A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond. Issue 1 (4th February 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Premo, Bianca; Yannakakis, Yanna
• Is Part Of: American historical review. Volume 124:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 28
• Page End: 55
• Publication Date: 2019-02-04
• Subjects: indigenous law -- jurisdiction -- colonialism -- early modern justice -- native courts -- ethnohistory; United States -- History -- Periodicals; History -- Periodicals; 973.005
• DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhy574
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0002-8762

Abstract

Abstract: Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case from southern Mexico, centered on the 1683 arrest of a native man named Juan Matías at a makeshift court built on a wheat field, provides both. Close attention to this case, supplemented with regional and temporal comparison, offers glimpses of how imperial law on the books animated local understandings of jurisdiction on the ground. In turn, in the very act of translating local events and native practices for a Spanish judge, Juan Matías demonstrates how jurisdiction—in this case "Indian jurisdiction, " a unique plane of native authority within the Spanish Empire—was not merely captured on the page in legal documentation but produced through it by native judges and legal agents.