Strategies of indigenous resistance and assimilation to colonial rule
Keywords: Political Science.

This dissertation explores the strategies that the Indigenous people of Latin America employed to survive European colonization. Through these chapters I highlight their central role in the creation of the colonial state. This dissertation challenges the narrative that defines Indian communities solely as passive recipients of colonial extraction. Focusing on colonial Mexico from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries and using extensive archival research, I study the strategic reasoning which led Indigenous groups to collaborate with the colonial power or resist colonial rule. I argue that in order to understand the legacy of these institutions at a macro-level we first must have a clearer understanding of the logic of particular institutions at a micro-level. I also engage with the work produced by historians exploring the question of alliances, native claims, and Indigenous rebellions. The ultimate goal of this project is bringing back Indigenous groups into the discussion of institutional development and long-term historical processes. In Chapter 1 I motivate this discussion by arguing that the main theories of colonial governance and institutional persistence disregard the prominent role Indigenous communities played in the creation and maintenance of the colonial state. I argue that these theories echo the Black Legend narrative in which the Spanish empire is depicted as a centralized, despotic, and exploitative regime. Although the colonial period was certainly oppressive and the Spanish bureaucracy was plagued with corruption, recent historical literature shows that the institutional architecture of the empire was more nuanced than these theories assume. In particular, the interaction with Indigenous communities has been misrepresented as these groups were central actors that skillfully resisted and negotiated colonial control. In this chapter I map the repertoire of contention used by Indigenous communities, illustrating the strategies which ranged from open collaboration to violent resistance. Based on this mapping, I develop the intellectual contributions of the dissertation to the colonial governance literature, to the field of judicial politics, and to the political economy literature studying long-term development processes. The second chapter, Tlaxcala Since the 16th Century, focuses on the motivations behind the three-hundred-year alliance between the Indigenous province of Tlaxcala and the colonial powers. Using this historical example, I show how the early military alliance between this province and the Spanish conquerors evolved in a long-term partnership with mutual benefits. During the entire colonial period Tlaxcalans enjoyed special taxing privileges and maintained an autonomous Indigenous government that served as a shield for Spanish encroachment. Based on extensive archival research I show how Tlaxcala had higher levels of communication with the central powers, measured in the number of claims. Moreover, these claims were more successful than for neighboring provinces. I also present some evidence on the success of the province to provide public goods by presenting measures on the number of schools in Indigenous towns by the end of the eighteenth century. For the same time period, using anthropometric measures I show that people with Indigenous heritage presented higher levels of well-being than in neighboring provinces. I conclude the chapter presenting evidence on the long-term effects of the alliance on modern economic outcomes by implementing a geographic discontinuity approach. In the third chapter, Justice as Checks and Balances, I explore the judicial system of the Spanish empire. In particular I ask why colonial rulers decided to protect Indigenous populations and why these populations decided to use this institutional arrangement to address their grievances. I theorize that this judicial system was used strategically to balance powers in the colony by keeping local elites and bureaucrats in check. Despite being a fundamental element of colonial governance, existing research in political science has overlooked how these regimes managed Indigenous grievances. I analyze more than a half million historical documents stored in the colonial archives of Mexico and Spain. Applying computational text analysis and geographic parsing to these documents I create a dataset of 30,000+ Indigenous claims sent to the colonial courts. I find that the decisions of the court are consistent with a theory of strategic judicial protection. Indians were more likely to win court cases when their local population was under decline, when settler elites were powerful, and when their claims did not challenge the power of the central state. These results have implications for our understanding of both the development of Indigenous legal autonomy in colonial history and for the more general strategic development of judicial power in autocracies. One plausible, yet controversial, implication is that Indigenous communities had more tools to resist oppression during the colonial period than following the rise of the nation-state. In the final chapter, Riot, Rebellion, and Lawsuits, I draw on the literature of social and political movements and argue that Indigenous groups resorted to the judicial system as an alternative for violent contention. It is only when the institutional solution failed that violence became a logical and legitimate alternative. Paradoxically, the use of the colonial institutional apparatus to resist colonial rule also facilitated the assimilation of Indigenous populations. I provide empirical evidence to support these claims with a novel dataset of Indian rebellions. Through a careful archival research, I identify about three hundred previously unclassified revolts. My findings suggest that the rule of law had a central role in the provision of social order in the Spanish Empire, and in the assimilation of Indigenous people more broadly.