The subaltern provinces of the audiencia of Guadalajara: a jurisdiction split between two capitals, and a lawyer of 1742 recording that Indian complainants gave up and were left without recourse
Avalos and Colima answered to Guadalajara in justice and to Mexico in government, a hundred leagues away. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of that court, argues for joining the two, and in the middle of the argument records what the split cost: poor Indians came often to the audiencia over tribute, labour repartimientos and the rigging of their elections, were sent to Mexico so the viceroy's jurisdiction stayed intact, and commonly desisted for the difficulty and were left without remedy.
Why this wins its question: The standing argument about indigenous litigation in colonial Spanish America is settled in the affirmative and is usually made with case counts from Mexico City and Lima: Indians sued, often, and sometimes won. What is scarce is a contemporary witness to the cases that never got filed. This object supplies one, in two pages nobody quotes: a serving lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, writing in 1742, states that poor Indians came frequently to his court over tribute, labour repartimientos and the rigging of their own elections; that the court sent them a hundred leagues to Mexico to protect a jurisdictional boundary; and that they commonly gave up and were left with no remedy at all. It gives the reform case around it, the coastal-defence failure that made the same argument in wartime, and the author's own declaration that he expects to be called a partisan. And it prints, from the same volume, the passage in which that same author argues the northern Indians should have been reduced by military force, so that the reader has the whole man and not the useful half of him.
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 anomaly is stated first and it is geographical before it is legal. Page 67 records that the provinces called subaltern to the audiencia of Guadalajara begin ten leagues from that city and extend fifty to the south, ending at the coasts of the South Sea or Pacific; that their Indians are of the same nature, rites and customs as those of the Galicia; and that no other difference exists between them but being ruled by different persons. They were subordinated to the audiencia of Guadalajara in points of justice and remained under the viceroy of Mexico in points of government, more than a hundred leagues away. The chapter breaks off the narrative of the conquest to argue that what was done for justice should be done for government too, and the author says so openly.
The stated reason for the original subordination in justice is the one that matters here, because it shows what the crown thought courts were for. Page 67 records that the provinces were made subaltern to the audiencia in points of justice so that litigants should have prompt recourse. The rest of the page reasons from that principle to the administrative case: the alcaldes mayores would deliver the tributes in their charge into the royal treasury of Guadalajara with greater ease and at less cost than into that of Mexico; the royal officials would be better informed, by nearness, whether the alcaldes mayores were dissipating those tributes; the goods of the deceased would be more promptly collected by the privative court of Guadalajara than by that of Mexico; and the frequent controversies between the doctrine priests and the alcaldes mayores in points of government, whose settlement commonly needs the intervention of the bishops and the provincial prelates of those religious, would be settled faster at Guadalajara, where the bishop and the provincial reside, than at Mexico.
Then the sentence that makes this a document about access to justice rather than about administrative tidiness. Page 68 records that the poor Indians frequently come to the audiencia complaining of the excesses of the alcaldes mayores in matters of tribute, of repartimientos for labour, of elections of office and other points of government; that the audiencia, with great feeling at considering the difficult recourse to Mexico for things of so little moment, nevertheless, in order to keep the jurisdiction of the viceroys unharmed, orders them to have recourse where it belongs; and that commonly the Indians desist for the difficulty and are left without recourse. Three things are established by it at once and none of them is inferred: that indigenous complainants used the royal courts often and on their own initiative; that the grievances they brought were tribute, forced labour and the manipulation of their own municipal elections; and that a jurisdictional line drawn for reasons of state defeated the remedy in the ordinary case. The witness is the court's own lawyer, writing about his own court, and he records the failure as a reason for reform rather than concealing it.
The same split is shown failing in the other direction, on a coast under attack. Page 68 records that these provinces lie on the sea coast and have on occasions been assaulted by the English; that the alcaldes mayores of the parts belonging to New Spain report to the viceroys while those with jurisdiction from the Galicia give notice to the presidents; that the presidents, being nearer, give faster orders and send relief; and that when the viceroy's orders arrive they are found to be either the same or contrary. If the same, the cost of couriers was idle and the delay dangerous; if contrary, the president's orders were frustrated, the expense idle, and the president left cold about ordering anything on another occasion for fear of the slight of not being obeyed by the alcaldes mayores, so that they act remissly waiting for new orders from the viceroy and the effects are not obtained that would follow from orders given by the one who has the matter most present.
The author names his own bias before a reader can, which is why the passage can be used at all. Page 68 records his expectation that this digression will be accused as impertinent to the history and that he will suffer the calumny of writing as a partisan; his answer, that histories serve as maps of kingdoms so that those who govern, being informed of them, may give the orders conducing to the best success; his statement of the asymmetry he objects to, that the hand of government extends more than a hundred leagues north and west and forty to the east but is so drawn in to the south that it reaches only ten leagues, to the prejudice of the inhabitants of those subaltern provinces, who have their dealings and commerce at Guadalajara, are provided with priests from there and pay tithes to its church, and are nevertheless obliged to have recourse in points of government to Mexico, more than a hundred leagues off; and his personal answer to the charge, that he is more than fifty years old and therefore without hope of interesting himself in anything, that experience of the inconsistencies moves him, and that he speaks after twenty-nine years. The claims above rest on what he reports of the court's practice; his recommendation that the provinces be joined to the government of Guadalajara is his own case and is reported as that.
The counterweight is on this same author's other pages and is put here rather than left for a reader to find. The man who records that Indian complainants were left without recourse is also the man who, on page 64 of the same book, argues that the missions of the north failed for gentleness: that the pilhuanejos and those most benefited by the fathers had been the ringleaders in the risings, that there was no cruelty they did not execute, burning and destroying settlements and churches and killing their own doctrine priests and men, women and children, and that the cause was none other than the temperance with which they had been treated in their reduction and their not having been reduced with a military hand as the rest of New Spain and Nueva Galicia were. The same page holds up the Jesuit missionaries of Sonora, Sinaloa and the Californias who had been killed by those they had taught, and the loss of all the missionaries' work in Sonora in the year 1740, as the answer to those who would have wished the standard of the faith planted in the kingdom without an armed hand. His view of Indians as sons of fear who are only domesticated in virga ferrea and his indignation at their being denied a hearing are the same man's, in the same book, and this entry states both rather than quoting the one that flatters the institution.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 67 and 68, with page 64 for the last claim, 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 decree fixing the subaltern status of Avalos and Colima has been read for this entry, and none is quoted on these pages, so nothing here dates the arrangement or states its legal instrument; the corpus's entry on the audiencia of Nueva Galicia carries the crown's answer of 27 April 1574 on the same provinces from a different page-run of the same book. Nothing here establishes how many indigenous complaints the audiencia actually received, how many were remitted to Mexico, how many complainants pursued them there, or whether the aggregation the author urges was ever granted. The phrase about the Indians desisting is a lawyer's generalisation from practice and not a count.