Ñudzahui Custom, Contracts, and Common Lands in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

Indigenous communities in colonial Spanish America used imperial law to preserve, create, defend, and expand their landholding. This chapter analyzes Indigenous claims to customary land tenure and possession in response to a Spanish imperial program of land titling known as the composiciones de tierras and other challenges to communal territory in the Ñudzahui (Mixtec) region of Oaxaca. The land titling program dovetailed with the expansion of the livestock economy, population growth, and an increase in tribute and taxes during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a context of increasing scarcity and pressure to normalize landholding, many Native communities went to court with competing claims to land. But Indigenous pueblos also came together to create plural ownership that allowed them to pool resources and share territorial jurisdiction. Through partnership contracts—the Spanish notarial form in which plural ownership was legally instantiated—Native authorities preserved or extended the territorial expanses of their communities, challenged or whittled away at the property of powerful Native elites (caciques), and transformed customary claims into new legal rights with an eye to securing the territorial integrity of their communities for the future.