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Migration as a fundamental adjunct of settlement – the veins through which the blood of population moves – needs to be measured and assigned a place in the fabric of colonial spatial and social organization. Various types of migration and motives for such movement have come to light. Spanish colonial administrators were themselves aware of the complex mobility of native populations. Individuals moved with, or were followed by their families, or moved alone in pursuit of marriage and the opportunity to work, or by contrast, to flee looming death and unpaid tribute. Villages collapsed and their remnants dispersed to new sites, or corporate decisions might be taken to relocate in proximity to cash crop economies. Whole regions underwent upheaval and experienced economic decline or boom, with consequent dislocation and relocation. This study discusses recorded migration amongst the Indians of colonial Chiapas, with particular emphasis on reactions to eighteenth-century crises in the region. The idea of fugitivism, or flight – the most common words used by Spanish administrators to describe absent Indians – implies deliberate concealment of self from authority. Its use to describe such movement by Indian individuals and groups might be thought inappropriate in most situations, although the word is employed widely by Latin American historians of the colony. There is nothing in the documents for Spanish-controlled Chiapas to suggest that the absent were hunted down, apart from the entradas made against the Lacandon Indians of the frontier during the seventeenth century. But undramatic movement by those who declined to stay put was seen as doing violence to the Spanish conception of ordered administration, undermining the fabric of the system, calling down on offenders an indictment of unreason, godlessness, and sheer contrary-minded elusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urbanization of Latin America since the Second World War, much of it characterized by the migration of impoverished rural people to primate cities, has attracted a great deal of scholarly analysis, so much that influential hypotheses, such as the “culture of poverty” and “marginality, ” are periodically posited and tested against prevailing studies and that syntheses of the considerable literature are composed. Although studies of recent migration may attempt some sort of historical overview in their introductory chapters, their treatment is handicapped by several factors. The first is that there is relatively little literature on migration to major cities in Latin American history. While some excellent studies of aspects of migration do exist, they usually cover rural areas and towns and villages and emphasize the origins of marriage partners or movement back and forth between Indian villages or small towns and the surrounding hinterland. These subjects are certainly worthy of serious study, but neither in their findings nor in the implications do they suggest what we might expect to find in patterns of migration to the major cities. The second failing is an assumption that in the past as in the present the most important component of urban migration was that conducted by the rural poor. In fact, it constituted merely one aspect of a broader and long-maintained movement by elements from a variety of socioeconomic and occupational groups towards the large cities. Finally, these studies do not appreciate the extent to which modern-day migration represents the continuation of traditions and patterns determining who within the family migrates, when, to what destination, and what relationship the migrants maintain with those who do not move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who fails to settle fails to conquer properly. Compared with Mexico and Peru, the colonial experience in Central America, period by period, place by place, remains elusively beyond our knowledge. General works such as those by Murdo MacLeod and William Sherman serve effectively as important frames of reference, but neither scholar would claim his contribution to be anything more than a foundation upon which further research must be built. MacLeod in particular recognizes this, emphasizing that “research on colonial Guatemala has hardly begun.” Declaring the field to be “almost limitless,” he identifies unequivocally the priorities of future research: “One should begin by establishing the geographical context and by putting people into it.” Our intent in this chapter, and the larger work it precedes, could not be worded more succinctly. The geographical context we wish, if not to establish, at least to explore, is the area of Spanish dominion known in the mid-sixteenth century as the “términos y jurisdicción” of Santiago de Guatemala. Today, such a territorial unit would embrace the Republic of Guatemala, excluding the northern department of El Péten, with some overspill east into El Salvador and west into Chiapas (Figure 2.1). Not the environs of the colonial capital itself but how place arrangements within its jurisdiction came into existence form the focus of inquiry. People may be put into this geographical context a number of ways. The way we choose to project them, Spaniards as well as Indians, is by looking at how each adapted to the other during the complex process of population movement and community formation referred to as congregación. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]