From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / David Yetman
In 1640 or somewhat earlier the first non-clerical Spaniards settled in Sonora and in so doing stirred up a conflict with Sonoran Indians over land rights that lasted for nearly two decades, from roughly 1640 through 1658.1 Jesuit missionaries advised the Indians to take legal action against the settlers. The document that appears in this article portrays the strategy the Indians and their advisors employed to reclaim lands that Spaniards had taken from them. It also reveals the response of Spanish courts to those strategies.
Led by a military captain on a civilian mission, Spanish soldiers and settlers (the two often played the same role) ventured into what is now Sonora, not seeking a military conquest but intent on establishing a colony. Their foray had the full backing of the Crown, and they considered their mission a license to civilize the region, i.e., establish an enclave of Spanish culture, institute European customs and norms to guide the “barbarian” native peoples, and, even more important, extract wealth from the land. If Indians stood in the way of convenient development of human and natural resources, so much the worse for them. In this case, the nondescript Eudeve settlement of Tuape on the Río San Miguel, a minor, ephemeral stream in central Sonora, became the location of a struggle that would be repeated numerous times in northwest New Spain in the following 150 years. It would also symbolize the conflicting cur-rents in Spanish expansionism: evangelizing and pacifying native peoples versus expanding the royal treasury and establishing Spanish colonies in lands claimed by the king. The conflict would set the stage for Sonora’s colonization and outsiders’ eventual appropriation of Indian lands and Indian water. The clash of forces would continue through the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and on through Mexican independence. It continues today in the form of the neoliberal drive against cooperatively and communally owned lands in Mexico.
In the Tuape case, the facts clearly favored the Indians, as all parties acknowledged, yet the authorities were reluctant to rule in their favor. With evidence presented by a Jesuit who knew the Indians well, sup-ported by the Indians’ intimate knowledge of the land and their stub-born persistence and the demonstrable improbability of the Spaniards’ land claims, the Spanish courts were forced to recognize the validity of the Indians’ petition. Still, the courts, as far as the documentary record demonstrates, did not rule against the settlers. Instead, they brought pressure on the Spaniards involved to relinquish their holdings without issuing a formal ruling against them.
Prior to 1640 the only Europeans to be found in Sonora, apart from a smattering of prospectors in search of precious metals, were priests—a couple of dozen Jesuits and a small handful of Franciscans. These resided in newly created mission communities, not on landed estates under private ownership. Indeed, the Crown entrusted Jesuits with “pacifying” the natives, converting them to Catholicism, and shaping them into a new breed of peasantry freed from their “savage” past, humbly, quietly, and piously tilling the land and reaping harvests. […]
