The Cargo System in Mesoamerica: From its Ecclesiastic Foundation to Political-Religious Institution

Abstract

The present text studies some of the explanations that, to date, have been put forward to understand the socalled cargo system or civil-religious hierarchy in Mesoamerica. After noting that interest in the topic basically began in connection with peasant studies in the 1920s, the text shows how very varied interpretations of the cargo system were proposed in the following decades. These made it compatible not only with the traditional view of a homogeneous community but also with the perspective of a heterogeneous community. The discussion was enriched with the suggestive supposition that the cargo system possessed a pre-Hispanic origin. However, the present paper shows that the cultural models introduced by the colonisers transformed pre-Hispanic society and were later perpetuated by the ideology of coloniality. This was the case of the cofradía or guild, which, as a pious foundation, finally became a nuclear institution in local life, endowed with a clear integrating role and a powerful identitarian sense in a multi-ethnic society. The cargo system in Mesoamerica would be the consequence of successive pressure exercised on the old cofradías by royal power and, above all by republican power, through secularism and disentailment in the case of Mexico. The most apparent effects consisted first of the increasingly important political nature of the cofradía, without its religious carácter weakening; and secondly of strengthening patronage as a fundamental pillar of the institution. In this way a pyramidal and clientelist structure was shaped, still conserving many of the traits that traditionally defined the cofradías, both in Spain and in Latin America.