The growth of Mesoamerican ethnohistory has resulted in a number of monographs on Indian communities of the postconquest period that make use of local documentation, an important part of it in Nahuatl. Previous studies of this type have dealt with the Tlaxcala-Puebla area; Susan Cline now contributes a study of Culhuacán, a town in the Valley of Mexico. Cline’s book is primarily an analysis of a collection of testaments made in Culhuacán between 1572 and 1606, which has recently been published by the author and Miguel León-Portilla with both the Nahuatl text and an English translation. Although many Nahuatl testaments have survived, it is unusual to have such a large number of them from a single community at a given time in its history.
As Cline points out, the testaments closely follow Spanish legal norms, but they provide, in Nahuatl and in terms of indigenous concepts, rich information on a variety of subjects such as family, material possessions, inheritance, commerce, and land tenure. It is on such subjects that the book is best documented. To give coherence to the analysis, the lives and deaths of a set of relatives well represented in the testaments are followed throughout the book. The wills also shed light on local institutions, which are used to organize the book’s division into chapters.
An outline of the historical background of Culhuacán is followed by a discussion of local government during the late sixteenth century, an example of a system widespread at the time, with a gobernador and a cabildo, all positions filled by members of the local native nobility. Nahuatl kinship is well illustrated, as is the ritual godparenthood successfully introduced by the Spanish. A system of partible inheritance prevailed in which women participated, but it is not clear to what extent Spanish law had affected Indian practices in this respect. Bequests for masses were also common. The most prominent types of wealth bequeathed were land and houses; movable goods are also listed, providing in effect a material culture inventory, showing the coexistence of native items with goods of Spanish origin such as metal tools and horses.
Land tenure is one of the most important subjects for which this study gives new documentation. Some of the native categories of land known from the historical sources are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the wills. Other categories appear that are not described in the standard sources but cannot be fully elucidated by the data available. Most notable are the frequent references to land sales and to the category of purchased as against inherited land. Although some pre-Hispanic precedents for land sales exist, Cline concludes that “the development of a full-scale real estate market is probably the most important change from the pre-Hispanic period” (p. 159).
Four appendixes give: 1) a list of prices from about 1580; 2) Spanish loanwords in Nahuatl; 3) the Nahuatl text with English translation of a testament now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and 4) the Nahuatl text with English translation of documents in the Archivo General de la Nación in reference to the estate of a noble lady of Culhuacán.
This book, together with the previous publication of the testaments, constitutes a basic corpus for the study of a colonial Indian community. Cline’s illuminating discussion gives us an intimate portrayal of the people of sixteenth-century Culhuacán.
