The legal measures of land and water of New Spain
Spanish America measured water as an aperture, not a volume: a buey was a hole one vara square, subdivided into surcos, naranjas, reales and pajas, so that a grant was a fixed share of a moving stream. The same formulary fixes the caballeria at 1,104 by 552 varas and prints the cedulas on the 600 varas owed to every Indian pueblo - together with the landowners' brief against them. Its fifth edition appeared in 1868, still in force.
Why this wins its question: Two things are usually asserted about Spanish American land and water law and almost never shown: that colonial water rights were shares of a flow rather than volumes, and that Indian pueblos held a protected fundo legal. This object shows both from the working handbook itself, opened page by page, with the numbers that make them checkable - the buey of one square vara, the surco of 48 square dedos, the naranja, the real, the paja of one ninth of a square dedo, the caballeria of 1,104 by 552 varas - and with the cedula texts on the 500, 600 and 1,100 varas. It then prints what the literature omits from both sides: the landowners' brief against the extra hundred varas, the crown conceding that the count start at the church, the order that any shortfall be made good out of crown land, and the fact that all of it was still being sold as current law in a fifth edition of 1868. It also states its own limit, that the colonial texts are read through an 1868 compiler with a declared clientele of hacienda owners.
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 working handbook of this system was still being reprinted half a century after independence. Its title page reads "Ordenanzas de tierras y aguas, o sea formulario geometrico-judicial para la designacion, establecimiento, mensura, amojonamiento y deslinde de las poblaciones y todas suertes de tierras, sitios, caballerias y criaderos de ganados mayores y menores, y mercedes de agua", compiled from "las muchas y dispersas resoluciones dictadas sobre la materia, y vigentes hasta el dia en la Republica Mexicana", published by Mariano Galvan Rivera; the copy read here is the fifth edition, corrected and enlarged, printed at Paris by the Libreria de Rosa y Bouret in 1868.
Land measure rested on the vara, divided into 48 dedos or 36 pulgadas, and on the cordel of 50 varas used in the field. A caballeria de tierra is defined as a right-angled parallelogram whose two longer sides measure 1,104 varas and whose shorter sides measure 552, that is 22 cordeles and 4 varas by 11 cordeles and 2 varas, giving an area of 609,408 square varas; the width is by definition half the length.
Water was measured in a way that repays attention, because it is not a volume. Chapter XXIII sets out the names, figures and dimensions of the "aberturas, datas o tomas" that law and constant practice had established for letting out water: a grant is an opening of fixed shape cut in the side of a channel, so that what is conveyed is a share of a running stream rather than a quantity in a tank. A buey de agua is a square opening of one vara a side - one square vara, or 2,304 square dedos, since the vara has 48 dedos.
The subdivisions are exact and they nest. A surco is a rectangle 8 dedos in the base by 6 in the height, an area of 48 square dedos or 27 square pulgadas, and forty-eight surcos make a buey. A naranja is a rectangle 8 dedos by 2, an area of 16 square dedos or 9 square pulgadas, and three naranjas make a surco. A real de agua is a rectangle of 2 dedos by 1, an area of 2 square dedos, and eight reales make a naranja. A paja de agua is a square of a third of a dedo a side, an area of one ninth of a square dedo, and eighteen pajas make a real. A buey is therefore 48 surcos, 144 naranjas, 1,152 reales and 20,736 pajas of water.
The purpose of the scale is stated in the same chapter and is worth keeping in view: these openings existed so that the water "se ha de distribuir con equidad y justicia", whether for irrigating the fields or for driving the trapiches, mills and other machines of human industry. A unit as small as one ninth of a square dedo exists because shares of a scarce stream had to be divided among many users and had to be justiciable in court.
The compilation carries the sixteenth-century law on siting towns into the nineteenth century as operative material, quoting ordinances 34, 35 and 36 of 1573 as inserted in ley 1, tit. V, lib. 4 of the Recopilacion de Indias - the settlers are to consider whether the ground is healthy, whether old men and well-complexioned youths are found there, whether the livestock are sound, the fruits good, the air pure, the temper without excess of heat or cold and if it must incline, to choose the cold; whether there are pastures, woods for firewood, building materials, and "muchas y buenas aguas para beber y regar" - and Charles V's cedula of 26 June 1523 requiring viceroys and governors to assign each newly founded town the lands and solares it needed for its propios, without prejudice to third parties, and to send a return for confirmation.
The land reserved to an Indian pueblo has a documented history of enlargement in the same volume. The ordinance of the viceroy marques de Falces, conde de Santisteban, of 26 May 1567 fixed 500 varas between the farmers' haciendas and the Indians' lands; a royal cedula of 4 June 1687 granted the Indians another hundred varas over the five hundred, ordered measured "por todos los cuatro vientos desde la ultima casa", leaving the built-up core of the town free of the count.
What was contested, and by whom, is printed beside it. The farmers' representation to the audiencia asks that the 1687 grant not be practised; that the ordinance be understood only of pueblos settled before the mercedes and foundations of their haciendas; that the measurement run not from the last house but from the centre of the church; that it apply only to cabeceras where the Blessed Sacrament, governors and alcaldes mayores are, since to read it of any settlement, barrio or congregacion would be of gravest injury; and that Indians be forbidden to raise jacales or hermitas on farm land, because on that pretext "fomentando una informacion falsa, le hacen pueblo, y se les da medida de tierras". Their stated reason for the church rule is that Indian houses stand irregularly, thirty or forty varas apart and some almost a quarter of a league.
The crown's answer, the cedula given at Madrid on 12 July 1695 over "YO EL REY", splits the difference and is quoted here for both halves. It orders the cedula of 4 June 1687 kept and executed, and concedes the farmers' procedural point: the six hundred varas between the Indians' lands and sementeras and those of the labradores are to be counted from the centre of the towns, "entendiendose esto desde la iglesia de ellos, y no desde la ultima casa", and the same for the eleven hundred varas that must lie between a pueblo and the estancias. Where either side is injured by the measurement it is to be made good by lengthening distances at the least prejudicial point, and if there is no land of Indian repartimiento or of farmers' composiciones from which to make it good, it is to be taken from the lands belonging to the king; and the governor is charged to proceed with such equality that neither Indians nor farmers have cause of complaint and to attend "muy especialmente al bien y provecho de los indios como lo tengo mandado".
A qualification on the evidence, stated rather than hidden. The 1567 ordinance and the cedulas of 1687 and 1695 are read here in a compilation printed in 1868, not in their own printings or in the archive; what is first-hand in this object is the nineteenth-century formulary itself - its definitions, its figures, its arithmetic and the texts it chose to reproduce - and the claims resting on the colonial dispositions are reported at that remove, which is why the object is tiered secondary. The compiler's own interest is on his title page: the work is offered "a beneficio y obsequio de los pobladores, ganaderos, labradores, duenos, arrendatarios y administradores de haciendas".