This chapter and the following one are closely related, as the documents in both provide insight into the topics of household and land, as well as society and gender. Both chapters also contain several examples of the most common genre of native-language writing, the last will and testament. Our focus in this chapter, however, is on how wills and other documents reveal the ways in which Mesoamericans constituted their homes, families, and neighborhoods and conceived of land use and ownership.

Indigenous landholding was communal only in a qualified sense. A household worked its own lands individually; the different members of the household divided multiple, scattered plots among them to work. A household could keep all its land through inheritance as long as there were members to work each of the plots. This was true of both nobles and commoners, and among both, holdings varied a great deal, some people having much more land than others, and some commoners having no land of their own. The community intervened, often immediately, to reallocate any land that was left uncultivated. Thus, native landholding did not easily divide into public and private categories, like the European system. Everything from the lord's land to that of an ordinary household shared both aspects. Everyone paid taxes to the community based on the extent of their landholdings and other forms of household wealth.