Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people for their help over the long gestation of this book. First of all, I am grateful to my family. My parents, Dr. Wilfred and Marjorie Albi, are no longer around to see the completion of this project, but without their love and support it could not have started in the first place. I thank my sister Andrea, my brother-in-law Brent, and my nephews Max and Liam for their encouragement and the use of the man cave in Bellingham as an occasional writing retreat.

I owe an enormous debt to the University of Texas at Austin, where this book began its life as my doctoral dissertation. Susan Deans-Smith and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, in their distinct but complementary ways, were both superb mentors. I appreciate the help I received from Alan Tully, Ann Twinam, Jonathan Brown, Virginia Garrard, Seth Garfield, and Julie Hardwick. I also want to thank my fellow graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, many of whom have already made their marks in the profession. Special thanks to Kenny Aslakson, Adrian Howkins, Pablo Mijangos, Heather Peterson, Michael Anderson, José Adrián Barragán, Andrew Paxman, Jackie Zahn, Matt Gildner, Emily Berquist, Evan Ross, Jennifer Hoyt, and Renata Keller.

John Tutino, Kris Lane, Pablo Mijangos, and José Adrián Barragán all read the manuscript carefully and provided expert comments. They have made this book much better than it would have been otherwise. Thanks as well to the people at the University of New Mexico Press, especially Michael Millman for his patient guidance and Bridget Manzella for her expert copyediting.

I am grateful to Brian Owensby for serving on my dissertation committee, Gabriel Paquette for getting my work in print at an early stage, and Linda and Richard Salvucci for their friendship during my two years at Trinity University in San Antonio. Conversations with colleagues at conferences, as well as in bars in Spain, cantinas in Mexico, and baseball stadiums in Chicago, have sharpened my arguments over the years. Particular thanks to Jeremy Adelman, Matthew Restall, Bianca Premo, Esther González, Mara Wade, and Paul Ramírez. I feel especially privileged that John Elliott and Bernard Bailyn took the time to read and comment on early drafts of my work. I also want to thank Peter Bailey for his mentorship during my undergraduate days at the University of Manitoba.

The writing of this book was supported by a number of fellowships. I am grateful to have received a three-year dissertation fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Spanish government, through its Program for International Cooperation, provided funds for travel to Spanish archives. I received a lot of support from the University of Texas, including an affiliation with its Institute for Historical Studies that bridged a year between graduation and success on the job market. I have been fortunate to have been awarded fellowships from the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. I especially want to thank Neil Safier at the JCB and D. Bradford Hunt at the Newberry for fostering such diverse and supportive scholarly communities at their institutions.

I would not be an historian if I didn’t love archives. I thank the librarians and archivists at the Nettie Lee Benson Library in Austin; the British Library in London; the Hispanic Society of America in New York; the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo Histórico del Colegio de las Vizcaínas, and the Augustinian archive at the parish of Nuestra Señora del Socorro in Mexico City; and the Archivo General de Indias, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Real Academia de Historia, and the Real Biblioteca in Spain.

Living in Oaxaca and Mexico City in the 1990s, I discovered Mexico in the company of great friends like Xóchitl Carrasco García, Greg Dechant (who reached up one day in a used bookstore on Doncelas and pulled down a copy of Gamboa’s Comentarios), Gerardo Copca, Ann Ginsburg, Bond Snodgrass, Elisabeth Malkin, Eduardo García, Andrew Downie, Laura Martínez, and the late Peter Gutrich. Similarly, without my friends Javier Mata and Juan Vicente Bachiller, my understanding of Spain would be much poorer.

Since 2012 I have been a faculty member of the State University of New York at New Paltz. I am grateful to the administration for giving me the time to finish this project and especially the support of my colleagues in the History Department, above all Andrew Evans, Heather Morrison, and Lou Roper. Finally, I want to thank all the students I have taught at New Paltz, San Antonio, and Austin over the years; teaching history remains an enviable way to make a living.

Introduction

If one day the literary and social history of Mexico is written, this person [Gamboa], born at the beginning of the eighteenth century and dying at its end, will play a major role, since his epoch was great and he was great in it.

—MARIANO OTERO, 1843

MARIANO OTERO CERTAINLY THOUGHT HIGHLY OF FRANCISCO Xavier de Gamboa. Otero, a Mexican writer and statesman of the early republican period, depicted Gamboa, in a short biographical sketch, as one of the great figures of eighteenth-century New Spain. Gamboa, born in Guadalajara in 1717, enjoyed a long and illustrious legal career. In the 1740s he became one of top letrados in Mexico City, advising merchants, miners, and religious organizations. In 1755 he traveled to Madrid to represent the Consulado of Mexico, the merchants’ guild, at the royal court. In the decade he lived in Spain, he wrote Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas, immediately recognized as the authoritative guide to mining law.¹ From 1764 to 1794 Gamboa served as an audiencia (or high court) magistrate in New Spain and Santo Domingo. In 1788 the crown named him the regent of the Real Audiencia of Mexico, the first locally born judge to hold the position equivalent to chief justice.² Upon his death in 1794, his contemporaries recognized him as the most impressive jurist of his era.

But despite Otero’s prediction, Gamboa has not played an especially prominent role in any of the hundreds of histories of Mexico written since the 1840s. This is not surprising if you consider how history has generally been written. Gamboa was not a major political or military leader. He did not amass a great fortune or otherwise gain popular fame during his lifetime. He led the studious, mostly uneventful life of a jurist, surrounded by books and paper. He has thus been easy to ignore by those writing conventional top-down history, which focuses on the dramatic actions of the movers and shakers of society. Nor was Gamboa in any way a subaltern, someone who challenges societal norms from the margins. He was a well-educated white man of Basque descent who enjoyed notable social, racial, and gender privileges in New Spain. He thus makes a poor subject for those writing history from below. Rather, Gamboa, as both a Spanish American and a lawyer, can be situated in the pivotal middle of novohispano society, a mediator between the power of the Spanish monarchy above and the intractable reality of Spanish America below. To really understand New Spain and the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth century, the career of Gamboa offers invaluable insight.

Reappraising Spanish American Law

In 2012 Jorge Castañeda, political scientist and former Mexican foreign minister, declared in a book intended for readers in the United States that “from the start, Mexican society was imbued with the quite logical notion that the law was meaningless, and that this was a forgivable sin.”³ This has long been a popular view of the legal order of the Spanish Empire, held even by many historians. Law was weak, merely an elaborate facade that masked the brutal exercise of colonial power. Scholars routinely cite the legal formula, obedezco pero no cumplo, “I obey but do not comply,” as proof of the cynical attitude American subjects supposedly felt towards the law. Law could be safely ignored, they suggest, as long as you first remembered to pledge your allegiance to the king.⁴ But in the words of historian Lewis Hanke, one of the first North American scholars to take Spanish law seriously, “If Spaniards in America were so ready to disregard the law, why did so many dread it?”⁵ And if law didn’t matter, why did so many American subjects, including poor indigenous villagers and plebeian women, flock to Spanish courts throughout the colonial period seeking justice?⁶

Rather than point out its weakness, other critics of Spanish law in America dwell on its oppressiveness. In this version, Spanish law propped up an absolutist colonial state that secured the dominance of a small elite of white men. It shaped exclusionary institutions that impeded natural economic development.⁷ In the words of John Coatsworth, people in Spanish America “tolerated royal monopolies (estancos), conformed to endless regulations for fiscal and other purposes, and had no choice but to accept a legal system that failed to define property rights clearly or to provide an efficient court system to enforce them.”⁸ But if this is true, that oppressive law stunted economic growth, how do you explain the dynamic silver-mining industry in New Spain, which by 1800 was producing almost two-thirds of the world’s refined silver?⁹ And if the law did little to protect property rights, why did so many individuals invest their capital in an industry as inherently risky as mining?

Historians are now studying with renewed enthusiasm the legal regime of colonial Spanish America, what Spanish-language scholars call Derecho Indiano. Their main task has been to historicize it properly, that is to frame it within its own particular historical context.¹⁰ This new legal history of Spanish America draws upon two larger historiographical trends of recent years: the reconsideration of political power under the ancien régime in Europe and the renewed interest in the governance of colonial empires.¹¹ One fundamental point made by scholars engaged in this work is that the state, as we know it today, with its monopoly on force and legislation, simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. Law should thus be studied more in its broader social and cultural context than as an ordering tool by the state.¹²

The new scholarship has brought into relief four fundamental attributes of the juridical order of colonial Spanish America. First, its foundation was profoundly religious. Human law fit into a larger, explicitly Christian normative framework. In the Spanish world, where only Catholicism was tolerated, a form of religious totalitarianism prevailed, although obviously without much of a state to enforce it.¹³ People simply accepted, with few exceptions, the existence of a divine order in the universe superior to human society. This did not mean that Spanish America was governed theocratically, but it did mean that even the king was subject to a higher constitution, the principles of justice, fairness, and mercy inscribed in nature by God. Positive laws, those enacted by human authorities, were thus always subject to challenge on the basis they were not in accord with the universal norms dictated by God. In the words of Isidore of Seville, a renowned seventh-century scholar and bishop, to be enforceable, the laws of society had to be “honest, just, possible, appropriate to the time and place, necessary, useful and clear.”¹⁴

Understanding this Christian foundation and the weakness of the state makes the legal pluralism of Spanish America easier to understand. State legislation was just part of a diverse mixture of normative instruments that included the unwritten natural law emanating from God, the canon law of the Catholic Church, Roman jurisprudence, and local customs. Lawyers learned to read Latin to penetrate the Corpus Juris Civilis, the compendium of Roman law and jurisprudence assembled under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Along with canon law, Roman law constituted the foundation of the ius commune, the common law of Europe.¹⁵ What we now think of as law—legislation issued constitutionally by the state—was still too narrow and inconsistent to monopolize the legal field. The Recopilación de las leyes de Indias, the collection of royal legislation for Spanish America published in 1680, served more as a handy reference than an unassailable code of law.¹⁶ Custom, the unwritten rules of a community that arise from repeated practice and gain force through majority consent, played an especially big role in the Spanish American legal order.¹⁷ Custom shaped the rules of everything from how mine workers got paid to the prerogatives of audiencia magistrates. Perhaps because Spanish America lacked local legislatures, custom was particularly useful as a way for ordinary subjects to “make law” for themselves. What remained custom in New Spain in the eighteenth century might have been codified into written law by the assemblies of colonial British North America.

A third key feature of the juridical order was the importance of jurisdiction, the power to make law and adjudicate disputes over a specific area, activity, or group of people. Jurisdiction ordered society. The Catholic Church, for instance, controlled jurisdiction over moral and religious matters, with its own laws and court system. It enjoyed an exemption from the civil jurisdiction controlled by the king. In addition, the military enjoyed a degree of jurisdictional independence from the ordinary civil courts. In Spanish America, the viceroys exercised jurisdiction over matters of government, with residual adjudicative powers although only through streamlined administrative processes.¹⁸ The audiencias exercised superior jurisdiction, independent from the viceroys, over all matters of civil and criminal justice, although with little power over the exempt clergy and soldiers. The consulados of Mexico and Lima, the merchants’ guilds, handled all commercial law matters. These multiple jurisdictional lines were always subject to dispute. The audiencias and viceroys fought incessantly over what constituted a matter of justicia or gobernación. Could a civil official arrest a suspected criminal on church grounds? Did the military fuero protect a drunk militiaman who caused a ruckus in a pulqueria? Could the viceroy protect Spanish merchants facing sanctions before the consulado? These turf battles consumed time, energy, and masses of paper, but they had their beneficial effect. They acted to increase institutional accountability and check and balance power; jurisdictional rivals denounced the abuses of each other. Absolutist government, however much the crown might have yearned for it at times, could never be established with such a fluid system of mixed and unsettled jurisdictions.

Finally, the preeminent concern of the legal regime of Spanish America was justice, not administrative efficiency or economic growth. This flowed from the understanding that the king was, first and foremost, a judge, obligated by God to dispense justice to the people in his realms. He was responsible for assuring that everyone got what was justly theirs and that the weak were protected from the strong. In the words of the Digest, one of the principal books of the Corpus Juris Civilis, justice was “the constant and perpetual desire to give to each his own.”¹⁹ This philosophy of government required that everyone had access to the law and its instrumentalities, such as the right to petition higher authorities or bring suit in court.²⁰ The preoccupation with justice, however much you can criticize the results in practice, led naturally to a casuistic approach to both lawmaking and adjudication. What was important was justice as defined in the particular case, not the application of abstract or general rules.²¹

The audiencias, the high courts of royal justice exercising jurisdiction over ordinary civil and criminal matters, were the principal institutions of the Spanish American justice system. The first ones were established in Santo Domingo in 1511 and Mexico City in 1527, even before the creation of the viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535.²² Audiencia magistrates, the king’s foremost representatives in matters of justice, never forgot the fact that they came before the viceroys.²³ The high courts in the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima could overrule decisions by the viceroy if they violated rules of justice, but the viceroy exercised no corresponding power to quash the courts’ judicial decisions. Juan Solórzano Pereyra, the most authoritative jurist of Spanish America, formerly an audiencia magistrate himself in Peru, described the audiencias, a bit hyperbolically to be sure, as “the stone fortresses of the Indies, where justice is safeguarded, the poor find protection from the aggravations and oppressions of the powerful, and everyone gets what is justly theirs.”²⁴ To serve on an audiencia required university training, a higher requirement than for any other civil position. Candidates were screened by the Council of the Indies in Madrid, the chief administrative and judicial body for Spanish America. Magistrates received decent salaries, which allowed them to live decorously and protected them from the temptation of bribes. They also enjoyed life tenure. Viceroys, treasury officers, and military commanders came and went but audiencia judges could remain on the bench for decades, accumulating deep local knowledge and valuable connections to local elites.²⁵ The relative independence of the audiencias is one of the most overlooked aspects of Spanish rule.

This juridical order, imported from Castile, worked well in the difficult social and geographic conditions of America.²⁶ Its inherent flexibility suited the kaleidoscopic diversity of the New World. Spanish law provided the language, procedures, and institutions for the negotiations and accommodations, especially between royal officials and American subjects, that made Spanish sovereignty possible.²⁷ This is not to deny at all the obvious shortcomings of this legal system. The rich and powerful enjoyed stark advantages over the poor and weak. Even if a court ruled in your favor, there was no reliable mechanism to ensure the decision was enforced. People still frequently resorted to extra-legal and sometimes violent means to secure what they thought they deserved and the law promised. But such problems were hardly unique to early modern Spanish America; even in the most advanced societies today legal equality and consistent enforcement remain problematic. If it did not redeem Spanish colonialism, the law at least made life more tolerable for most people. They found the tools it provided, especially petitions and lawsuits, useful in resolving problems in their daily lives. It thus fostered the legitimacy of Spanish rule and made the empire more durable.

Where does Gamboa fit into all of this? His life, I argue, allows us to examine the full panorama of law and legal culture in eighteenth-century New Spain. I chart his career chronologically. The first chapters examine his life and career before he became an audiencia magistrate in 1764. Chapter 1 starts with his upbringing in Guadalajara, his Jesuit education, and his legal studies at the University of Mexico. Erudition was an important tool for lawyers, and Gamboa came superbly equipped. Chapter 2 analyzes some of his most notable cases as a private lawyer in Mexico City in the 1740s and 1750s. He gained more practical experience at the bar than any other audiencia magistrate of his time. Chapter 3 investigates his social network, the transatlantic Basque community. This world of merchants, clerics, and officials of Basque descent, whether born in Spain or America, was instrumental in both advancing his career and shaping his thinking about such crucial matters as the relationship between local autonomy and imperial loyalty. As the lawyer of the Basque confraternity Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu, Gamboa helped to establish the Vizcaínas, a residential school for girls in Mexico City. As the deputy appointed by Basque merchants to represent the Consulado of Mexico in Madrid, he composed submissions on trade and fiscal matters, including on the future of the fleet system for colonial commerce. Chapter 4 analyzes the Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas, the ambitious book he wrote while in Spain, published in Madrid in 1761. The Comentarios accomplished several things: it clarified the confusing legal treatment of silver mining in New Spain, based on the Royal Mining Ordinances of 1584; it described technical processes, such as the patio method of mercury amalgamation; it proposed concrete reforms to make the industry more productive, such as a consulado-led mining bank; and it burnished Gamboa’s juridical credentials before the ministers of the Council of the Indies, responsible for audiencia appointments. In the Comentarios Gamboa articulated his thinking about the legal regime of Spanish America. It thus helps to explain what happened after 1764, when the Spanish crown appointed the novohispano lawyer to the bench of his local high court, the Real Audiencia of Mexico.

The Bourbon or Galvesian Reforms?

An examination of the legal regime in eighteenth-century New Spain naturally prompts a reappraisal of what historians have called the Bourbon Reforms. This phenomenon encompassed a diverse range of administrative, fiscal, economic, military and cultural measures. Their underlying purpose—if one can be discerned—was to strengthen Spain both economically and militarily by taking better advantage of its overseas territories. Major reforms included enhanced state control over tax collection; the establishment of new crown monopolies; the creation of the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata; the abolition of the Cadiz monopoly on trade with America; and the implementation of the intendancy system of local government.²⁸ In this book I focus on the reforms attempted in New Spain during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) and under the direction of José de Gálvez, first as visitor general of New Spain from 1765 to 1771 and then as minister of the Indies from 1776 to 1787. This period coincides almost exactly with Gamboa’s years as an audiencia magistrate from 1764 to 1794.

Rather than the Bourbon Reforms, I suggest a more apt term for this process, at least in the case of New Spain, might be the Galvesian reforms. Gálvez was both a true believer in the cause of reform and the principal agent of implementation in New Spain. He acted under the assumption, as did the government of Charles III as a whole, that the old juridical and governmental systems of Spanish America were broken and no longer served the economic interests of Spain or the financial needs of the crown. To Gálvez, a lawyer from Málaga in southern Spain, American subjects flouted royal laws with impunity, defending themselves with spurious invocations of immemorial custom. The judiciary was a willing partner in this game, always ready to soften the rigor of royal law to please local constituencies. The first remedy for such ills, in Gálvez’s eyes, was the strict application of existing legislation, which could best be effected if Spaniards from Spain supplanted locals in American government. In addition, the audiencias, the guardians of the old system, exercised, in Gálvez’s opinion, a dangerously broad jurisdiction. Conservative magistrates could thus jam up desirable fiscal and administrative changes. To curtail their power, Gálvez supported the expansion of exemptions for favored groups, including policemen, militiamen, bureaucrats and miners. He also advocated for the implementation of the intendancy system throughout Spanish America, which would turn regional government over to executive-style officials reporting directly to Madrid. This reform would also deprive the audiencias of power, since they oversaw in matters of justice the alcaldes mayores and corregidores whom intendants would replace.²⁹

In his groundbreaking first book, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810, David Brading identified Gamboa as a fierce opponent of Gálvez and the crown’s reform program.³⁰ To explain Gamboa’s stance, Brading emphasized his close ties to the merchants of the Consulado of Mexico, whose plan for a mining bank he had folded into the Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas. According to Brading:

Despite the legal and technical brilliance of his commentaries, Gamboa emerged as the political advocate of the great import houses and silver banks of Mexico City. Precisely at the time when the statesmen of the Bourbon dynasty were moving to undercut the position of the colonial merchant-monopolists, Gamboa wished to subject the entire Mexican silver mining industry to the control of the Consulado and the mercantile oligarchy.³¹

This research project began years ago as an attempt to challenge Brading’s assessment of Gamboa as basically the mouthpiece of self-serving, monopolistic merchants. Yes, Gamboa was close to the merchants, especially those who shared his Basque ancestry, like Manuel Aldaco, who sent Gamboa to Spain in 1755 to pitch the idea of a consulado mining bank. But after 1764, when the crown named Gamboa to the Real Audiencia of Mexico, he no longer acted as the consulado’s representative; his primary concern was the administration of justice and especially the integrity of the audiencias. Justice and not the economic concerns of the merchants of the consulado better explains Gamboa’s opposition to Bourbon or Galvesian reform. He saw no reason to tamper with a system of law that had proven its effectiveness in maintaining public order and respect for the monarchy.

Gamboa did not stand alone. By examining the eighteenth-century reform process through the lens of law, we can better understand the stiff opposition it aroused among veteran crown officials. Tomás Ortiz de Landázuri, a fellow Basque and the accountant-general on the Council of the Indies in the late 1760s and 1770s, was a case in point. He had spent two decades as a royal servant in New Spain. He came to know the country well, better perhaps than any other top official in Madrid at the time. He understood, for instance, that local customs that deviated from royal law and thus looked suspect to reformers in Madrid often served valuable purposes in America. He would have agreed with Solórzano, who wrote in Política Indiana that “the ancient customs of a province should not be changed easily, for each province has many, and it is better to adjust the law to suit local reality than to try to change reality to suit the law.”³² Landázuri, in his opinions for the Council of the Indies, urged a cautious approach to reform, with respect for local custom and the tradition of consultation with local experts. Along with Gamboa and many others, including Antonio María de Bucareli, the viceroy of New Spain in the 1770s, Landázuri saw no reason to upset the complex matrix of customs, practices, and institutions that had long kept New Spain both loyal and profitable to the Spanish crown.

This book analyzes two particular episodes of conflict between Gamboa the audiencia magistrate and Gálvez the imperial reformer. First, in chapter 5, I examine how Gamboa, as an alcalde del crimen, or criminal court magistrate, in the Real Audiencia of Mexico’s Sala de Crimen, opposed reforms to the administration of criminal justice. In November 1766, prompted by a police corruption scandal in Puebla, the viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix, backed by Gálvez, stripped the sala of jurisdiction over police captains outside of Mexico City. The viceroy’s decree granted the Tribunal of the Acordada, an independent force created in the early eighteenth century to combat rural banditry, the right to operate in all the cities of New Spain besides the countryside. Unlike the sala, the Acordada ignored formal rules of procedure. A few months later, in early 1767, Gálvez endorsed another viceregal decree. It required the courts of New Spain to send all prisoners to military presidios. Intended to bolster the workforce needed to rebuild Spanish defenses, the measure deprived the sala of the funds it had long raised through the sale of convict labor to private businesses, such as obrajes, or textile mills. Coupled with the loss of jurisdiction over policing in 1766, the presidio decree of 1767 crippled the Sala de Crimen. It could no longer function as a high court for criminal matters. This episode, largely overlooked by historians, epitomized the danger that Galvesian reform posed to the larger administration of justice in New Spain. The crown turned to fast and cheap solutions that sacrificed due process while shifting power from judicial to executive officials. Gamboa paid a high price for his defiance; in 1768 the Spanish government, desiring to reimpose order after the tumultuous expulsion of the Jesuits the previous year, ordered Gamboa out of New Spain. He spent three years in exile, separated from his wife and children, in Valladolid in northern Spain.

The second dispute I explore between Gálvez and Gamboa, the subject of chapter 6, concerns the creation of the Mining Tribunal. This organization, patterned on the consulados, gave silver miners control over their own bank, adjudicative system, and technical college. Gamboa, back in New Spain in 1773, thought the whole scheme preposterous. Miners, in his opinion, had no capacity to manage their own bank or adjudicative tribunal. They were by nature solitary risk takers. It was better if they stuck to what they knew best, digging ore from the ground, and leave financial and judicial matters to more responsible men. He particularly attacked the plan of relieving the audiencias of jurisdiction over mining disputes. Gamboa’s arguments against the tribunal convinced all of the members of the Real Audiencia of Mexico, Viceroy Bucareli, Landázuri, and the Council of the Indies of the impracticalities of the plan. But in 1776, Gálvez, after becoming minister of the Indies under Charles III, secured royal approval for the Mining Tribunal anyways. He then got rid of Gamboa again by transferring him against his will to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1783. The Mining Tribunal, so often lauded as an example of enlightened Bourbon reform, proved to be a failure on almost all counts, just as Gamboa predicted. It could not even improve the technical level of mining in New Spain since local methods turned out to be better than what imported European experts tried to implement. Yet the tribunal did succeed in one very important matter, perhaps what Gálvez sought all along: it served as an effective financial intermediary to arrange loans and donations for the crown supported by silver revenue.³³

Gamboa’s own perseverance, I would argue, symbolized the larger resilience of the juridical order, the subject of chapter 7. He survived five lonely years in Santo Domingo, again separated from his family. He participated in an attempt to remake the Spanish colony in the image of its French neighbor, Saint-Domingue, which, fortunately, failed. In 1788, after the death of Gálvez and the dissipation of the reform impulse, the crown approved his return to New Spain as the first American-born regent of the Real Audiencia of Mexico. Since the 1760s, he and his allies had managed to block or deflect many measures that would have transformed the legal regime of Spanish America. Because of this resistance, Bourbon reformers had little choice but to compromise. For example, it took twenty years for the crown to implement the intendancy system in New Spain and then only with major modifications that diluted the authority of the new officials. In fact, Gamboa as regent exercised significant power to frustrate the ambitious intendants Gálvez had appointed. But he refused to let down his guard, dueling with the second Conde de Revillagigedo, viceroy during his time as regent, on the most picayune matters, even the amount of barley consumed by horses in Mexico City, in order to safeguard the prerogatives, jurisdiction, and independence of the high court he led. He died in 1794.