Territorial Rights for Individuals, States, or Pueblos? Answers from Indigenous Land Struggles in Colonial Spanish America

Abstract

Who should have rights to territory? Dominant political theories hold that either individuals or state-based groups (states, nations, or state-based civic peoples) have foundational territorial rights. However, they cannot accommodate some Indigenous peoples’ claims that the land should be subject neither to private ownership nor to sovereign state control. Given these claims, some scholars have recently revised these theories to mediate between state jurisdiction and private property. But those revisions have thus far neglected the views of Indigenous peoples who did not experience Anglo-American settler colonialism. This article therefore examines contemporary territorial rights theories in light of the experience of colonial Spanish America. Using sixteenth-century documents in which Indigenous communities conceptualized and asserted their rights to territory, historical evidence of political struggles between these communities and the colonial state, and interpretations of colonial legal thinkers from the seventeenth century (particularly Juan de Solórzano Pereira), I argue that, in addition to individuals and state-based groups, we should consider another subject of territorial rights: pueblos, or grounded communities.