In the late 1500s, decades after Spain’s initial conquest, Mexico entered a period that scholar María Alba Pastor calls Social Recomposition. After the first encounter with the colonizers, “it was not clear what kind of government was going to be established,” Granados said. Several generations later, a distinct “colonial society was starting to emerge,” she explained. “The maps clearly point to the presence of all the groups involved. They were a way for indigenous peoples to say, ‘This is our community. This is who we are.’” As writer and scholar Alex Hidalgo told Artsy, “even after their initial commission, these maps continued to inform land disputes in the region for one or two hundred years.”
Toward the end of the 16th century, dynamics in the Spanish colonial government shifted. “Indigenous communities lost some of the privileges they’d had for a couple of decades,” explained Granados. “I’m not going to say the indigenous people were always granted a voice or that the Spanish didn’t kill a lot of people. That would be irresponsible. There was a lot of racism, but it was possible for them to negotiate, to some extent, their cultural position.”