Introduction
Early republican elites repeatedly pointed to the misery of indigenous peoples living on communal lands as proof of Spanish malfeasance. They turned the legal status of ‘miserable’ afforded to indigenous populations under monarchical rule into a cultural and political tool.Footnote 1 Rather than acknowledge the legal protections previously enjoyed by ‘indios miserables’, republican state-makers argued that the Spanish Crown created the conditions that rendered indigenous populations ‘miserables’.Footnote 2 Republican ‘indígenas’ would be different.Footnote 3 They would become republican citizens like all others. The extent to which the Spanish Monarchy was objectively exploitative of indigenous populations is less interesting for the purposes of this article than understanding how and why early republicans deployed this ‘colonial legacy’ trope about the Spanish Monarchy.Footnote 4 The legal and cultural category of the republican indígena invented in opposition to a colonial-era ‘indio miserable’ became useful for an array of competing actors who were attempting to work out the meanings and practices of republican governance.Footnote 5 These actors experimented legislatively and scientifically with abolishing tribute and privatising communally held land, but, because not all indios were equal under the Crown, republican indígenas could not receive equal shares of community land. Early republicans developed legislation and training for surveyors that permitted surveyors, backed up by science, to grant differently valued parcels of land to indigenous individuals and families according to the place that the surveyors believed each republican indígena – man, woman, or child – held within his/her community. Legislative and scientific calculations in equity would eventually produce republican equality within the república de indios.
During the period of Spanish rule, New World kingdoms had been separated into republics of Spaniards and repúblicas de indios.Footnote 6 The indigenous communities that paid tribute enjoyed inalienable rights to the usufruct from indivisible community lands. Within the Kingdom of New Granada, these indigenous communities were called resguardos.Footnote 7 As in other kingdoms, the Crown set up indigenous governing structures to administer resguardos under the supervision of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. These Indian towns constituted a specific juridical and political body within the monarchy, yet, as Steinar Saether has shown, several New Granada Indian communities legally recognised by the Spanish Crown had been thoroughly Hispanicised by the late eighteenth century.Footnote 8 That was the point: the object of Spanish legislation regulating resguardos was to convert indigenous people into good subjects of the Catholic monarchy.
In the wake of the dissolution of Spain's Atlantic Empire, republican officials faced a fundamental question: how to transform the república de indios into a seamless part of the republic of equal citizens without triggering, or worsening, monarchist Spanish-loyalist resistance.Footnote 9 With the formation of the first Colombian Republic (1819–30) – comprised of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada, the Audiencia of Quito and the Captaincy General of Venezuela – republican leaders like Simón Bolívar tried to strike a deathblow against Spain's ability to mobilise armed indigenous support via indigenous elites.Footnote 10 As president of this first Colombian Republic – also known as Gran Colombia – Bolívar decreed equal access to resguardo resources for all indigenous inhabitants, challenging elite indigenous control over communal lands via the cabildos, or indigenous governing bodies. More radical liberal republicans pushed to abolish tribute and resguardos outright, believing these policies created unequal distinctions among citizens, a move Bolívar reversed during his dictatorship starting in 1828. This tension within early republican leadership begins to point to the difficulties involved in implementing an idealised – yet still to be defined – republican equality within resguardos.Footnote 11 The 1830 dissolution of Gran Colombia into the republics of New Granada, Venezuela and Ecuador yielded a continued host of challenges with respect to early republican governance and indigenous communal land holding.
By taking New Granada as a case in point, this article examines experiments seeking to redistribute resguardo land among indigenous inhabitants within the early republic. Some republicans feared indigenous cabildos’ power to thwart these liberal efforts. Members of the Liberal party had reason for concern. Conservative political rivals formed armed alliances with the indigenous elites who dominated indigenous cabildos, leading to national legislation delaying the abolition of resguardos. Still, despite republican bargains between indigenous elites and some republican leaders, liberal and conservatives agreed: the república de indios was an ancien-régime engine of social and racial inequality. They argued that members of indigenous elite families who, in the main, held the leadership positions within cabildos benefitted from unequal access to resguardo resources, creating wealth for themselves and poverty among the majority of indigenous people. This article examines the oscillations in republican liberal policies that, on the one hand, were mindful of cabildo-led armed revolt and that, on the other, sought to undo the supposed ‘miserable’ state of poverty that oppressed indigenous peasants, including single mothers and illegitimate children.
As part of their effort to wrest control over resguardos away from male cabildo elites and their powerful mestizo and priestly allies, early republicans developed a new science of land surveys. Surveyors who simply assigned equal acreage of resguardo lands to each resguardo inhabitant would not produce the kind of republican equity New Granada needed, however. New Granada's mountainous terrain meant that each plot of resguardo land would have a distinct ecology and history of land use. Moreover, each family – and each family member – also had a distinct place within a resguardo community. Surveyor expertise needed to go beyond land measurement to include relevant legislation, local history, ecology and aspects of what we now would call sociology and anthropology. Scientifically trained surveyors became responsible for granting all resguardo inhabitants, not just elite cabildo families, guaranteed access to resguardo land parcels. But they needed to do so through a calculus of equity, where each family would get their fair share of land. In due time, resguardo land parcels would become private property, dissolving distinctions between indigenous resguardo inhabitants and all other republican citizens.
The article reveals how these legislative and scientific experiments with producing republican equity within resguardos by gradually abolishing the institution were consistently met with overwhelming numbers of formal complaints by indigenous people or outright armed resistance – such as the War of the Supremes as it played out in Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley. This tension not only delayed the abolition of resguardos but also forced republican lawmakers to create legislation that ultimately ensured that core aspects of indigenous community governance and landholding remained intact. A robust body of literature has examined how abolishing indigenous tribute and privatising indigenous community lands influenced state formation and ethnic identity in various Spanish American republics.Footnote 12 Eliminating tribute in the wake of independence did indeed prove fairly straightforward in New Granada. Abolishing resguardos was another matter. The case examined here reveals how national legislation offered detailed criteria to ensure each eligible indigenous man, woman and child received a fair share of resguardo land. Obstacles to the process nevertheless proved so overwhelming that several provinces suspended resguardo land surveys.Footnote 13 As in other parts of Spanish America, among the most oft-cited reasons for problems was the lack of trained expertise.Footnote 14 However, the success or failure of technical expertise in the division and privatisation of resguardos is not the focus of this article.Footnote 15 Instead, the article demonstrates how early nineteenth-century legislative experiments with producing republican equity within resguardos created a specific kind of scientifically trained surveyor. The article then suggests how republican experiments with equity in resguardos produced resistance that varied by region, ranging from armed insurrection against governing authorities, as was the case in several New Granada provinces during the War of the Supremes, to indigenous engagement with state-sanctioned channels of conflict resolution. The range of these reactions in turn impacted broader processes of national and provincial state formation, including the passage of national laws, shifting provincial boundaries and the regulation of official surveying work.Footnote 16 Indigenous resguardos were dissolved and the lands were privatised in the high plains surrounding Bogotá by the 1880s, but this was a process that took more than half a century to complete. Moreover, despite the dissolution of Suba and Bosa resguardos, indigenous cabildo leadership in those communities has seen a resurgence since the 1990s.Footnote 17
Over the course of the early nineteenth century, the way in which indigenous communities in the high plains surrounding Bogotá expressed resistance to resguardo division was not primarily through armed rebellion. This is not to say that violence or the threat of violence by indigenous groups did not occur. Several members of the communities studied here probably witnessed or participated in the massive indigenous mobilisation comprising the 20,000-strong Comunero Revolution of 1781, sparked in part by changing monarchical policies regulating resguardos.Footnote 18 Furthermore, the scope of armed indigenous mobilisation during the War of the Supremes in provinces such as Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley impacted how the national government approached the question of indigenous resguardos thereafter.Footnote 19 Still, little historical evidence exists suggesting that the indigenous population surrounding Bogotá rebelled against the central government during the War of the Supremes.Footnote 20 Neither did New Granada officials feel the need to send armed soldiers in to native communities near Bogotá to impose national policies on resguardos. Instead, governors, surveyors, civil engineers, legislators, indigenous peoples, judges and non-indigenous people with an interest in resguardos all employed and deployed a variety of strategies to either privatise resguardos, or to block privatisation and ensure resguardo continuity. Armed violence was not among the chosen strategies. The absence of armed conflict in this region seems to have led some scholars to conclude that resguardos indígenas surrounding Bogotá ‘disappeared’.Footnote 21 The recent return of indigenous cabildo leadership in Bosa and Suba and the mobilisation of indigenous groups around environmental concerns in the region suggests otherwise.
Experimentation with the parcelling out of equitable shares of resguardo lands near Bogotá might not have sparked armed conflict, but it did require the massive mobilisation of legal, political and scientific resources at the local and national levels to meet the demands and answer the complaints of indigenous populations. Scholarship examining indigenous people's engagement with Spanish colonial laws has shown how those actions were a form of politics that actively shaped Spanish colonial legal culture.Footnote 22 Historians such as Marcela Echeverri, Peter Guardino, Steinar Saether, Mark Thurner and James Sanders have explored not only the various ways indigenous peoples envisioned a state different from elite imaginings, but also how indigenous political engagement influenced processes of revolution and state formation at the local and national levels.Footnote 23 Instead of focusing on armed conflict, or delving into (the admittedly hard to find) indigenous voices in Bogotá archives, this article demonstrates how republican experimentation to produce equal citizens within resguardos was entangled with New Granada's broader legal culture, land tenure practices, scientific developments in land surveying and local governance. As such, this article challenges long-standing, still-influential, yet wholly inaccurate and simplistic interpretations whereby nineteenth-century Spanish Americans who sought to privatise communal land holding are seen as detached racist elites seeking to impose unworkable foreign models on local realities, impoverishing indigenous populations in the process.Footnote 24 The article also demonstrates how the supposedly scheming, immoral and poorly trained land surveyors were actually much more complicated historical actors.Footnote 25 As Sanders and others have shown, republican elites attempted to integrate indigenous people into republican society economically and culturally by striking republican bargains with them.Footnote 26 Indigenous people, far from being passive victims, actively participated in post-colonial state-building precisely because they, much like other members of the New Granada republic, understood, engaged and – through that engagement – shaped the growing points of access that the republic offered. One result has been that, however much official documents may sharply refract them, some indigenous actions and voices can be perceived through the governors’ reports, provincial ordinances and national legislation seeking to regulate resguardo governance.
The article's next section underscores the complex contradictions in governance policies over resguardos in the transition from the late colonial period to the first republic of Colombia in the 1820s. The following section examines how the New Granada republic that emerged from the dissolution of the first Colombian republic in the 1830s produced national laws that experimented with the gendered dimensions of indigenous eligibility for resguardo lands. These experiments to create republican equity nevertheless threatened the long-standing patriarchal underpinnings of indigenous community life that developed under Spanish rule. I then tease out what a variety of republican actors expected from the scientifically trained surveyors who divided up communal resguardo lands. Land surveying turned into a science of equity, one that could accurately calculate the extent to which ecological, gendered, sociological and historical variables affected how much of a resguardo land parcel individual inhabitants would receive, given their place in the community. The following section suggests how the War of the Supremes probably inspired new national legislation on the administration of resguardos as it also forced New Granada officials to engage in the decentralisation of governance, from the national capital to the provinces. I finally focus on how decentralisation got the better of scientifically trained surveyors who tried to divide the resguardos located in the high plains surrounding Bogotá.
Early Experiments: Resguardos from the Bourbon Reforms to Gran Colombia
The legal creation of indigenous resguardos and efforts to break up and privatise resguardo lands are rooted in the period of Spanish rule. Any simple ‘private property’ versus ‘communal lands’ opposition would miss the nuances of native property practices, especially given the complexity of property rights and practices in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans.Footnote 27 As with other Spanish American kingdoms in the seventeenth century, the Audiencia in Bogotá set aside substantial tracts of land in the name of the Spanish Crown and granted Indian inhabitants usufruct rights. Produce from resguardos in Santa Fe, Tunja, Vélez and Sogamoso helped pay annual tribute taxes and supported local Church functions.Footnote 28 Royal legislation forbade non-Indians from living on or renting resguardo lands and required Indians to live on resguardos. Mid-eighteenth-century inspections of Vélez and Tunja made clear that this segregation policy had broken down, if it had ever worked at all.Footnote 29 The exchange of products from resguardo lands, the labour provided by Indian resguardo inhabitants to their non-Indian neighbours and the leasing of resguardo lands by Indians to Spaniards, mestizos and mulattoes meant that resguardos had long been woven into the warp and weft of local and regional economies and migration patterns.
The Spanish Crown continued the policy of indigenous communal land holding in the 1750s, but rising costs of imperial defence demanded new sources of revenue. Unoccupied lands belonging to the Crown, including unproductive resguardos, could be sold. By the 1770s, this shift in policy meant that Crown authorities disestablished resguardos with smaller Indian populations, moving inhabitants to other resguardos so they could sell off the remaining lands to the highest bidder. Across the empire, several indigenous families tried defending their rights by invoking legal titles, loyalty, service and the need for legal protection of a ‘miserable’ class;Footnote 30 but they were up against creole elites and mestizos who demanded the Crown abolish resguardos altogether. These different sectors of the population did not explode in conflict against each other in New Granada, however. Instead, a common enemy was found: mal gobierno, or bad government. In 1781, thousands of Indians joined thousands more creoles and mestizos in armed rebellion against royal authorities who, in their eyes, had failed to rule effectively.Footnote 31 Viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora, together with Regent Visitor General Juan Francisco Gutiérrez de Piñeres, found a temporary solution to the resguardo question, placating indigenous rebels. Although they did not reverse the sale of resguardo lands that had already taken place, any further sales were prohibited. As long as the King of Spain reigned over New Granada, indios were guaranteed resguardo lands. The wars of independence sparked by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 reopened the resguardo question.
After over a decade of warfare, those fighting for independence understood that any change in policy with respect to resguardos needed to address a strategic question: how to channel indigenous support away from the Spanish Crown and towards independence and republicanism. Simón Bolívar, for one, understood this clearly. On 20 May 1820, as president of Gran Colombia, he issued a decree that sought to pit the more numerous popular sectors within indigenous resguardos against the Spanish Monarchy and against the ruling Indian caciques who tended to support royalism. Bolívar argued that ‘naturales deserve the most paternalistic attentions on the part of the government because they were the most mistreated, oppressed and degraded [peoples] during the period of Spanish despotism’.Footnote 32 Bolívar's ‘naturales’ would be like all other free men in Gran Colombia, with one exception: only naturales would enjoy access to resguardos, or communally held land.Footnote 33 With these words, delivered in the wake of a significant military victory against royalists, Bolívar initiated the creation of a new identity for indigenous populations under a republic. The naturales, Bolívar's new word for indios, would be protected under republicanism.
Bolívar's 1820 decree came only months after Rafael del Riego's rebellion in peninsular Spain, which brought the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 back into effect throughout the Spanish Monarchy. The Cádiz Constitution, one of the most liberal documents of its time, had abolished Indian tribute. Royalist Indian elites opposed the ending of tribute collection. Tribute ensured cabildo heads’ access to wealth produced on resguardos as well as their continued control over popular Indian sectors within resguardos.Footnote 34 Therefore, to incentivise popular support for the Spanish Crown against insurgents, the Cortes de Cádiz decreed in 1813 that certain portions of common lands would be parcelled out to the defenders of the ‘patria’.Footnote 35 Bolívar's decree of 1820 hence challenged the liberal Cortes by continuing the policy of resguardos, but with a republican twist.
Bolívar's decree assured the continuity of resguardos in a way that would have transformed their labour and resource relations. The people who most benefitted from the produce of the resguardos would not be limited to elite cacique families that controlled indigenous cabildos, or even those who supported independence by taking up arms against the Spanish. Instead, each indigenous family, regardless of status or duties served, would have equitable access to the wealth produced on communally held lands. Bolívar framed his decree as part of a republican effort to protect native populations. If implemented, the decree would have revolutionised access to resguardo resources, guaranteeing each and every indigenous family equitable access in ways unlike anything they had seen under the Spanish Monarchy.
The Congress of the first Colombian Republic agreed that resguardo resources needed to be redistributed among indigenous inhabitants. Its law of October 1821 nevertheless went further, abolishing resguardos altogether.Footnote 36 Ironically, this measure drew on the liberalism of the same Spanish government that Gran Colombia was fighting against. With the Cádiz liberal framework in mind, and with Bolívar's republican decree as a model, the Congress sought to score a moral victory against Spain by promulgating a law that abolished the ‘tax known by the degrading name of tribute’.Footnote 37 Resguardos would be broken up, and, as per Bolívar's decree, each and every indigenous family would possess their fair share of resguardo land, yet rather than continue as part of a resguardo, as Bolívar had envisioned, these land parcels would become privately held property. This would all occur ‘when circumstances permit, but before the end of five years’.Footnote 38
Five years came and five years went. Few, if any, resguardos were distributed to indigenous families. In 1827, one of Bolívar's secretaries travelled through the high plains around Bogotá and Tunja. His report on his journey through Boyacá underscored how local authorities, or jueces políticos, had evaded their responsibilities. Among the litany of civic sins they had committed was ‘apathy and indolence … in carrying out their duties, [and] lack of compliance with the law on the distribution of lands to the indígenas’.Footnote 39 This lack of compliance might have frustrated members of the 1821 Gran Colombian Congress, who had insisted on the divisions and privatisation of resguardos, but it did not necessarily upset indigenous peoples themselves. Although the historical record does not easily yield up the voices of native people who actively and directly opposed the 1821 law passed by Congress, delays by those charged with carrying out the law may begin to suggest local indigenous opposition, particularly elite cabildo opposition.
Bolívar recognised the significance of native opposition to resguardo privatisation for the Gran Colombian independence project. Upon assuming dictatorial powers in September 1828, he annulled the congressional law of 1821 abolishing resguardos, arguing that the measure worsened the condition of indigenous people.Footnote 40 Building on his decree granting equitable access to resguardo resources for all indigenous inhabitants, he authorised enhanced rights and protections for indigenous communal landholding. In return, he required a voluntary ‘personal contribution from indígenas’, a republican term for tribute.Footnote 41 By bringing back tribute, Bolívar not only developed a mechanism that would allow him to gauge the extent of indigenous support for independence, he also found a source of revenue that could help finance the Gran Colombian front of the war of independence. The Gran Colombian government upheld Bolívar's 1828 decree. The collection of republican tribute from indigenous people continued as late as 1832 in New Granada, well after Bolívar had died and the first Colombian Republic had dissolved.Footnote 42
As noted above, when the Spanish Monarchy had altered its policies on resguardos in the late eighteenth century, violence ensued in the form of the Comunero Revolution, and the Crown learned its lesson. The question of resguardos and tribute came to be at the centre of how the Spanish Monarchy recruited popular sectors towards royalism during the period of independence.Footnote 43 The contradictions between Bolívar's decrees and congressional laws reveal how early republican experiments with policies on resguardos also formed part of their effort to win support for independence and republicanism. Contradictions in decrees, laws and policies regulating resguardos would only increase after independence, as the case of the New Granada republic illustrates.
Legislative Experiments with Gendered Equity in New Granada Resguardos
With the end of Bolívar's dictatorship and the dissolution of the first Colombian Republic in 1830 came the constitutional convention that gave form to New Granada in 1832. Beyond providing checks and balances between the legislative, judicial and executive branches at the national level, New Granada's constitution outlined the functions of government.Footnote 44 Indigenous resguardos and tribute payments became a priority.Footnote 45 Lawmakers claimed that several granadino citizens, ‘known by the name of indígenas’, complained about the imposition of a personal contribution by Bolívar's ‘dictatorial government’ in 1828.Footnote 46 Apparently in response to indigenous complaints, the newly formed Congress passed a national law in 1832 ending the collection of indigenous contributions, arguing that the only way to fully ‘emancipate’ indigenous populations from the ‘degrading’ state in which they subsisted as a result of Spanish colonial rule was to abolish communal lands.Footnote 47 That same Congress then passed another law regulating the resguardo land surveys and partitions that would aid in their ultimate privatisation.Footnote 48
An entire generation of jurists and lawmakers argued that New Granada's future as a republic depended on avoiding what they diagnosed as a colonial-era legacy: the perpetuation of a parallel and separate república de indios within the polity.Footnote 49 The ills suffered by indios under Spanish colonial rule were widely accepted as sociological fact among several Spanish American intellectuals including the noted jurist, José María Samper.Footnote 50 Samper argued that communal, indivisible indigenous landholding had discouraged colonial-era indios from working in anything other than agriculture. Most deplorably, he argued, colonial-era laws on resguardos isolated indigenous peoples from society at large. The effect of these laws and practices perpetuated what Samper called ‘autogenésia [sic] de la raza’, or a legal, institutional situation that forced indigenous peoples to avoid mixing with people of a different ‘raza ó casta’.Footnote 51 Resguardos restricted human exchange and reproduction as well as the functioning of the market for land. The effective distribution and privatisation of resguardos became a critical site of democratic republican experimentation. Legislators passed a series of laws in the 1830s seeking to transform republican indígenas into citizens like all others.
Confusion quickly ensued after the first set of resguardo laws were passed in 1832. Tribute, after all, determined who was eligible to receive a resguardo land parcel, yet tribute had been legally abolished in 1821. Although Bolívar reinstated a personal contribution for indigenous people in 1828, determinations of eligibility were nevertheless unclear given the gap in tribute collection. New Granada's Department of the Treasury tried to clarify the situation by asking provincial officials if they had received personal contributions from indígenas, what measures they had adopted to collect the contribution and, if they had not done so, why not.Footnote 52 Adding to the confusion was the fact that resguardo lands had long been intricately woven into local mestizo economies, well beyond the usufruct that indigenous families derived from them. The 1832 legislation threatened to alter the warp and weft of those economies. Two years later, apparently in response to an overwhelming cascade of complaints unleashed by the 1832 legislation, the New Granada Congress tried to clear up the confusion by passing yet another law.Footnote 53
The most difficult question the new 1834 national law tried to settle was who was eligible to receive a parcel of resguardo land. Despite efforts to abolish them, tribute payments became the principal way Congress determined eligibility. The gendered detail of this legislation reveals how well versed national lawmakers were in the Spanish Crown's methods for collecting tribute. Perhaps they had personal experience with tribute collection in the period prior to independence. Alternatively, indigenous people, perhaps through their spokespersons, may have described the history and processes of tribute collection to lawmakers. Nevertheless, we do know that the 1834 law stipulated that tribute-paying indigenous males or those males who served on the indigenous cabildo and the families of these individuals were eligible to receive resguardo lands.Footnote 54 These men could claim lands for themselves and for all of their legitimate children, no matter whom they married. Emancipated – i.e. non-tribute-paying – men whose fathers had paid tribute could claim resguardo lands for themselves but did not have the right to do so for their children. Women posed a more complex problem. Women had never paid tribute nor were they allowed to serve on cabildos under the Spanish Crown. However, as daughters and wives of tribute-paying men or cabildo members they counted as emancipated non-tribute-paying indigenous men, but with a significant difference. The illegitimate children borne by these women did have a right to resguardo lands, unlike any children fathered by emancipated indigenous men. However, if an eligible indigenous woman married a ‘vecino’ – or non-tribute paying male – that woman could obtain resguardo lands only for herself, and not for the legitimate children born of that marriage. All resguardo land parcels distributed to all eligible indígenas would become private property after ten years.
This national legislative experiment would not only transform inalienable indigenous usufruct rights into private property, it would do so in ways that amounted to a gendered revolution in land tenure. Families headed by single mothers with illegitimate children would have as equal a share in resguardo lands as families headed by the wealthiest married tribute-paying male or the most powerful indigenous male cabildo leader. Not only did this law raise the status of unwed indigenous mothers as compared to that of indigenous males, it also potentially discouraged marriage for indigenous women who wished to ensure resguardo lands for themselves and their children. As James Sanders has demonstrated for the Cauca region, marriage as sanctioned through Catholicism granted indigenous males the ability to control dependent women and children, thereby legitimising indigenous male citizenship.Footnote 55 The 1834 law, which sought economic equity among all eligible indigenous people, including women, threatened the patriarchal ideological and structural system upon which indigenous communities rested.
Beyond the gendered detail in eligibility requirements that the 1834 law evinces, the law's articles also reveal the array of complications that arose from the deep entanglements between resguardos and local economies. Although lands that paid for religious services needed to be accounted for in surveys, the parts of resguardos that had been mortgaged out to pay for outstanding debts could not be. Litigants were afforded specific access points they could appeal to should disputes arise over resguardo surveys. They included provincial judges, provincial legislatures, provincial governors, the local protector of indígenas and cantonal jueces políticos. Finally, the 1834 law provided for the kind of expert knowledge resguardo land surveyors needed to possess. Scientifically trained surveyors were always to be preferred.Footnote 56 Such legislation was in the spirit of ensuring an equitable process: these surveyors would yield the best possible results for this republican experiment.
The Meaning of ‘Scientifically Trained Surveyor’
The same year the detailed 1834 law on resguardo partitions came out, Lorenzo María Lleras (1811–68), a noted educator and intellectual, published a 33-page booklet entitled Catecismo de agrimensura, apropiado al uso de los granadinos.Footnote 57 As a former provincial lawyer and government official, Lleras understood the reality of indigenous resguardo divisions all too well.Footnote 58 Several of Lleras’ contemporaries agreed that properly trained surveyors would solve the problems associated with resguardo partitioning. For instance, the Colegio de San Bartolomé, New Granada's first institution of higher learning, began holding public exams to test its students on a range of topics, including the survey of indigenous resguardos.Footnote 59 Lleras joined other liberal-minded Spanish Americans of his generation in the belief that the equitable distribution of resguardo land among indígenas was critical for republicanism.
Lleras considered that equitable land parcelling required surveying the resguardo in its entirety using accurate instruments and geometrical calculations. Lands with different levels of fertility, elevation and/or location could then be assigned value; it was not the same to own an acre of well irrigated river-valley land in the savannah as an acre in a high, treeless plateau. Equal size in land plots did not mean equity.Footnote 60 To properly assign value, a surveyor needed to know the economic and environmental history of the different lands contained within a resguardo. This included taking stock of the improvements tenants had made to the plot they inhabited, the kinds of crops grown on different parts of the resguardo, the parts of the resguardo used for pasture and how elevation and proximity to water affected the potential value of a tract of land. Once this array of land variables was accounted for, the surveyor then had to identify eligible indígenas.
Scientifically trained surveyors needed to be careful interpreters of New Granada laws when taking a census of eligible indígenas. As Lleras explained, ‘The law only says that one must keep in mind the number of individuals, but if the law had wanted that distribution to be made among them equally, then it would have stated as much without leaving room for doubt.’Footnote 61 Lleras considered that parishes that allocated an equal share to each member of each indigenous family had produced unfair results, since ‘it does not seem fair that individuals that have such different rights and obligations in society should be equal to each other’.Footnote 62 Lleras offered what he considered to be a prudent alternative so that ‘equity could be achieved without infringing the law’.Footnote 63 Lleras’ solution offered an abstract formula that had, as its base, the single tribute-paying male with no family.Footnote 64 If a surveyor considered that different family members deserved less of a share of resguardo land than this base unit, then the surveyor could count those less-deserving individuals as fractions. Rather than give geometrically equal plots of land to each inhabitant of a resguardo, Lleras proposed that a scientifically trained surveyor needed to engage in a form of sociological research within the resguardo. Indigenous cabildo heads in New Granada were required by law to accompany the surveyor in order to explain the various aspects of community life, and they were to do so without any compensation.Footnote 65 That they did so points to the importance of the endeavour. Surveyors learned about the roles and responsibilities of resguardo indígenas to determine the appropriate amount of land an indigenous family received.
A close reading of governors’ reports reveals that both governors and indigenous cabildo members understood the significance of selecting a surveyor to divide resguardo lands. Governors preferred scientifically trained surveyors, i.e. surveyors who could prove their educational credentials by submitting their diplomas to the governor, or passing a series of tests administered by the provincial government, or both. The problem was that, when they were not resisting the survey process in its entirety, indigenous cabildo heads would insist that untrained surveyors carry out the work. In his 1835 report to the Bogotá legislative chamber, Governor José María Mantilla complained about the obstacles indigenous cabildos posed to hiring trained surveyors. He described the cabildos de ind í genas as corporations made up of influential individuals who had long held control over the majority of the territories in the resguardos. ‘It was natural that these corporations … resist a measure that was directly opposed to their personal interests’, explained Mantilla. ‘For this reason’, he continued, ‘not only do they not cooperate in any way, but they also try to evade the division of the resguardo by suggesting individuals who are the least prepared to carry out the work of surveying in the way it should be done’.Footnote 66 From Governor Mantilla's perspective, elite indigenous cabildo members who enjoyed control over resguardo land and resources either resisted resguardo partitions outright, or tried to delay the process by selecting surveyors Mantilla deemed ineffectual.
There may have been other reasons for indigenous cabildo resistance to hiring scientifically trained surveyors. As Ray Craib has suggested for the Mexican case, villagers understood the implications of surveys for the lands they inhabited and worked.Footnote 67 Although the question requires further research within the context of New Granada, it is reasonable to assume that the republic's surveyors could potentially turn resguardos into discrete plots of land that did not necessarily – if at all – coincide with the ways local people put land to use. A plausible reason explaining indigenous cabildo resistance to hiring trained surveyors in particular may come down to the bottom line. The salaries for evaluators and surveyors in New Granada were set according to the 1824 national law on duties.Footnote 68 While untrained surveyors could earn up to 4 reales for every hour of work, trained surveyors earned 16 reales per hour and 8 reales for each part of an hour thereafter.Footnote 69 Scientifically trained surveyors increased the cost of the survey, one borne by the indigenous community in question.
Governor Mantilla's vision of a republic of equal citizens seems to have made him oblivious to the economic hardship a scientifically trained surveyor would bring to indigenous communities. He also was dismissive of indigenous cabildo participation in the selection of a surveyor. Mantilla seemed to think that cabildo insistence on hiring surveyors who lacked training was due to an effort on the part of indigenous elites to undermine the process overall by allowing inaccuracies to creep in. Mantilla therefore proposed the nullification of all contracts with existing surveyors so that formally trained surveyors could replace them. With trained professionals, and with clear instructions defined by the Bogotá chamber, Mantilla believed Bogotá resguardos could be surveyed and parcelled out within the year.Footnote 70 Governor Ramón Villoría succeeded Mantilla in 1836. He also insisted that delays in resguardo privatisation in Bogotá were caused by the ineptitude and lethargy of poorly trained surveyors and indigenous cabildo resistance. He argued that the only solution was to grant the governorship total control over the naming of these surveyors without having to accept the proposals coming from the jefes políticos, or the representatives of the executive branch in the cantons who, according to national law, needed to consult with the cabildo de indígenas.Footnote 71
Tensions mounted. Cabildo leaders, spokespersons for resguardo communities, individual indígenas, the array of state actors regulating resguardo partitions and people with no legal claim to indigenous identity yet whose economic interests were tied to resguardos all increasingly faced off against one another. Provincial governors bore the brunt of claims, counter-claims and complaints. Yet another governor of Bogotá, Alfonso Acevedo, grumbled to the provincial legislature that at least half his workday was dedicated to handling resguardo-related problems. His words echoed those of dozens of overwhelmed provincial governors: ‘The stupidity of the Indians, the avarice of some whites and the ignorance of the majority of the surveyors has produced such commotion and confusion in the partitioning, that a magistrate dedicated solely to the quick execution of all the processes related to the survey and distribution of resguardos is needed.’Footnote 72
In October 1836, Bogotá’s provincial legislature complied with governor recommendations by issuing an ordinance stipulating that ‘the Governor will name the surveyor to each parish without the need for proposals’.Footnote 73 This essentially foreclosed indigenous cabildo consultation when the time came to select a surveyor, a measure that went directly against the law of 1834.Footnote 74 But because that law stipulated that scientifically trained surveyors were always to be preferred, the Bogotá ordinance had grounds to stand. Still, by 1839, 17 years since the first independent republican law ending tribute and dissolving resguardos had passed, and three years after the Bogotá ordinance demanding that only trained surveyors be hired, most resguardos in the province had yet to be successfully surveyed and partitioned.
Bogotá was not the only province facing delays. As Minister of the Interior Pedro Alcántara Herrán noted, each province, and even each canton within each province, had different concerns and needs. He echoed complaints from an array of provincial officials about the lack of trained surveyors, and underscored how, even for trained experts, the job was complicated given the legal requirement that each indigenous family receive an equitable share of resguardo land. Resistance from the indigenous cabildos on this point was palpable in Alcántara Herrán's report. The minister proposed that the best measure would be to nullify existing laws, and instead issue a new, broader law that allowed provincial authorities more leeway in determining how to carry out the process.Footnote 75 Furthermore, because so many provincial reports had identified cabildos de indígenas as responsible for delaying the process of resguardo partitions, Alcántara Herrán suggested that these cabildos be abolished. The proposal was tempting. The New Granada Senate in 1840 contemplated such a bill. The bill never became law.Footnote 76
The War of the Supremes and the Return of the República de Indios
As the bill seeking to abolish indigenous cabildos was winding its way through Congress, the first civil war since the dissolution of the first Colombian Republic exploded in New Granada. Now known as the War of the Supremes, after the self-proclaimed title assumed by the ‘Supreme’ leaders of provincial armies, the war continued the fragmenting territorial logic unleashed by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula 30 years earlier.Footnote 77 Only the provinces of Bogotá and Neiva remained loyal to the central government from 1839 to 1842. Indigenous populations in the provinces of Pasto, Cauca and Santa Marta joined the armed struggle. As the conflict drew to a close, the forces for the central state violently and systematically executed several indigenous leaders, yet the threat of armed revolt by indigenous peoples continued.Footnote 78 The intricacies of this war and its broader impact on New Granada state formation merit further study. This section, however, focuses on how armed indigenous mobilisation, together with provincial rejection of the central authority in Bogotá, impacted republican experiments with resguardo governance and privatisation at the national level.
One year after the war ended, New Granada's legislative branch did an about-face on Minister Alcántara Herrán's recommendation that indigenous cabildos be supressed. The national law passed on 23 June 1843 offered new regulations on resguardo governance.Footnote 79 Incidentally, 1843 was to be the year that indigenous people would finally be able to assume private ownership of their land parcels across New Granada. Although indigenous resguardo members were legally barred from selling their allocated land parcels, lawmakers reported how several indigenous individuals had already treated their allocated land parcel as their private property prior to the passage of the 1843 law. Congress declared the sales illegal, arguing that they harmed the interests of indígenas. The law then delayed the date indigenous people could assume private ownership for another 20 years (until 1863). The new law also included provisions that indigenous populations would have found remarkably similar to those from the period of monarchical rule. For instance, the law clarified the role of the protectores de indios in the republic, a post that existed under the Spanish Monarchy.Footnote 80 For all their efforts to forge equal citizens out of indigenous people within a republic, New Granada legislators, wary following the destabilising effects of the recent civil war, recognised the value of returning to colonial-era mechanisms as a way of striking a republican bargain that appeased a significantly powerful portion of the population: indigenous cabildo leaders.
Perhaps there was some truth to the observations made by provincial governors in the 1830s that indigenous cabildo interests were negatively affected by the republican impulse towards economic equity in resguardos. This impulse, which was rooted in Bolívar's effort to secure mass support for the independent republican cause, had the potential to spark social and economic transformations within resguardos. Early republicans noted how powerful indigenous cabildo leaders and their wealthy families feared that they would lose control over how resguardo lands could be used, and especially the income that could come from renting the lands out. And yet, by mid-century, the resguardo inhabitants who did not necessarily enjoy indigenous cabildo patronage nevertheless did understand the levers of the state they could lean on to enable them to sell their lands. Consider how in June 1848, despite the passage of the 1843 law – or perhaps because of it – a group calling themselves the ‘indios de Chopo’ petitioned New Granada's House of Representatives for permission to sell the lands they had been assigned during the partitioning of their resguardo.Footnote 81 It is likely that graft, greed and corruption on the part of surveyors, government functionaries and other non-indigenous people with an interest in resguardo lands resulted in unfavourable outcomes for scores of indigenous individuals who sold their resguardo land parcels. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting how some land sales may have benefitted some resguardo members, much to the chagrin of elite male indigenous cabildo leaders who lost control over those lands. Just as some sectors within indigenous resguardos sought to bypass the 1843 national laws delaying resguardo privatisation, several government officials experimented with ways to work around the robust protections for indigenous cabildos enacted by the 1843 legislation.
Decentralisation offered a tempting solution. If the War of the Supremes had taught central authorities anything it was that provincial authorities demanded autonomy. Also by the 1840s, as province after province opted out of the resguardo survey and partitioning process, some national authorities believed government decentralisation could perhaps work towards solving the problem of resguardo privatisation.Footnote 82 In 1848, New Granada's Minister of the Interior, Manuel María Mallarino, proposed that the national government desist from overseeing the resguardo survey and partitioning process. He argued that a more decentralised approach was needed: ‘Provincial authorities should, to the exclusion of all other official powers, be in charge of this business that is by its very nature so complex.’Footnote 83 He admitted that abuses would undoubtedly occur, but the current system had not resolved abuses either. Besides, all reports detailing resguardo problems came from local agents anyway; they were the only eyes through which the national government could see. Within one year, it seems Mallarino's proposal bore fruit. In his report to Congress, he noted that ever since his office had devolved all responsibility regarding resguardos to the provinces, the process was finally beginning to proceed at a reasonable pace. ‘Every day I find new reasons to congratulate myself for excising this [resguardo] and other business from the action of the central government.’Footnote 84 Despite Mallarino's optimistic view, and as the following section demonstrates, decentralisation helped keep resguardos intact, even when the most outstanding, well-trained scientific surveyors were put to the task of partitioning them.
Decentralisation Foils Trained Expertise
The problems of surveying indigenous resguardos in the high plains surrounding Bogotá so overwhelmed provincial government offices that Bogotá’s legislature suspended all resguardo surveys in 1848.Footnote 85 After Minister Mallarino called for the decentralisation of resguardo partitions, newly elected Governor of Bogotá Vicente Lombana informed the provincial chamber that successful resguardo partitioning was at hand. His 1849 report was printed in the province's official newspaper, El Constitucional de Cundinamarca. By serendipitous coincidence, the issue preserved in the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango is autographed by Governor Lombana himself and is dedicated to ‘Commander Agustín Codazzi, Inspector of the Colegio Militar [Military School]’.Footnote 86 This archival trace underscores how Governor Lombana understood that the national military school and its inspector would play a critical role in the surveying and mapping of the province.Footnote 87 The outstanding scientific expertise of New Granada's elite military school would produce the effective and equitable republican distribution of resguardo lands among all eligible inhabitants in Bogotá province.
Arguably, the training that Colegio Militar cadets received in the 1850s was rooted in the republican needs articulated by legislators and educators a generation earlier. Lorenzo María Lleras’ Catecismo offered surveying lessons in the abstract through a manual that Colegio San Bartolomé students probably studied in their classrooms in the 1830s. Starting in the 1850s, Agustín Codazzi taught several military school cadets through hands-on mapping of Bogotá’s urban space, rural common lands and proposed roads in the national capital.Footnote 88 Codazzi sold the merits of the school by arguing in the national newspaper that Colegio Militar graduates would successfully survey lands, providing clear boundaries so as to avoid conflict.Footnote 89 Of all possible candidates, military school graduates possessed sophisticated training that would finally allow for the effective, fair, legal and equitable division and distribution of resguardos once and for all. This was precisely because Colegio Militar graduates would most effectively include necessary gendered, historical, sociological and ecological variables in their surveying work. Sophisticated training in tabular calculations, a method they learned from the Minister of the Interior, Lino de Pombo, would allow graduates to relate these variables to each other.Footnote 90 The location of the school in Bogotá facilitated the logistics of hiring these scientifically trained individuals to survey the resguardos in the high plains surrounding that city.
The stage was set in the savannah of Bogotá for the positive role Colegio Militar-trained surveyors could play in the effective and equitable distribution of resguardo lands (see Figure 1). One of the more successful graduates, Manuel Ponce de León, led his classmates in taking on those resguardos.Footnote 91 Ponce's proposal eventually became the template for drawing up subsequent resguardo partitioning contracts in Bogotá.Footnote 92 Ponce, together with his business partner Joaquín Solano Ricaurte, won the contracts to survey and distribute the resguardos of Engativá, Suba, Fontibón, Cota, Usme, Tocancipá, Cucunubá and Ubaté.Footnote 93 Joaquín Barriga, another noted graduate of the Colegio Militar, won the contracts to survey the resguardos of Anolaima and Cipacón nearby. The newly elected governor of Bogotá, Rafael Mendoza, boldly predicted positive results from the conscientious work of these trained engineers: ‘I have no doubt that after the course of one year, the period of their contract, not a single indigenous person will be left in the province that will not be able to make use of their right to freely dispose of their properties, in line with the principles of a liberal system.’Footnote 94 Governor Mendoza joined elites in championing the efficient probity and skills of the military school graduates.Footnote 95 These young men would finally bring an end to resguardos in the high plains surrounding Bogotá.
Figure 1. Map of indigenous resguardos located in the high plains near Bogotá to be divided by Colegio Militar graduates.
And yet, during the short time of Governor Mendoza's tenure, as the Solano, Ponce and Barriga surveys were under way, problems emerged. Ponce and Solano had originally agreed in their 1852 contracts that they would conclude their operations within the year. But in February of 1853 they requested a six-month extension. They cited unseasonable rains as their excuse.Footnote 96 Nature was not the only force working against them.
The most significant obstacle proved to be the same experimentation with decentralisation that the national state had set in motion starting in the 1840s. From 1845 to 1853, New Granada sought to move government closer to the people by increasing the number of provincial governments from 20 to 36. This territorial transformation formed part of several mid-century efforts to decentralize governance in New Granada.Footnote 97 Experiments with the decentralisation of republican governance were most keenly felt in the life of resguardos. By 1852, when Solano and Ponce began their work on the Tocancipá resguardo, the area no longer lay under Bogotá’s jurisdiction. Instead, it came under the jurisdiction of the newly formed province of Zipaquirá. Scientific expertise was no match for decentralisation's ability to expand the number of government agents with a stake in resguardo partitions.
Contrary to the rosy expectations of Bogotá governors, Zipaquirá’s governor, Juan Miguel Acevedo, did all in his power to put a stop to the surveys by the Colegio graduates.Footnote 98 When Ponce and Solano signed their contract to survey Tocancipá in January of 1852, that resguardo lay under Bogotá’s jurisdiction. Three months later, the province of Zipaquirá assumed jurisdiction over Tocancipá. By then, Governor Acevedo of Zipaquirá had received overwhelming numbers of complaints from Tocancipá resguardo indígenas.Footnote 99 In his report to the newly formed provincial legislature, he noted how the Tocancipá resguardo had already undergone a partial survey, and that it had been a disaster for its indigenous populations. None other than José María Solano Ricaurte, brother of Joaquín Solano Ricaurte, had conducted that survey in the 1830s. ‘La Comunidad’, a valuable section of that resguardo, was offered up in public auction to pay for José María Solano's surveying work. He received an amount supposedly greater than what he was owed. When asked to return the excess money, he disappeared.Footnote 100 Governor Acevedo's address to the Zipaquirá chamber signalled how another survey of Tocancipá would only have the effect of ‘encumbering those wretches with yet another unbearable expenditure’.Footnote 101
The re-drawing of provincial jurisdictions together with targeted indigenous cabildo complaints to the newly established provincial authorities worked against the Colegio-trained surveyors. By 1856 Ponce and Solano had still not met the terms of their contract. Cota and Suba were the only resguardos that Ponce and Solano had managed to distribute to indigenous families during that five-year period. But even these surveys had to be revised because, according to indigenous complaints, the surveyors had appropriated the best lands, leaving to the indígenas ‘desolate terrain’.Footnote 102 As of 23 April 1853, military school graduate Joaquín Barriga, for his part, never showed up to survey and partition the resguardos of Anolaima and Cipacón. Changing jurisdictions may have also played a role in Barriga's apparent dereliction of duty. Barriga's contract from 1852 had been with the province of Bogotá. By 1853 Anolaima had passed to the jurisdiction of the newly created province of Tequendama. The Tequendama governor's office opened up a new bid in May 1853 to survey Anolaima resguardos.Footnote 103
The move towards decentralisation of governance from the national level to that of the provinces had another effect beyond changing jurisdictions. A more decentralised state also increased the points of access that people could use to right perceived wrongs; these helped delay resguardo surveys and partitions. Consider the resguardos that remained under the jurisdiction of the Bogotá province. According to Bogotá Governor Mendoza, landowners adjacent to resguardos
appropriated resguardo lands with ease. As indigenous peoples are now on the same terms as the rest of the Citizens, with their same rights and obligations, they see themselves forced either to sell the small plot of land that they were adjudicated at a tenth of its value, or to fence the plot at a cost that is several times the value of their possessions.Footnote 104
The result was that hundreds of indígenas brought complaints before Mendoza, a governor who had originally been in favour of an expedited survey of indigenous resguardos by Colegio graduates.
Governor Mendoza's report also reveals how local and national authorities experimented with republican governance on the question of resguardos legislatively and through the court system. Mendoza argued that Bogotá province had resolved complaints in ways that were favourable to indigenous populations, but the national government overturned provincial decisions. To avoid future doubts and litigations on this issue, Mendoza recommended that the provincial chamber should issue an act that ‘defined once and for all resguardo borders in ways that put the best interests of that wretched class [of indígenas] first’.Footnote 105 Although the national government carefully sidestepped the legal category of ‘miserable’ in its 1843 national law on indigenous peoples, Mendoza openly evoked this category in his report to the Bogotá chamber. Perhaps he had heard the term ‘miserable’ in the many appeals brought to him by indigenous people? In any case, the problems outlined by Mendoza were a harbinger of the obstacles to resguardo distribution that would continue well into the end of the nineteenth century, obstacles that ultimately defeated Colegio-trained surveyors. The resguardos that Colegio students were hired to survey and partition proved remarkably resistant to their work. Although several of those resguardos, such as those of Engativá, were eventually dissolved, indigenous cabildo leadership in the region has recently sought to bring back resguardos in Bosa and Suba.
Conclusion
In 1984, don Miguel Taimal, governor of Cumbal, a recently reconstituted resguardo in the Nariño department near the Cauca river valley, spoke with anthropologist Joanne Rappaport about his people's historical relation to the land. According to don Miguel's account, Christopher Columbus himself brought Law 89 of 1890 to Colombia.Footnote 106 Law 89, referred to by don Miguel, was a piece of Colombian legislation that residents of Cumbal invoked to successfully gain recognition for their resguardo in the eyes of the national government. As Rappaport is right to argue, this dynamic illustrates how Colombian indigenous communities and the state shared and accepted legal definitions of indigenous identity when the time came to create and implement public policy regarding resguardos.Footnote 107 The emergence of this shared juridical idiom can nevertheless be dated prior to 1890.
The republican ‘indígena’ who emerged in the wake of independence was a legal co-creation resulting from political negotiations between republican lawmakers, indigenous people and several others with a stake in resguardo land. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as independent Spanish American republican governments tried to work out the meanings and practices of governance, resguardos offered a critical place of experimentation. Bolívar's radical effort to assure economic sustenance for each person with a legitimate claim on resguardo lands – while nevertheless maintaining resguardos and tribute – formed part of early republican efforts to win mass support and legitimacy away from the Spanish monarchy. Although Congress agreed with Bolívar's efforts, they thought he needed to go further and abolish resguardos and tribute altogether. Tensions between New Granada's executive and legislative branches on the question of resguardo governance did not die with Bolívar. Subsequent republican state-makers continually attempted to experiment with laws that would forge equal citizens of the indigenous people who, they argued, had been left in ‘misery’ due to life under Spanish rule. The effects of these legislative and scientific experiments to produce equity among resguardo inhabitants through censuses and land surveying were felt well after the 1850s.
As a concluding case in point, consider the resilience of the Suba resguardo that was subject to countless surveys and partitions, including one by Colegio graduates Solano and Ponce, whose unsuccessful survey demanded yet another revision. José Leiva Millán, also a Colegio Militar graduate, conducted that subsequent survey in the 1850s.Footnote 108 None of this survey work effectively dissolved the Suba resguardo. The partitioning of the Suba resguardo that took place in 1877 reflected further changes to national legislation on resguardos as well as that specific resguardo’s resilience.
After gathering together all the Suba comuneros (the people of Suba eligible to receive a resguardo land parcel), the surveyor read off names from his list. He tried to ensure that all comuneros eligible to receive land parcels were on it. He invited those who thought they had been unjustly excluded to state their claims – and claims abounded. How the surveyor noted them is worth citing at length, for it evokes continuities with the ways surveyors were trained in the 1830s under Lleras’ manual, while also suggesting the new ways people understood indigenous identity after the tribute-paying generation had long died off:
In effect, Juana Bulla claimed [resguardo lands] for herself and for her two children, Gregoria and Timoteo, and so did Antonia Ninque, who, because they were indigenous on both parental lines, were inscribed in the list under the first division. Eustaquio Cabiativa asked that his daughter, María, be inscribed in the first division, as a pure indígena, and she was immediately added because, in reality, she was. Santos Niviayo immediately followed by asking that her natural son, José Catarino, be included, and, [the fact of his being the son of an indígena] being true, he was included in the second division which lists the names of the natural children of single indígena mothers. Joaquín Mususú, indígena married to a white woman, asked that his daughter, Rufina, be included as well, and she was, under the third division that includes the names of the mestizos.Footnote 109
By the late 1870s, eligibility requirements for resguardo land had changed. The tributary status of the father or maternal grandfather mattered less than being able to prove to the surveyor indigenous identity and marital status along both parental lines. By the 1870s, another notable change was that ‘mestizos’, legitimate or illegitimate, could claim resguardo land rights. The nature of the claims indígenas could make, however, was still subject in part to surveyors’ calculations.
The mediating role of surveyors in the 1870s continued a trend from the 1830s, despite significant legal changes over the course of those 40-odd years. Surveyors continued to determine who was an eligible indígena, while also calculating what kind of land, and how much of it, eligible indígenas could obtain. As the above quote from the 1877 survey report on the Suba resguardo suggests, surveyors no longer created abstract indigenous families made up of fractions. They considered individual indígenas as whole persons, one by one. Parental lineages and legitimacy mattered, but whereas in the 1830s single indigenous mothers could legally claim resguardo lands for their children, 1870s indigenous children born out of wedlock received a lesser share.Footnote 110 Comuneros born of legitimate marriages between indígenas were classified as belonging to the ‘first’ division and obtained the most highly-valued lands. Children of illegitimate unions were ‘second class’, which meant they were probably assigned shares in less fertile or less advantageously located areas. ‘Mestizos’, or children born from the marriage of one indigenous parent to one non-indígena, were categorised in the third division and were allocated smaller ‘units’ of resguardo shares according to acreage and value. By 1888, several people had challenged the 1870s Suba resguardo survey, arguing unfair practices. Their petitions were heard, and another revision of documents and land distributions went forward, but surprisingly, even despite the passage of Law 89 of 1890 that again sought to abolish resguardos once and for all, the Suba resguardos de indígenas still existed as late as 1895.Footnote 111 After the devastating War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) and under the Rafael Reyes presidential administration (1904–9), it seems the resguardos of the high plains surrounding Bogotá, including those of Suba, were finally parcelled off and sold to the highest bidder.Footnote 112 The 1991 constitution nevertheless inspired over 2,500 indígenas in Suba to once again form an indigenous cabildo, one that has recently mobilised in defence of Suba's water and natural resources.Footnote 113
Over the course of the nineteenth century, surveyor manuals, together with national laws and provincial governor reports, reveal that, when it came time to survey and parcel out indigenous common lands, the meaning of equity was always up for debate. This uncertainty was, in and of itself, an important aspect of republican national state formation. Surveyors were among the first state agents to arbitrate the value of resguardo land, and then assign land shares to the individuals deemed eligible indígenas. Given extensive censuses and the implications of resguardo partitions for the entire community, indigenous cabildo leaders and elite families would not have been the only people interested in the process. Less influential people within these indigenous communities would have known about resguardo surveys. The fact that governors encountered complications, complaints, corruption and conflict when the abolition of tribute and partitioning of resguardo laws went into effect within their jurisdiction is evidence of indigenous awareness and participation. Much like their non-indigenous granadino counterparts, resguardo inhabitants understood the levers of power they could press to obtain resolution for their needs and concerns. Some indigenous people in places like Cauca, Santa Marta and Pasto resorted to armed violence to ensure their needs were met. The indigenous peoples living in the resguardos along the high plains near Bogotá chose less violent strategies. They turned to the growing points of access offered by a decentralising national state to obtain resolution when conflict over resguardo resources emerged. Indígenas had become republican citizens after all.
Author ORCIDs
Lina del Castillo, 0000-0002-6126-0389.
Acknowledgements
Research and writing for this article was conducted under the auspices of the University of Texas at Austin, the Fulbright Scholar Program in Bogotá, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the Institute of Latin American Studies – School of Advanced Study at the University of London. The author would like to thank Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Mark Thurner, Nancy Appelbaum and the Journal of Latin American Studies’ anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and feedback. All translations from the original Spanish are my own.
