Migration as a fundamental adjunct of settlement – the veins through which the blood of population moves – needs to be measured and assigned a place in the fabric of colonial spatial and social organization. Various types of migration and motives for such movement have come to light. Spanish colonial administrators were themselves aware of the complex mobility of native populations. Individuals moved with, or were followed by their families, or moved alone in pursuit of marriage and the opportunity to work, or by contrast, to flee looming death and unpaid tribute. Villages collapsed and their remnants dispersed to new sites, or corporate decisions might be taken to relocate in proximity to cash crop economies. Whole regions underwent upheaval and experienced economic decline or boom, with consequent dislocation and relocation. This study discusses recorded migration amongst the Indians of colonial Chiapas, with particular emphasis on reactions to eighteenth-century crises in the region.

The idea of fugitivism, or flight – the most common words used by Spanish administrators to describe absent Indians – implies deliberate concealment of self from authority. Its use to describe such movement by Indian individuals and groups might be thought inappropriate in most situations, although the word is employed widely by Latin American historians of the colony. There is nothing in the documents for Spanish-controlled Chiapas to suggest that the absent were hunted down, apart from the entradas made against the Lacandon Indians of the frontier during the seventeenth century. But undramatic movement by those who declined to stay put was seen as doing violence to the Spanish conception of ordered administration, undermining the fabric of the system, calling down on offenders an indictment of unreason, godlessness, and sheer contrary-minded elusiveness.