The república de indios: elected Indian magistrates and the law of the cacicazgos
Spanish law gave every Indian town in the Americas its own indigenous alcalde, and towns above eighty households two alcaldes and two regidores, all of them Indians of that town, each year's officers electing the next. The same code ordered that pre-conquest lords keep their lordships, that towns dispossessed of the right to elect their caciques be restored to it, and that no Spaniard, black, mestizo or mulatto live in an Indian town. Every one of those rules also cost the Indians something.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of colonial Spanish America almost always describes indigenous towns as governed by Spaniards, and where the república de indios is named at all it is glossed as a segregation policy. The laws are here instead, quoted from the 1791 impression opened page by page: one Indian alcalde in every town and two alcaldes and two regidores above eighty households, all of them Indians of that town, elected each new year by the outgoing officers; the arrest power those magistrates held over blacks and mestizos in the corregidor's absence; the order that dispossessed caciques and towns robbed of the right to elect their caciques be restored ex officio by the royal courts. And, from the same títulos and given equal weight, the twenty lashes for the Indian who left his town, the flogging power over churchgoing, the ban on caciques calling themselves lords, and the crown's own note that the caciques were oppressing the people it had confirmed them over.
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 law used here is the fourth impression of the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Madrid, Viuda de Joaquín Ibarra, 1791, tomo segundo, Libro VI, título tercero "De las Reducciones, y Pueblos de Indios", which opens at folio 207, and título séptimo "De los Caciques", which opens at folio 245. The índice of that volume lists both at those folios, and every page used carries the running head of its título.
Law xv of título tercero, given by Philip III at Madrid on 10 October 1618, is the constitutional core of the Indian town: "Ordenamos que en cada Pueblo, y Reduccion haya un Alcalde Indio de la misma Reduccion; y si pasare de ochenta casas, dos Alcaldes, y dos Regidores, tambien Indios." However large the town, it was to have no more than two alcaldes and four regidores; a town of fewer than eighty Indians and down to forty was to have one alcalde and one regidor. The officers of each year elected their successors at new year, in the presence of the parish priests, as the law says was already the practice in towns of Spaniards and of Indians.
The next law fixes what the Indian magistrates could and could not do, and its two halves have to be read together. Their jurisdiction ran only to inquiring, arresting and bringing offenders to the jail of the Indian town of that district; they could punish with a day's prison and six or eight lashes the Indian who missed Mass on a feast day, got drunk, or committed a like fault, with greater rigour for mass drunkenness. Leaving to the caciques what belonged to the distribution of their Indians' mitas, the law then states that the government of the towns in general terms rested with those alcaldes and regidores.
Indigenous magistrates were given authority over non-Indians in one defined case. By a law of Philip II at Madrid on 11 August 1563, where an Indian town had alcaldes ordinarios and the corregidor or alcalde mayor was absent, if blacks or mestizos committed aggravations or molestations the Indian alcaldes could arrest them and hold them in the jail until the corregidor, alcalde mayor or his lieutenant arrived and did justice.
The separation of the two republics was legislated as a protective measure and argued as one. Law xxj prohibits Spaniards, blacks, mestizos and mulattoes from living in the reducciones and towns of Indians, on the experience that some Spaniards who trade and travel among the Indians are "hombres inquietos, de mal vivir, ladrones, jugadores, viciosos, y gente perdida", so that Indians fleeing injury leave their towns and provinces, and that blacks, mestizos and mulattoes besides ill-treating them make use of them and teach them their bad customs and idleness. It then makes an exception for mestizos and zambaigos who are the children of Indian women, born among them and due to inherit their houses and estates, on the stated ground that it seems a hard thing to separate them from their parents.
A later law names the reason bluntly. Law xxij, of Philip IV at Zaragoza on 30 June 1646, holds that Spaniards, mestizos and mulattoes who have bought lands in Indian towns and their districts remain inside the prohibition and may not live there, this being "la causa principal, y origen de las opresiones, y molestias que padecen". The two following laws forbid any Spaniard travelling through to stay in an Indian town beyond the day he arrives and one more, under a penalty of fifty pesos of gold of mines, and any merchant to stay above three days.
The same title carries the cost of the arrangement, and it is not a small one. Law xviij forbids any Indian of one town to go to another, under twenty lashes for the Indian and four pesos for the cacique who consents; law xviiij, of 4 February 1604, forbids governors, judges and justices to give Indians licence to live outside their reducciones, under three years' suspension of office and five hundred ducats, "de que se les hará cargo en la residencia", the judge being ordered to make them return and to restore the Indians to their towns at the cost of the guilty. Law xj makes the reducciones themselves payable out of the tributes the newly settled Indians were excused.
On the pre-conquest lords the code states a principle it repeats nowhere else so plainly. The first law of título séptimo, given by Philip II and the princess governor at Valladolid on 26 February 1557, recites that some natives of the Indies were caciques and lords of towns in the time of their infidelity, and that after their conversion "es justo que conserven sus derechos, y el haber venido á nuestra obediencia no los haga de peor condicion"; the Audiencias are commanded to hear their claims to succeed in that kind of lordship, the parties called and heard, with all brevity.
The second law turns that from a right of petition into a duty of the crown's own courts. The Audiencias are to take cognisance of these rights privately and to inform themselves ex officio, and where they find that some have been unjustly dispossessed of their cacicazgos, jurisdictions, rights and rents, they are to make restitution — and to do the same "si algunos Pueblos estuvieren despojados del derecho, que hubieren tenido de elegir Caciques". That a town might hold the right to elect its own cacique, and be restored to it by a royal court, is stated in the code as a matter of course.
Succession was insulated from the local Spanish authorities. Law iij orders that the succession of cacicazgos follow the ancient right and custom observed since the discovery, and that viceroys, audiencias and governors have no discretion to take a cacicazgo from one and give it to another; law iiij forbids the ordinary justices to deprive caciques of their cacicazgos for any criminal cause or complaint, under deprivation of office and fifty thousand maravedís, reserving that cognisance to the Audiencias and the oidores visitadores of the district.
The limits the crown put on the same lordship belong beside it. Law v forbids caciques to be called or to style themselves lords of their towns, as not fitting the royal service and pre-eminence, while allowing the names cacique and principal; law vj orders that caciques not be mestizos, that any who are be removed, and that the office be given to Indians; and law viij records that in some towns the caciques and principales hold the Indians so oppressed and subject that they use them in everything at will and take more tribute than is permitted, ordering the viceroys, audiencias and governors to inform themselves and moderate the excess.
The jurist who systematised this law devotes a chapter of his book II to it, "De los Caciques, o Curacas de los Indios, y su jurisdiccion, y succession". Juan de Solórzano Pereira records that in New Spain the viceroys, holding cacicazgos to be offices of the administration of justice and government, judged it better that they be given by election than by succession and were doing so in practice; that when those who went from New Spain to govern Peru wished to introduce the same there, royal cédulas were issued ordering the viceroys of Peru not to change or appoint caciques at their own will but to keep the form and custom of succession from fathers to sons; and that other cédulas, with the testimony of the chronicler Herrera, show a settled will to conserve to the Indians their ancient customs and governments. Confidence is held down here because the passage is a dense 1736 setting in long s and the argument runs across numbered paragraphs rather than a single quotable sentence.
The same jurist puts the compulsion in his own summary. The contents list of that chapter runs from the jurisdiction left to the caciques and the submission the Indians owe them to the tyranny the caciques themselves use, the rule that in converting to the faith one must begin with the caciques, and the colleges and schools for the sons of the Indians. He is a crown judge and a minister of the Council of the Indies arguing that his own government's settlement was the right one, and this object treats his testimony accordingly.
What these sources are and are not is worth saying at the end. They are a printed code and a jurist's commentary on it: strong evidence of what the law required of Spanish officials and of what the crown knew was going wrong, and no evidence at all of how often an election was free, a dispossessed cacique restored or a Spanish squatter actually removed from an Indian town. The structure they describe gave indigenous towns their own magistrates and their own jail, and in the same breath bound their inhabitants to those towns under the lash and reserved every appeal to a Spanish audiencia.