestock estancias, the 1550 and 1618 laws on stock damage, and the surveyor's instruction for towns whose houses are too scattered to measure - and it says plainly that the entitlement is evidence of intent, not of possession.
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 rule was viceregal before it was royal. Galvan prints the royal cedula of 4 June 1687, which recites that the marques de Falces, conde de Santi-Estevan, as viceroy of New Spain, made an ordinance on 26 May 1567 commanding that the pueblos de indios which needed land to live and sow be given five hundred varas and more if they needed it, and that from then on no grant of any estancia or land be made to anyone unless it could be sited a thousand varas of cloth-measure away from the settlement and houses of the Indians.
The 1687 cedula raised the figure and gave its reason in the same sentence, and the reason is an admission. It states that against style, order and practice the owners of estancias and lands go entering into those of the Indians, taking them and seizing them, sometimes violently and other times by frauds, for which reason the wretched Indians leave their houses and town, which is what the Spaniards desire; and it adds that the Crown is moved to look again to the Indians who suffer so many injustices and vexations, being those who most pay tribute and most benefit the royal crown and all its vassals.
What the 1687 cedula ordered is precise and quantitative. The 500 varas around the settlement were no longer to be measured from the church but from the last house of the place, east and west and north and south; a further hundred varas were added to complete six hundred; the grant was to be made not only to the head town but to every other town that asked and needed it, whether already settled or founded thereafter; and where a place was of more than ordinary population and six hundred did not seem enough to all, the viceroy and the audiencia of Mexico were charged to distribute much more, without limitation. For livestock estancias the thousand varas of 1567 became eleven hundred, likewise counted from the last house and not from the church.
Eight years later the rule was cut back, and the counterpoint is printed immediately after the grant. The Spanish farmers petitioned that the measures be understood from the centre of the church and not from the last house, arguing that Indian houses stood thirty or forty varas apart and some almost a quarter of a league, that the extra hundred varas of 1687 was in detriment of the labradores, that the rule should apply only to head towns where the Blessed Sacrament and the governors were, and that Indians should be forbidden to build huts or chapels on farm land because a false information then turned the spot into a town entitled to its own measure.
The Crown conceded the essential point. The royal cedula dated at Madrid on 12 July 1695, countersigned by Bernardino Antonio de Pardinas Villar de Francos, orders that the cedula of 4 June 1687 be kept and executed, but that the six hundred varas between the lands and fields of the Indians and those of the farmers be counted from the centre of the towns, that is from their church and not from the last house, and that the eleven hundred varas to the estancias be counted in the same way. Because the built-up area was thereby absorbed into the grant, the concession of 1687 - the reason the figure had been raised at all - was substantially undone while the number six hundred survived.
The 1695 cedula does not end there, and what follows is why the exchange is worth reading whole. It orders that if either side is injured by the change, Indians or farmers alike are to be compensated by lengthening their distances at whatever site is found least prejudicial; that where there is no land of Indian repartimiento or of farmers' composicion from which to compensate, it be taken from the lands belonging to the Crown; and that the viceroy proceed with such equality that neither Indians nor farmers be given cause of complaint or lawsuits arise between them.
The measuring instruction that a surveyor actually followed survives in the same manual, and it is an instruction for a place that does not fit the rule. Before the cords are thrown the judge must take the auto de obedecimiento, inspect the site, name qualified measurers and summon the neighbouring pueblos with an interpreter; then measure the six hundred varas for each cardinal point from the last house, or from the churchyard, according to the law in force at the town's original foundation. If the place is not laid out in regular form and the houses stand apart with gaps of land, the measurer is to square the place from the churchyard by twenty or thirty varas and measure the six hundred from there, compensating on one side whatever cannot be had on another so that the six hundred are always made up.
The town grant sat inside a wider set of protective rules that the same chapter transcribes. A cedula of 1 December 1573 required that the sites of new towns and reducciones have convenience of waters, lands, woods, entrances and exits, farmland and a common of one league where the Indians could keep their animals without mixing with those of Spaniards; ley 12, tit. XII, lib. 4, given at Valladolid on 12 March 1550, forbade granting livestock estancias where they could damage Indian maize fields and required owners to post enough herdsmen and to pay for damage done; and ley 20, tit. III, lib. 6, of 10 October 1618 barred large-stock estancias within a league and a half of old reducciones and small stock within half a league, double for new ones, on pain of losing the estancia and half the animals, and allowed the Indians to kill without penalty any livestock that entered their land.
The purpose of the whole apparatus is stated by the law it starts from, and it is not a modern purpose. The chapter opens with the disposition of Carlos V given at Cigales on 21 March 1551, reproduced as ley 1, tit. III, lib. 6 of the Recopilacion, which says the means were interposed so that the Indians be instructed in the Catholic faith and, forgetting the errors of their ancient rites and ceremonies, live in concert and policia; the prelates of New Spain assembled in 1546 resolved that the Indians be reduced to towns and not live divided through the sierras. The land base was the material side of congregation: a guaranteed minimum for a settlement pattern the Crown had itself decided to impose.
What this object rests on and what it does not. Every text quoted here is read in an 1849 Mexican manual that reprints the cedulas rather than in the original sheets or in a registered archive copy, which is why the tier is secondary; Galvan states that he does not copy the 1567 ordinance literally because the 1687 cedula reproduces it more clearly, so the 1567 wording here is the 1687 recital of it, not the ordinance itself. Nothing here measures compliance: how many towns received their measure, how many lost it and what the courts did about it are questions this document cannot answer, and the 1695 reversal is evidence that a printed entitlement and a held field were different things.