Land in Spanish Enterprise: Colonial Morelos 1522-1547

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Abstract
THE state of Morelos in today's México comprised two rich and important provinces within the Aztec Confederacy when Spanish forces penetrated it for the first time in March of 1521. In that year of conflict, the Tlahuica and Xochimilca peoples who dominated the numerous settlements and fertile, well-watered, volcanic soils of its mountain-surrounded valleys were producing large quantities of valued agrarian and other goods. For generations, dating back 8,000 or more years, they and their predecessors had done so. The laborers among them—the commoners or macehuales, the serf-like, soil-bound mayeques, and the slaves—used valleys in the high-altitude, temperate to semitropical and semi-arid north and in the less-elevated, tropically hot and humid south to grow maize, beans, chile, tomatoes, peppers, squashes, some fruits, chía (a species of sage), huautli (amaranth), cotton and, perhaps, cacao.

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