Indian Congregations in the New Kingdom of Granada: Land Tenure Aspects, 1595–1850

Abstract

IN their essays on the congregation of Indians in New Spain, Lesley Byrd Simpson and Howard F. Cline advanced information on the general characteristics and legal bases of this royal policy. Essentially, the kings of Spain wanted to gather the Indians into towns for purposes of religious training and in order to facilitate fiscal and political administration. According to Simpson and Cline, the application of these laws in New Spain toward the latter part of the sixteenth century was largely ineffective and, apparently, the congregation program affected only a small portion of the native population. One of the main reasons for this partial failure was the fact that the Indians already had villages, and it was very difficult for them to move to newly established locations. The documentation of these socio-political processes is avowedly incomplete; investigators have not gone beyond 1606 and have not examined the intrinsic land tenure implications. Except for a case history presented by Cline in 1955, other social aspects of this policy have hardly been studied.

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