Money and Money Dealings

Although preconquest Mesoamerica lacked coinage or an exclusive reliance on precious metals as a medium of exchange, currencies existed. One reads in chronicles of copper artifacts, beads, and quills filled with gold dust serving in this capacity, as no doubt they did, but the items most commonly mentioned, and the only ones still found operating in early postconquest mundane records, are lengths of cotton cloth called quachtli (often used for tribute) and cacao beans. Both were commodities of ordinary consumption, especially for people of means, but in temperate central Mexico they had the aura of luxury goods because cotton and cacao grew only in warmer lands, mainly located to the south. Quachtli, arranged in standard bundles of twenty, were used to buy the indigenous slaves who were still owned in the Cuernavaca region around. (They also, as indicated at nn. 56-57 above, appear as payment in the earliest recorded postconquest land sale, in the Tlatelolco jurisdiction.) Cacao as a medium of exchange appears again and again, in both Spanish and Nahuatl documents, throughout the sixteenth century and on through the colonial period. Cacao could be amassed to represent substantial values, but ordinarily it came into play for small transactions worth less than a quachtli; at any particular time, with adjustments in a given case for the relative quality of the two products, a standard rate of cacao beans per quachtli prevailed.

Spanish money entered the Nahua world very quickly; it figures prominently in one of the earliest extant Nahuatl documents, a Tlaxcalan market price list of I 54 5, and it continues to appear as a standard item in documents of all kinds through the postconquest centuries. The Tlaxcalan cabildo records of the I 5 so's and I s6o's repeatedly show a conceptual mastery of the Spanish monetary system; furthermore, by the nature of the taxes imposed and by general descriptions of the local economy, they imply that most indigenous people including commoners actually had some money in their possession in the course of a year. Documents from Coyoacan show money circulating in the altepetl market by the middle of the sixteenth century, with the various specialties all able to pay money assessments. Similarly, the Culhuacan testaments (ca. 1580) show money in the hands of almost everyone, including women and very humble people; not only land, houses, and transport animals, but things such as household gear and ordinary foods bore a money value and were exchanged locally on that basis. The word tomin, signifying a coin, gold weight, and standard of value equal to the real or eighth of a peso, is one of the first attested Spanish loanwords in Nahuatl, and "peso" itself was not far behind (1548). 136 Both, as well as medio, half a tomin or real, were an indispensable part of the Nahuatl vocabulary from the mid-sixteenth century forward.

How much change did the introduction of the Spanish monetary system represent, and was the adjustment a difficult one? The transition to money occurred with great speed in all known parts of the area, and there is no evidence that the Nahuas had any difficulty in comprehending money's significance; prices seem rational, and money was prized and sought after by all. No strong indigenous reinterpretation, such as that affecting borrowed land categories or introduced governmental offices, seems to obtain. On one occasion, the Tlaxcalan cabildo took an apparently antimonetary position, condemning the commoners who neglected their duties and sustenance crops in growing cochineal for money, which they pointedly noted could not be eaten in time of famine. This is a statement, however, with few parallels in indigenous records (though some can be found in the annals of various other civilizations), and it covers up the fact that the nobles on the cabildo were themselves growing and selling cochineal for the money it brought them.