To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America

INTRODUCTION

Indio Identities in Colonial Spanish America

Mónica Díaz

The processes of conquest and colonization of the natives of the Americas altered their individual and communal ways of identification. Intended to homogenize cultural diversity, the misnomer indio (Indian) fostered a new collective identity that various groups of people interpreted and used in different ways. As indios these individuals performed and articulated identities that in some respects responded to what colonial officials expected, but they also shaped the meanings of Indian identity through processes of negotiation and accommodation. The imposition of social, legal, and cultural categories over a vast and heterogeneous population created new forms of identification throughout the Americas for as long as European presence remained.

This volume explores some of the identities that indigenous peoples forged through their engagement with colonial society and institutions while also highlighting the contexts and purposes for which these individuals drew recourse to such identities. By reading and analyzing native historiographies in conjunction with archival documentation, the contributors to the present volume reveal the diversity of strategies that native peoples used to negotiate the European presence in their territories. In doing so Amerindians bridged native and Spanish cultures, thereby shaping both indigenous identities and the colonial society in which they lived.

At the core of the processes of identity formation lies the sociopolitical organization of the colonial system that separated Spaniards and castas (mixed-race people), on the one hand, and natives, on the other, into two repúblicas: the república de españoles and the república de indios. During the first years of European presence in the Americas, the category indio functioned as an empty label crafted in response to the confusion surrounding the alleged arrival of Columbus to the Indies while also serving to differentiate Christians from non-Christians.¹ After the initial years of abuse—which included both native enslavement and massacres of Amerindians—clerics and jurists debated about the nature of the natives of the land they had occupied in order to regulate the treatment of the natives and, by extension, avoid further depopulation. Bartolomé de las Casas, for example, argued that the papal bull of 1493 entitled Inter Caetera should only allow Castile to evangelize the natives as opposed to governing them. This and other debates regarding Spain’s right to possess the land and the people they encountered culminated in the New Laws of 1542 that granted freedom to natives provided that they accepted Christianity and the rule of the Spanish crown.² Indio became a legal category that defined natives as miserables, meaning that they were regarded as in need of special legal assistance, and as a result their cases and complaints were taken under special royal and church protection (Borah 1983, 80–81).³ In addition, pueblo de indios functioned as a legal term that referred to areas where considerable numbers of natives lived under a somewhat autonomous native government recognized by the viceroy (Tanck de Estrada 2005, 21). The corporate character and juridical personality of these areas aided in the preservation of an ethnic memory that natives then reconfigured and fused into their new identity as indios.⁴ Particularly in the case of urban centers, the legal category of indio proved useful for administrative purposes and with time came to operate as an identity marker that surpassed ethnic differences and created cohesion and solidarity (Castro Gutiérrez 2010, 25).

The scholarship produced in the past thirty years regarding native peoples has advanced a more nuanced understanding of the Amerindian encounters with European cultures; however, scholars continue to privilege, for the most part, a paradigm that centers upon the oppositional binary of indio versus European. Scholarly debates have departed from essentializing that binary, yet we continue to center our discussions on the negotiations that took place between the cultural elements of the two main groups. Furthermore, there is an acute interest in identifying the authentic native features that survived native coexistence with Europeans under colonial rule. Still others have sought to determine which elements of European culture were adopted by natives so as to ultimately understand for what purposes such appropriations took place and with what results.

The work on Guamán Poma de Ayala by Rolena Adorno, for example, has proven instrumental in shifting our attention to the agency of indigenous peoples under colonial rule in addition to highlighting the hybrid identity of the indio ladino—a native who learned Spanish and functioned as an intermediary between the two worlds (1986, 1988, 1991, 1994). These and other similar studies have underscored how the asymmetries of colonial power and the unequal experiences of colonial rule prevented indios ladinos from becoming a homogeneous group (Adorno 1991, 233). Within this framework there existed many possibilities and overlapping forms of identification. Indios ladinos displayed varying degrees of European cultural traits, and in doing so they moved in different spheres of the colonial world and with diverse motives.⁵ In the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, the indio ladino, or hispanicized Indian—an intermediary who negotiated his place in society with both Spanish officials and native people—was also present, although both groups always tended to regard him with suspicion (Yannakakis 2008, 18). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru we find a similar phenomenon, where natives born in colonial cities such as Lima and Trujillo adopted different cultural values from those natives who lived in rural areas. Some natives called themselves indios criollos, an identity marker that denoted cultural adaptation as well as their place of birth (Graubart 2007, 147). The criollo element of this form of identification indicated the adoption of certain cultural characteristics and mercantile practices more related to the European (and urban) sector of society. Other scholarly contributions to this subject have emphasized indigenous identities in similar ways by positing them as the result of transculturated practices with strategic purposes that are difficult to label in clear-cut ways.⁶ In addition, the new conquest history has pushed for other categories of identification, such as that of the indio conquistador, that shed a different light on the processes of natives’ accommodation of and resistance to colonial power.⁷

These contributions have allowed us to understand how native communities adopted certain elements of Spanish culture while maintaining, on different levels, their own cultural traditions. In addition, such a framework provides a foundation from which we can explore and further elaborate the various indio identities that resulted from the colonial experience. However, rather than centering our discussions upon the degree of transculturation affecting a community or individual, we propose that our emphasis should be elsewhere. While the contributors to this volume have chosen to reflect on contact-zone negotiations, signaling the results of such contact as hybrid for the most part, we avoid framing the complexities of this situation as the result of the subordinated conditions of indigenous peoples under colonial rule. Instead we emphasize the agency of colonial subjects and highlight the choices they made in the processes of indio identity construction. We believe that indios’ chosen strategies to appropriate certain elements of European culture did not alter their identities as indios. If we consider the transculturating nature of colonial indigenous life, we become aware of the problems that ensue when attempting to draw neat distinctions between native and European worlds (Rappaport and Cummins 2012, 27). It is necessary, then, that we consider a more historically specific approach to transculturation as well as an even more nuanced view of the evolution of a collective colonial identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume explore the development of indigenous subjectivities in different colonial scenarios and in various time periods. In addition, these case studies also signal the different ways in which natives resisted or adapted the colonial legal category of indio for their own purposes and needs. While indio was an imposed label that implied certain restrictions and obligations, it also became a signifier to differentiate themselves vis-à-vis other ethnic or social groups in order to gain recognition and additional privileges. Furthermore, these chapters stress the unique nature of what becoming indio meant throughout the colonial period while also demonstrating that the cultural elements traditionally associated with indios and Spaniards were not mutually exclusive in the colonial setting.

We find Joanne Rappaport’s methodological approach useful to understand the complexities of the formation of indio identities. She proposes that we should move our gaze away from the condition of the individual, toward the context of the naming (2014, 4). Moreover, Rappaport stresses that the constitution of categories of difference is relational in nature, that it depends on the context, and that it is generated through speech acts (5).⁸ We build on the idea that we should focus on the discourse—that is, on both the act of naming and the particular circumstances in which the naming takes place. In a similar manner, Rachel O’Toole looking at the construction of casta as a situational process also suggests that scholars should focus on the multiplying differences within the categories of indio (2012, 2). O’Toole’s observations bring to light how being indio meant something different for a colonial official, for a native who was taken in slavery to Castile, or for a member of the nobility who had been granted special privileges. The process of naming thus produces a slippage (or transgression) of meaning as well as a space of negotiation.

By focusing on Amerindians’ manipulation and understanding of colonial institutions, language, and rhetorical strategies of self-identification (both individually and collectively), we can appreciate the agency that indigenous peoples were able to exercise within the system that intended to subordinate them. Furthermore, we glimpse the creative strategies that colonial subjects found to reformulate their identities and thus adapt, resist, and negotiate within the colonial system. As a result colonial subjects managed to empower themselves and authorize their ethnicity in the larger political and cultural schemes of the colonial enterprise. It is through our engagement with the written sources found in the many archives of Europe and the Americas that we seek the various identities of indios in the Spanish American colonial world.

FRAMEWORKS AND METHODS

This volume seeks to explore the ways in which writing is linked to practical action. In a similar manner, a recent edited volume on indigenous intellectuals offers a framework to study native knowledge in what Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis have termed pragmatic and ideological forms, referring to action and discourse, respectively (2014, 1). Following that framework, the present volume centers upon native epistemologies that can be found in writing or in action, and we extend our analysis to the distinct circumstances in which people embodied the indio identity in its many variations. Our focus on identity construction is aimed at contributing to the discussion of what becoming and being indio meant for individuals and communities in different contexts throughout the colonial period. Following Ramos and Yannakakis, we propose that in addition to viewing indigenous intellectuals as producers of knowledge, we should likewise consider them as subjects who, although labeled as indios within the colonial enterprise, nonetheless embodied numerous identities that existed as a direct result of their colonial condition. In other words, indios embodied cultural forms that responded to the coloniality of their circumstances. As such their actions and ideologies represented a more complex phenomenon than that of simply juggling certain aspects of their native traditions with the imposition of Spanish culture. We therefore aim at portraying indios as active producers of their various identities. While these identities seemingly fall under the encompassing category of indios, they also respond to specific historical and cultural circumstances and thus create important differences within the same monolithic label of indio.

As an interdisciplinary endeavor, this volume seeks to represent and model the fluid dialogue between the disciplines of history and literature within the area of colonial Latin American studies. In order to achieve this we have centered our inquiry on the archive. While we can identify disciplinary differences in the ways we approach texts, we can also find commonalities that bridge our interests and understandings of the same subject. The so-called linguistic turn impacted the way historians engaged with archival documentation; in addition, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories aided in our awareness of the documentary repositories as yet another form of power and control. These shifts in scholarship brought literary and historical studies closer together, particularly within a cultural approach. While historians acknowledged the rhetorical devices and narratives embedded in documentary sources, literary scholars recognized their historicity.⁹ More recently we have also witnessed a keen interest in problematizing the archive as a subjective site of information. Scholars have reflected on the constitution of colonial archives, on the kinds of materials that were considered worth preserving, and on the possible purposes behind their preservation. This scholarship also highlights the many filters apparent in the documents found in archives as well as the important role of the agents who produced, filed, annotated, and on occasion even disposed of certain pieces of documentation, thereby creating the silences that also frequently appear in archives.¹⁰ Ultimately we seek to craft this volume as an interdisciplinary endeavor through the close reading of documents, the analysis of language and rhetorical devices, and by highlighting particular actions that signal the conformation of the indio identities that flourished in the colonial context.

All of the case studies in the present volume originated with what Rolena Adorno calls the artifact, by which she refers to the archival document or material evidence that led the scholar to the discursive or practical configuration of identity making among natives. Yet historians and literary critics treat the artifice, or the way the artifact is created (see Adorno in this volume), in slightly different ways, on occasion trying to discern the actions of the individual who self-identified as an indio, and in other cases with an eye toward the rhetorical strategies, semantic complexities, and uses of discourse. In the end, historians and literary critics alike recognize the agency of colonial subjects either by the discursive traces that described their actions or by the act of creating a discourse.

In chapter 1 Rolena Adorno provides a useful framework from which to begin thinking about the different identities explored in the volume. The chapter centers upon a group of concepts that unify the academic endeavors of historians and literary critics working in the field of colonial Latin American studies. Artifact, artifice, and identity function here as a three-pronged approach aimed at understanding the elements shared by our discipline-specific methodologies, readings, and interpretations. Adorno asserts that the scholar always begins with the artifact and seeks notions of identification through the artifice, or as she terms it, the act of crafting. Adorno illustrates these three concepts by studying the manuscripts and printed books of sixteenth-century Andean author Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and Texcocan historian Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, underscoring the relationships that these men, through their artifacts, forged with the Basque Fray Martín de Murúa and Creole polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, respectively.

The pairing of Murúa with Guamán Poma and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl with Sigüenza y Góngora allows Adorno to provide an identity typology to discuss the different processes of identity construction in the colonial world. Rather than limit identity construction merely to indios, Adorno affirms that the process occurs in the hands of numerous subjects: individuals who identify with a historical ethnic past; people of European descent interested in recuperating a time immemorial of the land they now inhabit; and even scholars like us who, though we might not possess any connections to Amerindians, strive nonetheless to interpret their documents in order to call attention to both a colonial Indian identity and the processes that enabled the construction and performance of that identity. Adorno explores the relationship between artifact and artifice in the pairing of Murúa and Guamán Poma; and the relationship between Sigüenza y Góngora and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl allows her to delineate an intellectual and historical genealogy that ultimately takes us to the processes of identity construction. All of the protagonists in this chapter bound their identities to the indios of the land. In the processes of writing their histories, recuperating and preserving them, or recreating a cultural memory for the sake of the patria, these four protagonists took part in the processes of identity formation. As such Adorno’s chapter functions as a general framework to approach the diversity of indio identities.

Chapter 2, Nancy van Deusen’s Holograms of the Voiceless, provides a provocative methodology to begin exploring indio identities from an early period in Lima, Peru. Based on observations grounded in the experiences of slavery and servitude of thousands of natives who were, for the most part, violently displaced from their place of origin, van Deusen challenges traditional approaches to archival sources by seeking to construct holograms of this voiceless population. She pieces together the fate of those natives who were slaves and servants of Spanish conquerors and settlers throughout a twenty-year period of litigation suits, chronicles, and notarial records, among other archival sources. The chapter takes into consideration the years before the New Laws were passed and traces the transition from slavery to the moment when it became possible for a native who had been illegally branded to petition for his or her freedom.

In the context of slavery and servitude in sixteenth-century Lima, differences between indios soon become apparent. For example, Andean yanaconas, who served Spanish masters in hope of certain reciprocity and who also served as military commanders, were in fact ranked by who they served, what office they held, their gender, and their skills. Free indios called naborías were also distinguished by geographical location, since many Amerindians from Central America were abducted in slave raids and taken to South America or Europe.¹¹ The forced geographical relocation of natives in bondage or servitude brought people from different places into close contact, and as van Deusen convincingly demonstrates, the intimacies that were born among them in colonial Lima complicated the meaning of the concept of indio. A case in point is the community of slaves and servants from Nicaragua, Mexico, and Panama who, according to van Deusen, promoted new forms of mestizaje and ethnogenesis by having children with natives of the Andes. These relationships destabilized the subcategories in which they were placed within the compass of the indio identity category.

Chapter 2 challenges us to reflect on the complexities of trying to designate human beings into fixed categories in discursive terms while also highlighting the multiple identities that existed in practice. As van Deusen asserts, in the early colonial period being indio was as much about mobility as it was about relationality. Finally, the chapter also invites us to creatively approach archival sources in order to piece together stories that otherwise would be forgotten and/or lost in the historical record.

IDENTITY AND HYBRIDITY

In recent years the field of cultural studies has brought to the forefront questions of what identity is and why it matters.¹² For Latin American studies, different approaches to the subject have also enriched our view of colonial societies and have interrogated traditional ways of understanding colonial subjects.¹³ The most recent scholarly contribution to the topic is the ambitious Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara (2009). In addition to the volume editors’ thorough theoretical discussion on identity formation in the introduction, the collection of essays offers a broad view of various social identities embodied by different subjects during the colonial period. Our volume builds on the cases devoted to natives and seeks to expand its view by considering the processes of identity formation as instrumental to these individuals’ survival strategies in the colonial world. Bringing words and actions into dialogue, the interdisciplinary approaches in this study aid in our quest to better grasp those processes and to ask questions such as the following: What were the circumstances that gave rise to these indio identities? What particular goals informed the identities that these individuals embodied? Were the identities related to professional activities, or to social performance, or were they discursively instrumental?

Before we address these questions through the case studies included here, it is necessary to briefly highlight the ways in which we, and other scholars, understand identity. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have argued against the use of the word identity, stating that the humanities and the social sciences have surrendered to the concept. The constant negotiation between what these critics term the soft and hard meanings of the word identity has, in their view, rendered the concept too ambiguous to serve as a serious analytical category (2000, 1–2). The authors prefer to use identification rather than identity, arguing that the former operates as an active term that invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying (14). Stuart Hall, however, expresses reluctance to use identification in place of identity in view of the former’s psychoanalytical semantic legacies. Hall recalls Freud’s use of the concept of identification and characterizes it as ambivalent from the start (1996, 3). While for Hall identity is a meeting point between discourse and practice, he nonetheless privileges discourse over social practice because he sees identity as the result of one’s subject positions constructed through discourse (6).

Regardless of the word we choose, identity or identification, the phenomenon in question deals largely with an understanding of a certain uniformity that can be characterized as collective, since it is through this process that the individual becomes (objectively or not) part of a group. Therefore, because we are working within the frameworks of the social sciences and the humanities, we use both terms (identity and identification) to signal the discursively flexible nature of the concept as well as its constant transformation and adaptation into something original. In our specific contexts of Mesoamerica and the Andes in the colonial period, we are recalling the subject positions created through the discursive invention of the word indio and the social practices attached to it. The notion of indio should be understood first and foremost as a colonial invention that embodies the characteristics of its legal definition, which is further enriched with notions from pre-Hispanic historiography and the European imaginary that led to constructions of socioracial hierarchies.

In spite of the fact that natives experienced colonial rule in different ways, they all shared certain commonalities. All natives, for example, belonged to a pre-Hispanic ethnic group, and they all became indios within the new administrative system. The creation of a legal category that would protect natives while at the same time requiring certain obligations from them was intended to aid Spaniards in the administration of the newly found populations. With time, though, that category came to function as a collective form of identification that responded to people’s immediate needs and circumstances. To be indios natives had to learn to maneuver within the different laws, concepts, and values imposed by Spanish rule. Because of their dual participation in both European and New World cultural practices, these colonial subjects can be best described as individuals possessing a double consciousness. Although this concept has been used to refer to the experience of people of African descent in the Americas (first by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and later by Paul Gilroy), it is a concept that aids in our understanding of the processes of identity formation of native peoples in contact with European colonial systems. In Du Bois’s words, It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others (1994, 2). In writing and in actions we perceive the conflation of the pre-Hispanic (an imagined belonging, a real genealogical connection, or a simple admiration and loyalty to this past) and the European embodiment of language, culture, religion, profession, and so on. The various mechanisms that shaped the colonial subject prove essential to our analyses in order to glimpse, if only partially, what the lives of indios in colonial Spanish America might have been like.

The case studies included in this volume illustrate a wide range of native forms of identification as well as the negotiation that took place in the cases of imposed identities; at the same time, these studies also work to destabilize traditional notions of a native identity as static and monolithic. All of the indigenous subjects or indio identifications explored in these chapters make evident that from the moment of European contact, indigenous lives and traditional ways of understanding one’s subjectivity were altered forever, and that Europeans, Africans, and Asians influenced the lives of natives in the colonial world (and vice versa).¹⁴ These external agents together with other cultural factors played a central role in the ways that Amerindians juggled the colonial expectations of who they were supposed to be (indios) with the aspirations of how they wanted to be perceived (as conquistadores, ladinos, interpreters, Christians, etc.) or how they chose to be seen. Amerindians became indios and as such they maintained various degrees of connection with their native communities as well as with Europeans, Africans, Asians, and eventually other castas of the colonial world. Therefore, it is important to question the category of indio as removed from external social and cultural influences. Just as anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena has recently questioned the category of mestizo as identifying hybrid subjects historically removed from their indigeneity (2005, 262), we too would like to think about indios in more complex and open ways, acknowledging in particular the European influences deeply embedded within their chosen or imposed identity.

Since our interests center upon the phenomenon of colonial identity formation, we need not forget that Europeans triggered the creation of these new colonial indio identities and contributed to the formation of such identities in important ways. By exploring preconceptions of what Europeans thought native peoples were and conflating these preconceptions with practices of classification that were already in use in the Iberian Peninsula, we perceive flexible articulations of indio identities. A case in point is Nancy van Deusen’s study of the construction of indio identities in sixteenth-century Castile, where practices of classification were based on physiognomy, nation, and lineage (2012, 207). In addition to van Deusen’s insight, we might add the recent discussion regarding the need to unfix race by contextualizing its usage properly, depending on the time and place of enunciation. In this regard Kathryn Burns links the Iberian statutes of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) with the evolution of the concept of race, particularly in relation to the natives of the Americas (2007, 189). Building on this notion through the study of litigation suits initiated by indio slaves, van Deusen stresses the need to carefully study the processes of identification taking place in different contexts and documentary loci and not to assume an Iberian set of fixed, stable descriptors to articulate identity (2012, 210). Taking these points into careful consideration, we propose that the flexibility and malleability of identity formation need to be at the center of our inquiry.

Several contributors of the present volume have made reference to the concept of hybridity in their chapters explicitly (García Loaeza and O’Toole) or implicitly (Díaz Balsera and Quispe-Agnoli) when talking about indigenous forms of colonial identification. Employing the concept of hybridity in their discussions, some contributors (Brian and Seijas) have chosen to include in the study of indio identities subjects who could be placed in other social categories but who chose nonetheless to fashion their identities as indios because of their close ties to indigenous communities. The authors’ focus on hybridity proves especially important in our discussion since it is a complex and multifaceted concept that has recently been linked to postcolonial theories and subaltern studies. Aware of the political implications that these academic currents carry, we choose to use the term because we find it helpful in understanding the nature of colonial identities.¹⁵ We are particularly interested in exploring the notion of cultural hybridity in the processes of identity formation of subjects affected by everyday contact with the Spanish colonial system.¹⁶ We believe that a careful historical contextualization of the concept will allow us to use it in lieu of other theoretical frameworks that seek to shed light on phenomena similar to what we study here, such as that of transculturation.¹⁷

Although the concept of hybridity has often been loosely employed in studies concerning colonial Latin America, in this volume we find the concept a particularly useful strategy in that it refers to a space of negotiation through actions or discourses, thus allowing for the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism (Bhabha 1994, 58). In his study of hybridity and culture, for example, Homi Bhabha argues that the hybrid strategy neither assimilates to nor is in collaboration with a given network of hegemonic power. The idea that culture arises from interstitial enunciative sights proves especially relevant for many of the cases explored in this volume: for example, the negotiation of the marginalized subject recognized in the writing practices of Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Guamán Poma; or the performative act of the indio mestizo, the indio chino, and the native muleteer (all cases studied in this volume). This framework attempts to salvage the notion of difference in order to avoid the erasure of practices and discourses in which values and traditions of precontact communities can still be perceived.¹⁸ However, this idealized notion does not necessarily resolve the real dilemmas of subalterns in their everyday negotiations with hegemonic structures of power. We argue that the choices such individuals made were not casual but rather instrumental to their identities.

In this volume we see these negotiations with the colonial system as intentional acts on the part of natives to find accommodation in the new social order. We follow what Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn propose in their influential article concerning hybridity and visual culture. In this article the authors reject the traditional view of hybridity as a duality that privileges the visible cultural forms, which in turn disavows the colonial process itself (2003, 13). The chapters included herein closely examine the processes of identity formation in which multiple hybridities are possible. Although we identify certain aspects of the colonizing and colonized cultures in natives’ practices and discourses, we do not envision them as a simple byproduct. Instead, we recognize the complexities and innovations of a given indigenous form of identification (13).

COMMUNITIES

One way to approach indigenous identities in the colonial world involves a close examination of native communities as well as the ways in which these communities changed throughout time and triggered, as a result, the fashioning of certain indio identities. Years after the establishment of the Spanish colonial system in Mesoamerica and the Andes, native peoples continued to identify with indigenous terms of community. The altepetl, or ethnic state, was the organizational core of the Nahua world; the ayllu was the term used in the Andes.¹⁹ The altepetl and the ayllu referred mainly to an organization of people, although the terms also alluded to their territory; kinship relationships as well as mutual obligations of reciprocity were important. In the midst of Spanish colonization, natives maintained a strong sense of identity closely linked to their altepetl or ayllu, which in turn allowed for the preservation of what anthropologists and historians have called close corporate communities.²⁰

Hierarchical societies based on class differences were part of Iberian culture, and it is in large part because of this cultural stronghold that colonizers had few (if any) qualms in recognizing natives’ noble status and no qualms in allowing Indian nobles to maintain certain privileges. In return indigenous nobles served as intermediaries between Spanish colonizers and indigenous towns. The system of republics that allowed parallel although subjugated forms of government in Spanish and native towns also aided in the progressive constitution of a cohesive identity of indigenous peoples as indios. Spanish colonizers established themselves near indigenous communities in order to more efficiently exploit their subjects’ labor and receive tribute from them in a system that mirrored European feudalism. However, Spanish presence altered pre-Hispanic labor patterns as well as political structures, disrupting