In the fall of 1978, my wife and I were invited by some Mexican friends to visit their Nahua relatives in the pueblo of Tuspa.
That was the original name of today’s city and municipality of Tuxpan, located approximately 90 miles south of Guadalajara. Since we were to have the good fortune of staying with Nahua-speaking natives of Tuspa, we quickly began researching Spain’s province of Tuspa.
According to historical records from local monographs, Tuspan was founded by the Toltec pilgrimage in the year 642. In 1529, the Spanish arrived under the command of Francisco Cortés de San Buenaventura, nephew of Hernan Cortes. Franciscan friars “founded” the village of Tuspa in 1536 and quickly built a convent that year dedicated to San Juan de Bautista. Later, an eight-sided cross was built with a quadrangular base. It is currently considered the oldest colonial monument of Jalisco. Here, from that 1978 point of view, was what we were introduced to.
The area covered by the former Spanish province of Tuspa (the region surrounding Tuxpan, Jalisco) remains one of the few nearby regions which visibly, often dramatically, clings to its colonial past.
History remainsIn Tuxpa Indian women can still be seen wearing the same black wool sabanilla (skirt) and white huipil (blouse) and short white joloton (shawl) their ancestors wore centuries ago — a long time for a fashion to maintain its popularity.
The original center of the province was Tuspa, today’s Tuxpan, now a town of 34,000 located just below Ciudad Guzman off Mexican Federal Highway 54.
The Suma de Vista de Nueva España — the first detailed European survey of the new colony ordered by King Carlos I of Spain in April 1546, just as the initial disastrous epidemic struck New Spain — plus the Archivo General de la Nacion and the detailed Archivo General de Indias show that the first Spaniards here were outriders from Cristobal de Olid’s 1522 expedition, and indicate that Spanish control of the area was established around 1524. Local Tuspa records show that “in the year 29 of the XVI century the Spanish army descended from Masamitla to Zapotlan (today’s Ciudad Guzman) and Tamazula, impelled to dominate the Kindom of Colimotl (Colima), known to be rich and powerful, and which defended itself strongly ...”
Early Invasion
Two generations before the abrupt appearance here of Spanish conquistadores, the Purepechas (whom the Spanish named Tarascans) of Mechuacan (today’s Michoacan) invaded the region, encountering obdurate, but divided groups of tribes speaking a variety of languages, including the predominate Nahua, Pinome, Zayulteco and Xilotlantzinco.
At the time that the Spanish arrived, the Purepechas of Mechuacan had overwhelmed the tribes of the area and were pushing their occupation into the north, west and south.
By 1570, Nahua was spoken almost exclusively throughout the north and central portions of the province, with Xilotlantzinco (a related tongue) in the south, while Purepecha dominated in the Masamitla region. However, by this time, 1570, only a small portion of the original population which inhabited the area at the time of the first Spanish contact still survived. (Butchery and disease swiftly decimated the native Americans here as elsewhere in Nueva España.) Knowledgeable historians point out that evidence indicated there had been a significant Nahua replacement immigration from the Kingdom of Colimotl by this date.
Spanish settle Tuspa
Reports by the first Spanish explorers to reach the Tuspa region, recorded in the Archivo de la Nacion, show that Tamazula alone had “20,000 Indians and more.” But by 1580 the number of Indians there had fallen to 1,700 and by 1623 it had dropped to just 685.
Franciscan parishes in the province were organized in the early 1530s, one at Tuspa, where the church in which the citizens of today’s Tuxpan still worship, was founded in 1536, the other at Asuncion Zapotlan (Ciudad Guzman). Another convent (church) was constructed at San Francisco Tamazula by 1551 and by 1649 there was a fourth monastery at Zaptiltic.
For ecclesiastical administration, the Spanish originally assigned the province of Tuspa to the diocese of Mechuacan. But from 1795 to the present time, it has been a part of the Guadalajara diocese.
For the purpose of exploiting the natives and the lands of New Spain, the crown divided the area into encomiendas. Encomiendas were originally given to conquistadores so that they might collect tribute and labor from the Indians of the assigned area as part of the Spanish effort to “civilize” the new colony. Hernan Cortes assigned to himself the entire region of Tuspa as early as 1523, along with other provinces. However, while he was away from New Spain, the acting governors of the colony reassigned it to Rodrigo de Albornoz. Cortes reasserted his claim when he returned to Nueva España in 1526 from his disastrous — and needless — expedition to Honduras. His huge encomienda was seized in 1529 by Nuño de Guzman. By 1531, Tuspan had become a crown possession.
The changes
The religious orders in Nueva España worked together with the civil-military administrators of the Spanish crown to civilize the new colony. Both the priests and the conquistadores found that the natural inclination of the Indians to live in dispersed rancherias, estancias and family clusters was inconvenient for the purposes of pacification, conversion, administration and labor exploitation.
At first the Spanish did little to change this natural aboriginal population pattern. During the first years an amazingly few of the existing principal indigenous settlements (primarily Tenochtitlan — Mexico City) were made into Spanish bastions. More frequently, Spanish town sites were established in fertile valleys which had been left unoccupied by the local Indian population, usually because they were militarily indefensible. Spanish missionaries, however, made use of indigenous towns to begin their program of conversion, almost invariably establishing their convents, monasteries and parish churches on the shattered foundations of a native teocalli (temple), and bringing smaller outlying communities under control of these now more important cabeceras.
However, as Spanish cruelty, overwork and disease began to take their toll, the friars, the encomenderos and the crown officers woke up to the advantages of having their “charges” gathered into central settlements where they could be easily controlled and exploited. Living in largely inaccessible pueblos dispersed throughout New Spain’s difficult terrain, the Indians were able to avoid the tribute taxes and religious services required by the Spanish, and could continue to celebrate their own religious beliefs as they wished.
Congregations
This impulse to gather the indigenous population into controllable community units was given sudden legal force following the epidemic of cocoliztl (measles) in 1545-1548. Royal commands of 1551 and 1558 ordered all the surviving natives to be congregated in pueblos of European design near monasteries, convents and churches. By 1560 most of the original cabeceras had been moved to what the Spanish considered more useful sites, generally on lower, more level land.
Throughout the 1550s and 1560s an aggressive campaign was waged to persuade or force Indians living in outlying communities to abandon their ancestral homesites. Thousands of indigenous communities disappeared as this congregation campaign was carried out. Still there were maverick Indians who wanted to live where they chose and where tribal history dictated.
Immediately after the epidemic of matlazahual (typhus) in 1576-1581, the Crown, under pressure from the clergy and land-hungry Spaniards, began another program of forced congregation. By 1598, nearly all of Nueva España had been divided into 30 congregational districts, each of which had a juez de congregacion and subordinate officials who examined their assigned area and chose new sites for Indian communities. When these decisions were approved by Mexico City, the judges and their assistants revisited the communities marked for elimination to get the Indians to move. The new towns were built by the displaced Indians themselves, and were laid out in the typical Spanish grid pattern surrounding a central plaza dominated by a church with a market place adjoining it. The old estancias and cabeceras were abandoned, their churches razed and the Indian dwellings burned. Thus, the first pacification hamlets were born in the New World.
Another congregation campaign was initiated in the late 1500s and was vigorously enforced though 1605. Thousands of indigenous place names disappeared forever. Individual Spaniards acquired these abandoned villages, with their fields, forests and waters, and converted them into large haciendas.
In Tuspa province, an extensive program of congregation was carried out by the Franciscans even before 1551, during which many important aboriginal communities disappeared forever. Another reduction of such communities occurred again in the 1590s. Gathering those Indians who had thus far survived the civilizing effects of the Spanish into such central locations, of course, made them additionally vulnerable to overwork and to those contagious diseases which were to continue to sweep through New Spain for another 200 years.
(This is the first of a series on Tuspa – Tuxpan – Jalisco.)