Urban Republics and the Destruction of Ancien Regimes in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America
No matter what interpretation we use of the Spanish conquest (indigenous demographic collapse, indigenous participation-collaboration-civil wars), the alleged outcome makes no sense. It was simply impossible for a handful of “Europeans” to move across an entire continent to swiftly establish a global absolutist monarchy built on the enslaving of millions of “Indians” for nearly 400 years. This is a fairy tale. Force and violence do not empires make: Witness the US twenty-year adventure in Afghanistan. Diaz Ceballos comes closer to offering a satisfying account of one of the structural foundations of the resilient, polycentric, multi-cultural empire that was the Spanish Monarchy in the New World.
For Diaz Ceballos, the “city” as ideology and political practices holds the key to understanding the many mysteries of early “Spanish” conquest and colonization. Cities were not buildings but social relations that justified authority and mobility and defined legitimacy and sovereignty. They were not “Spanish” either. They were relations that from the very beginning involved indigenous elites first and later indigenous commoners. “Spanish” “cities” began as alliances (many matrimonial) between Spanish conquistadors and caciques via the patriarchal gifting of elite women.
The original cities were always hybrid denoting in their names the local supporting cacicazgo (Darien, Aclá, Natá, Panamá as Diaz Ceballos explores in Castilla de Oro from 1508 to 1530s) . Without this support, cities did not survive. Cities emerged usually as a result of conflict among rival parties (Spanish and Indians) to secure territorial jurisdictions, moving boundaries of hinterlands against rivals.
Natives commoners originally got involved as repartimiento-encomienda labor, thus reinforcing patterns of hinterland non-urban dispersion. Yet, soon and paradoxically the discourse of conversion as urban “conversation” made it imperative to create reducciones. Native commoners thus became the main consumers of urban institutions thereafter, leading to the transformation of one original unified hybrid city into two republics.
“Cities” were republican political relations of individuals with each other, outsiders, and rulers. The city was the ideological toolkit of anyone (Spanish, cimarrón, or Indian) seeking to negotiate with non-urban (not incorporated Indians) or urban communities nearby or with a distant crown. The ultimate sovereign was not the crown but the corporate electoral bond among hierarchies of peers that did not tolerate any autocratic rulings top down. The category of “tyranny” was the bottom-up critique of any outside, non-consensual imposition.
Legitimacy came from the endless negotiation of deeds communities deemed as service to the crown and the privileges a gracious king was expected to give out as rewards. For Diaz Ceballos, newly constituted cities systematically refused to acknowledge crown contracts with adelantados. The consensus of peers elected in cabildos could easily overturn crown rules. Independence juntas in 1810 did nothing different than did the elected cabildo members of Veracruz when in 1519 they decided not to recognize the contract signed by the crown that gave Diego Velazquez control over the colonization of Mexico. Cortés was neither the first nor the last to mobilize both commoners and Indigenous elites into the creation of cities to gain legitimacy and sovereignty over rivals empowered by the crown. There was no Spanish monarchy without the bottom-up power of cities and there were no cities without the power of the crown as the source of grace for both individuals and communities.
It would be a grave mistake to confuse this book with yet another study of the role of cities in the early modern Spanish Monarchy. This is not the Indies version of Helen Nader’s Liberty in Absolutist Spain. Díaz Ceballos uses his interpretation of cities as forms of relations and occupying space in Castilla de Oro (today’s Urabá and Panamá) to elucidate the bottom-up nature of the Spanish empire in the New World. In the Indies, the ideological cities led to the bicultural empowerment of commoners, first Spaniards and later natives. At least in Panama, cities became controlled by commoners-merchants whose claims to privilege were no other than having first offered specific urban trades and services. As encomiendas encouraged indigenous residential dispersal, conversion via the ideology of cities ultimately empowered indigenous commoners as well. The República de Indios was nothing but the expansion of the urban ideal to commoners, via the control of newly carved out commons and cabildo elections. The new social contracts of the Indies allowed for extraordinary levels of social mobility at least in the 16th century. Republicanism allowed for the rapid spread of the Spanish empire all over the Indies.
