Alcalde

Alcalde, a local magistrate. Alcaldes ordinarios were municipal magistrates normally elected each January 1 for a one-year term by the town council (Cabildo or Ayuntamiento). Cities had two alcaldes; small towns normally had one. Although elected by a cabildo, alcaldes usually were not also regidores of the council.

Alcaldes were men of substance in the community. While many were native to the town, outsiders who married into prominent families could become alcaldes. Early alcaldes were routinely encomenderos or their relatives, but later hacendados, other property owners, and eventually merchants served.

Alcaldes exercised first-instance jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases within the municipality's boundaries, but they could not issue sentences of death or mutilation. Appeals from their decisions were heard by an alcalde mayor or corregidor, or by the audiencia within whose jurisdiction the town lay. Despite their judicial responsibilities, alcaldes were not required to have formal training in jurisprudence. In some cases alcaldes fulfilled non-judicial responsibilities assigned by the cabildo. In others, indigenous alcaldes were name by the corregidor to dilute the political power of curacas, ethnic leaders.

See alsoAudiencia .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Additional Bibliography

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