Making Order Out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Politics in the Spanish Colonial Borderlands

Abstract

Jurisdictional fluidity was a central feature of early modem Iberian law, and jurisdictional tensions were exacerbated by overseas conquest and colonization. Contests over the legal status of conquered peoples featured both jurisdictional jockeying among colonial factions and widespread preoccupation with the symbols and rituals marking cultural and legal difference. This article examines the dynamics of jurisdictional politics in seventeenth-century New Mexico, where church and state officials carried on a bitter feud over legal authority during most of the century. Rather than viewing this contest as either transparently political or a mask for deeper processes defining hegemony, the article argues that seemingly dry legal distinctions were the focus of passionate and persistent struggle precisely because they merged institutional and cultural concerns of missionaries, settler elites, and Indians. The analysis leads to broader, more speculative claims about the role of jurisdictional fluidity in creating an “orderly disorder” that spanned diverse regions within Spanish America and, more broadly, across colonial regimes in the early modern world.

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