This guide, with its index, opens doors for researchers seeking to know rural Mexico in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The documents deal with lawsuits over land, disputes with Indians (four documents are in Nahuatl), genealogies, entails, and haciendas (descriptions, ownership, boundaries, value). Records for the Hacienda del Batán near Texcoco span a period from 1570 to the mid-1700s. The data on these ex-Jesuit lands acquired by the first Conde de Regla in the 1770s are long on legal battles and, according to John E. Kicza in his foreword, short on profitability calculations, workers’ situations, marketing, and management. In addition, the political content is missing. Mining documents and personal papers are still in Mexico City. (Edith B. Couturier has read letters of love and adulation to the first Conde de Regla from his wife —and his mother-in-law).
The Regla Papers emphasize the economic activities of the three Condes de Regla and their family members, with agricultural enterprises expanded by lands brought into the family through marriage. In Mexico City, full documentation of the Monte de Piedad, founded by the first conde in 1775, is complete to the 1890s.
This guide is divided into five parts. The first was catalogued by Jacquelyn M. Gaines, research assistant in Spanish, in 1949 and published in her Three Centuries of Mexican Documents (1963). The second part, the Gastine-Fieler sequence, was bought from an art dealer in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The third part is the Jesuit hacienda sequence. The fourth part includes maps, charts, and genealogies, and the fifth is a microfilm collection, assembled in the 1940s from papers not allowed to leave Mexico. Adele Knox researched the members of the Regla families, other families related to them, and place names. Unpublished, her work has been organized into a “Regla Supporting Materials Collection” at the archive.
The Regla papers will prove easy to use. Each entry in this guide features a Spanish title and an English-language description, plus the dates and numbers of folios. Miffed at not finding a citation for women in the index, I found in the entries women revealing themselves as strong, active, and competent —owning mines; buying, selling, and leasing lands; petitioning for water rights; suing for bad loans and restitution of dowries; inheriting entails. Two women stand out. The second Condesa de Regla had a dowry consisting of slaves, land, jewelry, and household items. María Velasco y Ovando, sister of the Condesa de Santiago, was given sole rights to manage the Salvatierra properties, with their waters, Indian litigation, and maize, wheat, barley, and pulque production.
The Regla Papers provides an excellent guide for a little-known archive.
