The Two, the One, the Many, the None: Rethinking the Republics of Spaniards and Indians in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Indies

Abstract

For a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using extensive archival evidence, this article suggests that the Mörner Thesis of the Two Republics is flawed. Historicizing sixteenth-century uses of the concept of the republic, it finds that contemporaries conceived of a complex social order in which many political communities such as municipalities and groups of petitioners could overlap within larger meta-republics, such as the Indies republic and the Christian faith-republic. It then turns to subjects’ uses of the two republics, noting that this conceptual duality appeared rarely in the petitions of Spanish officials, commoners, Indians, Afro-descendants, and mestizos, and was also rare in royal and viceregal legislation. Moreover, this binary most often served to suggest Spaniards’ and Indians’ common ground. The article then reflects on other approaches to understanding the Indies’ Spanish-Indian binary, the place of non-Spanish, non-Indian vassals within republic-thinking, and the staggering complexity of Indies laws, categories, and social interactions.

In the early 1600s, a number of printed treatises and manuscripts theorized about a major legal and social dichotomy within the Spanish Empire: the republics of Spaniards and Indians.¹ English-language readers might have first encountered these republics in Samuel Purchas's 1625 Purchas his Pilgrimes. He argued that “there is a twofold gouernment in the Indies, one of Spaniards, which is the same with that of Spaine; the other of Indians.”² The Englishman was drawing from the 1614 Historia y viage del mundo by the priest Pedro Ordoñez de Zevallos, who observed after having traveled through Peru that the republic of the Spaniards governed itself separately from the “second republic [which] is of the Indians,” each “very contrary” to the other.³

A sharply contrasting view appeared in Friar Miguel Agia's 1604 printed Servidumbres personales de Indios, which he wrote in Peru at the end of the 1590s. Agia wrote of a single republic—the “república indiana,” or Indies republic.⁴ His extensive petition on Peruvian labor and mining exhorted the monarch and his officials to uphold “the common good of the Indians and the Spaniards, for they are all vassals of your Majesty and members of the body of this Republic.”⁵ The Republic was one, not two. Another theorist, Pedro Mexía de Ovando, wrote a manuscript for publication around 1639 about his experience in Santo Domingo in the 1590s. There, he argued, the Spaniards formed a “Castilian republic,” which, despite its name, also included foreigners and blacks.⁶ However, “the Indians do not have a republic,” because they could not unite in a “civil body composed of mixed and diverse elements . . . under a single authority, leader, and spirit.”⁷ But the confusion did not stop there. An anonymous letter, perhaps by the Peruvian viceroy in the 1630s, characterized the New World as a republic, then posited the existence of the “republic of the Indians,” and continued to list innumerable other republics that had no formal institutional or legal existence: the “republic of the citizens” and industrial workers, the “republic of the merchants,” the “republic of the miners,” and others.⁸

The two republics, the one, the many, the none—how did these overlapping concepts coexist legally, socially, and conceptually in the Indies? Before unraveling this paradox, we must first historicize the idea of the “republic” or “república” within its early modern context, an undertaking that in the context of the Spanish New World remains to this day a “challenge,” in the words of one historian.⁹ Most works on the 2000-plus years of the concept's career in Europe focus primarily on tracing a genealogy “from . . . Aristotle, to the Florence of Bruni and Machiavelli, to Venice, England, and the American Republic.”¹⁰ Some authors have even discarded the possibility of a history of the republic within the Catholic world entirely.¹¹ Many scholars of the New World's Age of Revolutions have nonetheless found the term to be quite widely used in late eighteenth-century Iberian works, especially liberal constitutional writings, and have begun to explore its history within anti-monarchical contexts.¹² Historians are gradually recognizing the importance of the term in early modern Spain.¹³

Studies of the idea of the republic in the critical sixteenth-century Indies remain in their infancy, likely because scholars have thought republican thinking in this ostensibly hidebound monarchist context impossible.¹⁴ What is becoming clear is that both Iberian and Indies thinkers spoke of republics constantly, understanding the republic not only as a type of sovereign non-monarchical state but also as a “community constituted into a political body—ruled by justice and law—whose end was the common good, regardless of its form of government.”¹⁵ Early modern Spanish printed juridical treatises drew (often creatively) from Aristotle and Cicero to define republics as harmonious communities of shared interests, often headed by authorities who governed the commons. These republics, despite their unity, could be comprised of heterogenous individuals, families, and other collectives. Some Spanish authors, like Francisco de Vitoria (1532), Juan Fernández Medrano (1602) and Friar Juan de Santa María (1615), envisioned these republics needing leaders, laws, and institutions, while others like Alonso de Castrillo (1521), Furió Ceriol (1559), Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla (1597), Martín González de Cellorigo (1600), and Ramírez de Prado (1617) simply defined the republic as any supra-familial social body united by a shared public interest.¹⁶ Indeed, as we shall see in the pages that follow, many Indies petitioners, treaty-writers, and royal officials invoked the concept to describe communities that could be very concrete or completely theoretical, or anywhere in between, often rendering the term “republic” a floating signifier.¹⁷

On the rather rare occasions that today's scholars acknowledge and explore the existence of republics within early sixteenth-century Indies’ society and policy, they almost always point to the two republics as they appear in the writings of Purchas and Ordoñez. This model has survived in past decades thanks largely to the writings of the eminent Swedish historian Magnus Mörner, who argued influentially in the late 1960s and 1970s that the “crown maintained a strict division between the towns of the Spanish and of the Indians.”¹⁸ From this division of local communities arose the dualist notion of Indians and Spanish as socially incompatible, legally distinct, segregated “estates” which officials were to socially segregate from one another.¹⁹ These two republics constituted a true “system” influenced by the era's “very static concept of society” and formalized legally through “precepts from the metropolitan government.”²⁰ Despite the crown's “tenacious” efforts to impose this dual sociolegal order, the era's endemic disobedience of royal and viceregal policies and vassals’ incessant miscegenation caused the system to collapse.²¹ I call this the Mörner Thesis of the Two Republics. In the past 50-odd years, this binary vision of Indies difference has reigned almost unchallenged.²² The dichotomy of Purchas and Ordoñez thus survived, drowning out the more nuanced statements of their contemporaries Agia, Ovando, and many others.

The historiography has since enshrined Mörner's Two Republics model as one of the most singular aspects of the Spanish Empire. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti state, “The Americas were . . . unique in the division of imperial subjects into the ‘república de españoles’ and the ‘república de indios.’”²³ María Elena Martínez calls this “one of the most distinctive aspects of Spanish colonial rule.”²⁴ This central historiographical construct is deeply flawed, however, and has not been subjected to archival scrutiny since Mörner first articulated it in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Mörner Thesis ignores the almost total formal absence of the two-republics concept in sixteenth-century imperial decrees and petitions, distorts the era's understanding of the idea of the ‘republic,’ makes the crown out to be much more invested in social engineering than it was, and vastly oversimplifies Indians’ complex statuses within viceregal society and policy.

Some scholars have begun to signal that a reevaluation of the two-republics model is overdue. Already in 1975 Woodrow Borah suggested that this viewpoint actually “ran counter to the thinking of the bulk of the Spanish conquerors and settlers,” as well as that of many friars and officials.²⁵ Tatiana Seijas has recently noted that the term was “rarely used in the early colonial period.”²⁶ Additionally, Joanne Rappaport has argued for more recognition of “the notion of heterogenous social worlds [which pose] a counterpoint to the persistent myth of two hermetically sealed republics.”²⁷ Tamar Herzog has stated that the construct “never fully exist[ed],” and that these republics “were said to have ‘fallen’ before they were ever instituted.”²⁸ And most recently, Max Deardorff has noted that the “Latin American colonial historiography is moving away from an earlier emphasis on the “Two Republic” model,” by recognizing the complexity of the Indies’ many political communities (albeit without directly confronting this concept).²⁹

A critical evaluation of the Mörner Thesis and a historicization of the two-republics concept in the sixteenth century are thus necessary. Drawing from the extensive archival sources that many vassals produced throughout the sixteenth century New World, this article begins by contextualizing how Spanish, Indian, some Afro-descendant, and some part-Indian, part-Spanish vassals, as well as Indies officials and the Council of the Indies, employed ideas of ‘republics’ in sixteenth-century petitions and legislation. It finds that the era's few references to two republics rarely held a straightforward relationship with Mörner's vision of a crown-ordered sociolegal system of Spanish-Indian segregation. To the contrary, when this rare binary vision did appear in petitions and decrees, it more often than not served to underscore that these two very different groups had fundamentally shared interests. Some even employed this dualism to argue against segregation and in favor of these societies’ integration. And because of the inherent vagueness of the republic concept, and thinkers’ acceptance of the existence of overlapping republics within republics, writers could conjure up countless variations of the common good simultaneously and without risk of contradiction.

Thus while the Mörner Thesis finds support in a very reduced number of documents that invoke the concept of two separate Spanish and Indian republics, other visions of republics, often kaleidoscopically complex, and the place of Spaniards and Indians within them, were far more common. First proving the almost total inapplicability of the Mörner Thesis for sixteenth-century Indies society, this essay then briefly explores some of the historiographical consequences of this model's absence. It gestures towards the richness and fluidity of the Spanish-Indian legal dualism, reflects on new directions for our understanding of Afro-descendant and other vassals’ imagined place within Indian and Spanish communities, and points to the intricacy of Indies segregation, which certainly existed at times, albeit under a far less systematic framework and alongside projects of assimilation.

Many Republics: Municipalities, Their Affairs, and Their Officers

The proliferation of Spanish municipalities—some 170 by the early 1600s—meant that the ‘republic’ most often appears in sixteenth-century documents in the context of local government.³⁰ Petitions and decrees constantly used the term when describing municipal-level affairs relating to the common good: matters of local justice, policing, land distribution, food, upkeep of roads, and so forth.³¹ From at least the 1520s onward, decrees abundantly reflected this vocabulary.³² Municipalities themselves issued abundant acts and ordinances using the term as well.³³ Countless petitioners and decrees described city councilmen and other justices as the ‘officials of the republic.’³⁴ To be a member of the community who valued the common good over selfish interests made one “very republican” or “invested in the republic.”³⁵ Petitioners and the crown also employed the concept to draw a contrast between city councils’ spheres of influence and those of other jurisdictions, especially the royal Indies courts, or audiencias.³⁶

Early in the Spanish conquest and settlement, officials and other vassals suggested that Indians would benefit from similar styles of municipal government. References to Indian town-republics proliferated as petitioners debated whether municipalization was feasible.³⁷ Despite widespread initial doubts, in some regions these city councils took root by the dozens, even hundreds.³⁸ Through a mix of Spanish force and Indian desire to congregate, heterogenous municipal governments run by indigenous officials began forming in central Mexico by the 1530s, the Yucatan by the 1550s, Peru by the 1560s, and New Granada by the 1590s. Royal decrees, viceregal edicts, and municipal rulings therefore often referred to Indian municipalities (or similar local institutions) as republics.³⁹

Indian communities subsequently developed new European-inspired vocabularies to describe their communities. The Nahuas often called their community spheres altepetl, the Zapotec yetze or quèche, the Maya cab, the Ñuu Dzahui ñuu, the Muisca gue, and so forth, with many regional and linguistic variations. In their Spanish-language petitions to the king, the viceroys, and others, Indians also described their municipal sphere of common good using the term ‘republic.’ Noting the practice of their Spanish counterparts, Indians taking municipal office began to call themselves “officials of the republic” as well.⁴⁰

Many scholars have confused these local Spanish and Indian town-republics by considering them instances of the Mörner Thesis.⁴¹ The multiplication of Spanish city councils did not directly and immediately prompt contemporaries to embrace widespread views of a unified republic, for each of these had differing praxes and municipal legislation.⁴² For the Indian case, an even greater diversity of municipal forms arose. Far from creating two segregated republics á la Mörner, municipalization created an abundance of kaleidoscopically complex institutions for managing the public good. In a 1536 decree about local justice officials’ praxes, the crown mentioned in passing that Indian “pueblos,” each a “republic,” formed part of the “good of the Republic,” meaning “New Spain.”⁴³ In a 1571 report to the viceroy, corregidor (field justice) Polo de Ondegardo theorized that Peru was partly comprised of many “republics of the Spanish.”⁴⁴ Few visions of this plurality starkly divided Spanish and Indian interests. For instance, Cuzco's 1572 municipal ordinances claimed to uphold measures “convenient for the government of the republics of these states of your Majesty.”⁴⁵

High-ranking officials shared this view of provinces and viceroyalties comprising many republics, both Spanish and Indian. In a 1570 letter to the crown, the bishop of Quito proposed a number of reforms, intended to safeguard “the general good of the republics of the provinces of Quito.”⁴⁶ A circa 1594 report to the crown by Mexican viceroy Luis de Velasco referred to a multitude of “republics of Indians” that mutually benefited from cattle ranching along with Spanish ones. But he also referred to a greater “republic” sustained by these many town-republics—the whole—which was by implication the viceroyalty of Mexico itself.⁴⁷

Greater Republics: Provinces, Viceroyalties, the Indies, Christianity, and Beyond

The preceding reference reveals another stratum the republic the concept could occupy: the viceroyalty. In a 1553 petition to the crown, Antonio Rodríguez de Quesada, judge (oidor) of Mexico's audiencia, praised the viceroy as a “true father of this republic.”⁴⁸ He also complained in a 1554 letter that a certain prohibition on Indians providing tribute had caused “great shortages for the provision of the republic . . . in the cities and villas of all this New Spain.”⁴⁹ Likewise, the viceroyalty of Peru sometimes appeared as a republic. Interim president Lope García de Castro noted in a 1565 edict that various Spanish municipalities had sent petitions complaining that Peru's Indians did not serve their rotational labor, which was “a great inconvenience and damage to the republic” as a whole.⁵⁰ An undated, anonymous petition about Potosí promised to “give your majesty news of the republic of Peru,” including mining reforms in the “body of the republic” that would ensure that the “head of the republic,” its mineral wealth, could be preserved.⁵¹ And some time in the 1560s, the lawyer Licenciado Francisco Falcón Díaz petitioned the viceroy of Peru to argue for labor reforms so important “for the sustenance of the republic,” which term he used interchangeably with “this realm of Peru.”⁵² Royal legislation mirrored these usages. One 1535 royal decree sought to reform Mexico's mint, to achieve “what is most convenient . . . to the good of the republic of that New Spain.”⁵³ Another phrased in similar terms, from 1567, once again sought to reform the mint, using the same language.⁵⁴

A province might also constitute a republic. In a 1569 decree prompted by a legal agent representing a confederation of Spanish cities, the province of the Yucatan appeared as “all the republic.”⁵⁵ Puerto Rico appeared in a 1574 petition as a “land” (tierra) and a “poor republic.”⁵⁶ And a 1562 royal decree referred to the Zacatecas mining area vaguely in relation to “all the republic,” implying the Nueva Galicia region formed such a unit.⁵⁷

The Spanish Indies was not only comprised of town-republics, province-republics, and viceroyalty-republics, but was also one itself. A 1528 decree contrasted Castile with the “said republic” of the Indies as it ordered officials to be wary of fraudulent petitions for privilege.⁵⁸ Graviel de Osada of Madrid won a February 14, 1556, patent decree featuring a new mill design of “much utility and benefit to the republic of our Indies.” A 1565 ordinance recapitulating a 1563 decree won by the Cortes of Castile and dedicated to reducing Indies women's and men's lavish spending on clothing stated, “We desire to see the land founded in good government (policía) . . . so that in her the republic is conserved and augmented, and so that it does not fall into diminution nor poverty.”⁵⁹ One witness reported to the Inquisition's visitador Juan de Ovando during his late 1560s investigation of the affairs of the Council of the Indies and New World that it was “necessary to cleanse the Republic of the Indies of indolent men.”⁶⁰

There was an even more expansive and inclusive political community, the Christian republic—the ultimate community.⁶¹ The Indies were only one part of this global faith-republic. Licenciado Gaspar de Espinosa wrote from Panama in 1533 that Peru's mineral wealth could fund war against the Ottomans, resulting in a better “defense [and] conservation of our Holy Catholic Faith, which indebts the Christian Republic”—that is, the besieged Christians of the Old World.⁶² Medical doctor Pedro López wrote the king from Mexico City seeking help to fund a hospital for lepers, which he claimed would be “of use to the entire Christian republic.”⁶³ Friar Alonso Maldonado, in an undated 1560s petition to the crown, stated that the Indies were comprised of many town-republics, but were also a single community: “the Christian republic of Spaniards and Indians is all one—and all have one king and lord.”⁶⁴ Maldonado argued that as Christians and equals, not only Indians but also Spaniards should be obligated to pay tribute and take up agricultural trades. In one case, a vassal formulated the opposite argument about labor vis-à-vis republics: Indians should provide labor within the faith-republic because the Spaniards had provided them with the spiritual service of salvation. In 1559, conquistador-miner Pedro de Ahumada argued that Spaniards were justly superior to Indians precisely because they allowed for the “growth and ennoblement” of “this Christian republic, which is the foundation of this new Church.”⁶⁵

Some writers envisioned a harmonious faith-republic in the Indies’ future, suggesting it did not yet exist. Friar Gaspar de Recarte of New Spain stated as much in his dense 1584 manuscript about the legality of forcing Indian groups to provide rotational community labor (the repartimiento). Yes, he noted, “in the Primitive Church, by divine will, the holy Apostles” managed to bring together “peoples of many nations” into a “concordant republic.” In the present, officials trampled the Christian republic by disregarding what was good for Indian communities. The result of these abuses was the “sad and helpless manner” in which the “Indian republic,” comprised both of Indians and Spaniards, currently found itself.⁶⁶ Thus the Indies-republic had not yet become an apostolic Christian faith-republic, but might in the future.

Royal legislation rarely employed the notion of the faith-republic explicitly. A 1560 decree stated that vassals should aid the inquisitors by providing information for the “benefit of the Christian republic.”⁶⁷ A July 3, 1573, ordinance did so in a number of ways. It repeatedly mentioned the Council of the Indies’ desire for a “description of the Christian republic of the Indies.”⁶⁸ On one occasion, it stated explicitly that it hoped to use this information to reinvigorate the faith. The ordinance stated that “the main cause due to which we have with such diligence ordered the description of the whole orb of the Indies, and especially the Christian republic of them” was to propagate the evangelion. It also stressed the need for local officials to be upright, for “it is not enough for the republic to be well formed in its members, and instituted with good laws and ordinances, if there are not individuals appointed to public offices who can rule and uphold it.”⁶⁹

Writers sometimes made more exotic references to the existence of other types of republics. In one particularly unorthodox series of usages from 1571, corregidor Polo de Ondegardo wrote (likely to the viceroy) that in highland Peru there was a multiplicity of Indian town-republics, along with a single “republic of the poor and rich,” a unitary republic of Spaniards and Indians, and a “republic of the Tahuantinsuyo Indians” in Cuzco, all at once.⁷⁰ In some cases, petitioners also vaguely alluded to a single Spanish-Indian republic. For instance, on March 1, 1576, the Franciscans of the Yucatan described a famine that was causing “great hunger in the republic of the Spaniards and Indians.”⁷¹ The president of Quito wrote similarly in 1597 that the Indies were made up of a single “republic of Spaniards and Indians.”⁷² And a 1561 petition by the city council of Mexico even stated that there were “three Republics, one of Spaniards, and two of Indians”—one urban, the other rural, and “all woven into one another.”⁷³ None of these unconventional uses existed in law or juridical theory at the time.

As the previous examples suggest, these innumerable political communities could exist alongside or within one another, without implying their hermetic isolation, let alone antagonism. Indeed, some authors clearly believed in shared Indian and Spanish interests within these republics. A circa 1550 report by Mexico officials regarding indigenous tribute payment suggested that Indian governors should not grant land to Spaniards, as this damaged a single republic which encompassed both groups.⁷⁴ In 1576, a group of dispirited Mexica conquistadors in the Yucatan petitioned the crown for tribute exemptions, arguing they had acted “in the service of our republic,” including the peninsula's Spaniards and Indians.⁷⁵ In one of the Florentine Nicolao de Albenino's 1582 letters to the viceroy about the city of Potosí, he argued that “the good of this republic is all one”—that is, that the city was a composite of Spaniards and Indians with shared interests.⁷⁶ And in at least one curious case the town-republic sought measures against both Indians and Spaniards. In 1554, oidor Quesada proposed a number of reforms for the “growth of the Republic” that included building a fortress near the South Sea [the Gulf of Mexico] to thwart future “uprisings of Indians and Spaniards.”⁷⁷

The Republic of Spaniards and the Republic of Indians

“Republic” was thus a vague term—a tangible sphere of common good like a town, province, viceroyalty, or realm, or a less tangible one like a global faith group, class, or ethnicity. Larger republics also enclosed smaller ones without contradiction. With this understanding of the rich spectrum of sixteenth-century usages of the concept, we can begin to reframe the era's conceptualizations of the republics of Spaniards and Indians, and in doing so, test the Mörner Thesis.

The first of these abstract, binary republics to emerge as an isolated notion was the republic of Spaniards. In a February 7, 1554, report to the king, the Mexican viceroy employed this version of the term, along with an array of other ‘republics,’ to press for various reforms. He stressed how he had sought to avoid “becoming enemies with the republic of Spaniards,” and fretted: “I believe in the name of this city and the whole republic of the Spaniards of all of this New Spain [their petitioners] will go plead that Your Majesty grant them the privilege of implementing the repartimiento.”⁷⁸ He also included references to how Spaniards and Indians administered “their republics,” and praised Indian municipal officials “who are in charge of the republic” and were encouraging the “growth of the republics.”⁷⁹ We can surmise that the viceroy's conceptual republic of Spaniards was the sum and alliance of all Spanish municipal procurators, a political republic that arose situationally but did not constitute a permanent collective. For others, the republic might be more concrete and also might transcend mere political activity. Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente wrote in 1555 that Bartolomé de las Casas's polemical vision of wicked Spaniards “defames a republic and a nation.”⁸⁰

The republic of Indians had also appeared as a stand-alone concept in some petitions by the late 1550s. A group of Indians, likely writing the Peruvian president in the late 1550s or 1560s, claimed to speak “in favor of their republics.” They also stated that they wished to propose reforms that concerned “the whole republic of the Indians.”⁸¹ In other words, theirs was a political community comprised of many town-republics.

High officials also employed the term to mean a meta-republic within the viceregal community. Sometime in the mid-to-late-1550s the official Hernando de Santillán wrote from Lima or Chile complaining that officials had failed to attend to the “conservation of the republic of the natives.”⁸² The Mexican viceroy titled his 1568 report “The matters which have need of remedy regarding the Republic of the Indians of the land of Mexico, and of that Realm,” addressing issues related to alleviating labor demands and separating Spaniards from Indians except in exceptional circumstances.⁸³ The governor of Chile Martín García de Loyola wrote the crown in 1581 about mail reforms benefiting the “republic of these natives,” and “the Republic of the Indians,” while stating also, about Peru, that its “republic is comprised of people on the move” (gente de paso). His Peru was a multilayered composite of republics, including one of natives.⁸⁴ This formulation was rare in crown legislation. One Peruvian viceroy's petitions prompted a 1589 royal decree that stressed the abolition of Indian servitude and the introduction of fair labor wages, which the crown agreed would be good “for that republic,” that is, for the Indians.⁸⁵ This may have been the sole piece of sixteenth- century legislation to refer to the Indian republic in isolation.

This brings us to the historiography's vaunted two republics. Where did this conceptual binary come from, and what attributes did the crown, officials, and vassals assign it? Numerous scholars have erroneously stated that the king, the Council of the Indies, and high-ranking officials sought to implement the two republics immediately upon conquering the Indies. Others have asserted that this sociolegal construct was already in full swing by 1530s. A smaller number of scholars have correctly indicated that it emerged sometime in the 1550s, or even later.⁸⁶

Indeed, the earliest formal reference I have found to this dichotomy is in Friar Toribio's May 15, 1550, petition to the crown. The influential Franciscan stressed the need to balance Spanish and Indian interests, for “it is just that in the republic there be differences of persons and estates . . . like there are, in Spain, gentlemen and hidalgos who do not pay tribute.” Similarly, in the Indies it was only natural that there would be “people who would be free and exempt” of labor burdens. However, he warned that the crown should be wary lest “providing for the republic of the Spaniards, that [republic] of the Indians be depleted and consumed.”⁸⁷ This was likely not the first time anyone thinking about the Indies considered the two republics, of course, given what we know about how vague and adaptable this concept could be to virtually any context. Its appearance in writing was nonetheless significant, for it shows that influential figures had begun to reflect on this conceptual binary by the early 1550s.

Subsequent writings featuring the two republics rarely corresponded with the Mörner Thesis of incompatible interests and rigid segregation. The Franciscan order's undated instructions for its Madrid legal agent from the second half of the sixteenth century stated that Indians should not mix their municipal governments with the “republic of Spaniards,” considering that they were “very different.”⁸⁸ More explicitly, the Italian mercantile official Luis de León Romano wrote from Mexico City in 1553 that the crown should create Spanish-only towns and prevent Spaniards from living in Indian ones so that “these republics will divide in a manner that one will not aggravate or aggrieve the other.” He did not believe that this division of republics currently existed in New Spain. Spanish and Indian societies were already deeply intertwined—the Italian wrote of numerous disorderly Indian town-republics invaded by Spaniards. But Indians also corrupted Spaniards. He complained that the “young men of our republic” grew up in the immoral Indian marketplace, and that this ill-mannered youth “in our republic as well as that of the natives” showed signs that they might eventually grow disloyal to the crown. Solutions eluded officials because the “republic” in general (perhaps Indian municipalities, Mexico City, the viceroyalty, or the Indies) had “not been understood due to being different from all these others which exist among mankind.”⁸⁹

Another report that envisioned these two worlds as quite antagonistic came from Charcas treasurer Diego de Robles. He informed the crown sometime in the 1590s that while the Indies formed a united republic, comprised of many town-republics, the Council of the Indies should nonetheless understand that “in those Realms there are two communes of republics, the one of Indians, and the other of Spaniards, each one contrary in every way to the other.” However, they were not to be completely separated, for without one another they “cannot provide subsistence to themselves, or sustain themselves.” For this reason, the crown had to encourage measures favorable to the “republic with less strength and aid”—that of the Indians.⁹⁰ Sometime in the late 1590s, the legal agent Domingo de Eraso alleged on behalf of unspecified Chilean clients that the province's governor had “found the republic of the said Indians destroyed” at the hands of Spaniards, and suggested the Council offer more financial support to the protectors of Indians.⁹¹ Perhaps no communication was more vehement than Antonio Freire's 1593 petition from Quito, which alleged that local Spanish justices grievously abused Indians and that absolute segregation was imperative. He fumed, “The Spanish republic is the mortal enemy of the Indians,” and its officials “impoverish the republic of the natives.”⁹²

At least two officials suggested that segregation could contribute to the common good of both Indians and Spaniards. Charcas president Juan López de Cepeda promised in a 1585 letter to implement a royal decree forcing encomenderos out of Indian towns, a measure he considered “very in the service of God and your majesty and the good of one republic and the other.”⁹³ In another 1588 report, he suggested moving against “so many Spanish vagrants,” not only to help Indians but to remedy the “damages done to the republics of Spaniards and Indians.”⁹⁴ In 1583 an oidor of Santa Fé, Francisco Guillén Chaparro, suggested that while Spaniards often invaded Indian lands, this problem could and should be solved by officials’ careful division of local property, “for these two republics of Spaniards and Indians [both] require sustenance.”⁹⁵

The Two Republics, Beyond Antagonism and Segregation

Aside from this handful of invocations of the two republics, which do conform quite closely with the Mörner Thesis, most suggested Spanish and Indian republics shared fundamentally common interests and should not be segregated. Some even suggested that these two societies were converging, for the better. In his 1551 letter to the crown, Guatemalan oidor Tomás López Medel used the binary not to describe two permanently separate societies, but to state instead that though “these two republics of the Spaniards and natives” were quite different they would hopefully become so “together and so fraternized” that any damage done to one would befall the other.⁹⁶ In 1554 the Franciscan Juan de San Francisco suggested that the Council attempt to issue certain reforms to “provide [policies] for that which concerns the good government of these two republics” in order to “join and confederate these two so very different nations.”⁹⁷

Another petitioner, Friar Cristóbal de Ortega, reflected longer than most on the nature of this antagonism. He suggested that great opposition and mutual support coexisted in the two republics, and proposed an intricate solution allowing for Spaniards and Indians to harmoniously coexist. Writing from somewhere in Mexico in the second half of the sixteenth century, Ortega noted that he and certain other vassals favored a “New Spain divided into two republics, one of Indians and the other of Spaniards.” The republic of Indians currently had its own ordinances and community practices. This republic was also legitimately inhabited by some Spanish individuals, however. He noted, “In this republic, all the Spaniards who contribute to or are necessary for the conservation of Christianity . . . and good government” were “useful persons.” Consequently, some Spaniards—churchmen and officials especially—could be legitimately “incorporated and make a body” with the republic of Indians. For Ortega, there was also a separate republic of Spaniards, which included anyone who did not help Indians “by office nor by desire,” especially self-serving “miners, merchants, and other sorts of people who only procure their own comfort.” While noting that matters were currently strained between these two republics due to many Spaniards’ lack of concern for the Indians’ well-being, the friar could imagine future harmony and integration serving “the common good not only of the Spanish republic but also that of the Indians.” Even in the present, the friar noted, “they eat in our homes, and we in theirs.”⁹⁸

Some went further than to suggest limited interests that would cross republics. Officials might employ the dichotomy to discourage legal segregation outright. In 1590, oidor Alonso de las Cabezas de Meneses criticized those who believed Spaniards should distance themselves from Indians and cease to force them to provide labor. This would return Indians to their idolatrous ways and “destroy at every point the Spanish republic, and that of the Indians would be destroyed as well.” Labor encouraged Indians to become less like “beasts” and help them “pray, make the sign of the Cross, be on their knees, dress in clothes, wear shoes, sweep the house, serve the table.”⁹⁹ Licenciado Francisco de Auncibay echoed this when he wrote to the Council of the Indies in a 1596 report about the Quito and New Granada area that a certain decree banning Indians from cattle-ranching was “destruction for the Spanish republic, and not less for the Indian one.” Indeed, those who ranched “are richer, healthier, more plenteous of children and goods, and more Catholic.” He concluded that “in this matter one cannot create a general rule.”¹⁰⁰

One official argued on the eve of the seventeenth century that anyone wishing to rigorously segregate the Indies plotted the realm's undoing. Quito president Manuel Barros de San Millán stated that “now the republic of Spaniards and that of the Indians has been united and incorporated, in such a manner, that neither one nor the other could be conserved if we dismembered them.” He employed this binary to defend compulsory Indian labor, which forced interaction between both societies. These unequal duties, he insisted, benefited “the public good that runs throughout the conservation of both republics.”¹⁰¹

Other writers sidestepped the issues of antagonism and segregation completely, and instead suggested there were many policies that would unambiguously benefit both republics. In 1552, Friar Toribio and his fellow Franciscans reported that they had received royal decrees relating to “the good government of these two republics, Spanish and Indian.” They complained that viceroy-oidor jurisdictional conflicts were hurting “these two republics.”¹⁰² The friar wrote again from Tlaxcala in 1555 that there were certain vacant fields that both groups could graze upon for the benefit of “both republics.”¹⁰³ In other words, while Mexico's Franciscans were important pioneers of the Two Republic model, they did not always use it to mean two isolated, antagonistic spheres.¹⁰⁴

Many others agreed with this more harmonious vision. A member of the Puebla municipal council, Gregorio Díaz de Vargas, promised his 1556 proposals to the king would “benefit the common things of the Spanish republic and of these natives.” While his letter also referred to many Indian and Spanish town-republics, he also believed that certain agricultural reforms might be of “benefit to both republics, Spanish and Indian (yndica).”¹⁰⁵ Similarly, the municipality of Valladolid informed the crown in 1576 that Yucatán governor Francisco Velázquez de Gijón had “bested his predecessors in his good governance of these two republics, ours and that of the natives.”¹⁰⁶ In another similar instance, the city of Mérida complained in 1579 that the Yucatan had no wheat and that many had resorted to eating cooked corn and tortillas. They stated that the governor had been working to remedy the problem and “has understood the needs of both republics, natives and Spaniards.”¹⁰⁷ In 1595, a schoolmaster reported from New Granada that a visitador who spent “fourteen months” in the province “leaves both republics of Spaniards and Indians organized.”¹⁰⁸

By the final third of the 1500s, high-ranking officials increasingly echoed these less antagonistic interpretations of the two republics. Mexico's criminal judges (alcaldes del crimen) reported in 1570 that audiencia officials worked “in the service of God and your Majesty and the republics of Spaniards and Indians.”¹⁰⁹ The president and oidores of Quito stated in 1590 stated that an investigator was “seeking to settle matters in everything relating to the republic of Spaniards as in that of Indians.”¹¹⁰ Pedro de Vizcarra, lieutenant general of the Chilean governor, claimed that he sought to defend “the tranquility desired [by] both republics.”¹¹¹

The very same officials who sometimes employed an antagonistic two-republics model often modulated their views in other reports. Charcas's president Cepeda, who earlier sought to remove Spanish vagrants from Indian towns, also gave certain Spaniards Indian land. He wrote in 1592 that the “growth in the Republic of Spaniards” was becoming a burden on Indies society, so he had begun redistributing land to poor Spaniards and Indians to increase agricultural output “for the provision of their republic and that of the Indians.”¹¹² These lands had belonged to overly powerful caciques, but now he was redistributing parcels “to both republics of Spaniard and Indians . . . for the good of both republics.”¹¹³ The same official who had previously used the two-republics model to justify partial segregation of certain Spaniards now encouraged them to live on Indian land, albeit as peaceful farmers, not harmful vagrants.

By the final quarter of the century, several Mexican viceroys had also made occasional references to the two republics. However, they too implied that this binary did not preclude shared interests. In a private 1580 letter, Viceroy Martín Enríquez wrote his successor that within the republic-viceroyalty there were “two republics to be governed in this land, which are Indians and Spaniards”—and that the Indians required special care and protection.¹¹⁴ This did not entail insurmountable antagonism. Only a few years earlier, in 1577, Enríquez himself had issued an edict instructing local judges to supervise harvests “for being in the utility of the natives and the republic of Indians and Spaniards.”¹¹⁵ His successor likewise suggested in 1590 that his elimination of field justices with jurisdiction over roadways and stores (jueces de caminos y ventas) had benefited the “republic” of New Spain, as well as “the republics of Indians and Spaniards.”¹¹⁶ He wrote again in 1590 that his predecessor, “with his soft government of this New World” had benefited “both republics of Spaniards and Natives . . . with all the peace and tranquility that could be desired.”¹¹⁷ And in 1594 he reported that the public pasturelands around the Valley of Mexico had “provided sustenance for the republics of Indians . . . and that of the Spaniards,” and that because of this “the republic”—that is, all of Mexico—“can be sustained.”¹¹⁸

The Republics in Legislation

There was only one moment—albeit a very important one—in which the king and the Council of the Indies explicitly endorsed the existence of two republics in their internal paperwork. It transpired in the late 1560s and early 1570s, during inquisitor Ovando's investigation and his subsequent reforms of the council as its president beginning in 1571. Having discovered that council ministers were often ignorant of the many policies their predecessors had issued in previous years, Ovando proposed creating a thematic compilation to enable the orderly retrieval of past decrees for easier reference to them.¹¹⁹ By 1571, his subalterns had already outlined seven volumes: (I) the Church and spiritual governance, (II) temporal governance, (III) litigious justice (justicia), (IV) the Republic of Spaniards, (V) the Republic of Indians, (VI) royal finance, and (VII) navigation and trade.¹²⁰ President Ovando's subalterns managed to produce at least the first of these books, the manuscript First Book of the Spiritual Governance of the Indies. These officials also produced an index, cover, and draft page of the third book, the Republic of Indians, and two sheets of an early draft of an index of the fourth book, the Republic of the Spaniards.¹²¹ But did this mean Ovando believed the Indies was comprised of two republics, or that he wished to enforce such a distinction through rigid segregationist policy?

In a report to the king, he stated his intention to “remedy all the things of that republic”—that is, the Indies republic.¹²² In the preamble to the first book, he employed even more eclectic uses of the category. The Indies were increasingly turning to municipal life “in the form of the republic.” The New World also comprised “all one church, one kingdom, and one republic—we desire that in the entire Indies a single law be kept.”¹²³ One 1573 ordinance bearing his signature ordered vassals to submit “description[s] of the Christian republic of the Indies.”¹²⁴ In other words, president Ovando's thematic organization of Indies laws into two republics was a reflection of neither the sociolegal existence of these two bodies, nor of the crown's intention to enforce them—the reality was much more complex.¹²⁵

The record suggests president Ovando's already ephemeral definition of a legislative two-republics duality did not survive his 1575 death. Only three extant royal decrees refer to the two republics. The first is a 1573 ordinance ordering officials to ensure that their own jurisdictions be well organized before undertaking new conquests “for the perpetuity of both republics.”¹²⁶ The second is a 1574 decree responding to a viceroy's suggestion that certain Indians should work in mines for Spaniards because “one republic cannot sustain itself without the other.”¹²⁷ The third is a decree responding to viceroy Velasco the Younger's 1590 petition that wine sellers and cattle ranchers with monopolies lose their licenses to benefit the “utility of the republics of Indians and Spaniards.”¹²⁸ These decrees underscore these republics’ shared interests, rather than urging their separation. Lastly, of over 10,000 surviving Mexican viceregal edicts, only one references the two republics. The 1578 order by viceroy Enríquez sought to restore a ban on reselling bread, which he thought beneficial “both to the republic of Spaniards as with the natives.”¹²⁹

Another measure of whether the Council of the Indies sought to implement this duality was its first official printed decree compilation, Diego de Encinas's 1596 Provisions, Decrees, Chapters of Ordinances, Instructions, and Letters Issued and Dispatched in Different Times by Their Highnesses. Encinas began his work in the year of president Ovando's death, and 21 years later produced a mammoth four-volume book, of which the council distributed 500 copies to peninsular and Indies officials.¹³⁰ Only two of its entries mentioned the two republics. These were the 1573 ordinance on new conquests, and a 1574 decree to the Mexican viceroy concerning Indian work in the mines (both discussed above). These mentions were fleeting and lacking in detail. On 19 further occasions, Encinas included excerpts referring to republics that vaguely implied the “common good,” without further explanation.¹³¹ Another 19 instances alluded to town-republics—17 for Spaniards’ municipal affairs, and two regarding Indians.’¹³² One referenced the province-republic of the Yucatán, and three more described New Spain.¹³³ The compilation also made one reference to the republic of the Indies and another to the Christian republic.¹³⁴ By 1596, then, the council had not made the two-republics binary even a minor part of its massive legislative output, using the duality only in a handful of non-antagonistic instances, largely if not entirely in response to petitioners’ recommendations and requests. The monarchy, far from pressing this division as Mörner suggested, was almost entirely indifferent and passive in its development.

Beyond the Two Republics

As of 1600, then, the two republics as the Mörner Thesis conceives of them did not exist in the New World as a systematic legal effort to segregate Spaniards from Indians. The two republics were far from “perfectly juridically defined” during this critical century, for they lacked almost any legislative, or even conceptual, heft.¹³⁵ Doing away with the Mörner Thesis promises to give historians new perspectives into Spanish-Indian relations, but also throws us headlong on the problem of how to better describe Spanish and Indian legal categories and social realities.

Spaniards did consider Indians universally different in important respects, in spite of their obvious similarities. Yes, the Indians were humans, vassals, and potential Christians. Yet they looked different, spoke different languages, and lacked more than a few generations of Christianity in their family lines, at best. Most Spaniards also accepted that most Indians owed more in tribute to Indies society, though we have also seen that controversies raged about this issue.

Many vassals also believed that Indians should not cohabit with Spaniards under any circumstances, though this too was highly controversial. On the surface, the Indies’ institutional arrangements do favor the Mörner Thesis, as they seem to divide Indian and Spanish affairs rigorously, and in this article I have shown that municipalization of Spanish and Indian communities did indeed create an illusion of rigid legal segregation. Spanish city councils offered Indians no membership roles and few opportunities for the redress of grievances. Indians’ rare appearance in municipal minutes was not official policy, however, but was rather a reflection of most city councils’ weak authority.¹³⁶ It was almost always wiser to petition a higher authority. Caciques and Indian municipalities likewise had restricted memberships and generally did not have authority over Spaniards.

In many other jurisdictions authority was mixed and messy, although viceregal justice, on its surface, maintained the Spanish-Indian distinction. Viceroys and audiencias offered separate and more affordable channels for justice-seeking Indians, often providing translators and special government officials such as protectors and defenders of Indians.¹³⁷ And viceroys issued special policy and privilege edicts for Indians.¹³⁸ In practice, however, both Spaniards and Indians sought justice through many of the viceroyalty's legal paperwork channels and often had an impact on one another's affairs.¹³⁹ Other local justice officials, like corregidores and municipal justices, could resolve both Spanish and Indian cases and conflicts.¹⁴⁰ Episcopal inquisitors had jurisdiction over both Spaniards and Indians until the crown's official establishment of the Holy Office in 1571, which exempted Indians from inquisitorial trials but still invited their testimonies and accusations against Old Christians.¹⁴¹ Following in the inquisitorial tradition, Spanish visitadores universally encouraged Spaniards, Indians, and others to air grievances against officials.¹⁴² Lastly, the Council of the Indies dealt with both Spanish and Indian lawsuits and petitions. In theory and in practice, the justice system's institutional boundaries were rarely tidy.

The Mörner Thesis also does not accurately describe the Indies’ sociolegal realities. The Spanish-Indian binary was indeed omnipresent, but it still allowed vassals to think in complex ways about the Indies and all other crown vassals. The era's countless legal terms attest to this acceptance of legal diversity. All legislative authorities acquiesced to a degree of debate about legal categories, as ruled and ruler alike considered it a duty of vassals to petition and inform. The petition-and-response system influenced rulers’ phrasing of both viceregal and royal decrees, allowing Spaniards, Indians, and others to create, contest, and complicate legal terms.¹⁴³ As a result of this process, Indies legislation featured a hodgepodge of centuries-old and brand- new terms, which were unsystematic, often overlapping, and almost always vague.

Many commonly used categories could easily describe Spaniards and Indians simultaneously, for example, Christian (cristiano), vassal (vasallo), conquistador (conquistador) and local (natural).¹⁴⁴ Spaniards and Indians could share honorific categories like ‘sir’ (don), ‘lady’ (doña), ‘lord’ (señor), and ‘gentleman’ (hidalgo). They also could fall into the same birth classifications: bastard (bastardo), child born out of wedlock (hijo natural), and legitimate (legítimo), and marital statuses such as bachelor (soltero), concubine (mancebo), and widow (viudo).¹⁴⁵ Some born of Spanish-Indian unions might form part of either society, or neither, depending on the political context, social acceptance, and the opinion of outside observers.¹⁴⁶

Labor, generally a defining factor in contemporaries’ differentiations between Spaniards and Indians, was also complex. Each group could hold shared tax-exempt offices, including municipal positions like municipal official (regidor), scribe (escribano), local justice (alguacil), and others. Spaniards could fall into categories inspired by indigenous languages and practices, such as translator (nahuatlato) and tribute collector (calpisque). Indians were most often tribute-paying serfs, but the legal reality regarding their professions and work responsibilities was also intricate. Documents contain numerous terms for tribute-exempt Indian lords such as tlatoani, yya toniñe, pipiltin, teuctle, orejón, toniñe, cacique, cihuapilli, and curaca. Indian municipal functionaries could also belong to categories like council leaders (gobernador, gobernadoryotl, cacique gobernador), officials (camayocs), financial officers (tesoreros, fiscales mayordomos), and recordkeepers (escribanos, tlacuilos, and quipocamayocs).¹⁴⁷ There was an assortment of tribute and justice enforcers specific to Indians (mandón, capitán, merino, mayoral, tequitlato, tequitlato mayor, topil).¹⁴⁸ Special religious functionaries like alms-gatherer (fiscal de iglesia and topil de la iglesia), as well as singers or cantores, join the list.¹⁴⁹ All Indians falling within these categories were tribute-exempt.¹⁵⁰

Commoners who did pay tribute might appear simply as indios, indios tributarios, macehuales, mitimaes, or in other categories, depending on the region and the context. In addition, there was a complex array of servant categories, including naborías, mayeques, tlalmaites, indios de servicio, yanaconas, and camaricos.¹⁵¹ Tributary status sometimes varied by labor type, such as mining, ranching, artisan work, river service, or domestic work, and also by region, depending on Indians’ negotiations with local officials. Across all these categories came the dissecting force of sweeping rules about preventing lowlanders and highlanders (indios de tierra caliente, indios de tierra fría) from working outside of certain climates. Age, gender, marital status, wealth, physical fitness, and other considerations further complicated tribute arrangements.¹⁵²

Through grace (gracia) petitions which established an array of special privileges for crown loyalists and virtuous vassals, some ethnicities and political confederations also managed to carve out a status somehow different from their neighbors, distinguishing Indians from other Indians. Certain groups like the Mexica, Tlaxcala, Cañaris, Chachas, Huancas, and Cuzcos received decrees promising total or partial tribute exemption and other benefits.¹⁵³ Indian caciques, governors, and leaders, both men and women, also petitioned constantly for personal and family licenses to carry arms, dress like Spaniards, and ride horses, among other privileges, which simultaneously reinforced and eroded Spanish-Indian differences.¹⁵⁴ These petitions for privilege and the resulting decrees, perhaps more than any other feature of the Spanish justice system, reveal authorities’ flexible attitudes about cultural and legal segregation.

Inversely, many officials demoted certain Indians whose behaviors they felt gravely transgressed crown policies, the common good, or divine and natural law, and sometimes for other considerations. An array of special semi-deviant or deviant categories arose to describe illegitimate lords and others who sought to escape tribute and other duties (caciques intrusos, caciques postizos, forasteros, huidos, gente suelta, ladinos).¹⁵⁵ Indians who refused to submit to Spanish rule fell into another spectrum of legal categories that condoned their enslavement, like cannibal (caníbal), runaway (indio cimarrón), and war Indian (indio de guerra). During some periods of armed conflict, ethno-legal categories like Araucano, Chichimec, and Chiriguano became all but synonymous with enemy belligerents. And ecclesiastical judges and early inquisitors sought to uproot those they categorized as spellcasters (hechiceros ), warlocks (brujos), witches (brujas), and others.

Even this very superficial treatment of a small number of institutions and categories shows that the crown, far from drawing a firm line between Spaniards and Indians or seeking to treat either group as a legal monolith, allowed for vassals to co-create an insurmountably messy system, or quasi-system, of classification and action. This ever-changing structure superficially preserved the Spanish-Indian legal dichotomy but allowed massive areas of overlap and internal divisions that beneath the surface look little like the two-republics model. Segregation in both legislation and practice must therefore be rethought, beyond the Mörner Thesis. Such rethinking also involves consideration of the status of those whom observers considered neither fully Spanish nor Indian. One recent study, following Mörner, defines the republics as “two self-contained and fully segregated social or territorial units, one populated by Indians, the other by Spaniards, mestizos, Africans, criollos, and other non-Indian subjects.”¹⁵⁶ Many scholars have consequently depicted an overzealous Catholic monarchy bent on segregation but impotent against vassals’ unstoppable libidos. The puritanical crown was overwhelmed as pícaro miscegenation won the day.¹⁵⁷

Undoubtably, Spanish-Indian separation was the goal of many royal and viceregal laws, yet scholars have associated segregation with the two republics far too forcefully. ¹⁵⁸ As I have suggested above, even within the narrow space of writings dealing conceptually with republics, neither the crown nor its vassals were always of one mind about how to proceed with such an undertaking. Congregation of Indians into towns was not an enterprise dedicated exclusively to segregation, and it often had the opposite finality: to bring Indians closer to Spanish administrative and ecclesiastical control. Marriage between any vassals remained legal.¹⁵⁹ Viceregal, municipal, and communal policies and exceptions variously promoted and undermined separation, playing a major part that few scholars take into consideration.¹⁶⁰ The trope of systemic ‘failed segregation’ and its concomitant ‘colonial impossibility’ are overdue for serious reappraisals.¹⁶¹

Questioning the Mörner Thesis of the two republics concerns more than Spaniards and Indians. According to scholarship influenced by the Swedish historian, the crown manically produced abundant legislation on those partly or entirely outside of Spanish and Indian groups, such as mulattos (part Afro-descendants), zambahigos (part Afro-descendant, part Indian), mestizos, and others. For many historians, this proliferation of terms can be attributed to the crown's stubborn adherence to the strict dual republics system—a “disconnect between ideal and reality.”¹⁶² In other words, the failure of the Two Republics as a sociolegal system engendered the infamous Spanish imperial caste system.

For a crown “whose thinking could only fathom a society composed of ‘two republics,’” where would the others fit?¹⁶³ My research has uncovered only a few documents mentioning Afro-descendants and other non-Indians that also employed explicitly the concept of the republic. All date from the final third of the sixteenth century. One, a 1576 letter by the royal attorney Licenciado Ramírez de Cartagena, reported that there were not enough laborers in the “republic of Spaniards” and stated that the crown should look elsewhere, to non-Spanish, non-Indian “idle peoples” like “blacks . . . mulattos and mestizos and zambahigos.”¹⁶⁴

Other writings tended to make a very distinct argument for non-Indians’ membership in the republic of the Spaniards. Panama's municipal ordinances, which the crown ratified in 1571, described a “great quantity of free black men and women in this city and republic” who “cause much harm”—especially because city officials suspected some aided runaway slaves. Officials were to expel free Afro-descendants to a nearby island.¹⁶⁵ These subjects were part of the town-republic, the argument went, but should form their own community regardless. The Mexican viceroy issued a 1574 edict stating that officials should undertake a census with all “black men and women, [and] free vagabond mulattos and mulattas” in the “republic,” presumably meaning Mexico itself. According to this edict, “the republic of Spaniards and Indians” was “defrauded” by Afro-descendants’ refusal to pay taxes and take up professions.¹⁶⁶ This was the only text I managed to locate which explicitly envisioned a joint Spanish-Indian republic that explicitly excluded Afro-descendants and others.

Another group of writers offered the opposite argument. The Franciscans of Mérida, Yucatán, wrote in 1576 that “there is great hunger in the republic of the Spaniards and Indians,” and that “Spanish republic and the blacks and mulattos” ate, whereas “the republic of the natives” was left starving.¹⁶⁷ This equivocal use of the ‘republic of Spaniards’ implied, but did not clarify, where Afro-descendants belonged: within the Spanish republic, not the Indian. Yet Afro-descendants were sometimes deeply integrated into Indian republics, a fact officials did not always ignore. In 1586 the president of Charcas stated that “mulattos and zambahigos” were “a damned generation born from black men and Indian women . . . cruel executioners of the miserable Indians.” He proposed integrating them into Spanish municipal jurisdictions as tradesmen. This would prevent them from causing harm “in the republics, mainly among Indians”—that is, in Indian town-republics.¹⁶⁸ The president implied that this “damned generation” could nonetheless coexist with urban Spaniards and Indians if its members took up honest vocations.

For certain writers, all, including Afro-descendants and non-Indians, shared one republic. Friar Gaspar de Recarte noted in a 1584 report to the crown that “Spaniards and Indians make in this Indies one republic,” and that officials should not abuse Indians “as if they were slaves.” There were “many blacks, mestizos, and free mulattos, as well as other poor Spaniards and officials which the republic should compel” to work, instead of Indians.¹⁶⁹ All thus formed a single meta-republic of the Indies, making them responsible for forgoing individual interests for the common good. Friar Miguel de Benavides similarly reported to the crown in 1596 that Mexico's entire labor burden fell to Indians, though able-bodied “Spaniards and free blacks and mulattos and mestizos who are all part of this republic” could share this load.¹⁷⁰

Determining what Afro-descendant petitioners made of their place within these overlapping political communities is difficult. The petition-and-response system does provide one clue. One 1571 royal decree stated that the crown had been informed by “the mulattos of that land” that traveling Indian merchants (pustecas) brought “much harm” on the “republic.” Considering the geographical mobility of the pustecas, we can surmise that some of Mexico's mulatto petitioners viewed themselves as part of the viceroyalty-republic.¹⁷¹ This finding builds upon Chloe Ireton's research into Afro-descendants’ and Spaniards’ understanding of many black vassals not as outsiders but as members of the Indies’ many Old Christian political communities.¹⁷²

While self-described mestizos rarely formed political groups, in 1588 a legal representative of 150 part-Indian, part-Spanish petitioners named Pedro Rengifo informed the king and the council that “persons born in the Provinces of Peru from Spaniards and Indians, which are called mestizos,” were a “part of the republic,” albeit without defining which type of republic he meant.¹⁷³ Afro-descendants and mestizos thus occupied ambiguous roles in the era's conceptualization of republics. Nonetheless, republic-thinking did not cause their legal predicaments a priori. Nor were non-Spaniards barred from participating in the broader debate about the nature of their belonging within Indies society.

Conclusions

Drawing from extensive archival research, this article has come to four overarching conclusions about how ideas of human difference and community functioned within Indies society. First, I have provided an understanding of how republics functioned, one that largely invalidates Magnus Mörner's profoundly influential vision of the segregationist Two Republics. This has implications for historiographical models of Spanish imperial governance. The Mörner Thesis mischaracterized how the king, the Council of the Indies, and other officials ruled, depicting their actions and thoughts as highly interventionist, systematic, and aloof to Indies realities.¹⁷⁴ This article demonstrates the contrary: sixteenth-century officials did not systematically attempt to uniformly and rigidly segregate Spaniards and Indians into separate republics, even on a conceptual plane, during the sixteenth century. Only a fraction embraced a conceptually binary and segregated model of republics. In fact, when officials did invoke what we might call the Two Republics model, they most often did so to emphasize the shared interests of Spaniards and Indians. This corroborates what others have argued for other facets of early Indies rule: that officials were simultaneously quite passive and quite flexible, and royal legislation far from consistent and methodical.¹⁷⁵

Second, this article has demonstrated how vassals, officials, and jurists used the concept of the republic to envision the Indies as a composite of many communities, both conceptual and tangible. Vassals used the term creatively within a nested and heterogenous framework that encompassed municipal, provincial, viceregal, Indies, monarchical, and Christian spheres (among others). This supports other scholars’ contentions that the Anglocentric historiography on republic-thinking excludes this rich Spanish-imperial tradition. Even the few scholars who have explored this topic have focused almost entirely on jurists’ and priests’ visions of the republic.¹⁷⁶ As I have shown, however, many indigenous communities, as well as some Afro-descendant and mestizo subjects, employed this notion to frame their place in the empire, engaging in non-elite, non-Spanish ontological and intellectual enterprises that historians are increasingly beginning to recognize.¹⁷⁷

Third, while this article maintains that the Spanish-Indian binary was extraordinarily important in early Indies society, it maintains that the Mörner Thesis elides many of its social and institutional complexities, beyond the two-republics concept itself. Institutions and officials ostensibly exclusive to Spaniards or Indians had more complex operations than Mörner's model allows for. The crown did not seek segregation consistently. It simultaneously allowed Spanish-Indian marriages, cohabitation, economic association, conversion, and other actions that wove these groups together. These two legal categories also had important semantic overlaps with one another, as well as many internal complexities. The rise of a so-called caste system featuring countless legal categories such as mestizo and mulatto did not occur because of the libidinous breakdown of the Two Republics, but because of petitioners’ constant agonistic efforts to diminish their opponents.

These three points converge in a fourth and final conclusion: that historians must show extreme caution when embracing aesthetically elegant and conceptually convenient models for theorizing the early modern Spanish Empire. Instead, they might more fruitfully seek models better suited for explaining its complexity. This article has stopped far short of providing a comprehensive alternative framework but will hopefully buttress future research in this direction. If we explore Spanish-Indian legal dualities and social relations through the lens of the Spanish Empire's absolutist forms of nested and hierarchical but often messy multi-normativity and pluri-jurisdictionality, which invited petitioners’ constant engagement with law-giving institutions, and if we take into consideration the various institutions that granted gracia exceptions to norms to individuals and groups, the Indies’ many complex categories become, if not simpler, at least more comprehensible. Already, many are headed down this path.¹⁷⁸

The reformer-petitioner Martín González de Cellorigo provided an apt republican metaphor for this early modern messiness. In a 1600 treatise he noted that the global republic was “a just government of many families and their common good,” ruled over by a monarch and comprised of a complex union resembling a human body.¹⁷⁹ But if the king was “loaded with petitions, reports, and opinion pieces,” as Emperor Charles V and King Philip II had been in the previous century, and subsequently “promulgated multitudes of laws,” González warned, the republic would become turgid and disorderly.¹⁸⁰ Cellorigo complained that the Spanish imperial republic, rather than resembling an instrument of “harmonious sweetness,” was a “labyrinth of infinite errors.”¹⁸¹ Perhaps as historians we need not seek out harmony in early modern Spain's policies so aggressively. Rather, as we wander the labyrinths of the Indies’ disorderly categories, we might instead train our ears for their normative cacophony.