Alcalde Mayor

Alcalde mayor, the chief administrator of a territorial unit known as an alcaldía mayor. Alcaldías mayores were provincial units of varying size and significance. The term was used most frequently in New Spain, where there were about two hundred of these units in the 1780s. In Peru similar provincial units were termed corregimientos.

The alcalde mayor had judicial, administrative, military, and legislative authority. Judicial appeals from his decisions were heard by an audiencia.

Alcaldes mayores usually were appointed for terms of three to five years. Originally the viceroys named most alcaldes, but in 1677 the crown started selling appointments, thereby greatly reducing the viceroys' patronage. The sales, moreover, resulted in the alcaldes mayores placing even more pressure on the native populations of their districts in order to recoup their investment and make a profit. Working closely with wholesale merchants, they routinely required the natives to purchase animals and merchandise from them (repartimiento de mercancías or bienes) at inflated prices, and in some cases they forced the natives to sell their produce to them at below market prices.

The abuses of the alcaldes mayores and their lieutenants led to their replacement in most parts of the empire by intendants in the late eighteenth century.

See alsoNew Spain, Viceroyalty of .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clarence H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (1947).

Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (1972).

Additional Bibliography

Baskes, Jeremy. Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Dym, Irene, and Christophe Belaubre, eds. Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Río, Ignacio del. La aplicación regional de las reformas borbónicas en Nueva España: Sonora y Sinaloa, 1768–1787. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1994.

Taylor, William B. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-century Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

                                           Mark A. Burkholder