Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, circa 1600

Abstract

This article compares the itineraries of two men—one European, one Mesoamerican—accused of bigamy at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the European repeatedly remade his life in new locales, the Mesoamerican returned to the same places time and again, revealing a pattern of circular migration by multilingual Oaxacans along the southern Pacific coast. The European's travels enabled his manipulation of the Spanish Inquisition, while the Mesoamerican's expanding social geography became his undoing. Reading these two cases in tandem pushes us beyond their apparent similarities, a product of their framing by the Spanish Catholic legal system, and toward their profound incommensurability despite overlaps of time, place, and circumstance.