Colonial
History
One reason why the Spaniards arrived early in the coastal region
of Michoacán was that Hernán Cortés intended
to use Zacatula, at the mouth of the Balsas River, as his base
for exploring the Pacific. But the P'urhépechas living
in the interior of Michoacán, not yet conquered by the
Spaniards, also told the invaders that the coast was rich in gold.
The first prospecting in what became known as the province of
Motines de Oro began in 1524, but the mines were virtually abandoned
by 1536. There was considerable indigenous resistance to forced
labour. Rebellions occurred in 1526-28 and 1530-32, and there
was a good deal of spontaneous migration and resettlement to escape
forced labour. Ostula dates its foundation to this period. The
story goes that Cortés organised squads of indigenous people
to look for gold, and that the community of Ostula was founded
in 1531 by people from Pómaro, Maquilí and Ixtlahuacán
(another Náhuatl-speaking community in Colima state) who
entered the valley looking for a better place to live. 1531 happens
to be the same year that the Virgen of Guadalupe supposedly appeared
to Juan Diego in Tepeyac (according to sources that actually date
to the mid-17th century). The community's foundation myth may
therefore express an identity that it acquired later, when it
became part of a broader reconstructed colonial world of Náhuatl-speakers,
but it also conserves a memory of a traumatic time of displacement
associated with this early gold rush.
The
people of the Michoacán coast did not speak Náhuatl
at the time of the conquest. Even in the early 17th century, a
variety of mother-tongues were still spoken along with Náhuatl
in the communities. Individual settlements contained people speaking
diferent languages, a reflection of the "congregation"
of people from different ethnic groups in compact settlements
where they could be more easily controlled and converted to Christianity.
But Náhuatl became the lingua franca of the entire region,
and had displaced the original languages entirely by the end of
the 17th century.
The age of cacao and the encomenderos
The
gold reserves of the region were in fact of mediocre quality,
and as the region was unattractive to Spanish settlers, the costs
of mining operations were increased by the need to employ supervisors.
Few of those who did settle there possessed sufficient capital
to switch to slave labour. Cacao cultivation offered higher returns
on much lower costs, and the market for cacao expanded in the
second half of the 16th century because its precolonial use as
money continued in the colonial period. The indigenous people
were forced to work on Spanish cacao plantations and also to deliver
the beans as tribute. They often accused Spaniards of usurping
their lands and associated work in the humid cacao plantations
with the rising tide of sickness and death that decimated the
precolonial population. Demographic collapse proved so serious
in the coastal hotlands of Colima and Motines that Viceroy Velasco
sent Lorenzo Lebrón de Quiñónes to make an
official inspection in 1551. He reported widespread abuse of the
indigenous population and denounced many of the Spaniards exploiting
them as controlling land and tribute-payers illegally. Yet despite
Lebrón's humanitarian intentions his own enthusiasm for
the policy of "congregating" the indigenous people also
contributed to the death toll by magnifying the impact of epidemics.
In
the early years of the conquest, the Spanish imperial government
had delegated responsibility for the administration and christianization
of the indigenous population to individual encomenderos
(persons to whom the Indians were "entrusted"). Although
this was intended as a stop-gap measure, and the granting of new
encomiendas ended officially with the promulgation of
the "New Laws" in 1544, this region remained remote
from the centres of imperial power, which helps us to understand
why illegal enslavement of indigenous people, illegal extraction
of tribute and illegal take overs of indigenous lands were so
frequent. Some of the legal encomiendas lasted
into the 17th century. Ostula remained part of an encomienda
until after 1618, although the neighboring community of Maquilí
reverted to Crown control in 1560 and became the seat of a Crown-appointed
corregidor responsible for the collection of tribute
and administration of indigenous labour. Coalcomán, Pómaro,
Ixtlahuacán and Aquila reverted to Crown control even earlier,
between 1530 and 1560. In 1580, the encomendero of Ostula
and Coxumatlán, Juan Alcalde de Rueda, the mestizo
son of a Spanish conquistador who settled in Colima and an indigenous
woman wrote a report to the Spanish King Felipe II on the region
known as the Relación de la Provincia de Motines.
This contains our earliest detailed information about Ostula.
Juan Alcalde became encomendero in 1551, when he was
23 years old, by marrying a widow, Maria López de Robles,
and, unusually, lived close to his cacao orchards.
Evangelization
The
Franciscans pioneered the process, but little is known about this
early pastoral work, apart from a few brief accounts of the forty
year labours of Fray Pedro de Las Garrovillas, who traversed the
entire region from Zacatula to the present-day Colima border on
foot. Ostulan rituals do, however, incorporate figures that appear
to be friars, portrayed somewhat ambiguously as tricksters. But
the encomenderos also paid salaries to secular priests,
heavily criticised by Lebrón de Quiñónes
for paying more attention to their economic interests than their
religious duties and for failing to make any effort to learn indigenous
languages. Lebrón attributed this sorry state of affairs
to the long absence from the diocesis of its famous reforming
bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, who was stung into an energetic effort
to improve matters in the 1560s, appointing a Náhutal-speaker
as vicar of the newly created parish of Maquilí. Even so,
the indigenous communities of the province of Motines failed to
conform to Vasco de Quiroga's vision of a new "Republic of
Indians" that would lead indigenous people towards the civilised
virtues of the European urban world on the model of Thomas More's
Utopia. The region's priests spent the next century complaining
about the poverty of their indigenous parishioners and the miserable
living that service in the area offered to them. Communication
difficulties meant that their visits to the different communities
outside the parish centres were infrequent. This situation created
the conditions under which the indigenous communities themselves
were able to take charge of their daily devotions and achieve
a substantial degree of autonomy which allowed them to "indigenize"
the religious practices introduced by the Franciscans and parish
priests. The result was a complex process of "transculturation"
in which Ostula eventually emerged, during the 17th century, as
a regional centre of indigenous Christianity, combining radically
transformed versions of European rituals with a tradition of choral
singing in Latin. Sung masses were the principal service for which
the indigenous communities paid local priests during the 17th
and 18th centuries.
A
landscape of poverty and protests
In
an extraordinary passage of his Relación, the
encomendero Juan Alcalde tells the king of Spain that
it is impossible to make the Indians work and accept Spanish mercantile
values: even though they possess property, they respond to coercion
simply by running away to suffer misfortune or death somewhere
else. Yet in fact the indigenous people did try to participate
in the mercantile economy (and needed money to finance their religious
life). The communities constantly complained to higher colonial
authorities that the encomenderos and Crown-appointed
officials who were supposed to protect them robbed them of their
produce and forced them to buy Spanish products at inflated prices.
In 1581 and 1604, all the indigenous communities of the region
joined together to denounce the local officials of the colonial
administration. In the protest of 1604 they accused the Alcalde
Mayor and Corregidor of Coalcomán not only
of abusing his position in the ways just mentioned but of owning
a tavern, run by his wife, which caused immense social problems
by fostering drunkenness. Yet by 1630, cacao production in this
region had become unprofitable even with forced labour and forced
deliveries of cacao collected by the indigenous people themselves.
The production of a liquor made from coconuts (vino de coco)
had already replaced cacao in Colima, where the sharp demographic
decline of the indigenous population had led to the importation
of black and filipino labour. Some of the Filipinos moved into
the areas occupied by the indigenous communities on the Michoacán
coast and cultivated their own small plantations (as did some
indigenous families). In 1631, a report
by the parish priest in Maquilí lists a number of Spanish
properties alongside those of indigenous people and Filipinos
("indios chinos"), but also mentions that the costs
of celebrating the cult of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception
in Ostula were met from the proceeds of a small cacao orchard.
The
small number of Spanish residents had previously played an important
part in financing the chapels of the parish, but their economic
fortunes were now waning. Before the end of the 17th century,
the Filipinos and Spanish residents (vecinos) had disappeared,
setting the stage for a new beginning for the surviving indigenous
people of the region.
Autonomy
and recovery
While
the parish priests saw the indigenous people as poverty-stricken,
they in fact controlled an abundance of resources that they were
now free to exploit in their own fashion. The extreme demographic
losses caused by disease and over-exploitation meant that the
region probably did not recover its precolonial population levels
until the twentieth century. In 1765, the parish priest of Maquilí
reported that Ostula had a population of 76 married Indians, slightly
higher than that of Maquilí itself, where only one non-Indian
family now resided (and even that had gone before the end of the
century). Ostula's mid-18th century population was more than three
times that reported in 1631, but still small relative to the territory
the community controlled. In the 17th century the indigenous people
practiced a "broad spectrum" system of exploitation,
each family having access to multiple ecological zones. There
was an intensive exploitation of marine as well as forest resources,
alongside agriculture (which included cultivation of cotton, vegetables,
fruit trees and coconut stands, with some small-scale irrigation,
as well as maize cultivation and animal husbandry). Apart from
hunting and collecting, the forest was also a site of "cultivation":
the communities produced copal incense and wax candles on a commercial
scale, trading these products, along with what was perhaps the
most important regional product, salt, with the outside world.
Some trade was with muleteers arriving from other regions, but
there was also a web of commerce between indigenous communities
themselves over a wide area including other Náhuatl-speaking
communities in the modern states of Colima and Guerrero. Trade
routes were also routes of religious pilgrimage and interchange
of cultural innovations and ceremonial practices. In the 18th
century we also find indigenous families from the Motines region
migrating to the Spanish-owned landed estates around Zacatula
and renting land that these owners had virtually abandoned to
grow cotton on their own account.
Ostula
now had a confraternity, devoted to the Virgin of the Nativity,
which possessed the largest herd of cattle in the entire area,
some 280 head. Young men performed religious service looking after
the animals in the area that eventually became the modern settlement
of Cofradía de Ostula. Religious organization appears to
have been more hierarchic than today, with certain ritual activities
restricted to older men holding specific religious offices (and
women were excluded from certain devotions until recently, although
there were always specific roles for women in the ritual organization,
reflecting the principle of gender parallelism common to the entire
colonial Nahua world). The chief religious authority was the
fiscal and a group that staffed the main Church, accompanied
by a prioste and mayordomos responsible for
the confraternity and the cult of the Virgen de los Dolores. The
choir master and other singers (cantores) also possessed
prestige and authority. As time went by the cults of the saints
became more extensive and elaborate as new images and devotions
were added to the foundational cult of the Immaculate Conception,
the Nativity and other early cults, such as that of Saint Nicolas,
who was a christianised version of an older fertility deity. But
this was not a situation of "failed conversion" or "idols
behind the altars". What developed in Ostula was an indigenized
version of Christianity which differed radically from pre-Christian
models in its underlying logic and practice. It was a system largely
run by and for indigenous people. One of the most striking features
of the ritual process that emerged was its parodying of non-indigenous
culture. The people of Ostula asserted their autonomy by symbolically
rejecting of the claims to superiority of the Spaniards, portraying
indigenous people as the true defenders of the faith.
Civil
and religious government were combined in the town-council or
cabildo of the indigenous communities. This was another European
model that became thoroughly indigenized. In Ostula, status and
authority was not based simply on age, since the holders of public
offices were "advised" by a small group of influential
elders (called cabecillas in Spanish) who represented
an inner circle of power. Members of this group were masters of
rhetorical Náhuatl, who might also perform functions such
as "speaking" for the family of the groom in marriage
negotiations (the tlahtolero). The cabildo system
survived until the end of the 1930s in Ostula. Although it had
changed over time (particularly following the introduction of
municipalities as the basic unit of local government after national
independence), Ostula's form of civil-religious organization was
more complex than that of its neighbours because of the greater
complexity of its religious life and organization.
The
End of the Colonial Era
In
1786 the indigenous communities of Coire, Maquilí, Ostula
y Pómaro were authorized to form militias of archers to
guard the coast from attacks by pirates. This further enhanced
the autonomy that the communities enjoyed in managing their civil
and religious affairs (subject to their payment of the tribute
required by the Spanish colonial regime). In 1778, the vicar of
Ixtlahuacán wrote that the fact that the Indians were armed
with bows and arrows was a constant source of anxiety to the local
priests. After Father Hidalgo raised the banner of insurrection
against Spanish rule in 1810, the indigenous militiamen of Ostula
(alongside those of Maquilí and Ixtlahuacán) joined
the non-indigenous forces of the nearby commercial centre of Coahuayana
in the movement to secure national independence by force of arms.
This shows us that although the indigenous communities were jealous
of their autonomy and uncompromising in their defence of their
territories they were in no sense closed communities isolated
from the wider regional society. It also suggests that their leaders
were attracted by promises of a new society in which the old distinctions
between racial "castes", arbitrary government and colonial
economic monopolies would be abolished. Ostula in fact developed
its own idiosyncratic civic rituals for celebrating national Independence
Day long before school teachers brought the modern civic culture
of the state into the community after the Mexican revolution.
But although Ostula and other Nahua communities in the region
fought to end the colonial order, they also used the legal institutions
of that same colonial regime to compete with each other for control
of territory. Ostula and Coire spent the last decades of the colonial
period locked in bitter battles with each other to take control
of territory that had previously belonged to their neighbour Huizontla.
The fortunes of Huizontla had continued to decline during the
18th century, and the community had also lost land to non-indigenous
ranchers and landed estate owners, backed up by the district authorities
in Coahuayana, some of whom were active participants in efforts
to dismember the weaker community. Although these processes were
interrupted by the effects of the independence wars and subsequent
political instability in the region, new and yet more serious
threats to the territorial integrity of all the indigenous communities
were to emerge in the last decades of the 19th century.
Report
on Maquilí Parish 1631
Report
on Maquilí Parish 1765
Relación
Geográfica of Ixtlahuacán Parish 1778
Report
on from Subdelegado of Coahuayana on Jurisdiction of Motines 1791
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Hernán Cortés

Cacao beans

Shaman Figure, 250 AD
Colima
Map of Franciscan Province, 16th
Century

Fiscal of the Ostula Church
garlanding incoming
cargo holders


Choirmaster and members
of the cabildo, fiesta of Santa Teresa, Ostula

Report on the Jurisdiction of Motines
1791
Indigenous family from the Michoacán
coastal communities, 19th century

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