First, Elizabeth Archuleta covered the conflicts over statues of Juan de Onate and Po-Pay. Archuleta reminds us, “Cultural production is never power-neutral” (321). The rhetoric of the polarized sides of the conflict reflect aspects of contemporary racialization and its links with the past.

The Gonzales article discssed the quadricentennial of the conquest of New Mexico. Conflicts over a proposed scultpture of Juan de Oñate ignited a political battle; the author says that the symbolic violence of conflict over Oñate reflects the actual violence of the past (219). Pueblos opposed memorializing the violent conquistador Oñate (who cut off the feet of Indians who resisted him—an action for which the Spanish colonial government in Mexico hauled Oñate into court and convicted him). Hispanics saw him as a heroic figure, bringing civilization to the continent. Both sides were arguing for their version of a collective identity that was really just identity politics.

Frieze discusses the actual sculpture that was created after the political battle Gonzales describes. It was a divided memorial. One part, “La Jornada,” was full of figural sculptures, represented Oñate and the settlers—the Spanish side of the conquest. The other part of the memorial is dubbed “The Environment,” and is a spiral path that visitors actually walk through, leading to a spring, or representation of the womb of the earth, at the center. Frieze points out that these two monuments are physically separated—connected only by a plaque that many visitors may not even actually read—much like the collective memory of the events. She says that monuments like these give shape to the past in the way that they portray it.

Jiminez joins the debate about remembering the violence of the conquest, making the point that historians’ role is to embed the violent events of conquest—whether Oñate’s deviant acts of violence or Popé’s uprising—in their own cultural and historical contexts. Jiminez calls for resisting the “good guy” and “bad guy” stereotypes from Western movies, and trying to achieve historical objectivity.

Rigoberta Menchú, indigenous activist and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, adds another voice to the conversation. Menchú calls for ending the oppression of indigenous Americans, including the undervaluing of their precolumbian history and the celebration of the “discovery” of the Americas. She emphasizes that the issue is a class struggle more than a racial one.

The historian of world history Steve J. Stern analyzes 1492 as a loaded symbol and deals with the intersection of history, historiography, and politics academically. Stern says of the commemoration of 1492, “For indigenous Americans, and many Latin Americans and indigenous sympathizers, the event invites a denunciation of five centuries of exploitation and ethnocide, a commemoration of five centuries of resistance and survival against formidable odds. But ethnic critique can cut in several directions at once.” Stern points out that the Black Legend and stereotypes of the Spanish abound. Stern notes that remembering 1492 can take the form of progressive multiculturalism or conservative backlash (e.g. the Hispanophilia that Archuleta and Gonzalez were discussing). Stern does not think that we can achieve a nonpolitical reading of 1492, and of Conquest. Rather, he argues that it should be understood according to its own times. There was no single meaning of conquest even as it was enacted—even among the conquerors, who were divided by internal hierarchies, factions, and power struggles. An example of this would be the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas’ critique of the empire—which was motivated by political struggles within the Catholic church.

Stern also points out that the Black Legend of Spanish avarice and cruelty do a disservice to the complicated nature of the Spanish Conquest and the indigenous response to it. Stern writes, “Amerindian peoples simply refused to concede a Spanish monopoly on access to high authority, social reward, and policy debate” (18). They reinvented Spanish cultural and political forms, interpreted the conquest on their own terms, and competed with the Spanish economically—and in every other way. When we remember the conquest today, Stern argues we must remember that there was no clear meaning of conquest as it happened. Rather, it meant different things to different players—conquistadors, settlers, indigenous entrepreneurs, and others.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s article thoroughly reproduces the Black Legend—and unwittingly demonstrates all that is wrong with it. Oh, where to begin! His claim that the Inca were conquered by 180 Spaniards because they were poor decision makers is patently absurd. Vargas Llosa reproduces the myth of native desolation, and the myth that a few “Great” Spaniards defeating indigenous hordes. This is a cautionary tale about history as myth, and what happens when memory is reduced to a stereotype and a tragic literary narrative.

The subject of the Spanish conquest—especially how we deal with remembering and teaching and thinking about the violent aspects of it—is complicated. Yes, there were certainly acts of violence. But the Black Legend reduces a very complicated, negotiated reality into a caricature that does great violence to historical truth. Issues of collective memory, and memorializing history, often depend on modern notions of identity.

Think of the New Mexicans fighting over statues of Oñate and Popé. Imagined histories of valorous conquest in the name of civilization, or of the wholesale destruction of a helpless native world, can take over. The collective memory of medieval violence acted against one group or the other can rise up to epic proportions in our own time.

But the Black Legend was not the reality of the Spanish conquest. The sixteenth century was a complicated world, where there was violence on both sides. Indigenous allies of the Spanish played a huge role in that violence. People on both sides made pragmatic choices in the face of great change. There was a great deal of cultural convergence that shaped the conquest, and led to communication and miscommunication and “double mistaken identity” (where each side assumes a given event is functioning according to its own cultural interpretation).

At the end of the day, this course has taught me a great deal about both the Spanish conquest and the practice of history. The Black Legend is out. Complicated, messy, historical reality is in—and it’s infinitely more interesting.

8

I’m sorry; I just couldn’t help myself. But now that that’s out of my system, let’s get serious.

Cañizares-Esguerra writes, “British Protestants and Spanish Catholics deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a Biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies” (p. 9). The Spanish and the British, it seems, were not so different as much of colonial American historiography would have us believe. Both groups understood colonization as an epic struggle against the power of Satan, who, they believed, had enjoyed millennia of unchallenged tyrannical dominion over the weak, effeminate Indians of the Americas. A demonological discourse structured the way both Iberian Catholics and English Puritans thought about colonization and the New World. In fact, they saw colonization itself as a kind of exorcism. Even nature, in this worldview, was manipulated by devils. Storms, poisonous plants, even the poor opossum—all were indications of the evil one’s work in the New World.

Conveniently, “The devil operated in the New World by eroding the racial and social hierarchies of the well-ordered polity” (26-7), so satanic agency could be transferred to anyone’s enemy. Satan could work through the Spanish, the Indians, and even storms.

What is so stunning about Cañizares-Esguerra’s accomplishment is the way he seamlessly weaves together the mental worlds of Iberian Catholics and Protestant Puritans. The author drives a big nail into the coffin of American exceptionalism, and his point is well taken, if, perhaps, a wee bit over-the-top at times.

Chapters 1-5 are lucidly organized, cleverly analyzed, and convincingly argued. But as to the historiographically-oriented Chapter 6, which asks why historians have missed the similarity between Iberian and Puritan discourses of demonology, I offer another explanation: It must be Satan.

But first, to summarize the content. In general, the English believed that the mundane action of building houses, planting gardens, and erecting fences gave them the right to possession. Seed somewhat homogenizes the English here. For example, she equates the super-religious and persecuted Pilgrims at Plymouth with the mercenary Virginia Company at Jamestown. She does not discuss the Pilgrim belief that God had divinely ordained their possession of Indian land, though this is what the Pilgrims themselves might have thought gave them the ultimate right to possession. Also problematic, at one point, Seed oversimplifies, arguing that gardens lured the English to the New World while gold lured the Spanish (26-27).

Unlike the English, the French enacted elaborately ritualized ceremonies of possession that took the form of parades culminating with planting the cross of Christ and the standard of France into Indian land. Some Francophilia is evident here. Seed describes these rituals beautifully, almost reverently, and focuses a great deal on the French focus on the consent of the Indians. The French, Seed says, desired allies won by love. She writes, “No other Europeans so consistently sought the political permission of the natives in order to justify their own political authority” (62). Seed points out that often what the French sought was merely the appearance of consent. But depending on the definition of consent, one can find it in the Spanish conquest as well. What about consent of the Indian allies who made the Spanish Conquest possible (e.g. the several hundred thousand Tlaxcalans who went with Cortés’s much, much smaller group to conquer Tenochtitlan)? Still, her point is well taken–that during the ceremonies of possession themselves, the French focused much more on at least the appearance of native consent than did other colonizers.

The Spanish, for example, used a ritualized text, the Requirement (the Requerimiento in Spanish), to establish their legitimate dominion; here Seed follows Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in tracing the Islamic roots of both the Requerimiento and the Spanish Conquest. Here, there are traces of the Black Legend. She sees the Requerimiento—and the entire Spanish outlook when it is not obsessed with gold—as religious conquest in the name of God. Darn, that Black Legend is persistently pernicious–it rears up its ugly little head even in the best of books! The Requirement, Seed argues, was the principal way that the Spanish established authority. At one point, Seed says “Cortés’s carefully repeated statements that he had made the requirement known to the natives solidified his position as the undisputed representative of Spanish authority in the New World” (98). But, Cortés’s authority was almost always disputed, and reading the Requerimiento was just one of the many ways that he tried to legitimize his authority.

Seed’s sections on the Portuguese and the Dutch are very thoughtful and fairly convincing. Apparently the Portuguese thought that the act of discovery, or really, of noting the latitude of a place previously unknown to Europeans, was what gave them the right to possession. The Dutch, “sailing in the wake of the Portuguese,” have a similar concept, but since time has passed and more places have been measured, the Dutch think describing and mapping a new place should give them possession—as does the all-important trade licensed by the Dutch government.

In the conclusion of her book, Seed reduces all this to its simplest elements. She writes: “Englishmen held that they acquired rights to the New World by physical objects, Frenchmen by gestures, Spaniards by speech, Portuguese by numbers, Dutch by description” (179). What is excellent about Ceremonies of Possession is that it shows the ways that Europe was not a homogenous entity—competing European colonizing powers understood possession on their own terms, in context of their own cultures. Possession seems to have been a cultural construction, intelligible only within the culture that claimed it. Each European power really did have its own ideas about how to go about creating an empire that were rooted in the country’s own politics and folkways, so pointing out the ways in which European ceremonies of possession differ is brilliant.

But the book has its flaws. The big problem with the book is its reductionist tendency. Admittedly, this is understandable in such a broad work of comparative history. Still, downplaying, the construction of crosses (a practice which crossed cultural lines with total disregard for tidy categories) while highlighting the Requerimento (which the Spanish abolished in 1556) and the English love for hedgerows is problematic. Reducing each country’s complicated notions of possession to essentialist elements that are unique to each culture skews the analysis somewhat. One also wishes Seed had not homogenized the English, the French, etc. quite so much.

Since the nation-state had not yet developed, and there was so much interpenetration of trade and elite culture in Europe, one wonders if there can have been so very much misunderstanding? All of this mutual unintelligibility smacks of a problem in Latin American historiography—what Matthew Restall of the Lockhart School calls the Myth of (Mis)Communication. Where other scholars have presumed mutual unintelligibility between Spanish Conquistadores and indigenous Mesoamericans, Restall sees the communication of many ideas, albeit in a translated and altered form. Isn’t it possible that European powers wanted to misunderstand each other so that they could invalidate each other’s claims and get more access to land, resources, and wealth? Even more important, one wishes that Seed would have looked into indigenous people’s perceptions of all these ceremonies, and taken their own ideas about land rights into account.

Seed has written an important and thought-provoking book, and the idea of interpreting each colonizing power’s ceremonies of possession within its own cultural context is brilliant. Despite any quibbles, it is an incredibly useful analysis of a complicated block of time that brings historians one step closer to understanding the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere.

There is a copy of Levi-Strauss sitting on my bookshelf. I purchased it in undergrad for a course in symbolic anthropology, and I enjoyed the mental acrobatics it afforded me. In my undergraduate course, each student completed a structural analysis of a myth. I analyzed the Cherokee creation myth, and the story of Selu, the Cherokee Corn Mother. The point of all this was not to teach me the secrets of ethnographic analysis, but to impart a bit of the history of theory. After the papers were turned in, we learned about the flaws inherent in the structural method. Oversimplification, the creation of misleading Cartesian dualisms, and the deceptive ease of the method are some of structuralism’s weaknesses that are most readily apparent in When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away.

The opening chapter analyzes a Pueblo origin myth in classic structuralist style. Earth and sky, male and female, corn and flint—the oversimplification into essentialist blocks that can be sorted into opposing piles of index cards (in true structuralist fashion) is maddening! Also, throughout this chapter, the author assumes a 1:1 relationship between the present and the past that is problematic at best. He addresses this issue in the introduction: “Skeptics can easily counter … pointing out that symbols and practices can remain constant even though their meanings change; meanings can remain identical despite a radical change in the outward appearance of symbols and practices” (xxx). While Gutierrez acknowledges this, he does nothing to reassure the reader that he has not missed the point entirely.

He catalogues what he sees as the wholesale destruction of Indian culture, for example, the replacement of solstice with Christmas, and the replacement of the Corn Mother with the Virgin Mary. The whole book smacks of the reduction inherent in an unsophisticated application of Strauss.

Finally, the title itself is exceedingly annoying. It speaks to the “Myth of Desolation” (the idea that the Spanish Conquest destroyed indigenous cultures wholesale) that Matthew Restall identifies in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest as one of the biggest and most persistent problems in Latin American historiography. In reality, the idea of a Native American Corn Mother still exists today. Frustrated readers of Gutierrez would do well to read Cherokee author and poet Marilou Awiakta’s Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, published in 1994. The book is a testament to the vitality of the idea of the Corn Mother, and to her relevance to Native American spirituality today.

Pete Sigal’s From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), reveals that this reality of the conquest was fascinatingly complicated. Maya forms endured and persisted and were hybridized, colonizing the gods of the colonizers even as the Maya were colonized. The Spanish tried to inscribe their notion of sin onto Maya culture, but it took a long time—and even when it did, sin was something that displeased the gods, not something that was, for lack of a better word, sinful. This is just one example of the hybrid colonial culture that was created amongst the Maya and the Spanish. The Virgin Mary Moon Goddess was a hybrid creation of the Maya, where they reinscribed the Catholic mother of Jesus as a powerful goddess. This reinterpretation of Mary allowed preconquest ideas about divinity to persist into the colonial era. Moon Goddesses deals very sensitively with the relationships between sex, war, power, conquest, and colonialism.

Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) is much more heavy-handed. He fixates on the state, uses words like “sissy” (Trexler xi) and makes sweeping generalizations far too often (e.g. “warfare as the incubator of civil institutions” (Trexler 140). Trexler presents man-man sexual acts in the way that the Spanish would have understood them. And he does an excellent job of linking war and rape with ideas of power and masculinity. But Trexler’s subject is basically the berdache. He says that his “first and primary purpose is to describe and analyze American homosexual practices and the male transvestism often associated with them, as the Iberians heard of these practices during their original contacts with the many peoples of what would come to be called Latin America” (Trexler 2). Yet he includes the Zuni (Trexler 116,120,123), the Iroquois (Trexler 129) and any number of other groups scattered across the hemisphere. He also says the berdache is a ubiquitous institution across native America (Trexler 121), but this is debatable. Sigal, for example, discusses Trexler (whom he compliments) but Sigal says “there is only scattered evidence of a Maya equivalent to the berdache” (Sigal 202). Additionally, Trexler asserts, compared with Europeans, an “at least allegedly more misogynistic attitude of Amerindian males toward their females” (Trexler 172), which is a problematic notion at best. But Trexler is certainly correct that “Europeans had long imagined conquest in gender terms” (Trexler 175).

Sigal reveals that gender is so much more complicated than all this! Sigal’s study of Maya gender in the colonial period reveals that people did not have an identity based on sexuality—gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, etc… In reality, boundaries were more fluid and complex. Maya curing rituals depict tarantula representing a vagina might use its penis to cure the sick. The Moon Goddess is the perfect example of a complicated, fluid, classification-defying, powerful, gender-blurring goddess. And a goddess she was!

Trexler also says that in the indigenous world, “ high was male and low was female” and he uses the Book of Chilam Balam to show that the Itzá subordinated the Maya and became “older brother” (Trexler 81). But Sigal uses the same sources and shows us that the Moon Goddess was a colonizing goddess from Itzá, operating in a parallel gender structure in which her power was equal to or greater than the male gods who she had sex with (and sometimes penetrated). The Moon Goddess was female (although she played with gender quite a bit!), she was powerful, she penetrated other gods. One could even argue that she penetrated the Virgin Mary, as they merged. All of this is so much more complicated than the macho, misogynistic, male-homosexual-rape-obsessed world that Trexler describes. At the end of the day, much of history is messy and complicated, and cannot be packaged into neat conceptual categories.

Synopsis
Pete Sigal, From Moon Goddesses To Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire, Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2000.

Pete Sigal’s From Moon Goddesses To Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire is a stunning portrait of the way that the preconquest Maya discourse of desire adapted during the colonial period to create something that was not entirely Mayan, and not entirely Spanish, but something new and truly colonial. Sigal writes, “the Maya ethical system changed into a hybridized form, one in which the two systems (Maya and Spanish) did not replicate either of the prior two” (xiv).

Beginning the project searching for the Moon Goddess, Sigal ended up finding a hybridized Virgin Mary. Sigal writes: “The Virgin Mary Moon Goddess of the colonial Maya people was a virgin, a bisexually active woman, and perhaps a bisexually active man. I look at this sentence and believe that something has gone awry, and indeed something has. The categorizations and boundaries that modern Western peoples prescribe for sexual acts cannot be applied for the colonial Maya … and the Virgin Mary Moon Goddess, rather than embodying a single sexual identity, signified this search for understanding: she symbolized the hybrid sexual discourse of the colonial Maya” (241). This is Sigal’s subject—the creation and performance of a hybrid. Importantly, Sigal deals with shifting mental processes and cultural frameworks, not actual sexual practices at any given time.

This subject is messy, fascinating, and challenging—and Sigal’s analysis of it is excellent. The first chapter introduces the Moon Goddess and the subject matter of the book. We learn that the Moon Goddess was a very powerful goddess, with power paralleling or exceeding that of the other, mostly male gods who were her sexual partners (5). The Moon Goddess represents many things at once. She is the goddess of life and death, the mother, the goddess of sex, and what Sigal terms “The Goddess of Colonialism,” who spread out from Itzá during Maya expansion in the preconquest era (5). Chapter Two lays the groundwork for the cultural similarities between the Maya and the Spanish that allowed for hybridization during the colonial period, when the Maya reinscribed their own meanings onto the gods of the colonizers. Sigal says that the Maya did not classify or categorize sex, and it did not create an identity like a sexual orientation. But they did associate sex and gender with warfare and the political order, and sex had the power to creative normally and destructive in excess.

Chapter Four is titled “Fornicating with Priests, Communicating With Gods,” and it reexamines an anonymous 1774 petition that describes the inappropriate behavior of four secular priests whom the Maya parish wishes to censure in favor of their Franciscan priest, who presented an alternative to the power of the encomenderos. This is significant because it shows the Maya writers’ understanding and use of Spanish gender norms and Spanish clerical celibacy. By the late colonial period, the Maya are using the tools of the colonizers against them (65).

The most fascinating portions of the book deal with the melding of the Moon Goddess with the Virgin Mary in Chapter Five. Preconquest desire for the Moon Goddess transforms into Colonial desire for the Virgin Mary Moon Goddess, who is truly neither but shares attributes of both. After this chapter, there are explorations of the relationships between blood, truth, lineage, and the right of a ruler to rule. Also, the author explains the role of ritual bloodletting of men and women in the maintenance of the community and in the feeding and maintenance of the gods’ pleasure. Very interesting is Sigal’s discussion of the ways that Maya ritual blurred gender boundaries—a daughter might have a penis (171), men might be penetrated (168), and the phallus itself can be understood as a transsexual phenomenon (178). Sigal makes the point that Western Freudian notions of “penis envy” simply do not fit this picture.

Sigal’s use of theory is quite sophisticated. He does not merely throw out a name so that he may put Foucault in the endnotes. Rather, Sigal engages and wrestles with ideas in their contexts—and this includes taking the time to prove that Freudian analysis and the concept of Oedipus does not fit the Mayan context. What is relevant, and critically important to his project, is Sigal’s use of Foucaultian and Lacanian notions of the relationship between power and sex to illuminate his conclusions.

The book, like all books, is not above all criticism. At times Sigal appears gleefully lurid, always using the words “penis,” “vagina,” and “sodomy” where a less textually shocking term such as “genitalia” or “sex act” might suffice. (Which actually is a bit ironic, given the Maya distrust of sexual excess…) One worries that such a hypersexualized and sexually explicit academic volume runs the risk of further “othering” the Maya in the minds of western readers. Additionally, Sigal admits that the Maya language is “extremely complex and metaphorical, consciously veiled” making translation very challenging (xxi). Still, it is clear that Sigal has made a serious effort to translate faithfully, even if translating sexually charged terms from Maya to English is somewhat problematic. It is an exercise in cultural translation, translation from the sixteenth-century to the modern vernacular, and translation between systems that do not always overlap.

Successfully, Sigal delves into a very complicated, seemingly contradictory, and ever-changing discourse of sexuality and makes historical sense out of it. Sigal’s is a groundbreaking work that explores the Spanish Conquest from the perspective of gender. Sigal concludes simply, “Sexual desire never was inert but rather was in a constant state of flux, and it always was used to create a discourse which related to power” (249).

But Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin is a human being. Townsend weaves a tapestry of possibilities that humanize the legend. The real Malintzin, it seems, was above all a survivor, a woman who made pragmatic choices in awful situations. Townsend’s book Malintzin’s Choices does not claim to be a biography of Malintzin. Instead, it looks at her world as Malintzin might have seen it, and explores her choices in the context of the range of options that would have been available to her. Malintzin’s Choices brings historians one step closer to understanding the Spanish Conquest, and especially to understanding the range of choices that would have been available to indigenous women in that historical situation. Throughout the book, Townsend looks at the grim realities of the Spanish Conquest through the lens of gender. She deals with this violent time sensitively, and does not label perpetrators and victims, does not fixate on the gruesome. Townsend strives for balance, such as on page 127 when she describes indigenous human sacrifice and Spanish torture practices side by side, matter-of-factly, without sensational language or any resort to voyeuristic excess. It is this even-handedness which makes the book stand out.

Likely given to attacking Indians as a peace offering (22), and then traded to strangers from across the sea, it at first appears that the slave girl Malintzin did not have a lot of options. She was summarily baptized and probably expected to cook food and sexually service a Spanish conquistador. But she had grown up in a Mesoamerican palace, and she possessed the skill of using courtly language, and she chose to make the most of it. Townsend stresses that the choice to become an interpreter for Hernán Cortés was just that—a choice. When she heard Jerónimo de Aguilar speaking a dialect of Maya to the messengers of Moctezuma, “Malintzin could have remained silent. No one expected her to step forward and serve as a conduit. But by the end of that hour, she had made her value felt” (41). That decision would change her path forever. She became an important person, a valued interpreter, and acquired the title “doña” just like a Spanish noblewoman. She bore a child with Cortes, and seems to have maneuvered herself into an advantageous marriage afterward, securing her children a place in the New World that was being created in the sixteenth century. But Malintzin remains a liminal figure, betwixt and between several worlds.

Her son, Don Martín, inherits all this from her. As a six-year-old child, Martín is taken by his father Hernán Cortés to Spain, where the boy grows up at the Spanish court, in the retinue of Prince Philip. He is legitimized by a papal bull from the pope, and stands to inherit his father’s estate until Cortés remarries and has a second Martín, who, in many ways (and certainly legally via the inheritance) “would almost erase the existence of his older brother” (197). But like his mother, Don Martín survived, became a knight of Spain, likely visited the Tudor court of Princess Mary of England, and returned to Mexico in his late thirties only to be tortured under suspicion of a plot to overthrow the Audiencia (which he denied, even when his captors put him on the rack, and when that did not work, waterboarded him six times). This complicated man returned to Europe and was killed fighting Muslims for Spain. He died in another conquest, in another place.

Throughout the book, Townsend paints a very complicated portrait of Malintzin and the captive indigenous women whom she represents—in fact, this is a complicated portrait of the indigenous world during conquest. There are no clear lines between conqueror and conquered, just like Malinche is neither traitor, nor whore, nor hero. She is just a woman who did the best she could. And ironically, even had the Spaniards never come, she still would have lived her life as a captive, in a foreign land—it just would have had different contours.

The book is divided into two parts, the second of which is much more successful than the first. Krippner-Martinez is at his best explaining the ways that late colonial conservative creole identity manifests itself in historical texts. In Part II, Chapter 4 deals with the Crónica de Michoacán, written in 1788 by Franciscan intellectual Pablo de Beaumont. Here, Krippner-Martinez “seek[s] to evaluate how a distinct historical context and various subjective factors influenced a specific text, one that rewrote the narrative of the conquest of Michoacán” (115). Krippner-Martinez convincingly argues that Beaumont writes in a space between Baroque and Enlightenment intellectual contexts, and because of this, the Crónica displays an interesting and complicated relationship between the rational and supernatural. The work is a sort of union of opposites, as “Beaumont’s Enlightenment skepticism clashes with his profoundly held conviction that the Spanish Conquest of the Americas had been divinely ordained” (127). Beaumont correctly understood that the Spanish Conquest was not an event, “but rather represented a process constantly challenged and continually recreated over time” (132).

In Chapter 5, Krippner-Martinez seeks to understand and historicize the construction of the “Tata Vasco,” or “Father Vasco” myth surrounding Vasco de Quiroga, and the ways that people have appropriated that myth in the modern era. The author writes, “here I contend that the traditional image of Vasco de Quiroga as a saintly father figure, who understood and was beloved by his Indian charges, is an after-the-fact reconstruction, rooted more in colonial discourse, creole perceptions, and the formation of modern Mexican nationalism than the sixteenth-century past” (152). Here, he makes his case well.

Part I is somewhat less convincing, although it has its strong points as well. It is good that the author resists the “great man” myth surrounding leading figures of the Spanish conquest. For example, he says, “although Nuño de Guzmán was brutal, it would be wrong to view him as exceptional” (36). At times, Krippner-Martinez’s analysis dovetails nicely with the Lockhart school. He writes, “there is absolutely no evidence … that the ‘native king’ defined his obligations to Spanish colonialism according to the norms of the colonizers” (17). And his argument that the Spanish “sought to justify colonial rule by demonstrating what Spaniards believed to be the ‘perverse otherness’ of indigenous peoples, conceived of in sexual and other terms” is excellent, if not entirely new (118).

Despite these insights, Krippner-Martinez’s allegiance to postmodern theory pushes him into discussions of power and resistance that do not always fit the subject. Spanish power was not so consolidated in 1530 as to be Foucaultian. Resistance, too is a slippery concept. The word is so laden with meaning—it conjures up an image of the archetypal downtrodden hero rising up in ethnic solidarity to resist the evil hegemonic power destroying his way of life. But the gritty, business-as-usual, daily reality of conquest and colonization was less thrilling and more complicated. James Lockhart shows us in Of Things of the Indies that the convergence of Spanish and Mesoamerican cultures allowed for a great deal of continuity between the pre and post-contact periods that precluded a great deal of resistance, at least among sedentary indigenous peoples.

John A Kicza, a student of James Lockhart, reviewed Rereading the Conquest in his review article New Interpretations of Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence, appearing in Volume 40, Number 3 (2005) of the Latin American Research Review. Kicza writes, “Regarding most of the extant secondary literature on these documents as limited if not wrong headed, Krippner-Martinez makes little use of it.”

Because Krippner-Martinez has ignored the insights of the Lockhart School, Chapter Three is terribly problematic. He seems to admire many sixteenth century missionaries in Latin America, and somewhat sanitizes them. Krippner-Martinez glosses clerical hypocrisy, writing “at least in some cases … the sixteenth century clergy was not always beyond [sexual] temptation” (100). Some cases? Not beyond temptation?! This is a gross understatement.

Contrast this with a 1589 Maya petition to have a local priest removed. The document appears in Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Guatemala, edited by Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano (all students of James Lockhart). Here, the indigenous community complained of their holy missionary, “Until they recompense him with the sin of fornication, he does not give the women confession” (Restall et all p. 168). Another example from Restall et al is the 1774 petition against four friars in the Mani Region: “But look at their excessive fornication, putting their hands on these prostitutes’ vaginas, even saying mass like this. God willing, when the English come they may not be fornicators equal to these priests, who stop short only at carnal acts with men’s asses. God willing that smallpox be rubbed into their penis heads. Amen.” (Restall et al p. 169).

Krippner-Martinez discusses the meanings of the colonial discourses of gender. He explores Spanish reasons for using sexuality to “other” indigenous people, explaining that this process legitimizes Spanish dominance in the colonizers’ eyes. But this is not enough. He fails to grapple with clerical wickedness, the persistence of indigenous religious forms, and the ways that Catholicism adapted to Indian beliefs.

Krippner-Martinez has high aspirations for the book and uses fresh methods. But I found Rereading the Conquest disappointing. At the end of the day, despite his postmodern textual analyses and insights into the production of myths and texts, the author reproduces both the black and white legends. Once again, the “bad” conquistador is contrasted with the “good” missionary.

The book begins with a brief note on method. The editors express gratefulness to James Lockhart (xi), and discuss their method of translation and the ordering of the book. They translate idiom not literally, but with attention to capturing its meaning. They translate Spanish loanwords, except when they “represent a significant introduction to the material culture or conceptual vocabulary of the period” (xii). But, they leave the Nahuatl word altepetl untranslated, and their explanation of why reveals the orientation of the book: “we prefer to retain the original word in the translation and thereby challenge the reader to learn an important indigenous concept” (xii).

The introductory materials in the volume are nothing short of excellent. They ensure that readers understand the localized nature of Mesoamerican identity, and how this influences the course of the conquest. Localized identity is a key theme running through the documents, and it is difficult to overestimate its influence on the course of the conquest and New Spain. In the Annals of Tlatelolco localized identity takes the form of obvious bitterness and rivalry toward the Mexica (43). Similarly, the Florentine Codex notes that no one was sorry to see Moctezuma’s funeral pyre (37); there is no solidarity at the loss of an indigenous leader.

The influence of Lockhart on his students is clear. For example, though the authors do not use the Lockhart’s phrase “double mistaken identity,” the idea shines through. The authors write of Christianity, “despite shared features and possibilities for identification between native religions and Christianity, even if native parishioners wanted to accept the new system, they were likely to misunderstand it or interpret many introductions in terms of deeply rooted cultural beliefs or ideologies” (175). There is also a thoroughly Lockhartian analysis of documents such as wills and notarial records evident in the editors’ introductions to the documents.

Also apparent is the continuation of Restall’s myth-debunking. Restall’s “Myth of Desolation” and “Myth of Completion” stand out in high relief here (for more see Matthew Restall, Seven Myths). Indigenous communities continued to function much as they had before the conquest, despite new challenges like population decline resulting from disease. The indigenous cabildo minutes from Tlaxcala, extant from 1547-1567, highlight this. The Spanish required biannual elections of governors; the Tlaxcalans simply rotated the tlatoanis (indigenous rulers) from various parts of the altepetl (71, 73). The take-home point here is that the same families were ruling on a local level—there was a great deal of continuity with the past.

That is not to imply that change did not occur. Adaptations are revealed in the documents. For example, under Spanish influence in the colonial period, the tax structure changes from an indigenous one in which nobles paid more tribute to what may be called a flat tax, where everyone pays regardless of ability (129). Chimalpahin’s Diario, written from 1604-14, describes a Japanese diplomatic visit—and the indigenous author notes that some in the party are “idolators,” while others are baptized (153).

One thing which stands out in the mind of this reader is the way that indigenous people were able to use the justice system in New Spain. Defenses asserted in the colonial period reveal a sophisticated understanding and manipulation of Spanish ideas about justice. For example, one woman accused of adultery and attempted murder in 1581 defends her actions by saying, “the devil deceived me” (163). In a Mixtec murder note from 1684, a man says he killed his wife because he caught her with the local sacristan—he is mounting a traditional European affirmative defense: that he committed what a modern jurist would call a “crime of passion” (163). The Maya complain about priests who abuse their position and demand sexual favors from parishioners (168). Indigenous people can sue Spaniards, prosecute crimes against them, complain about mistreatment—and they DO.

Despite corruption, abuses, and structural equalities in the system, this seems like a vast improvement on indigenous North Americans’ experiences with colonial English law. In fact, it could be argued that the entire indigenous experience of Spanish conquest and colonization was an improvement over the English version. Restall has devoted his career to debunking the myths that surround this period of history—and in this book, you get the story “straight from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak. Who better to tell indigenous history than indigenous people?

On another note, Restall and Florine Asselberg’s Invading Guatemala takes down yet another myth—that Pedro Alvarado was the conqueror of Guatemala. Despite his self-presentation as such in letters to Hernán Cortés—and the crown and history’s acceptance of it—the conquest of Guatemala was bloody and protracted. It was not complete for decades.

To sum, so much of what we think we know about the Spanish conquest is shrouded in myth. But hearing indigenous views on the subject goes a long way toward clearing the mist.

All definitions from Macintosh version of The New Oxford American Dictionary

philology |fəˈläləjē| noun
the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages.
• literary or classical scholarship.

orthography |ôrˈθägrəfē| noun ( pl. -phies)
1 the conventional spelling system of a language.
• the study of spelling and how letters combine to represent sounds and form words.
2 another term for orthographic projection .

lenition |liˈni sh ən| noun
the process or result of weakened articulation of a consonant, causing the consonant to become voiced, spirantized, or lost.

prevocalic |ˌprēvōˈkalik|adjective
occurring immediately before a vowel.

diplomatic |ˌdipləˈmatik|adjective
2 (of an edition or copy) exactly reproducing an original version : a diplomatic transcription.

diacritic |ˌdīəˈkritik|noun
a sign, such as an accent or cedilla, which when written above or below a letter indicates a difference in pronunciation from the same letter when unmarked or differently marked.
adjective
(of a mark or sign) indicating a difference in pronunciation.

phonology |fəˈnäləjē; fō-|noun
the branch of linguistics that deals with systems of sounds (including or excluding phonetics), esp. in a particular language.
• the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of a language.

amanuensis |əˌmanyoōˈensis|noun ( pl. -ses |-ˌsēz|)
a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts.
ORIGIN early 17th cent.: Latin, from (servus) a manu ‘(slave) at hand(writing), secretary’ + -ensis ‘belonging to.’

paleography |ˌpālēˈägrəfē| ( Brit. palaeography) noun
the study of ancient writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts.

morphology |môrˈfäləjē|noun ( pl. -gies)
the study of the forms of things, in particular
• Biology the branch of biology that deals with the form of living organisms, and with relationships between their structures.
• Linguistics the study of the forms of words.