McDonough, K.: “‘Love’ Lost: Class Struggle among Indigenous Nobles and Commoners of Seventeenth-Century Tlaxcala”
This article examines the relationships across various social classes among indigenous peoples of Tlaxcala during the seventeenth century. In it, Kelly McDonough seeks to highlight the agency of indigenous commoners through their use of the Spanish legal system with which they challenged noble authority. Her essay focuses on how the social relations between Tlaxcalan natives stemming from different social strata were built and transformed, and how their interaction with outsiders (i.e. Spaniards, other indigenous groups, etc.) influenced such transformations. In order to address the above, McDonough makes use of discourse analysis to explore the Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala, the annals written by seventeenth century Tlaxcalan political and elite figure Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, as well as other archival sources from Tlaxcala. Through this analysis McDonough effectively elucidates the ways in which Tlaxcalan noblemen, “pipiltin”, acted as mediators between their indigenous subjects and Spanish authorities. According to the author, Zapata’s text reveals the ways in which commoners, macehualtin, challenged their relationship to the noble class by actions such as withholding tribute and performing various services. Given Zapata’s social standing, this study presents primarily the perspective of the nobility, which in turn raises the question of what did the commoners’ perspective was on their relationships to the nobility. Nonetheless, the contributions of this essay rest in McDonough’s approach to the political, social, and economic dynamics in the city of Tlaxcala – given its unique position as a ciudad de indios because of their alliance to the Spanish forces during the conquest – which focus on the often underexplored indigenous-to-indigenous relationships. Such an approach opens the window to yet another angle from which to examine colonial-era interactions, and thus to balance the narrative which the Spanish system is entirely hegemonic.
“While the relationship between indigenous peoples of varying social ranks may not have the same prominence in the historical record as those of Europeans and indigenous peoples it is a key one nonetheless. With a focus on inter-indigenous and Spanish power players. Zapata’s annals bear witness to the ongoing and perhaps inevitable modifications of pre-Hispanic patterns of social relations among the indigenous peoples of Tlaxcala” (25).