Creoles and Government: The Cabildo of Popayán
C ITIES WERE ONE of the building blocks of empire in Spanish America. Their construction mirrored the Iberian past and the ordering ideals of the Castilian state. They also were the place where the aspirations of men and the demands of the American environment met. Ultimately, cities were the locus of political and social power that organized town and countryside alike for its purposes. Whose power was that? Was it the Crown's and that of its local agents? Or did it belong to a local aristocracy secure in its control of local affairs? This article attempts to answer these questions, not comprehensively but by looking at one town alone. Over the course of several generations, who were the members of this town's upper stratum, and what positions did they hold? Did they run local affairs, or were they subject to outside control? Was continuity or mobility the hallmark of this stratum; i.e., was it more an aristocracy than an elite? The particular combination of formal construction and complex reality manifest in the Spanish colonial city has not quite received the attention it deserves. The reasons for this comparative neglect lie in the pronounced limitations of the conventional city records, in the disregard shown until recently for the Creole elite and the disproportionate attention paid to the countryside-disproportionate only when compared with the neglect of the cities. The actas de cabildo, the best known town records, are a highly formalized kind of source. To derive from them a formalistic pattern of politics approaching decadence would be as misleading as to deduce from the formulae of land tenure the operational character of farming. While it is true that Spanish settlers were prone to follow Hispanic patterns in politics, they were also likely to manipulate them and, if needs be, to modify them for their own ends. The actual configuration of politics was usually the