Future-making and Custom in Indigenous Land Claims in Colonial Mexico

A pernicious legacy of empire can be discerned in a common tendency of developed nations and elite institutions around the globe to imagine Indigenous peoples in a particular position in a singular flow of time: facing backward toward the past, locked in it, and perpetually behind in the historical march of modernity. My task in this presentation is to push against this framework by analyzing the future-making activities of Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico as they engaged with Spanish courts to litigate over and claim land. I am interested in how Native authorities used Spanish-style partnership contracts to produce common lands that were purportedly rooted in ancestral possession. By reaching into the past to make claims in the present, Indigenous communities anticipated a future that they hoped to avoid: cycles of costly litigation and violent conflict with their Indigenous neighbors. In doing so, they engaged in the willful and intentional creation of custom as a law for posterity, a criterion for prescriptive custom according to European norms. And in their effort to lend specific temporalities to custom, they produced new categories of time.