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Santiago de la Nación Guachichil: law and the re-emergence of a disappeared identity in eighteenth-century San Luis Potosí

Abstract After half a century of Spanish colonial presence in San Luis Potosí, the local Guachichil population vanished from all historical documentation. It resurfaced in the early eighteenth century, when the barrio of Santiago del Río filed a land litigation against its neighbors, the famous Tlaxcalans. In this article, I study the first fifty years of that long and continuous litigation to analyze the relations between law, identity, and political power in eighteenth-century New Spain. I explore how a subordinate indigenous community learned about elements of law, and how it could use that knowledge to bring back a lost ethnic identity and thus raise its political status. I argue that the elite of Santiago first emulated the Tlaxcalans, but then surpassed them in influence and developed new legal strategies that enabled them to gain the favor of the Spanish authorities. In the process, the barrio changed its ethnic identity, passing from a generic indio to a strong Guachichil identity.