Scholars of colonial Spanish America are divided between those who cherish Spaniards for respecting indigenous land rights and those who denounce them for not having done so. For the first group, Spanish respect was enshrined in political and theological debates and in legislation and practice that from the sixteenth century asserted that natives had right to the lands they possessed before Europeans arrived. For the second group, native dispossession was a dominant feature of colonial life. Whatever the theory may have mandated, the balance of power favored non-natives by allowing them access to a wide variety of social, legal, political, economic, and cultural instruments enabling them to control the land.

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica's relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation's supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica's tradition of “rural democracy.”

As the sun was setting on December 12, 1907, the 16-year-old Tecla Xicay and her sister Inocenta were returning to their village of Tonajuyu, San Martín Jilotepeque (henceforth San Martín), in highland Guatemala when a portly ladino with a thin blonde mustache jumped out from behind a gate, took off his shoes, and attempted to rape Tecla. When she resisted, he hit her twice in the neck and then stabbed her in the back as she fled. Illiterate and monolingual speakers of Kaqchikel-Maya (henceforth Kaqchikel), the sisters recounted their harrowing ordeal through an interpreter the next day in Chimaltenango's municipal court. Apparentiy eager to escape the grasp of the state and ladino world, the two indigenous women did not tarry in Chimaltenango. Despite the military surgeon's insistence that Xicay be admitted to the hospital to cure her open wound, she refused, saying she would take care of it herself. Ladino and patriarchal in their design and operation, institutions such as courts and hospitals that held the potential to assist indigenous women often alienated them.

In studying the nuances of any legal term from the colonial period in Latin America it is always good to have recourse to the Siete Partidas, the compilation of royal law promulgated, and some say written, by the famous thirteenth-century Castilian monarch, Alfonso X, often called “The Wise.”